Chapter 13/Lawsuits #4, 5 and 6

Dear Mr. Loyd:

I am enclosing a card with a vacation prize. I thought possibly you would be interested in this, as it sounds suspicious to me.

I also want to extend my best wishes in your suit with the plumber. He has been swindling gullible people with his silver tongue for years. I'm sure there are a lot of people pulling for you so please don't be intimidated by his threat.

Rosemary
Oconto, WI.

Back in Green Bay a tall muscular stranger showed up at the front door of my home while I was working nearby at TV-11. My young son answered his knock on the door.

"Is your father Glen Loyd?"

"Yes," said my son.

"Is he home?" the man asked.

"No," my son said, "he's at work."

"Is your mother home?" the man asked.

"Yes, she's in the kitchen," my son said.

The man opened the door, walked into my house without permission and into my kitchen where he startled my wife who was preparing dinner.
He identified himself as an U.S. Marshall, handed her a summons and told her to give it to me. I was being sued again, for $14 million by a plumber I had warned consumers about.

(You can imagine how my wife and I felt about this marshall walking into our house. I got on the phone to his boss and complained that the marshal was either too stupid or lazy to find me in person when most people in Green Bay knew where I would be at that time of day: WLUK-TV. He didn't even try me at work.)

Actually I was being sued twice by the plumber: In Brown County District Court and in federal court.

It all started when a woman in Appleton, Wisconsin called me with a complaint. Her basement was full of raw sewage. She had given $500 dollars to the plumber, but he never came back to complete the job. The plumber turned out to be a criminal who had a flood of complaints against him. In addition to the consumer complaints, he would hire employees and not pay them. He would rent tools and not return them. He rented an apartment and stopped paying rent. And he wrote bad checks. He had a rap sheet that literally stretched from floor to ceiling. (Criminal contractors are not uncommon in Wisconsin, especially during the summer. Always check out contractors by calling the toll free hotline of the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection and ask for brochures on hiring them: 1-800-422-7128).

WLUK-TV and I fought the case in circuit court and won. We fought the other lawsuit in federal court and won.

But acting as his own lawyer, the plumber went to the Appellate Court of Wisconsin.

A clerk at the Appellate Court told me that the plumber had appealed more verdicts than any other person in the history of Wisconsin.
When we won in Appellate Court, the plumber appealed to the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. And we won there.

While much of this was taking place, the plumber was actually running from the law. He had been found guilty of a number of crimes, but before he could be sentenced, he disappeared.

Despite the fact that he was a convicted criminal at large, he took legal action against me and continued to rip-off consumers.

After letting people know that the state wanted him, I got a call from a consumer who had hired him. I told the consumer to contact the Shawano County Sheriff's Department, and a trap was set. The plumber was lured to the consumer's home with the promise of more money and was arrested and jailed on the spot. He was sentenced to five years as a career criminal.

I was sued by another criminal in Wisconsin, an inmate of the Green Bay Reformatory, who was misusing military benefits. Although he said he was using the money for college, he was actually getting his education paid for by the State of Wisconsin. He used his federal benefits to buy a color TV.

After I reported on him, he sat down on the bunk in his cell and wrote out a jailhouse lawsuit against me.

In a personal letter to me, a Brown County judge said he was dismissing the case but that this type of lawsuit by prisoners was common, time consuming and expensive for the state.

That was the sixth time I was sued. "My Six Lawsuits" is now the title of a talk that I give to hundreds of civic groups around Wisconsin.
Although these lawsuits and other legal threats caused me a lot of worry, I wear them now like medals on solder's chest. Decisions in these cases protect freedom of the press.