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 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 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

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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 and Copeland nouveau-Cajun , 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 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. The acrimonious custody case dragged on for six years and was settled out of court two weeks before Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005. Hunter got two homes, full health insurance for herself and Alex as well as medical expenses, full school tuition, and $20,000 a month in child support.5 When finally unsealed in 2006 after a successful lawsuit by the Times-Picayune, court records revealed a lifestyle that had been, as one newspaper headline noted, “more Park Avenue than ’s.”6 There had been twice yearly trips to the Bahamas, vacations three times a year to Las Vegas and Los Angeles, out- ings to New York just to see snow and shop, chartered limousine buses to whisk classmates of Alex to see Christmas lights, and at home a cortege of housekeepers, nurses, secretaries, security guards, a barber, and even a mechanic just to fix broken toys. The court record also revealed a happier time when the couple took frequent trips to Key West and Destin, lounging on a yacht named the Cajun Princess Luan. There were photos showing Hunter with her mother and infant Alex at a bistro in Los An- geles and at a Lake Tahoe chalet on a trip for which Copeland brought along two personal chefs and a racing boat. The most revealing aspect of the case, however, was the es- timate of Copeland’s net worth, which in 2004 was put at $319 million with an average annual income of $13 million. Overall, Copeland held $242 million in stock, $12.5 million in cash, $14.7 million in real estate, and $4.5 million in automobiles, boats, and other personal property. Copeland, who proclaimed his innocence throughout the fed- eral case despite Bodenheimer’s later claim that Copeland had Al Copeland: “The Chicken King” 21 been directly involved, was never charged in the criminal case. The child-custody fracas represented one of the most sensational episodes in a long-running series of legal actions involving the col- orful capitalist. reported that Copeland kept several lawyers busy on dozens of lawsuits at a time. There were hundreds of separate filings spread over two years in the child-cus- tody dispute alone. Court records indicate that in a single Chapter 11 bankruptcy case filed in in 1991 on behalf of Al Copeland Enterprises and America’s Favorite Chicken Company, there were thousands of separate filings spread across fifteen years. Kit Wohl’s public relations firm handled Copeland’s media re- lations from 1977 through his funeral, “traveling the world with him for thirty years, entertaining and working with everyone from King Constantine of Greece to Princess Caroline and Don- ald Trump.” Regarding Copeland’s litigious nature, Wohl explained, “Al viewed challenges as a checkered starting flag. A masterful ne- gotiator, his innate intelligence made him a fearsome opponent in a courtroom or a boardroom. Scary even. There were few attorneys who could out think or out maneuver him. Actually, none I can remember.”7

Lights and Lawsuits For New Orleanians, Copeland’s legal battles first had drawn widespread attention in a series of disputes over his lavish holiday displays. As Copeland, born in 1944, recalled in a 2006 ad in the Times-Picayune, when he was growing up in New Orleans’s St. Thomas Housing Project his parents could not afford to decorate their home with Christmas lights. The family instead visited light displays in wealthy neighborhoods, making a special stop to take in the lights in front of the Centanni family home on Canal Street, a show that included a toy factory and a life-sized elephant. In the 1970s, Copeland, newly wealthy from his burgeoning fried-chicken business, began decorating his Spanish-style 22 COURTROOM CARNIVAL lakefront home with millions of lights that were so bright, airline pilots supposedly pointed out the display to passengers landing at nearby Moisant (now Louis Armstrong) International Airport. There were fourteen-foot stars over the house, giant toy sol- diers and snowmen, as well as a twenty-six-foot-tall Rudolph and Santa in a giant sleigh. Eight tiny reindeer stretched across Copeland’s lawn. Christmas carols blared from loudspeakers and a white neon banner proclaiming “Peace on Earth” covered the front of the house. At the apex of its garishness, virtually every inch of every palm tree and evergreen on Copeland’s lawn was covered with lights. Nightly, from Thanksgiving until New Year’s for thirteen years, the spectacle drew thousands of sightseers, creating bumper-to- bumper traffic along Folse Drive. In 1983, an exasperated neigh- bor, Brooklyn-born attorney Burton Klein, isolated in his house by legions of unruly gawkers, filed suit Rodrigue,( Klein and Borrell v. Copeland).8 During the trial, Dr. Katherine Knight, then clinical director of pediatrics at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, who lived three blocks from the Copeland house, testified that the traffic had killed her son’s pet cat and endangered her patients by delaying her arrival when called to the hospital. ‘‘This display has caused neither peace nor good will in our neighborhood,’’ she testified. District Judge Alvin “Rudy” Eason ruled that the crowds were a ‘‘mere inconvenience,” but he ordered Copeland to tone down the display by removing three angels or go to jail. Five neighbors stepped in, “adopting” Copeland’s Rudolph, Santa, a snowman, the eight reindeer, and the sleigh, and moving them to their yards. But Klein, who got hate mail and threatening phone calls that accused him of hating Christmas and being “anti-Christ,” hauled Copeland back into court, claiming Copeland had violated the court order. Klein also asked the court to order the local utility company to shut off power to the display. On Christmas Eve 1985, the Supreme Court ordered Al Copeland: “The Chicken King” 23

Copeland to turn off his 250,000 Christmas lights. The state high court also ordered his arrest for contempt. After losing an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Copeland avoided the hoosegow when he dismantled the display and moved it to headquarters in Metairie, where it remained for years. In 1990, Copeland moved the display to the State Capitol to honor U.S. troops in the Gulf War, but by 1997, the lights were back on in full force at Copeland’s house, with Klein even flipping the switch to turn on the displays. In 2004, Copeland’s two million lights blinked on at Lafre- niere Park in suburban Jefferson Parish, but Hurricane Katrina intervened a year later, turning the park into a storm-debris pro- cess center and effectively killing the show. The lights were put up in 2007 and again after Copeland’s death in 2008, when it was announced that the display would be moved permanently to Lafreniere Park in 2009. Further controversy developed in 2010 over the family’s plans to make a memorial park on the original site, complete with the annual Christmas display.9 Copeland, as with many public figures, found his lifestyle and business interests grist for gossip. In September 1990, for in- stance, rumors circulated in the greater New Orleans area alleg- ing that Copeland had made a large campaign contribution to former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, David Duke, who at the time was running for the U.S. Senate. It was not true, but the rumor shot through the African American community nationally, par- ticularly among black college students, according to sociologist Patricia Turner who studied the rumors.10 One young African American student shared a story he had heard from a coworker about Church’s Chicken (which Copeland eventually bought). In the student’s story, a mysterious ingredient was injected into chicken to sterilize black males. The ingredient allegedly had been manufactured on orders of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the supposed owners of the company. Copeland offered a $25,000 reward to anyone who could verify the source of the rumor, but the story endured and the reward 24 COURTROOM CARNIVAL remained unclaimed. At the time, Popeyes’ public relations and marketing units tried aggressively to mitigate the impact of the tale, but the company was hit with other contemporary legends such as one that claimed Popeyes was owned and operated by the KKK. One rumor even claimed that Copeland stole the company recipe from a black domestic servant who once worked for his family. It was a twist on a similar yarn that Colonel Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, had stolen his special reci- pe from a black domestic. In some cases it was Copeland who readily did the dragging, spending millions in legal fees defending his reputation from in- nuendo and insult. He went to court to defend the patent on the deep fryer used to cook chicken pieces in Popeyes restaurants, and he sued franchise owners for not paying royalties and adver- tising fees they owed him. His company over the years was hit with an (expected) array of customer claims such as one from a Shreveport woman who sued after supposedly breaking a tooth on a pebble in a serving of red beans and rice. (The customer had to settle for the $89 she had agreed to accept, the price of having the tooth fixed. See Alford v. Copeland.) Copeland’s penchant for going to court sprang from what amounted to an immoveable chip on his shoulder. For instance, Copeland filed suit over an affront to his image in 1999 against Louisiana State University’s Tiger Athletic Foundation (TAF). He complained that all the “good spots” were picked before he had a chance to select the location of his box suite at the newly reno- vated Tiger Stadium.11 Copeland’s suit asserted that he had generated more than $600,000 for the Alvin C. Copeland Endowed Chair in Fran- chising at the LSU School of Business, but that TAF had given him credit for only $60,000. Because the order in which donors selected one of the seventy Tiger Den Suites was determined Al Copeland: “The Chicken King” 25 by the amount of money they gave the university, Copeland claimed that he was not allowed to pick until fifty-second for his $59,000-a-year box, resulting in an apparently embarrassing spot overlooking the five-yard line. As the lawsuit revealed, however, Copeland had put up only $75,000. The remaining $525,000 came from vendors who owed money to Copeland’s companies for volume discounts. Copeland required vendors to send money straight to LSU on his behalf to avoid getting the money entangled in an impending bankruptcy. TAF decided that because not all $600,000 for the chair came directly from Copeland, he would be bumped down the selection order. A state district court threw out the lawsuit. Asked later why he pursued the matter in the first place, Copeland responded, “I just don’t like getting pushed around.”12 From his multimillion-dollar ocean-racing speedboats, to homes decked out with millions of Christmas lights, his Gulf- stream III jet, diamond earrings, and a $600,000 granite mau- soleum that holds fourteen caskets, evidence of Copeland’s outsized ego stood in sharp contrast to his childhood as a ben- eficiary of the city’s Catholic Charities. When the Al Copeland family gathered in Destin, , dur- ing recent summers, they carried along a $5 million collection of high-speed, high-priced toys, including a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, a Bentley convertible, a Cadillac Escalade, a souped- up golf cart, eight Boss Hogg V8-powered motorcycles, and a $2.5 million forty-six-foot Skater speed boat with twin turbine engines. All of the toys were put on display in the parking lot of a strip mall for the public to gawk at and envy. It all began in Copeland’s home kitchen in Chalmette, Louisi- ana, when he came up with a distinctive, cayenne-pepper-seasoned chicken flour batter that turned gold when fried. He also developed recipes for “dirty” rice, red beans, and hand-rolled biscuits. Copeland told friends that his entrepreneurial spark originated behind the beverage counter at a Schwegmann’s Giant Super Market 26 COURTROOM CARNIVAL in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. A coworker never stopped drumming up business. When Copeland asked why, the young man replied, “I’m out to prove I’m better than everybody,” according to Kit Wohl, the previously mentioned New Orleans au- thor, artist, and longtime Copeland publicist.13 They were words that seemed to fuse with Copeland’s psychological DNA. Copeland sold his car to get money to buy a Tastee Donut shop from his brother Gil, but watched as a Kentucky Fried Chicken store nearby seemed to do twice as much business. Copeland turned to fried chicken, opening Chicken on the Run in nearby Arabi (St. Bernard Parish) in 1972 with the slogan: “So fast, you get your chicken before you get your change.” When his business stumbled, Copeland tossed out a mild rec- ipe in favor of a version that was an almost instant hit. After seeing the movie The French Connection, he changed the com- pany name to Popeyes Mighty Good Fried Chicken after Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, a tough-talking New York detective played by Gene Hackman in the movie. There was no apostrophe in the name, Copeland often said, because he was too poor to afford one. He had enough money, however, for a jingle, “Love That Chicken From Popeyes” sung by Dr. John. Lamar Berry, Popeyes’ vice president for marketing and ad- vertising during the 1970s and 1980s, was credited with this campaign. Looking back, Berry remembers that Al Copeland, a “business genius,” started out as extremely competitive due to his impoverished upbringing: “Al had a feeling in some ways he had to protect himself, the world was not going to shower him with things. . . . He was absolutely bent on success.”14 got underway in 1977, and by the late 1980s, Copeland’s fried chicken empire included 750 franchised res- taurants and a $416 million junk-bond financing package from Merrill Lynch that he used to buy the Church’s Chicken chain in 1989. It was an ill-fated gambit to surpass Kentucky Fried Al Copeland: “The Chicken King” 27

Chicken as America’s largest chicken fast-food . According to Forbes, however, Copeland threw in almost no new equity, leading to a negative corporate net worth.15 Once all the debt was in place, concerns about the levels of and cho- lesterol in fried chicken received fresh publicity nationally, and that sent the company into a tailspin. Copeland tried raising $36 million by selling Church’s outlets to their managers. But he overpriced the stores, and only $21 million came in. When the junk-bond market collapsed, facing debt service of $160,000 a day in 1991, Copeland lost control of his company but retained the right in perpetuity to supply Pop- eyes with his unique seasonings and side dishes through one of his companies, Diversified Foods & Seasonings.16 Copeland asserted in a lawsuit against Merrill Lynch that the financial firm should have submitted a reorganization plan for his company, protecting it from a takeover, which is what happened. The courts found, however, that the parties had not reached an agreement on reorganization, but only “an agree- ment to agree” on restructuring the troubled chicken empire (Copeland v. Merrill Lynch). A fascinating peek inside the allegedly race-tinged marketing strategy behind the Popeyes-Church’s merger emerged in a 1997 lawsuit filed by the owners of nine Popeyes franchises in Detroit (Clark v. AFC). Franchisees claimed the merger was designed to corner the U.S. fried chicken market among “low-end” consumers. According to court documents, Al Copeland Enterprises, Inc. implemented a “Strategic Realignment Plan” calculated to in- crease the profitability of both chains. Church’s would pitch value—“Big pieces, little price”—and Popeyes would focus on product quality—“Love that chicken.” As part of the plan, the lawsuit contended, Church’s would target the “low-end” of the market by hyping value, a selling point designed to appeal to minority consumers, while Popeyes, which had experienced significant success with suburban and 28 COURTROOM CARNIVAL upscale urban locations, would concentrate on the high quality and uniqueness of its product. The Detroit franchisees, whose Popeyes restaurants in some cases were across the street from Church’s outlets, claimed bad faith and breach of contract, but the courts ruled against them. A group calling itself the Independent Popeyes Group had filed a similar breach of contract lawsuit in 1991, but it too was tossed out. Undaunted after losing control of his chicken company, Copeland rebounded by founding a string of Cajun-themed restaurants, including Copeland’s Cajun American Cafes, Straya California Creole Restaurants, Wrap & Roll, and Wholly Mackerel. One of those new restaurants, officially known as Straya Cali- fornia Creole Grand Café, drew the ire of vampire novelist Anne Rice, who at the time owned a home in New Orleans just up St. Charles Avenue from the garish, peach-colored eatery that was decorated with gold panthers, metallic palm trees, and a star- shaped bar. In 1997, Rice took out a full-page ad in the Times-Picayune, apologizing to tourists for the gaudy restaurant that she called “an abomination” less dignified than a “flop house.” Copeland sued for defamation and libel (Copeland v. Rice), contending the ad exposed him to “contempt, hatred, ridicule, or obloquy (humiliation).” He also responded with his own ad, arguing that Straya was good for New Orleans because it had replaced an abandoned car dealership and created two-hundred jobs. Co- peland added that he was putting extra garlic in his food as a precautionary measure. Rice, meanwhile, fired back with another advertisement, a mes- sage from her most famous character, the vampire Lestat. Straya was so ugly, Lestat announced, that it had stirred him from a long slumber and set him back to the business of biting necks. The back-and-forth between Copeland and Rice was not lim- ited to newspaper ads or court briefs. It spilled over into Carnival revelry. Rice reportedly tossed gold-colored rubber rats out of her Al Copeland: “The Chicken King” 29 black limo during one Mardi Gras parade, and Copeland rode on a float in another parade with a stake holstered to his waist and a ring of garlic around his neck. Within weeks, public sentiment turned against Rice. A Times- Picayune poll indicated readers took Copeland’s side three to one. For a brief time after the lawsuit was dropped and the up- roar over L’Affaire Straya had faded, there were two- to three- hour waits for dinner at the restaurant on weekends.17 Copeland’s yen for the limelight took on a Hollywood bent in 1999. He bought a 51 percent stake in the California Improv comedy clubs, which he planned for a dozen additional markets around the . When Copeland’s company failed to develop additional improv clubs, a California court threw out his exclusive deal. There also was little to laugh about a year later. Copeland was back in the headlines in 2000 with a lawsuit alleging that he lost a bid for a Louisiana riverboat casino license to a rival, who had corrupted the licensing process by bribing former governor Ed- win Edwards (Copeland v. Treasure Chest). (Earlier that year, Edwards had been convicted in federal court in a case involv- ing casino license corruption. See Chapter 10 Edwin Edwards: Fast Eddie Plays the Game “The Louisiana Way.”) Copeland sued Robert J. Guidry and Guidry’s Treasure Chest Casino of Kenner over Guidry’s testimony in the Edwards case in which Guidry, who pleaded guilty to extortion in a plea deal, testified he had paid the four-time governor $1.5 million to get the casino license, which Guidry then sold for $76 million. Copeland’s lawsuit charged that Guidry’s testimony proved the licensing process was rigged and that he should get back the reported $2.2 million that one of his companies, American International Gaming Association, had spent to win the river- boat license, along with a share of the profits from the casino. Copeland lost the lawsuit, but his bitterness over losing lingered. Fast forward to a Saturday night in 2001. Guidry and Copeland 30 COURTROOM CARNIVAL were seated across the dining room from each other at Morton’s steakhouse in downtown New Orleans. The two began shouting insults across the dining room. It did not take long for the verbal sparring to turn into a brawl. Witnesses said Guidry threw the first punch, but when it was over, Copeland’s fourth wife Jennifer, six months pregnant at the time, was knocked to the ground and complained later of early contractions. Copeland was treated for bruises and lacerations to his face and hands. “I was surrounded and attacked from all sides,” Copeland said in a statement. “One of the men was holding me as the others were throwing punches.”18 The Copelands, who were celebrating their first wedding anniversary, were hospitalized overnight and released. Guidry and two of his sons, Shane and Chad, landed in New Orleans Central Lockup booked with battery. Charges in the case, including countersuits over the melee, were eventually dropped. In April 2006, the Copelands were back in the news when the entrepreneur was arrested on a domestic abuse complaint, which stemmed from an alleged attempt to pull his wife out of her vehicle. According to sheriff’s deputies, the incident oc- curred when she apparently tried to drive away from the cou- ple’s home near Madisonville with one of the couple’s children.19 Two months earlier, Copeland had filed for divorce. Copeland had married his fourth wife Jennifer Devall in 2000 in front of five hundred guests at St. Louis Cathedral—despite the fact that he had already been married multiple times. True to his penchant for challenging convention, Copeland had appealed the church rejection of divorce, and the Archdiocese of New Orleans promptly decided that the wedding, although Copeland’s fourth, was okay canonically because only one of his marriages, his first, had taken place in a church, and after their divorce his wife had died, dissolving what the Church considered to be a lifelong bond. Although there had been a dazzling reception, with the Al Copeland: “The Chicken King” 31 newlyweds Al and Jennifer arriving in a horse-drawn pumpkin coach à lá Disney, the marriage melted into open rancor. In court papers filed in the divorce (Copeland v. Devall)—which the new judge, as in Copeland’s third divorce, had sealed, and again the press eventually obtained access to (In re Copeland v. Copeland)—his fourth wife admitted to an extramarital affair. By April of the following year, they were officially divorced.

“The Chicken King” After Hurricane Katrina, Copeland struggled with reopening a number of restaurants in the New Orleans area that had been closed after the storm. Labor shortages and contractor problems made it difficult to get the businesses back online, and then Co- peland was sidelined by illness. The company restructured its growth plans under Copeland’s son, Al Jr., opening outlets in Bossier City and South Lake, Texas. One of the Copeland’s Cheesecake Bistro outlets was re-branded as Copeland’s Social City, an eatery that combined socializing, entertainment, and dining, the company said. Copeland Invest- ments now included a hotel division and the comedy clubs in addition to the various Copeland’s restaurants and more than a dozen of the nearly 2,000 Popeyes franchises. “Copeland has created its cuisine by observing what was suc- cessful in hot restaurants of the moment and doing the same things but in a formulated, chain operations-friendly way,” said New Orleans food critic Tom Fitzmorris.20 As of 2010, there appeared to be method to Copeland’s formula. More than 50 percent of the business at Copeland’s downtown New Orleans restaurants came from out-of-town visitors. The company employed 2,500 people with at least two-thirds based in south Louisiana and served an average of 7,000 customers per day.21 When Al Copeland died on March 23, 2008, his estate was divided among his nine children, led by Al Copeland Jr. And that 32 COURTROOM CARNIVAL has made a difference in management style from father to son. There is less entrepreneurial swashbuckling and a more moder- ate business technique in launching new ventures. “I see a much more conservative approach to growth,” Al Co- peland Jr. said. “When my father owned the company, it was his money and he could decide what he wanted to do. And al- though I do have the right to make decisions, I have a fiduciary responsibility to eight others to do what’s right and preserve their wealth.”22 Preserving their wealth will likely continue to involve time in court. For instance, in February 2009, AFC Enterprises, Inc., which operated more than 1,900 Popeyes restaurants nation- wide, sued Copeland’s Diversified Foods & Seasonings, Inc., seeking the recipe and formula for Copeland’s spice blend in the name of insuring that the recipe met “nutritional mandates, regulatory matters, importation restrictions, and economic factors.” AFC demanded arbitration, asserting that Diversified Foods breached its supply agreement with AFC by not providing products to AFC and its franchises, both domestically and inter- nationally, at fair and reasonable prices.23 The case was settled in July 2010—with the details of the se- cret recipe remaining the property of Copeland.24 Despite the ambitions of its founder, Popeyes remains only one-third the size of KFC. Financial analysts say today’s under- thirty crowd prefers boneless instead of the bone-in-chicken that the chain sells, and that is challenging Popeyes’ traditional market focus on urban consumers.25 The chain is repositioning its brand and trying to speed up what analysts say is “extremely slow service.” The chain is no longer Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits. The brand is now called Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen. The chain also is drawing stiff com- petition from supermarkets and Wal-Mart. A few days before Thanksgiving, 2007, Copeland was diag- nosed with cancer. Al Copeland: “The Chicken King” 33

“People go through much worse every day,” he told his fam- ily while undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, where Copeland would show up with Popeyes chicken for an entire floor of the hospital every time a new grandchild was born.26 At his funeral in the posh St. Charles Avenue Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church, Copeland’s over-the-top lifestyle was well represented. There were a thousand people, including his ex-wives sitting alongside his nine children and fourteen grandchildren. (Copeland’s life had obviously changed greatly since the 1970s, when, as one professional associate remembered, he rarely attended funerals and was almost phobic on the subject: back then “Al didn’t like to think about death.”)27 After the funeral, at the family mausoleum in Metairie Cem- etery, nine cars, eight motorcycles, a sport-utility vehicle, and a dune buggy were parked in a semicircle around the tomb. A mo- torcycle was at the gates to the cemetery, and Copeland’s out- sized speedboat, with tongues of flame on each side, was nearby. “Al did everything in life big,” said local television anchor Eric Paulsen, a friend. “He’s going out big.”28 Al Copeland’s body was borne in a horse-drawn hearse with oval windows so everyone could see the gleaming bronze casket inside, and a jazz band played a medley of “My Way” and “St. James Infirmary” as grand marshal Jennifer Jones took long, slow steps in her spats-covered shoes, her gloved hand over her heart. The path leading to the mausoleum had been strewn with white rose petals. Tiny beads resembling Christmas lights—a re- minder of Copeland’s Christmas displays—had been threaded through some of the white flowers that banked the stand where the coffin rested. The mausoleum door was open, revealing a stained-glass win- dow depicting an oil lamp throwing off beams of light. Friends and relatives waved small black-and-white-checked finish-line 34 COURTROOM CARNIVAL flags. Because eleven was Copeland’s lucky number, as the ser- vice ended, eleven white doves were released, followed by 111 gold and white balloons as the jazz band struck up Copeland’s anthem, “Love that chicken from Popeyes.” Asked recently to reflect on his father’s popularity, Al Copeland Jr., admittedly much less flamboyant than his father, explained that Al Copeland had “started with nothing. He made his money along the way, and he never forgot to show his appreciation for people who worked the hardest—washing dishes, whatever.” Copeland Jr. added, “He was a hospitality man. He worked hard, every day, and he knew that if the worst happened he could start again. People respected him for that.”29 One of his neighbors said that living next door to Copeland had been “like living next door to Elvis.” And in the Times-Picayune the day after the funeral of Al Copeland, Sr., columnist Chris Rose observed, “[Al] was our Elvis. . . . The Chicken King has left the building.”30

Charles Zewe, PhD, is an award-winning broadcast jour- nalist who worked at two network affiliates in New Orleans before spending twelve years as a CNN-TV correspondent and anchor. He is currently vice president for communication and external affairs for the Louisiana State University System.