The Press: Stacked Deck?

When spindly Ken Dixon became managing editor of the daily Lake Charles, La. American Press 2½ years ago, the gambling dens of Lake Charles (pop. 41,202) were thriving as mightily as its mushrooming oil and chemical plants. Far into the night, the slot machines clanked and roulette wheels whirred at the Green Frog,

Tommy’s Oasis, many another neon-lit saloon along Highway 90. Somehow, the political powers who ran Calcasieu Parish —longtime Judge Mark Pickrel, Sheriff Henry (“Ham”) Reid, District Attorney Griffin Hawkins—did not seem to notice what was going on. But Editor Dixon, 36, onetime AP war correspondent and roving INS columnist, is no newsman to let bad enough alone. With the backing of Publisher Thomas Shearman, he ripped in after gambling.

By last week, his fight had not only closed down Lake Charles gambling; his crusade turned into an even more momentous one—that of the vigilant press v. official corruption.

Dixon started by merely kidding the gamblers in his column, “Charley Lake Says”; later, he began blasting them on Page One. One night as he drove home, someone shot at him, knocked out a headlight of his Ford convertible.

Bar-Room Tour. Meanwhile, the law went on yawning at gambling, and Dixon got action in another way. He helped set up the People’s Action Group, a citizens’ committee which sent secret “flying squads” iato gaming rooms after evidence. For months they roamed the bars, collecting affidavits of betting in 35 of them, turned the affidavits over to District Attorney Hawkins. Last month, P.A.G. asked a grand jury to charge Ham Reid (the fourth generation Reid to be Calcasieu Parish sheriff) with malfeasance. Gambling suddenly stopped. Hawkins used the affidavits to take 33 barkeeps before Judge Pickrel on gambling charges. The gamblers got off with light fines and suspended jail sentences, and the American Press pointed out that suspended sentences are usually given only to first offenders. It spread over six columns of its front page the police records of 15 men whose names were the same as 15 of the gamblers.

Then came the crusher. Last week the grand jury not only refused to indict Ham Reid but, in an astounding bit of legal beagling, it filed slander charges against three P.A.G. members and five American Pressmen, including Ken Dixon and Publisher Shearman. The accusation: they had “defamed” three of the local gamblers as well as Sheriff Reid, the district attorney, other officials.

How had gamblers and officials been “defamed”? In printing the gamblers’ police records, the paper in its eagerness had listed too many arrests for some of them. The American Press had also included arrests of other lawbreakers with the same names. Hawkins chirped that Dixon had maligned him editorially, by accusing the district attorney’s staff of “legal double-talk,” for failing to back the crusade. Apparently, the charges of “defamation” of other officials had an equally flimsy basis. Said P.A.G. President George Buchanan, a welder: “This is a fight to see whether the racketeers or the law-abiding citizens will run Calcasieu Parish.”

“Different Morals.” To the good citizens of Calcasieu Parish, alarmed at the corruption in their community, it was more: it was a fight to see whether public officials could gag the press with what seemed to be legal tomfoolery.

As big-city reporters swarmed into Lake Charles to cover the story, District Attorney Hawkins, a gaunt, darting-eyed man, blandly told them: “You people from distant places may have different morals than mine.” Seth May, a grand juror who helped indict the scrappy American Pressmen, put it another way. Said he to the visiting press: “If Huey Long were alive, you guys wouldn’t even be in town.”