The Fall of the House of Zeus (15 page)

Minor was often compared to Scruggs. They were friends, the same age, who practiced on the Gulf Coast. Both had admirable military backgrounds, Minor as a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War; Scruggs as a navy jet pilot. Together they owned a condominium in Biloxi as investment property. And they had just returned from an adventurous trip to New Zealand, arranged by Scruggs, to cheer on the dashing American sailor Dennis Conner in the America’s Cup competition. Scruggs offered his yacht as a hotel for his guests; it also served as a floating hospitality suite for Conner’s wealthy supporters to watch the races. As their wealth and renown grew, Minor and Scruggs enjoyed this ability to hobnob with celebrities as much as they relished their influence to sway political decisions.

Back home, Minor was also known as one of the principal benefactors of local Democratic candidates. Like Scruggs, he tended to operate as a lone wolf in dispensing his largesse rather than coordinating it through party functionaries. Many of Minor’s beneficiaries were considered, by Mississippi standards, liberal.

Minor’s political leanings could be traced directly to his father, Bill Minor, a respected newspaperman who had been reporting on the Mississippi scene since the days when Jim Eastland was a freshman senator. For more than a half century, the elder Minor had assailed demagogues and alerted his readers to the unfortunate consequences of racist policies. During the civil rights movement, visiting correspondents invariably sought out Bill Minor for guidance and perspective on Mississippi matters. In 1997, he had been the first recipient of the $25,000 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism, an honor given annually to courageous reporters.

The son, Paul, had become something of a celebrity in Mississippi, too, though in a different field. And unlike the gregarious Scruggs, Paul Minor exuded an air of arrogance and superiority. Sometimes his brusque behavior was burnished by alcohol. Minor did not hold his liquor well. His bristling, aloof manner often offended others, even his close associates, and it would work against him when trouble descended.

Yet he was persuasive in presenting to the governor the case for appointing Diaz. Though Diaz was considered plaintiff-friendly, he had served in the legislature as a Republican, and it was thought that this should spare Musgrove from partisan complaints.

Musgrove agreed to make Diaz his interim appointment. For consolation, the governor put Scruggs’s choice, Judge Myers, into a state court of appeals seat being vacated by Diaz.

After their meeting with Musgrove, Minor and Scruggs went to lunch. As they walked into the restaurant, Minor used his cell phone to deliver the good news to Diaz. Before ending the conversation, he passed the phone to Scruggs, who added his congratulations.

Over their meal, Minor and Scruggs mused about their latest thrust of political power. They had succeeded in putting their man on the state supreme court. But only for a few months. In November, Diaz would have to run for a full eight-year term.

    Four of the court’s nine seats were up for election that fall when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce flooded Mississippi with money and a massive campaign of television commercials, the greatest involvement ever by outside forces in a state supreme court election.

The Chamber’s candidate in the race against Diaz was Keith Starrett, a South Mississippi lawyer with strong ties to the Republican Party. Though judicial candidates do not run with party designation, it was no secret that Starrett was favored by the GOP. Following the first round of voting, which essentially produced a standoff between candidates favored by the plaintiffs’ bar and those perceived as pro-business, in late November Diaz and Starrett wound up in a runoff that provoked a new wave of spending by business interests.

To meet the threat posed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Minor guaranteed an $80,000 loan to Diaz and urged Scruggs to do the same. Scruggs was told the money was needed to finance the purchase of TV time for Diaz to offset a million-dollar blitz on Starrett’s behalf. He was given a private screening of Diaz’s ads at the Green Oaks Bed and Breakfast, operated by Diaz’s wife, Jennifer. Convinced of the soundness of the campaign, Scruggs agreed to guarantee another $80,000 loan from Merchants and Marine Bank of Pascagoula, where he did much of his business.

Diaz narrowly won the election with 51 percent of the vote to retain his seat, but an altogether different battle was just beginning that would keep him suspended for much of the term.

    The Republican Party had regained control of nominations to the federal judiciary with George W. Bush’s victory in 2000. So, by the next year, the Bush administration was able to offer some solace to
the Mississippi GOP and its business constituency, still smarting from Diaz’s election and the loss by the party’s nominee for a congressional seat, Dunn Lampton. It appeared to fit into a national plan.
As GOP theoretician Ben Ginsberg observed, “Republicans began to wield the RIP (revelation, investigation and prosecution) weapon against Democrats.”

In a move approved by the state’s two Republican senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, Lampton was named U.S. attorney for the southern district of Mississippi. And Lampton, along with the representatives of the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, soon launched an investigation of Democratic activities, looking into loans that had been given by trial lawyers to candidates for state judgeships. After news of an investigation of Minor and Scruggs was leaked to
The Clarion-Ledger
in Jackson, Democrats quickly noted that Lampton and Starrett were childhood friends and that Minor had once won a substantial judgment against one of Lampton’s relatives. It was also obvious that Minor’s father had long been the scourge of the Republican Party in Mississippi. Scruggs, of course, had his own Democratic credentials.

Well before the investigation resulted in indictments, the probe was being denounced by Democrats as a Republican witch hunt.

Scruggs was accustomed to guaranteeing loans for political candidates—and in some instances, never being repaid. Minor had a similar history. In 1996, before Steve Patterson was drummed out of the state auditor’s office, Minor wrote Scruggs about a debt owed by Patterson. “Trustmark demanding payment from me on the note that I guaranteed on Steve Patterson in which you said I would not have to pay,” Minor said in a somewhat jocular letter. “I realize you have been looking for an opportunity to retaliate for my recommendation on Copytel stocks, but this is not funny. Seriously, do you know whether Steve Patterson has raised any money and can retire this note or are we stuck with it?”

A few years later, there were problems with the Diaz loan, but Scruggs was not particularly upset until his friend Attorney General Mike Moore called in 2002 to tell him of the investigation. “You’ve got some explaining to do,” Moore said, and he set up an appointment for Scruggs to speak with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Jackson.

Scruggs told the prosecutors of complications involving the transaction. The note, which had been signed by Jennifer Diaz instead of her husband, had not been repaid. After the couple split following the
election, she had demanded that Oliver Diaz’s name replace hers on the note. This created a legal question, Scruggs said, because state law prevented a sitting justice from raising money to retire an old campaign debt. When he discussed the difficulty with Minor, his friend suggested staging a fund-raiser to pay off the debts owed to them. No fund-raiser was held, and Scruggs appeared stuck with the loan. Exasperated, he paid it off himself.

“I was kinda in a catch-22,” Scruggs later told a grand jury. “I couldn’t help raise the money to pay it, but if I paid it off myself, then I was in violation. But I owed the money. So what do you do? So I just paid it off, rather than try to pass the hat, which I felt like it was too late to do.”

In July 2003, two months after Scruggs was called before the grand jury—and four months before Republican Haley Barbour would challenge Governor Musgrove in statewide elections—the U.S. attorney announced the indictments of Diaz, his former wife, two other state judges, and Minor in connection with loans. Scruggs was not indicted.

    
During his grand jury testimony, Scruggs was asked about other loans arranged by Minor that had ensnared the two other Gulf Coast judges named in the indictment, Wes Teel and John Whitfield.

Scruggs said he loaned $27,500 to Teel, a chancery judge, at Minor’s request in February 2000, to help bail the judge out of “some financial emergency of some sort.”

“For whatever reason, either Paul didn’t have the money or didn’t want to guarantee the note or give him the money, loan him the money,” Scruggs testified. “He wanted me to do it, I said: I’ll do it, but only with a promissory note, and I want to be paid back.”

Scruggs said he had never appeared in court before Teel and knew of no cases Minor had pending before the judge. “Generally speaking,” he said, “trial lawyers don’t go into chancery court very often.”

Teel’s loan was paid back within two months, he said.

During his grand jury appearance, Scruggs was also asked about a $100,000 note that Minor held for Whitfield, a circuit judge who routinely heard civil litigation. Scruggs testified that Minor had asked him to substitute his name for Minor’s on the note. He inferred from their conversation, Scruggs said, that Minor “had a case before the judge or something coming up that would have looked bad … I think the reason he called me was because he didn’t think it was proper.”

Scruggs refused, he said, because “I just was not going to play that
game. I did it for Teel before because I didn’t think Paul would have many cases, if any, in chancery court. But I knew he had a lot of cases in the circuit court,” where Whitfield presided.

Scruggs asked the prosecutors to let him elaborate on his answer. “The main reason I didn’t guarantee that note, that $100,000—whatever it was—note that Paul asked me to guarantee for Judge Whitfield, was because I didn’t want to make Paul’s problem my problem. I didn’t want to get involved in that transaction.

“Another reason is,” he continued, “I thought I’d get stuck with it financially. Paul sometimes doesn’t pay his debts and I didn’t want to have to look to him or the judge for that money.”

Scruggs testified without seeking immunity, which meant that he left himself open for possible prosecution on anything he said. The prosecutors seemed satisfied that Scruggs had been truthful. Minor’s defense attorneys, inspecting Scruggs’s secret testimony later, also concluded that nothing he said had been particularly damaging to Minor.

But intimations of a broken friendship were apparent.

Near the end of Scruggs’s three hours before the grand jury, Lampton, the federal prosecutor, asked about Minor’s reputation as a “judge maker.” Scruggs might have been describing himself with his answer.

“Paul aggressively plays the political game,” Scruggs said. “He thinks he has to do that, I think, to counter organizations like the chamber of commerce that come in with large sums of money and try to influence elections, judicial and otherwise. The governor’s race is one of those places, and when vacancies occur on the bench the governor is the one that makes the appointment for the interim seat.”

Minor often leaned on Democratic governors “to appoint people who were trial lawyer–friendly or consumer-friendly,” he said. “I have never heard Paul characterize himself as a ‘judge maker’ or words to that effect. But he does—everybody knows that he is very active—and he is not the only one. There are lots of lawyers who are active on both sides of the aisle in asking the governor to make judicial appointments. Paul plays it—you know—is very aggressive in doing that.”

    
Minor and Scruggs were no longer speaking to one another at the time of Scruggs’s testimony. But differences over loans had not been responsible for the breach. Their long relationship had been ruptured by a very personal incident.

Several of Minor’s friends, including Scruggs, had become increasingly worried about his heavy drinking. Minor slurred words after a
couple of glasses of wine, and his condition deteriorated when he went beyond social consumption. He had barely escaped serious injury in two auto accidents attributed to alcohol—once when he drove himself off the road.

Scruggs had grown alarmed during their America’s Cup trip to New Zealand, when Minor stayed drunk for the first three days of the journey. One evening Minor woke from a jagged afternoon nap on the yacht insisting that it was 8:00 a.m. It was actually twelve hours earlier.

Later, in the summer of 2002, following an incident at Minor’s beach house in Destin, Florida, Scruggs was asked by Minor’s friends to talk with him. Minor had cut his nose after falling at a party, and there were fears that he would eventually hurt himself badly.

After consulting with a former partner of Minor’s and another Gulf Coast lawyer, a recovering alcoholic who had undergone treatment, Scruggs brought in a representative of the state bar association who dealt with lawyers with drug and alcohol problems. Once an appointment was lined up at the Betty Ford Center, a well-known California clinic offering rehabilitation from drug and alcohol dependency, the group arranged an intervention.

Scruggs and two others went to Destin to discuss their concerns with Minor, persuading him to check into the clinic. Accompanied by his wife, Minor boarded a plane Scruggs made available for the trip to Rancho Mirage. They got as far as the clinic when the intervention went awry.

When Scruggs called the center to make sure that Minor had checked in, he learned that Minor had departed. He reached Minor, who told him there was no reason to check into the facility on a weekend. He assured Scruggs he would do it on Monday. He never did. That was the last Scruggs heard from Minor.

Minor, like many targets of an intervention, was resentful over the action. He broke off communications with his old friend.

A year later, as he came under investigation, Minor charged that Scruggs was being protected by Senator Lott, and his attorneys argued that the case against Minor was the latest example of political prosecutions encouraged by Bush’s White House.