Today's crooks pale in comparison
by JAMES GILL - Times-Picayune (excerpt)

The ghosts of Judge Leander Perez and Doc Meraux must be consoling each other somewhere over the decline of the acquisitive Louisiana politician. As today's School Board members and parish councilmen traipse off to prison for taking relatively modest payoffs, Perez and Meraux will be shaking their hoary locks in remembrance of the golden age. They didn't deal in modest amounts, but more or less grabbed a parish apiece. And neither was so much as arrested. Theirs, even by Louisiana standards, was an unholy alliance. Whatever their posthumous sentiments may be, they were certainly in cahoots when Meraux was sheriff of St. Bernard and Perez was DA there and in Plaquemines. The titles did not do justice to their autocratic powers. Meraux was boss of St. Bernard, where, by the time he died in 1938, he owned practically every inch of undeveloped land. How he managed that is unknown, but it was probably not entirely due to prudent management of the salary he earned enforcing the law and collecting taxes.