The criminal prosecution of James F. Lomma, a prominent crane owner with offices in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, swivels on the failure of a Chinese rotator gear, the hold-down welding of which catastrophically snapped in May 2008, sending steel debris raining onto the streets of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The event killed two construction workers. In an earlier Lomma crane collapse in midtown Manhattan in March 2008, seven people died; a rigging company was indicted for manslaugheter in that case. The charges also fire a warning shot over the boardrooms of construction firms across America: Equipment owners may be held personally liable—even if safety regulators in their official investigation are unable to find code violations.
“I told my daughter that when she grows up, she should not be a CEO,” says Paul Shechtman, an attorney representing Lomma’s rental firm New York Crane and trucking outfit J.F. Lomma Inc. “There seems to be an automatic assumption that the CEO is the captain of the ship and that means criminal liability, and that notion is just not the law,” Shechtman says.