Bad Bet on the Bayou: The Rise of Gambling in Louisiana and the Fall of Governor Edwin Edwards - Softcover

Bridges, Tyler

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374528543 ISBN 13: 9780374528546

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Synopsis

An outrageous tale of fast cash, pretty women, dirty politics and extravagant greed in the Bayou State

Louisiana is our most exotic state. It is religious and roguish, a place populated by Cajuns, Creoles, Rednecks, and Bible-thumpers. It is a state that loves good food, good music, and good times. Laissez les bons temps rouler -- let the good times roll -- is the unofficial motto. Louisiana is also excessively corrupt.

In the 1990s, it plunged headlong into legalized gambling, authorizing more games of chance than any other state. Leading the charge was Governor Edwin Edwards, who for years had flaunted his fondness for cold cash and high-stakes gambling, and who had used his razor-sharp mind and catlike reflexes to stay one step ahead of the law. Gambling, Edwin Edwards, and Louisiana's political culture would prove to be a combustible mix.

Bad Bet on the Bayou tells the story of what happened when the most corrupt industry came to our most corrupt state. It is a sweeping morality tale about commerce, politics, and what happens when the law catches up to our most basic human desires and frailties.

About this title

About the Author

Tyler Bridges is a reporter for The Miami Herald, where he was part of a team that won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. He covered the legalization of gambling in Louisiana as a reporter for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. He is the author of The Rise of David Duke.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

BAD BET ON THE BAYOU
The Rise of Gambling in Louisiana and the Fall of Governor Edwin Edwards
By Tyler Bridges

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2001 Tyler Bridges.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-374-52854-3

Chapter One

Vote for the Crook

December 31, 1991, New Year's Eve. The large crowd at the craps table at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas was whooping it up. "Come on, mister! Two! Two!" cried out an eye-catching woman wearing a red and black jacket over a glittering metallic blouse. Her blond hair was picture perfect, her lipstick apple-red. The sixty-four-year-old silver-haired man standing to her right at the head of the craps table smiled at his young girlfriend's exuberance. Of medium build, he glided through life at his own pace. He could be cold, but when he turned on his charm, which was more often than not, few people could resist him. An acute sense of humor usually accompanied his charm, but his funniest remarks came not through storytelling?although he could tell humorous stories?but with lightning-quick comments that played off what others said.

    On this evening, he was dressed casually: a flannel shirt, blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a leather belt sporting his initials, EWE. But as Edwin Washington Edwards shuffled a pile of yellow chips in anticipation of a winning roll of the dice, it was clear that he was no casual gambler. Each chip was worth $1,000, and he was playing with a pile of twenty to thirty chips. Whenever it was time to bet, Edwards laid down his chips with confidence and aplomb, showing no more anxiety than if he were putting down a $5 after-dinner tip. "Hard eight for a thousand," he called out to a dealer as he tossed a yellow chip onto the green felt. "For Mom and the kids!"

    For a brief spell, Edwards was the "shooter," rolling the dice for all bettors gathered around the table. After a few throws, he turned the dice over to his companion, Candy Picou, a twenty-seven-year-old nursing student. She was easily the most animated player at the table. "Come on, mister! Two! Two!" she yelled as players prepared to roll the dice. At one point, Edwards handed her a couple of the $1,000 yellow chips. She waved them excitedly in the air.

    Of all the games at a casino, Edwards liked craps best. It was fast-paced, and it was exciting. So any delays in the game frustrated him. Repeatedly, when the dealers were sorting out payments between rolls of the dice, Edwards called out in a Cajun accent familiar to Louisiana voters: "Give him the dice! You got to roll to win! You got to roll to win! Come on, mister, roll the dice! What, are you giving him lessons down there?"

    Edwards's luck that day was uneven. At times, he bet on winning numbers, which caused Picou to shout in delight. But there were other rolls when he came up empty. His pile of $1,000 chips dwindled. Roll after roll, Edwards cried out for the number he wanted, and when it didn't turn up, he banged his fist hard on the table. Gradually, his luck improved. His numbers began to hit, one after another. The table erupted in cheers, and Edwards raised his arms in triumph. His mood brightened, and he began bantering with a group of men at the other end of the table. "Ocho! Ocho!" they called out.

    "Ocho?" Edwards asked. "What language is that?"

    "Spanish," came the reply. "It means eight."

    "Eight? We're looking for a five," Edwards retorted. "If you're going to use a foreign language, at least use the right number."

    Edwards was on a roll, and the pile of chips grew bigger. In time, they were worth $40,000 or $50,000. Soon, Edwards had his fill of action and cashed in his chips. He and Candy were ringing in the New Year at Frank Sinatra's show that night at the Riviera Hotel.

    In Baton Rouge two weeks later, on January 13, 1992, Edwin Edwards took the oath of office for the fourth time as governor of Louisiana. His return would bring together two combustible elements: Louisiana's inclination for political corruption and Edwards's passion for gambling and deal making.

Edwards always said his love for gambling came from his mother, who played nickel poker and nickel bourre, a Cajun card game. He had grown up poor during the Great Depression. Born in 1927, he was reared in an unpainted farmhouse in central Louisiana that Edwards's father had built out of cypress wood. Eight miles outside of Marksville, in Avoyelles Parish, in a community called Johnson, his home had neither electricity nor running water. At night, the future governor, the middle child of five, did his homework by lamplight. But his father insisted that he and his siblings finish their studies early because the family couldn't afford much kerosene oil after the sun went down.

    Edwards's father, Clarence, had only a third-grade education. His mother, Agnes, had left school after the seventh grade. When Edwards was a boy, they owned ten acres of farmland. Clarence Edwards sharecropped an additional forty acres, raising chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, cows, and sheep. Agnes Edwards was a midwife who taught her children to speak Cajun French.

    Edwards began his schooling in a one-room schoolhouse where one teacher taught grades one through four. It soon became clear that he was easily the smartest of the bunch, with a razor-sharp mind that amazed his elders. Edwards quickly realized that with an education, he would not have to spend his life working in the hot sun plowing the fields.

    Edwards was born the year before Huey Long was elected governor. Long exercised power for only seven years, but he was so forceful that his influence continued to dominate Louisiana politics after his assassination in 1935. For years afterward, Louisiana essentially could be divided into two political camps. One consisted of the populists, who advocated free textbooks, free medical care, and better roads, and tended to be colorful, sophisticated practitioners of politics, as well as tolerant of gambling. The other camp was described as favoring "good government."

    In contrast with the populists, the "good government" crowd favored clean politics, less government spending, and lower taxes for business. Edwards was a populist. As a boy growing up in poverty, he became convinced by the actions of Huey Long and President Franklin Roosevelt that government was a vehicle to improve the lives of its citizens. "I remember when government made it possible for electricity to be brought to my house," Edwards recalled years later, referring to the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. "I remember when government made it possible for a bus to pick me up and drive me eight miles into town. I remember when government made it possible for me to eat a free hot lunch at school. I remember when government made books available to me that I otherwise would not have been able to have."

    Although baptized a Catholic, Edwards became fascinated with the Church of the Nazarene, a conservative Methodist offshoot, during his junior and senior years in high school. Nazarenes dressed conservatively?women did not cut their hair and wore no makeup?and believed that a person who had been saved would fall out of grace by not continuing to lead a proper life. Edwards's association with the Nazarenes began when he and two of his brothers began accepting rides from churchgoers as a way of traveling to Marksville. The boys would go to the movies and visit friends in town before going to church at night. In time, Edwards converted. At the age of sixteen, showing an early confidence in public speaking, he preached before Nazarene assemblies and taught Sunday school. In his senior year at Marksville High School, Edwards decided to attend Louisiana State University. His parents were so unworldly that they didn't know it was in Baton Rouge, only ninety miles away. After his undergraduate studies?and a stint training as a naval pilot during World War II?Edwards went on to get a law degree from LSU in 1949.

    With the law degree in hand, he married Elaine Schwartzenburg, his high school sweetheart, converted back to Catholicism at Elaine's insistence, and sought a place to practice law. While visiting his sister in the town of Crowley-in southwest Louisiana, an area known as Acadiana?he looked in the telephone directory and saw listings for only fourteen lawyers. Crowley had a population of 18,000. Edwards knew that Marksville, with a population of 2,500, had twenty-five lawyers. In addition, the only French-speaking lawyer in Crowley was getting on in years. "I said, ?This must be a good place to practice law,?" Edwards remembered years later, With a laugh, he added, "I later learned that the phone company had made a mistake, and there were more than fourteen lawyers." After he and Elaine moved to Crowley, he established his office above a drugstore and began practicing law, handling a variety of cases, but primarily representing people injured or killed on the job.

    In Crowley the smooth-talking, handsome young attorney quickly made friends and political contacts. In 1954, Edwards entered the political arena by winning election to the Crowley City Council. He ran on a citywide ticket that included two black city council candidates, a racial coalition not seen in Louisiana since Reconstruction. In succeeding years, Edwards climbed the political ladder by winning elections to the Louisiana State Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. He quickly made his mark by being one of the few southern congressmen to support the 1966 extension to the Voting Rights Act. But living in Washington, D.C., and being one of 435 congressmen bored Edwards.

    In 1971, he ran for governor, the job he had always wanted. There were twenty candidates, and few people gave Edwards a chance. However, as it became clear that he could count on a strong base of Cajuns and blacks, his chief rival for that bloc of voters, Congressman Gillis Long, sought to undermine his campaign. Long, a cousin of Huey and Earl, paid for a man named Warren (Puggy) Moity to join the race and attack Edwards on a television show every Sunday in Lafayette. Moity "started off by saying I was fooling around with college girls," recalled Edwards. "And that didn't seem to make much difference. Then he accused me of running around with married women. That didn't seem to make much difference. Then he started accusing me of running around with black girls. That didn't catch on. In the final days of the campaign, he put the homosexual tag on me.... He called me Tweety Bird and said I was always traveling with three or four young boys.... In Baton Rouge, in particular?I don't know why?that seemed to strike a responsive chord."

    Edwards decided to defuse the attacks with humor. At a candidates' forum in Baton Rouge, Edwards deliberately arrived late. All of the other candidates were already seated at the head table. Edwards shook hands with a couple of his opponents and then got to Moity. He bent over and kissed Moity on the cheek. The large crowd at first was stunned and then roared with laughter.

    With strong support from Cajuns and African Americans, Edwards won a spot in the Democratic runoff and then narrowly defeated his opponent, a good-government state senator named J. Bennett Johnston. Edwards went on to be elected governor, easily defeating his Republican opponent.

    Like Huey Long, Edwards was a Democrat and a populist who championed the poor and the underprivileged. And like Long, he proved a contradiction, for he moved easily among the moneyed set and cut deals to steer work to friends and favored businessmen, who provided the money that fueled his campaigns. The Times-Picayune would dub this "The Louisiana Way": You had to pay someone close to the political decision makers to do business in Louisiana.

    In some instances, the deals seemed to benefit Edwards personally, such as the news in the mid- 1970s that he and his wife received as much as $20,000 from South Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park. Reporters constantly wrote about the various deals, some of which?such as the one involving Park?prompted grand jury investigations. The resulting news stories hurt Edwards's reputation in the short term, but when no charges were brought against him and the damaging headlines disappeared, the governor recovered his popularity. Edwards helped his cause because, unlike most politicians under fire, he rarely got defensive. Instead, he dismissed complaints with a wink and a few one-liners. For example, when asked about accepting illegal campaign contributions in the 1970s, he said, "It was illegal for them to give, but not for me to receive."

    Edwards never hid his love of gambling, and he cracked jokes when confronted with questions about his womanizing. Responding to a book's claim that he once made love with six women in a night, Edwards smiled and said, "No, it wasn't that way. He [the author] was gone when the last one came in."

    Edwards's approach disarmed Louisianians, who favored a live-and-let-live ethos anyway. "I think people realize that public officials are human and that we have our faults, our inadequacies," he explained once, "and if we don't try to be hypocritical or sanctimonious about it, I think they'll forgive us for it."

    Stanley Bardwell Jr., a United States Attorney; put it another way: "I have to give Edwards credit. He's brilliant, he plays the system like a violin. He has an uncanny knack of charging headlong to the brink and knowing exactly where to stop ... and he doesn't even try to cover his trail, he's that cocky."

    For most of the twentieth century, taxes on Louisiana's prodigious mineral wealth?oil and natural gas?filled the state treasury. This had three advantages for whoever occupied the Governor's Mansion. First, it minimized the taxes paid by voters. Second, the mineral taxes financed the social and public works doled out by Louisiana's governors to a grateful citizenry. Third, it created lots of opportunities for graft.

    During Governor Edwards's first term, he oversaw the modernization of Louisiana's state constitution?it had not been rewritten since 1921?and cleaned up several scandals from his predecessor's administration. He also got the legislature in 1973 to link the state oil and gas severance tax to a percentage of the market price. When prices jumped, the state earned millions and millions of additional revenue, and Louisiana's oil-based economy flourished. Flush with good times, Louisianians chortled at their governor's jokes and antics. In 1975, he was reelected with token opposition. During his second term, he continued to amaze Louisianians with his ability to have an answer to every question, a solution to every crisis.

    Louisiana's two-term law kept Edwards from running for reelection in 1979. Still extraordinarily popular, in 1983 he challenged the incumbent Republican governor, David Treen, a good-government conservative. During the campaign, Edwards showed that his political reflexes were as quick as ever. Treen, he said in a devastating comment, was "so slow it takes him an hour and a half to watch ?60 Minutes.?" Edwards also cracked, "If we don't get Treen out of office soon, there won't be any money left to steal."

    Edwards was so confident of victory in the 1983 governor's race that he said he couldn't lose unless he was caught "in bed with a dead girl or a live boy." He was right. Edwards returned to the Governor's Mansion with 63 percent of the vote. He was the first person to be elected governor of Louisiana three times. Although the challenger usually raises less money, Edwards outspent Treen by $10 million. Sighed a befuddled Treen: "It's difficult for me to understand his popularity. But how do you explain how 900 people drank Kool-Aid with [Peoples Temple founder] Jim Jones?"

    Edwards, fifty-six, didn't even wait for his inauguration to mark a return to the heady days of his first two terms. Before taking office again, he filled two 747s with some six hundred supporters, at $10,000 a head, for a weeklong trip to France that paid off a $4 million campaign debt. "The debt," wrote The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, "vanished in a spray of champagne at the Hotel George V, smoked salmon at Maxim's and dice at Monte Carlo." Edwards won $15,000 at Monte Carlo's dice tables and then told a dealer: "Give me a wheelbarrow for my money."

    But when Edwards moved back into the Governor's Mansion in early 1984, oil prices were dropping because of oversupply. The state's finances soon were a shambles. Edwards rammed a $730 million tax increase through the state legislature, but it did not plug the gap. He had to cut government programs, weakening his power base. Louisianians stopped laughing at his jokes about womanizing and gambling. The hay-ride was over. Or, as Louisiana novelist Walker Percy put it, "The bon temps have just roulered out."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from BAD BET ON THE BAYOU by Tyler Bridges. Copyright © 2001 by Tyler Bridges. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374528543
• ISBN 13: 9780374528546
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432