Here is a reference check on Ms. Mastroianni's attorney.
BigKNY3
Lawyer's Tactics Are Unusual,
But Not More So Than His Past
By RICHARD B. SCHMITT
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- The personal-injury bar is full of aggressive lawyers with a knack for finding novel ways to recover damages. But even in this colorful group, Ronald R. Benjamin stands out.
Mr. Benjamin once launched a suit on behalf of the family of a drunk who drowned during a charity rafting event on a local river. The suit was thrown out but made for a splash of publicity.
He is representing people who took diet drugs and claim harm -- not necessarily from the pills themselves but from the anxiety of knowing the pills harmed others.
Mr. Benjamin has even sued another trial lawyer. Taking some of that lawyer's ex-clients as his own, he accused the lawyer of settling their personal-injury cases too cheaply.
But what is most remarkable about Mr. Benjamin, 52 years old, is that he is a lawyer at all. He was admitted to the bar 20 years ago after serving 32 months in prison following a state felony conviction for grand larceny, plus a misdemeanor conviction. Among other things, Mr. Benjamin says, he sold someone two racehorses that didn't exist.
Mr. Benjamin operates out of the small upstate New York city of Binghamton, but he is shooting for the big leagues of mass-injury law. Several years ago, he scored a major victory in a case involving DES, the antimiscarriage drug. With more-recent cases filed on behalf of AIDS patients and now diet-pill users, he has begun playing on a broader stage.
Viagra Suits
This summer it got broader still, as Mr. Benjamin filed lawsuits against Pfizer Inc. based on alleged harm from the blockbuster impotence drug Viagra, the first suits of which Pfizer says it is aware. One of his legal theories: Viagra made his client, who was driving home from a date, run into a tree.
Last fall, Mr. Benjamin took his act on the road, opening an office on Park Avenue in New York City and soliciting clients in daily newspapers. He whips up cases by advertising for plaintiffs, and at least once held a news conference at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel to promote his cause.
Over the years, his record has given adversaries further ammunition. A decade ago, Mr. Benjamin was suspended from the practice of law in New York state for six months for using unusually aggressive tactics to collect a fee from a client. More recently, he was formally censured.
"I think most lay persons would look at it and say, 'Why is this guy still operating?' " says Robert Fischer, a retired New York state judge, who handled several of Mr. Benjamin's cases and later launched the disciplinary proceeding that resulted in the censure. Mr. Benjamin, he says, "was disturbing as hell to me."
'Devoted Lawyer'
Ensconced in a stately old mansion in Binghamton stocked with a museum-quality collection of Asian art, Mr. Benjamin is unapologetic, saying that the hits he took from disciplinary authorities were excessive. As for going to prison, it was "probably the best thing that ever happened to me," he says.
Not that his background bothers clients. One client, Lou Anne O'Malley of Milford, Conn., says she and some other "DES Daughters" were aware of some of Mr. Benjamin's past troubles, but "nobody cared." He was "a very, very devoted lawyer," she says.
Mr. Benjamin concedes that some of his highest-profile cases of late may be nonstarters: In the HIV cases, which allege that hospitals and pharmaceutical companies inadequately tested for the virus during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, he is suing under a state law that was intended to give relief to hemophiliacs. But most of the 100 or so people he represents were infected in other ways.
Mr. Benjamin was always something of a long shot. Growing up in New York's Queens borough, he dropped out of high school, hoping to become a jockey. But he toured the country, working as an exercise boy and groom, feeding a gambling habit and living in horse trailers. One year, he lived in a pool hall near Times Square, where his daily routine included rising at dawn to catch the first race at Belmont Park, and roaming the streets at night.
Among other ways, he supported himself by selling two racehorses to a real-estate investor for $34,000, the problem being that "there were no horses," he acknowledges.
He also picked up spending money by "touting," sharing supposedly inside information about a race with track regulars, for a fee. Nights, he would purchase and use stolen credit cards from prostitutes. At the age of 21, Mr. Benjamin was sentenced to 2 1/2 to four years in state prison for grand larceny. He served time at the prison known colloquially as Sing Sing, among other institutions.
He was released in 1970 and earned a degree at what is now the State University of New York at Binghamton, specializing, he says, in "social problem solving." He got into school with the help of Theodore McKee, who came to know him while recruiting ex-prisoners to college in the early 1970s. Mr. McKee, now a federal appellate judge in Philadelphia, was impressed with Mr. Benjamin's writing ability and high test scores and recalls his hanging out at the campus pub with "a book in one hand and a beer in the other."
Mr. Benjamin took a flier on law school and finally got into the University of Buffalo, with no guarantee he could be admitted to the bar. All states require "good moral character" of bar applicants. But the rules are unevenly applied. A Maryland court last year held open the possibility that a convicted murderer could become a lawyer after his parole was up.
Crossing the Bar
Mr. Benjamin's felony conviction made New York authorities more than a little nervous. The applicant argued that he was reformed and offered more than 40 references, including one from Judge McKee, who calls him "one of the most remarkable people I have ever come across."
A committee of lawyers deadlocked on whether Mr. Benjamin met the character test. The case eventually went to a New York appeals court, which approved his application, without explanation, in 1978.
No one was more surprised than he. Mr. Benjamin's ex-wife, Marya Young, says they were girding for years of litigation against the bar. "It was the farthest thing from our mind that he would be a lawyer right away," Ms. Young says.
Mr. Benjamin leased office space and started suing, mostly government agencies, on behalf of inmates, welfare cheats and other down-and-outs. A federal court once appointed him to represent a woman accused of threatening the life of Ronald Reagan; she got five years.
Later, recognizing the potential riches of personal-injury law, he diversified. In 1986, he gained a measure of fame by winning $150,000 for a man whose wife had run off with their marriage counselor, although the client never collected because the defendant lacked insurance.
Suspended for Six Months
Besides media attention, he attracted the interest of bar authorities. Court papers state that in 1985, New York lawyer-disciplinary authorities found that he "had sought to exact unreasonable and unconscionable compensation in an action commenced on behalf of an infant." He wasn't penalized, and state authorities say they have no further details in the matter. Mr. Benjamin says it stemmed from his ignorance of a law limiting the contingent fee a lawyer can charge in a case involving minors.
Two years later, New York state suspended Mr. Benjamin's license to practice law for six months, in connection with a suit he had filed against a client for fees. A court disciplinary committee said that after Mr. Benjamin took a woman's case on a contingency-fee basis but lost the case, he demanded a fee from her anyway; it also said he wrote to her father threatening that he would be subpoenaed if the fee wasn't paid. The state court's Appellate Division upheld the committee's case and imposed the six-month suspension.
He appealed that case to the U.S. Supreme Court. It declined to grant a hearing. In addition, although the reasons are unclear, the Supreme Court issued an order barring Mr. Benjamin from appearing before it until further notice. The restriction remains in effect today. Mr. Benjamin says he hasn't tried to be reinstated: "The disbarment was a disgrace... . If they are going to take that position, I don't need to be in that court."
Then, in a 1994 proceeding, Mr. Benjamin was censured following allegations by the court disciplinary committee that he had attempted to mislead a trial court. In one case, it said, he filed a false affidavit in support of a late amended complaint, falsely claiming the parties had agreed to continue the discovery phase of the trial. Spurring the censure was a complaint against Mr. Benjamin from Mr. Fischer, the now-retired state-court judge.
DES Verdict
In between those disciplinary actions came one of Mr. Benjamin's biggest court victories: a $12.7 million jury verdict in a case involving DES, the antimiscarriage drug. He won that 1991 case in a suit against Eli Lilly & Co. on behalf of a woman with vaginal cancer whose mother had taken DES in the 1960s.
There was no written proof that the mother took Lilly's pill. Indeed, she testified that the pill she took was of a color never used in Lilly's version of DES. Mr. Benjamin argued to the jury that the mother probably just got confused. After it returned its big verdict, and with an appeal expected, the case was settled for an undisclosed sum.
The plaintiff in that case said she retained Mr. Benjamin after seeing one of his TV commercials. Publicity about her case brought him many more clients.
In suing other plaintiffs' counsel, Mr. Benjamin targeted Paul Rheingold, a prominent New York personal-injury specialist, four times, alleging a pattern of malpractice in settling suits. They involved L-tryptophan, the amino-acid diet supplement pulled from the market in the 1980s after more than two dozen people died from contaminated batches.
Mr. Rheingold countersued, alleging a conspiracy to "mulct, extort, defame, libel and disparage" his firm, according to court documents in the cases, filed in New York state court in Manhattan. Three of the four suits have been settled.
Mr. Rheingold later wrote to a New York judge handling state litigation involving the diet drugs Redux and fenfluramine, part of the "fen-phen" cocktail. Mr. Rheingold described Mr. Benjamin's past legal and ethics problems to the judge, fearing she might appoint him to lead an influential steering committee in the cases. She didn't. Mr. Benjamin says he wasn't interested in working with the likes of Mr. Rheingold anyway.
'Our Best Interest'
Today, the Law Offices of Ronald R. Benjamin are a melting pot. He practices with his ex-wife, Ms. Young, a former public-interest lawyer. A recent addition is attorney Wayne Chariff, who, himself, in 1996 finished a six-month suspension of his right to practice law for mishandling client escrow accounts. Mr. Chariff is the point man for cases the firm has on alleged allergies to latex gloves.
Brochures on the front counter say that "Your Best Interest is Our Best Interest," and the formula seems to work for Mr. Benjamin. A short, broad-shouldered man, he drives a red Mercedes convertible, still plays the horses and, when in Manhattan, stays at his new luxury apartment at Trump Tower.
With his latest flurry of suits, on Viagra, he faces some of his biggest tests yet. Pfizer's warnings about Viagra's potential hazards were "the most comprehensive things imaginable," says Aaron Levine, a product-liability specialist in Washington who has handled DES cases and clashed with Mr. Benjamin in the past.
One well-known possible side effect of Viagra is a brief bluish tinge to the vision. One Benjamin client, Joseph Moran, a used-car dealer from Rahway, N.J., claims he crashed his Thunderbird while driving home from a date because he began seeing blue streaks up his arm while changing a cassette tape.
Mr. Benjamin, who also has Viagra suits that claim heart problems from the pill, says, "The science on this is solid."
Diet-Pill Litigation
The litigation over diet pills that are linked to heart-valve damage is more conventional, although some of Mr. Benjamin's cases turn on novel theories. Some of his clients, for example, seek money from marketer American Home Products Corp. for the anxiety associated with taking the pills. Another, a mother, claims her baby's heart problems were caused by her use of diet pills.
Mr. Benjamin already claims some satisfied clients in the diet-pill affair. Last year, he engineered a suit against the Food and Drug Administration, contacting obesity groups to see if they wanted to serve as plaintiff. He contends that his suit led to last year's recall of the diet drugs, and he intends to petition a federal court to award him attorneys' fees. The government is opposing him, saying, among other things, that officials had already encouraged the voluntary recall by the time Mr. Benjamin properly informed them of his litigation.
Lynn McAfee, director of medical advocacy for the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, says she was delighted that Mr. Benjamin called, because her group had no money. She doubts its suit had influence with the FDA, but likes the fact that Mr. Benjamin was willing to front the costs of a news conference to announce the suit.
"I didn't give a rat's a-- who he was," she says. "For us, it was a very legitimizing experience."
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