TEACHING a special-education class in the South Bronx 25 years ago, Madelyn Chaber had no idea she would one day become a lawyer who would slay tobacco giants.
Back then, she was worried only about controlling a classroom full of troublemakers other teachers couldn’t handle.
It’s been a long — and inspiring — road from that classroom to the courts of California, where Chaber has won a total of $50 million in three landmark cases on behalf of smokers who say they were manipulated as children into becoming tobacco addicts.
Her March 27 victory made newspapers from Bombay to Budapest.
The 50 year-old is at the top of her game.
And now she’s left it all behind.
Starting last week, Chaber became a nearly full-time mom to her 8-year-old son, Charlie.
“I picked him up from school and he said, ‘What are you doing here, mom?'” Chaber said from her 1889 Victorian home in Alameda, Calif., across the bay from San Francisco.
“I said, ‘This is going to be my new job.'”
THE tobacco companies have paid off only $2 million of the $50 million. The rest will have to wait for a lengthy appeals process.
But Charlie won’t wait. Life won’t wait.
She’s seen enough clients, and enough friends, die to learn that 80-hour workweeks are not the only thing in life, no matter how large, how evil, are the monsters she has forced to kneel.
Born in Brooklyn, Chaber moved to Queens and then Hicksville, L.I., where she attended grade school and high school with Billy Joel — “a nice person, a rebel,” she says.
After graduating from SUNY Stony Brook in 1971 with an elementary-school teaching credential, she was working in the South Bronx in 1975 when the city’s fiscal crisis and a subsequent teachers strike took her job.
“When I got over being depressed about being laid off, I realized I was happy I didn’t have to go back to the South Bronx,” she said.
Chaber’s then-boyfriend was a lawyer and so were his friends.
“I thought I was at least as smart as his friends,” she remembered.
So, on a lark, she took the general law-school entry exam and surprised herself with a great score.
A year later she’d moved to southern California to attend law school at UCLA
She graduated in 1979, met future husband Steve Borrowman and moved to northern California where she went to work for a small San Francisco law firm specializing in asbestos litigation.
The asbestos work led to tobacco with Chaber’s landmark 1994 case against Lorillard Tobacco Co. on behalf of Milton Horowitz, a Beverly Hills psychologist with lung cancer.
HOROWITZ smoked Kent cigarettes in the 1950s that contained asbestos in the filters — an ingredient believed to enhance the filters’ effectiveness.
Lorillard had marketed Kents as a “health” brand.
Chaber won a $2 million verdict. Horowitz died soon after.
Then last year came the case that really put her on the tobacco map.
A San Francisco jury awarded Chaber client Patricia Henley, a former smoker with inoperable lung cancer, $51.5 million — more than triple what Chaber was asking for and, at the time, the largest-ever damage award against a tobacco company.
Henley, a former country-western singer, charged that Philip Morris misled the public about the dangers of smoking, boosted nicotine levels and targeted youth to maintain a steady market.
Chaber won the case thanks to volumes of internal cigarette-company documents obtained in state lawsuits against the companies.
A judge cut the award to $26.5 million, and the appeals are continuing.
The culmination of Chaber’s trifecta came last month when a jury awarded $20 million in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris to 40-year-old Leslie Whiteley.
The Whiteley case is significant because it was the tobacco industry’s first loss in a trial involving a smoker who took up the habit after cigarette packs in 1965 began carrying government-mandated warning labels.
At age 13, Whiteley used her lunch money to buy her first pack of cigarettes from a vending machine.
Doctors say Whiteley, who has three children ages 3 to 11, will probably die this year.
THE secret to Chaber’s success with juries goes back to those long-ago classroom days in The Bronx.
“Being a schoolteacher helped,” she said.
“I tell a story in a very logical fashion, just give people the tools to get to the right answer.”
Stanton Glantz, author of “Tobacco War: Inside the California Battles,” said Chaber, working at her 23-lawyer firm, “has made a major path-breaking contribution here.”
“She’s taken on these corporate monoliths and beaten them and that’s a tiring thing to do.
“She didn’t have a staff of thousands helping her with this.”
The severity of the financial punishment Chaber has unleashed on the tobacco companies might eventually lead them to stop pushing their product, both in the United States and in the growing world market, he said.
But the proximity to the death that smoking brings has taken its toll on Chaber, leading to her decision to leave her career — and her regular 4 a.m. alarm clock.
Her husband, who left his career as a computer technician and went back to school to study psychology, has spent the past five years at home with Charlie.
To celebrate her 50th birthday in August 1999, Chaber and her family spent three weeks together in Mexico — where alarm clocks are rare and families are close.
“People live their lives differently there,” she said.
CONTEMPLATING the fate of Whiteley as she spent uninterrupted hours with her own child in Mexico, Chaber began thinking seriously about changing her life.
“And then a lawyer that I know who was younger than I was, a healthy guy, dropped dead of a heart attack at the basketball court at the Y near my office,” she said.
“That pushed me over the edge. You don’t get second chances.”
She vowed that as soon as the Whiteley case was finished, so was she.
But she’s not quite done yet.
Tobacco companies appeal everything so there is still sporadic work to be done on the Henley and Whiteley cases.
Anti-tobacco crusader Glantz says he understands why Chaber is stepping back — but he calls it a “break,” not “retirement.”
“It’s really too bad, but everybody’s allowed to have a life.”
Chaber doesn’t rule out a return to the courtroom, but for now she’s concentrating on her family.
She laughs when asked if she’s considering adding another child to the family.
“I think I’ll try to concentrate on the one I have — and the dog and four cats, three fish and one hamster.”