Big Sugar Episode 2: The Grass is Always Greener

Each day, when a cutter is brought to a field, they're told in number, it's the amount they'll earn for cutting a row of sugarcane. Remember, sugarcane is planted in rows. Some days it's one hundred dollars per row, some days it's one hundred and fifty dollars, some days it's eighty dollars. And a single row can take days to cut. But I want to zero in on one day and one field.

In this particular field, the workers, after cutting for a couple hours, figured out, we're not going to make any money because the price is too low. That the price you're paying, we'll be lucky to make ten dollars today, and so they stopped working.

It's nineteen eighty six, and there are grumblings. It's the start of an infamous event in the annals of the Florida sugarcane industry. It started when a group of workers declared, we're not cutting cane at these prices. It's just not enough money.

And so a number of the workers said, well, we're we're just not going to cut today and we're going to walk back to the camp. And it was not like it was on back roads that nobody saw there were all of a sudden, these hundreds of men walking down the highway. Then it certainly got people's attention.

The farm these guys we're working for is one of the biggest of all the sugarcane farms in Florida. It's called Okolanta. It's owned by the most famous sugar barons in America, the vun Hul Brothers. So after that long walk back to the barracks, there's an eerily quiet night. It's not until the morning that a representative from the sugar company arrives. Rather than send the workers out on their usual bus to the field, the company wants to negotiate.

Ultimately, the company just said we've had it, We're done with these.

Guys, and that's when things really started to go bad. Minutes after the negotiation leaves, police cars begin to surround the building, accompanied by Okalanta buses and a helicopter.

The company called the local sheriff's department, who sent out a riot squad, and the riot squad was directed to round up the supposed instigators, and they figured some might be hiding in the.

Bearers inside the massive building is Jamaican sugarcane cutter Selven Grant.

It was a strike, but I was not involved. But I was right there.

He isn't part of the strike. Actually, he's cut his finger and is recuperating when all of a sudden, uniformed officers barge.

In and one of the police was advancing to me, and I tell him, man, I'm not in fie my finger cut, I'm sick. I just come from a doctor, and I was showing them my band aid on my finger, saying that I'm not in tho strike.

But from Selvin's perspective, the shotgun armed police seemed to be rounding up everyone, so.

It seemed like Folly was not listening to me. He was advancing to me, like you want to grab me.

Selvin isn't alone. There are loads of guys caught up in the chaos.

Certain workers had actually gone to the barracks, not because they were hiding from the police, but they figured something is going on that sounds very bad, and we think the safest thing we can do is to sit on our bunk with our arms folded across our chest and nothing bad can happen to us. We won't be accused of striking. We'll just just be quiet and be obedient.

My sins tell me that get away from this crowd. Get away, get away, And that's what I did.

Selvin runs up some stairs and watches from a window on a higher floor.

And I go upstairs and was watching what going on, and then all of a sudden, I see the police coming a dog.

The riot squad came into the barracks and they brought with them their police dogs and the police dogs a cat. Some of these workers who were sitting on their bunks and several of them suffered some serious dog BikeE wounds.

Most of the guys has careded a dog that they just didn't really run. I just say please, said, well, you got to come with me, because you guys seemed like the trobeltmaker. Very scary, very scary, so scared.

The remaining workers who were viewed as instigators or strikers were placed on buses and sent to the Miami Airport to eventually be repatriated.

More than three hundred workers were rounded up by the police at gunpoint and sent back home back to the Caribbean.

This day.

This event was given a name.

Not only the workers involved, but everyone there that day refers to the event as the Dog War.

The Dog War a day when tensions exploded to something that felt to many like armed combat. But how did

I'm Edward Tuttenham and I'm an attorney.

Edward Tuttenham has spent his career challenging some of the working practices of big agriculture and when that's your job, well you're bound to make a few enemies.

I remember one farmer, Sue called me up and I picked up the phone and he just said, listen, I'm about to leave town and I want to kill you. I want you to drive down to my ranch right now so I can shoot you. I said, well, I'm tied up. Actually make it now, but if you'll call me back when you're back in town, we can talk about it.

Farmers were angry, angry enough to threaten Edward's life, albeit not angry enough to make the short ride to commit the crime. But this, it turns out, was par for the course when you're a lawyer sticking up from migrant farm workers.

The windows of our office were routinely broken out, people driving by at night throwing rocks of them.

How did Edward wind up in this situation? After graduating from Harvard in nineteen seventy eight, he went to work for Texas Rural Legal Aid. It's an organization that gives free legal help to farm workers, helping them with their pay and conditions. Had you been to Texas before that?

Uh? No, no, I had not.

Despite having little to no knowledge of Texas, Edward buttoned up his brooks brother's shirt and got straight to work.

They picked me up at the airport and immediately we drove to a picket line.

He represented onion harvesters, cotton pickers, and then began what he calls the Texas Melon experience, standing up from Mexican candlop pickers in the Presidio Valley.

And you know, that was exactly what I wanted to do.

If this was a Rocky style training montage, Edward would be right there on the picket line, drafting briefs and cross examining witnesses. Instead of hooking Russian boxers, he'd be ko in exploitative farmers. The young ambitious lawyer even deposed a local sheriff whose claim to fame was that he conducted the last public hanging in Texas. The ranchers gave Edward a nickname, the Harvard Idiot. And is it true that a deputy wrote a song?

It wasn't the deputy, it was the county sheriff. The name of the song was get out of Herford Trla, which was Texas urre Ilegal aid.

All this is to say that almost nothing would deter this Harvard Idiot, not threatening phone calls, not even hostile ballads composed by local law enforcement. He was going to defend farm workers no matter what.

I'm very similar to Edward Tutnham.

This is Greg Shell, managing attorney at Southern Migrant Legal Services, another group that helps migrant farm workers. And Greg was one year behind Edward Tuttenham at Harvard Law School.

One thing going to a high pressure, high prestige law school like Harvard is that it instills in you, if nothing else, an extreme sense of self confidence. Some people would say arrogance and you think that you can change the world and that you can do things. You can prevail over daunting odds because you can outsmart the other side and the challenge is something you relish.

And Edward was outsmarting the other side, winning many of his cases.

So picture it.

Edward's writing high on a string of successes holding powerful farmers to account. Pay your workers properly, treat them properly. Side note, some of the farm workers did end up getting fired after the lawsuits. Farmers would find other ways of harvesting that were cheaper than paying proper wages. But hey, there's always going to be collateral damage in the pure

They didn't understand how they were being cheated. They just knew that they were being cheated in some way.

Some sugar cane cutters reported they were somehow earning just a few dollars an hour, well below the minimum wage at the time. And this is also what journalist Marie Brenner heard when she was looking into the story in the nineteen nineties. She was working on an article for Vanity Fair, an article which eventually became the inspiration for this podcast. So in full investigative mode, one day, she's in lawyer Gregshal's office and she comes across a letter that one cutter had written home.

Here's a one letter we can read from the article. Dear Fatty, how keeping, I hope all of you are well. I write you and send you twenty six dollars. I don't know if you get it. You wouldn't know what I'm going through. We get a cane row for thirty dollars. It takes two days to cut it. That works out to be some one dollar and some cents an hour. I spoke to the timekeeper and he's ready to eat me up. He says, we just have to work fast enough, and then we'll make even more than the hourly wages

Okay, So to answer that, let's get into the nuts and bolts of what happens when sugar cane is being cultivated. Imagine a massive field.

Sugar cane is planted in rows, rows.

And rows of these long, thick stalks of sugarcane. Some are thirteen feet high and two inches around.

It's a grass, so it grows just like when you cut the grass in your yard. It grows up back year after year.

And at the time we're talking about. In the eighties and nineties, virtually all the sugar cane in America was cut by hand. Using a machine to cut the cane is certainly safer and more efficient, but some growers prefer manual labor because machines can accidentally pull out the roots of sugarcane, meaning it won't regrow the following year. So the workers turn up in the morning to a field and they're told how much each row is worth.

Every day in every field the rose would be priced differently.

Cut this row today and you'll get fifty dollars. The next day it would be cut this row and you'll get eighty dollar. It was a moving target, so there.

Was nothing fixed that you could put your finger on.

The cutters then get to work chopping as quickly as they can, bent over all day, slashing the bottom of the cane with a machete.

Sugar cane is very hard to.

Cut, and these workers cut tons of it on some of these farms in Florida, like eight tons a day. To put that in perspective, that's heavier than the combined weight of five Toyota.

Priases, which is astronomical.

Then the sticks are sent to a sugar mill to be turned into syrup and finally crystals, which are packaged in the iconic bags found in nearly every supermarket and convenience store in America. These days, we eat on average six cups of sugar a week, and believe me, it's in almost everything. A couple years ago, I went sugar free for six months, and I was shocked to find that my bread had sugar in it, and my pizza sauce, and my peanut butter, and my dried fruit and my

I started looking into it, and at first we did not realize exactly what was going on.

There was this problem workers were getting under pay that was well known to a whole large group of advocates.

But we didn't really understand why.

It was all a bit mysterious. But then Edward Tuttenham had an idea. By this point, he was an expert in H two litigation, which made him fairly specialized. H two A visas are used by farmers to bring in workers from overseas for ten ary agricultural work. So in the case of sugar, it had historically been used for cutters from the West Indies, mainly Jamaica, but also Barbados, Saint Lucia sent Kitts and others. Since the sugar companies claimed almost no Americans would do the job, Edwards starts

He looked at this very complicated contract that the Jamaican workers were employed under.

And there were three terms that he obsessed over. It's complicated, so bear with me.

One, if you cut eight tons in an eight hour day, you will be a satisfactory worker.

That's one ton per hour.

Two earning five dollars and thirty cents an hour is satisfactory.

Five dollars and thirty cents is the minimum wage.

Three, but anything less and you'll be fired. And I must have read those three sentences over and over and over again for months. Eight tons five thirty per hour is required. Worker would be expected to cut eight tons of pain in an eight hour day.

He took the time to parse this very thick and confusing document.

You will be expected to cut fast enough to earn five thirty.

An hour, and he read it carefully.

To pay five thirty a ton. A ton an hour is good enough and earning five thirty an hour, if you cut a ton an hour, you're a satisfactory worker.

These three terms swirled around in.

Edward's head until finally, in conversation with Greg, suddenly the light bulb went on.

He's got it.

When you have those three statements, the logical answer is then they have to pay at least five thirty per ton. Again, if one ton an hour is good enough and earning five thirty an hour is good enough, but anything less than five point thirty gets you fired, then they have to pay at least five thirty a ton.

Edward had figured out one piece of the puzzle. He hypothesized that according to this clearance order, the workers should be paid at least five dollars and thirty cents for every ton of cane they cut. That would be in line with the contract and minimum wage, and it would be in line with the expectation that the workers have been told they're expected to cut at least a ton

The problem was, how do you prove that this is occurring?

How do you prove they were paying them less than five dollars thirty cents per ton. It's not like there were scales in the fields. The workers were just told a price for the row and got cutting. But there was potentially a lot at stake. And when I say a lot, I mean tens of millions of dollars.

If you could prove in some easy way not only that the workers were not being paid properly, but the amount they were owed, that would be a huge amount of money.

Then out of the blue, another piece falls into the puzzle. Edward sitting in his office in Washington, d c. Surrounded by boxes of paper pouring over the dense H two contract. He's been at this for months, All these phrases and clauses and legal parlance are echoing around in his brain. He's thinking in lawyer terms, how do I prove what's going on here?

And then I'm in my office and the phone ring.

Is The secretary says to Edward, it's Ed.

Fountain and he needs to talk to you. I didn't know who Ed Fountain was, and I took the call and he said he was a former sugar supervisor.

US Sugar is one of the biggest sugarcane producers in the country.

So I got this call. Okay, you're a supervisor for US Sugar.

What about it?

And he said, well, you know, I've just been fired and I have some information that I think you would find useful. I said, really, what kind of information? And he says, well, I'm the guy who prices the roads. I know how they do it. And that birked up my ears pretty quickly. Yeah, and I said, great, where are you.

Put ed Fountain on hold? What exactly he told Edward In just a minute more after the break, let's get back for a moment to who the story is really about the sugarcane. I wonder if you would if we could start, if you don't mind by telling me a little bit about Jamaica. What is Jamaica like?

Where? Tell your boy Jamaica, Jamaica is very nice, very sonny. You have a lots of nice places where you can go hang out, I enjoy yourself.

Two of the Jamaican sugar cane cutters who found themselves caught up in the story are Victor Blackwood and Selven Grant, and from the way they talk about their motherland, it's clear they love the island in particular. They can wax lyrical about the food.

Dirt, chicken, fish, rice and chicken, and if you eat aqui and salfish and banana fish.

Fish is my favorite meal fish snapper fish. A matter of fact, fish is the best meal in the whole water. Very delicious.

Despite the delicious snapperfish, growing up in downtown Kingston also came with its challenges For Selven, I'll.

Go up in ghetto. So guys my age, they die and is the reason why they died in gangs. Some of them get shot by guns, tell of them and get stuck by knife. Theyn't have anywhere is to go live, So I got to live in that same neighborhood. I gotta be keep looking over my shoulder, morning, noon and night.

For some people in Jamaica, including Selvin, the H two worker visa was a way to get out of the cycle, to come to the US and earn money and change their lives.

Being able to come to the United States is a very prized right in Jamaica. One way you can tell who has been working in the United States is very obvious when you travel rural Jamaica. As you ride through rural Jamaica, you will observe it's like the Little Children's story the Three Little Pigs. You'll see most homes are made out of sticks, out of straw, but you'll see

Selvin's life in Jamaica could have gone very differently. At one point, some guys asked him to join a gang, but he refused. He wanted to be like his dad, the kind of guy who worked from before sunrise to after sunset on his own farm.

It was a hard worker. My dad was a very very hard worker. I don't see no man in the world could work like my dad.

Speaking of dads, Victor's father was actually part of the farm worker program too, Cutting Caine. He'd come home from working abroad and he'd bring Victor new wrangler janes and cautionary tales about the difficulties of the job.

So when he comes back and we are talking, he says, son, it is very off. It is very off. I said, well, Dad, I would like to go a dear go experience it for myself day to come. But he said to me, it is very off.

So what part about it made you want to go? Why did you want to follow in your dad's footsteps and also travel the Cutcaine.

Tell you the answers to what I would like to have the experience, And at that time I have two kids, So my goal is to go the antwerk and come up here, come work and buy Pisa and to make a house and to help take care of my kids.

Selvin had similar aspirations.

To better my life and not just me and my family too, build my house and send my kids to a better school.

Selven credits divine intervention for getting his shot at the Age two program. He says God put him in the right place, at the right time. He simply overheard people talking about a local government official who was giving out farm worker cards. These are like passes that would allow you to go for an interview for the program.

Just like that, Just like that, That's my first opportunity. Right there.

Selvin went to the official and asked for a card. He did his homework, asked people about the interview, the tests, and even took the day off work.

Before his physical I do not want to fail.

Both Selvin and Victor had heard it was a rigorous process. When Victor turned up for the selection day, so.

They called me name, and I go up to a man, a big, trapping white man by the name of Miranda, and he said yes Victor Blackwood. I said yes, you eat pork. I say yes, sir.

They supposedly didn't want any pork abstaining Rastafarians on the program.

He said, you were seven days a week. I said yes. You say you eat rice? I said yes, sir.

Then they ask can you cut sugarcane? Selvin says yeah, I've worked with my dad and cut fourteen tons a day.

He said, what because a lot? I say, I'm very strong and I'm a hard worker. You know, and not another word. You just say you passed.

You go over there next the infamous hand test.

So let me see your hand, and I turn over my hand and I show you my name, feel my hand.

The last of the workers to turn over their hands to see if they have houses on them. Is this a person who's been doing manual labor or is this a person who's been working in an office building?

What was he looking for when he was touching your hands?

You want to know if my hand took are itself? If you hand south, they're not gonna take it. Say you never I used the word for your handself.

This was like out of slave trade. You know, they're looking at their hands to make sure their hands are big enough to be able to hold these sites in the fields. You hear about these scenes and you could be back in the nineteenth century with the slave trade.

And there's more. Selvin and Victor have to go to a testing center in Hanover Street, Kingston, and I.

Go inside a room. Is a big room, big place, about three hundred men. And we've got inside a room. You take off your clothes and then you leave into your your underwear.

A doctor arrives in this huge room where the men are waiting in their underwear, and.

Then he said, you said drop your jazz. And then he said you most bent over, honey, combat and look if you have.

Pile hundreds of naked men bent over the doctor looking to see if the men have hemorrhoids. The men were treated as though they were livestock, a brutal and dehumanizing process. Then once clothed.

Then I gotta go take a blood test. My blood was was good. I gotta take a youine test by you, and that was good. I gotta take like Chesick's tray.

The hand test, the physical, the blood test, the X ray. Selvin and Victor got through it all.

I passed. I pass everything I do. I pas all. This.

Imagine the physical condition you need to be in just to cut sugarcane. Not something you want to think about when you're adding a teaspoon of sweetness to your morning coffee. So most men are ushered to the reject exit, but Victor and Selvin are directed towards another door. They're going to America.

I was so confident that I'm going to America. Yeah, I was so confident.

One last thing before they move on to their bright future. In the US, they just need to add their signature to a stack of documents.

You're saying, right, contract.

Did you read the contract before you signed it?

Not exactly, Bucadia find print and there were so many papers you couldn't really have got if you if you got to door papers, it would take it award day.

Did you notice anyone trying to stop and read them before they signed?

No? No, no, no, no. Everybody was so happy to gos that they didn't really stop us and read the papers. Then do you understand I do.

More after the break? So we're back to the contract. That contract they signed, Well, it's the same document, Lawyer Edward Tuttenham would go on to obsess over for months before that fateful call from the former US sugar supervisor Ed Fountain. Ed has evidence, he says, of how this complicated and frankly confusing system of row pricing works, of how much money the sugar cane cutters are really being paid. So Edward says to him.

Okay, mister Fountain, when can I meet you anytime? Anytime? Just come you know, next time you're in Ashville. I said, well, I'm coming to Ashville just as soon as I can get a plane ticket. I flew to Ashville and met mister Fountain in a diner. And then the thing that he gave is that sort of broke the case open. Was a pricing sheet.

This was how the company supposedly determined how much the cutter was going to be paid per row of cane he cut.

It was an insanely complicated system to figure out from scratch. There are hundreds and hundreds of cane fields and they need to be priced every day.

This pricing chart was produced by the sugar companies for each field they planted. The chart lays out the estimated number of tons in every single field to sugar, as well as how many rows are in a given field. And according to ed, this is how they calculate the total price to be paid per row.

It was all pre calculated. I mean, it's just a mathematical conversion.

For example, if one field is estimated to hold forty tons of sugar planted in let's say eight rows, this will give you five tons of cut sugar per row. Multiplying this number by the amount budgeted for the harvest gives the farmer the price they want to pay per row.

And to make it even easier. At the very top, it said, you know, three twenty five per ton.

Was that a little like a smoking gun?

Uh?

Yeah, a smoking gun, because remember from the contract.

If one ton an hour is good enough, and earning five thirty an hour is good enough, but anything less than five point thirty gets you fired, then they have to pay at least five thirty a ton.

That three dollars and twenty five cents per ton at the top of the sheet. That was not the five dollars thirty cents per ton that Edward understood the workers would be legally paid.

It was clear they were not paying anything close to five thirty a ton. Then it became obvious they were pricing the cane so that to earn five thirty an hour you had to cut over a ton and a half per hour, and people just couldn't do it. People clearly were not cutting fast enough. They just couldn't physically could not. I don't care whether you're an Olympic champion, you cannot cut cane that fast.

And that is why thousands of these workers wound up off and getting paid three dollars an hour.

But if a worker was only cutting enough cane to earn three dollars an hour. Well, that's not going to work. That's below minimum wage, which yes, also applies to H two visa workers. The company would have to make up the difference, or it turned out there was another option.

To disguise the fact that they were pushing people too fast. They then had to match the hours to put down fewer hours than people work to make it look like they were cutting more per hour than they actually were.

A worker may have been in the fields for eight hours but earning only four dollars an hour. A timekeeper thinks, hmmm, let's erase that. Let's say it was actually six hours, and like magic, the tickets sale worker is now earning five dollars thirty cents an hour.

You were supposed to make five dollars hour. You made five dollars an hour. Everything looks good to the government, looks good to the inspectors, and, knowing the workers were unlikely to complain, the companies realized tens of millions of dollars every year by doing it exactly that way.

One of the reasons this went on for so long was because the workers knew if they spoke out about the hours shorting or anything else, for that matter, they could be sent home. And to appreciate what a threat that was, I need to tell you one more detail about H two visas. There's strong evidence there was often also a background check for the cutters. If you'd cut cane before and complained about the pay or tried to unionize,

I didn't know it was so serious until I heard. But everything was done. But the police was there just to calm them down, and they go back to her the next day. But I didn't get to come back. They send them home. They's sending them back to Jamaica.

We've tracked down photos of one of the men who was arrested through a freedom of information request. He's barefoot, his thumb bandaged, and a patch on his inner arm. He's wearing a red tank top that's ripped on one shoulder, held together by a thread. Some people lawyers trying to help the men, say they saw the men boarding the planes in their underwear. They hadn't had time to gather their possessions.

All their belongings and everything. They left the ears. Maybe they get the money in their locker room and they left it.

It made Selvin really nervous the idea that he could be sent.

Home like that, and that was a scare, very scare part. That's the reason why I did never want anything like that happened to me.

That's a system that is prone to exploitation of workers because the workers are totally at the mercy of the employer. And if the choice is I can accept the job in the US, and I'm being cheated in that job, but it certainly is better than what I have at home in Jamaica, I'm inclined to just be quiet and accept those conditions and continue working in that job.

Victor's take is that the men were more or less disposable.

So many men is a tear, And then tell your plan if you don't want to quote it. When I go home, your brother are coming.

I mean, I know that Supposedly they had a liaison officer for you who was supposed to help you sort out problems. Did you feel like you had resources people that you could go to if there were problems with your your pay or your treatment.

Listen to me. Listen to me tell you the truth. The listen Apsadam. Them is no good. Them is no no good.

We asked the sugarcane companies and their trade group to respond to the claims that they underpaid their workers, the blacklisting, and much more about the working and living conditions on the farms in the eighties and nineties. No one replied. We also spoke to the Palm Beach County Sheriff's office

Contract law was just the most straightforward. There are no defenses. If this is what you promised, this is what you have to pay. It seemed so easy at the time. It seems so straightforward. I have never done a case that was more clearcut.

But you can't win a legal battle based on contract law without a contract lawyer.

So they approached this local Florida attorney named Dave Gorman.

Who specializes in business contracts.

He's a very nice guy, very smart, very smart. It's very different from most of my friends. He drove a Harley, an enormous Harley. He was a biker, long and short of it.

Oh, Dave was I met him? He drove into Belglade. I believe on his Harley and he was wearing his leather jacket.

He lifted weights and here was a biker. That's all I can sing.

Well.

I mean, I do have a motorcycle. I haven't ridden it much lately because of hip and back issues. But that doesn't mean you're I'm a goon.

I don't think what kind of motorcycle is it?

So Harley Davison, I got a nineteen eighty eight low Rider.

When you ask people about Dave Gorman, they usually tell you he's a biker, and they also tell you.

Dave enlisted in the Vietnam War.

He had been a Vietnamese interpreter.

He was a firebrand who had been in the Vietnam or.

This came after a bit of boyish delinquency, adding to the bad boy persona. Dave had dabbled in some frat boy behavior while at Duke University.

I got in a little bit of trouble with the school after a fraternity party. The police, Durham County Sheriff picked me up. I mean, they didn't charge me with anything. I was drunk as a lord, but they did turn me into the school. So the school charged me with drunkenness and conduct on becoming a duke gentleman. It's kind of hard to argue.

By his own admission, Dave was lacking direction.

I was going nowhere fast, so I wound up enlisting for It was a four year enlistment.

He avoided being shot at in the war because he was so smart. He could learn Vietnamese. I think he became a translator.

After the war, Dave became a lawyer, moved to Florida, and figured maybe working in the law he wouldn't have to take orders anymore.

I was never particularly good at taking orders in the.

Army, so career began. He didn't plaster his own face on billboards or put ads on TV. He just waited for cases to come to him.

My practice from the very nearly the very beginning, I have never and would never advertise.

And a life altering case was just around the corner. So this intelligence officer turned lawyer, Dave Gorman, is sitting in.

His office, same office I'm in now.

And here comes. Although it doesn't seem special at the time, the second fateful phone call in this story.

That to me doesn't stand out as anything particularly strange or unusual.

Dave didn't know it would be momentous. He gets calls like this all the time from other lawyers working on big cases who want his help, and Dave likes to take on what he calls twilight zone cases, those that are odd or fall outside the norm. On the other end of the line is Edward Tuttenham.

I remember I was sick that day. I was living in Austin, Texas.

Edward is actually lying in bed and he tells Dave about the case he's about to embark on that he wants to sue the sugar industry on behalf of the workers, and he needs a contract lawyer.

And I recognized immediately that he was smart and he knew what he was doing. And I think conversely, he recognized that I knew what I was doing too. I knew what this contract said, and I knew it should be a complete winner.

So would Dave help out mounting this case?

And I said, okay, well that's that's yeah, that's fine, I don't mind doing that sounds interesting.

And remember if they were right, then these workers were owed tens of millions of dollars in extra wages.

And the lawyers stood to pocket a couple of million dollars themselves.

And so no, it didn't take any convincing at all. I think we talked for thirty men and he said, I'm on, that sounds like a great case. How can we lose?

So Edward hops on the back of Dave's Harley and they ride off into the sunset on their righteous highway towards destination justice. This could be the biggest case of their careers and it seems unlosable.

It all looked like smooth sailing, but.

That wouldn't make for much of a story, would it. This case was anything but smooth. Next time on Big Sugar, did they know what they were getting into?

No work?

Now.

The case went through so many twists and turns the last I.

Don't think anybody anticipated what was going to happen.

And it changed very, very quickly.

Big Sugar is produced by Imagine Audio, Weekday Fund Productions and Novel for iHeartMedia. The series is hosted by me Celeste Hedley. Big Sugar is produced by Jeff Eisenman at Weekday Fund Productions. It's executive produced by Kara Welker, Nathan Kloke and Marie Brenner Story editor and executive producer is Joe Wheeler. The researcher is Nadia Metti. Production management from Cherie Houston, Frankie Taylor, and Charlotte Wolfe. Our fact checker