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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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But the numbers that really mattered were those returned by the jury: two defendants acquitted, the other five guilty (including Edwards' son). Edwards himself was convicted on 17 of 26 counts, for a potential maximum sentence of 250 years. To frame that horror in Edwardsian terms: If it were possible for the 72-year-old Edwards to outlive the sentence, his 35-year-old wife Candy would no longer be less than half his age, as is commonly emphasized, but nine-tenths of it. Not that he has any intention of letting that happen. Edwards has always been a realist, and figures he only has six to 10 years left of "biblically-allotted time."

Local handicappers aren't yet making book on Edwards' chances for appeal, but if ever there was a case filled with irregularities, this was it. While most defendants are convicted by 12 angry jurors, Edwards only had 11, since Juror No. 68 (as he was known under the judge's anonymity order) was bounced in the middle of deliberations after a three-day logjam of sealed notes and closed-door huddles. The local media had a field day speculating why -- everything from the juror being a piney-woods pew-jumper, whose religious beliefs prevented him from judging others, to him being ostracized by his fellow jurors for refusing to deliberate. Whatever the reason, everyone generally agrees he was kindly predisposed toward Edwards, and one dissenting voice is all it takes to hang a jury.

Another possible reason for appeal concerns the impetuses for wiretapping Edwards in the first place. The original order came as a result of tips to the feds by Michael and Patrick Graham, two brothers who'd been investigated for everything from phony real-estate development schemes to forgery. In their new line of work as FBI informants, one of the brothers admitted that they'd been given immunity for more crimes than they could remember committing. The wiretaps were allowed to continue largely because, an FBI agent conceded in testimony, he wrongly established in affidavits that Edwards had bribed five members of the Gaming Control Board. "I cannot say Edwin Edwards passed money to anyone," said the agent. That's hardly surprising. Most veteran Edwards watchers will tell you the former governor is way too greedy to pass along a bribe.

From there, all manner of baroque absurdities abounded. Almost every transaction under investigation involved large amounts of cash hidden in strange places. There was cash carried in briefcases and worn in money vests, stashed under Jacuzzis and frozen duck carcasses, and deposited for pickup in dumpsters and ash bins. In one cash-carrying point of contention, an Edwards attorney argued that his client couldn't have worn a money belt filled with $400,000 of DeBartolo's money while walking through the San Francisco airport, since he'd have been stopped for looking "like the Michelin Man."

Edwards on tape is as clipped and cagey as ever, leaving many of the schemes open to interpretation. But some of his alleged bagmen had verbal tendencies that seemed to cast a shadow on the rectitude of their "consulting" arrangements. At one point his son Stephen can be heard wondering of a prospective business acquaintance, "You don't think that motherfucker could be wired?" And Bobby Johnson, another Edwards crony, employed similar subtlety when informing a casino applicant that he'd be requiring 12.5 percent ownership to make the deal happen: "I ain't being an iron ass, but I mean, I want a piece of that."

Johnson, a self-made cement magnate who used to live in a cardboard box under a bridge, was not the sharpest Ginsu in the knife block. His own attorney called him a "buffoon." When Johnson begged out in the middle of the trial so that he could have quintuple-bypass surgery, the crotchety Judge Frank Polozola (not-so affectionately nicknamed "Ayatollah," after threatening to jail squabbling attorneys and barking at reporters for tromping through courthouse flowerbeds) was rebuffed when he offered to let Johnson communicate with the court through an Internet hookup. Impossible, Johnson's attorney said, because Johnson could neither read nor write.

For someone as dim as Johnson, it would seem a formidable task to locate a jury of his peers. But the court managed. When deliberations began, one juror asked the judge for a dictionary to determine the meaning of extortion. Another jury note inquired, "Do you become a part of a conspiracy if you except [sic] extortion money along with others?"

But if jurors weren't easily educated, neither were they easily charmed. Edwards tried, tossing off snappy rejoinders on the stand, such as when he was asked if he'd been lying throughout his testimony. "No," he replied, "and if I were, you've got to assume I wouldn't be telling you."

Many longtime Edwards watchers, including his biographer John Maginnis, say Edwards's shtick is now shopworn. It lacks the spark and imagination of, say, his mid-'80s courtroom performances, when he was on trial (and eventually acquitted) for profiting off of state hospital contracts. Back then, Edwards rolled up to court in a horse-drawn buggy in order to illustrate the slow wheels of justice. And a younger, sprier Edwards fearlessly taunted his tormentor, U.S. Attorney John Volz, once rising to his feet for a toast in a French Quarter bar while trilling, "When my moods are over, and my time has come to pass, I hope they bury me upside down, so Volz can kiss my ass."

It's perhaps a measure of his fading potency that even his mortal enemies sound a tad nostalgic after his conviction. "It's good for the state," says Volz, who suffered a heart attack and lost two judgeships in the fallout after losing to Edwards in federal court. "Still," adds Volz, "we're seeing the end of an era. There'll never be another Edwin Edwards in our generation."

Even David Duke, who Edwards felt a certain camaraderie with, as they were "both wizards under the sheets," passes up the obvious gloat. Edwards trounced Duke in the 1991 gubernatorial election, as skeptical voters rallied behind the bumper sticker "Vote for the Crook, It's important." Duke's political career has waned ever since, but he says, "As much as I dislike Edwards, I think I dislike the wiretapping federal government a lot worse."

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