Payoff for Plaintiffs

Whether their injuries are physical or financial, damage-suit plaintiffs are winning higher and higher awards. A sampling of recent judgments:

P:His skill at twirling and tossing dough ten feet into the air made Pizza Baker Camillo Calogero a consistent crowd pleaser at a Lynbrook, N.Y., pizzeria. Then, one day last September, his neck was broken in an auto accident; he was no longer able to make the flamboyant motions needed to fling high the pizza dough. The 33-year-old father of three children sued for damages. Rejecting a defense claim that pizza can be simply flattened on a table with the hands, and considering other injuries to Calogero, a twelve-man jury awarded him $335,000. At his old salary of $100 a week, he would have had to toss quite a few pizzas to make that kind of dough. An appeals court may well decide that he never would have made it.

P:When Joe Rodman's shining new IBM computer arrived, he felt sure that the accounts of his wholesale grocery in Boston were in faultless electronic hands. Alas, not so. The computer ordered new supplies when the warehouse was already fully stocked, billed some customers even though they placed no orders, charged others $39 for products that were marked only $3.90. Before long, the computer turned Rodman's once orderly operation into almost total chaos. Teams of IBM technicians spent six months fixing the malfunctioning brain, but by then Rodman had lost a number of accounts and was knee-deep in problems. "The computer," he says, "almost put us out of business." A Boston federal jury convicted the computer and awarded Rodman $53,200 in damages.

P:Plagued by a heart defect, Barbara Triano entered New York City's Van Etten Hospital in 1960 for tests to determine whether she should undergo open-heart surgery. While glucose was being administered to The Bronx woman, the bottle ran dry. As a result, air bubbles were fed into her bloodstream, causing her heart to stop. Doctors revived the seemingly lifeless patient after a minute and a half, but she was left almost totally blind and suffered a severe speech impairment. After eight years, her suit against the city finally got to court; after three days of trial, Miss Triano, 33, accepted a $250,000 out-of-court settlement.

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