Whistleblower Slain After Police Release Tape Of His Call

GREEN BAY, Wis. - The voice on the police line was firm but halting. "OK. I'd like to report an employee theft which is gonna occur at James River (paper mill). . . . I witnessed ah, him, you know, loading the stuff up . . . to take it out. . . . But, he ah, ah, he's known to be violent . . ."

Tom Monfils assumed that his call on Nov. 10, 1992, would remain anonymous and confidential. He assumed wrong. After a five-day suspension for refusing to cooperate with an investigation of the reported theft, the employee, Keith Kutska, legally acquired a recording of the call. Then he took it to work, "because people wanted to know who the snitch was," he said at a hearing. "I played it and said, `There he is.' "

When Monfils came to work the next day, close to 40 people had heard the tape. "The noose was already around his neck," said Joan Monfils, his mother. One day later, on Nov. 22, Monfils' body was found at the bottom of a 20-foot holding vat for tissue pulp. A rope attached to a 40-pound weight was tied to his neck.

Now, nearly one year later, no one has been charged, and fear and silence linger among James River mill workers despite a $25,000 reward.

Green Bay, where for generations paper mills have provided the best-paying production jobs, was stunned by the crime. "In the annals of workplace misconduct, nothing compares," Robert Duffy, a lawyer for the company, wrote in a brief for an unemployment-benefits hearing.

The case seemed to pit two contrary ethics against each other: that of the loyal worker who identifies his interests with the company's, and that of the unwritten code held by some that says never to inform on a fellow union member, even if he steals from the company.

There is little doubt that Monfils, 35, the father of two, was a company man. "He was the kind of guy that if you owned a company, you'd want to hire. He'd do the job you'd do if you were there," said a co-worker who, like others contacted, would not speak for attribution.

He had a work ethic given him by his mother and his father, Ed, who worked at the same mill for 36 years. As a boy, Tom Monfils built up his newspaper route to 300 customers, and delivered papers on a unicycle. As a young Coast Guardsman in New Jersey, he won recognition for his commitment to duty.

Once hired at James River Corp., he picked up as much overtime as he could and spent his spare hours remodeling old homes. "Tom was a goer," said his mother.

At the mill, Monfils, a nonsmoker and nondrinker, was clearly outside the dominant clique that enjoyed hitting the bars and strip joints after work, said the co-worker.

While no one has been charged in the murder, Kutska, 42 - who was fired last March for creating an "atmosphere of intimidation" and convicted of stealing a 16-foot extension cord from the mill - has been named in a wrongful-death suit filed by Monfils' wife, Susan. Also named is another former James River mill employee, Reynold C. Moore, and five current ones, Michael Hirn, Randy Lepak, Michael L. Piaskowski, Dale Basten and Michael L. Johnson. She accuses them of conspiracy in the death of her husband.

"We believe that the evidence in this case will show . . . not that all seven beat and killed Tom Monfils, but that all seven played a part in his death," said Bruce Bachhuber, Susan Monfils' lawyer.

Kutska's lawyer, Royce Finne, says the suit is painting all seven men with the same brush: "It's a situation where there are one or two guilty people and five or six innocent ones, and the innocent ones don't know the details of what the guilty ones did."

All seven men, however, have maintained a stony silence over the past year. Their only comments have been made in legal hearings to retain their jobs or their jobless benefits.

From those proceedings, it is known that Kutska played the police tape Nov. 20 for Marlyn Charles, president of Local 227 of the United Paperworkers International Union. That night he played it over the phone to Piaskowski and Lepak, and he came to work early the next morning and played it again for any fellow worker who wanted to hear it.

It was obvious the voice was Monfils'.

Claiming that Charles condoned his actions, Kutska said he set out with Lepak and Piaskowski as witnesses to get Monfils' admission that he made the call. This was necessary, he claimed, to file a grievance under a clause in the union constitution that admonishes against "wronging" a fellow member.

Among fellow workers that morning, the start of deer-hunting season, Kutska joked, "Well, I got my first buck."

About 7 a.m. Kutska entered the narrow soundproof control booth for No. 7 paper machine, where Monfils sat reading a newspaper. Piaskowski sat nearby.

"Hey Py (Piaskowski), name that tune," Kutska said as he began playing the tape, according to the hearing transcripts. After moments of silence, and with Lepak and Kutska standing at the doors, a stunned Monfils admitted it was him. After Kutska supposedly left the room, Piaskowski and Lepak berated him.

Why, they said they asked him, didn't he report the impending theft to the union or the company, or talk it over with Kutska?

Monfils apparently felt the union was not an option: Kutska was his union steward.

James Taylor, chief of detectives at the Green Bay Police Department, believes Monfils' goal was to get Kutska, with whom he had differences, caught and punished. He was not out to curry favor with management, or he would have informed to them, Taylor said.

After Kutska left control room No. 7, he went down to his own station at No. 9, where he played the tape for some workers who had come up from another work area. Among them, according to testimony, were Hirn and Moore, Basten and Johnson. Kutska acknowledged telling Hirn, "I can't go intimidate him, Mike. I can't help what you want to do."

About 7:30, Monfils had completed some adjustments on No. 7 paper machine and was headed back to his control room. The civil suit alleges that one or more of the seven men named threatened him, "attacked him, beat him, knocked him unconscious, tied the rope and weight around his neck and threw him into the tissue chest (pulp vat) near No. 7 paper machine."

To an extent, the reluctance of townspeople to speak out may have grown out of the Police Department's surrendering of the Monfils tape to Kutska. That decision was based on a liberal, and in hindsight misguided, reading of the state's open-records law by an assistant city attorney.

"The cops screwed up," said one worker at the mill. "People aren't going to go on record saying nothing. A lot of guys are as scared of them (police) as they are the guys at the plant."

Still, Green Bay police, who have assigned three homicide detectives full time to the case, say they are confident they are making progress.

"It's not going to go away," Brown County District Attorney John Ziakowski said of the investigative effort. "These aren't professional killers. It's going to stick to them as long as they live."