Brown’s influence with Edwards key to second “scheme”

Natalie Gott

Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2000 | 1:22 a.m.

BATON ROUGE, La. - Edwin Edwards pointed to his friend Cecil Brown and said "this man speaks for me" when a potential casino investor asked him about a gambling license application in 1992, a witness in Edwards' federal racketeering trial testified Tuesday.

Allen Morse, an Alton, Ill., businessman, was testifying about a breakfast meeting at the governor's mansion in the first year of Edwards' fourth and final term as governor.

Edwards, his son Stephen, Brown and four others are on trial in what federal prosecutors say was a series of illegal schemes to profit from the awarding of riverboat casino licenses before and after Edwards left office in January 1996.

On Tuesday, the prosecution called witnesses involved in the second of those schemes, an alleged attempt to extort $350,000 from investors hoping to get a license for a riverboat casino in the Lake Charles area.

Testimony centered on how a group of out-of-state businessmen kept giving Brown large sums of money because they were convinced he had Edwards' ear.

Defense lawyers seized on two key points: Nobody testified that Edwards directly promised a license to anyone and the investors never got the casino license they were hoping for.

Two prosecution witnesses testified that Brown boasted of his relationship with Edwards, that Brown took the casino investors to meet with Edwards before and after he took office in 1992 and that Edwards expressed strong support for Brown, his longtime friend.

Vincent Fontenot, a Eunice park ranger who sings in a Cajun band, said Brown guaranteed the investors he could get them a license.

However neither Fontenot nor Morse said Edwards promised them anything, a point hammered home by the former governor's attorney, Daniel Small.

"He didn't say 'I support your riverboat gaming application,' did he, sir?" Small asked Fontenot during cross examination, and Fontenot agreed.

Fontenot, from Brown's home town of Eunice, said he was the Louisiana representative for eight investors trying in the early 1990s to obtain a license to operate a riverboat casino in New Orleans or Lake Charles.

Fontenot said he and Russ Meyer, a lawyer from Alton, Ill., started paying Brown money after they were introduced to him by former Eunice Mayor Curtis Joubert in his office in 1991.

Joubert left the room after they met, and Meyer told Brown about the investors' plan to apply for a casino license. Brown made one phone call out of earshot of the two men and came back saying, "We can do it. We can get a license," Fontenot testified.

Brown then told Meyer to hire him as a consultant and to give him and Edwards a percentage of their corporation, Fontenot said.

Meyer told Brown he did not want to give Edwards a percentage, but would give one to Brown and that he could do whatever he wanted with it, Fontenot said.

Fontenot described other times, before and after Edwards took office, when Brown boasted of his influence with Edwards, at times taking the potential investors to visit Edwards.

And the investors believed Brown was telling the truth when he guaranteed them a casino license, Fontenot said.

"If he said it once, he said it a hundred times: It's a done deal," Fontenot said.

Morse testified after Fontenot.

As acting treasurer of the group, Morse said, his job was to line up investors. His share of the casino was to be 17.9 percent.

Morse said Brown met with him in Alton in 1992 to pick up a $75,000 fee for helping with a licensing effort. But some potential investors balked at putting up the money.

Meyer and Brown went to Morse's house in Alton and Morse contacted a friend, St. Louis businessman Max Marcum, to see if he could help.

The group met at Marcum's office the next morning. Marcum agreed to pay the $75,000. After Morse, Meyer and Brown signed a contract guaranteeing Marcum his money back if they didn't get the license, Morse testified.

Morse said that in June of 1992, he, Meyer, and fellow investors Carl Bolm and Eugene Redman were in Louisiana at a Eunice hotel. They were set to travel to the governor's mansion for a luncheon meeting when they got a call from Brown at 5 a.m. telling them the luncheon had been changed to a 7 a.m. breakfast.

Trying to make the meeting on time, the men were pulled over for speeding, Morse said. When they told the state trooper that they were going to meet with the governor, the trooper went back to his car, made a radio call, then sent them on their way with just a warning.

"I was thrilled I didn't get a ticket, and it told me there was quite a bit of influence with state police," Morse testified.

Edwards hurried through the breakfast meeting, he was getting ready to leave for a hunting trip, Morse said.

When Redman asked Edwards about the application, Edwards pointed to Brown and said: "In that respect, this man speaks for me."

U.S. District Judge Frank Polozola approved prosecutors' request to have the group of investors named as unindicted co-conspirators.

The designation does not mean someone committed a crime, but that prosecutors believe he or she said or did something, perhaps innocently, that helped those charged.

Prosecutors name people as unindicted co-conspirators so that jurors can consider hearsay testimony about what they said or did.