John Barnett was called “Mitch” among family and “Swampy” (short for “Swamp Dawg”) by friends, a reference to the warm heaviness of his Louisiana drawl. He had lots of tattoos, raced cars on dirt tracks, drove a bright orange Dodge Ram pickup, and was known as the “FUNcle” by his doting nieces and nephews, to whom he jumped at the chance to move closer when Boeing, his then-employer of 22 years, announced it was opening a massive final assembly plant in North Charleston, South Carolina, for its new 787 Dreamliner in 2010.
The job, overseeing a group of 10 to 12 quality assurance inspectors, quickly turned out to be the stuff of night terrors. Boeing had relocated south to avoid the machinists’ union, but they had no real plan for circumventing Charleston’s distinct dearth of machinists. Swampy was a good teacher, but Boeing executives did not shy away from voicing their opinion that quality assurance itself was fundamentally frivolous. At Boeing’s Everett, Washington, facility, each quality assurance inspector was assigned to examine the work of 15 mechanics; in Charleston, that number was 50, and the mechanics themselves more often than not were guys who had been “flipping burgers” a month ago, as Swampy put it in multiple interviews. So every day, the workers he supervised inspected planes that had been assembled by complete amateurs, while the bosses to whom he reported insisted the fry cooks were perfectly qualified to self-inspect their own workmanship. “Every day was a battle to get Boeing management to do the right thing,” Swampy’s brother Rodney Barnett recalled in an email.
In 2016, a doctor warned Swampy he’d have a heart attack if he stayed at Boeing much longer; last weekend, when a front desk worker at a Holiday Inn in Charleston called to say that Swampy had been located in his orange Ram and that “EMS is coming,” his lawyer Robert Turkewitz figured his weary heart had given out on him.
He’d known Swampy since January 2017, when he got a call from the newly retired manager about what he’d witnessed at the 787 plant. They filed their first complaint in Barnett v. Boeing Co. that very night. More than seven years later, their case was finally in the home stretch, and Swampy, now 62, was scheduled to show up at the downtown office of Boeing’s defense firm Ogletree Deakins at 10 a.m. on Saturday for the third day of a three-day deposition. The trial date had been set for June.
“He was really glad to be finally getting the whole story out on the record,” says Turkewitz. “I think it was cathartic for him.”
On the first day of the deposition, Swampy had killed it, because no one knew more about his case than he did. But when it came time for Swampy’s own legal team to take over questioning, he began to wear thin, exhausted by the burdens of going over the minute details of his six-year odyssey into the depths of aviation hell. They agreed to break around 6 p.m. and come back the next morning, after which Swampy planned to drive straight back to Louisiana; he could no longer stomach flying after what he’d seen at the 787 plant.
Deliberate nondocumentation was a cornerstone of the new Boeing culture with which Swampy came into constant conflict.
He grabbed some Taco Bell on the way back to the Holiday Inn; there was still condensation on the cup of melted ice the hotel manager found when Turkewitz asked if the receptionist could check his room the next morning, worried that his phone was sending him straight to voicemail. Turkewitz asked if she could see the orange Ram in the parking lot; it was indeed there, sitting in about six inches of rain. All the lawyers, Boeing’s included, quickly drove over to what they assumed was the scene of a cardiac arrest.
Swampy was inside the Ram, bleeding from his right temple with a silver pistol in his hand and something “resembling a note” in the passenger seat. A groundsman told police he’d heard a “pop” around 9:24 a.m., but rain had muffled the sound. Everyone was in shock. Barnett had been diagnosed with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, incurred in his daily struggles with Boeing management. “I represent a lot of disabled veterans, and I know that there’s a really high percentage of people with PTSD who kill themselves because it becomes unbearable,” Turkewitz said. But Swampy, he insists, was not in that kind of place. “It made no sense” for him to take his own life when he was so close to final vindication, Turkewitz added.
“It really came out of nowhere,” concurs his brother Rodney, who otherwise refrained from commenting in deference to the ongoing investigation. (Louisiana does not require citizens to register their ownership of small firearms, but Rodney refused to say whether his brother owned a silver pistol.) A family member told Turkewitz what was written on the note, but “it didn’t sound like John,” he insists. Turkewitz’s co-counsel Brian Knowles issued a statement to Corporate Crime Reporter saying Barnett was “dead from an ‘alleged’ self-inflicted gunshot.” No one wanted to say outright what they thought had happened, but as CNBC anchor Becky Quick quipped when she opened Tuesday’s Squawk Box with the story, “this looks fishy.”
A RECORD 50,000 AMERICANS TOOK THEIR OWN LIVES in 2023; it is not a normal thing for Americans to assume an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound is actually a cleverly concealed corporate assassination. But that was the conclusion of just about everyone who saw news of Barnett’s death posted on X yesterday, just a few ominous hours after we heard that a Charleston-built 787 flying over New Zealand randomly plunged so suddenly that some 50 passengers who weren’t wearing seat belts slammed into the ceiling and required hospitalization.
I personally have trouble believing Boeing would plot a whistleblower murder, mostly because there are dozens of internal whistleblowers where Swampy came from, and it would be impractical to kill all of them, especially given that Boeing has thus far enjoyed exceptional impunity without bringing about the mysterious death of any crucial witnesses. (Save of course for the pilots and crew of the 737 MAX jets whose uncommanded nosedives into the Earth five years ago precipitated the quick descent of the reputation of America’s last great manufacturer into the ranks of corporate cartoon villains like Purdue Pharma and Corinthian Colleges.)
Last month, we explored the affiliations and career histories of the incestuous clique of Boeing attorneys and Justice Department officials who facilitated the shameful “deferred prosecution agreement” that ended the criminal investigation into Boeing’s homicidal conduct with regard to the 737 MAX. Conspiracy fans will be interested to read about the thicket of connections between the lawyers who drafted Jeffrey Epstein’s shocking 2008 immunity deal and those who concocted Boeing’s, which was signed January 6, 2021. Whatever the significance of those eerie connections, Boeing has thus far proven so immune from consequence for its greed-driven decisions that a federal judge warned the DOJ in open court two weeks ago that its mysterious resistance to properly investigating Boeing was jeopardizing its own reputation in the eyes of the American public.
The judge said this while ruling in the DOJ’s favor, in a case filed by 737 MAX victims’ families to force the agency to hand over its files on the decision to close the Boeing case with a toothless DPA. The judge, Beryl Howell, denied the families’ motion, but rebuked the agency for failing to “take seriously the reputation of the Department of Justice [in] responding to all the smoke that has been generated about this DPA,” as evidenced by its failure to send a single lawyer from the fraud division to the March 1 hearing. “It’s the Department of Justice’s reputation at stake here in how well they’re protecting the public interest,” she told the courtroom.
Eight days later, The Wall Street Journal broke the news that the DOJ had opened a new criminal investigation into Boeing’s culpability for the door plug that flew off a 737 MAX operated by Alaska Airlines on January 5.
Given all we have learned in the past few weeks alone about Boeing’s institutional rot—its failure to install a single bolt that would have affixed the door plug into the Alaska Airlines fuselage, that the Alaska plane was scheduled for a safety check the day the door plug blew out, its failure of 33 of 89 FAA audits, the jammed rudder that caused a near miss in a 737 MAX in Newark last week, the passenger noting a “wing coming apart” on a San Francisco-to-Boston flight that was forced to make a premature landing, its ongoing effort to fast-track a malfunctioning de-icing function, the use of Dawn dish soap and hotel room key cards to check door seals—one might assume that proving the company had violated the terms of its DPA would be a cakewalk. But as it is written, the only actual requirements of complying with the DPA are that Boeing cooperate fully with domestic and foreign regulatory authorities in any investigations during the three years in which it remains in effect.
To be sure, the National Transportation Safety Board accused Boeing last week of refusing to cooperate in its investigation of the flyaway door plug. Boeing maintains it has cooperated “fully and transparently” with the NTSB; it simply does not possess the documents the agency is seeking because it no longer documents the repairs and procedures the agency is accustomed to asking for documentation of.
Deliberate nondocumentation was a cornerstone of the new Boeing culture with which Swampy came into constant conflict. In 2014, he was reprimanded in a performance review for documenting “process violations” in writing instead of flagging issues verbally and “working in the gray areas”—i.e., without leaving a paper trail. Nondocumentation was part of a larger “theory,” Swampy explained in an interview earlier this year with TMZ, that “quality is overhead and not value-added.”
Sitting before a commemorative plaque from his work on the Space Shuttle program, on which he worked before Boeing bought the Rockwell division that managed the shuttle contract, Swampy gently described how his team had been taken off a job for finding 300 defects on a section of fuselage, and his failed efforts to prevent mechanics from breaking into the cage where defective parts were stored before suppliers retrieved them to be repaired. Managers stole parts from the cage so frequently that he had the locks changed, Turkewitz told the Prospect, but higher-ups directed him to have 200 new keys made so they could continue swiping bad parts to install on planes. And that was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg of what Swampy witnessed in his six torturous years in North Charleston, Turkewitz says.
And while Barnett conducted numerous high-profile interviews over the years with the likes of The New York Times, the producers of the Netflix documentary Downfall, and the Today show, what was most unusual from his lawyers’ perspective was that he had the receipts. Unlike would-be whistleblower clients who find themselves “perp walked” out of the plant without access to their phones or email accounts, Turkewitz told the Prospect, “John had meticulously documented everything, he had thousands of pages stored on his computer.” Those documents were especially invaluable because of the meager force of the “AIR 21” statute governing aviation whistleblowers, which forces industry employees who are fired for speaking out about unsafe practices to litigate their grievances in a secret court system operated by the Department of Labor that lacks subpoena power.
If nothing else, Turkewitz hopes to use Barnett’s death to make a case for reform to the AIR 21 statute, the creation of an obscure 2000 law that places near-impossible demands on whistleblowers—including an absurd 90-day statute of limitations on retaliatory conduct—and is still so woefully underfunded it can barely handle the cases it has, which is why Swampy’s case had dragged on more than seven years.
But the end was almost in sight. “He was in very good spirits and really looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him,” Turkewitz said. “We didn’t see any indication he would take his own life. We need more information … No one can believe it.”