Many people have that former significant other whom they broke up with not for one big reason, but a thousand little ones. Time passes, and despite knowing that the relationship was far from perfect, they place it on a pedestal as their romantic ideal. Whenever their current relationship sours, they go back and think Oh, things were so good with so-and-so. I should give her a call, maybe we can give it another chance. While others feel this way about men or women, it perfectly describes my feelings about New York—my personal paradox, my great white whale. We broke up, but any time Seattle, the lovely woman with whom I’ve settled down, disappoints me in the slightest, I feel the urge to give New York a call1.
Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It never goes well, either way, because while I can’t see myself living here again, I can’t see myself not living here again. New York is my unstoppable force. New York is my immovable object.
Today will be an interesting day.
When my friend Amy arrives at the kosher dairy place she suggested for lunch, she apologizes for being late, and I apologize for forgetting to get her a birthday card on the way here, so I suppose we’re even. If anything, her mistake was more understandable than mine—considering she lives in Park Slope, and the rest of her day consists of a job interview in the East Village, a grad school meeting on the Upper West Side, and a second date with a guy whom she really liked, I’m flattered that Amy managed to find time for me at all.
Only nine months have passed since Amy moved here from Seattle, but somehow, this is the third time I’ve seen her since, and, after three weeks on the road, it’s nice to be around someone I consider a Seattle person, if only for a moment. Aside from a moment of road trip talk, we spend lunch catching up on far more minor topics. She liked a guy, but he fell off the radar after his apartment got infested with bed bugs. She ran into a couple of our friends from Seattle—who began dating shortly after Amy moved away—at a restaurant in Brooklyn last week, totally by chance. I ask her if she has any big plans for her birthday tomorrow, and explain how I had a whole scheme in mind with regards to the card I was going to get her, but I froze when I arrived at the Walgreens where I planned to buy it.
That Walgreens and I have history.
I tell Amy the story—including a tangent about how I call that location my Drugstore of Awkwardness because a mutual friend of ours refers to a particular Denny’s as her Restaurant of Pain—and she proposes a solution that is simple, elegant, and obvious. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to get a message to my younger self.
Time only works one way.
A ten-minute walk across the East Village after I say goodbye to Amy, I wait in the lobby of an NYU office building for Erin McLaughlin, the only person to ever be both a Lockerbie and Remembrance Scholar. I only have the vaguest idea of what she looks like, based upon a glance at a five-year-old photograph, but figure that I’ll be able to pick her out by her Scottish accent.
I will be wrong.
I will not be disappointed.
The girl who emerges from the elevator bears only a passing resemblance to the one I saw in the photograph on Judy’s quilt. In the years since the picture was taken, she has grown from a teen with a goofy-looking smile into quite the beautiful twenty-something. She suggests we head to a nearby coffee shop, and, being a true Seattleite, I reply that I’m fine with anywhere that is not a Starbucks.
We talk as we walk. She speaks with only the faintest of accents, one that I would have missed entirely if I weren’t listening for it.
Two days from now, as I drive back to Morristown from an early afternoon interview with a 39-year-old depressed and relatively paranoid man on Long Island, my mind will distract itself from traffic by remembering Erin. I will try to imagine what her hair looks like first thing in the morning, and I will wonder what it would be like to sit across from, or perhaps next to, her at brunch. Somewhere in the Bronx, I will realize that, over the course of the next hour’s conversation, I will have developed a crush on her which will lead to me idly ruminating on these questions, which I will almost certainly never have answered.
That’s two days from now, though.
In this moment, as I set my iced latte down on the coffee shop’s counter and sit on the barstool beside Erin, my questions focus on her past, not the future we will never share. I open with the most obvious one: Why did she become a Lockerbie Scholar?
“Thinking back, I never really know the answer to that. I’m actually from Moffat, which is 15 miles away from Lockerbie, and for some reason, I really wanted to go to Lockerbie Academy. I think it was because they did drama. So I decided to go there, and then, I think it was the first year they announced who was going to Syracuse, and they were like, ‘These two people have been chosen, it’s a really great honor.’ That moment, I thought, Wow, this is something I should really work towards.
“Also, Doc Mason2 from Syracuse came to school, and I remember one lunchtime, sitting and talking to American students who went to Syracuse about what it was like to be there. I got really excited that these Americans were in our school and interested in the town, and so I decided to become interested in Syracuse. By fourth year of high school3, I decided that I really wanted to go. I think one reason I really wanted to go was Andrew McClune. I don’t know if you’ve heard about him.”
I tell Erin that I have, how I heard the story from Judy in Syracuse. Erin continues, explaining that he was a year ahead of her in school.
“Everyone in Lockerbie knows each other. There’s like a hundred people in every class year. When he died, it just had an added poignancy, because it was really affecting me now, the whole Syracuse-Lockerbie connection. Whereas before, it was something that happened back when I was two-and-a-half, that really brought it to my generation.”
“There were other reasons, but that was added incentive, to do it in his honor. He didn’t complete the year, and I’d known how great of a time he was having while he was there.”
Erin visited America as a child, long before she was awarded the scholarship. Soon after she left to attend Syracuse, a reminder of that trip resurfaced.
“My parents actually found a letter that I wrote to myself when I was seven, which is a wonderful letter. I look at it all the time. It went, ‘I really love America. I want to go back. I’d love to go back to Florida again, but Mom says we have to go visit New York. I want to live there, okay.’ It was like a statement: ‘I want to live there, okay.'”
“When they found the letter, they were like, ‘This is really weird how you foreshadowed your life in America.'”
Once she arrived in Syracuse, Erin found the college truly spoke to her. Quickly, she bonded with her floor-mates—two of whom are still her closest friends—and met her college boyfriend. She loved the flexibility of being a Lockerbie scholar, of going from a Roman history class to ballet, and getting credit for both. Meanwhile, she traveled America with her friends whenever she got the chance—New York City in October, New Hampshire and Boston for Thanksgiving, and a Spring Break road trip from New Orleans to Arkansas.
As the year progressed, Erin fell in love with her life in the States, and decided she no longer wanted to attend Glasgow University as planned. Trying to stay meant wading into uncharted waters.
“I asked Judy if anyone had ever done it, and she said, ‘No, but we would love to have a first.’ I wrote letters to financial aid looking for money, and my family was very, very supportive. It was a huge financial undertaking because my parents weren’t expecting it, so we had to rely on other extended family. It was a lot to try and stay. I wonder how that played on the dynamic of the year after me, because they had a Lockerbie scholar as a resource, which was great. They were a year below me in age, so I knew them from high school. It was like we were building the Lockerbie community in Syracuse.”
Erin remained engaged in Remembrance activities throughout her time at Syracuse, building awareness of the attack that had forever linked her secondary school and her college. While she had to participate in Remembrance Week as a Lockerbie Scholar, the next two years, she helped out of a genuine passion. When her senior year rolled around, Judy suggested Erin should apply for a Remembrance scholarship, something Erin was already considering.
“I really like planning events. That’s my thing. I’d seen how other Remembrance Weeks had been, and I felt we could do way more. This was 19 years after. We needed more, because students weren’t around when it happened. They walk by the Wall every day. It’s such a huge part of Syracuse history. The year I was a Remembrance Scholar, they combined the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 general meeting with Remembrance Week, so the families came and had the meeting. That was a really big thing, and I wanted to make sure that the families that were in attendance had a good view of what Remembrance Week was and how Syracuse remembered everyone that died in the disaster.”
As supportive as she is, Erin questions the long-term viability of the scholarships, and wonders if they should be replaced with some other kind of memorial. Part of her concern comes from the personal connections she developed while in the program. During her time as a Remembrance Scholar, she reached out to the mother of the student she memorialized.
“I represented Turhan Ergin, and his mother was Florence. We became very good friends. She came to Remembrance Week, and we used to write each other letters and things. She got me a graduation gift in 2007. But then, I guess she’s not been feeling well. She’s very depressed. She lost Turhan in the disaster, and then her husband died on December 21, 2002. It’s a really weird coincidence, and so she just couldn’t deal with the holiday season. So she’s kind of taken herself off the radar. She used to be very involved. Judy and I write her notes every now and again, but it’s sad.”
Erin tells me about Turhan in the same tone one discusses old friends, telling me how he had gone on that study abroad semester with his two best friends, fellow drama students who weren’t on the plane. Those two men went on to produce Wicked. Erin says Florence believed Turhan would have done the same.
While Turhan lost his life studying at Syracuse, Erin believes her time at the school changed the arc of hers.
“I’m still in touch with my best friend from high school. She’s married now. Everyone in Scotland has children and is married, and I’m like, ‘Okay. Good for you.’ Everyone here says, ‘Wait until your thirties to get married.’ My friends will be grandparents then!”
While her friends back home have babies, Erin still has class—next month, she’s due to receive a master’s degree in higher education administration. After that, she hopes to find a way to stay in America even longer.
“I’ve applied to Syracuse, in their Res Life department, so I might have a chance to go back there. I would like to stay in the city another year, just experience it just working and not having to deal with school and earn money, but I want to stay in America, so wherever I get legal sponsorship is probably the best option for me.”
Erin doesn’t know what’s next, but whatever happens, she will remain grateful for the opportunities these scholarships created for her, and honor those whose deaths inspired them.
“The whole tragedy has changed my life, and affected it. I wouldn’t be here now had I not applied for the scholarship, had the disaster not happened. There’s all these what ifs. I’m just so grateful that I had a chance to meet family members and research Turhan and all the other students. I think that’s why I’m so involved.
“It’s weird how life works out,” she observes. “I think one terrible thing can result in so many good things, and I want that to continue.”
I walk Erin back to her office, and then dash off to catch a 6 train—the train was once my neighborhood subway—uptown. My destination is Grand Central Station, a single stop past 33rd Street, where I used to hop on the train to go explore the city.
In the months before I lived here, and the first few when I did, I wanted to make this place my home forever. I still loved Seattle, but New York had a degree of unattainability to it.
When I applied for that internship at SPIN, I did so on a whim—I didn’t have the slightest expectation that I would get the internship. Once the whirlwind of activity that followed settled down, I was living in a $1500-a-month furnished studio in the Manhattan neighborhood of Kips Bay, two blocks away from SPIN‘s office. Initially, SPIN seemed like the dream job I imagined: On my first day, a singer/songwriter named Ben Kweller performed in the office after work ended, and my next day there, five dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts were delivered on behalf of Franz Ferdinand, the Scottish band which received their first-ever American cover story in that month’s issue of the magazine.
Within weeks, those experiences proved the exception, rather than the norm.
Inside the offices of SPIN, I began to notice an undercurrent of unhappiness. Everyone seemed too busy or burnt out to actually enjoy music anymore—I remember my supervisor blowing off a highly anticipated show so she could work on her book about the Pixies after a full day in the office.
Life in New York carried an unspoken competitive nature. Lindsay, the intern who lived with family friends in Connecticut, was jealous of us interns who lived in the city. The other interns were jealous of me for not having roommates. I was jealous of anyone who a) lived in a more relevant part of town or b) could preheat their apartment’s oven without setting off the smoke detector. And that’s just among those of us on the lower rungs.
I don’t know what staff at SPIN made, but it wasn’t much, especially considering the lifestyles of those they reported on—the most memorable article written during my time there was a Chuck Klosterman piece about U2 which opens with Bono giving the writer a ride in a Maserati Quattroporte, a vehicle that likely cost several times more than Chuck made in a year.
When I started at SPIN, I viewed it as getting my foot in the door, the beginning of what I hoped would become a long and storied career. I left disillusioned, uncertain what I wanted to do with my life, and more than four years later, I’m still floating through and trying to figure that out.
Luckily, I haven’t had to choose, and I’ve never had to do anything simply for the money. As I get off the subway at Grand Central, I’m late for my appointment with one of the men who made that possible.
After hearing Mark Zaid’s critical remarks about Kreindler and Kreindler in D.C., I decided to get perspective from the legal team that represented my family. I’m deeply grateful for their work—their efforts all but created my current lifestyle, and therefore, this project—so getting their side of the story is the least I could do.
When told my mom about Zaid’s opinions, and asked how to get in touch with our people at the firm, she sent me their contact info in an email defending the work they’d done.
Steve Pounian was my family’s primary contact, while Jim Kreindler was the lead of the legal team after his father, Lee, passed away. Jim replied to my email right away, saying that he would be happy to meet me today, but this was followed almost immediately by an email directed to Steve—Jim hit “reply all” instead of “reply,” it seems—asking who I am. Perhaps I should feel slighted, but this made complete sense—the Kreindlers represented around 100 families, and I only remember meeting him in passing twice—but amused me nonetheless. The man’s work left me set for life, and he has no idea I exist.
Dashing out of Grand Central Station towards Kreindler and Kreindler’s office, I emerge into daylight just below the iconic MetLife building.
The former Pan Am building.
For several years, I made a point of offering that edifice the finger every time I saw it, in person or in films, but that habit fell by the wayside when I took up residence in this city and saw it on a near-daily basis. The former Pan Am building straddles the street and throws off the grid, meaning it’s visible from afar despite Manhattan’s street plan.
Also, I can see it from Jim Kreindler’s office.
That’s the first thing that strikes me about the Kreindler and Kreindler offices, once I get past security and to their space on the 18th floor of a Park Avenue building two blocks south of Grand Central. I knew their building was close to the then-headquarters of our old nemesis, but not how close.
After a brief wait, Jim Kreindler, wearing a white linen shirt and blue jeans, greets me in the lobby and shows me to his corner office. His attire amuses me, because I deliberately dressed up—by my standards, at least—in a blue dress shirt and black jeans, and worried I would be underdressed.
But then, this is his office, his world, the place where he worked to make my family as whole as we could ever hope to be. As far as I’m concerned, he can wear whatever he wants.
I take a seat in Jim’s office and explain why I’m there, how I spoke with Mark Zaid in D.C. last week. Before I finish my sentence about the uncomplimentary things Zaid said about his firm, Kreindler interrupts.
“I can’t stand him, frankly. He’s a liar.”
So, there’s that.
“There’s a couple of people who I can’t forgive,” Kreindler says. “I understand lawyers who want to get money when they don’t earn it and haven’t done anything, but to concoct stories, a series of lies, and try and malign my dad after his death is just unforgivable.”
“Every lawyer wants to make money doing good work. The difference is, we were glad to make a lot of money working hard for a great result for 20 years, he wanted to make a lot of money having done absolutely nothing.”
Kreindler takes me back to the beginning of the case and reconstructs the work his firm, led by his late father, did.
As he remembers, Kreindler and Kreindler got its first phone call related to the case in December of 1988—possibly before Christmas, even—but didn’t file its first lawsuit until January of the following year. At the time, they never imagined how big it would become.
“Here’s what we went through: The press reported what happened. Then, we’re still living with the Warsaw Convention. On international travel such as this, we’re limited to $75,000 unless you could prove willful misconduct, which is almost impossible. Dad and I were talking about it, and we were hoping that the investigation would reveal some mechanical fault so we could bring a claim against Boeing, because Boeing is not governed by Warsaw4. We thought, how could you prove willful misconduct if a bomb went off on a Pan Am airplane?”
Within the first week, Scottish authorities recovered parts of a baggage container that showed evidence of an explosion, which the Kreindlers thought would make their job all but impossible. Soon, though, other stories surfaced that gave them hope.
On December 5, 1988, a man with an Arabian accent called the American Embassy in Helsinki, Finland and warned that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt, Germany to the United States5 would be blown up within the next two weeks. American authorities deemed the threat credible, and circulated a memo about this anonymous tip—which became known as the Helsinki Warning—to American embassies and air carriers.
Pan Am’s chief of security in Frankfurt, Ulrich Weber, ignored it.
The day after the bombing, Weber assigned a man named Oliver Koch to go through his desk in search of anything relevant. When Koch found the Helsinki Warning memo, Weber ordered him to make it look like it had been properly disseminated to screeners before the bombing.
“Because of that story, we thought we should get into the case and see if we could find that security procedures were so bad that we could make out a willful misconduct claim,” Kreindler remembers. “We’d already met with a lot of families, but we were pretty cautious in the beginning, saying, ‘There’s no willful misconduct verdicts that have stood up on appeal. It’s going to be extremely difficult, but we’ll try.'”
At first, the firm simply hoped to dig up enough dirt on Pan Am to convince the airline to settle for more than the Warsaw Convention’s $75,000 cap. The deeper they searched, the more convinced the Kreindlers became that they could prove willful misconduct in a court of law.
One key piece of evidence they discovered became known as the “Load’em and go” memo, in which Pan Am headquarters told the airline’s head of security in Europe to disregard procedures for matching bags to passengers before loading them onto international flights. That, along with other scandals, allowed the families’ lawyers to get far more from Pan Am than they expected.
“It doesn’t seem like so much, because things have changed. But back then, we settled non-dependency cases—students who were killed, survived by parents—for $575,000. Most cases, said as a matter of law, $200,000 or $250,000 would be excessive. When a young person who isn’t yet working is killed, as a matter of law, compensatory damages may not exceed $100,000. So you know, dad and I, when we tried Pagnucco6 and Bainbridge7, set the records at $9 million. But even more remarkable, in a way, is getting $575,000 when full value under New York law was $100,000 to $250,000. It’s inconceivable, but that’s how it was.”
Kreindler explains to me how the legal action played out, including how virtually the same plaintiffs’ committee8 represented the families in both the Pan Am and Libya lawsuits. He also confirms what Zaid said about an amendment to the Federal Sovereign Immunities Act being key to suing Libya, but disputes that Zaid was responsible for writing that amendment.
“That’s not true. It’s amazing how many people can claim credit. It was obviously passed by Congress. I did a program with some of the Justice Department people who were active in formulating it. I mean, that came into being really because of the political pressure from a number of families, including Pan Am 103 families, but particularly the Flatow plaintiff9, who was represented by Steve Perles. In fact, the amendment is still called the Flatow amendment.”
Soon after President Clinton signed the bill10, the Pan Am 103 families filed suit. While other countries that were sued under the new law ignored the claims, Libya hired lawyers and showed up in court. At first, Libya’s lawyer tried to get the case dismissed, arguing that the law was unconstitutional, but Judge Platt quickly shot that argument down.
Then, developments on the criminal side of things put the civil suit on hold for a while.
Nelson Mandela had taken an interest in the case some years earlier, and through his efforts, an agreement was reached to try Megrahi and Fhimah, the accused bombers, at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. Scotland took custody of the duo in early 1999, putting the lawsuit against Libya on the back burner..
“We were told by the Justice Department that anything we did in the case could compromise the criminal prosecution of Megrahi and Fhimah by generating inconsistent evidence,” Kreindler says. “We put our civil case on hold until the criminal trial ended—Fhimah acquitted, Megrahi convicted. We told the Justice Department, ‘We’re not going to do anything to jeopardize the conviction of Megrahi.'”
In Scotland, unlike the United States, new evidence can be introduced on appeal, so even after Megrahi’s conviction, the plaintiffs’ committee did little in the way of searching for evidence until Megrahi exhausted all his appeals. Once his conviction was upheld, the civil suit moved forward at last.
The plaintiffs’ committee asked Judge Platt for the chance to depose many top Libyan officials, Libyan Arab Airlines employees, and the like. The committee wanted to depose those people in New York, where the trial was to take place, while the Libyan lawyers argued that the committee wasn’t entitled to any depositions, but if they wanted them, they should head to Libya. Platt forced a compromise at a neutral site: Paris.
“We showed up to take depositions. There’s only one deposition, which I took, of a Libyan Arab Airlines guy who didn’t even work for Libyan Arab Airlines at the time of Lockerbie. He was the only guy who Libya would produce. That was the first occasion where we were having direct talks with Libyans, including Hasnawi, who later became Libya’s Minister of Justice. It was at that first Paris meeting where we were arguing over which depositions to take, where, and when, that we first started negotiating with the Libyans.
“When we began our negotiations with the Libyans, our first demand, I told the Libyans we would recommend a settlement of $20 million per death, because that’s what the courts routinely award for compensatory damages. And we would drop punitive11 if there’s a settlement. The Libyans countered with an offer of $150,000. We moved down from $20 (million), they moved up, and we agreed on $10 (million). We kept the negotiations confidential, because if it leaked out, it would kill it.”
In most civil lawsuits, settlements take the form of a financial payment and a release which prevents the parties from suing again over the same situation, but the international nature of Pan Am 103 complicated the deal. Libya wanted the agreement , which it saw as a means to an end, to reflect the country’s goals.
“The Libyans made it clear that the settlement would have to be linked to what it was buying, ultimately, for $2.7 billion. Namely, lifting U.N. sanctions, lifting U.S. commercial sanctions, and coming off the list. When we agreed on $10 (million), then we had the discussion how to link particular amounts to the three triggers. Trigger A: The U.N. Trigger B: The U.S. commercial sanctions. Trigger C: The list. We went through different proposals, and ultimately agreed on $4 (million), $4 (million), and $2 (million).”
The agreement meant the families’ payout depended upon how the Bush administration handled Libya, so the committee reworked it to ensure a minimum payment.
“We knew that U.N. sanctions would be lifted right away, as soon as any money is paid, so we created a no-strings-attached component, which was $5 million. Any plaintiff, when the U.N. sanctions were lifted, could elect $5 million and be done with it: The first $4 million from the U.N. sanctions, and a $1 million payment in lieu of the possibility of getting the second $4 (million) for Trigger B or the final $2 (million) for Trigger C.”
Discussions between the two legal teams progressed slowly, holding meetings once a month in Paris. In May of 2002, they settled upon the structure of the agreement, then spent the next four months working out the specifics. Kreindler remembers one potentially big hitch from those sessions: Libya wanted the families to agree to the deal unanimously.
“From the Libyan point of view, it doesn’t do any good if some plaintiffs don’t settle and the lawsuit continues. Our response to that was, you don’t want to empower one person with the authority to blow up12 the whole settlement process. Ultimately, we agreed that the settlement would be effective if 90% of the families accepted it. We sent a letter to your family and the others saying, ‘Here’s the outline of the settlement. If it’s accepted by the overwhelming majority, Libya will pay it. Do you agree?’ Of course, almost everybody said yes.”
Once the families approved the deal, another eight months passed as the teams worked out an escrow agreement. When that was done, France threatened to use its seat on the U.N. Security Council to prevent the agreement unless Libya paid similar compensation for an attack on a French flight, UTA Flight 772, which a Libyan bomb downed over Niger in 1989.
“France had settled for the UTA victims really cheap, an average of $100,000, $150,000 a death, and the French were embarrassed by us recovering 20 times more than they settled with Libya for. So a couple of months went by when we were dealing with France, and then finally, it was August of 2003 that Libya filed its statement with the U.N. Security Council accepting responsibility for the actions of its officials for the bombing of Pan Am 103. When that Security Council statement was filed, U.N. sanctions were lifted. We sent the Trigger A notices in, Libya did too, and we got the first payment in August 2003.”
The following year, the United States lifted sanctions against Libya, and each family received another $4 million. However, the agreement expired before the United States removed Libya from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list in May 2006. It took yet another act of Congress for the families to receive the final $2 million payment.
“The Libyans said, ‘Why should we make the last payment in Pan Am 103 when we’re still a defendant in 25 other lawsuits in the United States?’ The Libyans made it clear: ‘We’d make our last Lockerbie payment and pay more money to resolve all other claims if they’re resolved in total so we’re out of U.S. courts, period, and if some money goes to the families of the Libyans who were killed in ’86, when Reagan ordered the Tripoli bombing13.’ Ultimately, the administration worked out a deal with Libya to create a fund that would do that, but needed Congress to pass an act that says as soon as Libya puts the money into the fund, all these cases are removed from court, because the plaintiffs have access to this fund and will be paid by Libya.
“The La Belle Disco was the next biggest case, that was $282 million. So our last payment was $53614 (million) to Lockerbie, $282 (million) on La Belle, and a fund of another $600,000 to pay the 12 other death cases and 25 injury cases involving Americans pending against Libya.”
Libya made the final payment just last year, in October 2008. In early December, two weeks before the 20th anniversary, the lawyers invited the families to a luncheon a few blocks away from Kreindler and Kreindler’s offices to celebrate the conclusion of the legal action. Addressing the families at the lunch, Jim broke into tears while discussing the work of his father, who passed away from a stroke in February of 2003 at the age of 78.
Kreindler and Kreindler have played a hand in virtually every major air disaster lawsuit of the last two decades, including TWA Flight 800 and the 9/11 attacks, but Kreindler feels that Pan Am 103 was the work of a lifetime for him.
“I feel very lucky to have associated my personal life with something so important in my professional life. Most lawyers don’t get to do that. Most lawyers have a case, and it goes for a year or two or three. You’re constantly moving on, so I’m very glad to be linked with Lockerbie so closely. For my family, I think it’s unique. It’s special. They know I have this cause, this part of their life. They can connect with it more than if I was doing different legal matters, all of which had a term of a year or two.
“I’m very proud of it, on a personal level. In a way, it’s difficult. I’m sad to not have the fight, the cause. Cases now, where you don’t have to prove liability or willful misconduct, are easier. I mean, this is the last great aviation liability trial. I’m very gratified to have done what we’ve done, to stick with it for 20 years. It’s been the cause of my life, but it’s hard to leave that part of my life behind. To draw the analogy, you go off to war, and then you come back, and you’re proud and glad to be home, but planting the tomato seeds is just not the same thing.”
Kreindler still has other work, other cases ahead of him. He’s co-chair of the 9/11 plaintiffs’ committee, which he says is “creeping along,” and will represent some families in the recent plane crash in Buffalo. Now that Pan Am 103 is over, though, he has two main things he wants to do.
“I’ve got to take all the kids to Lockerbie,” he says of his five children, ages 12 to 25. “I want to do a trip, ideally, with all of them together. But now that they’re your age, it’s harder to get everybody together. The other thing I’ve wanted to do, because I had a lot of big dogs as a kid, I said when the case is over, there’s a particular dog I want to get, a Leonberger. Just today, I got confirmation from the breeder that I’ve got one of the males. I’m naming it Trigger C.”
On my way out of his office, I thank Kreindler, both for all the work he did on behalf of my family and for finding the time to speak with me today. As he shows me to the door, I lean towards Kreindler’s side in his dispute with Zaid, but then, if I hadn’t believed what Zaid had told me last week, I wouldn’t have gotten Kreindler’s side of the argument.
The truth probably lies somewhere between the two men’s claims, and I can’t say where. I contemplate this for the duration of my elevator ride, then stride out of the building onto the sidewalk, returning to the madness that is Manhattan at 5:30 on a springtime Friday afternoon.
The last time I visited this city, while attending the luncheon at which Kreindler spoke, a minor revelation unsettled me. Gold fixtures hung throughout the room, a relic of the days when the space contained a bank headquarters instead of a banquet hall. I felt fraudulent there, having swapped my usual t-shirt and jeans for dress clothes, dining in an opulent room alongside people whom I had never met before, and would never have met at all had we not shared a single tragedy.
Then, I realized we had something else in common: Everyone in that room was wealthy.
Libya made the final payment only six months ago, but my family has had the rest of the money for years, and I’m still not used to it. I feel more comfortable in moments like this one, weaving through crowded Manhattan sidewalks while trying not to drop a soft pretzel, or scrambling through Penn Station to catch the last train for an hour. I feel more comfortable sitting on a train, leaning against the window to avoid physical contact with the stranger sitting beside me as I catch up on the day’s news on my iPhone. I feel more comfortable in a bland chain restaurant smaller than my condo, halfway between the Morristown train station and my hotel, eating alone on a Friday night as I watch a teenage couple awkwardly make their way through a date and wonder if I might have done the same thing at this same place a decade ago, if things had been different.
But I feel most comfortable of all alone in my hotel room with the curtains closed, where nobody can see how uncomfortable I feel about how much my life has been defined by the actions of people who don’t even know who I am.
- On these occasions, I also frequently think about Seattle’s cute little sister, Portland.
- Professor Lawrence Mason teaches at Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. In addition, he co-wrote and provided photographs for a book entitled Looking for Lockerbie.
- High school at Lockerbie Academy consists of the equivalents of 7th to 12th grades. Fourth year would make Erin a sophomore in American terms at the time.
- The Warsaw limits liability for airlines, not plane manufacturers.
- Pan Am Flight 103A went from Frankfurt to London, where it became Flight 103 en route to JFK.
- Robert Pagnucco, 51, was assistant general counsel at Pepsi, and left behind a wife and four children.
- Harry Bainbridge, 34, was Pepsi’s international counsel, and left behind a wife.
- As explained in Chapter 15.
- In 1995, a Hamas terrorist suicide bombed an Israeli bus by ramming it with a car full of explosives. Among those killed was an American girl named Alisa Flatow. Her father, Stephen, lobbied Congress in favor of allowing Americans to sue State Sponsors of Terrorism and sued Iran, winning a judgment for $247.5 million in damages.
- Officially known as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.
- Compensatory damages are damages for loss of life, emotional distress, and the like. Punitive damages are meant to deter the responsible party (and others) from committing that act again.
- I assume this pun was unintended.
- Libya bombed Pan Am 103 in retaliation for 1986 airstrikes on Tripoli and Benghazi, which killed Gaddafi’s 15-month-old adopted daughter, among others. That airstrike was American retaliation for Libya bombing La Belle, a West Berlin nightclub frequented by American troops, which was itself Libyan retaliation for a naval confrontation in the Mediterranean.
- Out of a maximum of $540m, meaning very few people took the flat $5m or opted out of the deal entirely.