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“I’ve got my ways.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ve been picking up their garbage.”

“You’ve been what?”

“I’ve been diving every night.”

Susette burst out laughing. Von Winkle had been rifling through coffee cups and half-eaten sandwiches to get to hundreds of internal records. “Oh, my God,” she said, laughing hysterically. “Those dummies don’t even know it?”

Von Winkle laughed.

“Nobody else in the world would ever think of picking through the NLDC’s garbage,” she said.

“We’re never gonna win,” he said, the smile disappearing from his face.

“Huh?”

“You know, it’s like this, Red,” he said. “Pfizer is behind this. The governor is behind this. We’re never gonna win.”

Susette stopped laughing.

August 28, 2000

Expecting to see boarded-up buildings and dilapidated houses, Scott Bullock navigated his rental car through Fort Trumbull. Instead, he found neat, small houses with seacoast charm: weather vanes, wicker furniture, and porches facing the water.

“This is depressed?” Bullock said to himself. He had grown up in the economically devastated Pittsburgh of the seventies and eighties. The Fort Trumbull neighborhood didn’t look depressed to him.

He coasted down East Street and came to a stop across from Susette’s house. It was surrounded by flower boxes and white lawn furniture. An American flag waved from one corner of the house. A hand-painted plywood sign leaned against the front steps: “This Land Is Ours! Not Gov. Rowland’s. Not NLDC’s. Help Us Save Our Homes.”

Bullock stepped out of the car and retrieved his briefcase.

“Did you find everything okay?” Up on the porch, Susette rested her arms on the white railing. Kathleen Mitchell and Steve and Amy Hallquist stood with her.

Bullock climbed the steps and extended his hand. “Hi, I’m Scott Bullock. I’m blown away by the view here,” he said.

“This is where we always meet, at Susette’s place,” Mitchell said.

“This,” said Steve, “is ground zero.”

Susette pointed to the cranes towering over the tall buildings rising from the Pfizer property next door. “C’mon inside,” she said. Nearly twenty neighbors shook Bullock’s hand and expressed relief that he had come. The group crowded into a circle of chairs Susette had set up in the kitchen. Peter Kreckovic introduced Bullock and turned the floor over to him.

Bullock started with some brief background on the institute and its interest in the Fort Trumbull dispute. He made it clear that no decision had been made to represent anyone in New London. “I’m here to hear your stories,” he said, “and to offer some thoughts that I have on ways of fighting this and things that you need to do to try and organize to fight against this.”

He asked the people in the circle to provide their names and addresses, indicate whether they owned or rented, and explain what their interests were in opposing the property takings.

The first man indicated he owned a business in the area. “I don’t own the property,” he said. “I just rent the property.”

Bullock made a note on his pad: “Out of luck.” In eminent-domain cases, tenants are powerless unless the owner is dedicated to fighting.

The next man owned a house in an area where the city planned to build a new roadway leading to Pfizer. Bullock dismissed his situation, too. There was little legal basis for opposing instances when a municipality took property for roadways.

Then Susette spoke. She explained that the NLDC planned to take her entire block. Her story ignited the others, who started talking over each other.

“What are they planning to build on this block?” Bullock asked.

“Nothing,” Susette said.

“Nothing?” Bullock asked.

“For this block there is no plan,” Steve Hallquist said.

“They just want to get rid of it,” Susette said.

Bullock had studied a lot of eminent-domain cases. In virtually every case he’d seen, the government planned to take private property for some use. He’d seen disputes over whether the intended use qualified as public use. But he had never come across a situation where a local government had no plan for the land it seized.

There could be a case here,