On the dawn of the aftermath of Crumpler, something has been bothering me. The Scrushy situation, HealthSouth, and related peripheral issues are often dominant conversations in my sometimes obsessive world. Over dinner. On the dock. On the patio, under the moon. I believe the situation with HealthSouth can be a reflection of our world, and it has as many answers, false starts, illusions, and wrong ways as a trip into the mirrored world of the funhouse. And my sole aim has always been to get the story right, to wade through the comments, the commentary, the lies, the liars, and hopefully the truth might be what is left over in the end. And there is an understanding that sometimes honest well-meaning people say things that aren’t true, and at other times, liars tell the truth. We have had all this during this journey, and more. And finally, writing about these unfolding events has never been a game to me. It has never about getting ratings, or being lurid or taking shots at Scrushy and the others, from afar. These notes have always tried to cover various aspects of the story that have been perhaps uncovered by the press, with the ultimate goal of getting it right.
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Leach’s magic carpet ride ended with a thud, as Sonny Crumpler, the G. Gordon Liddy of HealthSouth, has been found guilty. There’ll be much more about this later, but this trial could have long ranging implications, including the involvement of Source Medical and other arms of HealthSouth’s spidery organization of subsidiaries. His non-involvement was a harder sell, as many of the conspirators casually placed Crumpler in their midst, while they were testifying against someone else, someone bigger; and it does not, as some will probably conclude, shed much new light on Scrushy’s involvement. This doesn’t vindicate the government or anything else but merely shows the list of convicted conspirators has grown by one. It does, however, put Crumpler in the unenviable position of answering a question hinted at by Parkman, and others, throughout this ordeal: That is what kind of sentence would a conspirator get if he hadn’t joined the others and testified against Scrushy. His appeal will probably be well [...] Although an early abbreviated victory for the defense seems yet to be an uphill battle, in Scrushy’s SEC litigation, the government likewise does not seem to have learned a whole lot from trial to trial. That the primary target was the CEO and Chairman of a company that was caught perpetrating a multi-billion dollar fraud scheme appears to make good, solid lay-intuitive sense. Their documents and accompanying language read like: There’s the fraud and there’s the CEO, so…um….QED. This strategy indeed works well for many of the people that are following this case, but it tends to unravel when it is formatted for judges and juries, and squeezed into the shape of a courtroom. These comments are not meant to address the pathology that swirls amongst the defendant and his legal advisors, and the question about what actually happened out there, but is specifically directed at the lesser pathology of a government that can’t seem to figure out what it is suppose to do, or to even understand this case, after three years of dedicating their best to it. (They were the best, weren’t they?) |
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