One segment of the resulting Q&A is enlightening:
Question: Did you see the movie The Firm?
Answer: Yes.
Q: Did you hear a joke about how the State Comp Fund is run like the law firm was run in the movie The Firm?
A: Yes.
Q: Is that sort of a running joke?
A: Yes.
Q: Did you partake in that joke?
A: Yes.
Q: What did that mean when the State Comp Fund was referred to as The Firm, like the firm in the movie?
A: Personally, just because of the appearance of the office politics.
Q: There are a lot of dead lawyers showing up in the movie The Firm. Do you recall that?
A: Yes.
Q: Do you equate Greg with being somewhat like one of those dead lawyers?
Fund lawyer: Objection.
Q: What is your objection?
Fund lawyer: It's an improper question.
There was a time when Greg Heeb was a golden boy of sorts at the State Compensation Fund, the quasi-governmental entity that provides workers' compensation insurance to thousands of Arizona businesses.
How golden was he? A top State Fund manager once said, out of the blue, that he wanted his daughter to marry someone like Heeb. Heeb was hired into the State Fund's payroll audit department in 1990. From there, he was quickly promoted into the loss-prevention department, where he helped advise businesses on improving worker safety. He also gave orientation presentations for new State Fund employees.
It is easy to understand why Heeb might be used in orientation programs. He's young--only 30--photogenic and fit, well-spoken yet serious. The overall appearance: just plain wholesome.
He remembers telling the new hires that the State Compensation Fund considered employees "its most important asset."
"I remember saying that at each and every presentation," Heeb says. "And then I found out the truth."
He didn't find it out for a while, though. For a while, he was just a pleasant, well-liked up-and-comer at the State Fund. His performance evaluations were excellent. He was one of six employees named as the top 1 percent of the State Fund work force for 1992. The fund's president, Jerry LeCompte, took those six workers on a trip to San Diego in May 1993 as a reward. As late as the fall of that year, Heeb was receiving glowing performance reviews.
About that time, Heeb began attending meetings. They were voluntary confabs where employees discussed diversity at the compensation fund. And that was when he began to encounter the internal reality of the State Compensation Fund, without really knowing he had done so. It's an odd, nasty reality. Complicated, too. But fascinating, in a sick way.
Now, back in the fall of 1993, Greg Heeb was not fully aware that he was working in the quasi-governmental version of a John Grisham novel. And so he spoke his mind at a couple of diversity meetings. His girlfriend, who worked in another department at the State Fund, had encountered a problem with a personal-leave request. Heeb advocated changes in the fund's leave policies. Apparently, this rankled the supervisor who had handled the girlfriend's leave request. Two other higher-ups at the State Fund told Heeb they thought he was out of line in advocating the changes in leave policy.
Heeb still doesn't think he said anything untoward about the supervisor, Alesia Martin, then administrator of the fund's training, education and communications department. But let's not quibble. Let's suggest, for the sake of argument, that Heeb presented his proposal harshly, that he had hidden motives, that he wanted to show up Martin.
Since when is indirectly criticizing a supervisor who is not in the room an offense that should be punished by mandatory psychiatric examination?
Since now. At least, that's what the State Compensation Fund thinks.
The events of Greg Heeb's subsequent tenure at the State Compensation Fund are as tangled with characters and intrigue as the plot for any potboiler novel. As you might guess, that plot now includes a lawsuit, filed by Heeb against the State Fund. Heeb claims State Fund managers forced him out of his job. The fund has yet to file a detailed response, and the fund's general counsel says he has advised fund officials not to comment for the time being. Martin, who has left the fund for work at a computer firm, did not return my phone calls last week.
From court documents, sworn depositions of fund employees and interviews, however, at least the outline of this odd, serpentine drama can be pieced together. And I must say that in my 15 years in journalism, I have never seen anything to match the viciousness of this State Comp Fund business. That business picked up steam during the spring of 1994, when Greg Heeb did something he acknowledges was not very smart. A co-worker had put a Mardi Gras poster on the wall. Heeb stuck a picture of Alesia Martin's face on a voodoo doll in the poster. He says there were often cartoons and posters around, and employees often defaced them in funny ways. It was months after the diversity meeting flap, which had not seemed like all that big a flap, anyway. The poster wasn't in a highly traveled area. It wasn't in Martin's department.
Heeb says a lot of people who saw the Mardi Gras poster laughed.
Even so, he admits, "It was dumb. It was a dumb thing to do. A silly joke."
Martin's husband spotted the poster and didn't get the joke. In remarkably short order, a high official of the fund presented Heeb with a formal reprimand letter that essentially threatened him with dismissal if he did anything like it again.
There's an interesting twist here, though. Martin's husband was around the office to see the poster because he was working under contract with the State Fund. In fact, Alesia Martin's department had hired her husband's audio-visual firm for several years running to provide equipment for an annual State Fund meeting. And there was another fund official, a human resources manager named Jeanine Decker, whose husband had done business with the fund, as well.
These happy family business arrangements did not involve massive sums. A few thousand, here and there. But the fund is considered at least a semigovernmental entity, and the fund's employee handbook listed activities employees should avoid, because those actions might be considered ethical breaches.
One of those breaches was described this way: "Engaging in Fund business with a firm in which the employee, or a close relative of the employee, has a substantial ownership or interest."
Heeb felt stepped on. He had been formally, seriously reprimanded--by a fund vice president, no less--for a bad joke. Nothing had happened to Martin or Decker, even though, it seems, all sorts of people knew the husbands of those relatively high officials were regularly doing business with the fund.
Heeb says he met with a sympathetic supervisor to discuss the "disparity" in the situation.
"And my supervisor told me I had come up on the powers of the State Fund, the players of the fund," Heeb says. Don't expect any action from inside the fund, Heeb says he was told. In fact, he says, his supervisor suggested that a letter to the legislature or the governor was the only real way to address the issue. The supervisor probably did not expect the suggestion to be taken seriously.
But Heeb did write a letter--a detailed letter, laying out what he considered unethical behavior at the fund, and he sent it to all sorts of people--the governor, legislators, news media. He didn't sign the letter. But that didn't prevent it from becoming part of a political war over control of the State Compensation Fund--and the roughly $1.4 billion in assets it controls.
When Greg Heeb sent his anonymous letter last May, the State Fund was already under scrutiny by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee. The JLBC has been trying to put the fund under stricter state oversight for a long time; last year's effort in that regard was serious.
Although created by the legislature, the State Fund essentially operates as a private business. It sells workers' compensation insurance to employers, and uses the premiums they pay, plus the considerable return on a billion-dollar-plus investment pool that has built over time, to run the agency.
Because no tax revenues are appropriated for the fund's operations, the agency receives far less oversight than other state departments. For example, State Fund budgeting is not handled through the process used for most state agencies. The personnel system that applies to most state agencies does not encompass the State Fund.
Yet, just like state agencies, the fund is exempt from paying taxes, and therefore has an innate advantage over private workers' comp providers.
In other words, the fund is sometimes a part of the state government, and sometimes not.
"When it's to their advantage, they want to be viewed as a state agency," JLBC director Ted Ferris says. "When it's not to their advantage, they lobby against that point of view."
Some members of the 16-person JLBC wanted to end that straddle by privatizing the fund entirely, that is, selling it, and putting the proceeds--perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars--into the state's coffers.
Regardless of whether that step was taken, the JLBC wanted to look at moving the fund's budget into the normal legislative review process.
And finally, the committee wanted the auditor general to conduct a special audit of the State Fund. In June 1994, the committee sent a letter asking the Joint Legislative Audit Committee to call for the audit.
That letter contained an apparent reference to Heeb's unsigned missive:
"Furthermore, we understand that allegations of procurement improprieties have recently surfaced. These allegations, which come from a current SCF employee, are quite serious and would appear to us to warrant investigation."
Now, I have seen no definitive evidence that anyone at the State Fund connected Heeb with the anonymous letter. And in the end, the fund's political allies helped it escape the state budgeting process and the audit. A serious attempt to sell the fund never materialized.
But State Fund bigwigs could not have been happy about the tornado the letter helped whip up. The minutes from a State Fund board of directors meeting show that directors were still discussing how to address their oversight battles with the JLBC as late as September. The board also heard an explanation of the fund's procurement procedures, and considered changes to those procedures, at that September meeting.
And Greg Heeb had a very bad September.
On September 19, 1994, Heeb was talking with some employees in Alesia Martin's department at State Compensation Fund headquarters. Martin walked up and started a conversation that involved something Heeb considered confidential: his request for a transfer to an office in Tucson, away from the Grishamesque atmosphere at State Fund headquarters. The awkward conversation ended quickly, and Heeb left. But he returned to Martin's department and confronted her about her indiscreet remarks.
After an investigation of sorts, fund officials decided the confrontation constituted a heinous form of harassment by Heeb. (There's ample evidence that Heeb was actually well-controlled when he spoke to Martin. But we'll get to that a bit further on.)
Nine days after the Heeb-Martin conversation, three officials called Heeb to a meeting where they presented him with a letter from Jerry LeCompte, the State Fund president. The letter placed Heeb on administrative leave and ordered him to undergo "an independent medical examination."
By this time, Heeb had finally begun to suspect that the State Compensation Fund was not entirely focused on furthering his personal welfare. So he put a tape recorder in a pocket before going to the meeting. The recorder appears to have picked up most everything that was said.
The transcript of the recording is fascinating, if you have a strong stomach.
In the meeting, the three officials--including a fund vice president--attempt to suggest that Heeb's eight-month-old comments on the personal-leave policy (which Martin was not present to hear), combined with the voodoo poster (which Martin never actually saw) and this latest confrontation with Martin (which witnesses say was not very confrontational), constituted a dangerous pattern.
It was a pattern that made the officials of the State Compensation Fund fear something was seriously wrong with Greg Heeb. They wanted him to go to a doctor. They'd already scheduled an appointment for the next morning. He just had to sign a release, so they could have access to the medical records from the examination.
Heeb asks, repeatedly, if he can have some time to consider this step.
The three officials push him to sign immediately. They say appointments are difficult to get. It will cost money if this one isn't kept. There are thinly veiled suggestions that if he doesn't sign the release and see the doctor, he will be fired.
One official says, "It's not just am I going to go to the doctor or not. You start shutting doors for possible resolution when you say I won't go."
Heeb offers to pay for rescheduling the appointment to a later date. Maybe two or three days down the line. The officials say that could cost as much as $500.
Heeb says he'll pay.
The officials say it doesn't matter. There can be no delay.
To get a flavor of the sick game being played here, read this bit of discussion between Heeb and Greg Casadei, a vice president of the fund, about signing the medical-records release:
Heeb: OK. Very soon, how do you define very soon?
Casadei: It's 2:33. No later than 3:30. We'll be glad to leave the room (unintelligible), but we have to get that release to the doctor in order for you to get that appointment tomorrow.
Heeb: I need additional time.
Casadei: Well, again let me tell you. If we haven't gotten that at the time of 3:30 so if the answer is not yes by 3:30 you don't sign that then the answer is no.
As you can tell, the transcript of the conversation contains a few words or phrases labeled "unintelligible," and the punctuation is out of whack. But I can't find any place in the transcript where these three high officials of the State Compensation Fund even begin to tell their former employee of the year that they want him to undergo psychiatric examination. Heeb says they never told him. They just kept up the pressure to sign the release for his "independent medical examination."
"I was scared. I felt just unbelievably betrayed. I was nervous, for sure," Heeb says. "I don't know; it was almost like being in a nightmare. It was clear their intentions were other than they were represented to be."
I can't swear that Greg Heeb has no mental, emotional or substance-abuse-related problems.
After all, Martin has testified that she felt physically threatened during the September confrontation with Heeb. Even though he did not touch her or move too close to her or raise his hands.
And LeCompte has said in letters filed in court that Heeb was asked to get a medical examination because fund officials suspected he had a disability, and they wanted to abide by the Americans With Disabilities Act.
But I have spoken with Heeb twice in person, both times at some length; he seemed absolutely tame to me, about as dangerous and stressed out as the Qantas koala. I also know he wasn't crazy enough to agree, on 57 minutes' notice, to go to some shrink the State Fund honchos tried to force him to see. So Mr. Heeb has at least two marks on the sanity side of the ledger, as far as I'm concerned.
Besides, many witnesses testified under oath that he was not out of control when he spoke to Martin in September of last year, that he did not yell at or harass her. In fact, those co-workers consistently described Heeb as professional, congenial, courteous, well-liked. When asked directly, they say they never had any reason whatsoever to doubt his mental health.
It's all but unanimous. They think Heeb's all right. Even when they're being questioned under oath, with their State Fund bosses watching.
They weren't so kind to Alesia Martin. At least three people who had to work under her testified that they had complained to superiors about her.
Here are some comments about Martin from Michael Stenner, who worked in her department:
Q: What sort of complaints were you making [about Martin]?
A: My boss's management style.
Q: What about it?
A: She doesn't have one.
Q: Okay. Anything else?
A: Her skills as a supervisor.
Q: What do you think is lacking in her skills as a supervisor?
A: The ability to manage people; motivate people; to groom them into a team; to acknowledge good things.
Employees from her department testified that they thought Martin was manipulative, that she tried to pit employees one against another. When asked whether Martin had lied to them, some simply said yes.
Several said, flat out, that they thought Martin was unethical. It was a full-scale trashing, mostly by people who worked for her.
Here's one employee's estimation of the general disgust over the business arrangement Martin's husband had with the fund:
Q: Was this a topic of discussion between you and your co-workers?
A: Yes.
Q: Tell me about those discussions.
A: I can just say on my part, it was mostly disbelief. I found it hard to believe that somebody could blatantly go against the [ethics] policy. It was in the policy manual of the state fund.
Q: Was that the general consensus among your peers?
A: I would say so.
Finally, there is the testimony of Kimberly Hicks, another employee who worked under Martin. She said that sometime in the second half of 1994--which would be after Heeb's anonymous letter was distributed--Martin forwarded a voice-mail message from Decker, directing that Hicks delete two sections of the employee handbook.
And which two sections might they be?
"Basically, they addressed doing business with relatives," Hicks testified.
Later in her deposition, this exchange occurred:
Q: Has Alesia [Martin] ever said anything to you to suggest that she's been given special treatment of some sort?
A: What do you mean by "special treatment"?
Q: Has she ever said something to that effect, that she is given special treatment by management?
A: She didn't use those words.
Q: What words did she use?
A: I can't recall verbatim.
Q: Do you recall the substance of what she said?
A: Yes.
Q: What is it?
A: That she knew information about certain people, so no one could tell her what to do.
In sworn testimony, Alesia Martin has denied saying she had information that protected her position at the fund. She said a lot of other things in her deposition back in February, mostly denying she'd done anything wrong.
The fund is expected to submit a detailed defense against Heeb's lawsuit this week, and I will be very interested to read it. In fact, I will probably go by the courthouse and read the file on this case once a week for a while. It will be like getting a John Grisham novel for free, one chapter at a time. Of course, for Greg Heeb, it's not going to be a particularly fun novel, and it might take a long time to get to the final chapters.
But maybe, sometime down the line, this real-life potboiler will stumble into one of those miracle endings.
Maybe the auditor general will conduct the special audit to which the State Compensation Fund should have been subjected last year.
Maybe the legislature will have a hearing on the fund's management practices--just to understand when it is, and when it is not, acceptable to force your workers to see psychiatrists.
Maybe the attorney general will invite the fund's top officials to speak with a grand jury.
Maybe someone in power at the State Compensation Fund will even apologize to Greg Heeb.
It could happen. These sorts of stories are supposed to end with a strange twist.
