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Al Copeland: “The Chicken King” By Charles Zewe A phone ringing broke the background rumble of tourists and traffic inside Monsignor Christopher Nalty’s small office at the Congregation for the Clergy, overlooking St. Peter’s Square. Nalty, a New Orleans native and member of the Roman Curia, picked up the phone to hear a voice from home. A woman asked a favor for her former boss, who was aboard his private jet on the way to Rome. Al Copeland wanted to see the pope before flying on to Germany in a last-ditch attempt to eradicate a rare salivary gland tumor. “Can you help?” she wanted to know. Hours later, Copeland, his face disfigured by the aggressive cancer, showed up in a wheelchair at the Vatican. He told Nalty he wanted to get his spiritual affairs in order, “to get right with Jesus,” starting with an audience with Benedict XVI. “Leave it to Al to go right to the top,” Nalty recalled.1 Because the pope was on retreat, however, “Al got stuck with me,” said Nalty who told Copeland if he was looking for a miracle, he should go instead to Lourdes. Perhaps it was for the best that the pope was away, Nalty added. “Al didn’t speak Italian and German, and the pope didn’t speak no Y’at, but I did.” Copeland asked the monsignor to accompany him to the shrine. Before leaving for Lourdes, however, Copeland and his family members attended a traditional Latin Mass inside St. Peter’s, the kind of Mass he doubtless attended as a child at St. Mary’s As- sumption Church in the fabled New Orleans Irish Channel. As the service, presided over by a cardinal and one hundred priests, ended, Copeland’s family members noticed an elderly 15 16 COURTROOM CARNIVAL Al Copeland © 2010 The Times-Picayune All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. woman dressed in black “kneeling beside him, kissing his hands, and praying with him,” Nalty said. “Before any of us could see her face, she gave Al her rosary, turned around, and left. When I looked down at Al, tears were rolling down his face. And I knew that that those were tears of grace.” Copeland got to see the pope with 20,000 pilgrims as Benedict XVI prayed the Angelus from his apartment window overlooking the square. Later, on the way from the Tarbes-Ossun-Lourdes airport to the shrine, Nalty said Copeland started pointing to banners hanging from streetlights, marking the 150th Anniver- sary of the Apparitions. The banners featured a sepia-toned pho- to of a dour fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous to whom the Virgin Mary appeared.“But that’s her, that’s her, isn’t it?” asked Copeland. “Yes, that’s Bernadette, the girl whom the Blessed Mother ap- peared to,” Nalty told the ailing millionaire. “No, no; that’s the woman I was talking with in Rome, right?” Copeland persisted. No one in the car said a word. Al Copeland: “The Chicken King” 17 “None of us except Al had seen the face of the woman who had prayed with Al in St. Peter’s,” said Nalty, “but Al was con- vinced that her face was the face of St. Bernadette, someone he’d never seen before in his life. And Al shed some more tears. And I knew that Al was ‘getting right with Jesus.’” Copeland, wearing a white cape, was immersed in one of the seventeen frigid marble baths at the shrine as he made the Sign of the Cross while those with him prayed to Our Lady of Lourdes and St. Bernadette. Afterward, he visited sites asso- ciated with St. Bernadette, reciting a complicated and gruel- ing series of prayers, earning a Plenary Indulgence, which the Catholic Church says erases the punishment from sin. He then went off to Germany. Alvin Charles Copeland died of Merkel Cell Carcinoma a few weeks later on Easter Sunday at a clinic outside Munich, Ger- many, holding his son Al Jr.’s hand. He was sixty-four. Copeland’s visits to the Vatican and Lourdes quickly became the final chapter in the outsized legends that marked Copeland’s life. He had four wives and four divorces and scorched his way through tens of millions of dollars in a sublimely self-indulgent quest for status and gratification. He frequently found himself in court in a relentless series of lawsuits that challenged his mar- riages, shielded his fortune, assailed his competitors, frustrated his creditors, and defended extravagant Christmas lights dis- plays—reveries that sprang from the wounded psyche of a hard- up childhood. “I don’t like being pushed around,” Copeland often said.2 It was the kind of pugnacious flare that led the man in his final hours of life to take an ultimate appeal to the Vicar of Christ on Earth. Marrying Man No sagas spoke more about Copeland than the tales of his tortured love life. Copeland was first married to Mary Alice LeCompte, his childhood sweetheart, from whom he was long 18 COURTROOM CARNIVAL divorced when she died in 1995. His 1978 second marriage to Patty White also ended in divorce. His third wedding was extrava- gant, as Copeland, a high-school dropout who rose from a New Orleans housing project to command a national empire of Pop- eyes fried chicken and Copeland nouveau-Cajun restaurants, wed his former receptionist Luan Hunter on Valentine’s Day 1991. Married first in a private ceremony in Las Vegas on October 17, 1990, the couple staged a lavish public wedding four months later in New Orleans. The bride carried a bouquet of pink, heart- shaped anthuriums and wore a gown with a fifteen-foot train decorated with pink and white hearts. Before six-hundred guests summoned by heart-shaped invitations to the atrium of the New Orleans Museum of Art, the couple stood beneath a nine-foot- tall portrait of Marie Antoinette for the six-minute civil ceremo- ny, uniting the would-be “Sun King” of chicken and biscuits with his third wife. Guests dined on veal and oyster patties, crawfish beignets, and smoked salmon while sipping champagne and pink zinfan- del. The six-foot-tall wedding cake was dotted with nine-hun- dred candy hearts. Kool & the Gang and Michael Jackson’s sister La Toya provided the entertainment. Following the exchange of vows, guests were ushered outside where a corporate helicopter hovered low, scattering rose petals over the wedding party. The finale was a heart-shaped fireworks display that included one shell that exploded over the crowd with a message from the bride: “Al, I’ll love you forever. Luan.” The happy couple sped off for a honeymoon in Maui in a fuchsia-colored Porsche with a license plate that read, ‘‘LUV U LUAN.’’ Eight years later, on Pearl Harbor Day 1999, the syrupy romanticism and rose-dropping helicopters had devolved into a divorce case, AC Copeland v. Luan Hunter. The judge kept the proceedings sealed despite the attempts of the press to obtain access, and child custody and financial support issues in the case festered for four years before exploding onto Al Copeland: “The Chicken King” 19 the public arena on September 15, 2003, in Luan Hunter v. Alvin Copeland, a civil complaint in which Hunter accused her ex-husband of a “selfish” scheme to pay $750,000 in hush mon- ey to someone in exchange for not telling authorities about a conspiracy to rig Copeland’s attempt to win custody of their son, Alex, by bribing the judge in the case. (Alex, one of Copeland’s nine children, was the only child of the marriage to Hunter.) According to Hunter, Jefferson Parish District Court Judge Ron- ald Bodenheimer was supposed to get a contract to sell seafood to Copeland’s restaurants in return for fixing the child custody case. Bodenheimer eventually went to prison for forty-six months after pleading guilty to drug conspiracy and mail fraud charges. One of Copeland’s corporate lawyers, Bryan M. White, who pleaded guilty to failing to report a felony, drew a ten-month jail sentence, and a mutual friend of the judge and Copeland, Phil Demma, served eighteen months.3 Much of the suspicion of Copeland centered on a sworn depo- sition in which Bodenheimer directly implicated the executive. The judge recounted a private meeting in which the restaura- teur asked him to “make sure he did not lose custody of his son.” According to Bodenheimer’s account, Copeland also reminded him of past political support, “Telling me that, you know, ‘We sup- ported you because you were the kind of guy who would do the right thing. And the right thing is to keep me and Alex together.’ What he let me know was that if I didn’t do his ‘right thing,’ that, yes, I would probably have a candidate run against me.”4 When confronted with the allegations during a separate de- position, Copeland asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, refusing to answer 102 of 105 questions de- signed to show whether he knew about the alleged conspiracy. After being released from jail, White was disbarred by the state supreme court. In its unsigned opinion on disbarment, the justices said White admitted to discussing trial strategy with Bodenheimer and arranging for the judge’s daughter and friends to obtain free 20 COURTROOM CARNIVAL drinks and appetizers at one of Copeland’s restaurants. As an example of the strategy discussions, the ruling said that when White called to schedule a hearing for Copeland to de- scribe his complaints against Hunter, Bodenheimer suggested that Copeland’s attorneys file a request that he find Hunter in contempt of court.

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