On New Year’s Eve in 2020, Tom Girardi called me from his cellphone. In a brief voicemail left in The Times’ general mailbox, the once fearsome attorney said there were “slanderous statements” in an article I had co-written. A lawsuit, he said, was coming soon. At another moment, a voicemail like that from Girardi might have elicited caution, even alarm. After all, for much of his career, Girardi was a formidable lawyer whose calling card was the “Erin Brockovich” case. He had won millions for scores of clients, and was on a first-name basis with judges, governors, senators. He was the type of opponent who knew his way around the corridors of power and how to leverage that for maximum gain. But all of that had changed a few weeks before. A federal judge in Chicago had determined that Girardi misappropriated more than $2 million from clients — widows and orphans whose loved ones died in a Boeing plane crash in Indonesia. Boeing had wired the money to Girardi’s firm, yet it never reached his …