Judge Edward Fine’s instructions to the jury were a puzzle: Did the contract require the Atlantic Sugar Association to pay a minimum of $5.30 for each ton? There was no reference in the judge’s instructions as to what might have been Atlantic’s actual budgeting plan. The jury was to focus on the intentions of the company, not on the tonnage-based theory of the plaintiff. Gorman and Tuddenham were convinced that the jury instructions were stacked against them. “Did they intend to pay them $5.30 a ton?” asked Gorman. “No, they had budgeted $4 a ton. We knew that. On the other side, you have the cutters; did they intend to get, or expect to get, $5.30 a ton? No. They did not know that the document that required it existed. If you had said to these guys, ‘Come to the United States and we will pay you $3 an hour,’ they would have said, ‘Fine!’ For $2 an hour they would be there!”

Roger Gamblin, the jury foreman, later said that he had been “irritated” by the judge’s instructions, wondering more than once, Why have we been here for a month? He believed, he said, that the judge had decided the case. Gamblin, who owns a title company, had no problem understanding the charts and graphs of the cutters’ case. He would later actually consult Gorman on a contract matter, he was so impressed with him in court. Inside the jury room, Gamblin said to the other jurors, “Did the company cheat the workers?” They said yes. The instructions from the judge, however, were clear. They had to decide whether the company had intended to pay the workers what it did. That was all. “It was clear that the incentive system was a moving benchmark,” he tells me. “I don’t use the word ‘fraud,’ but there was no level playing field for the workers.”

When the jurors returned to the courtroom, one woman was crying. The foreman asked the judge to read an unusual statement, which would later be reported in the Palm Beach Post.

Atlantic Sugar consistently misrepresented to the cutters the incentive features of their task system of payment. It was shameful.

However, the scope of the verdict form presented to us by the court was limited to a single issue—“Does the contract require Atlantic to pay plaintiffs a minimum task rate of $5.30 per ton of harvest cane?”

This case was not frivolous.

A few miles from the courthouse, in the neighborhood known as Little Guatemala, a former cane cutter named Michael Cameron lives in a single room attached to a family’s larger room in a dilapidated boardinghouse. He has no telephone, and it takes him some time to come to the door. He peers out, unsure whether to speak to me. It is a steamy April night, and he is in his underwear, but he quickly pulls on a pair of shorts. Ascertaining that I am not a lawyer or a cop, he agrees to come out and talk in the car.

Cameron, who was known as Big Mike at Okeelanta, was one of the fastest workers, sometimes cutting 20 tons in a single day. Arriving in Florida at age 21, he considered himself lucky just to get hired. That was, he said, “better than yard,” the Jamaican expression meaning no work. “Gentlemen, if it were easy, you would not be here,” the supervisor told the workers on their first day at Okeelanta.

I ask Cameron what he would say to Alfy Fanjul if he were sitting in the car with us. “I would say to him that he hides from his dirty work. They try to pat you on the shoulder in order to get you to kill the other guy.… Most of their guys in the field are the lead men and the ticket writers. They take them ‘off the knife.’ They know that cutting cane is very hard, so they try to work on the boss’s side. The boss tell them to cheat us, and they say, ‘I have to do my job, man. I have to get away from the slavery.’ … I have seen men working for 30-odd years on the contract. That man is old and shaky. He cannot get up the row as fast as he could.… They use the term ‘car faster than car’—that man is old, I am young, faster than him.