Edwards acquitted; Brown convicted of lying

Melinda Deslatte

Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2000 | 5:26 a.m.

BATON ROUGE, La. - Former Gov. Edwin Edwards was found innocent Wednesday on all corruption charges stemming from the liquidation of a failed insurance company. State Insurance Commissioner Jim Brown was found guilty of lying to investigators.

The verdict was reached on the fourth day of deliberations. The trial was Edwards' second of the year. Although exonerated, he still faces possible prison time for a conviction earlier this year on racketeering and fraud charges in an unrelated case.

Shreveport lawyer Ronald Weems, the third defendant in the case, was found innocent on all charges.

Brown was acquitted on most charges, but convicted on seven of 13 counts of making false statments to an FBI agent during an interview.

Edwards smiled as the verdict was read and looked at his family. His daughter Anna started crying.

Brown's wife Gladys put her arm around her son James, 16. Brown, the third consecutive Louisiana Insurance Commissioner to be convicted in federal court, sat stoically.

Weems was crying.

"Whatever joy my family and I experienced from this verdict is heavily dampened by what happened to Jim Brown," Edwards said as his wife, Candy, stood behind him, nodding in agreement.

"It's an awful burden for anybody" to be brought to trial, he said. "It is a double burden if he is found guilty, and triple if he happens to be a public official and attorney, because of the consequences which follow ..."

He said he would help Brown in his appeals, and criticized the judge's decision to keep the names of jurors secret. He called it wrong, "contrary to a jury of peers in a community where you know them and them knowing you."

Edwards, with characteristic flair, criticized his chief accuser, former Judge Foxy Sanders:

"He lied to make a sweetheart deal for himself," Edwards said. "Now let him kiss his bride and go to bed with it."

U.S. Attorney Eddie Jordan acknowledged that the jury apparently did not accept Sanders' testimony. He said plea bargains had been around for years and the U.S. Supreme Court had always ruled they are legal.

"We believe a judge cannot corrupt himself," Jordan said. "He has to have help. The tapes bore that out."

Brown said it was ironic that they were acquitted of every charge related to the tapes, but that his convictions came from one which was not taped - one he had thought a friendly conversation with an FBI agent.

"I can't explain it," Brown said. "I don't know what the jury was thinking. But that will come out."

Under the law, he will continue as commissioner through appeals but must step aside and let his first assistant take over responsibilities of the office.

He refused to align himself with the two previous insurance commissioners, who were convicted, saying the office now has a good, clean reputation.

"A year from now, you'll be calling me insurance commissioner," he said.

Edwards, 73, Brown, 60, and Weems, 55, were accused by prosecutors of creating a neat settlement for the owner of the failed Cascade Insurance Co. in 1996, several months after Edwards' final term ended.

Cascade owner David Disiere wound up settling with the state for $2.5 million. Prosecutors said he should have been forced to pay millions more to the state for reimbursement of Cascade's creditors.

Each man faced 43 counts of insurance, mail and wire fraud, witness tampering and conspiracy. Brown and Weems also were charged with additional counts of lying to federal authorities.

Edwards faced a total possible sentence on all counts of 230 years and $12 million in fines. Brown and Weems each faced the same, plus additional years and fines for their alleged lies. However, federal sentencing guidelines and the possibility of concurrent, rather than consecutive, prison terms made such severe sentences unlikely.

The trial began Sept. 18, and the 11-woman, one-man jury received the case Friday.

Edwards, a four-term governor, was convicted May 9 of racketeering on charges stemming from the licensing of riverboat casinos before and after his final term. He has not been sentenced. He is appealing the conviction.

In the Cascade case, the prosecution centered on secretly recorded tapes from wiretaps on Edwards' home telephone and a microphone in his law office.

On the tapes, Edwards, Brown, Weems and others are heard discussing the insurance company and possible settlements. Prosecutors claimed the tapes prove an illegally concocted settlement; defense lawyers argued the opposite, that the tapes indicate the negotiations were lengthy and legal.

The star witness in the government's case was Sanders, who was a state judge in 1996 and oversaw the receivership office that liquidated failed insurance companies.

Sanders, who pleaded guilty in the case, said Edwards bribed him by offering to use his influence to clear Sanders in an unrelated federal investigation.

Edwards and Weems, both attorneys, benefitted from the settlement because Disiere was their client, prosecutors claimed. They said Brown joined in the scheme hoping Sanders would give him control of the receivership office.