Spare Hearts

The videotape isn’t the clearest, shot as it was through the window of a car parked across the street from Kristin Eklof’s Independence home. But there’s Dennis Roberts Jr.’s black, four-door F150 pickup parked in Kristin’s driveway in the dark. It’s still parked there the next morning. And there’s Dennis, plodding out of the house, starting the truck and scraping the ice from his windshield. He had stayed that night and would stay the next night and the next, three incriminating nights in a row.

As a couple, Dennis says they were offended by the private investigator’s work. It’s “a complete invasion of privacy.”

As businesspeople, they’re disgusted, Dennis says. Executives at Ford Motor Company, who hired the professional snoop, could have saved a lot of money, he says. “They should have just asked us.”

Ford had hired the private dick to substantiate rumors of an office romance at GreenLeaf, an auto-salvage company it owned. The rumors troubled Ford executives because Dennis and Kristin were the highest-ranking employees at GreenLeaf’s Kansas City location. As company controller, Kristin was expected to check Dennis’ work as general manager; as general manager, Dennis’ job was to make sure Kristin wasn’t doing any funny math.

The couple had made no secret of their relationship. Dennis had been almost giddy during the courtship of his bright and beautiful coworker. More than a month before the recorded sleepover, Dennis had told his brother and a few employees about his first date with Kristin.

Ford said Dennis should have known better than to sleep with his bookkeeper, just as Kristin should have known not to get involved with her general manager.

But they didn’t know better. They’d both been raised in junkyards. Dennis had grown up at the same Kansas City salvage lot Ford had just bought, Kristin at her family’s salvage and transmission-repair businesses in Des Moines, Iowa. In the salvage business, nepotism is the norm. Family members are cheap and reliable labor. At times, Dennis had worked side-by-side with his first wife, his father, his mom and his brother. Kristin had logged hours with her own family and had met her first husband on the job.

Now Ford is suing Dennis, trying to keep him from working in the only business he’s ever known. And his second wedding is on hold.

Henry Ford started cranking out Model Ts in 1908. Dennis Roberts’ great-grandfather, Curtis Roberts, must have had a few of them on the lot when he started Roberts Auto Salvage in the 1930s at an abandoned coal yard between Kansas City and Independence. Curtis’ son, Dennis’ grandfather, opened his own salvage yard a couple of miles away. Billy Roberts called it Little Roberts because he was so much smaller than his physically imposing father. Dennis’ father eventually brought Little Roberts to the family’s original site at 2408 Blue Ridge Boulevard.

Dennis Roberts Sr. came from a tradition of businessmen bound more by handshakes than contracts. He worked long hours to support his family, and he ran an honest business, but he didn’t put up with any nonsense — not from his sons, his employees or his customers. More comfortable holding a cutting torch than a telephone, Dennis Sr. handled misunderstandings with harsh words rather than with free calendars and apologies. “Dad came from the old school,” Dennis says. “He handled things differently.”

For a while, Dennis Sr. worked with his brother, Randy Roberts. But Randy left in 1983 to start Late Model Auto Salvage at 10th and Hardesty. With limited space, Late Model set a standard for efficiency. It was one of the first local yards to replace note cards with computers, affixing a printed label to each alternator, fender, water pump or exhaust pipe organized on two floors of storage racks.

[page]

Dennis Sr.’s disposition didn’t improve when his wife was diagnosed with a debilitating disease in 1983. The expensive treatments drained the salvage yard’s resources and Dennis Sr.’s energy.

So it was a struggling business that Dennis Jr. took over after his 1987 graduation from Blue Springs High School. Dennis was a reluctant savior. He had wanted to go into the heating and air conditioning business. Bad knees and ankles kept him from that dream. But the junkyard had potential — it was in a great location north of the Truman Sports Complex on Blue Ridge Boulevard. Its 17 acres could hold 2,000 wrecked vehicles at a time. So Dennis bellied up to the counter at the same salvage yard in which he’d been raised.

The rows of junked cars had been Dennis’ playground. He’d learned to drive there when he was twelve, after tinkering with the clunkers just enough to get them running. He and his younger brother, Kent, raced them up and down the narrow dirt lanes. When he was about thirteen, Dennis wrecked a motorcycle with Kent on the back, nearly severing Kent’s foot when it caught in the gears. But that was the only bad accident, despite an upbringing filled with broken glass and sharp metal.

Unlike his father, Dennis knew the value of pleasing customers. He knew the advantage of computers. And he especially knew how important it was to have good countermen.

Countermen are the rainmakers of the salvage industry. They know how cars are put together down to the individual nuts and bolts. They know the availability of each piece. And they know their customers — which ones demand like-new quality and which ones put up with a few dings if it shaves a couple of dollars off the price. Find the right parts in the right condition fast enough, and you’ve earned a customer’s loyalty and trust as well as his business.

Dennis and Kent work a counter like dueling banjos, one picking up the melody when the other leaves off, answering phones, pulling up parts lists and calling out prices in response to the speakers at their elbows. These squawk boxes are part of a network of phones linked to almost all of the salvage yards in Kansas City. Kent’s request for a 1999 Chrysler Seabring headlight goes out all over town — to the NASCAR-decorated office at Late Model, to the simple metal building at A&J Auto Salvage in Harrisonville, to the tiny white garage of M&M Auto Salvage in Belton and to most of the other fifty members of the Kansas City Auto Wrecker’s Association.

Dennis and Kent subscribe to a second squawk-box system based in St. Louis, and both boxes broadcast an endless list of requests.

When Kent has one of the parts or knows he can get one, he’ll pick up the receiver. The final price and delivery time are usually negotiated with a real phone call.

Kent went to work at Little Roberts full-time the day after his own high-school graduation in 1992. Dennis brought in a friend, Steve Cox, who pulled Little Roberts into the computer age. (But he fired Cox a few years later, after an argument.) Then Dennis hustled to recruit local countermen Don Morris and Joe Roederer. His pursuit of Morris was particularly aggressive: Dennis called him every day for a year and occasionally picked up the squawk box to tell Morris publicly that he needed to seize life and take a chance.

[page]

Morris’ arrival in 1997 completed what Dennis considered a “dream team.” With Morris’ loyal following, business grew immediately.

Changes in the insurance industry fueled even faster growth. Auto insurers were beginning to win their power struggle with mechanics, says Laurie Garcia, director of sales and marketing with LKQ Corporation, a national chain of salvage yards. Mechanics had always preferred new parts to used — they were cleaner, easier to install and included a bigger markup on price — but insurance companies wanted mechanics to buy used parts because they cost less.

Little Roberts Auto Salvage had geared up just in time to capitalize on an industry that was taking off. Dennis replaced the yard’s shabby office with a three-piece modular building.

With Dennis and Kent working inside, Dennis Sr. took his rough persona out to the yard, where he could monitor the flow of inventory. From his perch atop a forklift, Dennis Sr. would retrieve a totaled-out car and serve it to a tear-down guy like Marty Christy, who would then fire up his cutting torches and power saws and reduce the thing to salable parts.

“Dennis Sr. always pretty much worked in the yard,” Christy says. “You can see what’s going on a whole lot more outside than you can inside.”

What had made Dennis Sr. a poor salesman was exactly what made him a good boss. Christy always knew where he stood with the elder Roberts and wasn’t afraid to admit his own mistakes. “There’s no reason to lie about anything. Come out and tell the truth, and we’ll take care of it,” Christy says. “He would work right alongside of you.”

When Christy arrived at Little Roberts in 1997, he worked outside under a carport. But Dennis Sr. had a workshop built to provide shelter for Christy and his tools. Christy needed all the comforts he could get, with so many vehicles coming in and so many parts going out.

“We had a lot of good times,” Dennis says. “That’s still the best years of my working days.”

But Dennis Sr. and his son clashed over control of the company. Easing toward retirement, Dennis Sr. wasn’t inclined to invest in the business. Dennis puts it bluntly. “Me and my dad did not like each other,” he says. “We were like two enemies.”

Caught in the middle was Kent, who was so worried about the volatile family chemistry that he demanded a contract in 1999. By then, Kent was a single parent with custody of two sons, one with a heart defect. The condition required expensive surgeries. “If I lose [medical] insurance,” he says, “they’ve informed me I can never get insurance again on him.”

Dennis had a plan. “I come up with a brilliant idea of buying my father out,” he says.

Dennis wanted to throw in with Roederer and Morris to purchase the business, but they squabbled with Dennis Sr. over the price and Kent’s job security. Then Dennis’ grandmother called. She’d read a newspaper story about how Ford was getting into the salvage industry. “You ought to look into it,” Dennis remembers her kidding. “I didn’t take it jokingly,” he says. “This might be a way to get Dad out of here.”
Ford’s entry into the salvage industry was driven in part by a European plan that may one day require automakers there to take back their vehicles when they’re ready to be junked, says Tim Foster, a Michigan-based manager of business-development strategy for Ford. Though the United States may never see similar regulations, the European Union’s proposal forced Ford execs to think about recycling.

[page]

Like all automakers, Ford produces a steady supply of undrivable vehicles, which used to be sold in bulk to salvage companies. With its own network of salvage yards, Ford would have an outlet for flawed vehicles, test vehicles or vehicles damaged during shipment. At the same time, it could meet the growing demand for high-quality used auto parts.

Ford entered the industry in a big way in 1998, coming up with the environmentally sensitive-sounding GreenLeaf name and buying individual yards in cities across the country. Last year, the company disassembled 40,000 cars and trucks at 34 locations in the United States and Canada.

At first it seemed farfetched that a company like Ford would have had an interest in the Roberts family trust. But the more Dennis thought about it, the more sense it made. “We’re in the middle of the country, a good location, by a Ford plant [in Claycomo]. I started thinking, ‘Why wouldn’t they buy?’ I made a phone call … four months later, it sold.”

Kent, however, was not celebrating. He was glad his folks would be able to retire in style: Ford paid them $3.35 million for the business, according to court records, and they still own the land, which Ford is leasing. But Kent was sorry to lose control of the business. “I put all them hours in and expected one day for half that to be mine,” he says. Instead, he simply had a new boss; Ford retained the $80,000 contract Kent had originally signed with his dad.

Dennis stayed on as well. He signed a contract to work for $85,000 a year, promising to stick around until December 2001 and not to compete or steal customers for two years after leaving. “I really thought I’d be there for a long time,” Dennis says.

In August 1999, Ford sent five executives to welcome the Little Roberts crew to the corporate fold. Dennis remembers their assurances that “nothing’s going to change. It’s going to be business as usual.”

But Dennis was surprised when the managers didn’t hand him a corporate manual. “You’d think day one they’d have that,” Dennis says. “I had to draw my own job description.”

He also had to put together a “work chart” showing who reported to whom in the office, something he’d never done before. The tree included his wife, Rachel Roberts, who was the head bookkeeper and reported to Dennis.

Ford had plenty to learn. Dennis says none of the execs knew a thing about the salvage industry.

“It’s definitely been a learning curve,” Ford’s Foster acknowledges.

Dennis says the Ford people were good students. “They relied on their general managers,” Dennis says. “They did listen. They knew they needed to listen.”

But some of Ford’s policies hurt business. For instance, the company refused to sell salvaged airbags or brake components. Foster says there is no proven way to test such equipment to make sure it is safe, but the rigid policy cut into the revenue stream in unexpected ways. Previously, the Roberts brothers would sell entire rear-axle assemblies — all the parts connecting the drive shaft to the rear wheels. Under Ford, though, the brake parts had to be stripped at Little Roberts, an added labor that also created extra work for the mechanic, who had to track down all of the tiny parts needed to put a car back together.

[page]

“It was a fiasco,” says Kent, who had to explain the change again and again to frustrated mechanics. Parts that he would have sold for $1,000 now went for $750.

What Ford had going for it was product. Brand new vehicles began arriving on a daily basis — cars that had fallen off trains during shipment, lemons that had to be bought back, brand new Expeditions, Excursions, Lincoln Town Cars, Contours, Mystiques and Cougars. It was almost more than Dennis could take. “I had no clue how much stuff they junk,” he says.

Marty Christy was equally amazed. Each week, cars were coming in on tractor trailers as if they’d taken a detour on their way to a showroom floor. Five might be brand new. Christy remembers cutting into Harley Davidson-edition pickup trucks shipped directly from Ford’s Claycomo assembly plant. The trucks had been stolen from the lot and run through a barbed wire fence. But other than paint scratches, they were in perfect condition. Christy dismantled several Lincoln LSs with their steering wheels on the right-hand side; the sports sedans had supposedly been damaged by salt water on their way to Singapore, though Christy couldn’t find a problem. A one-ton, four-by-four pickup was returned to Ford because it made a strange noise, but Christy says the buyer simply wasn’t familiar with the sound of the powerful diesel engine. “There wasn’t nothing wrong with it,” he says. “We took it out and sold it.”

Christy also took apart a shiny black-and-white Crown Victoria souped up for police duty in Texas. Before anyone could chase bad guys in it, a flood had soaked the floorboards and the carpet. New carpet and a little Lysol could have put it on the street in great shape, but Ford had totaled it out. “We did burnouts in the garage in it … just to see what it could do,” Christy says. The front eventually ended up on an Independence police car.

Christy had little patience with Ford’s bureaucracy. In February, Christy had a heated discussion with a company supervisor over written reprimands Christy believed were unfair. “I finally got pissed off and called him a motherfucking liar,” Christy says. That cost him his job.

While business was booming in the salvage industry, Dennis’ marriage was going to hell. He and Rachel had met shortly after Dennis graduated from high school. They had two children together and Rachel had come to work at Little Roberts as a bookkeeper. Their professional relationship didn’t help their home life. By his own admission, Dennis neglected his marriage. “I was not a communicator,” he says. “I communicated by going out.”

After Ford took over, Rachel began struggling at work as well. Ford demanded that she do much more than simply make sure the company checkbook balanced and the petty cash added up.

“They wanted a lot more reporting capabilities that were above her head,” Dennis says. “We decided to hire a controller.”

A Kansas City headhunter recommended Kristin Eklof, who sat down with Dennis and Rachel before wowing Ford managers in a phone interview. She got the job.

Kristin was perfect for the position. She was the daughter of a Des Moines, Iowa, salvage-yard family. “I’m a grease monkey at heart myself,” she says. But unlike the Roberts boys, she had continued her education, getting a master’s degree in business administration at Drake University, then taking a job in the bookstore at Iowa State University.

[page]

She was eager to move to Kansas City to be near her mother and stepfather, who was ill. She chose GreenLeaf over job offers from Sprint PCS and UMKC. She thought the connection to Ford would boost her career. “I felt I would make my mark and be able to go into Ford,” she says.

Arriving April 1, 2000, Kristin went right to work. She understood the business. She knew accounting practices. And she was motivated to do a good job.

But she had a challenge on her hands. Though an outside accountant had done Little Roberts’ more serious bookkeeping before Ford bought the business, there were few checks in place to make sure the money coming in and the parts going out were recorded. There was no way to make sure the cash from a sale wasn’t going straight into the salesman’s pocket or that a pricey radio wasn’t landing in a dismantler’s toolbox. She changed the system so that after the salesman made the sale, another person wrote an invoice and a cashier took the money and put it in a security bag.

Her changes went over like a transmission with missing teeth. Kristin’s coworkers resisted every new procedure. “She was put into a position with the responsibility without the authority to do the job,” Dennis says.

“It was almost like she had a chip on her shoulder, like she was better than everybody,” Kent says.

The resistance might have been caused partly by her Iowa-girl good looks. From her first day at work, rumors linked her romantically with various men around the twenty-employee shop. First she was supposedly making time with Kent, then a couple of other men in the office, and ultimately Dennis.

At least some of the rumors were fueled by Rachel. Within weeks of Kristin’s arrival, Rachel reported to the GreenLeaf headquarters that Dennis and Kristin were sleeping together, Ford executives later admitted in federal court.

GreenLeaf Director of Human Resources Tony Darin confronted Dennis over the phone about the friction with Rachel and the rumored affair with Kristin. Dennis told him Rachel was just upset and there was no affair.

The two men disagree about the rest of that conversation. Darin says he warned both Dennis and Kristin that they shouldn’t see each other romantically. “I did discuss with both of them the appropriateness, or the inappropriateness, of a personal relationship with them,” Darin testified. Both Dennis and Kristin deny that Darin addressed the topic other than to ask if they were dating at the time; they say they weren’t.

To fix things, Darin shuffled the work chart — a move that enraged Rachel, who now reported to Kristin. “She completely blew her lid and went on a rampage in the office,” Dennis later testified. (Rachel did not return repeated phone calls requesting an interview for this story.)

The situation was too much for Kristin. Coming from a family business, she had seen relatives fighting in the office and didn’t want to deal with that here. She asked Dennis and Rachel if they ever brought their problems to work. “I specifically asked them about their personal relationship … and it was not as they portrayed it,” she later testified in court.

Kristin quit. Darin begged her to come back. He told her it wasn’t her fault, that the problems were being caused by the pending divorce, that he would correct the situation. When Kristin returned about a week later, Rachel was gone, severance package in hand. To most everyone’s relief, the divorce became final in September 2000.

[page]

“It changed [Dennis] as a person for the better,” Kent says.

Kristin noticed. “My first impression of Dennis was not exactly favorable from a personal level,” she says. “I felt sympathetic to Rachel.”

But Kristin identified with Dennis’ personal trials, too. She had been through a divorce of her own. “I watched him go through some pretty painful stuff,” she recalls. “He lost most of his friends.”

Rachel’s departure hadn’t, however, ended speculation about a relationship between Kristin and Dennis. The rumors became so distracting that Dennis was forced to address them in a series of meetings with the employees shortly after Thanksgiving in 2000. Two at a time, Dennis called in his staff, giving them a chance to ask any questions they might have about several topics.

The employees had a number of gripes. They weren’t getting annual bonuses. They were confused about how the company perk of free gasoline was being doled out. They thought they were suspected of stealing money. And Dennis knew they all thought he was having an affair with Kristin.

“People were speculating a lot of stuff that was being disruptive to their work,” Dennis says. “They weren’t doing their job. I just wanted to set the stage and let people know that there was nothing going on. And if there ever would be, I would be the first to tell them.”

Kristin had personal problems of her own. Her stepfather was dying. She had broken up with her live-in boyfriend when he admitted that he was married. Her bulldog, Briggs (named for the Briggs and Stratton engine company), was being treated for cancer. She was having health problems herself.

In the midst of all this, she and Dennis made a trip to San Antonio in January 2001 for a company gathering called “Managing for More.” On the trip, Kristin says, she saw that Dennis was actually a sensitive guy. He drove the rental car and told her to take some time to herself when she was looking green. “He showed a human side to him you don’t normally see at work,” she says.

When they returned, Dennis asked her to go along with some friends of his to Clancy’s Café and Pub in Blue Springs. The next night he coaxed her to a country-and-western bar in Grain Valley. But the third date, a couple of weekends later, was a serious effort at romance. Kristin calls it a “wooing me” date — dinner at Fedora’s and a carriage ride around the Plaza, not at all like the Dennis she knew.

And no big secret. Dennis was excited to tell people. Kent remembers his brother’s call the night Dennis asked Kristin to dinner at Fedora’s. “He sounded like a kid that just won a grand-prize game,” Kent says. He’d never seen Dennis act this way. Kent and Dennis had worked side by side for nearly a decade. They had traded jabs in the locker-room atmosphere of the salvage yard. Now Dennis was talking to him about love. “It was hilarious,” Kent remembers.

The relationship progressed quickly. Soon Dennis and Kristin were spending nights together, and Kristin was balancing Dennis’ personal checkbook. The evolution of the relationship came easily. “We had developed a really good friendship,” Kristin says. “All it was was spending more time together and an intimate aspect.”

Rather than creating friction in the office, Kristin and Dennis actually worked harder after they started dating. “We were really motivated to be successful and make that place successful.”

[page]

But Rachel hadn’t disappeared entirely. She remained in contact with Ford’s Darin, sending him e-mails and talking to him on the phone. By late February, Rachel told Darin that Dennis and Kristin were living together.

Ford hired its private investigator to corroborate Rachel’s report. In hindsight, Kristin remembers a strange pickup truck parked on her street.

Dennis says they didn’t know their relationship was a problem until March 27, 2001. When a company human-resources consultant was in town for a meeting with Kristin, Dennis asked the woman about office dating. She told him there was no written policy on dating, but dating a subordinate would violate an unwritten policy.

Kristin and Dennis sat down that night to discuss what to do. They decided the relationship was important enough for Kristin to quit if Ford objected. She had other employment offers. She’d been in contact with a headhunter before she’d taken the job, so her name was still circulating. But Dennis and Kristin never got a chance to tell Ford.

The next morning, Darin and another Ford executive arrived unannounced at Little Roberts, briefcases in hand. Darin laid it out for Dennis in his office. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news. You’ve made some bad judgments,” Dennis remembers him saying.

Darin fired Dennis, telling him he’d been warned in June.

“I said, ‘Tony Darin, we had no conversation like this,'” Dennis says. “‘I bust my ass for this company. I don’t call in sick. I never miss a day. I’m making our site a lot of money.'”

Dennis stood up and left, walking out of the building that still bore his family name.

Kristin was having a similar conversation in the next room. At its conclusion, she resigned. She has since found a new job outside of the salvage industry.

A week later, Dennis drove the 37 miles to his uncle’s County Line Auto Salvage near Kingsville. He started working there immediately.

Ford fired Kent two months later, on June 5, 2001, after he was suspended for allegedly stealing airbags. Kent denies the charge. Like his brother, Kent was welcomed at his uncle’s yard.

Now the two men are busy building their uncle’s business. Behind the weathered County Line sign, freshly graded brown gravel shows the cleanup underway. Shiny white pickup-truck beds hang from new metal towers. Older crunched cars are stacked at the entrance, ready to be hauled away to make room for new inventory.

But Ford’s attorneys are arguing that County Line’s gain was Ford’s loss. This past March, Ford asked a federal judge to stop Dennis from working for his uncle and to keep Kent from contacting any of GreenLeaf’s customers. The automaker has set out to prove in court that both brothers are violating their contracts with Ford.

The contract Kent had signed with his father, which Ford honored when it bought the business, forbade him from sharing customer lists with anyone outside of Little Roberts-GreenLeaf until February 2004. Kent didn’t print a customer list, but there’s one in his head. To forbid him from contacting former GreenLeaf customers would prevent Kent from talking to nearly every significant repair shop in town.

Dennis’ contract was more restrictive, forbidding him from competing against GreenLeaf within 100 miles of the business or contacting its customers or employees for two years after he left.

But the brothers counter by saying that Ford violated the contracts first when it fired them without a good reason. Their attorney, Jeffrey Bruce, argues that Ford didn’t have a written policy regarding office dating and that Ford made up the charges against Kent because the company wanted him gone. Bruce cites an internal e-mail from GreenLeaf executive Pam Brayman, who said she wanted to “unload” Kent’s contract.

[page]

Brayman insisted in court that the dating policy should have been common sense. “They do not have a policy that says that it’s not appropriate for them to shoot their boss, but they know that that’s inappropriate behavior,” she said. “I mean, there’s a number of policies that a prudent person would understand.”

Federal Judge Nanette K. Laughery was unswayed and refused to grant the injunction. The matter is scheduled for trial October 7, though the two sides have been ordered to go through mediation in the meantime. Bruce is not optimistic about the prospect of settlement.

Bruce thinks the automaker was trying to cut costs when it dumped Dennis, Kristin and Kent — all of whom were well-paid. After a record year in 1999, Ford’s fortunes, like those of the rest of the country, began to falter; the company lost an estimated $2 billion in 2001. And in January, company officials announced a plan to cut $4 billion a year in costs. The company is eliminating about 20,000 jobs, is closing manufacturing plants and has announced that it may sell off its noncore businesses such as Hertz Corporation and GreenLeaf.

Ford already has kicked the family out of the family business. Now the company is trying to smash the family itself.

Ford also is suing Randy Roberts, claiming he should have known his nephews would violate their contracts by working for him. Ford is threatening to draw Dennis Sr. into the legal fray as well. The lawsuit has delayed Dennis and Kristin’s wedding.

If Ford wins its case against Dennis and Kent, the two brothers will see their livelihoods dented if not destroyed. Kent could keep working for his uncle, but he would have to do a strange dance, transferring phone calls from GreenLeaf customers to other salesmen and trying to piece together a client list from the remainder. Dennis would face a no-win situation. He could spend the next year working in the industry he knows, but he’d have to go 100 miles from home. Or he could stay near his children and try to find work in town with only a high-school diploma and an employment history that includes one job outside the salvage yard: a summer spent washing dishes at his grandmother’s chicken restaurant.

Dennis says he will keep fighting until he wins. At least he has plenty of money for attorneys. He and Kent have been borrowing that from their father, whose bank account holds Ford’s $3.35 million.