As the first Mardi Gras parades began to roll in New Orleans at the end of February, a different Louisiana spectacle was full swing in a Baton Rouge court house. Former Gov. Edwin Edwards was stuck in in a federal racketeering trial, facing millions in fines and up to 350 years in prison. Edwards and his son Stephen are charged with extorting payoffs from various parties who coveted casino licenses. The governor controlled the state commission that granted the lucrative licenses during his final term in office, which ended in 1996.

Now, with Fat Tuesday approaching, the Edwards saga and Carnival battle for space on the front page in New Orleans. The Times-Picayune has lately reported that the ex-governor has started showing “subtle signs of discomfort.” When his daughter ended up sobbing after some tough questioning on the stand, the paper noted that the normally unperturbable Edwards “sniffled.”

I am an outsider to all this. I moved to New Orleans less than three months ago, knowing that Carnival was coming up, and so was the Edwards trial, and that I was looking forward to both. I am originally from Texas, and for the last eight years I had lived in New York City. So I have high expectations for political theater, and Edwards seems like the right place to start. Fast Eddie, or the Pirate King, or simply “the crook,” as even some of his supporters have called him, is a wildly charismatic figure who has helped beat back previous prosecutions simply by playing the slick charmer. Always dressed to the nines, he is possessed with a quick wit and a winking attitude about the rules and authority.

That attitude has served him extremely well. He served four terms, shrugging off charges of corruption and during one election blithely commenting that the only way he would lose is if someone caught him in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.

To a certain extent, this is the Edwards who has emerged at the trial, and I've enjoyed following it. The overall narrative can be a little hard to follow, but the incidental details are great, even when they involve actions that are perfectly legal. One casino official recounted making a gift of some nice poker chips for Edwards to use in his usual $10,000-ante poker games, played with rich friends, at the governor's mansion. (Imagine, for a moment, George Pataki presiding over a tournament of card sharks in his drab Albany manse.)

Other testimony has dealt with Edwards' habit of paying for things with stacks of $100 bills — such things as $130,000 worth of furniture, $80,000 for landscaping and a Lincoln Town Car. His daughter Anna suggested this habit might have to do with a distrust of banks engendered by his own father's memories of the Great Depression. (The reader may pause here to sniffle.)

Plenty of Louisianans have grown a little weary of this sort of thing, and who can blame them? This is a state with real problems, and after a while, maybe it becomes clear that acting the fool will not solve them. Maybe it would be a good thing if the state's political culture was synonymous with something other than greased palms and ribald jokes.

The new governor, Mike Foster, is a business-friendly Republican who rides a motorcycle but otherwise seems pretty dull. A conviction for Edwards, the thinking among the state's civic boosters goes, could close the book on a laissez-faire attitude toward corruption associated with Louisiana at least since the decades-long dynastic reign of the Long family.

There is, indeed, a sense about the whole trial that Edwards, who was the living embodiment of the roguish Louisiana tradition, will now be made to pay for all of that tradition's sins. The action was moved from laid-back New Orleans to button-down Baton Rouge, and Judge Frank J. Polozola has muzzled Edwards and all lawyers in the case, barring them from making any public statements about it.

Now, where's the fun in that? No wonder you can hear a little grumbling that maybe this whole thing is starting to look a little like a witch hunt. “I'm sure I'm not the only one in town,” one thoughtful New Orleans resident said to me the other day, “who is sort of rooting for him. ”

Again, I'm an outsider, but I understand this attitude completely. I don't know enough to come out and root for Edwards myself, but I'm certainly all for entertainment. I'm also generally skeptical of symbolic prosecutions: It's a bad idea to prosecute a whole era in the form of a man, particularly if the results leave anyone thinking that the problems with a corrupt system are all in the past.

Meanwhile, the trial looks set to outlast Mardi Gras, and the sensible course of action would be simply to wait to hear from the jury before passing any further judgment. Perhaps, as Anna Edwards suggested, her father was able to throw around such sums simply because he was such a consistently winning gambler. “He's very lucky,” Anna explained. That has certainly been true so far. But he's playing under a different set of house rules now.

This appeared in the March 5, 2000 "Currents & Books" section of Newsday. Thanks to Chris Lehman for that kicker.