The most exuberant football rally at the University of Mississippi last year occurred four days after the season ended, when the school’s chancellor, Robert Khayat, announced the hiring of a new head football coach. A cheering overflow crowd at the school’s Center for the Performing Arts welcomed Houston Nutt, whom the university had somehow lured to Oxford from the Cotton Bowl-bound Arkansas Razorbacks (who had defeated Ole Miss, as the university is nicknamed, 44–8).

For Ole Miss, a relatively small public school in a poor state, a seven-and-a-half-million-dollar deal (as was reportedly given to Nutt) seemed an implausible splurge, and some sensed the hand of a private benefactor. Khayat acknowledged as much in his opening remarks, pronouncing himself “profoundly grateful to Dick Scruggs,” whose jet had been used as a shuttle during negotiations. Scruggs was arguably the most successful tort lawyer in America, and a deeply interested Ole Miss football fan. Dickie, as he was called, even by those who’d never met him, hated to lose; whenever an Ole Miss coaching change was rumored, fans tracked Scruggs’s plane on the Internet, for hints about where the school was looking. If Houston Nutt needed a deal sweetener, Dickie Scruggs, the man who took down Big Tobacco without conducting a single trial, probably had something to do with providing it.

But Robert Khayat was grateful to Scruggs for other reasons, too. Khayat became chancellor in 1995, with the mission of liberating Ole Miss from its past—a perilous ambition at a place where the past was so insistently present. Into the nineteen-sixties, Ole Miss embodied an idealized antebellum South. There were plenty of black people on campus, but they were caring for the immaculate green—the magnolia-lined Grove—or serving the sons and daughters of the state’s white establishment in their Greek-revival sorority and fraternity houses. The school’s nickname was itself a slave term for the mistress of a plantation. Students dressed for games as if going to church, and cheerleaders tossed bundles of Rebel flags into the stands before the start of each game as the band played a rousing version of “Dixie.”

When, in 1962, the federal government forced the enrollment of the first black student at the university, James Meredith, Ole Miss became a national symbol of white Southern resistance to the civil-rights movement. The U.S. Marshals accompanying Meredith were pelted with rocks and bottles, and, eventually, were targets of sniper fire. Two people were killed, and more than three hundred injured, before federal troops ended the riots. Burke Marshall, the head of the civil-rights division of the Kennedy Justice Department, called the episode “the final gasp of the Civil War.”

By the time Khayat became chancellor, the school’s endowment and enrollment had seriously declined. Khayat aggressively raised funds, cultivated allies in the academic establishment, and went to work on the school’s image. Rebel flags largely disappeared from the football stands, “Dixie” was downplayed, and the school’s mascot—Colonel Reb—was banished from the playing field. In thirteen years under Khayat, the school’s endowment has quintupled, enrollment has increased by about fifty per cent, and, along with the old statue of the Confederate soldier, a bronze sculpture commemorating James Meredith now holds an honored place on the campus.

The transformation at Ole Miss aroused a good deal of opposition, and would not have happened without support from key alumni, among the most important of whom was Dickie Scruggs. Although he is the brother-in-law of the former Republican Senator Trent Lott—the two men’s wives are sisters—Scruggs, who is sixty-one, is a staunch Democrat, and shares Khayat’s progressive vision for the school. A few years after Scruggs hit his first litigation jackpot, in 1993, taking on asbestos companies, he asked Khayat what he could do for the university. Khayat, who is seventy, had known Scruggs for most of his life. He had been his ninth-grade homeroom teacher in Pascagoula, and was on the faculty at Ole Miss Law School when Scruggs was a student there. The Chancellor told Scruggs that faculty salaries in the College of Liberal Arts were pitifully low, and Scruggs immediately made a twenty-five-million-dollar pledge. After his tobacco victory, in 1997, he coaxed his partner in that effort, an Ole Miss alum named David Nutt, to expand his own contribution. Ole Miss professors have since received several generous pay increases. In 2005, the music building, across from the Performing Arts Center, was renamed Scruggs Hall.

Scruggs was not present in November when Khayat publicly thanked him for his help in the coaching search. That morning, a federal grand jury in Oxford returned an indictment charging Scruggs, his son, Zach, and three other men with conspiring to offer a fifty-thousand-dollar bribe to a judge in Calhoun City. That afternoon, Scruggs was fingerprinted, processed, and arraigned.

The reaction to the indictment was incredulity. Scruggs had achieved rare standing among trial lawyers—as a visionary, whose extravagant fee awards allowed him to discount, with some credibility, money as his prime motivation. He was said to have scored a billion-dollar fee in the tobacco case. Why would he bother with a tawdry little bribery scam? Some speculated that the Bush Justice Department was trying to eliminate a prominent Democratic donor—invitations to a Hillary Clinton fund-raiser hosted by Scruggs, featuring an appearance by Bill Clinton, had recently been mailed. Others guessed that one of the indicted figures had been caught in a crime and was trying to win leniency by blaming Scruggs.

“I’m rarely at a loss for words, but I am at a complete loss about it,” said Jack Palladino, the San Francisco private investigator, who worked with Scruggs in the tobacco wars and came away an admirer. “It can’t be that he needed the money. I just don’t know what to say about it.”

Scruggs and his classmates at Ole Miss Law benefitted from a custom called “diploma privilege,” under which the school’s graduates were admitted to the Mississippi bar without having to pass the state exam. This practice (which ended in the nineteen-eighties) heightened the striking insularity of the Mississippi bar, a community of lawyers who mostly know one another, often because they were vetted by the same contracts professor during first-year law at Ole Miss. Seven of the nine justices on Mississippi’s Supreme Court attended Ole Miss Law School, as did Governor Haley Barbour and both of the state’s U.S. senators. Professional and personal relationships within this group are easily tangled. John Grisham, a friend of Scruggs’s, was a classmate of one of Scruggs’s prosecutors, U.S. Attorney Jim Greenlee (and they both sat through Professor Khayat’s class). Barbour, one of Scruggs’s fraternity brothers, was his adversary in the tobacco fight. Mississippi lawyers keep score, counting each other’s divorces and courtroom outcomes. Scruggs is not the only one of them to have been portrayed in the movies (“The Insider”), or to pilot his own jet, but he is the only lawyer notable for both distinctions. Many also insist that, although Scruggs is Mississippi’s most famous trial lawyer, he never really was a “trial” lawyer at all.

“I can assure you he hasn’t tried ten cases to verdict in his life,” Bill Reed, a Jackson attorney who is one of Scruggs’s closest friends, says. “But he is the master of the deal.”

Scruggs finished near the top of his class at Ole Miss Law, and was recruited into the Jackson law firm headed by one of his heroes—William Winter, the leader of the progressive wing of the state’s Democrats, and a future governor of the state. It was a terrible fit for Scruggs, as was his brief stay at the next big Jackson firm he tried. He was, by that time, married to Diane Thompson, a dentist’s daughter from Pascagoula, and he had served five years as a Navy pilot, flying A-6 attack planes from the decks of aircraft carriers. Within the disciplined hierarchy of the U.S. Navy, fighter-pilot culture is a thing apart, attracting the sort of personalities that warrant nicknames like Maverick. Scruggs is inclined to go his own way, and did. He moved to Pascagoula and opened a law office, in a former drugstore.

Pascagoula, on the eastern end of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, is an industrial town in the most cosmopolitan region of the state, and it was the nearest thing to a home town that Scruggs had known. He was born in 1946 in Brookhaven, up in the Piney Woods. (“We were so poor,” he likes to say, “that if I hadn’t been a boy, I wouldn’t have had anything to play with.”) His father, Tom Scruggs, left when Dickie was five, and his mother, Helen, eventually found work as a secretary at the Ingalls shipyard, in Pascagoula. Dickie lived there for four years before going to a military school in Georgia, on a scholarship. Now back in Pascagoula, where his mother still lived, Scruggs made his first fortune from the Ingalls shipyard.

In the nineteen-eighties, the growth field for tort lawyers was asbestos litigation. Inhalation of asbestos fibres had been linked to dire diseases, and lawyers, inevitably, had uncovered documentation that asbestos manufacturers knew of the material’s dangers for decades, without issuing warnings. Workplaces such as Ingalls, where asbestos was used in shipbuilding, produced whole populations of sick plaintiffs. Joining the rush of lawyers signing clients, Scruggs hit upon a competitive edge. Standard practice was to sign only clients with medical evidence of disease (such as an X-ray); Scruggs offered to pay the costs of a potential client’s visit to a clinic, and to accept the case if the tests returned positive. He soon had hundreds of clients.

The problem for Scruggs and other plaintiffs’ lawyers was getting their clients’ cases into court. In a product-liability case, the plaintiff had to prove that the manufacturer knew that asbestos was harmful or failed to properly investigate the danger, and that the plaintiff was exposed to the material and harmed by it. The litigation of one case could take years, and a deep-pocketed defendant could extend the process for as long as possible, and then settle the case just before trial. “It would typically cost more to litigate that one case than you could ever hope to recover for the total damage in the case,” says Danny Cupit, a Jackson lawyer who in 1982 helped win the first asbestos case in Mississippi, against Johns-Manville. By the time one case was resolved, hundreds more had been brought. “If it took you three years to get a case up for trial, and there were hundreds of cases being filed each year, the court could never keep up with that.”

Scruggs found that his cases were far down on the court docket, stacked behind those of Danny Cupit and other lawyers who had filed earlier. Again, he devised an edge. He persuaded a Pascagoula state-court judge, a populist who was sympathetic to the sick workers, to allow him to consolidate a mass of cases, and to split the traditional litigation process into two phases. The first phase would test only the general liability of the manufacturer: was asbestos harmful, did the manufacturer know it, and were plaintiffs exposed? If the answer to each question was yes, then a series of mini-trials would follow, determining the damages to be paid to the individual plaintiffs. This formulation raised the stakes tremendously for the defendant, because one bad verdict would multiply across all the cases.

“This is where the Scruggs approach was unique,” Cupit says. “The risk to a defendant of having liability imposed on several hundred cases was a risk that was more than that defendant wanted to reasonably bear. It created an atmosphere to settle the cases.” The asbestos companies caved.

Scruggs’s innovation helped to open the litigation floodgates in Mississippi, and the state became a principal battleground in the national political fight over tort reform. Mississippi has an elected judiciary, and, as settlement money rolled in, the plaintiffs bar began investing it in the campaigns of plaintiff-minded judges. Lawyers would then shop for friendly jurisdictions. Jefferson County (pop. 9,740) became so attractive to the tort bar that seventy-three mass-action lawsuits, representing more than three thousand plaintiffs, were filed there in 2000. The American Tort Reform Association calls such tortious hot spots “judicial hellholes.” Scruggs called them “magic jurisdictions.” In a panel discussion hosted by Prudential Financial in 2002, Scruggs explained the development:

The trial lawyers have established relationships with the judges that are elected; they’re State Court judges; they’re populists. They’ve got large populations of voters who are in on the deal, they’re getting their piece in many cases. And so, it’s a political force in their jurisdiction, and it’s almost impossible to get a fair trial if you’re a defendant in some of these places. . . . The cases are not won in the courtroom. They’re won on the back roads long before the case goes to trial. Any lawyer fresh out of law school can walk in there and win the case, so it doesn’t matter what the evidence or the law is. The major asbestos companies were bankrupted, and the tort bar turned to pharmaceutical companies, filing lawsuits on behalf of clients who were not always legitimately injured parties. “This is what I call the abusive phase,” Cupit says, “or what some others call killing the goose that laid the golden egg.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and big business began pouring money into the campaigns of industry-friendly judges, and into those of politicians who promised tort reform. Haley Barbour made the issue a priority after he was elected governor, in 2003. The Mississippi legislature passed his tort-reform program, which severely limited liability.

Scruggs did not join the Big Pharma frenzy. He prefers only “primary kills,” he said in a 2002 interview with the magazine Chief Executive. “I don’t want to get there after the antelope has been brought down.”

Scruggs began to formulate his own brand of litigation, entrepreneurial and boldly speculative, of which the actual practice of law was only one part. The strategic manipulation of politics and public opinion was just as important to this enterprise—“a three-legged stool,” as Scruggs described it to colleagues. By exerting pressure at key points, he could see to it that defenses collapsed and opponents settled without a jury ever having a say. He created a sort of floating legal syndicate, with changing players (only some of whom were lawyers) chosen as needed for a particular skill or connection.