Posts Tagged ‘Joey Langston’

Scruggs indictment VIII

A report in today’s New York Times advances the ball on a number of fronts:

  • Per an unidentified official, “federal prosecutors have asked the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section to examine whether Mr. Scruggs has engaged in multiple bribery attempts of local judges.” DoJ is said to have sent lawyers to Mississippi to check out leads along these lines, and is also said to be interested in possible misconduct by Scruggs in the Alwyn Luckey fee dispute.
  • The Times interviews Clarksdale, Miss. attorney Charles M. Merkel Jr., who spent more than a decade in court fighting Scruggs in the Luckey dispute:

    “It’s scorched earth with Dickie Scruggs,” says Mr. Merkel, sitting in a wood-paneled office featuring duck-hunting memorabilia and two framed checks representing about $17 million in payments that Mr. Scruggs had to disgorge to Mr. Merkel’s client — a lawyer named Alwyn Luckey who argued that Mr. Scruggs shortchanged him for work he performed on asbestos cases that made Mr. Scruggs rich.

    Mr. Merkel and prosecutors say that the Luckey case foreshadowed some of Mr. Scruggs’ woes in the current bribery case. “As far as whether he’s guilty, I can’t say,” Mr. Merkel concedes. “But I’m not surprised, because he’s willing to use any means to an end. And it irks the hell out of me when Scruggs skates on the edge and makes the profession look bad.”

  • Keker, as predicted, is labeling Timothy Balducci a “wannabe” and says, of him and Scruggs: “I don’t think they’re close at all.” Merkel, for one, isn’t buying that: “He’s a lot closer to Scruggs than Scruggs would like to portray now,” Mr. Merkel says. “Balducci made part of the closing arguments in one of my cases, and they sat at the same table. When I was negotiating with them, it was generally with Balducci.”
  • The Times also picks up on Scruggs’s liberal dispensing of resources to sway Mississippi political influence-holders during the tobacco caper:

    In his deposition with Mr. Merkel in 2004, he discussed some $10 million in payments he made to P. L. Blake, a onetime college football star in Mississippi. After running into financial troubles, Mr. Blake became a political consultant for Mr. Scruggs, helping his boss navigate the back rooms of state politics and tobacco litigation.

    In the deposition, where he was represented by Mr. Balducci, Mr. Scruggs praised Mr. Blake for keeping “his ear to the ground politically in this state and in the South generally, and he has been extremely helpful in keeping me apprised of that type activity.” Mr. Blake could not be reached for comment.

    When Mr. Merkel further pressed Mr. Scruggs about Mr. Blake’s services, Mr. Scruggs elaborated: “He has numerous connections — in terms — when I say connections, I don’t mean that in a sinister way, I mean he just has a lot — he knows an awful lot of people in the political realm. And he — depending on the stage of tobacco litigation proceedings was keeping his ear to the ground, prying, checking. I mean, I never asked who or what or all that.”

$10 million in walking-around money — and Scruggs “never asked who or what or all that”? (Update: in a sensational new post, David Rossmiller points to a document — page 514 of the Luckey trial transcript, PDF — in which the overall money paid to or through Blake (most of it in the form of future payouts) is pegged at around $50 million. The “well over $500,000” figure told to reporter Michael Orey seems to have signified well, well over, indeed.)

David Rossmiller takes note of a letter by Balducci dated August 1 over a regulatory matter which in its cocksure and sarcastic tone suggests that Balducci had not yet been confronted and “flipped” by federal investigators as of that date. This morning he adds a document and link roundup.

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger quotes Jackson attorney Dennis Sweet, who partnered with Scruggs on slavery reparations, as saying he “had a hard time believing that Dickie would involve his son in anything like this,” a comment that perhaps is open to close reading.

At Y’AllPolitics, two commenters discuss how conspiracy investigations logically develop over their life cycle. David Sanders notes that when the timing is up to them, federal investigators prefer not to uncover operations and reveal informants until they are satisfied they’ve caught all the targets in their net, which raises the question of whether they had developed what they considered to be the best evidence they were going to get, or whether some development forced their hand into closing the net before that point. “LawDoctor1960” observes that the indictees will soon get a look at the prosecution’s case, which if damning could induce one or more to join Balducci in “flipping” with resulting further revelations and perhaps further indictments.

The WSJ law blog has some answers to the question put the other day: Where is Mr. Keker?

Folo wonders: does the Scruggs firm (as opposed to Scruggs Katrina) really not have a website, and if so, isn’t that exceedingly strange? Don’t they want to encourage potential clients to approach them?

Finally, for those who are wondering whether there’s any pro-Scruggs blogging to be found, we can report that we’ve spotted a reasonable facsimile at Cotton Mouth and at Pensacola Beach Blog.

Earlier coverage: here, here, here, etc.

Breaking Monday afternoon: FBI agents search offices of another leading Mississippi plaintiff’s attorney, Joey Langston, who has been representing Scruggs in his indictment, and has had many other past dealings with him.

Scruggs indictment, days 3-4

Speculation continues to mount that central bribery-scandal figure Timothy Balducci may be cooperating with prosecutors, and perhaps has been doing so for some time; Balducci had not yet been arraigned as of this weekend, and the indictment quotes extensively from conversations he held with other defendants, in addition to those that took place in Judge Lackey’s bugged chambers. (Peter Lattman and Ashby Jones, “In Scruggs Probe, Focus Turns to Another Lawyer”, WSJ, Dec. 1)(sub-only). In the latest of his extensive posts on the case, David Rossmiller adds to the picture: “From the verbatim quotes by Balducci given in the indictment, one logically can surmise that investigators had substantial recorded evidence that would have given them tremendous leverage over Balducci in obtaining his cooperation against the others.” In addition, certain elements in the indictment’s description of Balducci’s actions suggest that by mid-October, presumably flipped by investigators, he had begun taking steps that could be used to document targets’ knowing participation in the conspiracy (in particular, his return to Dickie Scruggs to finance a purported second-round bribe, and his statement in the presence of Zach Scruggs and Sidney Backstrom that “we paid for this ruling”).

Rossmiller also analyzes the underlying Jones v. Scruggs dispute over legal fees, in which the Jones firm, formerly one of the five participants in the Scruggs Katrina Group (SKG), alleges that it was “frozen out” and ejected by the remaining four firms, allotted only token fees after shouldering the substantial work of case briefing. Why would it have been advantageous to the Scruggs firm to have Judge Lackey shunt this dispute into arbitration? One key reason is that proceeding with a court battle, even if successful, might have risked exposing to the public many of the internal workings of SKG and perhaps also of Scruggs’s own firm. (Having read the Jones complaint, I would note that Jones was alleging that Scruggs had made a common practice of squeezing collaborating lawyers out of their fee shares in earlier, unrelated litigation during his career. The evidence put forth to support such an allegation, apart from whether it turned out to support a claim for punitive damages, might result in public airing of all sorts of messy and embarrassing episodes from the past.)

John Jones and Steve Funderberg, the lawyers whose firm sued Scruggs et al in the underlying Jones v. Scruggs suit, have given an interview to the Mississippi press; Jones says he knows Scruggs well and has represented him in court, but that the relationship changed drastically “when the money hit the table”; of go-between Balducci, Funderberg said, “Knowing Tim Balducci as I do, I am utterly flabbergasted that he would ever be a part of something like that or believe he could ever get away with something like that”. (Jon Kalahar, “Former Scruggs Colleague Says Money Changed Him”, WTOK, Nov. 30).

At Y’AllPolitics, Alan Lange traces many of the recurring connections between the dramatis personae and notes that the “whole crowd” was deeply involved in the much-criticized MCI contingency-fee back taxes negotiation, which we posted on at the time at Point of Law. “Attorney General Jim Hood allowed his largest campaign contributor, Joey Langston, to be the plaintiff lawyer and also appointed Tim Balducci as a Special Assistant Attorney General in that case”. Langston, for whom Balducci used to work, is now among lawyers representing Scruggs.

Some noteworthy reactions to the indictments: “This is maybe the worst day of my life,” says longtime Scruggs friend Don Barrett, quoted in an Associated Press piece that also rounds up some of the high points of Scruggs’ career (Michael Kunzelman, “Scruggs’ career in jeopardy”, AP/Hattiesburg American, Dec. 1). “I’m disappointed in him,” Katrina client Lyman Cumbest of Pascagoula, who’s suing State Farm, said of Scruggs. “With all the money he had, he didn’t have to bribe a judge. He’s got more money than he could ever spend.” (“FBI probe in judicial bribe case to continue”, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Nov. 30). Byron Steir at Mass Tort Litigation Blog comments (Nov. 30):

If true, all of these allegations suggest remarkable hubris in at least some of the top plaintiffs’ lawyers. One wonders about the effect of a lifestyle of private jets and multiple wins of multiple millions (or tens of millions) in fees. One also wonders about the effect of high-risk, winner-take-all, contingency fee litigation. Brash and aggressive personalities seem to thrive in such an environment — but they too must keep in mind that lawyers ultimately serve the client (not the other way around) and that no one (especially not the lawyer) is above the law.

And more: “It just boggles the mind,” said Biloxi trial lawyer Jack Denton. “Here is a man who has had an enormous amount of success, who reached a level very few attorneys, if any, have reached. Why would he risk everything over a legal dispute over attorneys’ fees?” David Rossmiller, quoted in the same story, has one possible reply, which is that people may begin reevaluating “how this amazingly successful man got to be so amazingly successful.” (Richard Fausset and Jenny Jarvie, “Katrina lawyer at the eye of a storm”, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 30)(& welcome Tom Kirkendall readers).

Deep pocket files: Foradori v. Captain D’s

On December 22, 2000, 15-year-old Michael Foradori Jr. walked into a Captain D’s seafood restaurant in Tupelo, Mississippi for dinner; while there, he started flirting with the girlfriend of one of the employees, which resulted in a shouting match. “‘This (employee) was kind of picking on him, he started threatening him, he even hit him with a wadded up paper,’ said Joey Langston, Foradori’s attorney.” (More on Langston at Point of Law, May 13.) A manager restored order by kicking everyone out of the restaurant; outside, a cook who clocked out for the evening got into an altercation with Foradori, and pushed him over a wall, breaking his neck and paralyzing him. (Naomi Snyder, “Captain D’s customer gets $20.8M”, Tennesseean, Oct. 13; “Jury awards paralyzed man $21M”, Clarion-Ledger, Oct. 13; Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Oct. 13).

For this, the national Captain D’s chain in Nashville was held responsible to the tune of $20.8 million by a federal jury that deliberated for two hours. Foradori’s attorneys argued that the manager should have “stopped the argument” and that training about workplace violence would have prevented the accident.