The judge ruled that Tellez indeed had worked on a plantation but was lying about having been on an irrigation crew.
Tellez, who lives with his mother outside of Chinandega, said that many people were lying but that he wasn't. "Those who are really affected, who are truly sterile, are few," he said.
In a 2008 deposition, plaintiff Francisco Donald Quinonez testified that one of Dominguez's captains had trained him "like a parrot" to recite facts about the farm. But the captain, Carlota Rivera, said in an interview in Nicaragua that she knew him from their days together on a plantation and helped him only because he is mentally slow.
"We're still waiting for them to give me the money," Quinonez said.
Dominguez blamed poverty, illiteracy and the passage of time for clients who did "horribly" in their testimony.
"Many of them have a second- or third-grade education," he said. "You pair that with an Ivy League-trained lawyer, the best of the best, and you know how that is going to come out."
Hernandez, his Nicaraguan partner, said the weak depositions proved that the judge was wrong in saying workers were coached to lie.
"Frankly, we didn't prepare anybody," he said.
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The Dole investigation that served as the basis of Chaney's ruling consisted of statements from and interviews with 27 witnesses.
The evidence remains mysterious. The witnesses' names have been kept secret -- even from Dominguez in most cases.
Dole persuaded Chaney, a veteran judge who has handled several high-stakes cases, that witnesses would be in danger if their names were known in Nicaragua. Miller's firm could be present for the depositions but was not allowed to investigate the witnesses.
Among her most startling findings was that U.S. lawyers, including Dominguez, met in Chinandega with local justice officials, laboratory owners and captains in October 2003 and made arrangements to rig cases in the Nicaraguan courts.
The Nicaraguan judge, Socorro Toruno, who was allegedly there, called the accusation "absurd."
Two other U.S. attorneys named by the judge, neither of whom was working with Dominguez, deny being present at such a meeting.
Dominguez said he wasn't in Nicaragua at the time.
"It's easy to make me the boogeyman," he said.
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At the Law Office of the Ex-Banana Workers, lists of thousands of names of alleged DBCP victims still are taped to the walls.
Dominguez's Nicaraguan partner is still filing cases in the courts there.
But the dreams of a judgment in the United States are essentially over.
Since Dominguez and Miller have bowed out of Nicaraguan DBCP cases, the plaintiffs in the 2007 case, the sole victory, don't even have lawyers.
The award in that case had already been reduced and was under appeal before Chaney's ruling.
Carlos Enrique Diaz Artiaga, 56, who was awarded $452,000, is vague about the details of what the judge did in California but remains hopeful.
"They say we won," he said.
He lives alone in a cinder-block hut, with a picture of himself at Universal Studios on the wall.
Whatever happens, Diaz said, he is grateful to Dominguez for the trip.
"How's a poor guy ever going to get a chance to travel on an airplane?" he said.
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victoria.kim@latimes.com
