Officers Convicted : Murder Case a Corporate Landmark

At the time, the words meant little to prosecutor Jay Magnuson.

He was sitting at the round conference table in the second-floor branch office of the Cook County state’s attorney here in the suburbs west of Chicago. Phillip Mole, director of the county Department of Environmental Control, walked in late on the morning of March 6, 1983.

“We have a ticket situation,” he told Magnuson. “There’s a death involved.”

The prosecutor, then supervisor of the branch office, now chief of the criminal division, knew a ticket meant a violation of the environmental code. Looking at the paper work, he saw a worker had collapsed and died at Film Recovery Systems Inc., a nearby plant where silver was recovered by dipping used photographic film into huge vats filled with a cyanide-water solution.

Figuring the case to be another awful industrial accident, he turned the matter over to an assistant. Then the initial investigative reports began rolling in. They drew Magnuson’s attention. One night, he visited Humboldt Park on Chicago’s Near Northwest Side, a gang playground and shooting gallery inhabited by drug addicts, the impoverished and about 15 of the Mexican illegal aliens who worked at the Film Recovery plant.

What he heard from the laborers made him shiver. This was no accident, he thought to himself. This could be involuntary manslaughter. He listened to more stories. My God, he thought. This was murder.

Last June 14, Cook County Circuit Judge Ronald J. P. Banks agreed. After a two-month non-jury trial, Banks found three Film Recovery officials guilty of murder in the death of employee Stefan Golab, 59. He also found Film Recovery and two related corporations guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

25 Years in Prison

On July 1, he sentenced president Steven J. O’Neil, plant manager Charles Kirschbaum and plant foreman Daniel Rodriguez to 25 years in state prison.

The Film Recovery decision was a landmark, the first time corporate officials have been charged with and convicted of killing an employee through unsafe working conditions. But if the outcome stands alone, the case itself does not. It is only the most dramatic example of a growing effort within the legal system to fix corporate responsibility and individual accountability by means of criminal prosecution.

The details of the Film Recovery case paint a portrait of why a team of prosecutors decided to press such unusual charges, and of how they prevailed in uncharted legal territory. The case also sheds light on how three men, intent on making a living, found themselves convicted of murder--not by waving a knife or pulling a trigger, but by failing to take certain actions.

For many years, courts rejected the idea that corporations and their executives could be charged with a crime. The reasons were several.

A corporation has no mind, so cannot be said to have intent. A corporation has no body, so cannot be imprisoned. Fines levied against corporations usually hurt consumers and innocent shareholders the most. The complex fashion in which a corporation is usually organized and run make it difficult to point fingers at individuals. Finally, corporate officers did not look like criminals and were not thought of as such.

Attitudes are changing, although the verdicts suggest it is still difficult to fix liability.

An early sign of the current trend came when the district attorney in the New York borough of Queens won indictments against Warner-Lambert Co. and four executives for criminally negligent homicide after six workers died in a 1976 explosion at a Long Island chewing gum factory. The state high court, the Court of Appeals, dismissed the indictment in 1981, however. The court ruled that one could have foreseen the cause of the explosion.

In 1978, the Elkhart County, Ind., prosecutor obtained an indictment charging Ford Motor Co. with reckless homicide in the design and manufacture of the Pinto, after three teen-agers died when their Pinto was struck from the rear and the gas tank exploded. Ford was acquitted in 1980, after company documents were ruled inadmissible because they were dated before relevant state criminal statutes had gone into effect.

More recently, Six Flags Corp. of Chicago and its subsidiary, Great Adventure Inc., were charged with aggravated manslaughter after eight teen-agers died in a May, 1984, fire at the company’s amusement park in Jackson Township, N.J. After an eight-week trial, the jury last June 20 found the corporations not guilty.

Jay Magnuson was aware of the legal trends when he focused his attention on the Film Recovery case in the early spring of 1983. But he eventually decided he would not worry about precedents or fashioning new constructions of the law.

Old, Basic Law

“People talk about this case extending the law and being so unusual,” he said recently. “That’s not really so. We were just applying the old, basic law in a different area. Firing a gun into a crowd is murder. We had the crowd--the workers. The cyanide was the gun.”

As it happens, the defense attorney representing Film Recovery founder O’Neil also sees the case as one involving an old story, albeit a far different one.

“Mr. O’Neil’s activities,” Thomas J. Royce told the judge, “became something of the so-called American dream. . . . As a result of a substantial effort on his part, hard work, diligence, many hours, an industry was created. . . . I would argue that Mr. O’Neil’s intent and conduct was not anything unlike the process that any individual goes through as he proceeds on up the ladder.”

What follows is derived from the trial transcript, other court documents, law journal articles and interviews with the prosecutors, defense lawyers, law professors and other legal observers. The defendants, free on $25,000 bonds pending appeals, would not discuss the case.

O’Neil, now 31, first learned about recovering silver from film when he was a student majoring in commercial photography at Colorado Mountain College between 1972 and 1974. One day a representative from a Denver-based silver recycling firm, RKS Future Industries, visited the college’s photo club. He advised O’Neil to install beneath the film developing equipment a three-gallon bucket with steel mesh inside.

“What it would do would be to trap the silver before it went to the drain and we would derive the excess funds for our photo club,” O’Neil testified. “That was the first time that I became aware that silver was a valuable commodity to recover from film or solutions.”

O’Neil left college after two years to work full-time as a salesman for RKS. There, he learned how to extract silver from used film through use of a cyanide solution. It was a clever process.

The film was chopped into small chips, then put into 1,000-gallon vats that contained water and a sodium cyanide powder. The liquid would leach the silver from the film, producing a silver cyanide solution, which in turn was pumped into smaller electroplating tanks.

An electric current would draw the silver from the solution to the plates like a magnet, and workers would then scrape the flakes from the plates. The flakes would be shipped to a refiner to be made into silver bullion.

Price of Silver Rose

When O’Neil started at RKS, the price of silver was about $3.40 a troy ounce. Two years later, it was up to $6.40. O’Neil saw his chance.

In 1978, he left RKS for a new silver recovery firm in the Chicago area, Metallic Marketing Systems, where he negotiated for part-ownership in lieu of a salary. O’Neil said he arrived in town with all of $2,000 to his name, so he lived at the plant for four months and used his car as a closet. The plant, in the suburb of Wheeling, consisted of four vats and four electroplate tanks that O’Neil installed himself.

All that would soon change, for O’Neil had hitched his fortune to a rocket on the rise. By late 1979, the price of silver had peaked at $50 an ounce. O’Neil’s only problem was getting enough cash to buy used film and enough vats to recover the silver.

“Anybody who had product in silver, from little old ladies with heirlooms to large producers of X-ray film, were calling. . . . Actual lines were forming outside of the facility,” O’Neil said.

To handle the rush, O’Neil made a deal with B. R. MacKay & Sons of Salt Lake City, at the time the largest private silver refiner in the country. Essentially, they formed a partnership and launched a new corporation called Film Recovery Systems, which MacKay capitalized with $275,000. O’Neil became president of both Film Recovery and Metallic Marketing, drawing a combined annual salary of $120,000. He was 25 years old.

In early 1980, Film Recovery moved to a leased building in an industrial park at 1855 Greenleaf Ave., in the northwest Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village. By the end of that year, the plant had been expanded from eight to 80 tanks and vats.

O’Neil needed help running the operation. In 1981, Charles Kirschbaum was hired as plant manager.

Kirschbaum, now 37, had graduated from Southern Illinois University in 1972 with a degree in physical education and had spent seven years working as personnel manager at a chain of Chicago-area laundries called the Washing Well. In 1979, the Washing Well’s owner, Donald Jacks, decided to open a silver reclamation plant and asked Kirschbaum if he wanted to get involved.

Until then, Kirschbaum did not even know that film contained silver, but he said yes. “I was just getting married, and the dry cleaning business does not have much of a future left in it,” he said.

Plant Grew

Two years later, the Washing Well plant had grown to 32 tanks and Kirschbaum knew all about the cyanide-leaching process but he was sitting on four bounced paychecks and his wife was pregnant. In July of 1981, he signed on at Film Recovery at a starting salary of $36,000.

As the plant was enlarged, so was the number of workers, from half a dozen to 40. Most were Mexican or Polish illegal aliens who earned beginning wages of about $4 an hour. Few spoke or read English. To communicate with the Mexicans, O’Neil and Kirschbaum came to rely upon Daniel Rodriguez.

Rodriguez, now 27, had left school at the age of 9 to work on his father’s farm near Taluca in Mexico. With his wife and two children, he illegally entered the United States in December, 1979. The next month, through his wife’s uncles, he found a job at Film Recovery Systems.

After he taught himself English by reading and listening to others, he became the one who delivered orders to other workers, and was given the titles of foreman and assistant plant manager. He earned about $6 an hour.

In 1981, the plant expanded to 120 vats and tanks. Film Recovery was grossing $13 million a year.

O’Neil no longer spent much time at the Elk Grove site. He traveled throughout the country making deals with large film brokers. He journeyed twice to Europe, visited Germany, Switzerland, England and France, attended a convention, solicited film and studied potential sites for an overseas plant. He also acquired a house in Florida and interests in a Chicago bar and several new corporations.

Those who did visit the plant began to notice problems.

As it happens, one of the physical properties of sodium cyanide is that when it is mixed with either an acid or weak alkali it produces potentially fatal hydrogen cyanide gas.

Manufacturer’s Warning

E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. Inc. attaches a strongly worded warning label to every container of Cyanogran, the brand of sodium cyanide used by Film Recovery: “Poison. Danger! May be fatal if inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through skin. Contact with acid or weak alkalies liberates poisonous gas. . . . Do not breathe dust or gas. Do not get in eyes, on skin, on clothing.”

Water is a weak alkali. Water is what Cyanogran was mixed with at Film Recovery.

The Washing Well plant, where Kirschbaum first worked, had installed hooded side vents over the tanks to shunt the gas from the building. Film Recovery did not use hooded vents of any sort.

In July of 1981, an inspector from Film Recovery’s insurer, Home Insurance, visited the plant. Harvey Burns was affected by an overpowering odor in the air.

He noted that the ceiling exhaust system merely moved large quantities of air about and did not necessarily remove contaminants. He noticed that the air sampling pump that Film Recovery used to test the atmosphere had an error factor of plus or minus 25%. Employees were wearing disposable respirators not approved by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. Cyanide-contaminated water was splashed about the plant’s floor. Burns put all this in a written report, and concluded: “I would classify this account as a fair risk. It is my personal opinion that due to the expansion of their operations they have outgrown this present facility, which has resulted in this increase of contaminants within the air.”

The next year, Film Recovery did gain space by leasing the building next door, but only front-office personnel moved there. The laborers stayed in the processing plant, where 20 more vats and tanks were added, bringing the total to 140.

On the morning of Aug. 4, 1982, Kathy Arroreno, a newly hired agent for a medical supply company called Respond First Aid, visited the Film Recovery plant to service the account there.

The first thing she noticed was an overpowering odor. It seemed to her as if somebody had opened a bottle of ammonia under her nose. Her nose burned. Her eyes burned. The back of her throat burned. She felt nauseated and had trouble breathing.

Looking around the plant, she saw row after row of huge vats, bubbling and frothing. Some sort of stuff was running down the sides. A crystal-like chip substance covered the floors. As she walked about, the chips crunched under her feet.

First Aid Kit Filthy

She found the first-aid cabinet outside a small office. It looked filthy to her, covered with the same chip material that was on the floor. Inside, she found empty boxes of aspirin and a few other minor first-aid items. She quickly restocked the kit.

“I wasn’t in there more than three minutes,” she later testified. “I had to leave. . . . It took me a while to regain my composure, because I really felt weak at the knees.”

Stefan Golab began work at Film Recovery on the day after Christmas in 1982. He earned $4.50 an hour. He had arrived in the United States from Poland almost one year before with a passport and a visitor’s visa, had left behind his wife and son and more than 20 years of labor in steel construction. He lived in the Chicago home of his sister-in-law, Jadwiga Popek.

Popek told the court she immediately noticed the job’s effect on Golab. He very often came home with headaches and nausea. He would vomit.

Golab became casual friends with Roman Guzowski, another Polish worker who had overstayed his visa. They worked next to each other daily, pumping and stirring at the vats.

On Thursday, Feb. 3, 1983, both Guzowski and Golab were ill at work. The next day, Guzowski stayed home. Golab went to the plant with an interpreter to ask Kirschbaum if he could be transferred to another section or department. Golab wanted to work, the translator explained to the man known to the laborers as “Boss Charlie,” but he wanted to change to a different job. Kirschbaum said he would try to do something.

Golab and Guzowski returned to work on Monday, expecting to be transferred. Instead, they were assigned to the vats.

Four days later, on Thursday morning, Feb. 10, Golab rose early. His sister-in-law boiled milk for his breakfast, and he left for the plant at 6 a.m.

At 9:30 a.m., he and Guzowski were working over one of the vats, stirring the film with a rake. Golab went to disconnect the pump, then suddenly leaned back against a wall, his face chalk white. Guzowski could not leave the pump, for it would flood the plant, so he shouted at Golab, telling him to go outside.

“He looked very pale,” Guzowski recalled. “And he said, ‘After I rest, I will help you.’ And I told him not to worry because I had taken one of the Mexicans to help me finish the work.”

Golab walked unsteadily to the workers’ lunchroom, where he sat on a chair. He began shaking, and foam formed at his mouth. Five fellow workers carried him outside. One of them shouted that Golab’s heart had stopped beating.

Michael Lackman, a paramedic with the Elk Grove Village Fire Department, arrived at the scene at 10 a.m. and found an unconscious middle-aged man lying in the parking lot, his complexion gray-blue. He was not breathing and had no pulse.

Lackman and his partner began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Knowing that the plant contained cyanide, they asked if their patient had been exposed. No one would confirm that, so Golab was never treated with the prescribed antidote to cyanide inhalation, amyl nitrite. Golab was rushed to Alexian Brothers Medical Center, but he never revived.

Two officers and a detective with the Elk Grove Village Police Department also responded to the call for an ambulance. Their investigation was limited, for they could not bear to remain in the plant. Officer Kenneth Kvidera encountered a yellow-orange haze and an odor so foul he began gagging. “I wanted to get out of there as soon as I could,” he said.

They would not, at any rate, have been able to speak with O’Neil. The day Golab died, the company president was at La Guardia Airport in New York, attending a business meeting in which arrangements were being made to purchase used film from sources throughout the United States.

Autopsy Performed

Dr. Robert J. Stein, chief medical examiner for Cook County, performed an autopsy the next day. When he opened the body, he and his assistant smelled a pungent odor that hurt their eyes. The odor suggested bitter almonds, indicative of cyanide.

The lungs were more than twice normal size and unusually red, the tissue filled with blood. The toxicologist’s report later indicated a high concentration of cyanide in the blood.

Stein ruled that Golab died of cyanide poisoning. In his opinion, he said, Golab had received the lethal dose by inhalation.

On Feb. 18, a week after Golab’s death, the director of the Cook County Department of Environmental Control, Mole, visited the Film Recovery plant. He walked through the building, drawing an engineering flow diagram and watching the silver recovery process.

It was a process, he concluded, that had no control equipment to contain emissions of dust, vapors or hydrogen cyanide. It was also a process that had none of the required environmental and operating permits from the state and federal governments.

Mole returned on Feb. 23 with equipment to test the air in the plant. He found hydrogen cyanide levels almost twice the maximum called for in standards set by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Company Cited for 17 Violations

Michael Selway, an industrial hygienist for OSHA, visited the plant the same week and cited the company for 17 violations. He found that employees were given unapproved respirators inappropriate for hydrogen cyanide exposure, and dust masks that had no effect against hydrogen cyanide fumes.

He found there was inappropriate personal protection, including permeable cloth gloves. There was no safety training program for employees or warnings about the dangers of inhaling fumes. There was no antidote for cyanide poisoning in the first-aid kit.

At one point, Selway later testified, he asked O’Neil why his employees were not trained or educated.

“He said he didn’t want to over-emphasize the hazards of the operation because that would scare employees away,” Selway told the court.

The next month at a meeting with Film Recovery officials, Mole listed the changes suggested if the plant wanted to keep operating. One was the use of plastic spheres over the tanks. Another was the use of side-drafting hooded vents.

Faced with expenses of up to $250,000 to make the changes, officials at B. R. MacKay, the source of capital for Film Recovery, decided instead to shut down the plant. The price of silver in the past year had plummeted from $50 to $4.50 a troy ounce, and Metallic Marketing owed MacKay $800,000. Recovery of silver was no longer worth the effort.

However, Mole insisted that his suggested emission controls be installed during the shutdown period, even if it was at his department’s expense, for he wanted to test their effectiveness. After the controls were in place, he analyzed the air in the plant one more time. He found a 20-fold reduction in the amount of cyanide.

When prosecutor Magnuson and his colleagues, assistant state’s attorneys Thomas Tucker and Gary Leviton, received the reports from Mole and Selway in March of 1983, they began toying with the idea that Golab’s death might most accurately be considered involuntary manslaughter.

Then, during the spring and summer of 1983, they sent two Spanish-speaking investigators, usually assigned to gang-related crimes, to find and talk with Film Recovery’s 40 former laborers. What John Ayala and Frank Hernandez came back with was the key evidence to the prosecutors.

“The horror stories just got worse and worse,” Magnuson said. “And they were all consistent.”

They found Guzowski, Golab’s friend, who told how he has only 20% vision in one eye because water from a vat splashed into his face one day. He told of workers vomiting regularly. He said he complained several times to the foreman, Rodriguez, about the lack of ventilation, but was told that there was no money for changes. Never, he said, were the workers warned it was dangerous to inhale fumes from the tanks.

They found Antonio Roman, 28, an illegal alien who entered the United States from Mexico when he was 17 and has never attended school. He said he felt dizzy and suffered headaches every day of the year-and-a-half he worked at Film Recovery. He said he vomited every two or three days, and saw other workers vomit regularly, every day.

When he reported his illnesses to Kirschbaum and Rodriguez, they told him to rest outside for a few minutes. They never told him it was dangerous to work around the tanks, he said, or explained about cyanide.

New Mask for Inspection

Usually, he wore only a paper mask, but one day Rodriguez gave him a larger plastic mask with a filter. He explained that inspectors were coming to the plant. Rodriguez instructed him to return the mask to the office after the inspectors left, Roman said.

Three days after Golab was carried in convulsions from the building, Roman said, Rodriguez told him the Pole was recovering, that he was in the hospital and everyone should go back to work and not worry about him. Kirschbaum also told him Golab was recovering.

The investigators found Epiphranio Bahenia, 45. He said that days after Golab’s death, Rodriguez told him that inspectors would be coming to talk to him and he should deny any headaches or dizziness. He said Rodriguez showed him a rubber-and-glass mask and told him to say he wore that type, if he was asked.

The investigators also found Armando Delgado, 24; Gerardo Lagunas, 23; Secundino Boyas, 21, and Juan Fuentes, 50. All had illegally entered the United States in recent years and had had little schooling. All told the same story: They vomited, felt dizzy, had headaches. They told Rodriguez and Kirschbaum, who advised them to rest outside. They never were warned or educated about cyanide fumes.

The one night Magnuson went with his investigators to visit the illegal aliens, he was appalled at their living conditions. A dozen adults and children occupied a small ramshackle one-bedroom apartment. He met one 16-year-old who had lied about his age, so desperate to make a living that he gave Film Recovery a false name and identification.

Magnuson understood, for he had grown up in Prospect Heights on Chicago’s Northwest Side, one of the area’s few Latino areas at the time. He had worked the fields of a neighbor’s small truck farm next to Mexicans from the time he was 9 until he was 14. He had watched the evolution from open huts and migrant farm work to trailers and industrial plants. He knew the illegal aliens would do anything for steady work and a regular paycheck.

Magnuson eventually also talked to women who had worked in the plant’s front office.

Debra Sadzeck, a bookkeeper, said it was common knowledge that the workers in the back were sick and vomiting frequently. Kathy Erpito, a secretary and later an accountant, said they all knew cyanide was being used, but that the word was never mentioned, because Kirschbaum and O’Neil had instructed them to call it simply a “chemical.”

The prosecutors started thinking they certainly were dealing with a case of involuntary manslaughter. Then, late in the summer of 1983, they began receiving even more flagrant evidence of deception.

Allen Drewes, a truck driver who carted away the contaminated film chips after the silver was recovered, said he had regularly experienced headaches, nausea, irritated eyes and vomiting.

Driver Stricken on Road

One day, he was driving northbound on the Tri-State Tollway, a load of chips in his truck, when he began gasping for breath. He felt a tingling numbness shoot up his fingers, hands, arms, chest and head. As he passed through the Deerfield Road toll plaza, he pulled to the side and asked the toll clerk to call an ambulance. After a few hours in a hospital, away from the chips, he recovered.

The truck driver said when he complained to O’Neil about his headaches and nausea, O’Neil told him not to worry, that working at the plant was not the cause of his symptoms. Drewes said Kirschbaum told him that the danger from cyanide came from eating it, not inhaling or absorbing it in the plant. As it happens, the truck driver’s duty at Film Recovery was one carried out more than a few times. While the prosecutors were talking to Drewes, other officials were discovering that Film Recovery had stored no less than 17 million pounds of cyanide-contaminated film chips in warehouses and trailers at nine sites throughout Cook County, presumably to avoid the cost and burden of proper disposal.

In the wake of community uproar over the presence of toxic wastes in their neighborhoods, the state eventually spent $4 million on the cleanup and filed suit to collect from Film Recovery.

As he reviewed these statements and revelations, Magnuson kept going back to the warning label Du Pont put on every container of Cyanogran.

It was as clear as it could be, the prosecutor thought: “May be fatal if inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through skin. Contact with acids or weak alkalies liberates poisonous gas. Do not breathe dust or gas.” A Du Pont safety data sheet spelled out the hazards in even more detail.

Magnuson reflected. It seemed clear the people who ran Film Recovery knew of the health problems the workers were having. They saw it every day. And if they knew, how could what happened be called involuntary?

‘We Have a Murder Here’

He met in September, 1983, with his superiors in the state’s attorney’s office. Without revealing his own thoughts, he laid out the details of the case. When Magnuson finished, Greg Ginex, then the chief of the criminal division, turned to Larry O’Gara, then the chief deputy state’s attorney. “This is a murder,” Ginex said. “We have a murder here.”

The prosecutors first considered charging only the corporation. But they could not put a corporation in jail. It was then that they began thinking about charging the individual company officers. The only way to deter corporate crime, Magnuson reasoned, is to get the leaders.

After gaining approval from Richard M. Daley, the Cook County state’s attorney, Magnuson holed up in his office and began figuring out how to draw up a murder indictment against three corporate officials for actions they did not take.

He soon found himself pounding the desk in frustration. There were no precedents in the law. He knew of the Warner-Lambert and Pinto cases, and of a handful of others stretching back almost to the turn of the century. However, most were limited in scope, or the details differed greatly, or had resulted in acquittals and dismissals. The fact was, no corporate official had ever been charged with murder, let alone convicted.

With no case law to study, Magnuson instead began reading law journal articles.

Two professors particularly had written often on the matter of corporate liability.

One was William J. Maakestad, who teaches at Western Illinois University in Macomb and served as special deputy prosecuting attorney during 1980 in the famous Pinto case. The other was Christopher D. Stone, professor of law at the University of Southern California. As it happened, Stone had been one of Magnuson’s teachers when the Illinois prosecutor was studying law at USC from 1968 to 1971. He consulted both scholars.

Magnuson finally decided he need only look to the basic criminal statutes of the state of Illinois.

Particularly, he would rely upon Section 9-1A2. In the months to come, he would find himself re-reading the paragraph often.

The section says a person commits murder “if, in performing the acts which cause the death . . . he knows that such acts create a strong probability of death or great bodily harm to that individual or another.”

Magnuson pondered the phrase “performing the acts.” What acts had the Film Recovery officials performed? It was mainly what they had failed to do that had caused the harm.

The prosecutor looked to another article in the criminal code that defined what constituted a voluntary act. He found what he needed. A voluntary act, the section read, “includes an omission to perform a duty which the law imposes. . . .”

Link Between Murder, Corporation

Finally, Magnuson turned to one more section, which addressed the matter of accountability for conduct of a corporation. Here he found his link between the murder clause and corporate behavior: “A person is legally accountable for conduct which . . . in the name or in behalf of a corporation, he performs. . . .”

The law requires knowledge and notice, Magnuson reasoned, and he had both. The Du Pont warning label was the knowledge. The workers’ illnesses and complaints were the notice.

Magnuson was ready to draft his indictment.

One more turning point came in late September, when the prosecutor’s investigators entered the now-abandoned Film Recovery plant. Protected by special clothing and oxygen masks, they found 34 1,000-gallon vats full of cyanide sludge. They also found boxes of business papers.

The papers enabled the prosecutor to figure out and prove the corporate structure of Film Recovery.

“This is overlooked, but it’s the key legally,” Magnuson said. “One of the biggest problems in prosecuting corporate crime is piercing the corporate veil. Everyone blames everyone else and says they were not responsible. Our position is, someone was in charge.”

Magnuson presented his case to the grand jury Oct. 18, 1983. At the time, another prosecutor was having trouble getting a murder indictment on a contract killing, so there was considerable doubt about the Film Recovery case.

“But after 2 1/2 hours of testimony, it took them about 10 seconds to return a true bill,” Magnuson said. “They were angry.”

Besides O’Neil, Kirschbaum, and Rodriguez, the grand jury indicted on murder charges Film Recovery vice presidents Gerald Pett and Michael T. MacKay, who was also the president of B. R. MacKay & Sons. In addition, the grand jury indicted three corporations on involuntary manslaughter charges--Film Recovery, Metallic Marketing and B. R. MacKay. Charges against Pett were later dropped.

The indictments were unprecedented. Simply getting the case to trial would be considered a momentous landmark.

However, the prosecutors’ first task was getting the defendants into the state. O’Neil was then living in Montana and fighting extradition. MacKay was also fighting extradition from Utah.

The then-governor of Utah, Scott M. Matheson, refused Illinois’ request for extradition, and MacKay’s case had to be severed from the trial. MacKay is still in Utah.

But in February, 1984, a Montana judge ordered O’Neil’s return to Illinois.

The next hurdle came when the defense lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the indictments. “We are unable to find any case where a murder charge has been brought against a corporate official,” attorney Elliott Samuels argued.

It was at this stage that the case against Warner-Lambert had foundered. However, last Jan. 28, Judge Banks, who would preside at the trial, refused to dismiss the charges.

Agree With Lawyers, but . . .

“I agree with Mr. Samuels,” the judge said. “I don’t know of a case where corporate officials have been charged with murder. But the mere fact you don’t have it before doesn’t mean you can’t have it today.”

Before the trial began, Magnuson’s superiors asked him to check the law one more time, to make one more contact that would affirm their course of action. The prosecutor called his old USC law professor, Chris Stone, and soon after flew to Los Angeles to meet with him.

Magnuson found the professor in his office. All manner of books were piled on his desk, with markings on Illinois case law. Stone looked up at his former student.

“Why not?” he said.