Rudy and Dick Pretend to Have Contacted Prospective Jurors

Rudy Baylor and Deck Shifflet turn the apparent wiretap on Rudy’s office phone into a trap for Leo Drummond: they pretend to have improperly contacted prospective jurors and describe those candidates as hostile to Great Benefit. The ruse is both a calculated jury-selection tactic and a comic reversal. Drummond’s suspected surveillance gives him access to the fabricated information, but challenging it would risk exposing how he obtained it.

The Trap and Its Stakes

Rudy has been thinking about the plan for weeks and told Deck about it several days before they carry it out. Deck reacts strongly at first, but they decide to make the suspected listener hear exactly what they want him to hear. They wait until late afternoon, when Rudy is at the office and Deck is at a pay phone around the corner. Their conversation has been rehearsed several times, down to a script. Rudy makes a show of asking which prospective jurors Deck has supposedly found and what those people said about insurance companies and the Black family’s case.

The deception depends on a particular imbalance. Rudy and Deck believe Drummond has been listening to Rudy’s calls, but they also know that an objection to the supposed jury contacts would invite questions about the wiretap. In Rudy’s view, Drummond cannot openly reveal what he has heard without exposing himself to professional consequences and possibly criminal charges. The alleged misconduct is therefore designed not simply to mislead the defense about individual jurors, but to make the defense choose between acting on the information and explaining how it learned of it.

Rudy and Deck also use their opponents’ assumptions about them. They expect Drummond to regard Rudy as an inexperienced newcomer and Deck as a low-status investigator, making their apparent breach of professional rules seem plausible. Rudy deliberately speaks loudly and clearly into the phone. Their performance is meant for an unseen listener as much as for each other.

The Invented Juror Reports

Deck’s supposed reports paint several candidates as poor prospects for Great Benefit. He claims Dean Goodlow, a carpet-cleaning franchise owner who has been out of town, dislikes insurance companies and would make a strong juror for the Black family. He also names Dermont King, Jan DeCell, Lawrence Perotti, and Hilda Hinds, attributing to them hostility toward insurers or sympathy for the family. Rudy’s questions and Deck’s paper-rustling help make the exchange sound like an improvised review of actual investigative notes.

Their account is selective rather than uniformly favorable to the plaintiffs. Deck describes RaTilda Browning as a Black woman who rejected his approach and would not support their case. Rudy, in turn, says he has spoken with Esther Samuelson, a woman in her early sixties whose late husband had served with the Chamber of Commerce, and presents her as sympathetic to Dot Black. Rudy privately considers Samuelson a candidate he would not want on the jury. He also claims to have found Nathan Butts, who supposedly dislikes insurance companies. That contrast helps the invented reports sound less like a single, transparent list of ideal jurors.

The candidates’ descriptions are not incidental detail: each name gives Drummond something concrete to avoid. Rudy and Deck hope to contaminate the names of people they do not want seated by making the defense believe those people have already been approached and influenced. They claim to have spoken with enough prospective jurors to make the threat seem broad, while concealing which candidates they fear most.

The Billy Porter Call

The pair extend the performance with a staged call from Billy Porter, a Western Auto manager whom they consider a weak prospect for their side. The caller is actually Butch, helping with a brief impersonation after going to Porter’s workplace and speaking with him about tires. On the telephone, Butch adopts a gruff manner and then softens it, as planned. The call gives the imagined jury-contact campaign a new voice and makes the alleged ethical breach sound like a direct appeal to a summoned juror.

The supposed lawyer tells Porter that the case concerns a mother whose son died after Great Benefit denied treatment for leukemia. He portrays the claim as wrongful, refers to the company’s settlement offer of $200,000, and says the plaintiffs are seeking more, including punitive damages. Porter responds that he does not want to miss work for jury service, but agrees to do what he can while making clear that he does not want to serve. The exchange is fabricated as evidence of persuasion, not a genuine report of Porter’s views; its purpose is to give Drummond another reason to distrust the potential juror pool.

Immediate Effect at Jury Selection

Deck returns to the office, where he and Rudy eat a sandwich, then leaves twice more during the evening to make further calls. They continue circulating supposed reports of people ready to punish Great Benefit. By their estimate, they have cast serious doubt on about a third of the roughly sixty people who will remain available for questioning. They have focused on the candidates they most fear, and Rudy anticipates that Drummond will spend the night worrying about what the defense believes it has learned.

At jury selection, the defense consultants find that their computer models and theories no longer offer reliable guidance. Porter is present and becomes involved in a disturbance with Drummond; a tasselled loafer is found beneath a bench as Drummond brushes himself off and Porter is restrained. After a recess, Drummond moves to dismiss the entire panel, but Judge Kipler declines. Porter is excused from jury duty and leaves angrily. The episode does not erase the confusion the staged calls have created: later that day, Drummond and his team firmly avoid the candidates Rudy and Deck had named, convinced that the plaintiffs somehow reached them and secured their silence.

Method and Significance

The ruse works through a contradiction in the defense’s position. Drummond’s alleged surveillance is meant to provide an advantage, yet the information he hears is deliberately unreliable, and openly reacting to it could expose the surveillance. Rudy and Deck present themselves as careless enough to violate the rules while in fact carefully scripting the timing, wording, and supposed evidence of their conduct. Rudy later characterizes the performance as an attempt to make it appear that they had violated enough ethical rules to risk his disbarment.

The event also anticipates the trial’s larger contest over how information is presented and believed. Here, no disputed insurance record or medical claim is at issue; the immediate object is the defense’s confidence in its own jury strategy. The staged calls turn a concealed means of gathering information into a vulnerability and force Drummond’s team to act on reports it cannot safely acknowledge. The result is not control over every juror or a guaranteed verdict, but a disruption of the defense’s assumptions at the moment it must decide whom to question and exclude.