I'll Take The Case (eBook)

Becky

Chapter 1

Storms rise quickly off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a storied fishing village between Boston and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The sea just beyond Gloucester Harbor is the graveyard of hundreds of wooden ships, which over centuries have been risked for the plentiful scrod, pollock, and monkfish that teem just under the surface. The bars lining the bay on Rogers Street and Main Street have collectively poured rivers of rum into one-ounce glasses, and could tell countless tales of fisherman who were equal parts adventurous, industrious, brave, drunk and poor.

One summer, Ray Andrews, a businessman from Philadelphia, bought a blue 30-foot commercial gill-netter moored in nearby Kittery, Maine, named the Sara. He renamed it the Becky after his daughter and had it delivered to Gloucester. Andrews grew up reading Ernest Hemingway and idolized the seafaring hero in The Old Man and the Sea who fought off sharks for days to save his prize catch. Andrews was no fisherman, and instead bought the boat in order to hire a captain and crew and vicariously touch the water.

His search for an able sea captain led him to Elliot Sherwood, a violent drunk with a record of dealing more drugs than fish during his days out at sea. Sherwood was rumored once to have broken the neck of another sailor during a barroom fight over the affections of a woman. Knowing no better, asking no questions and thus satisfied, Andrews crowned Sherwood the captain of the Becky and left it to him to assemble a crew. Sherwood recruited a five-man crew through his own alchemy, and soon the good boat was packed for a run with ice and bait for the fish, and booze and food for the men. The crew met at the Crow’s Nest Bar on Main Street for a final round, then boarded the vessel and shoved off from the dock.

As the Becky left Gloucester Harbor, the crew could see that all the other gill-netters were heading back into port. Dark gray clouds soon covered the sky. Sherwood turned on the radio and scanner and heard the Coast Guard broadcasting a warning on all local channels that a major storm was coming. The crew prepared to return to port but Sherwood refused. The catch was better right after a storm, he reasoned, and no other boats out fishing ensured a larger haul and an increased price per pound after they returned with a boatload. Rain began falling and the wind blew. The crew urged Sherwood to return the boat to shore but their protests were ignored. Sherwood ordered the nets to be cast off portside. The Coast Guard’s warnings grew more dire. Whitecaps formed and the ocean swells grew to five feet and then to eight feet. Soon the waves rose above the ship’s gunnels. The engine room sloshed with water and the alternators flooded. The bilge pumps wheezed and strained to rid the boat of seawater.

The entire crew pleaded with Sherwood to abandon the nets and turn the boat around to safety, as a sunken ship loaded with fish is still a sunken ship. Sherwood, however, was unmoved. He dropped the iron anchor, sat in the captain’s chair and calmly lit a joint. His eyes began to glaze as the swells continued to rise, now reaching ten and fifteen feet high. The Becky was tethered to the ocean floor by its anchor. No other boats were visible to the crew as they stood on the heaving deck, ashen and blue. They braced themselves against the freezing guardrails and plotted their next move. Their stoned captain was risking their lives and there was no time left. They silently conspired by reading each other’s faces, and crept toward Sherwood from behind.

Just then an enormous swell dipped the Becky downwards and then violently up again. As the ship pointed downward for a second time, a towering blue-gray wave crashed through the boat’s three-inch thick windshield glass. Sherwood took the crushing brunt of the wall of Atlantic seawater and the impact broke off most of his front teeth. Two of the sailors furiously bailed out the boat while two others grabbed Sherwood—dazed from the drugs and his bloody mouth—and mutinied against him. They threw him into the cargo hold and latched it. The anchor was so deep on the ocean floor that it could not be recoiled fast enough to save the vessel. The fifth sailor tied a rope around his own body so he would not be washed overboard, climbed onto the heaving bow with his seven-inch gutting knife in his teeth, and cut all the lines just before the next wave could send the boat and crew to the salty sea bottom to join their anchor.

With the nets and anchor line cut and the Becky freed from Sherwood, the five sailors quickly piloted the storm-damaged and badly-leaking boat toward the harbor. It was the last boat to return to port. As other sailors stood on the dock and cheered them on, the seasick crew staggered down the gangplank onto firm ground. They were soaked, hypothermic, nauseated from the churning sea, and bore no fish. The mutinied captain, still high on pot and throbbing with pain from his bloody mouth, was finally released from the hold. The leaking boat, now denuded of anchor, nets, and windshield, was lashed to the pylons.

If this harrowing scene had been in a Herman Melville novel, once the sailors had dried off they would have bought each other rounds of drinks and toasted to their deliverance to fish another day. But that was not what happened. Instead, a lawsuit was filed.

Of course, I knew nothing of this. I had just opened my own law practice that week in Boston and was searching for my very first case. The phone rang. “Hello?” I answered.

“Is Attorney William Goodman there?” the caller asked. The caller had dialed the wrong number, looking for a different lawyer, and reached me instead. “There is no Attorney Goodman here,” I responded, “but I’m a lawyer. Maybe I can help you?”

“I want a lawyer who knows maritime mutiny law,” the caller said. The caller was none other than Ray Andrews, the owner of the Becky.

I had served a term as an Assistant District Attorney for Norfolk County, but that was exclusively criminal law. This case was civil litigation, in which I was quite inexperienced. As for maritime mutinies and unseaworthy boat cases, I did not even know those were areas of the law. The only time I had ever heard of a ship mutiny was in the Humphrey Bogart movie The Caine Mutiny, and I did not remember much about it except for the scene with the strawberries. But to pay my rent, I needed a case—any case—and I did not want this man to slip off my line and go elsewhere. “I’m listening,” I said. “Tell me the situation.”

Andrews told me the story of his fateful boat purchase, his poor choice of captain and his extremely lucky crew. Andrews asked if I could help. At first, I did not understand who the plaintiff was in the lawsuit, and who was the defendant. Were the sailors suing the captain for endangering their lives? Was the dock owner suing the crew for damaging his algae-covered pylons during the rocky mooring back in Gloucester harbor? Was Ray Andrews suing the Coast Guard for not ordering the Becky to return to harbor with sufficient clarity, costing him profits and his ship? Or did a group of conservationists sue them all for causing hundreds of fish to spoil in the nylon nets they left at the bottom of the sea?

It was none of those. The suit was brought by—ironically—the one person genuinely culpable: the sea captain himself. Sherwood sued the boat for being unseaworthy. According to his stoned logic, the Becky’s unworthiness caused the glass to break under the weight of the water, leaving him toothless, and this in turn rendered him helpless when the crew mutinied against him.

“To be honest,” I told him, “I’ve never handled a maritime mutiny case in my life. But you should hire me anyway because I learn quickly and I’ll represent you like you were my only client.” He did not know that he would actually be my only client. Andrews was silent for a moment. “Y’know,” he finally said. “I don’t know why I’m saying this, but congratulations, you’re hired.”

Overjoyed, I hung up the phone. My first case, I thought, through a wrong number and total bluster. I had taken no maritime law courses in law school and would have to learn this esoteric field in record speed. I went to the Boston law library and spent several days reading cases of crew mutinies and maritime statutes. I quickly realized how complex this area of law could be, and started to wonder if I was just another bad hire by Andrews. If I lost the case, I could imagine Andrew swearing to himself: First Sherwood, then Plaut. What was I thinking?

Sherwood had sued the boat owner under the Maritime Jones Act in Federal Court. He was looking for someone other than himself to blame, and did not want to believe that the thick glass broke because he ignored the pleadings of his crewmembers and the Coast Guard and effectively taunted Mother Nature to attack the ship. People read sensational stories of juries who dole out millions of dollars for slight infractions, and the chance of a big payday is intoxicating. Even swashbucklers like Sherwood who do an ancient mariner’s task now come whimpering to the courts when their sea nets come up empty.

As defense counsel, it was my job to prove that Andrews had not sent his men out on a rickety boat. I needed the testimony of the sailors who rode on the maiden—and the last—voyage of the Becky to prove that Sherwood himself was to blame....