The Bribe.

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.