The Fall of the House of Zeus (42 page)

That was before Judge Lackey came to Hailman with his troubling story.

Amid the strained gaiety of the evening, at least one other reminder of the adversaries facing Scruggs lay outside. Behind his house and through the woods, the nearest structure was a brick batting clinic beside the Ole Miss baseball park. It was named for its donor, Charlie Merkel.

    The party was off limits to reporters, but Paulo Prada and Peter Lattman of
The Wall Street Journal
were on assignment in Oxford, and began pulling together a story with accounts of the evening and comments from several who attended the Scruggs affair.

“
People appreciate him for his support of the community, and we’re all willing to stand by and support him,” said Oxford’s mayor, Richard Howorth. (For his statement, Howorth was criticized in a letter to the editor in
The Oxford Eagle
later in the month.)

As a shot in the dark, the reporters called Steve Patterson’s home the night of the Scruggs party. Patterson did not want to talk, but his wife, Debbie, was quite loquacious. “We didn’t know any of this,” she said. “We were in the Holy Land seeking edification and returned home to this mess.” She laid all of their problems at the feet of Tim Balducci, whom she characterized as “a short, midget Italian.”
That quote worked
its way up the ladder of editors at
The Wall Street Journal
before the story was published. A top editor, exercising political correctness, took out the Italian reference.

On Monday following the party, the two reporters decided to make a call on Scruggs at his office. To their surprise, Scruggs greeted them cordially. He said he could not discuss the case, but invited them into his private office for an informal chat. For fifteen minutes, they talked. Seeing his old aviator’s helmet on his desk, one of his visitors asked about his experiences as a pilot. He said he rarely flew anymore. When Scruggs learned that Prada lived in Atlanta, he told of how the military school there had “whipped me into shape.” A photograph of Diane led to questions about how Scruggs had met his wife. She had not been his high school sweetheart, Scruggs said. “She had much better sense than to hook up with me back then.”

Leaving the law firm, the reporters were struck by Scruggs’s polite reception. But he seemed to them somewhat disoriented and not quite on top of his game.

Another curious turn occurred the next day, after their article appeared. While they were in Oxford, the reporters had talked with many people who seemed supportive of Scruggs. They began to receive emails from Oxford, some from the same people whom they had seen the week before. These messages now expressed doubts about Scruggs’s innocence—and even resentment of him.

    During the first two weeks after the indictment, Joey Langston served as Scruggs’s primary lifeline to the press. John Keker, the lead attorney on Scruggs’s defense team, preferred not to talk with reporters. So it was left to Langston, a Mississippian, to deal with local journalists and with those who had begun descending on Oxford from across the country. He seemed to speak with confidence and authority. But behind his façade of self-assurance lay growing concerns. Langston knew, as early as the night of the raid on Scruggs’s office, that if Balducci was cooperating with the authorities, he himself would be exposed to criminal charges on a different case.

Keker had picked up on Langston’s uneasiness from the time he arrived in Oxford. There was something a bit squirrelly and defensive in Langston’s manner, as though he were hiding something.

The source of Langston’s discomfort became clear to others on December 7, the day the defendants and their lawyers met at Scruggs’s office to review the first piece of evidence handed over by prosecutors
in accordance with rules requiring them to do so. The group had been given a recording of the most damaging material: Balducci’s visit to the law firm on November 1 when he was wearing a wire, only hours after his arrest. “Balducci should get an Academy Award for his performance,” Langston said of Balducci’s ability to carry off his undercover assignment.

The recording represented obvious trouble, but the mood became grimmer later in the day when Farese reported that investigators were digging into a second case. Scruggs was standing on the balcony outside his office, looking out at the old courthouse, swaddled in scaffolding during a renovation project, when Farese said cryptically that the new investigation involved “a case down south.” Since much of the Scruggs litigation dealt with Katrina cases to the south, Farese was asked to be more specific. “They’re looking at the Wilson case,” he said, referring to the
Wilson v. Scruggs
lawsuit in Jackson.

Scruggs thought the litigation had been resolved satisfactorily. Following his $17 million setback to Al Luckey and Charlie Merkel, he had taken the Wilson case out of Jack Dunbar’s hands and entrusted it to Langston, who had said he could draw upon his connections in Jackson to ensure that Scruggs would not suffer another embarrassing defeat. Sure enough, a series of rulings in 2006 by state circuit judge Bobby
DeLaughter effectively limited Scruggs’s losses.

DeLaughter had a sterling reputation among members of the bar association in Jackson, a high regard that originated with his performance as a local prosecutor in the office of District Attorney Ed Peters years before. The judge was thought to be irreproachable.

That evening, Dick Scruggs and his son talked over the events of the day on the driveway in front of Scruggs’s new home. After the intrusion of the wiretaps, they had developed a sense of paranoia, suspecting that even conversations with their wives might be overheard. While outside, Scruggs talked with Langston by cell phone about the “case down south.”

Though the prosecutors were crowing about sensational evidence that would implicate Scruggs in a new case, Langston said there was nothing to fear. Judge DeLaughter had never been promised any money, he said, and had relied on the law to make his decision.

But Langston and Scruggs both knew that Senator Lott had called DeLaughter to ask about his interest in a federal judgeship while he was considering the Wilson case.

·    ·    ·

    Another alarm was sounded that Friday. Farese mentioned that the government might try to seize the assets of the defendants. He startled Zach by asking for full payment of his $300,000 retainer—as if the Scruggses’ treasury would soon be looted by federal agents. To satisfy his attorney, Zach instructed the firm’s bookkeepers to issue a check. Farese still seemed upset. He fretted that it could not be deposited until after the weekend.

The next afternoon Zach drove to Holly Springs, halfway between Oxford and Farese’s home in Ashland, to meet his attorney at a gas station, where he was given another disk of the FBI’s recording of Balducci’s visit to the Scruggs Law Firm.

Farese provided some new intelligence. Steve Patterson might be forced to plead guilty because he had run out of money and could not pay his attorney’s fees. There was one possibility for help, Farese said. Patterson was going to Alabama to meet with someone who might be able to finance his defense.

P. L. Blake now lived in Birmingham.

Farese said he had looked closely at the evidence. He told Zach there was nothing to incriminate him. He offered further assurance: “Your dad’s fine.”

    Two days later, Dick Scruggs got an astonishing call from Farese, telling him that the FBI was in the midst of a raid on Langston’s law office.

“Oh, my God,” Scruggs said.

The agents were collecting papers dealing with Langston’s representation of Scruggs in the Wilson lawsuit, he said. It was an attempt to find evidence that would link Scruggs to another case of judicial bribery. The value of a second charge was contained in a provision in the Federal Rules of Evidence known as 404(b). The rule could be used to introduce evidence that a defendant had a record of engaging in criminal activity.

Tom Dawson liked the tactic so much that he had a vanity license plate on his car bearing the number 404.

Scruggs had been talking with his son, outside in the cold, when the message came. A few minutes later, Langston called. He told Zach, “I just want to let you know, they’re searching my office, looking for 404 stuff on Wilson. I hope they find what they’re looking for, because it will show that nothing happened.” He added, “None of this makes me diminish my faith in Dick and you.”

“Nor should it,” Zach said, a bit annoyed at Langston’s comment.

Farese, who was at the scene in Booneville—“holding Joey’s hand,” as he described it—reported back to the Scruggses. “I just talked with the prosecutors,” he said. “They told me Joey’s not a target, that they’re just looking for 404 on Dick. And they told me they’re not going after anybody’s assets.”

Despite the bravado, the latest turn in the case brought new threats. Just as Billy Quin had predicted and Langston had feared, Tim Balducci had implicated the Booneville attorney in a widening conspiracy. It involved the move to hire Ed Peters, the former district attorney in Jackson, to use his influence with Judge DeLaughter in the Wilson case.

    
A few days after the raid on Langston’s office, Scruggs and his son drove to New Albany—midway between Oxford and Booneville—to meet with Langston and Farese. By this time, no one trusted telephones. They were wary of public places, too. Finding the café where they planned to meet filled with customers and offering no intimacy, the four men conducted their talks while driving around town.

Langston told Scruggs the FBI was “looking at the Wilson case real hard.” He said it represented no significant threat, describing the investigation as a “fishing expedition.” The only person vulnerable, he said, might be Peters, who could face an income tax evasion charge if he failed to report a $50,000 payment he had gotten in cash after agreeing to get involved in the case.

Scruggs grew apprehensive. He had authorized Langston to make payments to Peters for his assistance in the case, but he did not recall all of the details. Nor did he remember the $50,000 in cash.

Langston sought to ease Scruggs’s mind. He speculated that the FBI action had actually been intended to disqualify Langston as Scruggs’s attorney. “It’s all a bunch of bullshit,” he said. In fact, Langston was very worried.

    
The government’s principal witness was frightened, too. During his confessions, Balducci reminded federal prosecutors that Langston had defended some of the most notorious figures in North Mississippi; he claimed Langston had enough acquaintances among these criminal elements, who lived in gritty little communities in the hills, to hire someone to kill him. One of these characters was a man Langston had defended successfully in a couple of murder cases.
Around the office, Langston jokingly referred to that client as “the devil from Jumpertown.”

The prosecutors were well acquainted with some of the defendants Langston had represented over the years. They were known at the U.S. Attorney’s Office as “stone killers,” men willing to perform murders for hire to settle domestic turmoil or personal disputes in the area. In fact, rural Prentiss County, where Langston lived, was so notorious that prosecutors claimed, only half-facetiously, that a car stolen in Chicago would wind up in a Prentiss County chop shop within hours.

In a meeting with Langston shortly after it became obvious that Bal ducci was cooperating with federal authorities, Dawson gave the Boone ville lawyer a stern warning. “I want you to know that if anything at all happens to Tim Balducci—or anybody else in this case—I’m not going to look at anyone but you first, and I’m going into Prentiss County.”

Langston’s face flushed. He knew there were men in Prentiss County who would be willing to exterminate Balducci, free of charge, merely as a favor to him. The prospect frightened him, too. “I swear on the heads of my children,” he told Dawson, “I’ll have nothing to do with that.”

Balducci remained terrified. On the weekend after his grand jury appearance, Balducci took his wife and children to a motel near Jackson, Tennessee, for refuge, then panicked when he feared that one of his accomplices had booked a nearby room.

He returned to his home in New Albany and asked for protection. For weeks, until he could be settled elsewhere, Balducci was guarded around the clock by teams of Mississippi Highway Patrol troopers and FBI agents trained in surveillance. Members of Balducci’s protective units wore camouflage and hid in the woods. Bob Norman, one of the prosecutors, planned to visit with his witness and deliver a couple of board games for entertainment to Balducci’s twin boys, who were confined with him. Before going, Norman was given specific instructions regarding two blinks of his headlights at a specific location near Balducci’s home. Norman had served in the Marines and considered himself adept at security practices, but even he was impressed by the armed guards’ speed and stealth as they surrounded his car. Members of the protective unit became known around the U.S. Attorney’s Office as “the snake-eaters.”

    
Balducci and his family were eventually relocated in a Mississippi hamlet a hundred miles south of New Albany, where Balducci
took a temporary job with a construction company while awaiting the forthcoming trials and the disposition of his own case.

At his hideaway, Balducci pondered his bleak future, which would surely include time in prison. He grew morose. Two weeks before Christmas he sent a sheet of parchment he once cherished to Norman Gillespie, one of the former judges who had joined his firm “of counsel.” It was Balducci’s certification to practice before the U.S. District Court, and it had been signed in 1991 by Gillespie when he was clerk of the court.

On the back, Balducci printed a message: “
Dear Judge Gillespie,” he began,