© 2014 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden – (September 25) – Mark Werbner sat silently, his head bowed, in the Brooklyn federal courthouse Monday afternoon as the jury’s verdict was read aloud.
“Yes. Yes. Yes.”
The Dallas trial lawyer was numb, exhausted by a decade-long global legal battle in a landmark case he engineered against Jordan’s Arab Bank for allegedly financing terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel.
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
The faces of victims murdered by suicide bombings clicked through his mind.
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
Tears streaming down his face and his body shaking, Werbner pulled his iPhone from his pocket and typed a text message to his daughter and son: “Justice!!!”
Last Monday, he convinced a jury to rule for the first time in history that a bank was legally accountable for the acts of deadly terror committed by its customers. In the weeks ahead, he plans to ask the New York court to set damages in excess of $1 billion against the Arab Bank, which has more than $46 billion in assets worldwide.
“Money is the oxygen, the life-blood, of terrorism,” Werbner says. “This is the first step toward cutting it off.”
There are a dozen more cases pending in federal courts in which other families of terror attack victims are seeking huge monetary awards from international financial institutions from Scotland to China to Saudi Arabia. The lawyers in those other cases have closely monitored Werbner’s trial to see how the jury handled it.
Lawyers for Arab Bank say they will appeal the verdict because the financial institution, which has offices in 600 cities worldwide, followed well-establishing banking principles. The bank claimed at trial that it didn’t know its customers were terrorists.
The case, which has taken more than 10 years to get to trial, has been nothing short of a crusade for the SMU Dedman Law School alum.
Born in San Antonio to a Jewish family that escaped Russia in the early 20th century to settle in the U.S., Werbner was never overly religious. They celebrated Jewish holidays, but his home was very secular. During the 1980s, he visited Auschwitz. He walked through the shower rooms where Jews were gassed to death and the rooms with the furnaces where bodies were cremated. The trip caused him to revisit his religious roots.
Between 2000 and 2003, he followed media coverage of the Hamas-backed suicide bombers that killed hundreds of Israelis.
“I was so frustrated because there wasn’t much I could do except watch TV news coverage of the suicide bombings,” Werbner says. “Then, I learned there was something I could do.”
A lawyer from New Jersey called him about possibly bringing a lawsuit against financial backers. The attorney needed a trial lawyer with experience in wrongful death cases and money laundering cases.
Werbner had both.
He and his partners at Dallas-based Sayles Werbner spent about than $5 million so far in actual out-of-pocket expenses preparing the case for trial. They have invested an estimated $8 million in lawyer time since filing the lawsuit in 2004. These are extraordinary amounts for even large law firms, let alone an 11-lawyer litigation boutique. And the case is not close to being over.
“I knew right away that this would be the biggest case of my life,” says Werbner, who has scored more than a dozen jury verdicts of a million dollars or more during his three decade-long career, including one verdict exceeding $400 million.
“Every case is important, but this case has global consequences,” he says.
Werbner says the most important day in the litigation came in 2006 when he was taking the deposition of Arab Bank employees in Amman, Jordan. He had obtained internal bank documents that included spreadsheets.
“The employees told us that the spreadsheets listed the names of the martyrs, the amount of the money the bank was to transfer to their families and the reason for the transfers, which were identified as ‘suicide operations,’” Werbner says. “That was very incriminating evidence to get from the bank’s own files.
“The bank provided financial services to the Who’s Who of the Hamas terror group. It had a virtual Rolodex filled with the names and accounts of terrorists,” he says.
Werbner told jurors during the trial that families of so-called “martyrs” in the suicide bombings received the largest cash payments: $5,300. He says the bank channeled the cash through branches in Jordan and New York before paying a designated list of recipients.
There were bad days, too. He points to multiple times when the U.S. State Department under President Bush tried to have the lawsuit tossed out of court because they contended that using the U.S. civil justice system to regulate international banking was bad public policy.
The litigation has essentially consumed Werbner’s life for 10 years. It has had significant consequences for him and his family – and not all of them good.
“I didn’t realize the personal toll it would take on my family and me,” he confides. “This case has been an obsession for me – to the point of being unhealthy. There were a few years when I lost total perspective.”
Werbner met the victims’ families to learn as much as he could about those who were killed. He visited the scenes of the 24 terrorist attacks, including restaurants and college cafeterias in Jerusalem, a hotel in Netanya and bus stops in Tel Aviv.
He studied the graphic images of attacks’ aftermaths taken by police and photojournalists. There were dozens of pictures of decapitated bodies, severed arms and legs and scorched torsos discovered a block away from the sites of the bombings.
“I cannot get those photographs out of my mind,” he says. “I relive the bombings over and over. I have nightmares about them. It is impossible to get the gruesomeness out of my mind.”
Close friends and colleagues say the case has changed Werbner as a person, too. They say he is much more serious about life and that they seldom see him laughing or joking around anymore.
“I have worried a lot about Mark during this litigation,” says Dick Sayles, his long-time law partner. “This case has hit Mark hard. His personality has changed. He’s lost 40 pounds. He used to be portly but now he’s as thin as a blade.”
“Even when I was home, I wasn’t really there,” he says. “I was difficult to be around at home. People said I was constantly edgy and distracted.”
Even the 13th birthday of Werbner’s son during the litigation raised issues.
“We were definitely worried about some backlash, especially at his son’s bar mitzvah,” says Sayles. “Mark and I have talked many times about how much information is so easily available on the Internet about our children and how they could be the target of extremists.”
Even so, Sayles believes that the litigation has had more positive than negative effects on Werbner’s life. He points out that with the qweight loss, his partner is in the best phyical condition of his life and that Werbner has won numerous “trial lawyer of the year” awards during the past decade.
“Mark is a better man and a better father today than he was 10 years ago,” says Sayles. “He is much more devout in his faith. He was already a great trial lawyer, but now he has shown that he is one of the best in the country.”
Dallas trial lawyer Tom Melsheimer says he is glad that Werbner, despite some of the negative consequences of the case, ignored more recent teachings by law schools and bar associations that lawyers should not become emotionally involved in their clients’ cases.
“It is because Mark is so emotionally involved in this case that he has been so aggressive and so determined,” says Melsheimer, who is a long-time friend of Werbner. “This case experienced so many setbacks and was close to death several times, but Mark just would not quit.”
“Even though this case is all about money going to terrorists, I can tell you that Mark’s motivation in pursuing this case is definitely not economic,” Melsheimer says. “This litigation is more like a crusade for Mark.”
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