The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [279]
“Now we were going to lose or win, and we had a judge who didn’t like us, and we were operating with our hands tied and under threat of contempt.”
Courier-Express employees began to police the minutiae of the order, and proved that the News had delivered some Sunday papers to people who had not filled out the proper forms. Judge Brieant held the News in contempt.
Five weeks later, advertisers had rallied behind the Courier-Express, and the new Sunday edition of the News could boast of only a quarter of the Courier-Express’s ad lineage.30 The Evening News swung from a modest profit to a whopping $1.4 million loss.31 Buffett was chilled by the news. No business he had ever owned had lost so much money so fast.
On a miserable, rain-driven day the week before Christmas 1977, Judge Brieant called the court into session for the beginning of a trial that would determine the terms of a final injunction. Buffett had spent the latter part of the fall sleepless and in tears, trying to digest what it meant that Susie was gone and yet not really leaving him. His idea of a distraction from his personal woes had been to cling like a junebug to Carol Loomis, Astrid, and Kay Graham in turn as he flew back and forth between New York, Omaha, and Washington. Certainly he had not wanted a distraction like this. The trial went into recess as he flew to Emerald Bay for the annual holiday family gathering, the first under the new arrangement with Susie, during which she would continue to reassure him that their lives would go on much as before. As soon as the Buffetts’ New Year’s Day party was over, Warren and Susie went their separate ways, Judge Brieant reconvened the litigants, and Olson and Munger began calling Buffett with updates on the trial as he returned to work in Omaha.
In July 1978, he was with Carol and George Gillespie. “We were playing bridge in Kay’s apartment in New York with Charlie, and Judge Brieant’s decision came in. I gave it to Charlie, and he read it, and he said, ‘Well, this is pretty well-written.’ I was so damned mad. I didn’t give a damn whether it was well-written or not, I was living with all these restrictions. I was not about to admire his prose.”
Judge Brieant’s final opinion, a masterpiece of judicial unrestraint carrying the subtitle “Mr. Buffett Comes to Buffalo,” kept in place restrictions against the Evening News. Munger and Olson planned to appeal. Characteristically, Buffett did not want to lengthen the fight with the judge. Munger had always kidded Buffett that his management technique was to take out all the cash from a company and raise prices. If that failed, Buffett didn’t have any more arrows in his quiver. This technique wouldn’t solve the problems of the Evening News. Buffett was so beaten down and wanted so badly not to get into a confrontation with the judge that he was willing to let $35.5 million go down the drain. A remnant of his last big legal battle was only now ending: The SEC had finally, at long last, approved the merger of Berkshire and Diversified. Buffett wanted desperately to be done with lawyers, depositions, subpoenas, and fighting. “I didn’t want to appeal. I just felt it would take so damned long, it would irritate the judge, and that we had more to lose