‘How Tough Do We Need to Be?’

Is Ogunleye vs. Pitney Bowes the case of the $11-million ooga booga? Or is it an important battle in a war that only the privileged or callous pretend has been resolved?

Some see it as a story of an old-boy judge protecting corporate insensitivity; others, as a renegade jury handing society’s hypersensitive another litigation lottery jackpot. Either way, the story tends to make arteries pump hard against collars, perhaps because it cuts so sharply to so many questions evolving from an unfolding age of diversity.

In September, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury decided that postage-meter behemoth Pitney Bowes Corp. had discriminated against Akintunde I. Ogunleye, a black Nigerian American salesman. It awarded him a stunning $11.1 million in damages.

Two months later, however, Judge Malcolm H. Mackey voided that, saying the award “shocks the conscience of this court. . . . This is a country of pioneers and immigrants who forged their way across the many hazards and dangers to reach the West. And to allow isolated statements and rudeness of our employees to destroy our business and legal communities is unwarranted.”

As Ogunleye’s attorney prepared to appeal, U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and Assemblywoman Sheila J. Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) took up the cause. Pointing to Mackey’s 1994 decision to throw out an $89-million discrimination judgment against Hughes Aircraft (part of which was restored Jan. 6 by the 2nd District Court of Appeal), they scheduled hearings about judges thwarting discrimination awards.

“His ancestors may have come across the plains in wagons,” Waters said of Mackey, but “mine came across the sea in chains. How tough do we need to be?”

As it happens, Ogunleye left Africa of his own accord, to live in what he still considers “the land of opportunity . . . the greatest country on Earth.”

But he, too, bristles at the suggestion that his fate at Pitney Bowes stems from fragility: “I come of a generation of warriors,” he says in impeccable Queen’s English, tinged with a Nigerian lilt. “I was raised to always try to overcome adversities in life.”

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In her opening statement in August, Margaret S. Henry, Ogunleye’s attorney, said she would piece together a portrait of a corporate America that still harbors enough racism to crack the strongest soul.

But a diverse world offers a kaleidoscope of viewpoints. From Pitney Bowes’ perspective--as reflected in court records, interviews and in company-supplied material--Ogunleye’s charges blindsided an enlightened firm far more accustomed to accolades.

Fifty years ago, for instance, a chairman of the Stamford, Conn.-based corporation began the company’s crusade against discrimination by advocating hiring policies that would now be called affirmative action. According to a 1961 corporate biography, the firm aspired to make its work force match the ethnic makeup of the surrounding community.

Today, the company offers a litany of statistics to show that it has steadily intensified its commitment: 24% of the company’s 24,000 U.S. employees are black, as are 11% of its middle managers. And 6% of the company’s best-paid executives are African American, which favorably compares to a national figure of 2.3%.

No one at Pitney Bowes will discuss the case since it is still pending. But the company’s intended message is clear: When Ogunleye joined the firm in June 1990, he stepped onto a welcome mat that the company had been unfurling for five decades--at least in part because it believes a diverse work force is good business.

In court, company attorney Lester Jones suggested that Ogunleye, by breaking company sales records, proved that very point. The company responded, Jones said, by identifying him as a “high potential minority,” assigning him to a national minority focus group and appointing him as its first Southern California “minority coordinator,” kicking up his salary by $500 a month.

Along the way, though, Ogunleye ran into the sort of difficulties that don’t discriminate, contended Jones, who is black. Ogunleye spread himself thin financially. He injured his neck. Depression set in. His performance sagged, Jones said, and customers complained.

Without citing discrimination, Ogunleye took disability leave in 1993--a year in which Pitney Bowes won its second “America’s Corporate Conscience” award and was named one of the top 10 employers for women and minorities by the book “100 Best Companies to Work for in America.”

After 60 days, Jones told the jury, the company followed its stated policy and reassigned Ogunleye’s sales territory, which included parts of San Fernando and Simi valleys. When Ogunleye returned, the company again tried to nurture him. But, Jones said, the once gung-ho employee seemed more interested in a favorite sales staff habit: whining about territory. And when a customer complained that Ogunleye had forged her name on a contract, the stress increased.

On top of all that, Jones said, Ogunleye’s marriage hit a particularly sharp rock, further jolting the salesman’s self-esteem. He took another disability leave and, in July 1994, resigned from Pitney Bowes. That he went to work for another corporation the next day shows that he must not have been too badly damaged, Jones implied.

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Ogunleye, now 46, was born in a small town in Nigeria. He grew up in Lagos, the capital, where his father worked as a short-haul trucker, a middle-class job that allowed him to send his six children to private school.

“My father said, ‘If I put my effort into building a house, it will someday collapse, but if I build my children, they will carry my name,’ ” Ogunleye recalls.

He dreamed of working in broadcasting and, for two years after high school, he had a show on Radio Nigeria. Then he left Africa to continue his education, bouncing from Great Britain to Ottawa, and on to a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Washington and a master of fine arts from UCLA.

With broadcast work hard to come by, Ogunleye took a job with a firm that sold prefabricated housing to African governments. On a trip to Nigeria, he realized, “This is not my home anymore.”

But he had grown comfortable with sales.

“Sales is exciting,” Ogunleye says. “You get to meet different kinds of people. . . . To be a successful salesperson, you have to understand human nature.”

Ogunleye’s sister-in-law worked at Pitney Bowes in Los Angeles, and he saw opportunity in her success. Today, he feels compelled to note: “She’s Caucasian.” At the time, though, her race seemed irrelevant, he says.

His father and his teachers--who mainly were black but included a few white Peace Corps volunteers--taught him to be colorblind, he says. But he also studied the African diaspora. He knew that the slave trade had scattered the continent’s people throughout a world that often greeted them with bigotry and hatred.

“When I came to America,” he says, “I really didn’t know what to expect. It’s one thing to read about something, another thing to experience it.”

What disturbed him most, he says, was that so many black children are exposed to prejudice that can wilt pride and confidence.

With that in mind, Ogunleye developed “Opportunity America,” a program to teach area students that “you can do whatever you put your mind to.”

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That same attitude, he says, drove his success at Pitney Bowes, where, in less than a year, he worked his way up from a salaried “street beater” to a record-breaking sales rep--despite being given what he considered a “terrible” territory.

At trial, Ogunleye was limited to complaints about his final year, and his lawyer outlined 21 incidents of discrimination. But those were just the final straws, he says.

On his initial ride-along, for instance, the company assigned him to an African American salesman who said that he, too, was new and didn’t know the territory.

“It’s kind of interesting that they’d match us together,” he quotes the man as saying.

“I kind of went, ‘hmmm,’ ” Ogunleye recalls.

Then, before Thanksgiving 1990, his division offered a turkey to any salesperson who “met quota.”

Ogunleye had chalked up two months of top sales figures. As he stood in the hallway of the Van Nuys office, he asked another sales representative about the contest.

At that point, he contends, a third rep stepped out of an office and said: “Let me explain it to you because you blacks are not as smart as us whites. Your teachers are not as smart as our teachers, so how can you guys be smart?”

Ogunleye was stunned. “Why would you make a statement like that?” he asked. “The color of your skin doesn’t determine your IQ.”

A manager overheard the remarks, he says, but did nothing. By year’s end, Ogunleye was the company’s top rookie salesman, but he says he didn’t receive awards and recognition he had earned.

Eventually it dawned on him: His white managers felt compelled to assuage the white sales force and to massage a human drive that transcends even greed, he says: “The dark side of these people came flying out. The hate. The prejudice.”

He began piecing incidents together. When leg cramps gave him a temporary limp, he says a district director asked: “What’s that, your jungle walk?”

Finally, in March 1993, Ogunleye took disability leave for stress and the injury he had suffered lifting a Pitney Bowes machine. Although he stayed in touch with the office, even working from home on occasion, on June 1 he learned that his sales turf had been redistributed among white reps.

When he returned to work that summer, he was assigned even less desirable sales terrain, despite, he says, promises that he would be given a better territory. He was also demoted. Ogunleye still blanches at his new district director’s way of telling the star salesman he would have to prove himself anew: “You’re are just like Darryl Strawberry.”

In his mind, the pattern of insults and discrimination had reappeared.

In December 1993, a French Canadian sales representative told him to move away from the window because “his blackness was causing the room to be dark,” he says. Then, in March 1994, the same man was sitting with another rep at a computer when Ogunleye entered the room.

The Canadian testified that he greeted Ogunleye, saying, “Akintunde, bonjour, bonjour.”

But Ogunleye, who studied French for two years, heard something different: “Akintunde, ooga booga, jungle jungle.”

His frustration overflowed: “Why are you always saying those things to me?” Ogunleye asked. That night, a manager who had witnessed the incident reprimanded him for “losing control.”

Such allegations evoke a sigh from Ogunleye, and a reference to prizefighter George Foreman: “[He] was a giant. But you can only take so many blows before you fall. . . . I took a lot of blows.”

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In his closing argument, company attorney Jones said that in “a desperate attempt to portray himself as a victim,” Ogunleye had cooked up a convoluted scenario in which people, many he had never even met, conspired to hurt him because of his race.

Conversely, Ogunleye’s lawyer labeled Pitney Bowes’ vaunted diversity program “all show.”

“Imagine a proud, African American man,” Henry said. “He’s well educated. He’s decent. He’s hard-working. He’s successful. . . . What price would [he] take to be made fun of, to have his dignity destroyed . . . to have his trust in humanity destroyed. . . ?”

She also addressed those skeptics who believe that discrimination has been driven from America. “One of the best things that came out of the O.J. Simpson trial,” she said, “are the Mark Fuhrman tapes . . . [which] show the degree of racial discrimination that still exists in this country.”

The racially mixed jury awarded Ogunleye $95,000 in economic damages and $11 million in emotional and punitive damages.

Jones promptly filed a motion that blasted the “utterly outrageous” award and said that the reference to Fuhrman had inflamed the jury. He urged the judge to fulfill his role as “13th juror” and render “a judgment notwithstanding the verdict” or grant a new trial.

Judge Mackey, an ex-Marine, former Democratic activist and onetime sales representative himself, agreed, saying the evidence did not support a “runaway verdict.” The sales world, he said, is a “dog-eat-dog competition,” and, “Most of the plaintiff’s claims are the ordinary grievances that a salesman suffers on their day-to-day battle to earn commission.

“Is our society so fragile that a salesman cannot take isolated comments, in a world where our movies, TV and media constantly use language which is offensive and salacious?”

Three months later, Ogunleye blinks back tears. Then he shakes his head angrily, both at the suggestion he should be tougher, and at such a harsh view of his chosen country.