Flamboyant ‘Cajun King’ of La. politics
Edwin Edwards, the only four-term governor in Louisiana’s history, a swashbuckling rogue who charmed voters with his escapades and survived a score of grand jury investigations and two corruption trials before going to prison in 2002 for racketeering, died Monday at his home in Gonzales, Louisiana. He was 93.
Leo Honeycutt, the author of his authorized biography, “Edwin Edwards: Governor of Louisiana,” said the cause was respiratory failure.
In January 2011, Edwards was released from a federal prison in Oakdale, Louisiana, after serving more than eight years of a 10-year sentence for bribery and extortion by rigging Louisiana’s riverboat casino licensing process during his last term in office.
Six months later he remarried. And in the fall, he rode in an open convertible through cheering crowds waving Edwards-for-governor signs at an election-day barbecue. “As you know, they sent me to prison for life,” he told them. “But I came back with a wife.”
Before Edwards, no one had ever been elected to more than two terms as governor of Louisiana. The state Constitution prohibits more than two consecutive terms. But from 1972 to 1996, with a couple of four-year furloughs to stoke up his improbable comebacks, Edwards was the undisputed “Cajun King” of Baton Rouge.
In a state where it has always been good politics to wink at a little wickedness, Edwards, the silver-haired, bilingual son of French Creole sharecroppers and a relentless electoral and legislative infighter, was perhaps the most dominant political force since Huey Long, the populist known as the Kingfish, who was assassinated at the state Capitol in 1935.
In his first two terms, from 1972 to 1980, Edwards achieved breakthroughs in hiring minorities and women, eliminated chronic budget deficits, modernized the state constitution, helped bring an NBA team to New Orleans and crafted changes in oil taxes, paving the way for boom revenues that paid for improved social services, health, education and highways.
In his third term, from 1984 to 1988, the oil boom went bust, his stock with voters crumbled and he grappled with new deficits. Still, he engineered a fourth term, from 1992 to 1996, and ushered in casino and riverboat gambling.