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RICO Defendants and their co-conspirators actually wrote the Cabrera Report, that would have
"bother[ ed]" him and affected his expert opinions.
195. Similarly, another "new" expert, Dr. Lawrence Barnthouse, relied on the
standards contained in the Cabrera Report, and "assume[d] [Cabrera] was correctly
characterizing what they were." Indeed, he has admitted that he was not retained to create a new,
independent report, and further acknowledged that he "couldn't be completely independent" and
he had not "independently performed all the [necessary] calculations" in his own report because
most of the information he needed was "only available from the Cabrera Report." Like Allen,
Barnthouse has admitted that he relied on the Cabrera Report despite the fact that he had reached
the conclusion that Cabrera's numbers were "uncertain" and that methodology he adopted from
Cabrera was an "an unreliable indicator" and was "[s]uboptimal, [and] inadequate."
196. Jonathan Shefftz, another of these experts, did no independent work and
repackaged portions of the fraudulent Cabrera Report. For example, Shefftz assumed without
doing any independent research or analysis that TexPet was required to incur costs and to
remediate pits based solely on the Cabrera Report's assertion that these costs were necessary.
Shefftz admitted that his report as a whole depends upon "data and cost figures from the Cabrera
Report" and that he had "simply taken [Cabrera's] volume figures and ... cost figures and used
those as inputs to [his] calculations." He explained that he "was not engaging in any exercise to
verify [Cabrera's] data series or his cost figures. [Shefftz] was just using them in [his] report."
Shefftz also conceded that his reliance on the Cabrera Report and its flawed numbers could "lend
an upward bias" to his own results. Furthermore, an annex of Shefftz's draft report relies heavily
on annex T to the Cabrera report-an annex that was drafted by Stratus, the consultants who
ghostwrote the Cabrera Report.
197. The reports of other experts, such as Carlos Picone, Robert Paolo Scardina, and
Daniel Rourke were written "in collaboration with the Weinberg Group," the group that had been
hired not to create new reports but rather to repackage the Cabrera Report. Sections of Picone's
report were written entirely by the Weinberg Group, with only "minimal" editing by Picone.
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