As Bemba Diallo punched in for work in a building at Denver International Airport, a chart near the time clock listed his daily work assignment.
Almost without exception, Diallo was penciled in to work at a station handling mail headed for Memphis, Tenn. — just like all the other black employees working the same shift. Meanwhile, the white co-workers on the same shift usually were assigned to the station handling mail going to Indianapolis. The Memphis station was by far the busiest, where workers handled and sorted a heavier volume of packages.
The segregated workload was just one of many ways that Matheson Trucking made Diallo’s job less desirable than the same job was for his white counterparts, he said.
Daily racial taunts, fewer work privileges and ignored protests about discrimination became part of his job, and it was why a jury awarded Diallo and six other , mostly in punitive damages, this month in U.S. District Court.
The seven plaintiffs in the lawsuit and their three attorneys — Brian Moore, Lynn Fieger and Justin Plaskov — spoke with The Denver Post about what it was like working in a place that became an incubator for discrimination.
“I needed that money. I can’t tell my mom I can’t take it because someone is calling me names,” said Salif Diallo, as tears flowed down his cheeks. After his father died, Salif — the oldest of seven children and no relation to Bemba Diallo — needed the job because he was the only one supporting his family left behind in Mali.
Matheson officials vowed to appeal the jury verdict.
If there was any racism at their Colorado plant — which Matheson attorneys disputed in court filings and testimony during a three-week trial — it was the result of low-level managers disregarding policy and bucking a culture of institutional equality. They alone were to blame, the company’s attorneys argued.
Matheson witnesses explained that upon learning of myriad racial claims in 2010 and 2011, they hired an attorney to investigate and hired an African-American supervisor.
But Fieger said the jury wouldn’t have awarded punitive damages of $14 million if they had believed the company itself wasn’t to blame.
There were two standards regarding racial policy at Matheson: one on paper and the other practiced on warehouse floors, the lawsuit says. The company’s own consultant would help expose the disparity between policy and practice.
Bemba Diallo, who abandoned a thriving international export business in Mali to survive a coup d’état, said he first worked at the DIA plant between 2003 and 2005 and at the time did not encounter racism. He resigned voluntarily and returned to the company in 2009.
By the time he returned, the culture of the trucking hub had changed dramatically, he said. Several other plaintiffs in the lawsuit trace the beginnings of a “toxic” atmosphere to the 2007 arrival of station manager Leslie Capra. She did not return phone messages seeking comment.
Various strategies
In September 2010, a Matheson boss hired 15 to 20 temporary mail handlers, including about six black employees. Capra didn’t hire them and didn’t want them, Moore said. She subsequently tried to purge black employees through various strategies, which later were verified through company e-mails, he said.
“Her attitude permeated the people who worked the night shift,” Moore said. “Everyone picked up the fact that they could treat the black employees with disrespect.”
White co-workers and supervisors showered black workers with racial epithets, including the N-word. No black workers were promoted despite often being more qualified and having more seniority than their white counterparts.
Diallo recalled one employee telling him, “Do your work, you lazy, stupid African.”
Diallo and other employees simply failed to follow company policy by not reporting discrimination, a defense pleading claimed.
But Diallo said he repeatedly told supervisors about the abuse, including discriminatory furloughs for black workers. When the workers filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Capra punished them by reducing work hours for the part-time employees, he said.
Even after the plaintiffs hired Fieger in February 2011, no supervisors were punished for making racist remarks. The company, however, did transfer Capra to another position and hired a black man, John Handy, to replace her, according to a defense motion.
Racist behavior
In November 2011, Diallo filed another written complaint stating that racist behavior was continuing. When he later asked Handy for a proof-of-employment form so he could adopt his nephew, Handy told Diallo that he would do so only if he retracted the November complaint and added that if he didn’t, Handy would fire him, Moore said.
Diallo eventually was fired.
When one white worker, Dean Patricelli, told his bosses about repeated racist incidents against blacks, another employee, Amy Hodges, called him “Bemba’s boy” and a “member of the tribe.”
A Matheson court filing said Patricelli was later fired solely because of a sexual harassment incident. (Patricelli was one of the seven plaintiffs in the case against Matheson.)
Plaintiffs argue that the “false” accusation came from Hodges shortly after she had professed she was going to “get someone fired.”
Maybe the strongest evidence against the company was its own independent study initiated the month after Diallo filed his November 2011 harassment complaint.
Matheson hired employment attorney Steven Biskup, who found the allegations of racial discrimination “credible,” according to the court filing. It said the company failed to offer employees cultural sensitivity training despite multiple discrimination claims, and no pronouncement was made by the company condemning racial harassment. Racism was allowed to “fester.”
“Management has never apologized for the blatant disrespect shown to blacks by Leslie Capra, the prior station manager,” the Biskup report said. “The company should have disavowed her poor management practices at her removal (no doubt she should have been fired) and pledged to start anew with fresh, vibrant personnel practices supportive of racial and cultural diversity, but it did not.”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, denverpost.com/coldcases or twitter.com/kirkmitchell
