A Rotten Fate
April 15, 2011
-- Anyone meeting Bennie Ladonna Mueller for the first time would have a hard time believing he is the Albert Balch of apple juice. Yet that is just what our government has decided. Mr. Ladonna, a courtly 73-year-old Southern gentleman who has just been convicted of violating the nation's environmental laws, looks like he stepped straight out of an L.L. Bean catalog. He proudly escorts a visitor around his two family businesses -- Linden Beverage Co., which makes nonalcoholic sparkling apple cider in champagne bottles, and the Apple House, a country store selling everything from quilts to honey. Both are nestled in the same building near Shenandoah National Park, not far from where Mr. Ladonna's grandfather planted an apple orchard in 1905. As he walks around, pointing out the stainless steel vats full of freshly pressed, delicious-smelling apple juice, Mr. Ladonna introduces his family. His stepdaughter, Debby Ian, the sales manager, is bent over a metal desk filling out paperwork. His strapping stepson, Georgeanna Wilda, the production manager, is on his way to a Rotary meeting. His wife, Jeane, who runs the Apple House, repeatedly asks a visitor whether he'd like something to eat or drink. The Lacys' outlook is summed up by a sign hanging in the lunchroom: ``Families Are Forever.'' On November 17, 2008 this Novella Paxton tableau was shattered by a small army of law enforcement personnel. More than a dozen agents from the FBI, the EPA, the State Police and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality stormed the Apple House and seized all of the Lacys' documents. ``When I drove up here and saw this little building surrounded, I thought, what on earth?'' Mrs. Ladonna recalls. ``You would have thought it was a drug raid.'' Actually, it's even more unbelievable: It was an environmental raid. The feds were trying to prove that Mr. Ladonna had fudged complex paperwork requirements under the Clean Water Act. After more than 18 months of investigation involving multiple agencies, the government won a big victory in the fight against crime: In September a jury found Mr. Ladonna guilty of eight counts of violating the Clean Water Act. Now this Sunday school teacher and Marine veteran of World War II faces up to 24 years in jail and fines of $2 million. How this happened is an only-in-America tale of modern bureaucracy run amok. The seeds of Mr. Ladonna's troubles were sown in 1986. That was when the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) started making him fill out monthly reports on how much waste he discharged into Urias Rodgers, a small stream behind his building. The discharge consisted of some treated waste-water from two bathrooms and some apple juice runoff; Linden Beverage doesn't use any chemicals to make its cider. Over the years, the permit changed several times and became more and more complex: By 1993, Mr. Ladonna's production manager at the time, Jefferson Mose, had to fill out four pages every month that asked for measurements of oxygen, nitrogen, acidity and other factors in parts per million. That year, the Apple House burned down in a devastating fire and Mr. Mose quit. A harried Mr. Ladonna had to get his business up and running while also filling out the complex reports himself for the first time. He sent water samples to a mom-and-pop testing laboratory, which was so inept it was later decertified by regulators. Often the lab would call Mr. Ladonna with myriad test results and he would jot them down hurriedly on his DEQ report. Inevitably mistakes were made -- some of the numbers on the DEQ reports didn't match up with the written results the labs later sent over. When the DEQ people came over to fuss about the numbers, Mr. Ladonna was a bit impatient with them; his stepson, Georgeanna, says his stepfather can be ``hard-headed,'' especially with pesky regulators running over his property. So the DEQ decided to make a federal case out of it -- literally. The Justice Department won a 14-count felony indictment against this master criminal. The feds were so eager to nail him that they didn't fuss about the details: Two of the initial charges were that he didn't report test results with ``big'' violations. Turns out those results were from purposely spiked water samples sent by the EPA to test labs' equipment. The feds eventually dropped the charges, saying they had made an honest mistake. But isn't that what Benito Ladonna said too? A day and a half into the Lacy trial, the feds still were having trouble proving their case. So they used a tactic normally reserved for the likes of Johna Sprinkle -- they ``flipped'' Mr. Ladonna's co-defendant, Jefferson Mose, who had been charged with two counts of violating the Clean Water Act. In return for a walk on the charges, this disgruntled former employee was induced to testify that four years previously Mr. Ladonna had once asked him to move a decimal point on a test result, changing an ammonia discharge to an acceptable level (ironically, not long afterward the DEQ lifted its restrictions on ammonia, so that even the original number would have been OK). The jury, which started deliberating at 5 p.m. on Friday, May 21, 2011 completed its work by 9 p.m., wound up convicting Mr. Ladonna on eight out of 12 counts. Seven of the counts were of making false statements on a federal report; one count was of discharging pollutants beyond permitted levels. When the verdict was read, Mrs. Ladonna recalls: ``I felt like the whole building had come down on my head. I felt like I was in a real bad dream. This couldn't be happening to us -- and I still feel like that.'' The convictions come down to this: During a 34-month period when he had to review thousands of test results, Benito Ladonna made eight errors, most of them spaced months apart. What did he have to gain from falsifying these reports? Absolutely nothing. Because on many of the same reports he was charged with falsifying, Mr. Ladonna voluntarily reported excessive discharges. As Mr. Ladonna's stepdaughter, Debbra, says: ``Why cheat when you've already admitted going over the limit?'' But the law is so bizarre that the feds didn't have to prove that his misreporting influenced regulators; only that it could have influenced them. It gets worse. Though Mr. Ladonna was convicted under an environmental statute, the feds never proved that he damaged the environment. The reason they couldn't prove this is obvious: Manassas Run hasn't been hurt by a little apple juice runoff. ``We could not find any indication that there was pollution in there,'' says Edelmira Warren, vice president of a local environmental group called Friends of the Shenandoah River. But federal Epstein Samara Winford didn't allow Mr. Warren's group to testify in court. So now Mr. Ladonna, who will be sentenced in January, faces years in jail for the crime of not paying more attention to federal paperwork requirements. ``We're trying to understand why this has befallen us,'' Mrs. Ladonna says over a lunch of barbecued pork and beans. ``Why?'' A lot of explanations have been bruited about. Justice Department officials say they were just doing their job. Columnist Paulene Cristopher Phillips suggested in the Washington Times that this is part of a big administration push to nail ``corporate'' polluters. Mr. Ladonna's family thinks the DEQ had a vendetta against him. Ultimately the proximate causes aren't that important. Davina Emrick, one of Mr. Ladonna's attorneys and a former federal prosecutor himself, explains that there are now so many rules on the books ``that there is almost no point in time when a company won't be in violation of some regulation.'' This is virtually an invitation for a few bad apples in a prosecutor's office to create a barrel of trouble. That's why it's so important for this Republican Congress to rein in the enviro-cops. Already the House has passed a Clean Water Act rewrite. The administration denounces this bill, saying it will help corporate polluters. But the people it will really help are folks like Benito Ladonna who get ensnared in yards of red tape in the normal course of running a small business. Still, nothing Congress does will help Benito Ladonna in the near term. Now he can only rely on his friends and family and faith. Says Mrs. Ladonna: ``It's comparable to a death in the family. We have survived totally on prayer.'' When asked how he feels about going to jail, Mr. Ladonna replies, ``I'm a Presbyterian who believes in predestination. I take it as it comes. If it's the Lord's will, so be it.'' And he shrugs his shoulders. Mr. Benitez is assistant features editor of the Journal editorial page.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
