Robert J. Mongeluzzi

Mongeluzzi — a Wharton business degree in 1978, a Fordham law degree in 1981, where he was a commentary editor of the Fordham Law Review, and in 1994 a Temple LL.M. in trial advocacy in the program's first class; admitted in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York — had filed the first action the day after the collapse. He founded Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky, and he founded the American Association for Justice's crane and aerial-lift litigation group, having challenged the crane industry to put him out of business by installing the safety devices that protect workers. In the collapse case his firm represented the estates of Anne Bryan, 24, Juanita Harmon, 75, and Johnson, and six of the survivors; the trial before Judge Sarmina consolidated about twenty suits by nineteen plaintiffs against Basciano, STB, Basciano's owner's representative, the architect Plato A. Marinakos Jr., the Salvation Army, Campbell and Benschop, and Mongeluzzi tried it with Harry M. Roth, Andrew J. Stern and Steven G. Wigrizer after more than a hundred days of depositions, more than 125 motions in limine and 43 motions for a mistrial.

Four Hours

Testimony ran fifteen weeks. On January 31, 2017, at about 4:30 in the afternoon, after roughly four hours of deliberation, the jury found every defendant liable and found that all but Campbell had shown a reckless indifference to the interests of others. For the store's customers it placed 75 percent of the responsibility on the Salvation Army, 13 percent on STB, 5 percent each on Basciano and Marinakos and 1 percent each on Campbell and Benschop; for the Salvation Army's own employees, whom the workers' compensation law barred from suing their employer, it placed 34 percent each on Basciano and STB, 30 percent on Marinakos and 1 percent each on Campbell and Benschop. Judge Sarmina recalled the jury for February 3 to begin the damages phase. On February 8, 2017 the plaintiffs' lawyers announced that the case had settled for $227 million, to be divided among the nineteen plaintiffs through an arbitration, as the Pier 34, Tropicana and duck-boat recoveries had been divided before it; each defendant's share was confidential. Mongeluzzi called the result “epic in dimension”.

Pier 34

Just after 8 p.m. on May 18, 2000, the end of Pier 34, south of Penn's Landing, where the open-air Club Heat had opened earlier that month, gave way and dropped at least forty people into the Delaware River. Three coworkers from the New Jersey State Aquarium in Camden drowned — Jean Marie Ferraro, 27, Monica Rodriguez, 21, and DeAnn White, 25 — and forty-three people were injured, eight of them rescue workers. The pier had been built in 1890 and extended in 1909; about five years before the collapse its owners had been told that more than $1.2 million in repairs were needed and some six hundred pilings replaced, and they had installed braces instead. Mongeluzzi and Thomas R. Kline were lead counsel for the plaintiffs in more than forty suits against roughly a dozen defendants, principally Portside Investors, whose head, Michael Asbell, had bought the pier in 1984, and HMS Ventures, which ran the club. The repairs, Mongeluzzi said, “guaranteed the pier was going to collapse — it was just a question of when.” Judge William J. Manfredi of the Court of Common Pleas presided over settlement negotiations for more than a year, and in the last week of January 2004 the cases settled for $29.6 million: one quarter to each of the three women's families, about $7.4 million apiece, and the remaining quarter to the injured plaintiffs through a binding arbitration that fixed each share.

October 30, 2003

A parking garage under construction at the Tropicana Casino and Resort in Atlantic City collapsed, killing four workers — Michael Wittland, 53, an ironworker six months from retirement after thirty-five years; James Bigelow, 29, an ironworker; and Robert Tartaglio Jr., 42, and Scott Pietrosante, 21, laborers for Fabi Construction — and injuring more than twenty others, among them Wittland's eldest son, Edward, whose neck was broken. In April 2004 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited four contractors. Mongeluzzi and Paul D'Amato of Linwood, New Jersey were lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the Superior Court in Atlantic County, where Judge William E. Nugent presided over the discovery — nearly 250 depositions, more than 1.5 million pages of documents and more than 50,000 pages of transcripts — and Judge Stephen P. Perskie over the settlement talks, with trial set for June 6. On April 11, 2007 the cases settled for $101 million with Tropicana, the general contractor Keating Building Corporation, Fabi Construction, Midstate Filigree Systems, DeSimone Consulting Engineers and Site-Blauvelt Engineers: about $82.5 million in cash, about $8.2 million in workers' compensation benefits that would not have to be repaid, more than $8.3 million for future medical care and $2 million from earlier settlements. The garage had come down, Mongeluzzi said, because “the floors were not connected to the walls.” In 2024 the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, looking back at the collapse in its Construction Code Communicator, wrote that the inspection reports had lacked detail and frequency and that the people who completed them had minimal construction experience; the Department's special-inspector certification program had taken effect on November 6, 2008.

Everyone Who Was on That Train

At 9:21 p.m. on May 12, 2015, Amtrak Train 188, with 245 passengers aboard, entered the Frankford Junction curve in Philadelphia, posted at fifty miles an hour, at 106. Eight passengers died and 185 were taken to hospitals. The National Transportation Safety Board, in the report it adopted on May 17, 2016, attributed the derailment to the engineer's loss of situational awareness, his attention diverted to an emergency aboard a nearby SEPTA train, and found that the absence of positive train control had contributed. The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation sent the suits to Judge Legrome D. Davis of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on October 13, 2015. Congress had raised the statutory cap on rail-passenger damages for the derailment from $200 million to $295 million in the FAST Act of December 4, 2015, and at the first conference, on April 1, 2016, Amtrak accepted responsibility for compensatory damages without qualification. On April 12, 2016 Judge Davis appointed Saltz Mongeluzzi, Kline & Specter and the Morelli firm liaison counsel, and on May 24 he named Mongeluzzi to the seven-member Plaintiffs' Management Committee, chaired by Thomas R. Kline, that recommended the structure of the litigation and negotiated with Amtrak; its members served without compensation, some for a thousand to fifteen hundred hours. The court approved their global resolution on October 27, 2016: a $265 million fund, the present value of the $295 million cap, open to everyone who had been on the train whether or not they had sued. Of 299 claimants, 159 chose the program, most of the rest having settled with Amtrak directly. Two Masters, the retired judges Diane M. Welsh and William J. Manfredi — the judge who had settled Pier 34 — reviewed each claimant's damages and held hearings, the court reviewed their recommendations de novo, and on July 31, 2017, twenty-two months after the MDL was created, the final awards were distributed and the fund paid out in full, its administrative costs $1,110,382.95.

The Summer of 2018

On July 1, 2014, a ninety-three-degree day, a propane cylinder on a food truck at Third Street and Wyoming Avenue in Feltonville ruptured; the fire killed the truck's owner, Olga Galdamez, 42, and her daughter Jaylin, 17, and burned two children nearby. Mongeluzzi, with Andrew Duffy and Benjamin Baer, represented a boy burned over more than 65 percent of his body, who had undergone many surgeries with more to come. The suits alleged that the general manager of U-Haul's Hunting Park store had repeatedly overfilled two seventy-year-old cylinders that lacked the safety valves federal rules required, leaving no room for the gas to expand in the heat. In mediation before Diane M. Welsh, one of the two Amtrak Masters, the claims settled on June 27, 2018, less than a week before trial, for $160 million: $69.17 million to Mongeluzzi's client, $54.35 million to the other injured child and $36.47 million to the Galdamez family. Three weeks later, on July 19, 2018, Stretch Duck 7 sank in a storm on Table Rock Lake near Branson, Missouri, killing seventeen people, nine of them members of the Coleman family of Indianapolis. On July 29 Mongeluzzi filed the first suit, in federal court in Kansas City, for the estates of Ervin Coleman, 76, and Maxwell Coleman-Ly, 2, against Ripley Entertainment, Ride the Ducks International and the vehicle's manufacturer, seeking $100 million and pleading that the operators had launched the boat despite severe-weather warnings; “Duck boats are sinking coffins,” he said the next day. The Coleman family's first claims against Ripley settled on confidential terms in March 2019. In the Champlain Towers South litigation before Judge Michael Hanzman in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, over the collapse of June 24, 2021 that killed ninety-eight people in Surfside, Florida, he was among the plaintiffs' counsel in the settlements the court approved on June 23, 2022, a day short of the first anniversary.

The Delaware River

On July 7, 2010, Ride the Ducks' Duck Boat 34, with thirty-seven people aboard, stopped in the Delaware River when its captain believed the engine was on fire and shut it down, which also silenced the air horn. It sat disabled for about twelve minutes. The tug Caribbean Sea, operated by K-Sea Transportation Partners, was pushing a 250-foot city sludge barge, The Resource, downriver, and its first mate at the wheel, Matthew Devlin, was on his cellphone about his five-year-old son's surgery instead of keeping a lookout, the National Transportation Safety Board found. The barge ran over the duck. Dora Schwendtner, 16, and Szabolcs Prem, 20, Hungarian students from Mosonmagyaróvár and a village fifteen minutes from it, each an only child, drowned; the other thirty-five survived. Peter and Holly Ronai of Ronai & Ronai in New York retained Mongeluzzi and Andrew Duffy for the families, and on the night of July 16 the two were on their way to Vienna, forty-five minutes by road from Mosonmagyaróvár, to meet the parents. Devlin pleaded guilty to misconduct of a ship operator causing death, and in November 2011 Judge Legrome D. Davis sentenced him to a year and a day. Ride the Ducks and K-Sea invoked the Limitation of Liability Act of 1851, valuing the duck at $150,000 and the tug at $1.65 million and asking that their liability be capped at the vessels' worth; Mongeluzzi answered that the Act gave no shelter to companies whose own negligence had caused the collision. The bench trial opened before Judge Thomas N. O'Neill Jr. on May 7, 2012. Mongeluzzi played the video that showed Dora tossing a life jacket to a deckhand in the water as the barge closed. The parents, Aniko and Peter Schwendtner and Mari and Sandor Prem, followed the testimony through headsets as Peter Ronai translated. On the second day, after a passenger from Illinois, Kevin Grace, described struggling to fit a life jacket on his nine-year-old daughter, Judge O'Neill halted the trial and sent the parties to Judge John R. Padova, and on the afternoon of May 9 the case settled for $17 million — $15 million to the two families and $2 million to the eighteen other passengers — nearly ten times, Mongeluzzi noted, the value the companies had put on their vessels. Aniko Schwendtner said she was proud of her daughter: “Now they can see what a special girl Dora was.”