The Fall of the House of Zeus (21 page)

Jones’s swipe at Danny Cupit, his old friend, was good-natured, but it succeeded in winning him a position in the unit Scruggs was developing.

Papers formalizing the Scruggs Katrina Group were drawn up within two months, with Nutt’s firm putting up the first $1 million to handle expenses for the organization. SKG began to attract clients through advertisements and word of mouth, and before long a map of the Gulf Coast in Scruggs’s office was decorated with pushpins representing the
properties of hundreds of clients. It looked like an exhibit in a war room.

    
Scruggs, as usual, engaged in a bit of freelancing that his partners knew little about. A few months after he targeted the insurance industry, he received a tip concerning some potentially explosive evidence from a friend of his chief secretary, Charlene Bosarge. The source was the mother of Corri and Kerri Rigsby, two sisters who worked as claims adjusters on the Gulf Coast. After learning about “some hanky-panky going on” from her daughters, she told Bosarge, “Dickie needs to know what these girls are doing.” Scruggs met with the mother, then with her daughters, and grew enthusiastic over what they told him. State Farm, they said, had been doctoring reports on Katrina damage in an effort to absolve the company of responsibility. The Rigsby sisters turned over a couple of documents indicating that engineering reports to determine the cause of damage had been changed from “wind” to “water.”

Scruggs enlisted the sisters, who were working for an Alabama firm that investigated claims for State Farm, to cooperate with him. Over the coming months, he would come into possession of roughly a thousand pages of confidential State Farm files.

Scruggs excitedly described the women to his associates as “insiders” who were in a position to cripple an adversary in the same way that Merrell Williams and Jeff Wigand had damaged the tobacco industry’s credibility. But he was also mindful of the legal jeopardy involved, and in an attempt to justify his arrangement with the Rigsby sisters, Scruggs hired them as “consultants,” with annual salaries of $150,000 each.

He employed the documents against State Farm, and to maximize pressure on the insurance company, he had much of the information passed to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for South Mississippi and to the state’s new attorney general, Jim Hood, who was elected in 2003. (After holding the office for sixteen years, Mike Moore had given up his political career to return to private practice.)

The Rigsby sisters would become central figures in a complex series of lawsuits and countersuits that eventually ensnarled Scruggs in a criminal contempt citation by a federal judge. But not before their evidence helped persuade State Farm to surrender on one set of claims.

    Throughout 2006, the Scruggs Katrina Group fought and negotiated with State Farm before finally reaching a tentative agreement near the end of the year that promised to bring nearly $90 million
for a set of clients and another $26.5 million in fees for the five law firms involved in the action.

But an argument broke out over plans to divide the fees, and two relatively unknown lawyers—who had helped represent Scruggs in the Luckey trial and hoped to build on the association—wound up on opposing sides of the dispute. Johnny Jones and Tim Balducci were both native Mississippians and products of the Ole Miss law school, but had little in common other than a stake in Scruggs. They were separated in age by more than a decade and had contrasting interests and temperaments. Though working in the same profession, they traveled different tracks. Yet each had a critical part in a case that would send tremors across the country’s legal community. In fact, without them the whole drama would never have occurred.

    
Jones was bookish and had a background that carried, by Mississippi standards, a whiff of the bohemian life. The product of a freethinking household in Jackson, Jones was one of a handful of white schoolchildren who stayed in the city’s public schools during the desegregation era. His mother taught English at Millsaps College and belonged to a cadre of liberal women who shared with their neighbor, the author Eudora Welty, an interest in literature and an allegiance to the national Democratic Party.

When schoolbuses filled with new black students pulled up in front of Bailey Junior High, an Art Deco landmark on North State Street, at the beginning of the fall semester in 1970, most of Jones’s classmates withdrew. He felt like a guinea pig, thrown into an unprecedented social experiment. Scores of prominent white Mississippians had passed through the corridors of Bailey over the years; suddenly Jones found himself in a distinct minority at the school.

A few blocks away, at the socially fashionable First Presbyterian Church, plans for a private, alternative school, Jackson Prep, were drawn up for those who felt dispossessed by the events at Bailey and elsewhere. “First Pres,” as the church was known in Jackson, rivaled the nearby First Baptist Church for power and rigid conservatism. Later, the congregation would lead a breakaway movement from the mainstream denomination and help form the new, theologically right-wing Presbyterian Church of America (PCA).

Jones and his mother were never part of the religious axis—First Baptist and First Pres—that dominated politics in the state capital. As Episcopalians, they subscribed to the teachings of their own minister,
John Jenkins, who encouraged racial reconciliation in a city torn by a decade of sit-ins, Freedom Rides, the assassination of civil rights martyr Medgar Evers, and a police fusillade at Jackson State that killed two black students. The Joneses also admired William Winter, a lay leader at the more progressive Fondren Presbyterian Church. Because Winter’s life would be distinguished by his long struggle to save public schools in Mississippi, it was no coincidence that Jones had been attracted to him for many of the same reasons that had led Scruggs to Winter’s law firm.

After graduation from Murrah High School, once the seed ground for Ole Miss freshmen and now predominantly black, Jones lasted only a year in Oxford. In Jack Kerouac style, he went on the road. He painted houses in Austin at a time when the Texas capital was a refuge for the outlaw musicians Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. He spent a year at Millsaps, then returned to Ole Miss and finally graduated, two years late, in 1977. He went west again, worked a night shift in a canning factory in the Pacific Northwest, spent an obligatory amount of time in San Francisco, and wound up tending bar at Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone Park. He then drifted back to Mississippi, met his future wife, and settled down.

His mother’s friends, knowing of his fondness for English and history, got him a job with the state archives. Jones went through a phase that prepared him for a task awaiting him: writing legal briefs. He worked on an oral history project that enabled him to interview some of the state’s literary giants, including Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. The interviews were considered so artful that they were published by the University Press of Mississippi.

In 1981, Jones and his wife moved to Oxford, where he enrolled in graduate school. Serendipitously, he arrived in the university town around the same time as two legendary Mississippi figures, the literary equivalents of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, wound up there.

Willie Morris, a native of Yazoo City and author of
North Toward Home
, had returned from years as an expatriate writer and editor of
Harper’s
magazine in New York to join the Ole Miss faculty. Barry Hannah, a brilliant craftsman of stories anthologized in many American collections, had also come to Ole Miss, to teach creative writing after losing his tenured position at the University of Alabama for displaying a pistol in class. Heavily fueled by drink, Morris and Hannah were at once friends and rivals, and they spent late hours almost every
night in an off-campus coffeehouse with admiring students like Jones serving as their courtiers.

To put some order in his unfocused life, Jones opted for law school and obtained a degree when he was thirty. Returning to Jackson, he clerked for a federal district judge, Tom S. Lee, and worked for a while in Danny Cupit’s firm during the asbestos frenzy.

He carried on a knockabout practice for years and had no illusions that Scruggs was hiring him for his talent when he was asked in 2004 to join in the defense against Luckey. The case had been transferred at one point to Judge Lee’s jurisdiction, so Scruggs fell back on an old tactic: he retained Jones to make sure his side had a face familiar to the judge.

Scruggs’s own interests and politics meshed with those of Jones, and the older lawyer enjoyed the younger man’s company. Though Scruggs reacted bitterly over the loss of the Luckey case, Jones had no qualms about inquiring if there might be a place for him in the Scruggs Katrina Group.

    
Tim Balducci had also served as a junior member of Scruggs’s defense team in the Luckey case, but he took a route far different from that of Jones to get there. Born in Shelby, a little town in cotton country not far from the Mississippi River, Balducci belonged to a well-known family. Like many others in the area, the Balduccis could be traced to a tribe of Italian immigrants who left Ancona province on the Adriatic Sea a century earlier to settle in the rich farmland of the Mississippi Delta. They labored in agriculture, boasted of their skills in making whiskey—illicit at the time—and served as pioneers in introducing the Catholic Church to the region. As their numbers increased, the Italian Americans became a significant force in the community, producing outstanding athletes and a corps of merchants, physicians, and tradesmen. Balducci’s father was a banker. Though some Old World customs were retained—Shelby had a bocce league—the Italians were effectively assimilated into the local community, and many became Protestants in the process.

Tim Balducci never strayed far from home. He attended Delta State University, located a few miles from Shelby. After graduation, he went to law school at Ole Miss. His grades were good, and he seemed bright enough, striking some of his classmates as a quick study and eager to learn. Others thought him ingratiating. Once, he approached his
instructor in a poverty law class to assure her that the course had been a touchstone for him, revealing truths about the poor that he had missed all his life. She dismissed his comment as arrant bullshit; after all, Balducci had grown up in Bolivar County, where two thirds of the people were black and one third of the population lived below the poverty level.

In many ways, Balducci was a quintessential good ole boy, a regional description for those who might choose hunting and fishing over books. A law degree did not rule anyone out of the good ole boys’ club. There is nothing inherently antiintellectual about a good ole boy. Plenty of lawyers readily accept the designation. But good ole boys prefer telling jokes and outlandish tales over having serious discussions. Good ole boys dare to be uncouth and poke fun at high manners. They favor informality: Caterpillar caps, blue jeans, and boots. They devote Saturdays to NASCAR rather than the Metropolitan Opera. Despite his Italian surname, Balducci fit right in with the Bubbas.

Good ole boys are essentially friendly, and Balducci realized that flattery and a willingness to learn from his elders could be tools as he climbed through the legal profession. Following law school, he had a modest practice in a couple of small-town firms in North Mississippi. To augment his income, he worked as a public defender in Oxford and nearby Holly Springs, representing indigents who faced criminal charges.

During this period, he became acquainted with circuit judge Henry Lackey, who presided over many of the cases. Balducci made the most of the relationship. He called Lackey, who was a generation older, his “mentor” and described their friendship as a warm one.
As he said later of Lackey, “He took me in his court, taught me the practice of law from the bench, showed me my mistakes, congratulated me on my successes, counseled me on my failures. We became close friends, not just in a professional sense, but more in a personal sense. I really looked up to him.”

After attracting attention as a hustler, Balducci was hired in 2000 by Joey Langston to return to the law firm where he’d spent the first year of his career. While Balducci may have thought of Judge Lackey as his mentor, he considered lawyers such as Langston and Dick Scruggs role models.

    At the end of 2006, after the Scruggs Katrina Group’s settlement with State Farm, the lives of Jones and Balducci would take radically different directions.

For Jones, bad news came in a telephone call on December 6. Scruggs told him that he could expect to receive a check for $1 million for his work on the Katrina cases. At first, Jones thought: This is great. It would cover his expenses and compensate for his work over the past year, and the money would come just before Christmas. Then he asked, what about his share of the $26.5 million fee coming to the group from the State Farm settlement?

“Well,” Scruggs said, “you won’t get any more money out of this settlement.”

Jones felt his stomach heave. He was being cut out of the deal.

Scruggs tried to allay Jones’s distress. “This is the first one, Johnny, and we are going forward, and we’ve got other settlements coming in. We think we can get the same thing that we got from State Farm out of Nationwide and Allstate combined.”

Scruggs said the million-dollar payment to Jones was something that others in the Katrina alliance had decided they “can live with.” He added: “Johnny, this is the first one. It’s a proposal, you know.” There was no malice in Scruggs’s voice, no tone of dominance by an older partner. He sounded almost casual, as though a few million dollars here, a few million dollars there, amounted to little in the greater scheme of things.

But to Johnny Jones, fifty-one at the time and still in search of the big lick, the words were devastating.

“Dick,” he said, “I don’t want to say anything right now. We’ve been friends for a long time. But this doesn’t make me whole. Just let me shut my big mouth and think about this.”

It was the last real conversation the two men ever had.