It Should Not Happen in America: From Selma to Wall Street—'A Journey of Fire and Faith'

By Richard Scrushy

This is the life story of a man who grew up in a small Southern town in a Christian family with all odds against him. He had visions and dreams of great businesses. He followed those dreams and rose to become the chairman of several multi-billion dollar companies, all three in New York, two of which were Fortune 500 companies, and one of which was in the S&P 500. Everything he built and gained in his twenty-five years of building businesses was taken away from him and his family through vicious attacks from dishonest prosecutors, judges, and plaintiff attorneys. It should not have happened in America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: Jun 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781588384447

Richard Scrushy

RICHARD SCRUSHY was born in 1952 in Selma, Alabama to working-class parents, himself going to work at a local hamburger-and-milkshake stand and as a hotel bellboy at the young age of twelve. After years of hard work as a young man, Scrushy built healthcare giant HealthSouth in Birmingham. This is but one example of his business prowess, as he has founded three billion-dollar companies. In 2004, twenty years after founding HealthSouth, Scrushy was tried for and acquitted of thirty-six counts of fraud. The former HealthSouth CEO was also indicted (and ultimately convicted) for bribery alongside then-governor Don Siegelman. Now released and rebuilding his life, Scrushy sets the record straight in It Should Not Happen in America.

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Preface

It should not have happened in America.

It certainly should not have happened twice.

But it did. And there is power in the story. It needs to be told.

I have a memory from that first horrible experience. It is a memory that comes back to me often. The date was November 4, 2004. Late on the afternoon of that day, I was sitting in a car with my wife just outside the gate to our home in Birmingham, Alabama. Though our children and the accumulations of a successful business career were all inside that home, we were forbidden to enter. Armed guards kept us not only from our possessions but also from our loved ones.

We were barred from entering our home because FBI agents were raiding us in search of evidence for a crime I had not committed. It did not matter that other men had already confessed to that crime. It did not matter that months earlier a federal judge had already said that prosecutors were in search of a mythical pink elephant, that there was no evidence I was guilty.

None of this made any difference. Though I lived in a country in which one is supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, I was presumed guilty and then punished. My assets were frozen. My possessions were seized. FBI agents rifled through my home, even digging into underwear drawers, photographing and cataloguing everything I owned.

There was no reason for such tactics. Early in the morning of that same day, I had voluntarily surrendered myself to the FBI. I had heard they were coming for me. An acquaintance of mine had been called by a friend of his who worked in the FBI. The man was trying to arrange dinner with my friend and said in passing, Yeah, I’ll be in town. We’re flying to Birmingham to get some guy named Scrushy tomorrow. I knew then what was coming, and I peacefully turned myself in at the FBI headquarters downtown.

Voluntarily surrendering myself should have set the tone for my treatment. It did not. I was immediately fingerprinted and shackled. When I complained that the shackles were too tight, I was told to deal with it. My glasses were taken. A little laminated card printed with Psalm 91 was also taken. I was left in a cell for hours.

All of this happened even though I was not only innocent but had lived a productive life, played by the rules, and prospered in fulfillment of the American dream. I had founded HealthSouth, one of the most successful healthcare companies in American history. My work and energy assured quality medical care for millions, employed tens of thousands, and generated wealth that I used to fund philanthropic endeavors in my hometown of Birmingham and around the country. None of this made a difference as I sat shackled in a jail cell, with my life seemingly destroyed.

IT SHOULD NOT HAVE happened in America.

It should not have happened in part because, as I later discovered, it was an elaborate drama played out for political purposes. The driving force behind this treatment of me was an ambitious United States attorney named Alice Martin. She had set her sights on making a name for herself in an age when prosecutors fashioned reputations by going after highly visible white-collar criminals. The scandals of Enron and WorldCom filled the news in those days, and ambitious young prosecutors dreamed of the power and fame that would grace them if they could bag the big game of a corrupt corporate CEO. Alice Martin dreamed these same dreams.

She had reason to. She had been encouraged by powerful people. And she knew how to play the game. During the months that led to the raid on my home and my time in jail, my company, HealthSouth, had been under investigation. Alice Martin knew how to turn what should have been a quiet, thorough investigation into a media circus. She openly bragged of her relationship with the press and spent hours over cocktails courting their favor. Media outlets around the country received anonymous emails trashing me and asserting as fact what was unproven. We later learned that these emails came from the U.S. Justice Department, Alice Martin’s employer.

But there was more and far worse. It was later revealed that during these months of investigation, Alice Martin was summoned to Karl Rove’s office. Rove, of course, is the man who was called Bush’s Brain. He was once the special assistant to the president of the United States. Rove told Martin that if she would prepare to indict me, President George W. Bush would fly to Birmingham on November 3, 2004, a Monday, and make a speech against white-collar crime. The next day, Martin could announce her indictment of me. It would make the Bush administration look tough on crime and make Martin into a hero. She would be rewarded with a judgeship and have her picture taken with the president.

This is exactly how it happened. On November 3, Bush flew to Birmingham and made a fiery speech against white-collar crime. The next day, Alice Martin indicted me for a crime I had not committed.

I don’t know if she had her picture taken with the president. What I do know is that after a five-month trial and more than thirty million dollars in legal fees, a jury of my peers found me not guilty of the thirty-six charges against me. My acquittal came on June 28, 2005, a day I will remember the rest of my life.

It should have stopped there. I had endured enough for a lifetime. The lies, the attempts to humiliate me, the corruption, and the judicial misconduct should have ended with that jury verdict.

It didn’t.

WITHIN WEEKS OF THE end of that first trial, my attorneys learned that I was about to be indicted in an entirely different matter. I was about to undergo one of the most torturous, destructive, and utterly un-American experiences of political persecution and judicial corruption on record.

This occurred because I got caught in a crossfire. On one side of me was Don Siegelman, the popular Democratic governor of Alabama who was a rising star on the national political scene. On the other side of me were Republican federal attorneys, again in league with Karl Rove, who were determined to stop Governor Siegelman’s political rise. They were also determined to protect Republican gambling interests, as I’ll explain in the coming pages.

Why was I caught in the middle? I had done two things these Republican federal attorneys decided to use against Siegelman. I contributed to a charity. I also agreed to stay on a state board at the governor’s request, a board I had already served on under three previous Alabama governors.

That’s it. That is all I had done. Yet the Republican federal attorneys asserted that my contribution to the charity was a bribe paid to Siegelman so that I could stay on that state board. Siegelman and I were indicted on federal charges of political corruption.

The trial that followed was a perfect demonstration of political persecution by means of the judiciary. The mere legal reasoning behind the charges was so flawed that dozens of attorneys general around the country registered their concerns and loudly warned of the dire consequences. A Friend of the Court brief was even filed with the United States Supreme Court by a distinguished body of jurists: a former U.S. attorney general, two congressmen, a half dozen special counselors to the president, and a solicitor general. They pleaded with the Supreme Court to intervene: The Court should reject this unwarranted expansion of the law so that officials who faithfully carry out their duties need not fear prosecution for granting the access that is essential to a representative democracy. That’s how serious the distortion of the law was in my case. Yet the Supreme Court refused to act.

Not only was the law perverted in my trial, but corruption reigned. A judge who was later dismissed from the bench and sent to jail allowed prosecutors to violate judicial procedure, allowed jurors to violate confidentiality, and allowed virtually nothing that my defense attorneys requested.

The result was predictable. Governor Don Siegelman and I were found guilty. We were marched off to prison. I served five years in a federal prison for a crime I did not commit. Siegelman was sentenced to eight years. He was referred to as America’s most famous political prisoner.

AS SHOCKING AS IS the tale of these two trials, what you are about to read is not an exercise in revenge, bitterness, or even regret. In fact, the most important things I want to say in these pages are not even about my two trials. Though I will describe my legal odyssey, my goal is to explain how a man can endure such torments and emerge whole, happy, and truly free.

I must tell of my judicial persecution because corruption and vice embedded in the American legal system must stop. No American should have to endure what I have. Our laws should not be perverted. Our judges should not be allowed to serve their own interests in their rulings. Our legal system should never be put in the service of a single political party.

Yet while the tale of my legal trials must be told, the more important story is what God has done with my life and the truths that have allowed me to survive and to thrive.

You see, my greatest pain does not come from what I endured, how much money I had to spend to defend myself, the years I unjustly spent in prison, or even what my family suffered. What I most regret is that the misguided indictments for crimes I did not commit threaten to obscure the valuable lessons to be learned from my life. Though I am no more important than any other man, I have been allowed a life that could serve as a well of inspiration for those who know the truth of it. I want this story told for the good of those who are willing to hear it and, perhaps, for the good of our nation.

I think it is important for people to know that I was born in a middle-class family in Selma, Alabama. I want them to understand the values I absorbed from an immigrant grandfather and the heroic soul who was my father. I want them to know how small and insignificant I was and the mistakes I made but also to know how faith in God, character, and hard work helped me rise in life. My story should be told not because it is about me but because it is a testimony to God’s grace.

What happened to me should not have happened in America, but it did. And since it did, I now have an opportunity: not to whine, but to proclaim; not to look back in bitterness but to look forward in faith that there is a God who rules in the affairs of men, that he is not done with America, and that my story may inspire some to live the dream God has for their lives.

1

The Seedbed of Selma

In the life of most every man, there are those large personalities—those heroes and inspirational figures—who make an imprint when he is young and shape what he will ultimately become. To understand the man, you must first understand the impact of these giants upon his soul. In my own life, the heroes’ marks were made by my father and grandfather.

My grandfather, Marin Screcui, was born in Romania on a farm nestled against the banks of the Danube River. The dark clouds that hung over the Europe of his youth must explain, in part, the unusual way he ended up in America. When he turned seventeen, his father gave him the equivalent of two hundred dollars to go to college in Germany. This was a huge sacrifice. Not only was that a sizeable sum in the first decade of the 1900s, but by letting his son go to college, my great-grandfather was giving up invaluable help he needed on the farm.

As Grandfather Screucui made his way to Germany, he met some men who told him that if he would give them his money they would put him on a ship to America. In one of those amazing moments that decide destinies, Marin took them up on their offer. He soon discovered his passage would be simply as a stowaway. He slept in the cargo area, avoided the crew, and had almost nothing to eat.

Despite the miserable conditions of his voyage, he joined the millions of immigrants who steamed into New York Harbor and went through Ellis Island in the early part of the twentieth century. As many immigrants names were, his was Americanized from Screcui to Scrushy, and somewhere along the way he became George instead of Marin. I have often imagined what the Statue of Liberty must have meant to a seventeen-year-old Romanian boy thousands of miles from home with no money, no job, and knowing no one in the bustling land called America.

The details of my grandfather’s early life in America are sketchy, but they have lived on in our family lore. He worked his way down the coast and ended up in Baltimore. The only English word he knew was beans, which he probably used often to ask for food. He made his way south by working odd jobs and acquired his thickly accented English along the way. He served in the Army during the latter part of World War I and was honorably discharged on March 14, 1919. Not long afterward, he found himself in Grady, Alabama, south of Montgomery, where he met the woman who would be his wife and my grandmother. When Maude and George Scrushy married, her father gave them a house and some land. They would live on that land, raising children, cattle, and crops, until the end of their lives.

My grandfather was one of the most amazing men I have met. I stayed often with him and my grandmother when I was a boy, and I learned a great deal from him. Though he never learned to read English well and never got a driver’s license, he taught lessons by proverb and by example that would guide me all my days. He learned well from his trials—from his passage to America, his hard life on the docks, and his time in the Army—and he always sought to pass the benefits of his experience on to me. I realize now that this is how wisdom was passed from generation to generation down through the centuries, but when I was a boy I thought my grandfather had been specially sent to prepare me for life.

He used to call me Bubba, and once he said, Bubba, always stay in good physical shape. When I asked why, he told me that people will always try to rob you and you must stay in good shape to fight them off. I could just picture him fighting off a thief who had just lunged at him from the shadows of some eastern city. Such experiences marked him and he wanted to teach me how to be a man before I was tested as he had been.

My grandfather’s greatness was matched in my childhood eyes by that of the grand lady he loved so dearly. My grandmother could match my grandfather for toughness, as she proved by giving birth to eight children—five boys and three girls. To feed her large, hungry family, she would rise early each morning and cook a hundred biscuits. Not one would be left when breakfast was done. This was only the beginning of her routine, though, because at the dawn each day my grandfather would go down to a pond on their property and catch a fish—usually a bream—for his breakfast. My grandmother would not only feed her eight children but would prepare eggs, bream, banana peppers, grits, and biscuits for her hard-working husband.

They were an inspiring pair and loved each other dearly. In fact, when my grandmother died, my grandfather was so lonely that he lost much of his will to live. When I dropped by for a visit in those days, he would say, Bubba, I’m so lonely. This continued until the day he called the family together and said, I’ve seen your mother and it is time for me to leave. Then he simply died. We asked the family doctor what he died of and the doctor said, Nothing. He just went. I have always believed that he died of a broken heart.

I take the time to describe my grandfather because he had a profound impact on the man I would become. He was constantly saying to me, Always do the right thing. I believe this philosophy grew from his faith. He was a devoted Christian who came to America as a Greek Orthodox believer but attended a Church of Christ in Alabama because it was close to his house and he could walk. On his deathbed, though, he called for an Orthodox priest. Whatever his church preferences, he always believed in the moral universe that his Christian faith painted for him. He believed a real man not only does the right thing but he does things right. He embedded these lessons in me, and I have never stopped being thankful for his imprint on my young life.

IF MY GRANDFATHER INSPIRED my early character, it was my father who shaped it. As the oldest of my grandfather’s eight children, much responsibility fell on my father, Gerald. In those days, which would have been the 1930s and 1940s, fathers and sons farmed the land together. My father’s world was filled with cows, mules, plows, farm duties, and lessons learned from sweat and blisters.

It can be heartbreaking to think of the sacrifices people made in those days. Though my father was virtually chained to his duties on the family farm, he still found time to become a wonderful baseball player. People said he could throw a baseball harder than anyone around. Like many boys of those years, he dreamed of playing professionally. Maybe he could have. He was offered a chance to play in the minor leagues but had to turn down the opportunity because of his responsibilities on the farm. I know he is not the only gifted young man who surrendered his dreams to his family’s needs, but I am moved by what it must have meant to him as a young boy.

My father eventually took a job with National Cash Register in Montgomery. He learned to repair NCR office machines and cash registers and became known as one of the best in the business. NCR even pulled him out of retirement to fix machines the younger guys didn’t know how to handle.

My father was my model of manliness. He never drank, smoked, or cussed. He was always clean and professional. I often went with him when he traveled to repair cash registers and bank bookkeeping machines, and I noticed that people loved to see him coming. He was beyond polite: he was pleasant and a joy to be around. He was also competent and did his work with excellence and pride. I noticed that people valued and respected him. It made me want to be like him.

As I got older, I realized that these virtues grew from his deep faith. My father was a devoted Christian and it was easy to see that what he was arose naturally from what he