Unlucky Numbers

Bart Durham targets a lotto winner's crazy downfall

In the nearly two-and-a-half years since he won the largest single lotto jackpot ever, West Virginia businessman Jack Whittaker has driven drunk, been sued for sexual assault and endured the drug-induced death of his granddaughter, Brandi Bragg. Now he's the target of a $100 million wrongful death suit, with none other than Nashville's dean of ambulance chasers, attorney Bart Durham, looking to make a very wealthy man pay for his sins.

The suit revolves around the death of Jesse Tribble, a friend of Bragg's who fatally overdosed at Whittaker's home. Before her own drug-addled corpse was found in a plastic sheet and tarp weeks later, the troubled teen allegedly left Tribble to die as he lay sick from a drug binge. Whittaker was away at the time of Tribble's death, but the cash he lavished on his granddaughter paid for the cocktail of narcotics that led to the teen's demise, the lawsuit alleges.

"He was giving money to his crack addict daughter, who he knew was a crack addict," says Bart Durham, speaking from his cell phone on his way to Malibu. "If I gave [my son] Blair a lot of money, and people were dying not at his house but at mine, I'd be liable too."

It's hardly surprising that Durham is targeting a rich lotto winner. On his website, the wiry attorney posts pictures of the Ferraris he drives. He owns a beach house in Malibu, which is presumably where he was heading while talking about Tribble's tragic death. Appearing in television ads for his practice, Durham gives a woeful performance, playing a caricature of a greedy personal injury lawyer, clumsily offering comfort to ailing victims of car crashes. "Justice is your right," he says, with the conviction of a vacuum salesman. "And we demand it."

In this case, he can demand all he wants—the only justice he can hope for is a settlement. It's unlikely a jury will hold a man responsible for the actions of his granddaughter. Then again, Whittaker is hardly a sympathetic defendant. In 2002, on Christmas Day, Whittaker won a $314.9 million Powerball jackpot, the largest undivided lottery prize ever. Already a wealthy owner of a few construction companies, Whittaker chose to accept a one-time lump payment of $113 million after taxes. Initially, Whittaker behaved like a prince, pledging millions of dollars to churches. According to a profile of him in GQ magazine, he bought people houses, cars and even college educations. He gave money to the poor and to the infirm. He returned to his job. To many West Virginians, long insecure about how they're perceived, the gregarious, charming contractor was a source of civic pride.

But with all the melodrama of a Behind the Music episode, Whittaker indulged a darker, dimmer side as soon as the cameras stopped filming. Six days after he claimed his multimillion-dollar prize, he dropped by a strip club and plopped $50,000 on the bar before being escorted out. It was just a little preview of the recklessness to come. Months later, an ex-dancer at the same strip club allegedly drugged him as her boyfriend was outside breaking into Whittaker's Lincoln Navigator. The boyfriend snatched a briefcase full of cash and stashed it outside a Dumpster. The beefy, balding Whittaker, who looks like you'd expect a West Virginian construction contractor would, caught the boyfriend and landed a punch or two before the police arrived at the scene. When the briefcase was found, it had more than $500,000 in cash inside.

Since he's won the lottery, Whittaker has generated a never-ending series of embarrassing headlines, acting like a warped hybrid of Jessica Simpson and Mike Tyson. He's been charged with drunk driving (twice) and been sued by racetrack employees for assault. He pled no contest to a battery charge. He's also been robbed several times, in part because everybody in the state of West Virginia seems to know how indiscreet he is with his fortune.

Meanwhile, as Whittaker was busy humiliating himself, his granddaughter struggled with drugs, including crack, according to a Washington Post Magazine story. Whittaker was trying to raise Bragg because her mother was sick. On two occasions, Whittaker told the Charleston CBS affiliate WOWK, Brandi Bragg went to out-of-state drug treatment centers. At the same time, though, he was giving her more than $2,000 a week to work at his construction company, while also buying her several pricey automobiles. He claimed that she deserved the income because of her impressive knowledge of the construction business. But clearly, Bragg, like any other teenager in that situation, wasn't exactly saving or spending judiciously.

"There is a real problem with drugs in this area," says Mark Hallburn, the publisher and editor of PutnamLive.com, a news website that covers Putnam County, W.V. "Until literally the other day, we didn't have a movie theater here. We just have a lack of things to do. Giving her $2,000 a week is a lot. What was she going to do with that money around here?"

That's the centerpiece of the lawsuit. Jesse's father, Jimmy Tribble, says he tried to keep his son away from drugs, but he couldn't compete with the allure of Bragg's newfound cash. In 2003, he caught his son with marijuana and placed him in the local probation system. He had him wear an ankle bracelet for six months. For a while, Jesse Tribble seemed to be faring better, until March 2004, when he began spending time with Bragg and her grandfather. Jesse had known Bragg when he was in middle school but only recently had become romantically involved with her, the father says.

Soon Jesse's grades dropped and, when he turned 18, he quit school and went to live with Bragg at Whittaker's home. Six weeks later, a beaten down Jesse returned to his dad in tears and apologized for leaving. Tribble says that he welcomed his son home and they agreed he'd attend summer school.

"I know for the months of June, July and August, he was clean and he was away from her," says Tribble, who coaches high school baseball in his spare time. "We knew where he was. And as far as we know, he was away from Brandi."

That changed on Sept. 16, 2004, when a friend took Tribble to see Bragg at the Whittaker home. According to the lawsuit, Tribble and Bragg used drugs before Tribble became severely ill. The blond teen left her friend alone in the house. That night, three young men burglarized the Whittaker home, stumbled upon the dead body and called 911 sometime later. The thieves, one of whom was dressed as a woman, were caught on Whittaker's security camera. Local authorities believe two of them came back to rob the home a second time, before alerting the police. Bragg knew at least one of them.

An autopsy report showed that Tribble accidentally overdosed on a mixture of drugs, including oxycodone, cocaine and methadone. Nearly three months after Tribble died and close to two years after Jack Whittaker won the lottery, Brandi Bragg was found dead after being concealed for two weeks under a dilapidated van near the home of her boyfriend Brandon Crosier. "All I know is she OD'd and Brandon freaked out," the boy's father told reporters.

Earlier this year, Tribble's father met Bart Durham at the Opryland Hotel and asked him to represent him in a lawsuit against the jackpot winner. Tribble's brother had been a client of the ubiquitous television lawyer. On three occasions, Durham visited West Virginia and talked to potential witnesses. On March 11, he filed a $100 million lawsuit in Putnam County Circuit Court.

On the phone at least, Tribble hardly seems like a man looking to exploit a big-time jackpot winner. Speaking from his office, where he makes baseball bats, he says that it was Whittaker's cash that led to his son's death. "My son didn't have a habit. He couldn't afford it," Tribble says. "Am I angry? Yes I am. If he wanted Brandi to do drugs, that's his business. But my son died because of that environment, and I'll go to my grave because of that."

Jack Whittaker could not be reached for comment, and his lawyer did not return repeated messages. The lottery winner told the Putnam Live website that he plans to contest the suit. "I'll be dead and gone to hell before he gets a dime out of me.... His son bought drugs for my granddaughter."

That comment only seemed to strengthen Tribble's resolve. "Well, we have a bunch of kids ready to say otherwise. He better be able to prove otherwise."

Bart and Blair Durham have already interviewed teenagers who knew both Bragg and Tribble. Blair says that as the case proceeds the evidence will show that Whittaker knew more about his granddaughter's destructive habits than he's let on.

"Brandi was a black widow and ate and consumed everything she touched, and Mr. Whittaker had a reverse Midas touch, and everything he touched turned to crap," Blair Durham says. Asked if Whittaker is being targeted solely because he's a big-time lottery winner, Durham says that the defendant's winnings are what led to Tribble's death. "If he wasn't a lottery winner, he wouldn't be getting sued because I don't know if his granddaughter would have had the money to buy the drugs and ruin people's lives."

Complicating the lawsuit is that when Jesse Tribble met up with Brandi last September, he had turned 18. He was an adult responsible for his own actions. And, obviously, no one forced him to use drugs. But the lawsuit also names Bragg, even though she's deceased, for abandoning him when he was very ill. That might be a stronger claim. In addition, Bart Durham says that Whittaker's home insurance company is partially liable for Tribble's death. "If you or I gave a drug party and people were dying, a homeowner's insurance policy will pay a judgment," he says. "It's not really a suit against Jack Whittaker as it is an alleged abandonment by Brandi Bragg. And the insurance company is liable for the judgment."

Spelling out his approach to litigation as only he could, Durham hit on the crux of his complaint. "Insurance companies have a lot more money than Jack Whittaker, and they are a lot easier to get money out of than Jack Whittaker."

But if Durham's encapsulation of his lawsuit is a little crass, a civil suit might be the only way to answer vexing questions about what really happened to Tribble. Did Bragg provide him the drugs that killed him? And did she know just how sick he was when she left him alone in the house? To what extent, if any, did Whittaker know about his granddaughter's destructive habits? Initially, the local Putnam County sheriff's department declined to investigate Tribble's death, stating that drug overdoses are self-inflicted. But at least two detectives working on the case have done security work for Whittaker, creating an obvious conflict of interest. Putnam County Sheriff Mark Smith now tells the Scene that his office has asked local police to reopen the investigation, but forgive Tribble if he's a little skeptical about their allegiances.

Meanwhile, the Durhams plan to take up to 20 depositions that will probe what Whittaker knew and when he knew it. They say they'll turn over what they find to the authorities even if that delays the civil case. It's easy to impugn Bart Durham's motives, but were it not for him, Tribble couldn't count on anyone to find out what happened to his son.

"Our interest is getting a financial recovery, but it is overshadowed in getting all the facts out," Bart Durham says. "As Jimmy Tribble says, 'If you don't stir things up, this may just die,' and I hope this case will put pressure on the authorities to investigate what happened."

Tribble knows that many people think of him as just another money-grubbing litigant, ducking responsibility for what happened to his grown son. But he doesn't shirk blame.

"I am going to be held accountable because I lost a son, and I have to live with that. I thought we had him going in the right direction."

Still, he insists Whittaker deserves to be held accountable for enabling his granddaughter to create a drug-laced path of destruction. Even worse, Tribble says, the jackpot winner won't take responsibility for the havoc his millions caused. "If the day my son was found dead Jack called and apologized like a real man would—if I just heard something from a guy that was truly sorry about the kids and their welfare and he was truly sorry, I would have a little respect for him," he says. "I'd have a trace of hope for him. But I don't. He's worthless."
By Matt Pulle
From The Nashville Scene, Nashville, TN, USA