Sabotage at the Xerxes plant was an attack on production that turned a small group of workers into the focus of a year-long investigation and a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit. Recounted by Gustav Humboldt to V. I. Warshawski, the episode also explains the suspicion surrounding her inquiries: the company feared that an old conflict was being reopened by lawyers.

The Production Disruption

Humboldt described the sabotage as an attempt to alter the product itself. The mixture’s balance was changed, creating highly unstable vapor and a residue that clogged the plant’s flow pipes. This was not a single brief interruption: Xerxes had to shut the plant down three times in 1979 to clean the pipes. The account gives a concrete measure of the disruption while leaving the perpetrators’ motive unstated.

Investigation and Legal Dispute

The company spent a year investigating before identifying Joey Pankowski and Steve Ferraro, along with two other men, as being behind the sabotage. All four were fired. They then sued the company for wrongful dismissal, extending the production crisis into a legal dispute. Humboldt called the episode a nightmare, a description that conveys its lasting weight for him without resolving the workers’ competing claim about their dismissal.

The Incident Recalled

Humboldt said the episode had made his employees wary when Warshawski came asking questions. With more than fifty thousand employees worldwide, he noted, the fact that he knew Pankowski’s and Ferraro’s names reflected how significant the conflict had been to the company. His account reframed the suspicion around Warshawski: his staff assumed she had been prompted by a lawyer seeking to revive the old dispute, but Humboldt said Gordon Firth had assured him that was not the case. Warshawski clarified that her inquiries were personal and unrelated to any suit involving the men. Humboldt then offered her whatever help she needed if her investigation involved Xerxes employees.