One Down

When scandal broke its levees in Louisiana last summer, began to rise pocket-deep around public hirelings high & low, a cynical citizenry waited to see what would happen to Huey Long's topmost heirs: ex-Governor Richard Webster Leche. New Orleans' Mayor Robert Sidney Maestri, New Orleans Hotelman Seymour Weiss.

Last week U. S. Attorney General Frank Murphy's clean-up man in Louisiana, Assistant Attorney General Oetje John Rogge, collared one of the Big Three. In New Orleans' Federal Court, slick, new-rich Seymour Weiss was convicted of using the mails to defraud, fined $2,000, sentenced to 30 months in prison. Convicted with him were Louisiana State University's ex-President James Monroe Smith, who must answer to 38 other charges and indictments; Dr. Smith's wife's nephew, John Emory Adams; and Louis C. LeSage, a previously suspended executive of Standard Oil Co. of Louisiana. All were charged with "selling" to the university $75,000 worth of furnishings which came from a hotel which the State had already bought, and pocketing the proceeds. Oetje John Rogge was able to turn this boodling into a Federal offense by showing that banks in Baton Rouge and New Orleans cleared the checks by mail.

Seymour Weiss is also under indictment for evading and conspiring to evade income taxes, for conspiring with Dick Leche to violate the Federal "hot oil" law restricting petroleum production. Alone of the Big Three, Bob Maestri is unindicted.*He still runs New Orleans and Louisiana (through Huey's little brother Earl, who became Governor when Dick Leche resigned). Accustomed to the rise--and the subsiding--of political scandal's flood, Louisianans concede Boss Maestri an excellent chance to get Earl Kemp Long re-elected next January, keep the shell-shocked but undestroyed Long machine intact.

*But not untouched. Federal Judge Thomas Whitfield Davidson in Dallas, ruling last month on a writ of habeas corpus in the "hot oil" case, declared that Mayor Maestri was "just as guilty" as Seymour Weiss and Richard Leche.

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