Corporate Crime Reporter (CCR)
interviewed Dr. Barry Castleman, one of the world's leading experts on asbestos
disease on October 27, 2025. The interview was published by CCR on
November 3, 2025. Castleman has documented corporate crimes in the asbestos industry in India and the struggle of Ban Asbestos Network of India (BANI) in his book Asbestos: Medical And Legal Aspects.
INTERVIEW WITH BARRY CASTLEMAN
Castleman opens his 2017 paper Criminality and Asbestos in Industry with a quote from Sin and Society, Edward Ross' 1907 classic.
Castleman then lays out his own five part formula for prevention - information, regulation, compensation, humiliation, and incarceration."
CCR: Criminal prosecutions for corporate manslaughter or homicide are few and far between. But you have been following one in Italy. Tell us about it.
CASTLEMAN: The case was originally brought in Italy to hold businessmen criminally responsible for causing the deaths of workers and neighbors of their factories from preventable occupational and environmental cancers. The company involved is the Swiss company Eternit, which had cement pipe and sheet manufacturing plants all over Europe, in South America and even in Lebanon and India. It was a giant corporation using asbestos combined with cement to make construction materials. As a result, you see the corrugated asbestos cement roofs gray in color all over the developing world today. The company's owner and CEO was a man named Stephan Schmidheiny. Mr. Schmidheiny eventually realized that asbestos was going to have to go and in the 1980s he sold or closed all of his asbestos mines and plants.
CCR: How did he come to that realization?
CASTLEMAN: Well, governments across Europe were banning asbestos, starting with Sweden. The Swedish labor unions took a look at the way asbestos was being used in the construction industry and said - we don't need to use asbestos cement roofs and pipes in our country, we have other alternative construction materials we can use for roofing and pipes - metal pipes, plastic pipes. And similarly, roofing materials could be made of other materials. Under pressure from the unions, the Swedes shut down the Enternit plants in 1976. And they put pressure on the giant automobile and truck companies - Saab, Volvo and Scania - and forced them to get serious about replacing asbestos in brake linings.
By 1987, the Swedes required that all new vehicles in Sweden be asbestos free. They started with brakes and then engine gaskets and clutches had to be asbestos free. That was the result of the Swedish unions pressuring the automobile industry. So the bans started in the Scandinavian countries. And by the early 1990s, other companies like Merdedez were seeing they had to go asbestos free in their new cars. And it turned out that the non asbestos brakes actually worked better than the asbestos brakes. They did cost a little more.
CCR: What are the health implications of exposure to asbestos and how long have we known about the problem?
CASTLEMAN: Asbestosis was first recognized over 100 years ago as an occupational disease, a lung scarring disease you could get from breathing asbestos dust. In the early days they were making asbestos cloth for safety gloves in the steel industry. The dust was so thick you couldn't see across the room and people in their early 30s were dying of asbestosis.
But as some protective measures were introduced in some countries like Britain and Germany, the workers started living long enough to get occupational cancer. The Germans recognized as early as the 1930s that lung cancer was also caused by asbestos. They had state worker compensation boards and they were compensating lung cancer as an occupational disease even for workers who had slight asbestosis. And that was reported in the most prominent German medical journal - the German Medical Weekly--in the beginning of 1939. And that was received in libraries in the United States. Then in the 1940s, cancers of the pleura and peritoneum, the thin membranes lining the chest cavity and the abdominal cavity, were extraordinarily rare. And these cancers started to be reported with people with asbestosis.
The Germans were the first to recognize, based on two cases, that this rare cancer was an occupational cancer. And that was published in Germany in 1943. And it was published in England nine months later. The Brits were still reading the German Medical Weekly during the war and writing abstracts and publishing those in the UK. And that was republished here in the United States.
By 1960, it was recognized that people who lived near asbestos mines were getting these rare cancers in rather large numbers. Thirty three cases were reported in South Africa and 32 of the 33 cases had a demonstrable history of asbestos exposure.
Then in the mid 1960s, British epidemiologists Murial Newhouse and Hilda Thompson did an epidemiological study of people who had died in a London hospital of mesothelioma. They tracked down the survivors and identified 76 comparison patients who had other conditions. They interviewed those people for a comparison population. And they found the people with asbestosis had a greater history of occupational exposure to asbestos.
There was also a larger study of the people in the mesothelioma group who had only household exposure to asbestos. They never worked with it but they lived with someone who did and who would bring this dust home on their clothes, on their shoes, on their lunch boxes, their hair, in the car. And the household would be contaminated with these indestructible mineral fibers. They would accumulate in the household and kill the family members of the asbestos workers.
This one study also showed that of the remaining cases, the mesothelioma patients had a statistically significant excess of people who had neither occupational or household exposure but lived within a half a mile of an asbestos factory. you have demonstrated that mesothelioma is So a disease that threatens all the people who worked with asbestos, all the people who live with those people and all of the people who lived within the surrounding communities around the asbestos air pollution point sources like shipyards, asbestos factories and construction factories.
At the same time you had Dr. Irving Selikoff in New York in 1964 doing a mortality study of insulation workers. And although individual deaths had been reported on a number of workers in the insulation trade, using pipe covering and boiler insulation that contained asbestos, no one had really identified the extent of the danger.
Selikoff did this through a mortality study. He was able to do this because he had the cooperation of the union of insulation workers. And that union trusted him with the ass of the members of the New York and New Jersey locals. That was the beginning of 1942. He followed these workers up through 1962, by which time 255 out of 632 men had died. If you look at the mortality experience of these men, one out five of these men died of cancer of the lung and pleura. He documented an appalling excess of pulmonary cancer. And 12 of the 255 died from asbestosis.
CCR: What about exposure to asbestos insulation in the home?
CASTLEMAN: There was also a recognition that people could get killed by consumer products. There was a report in 1974 of the British Mesothelioma Register and one of the deaths had only done one day of work building chicken coops with asbestos boards. That was the only asbestos exposure this person had and he died of mesothelioma. Nobody was able to do a study of ordinary consumers. The exposure to asbestos was so permeated throughout our society, you couldn't find an unexposed group.
CCR: If you had mesothelioma, that means you were exposed to asbestos. If you were not working in a facility or living near a facility or married to someone who worked in a facility - there must have been those cases. How many were there?
CASTLEMAN: We don't know. How many people are going to remember that they worked in an office building where there were renovations done to the building and they were carrying out a whole bunch of asbestos? And this would have been before anyone was putting up warning signs or taking any kinds of precautions.
CCR: If someone has mesothelioma but doesn't know where they got the exposure, who do they sue?
CASTLEMAN: Good question. The lawyers on both sides of the take exposure histories. These lawyers are looking for every possible way these people were exposed to asbestos. The plaintiffs' lawyers are looking for someone to sue. The defense lawyers are looking for someone to blame. Both sides are assiduously questioning these people if they are still alive. You question these people. The plaintiffs' lawyers will very thoroughly explore every job these people had, every way they could have been exposed to asbestos. But there turn out to be new things that come along that they were not asking about-like talcum powder. Up until about twenty years ago, generally the only talc that was being subject of litigation was New York State talc, which was well known to be contaminated with asbestos. There have been reports since the 1960s of people dying from lung cancer and mesothelioma these were people who mined this talc.
Then people started looking more carefully at other products that had talc.
CCR: How many people have been killed by asbestos?
CASTLEMAN: We estimate maybe 40,000 a year in the United States. So that would be hundreds of thousands of people, maybe a million or two.
CCR: What about worldwide?
CASTLEMAN: The estimates are now running around 300,000 a year.
CCR:How many criminal prosecutions have been brought against asbestos manufacturers?
CASTLEMAN: Practically none.
CCR: Millions of people around the world have died from this, from an exposure that the industry understood could kill and they understood it more than 100 years ago. And there have been practically no criminal prosecutions, except in Italy.
CASTLEMAN: They went after the Italian managers of the Eternit company. And they finally went after the top dog, the owner and CEO in Switzerland. He's a multi-billionaire.
CCR: Was there a criminal prosecution against the company?
CASTLEMAN: No, but criminal prosecutions against companies are kind of amorphous. You can only get a fine. Nobody goes to jail.
CCR: Except that our publication is called Corporate Crime Reporter and we have documented literally hundreds of prosecutions against companies. And there is a reason to prosecute companies instead of just individuals- and that is to send a message, and to deter future wrongdoing. There is a purpose for criminally prosecuting a company. In Italy the company was not criminally prosecuted. Instead they prosecute the top dog as you call him, Stephan Schmidheiny.
CASTLEMAN: Yes. He was initially charged with creating an environmental disaster. He was interviewed in 2002 by the Wall Street Journal and he said - "I will never go to an Italian jail."
CCR: Actually, I just looked it up for the full quote. He told the Journal - "I promise you, I will never go to an Italian prison. Once in a while, I have to look myself in the mirror. I can very well look this guy in the eyes and feel good about what I have done. Of course, nobody is perfect, and from hindsight, you always know more and you should have done more.
CASTLEMAN: The case actually went forward in 2009. I testified in the case about how the big asbestos companies were sharing documents with each other. Those documents came out in U.S. litigation.
In 2012, a three judge panel convicted Stephan Schmidheiny of creating an environmental disaster. There was also a Baron from Belgium who was prosecuted, but he died a few weeks before the court rendered its verdict. So, Schmidheiny was the only one convicted. He was sentenced to 16 years in jail for creating an environmental disaster.
Unionists from all over Europe came to the court to hear the verdict. They were wearing their union jackets. There were Eternit companies in many of these European countries.
Three auditoriums were filled with people who wanted to witness the verdict being handed down. We had simultaneous translation into English and French.
The verdict went on appeal the following year- 2013. The appeals court added some additional deaths from Naples and they raised the sentence to 18 years.
Then the case went to the Court of Cassation - which is the highest appellate court. That was an appeal based on just the law, not the facts. The Court of Cassation heard the case. The legendary prosecutor - Raffaele Guarniniello - who brought this case was not the one who took the case on its final appeal. The appeal was handled by some political appointee from the Ministry of Justice. He walked into the court and said - we ask for the case to be dismissed on the grounds of statute of limitations. That would be like the Justice Department winning a criminal case in the district court and a U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington and then saying - never mind, we want this conviction to be thrown out. And the statute of limitations issue had been raised in the lower courts and dismissed out of hand. It's not as if this issue was being brought up for the first time.
The Court of Cassation threw out the case. But six months before the Court of Cassation heard the appeal, the prosecutor, Raffaele Guarniniello, suspecting this might happen, filed murder charges against Schmidheiny. There's no statute of limitation for murder, but there is for manslaughter. Schmidheiny was represented by the best lawyers money can buy. He was reputed to have been spending millions of dollars on lawyers. The cases were batted around in different courts in Italy. And in the end, it was decided that there would be four separate trials of Schmidheiny on manslaughter charges.
Schmidheiny was tried in three courts. And in all three trials, he was convicted of manslaughter - in 2018, 2022 and 2023. The big case was in 2023, which involved a large number of deaths in Casale Monferrato.
CCR: The reason there were three separate trials
CASTLEMAN: They were broken down by different regions of the country. He was convicted three times by three different courts. And now three courts of appeal have upheld those verdicts.
CCR: What were the sentences in each case?
CASTLEMAN: Only a year or two in the first two. They started out with two deaths in Turin. Then it was reduced to one. They started out with eight in Naples and that was reduced to one.
Then the big case was in 2023. There were 392 deaths from mesothelioma in the Casale area. He was sentenced to twelve years in jail. And now the appeals court just ruled. It issued a judgment. But then it issued something called a motivation. This was an explanation on what the judgment was based on. The motivation was just issued and runs about 600 pages.
CCR: Where is Schmidheiny now?
CASTLEMAN: He never appeared in Italy. Only his lawyers appear in court.
CCR: What happens now?
CASTLEMAN: The final appeal goes to the Court of Cassation. That court has been playing some funny games with statutes of limitations in other cases. But these cases have achieved a great deal o media interest in Italy. People are following this. People want to know what a going to happen. This is a matter of public concern
CCR: When is the Court of Castion going to hear the case?
CASTLEMAN: I would say within the cast year or so. It might take another year inder frase law, while these cases are delayet, the statue of limitations clock keeps running. Depelievable.
CCR: How long has this been going on now?
CASTLEMAN: The trial court convictions go back to 2018.
CCR: Where is Schmidheiny now?
CASTLEMAN: Probably in Switzerland.
CCR: How much is he worth?
CASTLEMAN: Billions.
CCR: How would you explain the lack of criminal manslaughter prosecutions? In the United States you have Ford Motor Company, BP, PG&E. But few others. But why so few?
CASTLEMAN: The first release of documents from the asbestos litigation, which the journalists referred to as "the Pentagon Papers of the asbestos industry," was in 1978. Then Congressman George Miller (D-California) put forth legislation that would subject corporate executives to criminal prosecution if they were involved with suppressing information from the public that lead to serious illness or death.
I testified at Congressional hearings in 1979. He told me he never saw anything like the corporate opposition to this bill. It was going nowhere. The corporate powers were absolutely determined not to allow the United States to establish personal responsibility for these business decisions which endangered so many people's lives. The hearing was chaired by Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan).
CCR: By the way, I searched for the term "Pentagon Papers of the asbestos industry and a 1978 Washington Post article came up titled - New Data on Asbestos Indicate Cover-Up of Effects on Workers. And here is the quote from the article: "These files are going to be the Pentagon Papers of the asbestos industry," said Barry Castleman, a consultant to the Environmental Defense Fund and to attorneys who have been distributing the material through legal circles."
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