The Fall of the House of Zeus

by Curtis Wilkie

  The healthy balance in the legal community had been threatened, Greenlee said. “Because of the wealth and power and connections of Dickie Scruggs and the other defendants, they demonstrated tremendous influence over others in the state.”

  Their interests were thwarted, Greenlee said, by an undercover operation so tightly held that virtually no one knew about it. The timing of Lott’s resignation from the Senate was coincidental, he said, for there was no way for the senator to have known about the investigation of his brother-in-law.

  Turning to the case of Scruggs’s son. Greenlee said, “There has been hushed criticism of our office for prosecuting such a young attorney. Zach, to this day, will probably tell you that he is not guilty, that he did not know of a planned payment to Judge Lackey. Of course, we had evidence otherwise.”

  In closing, the U.S. attorney described a country judge as the real hero of the Scruggs story. “The tide was turned because of the courageous Henry Lackey, a frail man liked by all, an elected public official who said ‘enough is enough,’ who risked his life and his position. He has done more than any other I know to halt the tidal wave of attempts to corruptly influence our judges.”

  Back home, Judge Lackey continued to be honored. When a former federal prosecutor was sworn in as a state appellate judge in ceremonies in Oxford, Lackey was asked to deliver welcoming remarks on a program that included Senator Thad Cochran and several federal judges.

  At the reception afterward, Lackey could be seen chatting with his friend, former insurance commissioner George Dale.

  Though Greenlee, a Republican appointee, was not quickly replaced by the Democratic administration of President Obama, there was turnover in his office. Tom Dawson retired. David Sanders departed to become a U.S. magistrate. John Hailman, who left shortly after setting the Scruggs investigation in motion, devoted much of his time to completing a book about wine and a memoir of his experiences as a prosecutor.

  The remains of the Scruggs case—embodied in the prosecution of Judge Bobby DeLaughter—was entrusted to the last member of the team that conducted the investigation, Bob Norman.

  In court elsewhere, a federal district judge from Florida, Roger Vinson, dismissed the criminal contempt case against Scruggs initiated by the judge in Alabama, William Acker.

  Undeterred, Judge Acker ordered Scruggs and the Rigsby sisters, who had turned over State Farm documents to Scruggs, to pay $65,000 in attorney fees to the Rigsbys’ former employer. The elderly Acker was still angry. In a sharp attack, he described Scruggs as “too cute by half,” referred to Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood as a “so-called law enforcement officer,” and said that Scruggs and the Rigsbys were as “joined at the hip as any set of Siamese twins.”

  In July 2009, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Acker’s order on the grounds that the judge had no jurisdiction in the case. The appellate panel wrote, “Finally, in the interests of fairness to both the district court [Acker] and Scruggs we shall exercise our supervisory powers to direct that all remaining issues pertaining to Scruggs in the Renfroe case should be assigned to a different district court judge.”

  As he began his third year in prison, Paul Minor continued to come into the news. His case had been highlighted in a congressional report in 2008 concerning “selective prosecutions” by U.S. attorneys appointed by President George W. Bush. Noting that Minor had been a “major contributor” to the Democratic Party, the report suggested that “politics may have influenced” his prosecution.

  The report was issued by the House Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, Representative John Conyers, Jr., of Michigan, is a Democrat. It also touched on Scruggs.

  “While Mr. Minor was indicted by U.S. Attorney Lampton for making or guaranteeing loans to Mississippi judges, including Justice Diaz, another prominent Mississippi trial lawyer alleged to have engaged in virtually the same conduct, Richard Scruggs, was not. Mr. Scruggs, however, has been reported to have supported Republican candidates in other elections and is the brother-in-law of Senator Trent Lott. Indeed, Senator Lott himself acknowledged speaking to prosecutors about the case, stating that Mr. Scruggs had nothing to worry about regarding an investigation of connections between Mississippi judges and lawyers …”

  Minor filed another lengthy appeal of his conviction, and part of his sentence was vacated by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a ruling that brought some joy to Minor shortly before Christmas 2009.

  But earlier in the year, Sylvia Minor, his wife of forty-one years, died after a long struggle with cancer. Minor was not allowed to visit her in her last days or to attend her funeral.

  Karl Rove, the chief political advisor to former president Bush, was interviewed by the staff of the House Judiciary Committee in the summer, six months after Bush left office. Asked about the appointment of Dunn Lampton as U.S. attorney in Mississippi’s Southern District, Rove said he was the product of a routine process involving the state’s two Republican senators. “One of them, in particular, has strong feelings about anything that is connected with southern Mississippi,” he said. “I speak of former Senator Lott.”

  Rove said he had no knowledge of the prosecution of Paul Minor. The case took place in “a distant part of the country,” he said. “It was not the policy of the White House to directly or indirectly attempt to influence any specific case.”

  But Rove volunteered that the Scruggs case “makes for entertaining reading.”

  Scruggs asked to serve his time at a federal prison in Pensacola, Florida, where Minor was being held. Not far from his and Diane’s former home in Pascagoula, the location would be convenient for visits. His request was denied on the grounds that he represented a “flight risk.” The prison facility was adjacent to a naval air station where he had once flown, and it was theorized that he could somehow commandeer a plane and fly away.

  He was sent, instead, to a correctional facility in Ashland, Kentucky, a hard day’s drive for his friends and family members in Oxford. In the first week of his imprisonment, Scruggs suffered a seizure believed to be related to his withdrawal from the drugs on which he had grown dependent. He was hospitalized for several days. After recovering, he was given a job as a janitor; his first cellmate was a young man serving twenty years for operating a meth lab.

  Although the Kentucky prison was far away, Diane made the trip to visit her husband almost every weekend.

  Zeus Scruggs had fallen to unimaginable depths, but he kept the “stiff upper lip” so prized in the military. And a sense of humor. Two months into his sentence, he wrote a friend, “I am now teaching a phase of the GED course work. I just knew that someone would spot my genius by how I pushed that mop.”

  Later, he told of how he had been subjected to “tobacco’s curse” years after his assault on the industry. “I got promoted,” he wrote. “I no longer mop the hall every day. Now I only have to clean the guards’ lounge and bathrooms on weekends. You cannot imagine how much spit tobacco can fit into one trash can. These good old boys use empty pop bottles for cuspidors. After I carry this trash to a bin, it is culled by a group of inmates who reprocess this slimy stuff in a microwave and smoke it! I kid you not. These guys even get mad at me when there’s not enough. Tobacco’s curse is getting even with me.”

  Early in 2009, the federal prosecutors made another run at him. Threatened with indictment in connection with Senator Lott’s call to Judge DeLaughter and the judge’s favorable ruling in the Wilson case, Scruggs faced the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison if convicted of another bribery. His first instinct—to fight the charge—gave way to a decision to plead guilty in the case prosecutors called Scruggs II.

  He did so in the little North Mississippi town of Aberdeen before U.S. District Judge Glen Davidson. Although Roberts Wilson and Charlie Merkel were again present in the courtroom, the ambience seemed less ominous than his dates in the federal building in Oxford. Scruggs was allowed to wear a suit, but he moved toward the bench in a halting pace, still
shackled by leg irons.

  He told Judge Davidson that he had promised Judge Biggers “to be a better man” when he accepted his sentence for Scruggs I. “I hope what I am doing today is a major step toward redeeming that pledge.”

  By this time, Bob Norman was in charge of the prosecution, and he told the judge that Scruggs had already begun talking. “His cooperation has opened several doors we need to investigate.”

  The judge accepted Scruggs’s plea and added another two and a half years to his sentence. He also delivered a mild lecture about Scruggs’s “sad” thirst for money. Instead of citing the wisdom of ancient Greeks, Davidson invoked Scottish philosopher William Barclay: “The Romans had a proverb that money is like sea water. The more you drink, the thirstier you become.”

  When the session was finished, Scruggs was taken to another room, where he was stripped of his business suit. Photographers were waiting when the prisoner, manacled and wearing a vivid orange jump suit, was led from the building.

  While he was being shuttled from one location to another by the Bureau of Prisons, Scruggs once found himself briefly in the company of two other prisoners, Steve Patterson and Joey Langston. He had a conversation with Patterson, but refused to speak to Langston.

  The prosecutors felt confident that Scruggs’s testimony would finally lead them to P. L. Blake. At last, they believed, they had in their crosshairs the most intriguing figure in the case, the veteran of the old Mississippi organization.

  In the spring of 2009, Scruggs was brought to the Lafayette County Jail in Oxford—where he came within sight of his son but was unable to speak with him—to appear before a federal grand jury. But his testimony failed to win an immediate indictment of his old associate. In fact, the prosecutors were disturbed over the paucity of Scruggs’s remarks. His session with the grand jury was so unproductive that it lasted only fifteen minutes.

  He was kept in a windowless cell in Oxford for two months as talks continued between prosecutors and his attorneys.

  One of the most remarkable statements in their dialogue came from Bob Norman. It occurred in a conference room at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in late March, almost exactly two years after Tim Balducci had approached Judge Lackey. Representing the government were Norman, his associate Chad Lamar, and Bill Delaney. Scruggs was accompanied by two lawyers from John Keker’s office, Jan Little and Brook Dooley.

  At the beginning of the conversation, Norman tried to establish a convivial mood by remarking that the federal government had come to realize that none of the members of the Scruggs Law Firm had originally set out to bribe Judge Lackey.

  Scruggs was astonished by the statement. Across the conference table, it seemed to him that Delaney had grown uncomfortable, for Norman’s remark carried an implication that the government investigation had turned an unethical overture to Judge Lackey into a crime that reached monstrous proportions.

  “We tried to tell you that,” Scruggs said.

  That had been at the heart of Scruggs’s explanation of the crime: That Balducci had been instructed to do nothing that would break the law in his ear-wigging conversation with Judge Lackey. That Scruggs had not known of the payments to the judge until they had already been made in his name by Balducci. Even as he had pleaded guilty, Scruggs insisted in his remarks before the court “there was no intent to bribe the judge; it was an intent to earwig the judge.”

  But Scruggs had acknowledged, “I joined the conspiracy later in the game.”

  More than a month later, Scruggs was returned to prison in Ashland. He spent his sixty-third birthday in a solitary cell known by inmates as “the hole.” Prison authorities said he had been put there because it was feared he might have been exposed to swine flu while away.

  In the fall of 2009, after more than a year in confinement, Scruggs was moved to a prison camp at Ashland where inmates had more freedom. Reflecting on the variety of cellmates he had during his journeys he wrote a friend, “So far, I’ve learned how to run a Ponzi scheme, an Internet porno network, a still, a meth lab, proper bank robbery, espionage, and now pimping. Surely there is a degree for this.”

  Diane was capable of her own displays of black humor. When their daughter, Claire, was married in September 2009 at the family home in Oxford, Diane had a life-size pasteboard cutout of Dick, grinning and wearing a tuxedo, on hand for the ceremony. Guests posed for photographs with the facsimile of the missing father of the bride.

  Anticipating the need for a defense team, P. L. Blake began hiring lawyers shortly after Scruggs’s second guilty plea. Blake’s attorneys dispatched two private detectives to Pascagoula, where they went to see Diane Scruggs’s twin brother, David Thompson. He was not quite sure what to make of their visit. One of the detectives was quite intimidating in size, though nothing that was said seemed overtly threatening. They told Thompson that Blake “thought the world of Dick Scruggs.”

  When Thompson told his sister of the visit, she found it unsettling. Diane felt that Blake was trying to send some sort of message, but she was not sure what.

  At the end of July 2009, Bobby DeLaughter pleaded guilty to one of five counts in an indictment against him. His decision came after intense plea bargaining in the days before his trial, which had been set for August.

  DeLaughter admitted guilt in lying to an FBI agent when asked about his contacts with Ed Peters. The charge constituted obstruction of justice and carried a maximum sentence of twenty years’ imprisonment. The government chose to recommend an eighteen-month sentence, and the remaining four counts of the indictment were dropped.

  The sentence was formally imposed in November 2009.

  Before agreeing to the reduced charges, the prosecutors realized they would have problems in a trial. There was no hard evidence of a quid pro quo that DeLaughter received in exchange for his ruling in the Wilson v. Scruggs case, and the key witnesses—Tim Balducci, Joey Langston, Ed Peters, and Steve Patterson—might display shaky credibility on a vigorous cross-examination. If Trent Lott appeared as a witness, he would be expected to testify that his call to DeLaughter had been merely a courtesy, and that no federal judgeship was ever offered. But if the former senator were not called, he would represent a hole in the government’s case.

  The federal courtroom in Aberdeen was crowded for DeLaughter’s appearance. Earlier in the day, he had resigned as circuit judge, and his guilty plea would end his legal career. Charlie Merkel drove across the state, as he had done several times previously, to see justice done. But there was a new face among the spectators who wanted to witness DeLaughter’s final disgrace: Byron De La Beckwith, Jr., the son of the assassin whom DeLaughter had sent to prison for the remainder of his life.

  At the first of the new year, DeLaughter went to prison himself, assigned to a federal facility in distant Kentucky.

  In January 2010, a federal grand jury in Oxford indicted FBI agent Hal Neilson on charges of attempting to cover up his financial interest in a building housing the local FBI offices. He was also accused of lying to his own bureau. The formal charges came nearly two years after the U.S. Attorney’s Office recused itself from the investigation and the case had been turned over to federal prosecutors in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

  Neilson’s fellow agents in Oxford were angered over the action. A member of an old Mississippi family—Neilson’s is the name of a venerable department store in Oxford that survived the Civil War—Neilson had many other friends in the area who rallied to his side. Considered part of the fabric of the community, he held undergraduate and law degrees from Ole Miss, and he and his wife and four children had settled in Oxford years earlier.

  He had been reassigned to Washington in 2009 during the turmoil, but after his indictment he was suspended by the FBI—eleven months from retirement.

  Neilson vowed to fight the charges, even though he underwent major heart surgery days after the indictment.

  · · ·

  A week after Neilson’s indictment, Jim Greenlee announced that he would retire a
s U.S. attorney. The Obama administration had still not found a replacement for him, but Greenlee considered his work done.

  Though the wreckage of the house Zeus Scruggs built had been strewn about the landscape, the Force he dealt with endured.

  The Washington branch remained intact. Trent Lott had yielded his power on Capitol Hill, yet he flourished in his new lobbying job, building a strong list of clients who would both enrich him and enable him to maintain influence. His Senate seat was retained by another member of the brotherhood, Roger Wicker. And Lott’s alter ego, Tom Anderson, a man who left few footprints, continued to get $1.5 million a year from Scruggs. The money is wired to the Burke and Herbert Bank and Trust in Alexandria, Virginia, to be credited to the account of Bainberry LLC in Middlebury, Virginia, where Anderson lives. Bainberry is not registered as a corporation with the secretary of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

  Down south, more than two years after the investigation began, two of the darkest figures in the Force, P. L. Blake and Ed Peters, remained free.

  Notes

  Virtually all interviews for this book were conducted in 2008 or 2009. Exceptions will be noted, such as cases where the author drew upon informal conversations that took place earlier.

  Preface

  1 Two months … Letter from Curtis Wilkie to Dick Scruggs, Jan. 31, 2008.

  2 Afterward, I got … Letter from Scruggs to Wilkie, Feb. 12, 2008.