Flaking away at P.L. Blake
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It shouldn’t surprise you, as you race to the Biloxi Sun-Herald to see what Anita Lee has for us today, to find her Dickie Scruggs’ $50 million man,* Part 1 of 2, the paper’s currently Most-Read Story (at least, Part 1 still is as I commence typing). For good-ol’-boy P.L. Blake — whether to be found in his native Greenwood, Miss., or his apparently-current stomping-grounds around Birmingham, Ala. — lives in, perhaps is, the very heart of Scruggsiana.
(As for this state of mind of ours in-the-round: Y’allPolitics’ Alan Lange has done all us new and old Scruggsians a huge service this morning, marshaling in one streamlined post the four — really five – fronts of Dickie Scruggs’s War for Survival. Thank you, Alan, that really helps.)
But now to P.L. Blake . . . Yesterday, remember, Lee reported that
So valuable were Blake’s connections that Scruggs has said he will earn $50 million in fees over 20 years from Scruggs’ share of tobacco settlements. Mike Moore, who as Mississippi’s attorney general guided the tobacco litigation, has said he was unaware Scruggs is paying Blake such a large sum.
Accounts of how Blake earned the money are vague and contradictory.
Even more surprising, Blake and Scruggs were unable to say whether they sealed their business agreement with a handshake or in writing.
Court records also indicate Scruggs sent $10 million in initial tobacco payments to Blake, passing them through intermediary Joey Langston, a Booneville attorney who shared Scruggs’ ride to fortune on Moore’s tobacco train.
Scruggs “just told me he was going to take care of me,” Blake has said. “He might have wrote me a letter or something. If he did, I can’t find it and I don’t remember one, any agreement that we ever had of what he was going to pay me. But this - this lump sum up front, that was just - he said, ‘I’m sending this to you’.”
But what made “appropriate care taken” of P.L. Blake look like $50 million to Dickie Scruggs? What was he supplying Dickie that no one else could? Well, today we read that
Vicki Slater, a Jackson attorney who represented one of the lawyers suing Scruggs over legal fees, questioned [Mike] Moore under oath about the payments in August 2004. She asked the former attorney general, a close associate of Scruggs who has most recently worked with him on insurance cases, what Blake did to earn the money. “I - I couldn’t tell you what anybody did to, you know, receive $50 million because they laughed at me in Congress,” Moore said. “I was on the wrong side of this deal. I didn’t make any money out of it. It was kind of - kind of a funny deal at the time.
… [Blake] would call and provide, usually, political information, especially when we were dealing with Congress, and also back when we were dealing with the (Gov. Kirk) Fordice case, he had some - some amazing way to get information that I have never quite understood, but it always seemed to be good.
“And it supplied us with inside (sic) about what the other side was doing. And it seemed that he was talking directly to the tobacco industry or directly to the Republican Party, because every time he gave us information, it was right-on, and we were able to react on it and be ahead of what those guys were doing. So it was pretty valuable.” [emph. mine]
Testifying a few days later, Lee reports, Blake owned that, oh yeah, he clipped some newspaper articles, did some monitoring the state Legislature and Congress, and watched some C-Span to keep Dickie apprised [blimey, folo readers, I may have to consider a tip-jar!]:
“… anything to do with any articles or public information that was pertaining to tobacco, I got those articles or information that I heard by rumor or anything else and passed them on to him and gave him my opinion about it, because he would always ask.”
He also brought along 13 news articles, according to the attorney questioning him. The attorney, Charles Merkel, asked if more clippings existed.
“I know there was a lot more of them,” Blake said, “but I don’t know - unless we just threw them away as old excess newspapers or something, because I wouldn’t have been keeping them. They were of no benefit to me.”
[A flowah guffaws.] Another amusing bit of testimony that Lee quotes is from Joey Langston in January 2005:
“I’m sure there were some points in the litigation where everybody thought it was going to be nothing and didn’t think they could succeed, but they did. The rewards were great and, if I said it wasn’t worth what they received, what I meant to say was they received far greater rewards than anybody ever anticipated.” [Whew!]
Lee also brings back in the name Biden . . .
Langston said a consulting firm headed by Jim Biden, brother of U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, also received a fee for helping keep up with discussions in Washington. “It was a politically intensive matter, this issue of tobacco,” Langston said.
Langston said Jim Biden was not selected because his brother was a senator [nay, Hebn forfend]. Joe Biden and the Booneville attorney are friends and the senator has stayed at Langston’s house on Lake Pickwick. They met through Steve Patterson, who worked as southeast director for Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign, Langston said, and later served a stint as state auditor.
Patterson was forced to leave office for malfeasance and is now facing bribery charges along with Scruggs. Coincidentally[!], Patterson and Blake have known one another for decades, Blake said, because of their mutual love of thoroughbred horses.
As most resonant passage of this story, my vote goes to a bit of unintentional prophecy from P.L. Blake, under questioning about the $468,000 quarterly checks Dickie promised him for 20 years.
“If they stopped tomorrow, you wouldn’t raise Cain about it; that would be the end of it?” Merkel asked.
“Huh-uh,” Blake said. “That would be the end of it.”
Nossuh, Mr. P.L., we spec’ that won’t be quite all the end of it.
lotus
* Note to the Sun-Herald: I don’t know what agreement McClatchy-owned you may have with Gannett’s Hattiesburg American, so maybe this is legit. But did y’all know that they’re running Anita’s Part 1 today in full but without attribution?
UPDATE: Yikes, I forgot to link Walter Olson’s new post — also germane here, and of special interest to mississippi attorney and NMC, who get quoted there. My apologies, WO!
Meanwhile, Sunday’s Rossmiller post has attracted some provocative comments I bet y’all will want to see.
