"I've done kidnapping, murders, bank robberies…"

Jim Wilkes's voice trails off. His blue eyes steal about the room. They focus on nothing and everything. Unruly files and papers overrun and evade capture, piling helter-skelter upon every available flat surface.

Wilkes leans forward, arms on his desk. His shirt slightly rumpled, dark hair a tad mussed, he lists the types of cases he and partner Tim McHugh handled before they became the pre-eminent guarantors of nursing home patients' rights. Their law firm of Wilkes & McHugh gets roughly 90 percent of its business from disgruntled nursing home residents.

Wilkes has become a minor celebrity for his campaign against abuse and neglect at the hands of large nursing home corporations. Big-city newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, have chronicled his progress as he wrangles multimillion dollar settlements from unscrupulous companies.

Wielding Florida's broad-based "Nursing Home Bill of Rights," Wilkes has set the nursing home industry on its ear, prompting critics to charge that he's inflating the already high cost of care for the elderly. Proponents of Wilkes's tactics argue that the huge settlements have brought unsavory practices to light, thus forcing steps towards reform.

Fighting conglomerates is not Wilkes's first go-around as a do-gooder. While serving a three-year stint in the Army, he spent 10 months directing the entire USO program, crusading against the triple threat of boredom, frustration and fatigue. For sending the first-ever USO show to a secret military installation, a Naval base off the coast of Sri Lanka, Wilkes won his second medal (the first was a Good Conduct medal).

Wilkes's Army career began with him tucked away at a secret military base of his own. Perched on the border of Thailand and Laos, he was charged with top-secret crypt-analysis and traffic research. He and his fellow soldiers monitored Chinese and North Vietnamese communications.

Somehow, Army headquarters in Thailand discovered that Wilkes had a military occupational code of entertainment specialists. The general in charge needed a director for the Army's entertainment program, so he commandeered him. Much to the chagrin of the security folks. Wilkes was whisked from his top-secret listening post to a high-profile position at Army HQ.

It was Wilkes's empathy for troops operating in secrecy that moved him to jam an electric piano and a handful of performers into a truck bound for the Vietnamese-Cambodian border. A group of the Army's Special Forces was so deeply immersed in the "hearts and minds" campaign that Wilkes feared for the soldiers' sanity. The Psychological Operations groups were known to suffer a lot of stress, and Wilkes hoped that a pleasant diversion would help.

"I still remember their strange reaction when we took in our show," Wilkes says, adding that the Green Berets eventually and gratefully became acclimated to the entertainers.

"It was an interesting experience," Wilkes says of his time in the Army. "I met Russian spies, worked with some CIA folks…I even worked on one of Bob Hope's shows. I wouldn't trade it for the world."

Wilkes's desire to entertain didn't end with his Army career, though, and when he returned stateside, he tried his luck at singing. He began with Top-40 music, but was willing to try anything. He unabashedly admits he had a disco band for a while.

Despite a modest hit on the country music charts, Wilkes threw in the towel in 1980 to become a lawyer. It was something he had always wanted to do, and he graduated in 1983 from Stetson in St. Petersburg.

When he started law school, Wilkes wanted to be in entertainment law, but he soon became enamored with being a trial lawyer. He snagged a paying gig as a singer in a bar owned by a St. Petersburg lawyer, and in the afternoons worked as a clerk in the law office. There he developed a taste for medical malpractice cases.

In 1985, Wilkes partnered with fellow Stetson grad Tim McHugh and formed Wilkes & McHugh. Their first foray into personal injury cases was via dental malpractice suits.

"They weren't worth a lot of money," Wilkes says, "but I got a lot of cases, and I learned medicine real fast."

The firm of Wilkes & McHugh had built up a fairly successful personal injury practice before taking its first nursing home case. A fellow lawyer who knew Wilkes's penchant for crusades referred the case to him. The lawyer thought the case lacked value, but was nonetheless appalled by the claimant's accounts of abuse.

Having seen his own mother suffer neglect in a nursing home, Wilkes took the case. He soon learned, though, that these cases could be valuable, both morally and monetarily.

Jim McHugh, Tim's brother, was a clerk with the firm when he unearthed Chapter 400 of the Florida Statutes - the Nursing Home Bill of Rights. The law sets rigid standards for nursing home performance, and allows residents to claim neglect or abuse should a home fail to comply.

Critics of the law claim that it is unfairly balanced against nursing homes, and that it promotes lawsuits, especially the stipulation that allows the plaintiff's legal fees to be paid separately from the verdict award or settlement. Typically, lawyers build their fees into the awards. Florida's law is like few others. It is what makes Wilkes's job lucrative, and what raises the ire of the nursing home lobby.

Since 1987, the average damage award for nursing home negligence cases has nearly doubled to more than $500,000. Wilkes has two record-breaking settlements on the books-both more than $2 million. Nursing home lobbyists claim that Wilkes is grandstanding at the expense of the elderly, and they want to scale back Florida's Chapter 400 law. There are also rumblings about capping attorneys' fees.

"Anything that the nursing home lobby wants to do," Wilkes says, "is designed to benefit nursing home corporations, stockholders and profits. It is not designed to help nursing home residents."

He equates his critics' rationale to that of the Nazis' rationale, who claimed that execution of French civilians during German occupation was their own fault, brought on by disobedience of the French Resistance. In other words, the nursing home companies have to raise their costs, not because they want to, but because the residents allow Wilkes to fight for their rights. It's blame-shifting, he says.

"Now that nursing homes have been caught for heinous crimes, for gross incompetence, for willful, conscious indifference of the rights of human beings, they want to blame me - 'the messenger,'" he says.

Any talk about limiting attorneys' fees or of weakening the Chapter 400 law visibly agitates Wilkes. His friendly Southern drawl turns to staccato-like business and his face flushes.

"Until we took on these cases," he says, "nobody was fighting for elderly rights with any aggression. We've made a difference in how nursing home residents are treated."

As long as the nursing home industry remains as it is, there will be a need for lawsuits, according to Wilkes. Lawsuits work because they force companies to address and explain alleged abuses like an unofficial regulatory agency. Discouraging attorneys from taking these cases by making them unwinnable or unprofitable would be a disservice to elderly patients and taxpayers alike, he adds.

More than $1 billion a year of Medicare and Medicaid money gets funneled into nursing homes in Florida and more than $30 billion nationwide. When nursing home patients don't get adequate care, who figures out why? Who tells John Q. Public where his hard-earned tax dollars are going?

Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration is supposed to respond to complaints about nursing home care, but lawsuits seem to be more effective in taking offenders to task. The federal government instituted a system of fines in 1995 to help police the nursing home industry, but since then, the State of Florida has not brought a single case to trial under the program.

The present system of enforcement just will not suffice. People will die in nursing homes, but when they die from neglect in the care of paid personnel, something must change.

Wilkes relates the case of Walter Spilman: The 88-year old was placed in a nursing home because of his Alzheimer's disease, prostrate cancer and heart disease. The man, feeble from age and sickness, was inexplicably kept in restraints for hours on end, sometimes in soiled bed linens. He lost 32 pounds in four months and developed bed sores that destroyed skin, muscle and bone. Ultimately, he died from neglect-not from the illnesses that landed him in the home in the first place.

Wilkes earned more than $2 million for the Spilman estate. "As juries become more and more aware of this [abuse], they're less and less likely to accept it," Wilkes says. "But what I'd like to do is stop the need for lawsuits."

Nursing home corporations like the way things are because the present system of health care if efficient. It is cost-effective for them to "warehouse" the elderly, Wilkes says, and paying for lawsuits is cheaper than reform. He abhors the practice of warehousing and would like to see a transition to alternative forms of care. The system is defective as he sees it, and it's high time society scraps it and starts a new one.

"We don't need a major nursing home industry," Wilkes says. Nursing homes should be just one part of the continuum of long-term care… What I'm interested in is long-term change [of the system].

Although he sees no real chance of Florida's Chapter 400 being scaled back, Wilkes maintains that he will not give up his crusade. If it becomes counterproductive to try nursing home cases, he will redouble his efforts in the political arena. Through his Coalition to Protect Florida's Elders and Coalition to Protect America's Elders, Wilkes will continue to lobby for the rights of nursing home patients. The groups, he says, will teach people how to pick nursing homes and what to expect from them. Furthermore, they will fight against the politicians who whittled away their rights.

Between politics and his practice, Wilkes sometimes works 70 to 80 hours a week. The Tampa native has no plans to ease up anytime soon, only, "when they throw that last shovel of dirt on me," he says. But he does find time to relax. In his rare moments of respite, Wilkes like to fish.

"I can't relax playing golf," he says. "I like to get away from the sights and sounds of the city and people, so I can clear my mind…and so when I get back, I can start kickin'."

 

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