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When FBI agents this year claimed they found $90,000 in cold cash in Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson’s deep freeze, I immediately thought of how three-time state Gov. Earl Long coped with a similar experience in 1959.

The day before I interviewed Long in Ruston on May 5, 1959, FBI agents raided the governor’s New Orleans Bourbon Street apartment, looking for incriminating financial papers and cash.

My first question to Long, naturally, was what had the Feds found in the New Orleans apartment Earl shared with stripper Blaze Starr.

Long fielded the question serenely. “The Feds ain’t going to find nothing in that place,” Long answered me in his raspy voice, while he lit up the first of several Camel cigarettes with kitchen matches.

“Why not?” I asked.

Long blew a cloud of cigarette smoke in my face.

“Because I burned all the stuff they are looking for,” Long said, as if that settled the issue, which for me it did. If it was between Earl and the FBI, I was on Earl’s side.

I was the 21-year-old “political reporter” for the Ruston Daily Leader in 1959, my hometown paper. Long had agreed to an interview at the Ruston North Vienna Street residence of his sister, Lucille Long Hunt. Long had announced he would run for a fourth term as governor, but later Earl had to abandon that idea. He could not overcome a constitutional provision against consecutive terms then in existence.

Once I arrived at Mrs. Hunt’s, the governor invited me to sit in the dusty white Fleetwood Cadillac that was his campaign vehicle for what would be an hour-long conversation. Three of Long’s black-clad bodyguards walked around in Mrs. Hunt’s oak-shaded backyard and drank whiskey out of paper cups while the governor and I talked. The whole scene seemed altogether natural to me.

As we settled down in the Caddy, with Earl behind the wheel and me in the passenger seat, I got a close look at this already larger-than-life populist politician and brother of the famous Huey Long.

In awe of “Uncle Earl,” as Long was called, I was frankly disappointed at his nondescript appearance that day in May of 1959. Earl, I noticed, was about 5-foot-10 (my height), with bowl-cut reddish-gray, uncombed hair, a prominent nose and jowly cheeks.

Long struck my undergraduate consciousness like a character out of a Tennessee Williams play (Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”), with his slightly soiled white Palm Beach suit, red suspenders and dangling, untied shoe laces with holes in the sole.

I could see all that because Long slouched in the car seat and arranged himself so he could prop up his feet on the car’s dashboard, jamming me against the passenger door.

My next question was about the governor’s take on integration, which that year was looming as the main issue in Louisiana and the South.

“I’m 1,000 percent for segregation,” Long said, his voice rising. “If the NAACP and the Communists will just leave us alone, we will be fine,” Long intoned.

At the end of that statement on what would become the politics of race in Louisiana, Long gave me a broad, arch wink that I could not miss, but that I did not understand.

Only much later did I come to believe Long was referring to — and winking at — his all-out effort to get blacks on the voting rolls.

In fact, Long had increased the number of black voters from 7,000 in 1948 to 110,000 by the year I interviewed him in 1959 — a courageous feat that anticipated President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act by nearly 17 years.

In 1959, while I was interviewing Long, hard-core segregationists like State Sen. Willie Rainach, of Summerfield, were trying to roll back black registration, angering Long. Indeed, Rainach and other arch-segregationists were trying to purge ALL black voters from the rolls, FBI records show.

Long’s anger at Rainach and his allies over this issue, I think, led Earl to lose control in a profane, drunken speech to legislators in May 1959, only days after I talked to Long in Ruston.

The governor was committed for a short time after that calamitous rant before TV cameras. Historians now say Long suffered from a bipolar disorder that took complete hold of him in pressure-packed 1959.

It did not help Long, either, that he was boozing heavily, chain-smoking, popping Dexedrine pills, missing meals and sleeping only a couple of hours a night. Or maybe that lifestyle was just part of the problem.

In August of that year, I would interview Earl again in Ruston — after the mental break down — and the governor had aged 10 years. Long looked wasted, and he told me, “I’m so tired, Hilburn.”

But in the first much longer interview, Long seemed fine to me. He was unpredictable, but I was prepared for that. He seemed very restless, getting in and out of the car, but that was no problem, either.

Some people might have thought he was crazy when — in our first meeting in May ‘59 — Long started lining polished silver dollars across the dashboard, even while we talked. But I had seen Long throw dollars to crowds before.

What I did not know then was that those silver dollars were probably underwritten by the Louisiana Mafia, as were most of Earl’s expenses.

It was only long after the first Lincoln Parish interview that I learned Earl was routinely and intimately involved, not only with Louisiana Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, but also with the likes of New York crime bosses Frank Costello and “Dandy Phil” Kastel.

The greedy Long took his payoffs directly from the mobsters, avoiding the middle man, and Louisiana was in many ways — including prostitution — the province of Organized Crime. No wonder Long could bet $10,000 on a single horse race, as he often did.

Earl’s links with the Mafia were documented in what remains by far the best biography of the governor, “Earl K. Long, The Saga of Uncle Earl and Louisiana,” published in 1990 by state historians Michael Kurtz and Morgan Peoples. Peoples, who admired Earl, was stunned by the crime connection his and Kurtz’s deep research turned up, and told me he almost gave up on the book when the Mafia links surfaced.

I’m glad, quite honestly, that I was not aware of Earl’s connection to Organized Crime when we crossed paths in 1959.

I was awed by Long that spring afternoon, and I was grateful he would award an interview to a 21-year-old cub reporter. I loved Uncle Earl. But in the immediate aftermath of that interview, even a cub reporter could tell Earl Long’s star was in free fall, and that his legacy would be in doubt.

I was surprised, then, when Earl announced that he would run for the U.S. Congress in the old 8th Congressional District, which sprawled hugely through central and northwest Louisiana, in 1960.

The last time I had seen Earl in Ruston — after the mental breakdown — he looked too exhausted and too broken to run for any office ever again, much less against an incumbent like U.S. Rep. Harold McSween in the 8th District. McSween, with the machine backing him, was a prohibitive favorite in the long, hot summer of 1960.

Bearing down in 103-degree heat, the 65-year-old Long concentrated on the rural vote — stopping at Boyce, Lecompte, Bunkie and Simmesport, for example — in sweltering, endless days that started at 7 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m. McSween concentrated on the capital of the district, Alexandria.

Earl openly wooed the black vote in that final race — only 15 percent of the electorate — and attacked racists. His campaign was faltering and tired in June, but slowly Earl began to lace into McSween as “catfish mouth” in the last two months — July and August — of the race.

While awaiting election returns Sat., Aug. 27, the exhausted Long suffered a heart attack at his headquarters at Alexandria’s Bentley Hotel. Earl refused to seek aid until the polls closed at 8, and he could put down the telephone.

Long was rewarded with a staggering upset win, with the rural and black vote — the commoner constituency that had carried Earl so far — securing one more victory for Uncle Earl.

After a triumphant press conference, Congressman-elect Long died Sept. 5, 1960. I got the news when I stepped outside the old Dixie Theater after a matinee, blinking in the bright heat. Dr. Henry Roane, of Ruston, pulled over. “Wiley, your governor just died,” Dr. Roane told me. Roane had been reading my Long stories in The Leader and was one of my Ruston role models.

Earl would always be my governor. I went home, heart broken, to secure my notes from the two Long interviews. I knew, even then, that Earl Long would always be news. I loved Long.

I could not know, however, that Long’s brazen marriage to the Mafia would forever taint his name, and I’m glad I didn’t know. It hurts, even now, to realize Earl Long’s legacy is, sadly, a crime against the Louisiana and the common people he so loved.

Earl Long’s legacy: It’s a crime - September 10, 2007 - Wiley Hilburn is a Times columnist and the head of the Journalism Department at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston. - The Times - http://www.shreveporttimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070910/NEWS0804/709100329/1007/OPINIO

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