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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 hayride was over. Or, as Louisiana novelist Walker Percy put it, "The bon temps have just roulered out."

Meanwhile, federal authorities were closing in. More than a dozen grand juries had investigated Edwards over the years, but he had always stayed one step ahead of the law. As United States Attorney Stanley Bardwell noted, Edwards always seemed to know exactly how far he could go without running afoul of the law. In one instance, however, his activities were so flagrant that a federal grand jury indicted him in 1985 on charges that four hospitals paid him $1.9 million, while Treen was governor. In exchange, federal prosecutors alleged, Edwards agreed to grant state government permits so the hospitals could begin operations when, as expected, he became governor again in 1984. Prosecutors charged that Edwards needed the bribe money to pay off $2 million in gambling debts from Nevada casinos. Edwards denied the charges with his typical twist. "What's wrong with making money?" he asked. "You don't get rich as governor, you know. When I left office [in 1980], I was only worth about half a million, now I'm worth maybe 3 to 5 [million]. But I did it as a private businessman, not as governor. So there's nothing illegal about it." Edwards accused Republicans of trying to use the courts to oust him from office, having failed to do so at the ballot box.

As governor, Edwards frequently went to Las Vegas, usually on the casinos' tab. He played poker and blackjack, but he loved craps the most. It is the fastest-paced game, usually creating so much excitement that onlookers typically crowd around the table, cheering on those who toss the dice and bet. "I do not collect stamps, I do not collect coins, racehorses," Edwards said once. "I do not own boats or do things other people like to do. I like to gamble."

In time, the Las Vegas casinos rewarded him by treating him, as one reporter described it,

like an Oriental potentate in the gambling mecca, where he is granted up to $200,000 in casino credit at the stroke of his pen.... He is classified by his favorite hotel-casino--Caesars Palace--among the 0.25 percent [1 in 400] of its customers whose importance as gamblers makes the company unwilling to share credit information with other casinos. Caesars even waives its maximum bet limit when Edwards steps to the table.... He eats his meals on the casinos' tab in the Strip's poshest restaurants. He sunbathes on casino-owned yachts at Lake Tahoe. He glides around town in casino limousines, and he and his entourage stay at luxury suites in the most popular hotels. All for free.

What can Edwards get from the Vegas casinos? "Anything he wants," a former Caesars Palace employee said.

Because the odds favor the casinos, in time nearly all gamblers become losers, and that is what happened to Edwin Edwards. In sensational testimony during his 1985 trial, Edwards testified that he had lost between $10,000 and $50,000 in thirteen of the preceding fifteen years. A Caesars executive testified that he had flown to Baton Rouge to retrieve suitcases full of cash from the Governor's Mansion--$400,000 in one case, $380,000 in another. Edwards attempted to hide his losses, prosecutors said, by gambling under the aliases of "T. Wong," "T. Lee," "B. True," and "Ed Neff." When he took the stand to defend himself, Edwards said he had always gambled within his economic means and offered a whimsical explanation for his aliases.

"How did you get the alias `T. Wong'?" his attorney asked.

"The Chinese are pretty good gamblers," Edwards replied, "and one day this beautifully fantastic elderly Chinese gentleman was at the same table with me. His name was Mr. Wong. He made a bad roll, and I decided to quit. As they brought me the marker, I said [to him], `Look, you're responsible for the debts. I'm going to sign your name.' The poor man didn't know I could use aliases, and he almost hit the ceiling. But I explained it to him."

"What about the name Ed Neff?" asked his attorney.

"One time I was gambling," Edwards replied, "and I had a bad streak of luck and ran out of chips. The dealer asked if I wanted more chips, so I said, no, I'd had enough, and when they brought me the marker, I signed it `E. Nuff.' Whoever picked it up on the computer thought it said Ed Neff."

Outside the courtroom, Edwards kept up a daily show. One day, he arrived at the federal courthouse in a mule-drawn buggy that ordinarily hauled tourists around the French Quarter. "It's indicative of the [slow] pace of the trial," he cracked. On other days, as United Press International reported, he "has walked backwards for the benefit of television cameramen who usually have to backpedal to get their shots, sat on the courthouse steps for a group photo of the cameramen he calls `the dirtiest dozen,' attended `media night' at a French Quarter pub where he read a bawdy poem and his defense attorney James Neal tended bar [and] sat on the [courthouse] steps with his wife to wave at passersby...."

In the end, Edwards's battle with the federal prosecutors was no contest. Nearly the entire jury sided with him, voting 10-2 to acquit Edwards on some charges, 11-1 on others. The judge declared a mistrial. In a press conference afterward, a reporter shouted at Edwards, "What's your answer to those who will say, `Edwin Edwards is guilty as hell, but the prosecution just wasn't smart enough to get him?'"

Edwards paused and then smiled. "They're half right," he replied. Everyone knew which half he meant, except for the hapless prosecutors, who decided to try Edwards a second time. This time he was acquitted. "Edwin Edwards will return to run the state again," promised his brother Marion.

Edwards had won in court and indeed did return to run Louisiana again. Even so, the sensational revelations and his focus on the trial--and not on the state's pressing needs--had damaged him politically. To make matters worse, with the Oil Bust, he was no longer facing a forgiving populace. "Everybody laughs when the oil companies foot the bill for the graft," Lothar Richane, an unemployed offshore-rig hand, said at the time. "But now that it's coming out of my pocket, ain't nobody laughing." The state's treasury had run dry, and Edwards no longer could throw money at problems.

In January 1986, Edwards outlined his plan to revive the state's economy. It called for Louisiana to legalize ten to fifteen gambling casinos in New Orleans, Jefferson Parish, and St. Bernard Parish. The casinos had to be attached to hotels that had at least five hundred rooms. Edwards's plan also called for the legalization of a state lottery and the legalization of gambling on cruise ships on the Mississippi River out of New Orleans.

Each component of Edwards's plan was rooted in the state's history. In the twenty-five years before the Civil War, illegal gambling flourished on boats out of New Orleans. The Louisiana Lottery had attracted players from across the country' in the years after the Civil War, until its massive corruption prompted Congress to shut it down in the 1890s. Similarly, during the 1950s and 1960s, illegal casinos had operated in Jefferson Parish and in St. Bernard Parish. New Orleans also had a long history of illegal gambling. Now Edwards was seeking to reincarnate the illicit history in a legal way.

In all, Edwards predicted, the casinos, the state lottery, and cruise ship gambling would create 100,000 jobs and produce $600 million a year in desperately needed tax revenues. There would be so much new revenue, he predicted, that the legislature would have money to raise salaries for state employees and teachers, land values in New Orleans would rise dramatically, and crime would drop 20 percent. If the legislature didn't approve his proposals, Edwards warned, he would have to make crippling budget cuts that would force state employee layoffs and eliminate much-needed programs.

But with Edwards weakened politically by the trial and the state's economic troubles, opponents mobilized against his gambling plan. They argued that Edwards's proposals would increase crime, were antifamily, and didn't address the state's basic economic problems. They also argued that Edwards, with his penchant for wagering in Las Vegas, could not be trusted to oversee gambling. In the end, the legislature shelved Edwards's plan.

By the time Edwards ran for reelection in 1987, the state's economy was in a deep recession. The unemployment rate had reached 14 percent, the nation's highest. Not surprisingly, voters blamed the governor. Polls showed that his disapproval rating ranged from 52 percent to 71 percent, or as one legislator put it, "higher than any candidate not in jail and some who are." Because of his problems, Edwards had trouble raising money "Nosey feds are making fund-raising a real drag," said political commentator John Maginnis. "A $100,000 contribution to Edwards was once considered a good investment. Now it's an open invitation to the grand jury."

To win reelection, the governor would have to overcome four major challengers. In Louisiana's open primary system, the top two finishers would make the general election runoff, regardless of political party. Each of the four challengers--congressmen Bob Livingston, Billy Tauzin, and Buddy Roemer, and Secretary of State Jim Brown--figured that Edwards still had enough strength, particularly among black voters, to win one of the two runoff spots. The battle then was for that second spot, with the thinking that whoever faced Edwards in the runoff would defeat him.

Charles E. (Buddy) Roemer III, a bantamweight at five feet seven inches and 145 pounds, began the race the longest of long shots, at 1 percent in the polls. A four-term congressman from Bossier City, in northern Louisiana, the Harvard-educated Roemer had been an Edwards insider, managing Edwards's campaign in north Louisiana in the 1971 governor's race. His father, too, was an insider. When Edwards was elected governor, he named Charles Roemer II as commissioner of administration, the state's second most powerful post. But Charles Roemer abused his position. In 1981, he was convicted of taking bribes from Mafia boss Carlos Marcello in exchange for the awarding of state insurance contracts. By then, Buddy Roemer was a Democratic member of Congress and was beginning to inveigh against Louisiana's political system, a system that his father had been part of.

By 1987, Roemer had set his sights on slaying the dragon, Edwin Edwards himself. "I want a governor who puts our pocketbook ahead of his," Roemer said repeatedly during the campaign. Roemer aired tough-talking, plainspoken television ads in which he pledged to clean up Louisiana's corrupt politics, improve education, fight crime, cut taxes, eliminate wasteful government spending, and crack down on polluters who had made the state the most befouled in the nation. "The choice is between Edwin Edwards, who's gone corrupt, and Buddy Roemer, who's trying to start a revolution," Roemer declared in one television ad.

The state's newspapers, desperately yearning for a good-government candidate, one after another endorsed him. Voters, also hungry for change, responded favorably. On the night of the primary, Roemer finished first with 33 percent. Edwards finished second with 28 percent, and at 1:10 a.m. that evening, he shocked his supporters by announcing that he would not contest the runoff. Suddenly, his political career seemed over. "I guess the big jury has spoken," said United States Attorney John Volz, who had been the lead federal prosecutor in the failed attempt to convict Edwards.

"He was blessed with many gifts," said John Hainkel, a longtime state lawmaker and Edwards critic, thinking it was time to write his epitaph. "He is extremely glib and able to communicate. But he had a tragic character flaw.... He thinks of politics as a way to make money for himself and his friends rather than public service. That flaw finally brought him to his knees."

Although down, Edwards wasn't ready to concede he was out forever. "If Buddy Roemer isn't successful, maybe I'll be back," he mused with uncanny prescience just two days after the election.

Surrounded by a group of young, idealistic aides, Roemer got off to a strong start as governor in 1988. He won teacher pay increases, a teacher evaluation program, tough environmental enforcement, and strict limits on campaign financing. To balance the state budget, Roemer sold government airplanes, cut wasteful programs, and borrowed $1 billion to be paid off over ten years. He had staved off Louisiana's bankruptcy, and now he moved to his biggest gambit yet--a restructuring of the state tax system that he said would put Louisiana on sound fiscal standing and encourage more investment. It was put before the voters in April 1989. They rejected it decisively. Louisianians, tolerant of only so much good government, were tiring of Roemer.

After being ousted from the Governor's Mansion, Edwin Edwards had bided his time, hoping that Roemer would stumble and give him an opening to win back the governorship. When his successor did stumble, Edwards plotted with populist legislators to ensure that Roemer suffered more defeats. In the meantime, Roemer's wife, Patti, tired of living a politician's life, left her husband. Heartbroken, Roemer retreated into his shell, canceling appointments while he sat by the mansion's pool and brooded. The Roemer Revolution was derailing.

By 1991, Roemer was running for reelection and attempting to get back on track. One of the ways he sought to change his fortunes was by supporting two gambling bills. Doing so would invite criticism because Roemer had fervently opposed gambling during the 1987 gubernatorial campaign, a stance that had played well with his conservative north Louisiana base. But the gambling supporters convinced Roemer that the measures would benefit Louisiana and his own political fortunes.

Nearly one hundred years after the corrupt, privately operated Louisiana Lottery had shut down, the state had already begun to allow legal gambling. In 1990, the legislature gave voters the chance to amend the state constitution to legalize a state-run lottery. Louisianians approved it overwhelmingly. Now a year later a group of lawmakers wanted to open the door to gambling even further, although not as widely as Edwards had sought with his 1986 proposal to legalize big casinos throughout metro New Orleans.

One of the 1991 bills would legalize gambling on riverboats all over the state. The other would authorize a new form of gambling known as video poker.

The riverboat measure had been offered in previous years with little success. But by 1991, supporters had a new weapon to buttress their argument. Whereas a decade earlier only Nevada and New Jersey had legalized gambling, now other states were joining the bandwagon. Of specific concern to Louisiana was that Iowa, Illinois, and Mississippi all had legalized riverboat gambling within the previous two years. "We are losing our competitive edge," said Louisiana state representative Francis Heitmeier, the main House sponsor. By proposing to have the state take a hefty 18.5 percent cut of a riverboat's winnings, Heitmeier had another argument for his bill. "These guys," he said, referring to his colleagues, "don't want to vote for taxes, so I am giving them an alternative."

The Heitmeier bill limited the amount of gambling space on each boat to 30,000 square feet--the size of a small Las Vegas casino. It also called for a limited number of boats--fifteen--with a seven-member board appointed by the governor to award the licenses. There was nothing magical about the number 15, it was simply the number pulled from thin air by Jimmy Smith Jr., a New Orleans lawyer who wrote the draft version of the bill and lobbied for the measure. Smith worked for a group of men who owned boats--the Natchez , the Cotton Blossom , the Delta Queen , and the John James Audubon --that offered daily pleasure cruises to tourists from Mississippi River wharves in New Orleans. These men weren't particularly enamored with gambling, but they had seen how owners of similar vessels in Iowa had lost their business to the floating casinos that had been authorized there. So they figured that if riverboat gambling was going to come to Louisiana, they ought to try to ensure that they be the beneficiaries. The Heitmeier bill required each riverboat casino to take three-hour cruises throughout the day. This seemed to give the pleasure boat owners an advantage, since they knew the river.

At the suggestion of the boat operators, the riverboat bill contained two additional features that attracted little attention at the time. One feature gave the riverboat's captain the right to keep the boat at dock if he determined that conditions on the water posed a threat to the vessel's safety. Gambling would be allowed to continue during this time. The other feature gave gamblers forty-five minutes to board the vessel before it left the dock and another forty-five minutes to exit once it had arrived back at the dock. The argument for this rule was that it would give everyone enough time to board and exit the boat. But it was actually a way to give, patrons up to ninety minutes to gamble at dock. The distinction would be important because some gamblers would not like going out on the water. Boats earned more when the vessel was dockside.

The Heitmeier bill contained an additional important feature: it mandated that the boats be designed to look like the nineteenth-century paddle wheelers that had cruised up and down the Mississippi. This was meant to evoke romantic images out of Mark Twain--men in satin vests, women in flowing dresses--and thus attract hordes of free-spending tourists to Louisiana. The group backing the bill hired a Louisiana State University economist who said the measure would bring two million new visitors to Louisiana, generating $376 million a year in economic activity and creating 33,000 permanent jobs throughout the state. In reality, most observers thought New Orleans would receive the lion's share. It was assumed that nearly everyone would want to operate from New Orleans, since the Crescent City already attracted millions of tourists a year and had a long history of embracing gambling. To attract the support of lawmakers outside New Orleans, however, the bill also allowed gambling on the Calcasieu River in Lake Charles, on the Red River in the Shreveport-Bossier City area, on the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, and on Lake Pontchartrain, which abutted New Orleans and the metro area's surrounding parishes.

As Heitmeier pushed the riverboat bill through the legislature, he emphasized that the measure was a painless way to raise revenue while spurring economic development--at a time when the state was still suffering from the Oil Bust. Heitmeier downplayed gambling's negative side effects. One of the few public objections was raised by Warren de Brueys, who headed the Metropolitan Crime Commission, the New Orleans group that was created in the 1950s to combat mobster Carlos Marcello and gambling payoffs to the police. If the legislature legalized riverboat gambling, de Brueys warned, lawmakers would open the door to a land-based casino that would have a particularly harmful effect on the state. De Brueys's warnings fell on deaf ears. By early July 1991, the House and the Senate had approved different versions of riverboat gambling. If leaders of the two chambers could settle on a compromise measure, Louisiana again would become a gambling state.

Video poker in the meantime was following its own path through the legislature. Legalizing video poker was the brainchild of a group of men who owned pinball machines, which were popular in bars and restaurants. It was a profitable if somewhat shady business--some of the owners had been convicted of operating illegal pinball machines. But the business changed in the late 1980s when illegal video machines began to crowd out the pinball machines. The new machines offered poker on a video screen and allowed the player to request replacements for some or all of the five cards displayed on the screen, as the player sought to assemble a hand that beat a predetermined "house" hand. Some bar owners, however, had reprogrammed the machines so that with a flick of the switch they could pay off winners. This was illegal but highly profitable for the bar owners. They netted $500 to $1,500 a week per illegal video poker' machine.

In reaction, the pinball machine owners sought the assistance of their champion in the legislature, Representative Charles Emile (Peppi) Bruneau Jr. of New Orleans. Bruneau spoke in the "Yat" accent of New Orleans that made it seem as if he hailed from Brooklyn. As a hobby, he collected old jukeboxes and pinball machines, and became such an expert in the field that he could guess the value and manufacturer of almost any machine. On social, tax, and race issues, Bruneau was an ultraconservative. Although he opposed a land casino, he supported other forms of gambling. His love for gambling came from his father, Emile, who owned a bar and who was the state boxing commissioner throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Emile Bruneau also was identified as an associate of Carlos Marcello.

The pinball owners and Peppi Bruneau agreed that they would push to legalize the video poker machines, with the argument that the state could drive the illegal machines out of business and begin raising revenue from the legal machines by imposing a tax on their winnings. State laws didn't have enough teeth to permit authorities to crack down on the illegal machines, they argued. "These machines are a fact of life," Bruneau said. "They are there from Caddo Parish to Plaquemines Parish, and from the Delta to Cameron Parish, and all points 'twixt and 'tween." The Bruneau bill would allow bars and any other establishment with a liquor license to have up to three video poker machines apiece, with the State Police regulating the operation. Each play would cost the gambler $1. To win over Roemer and other legislators, Bruneau pitched the measure as a way to raise money for the state without raising taxes and as a form of economic development for struggling bars and restaurants.

Bruneau's video poker bill ran into more opposition than did the riverboat measure in the summer of 1991. It sailed through the House, but then stalled before the Senate. Leading the opposition was Findley Raymond, lobbyist for the Louisiana Coalition of Charitable Gaming Organizations, whose members--many of them churches--owned and operated bingo halls. In a letter to the editor, Raymond spelled out his opposition to the bill. Video poker, he wrote, "would lead to widespread proliferation of the new-age slot machines in every neighborhood bar, restaurant, motel, bowling alley and other places that serve alcohol. The machines are the most addictive gambling devices invented to date. They spawn compulsive gambling and gambling-related crime." Raymond also said that rather than legalize video poker, the legislature ought to give authorities the means to crack down on the illegal machines and to levy tougher penalties against operators.

In the face of this opposition, the video poker bill remained stuck in a Senate committee. Even if they cleared that hurdle, the bill's supporters calculated, they were one vote shy of approval on the Senate floor. On June 24, as the Senate committee was considering the bill, Senator Gerry Hinton, a Republican from the New Orleans suburb of Slidell, spoke up. Hinton had been a video poker opponent up to then, but he was open to switching sides. "I've got a friend of mine," Hinton said, "a constituent of mine, named Fred Goodson. He's a God-fearing Baptist like me. He owns the biggest truck stop in the state, and it's in my district. He ought to have the same right to put in those machines, just like bars do."

Bruneau and other video poker supporters didn't quite understand what Hinton was trying to do with his amendment, and they didn't know Goodson. Nor did they understand what it might mean to allow truck stops to have video poker machines. But they did realize they needed Hinton's vote to get the measure out of the Senate committee, and he could provide the twentieth and final vote necessary for approval in the thirty-nine-member Senate. So they let Hinton add the truck stop amendment to the bill. Nobody paid much attention to the vote that day or in succeeding days. Yet it would turn out to have huge ramifications down the road, for both supporters and opponents of gambling in Louisiana.

July 8 was the final day of the 1991 legislative session. A number of measures hung in the balance, as usual, including the riverboat gambling and video poker bills. Each measure had passed both chambers, but in different versions. For the bills to become law, the House and Senate had to settle on a single, compromise measure. Governor Roemer, in the meantime, had said he would sign the riverboat gambling bill, arguing that it would provide economic development. He was noncommittal on the video poker bill.

The video poker bill came up first. With Hinton on board, the Senate the day before had approved the measure, 20-17. Now the House had to vote on the Senate bill, which contained the Hinton truck stop amendment. With little discussion, the House approved the bill, 60-36, and sent it to Roemer.

The Senate approved the riverboat gambling bill, 22-10, and the House, with four hours remaining in the session, took up the bill. Peppi Bruneau, already having gotten his video-poker bill through the legislature, delivered an impassioned speech in favor of the riverboat measure. He spoke after a conservative Republican from Slidell, Ed Scogin, had voiced his opposition. "We don't want these boats," Representative Scogin said emphatically. During a stirring closing, Bruneau addressed this comment. "Mr. Scogin, if you don't want to go, don't go. My people want to go. Let my people go!" By a 61-40 vote, the House agreed to let Peppi's people go. This bill also went to Roemer.

Two days after the two gambling bills passed, the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate printed an editorial pointing out the irony of the legislature's approving forms of gambling that Governor Edwards, the high roller, had not proposed. "About all that's left to legalize is the big on-land casinos, which might be irresistible to the next Legislature.... Within a few years, it's conceivable that a huge portion of the state's economy will revolve around gambling and related industries. And what will life be like in America's newest gambling mecca?" The editorial then noted that the legislature had approved more lenient rules for the riverboat casinos than originally proposed:

Action on that bill also suggests that, as time goes on, lawmakers might be more receptive, not only to more types of gambling, but to looser restrictions on the games already legalized. Things will snowball. A larger gambling industry will be able to exert more pressure for expansion on the Legislature and local governments, then use that growth to exert even more pressure for even more expansion. Gambling lobbyists will be as common as oil or chemical lobbyists at the State Capitol.

For good or ill, Louisiana is about to enter the world of big-time gambling. Are we up to it?

* * *

Eight days later, on July 18, Roemer signed the riverboat gambling bill into law. "This follows what Mississippi, Illinois and Iowa have done," he said. "We are the tourist center of the Mississippi Valley, and we should have it.... The bill is tightly drawn. It is acceptable and tight."

Roemer had mixed feelings about whether to let the video poker measure become law. Uneasy about gambling to begin with, he didn't think video poker would create jobs. Aware of his concerns, Representative Bruneau and Senator Don Kelly, who had guided the video poker bill through the Senate, told him that the bill would provide badly needed tax revenue for the state and help small bars and restaurants. By now, Roemer was aware of Senator Hinton's truck stop amendment and wondered if it would pose a problem. Bruneau assured him that he would get the legislature to eliminate the truck stops the following year if they did cause problems. Meanwhile, State Police officials said they could closely regulate the new form of gambling by having all the machines tied to a central computer. Reflecting his own ambivalence, Roemer let the video poker bill become law without his signature on July 31.

By then Roemer was facing an increasingly difficult reelection battle as the October 1991 open primary approached. Edwin Edwards was campaigning to be governor again. He loved being the Cajun King, having the governor's enormous powers at his disposal, having crowds flock to him wherever he went. As governor, Edwards could help his core consistency: the poor, the elderly, and African Americans. He also could help his friends and, many said, fatten his own bank account. There was another reason he wanted to run for governor in 1991: beginning with his election to the Crowley City Council in 1954, he had won twenty-two elections in a row before the 1987 loss. He wanted to avenge Roemer's victory and end his political career as a winner.

Meanwhile, a third candidate loomed on the horizon. His name was David Duke, and he was in the unique position of being stronger politically after losing a United States Senate election the year before. A Republican, Duke had won an astounding 60 percent of the state's white vote against the three-term incumbent, Senator J. Bennett Johnston, who had parlayed his 1971 defeat to Edwards into a Senate seat the following year.

As a grand wizard of a Ku Klux Klan faction in the 1970s and neo-Nazi apologist, Duke carried terrible political baggage. That same baggage, however, won him enormous press coverage, and Duke was a master at manipulating the media. Standing a couple of inches above six feet, with a trim build, sandy hair, and surgically enhanced looks that strengthened his chin and narrowed his nose, Duke was particularly effective in his television appearances.

Also, Duke's core issues, opposition to affirmative action, minority set-asides, and quotas--the same issues he had pushed in the Klan--had become winning issues with voters. Louisiana in 1989-1991 was rife with frustrated whites who felt that government programs meant to aid black people were responsible for their stagnant incomes or joblessness. Duke's arguments struck home even with some college students, who rallied behind him as the anti-establishment candidate. Duke, many people commented, said publicly what many Louisianians felt privately. In February 1989, Duke had tapped into voter anger by narrowly winning a House seat from the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. In 1990, he had campaigned strongly but lost the Senate race. In 1991, at forty-one, he ran for governor.

Perhaps fittingly, as the state headed into the gambling era, each of the three candidates for governor was a big-time gambler. Edwin Edwards, of course, loved high-stakes craps at Las Vegas casinos. David Duke, The Times-Picayune had just reported, also was a high roller at craps; the Horseshoe regularly flew him to its Las Vegas casino, meeting him at the airport with a limousine. Roemer, for his part, was a high-stakes poker player. As a congressman in Washington, D.C., he played in a regular game with House Speaker Tip O'Neill, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Roemer was successful enough to have to report his poker winnings on his income tax returns.

During the campaign, Edwards retained his base of blacks and Cajuns, Duke showed surprising strength, and Roemer lost support. In the open primary, Edwards ran first with 33.8 percent. Duke followed with 31.7 percent, and Roemer finished out of the money with 26.5 percent.

Edwards and Duke would face off in a four-week runoff election. To win, Edwards had to gain the support of Roemer supporters, who saw him as a crook and who feared he would usher in uncontrolled gambling. Throughout the campaign, Edwards, as he had done beginning in 1986, had proclaimed that casino gambling would uplift the state's downtrodden economy. Instead of wide-open gambling, as he had advocated unsuccessfully before, he now called for a single, huge casino in New Orleans. It would create 25,000 jobs, he promised, and create millions of dollars in tax revenue for New Orleans and Louisiana. But the prospect of a New Orleans casino under Edwards's control horrified many of Roemer's good-government supporters, who believed this would inevitably lead to corruption, crime, and lax morals. So in the waning days of his election battle with Duke, Edwards made a key promise: If elected governor, he would not push for a New Orleans casino.

In the final two weeks of the campaign, Roemer's supporters reluctantly backed Edwards. Two bumper stickers that became popular during the runoff campaign summed up their feelings. "Vote for the Lizard, not the Wizard," read one. "Vote for the Crook. It's Important," read the other. On election day, November 16, 1991, with the race attracting front-page news coverage in The New York Times and elsewhere, Edwards trounced Duke, winning 61 percent to 39 percent. Edwin Washington Edwards had been elected governor a record fourth time, even though exit polls showed that six out of ten voters thought he was a crook. Still, Edwards had promised to run a clean, honest administration. And he had promised not to push for a New Orleans casino.

So as Edwards prepared to take office in January 1992, many Louisianians asked: Could he be believed?

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

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