| Yup. And the Lizard would win again if he ran again, especially after the Godawful fuckup Blanco put the State into. "Fast Eddie" would have had his cut too, naturally, but things would have gotten -done-. That's why nobody cared that he was taking 5% off the top; things still got done and done properly. Sometimes his solutions were a little off-putting, but they worked.
When petty crime in New Orleans became a problem too big to ignore, Eddi e lobbied to legalize gambling as a way to cut down on muggings and rapes and such. His rationale was simple; wherever you have a casino, you have Mafia, and the Mob doesn't take kindly to small-time thugs who scare away the cash-cows otherwise known as Tourists.
Sure enough; the casinos came, and right behind them came the Mafia. New Orleans has always had an extremely powerful Mafia organization, but it had mostly gotten into shipping, union graft, that kind of thing. But now, they had their hands in the casinos too, and a vested interest in keeping the tourists coming. And whaddaya know, the crime-rate dropped. There were a number of high-profile shootings in the Quarter in which car-thieves were found shot to death outside the cars they were attempting to steal; SlimJim still in the car's door.
And if course, Fast Eddie was basking in the glow of a reduced crime-rate, more tourism money...and his usual 5% "unofficial commission" fee. |