Towers of Missing Paperwork

NEW YORK —  Attorney Sam Eber scoured the edges of the World Trade Center, his eyes darting over wads of dirty paper in search of any familiar shred.

Somewhere amid the billions of sheets that rained down after the buildings collapsed are files for a divorce case.

“There are 10-year-old phone records showing the husband calling his girlfriend,” Eber said. “The phone company doesn’t have them anymore. My client didn’t make copies. She trusted me to store everything.”

Along with the loss of life and property here on Sept. 11 came the destruction of the little, often overlooked pieces of paper that encapsulate a person’s daily life: phone logs, financial ledgers, Post-It notes, college degrees. All of it disappeared, sparking a search-and-recovery effort among New York office workers that is both wrenching and seemingly impossible.

Computer technology was supposed to have prevented this. And to a large degree, it did. Computers saved reams of business data, which were backed up routinely in whirling databases miles from lower Manhattan.

Yet it has become painfully clear here that the paperless life remains a fantasy. The loss of mere paper--and the ephemeral information scrawled, stamped or typed on it--has created an unexpected chaos that ranges from the serious to the trivial.

Dozens of half-completed cases are stalled in New York state courts.

“The courts in Manhattan, they’re all way behind,” said Judge Jonathan Lippman, chief administrative judge for the New York state court system. “Don’t get me started on the criminal actions and how behind schedule those are. This is a huge problem.”

Federal investigations have been put on hold as officials scramble to re-create evidence turned to ash. Investigators at the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose office disappeared in the collapse of the neighboring World Trade Center 7 building, have lost the paperwork for more than 300 active cases and thousands of archived ones.

The SEC’s New York office oversaw investigations of stock fraud, market manipulation, insider trading and organized crime. Some of the information--such as plaintiffs’ names and contact information, copies of court filings and lists of evidence--was stored electronically. Phone records, informal notes from interviews and scrawled reminders on documents or memos that helped the agents build cases all were written on paper.

SEC officials declined to comment on specific cases, saying only that all of those housed in its destroyed New York offices will move forward--eventually.

The local Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces federal job discrimination laws, was located in the same building as the SEC. It had evidence on 1,200 active cases. With the exception of the case number, the allegation, case status and contact information of the people involved, the files all were stored on paper.

After the attacks, the EEOC staff squeezed into borrowed office space Uptown and got to work. They started by contacting plaintiffs, many of whom were panicked about the status of their lawsuits.

“Do you still have your file? You do? Great!” an EEOC worker said to a plaintiff. “Can you make a copy and mail it to us?”

Slowly, the cases came back to life. Each morning, a postal carrier dropped off piles of letters. Some were resubmitted complaints. Others held copies of evidence, such as photographs, e-mail or contracts.

Each document had to be copied; EEOC employees waited patiently to use the one photocopier. The machine’s rumble still fills the room, a constant heard from early morning to late in the night.

The agency now expects to re-create at least half of the active cases, but it will take more than six months, said Spencer Lewis, director of the New York district. For the rest, the parties involved will be encouraged to resolve their cases with mediation.

Lewis himself has contacted dozens of people, trying to duplicate 10 years’ worth of information that he had stored in spiral notebooks. The papers listed every call he had made since 1991. Each log had tidbits scribbled by the number, little morsels of inside intelligence on business and law.

He has sent e-mail to co-workers, asking for contacts he spoke to in 1998. He has called friends, asking for phone numbers of attorneys long retired and copies of in-house magazines published decades ago.

“I remember I wrote something down on a note pad about a meeting I’m supposed to have,” Lewis said. “Sometime soon. My goodness, this is aggravating.”

Across town, Alfonso S. D’Elia, president of the architecture firm Mancini Duffy, knows that somewhere there is a Post-It note with a list of things he is supposed to do.

D’Elia also knows he will never get the note back. When the plane hit the World Trade Center’s south tower, where Mancini Duffy had its headquarters, he was driving to work. A few bits of paper, including his business cards, were safe at home.

As the company began to rebuild its files, he remembered that a friend had recently stopped by his office and snapped a picture of him sitting at his desk. Colorful slips of paper framed the edges of his computer monitor, each with a small reminder of an errand to run and an item to pick up.

Just a few days ago, his friend gave him the photo as a memento.

D’Elia studied it. The computer was there. So were the Post-It notes.

He enlarged the photo to twice its size. Then he bought a magnifying glass.

“I can’t quite make it out,” D’Elia said. “I’m going to try to scan it in the computer and clean it up.”

More Than Paper, Diploma Meant Pride

Some other lost sheets of paper, such as college degrees, carry enormous professional weight. They are public calling cards in cursive script and golden seals, a sign of success.

“A Harvard law degree or a Stanford MBA is not just a degree,” said attorney Roman Popik, whose office was on the 21st floor of the north tower. “It’s like having a World Trade Center address. It says everything about who you are. Without it, you’re just ordinary.”

No sheepskin could convince Popik, who was in the lobby of the north tower when the hijacked airliner hit it, to follow the advice of a security guard and stay in the building. “At the time, I wasn’t thinking about paper. My instincts suggested that I run.”

Although Harvard has yet to receive any calls from graduates who worked in the trade center, officials expect an onslaught of requests for reprints in the upcoming months.

“There’s already a system in place to handle that, regardless of how the diploma was destroyed,” school spokesman Michael Armini said.

But most of the things lost in the terrorist attacks are irreplaceable. The objects that matter most to survivors literally have been crushed.

Searching through the estimated 1.2 million tons of debris for a lone item is hopelessly surreal. Yet it is a quest that Eber, who said he occasionally borrowed office storage space from friends in the north tower, feels obligated to pursue. He needed to make the pilgrimage for his clients, whose financial futures depend on the paper inside those lost folders.

After three hours of searching through trash, he headed back to his office with only dirty hands.

Sometimes, though, miracles do happen.

Nearly a month after the attack, attorneys at Thacher, Proffitt & Wood got a call from a woman in Sheepshead Bay.

No one at the high-powered firm knew the Brooklyn stay-at-home mom, who lives nearly 15 miles from the World Trade Center. But on the tail of a eastward breeze, pieces of paper had come wafting down from the sky and into her backyard.

They were financial records from the law firm, whose staff of several hundred worked on four floors in the south tower. Although soggy and torn, the papers somehow were there--a ghostly reminder of what had been lost. Deals that hadn’t been completed. Mortgage agreements about to be signed.

“She called us and said, ‘I don’t really know who you are, but some of your paperwork fell into my backyard,’ ” recalled Joe Forte, partner and head of the firm’s real estate practice.

The lawyers hung up the phone and called a messenger service. The papers are on their way home.