Taking a Louisiana Mud Bath

Louisiana politics are, well, different. When a Federal official declared at a national Governors conference a few years ago that “it’s not part of my job to lie to people,” Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards cracked: “It’s a very big part of mine.” During his race against then Governor David Treen in 1983, he joked that his opponent seemed worried that Edwards, if elected, might loot the Governor’s mansion. Quipped Edwards: “If we don’t get Treen out of office soon, there won’t be any money left to steal.” Louisianians hooted and elected Edwards with 62% of the vote.

Last week a federal grand jury indicted the flamboyant Democratic Governor on 50 counts of racketeering, wire fraud and mail fraud. U.S. Attorney John Volz charged that Edwards and six associates, including a brother, Marion, and a nephew, had conspired to create 15 health corporations and to illegally acquire state certification that the companies, which existed only on paper, were needed to meet legitimate health needs in Louisiana. The companies would therefore be entitled to receive federal Medicare and Medicaid funds to reimburse them for capital expenditures. After gaining these certificates, the indictment alleges, Edwards and his co-conspirators sold the corporations to those interested in constructing health-care facilities. These operators paid more than $1 million for each of the companies.

The scheme had started, according to the indictment, in 1982, when Edwards was a private attorney between terms as Governor. His initial alleged co- conspirators were another attorney and a former state health official. Edwards is accused of concealing his partial ownership of four hospital corporations, reporting nearly $2 million in income from their sale as attorney’s fees. When he became Governor again in 1984, the indictment claims, Edwards declared a moratorium on the issuance of all new certificates but exempted eight pending projects, five of which belonged to his associates. Edwards and the others are charged under the same racketeering law (RICO) that Federal prosecutors have recently been using to indict many Mafia families.

Federal investigators began looking into the hospital scandal after James A. Cobb Jr., a Louisiana attorney who represented other health-care operators, filed a suit against the state. “The people I represent are decent, hardworking people who didn’t get a fair shake,” Cobb complained. Once the probe was under way, Cobb contends, he got anonymous telephone threats. One caller, according to Cobb, said, “My friend, you really don’t know what you’re messing around with.”

By his own count, Edwards has been a target of eleven other grand jury probes over the past decade, including one still under way. All of them, he claims, have been conducted by Republicans. But he has always shrugged off charges of wrongdoing. “People say I’ve had brushes with the law,” he has said. “That’s not true. I’ve had brushes with overzealous prosecutors.”

In Louisiana, political scandal is considered high entertainment, and “honest graft” has been tolerated so long as politicians deliver for their constituents. Former Governor Huey Long, the infamous “Kingfish,” presided over a scandal-ridden administration in the late ’20s, but he also built schools and roads and soaked the rich to give to the poor. Edwards, 57, the son of a Cajun sharecropper, is heir to Long’s populist legacy. He helped to streamline the Louisiana constitution and reorganize the state bureaucracy.

Enormously popular, he was first elected in 1972, re-elected in 1975, and he would probably have won again in 1979, had he not been barred by state law from seeking a third consecutive term. Four years later, Edwards bragged that he could not lose to Treen unless he was “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.” A riveting stump speaker who sprinkles his oratory with Cajun French, Edwards reputedly can film a 28-second campaign commercial in a single take without a script, a rehearsal or a stopwatch. He has run 15 times for public office, including four terms in Congress, and has never lost. Sighed the vanquished Treen: “It’s difficult for me to understand his popularity. But how do you explain how 900 people drank Kool-Aid with Jim Jones?”

Edwards is a nonsmoking teetotaler, but he delights in shouting, “Laissez les bons temps rouler!” (Let the good times roll). To pay off a $4.4 million campaign debt after his last election, he and some 600 of his supporters, many paying $10,000 a head, boarded two jumbo jets loaded with champagne and flew off on a one-week tour of Paris and Monte Carlo. Edwards happily posed with beautiful women and rolled high at the gaming tables, winning $15,000.

Ever the gambler, Edwards had offered any takers 8 to 5 that he would not be indicted. To cover his bet, he also offered 2-to-1 odds that if indicted, he would not be convicted. He greeted the indictments philosophically: “I don’t cry, I don’t sigh; this will be over with by and by.” He has hired former Watergate Prosecutor James Neal as his defense attorney. “You’re not ever going to see a fight like this,” he vows. “There is no way that any evidence can be produced to sustain or substantiate the tortuous allegations made by the U.S. Attorney.”

When accosted by reporters last week, Edwards cheerfully declared that he had just been pronounced so healthy by his doctor that “I’ll be able to live out any sentence I might receive.” That could prove difficult. The charges carry a maximum prison term of 265 years, as well as $74,000 in fines and forfeiture of all ill-gotten gains. Among them: a $200,000 yacht named Pipe Dreams that, prosecutors say, Edwards secretly bought for his son Stephen. Edwards conceded that he would have to resign if convicted. Said he: “I will plummet instantly from an enviable life to a miserable existence.” And the good times will roll no more.