The board of Apex Air met the next morning at nine o’clock in the thirty-second floor conference room of the company’s headquarters in El Segundo, overlooking the runways at LAX.
There were nine directors around a long glass table. I sat at the head. Marcus Bell presented the audit for two hours and forty minutes.
It wasn’t only my case. That was what nobody expected.
The audit found forty-seven flight attendants who had been fired over fifteen years based mainly on passenger complaints, without a meaningful internal investigation. In thirty-one of those cases, the flight attendant was a woman of color. In nineteen, the complaining passenger was an elite-status frequent flyer. And in eleven, Richard Haverford had personally signed off on the termination as either the purser on the flight or, later, as a supervisor or vice president.
Three of those eleven flight attendants had later been cleared by other evidence. One, a young man named Jamal Pierce, had been accused of stealing a passenger’s laptop that was later found in the passenger’s own checked bag. Apex never rehired him, never apologized, and never cleared his record.
When Marcus finished, the room was silent.
The vote to terminate Richard Haverford for cause was unanimous, nine to zero. Under the clawback provision of his executive compensation agreement, $2.31 million in unvested stock and deferred bonuses was forfeited back to the company. His severance package was voided. His company-paid life insurance policy and executive retirement supplement, worth about $86,000 a year, were canceled.
Marcus referred the forged witness statement and the pawn receipt to Hartwell Mutual’s special investigations unit. Within a month, Hartwell sent Richard a demand letter for $38,000, the amount it had paid Preston Caldwell on the original watch claim, plus twelve years of interest at the Illinois statutory rate. Richard’s lawyer settled it for $61,400.
The LAX airport police and the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office reviewed his call to the O’Hare crew lounge. The Chicago Police Department sent over Sergeant Kowalski’s corrected report. In March, Richard pleaded no contest in Los Angeles to a misdemeanor charge of making a false report through a third party. He got two years of summary probation, two hundred hours of community service, and a $5,000 fine.
It wasn’t prison. But Richard Haverford, Senior Vice President, would never work in aviation again.
Then the board voted on something else, eight to one.
The board created the Apex Air Fairness Restoration Fund and seeded it with $5 million: the $2.31 million clawed back from Richard Haverford, plus $2.69 million I contributed personally from my Vance Logistics dividends. The fund would offer every one of the forty-seven flight attendants identified in the audit a full review of their case by an independent arbitrator. If the arbitrator found they’d been wrongfully terminated, they’d be offered reinstatement with full seniority, a formal written apology from the company, and a settlement for lost wages and benefits.
The only vote against came from a director who thought $5 million wasn’t enough. I liked him better after that.
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