Thursday, Oct. 5, 2000 | 9:23 a.m.
BATON ROUGE, La. - The case against former Gov. Edwin Edwards, fighting to avoid his second corruption conviction in four months, came to a close Wednesday with Edwards' testimony. Jurors could begin deliberating by Thursday afternoon.
Defense attorneys rested their case after Edwards completed two days on the stand, and the prosecution called no rebuttal witnesses. U.S. District Judge Edith Brown Clement told the jurors to get enough rest for a full day of closing statements on Thursday.
Edwards, Insurance Commissioner Jim Brown and Shreveport lawyer Ronald Weems are accused of illegally arranging a settlement deal in 1996 for the owner of a failed insurance company liquidated by the state.
"There's no fix here," Edwards testified Wednesday. "In this case, at least we were trying to work out a negotiated settlement, not a fix, a negotiated settlement."
Cascade Insurance owner David Disiere settled with the state for a minimum of $2.5 million. Prosecutors say the settlement should have brought millions more to reimburse Cascade's creditors. Negotiators had asked for as much as $6 million.
The quick end to testimony and the short length of the trial that began Sept. 18 may have shocked just about everyone, except Clement who predicted the trial would last only three weeks.
Prosecutors focused its case on seven witnesses, questioning only one of the three men who pleaded guilty - former state Judge Foster "Foxy" Sanders, who was overseeing the state receivership office that liquidates failed insurance companies.
Robert Bourgeois, who headed the receivership office, and Disiere didn't testify despite assumptions they would as part of their plea agreements with the government. Ed Gonzales, one of the two attorneys who worked on the settlement for the state, also didn't testify.
Defense attorneys called 17 witnesses, but most of their case rested on the three defendants who testified to their innocence on all 57 counts in the indictment.
Edwards, Weems and Brown are charged with insurance, mail and wire fraud and conspiracy. Brown and Weems also are charged with lying to investigators.
Edwards, 73, spent Wednesday putting his own spin on federal prosecutors' secretly recorded conversations. The four-term former governor argued that the sheer number of the tapes prove he is innocent.
"We simply never had a fix," Edwards said during his second day on the stand. "That's why we're having all these phone calls and negotiations. That would have been unnecessary if someone had already agreed in advance with what it had to be."
Under heated cross-examination by federal prosecutor Sal Perricone, Edwards defended the settlement.
"It's very clear, Mr. Perricone, and I don't understand why you don't see it," Edwards said.
Perricone asked Edwards if he would lie to the jury.
"No, I would not," Edwards said. "I'm 73 years old. I've got to make preparations for the next world. I have very little time left in this world, but I have a lot in the next."
But in a rigorous line of questioning, Edwards admitted he did lie to Sanders, who took the receivership office from Brown in 1995.
Sanders was Edwards' client in an unrelated matter, a federal investigation by the office of Baton Rouge-based U.S. Attorney L.J. Hymel into bid rigging involving another insurance company.
"Did you lie to your client?" Perricone asked.
"Yes," Edwards said. "I'm trying to make my client feel well."
Sanders, who has pleaded guilty in the case and is cooperating with prosecutors, testified during the first week of the trial that Edwards offered him a bribe to help cause a low settlement in the Cascade case.
Sanders said Edwards offered him money and indicated the former governor would use his influence with Hymel to end the bid-rigging investigation. Edwards said he spoke with Hymel about the matter, only to find out if Sanders was a target of the investigation, not to exert influence over Hymel.
Edwards said he lied to Sanders when he told Sanders that he met personally with Hymel about the investigation. Edwards said Sanders kept asking him to meet with Hymel in person, and Edwards had only talked to him on the phone but wanted to make Sanders feel more at ease about an investigation in which he was not named.
"So far, we have two lies to your client?" Perricone asked.
"Two lies to my client to help get a level of comfort because he felt really stressed," Edwards said.
Perricone did not let go of Edwards' admission.
Later, he asked, "So it's OK to lie your client?"
"Hell, every lawyer in Louisiana would be in prison if that was an offense," Edwards said.
"I always did whatever I could, sometimes I went too far I acknowledge, to make my client feel comfortable."
No stranger to a federal courtroom, Edwards was tried in 1985 and 1986 on racketeering charges involving health care investments and was found innocent. On May 9 of this year, he was convicted of racketeering and fraud in connection with the licensing of casinos during and after his fourth term. He is appealing and has not been sentenced.
In the current case, prosecutors have played numerous tapes of secretly recorded conversations in which Edwards, Brown, Weems and Sanders discuss Cascade.
Prosecutors say the Cascade case and the bid-rigging investigation always were linked because Edwards kept promising to intervene with Hymel.
"You were holding Judge Sanders on a string, keeping him out there and leading him on, weren't you?" Perricone asked.
"I never strung him along," Edwards said.
Edwards testified Wednesday that he repeatedly asked Sanders to keep the subjects separate in their conversations.
In one tape played Wednesday, Edwards is heard doing just that.
"It caused me concern because I did not want it to develop that the two matters were entwined or that one was dependent on the other," Edwards explained from the witness stand.
Edwards also is heard on tape telling Sanders not to let the bid-rigging investigation bother him.
That conversation, Edwards said, proves he was not trying to bribe Sanders with promises of intervention. Had he been trying to bribe Sanders, Edwards said, "I would have tried to stimulate or cultivate the fears he had been expressing to me, rather than try to calm him down."
Edwards also tried to use Sanders' earlier prosecution testimony to his own advantage.
Sanders had testified that he had ordered that a racketeering lawsuit be prepared accusing Disiere of, among other things, illegally backdating documents and transferring money from the accounts of the troubled Cascade. The lawsuit, had it been filed, would have sought $27 million from Disiere.
Sanders had testified that he told Edwards about the threatened lawsuit to pressure Disiere for a large settlement.
More proof, Edwards said, that there was no sham settlement. There would have been no need for the threat of a $27 million lawsuit if he had the means to work out a sham $2.5 million settlement, Edwards said.
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