5.11.00
The Death of Outrageousness

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The War's Over

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Elian On Broadway

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O, Brother

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E-Freedom!

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Gore as Caligula?

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Don't Back the Quack

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Post-Columbine Syndrome

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Buckeye Babylon

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Dateline: Vieques, Puerto Rico

5/11/00 10:40 a.m.
The Death of Outrageousness
Justice is served in Louisiana.

By Quin Hillyer, columnist for the Mobile Register.

dwin Washington Edwards once bragged that there wasn't a prosecutor on earth who could ever trap him. Louisiana, and the nation, can now rejoice that he was wrong.

The former four-term Democratic governor of Louisiana, convicted on Tuesday on 17 counts of fraud and racketeering for extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from applicants for riverboat casino licenses, wasn't just the lovable "rogue" and "ladies' man" that the media liked to portray. Instead, he was a plague on Louisiana and on the republic, breeding cynicism about the political process and hornswoggling poor people like a perfidious Pied Piper.

Sure, he may have been technically correct on Wednesday when he played for sympathy by saying "There isn't a penny missing from the state treasury. There are no allegations and certainly no evidence that I at any time took anything voluntarily from the people of this state." But that's not how he worked. Instead, he funneled state funds and overstuffed contracts to cronies, who turned around and paid him for his efforts. Of course no state money went directly to him; he laundered it through crooked businessmen. That's why, by his own count, he was able to withstand some two dozen other criminal probes before finally being nailed in this one: He was exceedingly clever at covering his tracks, even while so flaunting his ill-earned wealth and disdain for propriety that he virtually dared the world to catch him in illegal shenanigans.

Former San Francisco 49ers owner Edward DeBartolo Jr., for instance, testified that Edwards demanded a $400,000 cash payoff for helping DeBartolo get a casino license in 1997. Recordings and videotape caught him discussing and conducting other deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. When this fateful probe first began, federal agents with a search warrant took more than $300,000 in cash from his house. And so on.

The first Edwards administration, oddly enough, had a mildly reformist hue. He pushed through a necessary re-write of the awful old state Constitution. He changed the method by which oil and gas were taxed so that the state profited more from the mineral wealth it produced — and other states' consumers, not Louisianans, paid.

But his last three administrations were marked by big spending commitments whose bills always came due only after he left office. They were also often paralyzed by scandal, noted for obstructiveness against reforms to help small businesses, and, in his last term, dominated by a breathtakingly flagrant sell-out to the sleaziest of gambling interests.

And his womanizing wasn't merely funny; it was obnoxious and crass. Witness the time when, leaving ahead of schedule a stint as a guest bartender in the French Quarter, he snapped at me (whom he didn't know from any Joe Voter off the street): "I've been propositioned so many times tonight that if I stayed any longer, I'd be tempted to f*** somebody." (He didn't realize that the young blondes to whom he was referring had been making fun of him every time he turned his back.)

Or witness the time he caused an interruption at a wedding by leaning over and unzipping the dress of a pretty woman, a complete stranger, in the pew in front of him — causing her to shriek in consternation.

But the times are a-changing. Even in Louisiana, politics-as-entertainment is falling out of favor. Eleven jurors (one was dismissed for refusing to deliberate) all ignored the famed Edwards "charm," looked at the facts, and decided to convict him. That says something good about the ability of our system of justice — it still works, at least some of the time.

It also may be a sign that even if William Bennett was right that Americans' "outrage" has died, perhaps it has been replaced with a citizenry bone-weary of public malfeasance and willing to stop it if given an opportunity.

Edwards will, of course, appeal on grounds of any legal technicality he can find. But his conviction by a (unanimous) Louisiana jury will never be erased from the public mind. Liberal populist demagoguery is no longer automatically an effective prophylactic against the just reach of the law. Instead, it is the province of a pathetic, aging felon who squandered great gifts because his character was defective.

And that's reason for a great big Louisiana party. Let the good times roll, but with no crooks invited.

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