Ben Reach knew there would be trouble when he learned Robert Hart was buying Twisted Pine Plantation. The trouble would come because of who owned adjoining Gnarled Oak Plantation. The storied properties shared a north-south boundary for three miles. Twisted Pine lay to the west, Gnarled Oak to the east.
Gnarled Oak was owned by Frank Knox. Knox and Hart had been partners in a private equity firm in Boston that before breaking up five years ago had made each partner very wealthy thanks to the old rule of 2 and 20. Two percent a year just to deploy the customers’ money. Twenty percent of any profits on the customer’s money off the top for Hart and Knox. As long term capital gain, not ordinary income thanks to the carried interest rule. When Knox and Hart decided to shut down the firm each man walked away with half a billion dollars after tax. But also with twenty five years of accumulated grievances, some real, some imagined, against one another.
On either side of the boundary lay quail hunting courses, shallow impoundments, dove fields and fishing ponds. Each Plantation occupied ten thousand prime acres of Red Hills land and swamp. Game in the form of quail, turkey, duck, deer and dove lived year year around or wintered in nearly equal proportions on the properties. Ideal for both owners one would think, but one would be wrong. How could that be? Because of the natures of Robert and Frank and the old grievances they harbored in their fetid souls. Because also of the men they hired to manage their lands, who for twenty years had been head-to-head competitors on the all-age pointing dog circuit.
The first dust-up came when Hart and his guests were arrested by federal game wardens and charged with shooting a baited natural flyway. The bait lay, unbeknownst to Hart supposedly, on the lands of Knox just across the boundary. Ben managed to convince the prosecutor to dismiss the charges. His warning to Hart afterward: “Next time you won’t be so lucky, so my advice is, don’t let there be a next time.”
Then came on Christmas Day a wildfire that started in the vicinity of the boundary and thanks to a steady twenty five knot wind from the west charred two thousand acres of Gnarled Oak’s ground cover on prime quail hunting courses. Predictably Knox claimed the fire started on Hart’s land, and just as predictably Hart denied it. Evidence inconclusive, said the officials charged with investigating. Tensions mounted.
Each owner had gained membership in the Georgia-Florida Field Trial Club with a large contribution to Tall Timbers Research Station and Conservancy and each soon had a new goal in life, to win with a dog of his breeding the Club’s Owner’s Trial, held each President’s Day since 1916 (except war years). Known to locals as the Yankee Trial, it was a pageant of medieval splendor, with each competing plantation represented by its finest shooting wagon bearing its women folk and pulled in Knox’s case by matched mule mares and in Hart’s case by matched Belgium geldings.
Knox won it first with a pointer named Rip, son of a Kentucky-bred National Champion. The next year Rip won it again, and Knox’s new goal became to win it a third year and retire its multiple trophies (this meant if Rip did, Knox would have to replace the retired trophies at an estimated cost of eighty grand, but Knox viewed this as a small price for the bragging rights and having the hardware in a glass case in his Gun Room to show shooting guests). Hart was now equally determined Rip would not win. The rivalry between him and his old partner had not dimmed, nor the enmity.
Hart’s manager decided the way to beat Rip was with a pup from Rip, raise from Hart’s best female, a bitch named Sue. So when Sue came in heat she was surreptitiously and in the dead of night carried to Rip’s kennel run where in minutes Rip serviced her. (Knox’s kennel man had been bribed not to report the canine liaison).
A litter of six pups appeared in Sue’s whelping box sixty three nights later. As soon as they were weaned Hart’s dog handler, who had been scout for Hart’s manager when they campaigned on the circuit, set out to pick the best from the litter and ready it for its life’s purpose, to defeat Rip in the Yankee Trial. This was shortly after Rip’s first win of the Yankee Trial.
As luck would have it, the litter produced five really talented pups, and Hart’s dog man and plantation manager had difficulty selecting the one among them to enter in the Yankee Trial. They finally decided on a male named Whip which as a Derby was drawn as a brace-mate of Rip in the Yankee Trial. This was the year Rip was first going for the third win.
Brought to the line together, Rip and Whip tore into one another with fury ten yards after release, and were both ordered up by the judges. A year later a female from the unauthorized litter named Princess was substituted for Whip as the entry to beat Rip.
Just before President’s Day, Knox’s kennel man was fired by his manager for being drunk on duty. Bent on revenge, he promptly had his wife send an anonymous note to Knox telling him of the unauthorized breeding of Rip to Sue.
Next day Knox appeared at Ben’s office. He asked Ben to seek an injunction against Hart preventing him from running Princess or Whip in the Owners’ Trial and seeking ownership of them and all litter mates by virtue of the unauthorized breeding.
Ben had for all his career followed his father’s admonition, delivered to him his first week of practice five decades earlier, “ Never get involved in a case involving a dog.”
Ben referred Knox to a young Thomasville lawyer he knew to be hungry for business and willing to take any case that would provide her a fee. The case was filed before the court clerk’s office closed that same day. Next day Ben got a call from Hart, seeking his services. He turned Hart down and referred him to another young female lawyer he knew to be equally willing to take and handle with vigor any case for which a fee was assured. Both these young lawyers had worked as Assistant U. S. Attorneys in Atlanta before hanging up shingles in Thomasville. They were rivals same as Hart and Knox, and did not much like one another, Ben sensed.
Dusk found Ben and Sam Nixon MD seated in Ben’s library-conference room with a bottle of The Macallan between them. After pouring them wee drams of their favorite Highland Elixir, Ben told Sam of his experiences of the last two days.
“So, you have turned a Dog Case into a Cat Fight. Are you sure you have escaped being bit or scratched?”
“Absolutely,” Ben said, somewhat smugly, and poured them dividends of The Macallan.
But next day Ben got a call from the judge assigned Knox vs. Hart. He asked Ben to take an assignment as Special Master to supervise mandatory settlement negotiations between the litigants. The judge also had great disdain for any litigation involving canines.
Ben knew he had no real choice about the assignment. If he refused the judge could retaliate by assigning to Ben multiple prisoner habeas corpus cases, requiring Ben to visit penal institutions across “the Great State of Georgia,” as the politicians called it.
President’s Day lay only a week away. Joanne got on the phone and two days later the lady lawyers and their clients and a court reporter were seated at Ben’s conference table when he arrived in the office following lunch at Millie’s Diner with Sam. Ben could sense if not see the steam figuratively emanating from the nostrils of the litigants and their lawyers. How do I defuse this tension, Ben asked himself.
Ben decided he would begin the conference with a coin toss. “I am going to start by meeting separately for thirty minutes with each client-lawyer team to see if I can get a sense for what might settle this unfortunate case. We are going to ask Joanne to flip a coin to determine which team I meet with first. While I am holding these meetings I ask our court reporter to summons her videographer to set up to video the sessions we will hold after that with lawyers and clients present. And by the way, Judge Jones has ordered that DVDs of these settlement sessions be delivered to him and local media outlets no later than the morning after each of our sessions.”
The shock and worry on Knox’s and Hart’s faces told Ben this announcement had achieved its purpose.
Sam had at lunch while the curmudgeons enjoyed the Catfish Special suggested the filming and publishing scheme. Both Hart’s and Knox’s wives were patients of Sam. Each had volunteered to Sam that her husband valued his privacy above everything except money.
With that Ben summonsed Joanne who flipped a quarter after Ben assigned heads to Knox and tails to Hart. Knox won the toss and elected to meet second with Ben. He used the time Ben was meeting with Hart and his lawyer to confer with his own. When the first separate session with Ben ended the lady lawyers conferred privately outside the conference room, then each met privately with her client.
In a half hour the lawyers asked Joanne to summons Ben who had been in his private office reading the latest John Grisham novel.
“Mr. Reach, our clients have decided to see if they can settle this matter through private negotiations outside the Court’s supervision,” Knox’s lawyer said as Hart’s nodded assent.
“Very well. Having anticipated this might develop, I discussed it with Judge Jones. He has entered an order granting you until five pm tomorrow to settle, otherwise these sessions resume at nine am the day after,” Ben said.
At noon next day Ben received a call from the lady lawyers. Their clients had settled. The terms were to remain confidential between them, and the lawyers were going to ask Judge Jones to seal the court file (Ben had been able to assure them the entire file had been in his office since his appointment as Special Master and had not been requested by any reporter or other citizen before then).
Ben wondered about the terms of the settlement. He learned first that Rip and Sue had been scratched as entries in the Owners’ Trial. The threat of ridicule in Plantation Society had outweighed the possibility of bragging rights to owning a three-time winner. Much later Ben learned Knox had in his wagon string all the litter-mates from the Rip-Sue mating except Whip.
