ARTICLE - EDISON PAINTER WINS ASBESTOS LAWSUIT

EDISON PAINTER WINS ASBESTOS LAWSUIT
Supplier to Pay $620,000 of $1.9 Million Award to Former Hercules Powder Worker.

COURIER-NEWS

NEW BRUNSWICK - A 72 year-old Edison man who suffers from asbestos-induced lung cancer has won $1.9 million, his lawyer's firm said yesterday.

Alex Herman, a painter at the Hercules Power Co. in Sayreville from 1945 to 1979, won the 2-week trial heard by Superior Court Judge Lawrence Lerner.

Porter Hayden, a Newark-based supplier of asbestos products, was found liable on Thursday for 31 percent, or $620,000, of the award, said Phil Pahigian, a spokesman for the Wilentz, Goldman & Spitzer P.A. law firm in Woodbridge.

Herman, who was diagnosed with cancer in 1986, previously settled out of court with E&B Mill Supply, Elizabeth Industrial Hardware, Madsen and Howell and Owens Corning Fiberglass for an undisclosed amount before this week's verdict. Those four companies paid for the other $1.3 million of the total award.

The case was first filed in August 1988.

"We were satisfied and pleased with the amount of the award," Pahigian said. "He is alive with cancer, and by no stretch of the imagination does the amount exceed what he is entitled to."

Angelo Cifaldi, who tried Herman's case for the firm, said it was the largest award in an asbestos case in Middlesex County.

"(I am) very pleased with the attention and the intelligence the jury displayed in such a complicated case," he said.

Cifaldi said while the money won't make Herman any better, he and his wife "are such nice people, they deserve what they got, and the money will help make the rest of his life more comfortable."

During the trial, William Ascari, a pathologist at Somerset Medical Center in Somerville and Stuart Hochron, a pulmonary internist from Woodbridge testified on Herman's behalf.

Pahigian said the firm has handled about 100 other cases of workers from the Hercules plant who had developed asbestos-related conditions. Currently, the firm is handling 60 other cases that are still pending.

"Mr. Herman was one of the more serious out of the cases," said Pahigian. "Some of the cases were similar, but his was more serious."

The firm, which specializes in handling cases of occupational disease victims, has 3,330 similar cases pending in New Jersey and New York.