The Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith never regained his national prominence, although he built a small empire in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, with a Bible college and a yearly Passion Play that attracted big crowds. He died, in 1976, a minor-league Oral Roberts.
I don’t know what became of Diamond Jim Moran, other than he was a high-profile presence in New Orleans throughout Mayor Maestri’s election-free six years in office. But Dandy Phil Kastel went on to build the Tropicana in Las Vegas in partnership with Frank Costello; in the late 1950s, Kastel was found with six bullets in him—it was ruled a suicide.
Kastel’s assistant, Carlos, went on from the rustic roots of his Willswood Tavern to be undisputed ruler of the mob in New Orleans. He was implicated in a later political assassination. His last name, incidentally, was Marcello.
Most of these people I kept track of casually, through the papers, chats with Eliot Ness, Wilson and Irey, and via sporadic correspondence and phone calls with Alice Jean. The only other one I ever had direct contact with again was, ironically enough, Seymour Weiss.
In 1955 I was in New York with a lady friend of mine for a long weekend of Broadway plays, shopping and fancy dining. On nostalgic impulse, I stayed at the Hotel New Yorker, and in the lounge, Seymour Weiss—looking like a fat, urbane lizard in his green-silk suit and narrow green-and-white tie—appeared at our table just after my female friend had gone to the powder room.
“Nate Heller?” he said, and that homely puss of his smiled; at age sixty or so, he didn’t look a hell of a lot older, but a little pudgier. Prosperous.
“Hiya, Seymour. Sit down.”
He did. “What brings you to New York?”
“Pleasure trip. Still hangin’ out in Huey’s hotel, after all these years?”
His smile was small and self-satisfied. “I own the hotel, Nate. I own a lot of hotels.”
“You must have invested wisely.”
“I did. I’ll buy you a drink….” He waved for a waiter.
“Swell. Just as long as it’s not a Ramos Gin Fizz.”
I had a rum-and-Coke, and he had some Dewar’s. Too casually, he asked, “You didn’t really believe that nonsense you told Murphy Roden, way back when?”
“How is Murphy?”
“Ailing. Did you, Nate? Do you?”
“What?”
“Believe that nonsense.”
I sipped my drink; smiled nastily. “Seymour, I’m at an age where I’m not believing in much of anything. You tell me something.”
“All right.”
“Way back when, why did you bring me here from Chicago, to deliver your damn birthday present to Huey?”
He shrugged; the dead eyes avoided me. “Because I was worried about him. I thought he’d listen to reason, coming from you.”
“I think it’s because Huey’d had a tip that somebody on the inside, somebody close to him, was gonna betray him. Maybe you just wanted him to think you were worried about him.”
The pockmarked face was immobile. “Is that any way to repay my hospitality?”
“I was just curious. Certain things, certain loose ends from cases long ago, can keep a detective up at night.”
He saluted me with his scotch glass. “I sleep fine.”
“I bet you do.”
He was looking past me now. “Is this your lady friend moving across the room? Very lovely.”
“Beautiful women are a habit I just can’t seem to break.”
“Tell you what, Nate,” he said genially. “For old times’ sake. To prove there’s no hard feelings…. Why don’t you and your young lady join me for dinner tonight in our restaurant. It’ll be my treat.”
“No thanks, Seymour,” I said. “I couldn’t properly dress for the occasion.”
He blinked. “It’s not formal. Just a tie and jacket.”
“Maybe. But I forgot my bullet-proof vest.”
I introduced him to Linda, and he was very suave, very charming, before leaving our table to stop by and chat with other guests.
“He seemed nice,” Linda said.
“Seymour’s a gracious host, all right.”
“Kind of ugly, though, don’t you think?”
I sipped my free rum-and-Coke—another Weiss lagniappe. “You don’t know the half of it.”
Seymour—who in his later years got involved with extreme right-wing political organizations and became close pals with J. Edgar Hoover—died in 1969 at age seventy-three.
Many of the others are gone, too: Murphy Roden, Joe Messina, Louis LeSage, Edward Hamilton, even Frank Wilson and Elmer Irey. Carlos Marcello died (as I write this) just a little over a year ago. On the other hand, the questions surrounding the shooting of the Kingfish are alive and well.
In 1985, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination prompted the usual journalistic rehashes. But one of the articles inspired the public relations director of Mutual Life to look up his company’s policies on Huey Long.
My long-forgotten report was dredged up and its contents made available to the press; considerations of privacy were cast aside in the public interest. A flurry of publicity followed, when it was discovered that, in 1936, Mutual had paid double-indemnity on the accidental-death policy of a political figure that history had declared the victim of an assassin’s bullet.
By this time, I was retired, living in a condo in Coral Springs, Florida, with my second wife. I did a number of interviews for both print and electronic media, and reiterated the “accidental death” conclusion of my report, implicating the bodyguards, all of whom were dead and buried by now. It took about five minutes for my fifteen minutes of fame to lapse.
Then Coleman Vidrine, Jr., a retired captain of the Louisiana State Police, came forward and announced that his late father, Dr. Arthur Vidrine’s first cousin, had passed down to him a bullet—a spent .38 slug—and a story that went with it. Seemed Dr. Vidrine had given the bullet to his cousin for safekeeping. Coleman Vidrine, Sr., had told his son that Arthur was concerned for his safety, and considered the bullet part of his “life insurance policy.”
The .45 slug never showed up, but in the midst of this renewed interest in the case, Merle Welsh—the funeral director who embalmed both Huey Long and Dr. Carl Weiss—confirmed the story of a predawn impromptu autopsy by Dr. Vidrine, during which a .45 slug was recovered from the body of the Kingfish.
The funeral director, who was familiar with gunshot cases, also identified both wounds in Huey Long’s body as wounds of entry.
None of this was enough for the Louisiana State Police to reopen the case.
Then in 1991, a flamboyant but renowned forensics expert, Dr. James E. Starrs of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., took an interest in Huey Long and Carl Weiss. He convinced the Weiss family—Carl Jr. and Tom Ed—to allow him to exhume Dr. Carl Austin Weiss’s body. Although many argued that this was the wrong body to exhume (the right one being under tons of concrete and steel), Starrs was able to establish a number of facts that tended to show Dr. Carl’s innocence.
A hollow-point .38—undoubtedly from Murphy Roden’s gun, though no one said so—was found in the doctor’s brain case. Fibers from Dr. Carl’s white shirt were found embedded in the hollow point of the slug, which—along with bullets smashing into left wrist and right arm (apparent via skeletal damage)—indicated the doctor’s arms were up in a defensive posture when that fatal shot into his head was fired.
The skeleton, which was about all that was left of Carl Austin Weiss, also disclosed—through a study of trajectory of the twenty-four bullets that caused bone damage (those that passed through or into flesh without striking bone are lost in the mists of history)—that at least a dozen bullets were fired into the fallen doctor’s back.
Roselawn Cemetery, where Dr. Carl Weiss had been buried, wasn’t the only place the forensics expert made an important discovery. Starrs also tracked down long-missing, key evidence in the estate of the late Louis Guerre, head of the B.C.I. at the time of Huey’s death: the state police f
iles on the investigation; and the “murder weapon,” Dr. Carl Weiss’s .32 Browning.
Also found among Guerre’s effects was a spent .32 slug, initially thought to be the “fatal bullet,” but ballistics experts soon established it had not come from Dr. Carl’s gun. Both proponents of Dr. Carl’s innocence and of his guilt found ways to use that bullet as ammunition in their arguments. In reality, it was just a spent slug among a deceased copper’s odds and ends, with no chain of custody to connect it with that Browning.
On February 21, 1992, Dr. Starrs presented his arguments, tending to favor Carl Austin Weiss’s innocence, at the forty-fourth annual meeting of the Academy of Forensics Sciences, which by coincidence was held that year in New Orleans. Four months later, the state police held a press conference declaring Dr. Carl Weiss the one-man, one-bullet assassin. Their conclusions were largely based on photographs (which had a poor chain of custody themselves) of the clothing Huey was supposedly wearing when he was shot.
There were indications, in the photos, of powder burns from a point-blank entry wound to the right abdomen. And of course, the police stated in support of their brother officers of bygone days, this meant Dr. Carl Weiss had to be the assassin. After all, he was the only one close enough to Huey Long to shoot him point-blank, leaving a powder burn….
Murphy Roden’s name wasn’t mentioned.
All of this latter-day attention to the case hasn’t served to do anything but raise the same old questions. If anything, things are more clouded now than ever.
When I saw Carl Weiss, Jr., a distinguished-looking man in his late fifties, speak on TV of his belief in his father’s innocence, I remembered a little boy playing with a Fresh Air Taxi and figured now was the time to come forward with what I know.
It doesn’t put anyone at risk, at this late date, not even me. But don’t you think it’s time people know that history almost got it right?
That a man named Weiss did kill Huey Long?
Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and a few liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of conflicting source material.
Most of the characters in this novel are real and appear with their true names. Any readers intimately familiar with the story of Huey Long’s life and death will be aware that I have focused on the key players, while omitting other, more minor ones, in an effort to streamline the narrative, and not overburden the reader with superfluous characters. For example, Long’s secretary Earle Christenberry is absent; as he served many of the same advisory (and glorified “gofer”) functions as Seymour Weiss, I considered his presence as a character redundant (several male secretaries and advisers are referred to here, in passing). Accordingly, some of Christenberry’s majordomo-type actions have been given to Seymour Weiss.
A similar liberty was taken in depicting Dr. Arthur Vidrine as performing the impromptu autopsy on Long at Rabenhorst Funeral Home; Dr. Clarence Lorio, who assisted Vidrine in the operation, was the man identified by undertaker Welsh. Similarly, while both Elmer Irey and Frank Wilson were indeed in New Orleans investigating Huey Long, it was another agent—Mike Malone (sometimes identified as Pat O’Rourke)—who went undercover at the Roosevelt Hotel. The agent was identified in the lobby by a Chicagoan with mob ties, who was hustled out of there by the agent, just as Heller is by Wilson m this novel.
The theory that Seymour Weiss orchestrated the assassination, using Murphy Roden as his triggerman, is my own, and, to my knowledge, new to this work. I do not mean to present it as the definitive solution to the mystery of Long’s death, but—despite its presence in a fictional work—it is rooted firmly in fact and fits the specifics of the case at least as well as any other theory.
Edward Hamilton is a composite character, but a fair representation of the “Square Dealers” leadership. Big George McCracken is also a composite, based primarily on Long’s bodyguard George McQuiston and “Big” George Caldwell, building superintendent at LSU. McQuiston did carry a tommy gun in a grocery sack (although some sources say the weapon was a sawed-off shotgun) and Caldwell indeed was mired in building scams and WPA malfeasance at the university.
Alice Jean Crosley is a fictional character, although she has a real-life counterpart; however, Long’s former mistress—disappointed by Long replacing her in Washington, D.C., with Earle Christenberry—married shortly before the Senator’s assassination, making the love affair between Alice Jean and Nate Heller purely fanciful. The notion that Huey’s former mistress (and the former Secretary of State, revenue collector, etc.) was bitter after her ouster by Long’s heirs, and that she was in possession of damaging pilfered documents, is based on material in Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship (1941), Harnett T. Kane’s classic, darkly amusing examination of Huey and his political heirs.
The story of Huey rejecting a bullet-proof vest from Chicago has a factual basis, as does the assigning of police liaisons to escort the Kingfish and his pistol-packing, deputized “Cossacks” to the 1932 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
Mutual Life Insurance Company did send an investigator to Louisiana in the last week of October 1936 to look into Mrs. Long’s double-indemnity claim. The investigator—the sublimely named?.?. Ponder—undertook an inquiry similar to the one Heller conducts in this book (the quotes from Heller’s report are near-quotes from Ponder’s seven-page document). Mutual did pay the double-indemnity claim.
Some authors contend that in 1936 Mutual considered death by assassination included under the umbrella of accidental death (which is apparently the case today), but this does not jibe with either logic or the facts: if such payment was automatic, why would Mutual have gone to the expense and trouble of sending Ponder to Louisiana to undertake a full investigation in dangerous, enemy territory?
My longtime research associate George Hagenauer did his usual stellar job of rooting out magazine and newspaper material (including Huey’s own, wildly outlandish American Progress). George also spent many hours with me, discussing this convoluted, fascinating, frustrating case; his feel for the more eccentric aspects of the American political scene was most helpful, and an overview of the case he prepared, exploring its political ramifications, was crucial to the development of this narrative. George is a valued collaborator on the Heller “memoirs”; I continue to appreciate his contribution, enthusiasm and friendship.
The relentless Lynn Myers dug out key material, including two vital early biographies: The Story of Huey P. Long (1935), Carlton Beals; and The Kingfish: Huey P. Long, Dictator (1938), Thomas O. Harris (journalist Harris is a minor character in this book). These contemporary accounts were crucial in this attempt to re-create a sense of the times, as was Huey Long: A Candid Biography (1935), Forrest Davis.
I was particularly fortunate to have the aid of one of the foremost collectors of Huey Long material, Michael Wynne of Pineville, Louisiana. Mike’s expertise was matched only by his friendliness: my constant, intrusive, impromptu phone calls, with lists of questions, got immediate detailed answers; and when Mike didn’t know an answer, he came up with it in a few days. He provided me with photocopies of rare, in some cases confidential, documents, about which I can say no more. My thanks, also, to bookseller Jim Taylor, of Baton Rouge, for putting Mike in contact with me…and for introducing me to the concept of lagniappe.
Another person was instrumental in the writing of this book: my talented wife, writer Barbara Collins, who accompanied me on a research trip to Baton Rouge and New Orleans in May of 1993. My son, Nate, was helpful, too, in our exploration of Huey’s fabulous art deco skyscraper capitol—even if he did break the rules and snap a photo in the House of Representatives (Huey broke his share of rules there as well).
A special thanks to Georgene Jones of Baton Rouge, who sent me articles on the reopening of the case, in the early stages of my research for this novel. Mystery writer Bob Randisi provided information
on New York City, and my father, Max Collins, Sr., shared his reminiscences of the Hotel New Yorker.
Three nonfiction works focus on the assassination, and all are of considerable merit: The Huey Long Murder Case (1963), Hermann B. Deutsch; Requiem for a Kingfish (1986), Ed Reed; and The Day Huey Long Was Shot (1963), David Zinman. Deutsche’s work benefits from the author being an eyewitness to many of the events, and is flawed only by a too-ready acceptance of Dr. Carl Weiss as the assassin. Reed’s privately printed work broke extensive new ground, and his research and analysis were crucial in the development of this book. Zinman’s lengthy postscript, in the 1993 expanded edition of his work, provides a detailed look at the James E. Starrs investigation and the subsequent controversy; also, Zinman alone of the three authors spends as much time on the story of Dr. Carl Austin Weiss as he does on that of the Kingfish.
Huey Long: A Biography (1970), T. Harry Williams, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning work with a grand reputation; certainly its wealth of detail was helpful to me, though its pro-Long bias (and Williams’s tendency to accept at face value the word of such dubious sources as Seymour Weiss and Long’s bodyguards) limited its usefulness. My purposes were better served by the much more balanced (and, to my thinking, readable) account, The Kingfish and His Realm: The Life and Times of Huey Long (1991), William Ivy Hair.
Long’s sketchy autobiography Every Man a King (1933) and his fanciful, posthumous My First Days in the White House (1935) were also beneficial. Dozens of books and pamphlets about Long were consulted, but the following were of the most use: Hattie and Huey (1989), David Malone; Dynasty: The Longs of Louisiana (1960), Thomas Martin; Favorite Huey Long Stories (1937), Hugh Mercer; The Longs of Louisiana (1960), Stan Opotowsky; and Huey Long’s Louisiana: State Politics, 1920–1952 (1956), Allan P. Sindler. Two books on would-be American dictators were of help: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (1982), Alan Brinkley; and Forerunners of American Fascism (1935), Raymond Graham Swing. First-rate chapters on Huey Long were found in Mainstream (1943), Hamilton Basso, and The Bosses (1972), Alfred Steinberg.
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