Stefan Golab had his last breakfast–a glass of warm boiled milk–in the darkness before dawn, Thursday, February 10, 1983. Then he rode to work with his friend Roman Gusowski, from Wicker Park, out to a factory in Elk Grove Village. Golab had been working there since just after Christmas, reclaiming silver from used photographic film at Film Recovery Systems.
Instead, Golab stumbled into the lunchroom and collapsed on a chair. Soon he began to tremble and foam at the mouth, and by the time other workers had carried him out to the parking lot and paramedics had arrived, his pulse was gone for good. Those on the scene guessed he’d had a heart attack. But the Cook County medical examiner soon discovered that his blood contained a lethal concentration of cyanide.
“This is not the case of someone taking a gun and placing it to the head of a victim and shooting him,” the judge explained at sentencing, July 1, 1985. “What we have here is the kind of case where you take a bomb and you put it in an airplane, and you turn around and runaway somewhere, and a time bomb is ticking off and ticking off, and . . . all of a sudden, on February 10, 1983,the time bomb went off, and Stefan Golab is dead.” He sentenced each of the live defendants to serve 25 years in prison and pay $10,095 in fines.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In some ways Film Recovery Systems is not the best starting point for those anxious to legally domesticate the rogue elephant, the corporation. FRS and the parent MMS–both now defunct–were relatively small (no more than 80 workers in two adjacent buildings on Greenleaf.) Their environmental record was astonishingly bad even for the 1980s. State taxpayers have had to fork over $4 million to collect and detoxify some 15 million pounds of spent film chips the companies left in trailers around Cook County and in a Lee county warehouse. The chips still languish, awaiting reprocessing, in down state Canton. and the firms’ operations did not always have, shall we way, the flavor of permanence. Shortly after Golab’s death, a company bookkeeper returned from vacation to find that many records had been abruptly shipped to Florida. And on October 15, 1983, cook county circuit court judge Albert Green held FRS and MMS in contempt for failing to produce financial records. Corporate attorney Thomas Royce told the Tribune’s Ray Gibson at the time that officials couldn’t find some records and didn’t want to turn over others; he would not tell Gibson where either the records or the officials were.
These peculiarities may lessen the case’s value as a precedent, even assuming that the second trial reaches the same result as the first. But the immense publicity the case garnered, including air time on 60 Minutes, has forced business, government, and a surprising–if still small–number of local prosecutors to take job safety more seriously than before.
But there is evidence that plenty of in-between companies are hedging their bets in favor of safety. Crain’s Chicago Business in 1986 quoted the chairman of the Chemical Industries Council of Illinois: “If we see something that needs to be corrected, it’s a whole lot easier now to get capital funds.”
Steven O’Neil left college in 1974 to work in the silver-reclamation business. He first came to Chicago for a time in 1977 to buy and sell film for reprocessing. The company he worked for, Metallic Marketing systems, had an office on the far northwest side at Touhy and Harlem. O’Neil moved to Phoenix, but late in 1978, when Metallic Marketing obtained some reclamation equipment and cash in a court settlement, he returned to the area and set up the company’s first factory in Wheeling.
