S. C. Gwynne joined Texas Monthly as an executive editor in June of 2000. Prior to that, he was Austin bureau chief for Time magazine, responsible for its coverage of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and the Mexico border. He moved to Austin in 1994 from Time's headquarters in New York where he was a senior editor in charge of the business section. He first joined Time in 1988 as a correspondent in the Los Angeles bureau covering California and the western states. He was later Detroit bureau chief and national economics correspondent in Time's Washington, D.C., bureau. Gwynne was co-author of Time's first cover story on George W. Bush. Subjects of his Texas Monthly stories include Tom Craddick, Karl Rove, terrorism in Houston, and Big Bend. Gwynne is a 1974 graduate of Princeton University and received a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1977.
The idea for "Dr. Evil" came out of a short article in the Houston Chronicle that was based on the news that Scheffey's medical license had been revoked.The reporter recapped the essentials of Scheffey's career-the lawsuits, the huge settlements. I had never heard of Scheffey before, but I was amazed that he had been able to continue to practice in spite of the huge number of complaints, lawsuits, and patient deaths.The $845,000 fine was impressive but it begged the question:Why hadn't the state medical board gotten rid of him years before?
Six months of reporting later, I finally had the full answer to that question. Why six months? Mainly because of the volume of legal material that I had to wade through. I have done a lot of investigative stories in my career but none that required as much slogging through depositions, court transcripts, pleadings, summary judgments, administrative law proceedings, and medical records. Scheffey was a monster of litigation. He sued everyone and was sued by everyone. The good part about this was that all these meticulous court records made it possible to track his thirty-year career in a fairly minute way and without his cooperation.The difficult part was sitting in regulatory and legal offices, week after week, reading thousands of pages of text. I estimate that I read or at least cast my eyes on more than 20,000 pages. I spent almost three weeks camped at a desk in downtown Austin at the medical board, as various board staffers brought me box after box of legal proceedings and medical records. From there I went to a plaintiff's lawyer's office in Houston where I spent another two weeks reading more than seventy lawsuits against Scheffey, including dozens of lengthy depositions.
The story has an interesting ending.While I was reporting it, I suspected that the Harris County (Houston) district attorney's office was investigating Scheffey, but they had denied this and I could not prove it. Then I managed to find out that Scheffey was not in Switzerland, as everyone assumed, but in Aspen, Colorado. Suddenly I was on the phone trading information with the Harris County district attorney.They told me that they were after Scheffey for practicing without a license and had a sealed indictment. The only reason they had not arrested him was because they believed he was out of the country. My information changed that. They put out warrants to the Aspen police, and Scheffey was arrested in Aspen about a week after my story came out. (I agreed not to spill the beans about the indictment, which almost certainly would have tipped Scheffey off and might have caused him to leave the country.) He agreed to return to Houston, where he was arraigned and charged with a felony. He is now mostly confined to his house in Houston, awaiting trial.
Paige Williams : How to Lose $100,000,000
from GQ
On Christmas Day 2002, Jack Whittaker, a fifty-five-year-old contractor from Scott Depot, West Virginia, won $314,900,000 off a $1 Powerball ticket and became the biggest lottery winner of all time. Lucky Jack.
But for certain guys, winning the lottery can be just about the worst thing to ever happen. You might as well hand them a grenade. Plenty of winners have blown their dough in the post-payoff delirium, but no one has done it quite like Big Jack. One minute he was a good Christian husband, father, grandfather, and businessman, just another respectable old dude in a cowboy hat living his West Virginia life, and the next he was sitting on a curb outside a titty bar, complaining to the cops that an ex-stripper named Misty and her boyfriend drugged his cocktail, busted out the window of his truck, and made off with a half-million of his dollars. And things were only starting to get ugly.
At its best, W est Virginia is as green as Jack Whittaker's millions, but in March it is muddy-river brown. Windowless factories line the Kanawha River, and in between stand forgettable little towns, drab mountain pockets of overworked humanity, connected by interstates. Every other restaurant is a Biscuit World. Fog hangs on the river and on the bare branches of trees. Rain falls on tobacco barns, boatyards, and coal trains, and on the lonely gold dome of the capitol. It's hard not to wonder how this affects a fellow's psychology. A man might be driven to do just about anything in the brown months of West Virginia.
Jack lives now, as he did then, in one of these little interstate towns, called Scott Depot. His house is a two-story brick number, like countless others in these parts. He owns a construction business, Diversified Enterprise Inc., which builds water and sewer systems across the state. He's been working since age fourteen and has been with his wife, Jewell, about that long, too. Supposedly, his company was grossing more than $17 million for a while but ran into some problems, and Jack had to lay off twenty-five of his 117 employees. His adult daughter, Ginger McMahan, has been battling lymphoma. Jack's own health isn't tip-top, either. He loves his teenage granddaughter, Brandi, so much, he named his office building after her: the Brandi Building. Millionaire or not, Jack liked to play the lottery.
Right before Christmas 2002, the Powerball prize climbed to record size. People in twenty-three states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S.Virgin Islands fattened the pot in anticipation of the televised drawing Christmas night. On the morning of December 23, Jack stopped by C &L Super Serve in the town of Hurricane, where Brenda Higginbotham cooked the food that sat under the heat lamp. Like most mornings, she fixed Jack a bacon-and-tomato biscuit to go, pulling out the biscuit guts to help him with his cholesterol. She called him her "cowboy man" and knew him about as well as you can know anyone who stays long enough to order breakfast and comment on the weather. That morning, along with the biscuit, Jack bought $100 worth of lottery tickets.
By Christmas Eve, the pot reached beyond $280 million, and by Christmas Day, $314.9 million.The odds of winning were 120 million to l.When the winning numbers were announced, Jack had all but one. He went to bed Christmas night thinking he'd won five grand. The next morning he learned that the TV had misre-ported it. He and Jewell checked and checked again-Jack had the sole winning combo: 5-14-16-29-53, Powerball 7.
Jack took the onetime payment of $170 million and walked away with $113 million post-tax. He accepted his easy money before a battery of cameras, dressed in a black outfit and hat, as Jewell, Ginger, and Brandi stood alongside him. The governor handed Jack the big poster-board check and said what a good ambassador Andrew Jackson Whittaker Jr. would make for the state of West Virginia. And for a while, that's what Jack was. Right away, he thanked God for giving him the right numbers. He immediately pledged $17 million to several franchises of the Church of God; then he started giving away millions to various charities. Jack bought people houses and cars and college educations, gave money to old people and poor people and Little Leaguers. He was feted and filmed and generally hailed as the pride of West Virginia but "real down-to-earth," which is just about the best thing one West Virginian can say about another.