DELTA MAGAZINE

After some 40 years as a news reporter, covering the darkest days of the civil rights movement and traveling the world as a writer for The Boston Globe, Greenville-born journalist Curtis Wilkie returned to Mississippi in 2000. He settled down in the literary town of Oxford, accepted a post in the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, married a Delta girl, Nancy Roberson of Clarksdale, and soon found what he describes as “the story of my lifetime.”

“It’s not a pretty story,” Wilkie admits of his new book, The Fall of the House of Zeus, a definitive account of the Dickie Scruggs bribery scandal, which rocked the Mississippi legal and political world in 2007. He calls it “a book without heroes,” not altogether flattering to the state’s legal and political figures, but when it is published on October 19, readers may agree that airing the state’s dirty laundry has rarely been so entertaining.

“The most important elements in good stories are conflict and tension,” says Wilkie in his Oxford home, seated where his friend Scruggs sat for ten hours while submitting to interviews for the book. “They are inherent in Mississippi, largely because of race and class. All of that plays into some pretty high drama. And we live with it.”

Wilkie chronicled his own struggles with the conflict and tension of his native state in his excellent 2001 memoir Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South. The book describes the land and people of his childhood, and pulls no punches portraying his trial by fire as a reporter in Clarksdale from 1963 to 1969. Like his later friend and advocate Willie Morris, Wilkie escaped the volatile social environment by heading north. He signed on with The Boston Globe in 1975 and covered Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign, then worked a three-year stretch covering the Middle East in the 1980s.

Wilkie returned to the South in the early 1990s. That’s when he first met Dickie Scruggs, while reporting for the Globe on a squabble among lawyers over asbestos litigation funds. The story was not flattering to Scruggs, but Wilkie found him candid and honest. This early episode served as the impetus for a story that would take outlandish turns before the famous trial lawyer was convicted some 12 years later for attempting to bribe a state judge.

To all but the most avid of Mississippi political junkies, the Scruggs affair remains an amorphous conspiracy. The billionaire trial lawyer earned his comeuppance at the hands of government attorneys after months of investigations and trials, but the specifics were lost in a meaningless montage of ten o’clock news clips showing lawyers in suits, marching into Oxford courtrooms, and the avalanche of accusations and counter-accusations, political falderal, blustery op-eds and talk radio blather only added static to the noise.

In Wilkie’s hands, the story is given not only definition, but a wide scope and classic themes. It’s not merely judicial wrangling but Greek tragedy, as chief U.S. attorney Jim Greenlee described it to the author. “The story certainly has any number of elements of Greek tragedy,” says Wilkie. “The heroic figure rises to great heights, then is struck down by fatal flaws and comes crashing to earth. When I discovered that Zeus was Scruggs’ fraternity nickname, the title fell in my lap.”

Every bit as engaging as a Grisham thriller, The Fall of the House of Zeus charts Scruggs’ scrappy rise from a broken home in south Mississippi to his ascension into upper crust Gulf Coast society. He earned the reputation as one of America’s most successful trial lawyers after scoring billions in litigation against the asbestos and tobacco industry. His unprecedented settlements brought vast sums of money to the state, along with a passel of enemies.

Woven through Wilkie’s deft reporting is a menagerie of lawyers and politicians from all over the state—well-known players and public officials, good ole boys on the national scene, others lurking in the shadows, all of them trading on astounding wealth, working impressive social connections, and seemingly hellbent on destroying one another.

“Whatever happened in 2007 didn’t occur in the proverbial vacuum,” says Wilkie. “There was plenty that set it up.” Like Wilkie, those who knew Scruggs always believed this was deeper than a simple crime. The real question was why—what drove a man who appeared to have it all to overreach so clumsily for such short gains? By delving into the environment that allowed this scandal to take root, Wilkie’s book ascends to the status of literature, supplying rich context to what would otherwise be just another story of excess and wrong-doing by the privileged class.

“When I talked to Dick early, way before he agreed to [be interviewed], he almost sounded stunned,” Wilkie recalls. “He said, ‘I’m still trying to connect the dots.’ And I found out that’s what I began to do as I started researching the story. And there are a hell of a lot of dots.”

Wilkie’s reputation as a fair reporter and his long-time acquaintances with many of the principal players, some going back to his college days at Ole Miss, earned him access to the inside story, including interviews with Dickie Scruggs, his wife Diane, and their son, who was also implicated and convicted. “I’m not a newspaper reporter anymore,” he says, “but I think that if someone threw [this book] on my desk, I would find 30 or 40 new stories stuffed in there that had never been reported. There’s a lot of new information, unpublished or unknown.”

While critics will posit that Wilkie is biased, based on his intimate friendship with Scruggs, his most obvious allegiance is to strong storytelling. He doesn’t let his friend off the hook, nor does he take a stand for any side. “I try to let the reader draw their own conclusions,” he says. “And there’s more than two sides. There’s about eight or ten.”

Among the book’s greatest strengths is Wilkie’s familiarity with the principal players, associations he divulges explicitly in a preface and author’s notes. At the outset he lists thirty major characters and sprinkles dozens upon dozens of cameos throughout the text, painting a broader portrait of the state and some of its most colorful denizens. The web of characters will surely touch most any Mississippian reading the book. “This is a fairly intimate state,” he says. “So many people know each other, especially if you went to Ole Miss or have Oxford connections. There are all of these dots and if there’s anything they have in common, a lot of it goes back to the Ole Miss law school.”

The Delta offers up plenty of good characters, including some of Wilkie’s early acquaintances from his Clarksdale reporting days who moved their law practices to Oxford and became big players. One of the story’s most fascinating figures is the notorious Greenwood farmer and political catalyst P.L. Blake, a dark and evasive character, whose backroom orchestrations set much of the action in motion. And then, of course, there is Senator James O. Eastland, “the godfather of the whole thing,” according to Wilkie. Even though he was out of power by the time Scruggs came on the scene, his abiding influence spawned a new political persuasion that both hastened and preyed on Scruggs’ hubris.

While this will doubtless be a fascinating work for Mississippians to read, the book should find an audience outside the state through Wilkie’s expert handling of these universal themes.

“It’s basically the modern South that we’re talking about,” he says. “These aren’t gothic characters but rather well-educated people, most of them lawyers, many of them wealthy. It’s an entirely different kind of image that a reader on the East coast will have of Mississippi.”

With his affable storytelling, dry humor and impressive recall for names and stories, it’s easy to believe that Curtis Wilkie is the only person who could do this story justice. Whether it’s read for entertainment or studied as a cautionary tale, The Fall of the House of Zeus and its author deserve their place among Mississippi’s great enduring literature.

“It could be that none of the principal characters will particularly like the book,” he says with a grin. “I can’t worry about that. As long as I think I’ve told the story as completely and honestly as I can, then I can rest my case and let readers make their own judgments on the behaviors of these different people.” DM

© 2011 Coopwood Magazines, Inc