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LOS ANGELES – Attorneys for Dole Food Co. launched an attack in court Monday against six Nicaraguan men and their lawyers, saying fraud led to a $2.3 million verdict in a lawsuit that claimed exposure to pesticides made the men sterile.
Judge Victoria Chaney, who presided over the 2007 trial and has since been elevated to the state's appellate court, returned to Superior Court to hear evidence and arguments. The case is closely related to one that Chaney dismissed last year on grounds of fraud.
Dole lawyers claim that an American and Nicaraguan lawyer recruited thousands of men willing to falsely claim they had been banana workers on Dole plantations and were sterilized by the pesticides.
Dole attorney Theodore Boutrous told the judge that the plaintiffs in the case of Tellez v. Dole were "the first foot soldiers" in an army organized in Nicaragua by American attorney Juan Dominguez and sent to the United States to commit a massive fraud in U.S. courts.
When the judge dismissed the related case last June, she said it had been tainted by a fraud designed to extort billions of dollars from Dole in multiple lawsuits across the country.
Dole's lawyers on Monday claimed that Dominguez and a Nicaraguan lawyer recruited men to make false claims in order to win the verdict in Los Angeles.
In court, Dole attorneys played videos of Dominguez exhorting crowds in Nicaragua to join what he called a war against the Westlake Village, Calif., company. He told them the Tellez case would be "the bellwether" to determine if cases could be won in American courts.
An appeals court panel that sent the case back to Chaney for final determination said she did not need to hold a hearing. But the judge said, "I recognize the fact that 12 people did listen to this case to a verdict and that is why I am holding this hearing."
She had previously denounced the waste of time and money on that four-month trial.
Boutrous noted that the jury in that case never saw evidence of fraud because it had not yet been documented.
"If they had known about witnesses lying and denying their own children it would have been a far different trial," he said.
He said Dole has discovered that the 14,000 plaintiffs recruited by Dominguez "vastly outstrips" the number of people who actually worked on the banana farms.
Dole attorney Scott Edelman played in court videotapes of the six plaintiffs at their depositions and then at trial in which they contradicted their own testimony. One man who had adamantly acknowledged his son as his own said at trial that the boy was not his biological son.
Edelman also showed charts tracking what he said were fake sperm tests arranged for the men. One man had two tests in Nicaragua that showed he had zero sperm. A test in the United States showed he had 20 million sperm.
Dominguez is a personal injury lawyer whose face has appeared on bus advertisements and billboards in Los Angeles. Chaney has referred him to the State Bar of California and to federal prosecutors for investigation.
Dominguez's attorney, Michael McCarthy, has said Chaney had treated his client unfairly and prejudged the facts. Last year he sought to have the judge removed from the case.
McCarthy said in a motion filed in June that Dominguez was excluded from some hearings and was not permitted to defend himself.
