Kings of Tort.

• Author: Jones, Annie Butterworth

Kings of Tort

By Alan Lange and Tom Dawson

Throughout the the 1990s and early 2000s, Mississippi attorney Dickie Scruggs had a reputation of helping the "little guy." He sued the asbestos industry on behalf of shipyard workers, brought down big tobacco companies, and fought insurance corporations after Hurricane Katrina. By the mid-2000s, Scruggs had reached a net worth of nearly one billion dollars.

But Scruggs' world came tumbling down in 2007, and today he sits in a Kentucky prison, where he's serving a seven-year sentence for bribery and mail fraud. Kings of Tort details both the rise and fall of Scruggs and his fellow attorneys and judges, many who wound up serving prison sentences of their own.

Alan Lange and Tom Dawson, both native Mississipians, write with authority about Scruggs' demise, providing a detailed background story and nearly minute-by-minute descriptions of the FBI's investigation and the actual events that led to the indictments.

Due to the complexity of Scruggs' story, Kings of Tort can get bogged down in the constantly changing cast of characters and the amount of details the authors choose to include. Even so, Dawson and Lange (a writer and...