Chapter Five
A Rogue Governor and a Horny Preacher
As much as I like to take full credit for my prize-winning ways, I recognize that I was only as good as my bosses let me be. Serendipitously, Louisiana was my first muckraking classroom. Every investigative reporter should be so lucky. I won a bunch of awards in Baton Rouge in the early 1970’s, and moved upward to Miami and Boston. A decade later after collecting more awards, I spiraled downward to Baton Rouge again before ending up at CNN.
My initial departure from “big time TV” in Boston was not by choice, but a hedge against poverty. Fortuitously, my adopted hometown was also the home of Barry Seal, Brother Jimmy Lee Swaggart, and a Governor who said the only way he could lose an election was to “get caught in bed with a dead girl, or a live boy.” Exposing the transgressions of these guys and other Louisiana rascals revitalized my career.
But before I set about building a prize-winning wall shrine to myself on the backs of these characters, I had to rebuild relationships with the family I left behind a decade earlier.
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I was returning to the scene of painful memories in a place where I made my final descent into the depths of alcoholic degradation. My first wife and our four children still lived in Louisiana. Tragically, my 28-year-old son, Michael, was awaiting trial in a New Orleans jail for a vicious crime that would eventually result in a life sentence. Sober for nearly a dozen years, I had not yet bridged a father/son gap that had been strained between us since his childhood. As a result of my career travels and his constant moves across the country, Mike remained a stranger. Although I couldn’t admit it then, even to myself, I wanted to avoid the parental humiliation of being in close proximity to my son’s tragic situation. I now had a second wife, two adopted sons and in my mind, professional and personal respectability.
Moreover, I worried that after years of neglecting the children of my first marriage, they would resent the attention I gave to a new family. A gratifying reward of sobriety had been developing better relationships with my children. Separated by many miles, the distance helped them forgive my past failures. Now what?
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If there is such a thing as muckraking karma, my destiny was to encounter Brother Jimmy Lee Swaggart. Again and again. Like couples who marry, divorce and remarry, we had a long and volatile love-hate relationship. Jimmy and I met five years before he tripped over his dick, causing a $150-million a year spiritual empire to come tumbling down.
Though not banned in the Roman Catholic stronghold of Boston, Swaggart’s popularity there was negligible and I barely recognized his name. I was only vaguely aware that rock and roll icon Jerry Lee Lewis had a well-known evangelist cousin living in Baton Rouge.