Jerry Mitchell imposes a narrative arc on the Scruggs story

If you can get past the overwritten riffs on being a fighter pilot, rhinoceroses-killing whatever, Jerry Mitchell’s summing up this morning is interesting for one thing: If you break it down to its parts, what’s news in it is a presentation of one particular narrative of how-Dickie-came-to-fall. Personally, for a number of reasons I’m not buying it. He describes the lawsuits Alwyn Luckey and Roberts Wilson filed against Scruggs over attorneys fees, with Johnny Jones as his source:

When two of Scruggs’ former law partners sued Scruggs, Jones became one of his defense attorneys.

“I became convinced he was a really good guy who was being shaken down by others,” Jones said. “He was a great client and did everything we asked him to do.”

I presume Jones is fully aware of the irony of his view of those lawsuits. I think the most apt narrative arc here may be Jones’s changing view of Scruggs, and not any change in Scruggs himself. To expand upon Jones’s invocation of All the King’s Men in the C/L story: while I’m not buying the Scruggs-as-Willie-Stark notion, I think it’s pretty clear Jones wants to be Jack Burden.

In 2005, Scruggs went to trial in one of those lawsuits.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerry Davis awarded Alwyn Luckey $17 million for legal fees due from the asbestos litigation.

Jones viewed the ruling as a victory since he had successfully protected Scruggs’ interests with regard to any legal fees earned from the tobacco litigation. Luckey had argued in a second lawsuit that he was entitled to a portion of the tobacco fees because asbestos earnings helped fund the tobacco litigation.

Scruggs saw the defeat as a sour loss, Jones said. “He thought he couldn’t trust the system.”

From that point forward, Scruggs changed the way he operated, Jones said. “He always had to rely on some inside connection when he didn’t need to.”

Someone should perhaps point out to Jones that this insider thing did not start in those trials, well-post-tobacco.

In an e-mail to Jones, Scruggs said that instead of listening to Jones and Oxford lawyer Jack Dunbar, he should have listened to “his friends” - lawyers Joey Langston of Booneville and Tim Balducci of New Albany.

“I didn’t get along with him after that,” Jones said. “It wasn’t about the merits anymore; it turned out to be something else besides the facts and the law.”

When in “after that” was Jones hired as counsel by Scruggs Katrina Group?  The Luckey case was tried in the summer of 2005, just weeks before Katrina.  Jones was hired by Scruggs to work as a Katrina lawyer and did so for almost a year and a half, falling out with Scruggs over attorneys fees in Dec ‘06 or Jan ‘07 as the money started to come in.   More than that, though, I am fundamentally not buying the notion that Scruggs became an outlaw only when he’d had a bad result in the Luckey case.   Based on what I’ve been told over and over by those with first hand knowledge, and read in primary-source documents and accounts of the asbestos and tobacco litigation, I can’t accept the pat narrative arc here.   Scruggs himself described how he turned to the “dark side” in the tobacco cases.  This was not a sudden change a decade later.

I think the narrative Mitchell presents is probably something Jones wants to believe, and I can understand why he might wish to.  But as I said, I’m not buying it.

NMC