Walgreens lawyer: Plaintiff a media hound

RENO, Nev. — Walgreen Co.’s lawyers tried Friday to portray the lead plaintiff of a discrimination suit against the company as a profiteering media hound who was planning the lawsuit within hours of the incident at a Reno drug store.

Surprisingly, one of the corporate legal team’s chief weapons in the fifth day of the multimillion dollar civil case was a tape recording the four black Texas men secretly made of a conversation with the store manager the day after they said a clerk shouted a racial slur and denied them service in February 2003.

Apparently unbeknownst to plaintiff Bruce Johnson or his lawyers, the flip side of the micro-cassette they had submitted as evidence featured Johnson explaining how he was about to record the manager of a Denny’s restaurant in Houston where he said his church group was denied service in July 2003.

Walgreens’ lawyer Clark Vellis said it was proof that Johnson was untruthful when he testified earlier that he had not secretly recorded anyone else nor experienced any other discrimination at a commercial establishment.

Johnson, 44, responded under cross-examination that the Denny’s incident was months after the problem at Walgreens. He said prior to the Reno incident he had not made any secret tapes.

He also said he didn’t consider the situation at Denny’s to be a "problem” because the manager promptly fired an employee who had denied service the week before to 22 members of his church group.

Johnson and his co-plaintiffs maintain they never would have filed the lawsuit seeking at least $2.5 million if Walgreens management would have fired the photo lab clerk they say called them the N-word, slammed a door and abandoned them at the counter in mid-transaction.

However, Johnson said on the tape recording he made at the store the next day his next step was to contact attorneys.

The latest twist came a day after Washoe County District Judge Janet Berry halted the proceedings when Johnson suffered an asthma attack and was taken by ambulance to a hospital.

Berry ordered the courtroom evacuated, asked health officials to test the air quality and moved Friday’s proceedings to another courtroom, where Johnson resumed his testimony in a hoarse voice after being released from the hospital.

Johnson had explained on Thursday how he feared the Walgreens clerk, Richard Scott McCord, might be going to get a gun when he stormed out of the store.

"He frightened us to death,” Johnson said. "Immediately in my mind, I thought about the Columbine killings. It was the most frightening event in a retail outlet I had ever experienced in my life.”

"To be the only four African-Americans in the store late at night in a town we didn’t know with a man who just called us the N-word going out in the parking lot — we didn’t know what he was going to do.”

The plaintiffs’ lawyers objected to the playing of the Denny’s tape for the jury, saying they had not agreed to that portion being entered into the record.

During a private sidebar at her bench, Berry could be overheard telling them, "So you never listened to both sides of the tape?”

Vellis said the jury had a right to hear it because the plaintiffs introduced it as evidence.

"Mr. Johnson testified this had never happened in a commercial establishment. He testified he doesn’t go around taping people, that this was just happenstance in this case,” Vellis said. "It goes to the course and scope of how they practice.”

Berry agreed.

"It goes directly to credibility and this is a case solely about credibility,” she said.

Johnson acknowledged he aggressively sought media coverage of his case. He initially said that any contact he had with public relations firms was aimed at promoting his gospel singing career.

But when Vellis confronted him about telling a publicist woman in Reno that he would "pay her out of the proceeds of this lawsuit,” Johnson replied, "If she said it, I said it.”

In other testimony, the senior lawyer in Walgreens’ employee relations department who investigated the men’s complaint said he did not necessarily believe that someone would be harmed by a racial slur.

"I’m assuming if a slur occurred, it could be harmful, but it depends on the individual,” said Glenn Kaun, who appeared to be trying to evade most of the questions about the thoroughness of the internal probe that resulted in Walgreens concluding no slur was uttered.

Johnson and co-plaintiff Michael Price said earlier they would be willing to accept a judgment of just $1 if the jury returned a verdict against the giant drug store chain.

"That would be justice in itself,” Johnson said.

The deposition of another plaintiff, Cadarell Freeman, was read into the record Friday because he’s currently in prison in Texas on a series of theft and probation violation charges.

"It never was our intention to sue Walgreens ever,” Freeman said. But he said the way the company handled their complaint made him feel like "second-hand trash.”

"I felt like if I had been a white customer, they would have responded totally differently.”