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I’m in Chicago, watching,writing and covering the Blagojevich trial.
One of the enduring images from the Scrushy-Siegelman trial was the rendition of Nick Bailey and Don Siegelman driving up to Birmingham to see HealthSouth CEO, Richard Scrushy. I could envision Bailey in a smart suit, dark shades, black hair slicked back, and the two of them cruising up I-65 singing along to Jimmy Buffet tunes. They pull into the HealthSouth corporate campus and there is a quiet scene while a staffer unlocks the elevator and they ride up to the fifth floor. In Scrushy’s spacious office, he greets them like the old friends they’re not–in perfect southern style–and the three of them sit down at his desk. Behind Scrushy is the sweeping vista of the unfinished Digital Hospital. He flips open a binder of HealthSouth corporate checks. Embellishing my reverie, l have him humming a country song. He dots the “i” in Richard with a flourish and hands Siegelman the check. They shake hands again and Siegelman gets up to leave with Bailey in tow. “Hello Governor,” rings out from the various execs on the fifth floor. Siegelman, ever the politician, stops to chat, something about the sewer system in Mountain Brook. He says he’ll look into it. And they ride back down the elevator, snap in another CD for the ride home, and head back to Montgomery.
It’s been four years since Bailey fixed that scene in my mind, and I still think that’s the craziest bribe I’ve ever heard of.
That’s not the way they do it in Chicago. It’s more like this:
Antoin “Tony” Rezko, perhaps the Lanny Young of Illinois, with his fingers in many pies, calls up the Governor’s Chief-of-Staff, Alonzo Monk, an old college chum of Blagojevich’s from Malibu. He’s the state’s Nick Bailey. Rezko tells Bailey: “I got a book for you.” They two of them make arrangements to meet in a dark secluded place where Rezko gives Monk an old UPS envelope stuffed with cash. That’s bribery Chicago style.
One more thing about Chicago style. In Birmingham, the story goes that Scrushy somehow “bought” the CON Board by paying Siegelman for it, and this was somehow going to reap benefits for himself. In Chicago, they know how to take a CON Board (the Health Facilities Management Board in Illinois) as it is alleged the conspirators had six of the nine seats in their pocket.
For those who followed my work in Birmingham, I think if Blagojevich’s attorney, Sam Adam Jr. and Jim Parkman–both very good juror’s lawyers–had an attorney-off (a cross-off?) Adam would probably take Parkman. However, if the two lawyers’ styles were somehow combined in a courtroom, I think it would be the most terrifying experience a hostile witness could ever imagine. It’d be the stuff of courtroom nightmares.
[--I've read Eddie Curran's book and will have some thoughts whenever there's enough of a break in this trial.]
If you’re interested in my other site, it can be found here.
Former HealthSouth CFO’s, convicted felons and cooperating witnesses Aaron Beam and Weston Smith have parlayed their notoriety into a second career, and found a way to make fraud pay off in the end. For followers of this story, it might be worth noting which of the conspirators have joined hands to make this ersatz fraud-fighting team. Beam rode his night-school CPA on a magic carpet ride that would make him a multi-millionaire before his small startup medical rehab company became too unwieldy for his talents and he accepted the HealthSouth fraud-laced golden parachute, and then sat it out in high-living style until the Feds came calling. And Smith was over-promoted into service only when HealthSouth was running out of fraud-aware accountants in the CFO pool. He then blew the whistle only when things became too hot after he had accepted a deal that would have allowed him to be the head of a “clean” division of HealthSouth while still being able to pocket his fraud-inflated earnings. Smith was presumably OK with the fraud until Sarbanes-Oxley kicked the legs of deniability out from under him. He also had the unenviable task of keeping his Family-member wife off the list of indicted conspirators. So he talked and cried a little bit on the stand, and now, along with Beam, he has a new career.
Their new venture is in full swing with Beam’s must-read book, the ominously titled “The Wagon to Disaster,” and he and Smith are also preaching to schools and conferences on the evils of fraud, and presumably how to make a spine materialize when confronted with the likes of a Richard Scrushy before you’ve stashed away millions in fraudulent income and the feds are pounding on your door. This site is not in the book review business, nor does it spend much time with other media, but Beam’s book is written in an oddly stilted, detached academic style that has a number of problems with grammar and diction as the voice of the ghost is often too evident in his heart-felt rendition. But we’ll slide by that and get to the content.
Although I might openly question how all $2.8 billion fell on Richard Scrushy’s head, this site has never been a Scrushy mouthpiece, nor has it been from the perspective of a friend, a family member, a supporter or an apologist, but it has always been about unraveling the shreds of truth in a complex emotional case, a case where many people were hurt in many different ways. But here’s the problem: Scrushy was mean—had a rather pronounced anger management problem. He was autocratic. He was flamboyant. He was scary or at least scared some people around him, perhaps those feeding at the trough, perhaps by those feeding at the trough. I get all that. I have met with dozens of people and fielded hundreds of emails that have regaled me with countless stories. I get it. But the problem is that these things, by themselves, give no proof of criminal responsibility. If they did, many, many corporate heads and managers—hundreds if not thousands—would be in the slammer by now. I’ve worked for some of them. The problem is that when we want the proof, when we want to know how this Master Mind of the fraud operated to pull the wool over the eyes of his colleagues, the banking world and the public, what we get are the stories: The Monday Morning Beatings, the petulant guy who acted like a spoiled brat when he got bad news, the show-off who annoyed people in Alabama when he got too big for his britches. That’s what we get.
But there’s a new document for us to take a look at, a new tome that is going to tell us what really happened up at HealthSouth and let us know how Scrushy’s silly pull the wagon thing turned into the Wagon to Disaster. First, before delving into some of the fraud era inconsistencies Beam reveals, let’s look at the charges made about Scrushy’s lifestyle that are supposed to convince us that Scrushy is an evil man who would claw to the top so he could prey on the carcasses of the ones he climbed over to get there. Beam tells us that Scrushy used money to acquire luxuries and gain access to power, he tells us this even while sprinkling the entire book with stories about the various music industry figures he knows, about how he invited the LSU coaching staff to one of his parties, about how he could be a mediocrity and live like a movie star. And most of this was done after he had pocketed the fraud money and left HealthSouth. Beam also mentions owning several homes, including a place in New Orleans’ French Quarter and “several houses” on St. George Island. He also said that he picked up two Mercedes, a Boxter, three Lexus, three BMWs, a Land Rover, a Jeep. And he slummed it by adding a pickup truck to the fleet. Pretty good for a night school CPA running a company that became too big for him to understand, much less manage. And this information is not meant to put Beam in a toe-to-toe who-sucked-the-most-out-of-the-fraud contest, but only to point out that it is a bit of a stretch to set Scrushy up on his Master Mind pedestal while various other members of the staff were doing the same thing. After the fraud commenced and Beam had left the company—ostensibly because he had a guilty conscience—he writes that he built a regulation football field in his back yard. This is a very Scrushy-esque story—the football field—and if Beam had been the fall guy instead of Scrushy, it might be on the first page of the proof-that-he-was-the-Master-Mind sheet.
Beam’s book also addresses one of the oldest of the running Scrushy themes that characterize him as the evil FraudMeister of HealthSouth. It is his philanthropic habits, and in particular, his penchant to have various entities and things named for him. This goes to the heart of the too big for his britches thing. In Birmingham, he definitely became way too big for a guy out of Selma to be carrying on and drawing attention to himself. Life has a certain order in the south and that’s not the way we do things down here. I live in Tampa, Florida and we have a baseball stadium called Steinbrenner Field and there is also a school called George Steinbrenner High School. Both Scrushy and Steinbrenner are polarizing individuals and although I will not make a one-to-one correspondence between the two of them—because there are differences—there are definitely some similarities. Beam brings out an oft-told story of the HealthSouth softball team that he outfitted with dazzling uniforms, and because they weren’t very good, he went out and brought in some college kids as ringers, paid them to hit homeruns so his team could win a few games. Mr. Steinbrenner has a ball team too. And he also likes to win. In fact, some would say Steinbrenner has diminished the game of professional baseball by paying grossly inflated salaries to marginal players in order to win some games. He also rules with an autocratic style, hiring and firing people over his whims, even forcing his millionaire ballplayers to submit to his notions about grooming. Sound a little familiar? The difference is the Yankees are still winning and people in his sphere are not in dire need of something to pin on him.
When he was doing these things—outfitting his ball team, zooming around in his speedboats—Scrushy had his detractors and people who thought he was already over-the-top, but he was also seen as the young dynamic face of a healthcare company that had the goal of changing the face of medical treatment, particularly rehab. The bankers liked it. The Board liked it. The medial liked it (as least they cheered him on for awhile). HealthSouth had a face and he was a one man promotion engine. Yes, maybe much of it was fueled by an out of control desire to hoard and display attention, maybe some of the motivations were narcissistic, but until HealthSouth descended into fraud and we needed a bad guy to explain the unthinkable, this is exactly what he was encouraged to do. There was a business practice that was particularly prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s that encouraged CEOs and corporate leaders to act very much like Scrushy did—the idea was considered part of the branding process of a product. A recently published article puts it this way: ”
In general, the corporate world needs its flamboyant visionaries and raging egomaniacs rather more than its humble leaders and corporate civil servants. Think of the people who have shaped the modern business landscape, and “faceless” and “humble” are not the first words that come to mind.”(The Economist, 11-09.)
(To be fair, it is a controversial practice but many businesses do subscribe to this branding methodology, and it was fairly commonplace in the 1980s and 1990s.) Many of the stories that later became the “proof” of his diabolical scheme to ruin his company and defraud shareholders out of $2.8 billion were once evidentiary proof that HealthSouth was a corporate flagship symbolic of the NewSouth, that it was a company of the future, that it was the new model of healthcare for active baby boomers. There are many examples of this kind of transference in the Scrushy saga, of many pieces of proof that merely add up to after-the-fact payback by some of his detractors. Over the years, I’ve heard many many stories from people who had varying vantage points of what happened at HealthSouth. Some of these were from several levels within the company, others were close to Scrushy or had dealings with his family, and these people would often tell me how they knew he was up to no good. But when it came down to the specifics, the what-did-you-see-that-made-you-know-Scrushy-was-knee-deep-in-fraud question, I would instead hear a story about a long-ago slight, about Scushy doing something outrageous at a barbeque, about him yelling at a hapless underling about some trivial detail—all things that are not necessarily admirable or likeable, but all falling short of a proof that a criminal Master Mind was at work. However, Beam once told us from the witness stand that, “Scrushy is not a man you would want to cross,” so let’s go to the latest of these tales, the new hotsheet, Aaron Beam’s book.
Beam uses a few terms to describe Richard Scrushy that were frequently used during the trial, in Birmingham. Words like brilliant and visionary and cutting-edge. He says that in the early days, when Richard gave the HealthSouth pitch to potential investors, the rooms were always filled. And the accolades came rolling in as Beam and Scrushy took their show on the road. He writes about a time when investors were salivating to be a part of this new approach to Healthcare. And against this backdrop of raging success, Beam talks about going to London where one of the bankers they were presenting to told Scrushy, “Your presentation needs work.” And Beam says that Scrushy went rather nuts, exhibiting what would eventually be his legendary anger management problem and what would eventually become one of the many “proofs” that he was behind the fraud. Now here’s the problem: If you’re a businessman (or a rockstar or an artist or you make donuts for a living) and you are out on the road and everyone loves what you do—you’re getting rave reviews—and one guy in the sea of applause is not impressed, it would seem to me that it would be settled nature to assume this guy must be an idiot, that he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Indeed, on the very next event that Beam says they went to, a big meeting in New York—he referred to it as “the big one”—the room full of investors was so impressed they stood on their feet and applauded. And Beam concedes that it was a herculean feat for a young company like HealthSouth to go public, but he says that “Richard pulled us through.”
And then Beam, the future convicted felon, talked about how they had all made a killing on the stock after they went public, and that they had to be careful to avoid accusations of insider trading on their windfall, but “In the end, most investors understand. They realized as my father used to say, that ‘You need a little walking around money.’” Eventually, we now know that Beam and Smith and the others are going to portray themselves as patsies, as poor hapless victims, but did you notice that the company was only just barely public, and the CFO is already walking the tightrope of the thin grey line. These are the people that Scrushy had surrounded himself with. And before Beam writes about Scrushy’s eventual wealth, his lavish accumulations and expensive lifestyle, he confides that he couldn’t wait to run out and by a Mercedes Benz. He just gave ‘em a check.
Now let’s get to the heart of the matter: Beam writes
“Richard and I were the only people who communicated with the Street. I spent much of my time with Richard discussing how we would spin everything, as events (earning releases, acquisitions, Medicaid rule changes, news about competitors, etc.) occurred it was pretty predictable which questions the Street would ask. Richard and I wanted to be sure we were saying the same thing in response to those questions.”
Now read this passage again. Slowly.
So it was all Richard who led Beam and the others down the path to fraud? For those that have followed this story closely, Beam just laid out kind of a blueprint to the fraud in that passage, as it involved press releases, acquisitions, and Medicaid rule changes. And then he goes on to say that not only were Scrushy and himself actively pushing the company toward the edge, but he says that he sincerely believed, “Many astute investors knew what we were doing and saw it as financial gamesmanship and not outright fraud. There was certainly much rationalization on our part.” This means that Beam, the CFO part of this duo, believed that the banking community knew what they were doing and that they were licensing them to do it. After all, the stocks kept accruing in value, the investors were happy and Beam could buy the things he had always dreamed of.
Now we’re back to our problem with the settled storyline, the one that has the evil Scrushy duping all of his executives and single handedly making them hatch the whole fraud plot. And it’s a big problem. Let’s review the facts: We have a company that is doing very well, that is consistently making and beating Street projections, we have a visionary and dynamic leader who has developed a penchant for the good life and has an anger management problem, we have a CFO who has spent much of his time with the CEO “spinning” things and has always been able to find a way to make the numbers work—even when he admittedly knows they’re over the edge, but he feels empowered because the banking industry knows what they’re doing. And then on one fateful day, as the spin of the oft-told Beam story goes, he tells Scrushy that the company can’t make the numbers. And Scrushy—who never wants to hear bad news—has a hard time accepting this because after all, his financial wizards have been spinning the numbers for years and they always manage to push the company ahead. The numbers have never been great but they somehow have always been able to put the right spin on them, just enough to keep the accolades coming, to keep everyone immersed in their toys and diversions, and enough to keep the company spinning long enough to fight another day. Scrushy tells him to do what he’s always done. You guys fix it. Don’t give me that we can’t do it stuff, that bad news, you guys go back there and fix it. That’s what he tells him. And why shouldn’t he? What in Beam’s behavior or anyone’s behavior around Scrushy would tell him that Beam can’t fix this like he’s always done. But if we’re telling an egregiously self-aggrandizing story, this is the moment that Scrushy went from being a brilliant visionary to the Master Mind of the fraud, it is the moment when everyone jumped off the wagon and Scrushy ended up pulling it alone. It’s a problem.
At one point, Beam breaks into some explanatory information about the inner-workings of the fraud, and how they carefully manipulated the numbers in order to not attract scrutiny. He writes: “We were careful to never disclose exactly how we calculated the numbers, as all of these weaknesses were better hidden earlier, when we began our merger activities.” In the very next paragraph, there is a slight of hand as the story he’s been telling for so long wobbles a bit while he recalls the way it actually happened. He said that when the various HealthSouth operating units prepared their budgets, “…there was a gap between what the people in the trenches said they could do and what Richard was promising the Street.” Between these two consecutive paragraphs, how did we deftly get from “WE were careful to never disclose exactly how we calculated the numbers,” to “what RICHARD was promising the Street.” Beam can’t have it both ways. In one paragraph he is part of a team that is collectively deceiving the investors, and in the following paragraph he is safely on the other side and Richard is doing it all by himself.
Let’s go back to the licensing of the fraud, the part that said it was OK to do this as long as everyone makes money. In a part of the book that was written from the first person point of view, but was supposed to have been contributed by Weston Smith because it relates to what happened after Beam left the company, he writes:
Many of the investment bankers that the company used in these deals were accommodating about this problem. They typically provided a checklist of information that needed to be gathered, and to sensitive areas Weston and the rest would say with a wink, “We can’t ask for that.” The understanding was clear: Questions that should have been easy to answer would not be asked. If the other side pushed for answers to the sensitive questions, the bankers effectively steered them away or berated them for asking those questions about such a ‘respectable’ company.
Now we have another problem and a big one. If we add it to the shortlist we’ve been building, it continues to diminish the role of Richard Scrushy as the overall Master Mind of the fraud. If his top accountants were always able to spin things just right and if the bankers colluded with them by consistently putting their stamp of approval on the company’s business practices, then how was Richard Scrushy supposed to know where the uncrossable line was supposed to be? And if he did cross it, it sure looks like he went over the line with a veritable stampede of people, including his best accountants and their investment banker partners.
If HealthSouth’s financial department—which had been spinning things for years—and the company’s investment bankers knew what they were doing and were sending signals that it was OK, couldn’t we assume that Richard Scrushy felt that the company must be doing business the way business is done? And if his lifestyle was not being reigned in by the The Board or the media or by his top advisors—and in fact was encouraged to be the over-the-top face of this dynamic young company, couldn’t we also assume that Scrushy felt licensed to behave as he did even if it meant that he was spinning toward an inevitable critical mass, the point where a fed up public was going to tie his antics to the fortunes of the company?
None of this is meant to take Aaron Beam’s and Weston Smith’s evil nemesis, and nominate him for Sainthood. Scrushy did dumb things. He made mistakes. He was often callous and cold and inattentive to his responsibilities at crucial times. In the aftermath of the fraud and through his subsequent trials, he continued to do things that appeared to be cynical pandering to various people and groups in order to improve his standing in the courts, or to the public. He had human failings. That is one Scrushyism that is immutable, undeniable. I will stop short of arguing that he was a good guy because that goes beyond the scope of this paper, and it is an assessment which is usually left to individuals to make, based on their own interactions and feelings. I know there are people who will never like Scrushy and I am not suggesting that they should. But it is his bigger than life human failings that crystallizes the mob rule mentality that made him the man that Aaron Beam says ruined his life, that made him the specter of evil. And it also made him the perfect patsy.
Richard Scrushy was the perfect fall-guy for what happened at HealthSouth. He was autocratic—even dictatorial—in his management style, he did outrageous things, he screamed at people when he didn’t get his way, he had a flat-lined ego fueled by an insatiable need for attention that would never be quenched. And his role as the BoogeyMan of fraud has grown over the years as people love to have a singular villain if only to avoid the confusion of complexity. Weston Smith tells a pretty good story in Beam’s book. He writes about an event that was supposed to have happened after what he termed an “excellent” quarterly conference call where HealthSouth reported great numbers even though Beam says the actual numbers were “dreadful.” At the end of the meeting, the story goes that Scrushy stayed behind and asked Bill Owens and Weston Smith, “OK, what really happened this quarter?” The funny thing about this story is that for some reason Weston Smith neglected to tell it when he was spending almost four days on the witness stand, under oath. Could he have been embellishing the Scrushy Saga as the years have gone by? And as there are books to write and new careers to launch? It is unlikely that this embellishment was an oversight by Weston Smith, the witness, because he was not all that great of a witness for the prosecution, saying that he rarely spoke to Scrushy because although he was the CFO, he reported to Bill Owens. (Owens spent eleven days on the witness stand, and didn’t mention this story either.) His usual line was that he assumed that Scrushy knew. It would have been a marvelous and welcome addition to the prosecution’s case if Smith could have related this clear and convincing snippet that demonstrated that Scrushy knew the numbers being reported were bogus. But he didn’t. Not until now.
In the final analysis, Scrushy looks like a lot of us, only bigger than life, only he was once successful enough to be the fall guy for the ungraspable realities of a banking industry out of control, of an economy on the brink, of a company carrying the banner of the New South that was too good to be true. Or perhaps he was the weak titular head of a company who was presiding over the storm of greed swirling below and around him, populated by people who were only too happy to feed his illusions that all the signs and pictures meant something, and that he was a very successful businessman. We can’t get at those things—too deep, too complex—but we can always dredge up our favorite Scrushy story—Aaron Beam just wrote a whole book of them.
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Now that I’ve lost the few remaining friends and supporters I had, I might as well mention that I am working on a new project coming soon from a courtroom near you…if you’re interested, the website home of that project is: here (It all goes to Chicago.)
Once a week or so, I make a scan of the latest articles on the Siegelman-Scrushy situation. And then I go on to look at the most recent editorials and make a quick check to see if there is any movement in the involved Federal Courts. And in making this sweep, I’ll usually take a detour down the Internet’s back-alleys, from the seedy bars and pubs of the Net to the more up-scale sophisticated cigar rooms, and finally to the Internet version of graffiti-strewn restrooms, where I’ll read what is written in all of these places as text messages stuffed in bottles and cast adrift across disparate forums. There’ll be wide spectrum of scrawled notes, from almost-informed impassioned arguments, to factual news blurbs, to the exposed raw nerves of hatred and the blind invectives of anger. The latter encompasses everything from small lives that have been bowed by a failing economy, from the ever-fresh frustration of stolen Southern Honor, to the embarrassment of Bull Connor’s dogs splashed across Life Magazine, to a still-simmering racial divide that quietly and quite voluntarily segregated itself in the aftermath of the 60’s, to the moral high-ground afforded by the close almost gang-like association to a political party. And to fear. Simply fear. And crisscrossing this uneven landscape is the perception of shady politicians from Bush to Clinton to Obama, and from Blagojevich to Jefferson to Cunningham to Sessions.
The Siegelman case is not simply a modern-day witch hunt. But it’s close.
Suppose there really were witches in Old Salem, people who did mischief by casting spells on cows and people, and if this were true—if there really were such people amongst the denizens of Old Salem—it might be easier to forgive the hysteria of a panicked public for mistaking innocent victims for actual witches. Then we might also expect—because it is a mark of humanity, a festering boil on the human race—that the people would error on the side of caution out of respect for the gravity of the situation. They might burn a few witches because of the danger that might come from having just one fully-empowered witch on the loose. Indeed, this is a topical dilemma in the age of terrorism. If the rights of an individual are sacred in a democracy, how sacred should the rights of a suspected terrorist be when allowing just one to slip through the cracks of justice could have disastrous consequences on the lives of the citizenry? Have we replaced one disaster for another?
We now know—at least we’re pretty sure—that there were no real witches in Old Salem. But we do know there are plenty of corrupt politicians that have seeped into our present-day world. There are enough that our society can be expected to error on the side of caution, they can be expected to parlay contentious political beliefs into a systematic denial of individual rights, something we once held to be sacred. We can expect that. We can further expect a restless public to continue spewing their vile thoughts across the back rooms of the Internet before retreating to the uneasy comfort of their fitful lives. We can expect the worst from our fellow humans.
It’s been a long time since that quaint episode happened in New England. Twenty-five people were convicted of witchcraft and were killed or died in prison. But that’s all over. There’s a statue in Salem that memorializes TV’s Samantha Stevens from the “Bewitched” sitcom. Cute. Quaint. In a darker memorial, there are bronze statues of dogs in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park, almost in the shadow of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where four little girls died in a very different kind of state-sponsored witch-hunt. But it’s all gone. Everything is quiet now.
No. It continues.
The worst of our democracy, the underside of our shared fears lives on. We like to think we’ve come so far from Salem, from Birmingham, but our fears and our prejudices still have us hunting witches today. And Siegelman will soon go back to prison. That much is all but certain. It will be a quiet act that will be cheered by many, rued by a few and shrugged off by the masses. The presence of real corruption and real bad guys makes it more difficult to stake out a moral high ground and stay the course. None of us want to be ostracized, to stand alone, we didn’t back then—in Salem—nor have we throughout history, but the rabble has become more entrenched, not less. In recent events, the Obama administration—or attorneys representing the administration—has filed a motion opposing Siegelman’s and Scrushy’s bid to have their case heard before the Supreme Court. Along with the sometimes understandable fear people have of standing with the accused, we can add a new low to moral integrity. Knowing, believing and understanding what is right and just, but still sacrificing individuals for the sake of political expediency is a moral lapse of which there is no depth and no dimension. Obama and others within the administration know that what happened in Montgomery was wrong. Anyone who can rise above the situational and topical anger of which Siegelman or Scrushy make a convenient scapegoat for, knows that these two people may have been flawed men who made mistakes, but they are hardly criminals. Some people will never know this, of course, because the fire in their brain is too hot. But people who put healthcare reform or economic programs ahead of their own conscious have fallen into the well of moral depravity.
In a limited defense of Obama and his actions, it is possible that he may feel the Blagojevich situation came too close—Obama’s name has already been smeared across too many court documents—and any association with a political corruption case, no matter how bogus, will cost him political capital. This could be doubly true for Obama because he already dodged some bullets over his association with Bill Ayers, during his presidential campaign. And Obama would know first-hand how historically corrupt Illinois’ politics is, and having supposedly woven through this minefield to the White House, he would probably have at least two thoughts on the subject now that it is in his rearview mirror. Associating himself with a person like Siegelman, even with all of the many red flags that are waving over Siegelman’s trial and conviction, could link Obama to this dark Illinois tradition and allow people to make the assumption that the President is likewise corrupt; and it is also likely that President Obama assumes Blagojevich is guilty as charged even without benefit of a trial because he would know-well the machinations of Chicago-style politics, and Obama’s assumptions, like other less-than-informed people, may carry over to politicians in other parts of the country. But in the end, Obama knows that what happened in Montgomery is wrong. Officials in his administration know that what happened is wrong. And to sacrifice Governor Siegelman for political expediency will forever taint what he might be able to buy with his political capital.
As for Scrushy, now rotting in a prison in Texas (even more people cheering, far less people rueing his plight) his incarceration is just as wrong because the case against him was equally tainted. And Scrushy’s situation is the personification of cynicism by the American Government. Obama and his advisors also know that to argue for Siegelman’s release in front of the Supreme Court is to argue for Scrushy’s. And no one in the administration wants to be remotely responsible for being the one who caused Richard Scrushy to be released. This is the gift that keeps on giving. As I have always reported, the single masterstroke of the government’s pursuit and criminalization of the Siegelman administration was reserving a seat for the pariah of Alabama, Richard Scrushy, at the defense table. Many people have had much fun and glee in watching Scrushy’s assets get sold in order to satisfy his $2.8 billion judgment in the civil suit resulting from the fraud at HealthSouth. This adds yet another dimension to the people’s blood lust that has Siegelman going to prison and Scrushy now behind bars for almost two and a half years now. The suit against Srushy and the judgment against him was vengeance, a financial stoning to death of the guy who made many people unhappy. It was vengeance at Scrushy for him having the audacity of doing exactly what he was licensed to do and had been encouraged to do. So while the guy from Selma does time in prison, there are people still today—in board rooms, heading banking groups, running hedge funds—who got away with it. Like Obama and his advisors, like certain attorneys, like many people who were victimized by real or perceived wrongs, like maybe you and I if we’re thinking clearly, these people not only know that what happened to Scrushy is wrong, they are living off the blood-money that cost him is freedom.
These are sad days in sad times.
On a personal note, I have not updated The Report from Birmingham much lately as I have been very busy on other projects, but it is something I faithfully pay attention to. I am not a noisy Democrat. Never was. I’m not a friend of Richard Scrushy and have incurred his, or his family’s, wrath more times than not. I know Don Siegelman but I would have no compunction to sort through the mountain of evidence as I did, or to sit through every day of his trial like I did, and conclude that he did it, that he’s guilty. I likewise have no problem with observing that the liberal media distorts a viewpoint about as much as the conservative media does. But it doesn’t matter—none of these things matter anymore. I know that I am not going to convince anyone. Those days are gone. Everything is quiet in Montgomery, just like Old Salem or Edmund Pettus Bridge or Kelly Ingram Park. All quiet. All gone. At this advanced date, it is way too late to worry about who believes me or who doesn’t believe me, who likes me or who doesn’t like me. But it is never too late to stand up for what is right. I can only wish and hope a few others believed this too. Like perhaps the Republicans with pea shooters, the HealthSouth employees who were once yelled at by the CEO. And like President Obama.
[Yes, it is increasingly likely that I’ll be there in Chicago with reports from the Blagojevich trial to contrast what we went through in Birmingham and Montgomery.]
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