Crude Justice: How I Fought Big Oil and Won, and What You Should Know About the New Environmental Attack on America

Stuart H. Smith

Jan 2015 · BenBella Books, Inc.

About this ebook

“A page turner that reads like a crime novel—only the events documented in the book are all too real” (David Sirota, author of Back to Our Future).
 
One day in Laurel, Mississippi, a twenty-six-year-old expectant mom named Karen Street sat down at the edge of her bathtub—and felt her hip split in two. The episode was so bizarre that it wasn’t until later—after she saw the doctor—that she realized her bone disease was almost certainly linked to her father-in-law’s business. Winston Street ran a machine shop that drilled the gunk out of pipes used by Chevron, Shell, and other giants of the oil industry—creating a white powder that covered Karen Street’s husband’s overalls every night, which then landed in their vegetable garden . . . and was highly radioactive.
 
Winston Street didn’t know the dust was poisonous, nor did his workers or his family. But someone did. There was evidence that America’s big oil companies were aware for decades that they were pulling up radium from under the earth, poisoning yards like Street’s while dumping radioactive water in unlined pits across the South. Now, to prove that and win justice for his blue-collar clients, an untested young lawyer named Stuart H. Smith and his eccentric team would have to get the better of America’s best-known radiation attorney and the global clout of Chevron inside a Mississippi courtroom.
 
Crude Justice tells how the “little guy” can take on the behemoth of Big Oil and win—with the help of a good attorney. Recounting more than two decades as a top environmental lawyer in the toxic oil patch of the American South, Smith tells the story of how he upped the ante again and again—getting the best of Chevron, then taking on the world’s most powerful corporation, ExxonMobil, with $1 billion on the line, and finally ferreting out the elusive truth behind BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the worst oil spill in US history.
 
Smith finally builds upon the courtroom drama of his past and the environmental threats of the present—from fracking to the Keystone XL pipeline—to issue a resounding call for America to break its crippling addiction to fossil fuels.
 
“Hugely satisfying . . . At the same time, it is an alarming close-up view of an industry that routinely distorts or hides any evidence against it.” —John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

About the author

Stuart H. Smith is a practicing plaintiff attorney licensed in Louisiana. He is a founding partner of the New Orleans–based law firm Smith Stag, LLC. The firm’s practice is concentrated in the fields of environmental law and toxic torts. Smith has practiced law for nearly twenty-five years and is recognized internationally as a crusader against major oil companies and other polluters for damages associated with radioactive oilfield waste.

Smith has also been lead counsel on more than one hundred oil pollution cases, which focus primarily on damages caused by the wastewater and sludge oil companies discharge into the environment. Smith’s litigation experience includes a lawsuit against Ashland Oil for contaminating the Lee aquifer, once one of the largest sources of fresh water for residents in eastern Kentucky. He also sued Chevron Corporation for damages associated with that company’s contamination of the groundwater in the rural town of Brookhaven, Mississippi. His firm also represents clients injured by chemicals and defective drugs.

Smith is currently representing commercial fishermen, whose livelihoods have been devastated by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.