The Fall of the House of Zeus (20 page)

When Scruggs learned of the division of the “three points,” he reproached Joey Langston for the way the funds had been distributed. Langston said Scruggs always knew of the way the money would be split, but Langston dropped his bid to get more.

Diane Scruggs was indignant after hearing of Langston’s action. Though she kept abreast of her family’s finances through regular meetings with Deloach, she had never been privy to Scruggs’s handling of the tobacco money. This peek at one example of Scruggs’s side deals astonished her, and she wondered how her husband tolerated relationships with people like Langston.

Inexplicably, Scruggs kept Langston as his lawyer and his friend.

    
On July 20, Judge Davis issued an eight-page opinion. He found that Scruggs “had adequate grounds to terminate” Luckey’s employment and denied Luckey’s constructive trust claims, which would have led to Scruggs’s tobacco money. But on the fourth page of the judgment, the tone of the decision began to change.

“The court finds that Scruggs’ position concerning Luckey’s status within Asbestos Group to be unreasonable and in conflict with existing law,” Davis wrote. He added that Scruggs’s refusal to pay Luckey’s fees was “frivolous” and constituted “a breach of fiduciary duty entitling plaintiff to prejudgment interest” on the money due him.

Davis ruled that Scruggs owed Luckey $13.7 million. Nearly half of that figure represented interest that accrued during the long dispute. In addition, Scruggs was ordered to pay nearly $4 million in attorney’s fees and expenses: $4 million to Merkel, his nemesis.

Scruggs was staggered by the judgment. Not that he was incapable of paying such a figure; he had the resources to do that. But the magnitude of his loss to two of his bitterest rivals ate at him. Scruggs was so consumed by enmity toward Merkel, Luckey, and Roberts Wilson that he was prepared to go to extreme lengths to prevent another judgment like this.

He walked down the hall of his office suite, pitched the order onto Zach’s desk, and expressed incredulity that Davis could have reached this decision. He quickly began to develop second thoughts about the wisdom of submitting the case to the magistrate. He wondered how Davis could have come down so hard against him.

Years before, in 1998, he had seen Davis at one of Mississippi’s premier social events, tailgating among thousands in the Grove before an Ole Miss football game. Davis, who had long experience in the federal court system, mentioned that he was interested in an open federal judgeship. Scruggs called his brother-in-law to see if he might submit Davis’s name to the Clinton administration for consideration. Trent Lott quickly dismissed the idea. He told Scruggs that Davis was a partisan Democrat, too liberal for his tastes. (Lott didn’t tell Scruggs, but the senator intended for the nomination to go to his old college roommate and Sigma Nu brother Allen Pepper.)

Scruggs wondered if Davis’s decision represented retaliation for Scruggs’s failure to deliver a judgeship. Scruggs’s post-trial doubts were reinforced after local lawyers said he should have known Merkel and Davis were good friends. Later, thinking back on the critical ruling, Scruggs remembered a conversation at a restaurant with Oxford lawyer Grady Tollison that especially irritated him. Tollison enjoyed baiting people, even his friends—and Scruggs was no friend—so he did not miss the opportunity to question Scruggs’s judgment. “I was surprised you took that case to Jerry Davis,” Scruggs recalled Tollison saying. “You know, he and Merkel go way back. They go to baseball games together.”

The rumor of Merkel and Davis hobnobbing at baseball games may have been conceived during their repartee at the beginning of the trial. Though both men were ardent baseball fans, they had never gone to a game together.

    
Scruggs smoldered over the judgment, but he paid. After his checks were sent, Luckey had them reproduced. He also made a copy of the glowing
Newsweek
article that had been headlined “Who’s Afraid of Dickie Scruggs?”—the same piece that Scruggs had framed and put on the wall of his office. Using the checks and the
Newsweek
piece, Luckey designed a montage that he framed and sent to Merkel. It wound up on Merkel’s wall, too; his own big game trophy.

With the success of Luckey’s lawsuit, Merkel took charge of related litigation, the old Roberts Wilson suit against Scruggs involving millions of dollars Wilson claimed from their joint venture in the Asbestos Group.

After years without movement, the Wilson case now loomed ahead for Scruggs. He felt beset by a rash of misfortune and found resonance in the biblical testament of Job, the prophet who lamented, “I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil.”

    
The setbacks in July bled into August, and the wound to Scruggs festered. He was angry with himself, and the balm of his drugs did little to comfort him. He would be sixty the next spring, and he began to think about pulling back from his law practice. It would be a radical step, but suddenly the thought had appeal. When he drove out to Deloach’s country estate to discuss the idea with his financial advisor, Scruggs was struck by the pastoral beauty of the place. Deloach owned many acres of fields and forests, and the road to his home cut through a landscape as tailored as a fairway at Augusta National. Scruggs had construction work under way on his own mansion in town. The time seemed favorable for him to put a halt to his frantic pace.

“You’ve got to get me out of law,” he said when he sat down with Deloach. “Clear me out of my practice and set something up for Zach and Sid,” his son and the associate he’d brought with him from Pascagoula. With millions of dollars of income assured each year for another two decades, Scruggs was fixed for life. He was ready to turn the Scruggs Law Firm over to the next generation.

Deloach said the transition could be accomplished without a great
deal of difficulty. But he was unable to move on it right away. Deloach and his wife were leaving the next week on a trip to Greece.

“Why don’t you and Diane come with us?” Deloach suggested. They could talk about the future there, and do it around the splendor of the Aegean Sea.

Another nice thought, Scruggs said. But there was no time to put together such a grand trip on such short notice. They would talk about it again, he said, when Deloach returned.

    
A few days later, on the morning of Saturday, August 27, Scruggs received a telephone call from Pascagoula telling him that his mother had died. Helen Scruggs had been in failing health for some time, and bedridden at her home, a couple of blocks from Scruggs’s beachfront house, since suffering a bad fall. Still, the news came as a shock to her only child.

Dick, more heavily medicated than usual, and Diane flew to the coast, where they were joined by Zach and Amy, who had been in nearby Gulfport for a wedding. Their duties were sad ones as they prepared funeral arrangements. By contrast, the late summer day was glorious, with clear skies and little wind, weekend weather that ordinarily lured thousands to frolic in the gulf waters. But something ominous was out there, beyond the Mississippi Sound and the barrier islands.

The storm was already hurricane-strength and had been given a name: Katrina. Its course was unpredictable, but projections pointed it toward New Orleans, one hundred miles to the west. Landfall was two days away, but close enough for apprehension. Pascagoula had endured great hurricanes before: Camille in 1969 and killers before the weather service designated names for the storms. The Mississippi coastline was regularly battered by seasonal blows, so residents knew to keep their vigilance.

Early Sunday morning, Scruggs woke his son. “This thing’s heading our way. We’ve got to board up.”

A look at television news confirmed his report. On the screen, Katrina had grown into a monster, a spinning red mass that seemed to occupy much of the gulf between the west coast of Florida and New Orleans. The Scruggses, accustomed to the drill over the years, began to gather portable items of value—pictures and antiques—and moved them to Helen’s home, a comfortable ranch house. It was built close to the ground, but high water had never gone that far inland in previous
storms. At the Scruggses’ house, furniture was moved upstairs or away from windows. Storm shutters were sealed, and sandbags placed at the foot of doors. They pitched outdoor furniture into the water of the swimming pool to prevent the deck chairs and chaise lounges from being blown away.

A visitation in Pascagoula to mourn Helen’s passing was canceled. Her body was sent ahead to her family’s old home in Brookhaven, a two-hour drive north. She had wanted to be buried there, and services would be rescheduled once the storm had passed.

By noon, Pascagoula was under an evacuation order. Scruggs learned he had until 2:00 p.m. to leave. At that time the airport would be closed, and his plane would be grounded. Moving quickly, the Scruggses fit themselves and as many friends as they could into the jet and were airborne for Oxford.

Shortly before dawn on Monday, Katrina struck land in the marshy bayou country south of New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi River, then caromed toward the Mississippi coastline like a billiard ball. By that point, those who had fled their homes and those who had stayed could do nothing other than hope.

Scruggs followed the situation from his home in Oxford, depending on television and sporadic cell phone calls from friends and family members who had stayed behind. First came word that Trent Lott’s lovely beachfront home, less than a mile from Scruggs’s place, was gone. Then it was the home of their good friends and neighbors the Bosios: gone. The home of Diane’s brother, Perry Thompson: gone. Then Scruggs’s own home: parts of it still standing, but basically, gone.

Unsatisfied with its carnage on the coast, Katrina came churning inland, crippling the city of Hattiesburg, ninety miles north of Pascagoula, and then wiping out trees and electricity in Jackson, nearly two hundred miles from the coast. To Scruggs, the storm seemed to be chasing him. Still not spent, Katrina struck Oxford at nightfall, uprooting towering old oaks and forcing many residents to resort to candlelight. For emphasis, a tree fell on a guest house at Zach and Amy Scruggs’s home.

    
Two days after Katrina, Scruggs obtained permission to fly his family south for his mother’s graveside service in Brookhaven, where heavy debris—felled trees and sheets of corrugated tin—lay scattered throughout the town. A small group gathered at the cemetery, members of the Furlow family and a few close friends. Scruggs was too emotional to speak. Instead, Zach spoke for the family.

Afterward, they reboarded Scruggs’s jet and flew into Pascagoula, where Zach had left his car behind at the airport. The scene resembled a war zone. Helicopter rotors beat noisily in the air, and armed guards were posted at intervals on the way into town.

They found the devastation they anticipated along the beach, but realized the damage went much deeper into Pascagoula. Helen’s house, which had remained dry through previous storms, had taken on five feet of water in the surge, and it reeked with the smell of decay—dead fish and animals. After hearing reports of looting, Dick and Zach armed themselves with handguns and shotguns and went about salvaging what was left in their homes. Mud caked Helen’s place. At Scruggs’s home, damage was much worse. Two wings of the mansion, as well as a guest house and small gym in the rear, had been washed away.

As he picked through the wreckage along the coastline, Scruggs encountered many old friends faced with a similar task. Their mutual plight pulled him, spiritually, back to Pascagoula.

He began a ritual that he carried out daily for several weeks. Each morning he loaded his plane in Oxford with provisions for the survivors and flew to Pascagoula with food and cases of bottled water and beer. Seeing the need for generators, he bought out the supply at the Oxford Wal-Mart and ferried them to Pascagoula for distribution. Sometimes Scruggs used both his nine-seat Citation and the more spacious Gulfstream; when he did, he flew as co-pilot because he had only three pilots on his payroll. He became a one-man relief agency, and the little Pascagoula airport, named Trent Lott International, took on the appearance of a third world waystop as people clambered around the planes to get the goods Scruggs was handing out. Each evening, he returned to Oxford, sometimes overloading his planes with passengers who wanted to flee the scene.

The work made him manic. One morning, when he was told that the Gulf Coast air space was off limits because of a visit by Vice-President Dick Cheney, Scruggs told his pilots, “Fuck ’em. We’re flying in. They can shoot us down if they want to.”

His obsession intensified after some of the Katrina victims told him in early September that insurance companies were already denying their claims for the loss of their homes. Citing fine print in the complicated policies, representatives of the insurance companies pointed out that coverage existed for wind but not for water. And much of the coastal damage was being attributed to the storm surge.

Just when he had contemplated retirement, a new cause had come
to him, a new target, one even more vast and powerful than the tobacco industry, one of America’s giants: the insurance industry. Scruggs felt energized again. His appraisal of the insurers mirrored his attitude toward the ban on use of Dick Cheney’s air space. Fuck ’em. We’re flying in.

He would see them in court. And he would forge another alliance, just as he had done to carry out his wars on asbestos and tobacco. To combat the insurance industry, he would create a new entity, and this time he would give it his name and that of one of the greatest natural disasters in the history of the country. He would call it the Scruggs Katrina Group.

T
o form his new attack group, Scruggs called on his comrade from the tobacco battles, Don Barrett, and the man who financed much of that initiative, David Nutt. He also invited a couple of new faces into the venture. One of them was Johnny Jones, a Jackson lawyer who had served on Scruggs’s defense team during the Luckey trial.

Jones charmed his way into the group with a beguiling email to Scruggs less than three weeks after the storm: “Cupit tells me that you guys are getting together a class action or other consolidated action against insurance carriers for denying claims for Katrina damage. He tells me that he attended a meeting with you guys on that topic. I told him I knew he was lying since I knew you guys would call me if you were looking for a real lawyer in Jackson … Do you want to get mixed up in more litigation with overweight and overpaid lawyers? … Cupit? Say it ain’t so.” He signed it simply, “Johnny.”