Corruption case going to jury

Natalie Gott

Monday, April 24, 2000 | 12:01 p.m.

BATON ROUGE, La. -- Money scattered on the floor. Money exchanged in high stakes poker games. Money hidden under ducks in the freezer. Briefcases full of money. Money in trash bins. Money in ash bins. Money in broken down trailers.

Big-money tales are nothing new in the 40-year public saga of Louisiana's rougish four-time ex-governor, Edwin Edwards. But this time the tales of money, money everywhere, could land him in a federal prison beyond what he calls his "biblically allotted time."

"Look him straight in the eye and tell him he's guilty," Assistant U.S. Attorney Fred Harper told jurors during closing statements last week near the close of his federal racketeering trial.

The 16-week case goes to the jury today.

Edwards is accused of masterminding a series of schemes to extort millions of dollars from applicants for lucrative riverboat casino licenses before and after his final term ended in January 1996. Also charged are his son Stephen, a state senator, a state gambling board member and three of Edwards friends. Their trial started Jan. 10.

If convicted on all counts, Edwards, 72, faces more than 300 years in prison -- a term he joked he would never serve.

Elected four times despite -- possibly because of -- his unabashed love of high-stakes gambling and his reputation as a ladies man, Edwards, by his own count, has been the target of nearly two dozen investigations.

A probe in the 1980s into his investments in hospital and nursing home deals led to two trials. The first ended with a hung jury in 1985. He was acquitted in a retrial a year later.

This time, however, they had Edwards' own words to use against him. With wiretaps and a hidden microphone and video camera, the FBI secretly recorded 1,500 hours of conversations of Edwards and his co-defendants.

The prosecution's case also includes three witnesses who claimed they paid extortion money to Edwards and financial experts who say Edwards outspent his reported earnings.

Edwards takes it in stride. With his 35-year-old wife, Candy, on one side and his 50-year-old daughter, Anna, on the other, he sauntered into the courthouse everyday with his head held high, giving a slight wave to the reporters he's forbidden to talk to because of a gag order.

The witnesses say the payoffs came in the form of vehicles, appliances and cash. A former casino owner, who said he keeps hundreds of thousands of dollars hidden under ducks and deer in his freezer, said he sometimes left the cash in trash bins or ash bins behind restaurants or in a trailer behind his office.

Former San Francisco 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. told jurors that Edwards threatened to cause problems to DeBartolo's riverboat casino license application if Edwards' was not paid $400,000. DeBartolo handed Edwards the money -- $100 bills stacked in a briefcase -- at the San Francisco airport. DeBartolo said Edwards flashed a money belt when DeBartolo asked how Edwards planned to transport the money without passing it through an airport x-ray machine.

Edwards denied the claims with his typical aplomb when he took the witness stand for four days and was bombarded with questions from a federal prosecutor.

When asked if he was lying, Edwards had a simple answer: "No, and if I were, you've got to assume I wouldn't be telling you," Edwards said.

Edwards was quick again when lead prosecutor Jim Letten accused him of answering a question in a way to embarrass Letten.

"I don't think I have the capacity to embarrass you," Edwards responded.

Even the jurors, whose faces remained expressionless throughout most of Edwards' testimony, cracked a smile on that one-liner.

Prosecutors also paraded in contractors and designers who testified that Edwards' paid them in cash when he was building a new home. In all, Edwards paid $733,567 in cash for his $1.4 million house. A delivery man said Candy Edwards paid him $4,500 in $100 bills. When he stepped inside the house to collect the money, he said he saw $100 bills lying on the floor.

When totaled up, the cash Edwards' spent between 1986 through 1997 far exceeds the cash he took home from his lucrative trips to casinos -- he once won $220,000 in Atlantic City - or what he pulled in at the high stake poker games at the Governor's Mansion, prosecutors said.

With all the evidence the five-person prosecution team does have -- 1,500 hours of testimony and 66 witnesses -- there has not been a "smoking gun."

"Where is the evidence that Edwin Edwards, Stephen Edwards, Andrew Martin and Cecil Brown actually sat down and talked about manipulating the licensing process?" asked attorney Jim Cole, who represents Stephen Edwards.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Fred Harper said the evidence is in all of the conversations. They talked about hiding money, cheating on their taxes and of secret payments, Harper said.

"It was the last Louisiana hayride for these men and they were determined to extract all they could," Harper said.