The Fall of the House of Zeus (3 page)

Their critics, after inspecting Scruggs’s audacious agreement with the attorney general, found several problems with the document and raised legal questions. Following the practices developed years before by Eastland, the old guard went about their business quietly, without any notice by the press.

The move to discredit Scruggs and Moore would not only diminish their stature, it would serve as retaliation for Moore’s destruction of Eddie Khayat.

    
One of the principal figures in the effort was the state auditor, Steve Patterson, a man with political ambitions of his own. Overweight and inclined to enjoy long nights out on the town, Patterson unconsciously mocked Moore’s Boy Scout image. He was a classic “good ole boy.” Quick with backwoods bonhomie and raunchy jokes, Patterson encouraged friends to call him “Big Daddy,” or, more symbolically, to refer to him as “Kingfish,” a nod to the nickname of the late Huey P. Long, the populist leader of Louisiana. Patterson felt such a designation would accentuate his ties to the movers and shakers in his state.

Like so many men wedded early to politics, Patterson got his start delivering campaign leaflets and driving candidates around the state in the days when all local politicians were Democrats, albeit conservative ones. One job came directly through patronage; he operated an elevator on Capitol Hill in Washington, a position found for him by the other Mississippi senator at the time, John C. Stennis. Patterson later served as a foot soldier in the southern campaign of Jimmy Carter during the presidential race in 1976 and enlisted in the gubernatorial campaign of William Winter in Mississippi in 1979.

After Winter won election as the first progressive governor in the
state’s modern history, Patterson was given an office in the state capitol. But he clashed culturally with the bright, well-scrubbed aides surrounding Winter. Patterson was relegated to dealing with the county supervisors, political hacks, and job-seekers who infested the capitol. Winter’s idealistic associates thought it a thankless, sometimes dirty task. Yet Patterson made the most of it before being eased out of Winter’s orbit. He collected scores of political contacts—many of them from the remnants of the Eastland organization—and went on to become state Democratic chairman in the 1980s.

By this time, the Republican Party had made significant inroads into the old “Solid South” that had once delivered all of its votes to Democrats. The party of Lincoln had been reinvented by Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” a plan that made naked appeals to white conservatives fearful of the political rise of blacks recently enfranchised with the right to vote. As the South morphed into a base for Ronald Reagan, the GOP became attractive to many white Mississippians. In the face of Republican growth, Patterson worked with black leaders to preserve a viable Democratic Party in the state. At the same time, he managed to keep his bona fides with the old guard.

Eager to play in national politics, Patterson signed on in 1987 as a regional director in Delaware senator Joe Biden’s first attempt to win the Democratic presidential nomination. After Biden’s bid failed, Patterson refocused on the state level and won election himself, as state auditor of Mississippi in 1991. Officially, his responsibilities included oversight of bookkeeping in state agencies; the job also enabled him to peep into transactions involving public money.

He was in an ideal position to investigate the Scruggs contract. Besides, he was interested in running for governor and considered Moore a potential adversary. Patterson soon dispatched a team of agents from his auditor’s office to comb through records on the Gulf Coast. They gathered evidence to be presented in a report issued by the state auditor.
One document prepared for Patterson stated that “serious doubt exists as to the legality” of the asbestos agreement.
Moore would be cited for “a singular lack of accountability.”
Scruggs would be implicated because his $20,000 contribution to Moore’s reelection campaign in 1991 would be considered a payoff to Moore for the asbestos contract. Ultimately, both Scruggs and Moore could be subject to indictment.

To handle the criminal charges, Patterson’s group found that Ed Peters, the district attorney in Jackson, was quite willing to present
the information to a grand jury. A longtime associate of figures from the Eastland network, Peters could be counted on to prosecute their enemies or protect their interests.

Peters had a history of using the weight of his office to inhibit people—sometimes in the pettiest of ways. Years before, he had threatened Danny Goodgame, the editor of the student newspaper at Ole Miss, after
The Daily Mississippian
carried a story about price-fixing at local laundries. One of the Oxford laundries was owned by a family in league with the Eastland organization. Though Peters had no jurisdiction in Oxford, he summoned Goodgame to Jackson and informed the student that he could face criminal charges if the paper carried another irresponsible article.

Indeed, from the time he was first elected in 1971, Peters used the threat of indictment as a weapon to intimidate those who strayed from the path of the organization.

    
One evening in 1992, as Scruggs struggled to deal with the case Patterson and Peters were building against him, he received a telephone call at his home from a man named P. L. Blake. “I know what’s going on, and I’m going to help you,” Blake told Scruggs. “You need to come up and see me.”

Blake was cryptic, but Scruggs understood the significance of his call. Blake’s name was not recognizable in most households in Mississippi, but among the political cognoscenti he was regarded as one of Eastland’s original agents who still had the ability to fix things. Blake had contacted him, Scruggs believed, at the direction of Scruggs’s brother-in-law Trent Lott, who had assumed command of the state’s conservative power structure after Eastland’s departure from the scene.

Scruggs had first been introduced to Blake a decade before, by Lott’s chief aide in Washington, Tom Anderson. Scruggs had been told by Anderson that there was “a friend up in the Delta” who needed help. Blake owned several thousand fertile acres in Mississippi and a group of grain elevators in Texas. But his empire faced bankruptcy and he needed assistance in filing Chapter 11 papers while trying to salvage much of his wealth. During this period, Scruggs handled mostly mundane bankruptcy proceedings. Still, he was fascinated by the intrigue of politics and eager to become an inside player himself.

Scruggs helped resolve Blake’s financial problems, and while handling the bankruptcy issues, he became peripherally involved in defending Blake in a criminal case.
Blake had been charged with offering
officials of Mississippi Bank $500,000 in bribes in order to get $21 million in loans. Scruggs worked with Blake’s criminal defense lawyer, a well-connected future Republican senator from Tennessee named Fred Thompson, to whittle down the felony to a misdemeanor. Blake pleaded guilty to the lesser charge and escaped jail. The hand of the Eastland ring was prominent in the disposition of the case.

Blake earned brief notoriety for the scandal, yet he remained an abiding mystery in Mississippi. No one knew how he had gained such wealth.
By normal standards, he should have been the stuff of a Horatio Alger tale. He grew up in a tarpaper shack in a Tallahatchie County village in the Mississippi Delta and worked his way out of rural obscurity on the playing field at Mississippi State.
Blake was a standout on State’s undistinguished football teams of the 1950s and the leading receiver in 1959, with a total of six passes caught in an era of ground games and strong defense. For a while, Blake played pro ball in Canada before resettling in the Delta as a farmer.

Sometime in the 1960s he became prosperous, acquiring loans to buy property while assuming a semblance of importance in Greenwood as an officer in Eastland’s army. Like his patron, Blake lurked in the background. When the legislature was in session, he could be seen patrolling the halls of the state capitol or trading messages after hours with officials in Jackson lounges. He did not seek public office; he did not openly support candidates. The general public had no idea that P. L. Blake represented power behind the scenes. Yet politicians knew he was one of the most important go-to guys in the state.

When David Bowen, a young Delta politician with a Harvard degree, decided to run for Congress in 1972, he was told that Blake’s approval was essential to deliver the organization’s support. Bowen got it and won the election. Thad Cochran was given the same advice in 1978 when he decided to run for the Senate seat Eastland had yielded: Call P. L. Blake. Cochran talked to Blake on the phone, asked for his help, and secured it. But the two men never melded after Cochran succeeded Eastland. Blake, like many members of the Eastland organization, moved to an alliance with Cochran’s rival in the Republican Party, Trent Lott.

Despite his connections, Blake was seldom quoted and rarely photographed. He existed like some sort of enigmatic don in the Delta. Over the years, he bought more land, made substantial investments, lost much of it, yet still lived comfortably in a big house in Greenwood.

It was to this place that Blake summoned Scruggs in the summer of
1992. Though Scruggs had not seen Blake in years, he was familiar with his home. He had spent nights there in the previous decade dealing with Blake’s problems. Now it was Blake’s turn to reciprocate.

    
When Scruggs told his wife of the trip, Diane began to wonder what hold Blake might have over her husband, to summon him to travel three hundred miles to the Delta. To Diane, Blake should have been indebted to Dick; Blake, more properly, should have been the supplicant, rather than the one to hold court.

Diane had begun to wonder about some of her husband’s associates outside the sphere of their friends in Pascagoula. In his rush to succeed, she believed Dick had taken untrustworthy partners into his law practice while consorting with others who seemed to her a bit crude and reaching. To Diane, the connections seemed out of synch with her husband’s personality. Dick had always exuded a special charm, she remembered, even during their childhood days when he was a fatherless boy and she the daughter of a popular dentist. She became attracted to him after he developed manners that made him seem downright debonair in the years after he went away to college. By the time the two of them returned to Pascagoula as a couple, it was as though he were Pygmalion’s Galatea, refined and acceptable to the local mavens. Yet for all of his social skills, Dick Scruggs now seemed drawn to men bearing the appearance of impropriety.

Despite Diane’s misgivings, Scruggs flew in his private plane to Greenwood’s small-town airport, where Blake met him. “You helped me a lot,” Blake told Scruggs. “Now I’m going to help you.” After they reached Blake’s house in an upscale neighborhood, Scruggs was told to wait in the living room and relax. “Somebody’s going to be here in about thirty minutes you need to talk to,” Blake said.

Soon Scruggs was astonished to see Steve Patterson arrive. Blake greeted the state auditor warmly, but he also had a few scolding words. Waving in Scruggs’s direction, Blake told Patterson, “This is chickenshit stuff. I want you to back off. If you want to go after somebody, go after somebody else.” Patterson may have already gotten the message from others, because he did not object.

The case was effectively settled that night in P. L. Blake’s living room. Patterson would not only write the district attorney a letter stating that “the auditor has found no evidence of criminal conduct on the part of Mr. Scruggs,” but
Patterson would also send a letter to Louisiana officials hailing Scruggs for “an outstanding job in [asbestos] litigation
on behalf of the people of Mississippi.” He recommended that the state of Louisiana hire Scruggs to serve as counsel on asbestos cases.
For his part, Scruggs agreed to reduce his expense claims to the state by $63,000.

To cement the understanding, to form a new bond, Blake proposed that the three men go out for dinner at Lusco’s, a venerable Greenwood restaurant that featured prime rib, pork chops, and pompano. With its private curtained booths and hard-drinking clientele, Lusco’s was a throwback to Prohibition days, and one of the most popular spots in the Delta. The place sang with the clamor of good times. In drunken food fights, patrons occasionally lobbed rolls over each other’s curtains or hurled butter patties to the pressed tin ceiling to see how long they might adhere there before falling on someone’s head.

Lusco’s represented a picture of joie de vivre, but Scruggs couldn’t fully enjoy himself that evening. He had a sense of relief; the criminal charges would never materialize. Still, he had difficulty eating. His stomach knotted with tension as he reflected on the raw power he had just seen exercised.

Eastland was six years dead, but his organization lived on, still capable of fixing cases, blocking investigations, finding satisfactory solutions for political allies, and creating insurmountable obstacles for enemies. Scruggs suddenly felt as though he had become a “made man,” like a character anointed by the Mafia. He was not exactly at ease with the role. Drawing from his memory of science fiction films rather than gangster epics, he thought a term from the 1977 movie
Star Wars
better described these people with whom he was dealing. They constituted, he thought, “the dark side of the Force.”

F
or all of the wealth and influence he accumulated later, Scruggs never outgrew his childhood nickname, Dickie. Though his name was Richard and he privately preferred to be known as Dick—it sounded more solid, more mature—he couldn’t shake the diminutive. He had been Dickie as a boy, the mischievous kid, the product of a broken home who lived for a time with his uncle and aunt in the leafy South Mississippi town of Brookhaven. Friends continued to call him Dickie in junior high school, after he went to live with his mother on the Gulf Coast. The name stayed with him through years at military academies and followed him to Ole Miss. It even survived alongside the mocking term his fraternity brothers gave him for his preoccupation with developing a finely toned physique: Zeus.