Ohio Valley Correspondent

WHEELING — The founder of the Pittsburgh law firm at the heart of an asbestos fraud suit filed four years ago by CSX Transportation said he never had any doubt that the case would be decided in his favor.

“They just made it up,” said Robert Peirce of Robert Peirce & Associates. “I don’t feel vindicated because I never thought we were in any peril. I knew there was no fraud, there never was a fraud. I knew that from the beginning, and when anybody asked me I told them it was bogus. I knew all along it was something they’d made up, without any evidence or facts to support it.”

Peirce and a co-defendant, now-retired Bridgeport radiologist Dr. Ray Harron, were slated to go on trial this week in U.S. District Court in Wheeling. U.S. Judge Frederick Stamp, however, granted their petition for summary judgment and instead dismissed all remaining counts against them, delivering a 15-page opinion in which he repeatedly referenced CSX’s inability to meet its burden of proof.

A CSX spokesman said the company will appeal Stamps' decision.

CSX had originally filed suit in 2005, alleging that Peirce’s staff and Harron had conspired with a union organizer, Robert Gilkerson, and ex-railroad employees Ricky May and Daniel Jayne to fake asbestos screenings in order to win cash settlements from the company. Two years later they added a fraud claim against Earl Baylor, another former employee, again alleging that test results had been falsified for financial gain.

In his ruling, Stamp noted that Peirce in actuality hadn’t relied on Harron’s reading of Baylor’s test results, instead seeking a second opinion before filing a claim on his behalf, and said CSX “cannot sustain its burden that the lawyer defendants acted with actual intent to defraud, as there remains no evidence that the lawyer defendants knew that Mr. Baylor did not have asbestosis.”

Last month, Stamp presided at a jury trial that ended in acquittal for Gilkerson and Peirce with relation to the May and Jayne cases. The suit stemming from the Baylor case was to have been tried separately.