Edwin Edwards started his political career on the Crowley City Council in 1954. By the time he was done, he had served sixteen years as Louisiana's governor — more than twice any other person in the state's history — and eight years in federal prison. He was both. Born near Marksville to a sharecropper's family, fluent in Cajun French, elected governor four times on a coalition of Cajun and Black voters that Louisiana had never seen before, he built the Superdome, rewrote the state constitution, modernized oil and gas taxation, and named Black Louisianans to positions of power when almost no one in the South was doing that. He was also, by his own admission, a high-stakes gambler, a relentless womanizer, and eventually a convicted racketeer who extorted millions from casino license applicants. He survived two federal trials — hung jury, then full acquittal — before the third one finally got him in 2000. In 1991 he ran against David Duke in a gubernatorial runoff. The bumper sticker read 'Vote for the Crook. It's important.' He won 61 to 39. He died at 93, at home, in 2021, having in his final years married a woman 61 years his junior, fathered a child at 86, and starred in a reality television show. He once said the only way he'd lose was if he were caught with 'a dead woman or a live boy.' Louisiana is the only place in America that would produce a man exactly like him, and the only place that would re-elect him three times knowing exactly what he was.