The Fall of the House of Zeus (51 page)

Zach was there with his wife, Amy, and their two small children. To those who wished him luck, he assured them he intended to fight until vindicated.

Despite his father’s guilty plea, Zach felt confident. When he met with Rhea Tannehill later in the day, he was further encouraged. “Everything is cool,” Tannehill told him. “Sid blew the air out of their case” when he met with the prosecutors. “Your biggest challenge is not to be cocky.”

Zach’s mood changed Monday morning when he saw Moore talking on his cell phone with Dawson as he walked up the interior steps to Scruggs’s office. Zach was troubled by Moore’s expression, and he overheard him say, “That’s not what you told me on Friday.”

The compromise Moore felt he had in hand Friday night had fallen apart over the weekend. “What about the deferred prosecution?” Moore asked.

“
Greenlee wouldn’t do it,” Dawson said. He encouraged Moore to persuade Zach to plead guilty. “You should be scared at how many years Judge Biggers would lay on him. He could get fifteen to twenty years.”

The prosecutors were prepared to accept a plea on one count of misprision of a felony, an obscure charge that would accuse Zach of knowing about a crime and failing to report it. In exchange, they would recommend that he serve no time in prison.

Zach told Moore he was not sure what “misprision of a felony” meant, and he was still unwilling to give in, especially if it meant the loss of his law license. But for the first time, he seemed less adamant.

To ensure that Zach would not go to prison, Moore suggested to the prosecutors that they meet collectively with Judge Biggers to finalize the deal. Dawson told Moore that contact of this sort with the judge was out of the question. “You might do this in state courts, but you can’t do that with a federal judge,” he said.

The federal prosecutors had a poor relationship with Moore. Despite his years as attorney general and district attorney, they’d never considered him one of their own. They thought him glib and naïve, and because of his friendship with Scruggs, they had suspicions about his honesty. They had pumped some of the defendants—notably Steve Patterson—with questions about the two Democratic attorneys general, Moore and Jim Hood.

It sounded as though the prosecutors would be delighted to be able to indict Moore, too, and accounts of their interest in him were relayed to him. At one point, during a recess in a hearing in the case, Moore approached the prosecutors’ table and made a caustic remark. “Do you guys have any questions you want to ask me?”

No one responded to Moore’s dare. Still, the prosecutors regarded him with disdain. Like his client, they thought Moore far too slick, and they considered him tarnished by an association with Dick Scruggs.

    
Moore worried that Zach, left alone, would wind up with the wrath of the federal government upon him. Following another meeting with prosecutors Tuesday morning, he told his client of his concerns at a meeting that afternoon at the law office while they nibbled at orders of take-out pizza. Dick was also there, as Moore presented the argument for a guilty plea.

Moore cited Judge Biggers’s hostility. “This judge will send you to the moon if you’re convicted,” he said. “And if it comes to that, I don’t know that I could ever practice law again.”

Zach’s father offered his own warning about the judge. “Don’t fool around with this guy.”

Zach felt he had been put in a hotbox by his best friends. For days he had the sensation, as he described it, of “being left wounded on the beach.” His father had capitulated to the government without ensuring that his son would escape. Zach believed that his father, under stress, had lost judgment, and he blamed Keker for failing to press for Zach’s freedom. At the same time, Zach recognized that Keker was, after all, representing Dick’s interest, and not his. The situation seemed hopelessly confusing.

Still, he resisted the advice to accept the results of the plea bargaining.

“Dick got five,” Zach said, calling his father by his first name, as had become his practice. “Sid got two and a half. There’s no way the judge will give me more than that. I’ll take my chances with five years.”

“If you’re convicted, it will be more than that,” Moore countered. He pointed out that a guilty plea would allow Zach to maintain his freedom.

“Are you sure about that?” Zach asked.

“Well, no,” Moore admitted. But he added, “Dawson says he will make a strong recommendation for probation, and the judge usually accepts his recommendations.”

“I need to think about this,” Zach said.

    That afternoon, Zach met his wife, his parents, and Moore at Dick and Diane’s home. Up until then, the women had been supportive of Zach’s position, but now they urged him to make a deal with the prosecutors in order to escape a prison sentence.

“
Do you want your children to grow up and for ten years not know you?” his mother asked. Diane was already struggling with the realization that her husband would soon be leaving for years in prison. It was unthinkable that her son, too, would be missing from the life of their family.

Zach said he would rather be in prison and have his children believe he had been convicted unjustly than to plead guilty.

Amy, who was pregnant with a child to be born that fall, said it was unacceptable to think that their family could survive without him for a decade.

The women were desperately trying to save him from the possibility of a terrible sentence.

Diane and Amy belittled the stigma of a misprision of felony conviction. “What’s that? It’s nothing,” Diane said. Amy said she could accept the prospect of a relatively short prison sentence, but not the specter of a long one. If the plea bargain ensured that Zach would not be jailed, Diane and Amy argued, he should accept the offer.

Outside, a harsh rain pelted the grounds of Scruggs’s property, where the first manifestations of spring were beginning to show in the scores of flowering shrubs planted the year before.

Zach thought to himself: I can fight the government, but I can’t fight my family and my lawyer, too.

    
Three days later, Zach stood before Biggers, laboring to appear as humble as possible. He attached the honorific “Your Honor” to each of his answers as the judge led him through a sequence of pro forma
questions. At the end, Judge Biggers asked, “Do you plead guilty or not guilty to count one of this information?”

“I plead guilty, Your Honor.”

David Sanders, one of the prosecutors, told the judge that the government would recommend probation.
Throughout the negotiations, Zach’s attorneys felt comfortable with Sanders. He was younger and seemed to understand the intricacies of Zach’s case. They believed Sanders had been consistent in his dealings with them and had pushed for a deferred prosecution in his discussions with his own colleagues. But Sanders was the junior member of the prosecution team, and within days he would be leaving the U.S. Attorney’s Office to become a federal magistrate.

Biggers informed Zach that the court would not be bound by the prosecutors’ recommendation, and he mentioned that a three-year prison sentence was still possible under the law.

Before the session ended, Zach sought permission to speak. “I’d like to start out by telling the court, and the public, that I had no knowledge that Tim Balducci bribed Judge Lackey,” he said.

Zach’s comments were a reflection of his attitude. He continued to assert innocence, even though he had just pleaded guilty.

“I didn’t conspire to bribe Judge Lackey in connection with an arbitration order,” he continued, “and I would have stopped it had I known.”

Zach did not realize that his remarks were triggering an adverse reaction among the federal authorities in the courtroom. As he spoke, he ratified their belief that he was prideful and arrogant, a young man who deserved to be cut down a notch.

“As a member of the Mississippi bar,” Zach went on, “I had a duty to prevent such contacts from occurring and to report them, and I failed to do so. I am truly and humbly sorry for that, and I apologize to the court, to the legal profession I love so deeply, and to the people of Mississippi.” He closed by saying that he hoped his case might serve as a lesson to lawyers in the state.

Zach’s speech failed to move Biggers. “All right, Mr. Scruggs,” the judge said, dismissing him. “Of course, the legal profession that you say you love so much, you will not be a part of it for the rest of your life.”

I
n the welter of betrayals and personal hatreds that characterized the Scruggs case, one man seemed to emerge with his reputation enhanced: circuit judge Henry L. Lackey. Publicly promoted as a hero by Grady Tollison, whose lawsuit had led to Balducci’s bribe, and hailed by federal prosecutors for his willingness to report Balducci’s first inappropriate approach, Lackey enjoyed an afterglow of admiration.
In commentary headlined “Consider Judge Lackey” displayed on the front page of
The Clarion-Ledger
’s Sunday Perspective section, one Mississippi attorney wrote, “Thank God for men like Judge Henry Lackey!”

After serving in relative anonymity in rural North Mississippi, the old judge seemed to be reaching apotheosis.
The Mississippi Supreme Court would give him their highest honor, the Chief Justice Award, while the state bar association added its Judicial Excellence Award.

In interviews, he liked to describe himself as simply a “country bumpkin” who loved the law. But a month after the guilty pleas by the members of the Scruggs Law Firm, Judge Lackey’s genial side gave way to a more disagreeable nature when he made a dramatic appearance in the reopening of Johnny Jones’s suit against the remnants of the Scruggs Katrina Group.

The case had been moved out of Lackey’s hands—for obvious reasons—and assigned to circuit judge William Coleman from Jackson, who presided at a hearing in Oxford to determine the extent
of involvement in the bribery by the defendants in the civil action. Lackey’s role would shift from that of judge to that of witness.

Before Lackey took the stand, Dick Scruggs was called as a witness, and he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment rights in refusing to answer questions posed by Tollison, who still smoldered.
As a regional president of the American Board of Trial Advocates, Tollison sent a fiery email to its members. Though he did not believe in capital punishment, Tollison wrote, he would be willing to make an exception for judge-bribing lawyers.

With Tollison guiding him during his opening testimony, Lackey was loquacious. But the judge’s animosity toward Scruggs came tumbling out during a cross-examination by Oxford attorney J. Cal
Mayo, who now represented Scruggs in the civil case.

Mayo found himself in a delicate position: the witness was a judge in whose court he would continue to practice. At the same time, he had a responsibility to his client to question Lackey’s motives. An additional source of tension existed in the courtroom. A decade earlier, Mayo had been offered a job by Tollison when Mayo worked as counsel for the University of Mississippi. Mayo sought advice from a friend who had experience with Tollison’s firm. He was warned of Tollison’s volatile personality. “Don’t go to work for him,” the friend urged Mayo, adding, “And if you don’t go to work for him, he’ll never speak to you again.” The prediction proved accurate. Although they practiced law in the same town for the next ten years, Tollison refused to acknowledge Mayo’s existence. During the run-up to the hearing, Tollison would not return Mayo’s phone calls or agree to an informal discussion of the case. Mayo decided that Tollison, riding a crest of favorable publicity for his part in bringing down Scruggs, now considered Mayo an acolyte of Satan.

Mayo employed a deferential manner in questioning Judge Lackey, but at the beginning of his cross-examination he touched on a sensitive subject: a suggestion that Tollison had engaged in improper ex parte contact with the judge a year before when he presented Lackey with an order to seal Jones’s lawsuit, a move that gave Tollison a tactical advantage.

Mayo: “Was anyone there at this time representing any of the other parties to this lawsuit besides the parties that Mr. Tollison repre-
sented?”

Lackey: “Oh, no.”

“And did Mr. Tollison tell you who any of the parties were?”

“I don’t believe he did.”

·    ·    ·

“Did he tell you that there was an arbitration agreement that the parties had signed?”

“No.”

“Did he tell you that there had been settlement discussions ongoing?”

“Been what?”

“Settlement discussions between the parties.”

“No.”

“Did he mention that the entry of this order sealing the complaint might impact those settlement discussions?”

“No. He said it might help to keep from hanging their dirty wash out before the public.”

Mayo’s line of questioning drew Tollison out of his chair. He objected to “all this about my conversations,” and said it was irrelevant to the purpose of the hearing.

The objection was sustained, but Mayo managed to pursue Lackey with a few more questions.

“Did Mr. Tollison prepare the order that you signed?”

“He’s the one that gave it to me. I assume he did …”

“You didn’t prepare it?”

“No.”

“Had you ever signed an order sealing a case like this before?”

“No. Never been asked.”

    The exchange set the tone for increasingly acrimonious responses from Lackey. He acknowledged that he’d fabricated several statements during his attempts to incriminate Tim Balducci, including a false claim of being under pressure from Tollison, and another tale of inadvertently having an out-of-court conversation with a member of Tollison’s firm. Lackey rationalized his “fabrications” with Balducci.

“I was not being truthful with him, and I didn’t think he was being truthful with me, but that doesn’t make any difference, his truthfulness to me.”

Lackey was asked about Balducci’s original request that Judge Lackey perform a “favor” for him by sending the case to arbitration. “Did there come a time, Judge Lackey, when you told him to stop, wait a minute, this is a case I’m involved in?”