The Fall of the House of Zeus (44 page)

All seemed calm. Then, three weeks after the election, the Scruggs case exploded on the scene.

    
Ever since the raid on Scruggs’s office, and then his own, Joey Langston recognized that he had a problem. Balducci, the government’s chief witness, was consumed with ill will and envy and would do anything in his power to bring him down. Langston could trace his vulnerability to the handling of the lawsuit against Scruggs by his former partner Roberts Wilson. First filed in 1993, the case had wandered
through different courts and jurisdictions until it settled on the docket of state circuit judge Bobby DeLaughter. After suffering from the companion action by Al Luckey, Scruggs was determined not to lose to Wilson. Circumstances seemed to call for different tactics.

Langston and Balducci had helped represent Scruggs in the Luckey trial. With the Wilson case looming, Langston had some new ideas. He warned Scruggs that he might be “home-cooked” in Jackson. “They’ll be out to strike against you,” he told Scruggs, referring to a cadre of law yers in the state capital who resented Scruggs. On the plaintiff’s side, Wilson had hired a Jackson lawyer, William Kirksey, to help represent him. Kirksey had once been in the same law firm as Judge DeLaughter. Langston warned Scruggs that Kirksey’s presence might sway the judge’s decision. To counter Kirksey, Langston suggested that Scruggs retain the services of Ed Peters, a longtime player in the old political network. The former district attorney had once been DeLaughter’s boss.

Peters was familiar with Wilson’s lingering dispute with Scruggs. Years before, after Scruggs made his peace with the “dark side of the Force,” Peters had obligingly threatened Wilson with prosecution over a tax issue.

Peters had a history of using his office as district attorney in the state’s largest county as a weapon, to run interference for his allies and to punish their enemies.

He was reelected repeatedly, although newspapers reported on some of the seamy episodes that tarnished his record. He escaped conviction after being acquitted of extortion charges in 1975, four years after he was first elected. He was also reprimanded by the Mississippi Bar Association after a federal judge found that an insurance company he represented had been involved in deceptive sales of securities. Later in the decade, he came under investigation by the FBI over allegations that prisoners at the state penitentiary were paying $1,000 a year to have their sentences reduced in Hinds County courts. In 1977, he was investigated as a result of reports that he accepted payoffs rather than prosecute prostitution rings. No charges were ever filed, and the muckraking Jack Anderson, a nationally syndicated columnist, attributed the lack of action to intervention by Senator Eastland, the original king of the dark side of the Force.

With his connections to the Eastland apparatus, Peters built a reputation over the years. One of his close associates was Steve Patterson, who said of him, “Ed Peters ran the Hinds County courthouse for twenty years. Period.” Patterson elaborated on his own political antennae
in a 2009 deposition. “You tell me a county, and I’ll tell you who you need to hire.” In Hinds County, where the state capital of Jackson was located, Patterson said Peters “could find out virtually anything on any subject.”

Although Peters no longer held public office, he still wielded influence—especially, Patterson and Langston thought, with his former deputy who had become a judge, Bobby
DeLaughter. “Anyone who understands Hinds County politics and Hinds County’s judicial system knows that’s a very close relationship,” Patterson said.

    
Peters and DeLaughter had been heroes in national news stories in 1994 when they carried out the successful prosecution of Byron De La Beckwith, an aging white supremacist accused of the civil rights–era assassination of Medgar Evers, an NAACP leader in Mississippi. Although Beckwith had been arrested shortly after the 1963 murder, two trials in that decade ended in hung juries, and the state made no further efforts to convict him.

Beckwith maintained his notoriety. He ran for lieutenant governor of Mississippi in 1967 as a “straight shooter”—Evers had been shot in the back by a high-powered rifle. He finished fifth in the race while winning thirty-four thousand votes. In 1973 he was arrested in New Orleans, with a time bomb ticking in his car, on a mission to dynamite the home of a prominent Jewish activist. After serving three years in a Louisiana prison, Beckwith retreated to a mountaintop near Chattanooga where he flew the Confederate battle flag from his porch and periodically issued racist proclamations.

By refusing to fade away, Beckwith ensured that people would not forget him. When news stories uncovered evidence of jury tampering in his long-ago trials, a clamor arose in Mississippi to bring the old man back for another courtroom drama.

DeLaughter, an energetic prosecutor in Peters’s office, advocated a new trial, and the district attorney—knowing that black voters represented a significant percentage of his constituency—agreed. In the first of a series of redemptive southern trials that obtained convictions in racial murders, DeLaughter and Peters built a formidable case that resulted in a guilty verdict. Beckwith died in prison.

DeLaughter wrote about his experiences in a prize-winning book,
Never Too Late
, and was gilded by a 1996 movie,
Ghosts of Mississippi
, in which his character was portrayed by Alec Baldwin. Three years
later he was appointed to a vacant county judgeship, elected to a full term, and then appointed in 2002 by Governor Musgrove to serve an unexpired term as circuit judge.

The movie reduced Peters’s character to a bit role, played by an actor named Craig T. Nelson. The script even gave DeLaughter credit for Peters’s tough cross-examination of a defense witness. Afterward, Peters complained to a reporter, “At first, it didn’t bother me. I always thought of movies as fiction anyway, and Bobby told me he had protested. Then I talked with Rob Reiner [the director], who told me the purpose of the movie was to record history. So you are recording history, but the moment everybody considers to be the turning point of the trial, you’re giving it to someone else?”

If Peters was irked that DeLaughter won most of the praise, he did not show it publicly. Instead, the two men remained close friends. Though DeLaughter occupied a place on the bench, Peters was still considered his mentor.

    
The idea to use Peters in the
Wilson v. Scruggs
case had actually come from Steve Patterson, who had been dealing for years with Peters, his confederate in the network. At the time, Patterson was still working for
Langston’s law firm. The plan made sense to Langston, who sold it to Scruggs. It was agreed that Peters would not serve as Scruggs’s attorney of record, but would represent his interests quietly outside the formal constraints of the court.

Scruggs asked his financial advisors to determine an amount that represented a “best-case scenario” of his prospective cost in the case. They arrived at a figure of $2.5 million. Negotiating through Langston, Scruggs proposed a “reverse contingency fee.” If the final judgment came in under $2.5 million, the Langston-Peters team could keep the difference. If the judgment exceeded $2.5 million, the former district attorney would get nothing.

Peters asked for $50,000 up front. Patterson suggested that he be paid in cash as a favor. “Nothing sinister about it,” he later explained. Peters was remodeling a fishing camp in Louisiana. “You know, you can pay contractors with cash pretty easily in Louisiana.”

Langston did not keep that much cash on hand, and was pleasantly surprised when his associate, Balducci, volunteered to provide the money. It came from a cache Balducci called his “slush fund.” With $50,000 in U.S. currency tucked into a thick envelope, Langston, Patterson, and
Balducci flew to Jackson to deliver the payment to Peters. They met at a private hanger at the Jackson airport. When Balducci, who had, after all, supplied the money—was asked to stay behind in a reception area to watch television while Langston and Patterson met privately with Peters, it became another grievance Balducci accumulated against Langston. He wanted to be an inside player, too. At least he was repaid. The $50,000 was reimbursed under the guise of payments for a swimming pool being built at Balducci’s home.

    
Scruggs said nothing about giving Langston primacy in handling the Wilson case. Johnny Jones, a member of the legal team, learned about Langston’s new role indirectly. He called Jack Dunbar in Oxford to tell him that “Joey Langston’s down in Jackson saying he’s now in charge of the Wilson case.” It was the first that Dunbar, who had been Scruggs’s lead attorney, knew he was being replaced.

Jones and his partner Steve Funderburg stayed on the case. They did not know of Peters’s involvement, but felt comfortable that Scruggs would win in DeLaughter’s court on the merits of his argument. DeLaughter seemed to have taken an interest in the nuances of the case that other judges had ignored.

Zach Scruggs was confident, too. He sent Jones an email hailing his firm’s work and DeLaughter’s grasp of the facts.

“I know Steve has been working hard on the Wilson case and has done a great job on briefing and getting Joey and Tim up to speed,” Zach wrote. “But I can tell you that you could file briefs on a napkin right now and get it granted given the Judge’s view of the case … Joey and Tim have this situation well in hand … I think they have turned this thing around before a judge who is fair, doesn’t hate Dick or want to punish him for making money like the other 2 [judges], and actually understands the case.”

Jones replied by email the next day. He told Zach: “You have some misconceptions about Joey and Tim that I hope do not ultimately need to be explored.” Jones considered the two Booneville lawyers high-caliber bullshit artists and was resentful that Langston had been given the lead in the case. “If we win, it will be because the law says we win. Letting J.D. [Judge DeLaughter] have 2 days to read the file and all the briefing back in February helped our cause tremendously. He finally did the hard work that no other judge (including Davis) would do to figure out where the merits lay in these cases.”

·    ·    ·

    
By this time, however, Scruggs had received a thirdhand message from Peters. The former D.A. was more concerned in gaining an advantage for Scruggs than in studying the merits of his case. It would help, Peters reported, if DeLaughter were considered for an open federal judgeship in Mississippi. Peters had passed the word to Patterson, who relayed it to Langston, who told his client.

Scruggs reminded Langston of his poor track record in recommending judicial nominations to his Republican brother-in-law. But he had known DeLaughter in law school and felt his moderate background might prove acceptable to Lott. At least, Scruggs thought, DeLaughter’s name could be put on a list of candidates that Lott and his fellow senator from Mississippi, Thad Cochran, would consider.

So he called Lott to suggest DeLaughter’s name. Lott, who constantly fended off supplicants for patronage jobs and federal appointments, asked if DeLaughter was seriously interested. Assured by Scruggs of DeLaughter’s qualifications and desire, Lott agreed to call the judge. They had a pleasant conversation, which Lott concluded by suggesting that DeLaughter send him a résumé.

For all of the activity, it was unlikely that Lott would recommend DeLaughter to the White House. The judge was perceived as too liberal.
Besides, he had a beard, and the senator did not care for beards.

Even as he implicated his former associates during his confessions to the FBI,
Balducci told the agents that Scruggs never promised a federal judgeship for DeLaughter. Balducci said he overheard Scruggs, “on more than one occasion,” tell Patterson and Langston that he could only “make sure that DeLaughter would be considered” for the post.

Lott’s call to DeLaughter came on March 29, 2006, a month after DeLaughter had already delivered an important ruling rejecting a finding by a special master in the case that recommended a $12 million judgment against Scruggs. By the time DeLaughter issued his final declaration in July, determining that Scruggs owed Wilson no more money, the vacant judgeship was on its way to another man.

Still, there were doubts about DeLaughter’s decision. When Wilson’s attorney, Charlie Merkel, got word of DeLaughter’s ruling, he cried out to one of his partners, “Somebody got to him.”

    Balducci, who had been overheard on FBI recordings bragging of “slush funds” and “bodies buried,” turned over the names of Joey
Langston and Ed Peters to the U.S. attorneys two days after he was first confronted by the FBI. That was the Saturday that Tom Dawson had to skip the Ole Miss homecoming game.

Balducci’s information not only imperiled Langston and Peters, it exposed Scruggs to a second charge of bribing a judge. This opened the door for the government to use the 404(b) provision to show that Scruggs had a predilection for criminal behavior.

Langston knew that he, too, would be targeted as soon as he heard the prosecutors play their 404(b) card against his client Dick Scruggs. Sifting through what he knew, Langston realized that Ed Peters would be a critical figure to the investigation.

On a dreary Saturday in early December—after Patterson had been indicted but before Langston’s office was raided—Langston and Patterson decided that they needed to make a pilgrimage to Jackson. Despite Patterson’s break with Langston’s firm, the two men had maintained an odd friendship throughout Patterson’s ill-fated alliance with Balducci. Langston continued to pay Patterson $80,000 a month for his role in helping to resolve the tangled tobacco lawsuit involving the Butler family, and they still had things in common. It would be in their interest, Langston said, to go see the former district attorney.

(The government would eventually allege that the trio—Langston, Patterson, and Peters—divided equally a $3 million payment from Scruggs. Like so much in the case, it was never as simple as the government indicated.

(Peters had gotten $50,000 in cash, up front. After DeLaughter ruled favorably for Scruggs, Peters demanded all of Scruggs’s $2.5 million. Because Scruggs had been forced to pay Wilson several million dollars over the long duration of the suit, he refused to hand over the full amount. Instead, he sent Langston a check for $1.9 million, earmarked primarily for Peters. Later, he sent a second check for $600,000 to settle Peters’s demand.