Eric MacLeish started to reach the breaking point the day they evacuated the parking garage. “I had gotten to be on a first-name basis with the Boston bomb squad,” he recalls, “and they used to check under my car with a mirror on the end of a pole. One day, the guy thought he saw something, and we all just took off out of there.” It was a false alarm. But MacLeish was feeling more than a little beleaguered: “I was fed up with the firm. And I was fed up with the church.”
The firm was Pittsburgh’s Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott. MacLeish had been a partner in its Boston office for about three years. The church was the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. MacLeish had been threatening its hierarchy with suits on behalf of plaintiffs who claimed leaders had ignored or abetted sexual abuse at the hands of priests. But the year was 1993. And the Roman Catholic Church in Boston was not widely perceived as the sometimes callously, sometimes conspiratorially self-protective institution that is under fire today. Just the opposite. MacLeish was a famous object of ire. “There were bomb threats. I had bodyguards. There was a gunshot at our house,” MacLeish recalls.
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