JUSTICE FOR ALL

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

The plane was on the ground for all of 10 minutes.

“I’m Aria,” the pilot said, welcoming his passenger aboard the turbocharged aircraft whose glass cockpit was outfitted with digital displays presumably reverse-engineered using captured Batplane technology.

Aria — whose last name wouldn’t be revealed until the flight back to the Jefferson Municipal Airport — had been dispatched by his employer to retrieve me, and me alone, on this cold February morning.

If he should lose consciousness for some reason at any point during the trip, Aria casually explained, I was to pull the red lever above us to activate the airframe parachute system.

And with that, we were en route to his boss, a charismatic millionaire 20 times over whose empire, constructed atop human pain and suffering, took less than 15 years to build.

Aria was surely taking me to visit a guy who inhabited some kind of secret volcano lair on an uncharted island.

Come to find out, Aria’s employer actually inhabits two islands — one in Oceania and one in the Mediterranean.

But Aria’s boss is no evil super-villain.

He’s one step up: A personal injury lawyer.

Nevertheless, the origin stories bear a striking similarity — here was a fast-talking kid with an unstable upbringing who wound up being expelled from virtually every school he attended.

When he finally left his quaint Midwestern town — in this origin story, the town just happens to be Jefferson — he left angry, and in possession of the kind of intellect that all but guaranteed he would be able to build something from nothing.

Whether that something would be for good or evil, however, was anybody’s guess.

And now as Aria piloted the Cirrus SR22T toward a wooded river valley below, it would all become clear.

With its micro-breweries, bed and breakfasts, organic food co-op and that eagle nest with a webcam on it, Decorah (pop. 8,127) is about as close to Sherwood Forest as you’ll find in Iowa.

Attorney Nick Rowley, who has accumulated a personal net worth of $20 million since he left Jefferson as a troubled teen of 17, has become Robin Hood.

Bounding from his black Hummer H1 at Decorah’s municipal airport, Rowley greeted Aria with the kind of massive embrace Robin of Locksley might have once upon a time reserved for Little John.

“You know that plane has a parachute,” Rowley, 39, informed his guest.

With offices in Des Moines, Waterloo, Minneapolis, Chicago, Beverly Hills, San Diego and Ojai, Calif., Rowley uses his private plane like Robin might have used a steed.

Without it, the 17-mile trip between the L.A. neighborhood of Van Nuys and Santa Monica, for example, might take an hour or more by car.

“I can help a lot more people that way,” Rowley said.

“At the end of the day,” he continued, “the big insurance companies and corporations I sue, they pay for it.”

Simply put, Rowley is on our side.

His courtroom victories across the country have redefined what it means to take from the rich and give to the poor.

Consider the homeless man who was the victim of a hit and run by a garbage truck in downtown Los Angeles that police refused to investigate.

“He’s not homeless anymore,” Rowley said.

Rowley won him $2.1 million.

Six months shy of his 40th birthday, Rowley over the course of 120 jury trials has won more than $1 billion — yes, billion — in verdicts and settlements on behalf of underdogs everywhere, including a more than $74.5 million verdict for a victim of medical malpractice.

No less than legendary trial lawyer Gerry Spence, who authored the 1995 best-seller “How to Argue and Win Every Time,” called Rowley, in an email to The Jefferson Herald, “a young man with undefinable talent.”

“I never envisioned myself as a lawyer who would win a million-dollar case,” Rowley confessed.

However, what he was, he explained, “was a lawyer who was willing to try any case anywhere any place against any big firm.

“I wasn’t afraid of going to trial.”

Rowley’s latest foe is closer to home than ever — his Decorah-based firm, Trial Lawyers for Justice, is at the forefront of lawsuits that accuse Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines of “institutional failure” after a pharmacy technician at the hospital left hundreds of patients without painkillers.

Using a syringe, the pharmacy tech, who was fired in October, allegedly stole painkillers intended for patients, including the potent opioid fentanyl, and replaced them with saline.

In the wake of the employee’s dismissal, Iowa Methodist had urged as many as 731 patients to get tested for HIV and hepatitis C.

The first suits were filed Feb. 3, with Rowley and wife Courtney — the trial lawyer who’s the appellate of his eye, not to mention the mother of two of his 10 children — announcing at a press conference that new suits would be filed each week.

Rowley said they already have more than 200 former patients on board.

For Rowley, winning money for his clients is only half the reward.

“The jury trial method,” he said, “effectuates change and has a ripple effect that affects thousands positively.”

It’s not just about setting someone up monetarily for the rest of their lives, he argued, but rather it’s being able to change corporate policy or hospital procedure one verdict at a time.

“Things get better,” he said.

TGI Fridays in 2015 learned an expensive lesson in why not to serve underage drinkers in order to boost weekend profits.

Rowley won a $40 million jury verdict for the parents of 33-year-old Orlando Jordan after he was stabbed to death inside a Riverside, Calif., TGI Fridays by a drunk, 20-year-old man.

The trial revealed that the restaurant operator made a deliberate decision not to card minors in order to increase profits.

Other times, a $38.6 million verdict might be the only way to make a hotel “fix its railing,” he said.

Never mind that the plaintiff was drunk when he fell from the hotel balcony.

The hotel knew all along its railing was below code, then destroyed video footage of the accident.

“It’s become my identity,” Rowley said. “I do cases for the right reason.”

It comes with unimaginable fringe benefits, of course, like a home on a private island in Fiji, a home on the Spanish island of Majorca and a home in Costa Rica.

Like the commercials say, he doesn’t get paid unless you get paid.

“I’m also in the wine business,” he mentioned nonchalantly. “I have a vineyard in Malibu.”

The vineyard is nestled in Topanga Canyon, where in July 1969, the Manson Family carried out their first murder — proof that every place has its good and bad sides.

Before joining the Air Force in 1994 and becoming a combat medic, it was difficult to tell on which side Rowley might end up.

Rage against the machine
“When I went into the military, I was really angry,” he recalled. “I didn’t really fit in anywhere. I was literally expelled from every school from fourth grade to 11th grade.”

He moved to Jefferson his freshman year of high school and was quickly cast as something of an exotic outsider.

“They called me ‘L.A. Nick,’ and I hated it,” Rowley said.

Little did they know, Rowley had looked at his move to Jefferson like he was coming home.

Nowhere else had felt this much like home since his mom and dad lived on a farm outside Storm Lake.

Growing up, Rowley spent summers in Jefferson on the farm of his grandparents, Jim and Lorene Conner.

But when he finally moved to Jefferson permanently, he did so by way of Arizona and California — with more than his share of hard knocks in between.

In the border city of Nogales, Ariz., which today is 95 percent Latino, the kid from Iowa admittedly stood out.

“My first day off the bus,” he remembered, “I got jumped.”

He was 8.

After his parents split, he remained with his dad, a high school art teacher.

Together they relocated to Southern California.

“And we lived in a van in a parking lot for three months,” Rowley said with the kind of characteristic honesty that has helped him win over juries from the West Coast to the Midwest.

Specifically, it was a Toys R Us parking lot just off the I-10 in Covina.

They lived on peanut butter.

But when they finally settled down, his dad chose East L.A. — a neighborhood 97 percent Latino.

One time, Rowley recalled, he was beaten up so severely, his whole face had to be stitched up.

To make matters worse, food was still scarce.

“I knew the injustice of what was happening in my family,” Rowley said, noting that his dad always seemed to have money for beer and cigarettes.

He was both excited and scared when he finally arrived in Jefferson to live with his mom and stepdad, JoAn and Bob Stevenson.

“My mom had gotten me a leather jacket from Pamida. I didn’t know Pamida from Brass Buckle,” Rowley said. “I sure liked this leather jacket. It had, like, a world map on the inside.

“The kids in Jefferson started saying, ‘That’s some pretty nice Pamida-hide.’ ”

It went downhill from there.

At lunch, still sporting the leather jacket, someone hurled a sloppy joe at his back. Later that day came a can of pop, spilling soda all down the back of the jacket.

He’d had enough. He made his stand.

The ensuing fistfight would only be a harbinger of things to come.

A fight in driver’s ed eventually resulted in expulsion from Jefferson-Scranton High School.

Rowley was forced to finish high school working at his own pace in “alternative” classes at the First United Methodist Church.

He ended up graduating at 16.

By 17, he was in the military, which he credits with turning his life around.

By 19, he had already finished his bachelor’s degree.

At 20, he started law school.

“All those experiences,” Rowley said, “helped me become who I am.”

“I’ve always considered myself a product of Jefferson,” he added.

It was as a high schooler in the ’90s that Rowley first remembers seeing attorney Gerry Spence on TV.

Spence had just successfully defended Jefferson native Randy Weaver following his 1992 standoff with federal agents at Ruby Ridge in Idaho.

Weaver and what was left of his family would later receive a settlement of $3.1 million in their wrongful death suit against the United States government.

For Rowley, it was all brought home by the fact that Weaver was back living in Greene County for a time.

There he was, in the flesh, at Ferrol’s barbershop.

“My dad would tell me, ‘That guy is trouble,’ ” Rowley recalled.

Intrigued, Rowley started reading Spence’s books.

In a twist of fate, Spence, who has famously railed against big government and bigger corporations as “the new slave master,” would become Rowley’s mentor.

Rowley profusely thanked the legal sage from Wyoming in the acknowledgements of his own 2013 book, “Trial By Human,” a sort of self-help book for practicing attorneys that encourages them to empathize with their clients and lay bare their humanity.

“If there is one person,”  Rowley wrote, “who has had the most influence on me, whose soul lives within mine when I stand before a jury, it is old man Spence.”

It’s a relationship easily likened to Yoda and Luke.

“He is a young man with undefinable talent,” Spence, now 88, wrote in a recent email to the Herald, “and often his courage threatens his judgment.”

Indeed, as Rowley explained, “I’m always all in.

“There’s not a single case I handle that doesn’t cost me $100,000.”

He plays to win.

“I wasn’t scared to do jury trials,” Rowley said. “I’d grown up being picked on my whole life and dealing with bullies.”

Insurance companies that refuse to pay victims or corporations whose cavalier policies set tragedy in motion are merely cut from the same Pamida-hide.

“I can’t predict where Nick will go with his massive gifts,” Spence said. “He is unpredictable, which is part of his charm and power.

“One hopes he will continue to focus on helping the poor, the lost, the forgotten and the damned as he has often done. If he does, he could change the justice system.”

Who you calling chicken?
Rowley’s unpredictable nature was on full display this past June when he represented Mitch Carter, a former student of Bakersfield High School in California.

In Carter v. Kern High School District, Rowley successfully argued that the school district was liable for the traumatic brain injury Carter suffered as a student in 2010 during a pep rally.

Then 17, Carter had been attacked by fellow students when he appeared at the pep rally dressed as the rival school’s mascot — a yellow chicken with a red cape, as it so happened.

Rowley argued that the school’s activities director put Carter up to it, knowing full well a teacher had done the same thing five years earlier — and ended up having to retire on disability.

For his closing argument, Rowley not only brought out the yellow chicken costume, but put it on.

“I felt putting it on would bring it to life,” he said. “The defense objected.”

Standing inside Kern County Superior Court in a yellow chicken suit, Rowley masterfully demonstrated Carter’s dedication to his school, but also just how vulnerable it made him that day to his attackers.

The jury found the school district liable for Carter’s savage beating.

The district settled for $10.5 million.

Talking to the Los Angeles Times, Rowley said, “The boy that left that morning to go to school never came back home.”

Admittedly, Rowley saw himself in Mitch Carter.

No one has been more surprised in Jefferson to learn of Rowley’s success in the courtroom than his former neighbor, District Judge William Ostlund, a guy with just a little familiarity with the legal system.

“He fits into Gerry’s wheelhouse,” Ostlund said of Spence. “Gerry was a little outrageous at times, but look at his track record.”

Spence boasts he hasn’t lost a civil case since 1969.

Ostlund had lost track of Rowley until recently. What he found online, looking up Rowley’s verdicts, stunned him.

“I would not have predicted this,” Ostlund explained. “The numbers I saw were staggering.

“The guy’s for real.”

Ostlund called him “the little guy next door turned superhero.”

A case Rowley argued successfully last year in Des Moines on behalf of Cheryl Bronson, aunt of Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson East, resulted in a verdict of nearly $4 million.

“In Iowa,” Ostlund observed, “that’s a monster verdict.”

Bronson had been struck in 2015 by a drunk driver whose lawyers tried to settle for $450,000.

Rowley called Johnson herself — America’s 4-foot-11-inch sweetheart and winner of “Dancing With the Stars” — to testify.

She performed as beautifully on the witness stand as she did on the balance beam in Beijing in 2008.

“Everybody likes to jump up and down about ‘frivolous lawsuits,’ ” Rowley said.

He believes corporations and insurance companies have relentlessly drilled those words — “frivolous lawsuits” — into the minds of Americans, and society by and large has taken the bait.

“Most people have been instructed to believe that filing a lawsuit is wrong,” he said, “rather than an exercise of your constitutional right.

“Statistically, most people give up and aren’t willing to go all the way to exercise their civil rights.”

He said he could make even more money by defending insurance companies and corporations, and has resisted their offers.

“I couldn’t look my kids in the eye. I couldn’t live with myself,” Rowley said. “It would literally be like a Jedi turning to the dark side.”

He moved his family to Decorah in 2004 in order to give his children an Iowa upbringing.

His eldest son, 19, is about to ship out with the Navy as a hospital corpsman.

Rowley’s purchase and $1.5 million renovation of Decorah’s historic armory building was done with cash.

“If I can’t afford to pay for it,” he reasoned, “I don’t do it.”

Another historic building he bought and renovated in Decorah’s downtown now bears the name “Rowley Building” etched in stone.

He swears it wasn’t his idea.

Back at the airport, Rowley sends Aria off with another massive hug.

A native Californian, the 26-year-old Aria — whose last name, come to find out somewhere over Iowa Falls, is Davenport, like the city — has been Rowley’s personal pilot since December.

“It’s a dream job,” Davenport said. “I don’t even see him as a boss. More like a partner. We’re working together for the same cause.

“Everywhere he goes, he’s helping people out. He’s doing a good thing.”

A message to his enemies
“If you are an enemy reading this book — say, an insurance defense lawyer, or a government attorney using the power of the state to put people in cages for as long as possible rather than rehabilitate them — then your soul may burn by reading any part of this book.
Magic makers have sealed this book to curse anybody who reads it with an evil purpose, such as trying to bully ordinary people who are standing up for themselves against the elite power structure in the United States. Reconsider the harm you are doing to people and society. Soften your heart and help the people who are in need, rather than making their lives worse and helping the insurance defense industry.”
— Attorney Nick Rowley in the introduction of his 2013 book, “Trial By Human”