The Fall of the House of Zeus

by Curtis Wilkie

  When students at Ole Miss, fifty miles away, ran afoul of the law, their parents often turned to the Farese firm for help. But when the Fareses opened an Oxford office, they had another reason. They were increasingly involved in cases in federal court there. The firm appeared proficient in hammering out plea bargains with federal prosecutors for their clients. Robert Whitwell, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Mississippi during President George H. W. Bush’s administration, joined the Farese firm after he left office in 1993. And it did not go without notice that Whitwell’s brother-in-law Jim Greenlee was appointed U.S. attorney after the election of the second George Bush.

  The Farese firm boasted of acquittals won in state courts in Mississippi and Tennessee, which sprang a variety of clients from murder charges. Just months before the Scruggs case broke, Steve Farese was instrumental in reducing the jail sentence of Mary Winkler to a matter of days to end a sensational case. Winkler had originally been charged with murdering her husband, a Church of Christ minister, in Selmer, Tennessee, by shooting him in the back with a shotgun while he slept. She was convicted of a lesser crime, voluntary manslaughter, during a trial that drew breathless television coverage in the Mid-South and further publicity for the Farese firm.

  The Fareses won favorable verdicts in federal court, too. Steve and Tony, working with Joey Langston and Zach Scruggs, had earned acquittals for the two Lee County deputies in Zach’s introduction to criminal trials. But the Fareses were better known in federal court circles for their ability to cut deals with prosecutors, who trusted their word and completed their agreements with simple handshakes rather than court papers.

  Zach Scruggs’s problem was that he wanted no plea bargain. He insisted upon his innocence, and he felt his position had been jeopardized by the latest turn in the case.

  After learning of Langston’s plea, Zach returned to his office late that afternoon and called Farese for details. Farese said he did not want to talk about the case on the phone, implying that Scruggs’s phone might be tapped by the FBI. Within an hour, he appeared at the office. They were the only people left in the darkened upstairs suite on the square, and they sat in the same conference room where Balducci had volunteered to approach Judge Lackey more than eight months earlier.

  Farese explained that Langston had pleaded guilty because prosecutors were threatening to indict him for money laundering, mail fraud, wire fraud, and racketeering. In addition, Farese said, the government attorneys had been ready to initiate RICO action to seize all of Langston’s assets.

  While Zach listened in disbelief, Farese said Langston was now cooperating with the federal government and would be willing to testify against his own client, Dick Scruggs. In an attempt to mollify Zach, Farese said Langston would say that Zach knew nothing of the plot to influence Judge DeLaughter. Langston also sent word that he “would not lie on Dick.”

  Zach retorted that his father had done nothing illegal and should not have to worry about lies.

  “Well, there are some things you do not know about your dad,” Farese replied.

  The conversation grew heated. Zach demanded to know why Farese had failed to share with him the knowledge that Langston would soon plead guilty. Farese told Zach, “You were not entitled to that information.”

  Despondent, Zach drove home. On the way, his cell phone rang. He could see the call came from Langston. He refused to answer.

  Instead, he called the man who had been close to him for most of his life, Mike Moore, and poured out his problem to the former attorney general. After hanging up and reflecting on their conversation, Moore told his wife, “You know, I think Zach wants me to represent him.”

  Tisha Moore had a quick reaction, invoking the name of their own son. “What if Kyle were in trouble and he called Dick? Don’t you think Dick would help?” Her husband immediately called Zach and agreed to take his case.

  During the ordeal in early January, Dick Scruggs maintained a certain calm—with the aid of Fioricet. His son did not take developments as quietly. Zach lashed out at those who he felt had betrayed the Scruggs family. After learning that Langston had wept as he pleaded guilty before Judge Mills, Zach was scornful. He remembered that Langston had bragged privately about his uncanny ability to cry when delivering passionate closing arguments. He told Zach how he would concentrate on an unhappy experience—the death of his father, for example—in order to establish a mood that would help him shed tears. He said the tactic often led jurors to weep themselves. Langston suggested that he should be awarded a “tear bonus”—a symbolic tear for each juror who cried—much in the same way that ace pilots in World War II earned an insignia of the enemy on the fuselage of their planes for each rival aircraft shot down.

  Zach remembered this as he pondered the situation in the privacy of his small office, down the hall from his father’s room overlooking the square. Zach had an inelegant view of the backsides of buildings from his window, but his wall was brightened with framed school degrees and other mementos, including the front page from the Tupelo newspaper with Langston’s congratulatory inscription. Zach was confused by the move of a man who had been a friend and a mentor. But for Tony Farese, Zach had only contempt.

  Though Zach was a novice in the field of criminal defense work, he felt he had enough innate intelligence and confidence to make some moves of his own. Without consulting his father, who no longer seemed to be thinking clearly under the pressure of prosecution, Zach decided to break with members of the defense team.

  His cell phone rang, and he saw he was getting another call from Langston. Instead of answering, Zach called Farese and told him, in dismissive tones, “Your client called me again. If he’s got a message, tell him to give it to you.”

  Farese said Zach should understand that Langston had no choice. “They were going to take his assets.”

  Twenty-four hours later, Zach placed another call to Farese.

  “Tony,” he said. “First of all, you’re fired. And I think you know why.”

  Farese said nothing.

  “I paid you three hundred thousand dollars,” Zach continued, “and I want it back, along with all of the evidence you gathered.” For the past month, the Scruggs defense team had been getting copies of wiretaps and other FBI material to which they were entitled under the federal rules that require prosecutors to share material evidence with defendants.

  Farese protested that Zach owed him $100,000 for the work he had done since his indictment six weeks earlier. He followed up with a three-page letter to Zach the same day. In it, Farese said he had been representing Langston since the day the FBI raided his office a month earlier, and he detailed the work he had done. “I checked with you to see if you had any conflict of interest with Joey,” Farese wrote. “I was assured by you that you had no conflict of interest with Joey, and that you had no objection to me representing him.”

  Noting that “Joey’s situation changed,” Farese said, “I certainly understand that you may wish to obtain new counsel” because the new case affected Zach’s father. “I was assured by Joey that you had no involvement in that case,” Farese added. “I was also assured by the government that you were not a suspect nor a target in that investigation.”

  He closed with personal regards. “I only want what is best for you and your family,” Farese wrote. “I would never do anything to compromise your case nor your well being. I certainly wish you the best of luck on these charges.”

  They settled their financial dispute by splitting the difference. Farese returned $250,000. He said later that he was not obligated to return any of the “non-refundable” retainer. “I did not take that position because I did not feel that was fair.”

  Zach remained indignant, and even as he prepared for his own defense, he compiled a ten-page treatise against Farese with the thought of seeking sanctions against his former lawyer from the state bar association.

  CHAPTER 23

  The morning after Joey Langston pleaded guilty in the closed chambers of
Judge Mills, three federal officers took a commercial flight from Memphis to Washington to begin a sensitive mission. U.S. attorney Jim Greenlee, chief prosecutor Tom Dawson, and an FBI agent from Tupelo named John Quaka were on their way to interview Trent Lott.

  The former senator had already figured in speculation about the Scruggs case. Lott’s resignation from the Senate came only two days before his brother-in-law’s indictment, triggering suspicions that his decision was related to the events about to unfold in Mississippi. The investigators had tried to hold knowledge of Operation Benchmark to a handful of people, and Greenlee insisted there had been no leak. Lott’s spokesman also claimed the timing was “totally coincidental.” Nevertheless, there were skeptics wary of Lott’s Sigma Nu network.

  Just as activities by the CIA during the period that George H. W. Bush served as vice-president and president were traced to his college connections with Skull and Bones, a secret society at Yale that produced its share of Bonesmen who became spies, political favors distributed by Lott were often linked to the Ole Miss chapter of Sigma Nu, where Lott had been the group’s “commander.” The fraternity kept a preternatural hold on its alumni. Aging Sigma Nus sent daily postings via the Internet to their old frat brothers, with personal news of births and weddings, illnesses and deaths. Lott seemed to rule as Commander for Life, and members of the brotherhood were loyal to him.

  In the hothouse climate of the Scruggs case, some of those involved in the investigation wondered about the objectivity of Greenlee, a Sigma Nu. Their qualms doubled when Quaka, another Sigma Nu, was chosen to accompany him to see Lott.

  At the meeting with Lott, who was accompanied by a lawyer, Dawson felt he had to take charge. He had doubts about Lott’s innocence. Yet Greenlee seemed deferential, and Quaka had no hard questions. Dawson pressed the former senator about the impact of a call to a judge who might hope to be elevated to the federal bench. Lott insisted that his discussion with Judge DeLaughter had been nothing more than a routine follow-up to Scruggs’s recommendation about an open federal judgeship. Lott told the prosecutors that he did not know Scruggs had a case pending before DeLaughter.

  He reminded his visitors that DeLaughter never got the nomination. Lott was also in a position to say that his call on March 29, 2006, came after DeLaughter had already made one decision favorable to Scruggs in February, and the process to fill the judgeship with another candidate was well under way before DeLaughter’s final decree.

  Dawson remained dubious about Lott’s explanation. A few months later, the prosecutors stopped short of a subpoena, but asked Lott to make available his records concerning his reviews of candidates for federal judicial positions.

  After the group finished with Lott, Greenlee and Quaka went back to their hotel. Dawson headed to the suburbs of northern Virginia, where his daughter lived. As he was riding across the Fourteenth Street bridge over the Potomac he got a call from his associate in Oxford, Bob Norman. Scruggs’s lawyer John Keker had just telephoned and said he wanted to talk.

  Keker’s overture set in a motion a series of meetings between the prosecutors and defense attorneys in which the two sides privately probed each other for strengths and weaknesses. Because the prosecutors were required by law to turn over evidence, including the wiretaps and the videotapes of Balducci’s conversations with Judge Lackey, the defense attorneys saw some of the hard facts that confronted them.

  It became something of a grim poker game, in which the prosecutors had aces and royal face cards showing. There were bluffs and bravado in the talks. If the defendants wished to avoid a trial, the prosecutors suggested prison sentences—as much as ten years for Scruggs—they might be willing to offer in exchange for guilty pleas. Both sides realized that a trial conviction could result in much harsher prison terms.

  The prosecutors figured that Dick Scruggs would take the gamble. He had the reputation of a risk-taker, a fighter pilot, a man always skating on the edge. But Langston, who was now cooperating with the prosecutors, confided to them his belief that Scruggs, his former client, would plead guilty in the end.

  After the defense attorneys reported to their clients the gist of their talks with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, all early proposals by the prosecutors were rejected.

  In the councils of the Scruggs defense team, it was time to regroup and rebuild after Langston’s abrupt departure. Keker took complete control of Dick Scruggs’s case.

  Sid Backstrom would be represented by Rhea Tannehill, a friend he trusted, but they would rely on the more experienced criminal defense lawyer from Jackson, Frank Trapp.

  Zach felt comfortable with the man close to his family, Mike Moore, but developments in the case prompted him to retain others. During the exploratory talks, prosecutors hinted they might drop charges against Zach if persuasive evidence could be produced that he had not been in Backstrom’s office during a critical point in Backstrom’s conversation with Balducci on November 1—the day Balducci first wore a body wire.

  Zach hired Todd Graves, a former U.S. attorney from Missouri, to handle negotiations with the federal prosecutors. Graves had been recently forced out of office during a purge of U.S. attorneys by the Bush administration, one of ten officials believed to have been targeted by the White House and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for failing to carry out prosecutions sought by Republican interests. Charges of political prosecutions were dominating headlines, and a congressional investigation led by Democrats was under way. With U.S. attorneys’ offices across the nation, including the one in Oxford, on the defensive, Graves was considered an ideal choice to assist Zach. Graves was joined by his partner Nathan Garrett. In addition, Zach retained another Missouri lawyer, Edward “Chip” Robertson, a former state supreme court justice who had been involved in some of Scruggs’s litigation against State Farm.

  · · ·

  Steve Patterson pleaded guilty a week after Langston. His capitulation came as no surprise. He had been implicated in telephone conversations recorded by the FBI and had been floundering in the days since his indictment. Unwilling to pay the retainer sought by his first attorney, Patterson turned to Ron Michael, a friend who had once worked with him at Langston’s firm. For good measure, he also called on another lawyer with a familiar name, Hiram Eastland, a cousin of the late senator. But the name Eastland no longer carried much weight outside the organization the old senator once directed.

  Appearing before U.S. District Judge Neal Biggers the week after Langston had been reduced to tears in the same building, Patterson could not resist a bit of theatrics. As he stood before Biggers, the judge said, “Mr. Patterson, I thought I was having a Kafkaesque moment this morning when I read the paper: you’d already entered a plea of guilty. You know, that’s like that novel by Franz Kafka where this guy was charged, he was convicted, and he was executed, and he never went before the court. It was like a surreal thing. But you haven’t been before the court on a guilty plea, have you?”

  “No, sir,” Patterson deadpanned. “The press stays ahead of me all the time.”

  He admitted guilt to one count of conspiring to bribe Judge Lackey. Patterson said he had never set out to corrupt a judge, implying that he had been drawn into the crime by others. “I stand here a blessed man,” he said. “My family, church and community have stood by me.” To complete the deal in which all other criminal charges against him were swept away, Patterson promised to cooperate with the prosecutors and to submit to a polygraph to verify that he was telling the truth.

  Patterson offered no defense in the Lackey bribery. Though he had been involved in hiring Peters in the second case, Patterson subsequently ridiculed the decision to ask Senator Lott to contact DeLaughter. In testimony Patterson gave more than a year later in a deposition, he said he learned of Lott’s action in a telephone call from Langston. “I shall never forget that call because I thought that was the most insane thing I had ever heard in my entire life,” Patterson said. “That a United States senator whose brother-in-law was in a case of
this magnitude would actually call the judge and ask him—I thought that was just going way over the line. I thought it was politically stupid, thought it made no sense.”

  With Patterson’s plea, Scruggs recognized that the prosecutors now had four witnesses—Patterson, Langston, Balducci, and Peters—prepared to testify that he had been involved in an attempt to sway Judge DeLaughter in the Wilson case. It not only opened Scruggs to a second charge in Scruggs II, but it also gave the prosecutors a powerful weapon: Rule 404(b).

  Keker, who commanded a fee of $900 an hour, found himself facing a difficult task, but it was hardly the first time he had been in that position. In the thirty years since he and a partner founded the law firm of Keker and Van Nest in San Francisco, the office had swelled to a force of fifty attorneys, and Keker had won a reputation as one of the leading criminal defense lawyers on the West Coast.

  He came from a city with a long history of colorful advocates. Melvin Belli, the first to claim the title of King of Torts, had represented an impressive cast of characters in his heyday; his clients ranged from Jack Ruby and Errol Flynn to the Rolling Stones. During the cold war, Vincent Hallinan, another San Francisco lawyer, was known as a passionate defender of leftist causes, an unpopular job in that period. Keker helped win an acquittal for Hallinan’s son Patrick—a criminal defense lawyer himself—in a celebrated case in 1996 involving a questionable drug charge brought by the federal government. Defending Hallinan, Keker lashed out at a U.S. attorney as “a chicken-shit” and complained about “fanatic prosecutors who believe that people who represent people accused of crime are the same as the people who are accused of crime.”