Michael Barasch, Advocate for the Victims Compensation Fund

By Roger Paradiso

I recently interviewed Michael Barasch. I had never met him, but he has had a profound influence on my health. You see, Michael is one of the leading lawyers fighting for the 9/11 community. He and his firm Barasch & McGarry, located right near ground zero, have been at the forefront of the Victims Compensation Fund. I told Michael that I was certified for the Victims Compensation Fund with the help of his firm.

About three days after the attack on the World Trade Center, I returned to my office downtown. The Mayor’s Office for Film and Television asked me to call my contacts at the film studios. I tried to assure them that filming was soon going to open up in areas of the city north of Houston Street.

Many years later, I was diagnosed with a fingernail squamous cell cancer that I was told was very rare, but they had seen it many times in people who lived and worked in the downtown area. It was at that point the Michael informed me he had the same cancer. What a coincidence.

I went through six biopsies and three surgeries. The last surgery was at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital. I have nothing but deep gratitude to Dr. Rossi and his team at MSK. And to Michael and his team who were so helpful compiling the reports and other papers involved in certification.

I asked Michael how he found out he had cancer.

“I went for my annual checkup and the doctor’s very thorough and everything was good except he didn’t like the color under my thumbnail.

He gave me a Novocaine shot and took a sample. I got a call a couple of days later—I had squamous cell skin cancer under my thumbnail. He told me this was rare, and he referred me to a Mohs surgeon, who removed my nail. The surgeon said he hoped it would grow back, but no guarantee. It turned out it did grow back and I’m now cancer free. Isn’t it strange that we both have had the same kind of cancer which is incredibly rare?

How did you get involved with the Victim’s compensation fund and the 9/11 community?
Before 9/11, I had the honor of representing NYC firefighters and cops when they got injured in the line of duty. There’s a special law that allows a firefighter who is hurt in a burning building to sue the negligent building owner who violated the electrical code or the building code or the administrative code. These guys get hurt badly when there are fires. So that’s what I was doing and then 9/11 happened. And I lost so many clients that day, so many witnesses to clients’ cases, friends, and my office staff. We’re only three blocks from Ground Zero.

You ask me why I take this so personally. Well, I’ll never get out of my head watching people jumping from the buildings. Then again it was personal because I knew so many people who died on 9/11, as I said earlier.

And then we started to do what many other New Yorkers did, we’d go around and bake trays of lasagna and bring it to firehouses because our office building on Park Place was closed for a month so we really had nothing to do other than lend our support to the firehouses. We kept hearing all these people coughing and the fire department actually called it the “world trade center cough.” It has since turned into a much more serious diagnosis.

You and I can have asthma and be a reporter or lawyer and have no problem, but you lose your career as a firefighter if you develop asthma. So many of these guys needed help in navigating the pension system and getting what was rightfully theirs which was a disability retirement.

We started to do that and then over Christmas of 2001, out of pure luck I ran into Ken Feinberg who had recently been appointed special master of the first victim compensation fund. He knew that I had filed claims against the city for failing to get these guys respiratory protection, so he said, “why don’t you drop those claims and bring all your guys to the victim compensation fund.” And I said, “I can’t do that because the law was written requiring people who wanted to make a claim to the VCF to have seen a doctor within 72 hours.” No firefighter or cop was going to leave the bucket brigade to go to a hospital or a doctor to complain about a cough. There was still hope that they would find people alive. So, nobody qualifies, and he said if I do away with that 72-hour requirement and I allow latent illnesses to be included would you drop those claims against the city, and I agreed.

So that chance meeting with Mr. Feinberg changed my life and changed the lives of so many others who have gotten sick after 9/11.

What brought you to almost devote the rest of your life to this?
My secretary Liana died of breast cancer in 2007—she was only 47. Another paralegal by the name of Dennis also died at 47 but from kidney cancer. So that just kind of thrust me into this lobbying effort to try to get the victim compensation fund reopened which congress did finally when they passed the [James] Zadroga [9/11 Health and] Compensation Act in 2011. Jimmy Zadroga was my client, so I was very involved in the efforts to get this victim compensation fund reopened because the original VCF closed in 2003. The VCF when it was first extended was only extended for five years. We got it re-extended again and then finally thanks to the unions and John Feal and Jon Stewart, we got it permanently extended in 2019, so now you know why I do what I do.

So, besides your advocacy for all victims of the World Trade Center tragedy, and the almost 100 bulletins you have personally put out to the 9/11 community, would you tell our readers what you have been doing for more than two decades?

I do a lot of speeches and outreach stressing how important it is to get checked. I also tell people the most common cancer in the 9/11 community is skin cancer and that you should go for a full body checkup every year.

There’s a presumption now linking all our exposure at 9/11 and the months that followed while the buildings were on fire to these skin cancers so let’s make sure I mention skin cancer as the number one disease in the community.

I’m trying to convince non-responders who were living or working or going to school in lower Manhattan during the eight months after 9/11 that they too are eligible for the benefits of the World Trade Center health program. And if ever certified with a 9/11 illness, which now includes 69 cancers, they are covered by the victim compensation fund.

It’s so frustrating. Over 85% of the first responders in NYC have now enrolled in the health program. The cops and firefighters unions have done a great job educating them and encouraging them to get checked out every year. Sadly, there’s no such organization for downtown residents or former office workers who were down here 23 years ago. So, only 10 percent of the downtown civilians have enrolled in the health program so far. That’s a huge difference. It includes 300,000 office workers, 50,000 students and teachers and about 35,000 downtown residents who lived or worked or went to school south of Canal Street.

If you think you fit the guidelines discussed above, please call 800-374-9102 and www.911victims.com/village.