Edwin Edwards & the Machinery of Suspicion
In a single, heavily redacted volume, FBI memoranda chart the federal government’s long, uneasy pursuit of Edwin Edwards—revealing as much about their obsession as about his alleged corruption.
In early July 2023, nearly two years after his death, the FBI quietly released a declassified but heavily redacted 328-page volume about four-term Louisiana Gov. Edwin Washington Edwards through its online “vault.” Edwards, a charismatic and enduringly popular Democrat and the only person in Louisiana history to serve in all three branches and all three levels of government, was hounded by allegations of corruption throughout his career.
In May 2000, five years after his final term as governor and following a controversial trial overseen by an erratic and hostile judge, Frank Polozola, Edwards was convicted on 17 charges related to a purported shakedown scheme involving the issuance of casino licenses. Judge Polozola, whose imperial self-regard and dictatorial courtroom management style earned him the nickname “Ayatollah Polozola,” handed Edwards a ten-year sentence, a punishment many believed was equivalent to the death penalty considering Edwards’s age.
Two years later, when the 75-year-old former governor addressed the press minutes before reporting to a federal prison in Fort Worth, it was treated as the legendary Louisiana politician’s final public act. But in 2011, Edwards, now 83, stepped out of prison and back into the spotlight. That summer, he married 32-year-old Trina Grimes Scott, a registered Republican from Alexandria, promoted Leo Honeycutt’s sprawling biography about his life at packed events throughout the state, starred in a reality television show, and on August 1, 2013, welcomed a baby boy, Eli Wallace Edwards, his fifth child. According to opinion polling, Edwards was vastly more popular than the state’s current governor, Bobby Jindal, and considered by most Louisianians as the state’s best governor during the past 50 years. State law prohibited him, as a convicted felon, from running again for governor or the state legislature, but he was not restricted from running for federal office, which is exactly what he did, running against Republican Garret Graves for Louisiana’s Sixth Congressional District in 2014. Edwards was resoundingly defeated in a district gerrymandered in favor of Republicans, but he ran a dignified campaign that reminded voters why he had been such a dominant force in state politics during the final half of the 20th century.
The 2000 casino-license case against Edwards was, in my view, so fraught that it should have been tossed on summary judgment. The issues arising during the course of the trial were even more alarming. In the aftermath of Edwards’s conviction, a roster of his former colleagues, including a considerable number of prominent Republicans like former Louisiana Gov. Dave Treen, embarked on an extensive, bipartisan effort to lobby President George W. Bush and then President Barack Obama to grant Edwards a pardon. The effort failed, and later, President Donald Trump would pardon former San Francisco 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI about paying Edwards a $400,000 bribe and avoided prison time in exchange for his cooperation and testimony.
Edwin Edwards first became the subject of public corruption allegations in the waning days of his last term in Congress, shortly before winning his first of four terms, only two of which were consecutive, as governor. He and his first wife Elaine were accused of improperly receiving gifts from Tongsun Park, a South Korean lobbyist secretly working for the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Although 30 other members of Congress were also implicated in a scandal popularly known as Koreagate, only one was ever indicted and convicted, and Edwards, notably, was never charged with a crime.
Koreagate may have dented his reputation, but Edwards continued to remain enormously popular throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, as evidenced by his landslide victory over incumbent governor Dave Treen in the 1983 Louisiana gubernatorial election, then the most expensive non-presidential campaign in American history.
Following his victory and at the beginning of his third term as governor, Edwards would become the target of John Volz, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana. Volz, who had been originally appointed to the position by Jimmy Carter, defected to the Republican Party in order to persuade the nation’s new president, Ronald Reagan, to reappoint him to the office. He would demonstrate his appreciation and prove his fealty to the right-wing Reagan by embarking on a series of public corruption investigations of Democratic leaders, none of whom were more important than Edwards. In 1985, Volz championed the prosecution of Edwards in a case involving his partnership, as a private citizen, in a business that sought certificates of need for nursing homes. The case was dubious from the beginning, but Volz’s success in securing an indictment would make Edwards the first sitting governor of Louisiana to go on trial while in office.
At trial, Volz’s lackluster case exposed his political agenda, but because of the holdout of a single juror, the judge was forced to declare a mistrial. As it turned out, the eleven other jurors had all voted to acquit Edwards, but Volz was undeterred. He retried the case the following year. His case somehow looked weaker, and memorably, Edwards’s lawyers elected to not even put on a defense. The jury cleared the governor on all counts. However, the reputational damage Volz inflicted would haunt Edwards for the rest of his life.
The documents released by the FBI are almost exclusively from the 1980s. None of them pertain to the case Volz brought to trial, but they add important context to the ways in which the Department of Justice pursued Edwin Edwards.
This isn’t just a pile of old investigations. Read as a single volume, it reveals an obsessive, multi-front effort by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office to prove that Edwin Edwards was corrupt, by constantly routing otherwise disparate cases through his name.
What stands out first in these documents is what’s missing.
Over and over, the same mantra appears at the bottom of memoranda and interview forms: “This document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI. It is the property of the FBI and is loaned to your agency; it and its contents are not to be distributed outside your agency.”
It’s a ritual denial: not a judgment, not an accusation, not a conclusion. But when you stack these pages—memoranda, interviews, subpoenas—they seem to become something else. The collection feels like a closing argument, restless and unfinished, built over a decade. The real focus isn’t just Edwin W. Edwards, the four-term governor. It’s the question that kept federal agents circling him: could they ever prove what so many already believed? Was Edwards more than just colorful? Was he a criminal? What comes through isn’t just a list of allegations, but a portrait of federal obsession, a long pursuit that never lets go.
This is not a single investigation, but a constellation. In the 328 pages, at least four major strands are woven together:
The collapse of the state employee deferred-compensation scheme run by Kenneth Ray Womack, with Edwards tied to letters of credit, stock options, and a fugitive administrator.
A sprawling probe of Texaco, Empire Land Corporation, and a supposed multimillion-dollar “bribe disguised as settlement” over royalties in St. Martin Parish.
A barite and oil-industry influence case that grows into an investigation of the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), and the governor’s circle of fundraisers.
An insurance-bond scam centered on Fiduciary Indemnity and Assurance Group (FIAG), where a single letter from Governor Edwards helped transform a hollow shell into something that appeared to be a legitimate insurer.
Any one of these cases could have kept a U.S. Attorney busy. But here, they’re all bundled together under one subject: “EDWIN W. EDWARDS, GOVERNOR, STATE OF LOUISIANA.” This is more than just a stack of files. It’s a ten-year effort to answer the Justice Department’s big question: how do you convict a man whose politics, business, and friendships are so closely connected?
Obsession isn’t hidden here. It’s the thread that ties everything together.
This isn’t just persistence; it’s a kind of institutional tunnel vision, where once Edwards becomes the hypothesis, every new scandal in Louisiana is tested against that same theory of the man.
Building the Universe: How Separate Cases Became “Edwards”
Structurally, the volume reads like a government version of a shared cinematic universe. The early entries concern Kenneth Ray Womack, beleaguered administrator of the state’s deferred-compensation program. They sit under file number 194C-286 and a modest subject line (early 1983): “UNKNOWN SUBJECTS; EMPLOYEES OF THE STATE OF LOUISIANA.” In later memoranda, the subject line is rewritten to name Womack and spell out the key statute: “HOBBS ACT; CORRUPTION OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS.”
Then, in February 1984, a kind of origin-story memo was addressed from the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) in New Orleans. Here, for the first time in this series, the subject line puts Edwards front and center:
“KENNETH RAY WOMACK, SR., (DECEASED); EDWIN W. EDWARDS, GOVERNOR-ELECT, STATE OF LOUISIANA; HOBBS ACT – CORRUPTION OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS; FALSE STATEMENTS TO A BANK.”
The narrative that follows would fit neatly in a prosecution’s opening statement. During Edwards’s earlier administration, the memo explains, the Pennsylvania company Deferred Compensation Corporation of America (DCCA) won the contract to run a deferred-compensation plan for state employees. Womack ran the Louisiana operation through a subsidiary, DCCL.
By 1978, Womack had acquired both DCCL and its parent. He financed the purchase through a loan from a bank in Pennsylvania. To secure the deal, he put up $400,000 in four letters of credit. Investigators later determined that three Louisiana banks issued these $400,000 letters of credit to Edwin Edwards.
In return, Womack granted Edwards and another man options to buy a third of the stock in both corporations, along with proxies that gave them control of all the shares. The consideration, the memo notes, was $400,000 in Letters of Credit.
You can almost hear the prosecutors’ pulse quicken in those lines. On paper, it’s a classic setup: a governor leans on Louisiana banks for credit in his name. Then he turns that leverage into quiet control of a private company—one whose business depends on a state contract he once signed, and might sign again.
The story grows. A separate 1981 memorandum sums up a preliminary investigation of Womack, multiple shell corporations, and “EMPLOYEES OF THE STATE OF LOUISIANA, DIVISION OF ADMINISTRATION.” It’s still under the Hobbs Act / corruption-of-public-officials heading.
Then Womack disappears.
On January 26, 1982, he failed to show up at his Baton Rouge office. Federal agents searched his home and found a note referencing threats on his life. More importantly, they found documents. Those papers, the FBI reports, revealed the true nature of Edwards’s interests in the deferred compensation. Within months, a federal complaint was filed against Womack for a separate charge of making a false statement to a bank, involving a bogus $25,000 coin collection used as collateral for a $25,000 loan. A fugitive warrant was issued. The New Orleans office sent an airtel—an FBI letter-telegram—to headquarters and to the legal attaché in Aruba to request assistance in tracking Womack. The subject line now read like a morality play: “KENNY RAY – FUGITIVE; EDWIN E. EDWARDS, LOUISIANA FORMER GOVERNOR; HOBBS ACT – COPO.” The last line was an all-caps warning: “ARMED AND SUICIDAL.”
The symmetry is hard to miss. In real life, Womack runs from the law. In the Bureau’s imagination, Edwards keeps slipping out of the net.
After Womack died of cancer in a Philadelphia VA hospital in January 1983, the FBI summed it up: the loan, the fake coins, the letters of credit, the options, the collapse, the lawsuits. The government stopped chasing Womack, but Edwards stayed at the story’s center. In this telling, Womack’s saga isn’t the end—it’s just the start.
Texaco, Empire Land, and the royal road to royalties
By 1984, the Edwards file found a new center of gravity: oil.
In an internal memorandum dated October 12, 1984, a supervisory agent in New Orleans writes to the SAC about a conversation with U.S. Attorney Stanford O. Bardwell Jr., the top federal prosecutor in the Middle District. Bardwell, the memo states, has received allegations from a source tied to the State Mineral Board, which is partially supported by work from Ernst & Whinney, the accounting firm hired by Governor Dave Treen to audit oil-and-gas royalties.
The heart of the allegation is stark:
“On or about January 20, 1984, Texaco, Inc., paid a five-million-dollar bribe to Edwin Edwards and Empire Land Corporation. The bribe was disguised as payment in settlement of several bogus lawsuits in St. Martin Parish brought by Edwards on behalf of Empire Land Company against Texaco.”
The supposed motive: get Edwards, once he resumed the governor’s office, to take pressure off Texaco in royalty battles. Under Treen, Ernst & Whinney concluded Texaco owed about $200 million in additional taxes. During his first week back, Edwards fired the auditors and shifted the work to the Department of Natural Resources bookkeepers. The DNR audit reached the opposite conclusion: not that Texaco owed hundreds of millions, but that the state owed Texaco $11,000.
From a prosecutor’s vantage point, this story is irresistible. According to the memo, the U.S. Attorney believes the source at the Mineral Board and recommends launching a new investigation into the allegations.
The Edwards volume shows what that meant in practice. Agents fan out across Louisiana and into Texas. They interview landmen and title researchers who worked on leases in St. Martin Parish, tracing how Empire Land Corporation acquired its interest in three sections of land near Lake Dauterive.
One witness, hired to track down mineral owners and secure leases, describes getting maps, lease copies, and instructions from an attorney in the Cotton Exchange Building in New Orleans. The leases she handled were in Empire Land’s name and covered most of the three tracts. She discovered missing interests and evidence that some land had been leased directly by the state to Texaco. Texaco, she says, had been paying royalties to the state, not anyone else.
Later, she recalls being told Empire Land planned to sue Texaco for nonpayment of royalties. She was asked to collect powers of attorney from landowners so the company could sue on their behalf. A follow-up FD-302 notes that as she proceeded, someone informed her that Edwin Edwards himself would represent Empire Land. Some landowners became eager to sign; others wanted nothing to do with it.
It’s a Louisiana story through and through. The lawyer you choose is either a reason to join the fight or a reason to run.
All of this culminates in an airtel sent from New Orleans to the Los Angeles and San Antonio offices in December 1984. The subject line: “EDWIN W. EDWARDS, GOVERNOR, STATE OF LOUISIANA; TEXACO, INC. – VICTIM; HOBBS ACT – COPO.”
The airtel repeats the $3–5 million bribe story, the bogus lawsuits, and the claim that Edwards promised to protect Texaco once he was back in office. Then it adds a new detail: agents have picked up word that Texaco might have sent truckloads of pipe—used and new—from Morgan City to Edwards’s ranch in Birome, Texas, to use as fencing. They begin checking shipping logs and transportation records, searching for evidence.
Did any of this ever make it to a jury? No. The Edwards-DEQ-DNR-Gulf Oil case was closed with a U.S. Attorney’s declination, not a conviction. The Womack investigation fell apart after his death. The Texaco and Empire Land probe never led to an indictment. What it did do was deepen the federal belief that Edwards treated state power and private oil money as interchangeable—a belief that reappears, in different form, in the casino-licensing prosecutions of the 1990s.
DEQ, DNR, barite, and the politics of “corruption”
The obsession doesn’t stop at Texaco. The same Edwards-oil-regulator nexus reappears in another big strand: a case coded 194C-462, titled “LOUISIANA DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY; LOUISIANA DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES; GULF OIL COMPANY – VICTIM; CORRUPTION OF STATE AND LOCAL PUBLIC OFFICIALS – STATE AND FEDERAL LEVELS; MAIL FRAUD; FRAUD BY WIRE.”
At the back of the statistical form for that case, someone has checked the box for “Closed” and, under “Basis for Closing,” marked “U.S. Attorney Declination.” But the pages between opening and closing are the important ones.
The case begins again, with a tip, and once more with Edwards as the gravitational center. A New Orleans memorandum dated May 20, 1985, announces a “full investigation” into Edwards, unnamed subjects at DEQ and DNR, and Gulf as the “victim,” based in part on information that a businessman associated with the Edwards family had contributed over $35,000 to the governor’s recent campaign and guaranteed campaign loans.
This businessman sold barite—barium sulfate, a heavy mineral used as drilling mud in oil exploration. He allegedly presented himself to companies like Kerr-McGee, Exxon, Texaco, Chevron, and Mobil as someone who could both supply barite and help fix their political problems.
In one detailed FD-302, he is said to have told a Shell executive that legislation had been introduced in Congress that would harm Shell and Mobil, and that he “would have a lot to do with whether this legislation passed or remained in committee.” In exchange for a commitment to buy barite from his company, he would seek to kill the bill.
Elsewhere, the file notes that he and another Louisiana official traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with Exxon, urging the company to “do its part to help businesses in Louisiana” by buying from this favored supplier.
The thread is easy to follow. Laws and regulations become bargaining chips, bundled up with private deals in the oil patch. The barite files aren’t really about minerals—they’re about the uneasy feeling in a prosecutor’s chest when a governor and his circle start treating regulation like just another thing to trade.
However, the line between how Louisiana politics operates and what constitutes a federal crime is often blurry. Lobbyists meet governors. Companies write checks. Legislation lives or dies in committee, depending on who calls whom at the right moment. The barite case ends up in the Edwards file, not because it’s especially outrageous, but because the theory of the man demands that anything he touches gets examined through the Hobbs Act lens.
By the late 1980s, the cosmic center of that universe shifts again—to a small insurance company in Shreveport that, for a brief window, claims to stand behind multimillion-dollar surety bonds.
FIAG and the letterhead of the governor
The Fiduciary Indemnity and Assurance Group (FIAG) sequence is one of the most revealing sections in the volume, because it shows how little is needed to make Edwards central to a case.
The FIAG investigation opens in 1989 with a multi-city plan of attack. Agents in Austin will check state insurance records; agents in San Francisco will interview brokers; agents in Baton Rouge will talk to the insurance commissioner and “locate and interview former Governor EDWIN W. EDWARDS, who is currently in private law practice in the Baton Rouge area,” to determine if he wrote a key letter dated August 28, 1987.
That letter, along with one from a Shreveport banker, is the cornerstone of FIAG’s claim to legitimacy. An internal summary in the file explains that the banker placed FIAG’s supposed trust documents in a safe deposit box and then, “based on that and nothing more,” wrote a letter stating his bank held a $1.5 million trust for the company. In reality, “no actual trust was ever opened at the bank and nothing was placed on record.”
What transforms that garden-variety misrepresentation into a public-corruption story is the political overlay. The same summary notes that the banker then contacted Governor Edwards and another state official. Both wrote letters, in “glowing terms,” touting FIAG’s management, financial backing, and general reliability.
The Louisiana Department of Insurance then approved FIAG to write surplus-lines coverage, officially based on the $41 million financial statement, the supposed $1.5 million trust deposit, and the fact that the company was “touted by the Governor.”
Two weeks later, the department abruptly revoked the license. A later review found “no internal work had been done whatsoever to validate or investigate FIAG” before the approval, and one key official claimed the certification letter bearing his name had been forged—an assertion other witnesses disputed.
The report pulls no punches: “At that point, FIAG/FIFC was a total ‘sham.’ The company had no financial ability to pay any sort of claim.”
Then comes the part that makes this feel like a sequel to every other Edwards storyline: political payoffs. In the weeks leading up to FIAG’s approval, several checks totaling thousands of dollars were allegedly funneled through an intermediary to be delivered as campaign contributions to Edwards and another politician. The memo notes that multiple $1,000 money orders were purchased in smaller denominations “so they could not be traced as campaign funds.”
Around the same time, Edwards was the beneficiary of a $317,000 performance bond for work on a country club in Cedar Creek, which was written by FIAG.
Do we get the end of this story here? Not quite. FIAG shows up the way so many satellites do in the Edwards file: just another object in his orbit, another scheme where his letterhead, his name, or his campaign account is one of the main ingredients.
The fact that a whole multi-city FBI plan hangs on a single favor letter from a former governor tells you plenty. In this universe, Edwards’ signature is never just a courtesy. It’s probable cause for looking for a crime. But why did Edwards write that FIAG letter? Was it a favor for a friend, an expression of hubris, or a calculated move to secure campaign cash? Such questions invite speculation and encourage readers to ponder the underlying intent. Even the mere intrigue of motive can breathe life into the document trail.
Obsession with the paperwork
So what do we do with the fact that some of these cases end in declination rather than indictment?
The DEQ/DNR/Gulf oil-corruption case is marked “Closed – U.S. Attorney Declination.” The Womack coin-collateral complaint evaporates when the defendant dies. The Texaco bribe allegations never resulted in an indictment against Texaco; instead, they merged into the broader river of suspicion that eventually led to the separate casino-licensing prosecution in the late 1990s. The FIAG materials sit in the file as a warning flare more than a finished story.
Yet every one of these threads is tied together in the same thick volume, released all at once under Edwards’s name. That bundling is its own kind of story. It says: Even when we couldn’t prove it, we were sure he was there.
You can see the mindset in the bureaucratic forms. One page is a generic “Public Corruption Statistical Report,” designed for all kinds of cases. But here, the caption at the bottom reads: “EDWIN W. EDWARDS, GOVERNOR… LOUISIANA DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY; LOUISIANA DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES; GULF OIL COMPANY – VICTIM; CORRUPTION OF STATE AND LOCAL PUBLIC OFFICIALS – STATE AND FEDERAL LEVELS.”
This is a system designed to categorize corruption, but the Edwards file keeps bringing it back to one man. Here, corruption isn’t a category. It’s a person.
You also see the depth of the government’s commitment in the sheer geography of the tasking memos. In the FIAG case alone, New Orleans directs Austin to check Texas insurance records, San Francisco to interview a national broker, Baton Rouge to interview state officials and Edwards himself, Lafayette to coordinate and issue subpoenas, and Shreveport to track down the banker whose letter helped set the whole thing in motion.
This isn’t a casual look. It’s an all-hands perimeter around any scheme where Edwards might show up.
And it’s not just the FBI. The volume is thick with grand-jury subpoenas from the Middle District of Louisiana, ordering witnesses to bring documents to the federal courthouse on Florida Street in Baton Rouge. The subpoenas are boilerplate; the pattern is not. In late 1984, multiple subpoenas were issued on the same day, all signed by the same deputy clerk, each stating, “issued on application of the United States of America by” an Assistant U.S. Attorney whose name and contact information were repeated like a refrain.
Put it all together, and you get a decade of institutional energy circling one orbit: Edwards, and the constellation of businesses, banks, and regulators that move around him.
What the obsession got right—and what it missed
Here’s the tricky part. The obsession wasn’t baseless.
The Edwards who walks through these pages really is at the center of an extraordinary web of money and influence. He personally guarantees loans for Womack’s companies, which depend on a state-created program for their business. He appears as a would-be champion of small landowners in St. Martin Parish, suing Texaco over royalties while political allies and law firms maneuver around mineral boards and audits.
His name is invoked, credibly or not, by barite salesmen promising favorable legislative treatment. His letter is one of the deciding factors in a too-good-to-be-true insurance company being allowed to sell coverage in Louisiana.
And outside this particular volume, we know how the larger story ended: Edwards was ultimately convicted in 2000 on federal racketeering charges related to the licensing of riverboat casinos. The FBI and the Justice Department were not chasing a ghost. The basic theory—that Edwards had turned his public power into a kind of tradable instrument—was vindicated in a courtroom, just not on the exact fact patterns sketched out in many of these earlier documents.
But obsession distorts, too. When every policy fight and every business deal gets filtered through the lens of guilt, the file fills up with what you might call ambient suspicion. A special session on oil-tax policy becomes, in the FBI’s telling, a reason to take statements from Sun Oil executives about their meetings with Edwards and the depletion allowance.
Those interviews are fascinating, but nothing in them is criminal on its face. They show a governor doing what governors do: taking meetings, listening to companies worried about a tax change, weighing revenue against jobs. But because the lens is fixed—“corruption of public officials”—even routine lobbying becomes another tile in the mosaic.
Something similar happens with rumors. The Empire Land section collects stories about bad blood toward Texaco in the countryside, suspicions that the state sold land it didn’t own, and old resentments of Baton Rouge. The DEQ and DNR files are rife with gossip about who got which committee chair and who might owe their job to Edwards. Each story is thin on its own, but writing it down in an FBI file gives it a weight it might not deserve. For anyone reading these files now, the challenge is obvious: which whispers are history, and which should have stayed barroom talk? The Bureau wrote them all down; it’s on us to decide which ones deserve weight.
The volume as a portrait
What does it mean that the FBI chose to release these documents to the public as a single bound unit?
On one level, it’s just how FOIA works: searches by name, documents gathered under a single subject, everything scanned into the Vault as “Part 01-2.” But for a historian—or anyone trying to see how power and paranoia move together—the effect is more than just paperwork.
Taken together, these pages are a portrait of an obsession, yes, but also of a structure: the system the federal government uses when it thinks a particular official has corrupted a whole state.
You can see the structure in the way the case numbers pile up: 194C-286 for Womack and deferred compensation, 194C-444 for Texaco and Empire Land, 194C-462 for DEQ, DNR, and barite. Each has its own forms, airtels, subpoenas, and closure codes. But the FBI bundles them all into one Edwards volume. It’s as if they’re saying: this isn’t four investigations. It’s one story with four faces.
And you can see it in the disclaimers. The Bureau insists, document by document, that these aren’t “recommendations or conclusions.” But the act of curation is a conclusion. When the FBI decides that a fugitive notice for Womack in Aruba, a memo about Texaco pipe shipments, a barite salesman’s promises, and a dodgy insurance bond all belong in the same book, it’s making a claim: these are not random episodes. They are chapters in a story about the same man.
The result is akin to a Gothic administrative novel. We meet the doomed Womack, stamped “ARMED AND SUICIDAL.” We ride with landmen down dusty roads in St. Martin Parish, persuading heirs to sign powers of attorney they barely understand. We sit in a committee room while a Sun Oil executive clicks through slides about depletion allowances and “mature” wells. We watch a Shreveport banker gather a handful of unsigned papers and conjure a $1.5 million “trust” out of thin air.
In almost every scene, Edwin Edwards is there—present, invoked, or just implied. Sometimes he’s the mastermind. Sometimes he’s just the letterhead. Sometimes he’s the person a witness assumes must be behind it all, because in Louisiana politics, he usually is.
Read straight through, the file doesn’t just document alleged crimes. It drafts a character—Edwards as the fixed star around which every suspicious deal or half-baked scheme must orbit.
The Edwards volume doesn’t answer the question of where politics ends and crime begins. It can’t. That answer was always going to live in the jury room, not the file room. What it does, and does well, is show what it looks like when the federal government decides you must be on the wrong side of that line—and spends ten years trying to prove it.
The result is messy, repetitive, and sometimes overreaching. But it’s also a testament to how seriously the Justice Department took the idea that no one man should treat an oil-rich state as his own checking account.
Reading it now as one long volume, you can feel the irony humming at the edges. The FBI tries so hard to avoid conclusions, to keep every memo in the safe language of “allegations” and “information received.” But by the time you close the back cover, the conclusion is inescapable—not about what Edwards did in every episode, but about what the government believed.
Somewhere between the declinations and the conviction, between rumor and RICO, is the place we call justice, a place this file keeps circling but never quite lands.