A Dogged Pursuit of Justice : Losing Job and Home Didn’t Deter Man From Regaining His Dignity

Sometimes he slept in the Superior Courthouse Downtown. “I had a special little place,” Niles DeGrate said, “in the attorneys’ conference room.”

When he couldn’t sleep there, he simply slept outside in front of the courthouse--especially if he had to be in court the next morning.

Not only was DeGrate representing himself in his lawsuit against the company that fired him in 1990, he was virtually living in the places that he used as resources for his dogged legal pursuit.

DeGrate lost his job, lost his home and spent more than four years filing his own motions in a lawsuit against Eaton Corp., where he said he was the frequent target of racial abuse and unfairly fired from his job as an administrator. But finally, with lawyers taking over his case just days before his case went to trial, DeGrate prevailed and on Friday became arguably the richest homeless man in Los Angeles.

Superior Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper ruled that DeGrate had been the victim of racial harassment and ordered the company to pay him $1.25 million.

Attorneys for the company did not return phone calls from The Times on Friday, when the ruling was announced.

In her decision, Cooper noted incidents of racial taunting including the dumping of food on DeGrate’s desk and co-workers calling him “nigger.” One of the most stunning pieces of evidence was a joke application for Jesse Jackson’s staff that white co-workers gave DeGrate to fill out. The judge called it “a blatantly racially derogatory, disgusting document.”

The application was riddled with offensive questions. Under place of birth, it gave these options: Free Clinic, Alley, Zoo, Car, Colonel Sanders and Popeye’s Chicken. Under auto, it listed Cadillac or Lincoln and asked “Financed” or “Stolen.”

When DeGrate first met his attorneys he told them he could be reached at a phone number--but only at 10 a.m., 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. He was using a phone booth at UCLA.

“On the street, I just dedicated my whole life to this case,” he said. “Anything that presented an obstacle was either overcome or insignificant.”

On Saturday afternoon, he was still ensconced in the $145-a-week motel just west of Downtown that his lawyers have put him up in. Friday night, they all celebrated at Gladstone’s 4 Fish at the beach.

However, no one knows when he will see that money. His lawyers are expecting the company to appeal. But for now, DeGrate, 52, looks athletically fit, crisply dressed in slacks and a sport shirt, his face relaxed.

“I haven’t had much sleep during the last four or five years,” he said chuckling. But there is no sign of the exhausted, scruffy man who, on the eve of his trial, sought the legal services of Shelly McMillan and Robert M. Ball.

“I always thought I would get to this point,” he said calmly. “But I didn’t know when. It was just a matter of survival. It was being the victim and the adversary.”

*

Only five years ago, DeGrate negotiated government contracts in the aerospace field for Eaton Corp. in their Valencia and El Segundo offices. “I had the bulk of the contracts for F-14s,” DeGrate said about the fighter plane. With a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and a law degree from a small local law school, he made $47,000 a year, rented a $1,050-a-month townhouse on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills and drove a BMW. He played tennis. He played golf.

“From chipping on the green to sleeping on the green--Bob said that in the closing arguments,” McMillan said Saturday as she and DeGrate recounted their saga.

He actually did not sleep on a golf course but used other public places. When he was able to save enough money he would temporarily rent an apartment or a hotel room.

He was often at the UCLA law library, working on his motions, and sleeping during the day. He sometimes maintained a locker where he stashed his belongings at UCLA.

“At every law library, there’s a loony,” said McMillan, “and I imagine to the UCLA students Niles was that loony.”

DeGrate has let details of his life on the streets recede easily into a hazy fog.

He tries to remember when he lost his townhouse, “1993, 1994,” he said, then smiles ruefully. “You know, sometimes I don’t want to remember.”

*

He is asked several times when he lost his car. “Why is the car so important?” he asked, a flicker of irritation breaking his otherwise consistently affable demeanor. “People’s values get so twisted.”

Even his lawyer good-naturedly points out that he was the one who brought up the car in the first place.

Similarly, in his homeless life, he got by on public transportation. “All I needed was to go down the street and take the Metro to the court and I was there for the day,” he said.

In fact, he is a jumble of reactions to his onetime homelessness.

Not only does he claim fuzziness on the details, he sometimes conveys a sense that homelessness was just an inconvenience--a one- or two-year aberration in an otherwise affluent middle-class, roof-sheltered life.

“If my dignity can’t be preserved, material things don’t matter,” DeGrate said. “You have to understand--all those losses were not nearly as traumatic as the loss of my dignity.”

But he does argue passionately that the pain of homelessness was far outweighed by the degradation that he suffered at Eaton Corp.

Cooper ruled that DeGrate was fired fairly--his work had suffered--but she also held that the company failed to rectify a climate of racial harassment. And she said that DeGrate’s inability to find employment since his firing “is related to the emotional trauma and psychological suffering resulting from the racially hostile actions at Eaton.”

From the minute he was terminated, his obsession--his “dedication” he prefers to call it--was to sue the company.

So he devoted himself to his lawsuit. He once commandeered a typewriter as movers were taking it out of an office and directed that it be put in an attorneys’ conference room in Superior Court Downtown. Once set up, he put a sign on the typewriter saying, “Do not remove by order of the court.” Everyday he would go and type legal papers. The typewriter remained unmoved for three months.

He tried unsuccessfully to get other jobs. While devoting himself to his case, he worked intermittently as a paralegal, sometimes just convincing harried lawyers in law libraries to pay him to assist them.

“If I made enough money to get legal paper and ribbon, that was really the only thing that mattered,” DeGrate said.

*

He did make one big misstep along the way, once claiming he was a lawyer, although he had never passed the State Bar exam, and ending up jailed for six months, according to his attorneys.

“He actually, quote unquote, won the case,” Ball said. DeGrate presented a plea bargain for a 16-year-old teen-ager and signed the papers as his lawyer.

Just days before his own trial this year, DeGrate was sitting next to a law student in a UCLA law school lounge watching the O.J. Simpson trial when he struck up a conversation about his case and his dread at having to finally go to trial. The law student remembered two attorneys who gave a seminar for minority students on taking law school exams. He had their cards and told DeGrate they might be able to help him.

A few days later, McMillan remembers walking down Wilshire Boulevard near her Beverly Hills offices when a bus door opened and out spilled DeGrate and two cardboard boxes of files. “That was Niles with his life,” McMillan said laughing. She didn’t realize he was on his way to see her. “He said ‘Where’s Lapeer?’ and I said, ‘Just down the block.’ ”

Then as McMillan neared the entrance to her office, there was DeGrate again asking if she knew where a specific address was. “That’s right here,” she remembers saying. Then, the next thing she knew he was asking for her.

*

Within a couple of days--it took DeGrate literally a day to sort through his box of files and show them papers--McMillan and Ball had signed on for a trial that was starting in three days. “His will was iron,” marveled McMillan.

“We didn’t know the facts, we were researching the case, we had to send attorneys to court to pull documents because he had literally filed his only copies,” McMillan said.

McMillan remembers how exhausted DeGrate was when he arrived at her offices. “Niles probably doesn’t remember the Niles we first met,” she said. “There’s a paranoia, a sense that the entire system was against you . . . a total devastation of self-confidence. . . . It’s a downward spiral.”

DeGrate was sick and suffering from a persistent cough. “Niles wasn’t very coherent,” McMillan said. At the courthouse he had become a fixture--bailiffs, filing clerks, secretaries, cafeteria workers all knew him. Cleaned up and articulate when his case finally went to trial, court staffers were stunned at the transformation.

During the trial, which ran from March 1-22, he and his lawyers worked late into the night, dragging themselves home at three and four in the morning, then setting an elaborate wake-up system whereby they would start calling each other at 7 a.m. “We were so afraid we were going to oversleep,” McMillan said.

*

After four days of deliberations, the jury could not reach a verdict and McMillan, invoking a rarely used legal provision, asked the judge to decide the case. DeGrate and his attorneys got that ruling Friday.

Now, DeGrate muses about his future. “I’ve been thinking about taking the Bar exam,” he said, but he’s ambivalent about practicing.

The smaller things are easier. “As soon as I get some rest I’m going to go to the golf course.”