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Dickie Scruggs on His Property on the Gulf Coast. After Hurricane Katrina

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Dickie Scruggs on His Property on the Gulf Coast. After Hurricane Katrina !2%0/24%2!4,!2'% 4(%"2)"% How the Mississippi lawyer who brought down Big Tobacco overstepped. "90%4%2*"/9%2 Dickie Scruggs on his property on the Gulf Coast. After Hurricane Katrina struck, he launched another crusade—against the insurance he most exuberant football rally at ment forced the enrollment of the first the University of Mississippi last black student at the university, James yearT occurred four days after the season Meredith, Ole Miss became a national ended, when the school’s chancellor, symbol of white Southern resistance to Robert Khayat, announced the hiring of the civil-rights movement. The U.S. a new head football coach. A cheering Marshals accompanying Meredith were overflow crowd at the school’s Center for pelted with rocks and bottles, and, the Performing Arts welcomed Houston eventually, were targets of sniper fire. Nutt, whom the university had some- Two people were killed, and more than how lured to Oxford from the Cotton three hundred injured, before federal Bowl-bound Arkansas Razorbacks (who troops ended the riots. Burke Marshall, had defeated Ole Miss, as the university the head of the civil-rights division of is nicknamed, 44–8). the Kennedy Justice Department, called For Ole Miss, a relatively small pub- the episode “the final gasp of the Civil lic school in a poor state, a seven-and-a- War.” half-million-dollar deal (as was report- By the time Khayat became chancel- edly given to Nutt) seemed an implausi- lor, the school’s endowment and enroll- ble splurge, and some sensed the hand of ment had seriously declined. Khayat ag- a private benefactor. Khayat acknowl- gressively raised funds, cultivated allies in edged as much in his opening remarks, the academic establishment, and went to pronouncing himself “profoundly grate- work on the school’s image. Rebel flags ful to Dick Scruggs,” whose jet had been largely disappeared from the football used as a shuttle during negotiations. stands, “Dixie” was downplayed, and the Scruggs was arguably the most success- school’s mascot—Colonel Reb—was ful tort lawyer in America, and a deeply banished from the playing field. In thir- interested Ole Miss football fan. Dickie, teen years under Khayat, the school’s as he was called, even by those who’d endowment has quintupled, enrollment never met him, hated to lose; whenever has increased by about fifty per cent, and, an Ole Miss coaching change was ru- along with the old statue of the Confed- mored, fans tracked Scruggs’s plane on erate soldier, a bronze sculpture com- the Internet, for hints about where the memorating James Meredith now holds school was looking. If Houston Nutt an honored place on the campus. needed a deal sweetener, Dickie Scruggs, The transformation at Ole Miss the man who took down Big Tobacco aroused a good deal of opposition, and without conducting a single trial, proba- would not have happened without sup- bly had something to do with provid- port from key alumni, among the most ing it. important of whom was Dickie Scruggs. But Robert Khayat was grateful to Although he is the brother-in-law of the Scruggs for other reasons, too. Khayat former Republican Senator Trent Lott— became chancellor in 1995, with the mis- the two men’s wives are sisters—Scruggs, sion of liberating Ole Miss from its who is sixty-one, is a staunch Democrat, past—a perilous ambition at a place and shares Kha yat’s progressive vision for where the past was so insistently present. the school. A few years after Scruggs hit Into the nineteen-sixties, Ole Miss em- his first litigation jackpot, in 1993, tak- bodied an idealized antebellum South. ing on asbestos companies, he asked There were plenty of black people on Khayat what he could do for the univer- campus, but they were caring for the im- sity. Khayat, who is seventy, had known maculate green—the magnolia-lined Scruggs for most of his life. He had been Grove—or serving the sons and daugh- his ninth-grade homeroom teacher in ters of the state’s white establishment in Pascagoula, and was on the faculty at their Greek-revival sorority and fraternity Ole Miss Law School when Scruggs was houses. The school’s nickname was itself a student there. The Chancellor told a slave term for the mistress of a planta- Scruggs that faculty salaries in the Col- tion. Students dressed for games as if lege of Liberal Arts were pitifully low, going to church, and cheerleaders tossed and Scruggs immediately made a twenty- bundles of Rebel flags into the stands be- five-million-dollar pledge. After his to- fore the start of each game as the band bacco victory, in 1997, he coaxed his played a rousing version of “Dixie.” partner in that effort, an Ole Miss alum industry. Photograph by Brian Smale. When, in 1962, the federal govern- named David Nutt, to expand his own the NeW YORKer, MAY 19, 2008 45 TNY—2008_05_19—PAGE 45—133SC.—livE ART R 17405_E_ALT, CRITICAL CUT TO BE WatcHED THROUGHOUT ENTIRE PRESS RUN, PLS PULL KODAK FOR COLOR GUIDANCE!—#2 page—fixed border per printer’s request contribution. Ole Miss professors have U.S. senators. Professional and personal lived there for four years before going to since received several generous pay in- relationships within this group are easily a military school in Georgia, on a schol- creases. In 2005, the music building, tangled. John Grisham, a friend of arship. Now back in Pascagoula, where across from the Performing Arts Center, Scruggs’s, was a classmate of one of his mother still lived, Scruggs made his was renamed Scruggs Hall. Scruggs’s prosecutors, U.S. Attorney Jim first fortune from the Ingalls shipyard. Scruggs was not present in November Greenlee (and they both sat through In the nineteen-eighties, the growth when Khayat publicly thanked him for Professor Khayat’s class). Barbour, one field for tort lawyers was asbestos litiga- his help in the coaching search. That of Scruggs’s fraternity brothers, was his tion. Inhalation of asbestos fibres had morning, a federal grand jury in Oxford adversary in the tobacco fight. Missis- been linked to dire diseases, and lawyers, returned an indictment charging Scruggs, sippi lawyers keep score, counting each inevitably, had uncovered documenta- his son, Zach, and three other men other’s divorces and courtroom out- tion that asbestos manufacturers knew of with conspiring to offer a fifty-thousand- comes. Scruggs is not the only one of the material’s dangers for decades, with- dollar bribe to a judge in Calhoun City. them to have been portrayed in the mov- out issuing warnings. Workplaces such That afternoon, Scruggs was finger- ies (“The Insider”), or to pilot his own as Ingalls, where asbestos was used in printed, processed, and arraigned. jet, but he is the only lawyer notable for shipbuilding, produced whole popula- The reaction to the indictment was both distinctions. Many also insist that, tions of sick plaintiffs. Joining the rush of incredulity. Scruggs had achieved rare although Scruggs is Mississippi’s most lawyers signing clients, Scruggs hit upon standing among trial lawyers—as a vi- famous trial lawyer, he never really was a a competitive edge. Standard practice sionary, whose extravagant fee awards al- “trial” lawyer at all. was to sign only clients with medical ev- lowed him to discount, with some cred- “I can assure you he hasn’t tried ten idence of disease (such as an X-ray); ibility, money as his prime motivation. cases to verdict in his life,” Bill Reed, a Scruggs offered to pay the costs of a po- He was said to have scored a billion-dol- Jackson attorney who is one of Scruggs’s tential client’s visit to a clinic, and to ac- lar fee in the tobacco case. Why would closest friends, says. “But he is the mas- cept the case if the tests returned posi- he bother with a tawdry little bribery ter of the deal.” tive. He soon had hundreds of clients. scam? Some speculated that the Bush Scruggs finished near the top of his The problem for Scruggs and other Justice Department was trying to elimi- class at Ole Miss Law, and was recruited plaintiffs’ lawyers was getting their cli- nate a prominent Democratic donor— into the Jackson law firm headed by one ents’ cases into court. In a product-lia- invitations to a Hillary Clinton fund- of his heroes—William Winter, the bility case, the plaintiff had to prove that raiser hosted by Scruggs, featuring an leader of the progressive wing of the the manufacturer knew that asbestos appearance by Bill Clinton, had recently state’s Democrats, and a future governor was harmful or failed to properly inves- been mailed. Others guessed that one of of the state. It was a terrible fit for tigate the danger, and that the plaintiff the indicted figures had been caught in a Scruggs, as was his brief stay at the next was exposed to the material and harmed crime and was trying to win leniency by big Jackson firm he tried. He was, by that by it. The litigation of one case could blaming Scruggs. time, married to Diane Thompson, a take years, and a deep-pocketed defen- “I’m rarely at a loss for words, but I dentist’s daughter from Pascagoula, and dant could extend the process for as am at a complete loss about it,” said Jack he had served five years as a Navy pilot, long as possible, and then settle the case Palladino, the San Francisco private in- flying A-6 attack planes from the decks just before trial.
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