Trench Warfare

As the case finally wraps up, Celeste asks what happened to the cane cutters, and what happened to the lawyers whose lives were consumed by this case. And we ask what’s next for Big Sugar?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Imagine South Florida in the summer, going through boxes that
are ten or twelve years old in an unair conditioned barracks.
I mean, it's dirty, it's hot, it's muggy. It's just
it's no fun at all.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
I doubt there are many people who'd say sifting through
boxes of old company records is their idea of a
good time. But that's exactly where lawyers Dave Gorman and
Greg Shale find themselves in two thousand and five. They're
actually in one of the barracks, which used to house
sugar cane cutters and it's now being used to store
farm records. They're trying to dig up evidence for their

(00:43):
upcoming trial, while a lawyer representing the sugarcane company they've
sued is watching their every move. But you know, they
made the best of it, all things considered.

Speaker 4 (00:53):
We know it'll be hot and dirty inside, and so
we were in very casual clothes, jeans, whatever. But the
lawyer from the company came out in his suit and
we couldn't resist. We said, we're going to stay in
there longer than we were ordinarily, just to watch this
guy just melt and swept through his fancy suit, and
we did. I'm sorry, we were very immature, but we

(01:14):
took great joy in that.

Speaker 3 (01:17):
So they had that going for them, and there are
plenty more thrills still to come. Greg and Dave are
staring down at.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Boxes and boxes and boxes of records, and inside the
boxes you've got reams of paper that show you all
kinds of things that you don't really care about. You know,
you still have to look to make sure that you're
not going to miss anything.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
They're sifting, sifting, sifting, hoping, hoping there could be a
needle in this haystack. They'd lost three trials already, so
they're really looking for new evidence, something to prove the
companies had underpaid their workers.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
Then I remember opening a box and seeing these envelope
and pulling an envelope out and looking at it, well,
what's in it? Oh, it's cane tickets, and then looking
at what's written on it and realizing what it had
to be.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
Cane tickets are basically like time cards. They list the date,
the amount of sugarcane a cutter has cut in a day,
a row, half row, a quarter of a row, and
the number of hours they've supposedly worked, and there were
masses of them.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
But then the.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Lawyers realized that on the outside of each envelope there
was something else written. Dave's curious.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
It's like, wait a minute.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
He turns to Greg, I called him over.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
I said, hey, check this out, and he did, and
we both immediately knew what it was.

Speaker 4 (02:44):
It had two times. It had a time in the
morning and a time in the afternoon, and we quickly
realized what those were. Those were the actual time the
crew had worked.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
Their realization the times on the envelopes were actually a
log of the bus journeys made by the cutters each day.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
There was a notation of who the bus driver was,
and he wrote the time that he left the camp
and the time the exact time that they got back.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
But there was something else that made Dave.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Go, wait a minute. Then you pull out the cane
tickets and you see that the pus driver times we
know are accurate, and they don't match up to the
times that are on the cane tickets.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
Like the cane ticket says the cutters worked six hours,
but the bus driver time says they were at the
field for eight hours.

Speaker 4 (03:39):
The tickets had been fabricated to cheat the workers on
the hours.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
It was the kind of evidence they'd been looking for,
hoping for.

Speaker 4 (03:49):
We found proof that we could prove down to the
minute how many hours each worker had really worked and
how much you should have been paid. It took a
few minutes more and then we said, this is amazing.
Because I've done this sort of cases with fabrication of
work documents for forty years, I've never seen something this amazing.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
They proved the lie.

Speaker 4 (04:14):
We just sort of just looked at each other and said, Wow,
this was going to be a case we should clearly win,
and we felt very confident.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
It was nice to know that we could win on this.

Speaker 4 (04:26):
We said, gee, if we can get this case to
the court, either a jury or a judge, we will
win this because the evidence is overwhelming.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
To put it in a more Dave like way, the
sugarcane company.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
They're suing, so now they're screwed.

Speaker 3 (04:43):
I'm Celeste Hedley and from iHeartMedia, Imagine Audio and the
teams at Weekday Fun and Novel. This is Big Sugar
Episode nine, Trench Warfare. We've gotten to know the world

(05:10):
of Sugar pretty well over the past eight episodes. We've
met some of the men from the Caribbean who worked
tirelessly cutting sugar cane on Florida's farms.

Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yeah, it does a very very very very very very
very hard John, That's the hardest job in the hold.

Speaker 3 (05:26):
We've met the investigators and journalists who've exposed the industry's
treatment of the workers.

Speaker 5 (05:32):
I saw that they were being mistreated and deceived, and
I felt ashamed as an American.

Speaker 3 (05:38):
They've shone a light on Big Sugar's political influence.

Speaker 4 (05:42):
They are, without a doubt, the most powerful agricultural industry
and one of the most powerful industries in Florida.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
The armies of the best lobbyists that money can buy.
They've got it worked out.

Speaker 3 (05:56):
And uncovered their pr strategies. It's been behind doors, you know.
They really have had a strategy to influence the public.
And we've heard from the lawyers who tried to take
on this leviathan industry.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
It seemed so easy at the time, it seemed so straightforward.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
I mean, I have never done a case that was
more clearcut.

Speaker 3 (06:20):
But let's face it, up until this point failed it
had to have been disappointing at the minimum.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Oh, wrist cutting disappointing.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
And it's like Jesus, you know what else can go wrong?

Speaker 6 (06:36):
Here?

Speaker 3 (06:41):
To recap, if we go back to the start, the
lawyer's original case against the sugar companies was based on
something called a clearance order. It was written on behalf
of the sugarcane companies for the Department of Labor, kind
of like a contract. It laid out what the job
would entail so they could get visas for the men

(07:02):
to travel to the US. The lawyer's main argument was
that according to this clearance order, the men should be
paid five dollars and thirty cents per ton of cane
they cut. However, in reality they were paid more like
three to four dollars per ton. That was their theory anyway,
and so back in nineteen eighty nine, the team of

(07:23):
lawyers sued five sugar cane companies. It was first filed
as a class action on behalf of some twenty thousand
sugar cane cutters from the Caribbean. A judge agreed with
their argument and issued a fifty one million dollar summary judgment.
Case closed. The companies would have to shell out tens
of millions to the workers and a couple of million

(07:45):
to the lawyers too. But this was quickly overturned on appeal.
Then the case was split up into five jury trials,
one for each of the sugar companies. By two thousand
and five, more than fifteen years into the leetle, one
of the companies US Sugar had settled, but each Cutter

(08:05):
received just hundreds of dollars. Three of the cases had
gone to trial so far, and the Sugarcane Cutter lawyers
had lost every single one. There was just one case left.
This is when one of the lawyers you've heard from
quite a bit already, Greg Shell, becomes a key player.

(08:26):
He's been helping out already, but in two thousand and five,
he joins Dave Gorman to fight this final skirmish, and
the guy who initiated the whole thing, Edward Tuddam, is out,
possibly because of personal disagreements, possibly as we heard in
a previous episode, because he signed over his life rights
for a film to be made by Robert de Niro's

(08:47):
production company. So anyway, Greg takes his place.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
Greg Shell and I were co council, which was a
pleasure for me. Frankly. Greg's a very bright guy. He
knows a lot a.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
Bit of background on Greg. He'd gone to Harvard Law,
and when he graduated in the nineteen seventies he could
have earned big bucks in commercial or criminal law. Instead,
he took a job in public interest law, representing farm workers.

Speaker 4 (09:14):
It was a job that would be very fulfilling in
terms of the contribution you were going to make to society.
You were going to be sent to a remote, probably
uncomfortable place, and also that you would not be you
not realize much in the way of income from it.

Speaker 3 (09:30):
And all that was true, uncomfortable, low paying, but somehow
it appealed to Greg.

Speaker 4 (09:36):
I said, well, gee, this sounds like something I'll try.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
Greg flourished. He was suing farms and farmers and getting
farm workers, often migrants from Mexico or the Caribbean, better
conditions were pay.

Speaker 4 (09:51):
Was the challenge of being David versus Goliath in every
single case, particularly taking on the larger farms which had
all sorts of legal resources, and we were always under manned,
but we won the majority of the cases, which was
extra rewarding.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
Even though the work is tough, it suits Greg. He's
a frenetic guy. In fact, editing the tape of his
interview has been a challenge because of the bullet like
speed he speaks at and the way he inhales like
he's just surfaced from showing you how long he can
hold his breath underwater. He's the kind of guy who
bolts out of bed at four in the morning and

(10:29):
gets straight to work in his office, well, his garage
slash office. So this kind of work that relies on
energy and grit really suits Greg. Plus there were the
unexpected fringe benefits.

Speaker 4 (10:46):
I met my wife there. My wife is a former
farm worker, and I met her through the work, and
I mean we've been married for nearly forty years, so
I mean, the unexpected things happen. The other big reward
from taking this type of work was I wasn't required
to wear a tie to work, which was very important
to me. We dressed business casual or no, not in

(11:08):
business cashle jean's and usually a button shirt. At least
that was the concession we made to fashion.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
By two thousand and five, Greg had been representing farm
workers in Florida for several decades, and that's when he
stepped into the final sugarcane case against Osceola Farms, a
farm owned by the billionaire Cuban brothers. The funuls. They
needed a scrappy guy with his expertise on the team,
but there was a long way to go.

Speaker 4 (11:36):
The Osceola case was on life support.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
The lawyers were exhausted and.

Speaker 4 (11:41):
They didn't have any money, and Dave's practice was in shambles.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
Exhausted and broke. It costs a lot to fight a
case for fifteen years, plus This five dollars thirty cents
theory based on the contract just wasn't working in the trials.
They kept losing, so they needed a new angle, one
which could win over a jury.

Speaker 1 (12:05):
We decided that since we were not getting anywhere, you know,
it's like the definition of insanity, of course, is to
keep doing the same thing and hope for a different result.
So we decided to approach it as a wage an
hour case and show that the guys were cheated on
the hours that were recorded for them, that they actually

(12:26):
worked more hours than they were given credit for.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
This is what the cutters were telling them, that they'd
work a ten hour day cutting sugarcane, but their pay
slip would only say something like six hours. The lawyers
believed this was so the sugar companies could pay the
workers less money, but they needed proof.

Speaker 4 (12:42):
We were interested in what we viewed as the core
issue that there have been a systematic under reporting of
the hours by the company.

Speaker 3 (12:50):
What Greg and Dave wanted to show was that the
worker's time cards were reporting fewer hours than they'd actually worked.
So we're back to that moment. We started this whole
episode on in the hot storeroom filled with boxes. This
is when they discovered those envelopes showing.

Speaker 1 (13:08):
The actual accurate time that the buses were taking these
men to and from the fields.

Speaker 3 (13:14):
Which didn't match the times written on the cane tickets.
Inside a smoking gun evidence they were thinking that the
hours were shorted.

Speaker 4 (13:22):
We found the proof. That was just amazing.

Speaker 3 (13:26):
Dave's excited in his own way.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
Well, first of all, it's not my style to be
jumping up and down, but yeah, it was definitely. It
was very cool finding it. Very cool because up to
that point we had no idea that anything like that existed.

Speaker 3 (13:40):
Then began the serious grunt work going through all the envelopes,
recording the times on all the cane tickets and cross
checking them against the bus times written on the envelopes.
And there's not a team of associates or pair ofalegals
doing the grunt work. It's Dave and Greg.

Speaker 4 (13:56):
If you think about it, on a single day there
were roughly one thousand tickets. You can't imagine how tedious
it was. Just going through a single day took a
long time. So we realized this was going to be
just a tremendous undertaking to do this, But we also
saw it was a clear path forward. We do this
carefully and get this data done and we show the

(14:19):
jury that this was going on. The jury will get this.
This is not complicated at all.

Speaker 3 (14:27):
But the company could have said a couple of things
to defend themselves against this accusation that they shorted the
cutter's hours. Osciola could have argued that the men refused
to work, that they didn't want to cut any more cane.
They worked to say four hours, and then said I've
had enough and just sat on the bus for four hours.
And when that supposedly happened, the supervisors put a little

(14:50):
code on the cane tickets are for refuse. But the
cutters themselves told Greg and Dave that this wasn't true.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
Have guys sitting for four hours on a bus waiting
to return from the field that didn't happen, and the
testimony on that was pretty consistent.

Speaker 3 (15:07):
All the workers Greg spoke to were sure about one thing.

Speaker 4 (15:12):
I never ever stopped work early. I always worked the fallmaut.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
Former cutter Victor Blackwood also confirms that although the companies
would sometimes write aren't for refuse, this was simply not
the case.

Speaker 7 (15:29):
Five and a half or is and put two and
a half or refused. We never refused working yet become
in love to work? Yeah, are you worth at the
easy I live?

Speaker 3 (15:41):
Another excuse for why the hours didn't match was that
the men were sick. That's why they stopped working.

Speaker 4 (15:47):
They would show that all of a sudden, at two
o'clock twenty eight people got sick. That seemed unlikely. We
thought a jury would see right through this.

Speaker 3 (15:57):
By the way, we asked the sugar king come but
he's and their trade group for an interview or to
respond to the claim that they underpaid the workers, and
they never replied. To find more ammunition though, they'd need
more witnesses, so David Greg went to Jamaica to look
for more plaintiffs former cutters to represent and to gather

(16:19):
more firsthand testimony. Cutters who'd say my hours were shorted.

Speaker 4 (16:26):
I went to the Jamaican press, the print press, and
the radio and TV and said, well, the word needs
to go out to everybody, everybody who worked at Ociola Farms.

Speaker 3 (16:38):
Greg sent press releases saying the lawsuit claims that Osceola
routinely paid them in less than the hourly wage guaranteed
in their work contracts, and that the company falsified its
records to cover up these violations of law. The court
action seeks to recover and estimated ten million dollars in
additional pay. And then at the end, if you were

(17:00):
a cutter during these years, here's our number. Call us.
We want to hear from you.

Speaker 4 (17:06):
Well, we were astonished. We were bombarded by calls out
of the potential I think it was about twenty five
hundred workers who were eligible during this time period to
bring a claim. Over fifteen hundred responded and they called us,
not only from Jamaica, but from the other Caribbean islands,
and workers who had settled in the United States and
then are Amosa called us and said I want to
bring my claim.

Speaker 3 (17:28):
Greg and Dave eventually had all the evidence they thought
they needed. The tickets, the envelopes the interviews with workers, saying, yeah,
the company falsified by pacelips. They were ready.

Speaker 4 (17:39):
If we got the case to trial, we were going
to win. I've rarely been as confident of this. We
were going to win this case. The evidence was just overwhelming.

Speaker 3 (17:48):
This win would mean a lot for the lawyers. They'd
sacrificed so much. Dave in particular, who'd been at this
for more than a decade so far, he'd lost every
case that had gone to trial.

Speaker 4 (18:01):
Dave, increasingly his practice sort of dwindled, and more and
more of his time was taken up with sugar cane work. Dave,
who had been I think doing reasonably well in his
prior practice, was all of a sudden not making any
money because these cases were not paying off. So Dave's
practice was slipping badly, and it coincided with Dave's marriage

(18:24):
was breaking up. I think it was a tough time
for Dave in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
It consumed a great deal of my professional life. It
cost me both in terms of out of pocket expenses,
but much more in terms of other work that I
couldn't do. It wrecked any plans I had if an early.

Speaker 3 (18:45):
Retirement working on the jury trials was grueling, but this
new evidence with the envelopes was the last little push,
a drop of nitrous oxide in their tanks. Maybe finally,
after all the years in work, they'd get away in
more after the break.

Speaker 4 (19:05):
So we're going along field pretty good.

Speaker 3 (19:08):
Gregan Day's elbows are well and truly greased, going to Jamaica,
organizing the envelopes, tracking all the data. It's going to
be worth it. That's their mantra. Then they get this letter.

Speaker 4 (19:21):
And then all of a sudden we get a request
from the other side saying the court order the plaintiffs
to post the required cost bond.

Speaker 3 (19:33):
Post a bond. Huh what is this all about? Well, bizarrely,
you've got to go back to eighteen twenty eight to
answer that. The sugarcane companies are digging deep here, going
back to a law from nearly two hundred years ago.
It can't make this stuff up.

Speaker 4 (19:54):
Florida passed the Statute to protect its residents from lawsuits
from people residing outside of Florida.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
This was a pretty obscure law passed before Florida was
even a state. Basically, it was intended to protect people
living in Florida from frivolous lawsuits. So let's say someone
from outside Florida sued a Florida resident with a frivolous case,
a case bound to fail. The Floridian who got sued

(20:23):
would sometimes be awarded costs, meaning the person who sued
them would have to pay their legal costs. But if
the person bringing the case didn't live in Florida, it
might be hard to track them down and get the payment.
So this bond statute was created. Before you could sue
the person living in Florida, you had to put down

(20:43):
one hundred dollars as a backup in case you ultimately
had to pay their costs. One hundred dollars was a
pretty large sum of money two hundred years ago. By
the twenty first century, nobody really used that law, and
it was so antiquated that by twenty sixteen it was
repealed all time together. But back in two thousand and seven,

(21:03):
Dave gets this notice about posting a bond in the mail.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
He's thinking, I probably shouldn't say the actual words I
would have used, but yeah, I knew it was a problem.

Speaker 4 (21:14):
When they made this demand. We had fifteen hundred plaintiffs,
almost all of whom were living outside of Florida. So essentially,
we need to come up with one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars worth of bond, and we didn't have it.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
If I had one or two or five clients, sure
I'll front the money, put one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
I don't have it.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
The only way to fight this meant going back to
court to appeal again. But Greg and Dave do it.
So they're in front of a panel of three judges
pleading with them, please don't make us pay this bond.

Speaker 4 (21:51):
We said, look, if this is going to be required,
these poor Jamaicans who cannot sue in any other court,
the only place they can sue Ociola Farms is in Florida.
What you're saying is you don't have one hundred dollars,
you don't have the right to sue them, which is
totally against the constitution. That was our argument.

Speaker 3 (22:08):
These Jamaican men deserve to have their day in court,
they say. Then the lawyers for the sugarcane company, Osciola
Farms respond, this is one of the companies owned by
the billionaire Cuban exiles Pepe and Alfi Vanjul saying.

Speaker 4 (22:22):
You know, the poor fawn holes. If they don't have
this hundred dollars costmont Goodness knows how they're going to
survive because they're only worth gazillions of dollars. You know,
things are tough on Palm Beach.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Okay, I'm pretty sure that's not what they said, but
they made their argument.

Speaker 4 (22:37):
It was the fonn holes, the classic Goliath, claiming they
were now the David, the poor injured party that needed
this protection of one hundred dollars from each of these
starving Jamaicans.

Speaker 3 (22:48):
After each side presenting their arguments in court, they wait
months pass. Will the judges agree with Dave and Greg
or will they be crippled by the costs? Then the
decision comes down. There were three judges. They needed two
of their votes to win, so David Greg read the.

Speaker 4 (23:09):
Decision by a two to one margin.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
We lost.

Speaker 4 (23:14):
That was the end of the case.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
I'd love to say I was surprised and disappointed, but
I disappointed, sure, but surprised.

Speaker 4 (23:26):
No, Well, it felt terrible. I mean because we felt
terrible for the guys, because this is what is wrong
with the legal system. A legal system that's designed to
produce justice was using procedural niceties to essentially tell people
who are poor, because you're poor, you don't even have

(23:46):
a chance to come to ask for justice from this court.

Speaker 8 (23:55):
When this was done, what did you feel for the workers?

Speaker 1 (24:04):
Well, I wouldn't have spent close to thirty years trying
to help them if I didn't think they deserved it.
And I have been to enough workers' homes in Jamaica
to know how little really it would have taken to

(24:25):
make an enormous, a measurable difference in their lives. I've
been to houses in Jamaica that are made out of cinderblock,
that have no running water. They have spaces for windows,
but there's no glass in them, Okay, And the difference
that these cases would have made for men like that

(24:48):
is measurable.

Speaker 3 (24:50):
After reading the decision, Gregshell went for a long run.
He needed to clear his head. Then he sat down
and wrote a letter to be sent to the fourteen
hundred men in Jamaica. Them know the case was lost,
they wouldn't see a penny.

Speaker 4 (25:03):
Well, pretty tough because you sort of say you were cheated,
and we all agree that you're cheated, and all the
others shows you're cheated. But because of the horrible rules,
and you know you will never get a chance to
tell your story.

Speaker 3 (25:22):
An important aside here, there was something else that was
going on at this time. In the nineteen nineties, the
sugarcane industry in Florida stopped hiring men from Jamaica or
other West Indian countries to cut the cane. Instead, they
turned to machines, machines that couldn't sue them. The thousands
of men who had previously relied on cutting sugarcane in

(25:44):
the US for money had to find another way to
make a living. And actually, in two thousand and five,
a representative of Florida Crystal said the decision to mechanize
the company and cut jobs came about partly because of
the lawsuits. I have to remind you here it was
the lawyers who initiated this case, not the cutters. So

(26:06):
if you look at it the way the company is suggesting, well,
the lawyers thought up this case just to make money,
and then they cost all of the workers their jobs.

Speaker 8 (26:16):
The growers have mechanized, and I wonder what if you
think that this case.

Speaker 1 (26:24):
No, I do not to anticipate your question. They were
going to mechanize, they would have done it sooner, but
the machines weren't good enough. Maybe the fact that they
were confronted with the obligation to pay what they said
they were going to inspired them to stop a little
bit earlier. But I'm sorry, I'm not going to accept
blame for trying to make them do what they said

(26:46):
they were going to do.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
Edward Tuttenham, the lawyer who helped launch this case, has
a different take.

Speaker 8 (26:52):
Do you think that your lawsuit hastened the mechanization of
the cane fields?

Speaker 2 (26:59):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (26:59):
Absolutely absolutely.

Speaker 3 (27:02):
With the cost of lawsuits and perhaps increasing wages, Edward says.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
It immediately became more economical to just mechanize, and they did.

Speaker 3 (27:15):
In the aftermath of all this, when the sound and
fury of legal arguments and testimony has died down to
a dull roar, it's natural to ask why why did
they lose this case? Greg's take is that when the
case went from a class action in front of a
judge to five jury trials, the lawyers representing the cutters

(27:35):
simply couldn't compete. He likens it to war.

Speaker 4 (27:39):
The swogging sort of drawn out trench warfare that they
ended up being drawn into, and that trench warfare. They
were bound to lose because they did not have the
troops that the other side did. And the other side
can just keep hiring lawyers and just keep going and going,
which is what they did.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
Greg has witnessed what he considers as Dave's evolution throughout
this case.

Speaker 4 (28:01):
Oh, Dave has totally changed, and now he sounds like
the most radical lawyer out there. Convinced that the fix
is in, convinced that the system is totally biased against
poor people.

Speaker 3 (28:17):
To this day, Dave thinks they should have won.

Speaker 1 (28:19):
I will go to my grave feeling that way. And
you know, there are some cases you lose and you
say to yourself, well, okay, I understand why we lost,
but this is not one of them.

Speaker 8 (28:34):
Do you regret taking it?

Speaker 1 (28:37):
Nah, It's a decision I made. I can live with
a decision. Do I wish we'd have won. Sure? Would
it have made my life financially much better? Absolutely? But
I'd probably do it again. I mean, if I thought
I had a chance of winning, I'd do it.

Speaker 2 (28:54):
Sure.

Speaker 3 (28:55):
Marie Brenner, who wrote the article in Vanity Fair about
the case twenty years ago, still feel angry over how
the cases turned out and imagines how she would have
felt had Greg and Dave's.

Speaker 9 (29:05):
Side won, I would have felt that American justice worked
in this case. I would have felt, Okay, they went
to court and they won, right prevailed, but they didn't win.
They lost, and the workers lost their jobs, and the
fields got mechanized, and so big industry and big Sugar

(29:27):
bigfooted them more.

Speaker 3 (29:31):
After the break, Dave continues working. He's seventy four now.
He couldn't put a dollar amount on how much it
cost him over the last thirty years, but he guesses
he sunk more than a million dollars into the lawsuits.
A confident attorney whizzing around Florida on his Harley Davidson,

(29:53):
he had the kind of energy of someone who'd be
hanging out with the dude from the Big Lebowski. Now
he doesn't ride much. He's had six hip surgeries and
four back surgeries, and these days Dave is the career
for a woman who's his sort of girlfriend, sort of
because it's been a tumultuous relationship. She struggled with addiction

(30:15):
since the pandemic, She's had two strokes and is now
living with disabilities. Dave takes care of her.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
Yeah, but it's been a bizarre on and off relationship.
She didn't have anything, she doesn't have anybody else, and
we get along. I play pool, I play in league
one night a week, and I play Saturday afternoons with
friends and usually Wednesday evenings with friends. That's you know,
that's my life. It's not not real interesting or exciting anymore.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
One final note about the case. There were two settlements.
In nineteen ninety nine. US Sugar settled for five point
one million. They avoided a lot of bad press by
settling early One million dollars covered legal costs, and four
million went to the workers. Each man received ninety five
dollars per year they worked for US Sugar, then with Osceola.

(31:09):
That last case, there was also a small payout, practically
nothing compared to the fifty one million summary judgment. It
was around one hundred thousand for about eighty men who
had settled in Florida, men who didn't need to post
that one hundred dollar bond.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
It kind of went out with a whimper rather than
a bag.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
For me.

Speaker 1 (31:29):
It's not what I wanted, but it's better than nothing.
These guys got screwed, pure and simple.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
Two of the men who got a bit of money
from the settlement were former cane cutters Selvin Grant and
Victor Blackwood. Victor cut cane for twelve years. He spent
four on Osciola farms. He got five hundred dollars. Selvin
spent four years cutting cane too, on Osciola farms. He
got seven hundred dollars.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
I feedback because I worked so hard and need more
money that I was robbed blind.

Speaker 3 (32:13):
Robbed blind seven thinks back on the time he cut
his finger with his cane cutting machete, the worst pain
he ever felt, or the time a razor sharp sugarcane
leaf poked him in the eye, and then just seven
hundred dollars. Selvin felt like he deserved more.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
I needed money.

Speaker 3 (32:34):
We did speak to some cutters who got several thousand
dollars in compensation, but it's hard to say what monetary
amount really would have been enough. The experiences they had
cutting sugar cane in Florida really changed everyone we spoke to.
Victor is scarred by his time at Osiola farm, the
long days, the danger of the work, the barracks where

(32:56):
they lived. In fact, he says it was so similar
to incarceration that had kept him on the straight and narrow.

Speaker 7 (33:03):
It's just like I was in prison. That's why I
tried my best not to try to commit no crimes.
I'm sixty eight year old. No, I'm praise the lad
I've never been arrested. No, I never been convicted than nothing.
Because ostol accompany made me experience what his prison life.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
Victor just couldn't keep doing it after a while.

Speaker 8 (33:26):
Do you remember the day that you quit?

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Yes, yes, I remember.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
It was the day before the harvest ended. Victor told
a supervisor he wasn't coming back the next year.

Speaker 7 (33:40):
He was a nice man. He tried to cox me,
Cox me.

Speaker 3 (33:45):
Please, don't quit, Victor, he pleaded. Then Victor said something
which is equal parts jaw dropping and eye widening.

Speaker 7 (33:56):
I asked you for your exu my language. You're not
gonna say exud miss, I'm gonna say sure, I said
to him, as said super if the kane grew up
my wife pussy him, have to pay somebody for k
I'm not gonna got it. So I'm not quoting no
more shuba cane.

Speaker 3 (34:13):
Even if the sugar cane grew from his wife's private parts.
Victor wouldn't cut the cane.

Speaker 7 (34:19):
And so when he when is here and we said
that in fin or semi CEOs and he said, alright, Vick,
wish your alibis. I said, okay, super, wish your good
luck too, and that's it. I never turned back.

Speaker 3 (34:32):
That was in nineteen eighty nine. Victor first went back
to Jamaica, where he had his own farm. He lived
in a house he was able to afford thanks to
his twelve years of cutting cane. Sixteen years ago he
relocated permanently to Florida, and since then he's been working
at the same job, caving roads. When you took a

(34:55):
job here and you compare it with your job cutting cane,
what's strikes you about the difference.

Speaker 7 (35:02):
Well, this job here is better. Yeah, I make more money.
You don't have nobody rushing you. You can eat anytime
you want to eat on the job. And if you're
sick and your colleges are you're sick, you have two
days apa your faye. Same way and right now I
have three weeks locations every year because after when I

(35:25):
were a first year, get one. When I do two years,
I do get two. When I do ten years, I
get three. I'm making leg two hundred and four dollars
at night.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
Victor seems really happy. He's been with his wife for
around forty years. He owns his own house in the
US and has another big house in Jamaica.

Speaker 7 (35:46):
I'm doing pretty pretty good two years ago by my
brand new BMW cash. Yes, I'm living relax ave fat
through at right now.

Speaker 3 (35:55):
Selvinc's positives too. He says cutting cane was the hardest
roughest job ever had, but at the same time, he
sees the farm work visa as the start of his life.
The money he earned allowed him to build a house
in Jamaica and he managed to get a visa to
come to the US. He married an American woman and
he's lived here since the nineties.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
The reason why I say changed my life, it is
the only opportunity I didn't get at that time to
start to start a life, even though it was so hard,
it was a holy opportunity I get. Maybe it wasn't
the farmer. I wouldn't be here right now. Maybe he's

(36:36):
still in Jamaica. Try to get a visa to come
up in another way, But that is the starting point
of my life. The farmer.

Speaker 3 (36:47):
These days seven, works in construction and has his own
pressure cleaning business. His days are spent climbing cleaning. Pretty
name will work for a guy in his sixties.

Speaker 2 (36:57):
I'm sixty four years old, when i'd like seventeen, I
could do anything right now, like when I was seventeen
years old.

Speaker 3 (37:04):
One other thing he can still do like a young
man is father children. Selvin has six kids. The oldest
is forty one and the youngest is still a baby.
Selvin's nickname is Power after all. He credited to his
diet Jamaican food, particularly sniperfish.

Speaker 2 (37:23):
I steamy down. I love it when it's team that's
my number one way, or the second way I cook
it in soup. Thirdly I fried it. But the number
one way is steam it down with some hop crows
and some vealge severs like carrots and a little season salt.
Oh my god, so sweet. This is so very good

(37:46):
for you.

Speaker 3 (37:47):
Victor's a bit older, sixty eight, and also says he
looks pretty good for his age.

Speaker 7 (37:51):
His secret, Oh the old Jamaican food, Jamaican jur chicken
fish yng man don't flan.

Speaker 3 (38:02):
So you're saying it's the Jamaican food. So you're saying
that if I eat Jamaican food, yes, I will look
great when I'm sixty eight years old. Yes, noted. So

(38:25):
that's the cutters, the lawyers, and we'll talk about the
fun hooles in a moment. But what about the bigger
issues at stake in this story? The questions about whether
a poor worker can get a fair shake in the
American justice system, or whether justice favors the wealthy. That
is still very much a relevant question today, and the

(38:47):
issue of environmental justice, the delicate balance between welcoming industry
and providing jobs while making sure business doesn't boom at
the expense of healthy communities and healthy wildlife. Most people
agree that the Everglades should be restored, but who should
pay for it. Also entangled in this case is the

(39:08):
debate over the product sugar. The average American eats about
three pounds of it every week, several times the recommended amount.
Is it too late to put that genie back in
the bottle and get sugar out of our bread and
peanut butter and toothpaste. And then there's a very current
debate about whether American taxpayer should be giving billions to

(39:32):
sugar companies every year. Not only do we write checks
to these corporations when sugar prices fall, we also pay
more for our groceries because imports are limited, meaning US
sugar companies don't exist in a truly competitive market. The
Farm Bill comes up for renewal in twenty twenty three,
and buried within nearly one thousand pages is the Sugar Program,

(39:56):
a fat package of corporate welfare for the sugar industry.
Lobbyists are already meeting with politicians asking that those subsidies
being maintained. The subject of lobbyists and the incredible influence
they wheeled brings us right back to the fun holes.
The billionaire brothers who pull the strings behind a whole

(40:18):
phalanx of lobbyists. They're not the only billionaires who've built
their fortunes on the backs of low wage laborers and
government checks, but they are among the most wealthy and
the most powerful. Where are they now more after the break, Well,

(40:39):
they wouldn't speak to us, but they're still big players
in the sugar industry, and they're still well connected. For example,
in twenty fifteen, when Marco Rubio announced he was running
for president, he immediately walked off stage and into the
embrace of Peppi fun Hool. The fun Hooles donated hundreds
of thousands of dollars to his presidential camps. Pain their

(41:01):
companies still employ an army of lobbyists, and as recently
a September twenty twenty one, Alfhi Funhul was spotted with
another of his political friends. He was hopping onto his
twenty three million dollar yacht with Bill Clinton, and there's
still no strangers to controversy. When Jeffrey Epstein's Little Black
Book leaked recently, Peppy Funhull's name appeared. It was alongside

(41:25):
thousands of others, including royals, politicians, rock stars, though I
must stress this doesn't mean Peppy was doing anything illegal
with Epstein. And then in twenty ten, it was revealed
that Peppy's executive assistant, Chloe Black, had been married to
former KKK leader David Duke, and she is the current
wife of Don Black, a former KKK Grand Wizard and

(41:49):
member of the American Nazi Party. An ironic side note here,
she also at one time helped with public relations at
Glades Academy. That's a fun Hul supported school explicitly aimed
at raising black and Latino children. Out of poverty and
an even more ironic side note, her husband was once
imprisoned for attempting an armed overthrow of the government of

(42:12):
a Caribbean island. Speaking of the Caribbean, the fun Hoholes
still employ cane cutters in the Dominican Republic. Thousands of
Haitians work for them there. It's been reported that many
are housed in shacks without electricity, and the compounds are
patrolled by armed company police. The cutters often earn as
little as three dollars a day despite the sugar bill quotas.

(42:35):
Some of the sugar gets sent to the US. You
eat it, and of course they're still rich. One thing
they splash their cash on is charity. They're known as
massive philanthropists, but also on personal investments. Pepifun Hoods sold
his two thousand plus square foot condo for five point

(42:57):
two million dollars. It's often reported that their company, Florida Crystals,
brings in several billion dollars per year. After all the
reporting we've done on this story, a recurring theme has emerged.
It seems for everyone involved. It's like the sugarcane industry

(43:19):
is a ghost, something that continues to haunt them that
they can't seem to escape or let go of. In fact,
Dave can trace his connection way back to one of
his first ever cases as a lawyer.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
The very first court appointed case I got back in
nineteen seventy seven was a first degree murder case.

Speaker 3 (43:39):
Dave had only been admitted to practice law six months earlier.
The guy Dave was representing was the getaway driver during
a murder robbery at a sugarcane mill. And which meal
was it?

Speaker 1 (43:50):
I think it was Osciola.

Speaker 3 (43:52):
The same sugarcane farm. He sued, the same company at
the center of the case that had consumed his life
years later.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
This is a funny coincidence.

Speaker 3 (44:02):
And if we returned to other characters in the series,
remember Stephanie from episode one. She was the student filmmaker
who snuck onto the sugarcane fields and camps to document
the lives of the men there. In nineteen ninety, Stephanie
released her film H two Worker and it was incredibly
well received. It won a Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury.

Speaker 6 (44:23):
Prize, winning first prize at Sundance and being invited to
con You know that was very professionally rewarding At a
time when I didn't even have a profession.

Speaker 3 (44:35):
Really, it was the catalyst for the rest of her career. Meanwhile,
there was Alec Wilkinson. He went down to Florida to
write an article for The New Yorker about the sugar
cane cutters. He thought it was just an adventure, but
he ended up going back there year after year, investigating
and forging close relationships. And he didn't write just one article.

(44:58):
He published a whole book on his experiences called Big Sugar.

Speaker 5 (45:03):
I did come to feel deeply indignant on behalf of
the cutters, and I felt obliged to try to describe
what I regarded as an outrage.

Speaker 3 (45:18):
And you know, it's been kind of surprising talking to
Alec about the impact of working on this story. He's
had such an accomplished career. He's written ten books, on
a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and
a Lyndhurst Prize. You might think his time in the
cane fields was a blip on his literary radar, but really.

Speaker 10 (45:38):
I never had an experience like that with any other
kind of work over the forty years that I've been
doing this.

Speaker 3 (45:48):
And one thing that was Even more surprising was the
impact of one man, one cutter, on Alec Ough Nathan.

Speaker 10 (45:58):
Oh, Nathan, I wonder where Nathan is often. Nathan Nelson
was a cutter that I just I got very close to.
I went to see him twice in Jamaica. He was
a I can see him in my imagination now.

Speaker 5 (46:18):
Nathan was just.

Speaker 10 (46:19):
A very kind, very generous, very long suffering, very handsome
in his dignity.

Speaker 5 (46:28):
He was cool.

Speaker 7 (46:29):
You know.

Speaker 10 (46:29):
I just thought a lot a lot of when I
was young, I wanted to write about people I thought
were cool because they they were smart, or they had
interesting ideas in the world, or they did interesting things,
or they exemplified some quality that I found alluring. And
Nathan demonstrated a number of these.

Speaker 3 (46:55):
To this day, Alec longs to see Nathan again.

Speaker 5 (46:58):
Oh I mean, I'm almost.

Speaker 10 (47:03):
I have to recover my composure just hearing his name
and the thought of it. I would love to see
Nathan again.

Speaker 3 (47:10):
So we couldn't let this go either. We sent a
reporter in Jamaica to track Nathan down. It wasn't good
news Nathan had passed away, but we wanted to give
Alex some closure, so we called him up to tell
him what we'd found.

Speaker 11 (47:24):
You know, I've thought about him all these years. I
can't believe he's died. He was a lovely, lovely person.
He was very quietly charismatic, incredibly handsome, tall, dignified, funny.
He was a really lovely, great person, kind of a

(47:44):
best friend type, you know, a true friend type. I
really just was over the moon about him. I'd showed
pictures of Nathan to people in New York and say,
what's my friend.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
It really demonstrates the impact of reporting the story, of
delving into this industry, meeting the people. Forty years later,
Alec is still thinking about the cutters, about Nathan. This
story begins and ends with the cane cutters, and even
they can't seem to free themselves from the sugar cane ghost.

(48:20):
Victor made his dramatic exit from cutting caine in the eighties,
but even in the last year, he's found himself back
on Osceola Farm, not cutting caine this time.

Speaker 8 (48:29):
Mind you, I understand that you have gone back to
Osceola actually doing this paving work.

Speaker 1 (48:35):
Is that right?

Speaker 2 (48:37):
Yes?

Speaker 7 (48:38):
When I go dear on City Press, I have the
remember of in the eighties when I used to wear
it deer.

Speaker 3 (48:46):
Sometimes when he's paving, he turns to his colleagues, looks
out over the stocks stretching to the horizon, and he says,
I used to cut cane here and for Selvin, and
the experience of cutting cane was also an indelible one
decades later, he actually still dreams of it.

Speaker 2 (49:07):
Maybe like a couple of years ago, I've been dreaming
that I'm cutting sugarcane.

Speaker 3 (49:11):
The reason Salvin knows he's been dreaming about cutting sugarcane.
He's bashing his hand back and forth with an imaginary machete,
cutting sugarcane in his sleep.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
You know that I used my hand and chop in
my bed sleeping and hit myself.

Speaker 3 (49:28):
He even wakes himself up with his pretend chopping.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
Yeah, I can't imagine chopping in my bed sleeping, and
he used my hand and hit myself.

Speaker 3 (49:40):
Those years spent cutting and all the roughness are still
buried somewhere in selvin subconscious and they still come out
like a memory zombie resurrecting itself in his dreams.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
I don't know. Maybe it was so hard, as I
still have my mind and there.

Speaker 3 (49:58):
Even though it was tough, the hardest job in the world.
Seven thinks. He says he'd still do it if he
had to.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
Yeah, really, if that was the only job in the world,
house to'll do it just to survive, just to survive.

Speaker 3 (50:21):
I've never cut Cain, but from what I've seen in
the work, I doubt I'd make the decision that Selvin would,
even if cutting Cain were the last job on Earth.
It breaks my heart to think about Salvin and Victor
stepping off that plane in Florida, their hearts filled with
hope and optimism, truly believing that they could work hard
enough to better their lives, to earn a slice of

(50:44):
the American dream. But that hope was destined to be disappointed.
The optimism was unfounded. This nation needed the strong backs
and diligent labor of these men, and the industry they
helped build brought in untold riches, but they saw almost
none of that wealth. Nearly all of it went to
owners like the fun Hools. I can't help but feel

(51:07):
that my country let these men down, that we allowed
abusive systems, both economic and legal, to steal their labor
and their time. There's a song that was written about
the cutters, the h two workers, as they're called after
their visa by a Jamaican musician called Mutabaruka. It hits
on a lot of the themes from this story and

(51:27):
it's broader message that we live in this scaffolding, centuries
of inequality, the systems and history around us that means
some people are poor, some are rich, some people get
justice and others don't. And it hits on the purity,
the nucleus of the story of the Cutters, the purity

(51:47):
of being dumped into an unequal world, navigating this scaffolding,
and still still still trying to make your life better
just to survive. The legal case that inspired this story
has ended, but the big sugar story is far from over.
The market for candy alone is tens of billions of dollars,

(52:10):
and the United States on its own has one million
acres of sugar cane that produce more than four million
tons of sugar every year. And just like big oil,
big tobacco, and big pharma, big sugar wields incredible power
in US politics. You heard tape of President Nixon calling
the sugar lobby the most effective in the world, so
effective they're murderous. Well, that lobbying has continued in the

(52:35):
decades since Nixon resigned courtesy of the fun Hools and
their industry colleagues. Then there's the impact of sugar cane
harvesting on the environment and the added sugars invading so
much of the food we eat. And while men like
Victor and Selvin may not be cutting cane by hand
in the United States anymore, the backbreaking work continues elsewhere

(52:56):
in order to meet the insatiable hunger for sweetness all
over the world. A recent report found cutters in the
Dominican Republic had their wages withheld, were forced to work
terribly long hours, and faced abusive living conditions. In fact,
in the fall of twenty twenty two, the United States
government banned imports from farms in the Dominican Republic owned

(53:17):
by Central Romana Corp. And you know who owns a
significant stake in that company. You've guessed it, the fun Hools.
Back in Florida, there remains a major harvesting issue in
America's sugar towns, some of the poorest towns in the country.
The routine burning of cane fields, which is only permitted
when the wind blows away from the wealthy neighborhoods and

(53:38):
in the direction of poor areas. You heard that right.
Residents say the smoke and ash falling on their homes
is making people sick, while farmers and other residents argue
that these same communities depend on sugar production jobs to
make a living. It's complicated, but with renewed attention and
ongoing activism, we might be on the brink of something big.

(54:03):
Our land, our health, workers' rights, and now the fundamental
economics of the industry in the US are front and center.
Let me explain. Every five years, Congress proposes, debates, and
passes legislation that sets policies for agriculture, nutrition and conservation,
and forestry. This is the massive Farm Bill, which is

(54:23):
once again up for renewal for the first time since
twenty eighteen. It's an eight hundred and seven page piece
of legislation that covers everything from crop insurance to healthy
food access for low income families. So both houses of
Congress are haggling over the tens of billions of dollars
at stake, and many many eyes are in the Farm

(54:44):
Bill's sugar program, the program's import quotas, price floors, and
subsidized loans make sugar more expensive for consumers and mean
a whole lot more money for the companies that dominate
the industry. To be clear, we're not questioning whether farmers
should have the op oportunity to make a living, but
we are pointing out that environmentalists, free market advocates, social

(55:06):
justice advocates, and the elected politicians who have turned down
donations from sugar companies are questioning whether a massively profitable
industry like sugar needs to be enriched through government policies.
On the other side, of course, the industry and its
lobbyists are fighting for the status quo. All the backroom
lobbying is now very much out in the open. Here's

(55:29):
how former Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey put it to us
before he left office. Currently, the US sugar program is
a bad deal for American consumers and federal taxpayers. The
program's labyrinth of price controls and subsidies lavish corporate welfare
on a handful of wealthy sugar producers. And finally, there's

(55:50):
the science of sugar. We continue to learn more about
how it affects our bodies, how addictive it can be,
and its rolling conditions like tooth decake, heart disease, and diabetes.
Yet thanks to decades of industry propaganda, many of us
still worry more about grams of fat than the added
sugar found in so much of what we eat, if

(56:11):
nothing else. The twenty five year court case on behalf
of Workers, the government policies, the cane burning, and most fundamentally,
our health should make all of us look more closely
at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But I'm guessing it's going
to take a little while longer before we can truly

(56:32):
reckon with the enticing sweet power of Big Sugar. Big
Sugar is produced by Imagine Audio, Weekday Fund Productions and
novel for iHeartMedia. The series is hosted by me Celeste Hedley.
Big Sugar is produced by Jeff Eisenman at Weekday Fund Productions.

(56:55):
It's executive produced by Karl Welker, Nathan Kloke, and Marie Brenner.
Story editor and executive producer is Joe Wheeler. The researcher
is Nadia Metti. Production management from Scherie Houston, Frankie Taylor,
and Charlotte Wolfe. Our fact checker is Sona Avakian. Field

(57:16):
reporting by Amber of Mortigi and Zara Burton. Sound design
and mixing by Eli Block, Naomi Clark and Daniel Kempsen.
Original music composed by Troy McCubbin at Alloy Tracks. Additional
music by Nicholas Alexander. Thanks to Eleanor Biggs, Rosie Collier,
Tera Gadomski, Robert Gano, Renet de Sego, Anna Sinfield, Hanna Cassavetti,

(57:40):
and Julie Steinhagen. Special thanks to Alec Wilkinson, author of
the book Big Sugar, and Stephanie Black, director of the
documentary H two Worker. Big Sugar is based on the
Vanity Fair article in the Kingdom of Big Sugar by
Marie Branner. To make the confect not consisted, this