The Fall of the House of Zeus

by Curtis Wilkie

  When he decided upon law, Scruggs had not bargained for the grunt work given to young associates at big-time firms. Nor did he relish the prospect of defending insurance companies in every nickel-and-dime, slip-and-fall case filed in circuit court. He had dreams of greater glory, and he thus began cultivating an Alaska Indian tribe in an exotic civil case involving a food services contract at a distant military installation. It seemed out of Watkins, Eager’s territory, but Scruggs liked to freelance. And he felt underappreciated for his work with another client he handled for the firm, Frigitemp Marine Corporation, a subcontractor at the Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula.

  He decided to challenge his superiors. He asked for a meeting with Bill Goodman, the managing partner of the firm, and explained that his Frigitemp connection had brought in a lot of money for Watkins, Eager. He was working for a salary at the time, earning a bit more than $15,000 a year. “If I don’t get a good raise,” he threatened, “then I’m going to have to leave.”

  Goodman closed the folder on his desk, looked at his young associate, and said, “Dick, we’re sure going to miss you.”

  Thirty-four years old and out of work, Scruggs returned to Pascagoula in 1980.

  Because of the presence of the shipyards, Pascagoula retained much of the frontier spirit that had characterized the place when he left there sixteen years earlier to go off to Ole Miss. In a rural state dependent on agriculture and dominated by a belief in religious fundamentalism, it was still a blue-collar union town with bars to match a hard-drinking clientele. The city had none of the moonlight-and-magnolia aroma of the Old South, few traces of an aristocracy built on the fertility of land in the Delta. Instead, Pascagoula looked out onto the uncertain mysteries of the Gulf of Mexico.

  Before Scruggs made his decision to go back to Pascagoula, he had to convince Diane that it was the right step to take. She was reluctant to return to the place where she was known as “Dr. Thompson’s daughter,” without an identity of her own. “My claw marks are going to be all the way down Highway Forty-nine,” she told her husband, referring to the route they would take from Jackson to the coast. But she acceded to the move, as she did to most of Dick’s decisions.

  From the time they had married, Diane held a series of jobs to help support their family. She handled loan closings for a law firm in Virginia, where their son, Zach, was born in 1974, while Scruggs was wrapping up his navy career. She had secretarial duties at academic offices at Ole Miss during his law school days. After she developed a serious health problem—she suffered from Crohn’s disease, an intestinal disorder—her work in Jackson was sporadic. But the couple needed her income, and she went from one temporary job to another when she was able to do so.

  Once the Scruggses were back in Pascagoula, Dick opened a law office of his own while Diane held a series of piecemeal jobs to help keep their bills paid. They renewed friendships with classmates from their school days and joined a group of doctors and lawyers who formed a subset of striving young professionals. In 1980, Pascagoula held out the prospect of hard work and little promise of sudden wealth. For some of the lawyers, the struggle was so difficult that they hung out at the Jackson County courthouse, hoping a judge might assign them to represent indigent defendants. The jobs paid $300 a case, and for these lawyers, this enabled them to pay their own bills.

  Most of these local attorneys could be traced back to the Ole Miss law school. Their ranks included Raymond Brown, a former quarterback at Ole Miss. Brown had been the most valuable player in the Rebels’ 1958 Sugar Bowl triumph over Texas and a defensive back for the Baltimore Colts the next season in the classic overtime NFL championship contest with the New York Giants—“the greatest game ever played.”

  There were younger, upwardly mobile guys in the crowd, too. Mike Moore had just been elected district attorney, and Lowry Lomax, who had given up pharmacy for law, was destined to become a successful trial lawyer himself. Scruggs forged a lasting bond with both men.

  For a few months, the Scruggs family lived in the home of Diane’s father before they were able to buy a house on Columbus Avenue, in a distinctly middle-class neighborhood with an unappealing view of the shipyard. They spent weekends in a predictable social pattern. On Friday nights, young couples and their children gathered at the Singing River Yacht Club, an unpretentious A-frame on the water, for the weekly “steak night,” where members would grill their own selections of beef, washed down with cocktails and wine. Saturdays were given over to picnic expeditions to Horn Island, one of the barrier isles a dozen miles offshore.

  One of the more talked-about escapades of the period involved two attorneys, slightly older than Scruggs, who had moved to Pascagoula after law school, carrying with them their reputation as gregarious frat boys with a penchant for fun: Joe Colingo, who had already attained notoriety in the pages of Rolling Stone for representing two Ingalls workers who swore they had seen UFOs, and his pal George Shaddock. The pair had been barhopping one evening when their car, moving erratically, was stopped by a state trooper. While Shaddock feigned a heart attack, Colingo explained that he needed to rush his passenger to the hospital. With a police escort, they arrived at the emergency room, where they summoned a friendly physician to administer a “life-saving” shot to complete the ruse.

  The zany incident represented, as much as anything, the zeitgeist of the Singing River crowd. The lawyers, all still relatively young, were waiting for the big lick. For some of them, it would soon come. In the meantime, nothing would get in the way of a good time.

  The political “moderates” in Mississippi won a rare victory when William Winter took office as governor in 1980. It pleased Scruggs, but he already had a contact in high places, and it was ironic that his brother-in-law Trent Lott occupied an ideological corner diametrically opposed to Winter. From the time he took interest in politics Lott stamped himself a staunch conservative and became one of the early Republican converts in the state. Family considerations proved to be an essential ingredient for the friendship between the Republican, who had been elected to Congress in 1972, and the Democratic lawyer.

  Aside from wives who were daughters of Dr. Perry Thompson, Lott and Scruggs had a couple of other things in common. Both had moved to Pascagoula as boys, the only children produced in troubled marriages. Lott’s father, who was drawn to the Gulf Coast by a job at Ingalls, had stayed with his wife and young son. But he drank heavily and earned barely enough to keep his family in one of the humble navy houses in a working-class neighborhood.

  Lott was five years older than Scruggs. He, too, went to Ole Miss as an undergraduate and eventually emerged from Oxford with a law degree. Not many other entries in their résumés are alike, but the two men shared one important characteristic: they were both boundlessly ambitious.

  At Ole Miss, Lott joined a fraternity, Sigma Nu, that would become pivotal to his future. The Sigma Nus were more egalitarian than many of the social clubs on campus; the group opened its arms to freshmen with few connections, making it possible for someone from an unmonied background like Lott to win acceptance. The Sigma Nus carried a combative complex about them and relished their nickname, the Snakes. Most of the brothers were given nicknames. Lott was known as Gap, for the space between his teeth. The Sigma Nus believed they functioned alone, arrayed against the rest of the wealthier, established fraternities on a campus where Greek life seemed as important as a bachelor’s degree. But to those outside their house, the Snakes seemed a touch too “gung ho,” a military expression left over from World War II to describe those overly enthusiastic.

  The Sigma Nus were the most politically active house on fraternity row, with brothers running for practically every student office available. Cheerleaders were elected at Ole Miss, so Lott wound up a cheerleader for some of the most successful football teams in the school’s history. The Sigma Nu house bred cheerleaders. One of Lott’s good friends, Roy “Rah Rah” Williams, served as a cheerleader before going home to Pascagoula to practice law and join the Singing R
iver gang. Another frat brother, Guy Hovis, led cheers with Lott and became a featured singer on The Lawrence Welk Show, a musical program that attracted millions of elderly, stay-at-home viewers on Saturday nights. After the show ran its course, Hovis returned to Mississippi to take charge of Lott’s state office in Jackson.

  There seemed to be no end to the Sigma Nu hunger for political success. But when Lott ran for president of the student body in 1962, he suffered the only electoral defeat in his career. He was beaten by the son of the head of Mississippi Power and Light Co., a candidate backed by most of the other fraternities. While the Phi Delts, Kappa Alphas, SAEs, and Sigma Chis ganged up against him, Lott realized, in retrospect, that he had failed to mobilize the “independents” on campus who could not afford Greek organizations or who disapproved of the fraternities’ sophomoric high jinks. He would never again neglect the constituency of the aggrieved, white working class.

  As the war in Vietnam intensified, hundreds of young men from Ole Miss, including Lott’s future brother-in-law, enlisted in the military. Lott supported the war wholeheartedly, but he managed to avoid the service. He claimed four student exemptions while at Ole Miss and won a final 3-A classification from the draft board when he graduated from law school. The dispensation was granted “by reason of extreme hardship to dependents”—his wife and mother.

  After law school, Lott began parlaying his Ole Miss connections. One was an influential state senator named George Payne Cossar who doubled as a lieutenant in Senator Jim Eastland’s political apparatus. Cossar represented the Tallahatchie–Carroll County region, where the Lott family lived before moving to Pascagoula. More important, Cossar was an enthusiastic Sigma Nu who still made impassioned pleas during rush each autumn, exhorting freshmen to join the brotherhood. He had three sons in the fraternity with Lott.

  Lott also had an uncle, Arnie Watson, who served the same area in the legislature. At public events, Watson preferred to recite a pledge of allegiance to the old Confederacy rather than to a government based in Washington.

  But Lott’s most important entrée to politics turned out to be the Gulf Coast’s veteran congressman William Colmer, another nominal Democrat affiliated with the political network overseen by Eastland. Lott took a job out of law school as Colmer’s administrative assistant. When the old man decided to retire before the 1972 election, he gave Lott his blessing to succeed him. But Lott surprised his benefactor, and many of his friends, by running as a Republican. It was an easy decision for him; it came at the height of President Richard Nixon’s efforts to lure erstwhile Southern Democrats, upset over the Democratic Party’s commitment to civil rights, to an increasingly conservative GOP. Lott felt at home with Nixon’s policies. Besides, it was good politics in Mississippi, tying himself to a Republican standardbearer who won his greatest majority, 87 percent, in the congressional district that would elect Lott as its representative to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time.

  By the time Scruggs moved back to Pascagoula, Trent Lott had become the darling of the archconservatives in the state. With the retirement of Senator Eastland in 1978, a power shift took place. Members of the Eastland network, layered into the political infrastructure of every county, needed a new leader who could bring patronage and appropriations from Washington, and most of them felt more comfortable with Lott than Eastland’s replacement, the freshman senator Thad Cochran.

  No matter that Lott, as well as Cochran, had abandoned the Democratic Party for the Republican. Those belonging to Eastland’s camp were Democrats in name only. Like Eastland, they called themselves Democrats for old times’ sake—and to maintain party affiliations that preserved Eastland’s seniority and ensured largesse from Washington. But the Mississippi conservatives had effectively broken with the national party long ago. For some, the rupture occurred in 1948, when the Mississippi delegation walked out of the national Democratic convention rather than accept a plank in the party platform that deplored segregation. Mississippi supported a Dixiecrat ticket that year that included the state’s governor, Fielding Wright, as a running mate for the renegade presidential candidate Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. For younger members of the Eastland apparatus, the final schism came in 1964, when a Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, engineered passage of the Civil Rights Act, while a Republican, Barry Goldwater, who opposed the legislation, carried the GOP banner that fall. Goldwater was buried under LBJ’s national landslide, but he won more than 80 percent of Mississippi’s votes.

  Thad Cochran actually voted for Johnson in 1964. But as the Democratic president pushed the federal government toward his “Great Society” and encouraged a quicker fall for segregation, Cochran felt the thrust went too far and too fast for Mississippi. He drifted toward the Republicans. In 1968, he served as state co-chairman of Citizens for Nixon with Raymond Brown, the Pascagoula lawyer. Four years later Cochran ran as a Republican and won an open U.S. House seat—the same year Lott claimed Colmer’s office.

  The two new GOP congressmen never bonded, in spite of some shared background. Four years older and a member of a different fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha, Cochran had been a cheerleader at Ole Miss and active in campus politics. The pair overlapped in Oxford; Cochran obtained his law degree while Lott was an undergraduate. But they were two different personalities.

  From the beginning of his career on Capitol Hill, Cochran appeared easygoing, and courted friendships on both sides of the aisle. Lott was stridently partisan, and no issue better demonstrated this approach than his fight-to-the-last-ditch defense of President Nixon during Watergate, when Lott served as a junior member of the House Judiciary Committee.

  Their attitudes were reflected back home, too. Cochran built a following among the wealthier, business-oriented voters flocking to the GOP. Lott attracted a coarser element, the hard-core segregationists and hardshell Protestant true believers. Cochran personified the Chamber of Commerce; Lott epitomized the all-white Citizens’ Council, a Mississippi organization dedicated to the fight against Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  When Eastland retired, Cochran moved quickly to declare interest in the Senate seat and locked up support before Lott could act. Just as he nursed old grudges from his losing campaign for student body president, Lott never forgot that he had been preempted by Cochran. His rival might take over Eastland’s office, but Lott began to assume control of Eastland’s organization.

  There was no formal passing of the torch. The Eastland apparatus existed outside of party lines and had no structure. It was composed of a motley assortment of interests, its most influential members local lawyers and judges who gave the organization a patina of legality. In Mississippi, all judges were elected, and they were as attuned to politics as the lowliest constable.

  The Eastland organization may have lost its long battle against racial integration, but it survived to represent the interests of conservative white Mississippians. It was capable of finding jobs for the faithful, of making such irritants as minor criminal charges and traffic tickets disappear from court dockets, of promoting sympathetic candidates for public office, and of throwing up roadblocks to progressive ideas or any piece of legislation deemed too liberal.

  For the Eastland crowd, it was a fairly smooth transition to Lott. He had proper manners. Despite his carefully groomed appearance—he had creases pressed into the blue jeans he wore when he went native, and he kept his hair styled—Lott seemed at home with the best of the good ole boys. He talked their talk, and he voted their way in Washington.

  After he entered politics, Lott tended to surround himself with fellow Sigma Nus who could be trusted. He made it a rule to restrict his Capitol Hill internships to boys from his fraternity at Ole Miss, and at the top of his staff he preferred Sigma Nu alums to help watch over his interests. When he first took office, Lott appointed Tom Anderson, class of ’68 at Ole Miss and a Sigma Nu, as his administrative assistant in Washington. Anderson had been a bank
er in Gulfport, and he possessed the loyalty and discretion that made him an ideal associate for Lott.

  Anderson took charge of the new congressman’s Capitol Hill office, imposing a strict dress code and issuing orders to other staff members with the discipline of a martinet. He was not the most popular figure in the office, but he became known as Lott’s alter ego, and constituents soon learned that if they were unable to reach Trent, it was just as good if they could talk to Tommy.

  Anderson proved vital to Lott, helping him bridge the distance between the nation’s capital and Mississippi. He performed duties privately that the congressman avoided publicly, cutting deals, extending favors, and exerting pressure. It didn’t take long for Lott and Anderson to fall into the folkways of the political apparatus back home, and when it came time to inherit the Eastland organization, they were ready. Under Lott and Anderson, the Sigma Nus formed a new subdivision of the old network that would grow through the years. At the same time, they knew to stay in touch with the veteran insiders, and one of the valuable contacts they inherited was Eastland’s quiet operative, a former Mississippi State football player and Delta farmer named P. L. Blake.

  Blake once described himself as a “plunger and promoter,” but basically he claimed to be a planter. “I’ve been involved with farming during my childhood from sharecropping,” he said in a 1985 deposition, “and had the desire of probably a lot of young people that was raised in the rural areas of someday owning a farm.”

  Court documents indicate that some of the earliest loans to finance his land purchases came from the Hancock Bank in Gulfport. Tom Anderson worked for the bank at the time, before joining Trent Lott’s staff. The president of Hancock’s mortgage operation was Kent Lovelace, a former running back at Ole Miss who had played against Blake in college and become his friend. Lovelace formed Dewitt Corporation, the real estate investment company that Blake took over in the mid-1970s as he began acquiring more than five thousand acres of farmland.