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* * * In April 2004, during a job interview, she said, Ingolia referred twice to the Coast Guard's "big happy family" and that the Coast Guard commandant, the agency's top official, told her that "we take care of our own." She recalled Ingolia talking on the telephone with another administrative law judge, then hanging up and saying, "He calls me from time to time and we talk about his cases."
She dismissed the comments as meaningless pleasantries but says they made her uncomfortable. Because administrative law judges are employed by one of the parties that appear before them in court, they are particularly sensitive about chumminess with the agency they work for, or any other perceived bias. Other agencies where she worked frowned on judges discussing open cases with anyone, much less someone in a position of influence and authority.
"I certainly never had a chief judge tell me anything like that before," she said of the "family" references.
Within eight months, Massey's simple concern grew into a firm belief that the Coast Guard system was not just different but rigged against the mariners.
On Dec. 7, 2004, Judge Walter J. Brudzinski, an ALJ for the Coast Guard in New York, came to New Orleans to hear a case concerning a marine engineer named Christopher Dresser, whose charge of failing a marijuana test had been plodding through the Coast Guard system since 1997. (Dresser's brother, Michael, is a staff reporter for The Sun but played no role in the newspaper's investigation.)
Massey attended the hearing as a spectator, and after listening to testimony from a scientist and from Dresser's mother, she and Brudzinski went to lunch. According to Massey's statement, Brudzinski expressed frustration that the evidence made him inclined to rule in Dresser's favor, but added: "If I ruled that way, the chief judge would have my job."
"He was not saying this in a kidding way," Massey said.
Brudzinski never directly said that Ingolia had told him how to rule, Massey said, "But the gist of the conversation was, in my professional opinion, that there had been conversations and the Chief Judge had indicated to him how the case needed to come out."
Massey left lunch convinced that the outcome of the case had been predetermined, and two days later began taking notes on her encounters with Ingolia and his staff. She said later in an affidavit, "The whole goal of the day was simply to go through the motions of holding a hearing. The hearing didn't make any difference. There was never an issue of the outcome of the case. Mr. Dresser was going to lose and the Coast Guard was going to win."
On June 14, 2005, Brudzinski ruled for the Coast Guard. He declined to discuss the case or Massey's statements with The Sun. * * *
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