In JTC Petroleum Co. v. Piasa Motor Fuels, Inc. (7th Cir. 1999) 190 F.3d 775, the plaintiff, a road repair contractor, brought an antitrust suit against its competitors (the applicator defendants) and asphalt producers (the producer defendants). The producers settled. JTC tried to show that the applicators enlisted the producers in their conspiracy, "assigning them the role of policing the applicators' cartel by refusing to sell to applicators who defied the cartel--such as JTC, which has bid for jobs that the cartel had assigned to other applicators." (Id. at p. 778.) Since the producers had nowhere else to sell their asphalt, the applicator defendants could "coerce them into helping to police their cartel by threatening to buy less product from them or pay less for it," or may have been paying the producers rather than coercing them. (Ibid.) The court observed there was also evidence "that the reasons the producers gave for refusing to sell to JTC were pretextual ... ." (Id. at p. 779.) For example, the producers said they refused to sell to JTC because it was not a good credit risk. However, when JTC offered to pay cash, the producers still refused to sell. "This suggests that the real reason for the refusal was ... that they were being compensated by the cartel for refusing to sell to a customer whom otherwise they would have been happy to sell to." (Ibid.) "Given the evidence of cartelization at both the applicator and producer level, the suspicious producer price behavior (suggestive of the producers' having been 'paid off' by the cartel to boycott JTC and other upstarts), and the pretextual character of the reasons the producers gave for the refusal to deal, a rational jury could conclude that JTC was indeed the victim of a producers' boycott organized by the applicator defendants." (Ibid.)