The Special Master: Holding the Checkbook

Ken Feinberg has a big personality, and he is hit or miss on first impression. He missed with Steve Campbell, a New York City police officer whose wife was killed in the World Trade Center collapse. "Your offer spits on my wife, spits on my son and spits on my father-in-law," Campbell told him during one of Feinberg's first Manhattan meetings with the families of Sept. 11 victims. The Campbell meeting was not rock bottom. "Staten Island," says Feinberg. "Staten Island was the worst. Very, very heated. Just awful. It's on CNN; I've got the tape if you want it."

As special master of the Federal Government's September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, Feinberg has to put a price on lost life. It may be a heartrending calculus, but it is, in the end, just calculus. Lawyers and actuaries worked out payment structures for catastrophic death decades ago, and--with a few modifications for cost of living, income and dependents--anyone can discover his or her approximate postmortem value with a 10- second glance at a statistical chart. Feinberg's challenge is to convince the 9/11 families that even though the country has valorized their husbands, sisters, sons and mothers because of their ghastly death, the dollars Feinberg will pay them will be a reflection of who their loved ones were--and what they earned--in life.

"In some respects this case is one of the easiest I've ever done," says Feinberg, 56. "There's a relatively finite number of claimants: 3,000, maybe 3,200. There's no causation problem here, not really. These people were injured or killed by traumatic injury--instantaneous. It's the emotion. The emotional proximity between this program and the event makes this an unprecedented, difficult assignment because people, understandably, see no reason to be reasonable. Why should they be? What happened to them was not reasonable."

Feinberg is not the first person you would pick to comfort the aggrieved. He has a jagged intellect that does not easily abide dissent; he is a leading candidate for the title of World's Most Competitive Human; he is completely unfamiliar with hushed, conciliatory tones (even in intimate moments, his thick Boston accent and habit of applying verbal italics to every third word make Feinberg sound as if he is in the midst of a perpetual rant). He is, not surprisingly, a very successful lawyer.

Raised by a bookkeeper mother and tire-salesman father in Brockton, Mass., Feinberg was the family ham. He went to the University of Massachusetts with thoughts of becoming an actor until he considered the merits of a weekly paycheck and enrolled at New York University Law School. After clerking for New York Court of Appeals Judge Stanley Fuld in 1970, Feinberg landed a job in the office of Senator Edward Kennedy, and then took a job with a big firm. Feinberg was on his way to becoming "just another Washington lawyer," as he puts it, until a bit of acting changed his legal career.

"I saw him do a satire of Judge Fuld that had the entire room--40 clerks and Judge Fuld--in hysterical tears," says U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein. "That marked him in my mind. Years later, when the Agent Orange case was in front of me and I needed somebody to try and settle it, I reached back in my mind to Ken because he was not only brilliant, but he had a particular sense of humor that would make people want to work with him."