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Press [RETURN] to continue or type q to return to Menu: ♦ mhcur LADY CLAW 01/04/98 THE MIAMI HERALD Copyright (c) 1998, The Miami Herald DATE: Sunday, January 4 , 1998 EDITION: Final SECTION: Tropic PAGE: 9 LENGTH: 643 `lines ILLUSTRATION: color photo: Grace Weiss and Jo Ann Bass (a) , Joe ' s crab (n) , Steve Sawitz in Joe' s courtyard (n) , Jessica and Lauren Hershey with Jo Ann Bass and Jodi Hershey and Gracw Weiss (a) , Eve Lowe (a) , Jo Ann Weiss (a-ran on the cover) ; photo: Joe and Jennie Weiss in front of the orginial bungalow (a) , Say Sawitz (n) , Jo Ann as a baby with her grandmother Jennie, Jo Ann with an unidentified woman (n) , Grace and Jesse with Tommy Dorsey and another man (n) , Jo Ann as a teenager (a) SOURCE/CREDIT LINE: JOHN DORSCHNER Tropic Staff Writer LADY CLAW Roll call, 1997 : Trembling slightly, the woman with a ponytail takes a seat at a table facing three grim interviewers. She leans forward, knowing she has maybe three minutes to sell herself if she ' s to land the dream job that virtually all South Florida waiters aspire to. Dozens of eyes are watching her carefully in the dining room of Joe ' s Stone Crab Restaurant. At a nearby table, two government lawyers lean forward to hear. So does a $200-an-hour moderator appointed by a federal judge. Plus a court-ordered industrial psychologist, two Joe ' s lawyers and a pair of publicists hired by Joe ' s to handle all the journalists who have come. Under the glare of TV hot lights, the lead interviewer asks the woman why she wants to become a server at Joe' s. The real answer is that it ' s one of the great restaurant jobs in America: $30, 000 to $50, 000 for seven months ' work, great health plan, profit sharing -- and stability. The average waiter switches jobs every six months. At Joe ' s, people stay for decades. The job is so lucrative almost 200 men and women are here to vie for perhaps a dozen positions. The woman' s answer is lost to reporters because it is drowned out by the whir of motor-driven still cameras, but the interviewers nod pleasantly (as they have been told to do after hours of court-required training) and make notes on their four-page court-approved evaluation forms. The interviewers study the woman carefully. She is pushing 40 and her eyes are heavily made up. Is that good -- an indication that she ' s concerned about a good appearance, one of the four court-approved hiring criteria. Or do her eyes earn a demerit by making her look too much like a cocktail waitress? The interviewers (two men and a woman, a court-required ratio) quietly make more marks. The woman walks to a large metal tray loaded with plates and bowls. It weighs precisely 21 .24 pounds -- a court-approved weight. Slowly, knowing how important the next few seconds are, the applicant bends her knees and puts a hand under the center of the tray. She rises, lifting the tray above her shoulder. She takes a half-dozen steps. The tray wobbles, and she glances at the panel. Is this an unacceptable slip? Or an irrelevant bobble? Lawyers and interviewers make more little marks, but no one says anything. A few feet away, Jo Ann Bass and Grace Weiss stand, shaking their heads. They are the co-owners of Joe ' s, and because a federal judge has ruled after a 15-day trial that they have discriminated against women for a decade, their restaurant is staging this bizarre spectacle. The one-day hiring ritual used to cost them $650 ( for a classified ad and doughnuts for the applicants) . This year, after months of court hearings, Jo Ann guesses the cost is $100, 000 , most of which has gone to lawyers in the intense legal wrangling over the specifics of how the roll call would be conducted. - -What a travesty, " she mumbles. Big Sister After eight decades, Joe ' s Stone Crab Restaurant is a Miami institution, arguably a national treasure. Even in the midst of its battles over discrimination, Gov. Lawton Chiles calls on the restaurant to send 100 pounds of stone crabs to Washington bigwigs to help persuade them to have a big hemispheric conference in South Florida. When South Florida wants to host a Super Bowl, it bribes NFL owners with Joe ' s crabs. On weekend nights, people often wait two hours to eat, and the most effective method of tipping the maitre d' is the subject of local lore. Joe ' s ranks consistently among the top money-earning restaurants in the United States, though it is open only the seven months each year that stone crabs are in season. Last year, according to a trade publication, it brought in $17 .6 million, placing it seventh in the nation. Jo Ann Bass, granddaughter of founder Joe Weiss, owns two-thirds of the restaurant. The other third is owned by Grace Weiss, who was wife No. 5 and No. 7 of Jo Ann' s father, the late Jesse Weiss. Jesse Weiss was a stubborn and passionate man, and the two women proudly follow his combative tradition -- most particularly in their six-year battle against the federal government. It began in 1991, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accused Joe ' s of discrimination because none of its 65-plus servers was a woman. Jo Ann was shocked. Just that year, she had received an award from the National Association of Businesswomen. She counted as her closest friends Ruth Shack, for years the leading female politician in Dade County, and the late Janet Chusmir, the first female to head The Miami Herald' s news operations. At the time of the EEOC complaint, Jo Ann says, seven of her 11 department heads were women. - -There was nothing I would do to hurt the cause of women, " she says. Her stepmother, Grace, was even more shocked. She asked Jo Ann: "You' re not going to roll over and play dead on this, are you? " That' s precisely what Joe ' s lawyers were advising: settle quickly. They estimated it would cost no more than a couple of hundred thousand dollars to get the feds off their backs. To Jo Ann, that meant confessing guilt. " I 'm just not going to say I discriminate when I don' t, " she insists. So far, that stand has cost her more than $650, 000 in legal fees, and she still is liable for damages to women allegedly victimized by Joe' s discrimination. The amount of the damages should be determined in a trial scheduled to start this in the next few days. " I 'm standing up for all the small businesses that can't stand up for themselves, " she says . "Even if we lose, it ' s important to stand up for your rights. This is America. " Jo Ann has become so committed that several weeks ago, she flew to Osgood, Ind. , just to thank a half-dozen high-school students who wrote her sympathetic letters after reading a syndicated column about how "Big Sister" was attempting to take over a family restaurant. She ' s finding support in a lot of places, including ones that might never be expected to oppose the EEOC. Alcee Hastings, the African-American congressman from Fort Lauderdale, sent Jo Ann a handwritten note. " I too am outraged, " he wrote, about the EEOC ' s "unwarranted, unfair and most unnecessary litigation. " What ' s unfair, counters EEOC officials, is discriminating against women. "We say the same thing they do, " says Eve Lowe, head of EEOC ' s Miami office. " It ' s the principle. People were being discriminated against, and we wanted to stop the discrimination. " But even the EEOC people are careful not to directly blame Joe ' s female owners. Donald Tyler, who helped try the case for the commission: "No one is saying Jo Ann Bass is personally responsible. No one is asking her to personally confess or apologize. She testified she delegated hiring to the maitre d' , a man, who had been hired by Jo Ann' s father, a man. " Jo Ann is infuriated when she hears that. She defends her late father even more vigorously than she defends herself. "Joe ' s is more than a restaurant. It is more than a business. The attorneys keep telling me, 'Don't take it personally. ' But Joe' s is our . . . life. We' re very hands-on people. A family member is there whenever the restaurant is open. I lived above it until I got married. My parents lived above it for more than 40 years. . . . My` grandfather never discriminated. My father never discriminated. I never discriminated. " "She'd Hit Me Harder" Joe Weiss was a Jewish Hungarian immigrant who worked as a waiter in New York. In 1913, suffering from asthma, he moved to Miami Beach and started a lunch stand at Smith' s Bathing Casino. Business was good, so he sent for his wife, Jennie, and their only child, Jesse. In 1918 , he built a small wooden bungalow. He set up a half-dozen tables on the porch and called it Joe' s Restaurant, specializing in snapper and mackerel. He cooked. Jennie waited on tables, helped by Jesse when he turned 12 . At the time, Beach developer Carl Fisher refused to sell property to Jews north of Fifth Street, but down at the tip of South Beach, the Weisses carved out a living. In 1921 , life got much better after a Harvard ichthyologist told Joe that the stone crabs then plentiful in Biscayne Bay were a great delicacy. "No one eats the damn things around here, " Joe told him. "Try them, " urged the scientist. Legend has it Joe boiled the crabs, but no one liked them hot. Leftovers were thrown in the refrigerator, and the next day a couple of people tried them cold. Voila, a culinary delicacy was born. Before long, a plate of stone crabs -- 75 cents for four or five -- were the tourists ' dish of choice. In 1930, with business booming, Joe built a new restaurant in South Beach, with a cramped upstairs living quarters that consisted of two bedrooms separated by a small living room, a tiny kitchen-dining area and a bathroom. Joe died that same year, and Jesse, who was studying law, came back to help Jennie run the business. Jesse had a family to support. At 19 , he had married Frances Levitt, daughter of a wealthy Canadian investor. She gave birth to Jo Ann on Oct. 18 , 1931 . Nineteen months later, Frances died after colon surgery. She was 25 . Jo Ann has no memories of her mother. Nor does she recall her father' s wife No. 2 or No. 3, who came and went fairly quickly as Jo Ann occupied a bed in her grandmother' s room. "At nights, the kitchen crew would put me up on a shelf and watch me, " she says . When she got a little older, Jennie sent her across the street, to the Plaza Theater, where she 'd stay from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. , watching over and over movies like The Hurricane with Dorothy Lamour. Then Jo Ann would go back to the restaurant, to help out in the kitchen. Jennie didn't hesitate to punish her if she misbehaved. - -She 'd beat the living daylights out of me. She 'd swat me and say, 'Does that hurt? ' And I 'd say no. So she 'd hit me harder. . . . I have to say I deserved it. . . . I was an impossible little girl, but not as headstrong as she was. " Jennie died when Jo Ann was 7, and the girl began sharing her room with an African-American housekeeper and her two small children. As Jo Ann later testified in court: " I was totally raised by African Americans because my father was, to put it kindly -- and I adored him -- irresponsible. " Occasionally, Jesse even used his daughter to attract babes. As he once confessed to an interviewer: " I used to use Jo Ann as bait when I went to the beach. I 'd take this cute little girl with her little Scottie dog. " Jo Ann: - -He didn' t really need me, but he 'd use me sometimes. . . . He was a great womanizer. " She says Jesse ' s playing around didn't affect her at all, except in one way: " I vowed that when I grew up, I would never get divorced, no matter what. " Everyone adored her dad, she says, - -because he was so charming, such a rogue. You couldn't help but love him. " He loved lavishing gifts on people. Once, to stop a friend from making a marriage that Jesse thought unwise, he locked him in a bathroom. He told hilarious stories, took friends on spur-of-the-moment trips to the Bahamas and made women feel as though they were the most enchanting creatures in the world -- at least for a while. Women weren't Jesse ' s only weakness . As Jo Ann later put it in court testimony: "He gambled everything away that he ever got, and we never had any money. " Many nights he scooped money from the cash register and rushed across to a bookie ' s cabana to bet on the horses. One Stop Ahead of the Sheriff The first wife that Jo Ann remembers was No. 4 . Her name was Mildred, and after several years of marriage, when Jesse told her it was over, " I remember being very upset. " Not because she felt much attachment to Mildred, but because she feared losing what shred of stability the marriage provided. While Jo Ann was tended by kitchen help, Jesse went off to World War II, assigned to an Army unit in Illinois. There he met Grace Babbitt, a young student at a Chicago music conservatory. Grace was swept off her feet, as many a woman before her, and spent a year living with him until his divorce from Mildred became final. In 1943 they married, and after the war, they picked up Jo Ann at a summer camp. At age 11, Jo Ann met the woman who ever since she has called "Mother. " Though they have been steadfastly united through the years in their loyalty to Jesse and the restaurant, theirs is an exceedingly complicated relationship. Says Jo Ann: "All mothers and daughters have misunderstandings. . . . She loves me as much in her way as she ' s capable. . . . She ' s a very strong lady. Grace describes Jo Ann as "a good friend, " but when they first met, she says, " 'Jo Ann and I were competing for this man, and we didn't get along. . . either one. . . . It look years until everybody realized everybody was here to stay. " Jo Ann has a different recollection. She says that when the three of them went out to eat, Jesse lavished attention on her and ignored Grace. " I never competed with Mother. I always felt very secure with my dad. " But not so secure with Grace. Before No. 5 arrived, Jo Ann was used to having friends to the upstairs apartment and was never bothered by a mess. "But Mother was extremely fastidious. She brought order, and control . " Friends were no long allowed upstairs, and at 11 Jo Ann was made to work a full shift in the kitchen. ' 'Grace demanded and received my loyalty . . . I was always trying to placate my mother. " In the restaurant, Grace quickly realized that Jesse needed help and she jumped right in. The place was a financial disaster. Jesse was a glad-hander. He worked the dining room, swapping stories with diners, but had no interest in backroom operations. Grace soon found herself immersed in receipts and bills . Merchants taught her about seafood and vegetables. Grace: " I loved it from the very beginning. We struggled to survive. We all worked hard. " Grace and Jo Ann did whatever needed to be done, from making salads to helping with the cash register. Business kept getting better. But that didn' t mean any more affluence for the family, because Jesse hadn' t lost his fascination with gambling. Jo Ann: "We were always one stop ahead of the sheriff . " Eventually, banks refused to lend Jesse any more money, and he turned to Jo Ann' s maternal grandfather. Harry Levitt agreed to a loan only on the condition that Jesse sign over a third of the restaurant to Jo Ann -- who was all of 16 . School was Jo Ann' s one escape from restaurant drudgery. ' ' In high school, I had one dream. I wanted to be a cheerleader. I was short and fat and not very agile. Still, I got picked. Maybe because they felt sorry for me. But I had to give it up, because Grace said you can' t do both -- work in the restaurant and be cheerleader. " Jo Ann could have appealed to her father, but she didn' t want to cause any dissension in the family, of which there was already plenty. Jesse, who admitted to having "a hot Hungarian temper, " often threw pots and pans at Grace with the same fervor that he sometimes yelled at diners who dawdled over meals while others waited to be seated: "What do you think this is -- a library? " Jesse also objected intensely when anyone interfered with the way Joe ' s was run. For years, when a Beach curfew forbid blacks to be on the street at night, Jesse drove his black workers home to Overtown. When a restaurant union wanted to go into Joe ' s, Jesse objected. He didn' t want anyone interfering with his employees, Joe ' s paid better benefits than the union' s, and he hated the fact that the union at that time didn't allow black members. After a year of picketing, the union gave up. Later in court testimony, employees repeatedly talked about Joe ' s offering a sense of - - family. " Offspring of long-term employees went to work there. Youths started as busboys and worked their way up to waiters. Many called Grace - -Mother. " Jesse was - -Papa. " Sinking in Quicksand When Jo Ann was 18, she enrolled at the University of Miami. But the family turmoil created by Jesse ' s flamboyant lifestyle kept interfering. "Mother would call and say, ' I can't take this. You have to come talk to your father. ' I was doing very well in class, but I was in quicksand with this dysfunctional family. " She dropped out of school and moved back to the upstairs apartment. At 19, she escaped the family conflict by marrying Irwin (Say) Sawitz, a man she knew from high school, and moved to North Carolina, where he was going to college. She worked in a dress store to support them. "I couldn't go to school because the University of North Carolina . . . did not accept women in the freshman or sophomore years. " After Say graduated and finished a military stint, he was hoping to become an FBI agent. Grace begged him to come to work in the family business instead. - -She needed my strength because she couldn' t manage Jesse. . . . I had to take a strong hand, " says Say. He became vice president; Grace remained president. Jesse, who had been accustomed to taking all the cash from the bar to use for spending sprees, found himself on a strict allowance. From then on, says Say, 'basically he did PR. " While Say often worked from 6 a.m. to midnight, Jo Ann was a full-time homemaker in Miami Shores. - - I wanted a white picket fence and 12 children. " She had two: Jodi, followed two years later by Steve. Meanwhile, her father' s marriage fell apart, and in 1955 he divorced Grace. Grace says the split was amicable: - -The day after the divorce, we went out to lunch together. " At the restaurant, few customers knew about the change because both Jesse and Grace continued working there. Jesse moved out of the upstairs apartment, while Grace remained. Jesse married another woman and had two children, but in 1961, he obtained yet another divorce and remarried Grace, wife No. 7 . It was during the period of wife No. 6 that Jesse signed over to Jo Ann another third of the restaurant, with the understanding Jo Ann would always take care of him. - -He knew he wasn't dependable with money, and he knew he could always trust me. " When her son reached second grade, Jo Ann says, she was itching to do something outside the house, but Say didn' t want her working in the restaurant. She says Say had a - -rather fragile ego" and anytime she complained about something, even the lack of seasoning in a dish, - -he took it as an affront. He was a good entrepreneur, but not a good detail person. " She took a few courses at Barry University. That, she says, angered him because he thought she should devote herself full time to being a homemaker. She kept after him. " I just can' t sit home all day long, " she complained. After repeated cajoling, he allowed her to work as a bookkeeper at $100 a week -- at the very restaurant she owned two-thirds of. Meanwhile, the Sawitzes ' elder child, Jodi, dreamed of being a teacher, majored in education at the University of Miami, got married and raised children. Her younger sibling, Steve, was groomed to enter the business. He majored in restaurant management at Cornell and then went to work for Joe ' s. Later, after Jodi divorced, she, too, joined the family business. Jo Ann' s marriage also was struggling. She says problems arose in the early ' 80s, when Say started traveling to Japan to export stone crabs. " It gave him another vision of how women are supposed to be, " says Jo Ann, meaning submissive Japanese style. Say' s version of their breakup: "We got married very young. We had a wonderful marriage for many years . Things just fell apart over time. I really don't want to go into it. She ' s a wonderful woman. I was the one who left. I just wanted to get on with my life. " Jo Ann: - - It was devastating. " Her vow about never getting a divorce was - -taken out of my hands. " For a while, they tried to work together in the restaurant. " I couldn't work with him. He wanted to be my best friend, but every time we got together I ended up being manipulated. " In 1985, they agreed to part ways. As part of the arrangement, Say left the restaurant. He and Grace became co-owners of the wholesale company that provides stone crabs to Joe ' s and other South Florida restaurants. Say still talks frequently to his son, Steve, about the business, but not to Jo Ann. "We do not speak to each other to this day, " she says. The Cream of the Crop Now Jo Ann was left with a tough decision. - -When Say left me, I was told by the attorneys, by the accountants, 'You better sell it. You ' ll never be able to run it. ' " Her closest friends told her that was nonsense. Janet Chusmir, then publisher of a Colorado newspaper, advised her, "You sell it, I ' ll break both your arms. . . . You were born to it. You have forgotten more than most people will ever know. " Jo Ann immersed herself in the business. "When my marriage fell apart, the work saved me. . . . I was so scared I practically lived here the first year. " She started changing many things she thought had slipped over the years: altering the recipe for apple pie, devising a new house dressing, restoring jumbo stone crabs to the menu. She started a take-out service because some people were so desperate for stone crabs that they circumvented the waiting • line out front by going to the kitchen entrance in the alley and handing money to the kitchen help. One area she left alone, she says, was the hiring. Each October, there was a whirlwind week in which the restaurant prepared for the new season. On roll call day, all employees who wanted to return to work showed up, and Joe' s figured out how many new hires it needed. Selecting servers was left to a maitre d' . Occasionally a classified ad was placed in The Herald, but the job was so sought after that often just word-of-mouth brought in more than 100 applicants -- far more than enough to fill the five or 10 vacancies each fall. Joe ' s servers over the years had evolved into a predominantly male staff. During World War II, women had taken over for the men, but when the soldiers came home, they took back their jobs. There were usually a couple of women servers, but no more than that. Only once did a Joe ' s manager give a public explanation before the lawsuit. In 1983, a Herald reporter asked Say Sawitz why she saw only one female waiter: "Sawitz said the restaurant has no policy against hiring women, but that the huge food trays weigh too much for most women to carry comfortably. " The lone female server was Dottie Malone, who worked at Joe' s for 17 years. In 1986, Joe ' s put a second woman on the floor -- Linda Biancarny, an experienced server who had been hired as a cashier. She asked one of the women in the office -- she thought it might have been Jo Ann -- if she could become a server, and was given a three-day tryout. She did great and was put on full time. She stayed a few months, then left, citing family problems. At the end of the 1986 season, Dottie Malone retired at age 70. Over the next five years, Joe ' s hired 100 new servers -- all males. Females rarely applied. Each year in the late ' 80s, several Joe's managers testified, fewer than five of the 100 or so applicants were female. Those 100 were usually the cream of the crop of South Florida' s waiters, says Jo Ann. " I didn' t give direction to my maitre d' , " she says. "I had no reason not to have faith in him because of his choices up until then. " At First She Laughed Lunchtime at Joe ' s: Jo Ann Bass entertains an interviewer. She rarely eats at Joe ' s but when she does she sits at what has been considered the " family table " for more than 50 years -- right at the entrance to the main dining room, next to the cashier' s counter. She looks around anxiously, as she always does when she ' s in the restaurant. "Any smudge on the wall, I 'm hypersensitive, " she says. "Ohl " Dishes clatter in the kitchen. Most diners wouldn't fret about it, but Jo Ann knows: Something has been dropped. She orders a salad. She almost never eats stone crabs, she says. After 66 years of being surrounded by them, she finds they hold no romance for her. When the salad comes, served by a young man who was just hired at the ' 97 roll call, Jo Ann feels the underlying plate. - - It' s room temperature, " she says . - -You should always have a chilled plate with salad. They should have taught you that. " - -Yes, ma' am, " the waiter says quickly. Diners keep dropping by her table and giving her a quick hand squeeze or a hug. Hank Goldberg, the broadcaster, is there. So is Neisen Kasdin, the Miami Beach mayor. Nearby are two African-American attorneys, Jesse McCrary and H.T. Smith. Smith, who led the black tourist boycott several years ago after accusing local politicians of discrimination, is happily eating crabs in this place that has been accused of discriminating against women. He gives Jo Ann a friendly wave. At 66, she is - -mostly retired, " and travels a lot with her husband, Bob Bass, a retired surgeon. But during the season, she drops by the restaurant frequently. So does Grace, now 83, who became one-third owner after Jesse died in 1994 after a long bout with Alzheimer' s. Jo Ann' s son, Steve, 40, is chief operating officer. Jo Ann says that if the National Organization for Women had picketed, if women had complained that Joe ' s was discriminating by not hiring them, she would have looked more closely at the hiring. But that ' s not what happened. Instead, on June 25, 1991, Evan J. Kemp Jr. , head of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, sent a two-page letter to Joe ' s Stone Crabs charging the restaurant with " failing to recruit and hire females because of their sex. " Jo Ann laughed. She couldn' t believe it. Then she was shocked. " 'When I got over the shock, I was damn well outraged. " There was no indication any woman had complained that Joe ' s had discriminated against her. She wondered if government bureaucrats had arbitrarily decided to pick on Joe' s. In fact, the EEOC had targeted several restaurants. It filed a charge against Pat O' Brien' s in New Orleans in 1989 for not having any female servers. For that case, Commissioner Kemp trumpeted the new campaign by traveling to Louisiana to hold a nationally televised press conference. In 1990, it went after a fancy Dallas eatery, The Mansion on Turtle Creek, for having an all-male staff. And in the fall of 1991, it filed against the huge national chain, Hooters, for having only female servers. All of these cases began with a commission complaint: None started with persons complaining they had been discriminated against. Jo Ann began talking to labor attorneys. ' 'You can' t beat them, " she was told. A court battle could stretch on for years, and even if she won, her legal fees would be far greater than any settlement. Still, at the urging of Joe ' s lawyers, Jo Ann attended a mediation conference. ' 'A very disturbing meeting, " she dubs it. Though Joe's and the EEOC have agreed not to make settlement discussions public, experts say Joe ' s probably could have settled for around $100, 000. That money would have gone to women who could show that they were experienced servers who would have applied at Joe ' s if they hadn't thought the place discriminated against them. To Jo Ann, the money wasn't important. "They wanted an admission of guilt, and that I couldn't give them. " Eve Lowe, the head of EEOC ' s Miami office: ' ' I have no idea what she means. " Lowe says the courts require mediation efforts be kept confidential, but she says that " it ' s very common to allow a non-admissions clause, " in which a company settles without admitting to any wrongdoing. Jo Ann: —That ' s a god-blessed lie. " She says the EEOC wanted her to take out ads in trade publications and put up a sign in the restaurant admitting guilt and saying that women who felt they had been wronged could seek damages. A Men' s Saloon? Though she was convinced that Joe ' s did nothing wrong, for the 1991 roll call, Jo Ann began examining Joe' s hiring. She had a second maitre d' sit in on interviews . That year, 21 of 139 applicants were women. Publicity on the EEOC suit had spread word that Joe' s was looking for women, and Jo Ann suspects the EEOC sent in some test cases . She says she didn't care: Joe' s was always willing to hire qualified help. In 1991, Joe' s records indicate it hired 11 new servers -- including three females. From ' 92 through ' 96, 153 of 647 applicants (24 percent) would be women, according to Joe ' s figures. Of these, Joe ' s hired 91, 23 of them women -- 25 percent. EEOC figures, which Joe ' s attorneys said erred by misidentifying a number of old employees as new hires, were somewhat less favorable: 23 percent of applicants were women, and 20 percent were hired. These hirings did nothing to derail the lawsuit. In 1992 , an angry Grace sent a letter to U.S. Sen. Connie Mack. This letter became critical in the court case because of one paragraph: ' 'We have a mixture of young and old, black, white and Oriental waiters, and occasionally female servers. I cannot explain the predominance of male servers, but perhaps it has to do with the very heavy trays to be carried, the ambience of the restaurant and the extremely low turnover in servers. " The phrase —ambience of the restaurant " would echo all the way to the judge ' s summary judgment against Joe ' s -- as an indication of underlying bias. Grace: "What I meant was that sort of Old World men' s saloon feel, the way it looks, but that never meant we wouldn' t hire a woman who applied. " Legal Extortion The non-jury trial began in August 1996 -- five years after Joe ' s was cited. It lasted 15 days, and began with three former Joe ' s employees saying they had heard several managers say that Joe ' s wouldn' t hire women as servers. The first of the former employees, Cathy Evans, testified that she applied for a job as a waitress in 1987 , but was given a job answering phones. She said she observed a manager, Judy Coupee, destroy women' s server applications. On cross-examination, Joe ' s attorneys brought out that Evans had been fired after a year and a half. They suggested she was disgruntled. She said she was dismissed because she was pregnant. A Joe' s manager said she was let go for chronic absenteeism. Coupee, the head cashier, said she had nothing to do with hiring servers and never had any server applications, so she couldn' t have destroyed them. Cassandra Williams, who worked for Joe ' s for three months in 1990 , testified that a male employee told her that women weren' t hired as servers because —the trays were too heavy, " and that she overhead a maitre d' , whose name she didn' t know, tell a female applicant that Joe ' s didn't hire women as servers. Under cross-examination, she acknowledged she had been fired after an argument with Steve. Tatia Ann Nichols, who worked in take-out for two months in 1989 , said she had hoped to become a server. When the take-out manager told her —it wasn' t possible, " she quit. On cross-examination, it was brought out she didn' t have any experience in tray-service restaurants. Barbara Mommsen was the only woman to testify about auditioning for a server' s job in the late ' 80s, when no women were hired. She stated that, after 15 years of handling heavy trays at seafood restaurants like Rusty Pelican and Sundays on the Bay, she attended the ' 87 roll call, along with one or two other women. She said maitre d' Roy Garret told her she had an impressive application. He said The wasn't in a position to offer me the job, he would have to go and speak with someone else to have them review my application. And I said to him, I know it is not your policy to hire women here, but if you would give me the chance, I think I could do a really good job here. " He took her to meet Joe ' s owner. "Jo Ann said that my application was favorable, that it was not their policy to hire women, but they would check my references, and she would get back to me. " The next day, Mommsen testified, Jo Ann offered her a job in the take-out department. "She told me that it would be minimum wage, and I said that wasn' t acceptable to me. " Both Garret and Jo Ann said they had no memories of her, and Jo Ann stated she would never have told anyone Joe ' s didn' t hire women, though she might have told all the applicants that if they didn't get a job as server that year, they should apply for take-out, which was just getting started at the time. The EEOC also presented a dozen veteran female servers who were denied employment after the 1991 complaint had been filed. Many testified they hadn' t gone to roll call before because they had heard Joe ' s didn't hire women. In response, Joe ' s attorneys pointed out that there were also dozens, even hundreds, of experienced male servers who hadn' t been hired during the same time. The heart of the EEOC ' s case was statistical. Economist Elvira Sisolak testified that 44 . 1 percent of servers living in Miami Beach and 44 . 2 percent of servers working in Miami Beach were female. If Joe' s hired less than 44 percent, she testified, it was a sign the firm was discriminating. Joe' s attorney Robert Soloff put on a series of managers who denied ever saying Joe ' s wouldn't hire women. They gave varying explanations why women hadn' t been applying before 1991 . In 1975, South Beach had been declared a blighted area, and for years it was considered dangerous. Perhaps women servers were more afraid than men to be leaving late at night with large amounts of cash. It was only when South Beach boomed in the early ' 90s that female applications picked up. Jo Ann suggested that because all servers hired by Joe ' s have to start by working lunches, some mothers who had to be home when their children returned from school may have been deterred. Anthony Arenson, the luncheon maitre d' who did much of the hiring in the late ' 80s, testified that he never said anything negative about women. He added that he made hiring decisions by going with his - -gut feeling. " However, the EEOC presented a deposition by Roy Garret, the legendary maitre d' who when he retired last spring bought himself a $400 , 000 condo. He stated: - - It was always tradition from the time I arrived there that it was a male server type of job. . . . I mean, it ' s just some restaurants, when you walk in, you know there are going to be women waitresses, other restaurants you know it is going to be male waiters. " Joe ' s expert witness, a University of Florida statistician, testified that South Pointe Seafood, only a block from Joe ' s, was employing 23 . 5 percent female servers during 1995-96, at a time when Joe ' s was hiring 23 . 6 percent females. He disputed the EEOC economist ' s contention that the Joe ' s wait staff should reflect the 44 percent of all area servers who were women. A better standard would be to use Dade census figures for servers in top quality restaurants, those earning between $25, 000 and $49 , 999 a year. Of that group, only 31 . 9 percent were female, and, he argued, there was no significant statistical difference between 31 . 9 percent and the 24 percent Joe ' s was hiring. The EEOC attorney responded that a nearly 8 percent difference was plenty significant. In the EEOC summation, Gedety Serralta pointed out that Rusty Pelican, another upscale seafood restaurant, had 33 percent female servers in 1988, when Joe ' s had zero. She lambasted the "gut feeling" interview system and called the tray test " suspect. " Pointing to Joe ' s female ownership, she added: - -Nobody has a monopoly on discrimination. . . . These women were blessed and fortunate enough to inherit a financial legacy and succeed. Who wants to mess with success? . . . Ultimately, Your Honor, they didn' t want to change the formula that had worked. They wanted to make money. " On July 3, 1997 , U.S. District Judge Daniel T.K. Hurley ruled that Joe ' s did not intentionally discriminate, but used - -employment practices that have an illegal disproportionate impact on women. " Most notably, he found that the restaurant ' s "gut feeling" hiring perpetuated a system of male servers . He picked up the "ambience of the restaurant" from Grace' s letter and underlined it. 'Joe ' s sought to emulate Old World traditions, " the judge concluded, "by creating an ambience in which tuxedo-clad men served its distinctive menu. " At the heart of his ruling was what the Supreme Court once called the - - inexorable zero. " If zero members of a union were black, if zero executives of a work force were women -- that by itself proved discrimination. Joe ' s lawyers were not shocked by this. They could appeal; life at Joe ' s could return to normal. However, a second part of Hurley' s decision turned the operation of Joe' s into a bureaucratic nightmare. The judge ruled that Joe ' s was still discriminating. Though he rejected the EEOC target of 44 percent women servers, he fixed on the 31 .9 percent of females offered by Joe ' s own statistician. By hiring only 22 percent females since 1991, he stated, the restaurant had continued to show prejudice, and he wanted to find remedies to end the discrimination. Joe ' s people were fuming. "The judge doesn't understand anything, " says Steve Sawitz . "He ' s a despicable human being. He ' s already living in hell . . It took months of hearings -- and tens of thousands of dollars in attorneys ' fees -- to determine the minutia of hiring new employees. Joe ' s had to notify the National Organization for Women of its next roll call. Ads had to be placed, with exact specifications concerning the size of the type and the wording. Even the recorded telephone message to applicants was dictated by the judge. For a long time, Hurley was adamant that Joe' s detail its hiring criteria in dozens of categories and subcategories that interviewers would grade -- everything from physical appearance to experience. Joe' s objected to using numbers to grade every little thing, arguing that the court was turning hiring into an arbitrary numbers game. The judge became so angry at the restaurant ' s - -non-compliance " that he threatened to throw a corporate officer in jail and fine the corporation $10, 000 a day until his order was obeyed. Joe ' s fought back by commissioning a series of industrial psychologists and restaurant experts to write opinions decrying the proposed numerical evaluation system as arbitrary. The judge relented on subcategories, but his final directions for the ' 97 roll call filled four single-spaced pages. Despite all this preparation, only 34 of the 124 applicants interviewed at the ' 97 roll call were women -- 27 percent, a drop from the 35 percent of a year before. Though Steve Sawitz says the hiring process isn't complete, it looks as though five of the 15 new hires -- 33 percent -- will be women. Joe ' s owners hope that turnout proves to the judge what they've _,argued all along: the women who want jobs at Joe' s were appearing at roll call and the qualified ones were being hired. They hope this will end the oversight process, and that the EEOC will quietly go away, as it did in the Hooters case after a four-year investigation. Unlike Joe ' s, Hooters admitted gender was key to hiring decisions, claiming that women in skimpy outfits were a necessary part of its ambience. Hooters ' commercials showing mustachioed muscle-men in tight waitress outfits with the motto -- - -Come on Washington. Get a grip! " -- sent such ripples of embarrassment through political circles that the EEOC dropped its $22-million Hooters suit, saying it didn't have the finances to pursue it. But in Joe ' s case, unlike Hooters ' , the EEOC already has a judge ' s determination of guilt. Tyler, a commission attorney, blames the low turnout of women at the ' 97 roll call on the "chilling effect " of discrimination that still exists at Joe ' s. With all the media attention now on Joe' s, Tyler says, it may be a long time before many women feel comfortable applying there. At the moment, the Joe ' s people are more worried about the penalty phase of the case, scheduled to start in the next few days. After six years of bitter legal battling, the EEOC is planning to present only six victims, women who applied after 1991 and weren't hired. Testimony will focus on whether they were qualified to work at Joe ' s and how much they lost in wages by having to take waitress jobs that didn't pay as much. If the judge agrees that a woman was wronged, Joe ' s would be required to pay her the net of lost income -- a Joe ' s average wage minus what she earned in another job -- plus interest. Eve Lowe of the EEOC: - -We 're sure there are other victims out there, but they' re hard to find after all these years. " She says it ' s likely that the money the six may be due will be far less than the $650, 000 Joe ' s says it has spent in legal fees . - -This isn't a big money case. We certainly didn't force them to fight this case all the way. That was their decision. They could have settled at any time. " Jo Ann fumes when she hears those remarks. - -Without question, I admit fiscally that the smartest thing to do was to settle. But then I would have been giving in to legalized extortion. What ' s the difference between the old-time mobsters who used to come up to restaurants and say, 'Pay me or I ' ll break your windows, ' and these new bureaucrats who say, 'Pay me or I ' ll force you to lose 10 times as much in legal fees ' ? I can 't allow that. " KEYWORDS: PROFILE JOE ' S STONE CRAB RESTAURANT DISCRIMINATION LAWSUIT MB STATISTIC TAG: 9801070201 1 of 4 , 8 Terms Transfer complete. Press [RETURN] to return to Menu: