The Fall of the House of Zeus

by Curtis Wilkie

  After graduating from law school, with cum laude honors and a spot on the Law Journal staff, Zach took a job with a Jackson law firm to begin his own five-year plan for himself and his family. A son, Jackson, was born just before Christmas 2002, and a daughter, Augusta, would follow in a couple of years. Zach intended to spend the time in Jackson gaining experience in different phases of law practice, but there had always been an understanding that he would someday join his father’s firm.

  Even though he was nearly a decade removed from undergraduate school, Zach retained the appearance of a guileless sophomore. He had his mother’s delicate features and a habit of sweeping from his forehead a fall of hair worn moderately long, in the style favored by fraternity boys at Ole Miss.

  Zach plunged into the practice of law, yet continued to be drawn to public service. He was bright, energetic, and ambitious, and after being approached by prominent Democrats, he entertained notions of running for office. They suggested that Zach become a candidate for secretary of state, a position that might serve as a stepping stone to higher things. But Moore felt the move would be premature for his young friend, and he counseled against it. There would be a better time, he suggested.

  Even though he had moved away from the Republican Party, Zach valued the advice of his uncle Trent, who also discouraged him from mounting a statewide campaign at an early age.

  His life seemed in order. But after only three years at the Jackson firm, Zach ended his apprenticeship to join his father as a junior partner in Oxford.

  Before making the move, Zach already had the opportunity for firsthand criminal defense work under the tutelage of his father’s friend Joey Langston. In 2002, he had gotten a message from the skilled Booneville attorney: Would Zach be interested in assisting in the defense of two Lee County deputy sheriffs charged in federal court with the death of a suspect in a sensational shoot-’em-up near Tupelo? Of course he would.

  Had the case not been so tragic it could have been an episode in The Dukes of Hazzard. It started at a routine Fourth of July roadblock when a motorist refused to hand over his driver’s license for inspection. Instead, Billy Ray Stone produced a gun, suspecting that the officer could see that his passenger in the work truck was a woman who had been assaulted, kidnapped, bound with duct tape, and stuffed into the well between the dashboard and front seat. A shot was fired and a chase ensued, with bullets flying in the summer night. Stone wrecked the truck, and his hostage was killed in the melee, but he managed to escape into the woods. After a manhunt, he was cornered in a country outhouse. He died in a climactic confrontation, but not before fatally wounding the Lee County sheriff, Harold Ray Presley, a second cousin of Elvis.

  Sometime well after the dust had settled, the federal government brought criminal charges against two deputies, saying that Stone had actually been beaten to death after his capture. Since the state had no interest in prosecuting its own deputies, the U.S. Attorney’s Office invoked the same charges—deprivation of civil rights—that the federal government relied upon in the 1960s to bring suspects to trial in racial murders.

  It would be an interesting experience for young Scruggs. He joined Langston and two members of another firm famed for criminal defense work, Steve Farese and his cousin Tony Farese, in preparing for a trial. The case was moved by the government to the U.S. District Court in Greenville, in the Delta, where a predominantly black jury would be expected to frown upon a pair of white deputy sheriffs from Mississippi’s hill country accused of stomping someone to death.

  As they worked over the list of prospective jurors, the defense team hired a knowledgeable woman from the Delta to aid them in learning about each individual. Facetiously, Langston dubbed her “Madame Cleo,” a mystical soothsayer who would ensure that the defense found the proper jurors. Though the tactic of vetting jurors is standard practice for any trial preparation, Langston’s reliance on the wisdom of Madame Cleo happened to converge with the prosecutors’ concerns about the composition of juries in cases involving Langston. Their suspicions intensified after the two deputies were acquitted.

  During the week-long trial, Zach fraternized with his older colleagues, sat in on all strategy sessions, and handled the cross-examinations of several witnesses.

  Langston had the front page of the Tupelo newspaper bearing a banner headline—NOT GUILTY—framed and gave it to young Scruggs. He added his own inscription, “Zach, Great Job! Your friend, Joey.” The memento hung on the wall of Zach’s office for the next six years.

  Oxford was running over with lawyers. Some settled there after law school. Others were attracted by the college town’s cultural advantages and shifted their practices in mid-career. Still others, on the cusp of retirement, opened offices after choosing to spend their latter years among the memories of their student days.

  The glut of attorneys fostered a carnivorous atmosphere. Jealousies and hatreds developed within the legal profession, and it was not too far-fetched to compare the environment to that of a lobster trap where creatures crowded into a small space begin to tear limbs from the bodies of others.

  With so many attorneys, there also existed a shortage of space. One prominent lawyer, Grady Tollison, owned a large corner office with balconies overlooking the courthouse, while others were reduced to offices in back alleys or to working from their homes.

  Scruggs wanted the best spot available, so he paid $695,000 for a second-floor location in an older building on the square. A popular café, Ajax, occupied the street level and lent the address some panache. The place had a funky atmosphere and a down-home menu featuring plate lunches of meat loaf and pork chops. A bar in the front was braced by the dining area, where the acoustic tile ceiling had been pierced by hundreds of toothpicks blown there through drinking straws by patrons. Ajax had been Eli Manning’s favorite café when he played quarterback at Ole Miss. The visiting novelist and poet Jim Harrison spoke of its virtues in The Raw and the Cooked, a book about his eating experiences. “I was saved by the Ajax Diner on the Square,” he wrote, “a southern-soul-food restaurant that is always crowded, where I was soothed by five vegetable dishes: potato salad, black-eyed peas, butter beans with beef gravy, turnip greens with smoked pork, and, grudgingly, broccoli.”

  Before Scruggs took possession upstairs, the space held a warren of apartments for students. To turn it into something more worthy, he invested hundreds of thousands more in renovation. When that work spun toward the million-dollar mark, he again called upon Rex Deloach for help, this time to supervise the renovation.

  Scruggs wanted nice art, so Deloach put him in touch with a gallery in Memphis. He bought a few still lifes in the range of $25,000 each and was loaned others. Scruggs told the gallery owner he wanted to know more about paintings, so she sent him an expensive book, designed to grace coffee tables, extolling art. Scruggs read it for a day, then lost interest in the subject.

  When the office was complete, it gleamed with polished wood wainscoting. The floors were adorned with Oriental rugs, and the furniture was of the finest quality. The Scruggs Law Firm, 120A Courthouse Square, Oxford, stood out like a showpiece.

  The Scruggses, père et fils, relocated their families to neighboring houses on a stretch of road north of town, where they planned to live until they could find bigger and more comfortable quarters for themselves.

  The move to Oxford seemed to have worked. A bit of resentment lingered in the old community over Scruggs’s wanton spending, but the Scruggs family had essentially been assimilated into Oxford as part of the surge of alumni coming home. When asked, Scruggs invariably responded with handsome checks for local causes. They were putting down new roots. Dick and Diane found land just south of the campus, a large, wooded lot harboring deer and other wild game, where they planned to build a vast home that would shelter them the rest of their lives.

  At the end of 2004, Dick felt that most of his problems had been resolved. Everything seemed secure, as warm and satisfying as a fever dream induced by drugs. But the next ye
ar, Scruggs’s life would begin to go haywire.

  CHAPTER 9

  Diane Scruggs began to notice a change in her husband’s behavior. Always a gregarious personality, he started to withdraw from social invitations. Apropos of nothing, he made startlingly weird remarks. Some days he would be driven home from work by his staff members and go to bed early. He blamed it on headaches, and he used that malady as an excuse to expand his search for medication.

  He called various doctors asking for prescriptions for Fioricet. When the physicians were reluctant to give him carte blanche access to the drug, he discovered it could be ordered quite easily via the Internet. Unexplained notices—“It’s time for your prescription to be refilled”—began showing up on the Scruggses’ home computer. Diane learned the magnitude of Dick’s orders when she inspected an itemized credit card statement and saw a troubling number of shipments listed.

  Concerned over her husband’s altered personality, Diane concluded that it was drug-induced. She called Dick to a “come to Jesus meeting” to discuss his problem with her. He agreed to stop using the drug. Instead, he became adept at hiding the tablets from her. He mixed them with the contents of an Excedrin bottle. After being awakened, night after night, by the noise of Dick rattling the bottle, Diane determined he was trying to fish out his Fioricet.

  In the mornings, he seemed fine. But in the afternoons and evenings, he relied more and more on the drug. He insisted it was essential to his livelihood.

  Scruggs looked for new issues to exploit. He felt he found one in the operation of nonprofit hospitals. Arguing that these institutions tended to overcharge uninsured patients and failed to devote an appropriate percentage of revenue to charity cases, Scruggs led a series of class action lawsuits by a team of trial lawyers across the country. More than four hundred nonprofit hospitals, many of them functioning under the umbrella of religious denominations, were targeted in roughly fifty separate suits. Though the cases spanned the continent, from New York and Illinois to California and Texas, Scruggs acted as the mastermind for the attack from his small office in Oxford. The effort won him greater approbation as an advocate for the little man, as the scourge of bottom-line values. After the suits were filed. Time magazine characterized him as “corporate America’s worst legal nightmare.”

  Scruggs enjoyed the company of reporters and served as his own press agent, winning favorable coverage for his initiatives. While some lawyers were reticent and reluctant to talk openly, Scruggs gladly flew off in his private plane to Washington simply to meet with journalists to promote interest in his suits against the nonprofit hospitals.

  But the initiative stalled early in 2005. A federal judge not only dismissed a suit filed by Scruggs against New York Presbyterian Hospital and the American Hospital Association, but she also rebuked him for an “orchestrated assault on scores of non-profit hospitals, necessitating the expenditure of those hospitals’ scarce resources to beat back merit-less legal claims.” Other federal courts refused to hear his cases.

  Undaunted by the setbacks, Scruggs announced the opening of a “second front” to be conducted in state courts. He vowed to hold the hospitals accountable, under state laws, for “consumer fraud, breach of contract, deceptive business practices, unfair and predatory debt collection practices, and breach of usury limits.” It was vintage Scruggs, employing strong words and drawing upon his ability to attract press attention. Yet the “second front” proved no more productive than the first.

  Scruggs won minor victories. And even his critics conceded that the offensive forced hospitals to change policies. There were fewer attempts to extract payments from poor people for bloated bills, increased instances of charity care for the indigent, and tighter vigilance by the Internal Revenue Service over the nonprofit nature of these institutions.

  Still, a big lick never occurred. And Scruggs, who boasted a couple of years earlier that he only went after “primary kills”—the figurative lions and tigers (“I don’t want to get there after the antelope has been brought down,” he told Chief Executive magazine)—he came out of the nonprofit venture without a head to mount.

  While the promise of his initiative against the hospitals withered, Scruggs continued to be hounded by the lawsuits filed by two former partners—the cases that would not go away. The action had grown out of Scruggs’s handling of fees won in the asbestos litigation, the source of his first major triumph, and had persisted for years, from the time of his first clashes with Roberts Wilson and his firing of a young associate named Al Luckey.

  After countless delays and shifts in venue, Wilson’s and Luckey’s separate suits against Scruggs crystallized in the hands of a single lawyer, Charles Merkel of Clarksdale, who was every bit as headstrong and stubborn as Scruggs.

  Although they wound up as implacable enemies, as determined in their hatred of each other as Sherlock Holmes and Professor Mor iarty, Merkel and Scruggs had similar backgrounds, coming from little Mississippi towns to obtain Ole Miss degrees in the 1960s. Five years older, Merkel was studying at the law school by the time Scruggs enrolled as a freshman. Merkel created a bigger splash on campus, graduating magna cum laude from law school. But in the ways of the sports-addicted school, he created a more lasting name for himself there through baseball.

  From the time he was a child in Leland, a Delta town advertising itself on a welcoming road sign as the home of 5,000 NICE PEOPLE AND A FEW OLD SORE HEADS, Merkel had been passionate about baseball. Though no major league franchise was closer than St. Louis, the Delta had three teams in the old Cotton States League, a Class C association of big-league farm teams. In the days before television, the Greenwood Dodgers might draw as many as a thousand spectators to a game with the Clarksdale Planters, an hour’s drive up U.S. Highway 49. One of the products of the league was Ryne Duren, whose wildness later terrified the American League. Duren’s bottle-thick eyeglasses and thirst for alcohol compounded his control problems, provoking quakes of fear from opposing hitters and making him a memorable relief pitcher for the New York Yankees, Merkel’s favorite team.

  There was something refreshingly competitive about the sport in the post–World War II period, and if there was no game in the Delta, the air crackled with radio dispatches of bigger contests in places such as Boston and Brooklyn. Like so many boys his age, Merkel played makeshift games, using marbles and sticks in lieu of balls and bats, all the while dreaming of a career in the sport. He came closer than most, starring as an infielder for the Ole Miss Rebels. He played shortstop, next to the All-American third baseman Jake Gibbs, who wound up with the Yankees. But it was Merkel’s aging collection of Topps baseball cards that ultimately drew him wider recognition, in a coffee table book, Smithsonian Baseball: Inside the World’s Finest Private Collections, published in 2005, the year his feud with Scruggs reached new heights.

  Merkel was known in legal circles as smart and tough. His self-confidence touched some as conceit. His nickname at Ole Miss was Self. But no one dismissed him as an unworthy adversary. Early in his career, he was linked to some of the sharpest minds in the practice of law in Mississippi, in a partnership with three others who would later have major roles in Scruggs’s life: Jack Dunbar, Robert Khayat, and Grady Tollison. After that union broke up, Merkel established a law firm in Clarksdale specializing in plaintiffs’ cases. Years later, Merkel and Cocke would be cited by a trade publication as among the “super lawyers” in the Mid-South.

  Once he was retained to represent Luckey, Merkel began pursuing Scruggs as relentlessly as Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective tracked Moriarty. Said Sherlock Holmes of Moriarty: “A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers.” Said Merkel of Scruggs: “I have nothing for him. On a scale of one-to-ten, I’d put Dick Scruggs at about a two.” Merkel recognized that Scruggs was cunning, bold in his gambles, and especially astute in attracting favorable publicity. But he burned over the belief that
Scruggs was essentially a scoundrel.

  For more than ten years, the two men waged a legal war. Merkel insisted that Scruggs owed Luckey millions of dollars in dividends from a joint asbestos litigation project. Scruggs refused to pay. As a result, Merkel put Scruggs through a series of grinding depositions, testimony taken outside a courtroom for use in a prospective trial, where they clashed over issues both petty and significant. They addressed each other in mocking, sarcastic tones, and occasionally the volleys between the two men grew so loud that others would threaten to leave the room.

  Contending that Scruggs had used income from the asbestos victories to finance the tobacco triumph, Merkel argued that a “constructive trust” existed that would extend Luckey’s claim against Scruggs to his tobacco earnings. In an effort to find how Scruggs had expended the tobacco money, Merkel probed a Rube Goldberg–like flow chart showing the circuitous route that Scruggs’s payments took. Merkel’s questions eventually revealed P. L. Blake’s $2 million-a-year arrangement with Scruggs. Merkel deposed Blake, too, and extracted from him the laughable explanation that he had earned the income through such chores as sending Scruggs newspaper clippings.

  The psychic battering troubled Diane Scruggs. She worried that the lawsuits by Luckey and Wilson were undermining her husband’s health and mental alertness, and contributing to his growing dependency on drugs. She grew to loathe Merkel, whom she considered tactless, and she feared that his persistent hounding of her husband had a deleterious effect outside the hearing rooms. She urged Dick to bring the cases to an end. But Merkel’s bargaining position asked for $60 million from Scruggs, and it was difficult for Scruggs to countenance the thought of paying anything at all.