Have Greed And Egomania Finally Caught Up To Dickie Scruggs?

Richard ("Dickie") Scruggs is a Mississippi trial lawyer, one who's made tens of millions of dollars (or more!) litigating asbestos, tobacco and other product liability claims. (Here he is next to his private jet.)

Scruggs doesn't necessarily follow the same rules as other lawyers. In the tobacco litigation, he helped a former paralegal for a Kentucky law firm representing Brown & Williamson to publicize documents the paralegal had stolen while working for the firm. Despite a court order requiring return of the documents, they turned up--anonymously--on Capitol Hill and in some news outlets. The paralegal then ended up in a house Scruggs' law firm purchased in Pascagoula, Mississippi, got a "job" at the Scruggs law firm, and had a couple auto loans co-signed by the law firm.

If that sounds to you like Scruggs--who proceeded to make a huge fortune off tobacco litigation--paid the fellow off, well, you're entitled to your opinion. Scruggs would say there's no connection and he did nothing illegal or unethical. The house and the cars--why those were just "loans."

Then, in later litigation involving victims of Hurricane Katrina, Scruggs tried to turn them into victims of insurers. Despite the fact Scruggs' clients hadn't purchased expensive flood insurance, Scruggs argued, among other things, that the insurers should nonetheless reimburse them for flood damage because it was really all caused by wind blowing the water into their homes, and they were insured against wind damage. Arguments like that, of course, are why most people dislike trial lawyers.

Along the way in the Katrina litigation, some ladies who worked for State Farm took some of State Farm's documents and, again, despite court orders to the contrary, those documents made there way to the public. Scruggs' fingerprints were all over the revelation, and a federal judge recommended he be prosecuted for criminal contempt.

For his part, Scruggs would probably tell you he's a hero. He stands up to "the man" for the "little guy" and he fights hard to represent people who other lawyers would simply ignore.

Most heroes, however, don't earn millions, tens of millions or even hundreds of millions from their heroics. One might well argue that Scruggs is motivated primarily by greed, with a pretty good dose of megolamania thrown in. And, some lawyers would argue, his success has depended heavily on his willingness to break the rules, or to play outside the rules.

Now, however, Scruggs is facing a new challenge: he's been indicted on serious charges--bribery of a state court judge in Mississippi. The indictment charges that another Mississippi lawyer, Timothy Balducci, gave a $40,000 bribe to Judge Henry Lackey, who brought the scheme to the attention of federal investigators. The bribe money was allegedly reimbursed to Balducci by Scruggs, with fake documentation created to make it look ok. The purpose of the bribe was to get Judge Lackey to rule favorably on disbursement of around $25 million in legal fees related to the Katrina litigation.

One of Scruggs' friends, novelist John Grisham, some of whose wild characters resemble Mr. Scruggs, says he doesn't believe Scruggs did it because "you could not believe he would be involved in such a boneheaded bribery scam that is not in the least bit sophisticated." (According to today's WSJ.) Isn't it great having friends like John Grisham? In other words, if it had been a SOPHISTICATED bribery scheme, then, yeah, sure, he could see Dickie doing that. But not a boneheaded scam.

But then maybe Scruggs has been getting away with breaking the rules for so long that he didn't really think it was a problem, or didn't realize it was so unsophisticated. Maybe he'd done this kind of thing before and gotten away with it.

(At least Scruggs didn't buy the Baltimore Orioles and run them into the ground like fellow megalomaniacal asbestos/tobacco lawyer Peter Angelos. That's a sin of a higher order of magnitude.)

Whether Scruggs will be convicted, only time will tell. But somehow, we think his antics may finally have caught up with him.