The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [114]
Rogers takes credit for forcing Patrick out of the company—the first casualty of Killer Coke’s corporate campaign. He also suspects that the campaign played a role in Daft’s own retirement from the company shortly thereafter. Whether or not that’s true, Rogers did at least ensure he went out with a bang. Unlike the tepid protests at the previous year’s shareholder meeting, Rogers intended the 2004 meeting to be an affair to remember.
Rogers had a love-hate relationship with shareholder meetings. It was his one opportunity all year to confront his enemies in the ring, mano a mano. But he also hated the pressure of direct confrontation. He couldn’t sleep the night before Coke’s annual meeting in April 2004, and he was still scribbling notes as he sat in the audience in the ballroom of the Hotel Dupont in Wilmington, Delaware, not exactly sure what he would say.
At least he had a new weapon in his arsenal. Just a month earlier, a New York City councillor, Hiram Monserrate, had released a report from a fact-finding mission to Coke plants in Colombia. In ten days, Monserrate and his team had met with dozens of Coke workers and Coke FEMSA managers who admitted that it was possible that bottling plant managers may have worked with paramilitaries without authorization. Shockingly, however, those officials said neither Coca-Cola nor any of its bottling companies had ever done any internal investigations into the violence. The report’s conclusions were damning to the company. “Coke has shown—at best—disregard for the lives of its workers,” it stated, adding that the company “has allowed if not itself orchestrated the human rights violations of its workers, and it has benefited economically from those violations, which have severely weakened the workers’ union and their bargaining power.”
Sitting in the audience, Rogers grew increasingly angry listening to Daft standing at the podium. After he declared record first-quarter profits of $1.13 billion—an increase of 35 percent over the previous year— Daft addressed the Colombia situation, saying not only that Coca-Cola was innocent of any violence but that no union member had ever been harmed on the grounds of a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Colombia. That was too much, for Rogers, who leaped to the microphone as soon as Daft opened the floor to comments.
“After months of investigation into Coca-Cola,” he began shouting, “all evidence shows that the Coca-Cola system is rife with immorality, corruption, and complicity in gross human rights violations including murder and torture. Mr. Daft, you lied earlier today about the situation in Colombia,” he continued. “Isidro Gil was assassinated, murdered, in one of your bottling plants in Colombia.” As Rogers’s voice boomed off the ballroom’s high ceiling, Daft impatiently tried to break into his speech, warning Rogers had exceeded his two-minute limit. “Please do not interrupt me, Mr. Daft!” Rogers yelled, as audience members started joining in the call for him to be quiet.
Rogers continued on about the Monserrate report and the ATCA lawsuit, as Daft ordered his microphone shut off. Security guards moved in, but the former boxer wouldn’t be taken out of the ring without a fight. “You’re getting out of here,” said one guard, trying to put an arm around Rogers’s neck in a chokehold. “Oh no, I’m not,” said Rogers, struggling free. Three more guards came to help, knocking out Rogers’s legs and tackling him to the floor, knocking off his glasses. “I’m not leaving,” he continued to yell, even as Daft pleaded from the podium for the police to be gentle. Finally, Rogers relented and they carried him out of the room. “We shouldn’t have done that,” Daft said to a fellow executive on the podium, even as more members of the audience