Big Projects, Big Payoffs in the Big Easy   

The abandoned hulk of the Circus Circus boat, New Orleans' fifth floating casino, now lies rusting in Bayou Bienvenue, disintegrating along with Louisiana's short-lived romance with legal gambling.

Amid glittering promises of prosperity, the state legislature embraced gambling in the early 1990s, approving video poker, riverboat gambling and plans for one of the world's largest casinos.

But now the video poker operators are the targets of an FBI investigation, and many of the riverboats have run into rough financial waters. The day before Thanksgiving 3,300 casino and construction workers lost their jobs when Harrah's New Orleans venture declared bankruptcy--closing the temporary casino that opened last May in the Municipal Auditorium and halting construction on the half-finished behemoth gambling hall that dominates the Big Easy's most prominent street corner.

How were so many seduced by the gambling boosters' sweet-talk? Lots of money opened all the right doors, according to a five-part New Orleans Times-Picayune series called "Stacking the Deck," which exposed the web of corruption in which gambling interests had ensnared many of the state's politicians.

The December 1994 series was just the beginning of a string of high-profile investigations by the New Orleans paper during the last year, including reports on Medicaid billing abuses and nepotism in a legislative scholarship program, as well as a revealing analysis of statewide campaign contributions.

The reports have done much to help the paper shake off its reputation as the sleepy Southern outpost of Newhouse Newspapers. But Times-Pic-ayune Editor Jim Amoss says the investigative efforts were merely a response to increasingly widespread corruption in Louisiana. "With chicanery as blatant as what we've seen in the birth of gambling here, we couldn't help but respond," says Amoss, who became the paper's editor in 1990.

The 275,000-circulation Times-Picayune had been following the debate over bringing legalized gambling to Louisiana for 10 years. But editors shifted into high gear after statehouse reporter Peter Nicholas reported in May 1994 that Louisiana State Senate President Samuel Nunez had passed out several $2,500 campaign contributions from gambling boat owner Louie Roussel III on the Senate floor.

Newly inspired, Special Projects Editor James O'Byrne, along with a team of four other reporters, began work on "Stacking the Deck," concentrating their investigation on the 15 gambling boat licenses authorized by the state legislature.

"We worked along two tracks," says O'Byrne, now the paper's Sunday editor. "We wanted to follow every dollar we could, and we wanted to find out the political tie-ins to every boat." O'Byrne credits two "serious document hounds," team members Mark Schleifstein and Susan Finch, with the discoveries that gave the series its bite. A footnote in an obscure SEC document clued Schleifstein in to the fact that William C. (Billy) Broadhurst, friend and former law partner of Gov. Edwin Edwards, earned a $600,000 bonus for helping his client, developer Christopher Hemmeter, obtain one of the coveted licenses. Broadhurst put in a call to Edwards that ultimately prompted the governor to intervene in a licensing hearing on Hemmeter's behalf. Then, Finch's scrutiny of a campaign contribution database assembled by the "Stacking the Deck" team led to the discovery that 33 lawyers employed by the Chicago firm of Hemmeter's attorneys had contributed to Edwards' campaign on a single day in 1993.

The team's work did not go unnoticed. Polls indicate that the series coincided with a considerable swing in public opinion against gambling in Louisiana, a shift that demanded the attention of local politicians. In last fall's gubernatorial primary all seven major candidates refused contributions from gambling companies, and now Louisiana Gov.-elect Mike Foster is calling for a statewide referendum on gambling.

"Stacking the Deck" recently won the 1995 Associated Press Managing Editors' Public Service Award and the University of Southern California's Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. For his part, O'Byrne says he's most proud that the series won the Gerald R. Loeb Award for Business and Financial Journalism even though the series was based on a political story.

"Lots of editors at other papers see special projects as big, dull thumb-suckers," says O'Byrne. "But we think we get a tremendous impact, an impact we don't get even with sustained daily coverage of a topic. It gives us an ability to focus public attention and buzz on a subject."

The paper focused the public buzz several times last summer. For example, in July a series called "Green Waived" dissected a Tulane University scholarship program that allowed political insiders to obtain tuition waivers for their children and for political cronies. In August, state officials who rewrote the Medicaid rulebook in order to benefit a small group of doctors and psychiatric hospitals to the tune of millions of dollars were chagrined to see their machinations exposed in a special report called "Medicaid Madness." And in September, reporters traced campaign contributions to Louisiana legislators back through the previous election cycle, revealing in a series called "Power and Money" just how pervasively gambling money had infiltrated the state's political hierarchy--$1 of every $5 contributed.

O'Byrne, a 14-year veteran of the Times-Picayune, says he's thrilled with the results of the paper's commitment to investigative special projects. He says this commitment has strengthened during the last five years as staffers, judging from the success of recent investigative efforts, have become more experienced in executing such undertakings. "On a paper this size projects require a more significant commitment of staff time. It takes a lot of juggling to commit the resources necessary for stories like these," he says. "But we're a lot more comfortable now making that kind of commitment."