A small contingent of Roth Properties executives had followed Simon Roth into the room: Roth’s two children, Jeremy and Leah, both of whom were vice presidents, followed by the general counsel, Roger Carrington, and the CFO, Preston Thomas.
Leah and her brother were very young for their positions, not far north of thirty, although that was hardly unusual in a family-controlled private company. Jeremy was heavyset and jaundiced-looking, while Leah was thin and ascetic, both appearing older than their years, although in entirely different ways.
Carrington and Thomas were each well into their fifties. Carrington looked like an old-school WASP; Thomas was African-American. They were dressed virtually identically: both in dark pinstripe suits with pocket squares in their jackets and cuff links in their crisp white shirts.
Duncan took his turn shaking hands after Blake, offering his best bright-boy smile and hoping he didn’t look ill at ease. Simon Roth was a notoriously demanding and prickly client, prided himself on it, and Duncan would have been perfectly content to leave the client interactions to Blake, though he’d dutifully feigned enthusiasm when tapped to come along. Duncan was on hand to be the details guy; as a senior partner, Blake had scant involvement with the nitty-gritty of a case.
Roth Properties was the developer of the Aurora Tower, thirty-six stories of luxury condominiums going up in the heart of SoHo. The cheapest apartment, a five-hundred-square-foot pied-à-terre, was listed at just under a million, while a top-floor penthouse was on the market at twenty-five. However, advance sales for the building had been only a trickle, not good news for a half-billion-dollar construction project. The luxury aura had been tarnished by the accident and the resulting flurry of investigations and lawsuits.
First up had been the Department of Buildings. Construction had been completely shut down for a month while city inspectors nosed around the building site. The lawyers had coordinated the turning over of documents and been present at interviews, but had generally stayed in the background while the agency did its work. Unsurprisingly, the DOB issued multiple violations relating to the accident (the site had collected over a dozen violations from the city before the fatalities, which wasn’t an unusual number for a large-scale Manhattan construction project), levying relatively small fines against both the subcontractor, Pellettieri Concrete, and the general contractor, Omni Construction.
Even before the DOB had issued its findings, a wrongful-death suit had been filed on behalf of the families of the three construction workers. The suit named Roth Properties among the defendants, although generally it was only the contractors who were on the hook for a construction accident. But Roth was the deepest pocket and the highest-profile company involved in the Aurora, so there were strategic reasons to include them as a defendant, even if there was virtually no chance of the plaintiffs actually seeing a dime of Roth’s money.
The accident’s aftermath had been proceeding predictably, with nothing but minor headaches as far as Roth Properties was concerned, when the article had appeared in the New York Journal. The story claimed that the concrete company had failed to provide the standard secondary supports for settling concrete. Even after workers had warned that cracks were appearing, Pellettieri Concrete did nothing to shore it up, ignoring the obvious risk. The article went on to mention that the company’s cofounder was currently in jail on racketeering charges out of a prosecution aimed at weeding out organized crime from the construction industry.
But the main focus of the article had not been on the accident itself, but rather on the city’s response to it. The story claimed that the DOB inspector in charge of investigating the collapse, William Stanton, had originally recommended referring the case to the district attorney for a criminal investigation. That recommendation had supposedly been rejected by the head of the department, Ronald Durant, who’d then watered down the investigator’s findings before issuing a public report. Shortly thereafter Durant had resigned from the DOB and joined a prominent architectural firm that had been hired by Roth Properties to design a wholesale transformation of a city housing project. Although the article didn’t come right out and say so, the suggestion was that the city agency charged with policing construction accidents had gone out of its way to issue a toothless report in exchange for a plum job for Durant.
The Journal’s story had sparked immediate outrage and was quickly picked up by the rest of the New York press. The district attorney’s office promptly announced