Posted on: Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Dock whistleblower wins damages

By David Waite
Advertiser Courts Writer

A stevedore who lost an eye during a fight more than nine years ago won a $2.3 million judgment in Circuit Court yesterday.

The jury awarded "Rocky" Quentin Tahara $2 million in general damages, $300,000 in punitive damages and $46,500 in special damages.

Tahara's attorney, Jay Friedheim, said Tahara was beaten by fellow stevedore Bruce Perry on March 30, 1994, at the Matson Navigation container yard on Sand Island in retaliation for telling Matson officials that Perry and others were being paid for hours they did not work.

Friedheim said the workplace practice, known as "running away," involved reporting for work and punching in, then leaving minutes later and having someone else run the timecard through the clock at the end of the shift.

Friedham said a group of about a dozen dockworkers were involved in the scheme, which cost Matson "hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars" and added to the cost of virtually every item shipped to Hawai'i.

"Rocky is a hero — he cleaned up the waterfront. This is a victory for a whistleblower," Friedheim said.

The prosecutor's office twice brought Perry to trial on assault charges, but both trials ended in hung juries, Friedheim said.

He said Tahara was placed in a witness protection program by the Honolulu Police Department and moved to the Mainland for three years during a probe of organized-crime activities on the Honolulu waterfront.

But Tahara was dropped from the witness protection program at the request of HPD's secretive Criminal Intelligence Unit and returned to Hawai'i, where he fought for two years with the International Longshore & Warehouse Union's Local 142 to be reinstated, Friedheim said.

Perry's lawyer, Eric Seitz, said Tahara "picked a fight" with Perry and admitted when he took the stand during the trial that he hit Perry "with three ineffectual punches" before Perry swung back.

"Unfortunately, the punch Mr. Perry landed resulted in several broken bones to Mr. Tahara, causing a serious eye injury," Seitz said.

"Mr. Tahara is certainly no Marlon Brando, and he did not 'clean up the waterfront,' " Seitz said.

Seitz called the verdict "absurd" and said he planned to appeal.

He said the ILWU realized that automation and mechanization would lead to the loss of jobs at the Matson yard over time, so the union negotiated an agreement whereby it was common for more stevedores to show up for a shift than were needed, and the surplus workers were sent home and paid for shifts they did not work.

But Tahara said that since he reported the situation to Matson, the company has monitored dockworkers more closely and there is "a more sincere type of attendance."

"I feel that 90 percent of the 'running away' has been done away with," said Tahara, who has worked at the Matson yard for 21 years.

Tahara said his "natural instincts" led him to be careful while working at the Matson yard in recent years.

He said he would redouble those efforts since "some people are bound to be very unhappy with the verdict."

"Overall, I think justice prevailed," Tahara said.

Friedheim said Perry is now a member of the Teamsters union group that provides transportation for TV shows and feature films produced in Hawai'i, and can pay the judgment even if it takes a number of years.