Richard Leche: The New Orleans Governor Who Went to Federal Prison

The Governor Who Went to Prison

Richard Leche grew up in New Orleans — Warren Easton High School, Tulane, Loyola law school — and became the first Louisiana governor to go to federal prison. That's a distinction that takes some doing in a state where corruption is practically a folk art, but Leche managed it with a combination of ambition, greed, and spectacularly bad timing.

The story starts, as so many Louisiana political stories do, with Huey Long. By 1930, Leche had attached himself to the Kingfish's machine, and Long recognized him as useful — smart enough to be trusted, loyal enough to follow orders. When Long won his U.S. Senate seat in 1932, Leche managed the campaign. When Long needed someone to keep an eye on Governor Oscar K. Allen — the puppet governor who famously did whatever Huey told him — Long installed Leche as Allen's secretary, with instructions to report back daily. Leche was the machine's watchdog, and he did the job well enough that Long rewarded him with a state appeals court judgeship in 1934.

Then Huey Long was assassinated in September 1935, and everything changed. The Long machine needed a new candidate for governor, and the party bosses settled on Leche as a compromise pick. He was young, presentable, connected, and — most importantly — not powerful enough to threaten anyone else's position. He won the 1936 Democratic primary with sixty-seven percent of the vote, which in one-party Louisiana was the same as winning the general election.

As governor, Leche wasn't all bad. He had a twenty-six-point improvement plan that included tax reform, homestead exemptions, and continuation of Long's popular programs. He supported progressive labor laws and praised Roosevelt's New Deal. The federal money was flowing, and Louisiana was building roads, bridges, and public buildings at a pace the state had never seen.

The problem was that Leche and his associates were building private fortunes at the same pace. The corruption was breathtaking in its brazenness. Federal funds earmarked for public works disappeared into private pockets. WPA money meant for infrastructure went toward building homes for Leche and his friends. The governor was involved in illegal oil sales, truck procurement schemes, and the systematic looting of LSU's finances alongside university president James Monroe Smith, who was embezzling money to cover losses in the wheat futures market.

The whole thing became known as the Louisiana Scandals, and it was reporter F. Edward Hébert at The Times-Picayune who broke it open. The scale of the graft was so enormous that people started calling it "the Second Louisiana Purchase" — and they weren't being complimentary. Leche resigned on June 26, 1939, as the indictments piled up.

In 1940, he was convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to ten years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. He served five years before being paroled in 1945, and President Truman pardoned him in 1953. He went back to practicing law in New Orleans and died in 1965, buried at Metairie Cemetery among the city's most distinguished dead — which, if you think about it, is the most Louisiana ending possible for a man who stole from the public and still got a nice burial plot.

Richard Leche's story matters because it's the story of what happens when the machine outlives the man who built it. Huey Long, whatever his faults, had a vision — roads, hospitals, free textbooks, a bridge across the Mississippi. The people who inherited his machine had the power but not the vision. They had access to rivers of federal money and no one watching the till. Leche was the product of that vacuum, a man talented enough to rise but not principled enough to resist. In Louisiana politics, that combination has always been more common than anyone would like to admit.