The Killing of Huey Long

Louisiana, 1935. An influential US senator is assassinated in the hallways of the State Capitol in Baton Rouge.

On September 8, 1935, Senator Huey Long, known by his nickname “The Kingfish,” was at the Louisiana State Capitol to pass a redistricting bill that would oust district judge Benjamin Henry Pavy. Shortly after the vote, Long was shot in the capitol building’s corridors and later died of his wounds. The prime suspect was a man named Carl Weiss, a physician and the son-in-law of Judge Pavy. The official version of events is that Weiss shot the senator during a scuffle before being gunned down by Long’s bodyguards.

However, that did not stop other theories from cropping up. Senator Long’s critiques of the administration led his supporters to believe he might challenge President Roosevelt to win the White House in 1936. Is it possible that Long’s assassination was linked to his political ambitions or his ties to the New Orleans Mafia? What if he had, probably accidentally, been shot by one of his own bodyguards? And what if the fatal accident was subsequently covered up by the local police?

French journalist Jean-Marie Pottier dives into the details, exploring the facts of the case and the merits of this alternate theory.

50 States of Crime: France’s leading true crime journalists investigate America’s most notorious cases, one for every state in the Union, offering up fresh perspectives on famously storied crimes and reflecting, in the process, a dark national legacy that leads from coast to coast.

Highly recommended for anybody who wants to find out more about a particularly evil act of violence and how large segments of society banded together to fight injustice. It’s an often shocking and upsetting narrative, but a very important and well-told one, explaining the consequences when a jury’s verdict is itself a crime.”
—CrimeSpree Magazine on The Emmett Till Case

Born in Rennes in 1982, Jean-Marie Pottier is an independent journalist, after working as an economic journalist for the magazine Challenges, then as editor-in-chief of Slate.fr. Currently, he works for Sciences humaines, Arte, L’ Express, Retronews, and Society, for which he has written several stories and reports on American politics and society. Passionate about music, he writes regularly for the pop magazine Magic. He is also the author of several essays published with Editions Le mot et le reste, including Ground Zero: A musical history of September 11 (2016) and Alternative Nation: The Independent American Scene, 1979-2001 (2021).