Kelley Drye’s Don D. Buchwald, yesterday’s Law Blog lawyer of the day, is earning his keep.

Working for $100 an hour as a court-appointed attorney for Ashley Dupr, the prostitute and aspiring singer said to have liaised with New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer in February, Buchwald defended his client’s privacy in a email to reporters this evening.

The email says Dupr was “thrust into the public glare at age 22 without her consent” and that “some publications, in violation of journalistic norms, have used the occasion of Governor Spitzers political misfortunes as an excuse to exploit Ms. Duprs persona for commercial purposes by, among other things, displaying a montage of suggestive photographs of Ms. Dupr that has nothing to do with the Spitzer story,” and in “violation of her privacy fights and federal copyright law.” It adds that unnamed commercial websites have also done the same.

The email says “we feel constrained to put the media on notice that as counsel for Ms. Dupr we will take all steps that we deem necessary or appropriate to protect Ms. Dupr from any unwarranted exploitation of her name, picture, voice or likeness for purposes of profit.”

A person familiar with the matter said the statement is a not-so-thinly-veiled reference to today’s spread in the New York Post, which by our count had at least six images of Dupr in its print edition and 20 online. The Post wrote that the photos were “taken by a pal for a modeling portfolio.”

Howard Rubenstein, the New York Post’s spokesperson, said the Post had no comment.

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Oh, had we known to be down in Oxford, Miss., today! Alas, we’ve tried to make up for our absence by tracking down the transcripts of both Dickie Scruggs’s and Sid Backstrom’s plea hearings, which get you inside the action, at least a bit. (Click here for Scruggs’s and here for Backstrom’s.)

Highlights:

A Bribe? No! An Earwig! At one point, the following colloquy broke out between Scruggs and Judge Neal Biggers:

THE COURT : All right. Mr. Scruggs, then, did you do what the prosecutor just said you did, as far as your acts in this charge are concerned?

THE DEFENDANT : I joined the conspiracy later in the game. It’ s not exactly as the prosecutor allocuted, in that there was no intent to bribe the judge; it was an intent to earwig the judge, Judge Lackey; and that that - - the earwigging idea was not originated by me or anyone in our firm, although we went along with it, at the beginning of - - sometime in March.

We’re not sure if it’s a regional thing or a generational thing, but we had no idea what this meant. Turns out, it makes sense. According to Merriam-Webster, the word has two definitions.

1: earwig, n,: any of numerous insects (order Dermaptera) having slender many-jointed antennae and a pair of cerci resembling forceps at the end of the body (pictured);

2. earwig, v: to annoy or attempt to influence by private talk.

The Nagging DeLaughter Problem Keep in mind, Law Blog Loyals, the in the midst of the situation with Judge Lackey and Scruggs, another bribery allegation emerged, one involving Hinds County Judge Bobby DeLaughter.

Quick recap: In the early 1990s, two former partners of Scruggs, Alwyn Luckey and William Roberts Wilson Jr., sued Scruggs over attorneys fees earned in asbestos litigation. After years of litigation in the fee dispute, the case was assigned to Mississippi judge Bobby DeLaughter. Early last year, shortly after Scruggs hired Booneville, Miss., laywer Joey Langston to work on the case, Judge DeLaughter made a key ruling in Scruggss favor.

A couple of months ago, Joey Langston agreed to plead guilty to conspiring to bribe Judge DeLaughter, with the promise that Scruggs would pass the judge’s name along for a federal judgeship.

Scruggs has not been indicted in the DeLaughter case, but federal prosecutors were all set to use evidence in the DeLaughter case in the Lackey case.

In today’s hearing, prosecutor Thomas Dawson hinted that Scruggs might not have seen the last of the DeLaughter situation:

I want to make it painfully clear that the investigation with respect to the Wilson matter that is currently under investigation - - that this plea agreement and this plea has no affect with respect to any charging decision or subsequent prosecution with respect to that case.

In other words, Dickie’s legal troubles might not be over.

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It’s been one heckuva heavy week. Two of America’s most famous and controversial lawyers — men who built careers under the mantle of fighting corporate wrongdoing — have crashed to earth, felled by what many consider the petty machinations of the power-drunk, two of the deadliest of the deadly sins, lust and avarice.

Now we let out our breath, and thank our loyal LB readership for sticking with us. But before we ring the bell and go home to rest up for what’s bound to be another big week of legal news, here’s a roundup of some smaller but worthy legal stories of late.

Craigslist Not Liable for Discrimination: A consortium of 45 law firms, known as the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, sued Craigslist two years ago, arguing that the Internet classifieds company violated the Fair Housing Act by publishing discriminatory housing postings with restrictions such as “no minorities.” Today, Judge Amy St. Eve of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, affirmed the district court ruling that Craigslist isn’t liable for its users since it’s “not the author of the ads and could not be treated as the ’speaker’ of the posters’ words.”

“The South Pole Diet:” That was the title of a cover story that was scheduled to run in the December issue of The Knights Circular, the newspaper of Florida’s Monarch High School. Reportedly, the story, an Onion-like parody, was about the health problems Santa Claus suffers because of chronic overfeeding by Americans. Another story told the faux tale of feminists protesting Santa’s trademark “Ho! Ho! Ho!”

But the December issue of The Knight Circular never reached its readership. School administrators, who claimed the the paper could’ve been misconstrued by people who don’t attend Monarch High, quashed the issue. According to Mike Hiestand, the legal consultant for the Student Press Law Center in Virginia, a 1988 Supreme Court opinion permits high school administrators to suppress a paper if its content is “inconsistent with the shared values of a civilized social order.”

Who Put Steroids in my Vitamins?! Last week, former San Diego State and NFL running back, Femi Ayanbadejo (pictured), filed a lawsuit in San Diego Superior Court against Nevada-based ALR Industries, a supplement company, and Nutrimart, the distributor, which shut down recently. (Here’s the report.) I took a supplement that had a banned substance in it that was not listed on the bottle, Ayanbadejo reportedly said. I know a lot of guys have been using that excuse. But I said from the beginning that I was going to sue the company and make sure that whoever was responsible would face the music.

He said the stigma of testing positive in January 2007 has helped keep him from getting back in the league. According to the report, most tainted supplement cases involve nandrolone. Ayanbadejo tested positive for a form of nandrolone. We reached out to ALR Industries and will let you know if we hear back.

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Dickie Scruggs’s plea, reported on the Law Blog and in the WSJ earlier today, is surprising for a couple reasons, not least of which is the Zach factor. Many speculated that Scruggs would offer himself up to the feds in return for an agreement to let his son, Zach, off the hook. But here we are: Scruggs has copped a plea and faces five years, and Zach — at least for now — is still heading to trial, the only one of five defendants not to plea.

Was the evidence against Scruggs & Son so strong that Dickie didn’t have the leverage to get his son sprung?

“All we can tell from the fact that he plead and his son didnt was that there was no such deal struck,” Daniel R. Alonso, a white-collar litigator at Kaye Scholer, told the Law Blog. “The government felt it had a strong enough case that there was no advantage to offering such a deal. The government likely believes they were both guilty and that both should be held accountable.” (The plea deadline for Zach is Monday. His lawyer hasn’t responded to a Journal request for comment.)

Alonso, a former EDNY prosecutor, added that judicial bribery cases are notoriously difficult to make, and that it’s rare to see such strong evidence in a bribery case. “We like to think theyre not as common, but when there is a corrupt judge or party, its often pretty hard to get solid evidence because of the secrecy involved,” said Alonso. “Often theyll use intermediaries so they can claim plausible deniability, or the corrupt judge will have a loyal lieutenant who wont talk. Usually, you need either a cooperator inside, a tape recording, or solid documentary evidence. In this case, they had a cooperating judge” — Judge Henry Lackey. “From all I can see, it looks like the government did a great job.”

LB Readers: You’ve stayed with us on the Mess in Mississippi for months. Now, resolution is here. Too much, too little, or just right?

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A few months ago, we attended a goodbye party for an old law-firm colleague — a seventh-year associate who was leaving the firm to take an in-house job at a pharma company. As the liquor flowed, whispers grew about fewer hours, improved quality of life, and, of course, a better paycheck.

It got us wondering: Just how good is the money at an in-house job?

This morning, Zachary Zaharek, the senior corporate counsel at First American CoreLogic, a real-estate data company in Southern California, passed along the results of a recent survey that offers partial answers to those questions. The Southern California chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel, which Zaharek heads, polled its members on everything from signing bonuses to company revenue to male vs. female pay. The poll surveyed 324 in-house lawyers, including 132 who ID’d themselves as general counsel. Of the members who responded to the geographically-limited survey, we learned the following about in-house jobs:

• Average 2007 Salary + Bonus for In-House Attorneys: $181,810 + $56,132
• Average 2007 Salary + Bonus for General Counsel: $220,164 + $82,640
• Male vs. Female Pay for In-House Jobs: Men were paid a cash salary of 13% more than women in 2007 (and men hold 60% of general counsel jobs.)
• Private Company vs. Public Company Pay: Counsel at private companies were paid slightly better than their public counterparts in 2007.

We called Zaharek to get his take on the firm/in-house debate. “An associate is getting grinded with billable hour requirements, and working weekends and late at night,” said Zaharek, who was a bankruptcy attorney at Malcolm Cisneros before going in-house. “A corporate counsel doesn’t have that. Also, when you’re a litigator, you’re looking back at history and asking what should the parties have done. As an in-house lawyer, you’re looking ahead and asking how you can help the company avoid pitfalls.”

But it’s not all peaches and cream as a company lawyer. “At a law firm you have a book of business, which is maybe 10 clients,” explained Zaharek. “At a corporation, you only have one client. So the risk is that if the company goes insolvent, or gets merged or bought, then there goes your client.”

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Update: More on Mr. Scruggs. Prosecutors are going to recommend five years for him, 2.5 for co-defendant Sidney Backstrom, according to the wires. Zach is apparently going to trial.

See the plea docs here and here.

* * *

So much for Manic Mississippi Monday. That day, March 31, was supposed to be the start-date of the trial for Dickie Scruggs, who stands accused of conspiring to bribe a Mississippi judge in a lawsuit involving a fee-dispute with former cohorts. For earlier posts on L’Affaire Scruggs, click here.

But, on the heels of this morning’s WSJ front-pager about Scruggs, wire reports have confirmed that Scruggs, represented in the case by John Keker, has copped a plea to a charge of conspiracy in the judicial bribery case. According to the AP, the surprise plea came this morning during a hearing in Oxford, Miss. on pretrial matters. Co-defendant Sidney Backstrom also pleaded guilty to
conspiring to bribe a judge. Scruggs’s son, Zach, also is charged in the case but has not entered a plea.

The three were accused of conspiring to bribe a Lafayette County Circuit Court judge for a favorable ruling in a dispute over $26.5 million in legal fees from a mass settlement of Hurricane Katrina cases.

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The Mann Act? Structuring? Assisting money-laundering? Many legal beagles think these possible charges against Spitzer are, even with favorable facts, mostly a reach. Why, if he was merely paying a fee-for-service, and had no actual knowledge of the money laundering operation, would the Feds be so interested in Spitzer (aside from alleged political motivations)?

Today the NYT suggests the fallen governor may be in deeper legal waters. The NYT says federal prosecutors are investigating whether the governor used campaign funds in connection with meetings with prostitutes, including payments for hotels or ground transportation, citing three people with knowledge of the investigation. It’s not entirely clear if the concern is that he had trysts on what might be considered non-essential government trips, or whether he might have used government funds to pay for services. According to the piece, Spitzer told his lawyer, Michele Hirshman, that he used prostitutes only in the last eight months and that he never spent campaign or public money in that regard.

Meanwhile, the NY Post is reporting that a local probe is underway into the security detail designed to protect the governor on out of town trips.

Earlier this week, Sharon McCarthy, a former chief of the violent crimes unit at the Manhattan U.S. attorneys office and now a defense lawyer at Kostelanetz & Fink, told the Law Blog that some of the most pertinent questions about Spitzer are not whether he helped launder money or illegally structure transactions, but rather whether he used public money to support a prostitution habit.

Its the source of the funds, McCarthy said. We dont know what funds were used for hotel rooms or train tickets, or if public employees made reservations for him. Did he [take trips] to get to places earlier than he should have?

The Times points out that it is illegal to use campaign money for personal expenses and that Spitzer, a Democrat, has championed campaign-finance reform and often excoriated Republicans, saying their fund-raising practices were responsible for the haze and smog surrounding the capital.

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A full week has passed since the much-hyped trial of Hollywood PI Anthony Pellicano started, and, yet, we haven’t written about it since describing the opening statements from last Thursday. Why? Well, nothing much has happened; even the trial’s hometown paper is taking a pass.

“It’s kind of yesterday’s news,” producer Bill Mechanic told the LAT on Saturday. “There were all these rumors a couple of years ago that it would explode, and it seemingly never did.” Apparently, having a C-list of tinseltown glitterati attached to the case isn’t enough. Pellicano would likely need to turn on his former clients in order to reinspire the public’s interest in his case. Meanwhile, many of those who benefited the most from Pellicano’s allegedly surreptitious ways — his clients — are being used against him by the prosecution.

Still, it’s not all hum-drum at the Pellicano trial. Yesterday, comedian Garry Shandling took the stage stand to describe how it felt to be on the receiving end of Pellicano’s investigative tactics. Among the first questions AUSA Kevin Lally asked Shandling was to name his occupation. The star of “The Larry Sanders Show” paused, as if to acknowledge he hadn’t been working much lately. “That’s a bad sign,” said Shandling, drawing laughs from jurors and the courtroom crowd. (Here’s the NYT report, and here’s a story from the NYP.)

Shandlings testimony focused on a $100 million lawsuit he brought against Paramount chairman Brad Grey in 1998. In that suit, Shandling accused Grey — who before going to Paramount was Shandlings manager — of “triple dipping,” or taking half-ownership of Shandling’s HBO show, “The Larry Sanders Show,” plus a producers fee, plus commissions on Shandlings acting and writing fees. In the suit, prosecutors say Pellicano, on behalf of Grey, bribed cops for information about Shandling from police databases. (Grey’s lawyer in that suit was Bert Fields, a frequent user of Pellicano’s services.)

In a brief cross, Pellicano, representing himself, reportedly tried and failed to get Shandling to say that Grey had helped make him a success. Pellicano asked Shandling who had negotiated his deal with HBO for The Larry Sanders Show. But Shandling said he sold the show to an HBO executive in one phone call. Brad Grey had nothing to do with it till he said, Ill take half of the show, Shandling said.

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First thing’s first this morning: A big LB shout-out to the SDNY prosecutors. We’ve been so wrapped up with Spitzer’s fancy defense team, Don Buchwald’s assignment of the century, and, courtesy of the NY Post, this morning’s revelation that “Kristen” sports a belly tattoo that reads “tutela valui” (”fair value” in Latin), that we forgot all about the government lawyers working the other side of what might be the most high-profile prostitution bust of all time.

Thanks to LB colleague Amir Efrati, we can shine a light on Boyd M. Johnson III, the head of the public-corruption unit at the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, which last week brought the case against four defendants on prostitution and money-laundering charges.

Johnson, 40, prosecuted a number of high-profile international drug figures — such as Afghan heroin kingpin Baz Mohammad — before being appointed to jump-start the public-corruption unit in 2006, the report says. Incidentally, the same unit was once run by Michele Hirshman, the Paul Weiss partner who’s now representing Spitzer.

As a former chief of the international narcotics-trafficking unit of the U.S. attorney’s office and in his current role, Johnson developed close ties to FBI agents, including those in the agency’s public-corruption squad in New York, known as C14, which investigated the prostitution ring. Those relationships are important because agents can bring cases to prosecutors in multiple districts.

Johnson, a married father of two, is a Connecticut native who graduated from Hamilton College and Cornell Law School. He joined Gibson Dunn in the mid-1990’s after a federal-judicial clerkship in California. Randy Mastro, a Gibson Dunn partner and the former deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani, supervised Johnson as an associate, and says that, when the “young star” was considering a move to the U.S. attorney’s office, he tried to convince him to stay by telling him he had a good chance of making partner. He says Johnson responded that being a prosecutor “is just something I really want to do.” Mastro added: “He’s a very affable guy, but don’t let that affability fool you — he’s a very tenacious, determined litigator.”

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Manic Mississippi Monday is rapidly approaching. That’s March 31, the start-date of the trial for Dickie Scruggs. For all those new to the story, or for all those old readers wondering how Scruggs may have gotten himself into into this situation, check out this page-one WSJ story today. For earlier posts on L’Affaire Scruggs, click here.

This situation is this: Scruggs has been accused of conspiring to bribe a Mississippi judge in a lawsuit involving a fee-dispute with former cohorts. But it’s not the first fee-dispute of Scruggs’s career. Far from it. For years, he battled two former colleagues from his asbestos days, and after his mammoth tobacco wins of the late 1990s, he squabbled with a handful of folks over fees.

Some, like Alwyn Luckey and Roberts Wilson, fought him tooth-and-nail. Others, like Pete Johnson and Michael T. Lewis, opted for less litigious routes. I “decided I’d rather spend whatever time I have alive at peace and not in court fighting for money,” explained Johnson, who claims that Scruggs promised him 10% of the legal fees from big tobacco, then reneged.

Scruggs declined to comment on the story. But his lawyer, John Keker, says that in many instances, the fault lies elsewhere. “In these situations people want more money,” he told the WSJ. “Flies come around buzzing and think that their contribution is more than it is.”

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