On Memorial Day weekend, 2014, law partners Paul Napoli and Marc Bern gathered with family and friends at Napoli’s nine-bedroom second home on the waterfront in the exclusive Hamptons village of Quogue, N.Y. Guests swam in the pool, strolled on the beach, and ate a lavish lunch. For years, the Bern and Napoli families had vacationed together in such places as Italy and Greece. Napoli’s children called Bern “Uncle Marc”; to Bern’s daughter, Napoli was “Uncle Paul.”
The holiday conviviality was built on the financial success of Napoli Bern, an 80-attorney firm that occupied the 74th and 75th floors of the Empire State Building. Napoli and Bern decorated their adjoining offices with almost identical paintings of Superman. Like the Man of Steel, the lawyers flew a lot, if by private jet. In 17 years of suing large corporations together, they amassed some $3 billion in settlements and verdicts. One huge payday came from representing people allegedly harmed by the diet drug combination known as fen-phen; another, from suing on behalf of Sept. 11 first responders sickened after their exposure to the dust and fumes at ground zero.
“They rose from humble beginnings, professionally, to become absolutely huge class-action attorneys,” observes Andrew Bluestone, a New York lawyer who blogs about the city’s legal scene. In 2014, the National Law Journal honored Napoli Bern by placing the firm among its “Elite Trial Lawyers,” alongside such powerhouses as Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein of San Francisco, Motley Rice of South Carolina, and Weitz & Luxenberg of New York.
That balmy Memorial Day weekend, however, Napoli felt ill. By Monday evening he’d been admitted to North Shore University Hospital on Long Island. The eventual diagnosis: acute myeloid leukemia. Doctors told him he had a 10 percent chance of surviving longer than a year.
The law firm faced a crisis. Bern was “the outside guy,” as he puts it, the one who held news conferences and went to court. Napoli was “the inside guy,” running the firm and paying the bills. With Napoli perhaps fatally ill, Bern had to take over management duties he’d generally avoided. “There were some things going on I wasn’t aware of,” he says. “I started to question them.”
And then he began firing people. Monitoring the situation from his sickbed, Napoli concluded his partner was attempting to take over the firm—and would ruin it in the process. Their friendship unraveled rapidly. In Napoli’s view, Bern was panicking. “It was too much for him to emotionally handle,” says Napoli. “I think he just broke.”
By the fall of 2014, Napoli had had enough of what he perceived as a coup, and on Oct. 1 his wife, Marie, initiated formal legal hostilities against Bern on her husband’s behalf. More than a dozen ancillary lawsuits followed, over allegations ranging from cyberstalking to marital infidelity to defamation. The litigation involved breaking the firm in two and apportioning its 24,000 clients, but at its core it was about something far more personal: the deep sense of betrayal shared by former comrades.
Disputes between law partners—trained combatants, after all—tend to become ugly. But even attorney feuds rarely turn as vitriolic as Napoli v. Bern. Napoli, 48, has survived leukemia. He says of Bern: “He was not a law person. He was not a get-things-done-type person.” In a legal filing, Bern, 66, said: “Napoli knows no boundaries and will use every waking moment to embarrass me and mask his improprieties.”
Like family split-ups, business divorces can devolve into self-defeating warfare and expose unacknowledged rivalries and hidden resentments over money and ego. By feuding rather than quietly working out a decoupling, former partners risk the erosion of their brand. “In this case,” Bluestone says, “no one comes out looking particularly good.”
The early chapters of the Napoli-Bern story are marked by a shared scrappiness. Bern graduated from the Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1975, returned to his native Milwaukee for a few years of seasoning, then moved to New York in 1981. One still hears Wisconsin in his speech. A journeyman litigator, he specialized in suing doctors and hospitals.
Napoli appeared destined to inherit a position of privilege in the New York plaintiffs’ bar. In the 1970s and ’80s, his father, Joseph, had a thriving accident-and-injury practice. Paul attended St. John’s University Law School in Queens, where his father received his J.D. But his plans to practice alongside his father were ruined in early 1990, when federal prosecutors charged Joseph with participating in a conspiracy involving bribed witnesses and faked evidence. Joseph was convicted of racketeering in 1991, along with several others, and sentenced to almost four years in prison. He was also disbarred. Paul still seems uncomfortable talking about his father’s conviction. “Rightly or wrongly, he ended up in a bad situation,” he says. Paul discovered that he, too, bore a taint, as law firms turned away his job applications. Seeing few alternatives, he “just started trying cases—good, bad, or ugly.”
In 1996, while handling a car-crash trial in state court in Long Island’s Nassau County, Napoli noticed Bern working a medical malpractice case across the hall. The two struck up a professional relationship. In 1997, Napoli married Marie Kaiser, another St. John’s alum, and the two of them formed a firm that occasionally handed off cases to Bern. Not quite a generation apart, the two men say they became best friends, but tensions also ran through the relationship. For one thing, Bern came to depend on the Napolis for part of his livelihood.
Around this time, Bern, who often combed medical journals for leads, noticed problems associated with the diet drug fen-phen, a combination of fenfluramine and phentermine. Marketed by American Home Products (later Wyeth Pharmaceuticals), fen-phen had been linked by the Mayo Clinic to heart-valve disease and pulmonary hypertension. “It had all the earmarks of a great case,” Bern recalls. Specifically, it involved serious physical harm, a manufacturer with deep pockets, and loads of potential claimants. He called around to law firms that might want to share the cost of advertising for clients. Napoli said yes. On Sept. 15, 1997, the New York Post reported that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was pulling fen-phen from the market. Near that story ran Napoli and Bern’s advertisement. Their file soon swelled to 5,600 cases.
Napoli, who majored in accounting as an undergraduate, designed a computerized system to keep track of the stable of plaintiffs. Bern admits he couldn’t have done this alone. “Paul’s strengths are my weaknesses,” he says. When American Home Products agreed, in 1999, to a $3.8 billion class-action settlement designed to cover tens of thousands of claims, Napoli and Bern made the strategically risky choice of having their clients “opt out.” This meant that their plaintiffs couldn’t seek a share of the main settlement and would have to fight for separate awards via trials or additional out-of-court negotiation. The gamble paid off, as the 5,600 opt-outs eventually obtained settlements greater than $1 billion. The resolution remains secret, and Napoli and Bern decline to discuss its precise dollar value, but if they charged the typical one-third fee, their take would exceed $300 million. Suddenly, Bern says, they “had a different type of financial independence, personally as well as professionally.”
Fen-phen also provided an early example of how, for better or worse, thousands of individual claims could be bunched together and resolved at once with multibillion-dollar settlements. Napoli professes little interest, however, in the firm’s place in legal history. “We like making money more than making law,” he says. The case put the previously obscure duo on the map.
In 2004 they formalized their partnership, starting an eponymous firm that they co-owned, 50-50. (Marie Napoli took a leave from practicing law to raise her two children.) Robert Bard, a New York defense lawyer, describes Napoli Bern as “a high-end litigation firm that did big cases and did them well: no expense spared, no stone unturned.” Asked whether he liked them, he says, “No way. They’re very abrasive and unpleasant on a personal level, but good attorneys.”
By the time the new firm took shape, it was amassing claims on behalf of cops and firefighters who’d done rescue work at ground zero. Some first responders had developed severe rashes, respiratory problems, and even cancer. The smoldering rubble and dust were laced with asbestos, benzene, PCBs, and other chemicals. Napoli helped organize the Sept. 11 case against the City of New York, its contractors, and other defendants, who were accused of failing to protect first responders and cleanup workers. Ultimately, he became one of two lead attorneys representing a client group of some 11,000 plaintiffs. Napoli and Bern assigned almost their entire firm—some 80 attorneys, plus 200 paralegals and clerks—to the Sept. 11 battle. Once again, they won on a huge scale. In 2010, after eight years of pretrial skirmishing, the main cases were settled, with an award of more than $1 billion. Under pressure from the judge, the plaintiffs’ lawyers reduced their proposed fees by $85 million, but that still left roughly $220 million in attorney compensation, Napoli says. The rich reward was justified, he adds, because for seven years, Napoli Bern handled the Sept. 11 litigation largely on its own. “It was all us,” he says. As Napoli Bern became a leader in the mass-tort field, veins of resentment began to develop beneath the surface. To Napoli’s delight, his father was reinstated to the New York bar in 2012, 15 years after being released from prison. Paul installed Joseph, who was 70, in the thriving law firm. Bern says he unenthusiastically acquiesced. “His reputation precedes him, and that’s all I need to say about Joseph Napoli,” Bern says. The hiring was only one irritant to Bern, who says, “We’d been equal partners once, but now Paul did what he wanted, like it was his law firm.”
For some time, Napoli says, he’d thought Bern wasn’t pulling his weight: “Marc’s skills weren’t in managing an office or in managing people. His skills were in helping identify new cases and helping to find experts.” Hunter Shkolnik, a former Napoli Bern attorney who later joined a new firm started by Napoli, says Bern seemed distracted at times. According to Shkolnik, on certain business trips, Bern skipped meetings with other lawyers and resurfaced at the end of the day without explaining himself. Bern says Shkolnik is trying to ingratiate himself with the Napolis, and that his account is untrue.
Paul Napoli had his own diversion. During this period, he became entangled with a younger lawyer at the firm. “People make mistakes in life,” he says. “I made a mistake, had an affair with an associate. It was not right. It was not who I was or who I am.” Vanessa Dennis, the woman with whom Napoli got involved, later said in a defamation suit she filed in New York state court against Napoli and his wife that the affair lasted from October 2011 through April 2013, when Marie Napoli discovered what was going on and confronted her husband. In court papers, Marie said she hired a private detective to confirm the relationship, which she maintains began and ended in April 2013. Dennis left the firm in May 2013 and later moved to Houston. Through a lawyer, she declined to comment.
According to Dennis’s suit, in 2013, Marie began a campaign of harassment, including e-mails to Dennis calling her a “slut” and text messages to Dennis’s then-husband demanding that he tell his wife to “stop f---ing my man.” That December, Marie allegedly sent identical three-page handwritten letters to wives and other family members of the partners of Dennis’s new employer, a Houston law firm. Dennis’s court papers said the letters described her as “a sexual predator” who “has no respect for the sanctity of marriage and the damage she causes to families and children.”
Marie contests some, but not all, of Dennis’s allegations. In an interview, she concedes that she called Dennis a slut, because it’s “an accurate description of this woman.” She denies, however, that she sent the “stop f---ing” message, saying, “I find that language highly offensive.” She acknowledges that she communicated with Dennis’s then-husband but says it wasn’t in a harassing way. “He called and texted me multiple times,” she says. Confirming that she wrote the three-page letters and sent them to two people, she adds, they were “100 percent true.”
“Anyone that will attack my family, my marriage, or my children, I’m going to fight,” Marie says. Paul Napoli takes his wife’s reaction in stride: “She went after the other woman to the extent she could,” he says, “and she went after me to the extent she could, until I made amends.” After a short separation, the Napolis repaired their marriage, but it wasn’t long before Paul was diagnosed with leukemia. He was in and out of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan throughout the summer and fall of 2014, receiving three exhausting rounds of chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant. In mid-September he came so close to death that a priest administered last rites.
Back at the firm, Bern told lawyers that Napoli was too sick to return and that he was now in charge, Shkolnik recalls. “These two people had seemed like family,” he says. “Then one gets sick, and the other pulls an Al Haig, ‘I’m in control here.’ ” (Bern says this statement of Shkolnik’s is also false and intended to gain favor with the Napolis.) According to Napoli’s court filings, he eventually discovered that while he was fighting for his life, Bern paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to retain the loyalty of certain attorneys, squandered money on ads Napoli disapproved of, sought to block Napoli’s access to the firm’s bank accounts, and fired several employees, including Joseph Napoli.
For his part, Bern says he didn’t actually fire Joseph but rather stopped paying him for a while. He describes this, and his other actions, as appropriate. He had complaints of his own about “financial irregularities” he’d found when he dug into the firm’s books. These included unpaid bills and what he said were previously undisclosed debts. But what really bothered Bern was Napoli’s attempt to appoint his wife as his proxy at the firm. The Napoli-Bern partnership agreement allowed either partner, in the event of temporary disability, to appoint a stand-in. Napoli had designated his wife, and she filed suit on Oct. 1 seeking to enforce this arrangement.
Bern responded in a Nov. 5 filing that Marie wasn’t suited to step into her husband’s shoes. She’d caused “harm to the partnership” and exposed it to potential liability, Bern argued, saying, “Her harassment of former employee Vanessa Dennis is a definitive example of her improper conduct.” In a move guaranteed to provoke the Napolis, Bern attached to his court papers a draft version of the defamation complaint Dennis was preparing to file against the Napolis. The document included details about her affair with Paul and Marie’s allegedly abusive behavior toward her. Soon after, Dennis formally filed the complaint in New York state court, where it’s still pending.
The salacious Dennis document got a much broader airing when the New York Post ran a series of articles on the goings-on at Napoli Bern, beginning with a Nov. 9, 2014, story with the front-page headline: “Sex, lies & stalking at 9/11 law firm.” Paul Napoli told the newspaper he supported Marie’s actions toward Dennis, adding, “Everything my wife said in any e-mail whether it sounds terrible or not was all true, and was all factually correct.” The next day, in a letter he e-mailed to friends, Paul called the Dennis suit “the definition of extortion” and condemned Bern for publicizing it “in an attempt to humiliate our family and expose our personal life and office to ridicule.” Bern calls the accusation “absolutely false” and contends that it was Marie’s Oct. 1, 2014, suit that brought all the tawdry allegations into the open. He also denies tipping off the Post to the controversy.
Paul Napoli says he grew hungry for payback. “What I wanted to see was what bodies were buried in Bern’s backyard, and it wasn’t hard to find,” he says. He sifted through Bern’s past e-mail at the firm and put his alleged findings in New York state court papers. In a Nov. 10 filing, he asserted that Bern “has committed multiple affairs and even now continues to frequent prostitutes.” In a subsequent filing, he alleged that Bern’s personal conduct affected management of the firm during the period before the falling-out. Bern, the document said, “began leaving home and spending more time in L.A. He claimed to have work in the area, but this was really a cover story. His real purpose in traveling to L.A. was to visit and party with prostitutes. By this time, Bern had all but stopped working and left Napoli alone to run the firm and worry about bills and overhead.” Bern denies this account, saying he traveled to Los Angeles to work on a protracted case against manufacturers of certain diabetes drugs. Napoli’s assertions about prostitutes represent “desperation more than they reflect reality,” he adds. “I refuse to dignify them by commenting further.”
Napoli’s improving health allowed him to return to work in late 2014, rendering moot the attempt to install his wife as co-managing partner. As for the rest of the legal proceedings, Eileen Bransten, the New York state court judge overseeing the Napoli v. Bern fracas, showed admirable patience in steering away from both sides’ tackier allegations and focusing instead on preserving the remains of Napoli Bern so that its debts and assets, including its 24,000 clients, could be sensibly divided. At times she seemed dismayed by the behavior of the former partners. “For some reason, the depth of hatred in this [case] is extraordinary,” she said at one point in open court. “I do business divorces all the time, but this has got to be one of the most unhappy situations I have ever heard. So all I can do is beg you, everybody, act like an adult.”
Her plea went unheeded. Napoli and Bern accused each other of, among many other things, improperly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of firm money on posh hotels, chartered air travel, and charitable donations. (Each defended his own expenditures as legitimate.) Napoli captured the atmosphere in a July 2015 filing that alleged, “The purpose of Bern’s conduct is clear: to destroy the partnership and its employees so that he can make a run on the partnership’s cases.”
“One hundred percent false,” says Bern, who maintains that his only goal was to serve clients and split Napoli Bern in a fair manner.
Both Bern and Napoli started new firms while they continued to fight over the old one. After filing dueling motions in the summer of 2015 that sought to hold each other in contempt of court, they agreed on a settlement in August. But rather than a true peace treaty, the settlement became a basis for continued feuding. Napoli Bern’s clients were assigned to one or the other new firm, depending on which lawyer had brought in the business. Remaining cases were divided arbitrarily, with a court-appointed referee making adjustments so each side ended up with about half the clients.
Almost as soon as the settlement went into force, Napoli and Bern began accusing each other of improperly soliciting the other’s clients. This skirmish reached a head in August 2016, when Bern’s new firm, Bern Ripka, after less than a year in existence, reshuffled its leadership; Alan Ripka left to start a firm of his own. Paul and Marie Napoli’s new firm, Napoli Shkolnik, put out a news release on Aug. 12, offering itself as “a lifeboat to clients who are expected to exit the Bern Ripka sinking ship.”
Bern heatedly denies that his new firm—now known as Marc J. Bern & Partners—is sinking and says none of his clients have left. “If there is any Titanic,” he adds, “it’s probably Napoli Shkolnik.”
Despite his palpable bitterness, Bern says he just wants to move on. He’s set up shop near Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, where he sits behind a perfectly clean glass-topped desk. The hustle-bustle of his 28-lawyer firm often proceeds without his physical presence, as he spends much of his time in Aspen, Colo., where his wife and daughter live. Still, he says, “I’m intimately involved in every aspect of what goes on here.” He ticks off major cases the firm is handling, including one targeting IVC filters, vascular devices that are implanted to prevent pulmonary embolisms but allegedly cause life-threatening complications. “We’re wildly successful,” he says. “I have no desire to be involved in Paul’s life. I just want him out of my life.”
The Napolis’ new firm is on Lexington Avenue, a few blocks from Bern’s. Napoli Shkolnik has 55 lawyers overseeing its own roster of mass-tort cases, including one involving claims that Pfizer’s erectile dysfunction drug Viagra increases the risk of melanoma, a potentially fatal form of skin cancer.
Having so far beaten the odds by surviving leukemia, Paul has grown back his wavy brown hair and recovered his beefy, athletic build. “I’m working on my tennis game,” he says cheerfully. In addition to perfecting his backhand, he’s nursing rancor toward his former partner. Recollecting the heyday of his old firm, Napoli invokes Bern’s marital history. “We spent weekends with him and his fourth wife,” Napoli says. “When he got married to his fifth wife, I was the best man.”
Marie Napoli seems to harbor even more anger than her husband. Her voice quavering, she says, “I was annihilated. My children were humiliated. That’s where my litigations come from.” Her litigations are indeed profuse: She’s suing Dennis for defamation and “alienation of affection”—a tort under which a spouse can seek recompense from a third party allegedly responsible for harming a marriage. In a separate $80 million case, she’s suing Dennis’s current and former lawyers for extortion and blackmail. And in yet another pair of suits, alleging defamation, she’s going after the New York Post and a number of online media organizations for their coverage of the Dennis allegations. She’s also suing Bern and his lawyer for $500 million. She says her goal is to “put the truth out there and rehabilitate my family and my children.” The defendants in these suits all deny wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, the Napoli Bern divorce grinds on, unresolved. Napoli and Bern are pressing new contempt-of-court motions against each other and are expected to commence another round of hearings later this year before a court-appointed referee.
To contact the author of this story: Paul Barrett in New York at pbarrett17@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Bradford Wieners at bwieners@bloomberg.net.
©2016 Bloomberg L.P.
