2, the quotes he gives to this reporter are absolutely charming, it makes me like him, is obvious how he kills with juries. lol at the self-analysis to say that he drives flashy cars "because he's seeking that external validation he never got as a child"

3, he admits he "wasn't a good husband" during his first marriage, but says he "was a good father"

4, sean combs was already fucked, but after buzbee is done with him he won't have a dime left

5, his new wife is from a rich family, it seems like they're having fun together https://www.instagram.com/tonybuzbee/p/CuPUruiAxZt/?hl=en&img_index=1

6, the stories about his dad, omg. his dad beat up a DWARF? but then you hear the story and you're like fucking right, dwarf had it coming

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/20/tony-buzbee-lawyer-suing-p-diddy-sean-combs/

20 Dec 2024 15:00:06 UTC

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The ‘fire-breathing’ Texan lawyer suing rap’s royalty for millions: ‘I’m going to win’

He made his name taking on BP, but now Tony Buzbee has his sights set on P Diddy – and says ‘many powerful people’ will be exposed

Mick Brown

20 December 2024 2:00pm GMT

Mick Brown

Twenty years ago, when Tony Buzbee started making his fortune as a personal injury lawyer, reaping the spoils from his lawsuits against oil and gas companies around America’s Gulf Coast, he had a particular liking for rap music.

At the time, Buzbee was driving a Mercedes SLR McLaren Convertible (cost $500,000). “I’d drive around in my fancy car,” he remembers with a laugh, “playing the music real loud, make sure everybody could see me – then come back around again in case you missed me the first time.”

One of the songs Buzbee particularly liked was Mo Money Mo Problems, a million-selling hit for the rap artist The Notorious B.I.G., co-written, produced by and featuring the boss of Bad Boy Records, Sean ‘Puff Daddy’ Combs – better known now as P. Diddy.

The song, about the perils that can come from success, had a particular prescience – Mo Problems for Combs, who is presently languishing in jail on remand in New York facing charges of kidnapping, drugging and coercing women into sexual activities, and, if Tony Buzbee has his way, Mo Money for him and for the more than 100 people he is representing who claim to have suffered sexual assault and/or abuse by Combs and his associates, in incidents going back more than 30 years.

Combs, who has been denied bail three times, has refuted all the criminal charges against him. If convicted he could face a life sentence.

‘The biggest, baddest, meanest dog in the yard’

Buzbee claims to have won billions in lawsuits fighting oil companies, maritime operators, banks and insurance companies, and has cultivated an image of braggadocio and flaunted wealth.

In describing his tactics and courtroom manner, profiles in American papers and magazines invariably reach for the adjectives hard-nosed and ruthless, dwelling on the shark tattoo he has on his forearm, which matches the shark motif on the tail fin of his private jet (actually both his jets: he has a big one for long flights, to California, New York, and a smaller one for flights around Texas) and the shark-shaped door handles on his offices on the top floor of the JP Morgan Chase Tower in downtown Houston, the tallest building in Texas.

He was once described by The Texas Tribune as a “big, mean, ambitious, tenacious, fire-breathing Texas trial lawyer”, and a fellow attorney has called him “the biggest, baddest, meanest dog in the yard” – a description you seldom hear applied to those called to the bar in this country.

“Oh that’s just somebody blowing smoke,” Buzbee says with a laugh, tugging at the sleeve of his tailor-made Brioni suit, and revealing a glimpse of a diamond-studded gold watch. “Trying to make me happy.”

Combs, who is 55, is a phenomenon beyond the world of rap music. Born in Harlem, and an altar boy as a child, he worked as a music talent scout, founding Bad Boy Records when he was just 24, going on to develop the careers of artists including the Notorious B.I.G., Mary J Blige and Usher, and having a string of million-selling records under the name Puff Daddy.

The allegations against Sean Combs aka P Diddy go back as far as the 1990s

The allegations against Sean Combs aka P Diddy go back as far as the 1990s Credit: Al Pereira/Getty Images/Michael Ochs Archives

He branched out into the worlds of fashion and acting, but in the 2000s he became as well known for his so called White Parties – with a strict all-white dress code – extravagant affairs at his homes in Los Angeles and the Hamptons and on yachts in the South of France, which had musicians, Hollywood celebrities and socialites clamouring for an invitation.

It is these parties, and more particularly what have been described as the “freak offs”, drug-fuelled orgies at which Combs allegedly coerced women into sexual acts and filming them for his own pleasure, that have been the principal focus of the criminal investigation and the civil actions being brought by Buzbee.

Buzbee says his cases could extend to anyone who took part in, facilitated, or observed the alleged offences. But his main focus is Combs. At a press conference in October he announced that he was representing 120 people making allegations against Combs, dating back to the 1990s.

In fact, he says now, he has received allegations from more than 400 individuals, all of which are being screened by a 100-strong team made up of special investigators, many of them former police officers. “Ultimately we’ll be filing about 100 cases, maybe more,” he says. “There’s a lot of cases I could file, but I’m going to make sure we only file the ones that are solid.”

‘People thought they could do whatever they want with impunity’

All of these cases, Buzbee says, follow a similar pattern where an individual, singled out at a party or picked up at a concert, is drugged with GHB or some other date-rape drug and then abused.

“They’re given a drink, either a bottle of water, or these bottles of vodka that have been laced with something, and the next thing you know they’re in la-la land and they’re taken advantage of, either by him or just by people who are attending the party.

“We’re dealing with a situation – and this is my opinion – where people, including Mr Combs, thought they could do whatever they want with impunity. He’s a powerful rich person and he’s surrounded by celebrities and well-connected politically, but that wasn’t good enough. Now I can put a drop in your drink and do whatever I want, and just have a good old time doing it. And that became a course of conduct.”

Buzbee continues: “There were girls at these parties doing things they would never do in public, with everybody watching. And I don’t think it’s because they were just drunk or high on drugs. It’s because they didn’t even realise they were being given a drug and were being coerced into it.

“Guilt, shame, fear of retribution, fear of violence, whatever, it takes people a long time to get up the courage to come forward,” Buzbee says. “Usually the argument they make to themselves is, ‘How did I put myself in this position?’ They blame themselves. And they won’t come forward unless somebody else does with the same kind of story. But every day they don’t come forward makes it harder, because most people who don’t understand sexual assault will be very judgmental.

“But the way I look at it, I don’t care how long it takes, you’ve had the courage to step forward. A lot of people will say, ‘I believe all victims’ – well, I can’t be that silly, because there are people that come forward trying to sell me a bunch of baloney.

“It’s my bar licence and my reputation, so I have to be very careful about being on the one hand very receptive, and trying to help somebody; and on the other hand not pursuing a case that turns out not to be credible and which makes all the other cases look bad. It’s a very fine line, which is why we’re filing these cases so slowly.”

In October, Buzbee warned that “many powerful people will be exposed” through the lawsuits. And the charges against Combs have set the conspiracy mill churning. “There’s a lot of interest in this case, and a lot of foolishness out there,” Buzbee says now. “I don’t read all of it, but I hear about it. All the things related to this case, I would say 90 per cent of it is foolishness.

“There’s this idea that I’m Joe McCarthy or something, that I have in my possession some secret list. There’s no secret list. I have said that some of the people named in the case will raise some eyebrows. But most of them we can already guess who they are. It’s not like they were secret parties.”

The most high-profile name to emerge so far is Jay-Z, the rapper and businessman married to fellow superstar Beyoncé.

Jay-Z, right, has been accused of raping a 13-year-old girl with Combs

Jay-Z, right, has been accused of raping a 13-year-old girl with Combs Credit: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Roc Nation

It is a standard legal practice in personal injury cases, Buzbee says, to file what is known as a demand – usually a letter outlining the case against the accused, and offering a mediation to settle the case.

“I’ll never put a number in there. I’ll just send a letter saying, here’s the facts we have about you, it’s confidential, and we would like to get together in two weeks for a mediation that’s cloaked and nobody can talk about what’s said, and try to resolve this without the filing of a public lawsuit.

“People claim extortion and all kinds of silly stuff. But it’s typical in these kinds of cases, because suits are so overwhelming and stressful to the plaintiff, because it creates a lot of publicity which makes it even more difficult.

“But I have not been sending these letters saying you will do this or else. First off, that’s the way to get yourself in trouble; and number two, that’s not the way I operate. I try to keep it professional.”

‘If something has happened once it’s happened a hundred times’

In November, Buzbee despatched a confidential letter to Jay-Z – real name Shawn Carter – outlining an allegation against him, along with Combs, having raped a 13-year-old girl, identified only as “Jane Doe”, at a party in 2000 following the MTV Video Awards. Jay-Z had been nominated for an award for the video of his song Big Pimpin’.

Carter’s response was to sue Buzbee, alleging the lawyer had attempted to blackmail him by making the rape allegation public if he did not agree to a legal settlement. He later took to social media platform X describing the demand letter as a “blackmail attempt”, and Buzbee as “deplorable” and “an ambulance chaser in a cheap suit”.

“I mourn yet another loss of innocence,” Carter went on, lamenting the pain the allegations have inflicted on his family. “We protect children,” he wrote, “you seem to exploit them for personal gain. Only your network of conspiracy theorists, fake psychics, will believe the idiotic claims you have levied against me that, if not for the seriousness surrounding harm to kids, would be laughable.”

This week Carter’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, described the now 38-year-old unnamed woman’s account as “provably, demonstrably false” pointing out apparent inconsistencies in her account.

Responding to these allegations, Buzbee issued a statement to NBC News saying that his office had “interrogated [the woman] intensely” and that she had even agreed to a polygraph. “This has been extremely distressing for her, to the point she has experienced seizures and had to seek medical treatment due to the stress.”

In postings made on X he described Carter’s assertions about attempts to blackmail him as “bogus and laughable”.

Carter, he said, had not only sued him anonymously “but has tried to bully me and harass me and this plaintiff. His conduct has had the opposite impact. She is emboldened. I’m very proud of her resolve,” adding that the facts of the case will be “[litigated] in court, not in the media”.

Jay-Z and P Diddy's friendship

Jay-Z and P Diddy together in 2000, the year the alleged incident took place Credit: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

Not all the plaintiffs Buzbee is representing are women. The youngest is a man who, it is alleged, as a nine-year-old boy, was abused by Combs and others at an audition at the studio of his Bad Boy Records, where promises were made to the boy and his parents about a potential record deal.

Buzbee has handled a number of high-profile sexual abuse cases in the past and there is usually a pattern, he says – if something has happened once it’s happened a hundred times.

In 2013 he sued Stanley Marsh, the eccentric millionaire responsible for “Cadillac Ranch” – the art installation in Amarillo, Texas, featuring a row of vintage Cadillacs buried nose first in the ground. Marsh had an apartment downtown where over the years he sexually abused a succession of underage boys.

“It turned out there were 30 or 40 boys still around, and probably a hundred over the years,” Buzbee says. “Those boys were going in and out of the Chase Tower in downtown Amarillo, and no one ever questioned, why are these boys going in there? He was hiding right in plain sight.”

Buzbee represented 10 boys, and “I took every penny he owned. Which,” he adds, “I was very proud of. I can’t say what the settlement was, but I know that a lot of them were driving Ferraris around Amarillo.” He laughs. “And you don’t normally see a lot of Ferraris or Lamborghinis in Amarillo.”

‘The kind of business I’m in, you don’t garner a lot of love’

Buzbee lives in one of the biggest mansions on the most exclusive street in Houston. There is a white Rolls-Royce parked in the forecourt, beside his wife Frances’ white Mercedes.

He has lived in the house for the past 11 years, purchased from a man who had sold his oil and gas company and gone into the wine business. He completely rebuilt the house, then sold it following a divorce. Buzbee paid $13 million for it.

Arriving at his home, I ring the doorbell, and a woman’s voice on the intercom instructs me to wait outside until Buzbee is ready to see me.

He appears 10 minutes later, sturdily built and of medium height, with a tan and slicked-back hair; he looks toned and refreshed. He is wearing a light-blue linen suit, hand-tooled alligator-skin boots and a dark-blue shirt. He speaks in a soft Texas twang at odds with his air of palpable self-confidence.

He has been following his daily routine of meditation, exercise and a plunge in an ice bath. He leads the way into the sitting room and sinks into a capacious sofa.

The house is a study in muted opulence. An art deco lamp on a rosewood table, paintings by Léger, Louis Kronberg and Alexander Calder on the walls. A book detailing his art collection – Matisse, Pissaro, Renoir, Cy Twombly, an abstract painted by Frank Sinatra – sits on a coffee table. (In an unfortunate incident in 2017, a female guest who had drunk too much ran amok when Buzbee called for an Uber, overturning furniture and causing $300,000 in damage to artworks including two Andy Warhol paintings.)

Buzbee's mansion in downtown Houston is a far cry from his modest rural upbringing

Buzbee’s mansion in downtown Houston is a far cry from his modest rural upbringing Credit: Shane Lavalette

Bookshelves line the room: volumes on law, politics and international relations. There is a well-thumbed copy of The Book of Disquiet, by the Portuguese existentialist poet and writer Fernando Pessoa – from a time when Buzbee was living in New York’s East Village, he says, “trying to be a poet”. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, CS Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, and a book by the new age spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.

Buzbee is a much more complicated man than his reputation for abrasiveness suggests.

As we talk, a small white dog bounces into the room, and leaps excitedly on his lap, before being shushed away. This reputation, I say, hard-nosed, ruthless, the meanest dog in the yard… how would he describe himself?

“Super nice guy.” He grins. That’s not what I’ve heard. He feigns a wounded look. “Is that right?” The grin broadens. “That’s hurtful. I’m trying to get in touch with my emotions.”

So would he describe himself as loved, respected or feared? “Well, you saw the dog…”

But in the human realm? “I guess respected, probably. The kind of business I’m in, you don’t garner a lot of love.

“I was at a dinner here once in this grand house owned by a billionaire, with a lot of oil and gas people, and I said to my date, I’ve literally sued every single person in this room. So you don’t get a lot of love when you do that.”

‘If I had the case today I probably would have got £500 million’

Nor did Buzbee have a lot of love growing up in the small, rural north Texas town of Atlanta. His father worked as a butcher at a local grocery and his mother worked in the school cafeteria.

A hard-scrabble upbringing. His father, he says, would fight at the drop of a hat – and usually be the one to drop it – and Buzbee would frequently be the object of his temper. “Big and mean,” he says. “Everybody knew him in town. Still do, and he’s 81.”

On days when he wasn’t working, he’d tell Buzbee to “get in the truck, boy”, and they’d drive the dirt roads around town looking for discarded beer cans. “He’d slow down, I’d jump out, pick up a can, throw it in the back and we’d keep going. We’d do that for hours.” After selling the aluminum, his father would retire to his favourite bar to drink and play pool with his buddies, while Buzbee sat in the corner watching. “He wrestled a bear once,’ he says, ‘and fought a dwarf”.

He did what?

“I saw it happen.” One day there was a dwarf in the bar who was drunk and who took it into his head to needle Buzbee’s father when he was shooting pool, jogging his arm when he went to make a shot.

“My dad took pool super-serious, and he got annoyed pretty quick. When my dad said ‘hey’, the dwarf kicked him on the shin. My dad has really skinny legs, hardly any fat on them. He saw stars and he just went ‘whack! and knocked the dwarf into the wall.”

And the bear?

There was a man, he says, who would travel the small towns in the area with a muzzled bear, charging people $20 to wrestle with it, just to prove they could. ‘Nobody could beat the bear. My dad wrestled it, and the bear beat him easily.” Buzbee laughs.

Deepwater Horizon

At the age of 17, Buzbee graduated from high school, “and I was out of there. Tried to get as far away as I could.” He attended college on a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship, and went to serve in the Marines, spending four years in the Middle East, Kenya and Somalia and rising to the rank of lieutenant.

Wondering what to do in the future, on a ship sailing off the coast of India he picked up a friend’s preparatory law school handbook and started answering questions and found he was pretty good at it. “And I said, hey boys, I’m going to go to law school.”

He shakes his head and laughs. “The weird things that happen to you.”

He enrolled at the University of Houston Law Center, and in 1997 graduated summa cum laude, then joined one of Houston’s biggest law firms, but left after a year. “I decided, I don’t want to keep making the managing partners richer so I’m going to try to do it myself.”

He set up with a partner in an office in a suburban strip mall, handling personal injury cases for oil-rig workers; he took to it, he says, like a duck to water. “With my working-class background I could bond with those guys really easily. And if you have access to one guy you have access to 25 others – cousins, brothers, whatever; something happens in their family and they call you.”

His first major case was an anti-trust violation. Reading through “a truckload” of depositions in a case against a drilling company he came upon evidence that nobody else seemed to have noticed, that companies were sharing information on employees’ wages to keep them rigged low. He told his partner they should pursue the case. When his partner hesitated, Buzbee took out two lines of credit to pursue it on his own, and within a year had collected $75 million in settlements from various drilling companies. “If I had the case today I probably would have got £500 million.”

Among the settlements was $15 million from the law firm he had been working for the year before, and who were representing one of the defendants. The case was a class action, meaning he had to make an application to the judge for a fee. He was awarded $18.6 million.

His biggest wins have come from actions against BP. In 2005 a BP plant blew up in Texas city, killing 15 workers and injuring a further 180. Buzbee represented 1,400 people and ended up settling for just under $500 million.

In 2010 he filed another lawsuit representing more than 10,000 individuals and businesses, following the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling platform that killed 11 workers and injured 17 others, and which caused an oil spill that spread across the Gulf of Mexico, devastating wildlife, and contaminating beaches, wetlands and estuaries. BP would end up paying $20.8 billion in damages for the spill, the largest environmental damage settlement in US history.

The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig started one of the worst environmental disasters in history

The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig started one of the worst environmental disasters in history Credit: U.S. Coast Guard via AP

Buzbee remembers that in the midst of the case he applied for a deposition to take testimony from the CEO of BP, Lord Browne, “who I was very excited to meet for obvious reasons.

“I went to my ranch and I received a call from the general counsel of BP. He said, it looks like you got the deposition you wanted. I said, yes, I did. I’d already taken a lot of BP money at that point. There were 85 cases I’d already settled.

“He said, well, we’d like to settle all your cases. I told him we could discuss it, and I’d be back in town on Tuesday. He said, no I don’t think you understand. We want to settle all your cases today. I said, I’m at my ranch and, s–t man, I don’t even know who I represent.

“He asked me how long it would take to get a list. I said, call me back in two hours. I had my assistant go to my office and fax me a list of clients, their injuries and their medical treatments. At hour two I was parked in my Jeep at the highest point of my ranch where I could get a signal, with a pen and paper and I said, let’s go.

“And in two and half hours we resolved 185 cases. It was like, ‘Tom Jones…. John Smith…’ He said, ‘We’ll give you four million on that.’ I said, ‘Well make it six.’ ‘OK, we’ll give you five and half.’ ‘OK, done.’”

“When I hung up I drove back to my ranch house and sat in the front yard in my Jeep, trying to add all this up on the calculator on my cell phone. I went in and said to my wife, ‘Goddam, I just settled all my BP cases.’ She said, ‘That’s awesome, how did you do?’ I said, ‘I think it’s something over 300 million but I’ve got to add it up again.’

“And that was as close as I got to meeting Lord Browne.”

Buzbee wants to smoke a cigar, so we move to his study – the only room in the house, he says with a rueful smile, where his wife will let him smoke. He settles in a chair and ignites a truncheon-sized Romeo Y Julieta.

He and Frances married in 2021. It is his second marriage. He was divorced from his first wife Zoe Benson, his college sweetheart and the mother of his four children, in 2017 after 26 years of marriage: “I was not a good husband, but I was a good father.”

Frances Moody is 24 years his junior, a daughter of one of the pre-eminent families in Texas with extensive interests in banking, insurance and hotels. Buzbee served on a bank board with her father for 10 years, and once sued her grandfather over an employment issue.

Did you win? “Well, he paid me.”

When he proposed to Frances, her father came to his office and asked him “a hundred questions” about his intentions. “Some very pointed questions because I’m considerably older than her. And apparently I passed. But he’s just a very nice man, a very gentle, even-keeled kind of guy. And she’s the same. And why would she want to marry a rogue like me? You’d have to ask her. But I’m very glad she did. She doesn’t need money. A lot of the things women would be attracted to me for, she doesn’t need any of that.”

For a wedding present, he bought her a farm.

‘When you run for mayor, half the people hate you and half the people like you’

Buzbee collects presidential memorabilia. On the desk there is a wine decanter that once belonged to George Washington, a tobacco holder that belonged to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Elsewhere in the house, there is a framed piece of the original Star-Spangled Banner, the flag that inspired the US national anthem, and a framed doodle drawn by John F Kennedy on stationery from the Rice Hotel in Houston, where Kennedy stopped the day before he was assassinated in Dallas. The rocking chair he sat in is upstairs.

There was a time when Buzbee had political ambitions of his own. He was chairman of the Democratic Committee in Galveston, but gave it up citing pressure of work and the responsibilities of having a young family.

In 2019 he ran for mayor of Houston, and lost. “When you run for mayor, half the people hate you and half the people like you,” he says. In 2016 he hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump at his home, raising $500,000 for Trump’s first run at the presidency. “And that automatically gets you 40 per cent of the people who hate you and think you’re the anti-Christ.’

The idea of hosting Trump, he says, was “just a novelty”. Trump had just finished the last series of The Apprentice. “I thought that was a cool show. I was asked, would you give this fundraiser; nobody else would do it in this area, so I said I’ll do it.” He was single at the time. “They said, bonus – Ivanka’s coming! I thought, ‘Let’s go!’” He laughs. “And she didn’t turn up.”

Trump, he says, was “not what I expected. My mother came and we sat in the kitchen and he signed autographs for the kids.”

There were some 40 people in his house, waiting to meet Trump and 700 more in the backyard. “That’s how it is in America; you pay a little more and you get a picture.” Trump was supposed to give a 10-minute speech indoors, then give his main speech outside, with those inside joining to hear it.

“Well nobody told him that apparently. So he gave his typical 45-minute speech, off the cuff, just rambling. He thought he was finished, so I went and tugged on his arm and said, Mr Trump there’s 700 more people waiting in the backyard. So he went out and gave exactly the same damn speech.” He laughs.

I asked why he ran for mayor.

“It was probably to assuage my inner child.” Buzbee often jokes in conversation, but he’s being serious. “If you want the honest answer, that’s probably it. I can go deeper if you want. To get the external validation I didn’t get as a child. That’s probably the truth after many years of reflection on it, because I’ve asked myself, why did I do that?

“I spent $13 million doing it. Obviously I had a lot of ideas. I care about the city and the place where I live. I know how the city works and how it should work. I had a lot of people backing me who had great ideas…”

Buzbee in 2014

Tony Buzbee in 2014, when he was on the team that would be handling tackle two felony indictments against Texas governor Rick Perry Credit: Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis via Getty Images

And you wanted the power? “No, it was a lot of things. If you look closely at your life, you’re probably dealing with things that happened in your past.

“Not to get too psychological, but why do I have personalised licence plates? Why do I live on the richest street in town? I’m in a fishbowl. There’s no privacy here.”

It’s become a tradition at Christmas time for every house to be decked out with spectacular decorations – Buzbee’s is no exception – and the streets are thronged with thousands of people from all over town coming to look.

He pulls on his cigar. He’s been doing a lot of soul searching over the last few months, he says. pondering on all this – his upbringing, his success – man’s search for meaning, as Viktor Frankl would put it.

Therapy?

“I’m doing my own analysis and therapy all the time. Adaptive behaviours that become maladaptive in adulthood, extreme self-reliance… probably not the best trait to have if you’re trying to have connection and vulnerability with people. I rarely show any vulnerability, I rarely express emotions other than anger. Anger has fuelled my career for 30 years.”

That shark tattoo, I say – it’s definitely saying something…

He pulls up his sleeve to show me. There is another on his arm in Latin script, “bellum omnium contra omnes”. It’s from Thomas Hobbes, he says. “War against everyone. I always used to say, whether it’s philosophical or otherwise, we’re always at war.

“I created this aura of, we’re going to kick your ass and here we come – that in-your-face kind of thing. There was a lot of thinking and calculation that went into that. But now I’m trying to figure out, why am I doing that?

“Running from something. Running to something. Running… Having a chip on your shoulder only goes so far. Are you going to have that till you’re 90? I hope not. My dad still does. He’s never been able to process it, work it out. He was always angry about something.”

But he must be proud of you, I say.

“I would assume, but it’s not something I’ve discussed with him. I don’t think I’ve seen him since I told him I was going to slap the s–t out of him, probably seven or eight years ago, and told him to get off my property.”

‘It’s important to the clients, it’s important to me and I’ll put on a good show’

Buzbee has a 7,000 acre ranch in north Texas, where he keeps a menagerie of animals including horses, llamas, zebra, wildebeest, water buffalo… the list goes on. “For a while I had him working on it. But at some point you have to make some decisions about how to go forward, and I made the decision to go forward without him in my life for my own peace of mind.”

Buzbee thinks about this. He’s been making an inventory of his life, all this stuff he’s acquired and surrounded himself with. The Second World War-era tank that used to be parked in the forecourt. The 40 cars he collected over the years. “I’m getting rid of them slowly. I didn’t care about them. I didn’t drive them, and when I did I didn’t enjoy them. So I finally had to ask myself, why have them? We have the worst streets here in Houston.”

Tony Buzbee': Anger has fuelled my career for 30 years'

‘Anger has fuelled my career for 30 years’ Credit: Shane Lavalette

He also has a home in Dallas – “we like to go to Dallas” – and another in Galveston, where he anchored his yacht. He’s had two – an 85ft Azimut yacht, with five staterooms that can accommodate up to 10 guests, and which Buzbee liked to sail into harbour with the Pirates of Caribbean theme tune blaring out over the sound system.

That was replaced by a smaller boat, The Patriot, which sank in the Galveston marina during Hurricane Beryl in July. “I’d never been on that boat. I’d walked on it, but I’d never been underway.”

He had homes in New York, Montana and Malibu – but he sold those. How many homes does one man need? He sighs. “I’ve got too much stuff. Even my ranch, all these animals, it’s too much. It’s got eight houses on it. Staff. It’s really a fabulous place, but I’ve only been there once this year.

“At some point in my life, I don’t know if you call it angst, or… restlessness. But being able to find out where that comes from can bring you peace.

“And it took me a long time to figure out, first off, where it came from, and secondly how to turn it off. Because if you’re not able to turn it off, you’ll never be at peace.”

He muses on this. There is a church in the town, non-denominational Christian, where he grew up, with a graveyard where most of his family are buried. Over the years he has paid for its upkeep, but the last preacher left the church in the 1980s and it fell into disrepair. He has now rebuilt it, and preachers from all over the area will be invited to preach there. He might speak there himself. “I think there are some things I could say.

“So right now I’m trying to simplify my life.” He pauses. “Of course, this Diddy case doesn’t simplify my life very much…”

When I ask when he last lost a case, there is an immoderately long pause while he ponders the question.

“Not in a long time…”

He used to feel terrible whenever he lost, he says, roll up in a ball and lie in a foetal position for a couple of days. “I’m not sure I’d have that reaction now. I’d probably move on pretty easily. Winning cases used to be something I needed to shore me up. But not any more.

“I have the luxury of choosing the cases I work on, so I can be very particular about why I’m doing them. Am I doing it because of a chip on my shoulder, or because I’m truly trying to help somebody and even the score for them?”

He has 26 lawyers working for his firm. “They hand me a folder, I can get up at 4am, read that folder and commit it to memory, I can go to court and put on a show. And they can put up any witness they want, and whether I’ve read his testimony or not I can still twist him up and make him look foolish. And I’ll do that pretty easy. That’s just what I do and I’m good at it.

“But I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on the victories… OK, move on. Last case, we were in Colorado. I think the verdict there was $50 million, and I forgot about it before I landed back here.”

The criminal trial of Sean Combs is scheduled to begin in May. In the meantime, Buzbee will be filing more civil suits, and he has other cases to fight.

One is going to trial soon.

“It’s important to the clients, it’s important to me and I’ll put on a good show, everybody will have a nice time, everybody entertained.” He gives a smile to match his tattoo. “And I’m going to win – I’m pretty certain of it.’

He usually does.

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