Law in Popular Culture
Grisham on Dreier: Fiction Couldn’t Improve on Real-Life Accusations
Posted Jan 28, 2009, 07:11 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
Legal novelist and lawyer John Grisham says fiction couldn’t improve on newspaper accounts about lawyer Marc Dreier, accused of scamming hedge funds and other sophisticated investors out of $380 million.
Prosecutors have accused Dreier, being held on $20 million bond, of being “a Houdini of impersonation” who faked financial documents, posed as others and charmed his way into conference rooms for meetings with potential investors. Grisham calls newspaper accounts of the accusations against Dreier and his extravagant lifestyle “my favorite story” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.
“It’s incredible,” Grisham says in the interview. “Pretending to be someone else? Taking over a conference room? I knew something was wrong when I read about his 120-foot yacht. When you’ve got a yacht that big you’re living like a billionaire. And you can’t do that as a New York lawyer. I don’t care how big your firm is.”
But Grisham said he doesn’t think he’ll base his next novel on a character such as Dreier. “It’s already been covered so much,” he told the blog. “And I couldn’t make it any better. I couldn’t improve on it. The sushi restaurant [Dreier] owned? All the cars? The secretaries making $200,000 a year? It’s too much. When I see stuff like that my imagination just goes into overdrive.”
Grisham also told the blog that he corresponds with imprisoned Mississippi plaintiffs attorney Richard "Dickie" Scruggs, sentenced to five years in prison for conspiring to bribe a judge. Grisham said Scruggs is working with inmates to help them earn high school equivalency degrees and hanging out with “a white-collar crowd.”
Grisham has published a new novel, The Associate, described by one reviewer as "a devastating portrait of the big-time, big-bucks legal world."
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