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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.

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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...