The Fall of the House of Zeus (38 page)

He was told that the firm’s American Express credit card had been cut off. “I figured that out when I tried to get gas,” Balducci replied.

Since the firm needed money, Balducci was informed of a potential case that might grow out of a disaster that morning: “A gas line explosion in Clark County—two people were killed.”

“I’m sure Joey’s on it,” Balducci replied sarcastically. Nevertheless, he discussed how the names of the victims and their families might be obtained. Patterson, Balducci and Biden was sinking to ambulance chasing in the lowest form.

There seemed to be no end to discouraging news. Balducci sighed and closed the conversation with a crude announcement. “I’m fixing to go into my house and take a monster shit.”

    
Although Balducci had been debriefed by the FBI before he left Oxford, the authorities were still not sure what had actually been recorded. The listening device, now in Delaney’s hands, had to be downloaded and taken to FBI headquarters in Jackson for scrutiny.

The next day, Delaney called. “We got the five words we needed,” he told Tom Dawson.

They were Scruggs’s words: “I’ll take care of it.”

    
On the same day, Tim Cantrell, the financial officer for the Scruggs Law Firm, emailed two secretaries:

“Ladies, we need to prepare an additional check to Tim Balducci, the same payee as the last check, for $10,000. This is for assistance with the Lisanby case. We need first thing Monday.”

    The following day was a Saturday, and in homes across the state there was an autumn ritual to be followed. Like thousands of others, Dawson prepared to attend the Ole Miss football game, along with homecoming festivities in the Grove. His plans were interrupted by a telephone call from his colleague Bob Norman.

Tim Balducci was rushing to Oxford. In the secret agent atmosphere, Balducci had alerted his control, Bill Delaney, and said he needed to talk with the prosecutors.

Norman, who did not know what to expect, arranged to meet Balducci in the rear of the U.S. attorney’s building. Once Balducci was safely inside, he and Norman were joined by Dawson.

Balducci said he had reflected on their interrogation two days earlier. At the time, he had replied negatively when asked about any other cases involving Scruggs. Now the witness said he’d remembered something. He began to talk, and what he told the prosecutors was startling and significant.

Dawson never made it to the football game.

T
hree weeks later, on the day after Thanksgiving, many Mississippians concentrated on a more important contest than the one Dawson missed: the annual football game between Ole Miss and Mississippi State. Though neither team had enjoyed a stellar season, fifty thousand fans traveled to Starkville and several million others watched the game on national television. For Ole Miss partisans, it morphed into a horror show. Winless in the Southeastern Conference for the first time in the school’s history, Ole Miss appeared to be certain of victory in their last match of the season. With the Rebels in control of every aspect of the game and leading 14–0 in the fourth quarter, the Ole Miss coach, Ed Orgeron, unaccountably decided to run rather than punt on a fourth-down play in Rebel territory. The running back was stopped short of a first down, momentum vanished, and a collapse ensued. Ole Miss lost in the final minute. “
Thinking is not what Orgeron does best,” wrote sports columnist Geoff Calkins the next day in the Memphis newspaper
The Commercial Appeal
. “There may be dumber calls in the history of the world, but none immediately leaps to mind. OK, maybe Napoleon, when he decided to invade Russia.”

With his brusque manners, Cajun dialect, and dubious intellect, Orgeron had never been a happy fit in Oxford. Now his critics were baying like bloodhounds.

Some Ole Miss supporters believed Orgeron had been installed in
the head coaching job by Dick Scruggs. Some felt the lawyer had used his money to act as de facto athletic director at the school. So amid the post-game cursing and gnashing of teeth, a bit of the anger was directed toward Scruggs.

In fact, Scruggs had played a role in Orgeron’s hiring three years earlier, but it was largely through his agreement to help pay off the contract of the previous coach, David Cutcliffe. Like other wealthy, enthusiastic alumni at football powers across the country, Scruggs was quick to get involved in the Ole Miss athletic program. Sometimes without being asked.

During an early-season game in 2003, Scruggs and his friend Richmond Flowers, once an outstanding receiver at the University of Tennessee and now father of one of Eli Manning’s favorite targets at Ole Miss, had watched in dismay from Scruggs’s luxury box as Texas Tech outscored the Rebels 49–44. Scruggs and Flowers agreed that a coaching change was needed. Flowers recommended Rick Neuheisel, a well-traveled coach looking for a job. So Neuheisel was invited to come to Ole Miss as Scruggs’s guest for the climactic game with LSU in two months. When the Rebels proceeded to win six straight games, Scruggs felt compelled to withdraw the invitation. But fortunes turned badly the next year, Cutcliffe was fired, and Scruggs helped complete the financial arrangements for his ouster.

(Orgeron was hired, but before he came to Ole Miss he was allowed to discharge his duties as Southern California’s defensive coach one last time in a contest with Oklahoma for the national title. Scruggs deployed his Gulfstream to fly Ole Miss chancellor Robert Khayat, athletic director Pete Boone, and several others from Oxford to Florida for the game.

(En route, Khayat, under criticism by some alumni for a procession of liberal speakers on campus, asked for suggestions of a respected Republican who might come to Ole Miss. Scruggs volunteered the name of his friend from the tobacco wars, Senator John McCain. Once on the ground, as if on cue, the Ole Miss group encountered McCain at a pre-game party. Introductions were made, and McCain spoke the next year before a full house at the school’s biggest auditorium. Scruggs had a front-row seat for the occasion.)

Three years later, following the debacle at Mississippi State, Orgeron was sacked. As usual, Ole Miss turned to Scruggs. As much as $3 million remained on Orgeron’s contract, and the Athletic Department counted on Scruggs to come up with some of it. But there was
a more immediate concern. A replacement for Orgeron had to be found quickly, because recruiting season loomed. The university asked Scruggs to provide his private jet to fly school officials to interview prospects for the job.

He had loaned planes during the coaching quest three years earlier and learned that enterprising sportswriters could track the aircraft’s movements by obtaining flight plans to determine which candidates were being visited by Ole Miss delegations. This time, Scruggs spent part of the weekend gleefully submitting bogus flight plans to outwit the pesky reporters. His tactic led to one erroneous report that Ole Miss was in consultation with Neuheisel, by then the offensive coordinator for the Baltimore Ravens, and to another false bulletin that Ole Miss had a prospect in Cincinnati.

On Monday night, November 26, Scruggs’s Falcon 20 was actually in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where it carried athletic director Pete Boone to sign up Houston Nutt, who had just quit as coach at the University of Arkansas.

But by this time, other events had claimed Scruggs’s attention.

    
On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Scruggs got a telephone call from his brother-in-law, who told of his plans to resign from the Senate. Though the Scruggs and Lott families had celebrated the holiday together at Lott’s new home—an estate near Jackson called “Sub Rosa,” bought with the help of a low-interest loan from Scruggs—there had been no whisper of the shocking announcement that would change the face of Mississippi politics and have national implications.

Lott had served less than a year of his new six-year term and had regained some of his old power in the Senate. Though still a loyal Republican, he had seemed to mellow in the years following his disgrace over the Strom Thurmond encomium.
At times, he appeared downright ecumenical in his dealings with Democrats, and he took on their rhetoric when inveighing against State Farm’s failure to cover losses from Katrina. He seemed in good health and unbeatable in Mississippi. Now, with no warning, he was giving it all up.

When Lott made a public announcement the next morning, he cited a verse from Ecclesiastes: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” Skeptics speculated that Lott had lined up a lucrative lobbying job and wanted to beat a December deadline, imposed by recent legislation, that would prevent him from engaging in the practice for two years after leaving office. Even after
Lott joined John Breaux, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana, to found a bipartisan lobbying firm, there were others who suspected a more sinister explanation, especially after the events that followed.

Both Lott and Scruggs would say there was no connection, that the timing was an extraordinary coincidence.

When Scruggs was asked on Monday about Lott’s decision by Humphreys McGee, a young lawyer working for his firm, he said he had heard of it only the night before. “I was just as surprised as the rest of the state,” he said.

    
There was a greater shock coming. Federal authorities were poised to strike the next morning, swooping in on some of the suspects and raiding Scruggs’s office.

The move created new dissension between the Oxford FBI office and the prosecutors. Although the agents had been cut out of the plans, they learned of the investigation a few weeks earlier when a visiting colleague, assuming they knew of the operation, talked about surveillance of Scruggs’s office.

Indignant over being excluded by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Oxford agents questioned the wisdom of a daylight raid that would be highly publicized. They, too, had little doubt of Scruggs’s guilt, based on the intercepted telephone calls, but they advocated a different approach. Knowing of a loose network of public officials and private fixers who had been swaying the outcome of court cases in North Mississippi for years, the Oxford FBI agents felt that Scruggs should be privately confronted with the incriminating information and squeezed into testifying against these powerful political figures. Even if the trail led to his brother-in-law.

And after hearing of Lott’s announcement, several of the agents were convinced that someone in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, while retaining deniability of doing it directly, had managed to get word of the investigation to the senator.

The prosecutors dismissed these contentions as petty carping by disgruntled agents who had no role in the investigation. For the U.S. attorneys, Scruggs served as the ultimate Big Fish.

    
Early on the morning of November 27, Scruggs’s junior partner Sid Backstrom was dressing for work when his three-year-old son informed him that someone was knocking loudly on their front door. Backstrom found that the noise came from two FBI agents, who
displayed their badges and said they wanted to talk with him. He invited them inside his home. They said they preferred to talk outside or in their car.

“Can you tell me what this is about?” he asked.

“The bribery of a judge,” one of them answered.

At their car, a laptop was produced and a recording of one of Balducci’s conversations with Backstrom began. The audio lasted two minutes. In it, Backstrom heard a replay of a call he had received while working on the Gulf Coast five weeks earlier.

Balducci: “I swung by your office a little while ago and saw Zach and dropped off a copy of those papers that we’ve been waiting on.”

Backstrom: “Oh, great!”

Balducci: “Everything looked just right. Just like we wanted … 
That’ll probably get distributed in the mail here in the next few days so you’ll probably get an official call with the good news directly.”

Backstrom: “Good.”

Balducci: “But we got us a little advance copy this afternoon.”

Backstrom: “Good deal, good deal.”

Balducci: “Just so you’ll know, Dick hired me to prepare the voir dire for the upcoming Katrina trial y’all got in Jackson County, and to review the other voir dire, et cetera, from some of those other trials, and do a little analysis and summary of that. And he gave me a retainer check today for forty grand for that.”

Backstrom: “Oh, great! Well, that’s a good deal for everyone.”

To the FBI, the call illustrated a cover story Scruggs conceived to justify the $40,000 payment: that the money had gone to Balducci for his work on jury consultation for the Scruggs Katrina Group.

The agents asked Backstrom if he recognized the voice other than his own.

“Sounds like Tim Balducci,” Backstrom said. He struggled to think clearly. He was not sure what the FBI visit meant, but he knew it could not be good.

The agents—one of them was Bill Delaney—asked Backstrom to come with them to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Backstrom said he preferred to drive himself, explaining that he had a flight to catch later that day to go to the Gulf Coast for a Katrina settlement hearing. The agents insisted that he come with them. Backstrom, just as adamantly, refused.

In his own car, he followed the pair to the back entrance of the downtown building, where several men were waiting sternly at the gate. In
their dark suits they looked ready for a funeral. Among them, Backstrom recognized only Tom Dawson, the chief prosecutor, who worked out regularly at the same health club where Backstrom was a member.

“You’re dressed differently,” Backstrom quipped. Dawson neither answered nor smiled.

Upstairs, Backstrom was led to a windowless room where he was given a chair across the table from six glowering men. Thinking about the encounter later, Backstrom was certain the authorities failed to give him the standard Miranda warning: that he had the right to remain silent and to seek legal counsel.

Instead, Dawson opened the interrogation on a chilling note. “There’s only one question you need to answer this morning,” he said. “Do you want to be able to see your children graduate?”

Backstrom asked for an explanation.