Edwin Edwards

The former Louisiana governor and U.S. congressman, 93, who died July 12 2021 of respiratory problems, was a brazen practitioner of the corrupt-politics-as-theatrics style mastered by the legendary Depression-era demagogue Huey Long. He gambled prodigiously. He boasted of chasing women half his age; he met his third wife, who was 51 years his junior, through a prison correspondence. He wore his hair, which turned silver, in the smooth pompadour of a televangelist. EDWIN W. EDWARDS was born on a sharecropper's farm in Avoyelles Parish, near Marksville, Louisiana. He attended Louisiana State University for one year and then enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he was trained as an aviation cadet in the closing months of World War II. In 1949, he married Elaine Schwartzenburg, with whom he had four children; he also converted back to Catholicism around that time. He also returned to LSU and received a law degree in 1949 and began law practice in Crowley, Louisiana. His public life started when he was elected to the Crowley City Council in 1954; he spent the next three deades in public office. In the 1950s, he also served as an ad hoc city court judge in Crowley. He served in the state senate from 1964 to 1965 and in the U.S. House of Representatives 1965 to 1972. He was elected governor in 1971 and served two consecutive terms from 1972 to 1980. In 1983 he was elected to a third term and in 1991 won a fourth term as governor. During his tenure, he was the only political leader in the United States to have served in all three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial) and at all three levels of government (local, state, and national). In 1976 — four years after he left the House — he was briefly ensnared in a congressional bribery and influence-peddling scandal involving South Korean businessman Tongsun Park. He was indicted on corruption charges in 1985, when he was accused of taking kickbacks from companies dealing with state hospitals. The charges stemmed from a partnership he formed between his second and third terms as governor — a business enterprise from which he made about $2 million. Mr. Edwards won a final term in 1991 — running against David Duke, the former Klansman — mostly because he was widely perceived as the lesser of two evils. Once he was out of office, Mr. Edwards’s luck ran out. In 2000, he was convicted on 17 counts of corruption and fraud stemming from kickbacks he received for riverboat-gambling licenses — in one instance, a suitcase stuffed with $400,000 in cash from the former owner of the San Francisco 49ers. (Mr. Edwards’s son Stephen and several other associates were also convicted.) Mr. Edwards served eight years of the 10-year sentence and emerged from a halfway house in 2011, in time for his 84th birthday. Then, he wed 32-year-old Trina Grimes Scott, his third wife, who had been his pen pal while he was in prison. Mr. Edwards’s first marriage, which lasted 40 years, and his second, to Candy Picou, ended in divorce.