Under watch: Oral Roberts’ son Richard, Brooke Astor’s son Anthony Marshall, Trial lawyer Richard F. Scruggs and Lawyer Stephen G. Yagman
Richard Roberts, son of school founder and televangelist Oral Roberts, who resigned from his position as president of Oral Roberts University. In a lawsuit filed by three dismissed university professors Roberts was accused of misspending university funds to support a lavish lifestyle, including allegations of a $39,000 shopping spree for Roberts’ wife, Lindsay Roberts, a $29,000 trip on the university jet to the Bahamas for one of their daughters, and the purchase of a stable of horses for their children. The resignation came on the heels of an amended lawsuit, which included an internal ministry report titled “Scandal Vulnerability Assessment,” documenting allegations of misconduct by the Roberts family. Among other indications that alcoholism is heavily involved somewhere, the detailed account alleges that Lindsay spent the night in the Oral Roberts University guesthouse with an underage male “on nine separate occasions.” The internal report, prepared by Richard Roberts’ sister-in-law, Stephanie Cantees, was found by an Oral Roberts University student while he was repairing Cantees’ laptop computer. The student provided a copy of the report to the professors. If there’s an addict in here somewhere, it wouldn’t be the first in the family: Roberts’ eldest son, Ronald Roberts, committed suicide in June 1982 at the age of 37 after a court order required him to get counseling at a drug treatment center.
Anthony Marshall, 83, son of the late philanthropist and Manhattan socialite Brooke Astor, charged with falsifying records, grand larceny and scheming to defraud his mother’s estate out of millions of dollars. The indictment alleges that Marshall and his former attorney, Francis X. Morrissey Jr., cooperated in forging Astor’s signature in a codicil to her will in which she left most of her $198 million fortune to Marshall rather than to step-children of subsequent marriages and his own son, Philip Marshall, 54. The point of interest to the addictionologist is Astor’s first husband and father of Marshall, New Jersey Republican councilman, assemblyman and state senator John Dryden Kuser, with whom her marriage was highlighted by Kuser’s “physical abuse, alcoholism and adultery.” She got lucky–he asked her to leave him, which she did in 1931 after dutifully waiting for the successful culmination of his New Jersey senatorial campaign, thereby enabling him to yet higher office. Soon after, she married Charles H. Marshall and, when he died in 1952, she married Vincent Astor of the famous Astor family. Marshall, who adopted his mother’s second husband’s surname at age 18, is accused by his son, Philip, of mistreating her, including an allegation of denying medical care and letting her sleep in her dilapidated Park Avenue residence on a couch reeking of urine, which triggered a criminal investigation leading to the indictments. The elder Marshall could easily spend the rest of his life behind bars–which, if convicted, would likely be due either to misbehaviors stemming from his own alcoholism or going through life as an untreated codependent to his long-dead father, from whom he may have learned awful lessons.
Trial lawyer Richard F. Scruggs, one of the richest men in Mississippi, accused of attempting to bribe a state judge presiding over a lawsuit involving millions in legal fees. Scruggs, who is related through marriage to Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate Trent Lott, was indicted with four others, including his lawyer son David Z. Scruggs. The five-some allegedly offered Mississippi Third Circuit Court Judge Henry L. Lackey (who cooperated with the federal government in the investigation) $50,000 for a favorable ruling over fees relating to the Scruggs Katrina Group Litigation Team, which has fought the insurance industry’s alleged failure to adequately reimburse homeowners for losses due to Hurricane Katrina. Scruggs’ fellow attorneys wonder why a man of his wealth and fame (he is known as one of the prime movers in class action lawsuits against the asbestos industry and for his role–dramatized in the 1999 film “The Insider”–in the government’s case in the 1990s against the tobacco industry, which settled for $248 billion) would allegedly risk so much over a few million dollars in legal fees. “It just boggles the mind,” said fellow trial attorney Jack Denton. “Here is a man who has had an enormous amount of success, who reached a level very few attorneys, if any, have reached. Why would he risk everything over a legal dispute over attorneys’ fees?” Only those few of us who grasp the most common root cause of egomania manifesting itself as overachievement, a need to win regardless of cost and (allegedly) felonious behaviors can answer this otherwise befuddling question. In the meantime, a fundraiser to be held at Scruggs’ home for Senator Hillary Clinton, in which former President Clinton was scheduled to appear, has been cancelled.
Lawyer Stephen G. Yagman, who made a career of suing law enforcement agencies, sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion, money laundering and bankruptcy fraud. He made the “Under Watch” section of the August 2007 Report, where you can read about his antics in a legal system that frequently pits addicts against addicts. The judge in the case, Stephen V. Wilson, concluded that Yagman had not only committed the crimes but also lied to cover his tracks. “Frankly, I was shocked by his testimony,” Wilson said, calling it “transparently untrue in so many areas.” The addiction aware would ask only how many of his cases were fought with similar fabrications. U.S. attorney Thomas P. O’Brien commented, “Mr. Yagman, who as an attorney had a special obligation to follow the rules, chose not to do so.” One mark of an alcoholic is acting like “The rules don’t apply to me,” clue # 7 in the chapter, “A Supreme Being Complex,” in How to Spot Hidden Alcoholics. As usual, we’ll give Mr. Yagman the benefit of the doubt and assume that alcoholism explains–but does not excuse his behaviors.