Tobacco lawyer taking on insurance firms

MOSS POINT, Miss. — A private jet is waiting for Richard Scruggs, but first the millionaire lawyer wants to squeeze in a quick lunch. Smiles and nods greet him as he walks into Lu-Cher Doe's Diner, a soul food restaurant down the street from his law office.

Everyone in the diner instantly recognizes the trim, gray-haired man in the expensive suit. Scruggs feels right at home, even though he sticks out in the crowd of T-shirt-wearing patrons seated at vinyl-covered tables.

"How are you, pretty lady?" he asks the cashier, turning on his Mississippi drawl.

"How are you doing, Mr. Scruggs?" she responds with a smile.

"Glad to see you're making lots of money," he adds.

Newsweek has called him possibly "the most influential man in America that you've never heard of," but no introductions are needed here.

Scruggs, "Dickie" to his friends and neighbors, is one of the nation's wealthiest trial attorneys. In the late 1990s, his Mississippi-based firm earned nearly $1 billion in fees for his part in reaching a landmark $250 billion settlement with tobacco companies.

Now he's using that windfall to finance his latest high-profile legal battle — suing insurance companies for denying thousands of policyholders' claims after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their homes.

Scruggs, already facing long odds in the eyes of some experts, recently lost a key ruling in one of his lawsuits. Despite that early setback, few legal handicappers are willing to count out someone with a track record of winning cases that nobody else could.

Many residents of southern Mississippi have turned to Scruggs for help since Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast eight months ago.

It's no different at the diner: After Scruggs finishes his meal, a waitress sidles up to his table and asks for his help in getting the Federal Emergency Management Agency to fix her trailer. Scruggs promises to draw up a strongly worded letter.

"I don't know if it will do any good, but I'll give 'em hell," says Scruggs, whose courtly manner has a way of softening his fiery rhetoric.

Less than an hour later, Scruggs is flying 20,000 feet above Mississippi in the cockpit of a Falcon 10 — one of two corporate jets the former Navy fighter pilot uses for his frequent 300-mile commutes from his home base in Oxford to the coast.