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Olympian ticket trouble
If you want to go to the Games, you need lots of money and the ability to juggle basketball, sword fighting and that strangely "modern" pentathlon.
By Gary Kamiya
[05/12/00]

"I never made myself famous"
Donato Dalrymple defends his role in the ongoing Elián González saga.
By Daryl Lindsey
[05/12/00]

Waiting for November
The Miami family could lose the legal battle over Elián's asylum, but win the war by keeping him here long enough to get a green card.
By Bruce Shapiro
[05/12/00]

Civil war in Miami?
The battle over Elián has led non-Cubans to threaten secession, and to back a recall drive against the mayor.
By John Lantigua
[05/11/00]

What Elián learned in Georgetown
Unlike Cuban homes, American houses have swimming pools in the basement.
By Daryl Lindsey
[05/11/00]

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Edwards is late for our afternoon appointment, so I'm grilling George, his cook, a liberally tattooed ex-con. As George sings the Guv'nah's hosannas while stabbing a strawberry pie crust with a fork, a haggard Edwards walks in, tossing his keys on the counter. Back from a third day of jury deliberations, he looks unhappy to have a visitor. I don't wait for an introduction before presumptuously making chummy. I inform Edwards that George, here, has allowed me to rifle through Edwards' underwear drawers. Edwards does not offer a courtesy smile, and instead fixes me with a stare through those possum-like orbs that served him so well during governor's-mansion poker games. "It don't both-ahhh me none," he shrugs. "Everybody else does."

In Louisiana, there have always been three truisms: A) No matter how ugly a truth you visit upon a native (the state's obesity and syphilis rates are among the nation's highest, while livability and literacy rates are the lowest) they'll still give thanks to the Lord for creating Mississippi; B) If one finds oneself at a fine-dining establishment and is tempted to rely on the "How to Eat Crawfish" instruction poster, one better stick to shrimp, in the interest of avoiding ridicule; and C) If one is in the employ of the U.S. Attorney's office, one will be regarded as too sluggish, too stupid or too unlucky to catch Edwin Edwards.

Or so it seemed -- until Tuesday. That's when Edwards sat impassively in the Russell B. Long federal courthouse, where a portrait of the son of Huey Long (the original Kingfish) keeps sentry over the lobby. There, a jury convicted Edwards, the only person to ever serve four terms as governor of Louisiana, of 17 counts of racketeering, money laundering, conspiracy and extortion. It's ironic perhaps that the man often likened to a riverboat gambler (who has slipped the feds in nearly two dozen investigations, as well as two corruption trials in the 1980s) is finally headed up the river for attempting to rig the disbursement of state riverboat-casino licenses.

On the courthouse steps, Edwards looked the part of the vanquished gladiator as he stood stoically with his wife Candy, herself looking glum in an otherwise-festive pink pantsuit. Only four years ago at the building's ribbon-cutting, then-Gov. Edwards joked that the ceremony was "my first invitation to a federal courthouse not delivered by U.S. marshals." It was a typical Edwards line: no fat, black-humored, enhanced by his velveteen Cajun accent. A political Houdini, Edwards has always had a knack for making use of his worst liability (the perception that he's crooked), and wrestling it into submission in a sort of rhetorical aikido: he absorbs the momentum of the suspicion, then flips it to his advantage.

The perception has given him ample opportunity to employ his wit, which amuses even his enemies -- a large segment of his audience. In 1983, in the course of a single campaign against the vanilla incumbent Dave Treen, Edwards pulled a hat trick, formulating the three most entertaining lines ever uttered by an American politician. The deliberative Treen, he said, was so slow, "he takes an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes." While Treen had surmised that if Edwards won, he'd be up to his armpits in the public cookie jar, Edwards rejoined that if voters reelected the ineffectual Treen, "there'll be nothing left to steal." Then, after it became apparent he would steamroll Treen, Edwards boasted that the only way he could lose was "if I get caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy."

After the verdict, however, it was hard to tell if Edwards was joking. "I have lived 72 years of my life within the system," he said of the decision, "and I will live the rest of my life within the system." If Edwards isn't in peak comic form, it's certainly understandable. For a devoted gambler who has reaped millions rolling lucky numbers down the fast felt of Las Vegas craps tables, Edwards faced a series of daunting numbers that didn't hold much promise. A two-year FBI investigation, complete with surveillance tapes and wiretaps, yielded 26,000 recorded conversations, 5,000 of which involved Edwards. This resulted in a 33-count indictment against Edwards and six co-defendants (including his son Stephen), involving six extortion schemes in connection with 15 riverboat casino licenses.

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