Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [179]
CLOSING THE DEAL IN CALIFORNIA
As Ray Boucher pushed his counterpart Mike Hennigan to embrace an aggregate settlement exceeding $600 million, all of the attorneys with cases in the Clergy 2 grouping saw Cardinal Mahony’s role as strategic if they were to prevail. Mahony was being battered in the media (the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, in disgust at his recycling of pedophiles, called on the cardinal to resign), but the lawyers knew that to close the deal, they needed Mahony on the job, threading the tightrope between insurance companies and the religious orders, particularly the Salesians, who would have to contribute funds for the settlement packages to come together. For all of their clients’ fury at the long delays, the lawyers realized that attacking Mahony as author of a cover-up undercut their interests. As Steve Rubino put it: “If a lawsuit says that negligence causes an injury, that’s a covered claim. But if proof comes out that these were intentional acts, a cover-up, the carriers don’t have to pay. We knew as we prepared these cases, that if we went to trial and aggressively argued cover-up, we’d walk right out of coverage: no deep pocket. And we knew Mahony did not have the assets to pay the full value”—which Boucher was pushing for an average of $1.4 million per case.
Jeff Anderson suggested they find a way for Mahony to meet some survivors. As part of this strategy, Boucher hired a producer to film interviews with the clients, edit their testimonies with the reflections of parents or spouses, intercut the memoir sequences with news footage where possible, and provide DVDs of the ten-minute profiles to Mahony and the judges overseeing the mediation process, as a way of turning “clients” and “survivors” into actual people whose stories would inject pathos and real-life issues into the legal mix.
“I’ve met a very large number of victims,” the cardinal told me in our 2005 interview. “I’ve also looked at the taped interviews the plaintiff attorneys here have developed. Dozens of interviews on DVD. I’ve listened to those, every single one of them. They just cause you to cry. You simply are in disbelief at what has happened to the lives of these people. It has been a very humbling experience. Spiritually, I was absolutely at the bottom, which means total vulnerability to God’s grace. And I began to realize that this is the ministry Jesus Christ is asking of me and others at this time, to repair the damage, to make sure it won’t happen again.”
Boucher, at a dinner with Mahony and counsel Mike Hennigan in the cathedral rectory, insisted that the settlement numbers for the 554 claims go well north of $600 million, using $1.4 million per victim as the gauge. He knew his counterparts were in a mosh pit with the insurance lawyers. Subsequently, Hennigan suggested they divide the L.A. group into two sequences—one small, one large. For Mahony’s planning, they had to cut the first deal before the end of 2006, and give the cardinal some time to corral the rest of the money. On December 1, 2006, the archdiocese agreed to $60 million for forty-five plaintiffs. These cases involved the most recent perpetrators, post-1985, when the archdiocese was self-insured, and the earliest cases, when it had little or no insurance. Mahony announced that $40 million had come from “funds we set aside last year,” money from religious orders and limited insurance payments.49
Most of the trial lawyers, like Jeff Anderson and Steve Rubino, had been working on these Orange diocese and northern California cases