From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  To top off the weirdness of the occasion, when Steve Patterson had finished his presentation, which was actually very impressive, he announced he was only going to eat a bite or two of salad, which was unusual. Nicknamed “Big Daddy,” Steve weighed 300 pounds and was no dieter. He explained that the week before he had undergone gastric bypass surgery and that his new stomach was no bigger than a tangerine and would accept very little food. On that bizarre note, it was time for me to explain myself.

  I told Steve and Norman, truthfully, that the offer was attractive. It would be an ideal situation for me, and I would even have liked to practice a little (except for the illegal parts), but I’d already accepted an exclusive appointment as a Fellow at the brand-new Overby Center at Ole Miss. The Overby Center is the Mississippi branch of Washington’s Freedom Forum and attached to the new Meek School of Journalism. Its CEO and namesake Charles Overby, also CEO of the famed Washington Newseum, the Smithsonian of journalism, established the Center to be a “forum for civilized discussion of issues of interest.” The Overby Center was in essence Oxford’s first think tank. I told Steve I’d already signed a contract with them and could not do outside work and thus could not accept the firm’s attractive offer. To allay any suspicions, I asked if they would consider renewing the offer in a couple of years when my fellowship ended. He said they would, and we left on good terms. All seemed quiet.

  Then came another twist. Less than a week before the FBI planned to raid the Scruggs law offices and arrest Scruggs, Balducci, and Patterson, I got a phone call from Jimbo Adams, an Oxford native who had done exceedingly well in real estate in Florida. Jim had asked me to speak on wine at fund-raisers before, but I was always busy in court. This time, the event was to celebrate the spectacular renovation of his beautiful condo in an exclusive gated area near Ole Miss called Van Buren Place. Lots of old friends would be there as guests and he had a fantastic wine list and wanted me to give a few toasts and remarks about the wines as we drank them. It sounded like another dream occasion. Then he gave me the punch line: “Your friend Dick Scruggs will be a guest of honor.” Good grief. I could not decline but felt like a rat knowing what would happen the next week. But that was the deal. The dinner Friday night was great, the wines superb, the emotions expressed sincere. We all went home happy and full of wine Friday night. Then, on Tuesday, they busted Dick Scruggs and his partners.

  The Scruggs story became radioactive worldwide. One day, surfing the Web, I found a front-page in-depth article analyzing the case in the English-language edition of Pravda, the leading Russian newspaper. When he pled guilty, a Wall Street Journal editorial treated him as a single-name celebrity, like Oprah or Madonna. The heading read simply: “Dickie’s Plea.” But the Scruggs case had one last personal twist for me. I had known Steve Patterson for years, ever since I was legal counsel to Senator Stennis in Washington and Steve was his student aide, operating Senate elevators. Steve was always an ambitious guy with a gift for telling funny stories. Politics was his love, and if things had gone differently he might have been governor. When the FBI arrested him and took him to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, they put him on the line with Tim Balducci, who encouraged him to cooperate. Steve was not a lawyer but was always cautious and savvy. “I want to talk to John Hailman.” The agents called me at home. “I’m retired,” I protested. Bill Delaney sealed the deal: “John, if you’ll come down, I think you can help us get Patterson to cooperate.” I went to the interrogation room. Steve said, “John, I know you can’t represent me and most of the big-name federal defense attorneys already represent other people and have conflicts, but can you recommend a lawyer who would not be too expensive and have my real interests at heart?”

  Another ethical dilemma. I wanted to help Steve but also wanted to help our team get him to plead guilty and cooperate, which might or might not be in his best interest; at that point, I didn’t know enough about his role in the case to know. So I gave Steve three names, as we used to do in my office. First was my old prosecutor counterpart James Tucker of Jackson, who had also just retired. “Too far away,” Steve said. Then I suggested Bill Travis of Southaven, a savvy old paratrooper who was the best federal defense attorney no one knew about, loyal to his clients and highly effective. “Anybody here in Oxford?” Steve asked. “Yeah, Ken Coghlan, former star Ole Miss basketball player and a tough negotiator who has the trust of our office.” Steve was decisive. “Please call him for me.” The agents called Ken and I left. Ken’s fee turned out to be too high, and Steve finally turned to his old friend Hiram Eastland, a cousin of the senator. I was glad to finally be out of the loop.

  Most of the rest of the Dick Scruggs story, including his first and second guilty pleas, has already been told in two books: Kings of Tort by prosecutor Tom Dawson and blogger Alan Lange; and Fall of the House of Zeus by my friend and fellow Overby Fellow Curtis Wilkie, the veteran Boston Globe political reporter. Zeus received national attention and so far my greatest fear did not materialize: for once Mississippi was not made a national whipping boy. Most commentators have so far treated the Scruggs story of judicial bribery as a national problem, not a Mississippi one.

  Zeus is a dark and funny piece reminiscent of a series of Vanity Fair articles dishing dirt on colorful characters from Steve “Big Daddy” Patterson to “Joey the Blade” Langston with lots of politics and typically incestuous Magnolia State backroom deals thrown in. From my own insider perspective, however, there is one point on which I must strongly disagree with my friend Curtis’s book: his conclusion that the Scruggs case had no heroes. To me Judge Henry Lackey is definitely the hero, and I am in a large majority in that view. In 2008, the Mississippi Bar awarded Henry the coveted Chief Justice Award, the bar’s highest honor. He was already serving as chairman of the Mississippi Commission on Judicial Performance when all this happened. As so many people who know him have said, it is beyond belief that anyone would be foolish enough to choose Judge Henry Lackey as someone who might take a bribe.

  Yet human perceptions are incredibly varied. As shown above, Henry Lackey and I knew each other as friendly adversaries in some colorful criminal cases. I didn’t even recall when Henry became a judge because as federal prosecutors we rarely appear in state court. If anyone had asked me what political party he belonged to, I’d have said the underdog party because that’s who he always represented. If forced to guess, I’d have said he was a blue dog Democrat appointed by Governor Ronnie Musgrove instead of Republican Governor Haley Barbour. Shows how little I know. The idea that there were politics in his decision to help us investigate the bribe Tim offered him is absurd. In my mind Dick Scruggs always seemed more like a country club Republican than Henry ever was.

  It even surprised me a little to hear that Henry was a Baptist. I would have guessed Methodist. But to treat him as some sort of back-country fundamentalist yahoo is equally absurd. His comments calling himself a “deepwater” Baptist are typical of Henry’s tongue-in-cheek humor about himself. Henry is undoubtedly upright, but he was never uptight, otherwise he could never have represented all the Faulknerian characters he did. When I heard how his wife resented his characterization in Zeus as a sort of country cousin, I could not help but laugh. It was a case of the biter bit, as Shakespeare said. Henry played the “just a country lawyer” role so long that some people actually began to believe him.

  My lasting image of Judge Henry Lackey came to me in a flash in a fancy ballroom at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis in October 2010. Henry was speaking to a Tennessee bar group, the first time I had ever heard him talk about the Scruggs case in public. His longish but well-trimmed head of thick white hair and his well-cut suit did not say “country.” His demeanor was that of a courtly and thoughtful Southern judge. When I turned my head for a moment as he spoke, alternating stark seriousness about corruption with warm humor about the weaknesses of human nature, his voice suddenly gave me a powerful flashback to the early 1970s when I was legal counsel to Senator Stennis in Washington. One of my key ass
ignments was to attend the Watergate hearings, in which a “third-rate burglary” by some of President Nixon’s minions was being investigated by the U.S. Senate. As I listened to Henry speak, I realized I had heard that same wise and self-effacing tone, had seen that same subtle judicial demeanor before. Henry Lackey was Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina reincarnated. Sam Ervin was the former North Carolina judge who presided with gentle humor and subtle literary wisdom over those hearings. A natural hero for his incredible ability to break tension with quotes from Shakespeare and the King James version, Senator Sam entitled his autobiography, as if anticipating Henry Lackey, Just A Country Lawyer (Indiana U. Press 1974).

  I told a couple of people about my eureka moment, but no one seemed to know what I was talking about. Too young I suppose. Then one afternoon Curtis Wilkie was being interviewed before a full house at the Overby Center by Ole Miss journalism graduate Peter Boyer, a staff writer at the New Yorker. Curtis repeated his opinion that the Scruggs saga had no heroes. I had often told Curtis my opinion that he should at least admit, based on statements in his own book, that the Scruggs story at least has one Cassandra-like heroine, Dick’s loyal wife Diane, who repeatedly warned him to stay away from Patterson, Langston, and P. L. Blake, the political fixer.

  But Dick didn’t listen. Just like he didn’t listen when she tried to wean him from a cocktail of addictive prescription drugs, especially the powerful barbiturate Fioricet, to which he was admittedly addicted and which to my mind gave him the sense of bullet-proof euphoria that led him over the brink from merely paying off insider witnesses in lawsuits against big bad corporations, believing the ends justified the means, to outright bribery of judges. To me it was his drug-enhanced sense of invulnerability that combined with his sense of entitlement as a good-guy crusader to bring about his downfall. To me Dick Scruggs was not a fallen tragic hero as some said, but a regular human being who rose too fast, had his head turned by fame and fortune, and like Elvis was finished off by the euphoria of prescription drugs.

  At the end of the program I approached Peter Boyer and told him my theory that Henry Lackey was the reincarnation of Sam Ervin. Peter pointed to a lady who had just walked up. “My wife told me the exact same thing two days ago when she first read Curtis’s book. She said, ‘That’s Sam Ervin.’ Y’all need to talk.” We did talk, and I hope there will be others who share our view.

  My other candidate for a Scruggs case hero was a critical player, but one whose name is almost totally unknown to the public: FBI case agent Bill Delaney. In an important sense Bill was the anti-Scruggs: modest and seeking neither money nor glory. When assigned the Scruggs case, he was already up to his neck as the case agent on Mississippi Beef, a thankless high-profile case of enormous complexity involving over $55 million in fraud against the state. A media frenzy followed Bill’s every move in the case, but he wisely stayed below all radar. For my money, Bill is the kind of hero modern America needs.

  A new paperback version of Zeus has now been released with a new epilogue which actually seems to attempt to exonerate Dick Scruggs. The new Zeus epilogue, which speaks at length through a quote from a letter written to supporters by Steve Patterson, actually alleges that Henry Lackey was the villain and Dick Scruggs the victim of extortion by Judge Lackey. I have to say that here the point of total absurdity has been reached. The epilogue, sadly, tries to turn the whole Scruggs fiasco on its head. On English TV there is a show called Without Villains There Would Be No Heroes. I’m afraid that, to raise up Dick Scruggs, Zeus had to try to pull down Judge Henry Lackey, a total travesty of justice.

  In my view the neutral Daily Journal of Tupelo should have the last word because it got the Scruggs case exactly right in its editorial written just after Dick Scruggs’s first sentencing for judicial bribery, even before the DeLaughter bribery case and his second guilty plea. The editorial is worth quoting in its entirety as the last, best word on the case:

  JUSTICE TRUMPS ARROGANCE

  The federal judiciary and its prosecutors delivered a humiliating blow on Friday to the enemies of integrity in the Mississippi state judiciary. The sentencing of famed plaintiffs’ attorney Richard Scruggs and his former law firm associate, Sidney Backstrom, on charges of attempting to bribe a state circuit court judge, reverberates among all who think they can get away with anything because they are above the law.

  Both pleaded guilty earlier in conspiring to bribe Circuit Judge Henry Lackey of Calhoun County. Lackey turned to the federal prosecutor’s office in Oxford after being approached about a bribe by Timothy Balducci, a lawyer from New Albany who was in cahoots with Scruggs, Backstrom, and Scruggs’ son, Zach Scruggs, also an attorney in the Oxford-based firm. Balducci has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors. Zach Scruggs pleaded guilty to misprision of a felony—knowing about the planned bribery but failing to report it. He will be sentenced in early July.

  Earlier, in a separate case but tied to the Scruggs firm, noted Boon-eville attorney Joey Langston pled guilty in a case involving attempting to illegally influence Circuit Judge Bobby DeLaughter of Jackson. That case also involves former District Attorney Ed Peters.

  Former state Auditor Steve Patterson, who worked for the Balducci firm, has pleaded guilty in relation to the Scruggs conspiracy involving Judge Lackey. Langston and Patterson both are cooperating with federal investigators.

  Langston pleaded guilty to trying to influence DeLaughter in an asbestos lawsuit fee case by promising that Scruggs could help DeLaughter get appointed to a federal judgeship with the help of Republican former U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, Scruggs’ brother-in-law. . . .

  This sordid web of deceit apparently is far from being fully untangled, but what’s been revealed so far is enough to make Mississippians wonder why smart, successful people become consumed by greed and deluded by a sense of invincible power.

  Scruggs, by consensus, was among the most famous trial lawyers in the world. He won a settlement from Big Tobacco for the state of Mississippi that made him, by all accounts and appearances, wealthy almost beyond belief. Dickie Scruggs, Zach Scruggs, Sid Backstrom, Steve Patterson, Joey Langston, and Tim Balducci failed themselves, their families, their communities, their friends, their innocent colleagues, and the legal profession.

  But they got caught, the single possibility that apparently never entered their minds or touched their consciences. (June 30, 2008)

  3

  CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL WRONGS

  Introduction

  When I joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office, because of my three years of civil rights experience with Legal Services during law school and my two years as law clerk for Judge William Keady during school and prison desegregation, U.S. Attorney H. M. Ray assigned me to do all the office’s civil rights cases, both criminal and civil. For a few years, we had only civil class actions, handled by the Civil Rights Division in Washington with me helping. First there was Gates, a monster class-action suit to desegregate Parchman Prison; then came Gipson, another monster class-action with over five thousand plaintiffs claiming discrimination in hiring by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Later came Papasan, a class action by school superintendents against Mississippi and the United States for frittering away during the Civil War all the lands set aside to support public schools.

  Most difficult was the famed Ayers case to desegregate and equalize Mississippi’s five white and three black state universities. The case lasted over three decades and outlived its plaintiff, its first trial judge, and numerous defendant governors and college presidents. When it was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, I ended up in Washington in the unique role of briefing U.S. Solicitor General Kenneth Starr as to its years of intricacies.

  Eventually my criminal civil rights cases began and with a vengeance. Nearly all of them involved alleged use of excessive force by officers against citizens in custody, either inmates or persons just arrested. From Marks came the allegation that an intoxicated sheriff tried to fire a bullet between an inmate’s ear and h
is head, fortunately missing both. The sheriff then cut the crotch out of his jeans with a sharp knife in an attempt to get him to confess. We won a victory of sorts in the first trial. The jury hung up 6–6, which was the first case in the history of our district where an all-white jury did not acquit a white officer for abusing a black defendant. Then we began to win. Several Delta cross burners pled guilty. A white jury convicted the chief deputy sheriff of Tippah County of beating a seventy-year-old black arrestee. The black chief deputy sheriff of Marshall County pled guilty to abusing a black inmate by accidentally shooting him while beating him with an illegal sawed-off shotgun. Even that victory was not wholly popular. When the deputy got back from federal prison, a large integrated crowd held a parade and threw a party for him. The sheriff hired him back. It was discouraging, but at least we had the races agreeing on something: They liked officers better than inmates. Next, a Justice Court judge pled guilty to sexually molesting several poor and defenseless female litigants who had cases in his court, boasting about his handy “pecker pump” paid for by his social security.

  Then we got the big case. An anonymous informant from Parchman began reporting to us that guards had beaten an inmate almost to death. The warden and deputy warden were both allegedly present. It was our chance to put an end to the legend that beatings and killings of inmates at Parchman were commonplace and committed with impunity. With the help of master FBI interrogator and polygrapher Ed Lee of New Orleans, we got several guards to cooperate, resulting in several guilty pleas and jury convictions. We hoped it would help reduce the culture of brutality and silence that had so long ruled at Parchman. The legislature created a new, much more effective internal affairs unit headed by a retired FBI agent untainted by politics.