Anna Nicole Smith’s billionaire in-laws secretly lobbied the courts. When the heirs of a Texas oil billionaire went to court in a $75 million tax dispute, they got help from an unlikely ally: Barber-Scotia College, the nation’s first institution of higher learning for black women. That may seem like the last place for the family of J. Howard Marshall II, famous for his romance with Anna Nicole Smith, to look for help with a tax matter. But the college’s name was listed, along with those of four other historically black colleges and universities, on a friend-of-the-court brief submitted in 2013 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. |