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Well wow, let me get distracted by real life for a few hours and BIG OL’ trees start dropping Scruggs-case pecans.

Now we got us (from Fortune magazine’s Legal Pad blog) Roger Parloff‘s interview with 52-year-old John Jones — head of the firm suing Scruggs Katrina Group in the fee-dispute case that ended up before Judge Henry Lackey — plumping up our bagful considerably.

Visibility warning: Unfortunately, (at least on my screen) Parloff’s blog is printed in an even lighter gray font than folo’s, so though I advise you read the whole post, you may want to copy it to an email or somewhere else you can bulk it up first. If you don’t have time to do that right now, here are some of its crunchiest chomps:

Lackey’s first recusal

Thanks to n miss commenter, we know now that Judge Lackey recused himself from this case once-and-for-all on November 30. But Parloff — to my mind, burying his lede far down in the piece — relates that that wasn’t the first time.

In April, Jones says, Lackey recused himself from hearing Jones’s case without explanation. But then in May, on his own motion, Lackey suddenly "unrecused " himself, Jones says — again without explanation. Jones now surmises that Lackey had, by May, brought the FBI into the picture, and was now prepared to wear a wire and help it prove the crime.

Um-hmm. Recall that the indictment (pdf) has it as “on or about March 28, 2007″ that Tim Balducci placed a phone call to and then visited Judge Lackey in Calhoun County to make his “overture” of bribery. Then on or about May 3, he called the judge to say that “they had changed their strategy” and would now be seeking arbitration rather than summary judgment. So apparently the unrecusal order happened in the first two days of May [yo, NMC, when you have a minute . . .].

"It isn’t what Clarence Darrow would’ve done "

That quote comes from Jones on what he says is the shabby way Dickie Scruggs treats business associates. I don’t yet understand why a court way down the road from Oxford in far-out-in-the-sticks Calhoun City (at least I think that’s where it is — various town and county names have flown by in different accounts) ended up with the case. Jones certainly did all that he could to make sure it be heard in Oxford:

In March 2007, Jones sued Scruggs and the other SKG partners. He specifically chose to bring the case in Oxford, where Scruggs lives and works, rather than in Jackson, where Jones does, in order to shame Scruggs, he says. (Oxford is about 160 miles north of Jackson.)

"I wanted a jury to hear it in Dickie’s backyard, " Jones says. "I wanted to "out’ this a little bit. I’d known he’d done this repeatedly to other lawyers, he and [Don] Barrett. They got them to do the work, but when the money came in, they’d just low-ball "em. "

Accordingly, Jones now supposes that if Dickie was involved in a bribery scheme (and he still says, "I did not think they had it in "em. I’d have bet they’d never do anything like that "), sending the case to arbitration — which would have at least shielded it from public view — might have seemed worth purchasing. "Mr. Scruggs would’ve been, in his public persona, highly offended by those allegations " being aired in public, Jones tells Parloff. "He has almost an obsession with image in the public. "

Well, Brother Jones, if you wanted to “‘out’ this a little bit,” Mission Accomplished.

Flip-floppers galore

Jeez, at one time or another, according to Jones via Parloff, each side wanted arbitration when the other opposed it.

See, the State Farm settlement came together in late 2006. According to the SKG partnership agreement, David Nutt’s firm, having fronted the litigation funding, would get 35% of the fees awarded while, John Jones assumed, the other five partner-firms could each expect a base 16.25% share — to be adjusted, in accordance with Mississippi ethics rules, to reflect their relative risk, time, contributions to success, etc.

"We had 1.5 lawyers on it full-time, a secretary and a paralegal, " he says, "while Scruggs had three lawyers and three or four paralegals; Nutt had 2 lawyers and untold paralegals, " and so on. He says his firm took the lead on all briefing, developing of legal theories, and deposing State Farm’s corporate and expert witnesses.

Back when they drafted the agreement, Jones says, someone suggested including more explicit language about the split, but Dickie opposed that idea and eventually persuaded him.

"Here I am, like Gomer Pyle, " says Jones, disgusted with himself in retrospect. "I said, Okay, let’s do it on trust and faith. "

Welp, a year ago yesterday, Dickie Scruggs called him to say the Jones firm would be getting $1 million (about a 4% share). Jones of course said Hell No and, after a few weeks, the others upped their offer to 6.5 percent. Jones now demanded the neutral arbitration designated by a clause of the SKG agreement as remedy for any dispute. In fact, Jones claims he asked for arbitration 14 times in writing, nine times orally, and got nuthin’. However, after he filed suit against SKG, the parties flipflopped — SKG now wanting it and Jones preferring to stay in open court.

Jones voted off the island

According to Parloff,

Another clause says that "agreement by 4 of the 5 venturers is required to distribute . . . fees. " (It’s unclear if this also means that four can forcibly apportion fees, too; Jones’s position is that it doesn’t. A copy of the SKG agreement is appended to Jones’s civil complaint, which is here.)

Late in February, Jones threatened to go to Judge L.T. Senter of Gulfport, presiding over the State Farm cases in federal court, and ask him to freeze the trust account holding the attorneys fees from the settlement. On March 2, the others persuaded him to meet with them at David Nutt’s office in Ridgeland. After telling him, "I’m mad at you, Johnnie. Nobody’s ever threatened to sue me before. I’m highly offended, " Don Barrett demanded that Jones accept 6% then and there — if he didn’t, the others would give him 3% and throw him outta the group. Jones persuaded them to let him go consult his firm partners before giving an answer.

But when Jones got back to his office in Jackson later that afternoon and "got on the e-mails, " he recalls, there were two waiting for him from the SKG group. One gave him less than a half-hour to get back to them with his final answer, and the next — written after expiration of the deadline — told him he’d been voted off the island.

So he sued their fanny.

A "died-in-the-wool Republican "

And the case went to Henry Lackey — whom Jones describes as "extremely liked and respected. If you lined them all up, he’s the last judge in Mississippi I would’ve picked to try to bribe. "

Lackey is a "died [sic]-in-the-wool Republican " with no ties to the Mississippi Trial Lawyers Association, according to Jones. Lackey was appointed in 1993 by Governor Kirk Fordice, the first Republican governor of Mississippi since Reconstruction and, as Jones puts it, "the most conservative man to ever walk the face of the earth. "

While approaching any judge — Democrat or Republican — is obviously plenty risky, Lackey seems like such a bad choice as to be almost incomprehensible for a man of Scruggs’s worldliness.

In July, Judge Lackey told the parties another matter had come up and he’d take their pleadings under advisement. That’s the last Jones heard of the case until last week. "You have to be kidding me, " Jones says he thought when he heard of the arrests: this allegation seemed so out of character for Dickie.

At the same time, Jones says of his joint venturers, "When money was on the table, it was like Dr. Jeckyll [sic] and Mr. Hyde ". They morphed into people I’d never known. "

How about Tim Balducci‘s worldliness?

Now that I’ve read the WSJ’s Prada/Lattman story on Dickie and Diane’s Christmas party — great news: they’ve loosed it to us po’ folk too — I think more highly of Dickie (as would my deah mammy, a piano-major graduate of the W):

A music building at [Ole Miss] bears the names of Mr. and Mrs. Scruggs. In 1998 the couple pledged $25 million to help raise salaries of liberal-arts professors.

WOOT! But I digress. The most interesting stuff here concerns folks’ views of Tim Balducci . . .

As for the man considered Mr. Scruggs’s chief accuser — the considerably less-well known Mr. Balducci — many people in these parts are contemptuous. “He has some sort of complex,” said Deborah Patterson, the wife of Steven Patterson, Mr. Balducci’s business partner, who was also indicted in the case.

She says she and her husband had just returned from a trip to Israel and knew nothing of the $40,000 in bribes allegedly delivered by Mr. Balducci. People familiar with the investigation say Mr. Balducci began cooperating with prosecutors at some point after offering the judge money.

“We didn’t know any of this,” she says. “We were in the Holy Land seeking edification and returned home to this mess.” Mr. Patterson declined to comment. Mr. Balducci couldn’t be reached for comment. U.S. Attorney Jim M. Greenlee, the prosecutor leading the investigation, didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Well now, I declare, that‘s interesting: they seem to have cleaned-up a bit after the Holy Land-edified Ms. Patterson before freeing this story. In the version I saw a bit earlier today (via a library), her quote reads, “He’s a short midget … and he has some sort of complex.”

Anyhoo, Prada/Lattman go on that Balducci (who’s 40) got to know Dickie Scruggs during the six years he worked for Joey Langston.

In that time, Mr. Balducci helped defend Mr. Scruggs in at least two lawsuits, both brought against Mr. Scruggs by lawyers previously associated with his firm. In both cases, the lawyers were suing over the distribution of attorneys’ fees from cases handled by the Scruggs firm. Mr. Balducci made court appearances and signed legal pleadings in both cases, and met with Mr. Scruggs many times on these matters, according to a person familiar with the cases.

“Tim knew Dick and they were friends — they’d eat lunch and dinner together,” said Mr. Langston. “When he left our firm, I think Tim [Balducci] was anxious for his relationship with Dick to be much, much better and he wanted to be as close to him as he could get.”

Langston tells them he “would be very surprised to learn, when the investigation is complete, that the men in the Scruggs firm had any knowledge whatsoever that Mr. Balducci was going to pay money” to Judge Lackey.

“This is a clear case of a young man wanting to endear himself to Dickie Scruggs in hopes that he might one day have a chair at his table,” says Lowry Lomax, a close friend of Mr. Scruggs who is also an Oxford plaintiffs lawyer and was the co-host of Saturday’s Christmas party.

Yesterday, at Mr. Balducci’s office in New Albany, Beau Buse, listed on the firm’s Web site as an investigator, wouldn’t open the front door to speak with a reporter. Through the glass window he said, “We’re going through a lot of issues right now.” No one answered the door at Mr. Balducci’s home. A neighbor said no one had been there for a more than a week.

Yepper, this is going just where we figured it would. Meanwhile, I wonder if they tried his inlaws’ in Amory . . .

lotus

UPDATE: As emptywheel noticed, the WSJ law blog reports Balducci Arraigned; Has Asked to Withdraw Law License. Which is gonna be more than a little inconvenient, since sez here “He pleaded not guilty and was released on his own recognizance. A lawyer was named, as well: Tim Balducci himself.”

Hah?

UPDATE II: Rossmiller: Dickie’s now withdrawn from the Katrina cases. See PACER links to Balducci’s arraignment, terms of release, and summons, and SKG’s letter to Katrina clients too.

UPDATE III: Good ol’ David Rossmiller! Now he’s got Scruggs Law Firm’s motion to withdraw from McIntosh v. State Farm, the case that parted Brian Ford from Forensic.

Among the grounds the motion cites:

2. The Scruggs Law Firm wishes to withdraw based on MRPC Rules 1.16(b)(3), 1.16(b)(5), and 1.16(b)(6), which state in part that "a lawyer may withdraw from representing a client if " good cause for withdrawal exists. "

But it doesn’t specify what its “good cause” may be. I guess “Uh, we wuz busted” is unnecessary info. (Note to NMC: check out the three Webb Sanders names listed as McIntosh counsel on the certificate of service.)