Jack DeCoster was sentenced to three months in jail this week, after decades of lawlessness against immigrant employees, the environment and now consumers.

At the same time, a thousand miles away in Atlanta, a group of black educators with no criminal record was sentenced for cheating on elementary school tests. Some of them were given 20-year terms, with a minimum of seven years in prison.

All deserved to be punished, but those sentences should have been swapped.

For about six weeks, some years ago, I joined with three prominent Maine businesspeople in an effort to rescue DeCoster from himself, give him basic instruction on becoming a responsible businessman and, most importantly, help the workers at his operation in Leeds.

It was a long-shot assignment, but one that we believed was worth the try.

Together with Buzz Fitzgerald, former head of Bath Iron Works, Dana Connors of the Maine State Chamber of Commerce and Preti Flaherty founding partner Harold Pachios, then DeCoster’s attorney, we persuaded DeCoster to publicly commit to 10 major changes in his operations related to housing, sanitation, worker safety and discrimination.

At a packed news conference at Portland City Hall, DeCoster promised to carry out those changes. Some of them, including new housing for immigrant workers, were accomplished. But within a month, DeCoster began to hedge, and we soon decided that it was our responsibility to leave, and to let others know.

While we were there, I spent more time inside the DeCoster operation than just about anyone outside his immediate circle. He wanted the world to believe he was a simple farmer, sitting on a tractor, but he was far more complex than that.

Through four decades, I’ve worked with thousands of people in Maine to make this state a better place. Some, like Fitzgerald, were saints. Others were clearly on the wrong side of the heaven and hell divide. None has been nearly as evil and fascinating as DeCoster.

Shut off from the larger world of politics and media, he hadn’t read a newspaper or watched the news for 20 years. One of the first things we did was to redecorate his boardroom with news stories documenting decades of violations and lawlessness. DeCoster wouldn’t look at them.

DeCoster was an uneducated but intelligent man, and a ruthless character, full of contradictions. First among them was that he was both highly religious and lacking in basic morals. He’s a man who built an egg empire from 100 hens to seven egg “factories” surrounding his modest Cape Cod house.

His hero was Henry Ford, the inventor of modern mass production, and he reinvented egg farming into a brutally efficient operation that produced millions of eggs each year that were never touched by human hands until they came out of your refrigerator.

DeCoster, like the 19th-century robber barons he admired, put efficiency and profits ahead of laws and people. He crowded Mexican and Mexican-American workers into fetid and dangerous housing in the same way that he stuffed birds into tiny, straitjacket cages for most of their lives, with conveyor belts just below them ready to whisk their eggs away.

One time Fitzgerald and I confronted DeCoster about the lack of toilet paper and proper soap in the factory bathrooms. “Mexicans don’t use toilet paper,” he told us. When we protested, DeCoster became more animated. “You know, for Mexicans this is so much better than what they left,” he said. For emphasis, he added this gem: “There’s a lot of black people who never wanted to be freed from slavery for the same reason. They had it good.”

While DeCoster was giving us that lesson in history, race, culture and ethics, what looked like three satellite cellphones sat before him on the conference table. “I’ve got trains loaded with grain in the Midwest,” he said, “and we don’t move them until the price is right and I give the OK.”

DeCoster then began railing against all the costly things we made him do. We listened quietly. We hadn’t come to that place to argue. When he had exhausted himself, Fitzgerald asked a simple question. “Have you said everything you want to say?” he asked. When a perplexed DeCoster nodded, Fitzgerald quietly stood up, reached for his coat and said to me, “It’s time to go.”

The Jack DeCoster story is a collection of well-documented tragedies for the people around him. One unwritten tragedy is that we’ll never know how much good a man like him could have done, for his workers, his community and his state, if he’d been a better man.

Alan Caron, a Waterville native, is a partner in the strategic consulting firm of Caron and Egan. He can be contacted at:

alancaroninmaine@gmail.com