Retired executives from Columbia-based Grace go on trial in Libby, Montana. From the NYT:

Grace, which bought the mine in 1963 and shut it in 1990, has been paying medical bills here for years and agreed in 2008 to spend $250 million for environmental cleanup of the town. The company, which was driven into bankruptcy protection in 2001 by hundreds of millions of dollars in asbestos poisoning claims mostly unrelated to the Libby disaster, reached tentative civil settlements last year to pay $3 billion to asbestos victims.

Its criminal trial in the Libby affair, originally set to begin in 2006, was delayed by prosecutors’ ultimately successful appeals of judicial rulings on the admissibility of evidence.

At least 200 deaths and thousands of illnesses are known to be related to the town’s exposure to the mine’s billowing dust clouds of vermiculite, which by dint of geological bad luck was layered millions of years ago with naturally occurring asbestos.

Prosecutors say that the mine’s owner, W. R. Grace & Company, which is also a defendant, and its managers knew as far back as the 1970s that asbestos was mixed with the vermiculite and that this posed a risk to their workers, but that they conspired to continue releasing it into the air and to misrepresent the peril.

The company’s own medical studies of its miners, the government says, create a paper trail that will prove the charges of wire fraud, obstruction of justice, conspiracy and violations of the Clean Air Act.

“Our major problem is death from respiratory cancer,” one of the executives, Henry A. Eschenbach, wrote in 1982 in response to one such study, according to the indictment, returned in 2005. “This is no surprise."

The judge in the case, for which jury selection is to begin Thursday in Missoula, has barred lawyers on both sides from commenting publicly. But Grace has said in the past that its managers acted in good faith.

The five executives being tried are Mr. Eschenbach, Jack W. Wolter, William J. McCaig, Robert J. Bettacchi and Robert C. Walsh. All are now retired, and all have remained free on their own recognizance while awaiting trial.

If convicted, they face as much as 15 years in prison on each of three counts of endangering Libby through Clean Air Act violations, and lesser time on each of the other charges, plus fines that could amount to several million dollars. Conviction of Grace could mean fines of hundreds of millions.