The Fall of the House of Zeus (37 page)

The dispute still burned four days later when Balducci, wearing the FBI wire, encountered Zach. “I know Joey’s been dumping on me a lot,” Balducci said. “That issue is squarely just a pissing match between Joey and us, and I feel like y’all have gotten caught in the crossfire. I hate it.”

“Joey didn’t intend that consequence, either,” Zach said. Like his father, Zach was reluctant to choose a side in the feud. Langston, after all, had been like a solicitous older brother, introducing Zach to criminal defense strategy in the two trials they worked together.

Balducci, whose mission was to record incriminating remarks by Backstrom, strolled toward his office in the rear of the suite.

“
When did you get here?” Backstrom asked. “I thought you were coming before lunch.”

“Well, I got tied up,” Balducci said. “You know how it is.”

    
During his painful session with the federal authorities, Balducci agreed to try to strengthen their case against Scruggs. He had no choice other than to betray some of his closest friends and associates to spare himself a harsh prison sentence. To develop more explicit evidence, he said he could go talk to Scruggs and Backstrom to ask for another $10,000 to fix the Jones case. If he could implicate Zach Scruggs, all the better.

Balducci had a good relationship with the firm. He had been professionally associated with them when, working for Langston, he helped represent Scruggs in the bitter litigation with Luckey and Wilson. Backstrom, in particular, had become a close friend. Balducci seemed to be able to draw out a playful side of Backstrom’s personality. While Backstrom usually appeared serious and rarely seasoned his conversations with profanity, he grew robust in Balducci’s company. They greeted each other with salutations such as “dude” and “my man” and exchanged wisecracks. Mutual friends, curious about the unlikely fellowship
that had developed between the two men, wondered if Backstrom seized upon Balducci as a source for high spirits, as a means to lift him out of the boredom of the straight and narrow. Whatever the reason, Backstrom represented Balducci’s strongest link to the Scruggs Law Firm.

In the privacy of Backstrom’s office, Balducci told him he had “a couple of things I wanted to run through with you. First things first, let me tell you about the deal with Judge Lackey.”

Concocting a false story, Balducci said that Grady Tollison, Jones’s lawyer, had “filed a bunch of shit” before Lackey could enter his order sending the case to arbitration. The new motions by Tollison, he explained, were forcing the judge to draft different language in his order.

As they inspected the proposed order, Balducci hovered close to Backstrom to ensure that the recording device caught their conversation.

Zach Scruggs, who had left to take a call, returned. It was an opportunity for Balducci to implicate him, too, so he said, “Zach, let me bring you up to speed,” and he repeated his tale of complications.

Trying to understand, Zach asked, “So he’s drafted a new order …”

Balducci completed Zach’s sentence: “…  addressing that recent filing. He wanted me to approve it. The problem is I didn’t have the institutional knowledge of the case to know if it was okay or not. So I wanted y’all to look at it and tell me if it’s okay, and if not, make whatever edits need to be made.”

Backstrom said he was confused by the wording of the document, purportedly sent by Lackey. Zach agreed. “I don’t know how to clean it up because I don’t know what he’s trying to say.”

“I’m not sure, either,” Balducci volunteered. His claims of new Tollison motions set off a brief tirade against the Oxford lawyer, who was rapidly becoming as implacable an enemy to Scruggs’s interests as Charlie Merkel.

Zach complained that Tollison had been using the Jones case as a device to obtain information from the Scruggs firm in connection with the State Farm action. Tollison was known to be close to the pair of lawyers in Jackson, Danny Cupit and Crymes Pittman, who were advising Attorney General Jim Hood on a separate track in the State Farm negotiations.

Zach speculated that Tollison had obtained some of Backstrom’s emails regarding State Farm through the discovery process—in which rival sides can demand material that might otherwise be unavailable—in the
Jones case. “They’re citing Sid’s email, just one little part of it—just chickenshit shit,” Zach said. “I mean, State Farm is using Johnny Jones’s action and all the shit they’re getting from it. They’re getting all these internal emails.” He said the latest filings in the Jones case might reflect “all kinds of crooked shit” invented by Tollison. “There’s no telling. He might have pulled all kinds of crazy-ass emails.”

“I think he’s probably doing that because he knows that it’s causing us pain elsewhere,” Backstrom added.

“What do we do about him releasing privileged stuff?” Zach asked. “Do we file a bar complaint that he’s filing a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with his dispute against us to try to get it in the public domain?”

Backstrom said Lackey’s order should be entered, followed by a request to seal the Jones case “because there’s a bunch of shit in here that is just inflammatory and not helpful to us in connection with the other litigation.”

Balducci offered a suggestion. “Let’s get this order entered, and then if you want to go back to the well later and get an order sealing the file, we can do that later.”

“What if Judge Lackey retires on the bench and some other asshole gets a hold of it?” Zach asked.

“Well, if he compels it to arbitration, then they gotta wait until arbitration is over,” Backstrom said.

Balducci offered a solution. “Do you wanna put in there that the action’s dismissed? Put that it’s compelled to arbitration, and the proceedings before this court are dismissed? He could dismiss it without prejudice instead of staying it.”

That sounded reasonable to Zach. “I might be overlooking a drawback to doing that. I don’t know what it would be. I mean, Lackey’s fine. But you know, who the fuck else is gonna get this thing?”

If another judge were appointed to hear the case, Balducci said, “I don’t know that I’ll have the stroke with the next one.”

“This is the proper thing to do,” Zach said. “It’s just so unprofessional what these guys have been up to. Attaching all these things that they’re ciphering through, and God knows what Grady’s talking to State Farm lawyers about.”

Backstrom said arbitration would be the best and simplest course to take. Zach approved of this approach, too. Just as Zach was called out of the room to take another telephone call, Balducci tried to insert a damning line into the conversation. “The other piece of this puzzle
I hadn’t told you yet is: get it how you want it, because I’ve got to go back for another delivery of another bushel of sweet potatoes down there. Get it how you want it, because we’re paying for it to get it done right.”

But by this time, Zach was leaving the room and was no longer listening.

    
Balducci and Backstrom continued their conversation on other topics. Backstrom said he was surrounded by constant discussion of the State Farm–Jim Hood situation. Both Dick and Zach Scruggs seemed obsessed with the matter, he said, while the Jackson lawyers, Cupit and Pittman, were “trying to gum up the deal so they could get paid.” It had been difficult “to keep my sanity” in the Scruggs office, he said.

Balducci said he had not seen Hood in months. “I think he’s firmly attached at Joey’s hip,” he said, implying that Langston enjoyed closer proximity to the attorney general.

The visitor changed the subject abruptly. “When I talked with you last night, you said Dick was walking the floor or something over this Lackey deal. Is he okay? Or is he pissed at me over this?”

Backstrom was elliptical in his response, using interchanging singular and plural references.

“I told him, guys, part of the reason why it hadn’t been on the front burner is because we told him it didn’t have to be. And I oversold that a little bit. I said, we’re defendants. We can wait till the cows come home. They bought that for a while, but then, you know—When you gonna get that order? We need that order. Well, we really don’t. Our lawyers aren’t billing us anything because they ain’t doing anything. But, you know, they just got it in their heads that they wanted it.”

Federal agents, listening to the dialogue later, interpreted Backstrom’s remarks as an indication that Zach was part of the plan to obtain the order from Lackey.

“So, they were like,” Backstrom continued, “Can you call Tim? And I was like, yeah, I can call Tim. No problem. Then later that day, Dick was like, no we can go about this another way. Don’t call Tim. I’ll go about it another way, a more indirect way. And I was like, What are you planning on doing? And he was like, I’m a gonna handle it. And kinda giving me the: you don’t wanna know kinda thing. So I don’t know what he did.”

Backstrom said Scruggs had a habit. “Whenever he talks to somebody, he automatically thinks of something that they could do on something
else.” He said he could only speculate on what Scruggs might do in the Jones case.

“I can put his concerns to rest,” Balducci said. “It’s all done. He had paid the money, and he was probably upset, you know, or concerned that it wasn’t getting delivered like it was supposed to be. That may have been part of the problem.”

Backstrom shrugged, then he and Balducci turned to talk of what their children had done on Halloween night.

    
Before he left the law firm, Balducci finally made his way into Scruggs’s office.

Scruggs, who was completing a telephone call, looked up. “Hey, man, I don’t practice law. I talk on the phone.”

Balducci asked for a minute of his time.

To Scruggs, the Jones case was a minor distraction compared to the war with State Farm, so he welcomed his visitor and began talking about the legal argument over wind and water damage. He showed Balducci satellite photos that he believed would demonstrate that homes had been destroyed by wind rather than a surge from the gulf. And he mentioned a trial scheduled soon on the coast where he would need the same sort of advance jury work that he had sought from Balducci earlier.

Scruggs was in his afternoon mode. He had taken another dose of Fioricet after lunch and felt washed over with optimism and a sense of well-being. Sometimes the drug made him manic in conversation.

Scruggs continued to elaborate on the satellite photos. “This is a hell of a lot better shit than you can get on Google Earth.”

“That’s great stuff,” Balducci said. But he knew he had other matters the FBI wanted him to discuss. “Just very quickly,” he said, “I need to talk to you about the Johnny Jones order.”

Balducci explained that Tollison had filed new material before Lackey had time to enter his order, so the judge “pulled back that other order and has drafted this new one that I want to show you.”

Scruggs felt the change was inconsequential. “I’m sorry you came over here for this,” he apologized.

Balducci pressed forward. What the judge had done, he said, was to add one paragraph. “So I needed to get it cleared before I told him to go ahead with it. So read it and tell me if that’s okay, that language.”

Scruggs quickly edited the document, observing “that last sentence is
not really a sentence.” He added that another sentence “needs a colon.” He returned the order to Balducci.

“So you want me to go ahead? No problems with having this entered?”

“No problems at all,” Scruggs said.

Balducci knew he had to follow through on his plan with the FBI to raise the payment another $10,000.

“I know I keep going back and forth about this, Dick, and I’m sorry,” Balducci said. The judge had become “a little bit nervous with that last filing by Grady because he thinks they’ve made a decent argument. He’s gonna do this, but he says he thinks he’s a little more exposed on the facts and the law than he was before, and did I think you would do a little something else, you know, to about ten or so more?”

Scruggs paused and thought about the request for a moment. He knew Balducci and Patterson were in troubled financial straits. He had given their fledgling firm $500,000 to use their influence with Jim Hood and his advisors earlier in the year. Encouraged by P. L. Blake, Scruggs had given the pair another $40,000 a month ago. That payment was ostensibly for help in preparing for jury selections. But Balducci’s new suggestion seemed blatant in its criminality.

Suddenly, Scruggs became peeved with Balducci—and Patterson as well. He thought: What in the fuck are these guys doing? Is this another excuse to ask for money?

His concentration was broken by his secretary announcing a telephone call from Governor Minner of Delaware.

“I’ll call him back.”

“Sounds like fund-raising,” Balducci said.

“Shit,” Scruggs said. “Don’t know who that is.” That was obvious. The caller was not a “him,” but Governor Ruth Ann Minner, a political ally of Joe Biden’s.

Balducci brought Scruggs back to the $10,000 question. “Do you want me to cover that or not?”

Scruggs paused again, noncommittal.

“Because I’ve already taken care of everything,” Balducci said.

Scruggs grunted. “I’ll take care of it.” To ensure that he had a reason for writing another check, Scruggs added, “I need some suggested voir dire from you.”

In a letter dictated later that day, Scruggs wrote Balducci, “Great seeing you this p.m. and more than appreciate your suggestion to draft proposed instructions …”

·    ·    ·

    
Balducci felt he had completed his assignment. He made contact with Delaney at a prearranged site.

“Howdy. How you doing? I hope this fucking thing’s working,” Balducci said, referring to the recording device. It was. His voice could be distinguished clearly over the background noise of traffic and barking dogs.

“Go ahead and get this thing shut off,” the FBI agent told Balducci. “Go ahead and say the time.”

Balducci glanced at his watch and spoke again into the device: “It’s almost three, about two fifty-eight Central time. October first. Excuse me, November first.”

    
By the time Balducci reached the outskirts of New Albany later that afternoonn, his voice had lost its confident timbre. He sounded weary and defeated as he talked on his cell phone with a friend at his firm. He explained that he had been incommunicado all day because “I been monkeying around doing some personal shit.”