The Fall of the House of Zeus (43 page)

    
It was a troubled Christmas for the members of the Scruggs family, and their concerns increased when Diane was hospitalized at the beginning of the new year after a flare-up of her illness. On Monday, January 7, she seemed stable enough to be discharged, but after the hospital staff disconnected some of the medical tubes, she suffered an embolism. The stroke-like seizure left her temporarily paralyzed on the right side of her body.

The relapse occurred around lunchtime. Early that afternoon, both Dick and Zach were at her bedside. She was conscious but able to say little.

Scruggs’s cell phone rang. John Keker, his San Francisco attorney, was calling with urgent news. Scruggs left the room and walked to the end of the hospital hall to carry on the conversation without disturbing his
wife. Already burdened by criminal charges and his wife’s grave illness, Scruggs was stunned by Keker’s report. According to a friend with connections in the Justice Department, Joey Langston was, that afternoon, in a closed federal courtroom in Oxford pleading guilty to conspiring with Scruggs and Steve Patterson to ensure “favorable consideration” for an appointment to a prestigious federal judgeship to the state judge who heard the Wilson case.

Incredulous, Scruggs walked back to his wife’s room, turned to his son, and asked, “Zach, what in the hell is Joey doing?”

L
ike Dick Scruggs, Paul Minor, and other Mississippi attorneys who became rich during the 1980s, Joey Langston had acquired all the trappings of success: the private jet, the vacation home in Telluride, the taste for a luxurious life that eluded most citizens of the hardscrabble hills of northeast Mississippi at the tail end of Appalachia.

No place in Booneville came close to matching Langston’s estate on Old Highway 45 south of town. Set behind iron gates and a long brick wall, it occupied 250 acres of groomed land. His mansion was flanked by a swimming pool and marble statuary that had once graced Gianni Versace’s palace in Miami. Langston purchased the pieces after the fashion designer’s murder in 1997. He built a guesthouse with a game room bigger and finer than that of most full-time residences in the region. Paved footpaths meandered into a forest, past a tennis court. Langston had been a standout player at Millsaps College before he went on to graduate from Ole Miss law school in 1983.

He came home to a firm established by his father, Joe Ray Langston, known in the area for representing the common man, serving as a lawyerly equivalent of a country doctor building a popular practice while making house calls. But Joe Ray died a few years after his son joined him, and it was left to Joey to keep up the tradition. His siblings, Shane and Cindy, were lawyers, too. But they chose to start their careers under the more radiant lights of Jackson.

Everyone knew the lawyer as Joey; the name had a nice, homey ring. His middle name was Cashe, and that fit, too, for money seemed to flow to his office like rainwater seeking low ground. Some of his colleagues, described as “trial lawyers,” were not actually trial lawyers at all. They preferred to bring their adversaries to their knees before court convened, to secure a big lick settlement. Scruggs took that approach. But Joey Langston liked to engage in trials, both civil and criminal.

He defended a number of thieves and killers and developed a reputation around the state’s FBI shops as a mouthpiece for villains. Long before Langston became involved in the Scruggs case, federal prosecutors looked into allegations about him. He was never charged with misconduct until the Scruggs case, but the prosecutors were wary of him because Langston’s father and law partner had been under investigation at the time of his death.

Because Langston had won so many acquittals for his clients, his supporters dismissed the allegations by the prosecutors as the juice of sour grapes. No question that he was effective in the courtroom. He had argued close to one hundred cases in trials, and had scored some stunning victories in criminal cases and civil litigation.

By 1990, when he bought the property he turned into his estate, Langston was a millionaire. He got richer. After a young boy was electrocuted when he touched a poorly wired hand-drying device in the men’s room of a Pizza Hut, Langston won an eight-figure settlement from the parent company, Pepsico. He followed that up by convincing a federal court jury to deliver a $20.8 million judgment against another fast food franchise, Captain D’s, after a customer was left paralyzed from a beating by employees of the seafood chain.

These cases resulted in news stories that spread Langston’s name far beyond Booneville. But he was also successful in matters that were never publicly known.

    One of his unpublicized achievements aided a Florida lawyer trying to unlock money won in a $187 million judgment against the government of Cuba.

The families of four men belonging to a Cuban American group called Brothers to the Rescue had received the award in federal court in Miami in 1997, nearly two years after the men were killed when Cuban jets shot down their planes on a Brothers mission in the Caribbean. However, there seemed to be no way to collect the money from a hostile government.

Langston learned of the situation in an offhand conversation with a Miami lawyer named Aaron Podhurst whom he knew from work with Scruggs in an unrelated case. Podhurst told Langston of his Cuban American clients who were sitting on a potential fortune and looking for a method to extract it from Cuba. Did Langston have any influential friends in Washington? Langston knew of one: Joe Biden, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Langston was acquainted with Biden through Steve Patterson, whom he had hired because of his political associations.

Langston initiated discussions with Biden’s office about the case. Talking with key members of the Delaware senator’s staff, Langston helped line up Biden’s support for complicated legislation that would enable the Cuban American plaintiffs to reach the foreign money. It turned out that there were other claimants against other countries. Americans who had been held hostage by Iranian-backed terrorists in Lebanon were also intent on getting payments from the government of Iran. As a result, many lawyers and sympathetic senators were involved. For all of the people and money involved, the effort required quiet, behind-the-scenes work.

One legislative victory had been a tiny provision that took up less than a page in a 3,825-page budget bill in 1998. But more work needed to be done. This was accomplished two years later during consideration of a pet bill of Biden’s called the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000. The measure drew overlapping interest from the Foreign Relations and Judiciary committees; as a member of both, Biden occupied an important position. But at the time, the House and Senate were in a virtual meltdown, triggered by partisan bickering in the wake of President Clinton’s impeachment. During conference meetings between members of the two congressional houses to reconcile their differences in the bill, little was being accomplished. Some thought certain elements of the bill, such as the Brothers to the Rescue claim, represented a bad precedent, and they opposed these sections. Other obstructionists wanted to block the legislation altogether. Yet Biden remained a forceful advocate for the bill, especially on behalf of language dealing with violence against women.

At the eleventh hour, congressional staff members got a mysterious call from President Clinton’s National Security Council insisting that the Brothers to the Rescue provision be kept in the bill. One key staff member involved in crafting the legislation was puzzled by the intrigue. He later described the final product as a “strange animal” cobbled
together “in a midnight sort of way.” But the claims against Cuba and Iran survived as Section 2002 of Public Law 106-386, and the Cuban Americans got access to nearly $100 million.

For his troubles, Langston told his colleagues, he was paid several million dollars.

    When Langston boasted of his triumph in Washington back home in Booneville, he provoked envy rather than admiration among one of his associates. Tim Balducci yearned to make a big lick for himself. Though he was well paid as a young lawyer in Langston’s office, he wanted more.

Balducci had first worked for Langston shortly after law school, left for several years, and then returned to the firm in 2000. He seemed smart and clever, and for that Langston gave him a base salary of roughly $300,000 a year. At the end of each year, Langston calculated bonuses for his associates, and Balducci usually took home twice his annual salary. That put his income in the top percentile of the population in Mississippi, but it was not enough for Balducci.

When Balducci visited his boss at his home, Langston could sense that the younger man coveted his possessions. Balducci dreamed of a private jet, a getaway place at a popular resort area; he desired to join the ranks of the elite trial lawyers.

Balducci wanted to be made an equity partner in the firm, and that had not happened. He also felt he had been deprived of his fair share of Langston’s spoils, especially the bonanza that came after the multimillion-dollar settlement with MCI/WorldCom. When Langston informed him in 2006 that he had no plans to yield any of his ownership in the Langston Law Firm, Balducci made plans to leave. And he left in the company of Patterson, another of Langston’s longtime associates.

Langston was more troubled by Patterson’s departure. The two men had been friends since Langston, while a student at Millsaps, served as a volunteer in a 1975 gubernatorial campaign directed by Patterson. Two decades later, Patterson called upon Langston to defend him against criminal charges brought by Attorney General Mike Moore.
An investigation into the embezzlement of thousands of dollars from a police chiefs’ organization had led Moore to the state auditor’s office, which was headed by Patterson. Since Moore and Scruggs had been targeted by Patterson a few years earlier, the attorney general had no reluctance about pursuing the auditor. Moore’s investigators developed a list of allegations,
including falsified expense accounts and favors offered in exchange for money. Moore was prepared to seek Patterson’s indictment.

After assessing the situation, Langston saw that his client faced serious charges being pressed by a personal and political enemy. He knew of Patterson’s earlier attempt to undercut Moore via the action against Scruggs in 1992. “When you take a swing at the king, you better knock him down,” Langston told Patterson, reminding him of his failure to take out Moore.

In an effort to resolve the case out of court, Langston met with Moore. He argued that Patterson was an elected official and a Democrat. Moore countered that Patterson was a dishonest man dealing with state money. The attorney general insisted that Patterson give up his office, and he delivered Langston a deadline to make a decision. He warned that Patterson would be indicted the next day.

The talks ended in an agreement. Patterson would plead guilty to a misdemeanor—failing to pay taxes on a car—and would resign as state auditor. By doing so, he avoided a messier set of charges.

Patterson lost his portfolio as state auditor, but he retained his Rolodex. Though he had no law degree, he was hired to join the Langston Law Firm to lure clients and to lobby, unofficially, for special projects. Patterson not only served as Langston’s introduction to Joe Biden, he also wired Langston into P. L. Blake’s circle of cronies.

“
I introduced Mr. Langston to an awful lot of people that he made an awful lot of money out of,” Patterson once boasted.

    As his renown grew, Langston became a campaign issue during state elections in 2007.

Jim Hood, the incumbent attorney general, came under attack by his Republican opponent for the arrangement with Langston to represent the state in an effort to recover funds from MCI/WorldCom, the bankrupt telecommunications giant that had headquarters in Mississippi. In a way, it was a throwback to the dispute over Mike Moore’s decision to appoint Scruggs as a special assistant attorney general to handle litigation involving asbestos and tobacco.

After a period of spectacular growth from a little company domiciled in Clinton, Mississippi, to a $37 billion merger with MCI Communications—the largest in U.S. history at the time—MCI/WorldCom crashed in 2002. Its CEO, Bernard Ebbers, and other officers were sent to prison for fraudulent accounting practices that hid losses and
inflated revenue to stabilize its stock price. The state of Mississippi, among others, was left holding the bag.

But Billy Quin, a young lawyer in the Jackson office of a Louisiana law firm, Lundy and Davis, was intrigued by the idea that the state could prove that the company evaded taxes through deceptive reporting practices. After reviewing records for several days, he was convinced the state could make a substantial claim. Using a friend in the legislature as an intermediary, he presented his case to the attorney general. Hood liked Quin’s theory, but wanted to pair the Louisiana firm with Mississippi lawyers. He shopped the case among friendly trial lawyers, such as Scruggs. After Langston showed more enthusiasm for the case than others, he was given the job.

It resulted in 2005 in a payment of more than $100 million by MCI to the state to cover back taxes owed by its predecessor company, WorldCom. The company also turned over to the state a building it owned in downtown Jackson. Langston and the Louisiana law firm negotiated a separate fee for themselves of $14 million, which they split. (Quin, who had worked closely with Langston on the case, was dissatisfied with the share his firm gave him and wound up going to work for Langston, replacing Tim Balducci.)

With Hood facing a reelection campaign, Langston made a $100,000 contribution to the attorney general and channeled another $100,000 to him through an attorneys general organization. Hood was accused by the Republican candidate, Al Hopkins, of awarding state contracts to lawyers, who reciprocated with big political contributions.

Hood won reelection easily, the only Democrat to survive in statewide office. (Scruggs’s candidate for insurance commissioner, Gary Anderson, was among the losers.) Langston weathered criticism on the grounds that he had succeeded in winning the state far more than expected and negotiated his own payment from the company rather than taking a contingency fee from the state.