Down on the Batture

Casino

- 78 P Casino He is standing at the entrance of Audubon Park, facing the narrow road that loops around inside and has been off-limits to automobiles for years. At the present moment it carries a stream of joggers in all sizes, the lean and the pudgy, an evening ritual of uptown New Orleans passing him by. He is leaning on a cement balustrade in a sport shirt and slacks, silver hair combed to perfection . His face is inscrutable, but I am thinking how alien this scene must look to him. He is not in a city that loves him like the rest of the state loves him, and it is engaged in a physical activity here that he would not do himself at the point of a gun. He is the governor of Louisiana, and in a courtroom downtown he is on trial for racketeering. The joggers keep on coming, their feet sounding like a slapping rain. Not one stops to say hello. He is the most powerful man in the state and he looks completely alone. Within a few years he will bring the“world’s largest gambling casino” to Louisiana at the banks of the Mississippi River. It will be his legacy. It had to seem unfair, the trial. Here he was returning to the governor’s mansion after a cocky, one-sided campaign during which he accused his opponent of needing “an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes,” adding famously that the only thing that could defeat his return would be to catch him in bed“with a live boy or a dead girl.” Only to be greeted by a federal indictment charging him with rigging state licenses to build hospitals, which, magically, had been - 79 Casino granted to himself and were then sold to bona fide health care providers for a million dollars apiece. The government’s case fell apart when its witnesses, former Edwards appointees, suffered bad memory lapses on the stand, but the trial produced one sensational piece of news. It turned out that, perhaps with these hospital license proceeds, perhaps not, Edwin Edwards was regularly sneaking off to Las Vegas to gamble with the high rollers carrying paper bags of unmarked bills and signing the hotel register under such pseudonyms as“T-Lee” and“B-True.” Uptown New Orleans, very much of the opposite political persuasion , had a field day. T-Lee! Who could make that up? To which the governor would respond. Less than three hours after the jury failed to reach a verdict on the hospital cases, Edwards told the press that he had a plan to“revitalize” the state’s economy. Three weeks later his plan emerged: casino gambling in New Orleans . The city that had mocked him about trips to Las Vegas was going to eat its words. There is no doubt that Edwards believed in gambling. He also believed in the privileges of power. I happened to be invited to lunch with him one day while he was out of office, and he mentioned that the incumbent governor had apparently been ticketed for speeding over in Lake Charles. “Do you know what the man did?” he asked around the table. Nobody knew.“The man paid the ticket,” he said, repeating it for emphasis“The man paid the ticket.” The point was clear. What more proof of political incompetence did one need? In the end, it would take all the political competence Edwards could command to pull off the casino project. Then, with a terrible irony, it would bring him down. The proposal I first heard about was over the top. One evening at a university function I ran into an Edwards supporter who, after assuring me that people around the state thought Edwards was “the messiah,” laid out the grand plan. There would be only one casino in New Orleans, but the people who worked there would be recruited from all over the state and trained out in Crowley—the croupiers, the money managers, the girls with the drinks. Think - 80 Casino of it, he told me, “an all-Louisiana enterprise.” All I knew about Crowley was that Edwin Edwards was from there, throw in old cotton fields, patches of swamp, and a little sugarcane. It was about two towns west of Rayne, the Frog Capital of Louisiana, which was about two towns west of Opelousas, which was still an hour away from...