$135 Million Dram Shop Verdict Against Giants Stadium Beer Vendor for Child Paralyzed by Drunk Fan, Later Reversed and Settled for $25 Million

In 1999, Daniel Lanzaro spent a New York Giants game at Giants Stadium drinking heavily. Concession workers employed by Aramark, the stadium's beer vendor, kept serving him. He later admitted buying six beers at halftime even though he was already visibly drunk. Driving home after the game, with a blood alcohol level more than double the legal limit, he crashed into a car carrying the Verni family. The family's two-year-old daughter was left paralyzed from the neck down. Her mother, Fazila, was also injured.

The family sued Aramark and its related concession entities under New Jersey's dram shop law, which allows liability when a server sells alcohol to a visibly intoxicated person. David Mazie, then a partner at Nagel, Rice & Mazie, tried the case in the Superior Court of New Jersey in Bergen County alongside David Freeman. Trial began in December 2004 and ran into the new year.

In January 2005 the jury found Lanzaro and the Aramark defendants equally responsible and returned one of the largest alcohol liability awards ever recorded in the United States: roughly $135 million in total damages. That figure included about $60 million in compensatory damages, with $53.95 million for the child and $6.5 million for her mother, plus $75 million in punitive damages assessed against Aramark. Aramark's share of the judgment came to about $105 million, $30 million compensatory and the full $75 million punitive.

The verdict did not stand. On August 3, 2006, the New Jersey Appellate Division reversed and ordered a new trial. The panel held that the trial court had improperly admitted extensive testimony about a "culture of intoxication" at the stadium. Under the state's beverage server law, liability turns on whether a vendor served a visibly intoxicated patron, not on the general drinking atmosphere at the venue, and the appellate judges found the evidence went to the heart of the plaintiffs' case without a limiting instruction.

Rather than retry the case, the parties settled in 2008. Aramark and its co-defendants agreed to pay $25 million in cash and annuities. The child, by then ten years old and living as a quadriplegic, received the bulk of it with her mother: $19.5 million in cash plus annuities generating more than $60,000 a month for life, guaranteed for 25 years. By the time of the settlement, Mazie and Freeman had left Nagel Rice to co-found Mazie Slater Katz & Freeman, which carried the case through the appeal and resolution; the court approved a $5.2 million fee to the firm.

Lanzaro answered for the crash separately. He pleaded guilty to vehicular assault, received a five-year prison term, and paid the family $200,000 from his insurance toward his share of the damages.