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.

Filed under: asbestos, Dickie Scruggs, Joey Langston, Katrina, Mississippi, reparations, scandals, Timothy Balducci, tobacco