Six months after a Los Angeles Superior Court judge unraveled a corrupt client recruitment scheme involving pesticide litigation, California Lawyer magazine has featured the plaintiffs' lawyer-engineered scam in the cover story of its October issue.
The article describes how two lawyers for one of the defendant companies, Dole Food Co., obtained crucial evidence that the lead plaintiffs' lawyer, Juan J. Dominguez, had coached a plaintiff in his office in Nicaragua and supervised the recruitment and coaching of many more sham plaintiffs.
Their work led to Judge Victoria Chaney's dismissal of the case in April, where she spoke in her ruling of recruiting captains grabbing "groups of men to make spurious claims that they are sterile," of sham lab reports, and of corrupt Nicaraguan judges awarding "judgments based on trumped-up allegations and facts."
She dismissed the plaintiffs' claims with prejudice, "preventing their ability to ever come back, at least in this court, and hopefully in any other court, and raise these claims again." She added, "I have serious, serious doubts about the bona fides of any plaintiff claiming to have been injured as a result of exposure to (the pesticide) DBCP while working on banana plantations. Because of all this, lesser sanctions are wholly inadequate."
Dominguez now faces civil charges of contempt of court. Chaney has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation and has also made a disciplinary complaint to the State Bar of California.
Our earlier blog posts took a closer look at a Wall Street Journal article, a Los Angeles Times article, a documentary based on the lawsuits (click here and here), and our original blog post about Judge Chaney's ruling.