Talk:George W. D'Artois

Looking for sources on D'Artois's Mafia connections. I had a witness (two, actually) who said he saw D'Artois meet on a regular basis with prominent Mafia figures such as Carlos Marcello at Sansone's Restaurant. His Mafia connections have to be documented *somewhere*.... or maybe we'll never know. The witnesses are dying fast, after all -- both of my witnesses (one of whom was co-owner of Sansone's Restaurant, the other of whom was a nephew of both Tony Sansone and Carlos Marcello) are dead now.

Bill Keith's book is a nice introduction to this corrupt politician, but whitewashes the fact that Bill's newspaper, the Shreveport Times, basically created George D'Artois by pumping up a young Sheriff's deputy as the savior of the city then supporting him for decades. Bill implies he brought down D'Artois single-handedly. But the only reason Bill's reporting was allowed to be published was because a) a local television station had already scooped the Times after Leslie brought the checks to them and b) D'Artois had lost the support of many of Shreveport's elite due to his police department's raid on a "hippie encampment" at Betty Virginia Park, which resulted in many of the teenage children of Shreveport's elite being brutalized and arrested (they were fine with police brutality from the Shreveport PD when it was black people or civil rights workers being brutalized, but objected to their own children being brutalized). Looking for sources on these, the last time I talked to the witness for (a) was in 1980 and I don't know where he is now, and (b) is in the archives of the Shreveport Times *somewhere* in an interview with Bill Keith ten years after the death of D'Artois but I have had trouble locating it (at some point in the 1980's the archives moved from the old Depression-era Carnegie-style library building around the block to the current downtown library location in the old downtown post office and was put on microfilm, but the indexes were never particularly complete).

One of the sad things about living through this history is all the things I know because I or family members were there, but finding Wiki-compliant sources is proving problematic. SIGH. Badtux (talk) 06:48, 14 January 2022 (UTC)