Who Really Killed Huey Long?

WHO REALLY KILLED HUEY LONG?
Huey Long was one of the most flamboyant political characters in American History. His assassination is also one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in U.S. history. The official story is that Huey Long was killed by a mild-mannered doctor name Carl Weiss.  There are significant problems with the official story and many factors point to a cover-up.

The most common alternate explanation relates to Huey’s bodyguards. Weiss was said to have a dispute with Huey Long, which lead to his assassination of Long in a fit of rage. As the story goes, Weiss was able to approach Huey, fire two shots, one of which would prove fatal, and the second which would jam his pistol. Long’s bodyguards then shot Weiss dead.

There are many alternative theories that provide an alternate course of events. The standard alternative theory centers around “the punch”. This explanation retains the hypothesis of Carl Weiss’s rage, but assumes he did not come to the Capitol in Baton Rouge that fateful night to murder Huey, but simply to confront Long. When he did finally get a chance to talk to Huey, Weiss’s anger welled up, and he struck the Kingfish in anger. The bodyguards then overreacted and unloaded their semi-automatic pistols into Carl Weiss. In a hail of bullets, at least one (and maybe two bullets) accidentally struck Long and he would die as a result of this accident. The bodyguards, naturally, wanted to cover-up their role is the death of their patron, and so they would make sure that the blame was placed squarely on the doctor. Riddled with over 60 bullets, Weiss could never tell his side of the story. Huey Long, well-known for his corruption, did not hire his own bodyguards, and instead used Louisiana highway troopers, a division of the police. Naturally, no investigation was made by the police, and the official story stuck despite the lack of an official investigation.

Neither of these theories are right. Carl Weiss is completely innocent and his name has been wrongfully associated with a crime he didn’t commit. However, Huey’s killing was no accident. This was a premeditated assassination and betrayal by the members of Long’s political organization. To explain why, we must back up a bit first.

ELMER IREY AND THE WIN OR LOSE CORPORATION
The reader may not be familiar with the name of Elmer Irey, but he was a Treasury agent that brought down some of America’s most famous criminals in the 1920s and 1930s. Irey’s 90% conviction rate struck fear into the hearts of the criminals of the era, and helped convict America’s most famous criminal kingpin: at the time Al Capone.

Huey Long had set up the Win or Lose Oil Corporation in 1934 with his right-hand man, Seymour Weiss (no relation to Carl), his secretary, Earle Christenberry, and James A. Noe, an oilman and Long associate. The goal was to transfer oil leases from the state of Louisiana at artificially low prices. This was clear-cut and unambiguous corruption, and naturally, no tax had been paid on these ill-gotten gains. The Justice department had begun an investigation into the Long organization soon after his inauguration in 1929 under the Hoover administration.  The investigation was halted during the brief honeymoon period between Huey and FDR, but the investigation was renewed soon after.  Several Long associates faced indictment, including the aforementioned Seymour Weiss, on tax evasion. The discovery of the Win or Lose Oil Corporation was a coup for Irey which would implicate not just his associates, but the Kingfish himself. Elmer Irey went to Dan Moody, the U.S. Attorney assigned to the case, and laid out the facts of the case.  The evidence was strong enough to lead Moody to agree to seek indictment against Long and his close associates. Given Irey’s nearly flawless conviction record, this would certainly be the end for Long and his political organization. The indictment process began on September 7^th, 1935, and Huey Long was shot the next day, September 8^th, and he would die two day later on September 10^th.

In the wake of Huey’s death, his machine quickly made peace with FDR and all the charges were dropped. The Win or Lose Corporation continued to function and continues to send payments to the heirs of the owners to this day. Huey Long, thought to be an electoral threat to FDR in 1936, would not challenge the president and Roosevelt would be elected to three more terms. The bodyguards who participated in the assassination were promoted within the state government. Everything worked out perfectly for the conspirators, but this raises another mystery: Who Tipped Off the Machine?

JAMES FARLEY
Naturally there is no remaining evidence of the deal that was struck to betray the Kingfish. But we can exploit the timing of the investigations into the Long machine to discover a plausible candidate who had both motive and opportunity to betray the Kingfish: James A. Farley, Postmaster General in the Roosevelt administration, and nemesis of Huey Long.

James A. Farley was a businessman who also rose to prominence in the New York Tammany Hall political machine. He was a very different Democrat than his fellow New Yorker, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, preferring backroom deals and coalition building to FDR’s often quixotic impulse for liberal ideals. As Postmaster General, Farley engaged in petty corruption by giving out rare stamps to friends and allies. Huey Long discovered these schemes and other instances of corruption involving the James A. Stewart company that Farley was involved in. Long held hearings on these corrupt dealings, and even found a former employee that testified under oath regarding corruption related to Farley. However, with an overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress and a Democratic President, the investigations weren’t allowed to continue. Farley was clearly worried however, as Huey would keep coming back as long as he stayed alive. After Long’s death, any investigation into Farley’s corruption ended, as Farley’s corruption is little known today. Farley had the President’s ear, and the investigations into Seymour Weiss and the Long machine also ended with Long’s death as well. Farley remained close with Seymour Weiss, who was appointed by Farley to manage New Deal programs in Louisiana. If anyone was to strike a deal to ensure Long’s death, it was those two (though J. Edgar Hoover also hated Huey and was to exchange periodic mail with Seymour Weiss for decades).

The Farley-Roosevelt alliance was not to last forever, however. For the 1940 Democratic nomination, Farley was interested in having the President’s support for his candidacy.  This would imply that FDR would not then run for a 3^rd term, a norm that had not been violated since it was established by George Washington. These discussions broke down in the summer of 1939 when Roosevelt ended his equivocation and made it clear that he intended to be the nominee in 1940. With Farley and the President at loggerheads, the legal amnesty that Farley had secured were no longer in place.  Just a few months later, a major investigation into the Long organization’s corruption erupted, and Seymour Weiss and many other Long associates were indicted and sent to prison in the Louisiana Scandals.

THE SHOOTING ITSELF
Having laid out the evidence for the assassination being a betrayal of Huey Long by members of his political machine, an alternative timeline of the shooting should be laid out consistent with this new, correct theory. As was well known at the time, doctors like Weiss carried a semi-automatic pistol to ward off thieves interested in their drugs. Carl’s Belgian pistol had been jamming the week before, which would make it a poor choice as a murder weapon, though there was no way for the bodyguards to know this. Weiss spent the day with his family on a local lake, as strange choice for an enraged assassin planning a murder. Weiss confirmed an appointment for surgery the following day roughly an hour before his death.  No one knows why he parked his car in the Capitol that night, especially since his home was just blocks away.

At the capitol, Weiss approached Long several times, and it seems Carl was only able to talk with Huey when Weiss approached Long for the third time. This would have given the bodyguards ample time to decide on Weiss as the patsy, go to Weiss’s car, take his firearm out of its sock, and bring the gun up to the capitol. When Weiss approached Long for the third time, the bodyguards allowed Weiss to get close to Long.  Murphy Roden was probably chosen to pull the trigger, as he was a World War 1 sharpshooter. After firing a single shot, the gun jammed on the second shot, hitting Roden’s wristwatch at the exact time of the shooting. ¹ Roden then wrestled with Weiss to put the gun in his hands, before drawing his pistol along with the other bodyguards and unloading their pistols into Weiss. To ensure Weiss could never talk, more than 60 more shots were fired. ² Later forensic analysis from James Starrs finds that the trajectory of bullets is consistent with Weiss having his hands up, unsurprising given that the doctor was completely innocent. Another bullet fired by Joe Messina also struck the Kingfish. The bodyguards then placed Weiss’s gun on the floor next to him, and quickly sealed the scene to begin the coverup without any watchful eyes. Huey fled the scene, and was rushed to a local hospital.

AFTER THE SHOOTING
Allen Ellender was a loyal Long supporter and close associate, and he would eventually take Huey Long’s Senate seat. Just eleven minutes after the shooting, rather than tending to his patron who had been fatally wounded, Ellender was on the phone with a journalist in Washington, providing the name of the patsy, Carl Weiss. More phone calls ensued, and Weiss’s brother, Tom, was called to the scene. Tom found that Carl’s car had been moved, ransacked, the keys were missing, and the sock that had held Carl’s gun was on the floor of the car.

Having been threatened with assassination many times, Huey wanted to ensure that loyal pro-Long doctors treated him.  Given that Weiss’s gun had jammed and only one or two bullets hit him and that the doctors treating Huey were part of the Long political machine that wanted Long dead, this choice may have cost Huey his life. Huey’s closest associates were charged with his burial. Huey was buried on the grounds of the Capitol he had built, in a metal casket surrounded with concrete, to ensure that Long’s remains were never exhumed for examination. No autopsy had been conducted on either Carl Weiss or Huey Long before their burials.

EPILOGUE
Carl Weiss’s gun had been thought to be lost for many years, though in the 1990s it had been discovered to be in the possession of the heir to General Guerre, the head of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, who been in charge of the coverup to Huey Long’s murder. James Starrs, a prominent forensic investigator who discovered and obtained possession of the firearm, had it tested. There were bullets present alongside the Belgian pistol, including one alleged to be from the fatal shot that killed Long. However, none of the bullets had grooves that marched bullets fired from Weiss’s gun. The bodyguards certainly would have tried to find the bullet on the marble floor of the Capitol, and they must not have found it. Given the short time frame for the coverup and that Weiss’s gun was jamming, a gun of similar caliber was fired to make an imitation bullet. This leads to one inexorable conclusion. Either the bullet from Weiss’s gun shot by Huey’s bodyguards was removed but not recorded by the doctors treating Huey or the bullet was buried inside Huey Long’s body, where it will remain forever.

{Ed Note: If this subject interests you, it was explored in more depth in this paper.}

References:

Deutsch, Hermann Bacher. The Huey Long Murder Case. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963.

Farley, James A. James A. Farley papers. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://lccn.loc.gov/mm78020263.

Irey, Elmer Lincoln, and William J. Slocum. The tax dodgers: the inside story of the T-men’s war with America’s political and underworld hoodlums. Greenberg, 1948.

Reed, Ed. Requiem for a Kingfish. Award Publications/Ed Reed Org, 1986.

Starrs, James E., and Katherine M. Ramsland. A Voice for the Dead: A Forensic Investigator’s Pursuit of the Truth in the Grave. Putnam, 2005.

Williams, Thomas Harry. Huey Long. New York: Knopf, 1969.

Zinman, David H. The Day Huey Long was Shot, September 8, 1935. Univ Press of Mississippi, 1993 (1963).

1. This is according to Roden’s own testimony at an inquest into the Long assassination.
2. The coroner stopped counting once the number got into the 60s and so the actual number of bullets may be even higher.