The Fall of the House of Zeus (52 page)

“No,” Lackey said. “I was shocked that he would make that overture to me. I was incensed. I actually became physically ill because of it.”

The judge said he felt an obligation to report the overture by Balducci. “I didn’t know who to turn to in this circumstance. I didn’t know what kind of monster we were dealing with at this point.”

Lackey’s use of the term
monster
surprised Mayo, and he would return to that description later.

Scruggs’s attorney observed that two months after the first meeting between Balducci and Lackey, “Mr. Balducci has made no quid pro quo offer and he has offered no money” in exchange for a favorable ruling.

“He was lying to me, and I was lying to him,” Lackey testified. “That’s what happened.”

Confused over the lack of progress in establishing evidence of an actual bribe, Lackey had withdrawn from the case. Mayo asked Lackey about his decision. The judge said Bill Delaney, the FBI agent, came to see him immediately to encourage him to remain in the investigation.

“After talking with him and after realizing what a monster that we were probably dealing with, and the lives that he had probably destroyed, and the young lawyers whose lives and their families that he had destroyed, I agreed to get back in it,” Lackey said.

“And who is the ‘he’ that you’re referring to, Judge Lackey?”

“Talking about Dickie Scruggs.”

“And who was it that told you Mr. Scruggs had destroyed all those lives?”

“It’s evident what he’s done,” Lackey snapped. “It’s evident. Don’t you think he’s destroyed them?”

Mayo asked if this was part of the discussion he had with Delaney and John Hailman, the prosecutor.

“I didn’t know for sure at that point, didn’t know what type of monster we were dealing with. But I realize now. I think he’s done more to destroy this profession than anything that’s happened in my lifetime.”

    During his testimony, Lackey created a new controversy. He said he informed an assistant district attorney, Lon Stallings, about Balducci’s visit shortly after it happened but felt reluctant to take the information to a higher level, to Attorney General Jim Hood, after Stallings told him that Scruggs had threatened Hood’s political future.

Lackey’s statement was somewhat rambling: “I knew from my information—if it was true—that Jim Hood had told Lon Stallings that Mr.
Scruggs, through Mike Moore, had promised him if he didn’t go along with the settlement of these State Farm cases and allow them to collect this $26.5 million in attorney’s fees, that they would find a candidate that would run against him.”

Lackey had not forgotten that Scruggs had driven his friend George Dale out of the insurance commissioner’s office the year before. “They would fund” an opponent to challenge Hood “just like they were going to do the commissioner of insurance,” the judge declared. “Now, that’s what I knew.”

Moore, sitting in the courtroom, was outraged by Lackey’s statement. At a break in the hearing, the former attorney general told reporters, “Judge Lackey either is very confused or he made up the story out of whole cloth. Jim Hood is a very, very close friend. He worked for me, supported me in my first campaign. I encouraged him to take my place.”

Reached later by reporters, Hood said, “Mike Moore never approached me with such a message.”

Stallings said of Lackey’s testimony, “A few details got confused, but the thrust of his testimony was correct.” Stallings said Lackey didn’t trust the attorney general’s office because Hood, Moore, and Scruggs were all friends.

    Before he left the stand, Lackey asked the presiding judge if he could “retrieve my personal notes rather than them being disseminated to the public.”

During his testimony he had carried with him, for reference, the journal that prosecutors had asked Lackey to keep concerning his dealings with Balducci. Copies of the document were turned over to attorneys on both sides, but Lackey said they should not be made public.

“I don’t mind the lawyers having access to them,” he said, “but there are other matters in here of my personal expression about certain things and certain people.”

The journal would reflect his ill prediposition toward the Scruggs group, which he had called “scum.” In an early entry, Judge Lackey had also referred to Balducci as “the little wop.”

Lackey’s request to restrict his journal was granted.

    
Throughout the spring, Scruggs prepared for prison. His sentencing would take place on June 27, and shortly afterward he would
lose control of his future. A physical fitness buff, he began trying to work out regularly again at home. Seized by depression in the period after his indictment, his exercises had lapsed and the inactivity had contributed to his malaise. Now he felt a need to build back his strength.

More important, he took steps to deal with a demon that only his family and a few close friends knew about: his dependency on the prescription drug that gave him a sense of well-being, even in times of stress. Fioricet had been readily available on the Internet, ninety tablets for sixty-five dollars. Once, when Sid Backstrom came to work hung over from celebrating a big lick by the firm the night before, Scruggs offered his junior partner a couple of “happy pills.” The medicine jolted Backstrom so strongly that he had to be driven home. Employees of the firm were accustomed to the task. Quite often they had to get the boss safely home.

In April, Scruggs quietly checked into a drug treatment center in Hattiesburg, a South Mississippi city 250 miles away from Oxford. He spent a week, cold turkey, in a recovery program, trying to rid himself of the craving.

He came home pronouncing himself cured. But within a few weeks, one of his secretaries, Beth Jones, discovered that he had accessed the office computer to order a new shipment of the drug via FedEx. She alerted Rex Deloach, the financial advisor who had effectively taken charge of affairs at Scruggs’s office. Jones and Deloach planned to intercept the shipment. On the day of the delivery, they spotted the FedEx truck parked on the square and waited for the order to be brought upstairs. After an unproductive interval, they peered from the balcony and spied Scruggs below, seated in his Porsche SUV. He had beaten them to the delivery man. Deloach called Diane. “He’s outsmarted us,” he said, suggesting that she intervene. Scruggs’s wife drove quickly downtown.

A few minutes later, Scruggs appeared in Deloach’s office. “I want you to be my witness,” Scruggs announced. He led his friend to the men’s room, where he opened the package and poured the tablets into the toilet.

Despite his action, the close-knit group at Scruggs’s office suspected he continued to sneak the medication for himself.

    Disgraced by his guilty plea and remorseful over his son’s dilemma, it seemed natural for Scruggs to turn to any source of comfort
he could find. He not only faced prison and the loss of his law practice, but had become a subject of debate at his alma mater, where there were calls to remove his name from a campus music hall. To spare Chancellor Khayat a wrenching decision, Scruggs wrote to ask that the name be taken down. The job was done overnight. The next day, no traces of the lettering remained on the building’s façade. (Scruggs also arranged a discreet disappearance of the words
Scruggs Law Firm
from the front of his second-floor office overlooking the square.)

But his commitment to donate $5 million toward the construction of a new law school complex continued to cause division.
The day after his guilty plea, Scruggs called Sam Davis, his childhood friend from Pascagoula who had become dean of the law school.

“Sometime we need to sit down and talk about how I’m going to fulfill my pledge,” he told Davis.

The dean, who had tried to reach him earlier to commiserate, said, “Dick, that’s the farthest thing from my mind right now.”

Scruggs had been the co-chairman of a drive to raise $10 million for the project and helped host a fund-raising gala in Oxford the year before, an event that took place three days after the fateful March 2007 meeting with Balducci and Steve Patterson.

Davis might have wanted to put off his worries about Scruggs’s money, but the subject remained very much on the minds of some law school professors who considered the gift tainted.
At one faculty meeting, John Robin Bradley, a liberal voice at the school, observed, “We’ve not had the experience before of having wealthy people donate to us who were crooks. Other universities have had that experience. We should check on this, because I think there’s an ethical problem.”

    Appealing for leniency from Judge Biggers, the Scruggs Law Firm defendants mobilized a letter-writing campaign among their friends.

Backstrom sent an email to his neighbors, thanking them for their “prayers and thoughts” and explaining that he had chosen to plead guilty rather than gambling with a trial that might have resulted in a lengthy sentence. “I think most of you know that I am not a risk taker, either professionally or otherwise,” he wrote. The two-and-a-half-year sentence he expected “will allow me to still see most of the years of my children (Jayne is 9, Drew is 7 and Seth is 3) growing up as compared to the terrible risk of not seeing any of those or later years …”

In these letters, Backstrom suggested, “you can request favorable consideration or leniency at the sentencing.” He added, “I don’t want
to be presumptuous. If you are not comfortable writing such a letter, you need not.”

The request produced 127 letters in support of Backstrom.

Zach’s Sigma Nu brothers rallied behind him on the fraternity’s email network. But when critical bloggers obtained a copy of the message and gave it wider circulation, with sarcastic comment, the impact of the Sigma Nu effort was diminished. Seventy-one letters were written on Zach’s behalf.

Dick Scruggs’s case attracted 248 letters to Judge Biggers. Though a couple called for a severe sentence, virtually all of the correspondence noted Scruggs’s long record of generosity and asked the judge to take that into consideration.

There were handwritten notes by aging residents of Pascagoula who remembered Scruggs for his kindnesses and letters from influential Mississippians such as former governor William Winter, who wrote:

“I know of the generous financial support which he gave to many worth while causes which benefited his community and our state. I always found him to be a highly compassionate and engaged citizen leader who had a genuine interest in the well-being of his fellow citizens.”

The childhood friend in Brookhaven whom Scruggs had bailed out of a $90,000 debt sent a letter describing how Scruggs had hired a law firm to negotiate a settlement on the credit card demands and then paid off the settlement himself.

Another wrote of how Scruggs had been a major donor for the Piney Woods School, one of the few institutions for troubled African American youngsters in the country.

Michael Mann, the director of
The Insider
, wrote from Hollywood that he knew Scruggs as “a man of rare character, humanity, and I believe a positivism.”

But the letter that generated the most interest came from Scruggs’s old friend Robert Khayat. Writing on the university’s letterhead stationery, Khayat cited Scruggs’s “compassion and generosity” and ended with a proposal:

“It is my belief that any time he spends being incarcerated is an absolute waste of a great deal of talent and ability. He has much to offer society and is a public-spirited person. Furthermore, it would appear to be a waste of taxpayers’ money. Punishment is relative to the individual. A man such as Dick has been amply punished by the loss of his profession and public stature.”

Scruggs, who received copies of the letters, was able to call upon them for consolation while awaiting sentencing. But Khayat’s comments ignited a different reaction elsewhere.

Biggers allowed reporters to read the letters, and excerpts from the messages were published.
Learning of Khayat’s strong support, Grady Tollison became indignant. Though he had once worked in the same firm with the chancellor, Tollison told friends he hoped the new law school would never be named for Khayat.

The letter also proved counterproductive with a more significant figure. Instead of being persuaded by Khayat’s argument, Judge Biggers himself was said to be infuriated.

T
he evening before Dick Scruggs’s sentencing, his California lawyers sampled a taste of rustic Mississippi nightlife. John Keker and his associate Brook Dooley rode with Rex Deloach and others to Taylor, an artsy community eight miles from Oxford, to have dinner at a legendary catfish place called Taylor Grocery. They found themselves in a nest of strange sounds: the hubbub of demin-clad diners and the twangs of a jug band playing for tips in the back. The village occupies a “dry” corner of Lafayette County, where alcohol is illegal, so customers are forced to bring their own. With no notice, the group’s table was supplied with the sizable remains of a magnum of wine.

John Hailman, the recently retired federal prosecutor and wine maven, was leaving after dinner, and on the way out he thought to give the visitors what was left in his bottle. “Welcome to Oxford,” he said to the group. “Looks like you need some wine.” His gesture was a token of the informality at Taylor Grocery. Hailman had recognized Keker, but Scruggs’s attorney did not know the identity of the donor.

    The next day, a crowd began to gather outside Judge Biggers’s courtroom nearly an hour before doors opened. Many of them had come to give moral support to Scruggs: members of his family, including all of Diane’s siblings, and close friends such as Mike Moore, Sam Davis, and Robert Khayat. Others, though, had different reasons for
being there. Roberts Wilson, the former partner who had fought with Scruggs for fifteen years, had made the trip from his home in Alabama to witness the latest installment in the downfall of Dick Scruggs. Wilson’s lawyer, Charlie Merkel, had driven over from Clarksdale to see his old enemy in the dock. And Grady Tollison, whose case had resulted in the bribery, sat inside the rails of the courtroom, uncomfortably close to the defendant’s table.