Flamboyant ‘Cajun King’ of La. politics, 4-term governor
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 fouryear 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.
Throughout his years as governor, Edwards pursued his own pleasures: trips to Las Vegas with suitcases full of cash; all-night poker parties with cronies who paid $10,000 antes; a junket to Paris and Monte Carlo for 600 supporters who paid off his campaign debts; and endless womanizing, which he did not bother to deny.
Asked once if he feared that his phone were tapped, he answered, “I can’t imagine who would want to do it, except maybe some jealous husbands.”
In his third term, he was charged with conspiring to sell state hospital and nursing home construction permits. He admitted taking $1.9 million, but contended that he had done nothing illegal. His 1985 trial ended in a hung jury; at a second trial, in 1986, he was acquitted.
Edwards lost only once, in his 1987 bid for reelection. He dropped out after losing an open primary to Rep. Buddy Roemer, who accused him of turning the state into a “banana republic.” In 1991, Gov. Roemer lost to Edwards in a primary, then endorsed his old rival in the general election against David Duke, a neo-Nazi and former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard.
After trouncing his hapless opponent, Edwards delivered one of his most memorable lines. He could not be beaten or sunk by scandal, he said, unless he was “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.”
Edwin Washington Edwards was born on Aug. 7, 1927, in rural Avoyelles Parish.
He had married Elaine Schwartzenburg in 1949; they had four children, Anna, Victoria, Stephen and David, and divorced in 1989. He married Candace Picou in 1994. At his behest they were divorced in 2004, while he was in prison. In 2011, after his release, he married Trina Grimes Scott. She was 32; he was 83. She gave birth to a son, Eli, two years later.
In addition to his wife and their son, Edwards is survived by his children from his first marriage, 16 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren.