The Fall of the House of Zeus (6 page)

To his delight, the freshly minted attorney was recruited by one of his childhood political heroes, William Winter, to join a Jackson law firm featuring some prominent names in the profession: Watkins, Pyle, Ludlam, Winter, and Stennis. Since his election to the legislature in the post–World War II period, Winter, fifty-four, had been a leader of an outnumbered “moderate” faction in the state Democratic Party. Scruggs remembered, as a boy in Brookhaven, attending an old-fashioned political rally where Winter, alone among all of the candidates for public office, spoke with clarity and common sense while others babbled of the dangers inherent in
Brown v. Board of Education
. That year Winter won election as state tax collector, campaigned to abolish his own
office on the grounds that it was unnecessary, then was elected state treasurer. By the 1960s, he had developed a following among Mississippians who recognized that segregation not only was doomed but represented a hindrance to economic progress. This was not yet enough to get him elected governor—he lost in bitter campaigns in 1967 and 1975—but he retained his role as the leading white spokesman for racial equity in Mississippi, and Scruggs had long considered himself one of Winter’s political followers.

While serving as lieutenant governor and preparing for another campaign for governor, the candidate got to know Scruggs at the Ole Miss law school, where Winter was an active alumnus. Scruggs worked on a couple of Winter’s projects and impressed the older man with his outgoing personality and his commitment to changing the status quo.

After graduation, Scruggs signed on with Winter’s firm and moved his wife and their two-year-old son, Zach, to Jackson. But the practice of humdrum bankruptcy hearings and pedestrian civil disputes soon had him chafing at the bit for more action. Meanwhile, Winter reduced his own stake in the firm as he mobilized for a third race for governor, leaving Scruggs at the mercy of the firm’s managing partner, an easily irritated former judge named Arnold Pyle, whose nickname, Red, matched his temperament. After a meeting with some of the firm’s clients in which Pyle belittled Scruggs’s work on their behalf, Scruggs followed his boss into his office, grabbed his shirt, and told Pyle he would “whip his ass” if he ever talked that way again. One of Scruggs’s best friends, his colleague Bill Reed, was shocked by his behavior, which Reed considered out of character—until he remembered that Scruggs was only a few years from a flight deck. Scruggs was fired that afternoon.

He would be vindicated later when other young lawyers in the firm mutinied against Pyle and forced his ouster as their boss. But by that time, Scruggs had made a lateral move to another well-known Jackson firm with a shorthand name, Watkins, Eager, which was often confused with Watkins, Pyle, Ludlam. Yet his duties there were no more rewarding. Watkins, Eager was a conservative firm with a list of blue-chip clients that included banks and insurance companies. Scruggs was not inspired.

The firm entrusted Scruggs with one case that left him bittersweet memories. He was dispatched to rural Holmes County to defend a power company that had been sued by a customer whose home had
burned down after an electrical malfunction. Scruggs felt he had the facts on his side: the plaintiff had had several appliances drawing power from a single extension cord when the fire broke out. But Scruggs failed to reckon with the caprices of a backcountry jury and the persuasive powers of a local lawyer, Don Barrett, representing the single mother whose family had lived in the home. The plaintiff was black, and so were most of the members of the jury. They responded to Barrett’s oratory with approving murmurs, as though they were members of a congregation stirred by a fevered sermon. The jury awarded the plaintiff $15,000 in compensation for her loss and added another $50,000 in punitive damages for good measure. Out of his element, Scruggs felt he had been rolled, an experience he likened to a mugging, and he called his drive home to Jackson that day “the longest sixty-mile ride of my life.” But he felt a grudging admiration for Barrett, his courtroom rival. There had been something winning about Barrett’s populist assault on the utility company.

When he decided upon law, Scruggs had not bargained for the grunt work given to young associates at big-time firms. Nor did he relish the prospect of defending insurance companies in every nickel-and-dime, slip-and-fall case filed in circuit court. He had dreams of greater glory, and he thus began cultivating an Alaska Indian tribe in an exotic civil case involving a food services contract at a distant military installation. It seemed out of Watkins, Eager’s territory, but Scruggs liked to freelance. And he felt underappreciated for his work with another client he handled for the firm, Frigitemp Marine Corporation, a subcontractor at the Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula.

He decided to challenge his superiors. He asked for a meeting with Bill Goodman, the managing partner of the firm, and explained that his Frigitemp connection had brought in a lot of money for Watkins, Eager. He was working for a salary at the time, earning a bit more than $15,000 a year. “If I don’t get a good raise,” he threatened, “then I’m going to have to leave.”

Goodman closed the folder on his desk, looked at his young associate, and said, “Dick, we’re sure going to miss you.”

Thirty-four years old and out of work, Scruggs returned to Pascagoula in 1980.

    Because of the presence of the shipyards, Pascagoula retained much of the frontier spirit that had characterized the place when he
left there sixteen years earlier to go off to Ole Miss. In a rural state dependent on agriculture and dominated by a belief in religious fundamentalism, it was still a blue-collar union town with bars to match a hard-drinking clientele. The city had none of the moonlight-and-magnolia aroma of the Old South, few traces of an aristocracy built on the fertility of land in the Delta. Instead, Pascagoula looked out onto the uncertain mysteries of the Gulf of Mexico.

Before Scruggs made his decision to go back to Pascagoula, he had to convince Diane that it was the right step to take. She was reluctant to return to the place where she was known as “Dr. Thompson’s daughter,” without an identity of her own. “My claw marks are going to be all the way down Highway Forty-nine,” she told her husband, referring to the route they would take from Jackson to the coast. But she acceded to the move, as she did to most of Dick’s decisions.

From the time they had married, Diane held a series of jobs to help support their family. She handled loan closings for a law firm in Virginia, where their son, Zach, was born in 1974, while Scruggs was wrapping up his navy career. She had secretarial duties at academic offices at Ole Miss during his law school days. After she developed a serious health problem—she suffered from Crohn’s disease, an intestinal disorder—her work in Jackson was sporadic. But the couple needed her income, and she went from one temporary job to another when she was able to do so.

Once the Scruggses were back in Pascagoula, Dick opened a law office of his own while Diane held a series of piecemeal jobs to help keep their bills paid. They renewed friendships with classmates from their school days and joined a group of doctors and lawyers who formed a subset of striving young professionals. In 1980, Pascagoula held out the prospect of hard work and little promise of sudden wealth. For some of the lawyers, the struggle was so difficult that they hung out at the Jackson County courthouse, hoping a judge might assign them to represent indigent defendants. The jobs paid $300 a case, and for these lawyers, this enabled them to pay their own bills.

Most of these local attorneys could be traced back to the Ole Miss law school. Their ranks included Raymond Brown, a former quarterback at Ole Miss. Brown had been the most valuable player in the Rebels’ 1958 Sugar Bowl triumph over Texas and a defensive back for the Baltimore Colts the next season in the classic overtime NFL championship contest with the New York Giants—“the greatest game ever played.”

There were younger, upwardly mobile guys in the crowd, too. Mike Moore had just been elected district attorney, and Lowry Lomax, who had given up pharmacy for law, was destined to become a successful trial lawyer himself. Scruggs forged a lasting bond with both men.

For a few months, the Scruggs family lived in the home of Diane’s father before they were able to buy a house on Columbus Avenue, in a distinctly middle-class neighborhood with an unappealing view of the shipyard. They spent weekends in a predictable social pattern. On Friday nights, young couples and their children gathered at the Singing River Yacht Club, an unpretentious A-frame on the water, for the weekly “steak night,” where members would grill their own selections of beef, washed down with cocktails and wine. Saturdays were given over to picnic expeditions to Horn Island, one of the barrier isles a dozen miles offshore.

One of the more talked-about escapades of the period involved two attorneys, slightly older than Scruggs, who had moved to Pascagoula after law school, carrying with them their reputation as gregarious frat boys with a penchant for fun: Joe Colingo, who had already attained notoriety in the pages of
Rolling Stone
for representing two Ingalls workers who swore they had seen UFOs, and his pal George Shaddock. The pair had been barhopping one evening when their car, moving erratically, was stopped by a state trooper. While Shaddock feigned a heart attack, Colingo explained that he needed to rush his passenger to the hospital. With a police escort, they arrived at the emergency room, where they summoned a friendly physician to administer a “life-saving” shot to complete the ruse.

The zany incident represented, as much as anything, the zeitgeist of the Singing River crowd. The lawyers, all still relatively young, were waiting for the big lick. For some of them, it would soon come. In the meantime, nothing would get in the way of a good time.

    The political “moderates” in Mississippi won a rare victory when William Winter took office as governor in 1980. It pleased Scruggs, but he already had a contact in high places, and it was ironic that his brother-in-law Trent Lott occupied an ideological corner diametrically opposed to Winter. From the time he took interest in politics Lott stamped himself a staunch conservative and became one of the early Republican converts in the state. Family considerations proved to be an essential ingredient for the friendship between the Republican, who had been elected to Congress in 1972, and the Democratic lawyer.

Aside from wives who were daughters of Dr. Perry Thompson, Lott and Scruggs had a couple of other things in common. Both had moved to Pascagoula as boys, the only children produced in troubled marriages. Lott’s father, who was drawn to the Gulf Coast by a job at Ingalls, had stayed with his wife and young son. But he drank heavily and earned barely enough to keep his family in one of the humble navy houses in a working-class neighborhood.

Lott was five years older than Scruggs. He, too, went to Ole Miss as an undergraduate and eventually emerged from Oxford with a law degree. Not many other entries in their résumés are alike, but the two men shared one important characteristic: they were both boundlessly ambitious.

At Ole Miss, Lott joined a fraternity, Sigma Nu, that would become pivotal to his future. The Sigma Nus were more egalitarian than many of the social clubs on campus; the group opened its arms to freshmen with few connections, making it possible for someone from an unmonied background like Lott to win acceptance. The Sigma Nus carried a combative complex about them and relished their nickname, the Snakes. Most of the brothers were given nicknames. Lott was known as Gap, for the space between his teeth. The Sigma Nus believed they functioned alone, arrayed against the rest of the wealthier, established fraternities on a campus where Greek life seemed as important as a bachelor’s degree. But to those outside their house, the Snakes seemed a touch too “gung ho,” a military expression left over from World War II to describe those overly enthusiastic.

The Sigma Nus were the most politically active house on fraternity row, with brothers running for practically every student office available. Cheerleaders were elected at Ole Miss, so Lott wound up a cheerleader for some of the most successful football teams in the school’s history. The Sigma Nu house bred cheerleaders. One of Lott’s good friends, Roy “Rah Rah” Williams, served as a cheerleader before going home to Pascagoula to practice law and join the Singing River gang. Another frat brother, Guy Hovis, led cheers with Lott and became a featured singer on
The Lawrence Welk Show
, a musical program that attracted millions of elderly, stay-at-home viewers on Saturday nights. After the show ran its course, Hovis returned to Mississippi to take charge of Lott’s state office in Jackson.

There seemed to be no end to the Sigma Nu hunger for political success. But when Lott ran for president of the student body in 1962,
he suffered the only electoral defeat in his career. He was beaten by the son of the head of Mississippi Power and Light Co., a candidate backed by most of the other fraternities. While the Phi Delts, Kappa Alphas, SAEs, and Sigma Chis ganged up against him, Lott realized, in retrospect, that he had failed to mobilize the “independents” on campus who could not afford Greek organizations or who disapproved of the fraternities’ sophomoric high jinks. He would never again neglect the constituency of the aggrieved, white working class.

As the war in Vietnam intensified, hundreds of young men from Ole Miss, including Lott’s future brother-in-law, enlisted in the military. Lott supported the war wholeheartedly, but he managed to avoid the service. He claimed four student exemptions while at Ole Miss and won a final 3-A classification from the draft board when he graduated from law school. The dispensation was granted “by reason of extreme hardship to dependents”—his wife and mother.

After law school, Lott began parlaying his Ole Miss connections. One was an influential state senator named George Payne Cossar who doubled as a lieutenant in Senator Jim Eastland’s political apparatus. Cossar represented the Tallahatchie–Carroll County region, where the Lott family lived before moving to Pascagoula. More important, Cossar was an enthusiastic Sigma Nu who still made impassioned pleas during rush each autumn, exhorting freshmen to join the brotherhood. He had three sons in the fraternity with Lott.