Jury Awards $6.1 Million in Age Bias Lawsuit : Workplace: A former Tishman Realty executive contended that he was unexpectedly told to seek a new job after more than 27 years with the firm.

In one of the largest age discrimination verdicts in California, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury has awarded $6.1 million in damages to a former executive with Tishman Realty & Construction Co. who contended he was forced to quit after more than 27 years with the firm.

After deliberating more than eight days, the panel voted 9-3 on Friday to award Robert A. Hunio $4 million in damages for emotional distress and $2.1 million for his economic losses. His attorneys will seek punitive damages in a second phase of the trial that begins Nov. 18.

Tishman attorney Louise Ann Fernandez noted that the verdict was not unanimous and said she planned to appeal. “We’ll vigorously fight it,” she added while declining further comment.

Hunio, now 60, and a former first vice president and project manager, alleged in his lawsuit that his bosses in Tishman’s Los Angeles offices unexpectedly told him in 1987 to start looking for another job because they had no work for him.

During the next few months, Tishman, builder of Broadway Plaza and the new Ronald Reagan State Building in downtown Los Angeles, promoted, hired or reassigned to California nine project managers in their 20s and 30s, according to Hunio’s attorney.

The attorney, Philip J. Ganz Jr., said the company also falsely accused Hunio of losing a contract for them and informed him they could no longer afford his $104,000 salary.

Just before Christmas, Hunio was given a choice of leaving immediately or leaving the following April, with reduced benefits, Ganz said.

“It was like a nightmare,” Hunio said in a telephone interview. “I couldn’t believe that people who had been my friends and fellow employees would turn on me like this.”

Hunio, a Woodland Hills resident, left the company in 1988 after he was hospitalized for five days for depression. Ganz said he sent out 600 resumes but has only been sporadically employed since his departure from Tishman.

“He is no longer the same person he was when this started,” Ganz said Tuesday. “He will be on antidepressant medication for the rest of his life.”

Ganz said the company argued during the trial that Hunio quit voluntarily and put a psychiatrist on the stand who contended that the former executive was paranoid.

Hunio, who supervised the construction of the original Colorado Place office complex in Santa Monica as well as Maple Plaza in Beverly Hills, said he still wants to work, despite the verdict.

“I have all this knowledge, and for it to go down the drain is just devastating,” he said. “To think that no one wants me, that’s a terrible feeling.” He said he hoped that the large judgment would alert companies that “they just can’t get away with this, that sooner or later, when they engage in these activities, they have to pay the piper.”