Greed and corruption in the Sunshine State
A FEW months ago, I received an email that stopped me cold: “Hey, man, I guess we haven’t communicated since you wrote my obit,” it began. “I’ve been home from prison for more than two years.”
The email was from Dickie Scruggs, one of America’s most famous and richest trial lawyers. In 2007, as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, I had written Scruggs’s obituary, or at least his professional one, after he was charged with trying to pay a Mississippi judge a $40,000 bribe.
I travelled to Oxford, Mississippi, where I interviewed Scruggs in his stately offices overlooking the town’s picturesque courthouse square. Even under indictment, he had oozed country-lawyer charm.
Scruggs was something out of a John Grisham novel. And, it turned out, the author and Scruggs were pals. “This doesn’t sound like the Dickie Scruggs that I know,” Grisham said at the time, wondering how he could be “involved in such a boneheaded bribery scam that’s not in the least bit sophisticated”.
There’s nothing boneheaded or unsophisticated about the judicial bribery scam at the heart of Grisham’s riveting new novel.
Set in the Florida Panhandle, The Whistler centres on an elaborate conspiracy involving an Indian reservation, a crime syndicate and a crooked judge skimming a small fortune from the tribal casino’s haul.
Grisham’s heroine is Lacy Stoltz, an investigator for Florida’s judicial conduct board whose most interesting case, after nine years on the job, has been ousting a lecherous judge who preyed on women with divorces on his docket. But Stoltz’s career receives a jolt when a shady mole, looking to collect millions as a whistleblower, tips her off to the conspiracy.
Grisham has been criticised for not writing strong female characters, but Stoltz is finely drawn:
“The truth was that, at the age of 36, Lacy was content to live alone, to sleep in the centre of the bed, to clean up only after herself, to make and spend her own money, to come and go as she pleased, to pursue her career without worrying about his, to plan her evenings with input from no one else, to cook or not to cook, and to have sole possession of the remote control.”
The judge is also a woman – Claudia McDover, a former small-town lawyer with a fondness for Chanel handbags, Picasso lithographs and private planes. Suspiciously, these expensive tastes emerged only after she’d overseen the land-use litigation that eased the construction of the tribal casino. She also presided over the murder trial of a Native American opposed to gambling on the reservation. Now on death row, he insists he was framed.
Grisham fans looking for courtroom drama might be disappointed by The Whistler, since McDover’s questionable cases are glossed over. The book feels more like the first half of an episode of Law & Order, with much of the story focused on Stoltz and her crime-fighting squad as they snoop around gated communities and golf courses, chasing a basket of Florida deplorables who would make Carl Hiaasen proud.
As ever, Grisham sprinkles The Whistler with sharp observations about lawyers. He describes one as a “ham-andegg street hustler with two billboards to his name, and a practice that yearned for lucrative car wrecks but survived on workers’ comp and midlevel drug cases.” Or this, which rings true: “Lawyers could usually be trusted to keep secrets that involve their own clients, but were often horrible gossips when it came to everyone else.”
Those horrible gossips helped me almost a decade ago: Every lawyer in Oxford, Mississippi, wanted to dish about Dickie Scruggs. Today he runs a foundation that helps people obtain their high-school equivalency diplomas. I emailed Scruggs and told him Grisham’s new novel was about a judicial bribery conspiracy, albeit far different from the one that brought him down.
“I had a good visit with Grisham a few weeks ago at an Ole Miss football TheWhistler game,” Scruggs replied. Then he did some logrolling for his old friend. “Like millions of his fans, I can’t wait to read The Whistler.”