5 Inspiring Real-Life Stories Of The Little Guy Winning

Therrien, a dogged moralist and virtuoso phone negotiator, turned himself into the Dick Tracy of tracing dicks. At night he would harass collectors by phoning them nonstop until they gave up a name, slowly building a network of scumbag informants. When the leads went cold, he would occasionally make small payments on his fake loans just to see where the money would travel. To his family and friends, he was but a promotional salesman who spent a bit too much time locked away in his home office. But to loan sharks, he was the main character from Taken -- Liam Taken, we're pretty sure his name was.

Therrien tracked the kingpin of this massive network of phantom debt collection to Kansas City. Joel Tucker had packaged $7.7 million in fake debt through loan packages and sold it off to the shadiest bidders, including the person who threatened Therrien. Therrien confronted Tucker over the phone, whereupon he claimed he had no idea his company had systematically and intentionally ruined thousands of people's lives. But that only made Therrien angrier. He leaned on his network of contacts until he obtained hard proof of Tucker's heinous crimes. He mailed all his evidence to the FTC, who nearly tripped over their own shoes bringing him in to help bring Tucker's empire down.

In 2016, Joel Tucker was ordered by a judge to pay $34.2 million -- money he claimed not to have and which, in what had to be the sweetest of ironies, would permanently drown him in debt.

In 1999, a bunch of boring, grown-up newspapers reported on the passing of Sitha Vemireddy, an Indian teenager who died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a rundown apartment building in Berkeley. But seeing as cautionary tales about building safety codes aren't sexy, the papers quickly moved on. All but one: The Jacket, Berkeley High's paper. Editor Iliana Montauk was puzzled that, despite living in their neighborhood, she had never heard of Vemireddy. She asked Meghan Greenwell, a junior, to look into the story.

Together, working on tips from Indian-American students at their school, the pair uncovered some strange facts about Sitha. For starters, she and her sisters attended none of the schools in their district. Instead they worked full-time in a restaurant owned by Lakireddy Bali Reddy, one of Berkeley's wealthiest businessmen. Also strange: The apartment Sitha lived and died in wasn't the address her supposed parents lived at. Something smelled fishy, and this time it wasn't that weird kid with the fish thing.

After barely a week, Greenwell and Montauk had uncovered a sinister evil all the adults in Berkeley had been missing for years. With evidence in hand, they broke the story. The deceased girl (whose real name was Chanti Prattipati) and her sister had been the victims of a human trafficking ring orchestrated by Reddy. For decades, he and his son abused the Indian caste system, returning to their hometown in India to lure low-caste women with promising work in America.

Once the women arrived, they would treat them as slaves, imprisoning them in shitty tenements and pushing many into prostitution. This high school newspaper story prompted police to launch their own investigation, which landed Reddy in jail. In addition, the discovery of such a seedy underbelly in liberal Berkeley was so jarring that it led to serious reforms in California's trafficking laws. Not bad for a bunch of meddling kids.

For the next five years, the couple were huge thorns in Beto's side, with Jalet filing lawsuits and Cruz recruiting other prisoners as plaintiffs. Then, in 1972, Cruz was finally released. He and Jalet got married as quickly as possible. But just when things were looking up, Beto tried to drag Jalet into it. The crooked director intimidated three prisoners into testifying that Jalet had tried to incite a riot. She faced years in prison, but fought to the end, discrediting the evidence in court. The sensational climax of the trial came when one of Beto's witnesses had an attack of conscience and asked to retake the stand, whereupon he admitted to lying. This shattered Beto's plan, and after some impressive testifying from Cruz and legal maneuvering from Jalet, the case was won.

Beto was forced to resign in disgrace, but the lovebirds weren't going to stop there. By 1980, they had taken the case to the Supreme Court, and it was decided that the entire Texas Department of Corrections had acted unconstitutionally. This forever changed the way they treated prisoners in the Lone Star state. All because of one couple. And they lived happily ever after ... until Cruz got addicted to drugs, they divorced, and he overdosed at the age of 47. J-just like in The Shawshank Redemption?

When Nelson was making her documentary, she learned she would have to pay a $1,500 fee to record label Warner/Chappell, which claimed to own the copyright on the song. This was odd to Nelson, who knew that was, to put it in legal terms, a big ol' lie. During her research, she had discovered that the song's tune dated all the way back to 1890s, when sisters Patty and Mildred Hill, both kindergarten teachers, copyrighted a melody called "Good Morning To All" through the Clayton F Summy Company. But the copyright was only for the melody, there was no evidence or documentation attributing the famous lyrics to the Hill sisters. And yet that didn't stop the Summy Company from filing a copyright on the wildly popular birthday song in 1935, using their melody copyright as claim of legal ownership.

In 1988, Warner gulped up the Summy Company for $25 million, and with it, "Happy Birthday." Through ruthless enforcement of this shaky copyright, Warner/Chappell squeezed about $2 million each year out of movies, TV shows, and ... high-profile birthday parties, maybe? They also argued that according to the 1935 copyright registration, they could keep the copyright going until 2030.

Nelson took her findings to lawyers and launched a class-action suit to challenge the giant record label's claim. Realizing they might get hit with charges for much shadier dealings, Warner/Chappell paid $14 million in copyright compensation to avoid a court hearing about the fees they had collected. In 2016, the song became public domain again for the first time in over 85 years. So thanks to Nelson, everyone is free to use the birthday song in their art, movies, weird YouTube edits, etc.

Once past a few more petty roadblocks, Davis and the Plainfield folks finally got their free-standing emergency center. After her retirement, the community gave her a holiday -- something even Batman doesn't have. Where's the justice in that?

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