Dickie Scruggs: A 2nd chance

Dickie Scruggs sits near the head of a long table, in the seat normally reserved for the attorney if this were a legal deposition, which, of course, it isn't.

Scruggs no longer practices law. He can't. He's done taking depositions. He sits, instead, inside The Clarion-Ledger's second-floor conference room where he gives his first in-depth interview since completing a six-year stint in federal prison, his punishment for participating in one of the most shocking legal scandals in Mississippi history.

His other punishment — lifetime disbarment — ended a long and prominent career as one of the richest and most successful trial lawyers in the state, if not the country. Feted by Hollywood, reviled by the Wall Street Journal, Scruggs gained fame for taking down Big Tobacco and the asbestos industry before losing it all in a judicial bribery scheme.

But old habits die hard.

Dressed smartly in a navy suit and tri-colored tie, Scruggs is the one who draws the comparison of the newspaper's conference table to the kind used in a legal deposition, noting he's sitting where the attorney normally would sit. He then goes into great detail about the typical seating arrangement at such an event — where the paralegal sits, where the camera goes.

The reporter, he notes, has taken the chair typically reserved for the person being deposed.

It's Wednesday afternoon. Sun shines warmly through a sheer curtain veiling the floor-to-ceiling picture window. Scruggs sips coffee. Black.

"This is really the first time I've stuck my head up from the foxhole since I've been out," says Scruggs, who returned home to Oxford one year ago and since has kept a low profile.

Once a local celebrity, he initially feared ostracism and animosity from a community he felt he betrayed. So, he licked his wounds in private. Even his recently published opinion piece about the University of Mississippi chancellor debacle took a calculated risk — he worried people wouldn't read it, that they would read nothing coming from a felon.

But, at 68 years old, Scruggs says he wants to find meaning in the golden years of his life. He wants to make a difference in Mississippi. He wants to promote his new adult-education initiative.

The best way to do that, he says he has decided, is to get the tough questions out of the way.

"I regret what I did. I paid a high price for it," Scruggs says. "After all, I pled guilty to corruption."

Scruggs doesn't want to rehash the crimes; he ruminated on them enough in prison. He will say that he wasn't the victim of a vicious plot, the scapegoat for a common-but-unspoken practice. No. He was reckless.

He was abusing over-the-counter barbiturates and ceding logic to emotions in post-Hurricane Katrina litigation against insurance companies he felt had swindled friends and family members, including brother-in-law, then-U.S. Sen. Trent Lott.

His mistakes arose not from a feeling of invincibility, but of fear. Fear of losing a case. Fear of embarrassment. Fear of failure.

Those fears haunted him in prison. Stripped of power and prestige, clothed in an orange prison jumper, isolated from the free world, Scruggs confronted a lifetime of demons. He served his first sentence, for five years, at the low-security federal corrections facility in Ashland, Kentucky. His second stint, at the minimum-security federal prison camp in Montgomery, Alabama, lasted about one year.

"One of the hardest parts of prison for me was the feeling of total irrelevance, that I was irrelevant," Scruggs says. "Nothing that I would ever do again would matter to anybody. Most inmates go through that, and some never shake it."

He spent a year, maybe more, battling the shame and depression common after such a precipitous fall from grace. Then he decided to make the best of his situation. He started teaching math to fellow inmates preparing for the high-school equivalency exam and found it oddly rewarding.

His sense of relevance gradually returned.

"Every unfortunate thing that happens to you in your life holds a silver lining," Scruggs says. "It may not be apparent, but if you do find it, it helps for you to survive. For me, it was teaching other inmates in getting them prepared to take the GED examination."

Helping these men, many of whom suffered horrific childhoods molded by poverty and neglect, planted the seed of Scruggs' next chapter in life. These people weren't unintelligent, Scruggs discovered. They were abandoned emotionally and academically, to the point where they gave up on themselves.

Despite the perception that low-security federal prisons house only educated, white-collared criminals — criminals like Scruggs and his fellow Montgomery inmate, former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling — the vast majority did time for drugs. Many lacked a high school diploma.

But with the right attitude, the right encouragement and the right opportunity, Scruggs found they could succeed. Nearly half of his 60 or so students passed their GED exams, he said.

It transformed them, Scruggs says. They felt pride, wanted to get jobs after prison, contribute to society. It made Scruggs decide every high-school dropout in Mississippi should have the same opportunity.

That's why Scruggs says he now lays bare his life in a no-holds-barred interview with The Clarion-Ledger. He wants to promote SecondChanceMS, his new, nonprofit organization to help adults get their high-school equivalency diplomas.

Scruggs hopes to raise $1 million this year alone, and he will climb Washington state's Mount Olympus in August as a way to meet that goal. His climb, he says, will represent the efforts of adult learners who must overcome their own obstacles to get a GED.

The symbolism, though, extends beyond adult education and into Scruggs' own life. According to ancient Greek mythology, the original Mount Olympus in Greece was home to the gods, including Zeus, from which Scruggs took his college nickname.

The funds will augment the state community college system's strained efforts to reach high-school dropouts, get them into classrooms, educate them and offset the GED testing fee.

He has the support of all 15 community college presidents, but he faces a tough sell in the community at large.

People remain wary of Scruggs. Some aren't ready to forgive him for tarnishing Mississippi's reputation and casting doubt on the entire justice system. They distrust his motivations, question his sincerity, wonder if this whole thing is just an ego-driven publicity stunt that has everything to do with him and nothing with adult education.

Others say they're willing to give him a chance.

Climbing Mount Olympus "is not the most humbling choice," said Matt Steffey, constitutional law expert at the Mississippi College School of Law in Jackson. "But, if, in the end, more adults know how to read and balance their checkbooks, then that's wonderful."

Clarksdale attorney Charles Merkel of Clarksdale, with whom Scruggs notoriously sparred for years over legal fees, said his former adversary seems to have chosen a good cause in which to invest himself.

"Would I make a donation to him?" Merkel said. "No. But I wish him well."

Also rooting for him is Jackson attorney John Jones, whose civil suit against Scruggs sparked the bribery scandal. Jones had sued Scruggs in March 2007 to recover his share of $26.5 million in legal fees for his work in post-Hurricane Katrina insurance litigation.

Scruggs hoped to get the suit moved to arbitration and, to do so, offered a $40,000 bribe by way of fellow attorney Timothy Balducci to the presiding judge, Henry Lackey.

Lackey told the FBI, which had enough evidence by November 2007 to indict both Balducci and Scruggs, along with Scruggs's law partners — son Zach and Sidney Backstrom — and one of Balducci's associates, Steve Patterson.

Scruggs pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe a judge in March 2008 and received a five-year prison sentence.

He faced additional charges in a separate incident, for trying to sway Hinds County Circuit Judge Bobby DeLaughter on a yet another case involving legal fees. This time, Scruggs had paid former Hinds County District Attorney Ed Peters to offer DeLaughter the promise of a federal judgeship. He said his brother-in-law, Lott, would nominate him.

Lott didn't nominate DeLaughter and never faced charges.

Scruggs pleaded guilty to that crime — improperly influencing a judge — in February 2009. The scandal also took down DeLaughter, Peters, trial lawyer Joey Langston, and former state Auditor Steven Patterson. Peters alone escaped jail time by cooperating with authorities.

"I've forgiven Dickie long ago," Jones said. "I hope he does good stuff with his money, and I believe him when he says he'll do it. But convincing other people is going to be the toughest obstacle he'll come up against, and I don't envy him that task."

Scruggs knows this.

"There are always going to be doubters and haters, and there's not much I can do about that," Scruggs says. "People have made up their minds about me from the various books, articles, whatever, the court record. I can't change anybody's mind about me."

What he can do, Scruggs says, is beat the drum loud enough for the right people take notice. He cites the pertinent stats: Mississippi has a half-million high-school dropouts, adding some 14,000 new kids to the ranks each year; 85 percent fewer adults took the GED last year than in 2013; 90 percent fewer passed.

Arguing his case there in the conference room, Scruggs almost resembles a passionate trial attorney. This time, though, he's less the ruthless Hollywood-flick lawyer, and more the earnest counselor in a John Grisham tale.

Which is strange, in a way, because the man is rich. Millionaire rich.

He could have sold his sprawling Oxford mansion after prison and sailed to the south of France. Or stayed cloistered in his castle. Or opened shop as a high-priced consultant.

But no. He started a nonprofit for high school dropouts.

"I hate to say this because it always sounds wrong, but I don't need money," Scruggs says about his post-prison endeavor. "I'd rather write the last chapter in my life differently than if I hadn't done anything. I won't say that I'm spiritually motivated, but for whatever reason, I'm committing to doing this. It makes me feel good to help folks in giving them a second chance."

ON HIS FIRST DAYS IN PRISON

Incredibly humiliating. Empty. Cold. It's hard to put it in words. It was difficult to just put one foot in front of the other and go through the motions of living. It took a while. When I first got there — interestingly, because it was in Kentucky, no one there really knew who I was — when I walked in there as an older, white guy from an upper-middle-class background, I was immediately suspected of being a child molester. Those guys really have a tough time in prison, but I fit the profile, because a lot of child molesters were sent there to this prison. Those people are real outcasts within the outcasts.

For the first couple days I couldn't understand why people were extremely rude to me — went out of their way to be rude to me — wouldn't speak to me for any reason. Not good morning or anything. Finally one of them said, "Why are you here?" And I said, 'Well, I made a mistake." And they said, "No, that's not good enough. Why are you here?" And I said, "Well, I'm here for bribery." And they said, "Well, you got papers?" Something to prove that's why I'm there. And I said, "No, I can get something. What difference does it make?" He said, "It makes a lot of difference. If you're a child molester, we're not going to let you sit in the TV room and all these other things."

And so, as it turned out, a couple days went by and these guys who had been shunning me came around and said, "Hey, glad to meet you. We were wrong. We didn't know what you were here for, and Bob Stone says you're OK." Well, Bob Stone was this guy, been in jail 25 or 30 years. He killed a DEA agent and had been given, like, a life sentence. He was my age, but he was sort of the man there. The guy had gotten a Ph.D. while he was in prison, was well read, and had read about me in the Wall Street Journal. And he told everybody, "Oh, no, no, he's OK." And so my roommate came up and said, "Man, I gotta tell you how glad I am that you are a legitimate criminal."

ON HIS BIOGRAPHY (Curtis Wilkie's 2010 "The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America's Most Powerful Trial Lawyer")

When I read Curtis' book I was devastated. I had no idea what I was going to expect from it, but I was devastated to have to relive all that. I only read it once, and it was an effort. I thought, "Man there's no way I'm going to be able to go home after this." So I was just, I mean, in the dumps.

We didn't cease to be friends. He called it the way he saw it. I didn't expect an exoneration; I wasn't entitled to one. There were just very unflattering things in there, and I wasn't used to that kind of scrutiny. Curtis, I think, did a good job of explaining the bribe and how it all came out as opposed to what was popularly believed at the time. Maybe that's what made people feel better about it.

When I came home not too long after that for that break while I was on appeal, everybody seemed to think it helped me, that the book did. I couldn't see why — I still can't — but apparently people thought I was a real son of a bitch because just a minor son of a bitch was OK.

ON HIS DRUG USE

I'd been using Fioricet, which is a pain medicine I had started taking when I had back surgery (in 2000). I had been taking that for years. It was a sort of a euphoric feeling — not silly euphoria, but just a sense of well-being. Naturally, when you're on something like that, you tend to lose weight. And I did anyway. I was down to, like, 150 pounds. Very gaunt.

I don't think you would have been able to tell that I was taking something. Nobody knew until the very last year, maybe. I would fade late in the afternoon, maybe, say the same thing twice, things like that. I can't blame the crime on that. It got in the last two or three years where it wasn't a matter of getting high; it was a matter of being normal. I had to have them to function, and it was so easy to get. You just ordered them online. It was like 50 cents a pill or something. It was really cheap. I never want to do that again and I never will. I just wanted to feel normal without having to take those things.

ON HIS HOMECOMING

I didn't know how people would accept me coming home from prison. I didn't know who would be crossing the street when they saw me coming down. I wasn't sure I wouldn't be denied service in restaurants. I didn't know how I was going to be received, but it was remarkable. I don't know what people really think, but they've been extremely generous.

After the early days, we had never considered moving. We had just built a big new house there when this happened. We were barely in it. I feel very much a part of this community. I wouldn't want to go anywhere. I'm not sure, I'm sure I have detractors there but they've been keeping it to themselves. It's been a great homecoming, really better than I've expected so far.

ON WRITING HIS OWN BOOK

I've written a manuscript, and I'm working with an ex-reporter. Not Curtis. I haven't really publicized this much. I don't mind talking about it. And I'm not even sure I'm going to publish it. I want to wait until it's all finished. I've written a long manuscript, sort of an autobiography. And then I put it in somebody's hands who knows how to edit it and started that process. When it comes out — what I don't want to do is rekindle anything and, you know, be defending things I say in there.

It was a regrettable time in my life. I want to keep it in the rear-view mirror and not try to re-litigate it or talk about the people that were involved with me or anything like that. There are lot of experiences in there I think people would be interested in. It's not all negative (prison). There are some really funny things. You think back on them now, you can really laugh. I always had a sense of gallows humor. I laugh at some of the stuff we did or were subjected to.

Contact Emily Le Coz at (601) 961-7249 or elecoz@jackson.gannett.com. Follow @emily_lecoz on Twitter.