The devil at his elbow, p.6
The Devil at His Elbow, page 6
Decades later, when the subject of Randolph’s death arose, the Murdaughs made no secret of what had happened. If anyone uttered the word “suicide,” they just smiled.
A month after the accident, an election was held for a new solicitor. Buster Murdaugh, then twenty-five, won handily. All at once, Buster was head of the law firm as well as the Fourteenth Circuit’s top lawman. By September, Buster was trying cases in front of a new thirty-eight-year-old judge, a future U.S. senator named Strom Thurmond. Like so many others in the courthouse, Thurmond was an old family friend. His father, a former solicitor, had been close to Randolph Sr.
Ultimately the railroad did settle. To this day, the Murdaughs will not disclose the amount. But now Buster had the money and the title and the influence to build an empire.
Chapter Six
After the accident, Pamela Pinckney required seventeen surgeries and two years of physical therapy before she could walk again. She might have healed faster, except she kept skipping her therapy sessions and neglecting to take her meds so she could be with her son. She was still in a wheelchair, unable to place her weight on her broken ankles, so she had to ask her daughter to drive her. But Pamela had to see her boy.
By then Hakeem had been moved to a nursing home on the Georgia state line that catered to the poor and elderly. Even though she lived an hour and a half away, Pamela took to popping in unexpectedly to check on Hakeem. On the way she’d ask her daughter to take her to Walmart to pick up cans of ravioli and Beefaroni, childhood favorites Hakeem preferred to the nursing home gruel, most commonly a gray liquid fed to him through a straw.
Pamela found the nursing home dark and sad, and though she did not know it at the time, it had one of the worst safety records in the South. She had worked as a nursing assistant and had seen how easily patients could be neglected. Hakeem’s condition was harrowing enough. He could no longer move his torso or his arms and legs, and he was almost always on a ventilator. Sitting in her wheelchair at the side of his bed, Pamela would pray with him and brush her fingertips across his cheek and tell him how handsome he was. He had always hated to miss church, and in high school he would wait until after Sunday services to make the three-hour trek back to the school for the deaf. By his bedside, Pamela sang his favorite gospel songs, staples of contemporary worship like “God Is Able” and “Miracle Worker.”
He’d been given a whistle to blow in an emergency, but one day she found it behind his bed, dusty and forgotten. Another time she discovered her son’s bedsheets soggy with urine and as dark as tea, signs that they’d been soiled for hours. Hakeem was supposed to be bathed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but Pamela kept finding dirt between her son’s toes. So she and her daughter would give him a sponge bath and change his clothes. She was always sure to rub down any dry skin with oil.
Someone had donated an eye tracking device that allowed Hakeem to communicate simple messages, clicking on letters and words by blinking. Slowly moving his eye around the screen, he kept typing the same message, again and again:
I want to go home.
His desperation made it hard for Pamela to breathe. In his eyes, she could see how afraid he was.
“I’m going to get you home,” she told him. “Just give me a little more time.”
She told her son how Mr. Alex was working on the lawsuit, pushing for the insurance company to settle. Once the family got that money, she said, she could afford to buy a house that could accommodate a ventilator and all the other equipment Hakeem would need to come home. She was praying for that day to arrive soon.
On October 7, 2011, two years after the accident, Mr. Alex called Pamela with the news that he’d settled Hakeem’s case for $10 million. His fee would be $4 million. The rest, he told her, would go to the family. He told her to sit tight because it would take time to sort through the paperwork and get the money in hand. But he promised her it was coming.
Meantime, Alex was living big. Flush with the money he was stealing from the Plyler sisters and other clients, he took his family to Atlanta to watch the Gamecocks play in the SEC championship; they stayed at the Ritz-Carlton and drank champagne in the limo ride to the game, with Paul hanging out of the sunroof. He took them to the Bahamas for fishing. He bought custom sport coats and monogrammed cummerbunds. Maggie raided the Louis Vuitton store in Atlanta, buying what seemed like one of everything. A favorite was a $3,400 crossbody purse with a thick gold chain.
Word of Alex’s golden touch with the insurance companies was spreading. From all over South Carolina, new clients were making pilgrimages to Hampton, ready to sign whatever documents he pushed before them. A recommendation from someone in the courthouse led to his biggest case yet.
* * *
—
Arthur Badger Jr. was a widower who had watched his wife die in a car crash. Now he was struggling to raise their six children, all of them living in a mobile home. An investigator from the solicitor’s office handed him a piece of paper with the name and number of a lawyer.
Good news, the investigator said. I’ve lined up Alex Murdaugh to take your case.
Arthur had been driving with his wife, Donna, and some friends on a rural road in Allendale County when he started to pass a UPS truck. Suddenly the truck had swerved left, crashing into the passenger side of his Ford Expedition, killing Donna instantly.
Soon, like so many before him, Arthur eagerly signed a stack of forms in Alex’s office. He did not realize he had just surrendered the right to represent his own financial interests as well as the rights of his children and his dead wife’s estate.
“We’re here to help you,” the lawyer said.
When the case went to mediation, Alex negotiated a settlement with UPS. It was better that way, he told Arthur, rather than taking the case to trial, where a jury might have found Arthur partially at fault for trying to pass the truck. Alex told Arthur he’d gotten several million dollars for the children from their mother’s estate. Most of that money would be deposited in a trust to be disbursed to the children starting when they turned eighteen. Alex also told Arthur he’d arranged for him to receive $370,000, enough money for the family to move into a bigger mobile home.
What Alex did not reveal was that the settlement from UPS’s insurance company totaled roughly $8 million, and Arthur was immediately entitled to nearly all of it. Alex also did not tell Arthur he’d secured $1.325 million for himself personally, four times the amount Alex had mentioned. Based on the powers Arthur had signed over to him, Alex set about spending the extra money his client was due, including $152,000 to repay some of what he’d already stolen from the Plyler sisters.
Alex also did not reveal that he had taken nearly $5 million in legitimate fees on the Badger settlements in addition to what he stole.
Through it all, the Badgers struggled to make ends meet. Arthur fell so far behind on his property taxes that the family was threatened with eviction. Arthur hired Alex again to fight the eviction. He also took out a series of short-term, high-interest “lawyer loans” arranged by Alex, putting him on the hook for $50,000 in principal and interest to Palmetto State Bank. For a while, Arthur ignored the flyers that came in the mail offering cash for his children’s future settlement payments, a common predatory scheme run by outfits called structured settlement factoring companies. But when he got desperate enough, Arthur sold his youngest children’s trust accounts one after another, a total of $2.8 million in future payments, for $200,000 cash.
What choice did he have? “We needed the money,” he said.
Alex was adjusting the Murdaugh template. In some ways, his deceptions followed the path laid seventy years before when his great-grandfather allowed the up train to take him down, gambling that his suicide would be ruled an accident. But there was a crucial difference. Randolph Sr. had sacrificed his own life to cheat a rich and ruthless railroad. Alex was stealing millions from poor people to indulge his appetite for private jets and luxury vacations and his endless supply of pills, all of it for himself.
* * *
—
Alania and Hannah Plyler remained unaware of what their lawyer was doing with their money. The sisters did not realize Alex had stolen from their settlement accounts at the bank, or that he had begun replenishing those amounts with money he was stealing from the Badgers. Ultimately, Alex did repay all of the money he’d taken from the Plyler accounts. But the girls were still minors, and until they reached eighteen, he maintained tight control of their money through his friend at the bank, Russell Laffitte.
The sisters’ living situation had been precarious ever since the death of their mother and brother. Soon it grew desperate. For a while they continued staying with their father at his parents’ house, but their grief-stricken father was often drunk and angry. Eventually the tension grew so high the girls moved out. They shuttled from the house of one family member to the next, sleeping on couches, carrying whatever they owned in plastic bins and garbage bags. They were receiving their mother’s Social Security benefits, roughly $1,000 a month, with most of that money going to whomever they were staying with. The families who were housing them were poor as well, and the arrival of the two sisters often triggered more tensions. Life felt tenuous, as there was no place they called home. Alania later recalled, “Whoever needed the thousand dollars that month the most was where my sister and I ended up living.”
The girls’ mother and brother were dead, and they had effectively lost their father and grandparents as well. On top of all that, they were being manipulated and cheated by the lawyer and the banker entrusted to protect them, men who mostly existed as voices on the phone. Any time the girls asked for money, they had to go through Laffitte, who made such requests as onerous as possible. When Hannah wanted to visit Disney World with a friend’s family—her first true vacation—Laffitte required the child to bring back receipts for every purchase. Alania, in high school by then, wanted to rent an apartment for her and her sister but couldn’t afford to. She had found a part-time job and needed a car to reach both school and the job. She found a used Mercury Capri for $1,750, but when she checked with Laffitte, he pressured her to buy a new Nissan Maxima for $31,000 with a loan from his bank at 18 percent interest. At one point, when Alania’s living arrangements became too volatile, she ended up sleeping in the Maxima. When Alania turned seventeen, Russell arranged for another loan so Alania could buy a house for herself and her sister. When the house burned down, she had no insurance for the contents. No one had told her she needed it.
For a long time, Alania believed she and her sister had lost everything in the crash. But then Alex Murdaugh and Russell Laffitte had taken control. “That’s when we really lost it all,” Alania said. “We lost our mom and our brother and basically traded it in for money. And then they took the money.”
All told, the two men stole $1.4 million from the Plylers while Alania kept bouncing checks. Years later, she still struggled to understand the lack of empathy required to commit such a betrayal.
“I can’t imagine doing dirty work like that,” Alania said. “I don’t have the conscience to do that.”
* * *
—
On October 11, 2011, Alex was hurrying through the paperwork on the Pinckney settlement, working hard to get his hands on the family’s millions, when he heard from Pamela Pinckney. She’d gotten a call from the nursing home.
“Hakeem,” someone told her, “has taken a turn for the worse.”
Hakeem was taken to the hospital but died a few hours later. For his family, his death was a loss beyond belief. For their lawyer, it was a serious inconvenience.
“Please call me,” Alex emailed Russell Laffitte. “911.”
The settlement had been reached four days earlier but had not yet been finalized with the court. The $10 million payout had been based on the likelihood that twenty-one-year-old Hakeem would require around-the-clock care for decades to come. It was a sad fact of personal injury law that Hakeem’s life was worth far less now that he was dead.
As usual, Alex had a plan. He instructed Laffitte to backdate the documents and submit the paperwork to the court as if nothing had changed. Alex’s fee would remain the same. There would be plenty extra to steal.
The ploy worked. The court approved the settlement, and the deal rolled forward. Pamela eventually received a settlement for her own injuries and part of what Hakeem was owed. The paperwork was voluminous but seemed in order. This was a common strategy for Alex—give his clients enough money to placate them and stave off any questions. Pamela’s niece received a settlement of $83,000 for injuries to her eye. She promptly bought a car and went about her normal life. She had no way of knowing she was owed a separate $325,000 settlement. Alex stole that $325,000, using $140,000 to pay back Hannah Plyler’s account just before she turned eighteen, and passing $100,000 to Russell Laffitte’s father, Charlie Laffitte, the chairman of the bank and Alex’s godfather. Charlie Laffitte would later say that money was to pay back a loan, but provided no documentation of it. Neither did he report it on his tax return. Lawyers would argue that it was a payment to look the other way as his son and godson used his bank to steal and launder money.
The summer after Hakeem died, Alex chartered a plane to take some friends and his older son, Buster, to Omaha, Nebraska, to watch the USC baseball team play in the College World Series. The Gamecocks played thrillingly, though they lost to the University of Arizona. Buster caught sight of USC’s star pitcher on a street corner and posed with him for a picture. On Facebook, Buster joked that it was the future USC Hall of Famer who was starstruck, saying, “Michael Roth wanted to take a picture with me!”
No one knew until much later that the flight to Omaha was paid for by funds stolen from the late Hakeem Pinckney.
Unaware that Alex had been defrauding her family, Pamela Pinckney hired him again to sue the nursing home. Mr. Alex said he’d do anything he could to help her and settled the wrongful death lawsuit out of court. It would be a decade before Pamela learned that Hakeem had died because his ventilator had come unplugged and stayed that way for thirty minutes, leaving him to suffocate. Her lawyer either didn’t know what had happened or hadn’t bothered to tell her. Pamela wasn’t sure which was worse.
* * *
—
Alex’s crimes were growing more bold. As the years rolled by with no one questioning him, he began to steal from more and more clients. Initially he stole from one to put money back into the account of another, robbing Peter to pay Paul. But after a while, he was no longer paying anyone back. He was just grabbing as much as he could from as many people as he could, not just from his clients but from his partners and business associates, too, many of them his friends.
“They say you’ve got two kinds of family, the family you were born with and the family you chose,” said one of the lawyers following the case. “Alex stole from both.”
By early 2013, when he robbed the Badgers, Alex had embezzled several million dollars. At the same time, he was making even larger amounts in his legitimate fees.
* * *
—
The money Alex made in the Badger case—some legitimate, some stolen—was crucial to helping him close the most significant deal of his life: buying a jewel of a property he had long coveted. Moselle, as it was called, was a huge tract of forest and farmland, swamp and timber stands, with more than two miles of frontage on the Salkehatchie River and a stately white home and a long tree-lined driveway. At 1,700 acres, the property was twice the size of Central Park.
Alex wanted to turn Moselle into his family’s homestead, much like his parents’ homestead at Almeda. But Moselle was bigger, the house was grander, and the claim to Murdaugh history went deep. Moselle was located in Islandton, a small rural community where the Murdaughs had settled after immigrating from Ireland on the eve of the American Revolution. His great-great-grandfather was buried in a family cemetery off a nearby dirt road. Alex wanted to make Moselle the centerpiece of his claim to the family legacy. But first he had to get his hands on it.
For years the property had been owned by Barrett Boulware, a lifelong shrimper who dabbled in land deals. Boulware started as a pinhooker, making lowball offers on land and timber to unsophisticated sellers, often poor Blacks, then selling the assets for a quick profit. He graduated to more sophisticated deals, buying waterfront real estate with as little money down as possible, betting he could subdivide or otherwise make it profitable before the note came due.
Alex had known Boulware all his life. Barrett’s father, a lawyer, had represented Alex’s grandfather when he was charged with bootlegging back in the 1950s. As a young lawyer himself, Alex had watched Barrett flipping properties and raking in the profits. When Barrett offered to bring him in as a partner on the land deals, Alex had jumped at the chance. Some of the deals had gone sideways, but their friendship remained intact.
Boulware was widely understood to be one of South Carolina’s most enterprising drug smugglers. It was not uncommon for shrimpers to be middlemen in the drug trade, with their access to open water, ability to travel from small uninhabited islands to the mainland without raising an eyebrow, and boats big enough to conceal things that need to be hidden. In the 1980s, Boulware had been charged as the kingpin of a pot smuggling ring, caught up in a federal sting investigation called Operation Jackpot, one of the earliest salvoes in the Reagan administration’s war on drugs. Boulware had been charged with conspiracy to possess and distribute seventeen tons of pot seized from one of his shrimp boats. The charges were dropped before the case went to trial when the key government witness stepped in front of a car and was killed. A few years later, when Boulware and his wife were pulled over in a traffic stop, police searched their car and found twenty-eight grams of cocaine and seven pounds of marijuana, some of it in his wife’s purse. They were convicted but did not serve time.
