The Fall of the House of Zeus

by Curtis Wilkie

  If another judge were appointed to hear the case, Balducci said, “I don’t know that I’ll have the stroke with the next one.”

  “This is the proper thing to do,” Zach said. “It’s just so unprofessional what these guys have been up to. Attaching all these things that they’re ciphering through, and God knows what Grady’s talking to State Farm lawyers about.”

  Backstrom said arbitration would be the best and simplest course to take. Zach approved of this approach, too. Just as Zach was called out of the room to take another telephone call, Balducci tried to insert a damning line into the conversation. “The other piece of this puzzle I hadn’t told you yet is: get it how you want it, because I’ve got to go back for another delivery of another bushel of sweet potatoes down there. Get it how you want it, because we’re paying for it to get it done right.”

  But by this time, Zach was leaving the room and was no longer listening.

  Balducci and Backstrom continued their conversation on other topics. Backstrom said he was surrounded by constant discussion of the State Farm–Jim Hood situation. Both Dick and Zach Scruggs seemed obsessed with the matter, he said, while the Jackson lawyers, Cupit and Pittman, were “trying to gum up the deal so they could get paid.” It had been difficult “to keep my sanity” in the Scruggs office, he said.

  Balducci said he had not seen Hood in months. “I think he’s firmly attached at Joey’s hip,” he said, implying that Langston enjoyed closer proximity to the attorney general.

  The visitor changed the subject abruptly. “When I talked with you last night, you said Dick was walking the floor or something over this Lackey deal. Is he okay? Or is he pissed at me over this?”

  Backstrom was elliptical in his response, using interchanging singular and plural references.

  “I told him, guys, part of the reason why it hadn’t been on the front burner is because we told him it didn’t have to be. And I oversold that a little bit. I said, we’re defendants. We can wait till the cows come home. They bought that for a while, but then, you know—When you gonna get that order? We need that order. Well, we really don’t. Our lawyers aren’t billing us anything because they ain’t doing anything. But, you know, they just got it in their heads that they wanted it.”

  Federal agents, listening to the dialogue later, interpreted Backstrom’s remarks as an indication that Zach was part of the plan to obtain the order from Lackey.

  “So, they were like,” Backstrom continued, “Can you call Tim? And I was like, yeah, I can call Tim. No problem. Then later that day, Dick was like, no we can go about this another way. Don’t call Tim. I’ll go about it another way, a more indirect way. And I was like, What are you planning on doing? And he was like, I’m a gonna handle it. And kinda giving me the: you don’t wanna know kinda thing. So I don’t know what he did.”

  Backstrom said Scruggs had a habit. “Whenever he talks to somebody, he automatically thinks of something that they could do on something else.” He said he could only speculate on what Scruggs might do in the Jones case.

  “I can put his concerns to rest,” Balducci said. “It’s all done. He had paid the money, and he was probably upset, you know, or concerned that it wasn’t getting delivered like it was supposed to be. That may have been part of the problem.”

  Backstrom shrugged, then he and Balducci turned to talk of what their children had done on Halloween night.

  Before he left the law firm, Balducci finally made his way into Scruggs’s office.

  Scruggs, who was completing a telephone call, looked up. “Hey, man, I don’t practice law. I talk on the phone.”

  Balducci asked for a minute of his time.

  To Scruggs, the Jones case was a minor distraction compared to the war with State Farm, so he welcomed his visitor and began talking about the legal argument over wind and water damage. He showed Balducci satellite photos that he believed would demonstrate that homes had been destroyed by wind rather than a surge from the gulf. And he mentioned a trial scheduled soon on the coast where he would need the same sort of advance jury work that he had sought from Balducci earlier.

  Scruggs was in his afternoon mode. He had taken another dose of Fioricet after lunch and felt washed over with optimism and a sense of well-being. Sometimes the drug made him manic in conversation.

  Scruggs continued to elaborate on the satellite photos. “This is a hell of a lot better shit than you can get on Google Earth.”

  “That’s great stuff,” Balducci said. But he knew he had other matters the FBI wanted him to discuss. “Just very quickly,” he said, “I need to talk to you about the Johnny Jones order.”

  Balducci explained that Tollison had filed new material before Lackey had time to enter his order, so the judge “pulled back that other order and has drafted this new one that I want to show you.”

  Scruggs felt the change was inconsequential. “I’m sorry you came over here for this,” he apologized.

  Balducci pressed forward. What the judge had done, he said, was to add one paragraph. “So I needed to get it cleared before I told him to go ahead with it. So read it and tell me if that’s okay, that language.”

  Scruggs quickly edited the document, observing “that last sentence is not really a sentence.” He added that another sentence “needs a colon.” He returned the order to Balducci.

  “So you want me to go ahead? No problems with having this entered?”

  “No problems at all,” Scruggs said.

  Balducci knew he had to follow through on his plan with the FBI to raise the payment another $10,000.

  “I know I keep going back and forth about this, Dick, and I’m sorry,” Balducci said. The judge had become “a little bit nervous with that last filing by Grady because he thinks they’ve made a decent argument. He’s gonna do this, but he says he thinks he’s a little more exposed on the facts and the law than he was before, and did I think you would do a little something else, you know, to about ten or so more?”

  Scruggs paused and thought about the request for a moment. He knew Balducci and Patterson were in troubled financial straits. He had given their fledgling firm $500,000 to use their influence with Jim Hood and his advisors earlier in the year. Encouraged by P. L. Blake, Scruggs had given the pair another $40,000 a month ago. That payment was ostensibly for help in preparing for jury selections. But Balducci’s new suggestion seemed blatant in its criminality.

  Suddenly, Scruggs became peeved with Balducci—and Patterson as well. He thought: What in the fuck are these guys doing? Is this another excuse to ask for money?

  His concentration was broken by his secretary announcing a telephone call from Governor Minner of Delaware.

  “I’ll call him back.”

  “Sounds like fund-raising,” Balducci said.

  “Shit,” Scruggs said. “Don’t know who that is.” That was obvious. The caller was not a “him,” but Governor Ruth Ann Minner, a political ally of Joe Biden’s.

  Balducci brought Scruggs back to the $10,000 question. “Do you want me to cover that or not?”

  Scruggs paused again, noncommittal.

  “Because I’ve already taken care of everything,” Balducci said.

  Scruggs grunted. “I’ll take care of it.” To ensure that he had a reason for writing another check, Scruggs added, “I need some suggested voir dire from you.”

  In a letter dictated later that day, Scruggs wrote Balducci, “Great seeing you this p.m. and more than appreciate your suggestion to draft proposed instructions …”

  · · ·

  Balducci felt he had completed his assignment. He made contact with Delaney at a prearranged site.

  “Howdy. How you doing? I hope this fucking thing’s working,” Balducci said, referring to the recording device. It was. His voice could be distinguished clearly over the background noise of traffic and barking dogs.

  “Go ahead and get this thing shut off,” the FBI agent told Balducci. “Go ahead and say the time.”

  Balducci glanced at his
watch and spoke again into the device: “It’s almost three, about two fifty-eight Central time. October first. Excuse me, November first.”

  By the time Balducci reached the outskirts of New Albany later that afternoonn, his voice had lost its confident timbre. He sounded weary and defeated as he talked on his cell phone with a friend at his firm. He explained that he had been incommunicado all day because “I been monkeying around doing some personal shit.”

  He was told that the firm’s American Express credit card had been cut off. “I figured that out when I tried to get gas,” Balducci replied.

  Since the firm needed money, Balducci was informed of a potential case that might grow out of a disaster that morning: “A gas line explosion in Clark County—two people were killed.”

  “I’m sure Joey’s on it,” Balducci replied sarcastically. Nevertheless, he discussed how the names of the victims and their families might be obtained. Patterson, Balducci and Biden was sinking to ambulance chasing in the lowest form.

  There seemed to be no end to discouraging news. Balducci sighed and closed the conversation with a crude announcement. “I’m fixing to go into my house and take a monster shit.”

  Although Balducci had been debriefed by the FBI before he left Oxford, the authorities were still not sure what had actually been recorded. The listening device, now in Delaney’s hands, had to be downloaded and taken to FBI headquarters in Jackson for scrutiny.

  The next day, Delaney called. “We got the five words we needed,” he told Tom Dawson.

  They were Scruggs’s words: “I’ll take care of it.”

  On the same day, Tim Cantrell, the financial officer for the Scruggs Law Firm, emailed two secretaries:

  “Ladies, we need to prepare an additional check to Tim Balducci, the same payee as the last check, for $10,000. This is for assistance with the Lisanby case. We need first thing Monday.”

  The following day was a Saturday, and in homes across the state there was an autumn ritual to be followed. Like thousands of others, Dawson prepared to attend the Ole Miss football game, along with homecoming festivities in the Grove. His plans were interrupted by a telephone call from his colleague Bob Norman.

  Tim Balducci was rushing to Oxford. In the secret agent atmosphere, Balducci had alerted his control, Bill Delaney, and said he needed to talk with the prosecutors.

  Norman, who did not know what to expect, arranged to meet Balducci in the rear of the U.S. attorney’s building. Once Balducci was safely inside, he and Norman were joined by Dawson.

  Balducci said he had reflected on their interrogation two days earlier. At the time, he had replied negatively when asked about any other cases involving Scruggs. Now the witness said he’d remembered something. He began to talk, and what he told the prosecutors was startling and significant.

  Dawson never made it to the football game.

  CHAPTER 19

  Three weeks later, on the day after Thanksgiving, many Mississippians concentrated on a more important contest than the one Dawson missed: the annual football game between Ole Miss and Mississippi State. Though neither team had enjoyed a stellar season, fifty thousand fans traveled to Starkville and several million others watched the game on national television. For Ole Miss partisans, it morphed into a horror show. Winless in the Southeastern Conference for the first time in the school’s history, Ole Miss appeared to be certain of victory in their last match of the season. With the Rebels in control of every aspect of the game and leading 14–0 in the fourth quarter, the Ole Miss coach, Ed Orgeron, unaccountably decided to run rather than punt on a fourth-down play in Rebel territory. The running back was stopped short of a first down, momentum vanished, and a collapse ensued. Ole Miss lost in the final minute. “Thinking is not what Orgeron does best,” wrote sports columnist Geoff Calkins the next day in the Memphis newspaper The Commercial Appeal. “There may be dumber calls in the history of the world, but none immediately leaps to mind. OK, maybe Napoleon, when he decided to invade Russia.”

  With his brusque manners, Cajun dialect, and dubious intellect, Orgeron had never been a happy fit in Oxford. Now his critics were baying like bloodhounds.

  Some Ole Miss supporters believed Orgeron had been installed in the head coaching job by Dick Scruggs. Some felt the lawyer had used his money to act as de facto athletic director at the school. So amid the post-game cursing and gnashing of teeth, a bit of the anger was directed toward Scruggs.

  In fact, Scruggs had played a role in Orgeron’s hiring three years earlier, but it was largely through his agreement to help pay off the contract of the previous coach, David Cutcliffe. Like other wealthy, enthusiastic alumni at football powers across the country, Scruggs was quick to get involved in the Ole Miss athletic program. Sometimes without being asked.

  During an early-season game in 2003, Scruggs and his friend Richmond Flowers, once an outstanding receiver at the University of Tennessee and now father of one of Eli Manning’s favorite targets at Ole Miss, had watched in dismay from Scruggs’s luxury box as Texas Tech outscored the Rebels 49–44. Scruggs and Flowers agreed that a coaching change was needed. Flowers recommended Rick Neuheisel, a well-traveled coach looking for a job. So Neuheisel was invited to come to Ole Miss as Scruggs’s guest for the climactic game with LSU in two months. When the Rebels proceeded to win six straight games, Scruggs felt compelled to withdraw the invitation. But fortunes turned badly the next year, Cutcliffe was fired, and Scruggs helped complete the financial arrangements for his ouster.

  (Orgeron was hired, but before he came to Ole Miss he was allowed to discharge his duties as Southern California’s defensive coach one last time in a contest with Oklahoma for the national title. Scruggs deployed his Gulfstream to fly Ole Miss chancellor Robert Khayat, athletic director Pete Boone, and several others from Oxford to Florida for the game.

  (En route, Khayat, under criticism by some alumni for a procession of liberal speakers on campus, asked for suggestions of a respected Republican who might come to Ole Miss. Scruggs volunteered the name of his friend from the tobacco wars, Senator John McCain. Once on the ground, as if on cue, the Ole Miss group encountered McCain at a pre-game party. Introductions were made, and McCain spoke the next year before a full house at the school’s biggest auditorium. Scruggs had a front-row seat for the occasion.)

  Three years later, following the debacle at Mississippi State, Orgeron was sacked. As usual, Ole Miss turned to Scruggs. As much as $3 million remained on Orgeron’s contract, and the Athletic Department counted on Scruggs to come up with some of it. But there was a more immediate concern. A replacement for Orgeron had to be found quickly, because recruiting season loomed. The university asked Scruggs to provide his private jet to fly school officials to interview prospects for the job.

  He had loaned planes during the coaching quest three years earlier and learned that enterprising sportswriters could track the aircraft’s movements by obtaining flight plans to determine which candidates were being visited by Ole Miss delegations. This time, Scruggs spent part of the weekend gleefully submitting bogus flight plans to outwit the pesky reporters. His tactic led to one erroneous report that Ole Miss was in consultation with Neuheisel, by then the offensive coordinator for the Baltimore Ravens, and to another false bulletin that Ole Miss had a prospect in Cincinnati.

  On Monday night, November 26, Scruggs’s Falcon 20 was actually in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where it carried athletic director Pete Boone to sign up Houston Nutt, who had just quit as coach at the University of Arkansas.

  But by this time, other events had claimed Scruggs’s attention.

  On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Scruggs got a telephone call from his brother-in-law, who told of his plans to resign from the Senate. Though the Scruggs and Lott families had celebrated the holiday together at Lott’s new home—an estate near Jackson called “Sub Rosa,” bought with the help of a low-interest loan from Scruggs—there had been no whisper of the shocking announcement that would change the face of Mississippi politics an
d have national implications.

  Lott had served less than a year of his new six-year term and had regained some of his old power in the Senate. Though still a loyal Republican, he had seemed to mellow in the years following his disgrace over the Strom Thurmond encomium. At times, he appeared downright ecumenical in his dealings with Democrats, and he took on their rhetoric when inveighing against State Farm’s failure to cover losses from Katrina. He seemed in good health and unbeatable in Mississippi. Now, with no warning, he was giving it all up.

  When Lott made a public announcement the next morning, he cited a verse from Ecclesiastes: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” Skeptics speculated that Lott had lined up a lucrative lobbying job and wanted to beat a December deadline, imposed by recent legislation, that would prevent him from engaging in the practice for two years after leaving office. Even after Lott joined John Breaux, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana, to found a bipartisan lobbying firm, there were others who suspected a more sinister explanation, especially after the events that followed.

  Both Lott and Scruggs would say there was no connection, that the timing was an extraordinary coincidence.

  When Scruggs was asked on Monday about Lott’s decision by Humphreys McGee, a young lawyer working for his firm, he said he had heard of it only the night before. “I was just as surprised as the rest of the state,” he said.

  There was a greater shock coming. Federal authorities were poised to strike the next morning, swooping in on some of the suspects and raiding Scruggs’s office.

  The move created new dissension between the Oxford FBI office and the prosecutors. Although the agents had been cut out of the plans, they learned of the investigation a few weeks earlier when a visiting colleague, assuming they knew of the operation, talked about surveillance of Scruggs’s office.