The Fall of the House of Zeus (46 page)

Quin professed that he knew little. He told Tannehill of the trip to Washington with Langston a few days before to meet with Reid Wein garten, but he was stunned by news of Langston’s court appearance. “Listen, Rhea,” he told his friend, “if y’all think I know about this, you’d be wrong.” He was concerned that the other defense lawyers with whom he had been working would think that he, like Langston, had been double-dealing.

He finally reached Langston on his cell phone. Their conversation lasted less than a minute. “I’ve taken care of my problem,” Langston said simply. He promised to tell Quin more later.

When Quin got back to Booneville, Langston explained that he had had no choice other than to plead guilty. It was his only way out of a terrible bind.

In a tearful session, Langston met with members of his staff at the Langston Law Firm. He begged their forgiveness and expressed hope that the firm could continue. He asked Quin about the possibility of his staying; he even talked of changing the name of the firm. But Quin was uncomfortable with the proposition. Booneville was Joey Langston’s town; it would never be Quin’s. He had come there to work with Langston, had even handled an awkward commute to Booneville each day from Tupelo, where he had settled his family. It would be best for Quin to move back to Jackson and open his own firm.

    
Langston’s plea threw the Scruggs defense team into disarray as soon as they learned of it. Dick Scruggs suddenly faced a situation in which his own lawyer was prepared to implicate him in another bribery. His son had also been put in a difficult position. Zach’s defense attorney, Tony Farese, now represented someone planning to testify against his father.

Dick Scruggs felt betrayed; Zach, enraged. For several weeks, Zach had been troubled by Farese’s behavior, and as he absorbed the news of Langston’s guilty plea, he began to retrace his recent dealings with the two men.

Zach believed that both Farese and Langston had lied during their conversation with him and his father as they drove around New Albany before Christmas. At the time, they dismissed the likelihood that Langston would be charged. Zach also wondered about Farese’s connections with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. A couple of weeks before, Farese had complained that a motion by Keker had “pissed off the prosecutors.” Who cared if they annoyed the prosecutors if it helped Scruggs’s defense? Zach remembered that Farese had made an unauthorized overture to the prosecutors about a possible plea arrangement for his father the day after Christmas. When Zach questioned the wisdom of making this signal to the government lawyers, Farese said, “Things could get worse for Dick.”

A few hours before Langston appeared before Judge Mills, Zach had
a phone conversation with Farese, who had failed to return several calls over the weekend. Where had he been? “I’m in Oxford, killing some snakes on a Monday,” Farese said. A few minutes later, the lawyer came to Zach’s office but appeared in a rush. He said he had papers that Langston’s “D.C. lawyers” wanted Zach to sign, a “waiver of conflict of interest” form, which would enable Farese to represent Langston and Zach at the same time. He told Zach it was “no big deal … a pretty standard form.”

Zach was puzzled by the request. Farese had reassured him that Langston was not a target, explaining that the waiver would merely authorize Farese to assist Langston’s Washington lawyers in dealing with documents before a grand jury as a result of the FBI raid on Langston’s office.

Before leaving, Farese made copies of the waiver and said hello to Sid Backstrom.

Later, Zach concluded that Farese was on his way to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, a few blocks away, to complete the plea bargain for Langston.

Farese would insist that the contract signed that day formalized an agreement he and Zach had reached orally on December 11, the day after Langston’s office was searched by the FBI. At that time, Farese said, he and Langston became part of a joint defense agreement with other defendants and their attorneys.

Zach maintained that he never agreed to have Farese represent Langston at the same time. It was the beginning of yet another ugly dispute between lawyers.

    
Farese, Farese and Farese had amassed a powerful reputation in the years since “Big John” Farese founded the firm in 1939 in the remote North Mississippi village of Ashland. The son of an Italian immigrant, Farese had come south from Boston on a football scholarship at a Mississippi junior college. He stayed to work his way through Ole Miss law school and open an office in Ashland, where his new wife, Orene, had a job as a schoolteacher. As more members of the Farese family arrived in Benton County, they gave up Catholicism for the fundamentalist Protestant faiths popular in the region. They also became political players in a rural area along the Tennessee state line that has no major highway. “Big John” and his wife served together in the state legislature. After a nephew, Anthony Farese, joined the law firm, he
went on to be elected chancery judge for the district. By the latter part of the twentieth century, a new generation of Fareses, including Steve and Tony, took over the firm and specialized in criminal defense work.

When students at Ole Miss, fifty miles away, ran afoul of the law, their parents often turned to the Farese firm for help. But when the Fareses opened an Oxford office, they had another reason. They were increasingly involved in cases in federal court there. The firm appeared proficient in hammering out plea bargains with federal prosecutors for their clients. Robert Whitwell, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Mississippi during President George H. W. Bush’s administration, joined the Farese firm after he left office in 1993. And it did not go without notice that Whitwell’s brother-in-law Jim Greenlee was appointed U.S. attorney after the election of the second George Bush.

The Farese firm boasted of acquittals won in state courts in Mississippi and Tennessee, which sprang a variety of clients from murder charges.
Just months before the Scruggs case broke, Steve Farese was instrumental in reducing the jail sentence of Mary Winkler to a matter of days to end a sensational case. Winkler had originally been charged with murdering her husband, a Church of Christ minister, in Selmer, Tennessee, by shooting him in the back with a shotgun while he slept. She was convicted of a lesser crime, voluntary manslaughter, during a trial that drew breathless television coverage in the Mid-South and further publicity for the Farese firm.

The Fareses won favorable verdicts in federal court, too. Steve and Tony, working with Joey Langston and Zach Scruggs, had earned acquittals for the two Lee County deputies in Zach’s introduction to criminal trials. But the Fareses were better known in federal court circles for their ability to cut deals with prosecutors, who trusted their word and completed their agreements with simple handshakes rather than court papers.

Zach Scruggs’s problem was that he wanted no plea bargain. He insisted upon his innocence, and he felt his position had been jeopardized by the latest turn in the case.

    
After learning of Langston’s plea, Zach returned to his office late that afternoon and called Farese for details. Farese said he did not want to talk about the case on the phone, implying that Scruggs’s phone might be tapped by the FBI. Within an hour, he appeared at the office. They were the only people left in the darkened upstairs suite on the
square, and they sat in the same conference room where Balducci had volunteered to approach Judge Lackey more than eight months earlier.

Farese explained that Langston had pleaded guilty because prosecutors were threatening to indict him for money laundering, mail fraud, wire fraud, and racketeering. In addition, Farese said, the government attorneys had been ready to initiate RICO action to seize all of Langston’s assets.

While Zach listened in disbelief, Farese said Langston was now cooperating with the federal government and would be willing to testify against his own client, Dick Scruggs. In an attempt to mollify Zach, Farese said Langston would say that Zach knew nothing of the plot to influence Judge DeLaughter. Langston also sent word that he “would not lie on Dick.”

Zach retorted that his father had done nothing illegal and should not have to worry about lies.

“Well, there are some things you do not know about your dad,” Farese replied.

The conversation grew heated. Zach demanded to know why Farese had failed to share with him the knowledge that Langston would soon plead guilty. Farese told Zach, “You were not entitled to that information.”

Despondent, Zach drove home. On the way, his cell phone rang. He could see the call came from Langston. He refused to answer.

Instead, he called the man who had been close to him for most of his life, Mike Moore, and poured out his problem to the former attorney general. After hanging up and reflecting on their conversation, Moore told his wife, “You know, I think Zach wants me to represent him.”

Tisha Moore had a quick reaction, invoking the name of their own son. “What if Kyle were in trouble and he called Dick? Don’t you think Dick would help?” Her husband immediately called Zach and agreed to take his case.

    
During the ordeal in early January, Dick Scruggs maintained a certain calm—with the aid of Fioricet. His son did not take developments as quietly. Zach lashed out at those who he felt had betrayed the Scruggs family. After learning that Langston had wept as he pleaded guilty before Judge Mills, Zach was scornful. He remembered that Langston had bragged privately about his uncanny ability to cry when delivering passionate closing arguments. He told Zach how he would
concentrate on an unhappy experience—the death of his father, for example—in order to establish a mood that would help him shed tears. He said the tactic often led jurors to weep themselves. Langston suggested that he should be awarded a “tear bonus”—a symbolic tear for each juror who cried—much in the same way that ace pilots in World War II earned an insignia of the enemy on the fuselage of their planes for each rival aircraft shot down.

Zach remembered this as he pondered the situation in the privacy of his small office, down the hall from his father’s room overlooking the square. Zach had an inelegant view of the backsides of buildings from his window, but his wall was brightened with framed school degrees and other mementos, including the front page from the Tupelo newspaper with Langston’s congratulatory inscription. Zach was confused by the move of a man who had been a friend and a mentor. But for Tony Farese, Zach had only contempt.

Though Zach was a novice in the field of criminal defense work, he felt he had enough innate intelligence and confidence to make some moves of his own. Without consulting his father, who no longer seemed to be thinking clearly under the pressure of prosecution, Zach decided to break with members of the defense team.

His cell phone rang, and he saw he was getting another call from Langston. Instead of answering, Zach called Farese and told him, in dismissive tones, “Your client called me again. If he’s got a message, tell him to give it to you.”

Farese said Zach should understand that Langston had no choice. “They were going to take his assets.”

Twenty-four hours later, Zach placed another call to Farese.

“Tony,” he said. “First of all, you’re fired. And I think you know why.”

Farese said nothing.

“I paid you three hundred thousand dollars,” Zach continued, “and I want it back, along with all of the evidence you gathered.” For the past month, the Scruggs defense team had been getting copies of wiretaps and other FBI material to which they were entitled under the federal rules that require prosecutors to share material evidence with defendants.

Farese protested that Zach owed him $100,000 for the work he had done since his indictment six weeks earlier. He followed up with a three-page letter to Zach the same day. In it, Farese said he had been representing Langston since the day the FBI raided his office a month
earlier, and he detailed the work he had done. “I checked with you to see if you had any conflict of interest with Joey,” Farese wrote. “I was assured by you that you had no conflict of interest with Joey, and that you had no objection to me representing him.”

Noting that “Joey’s situation changed,” Farese said, “I certainly understand that you may wish to obtain new counsel” because the new case affected Zach’s father. “I was assured by Joey that you had no involvement in that case,” Farese added. “I was also assured by the government that you were not a suspect nor a target in that investigation.”

He closed with personal regards. “I only want what is best for you and your family,” Farese wrote. “I would never do anything to compromise your case nor your well being. I certainly wish you the best of luck on these charges.”

They settled their financial dispute by splitting the difference. Farese returned $250,000. He said later that he was not obligated to return any of the “non-refundable” retainer. “I did not take that position because I did not feel that was fair.”

Zach remained indignant, and even as he prepared for his own defense, he compiled a ten-page treatise against Farese with the thought of seeking sanctions against his former lawyer from the state bar association.

T
he morning after Joey Langston pleaded guilty in the closed chambers of Judge Mills, three federal officers took a commercial flight from Memphis to Washington to begin a sensitive mission. U.S. attorney Jim Greenlee, chief prosecutor Tom Dawson, and an FBI agent from Tupelo named John Quaka were on their way to interview Trent Lott.

The former senator had already figured in speculation about the Scruggs case. Lott’s resignation from the Senate came only two days before his brother-in-law’s indictment, triggering suspicions that his decision was related to the events about to unfold in Mississippi.
The investigators had tried to hold knowledge of Operation Benchmark to a handful of people, and Greenlee insisted there had been no leak. Lott’s spokesman also claimed the timing was “totally coincidental.” Nevertheless, there were skeptics wary of Lott’s Sigma Nu network.

Just as activities by the CIA during the period that George H. W. Bush served as vice-president and president were traced to his college connections with Skull and Bones, a secret society at Yale that produced its share of Bonesmen who became spies, political favors distributed by Lott were often linked to the Ole Miss chapter of Sigma Nu, where Lott had been the group’s “commander.” The fraternity kept a preternatural hold on its alumni. Aging Sigma Nus sent daily postings via the Internet to their old frat brothers, with personal news of births
and weddings, illnesses and deaths. Lott seemed to rule as Commander for Life, and members of the brotherhood were loyal to him.