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Col. Abraham Lazard Shushan was also the Senator's true-blue friend. It was he who rushed from the death bed with the first news of his chief's passing: "Huey's dead. It's terrible!" But Colonel Shushan, drygoods merchant, president of the New Orleans Levee Board and builder of one of the biggest, most expensive ($4,000,000) and most useless airports in the world for his personal glorification, was not destined to figure largely in the Long inheritance. Like Oscar Allen, his chief service to the Kingfish was as a yes-man.
Another overpublicized nonentity in the Long entourage was Alice Lee Grosjean Terrel Tharpe, whose pretty eyes flowed freely outside the Dictator's hospital room door while he fought for life. At 18 she started as Long's private secretary. He made her Secretary of State, later State Supervisor of Public Accounts, handling millions, her records immune to audit. Her power with the Kingfish arose from a personal relationship. No sooner was he dead than more potent lieutenants began planning to oust her in favor of Long's brother Earl.
Insiders, Outsiders. In London, where the death of the Dictator shouldered the Ethiopian crisis aside, the sensational Star stormed that Huey Long "left no successor, no system, no ideas for development, but only a passion for guns." Louisiana observers regarded this as an extravagance. Beyond and above the Allen type of Longster was a predatory but polished political system whose chief danger lay in the fact that its boss had left not too few but too many successors. They fell into two classes: Insiders, functioning as behind-the-scenes manipulators of the tightest, most profitable political dominion the nation has ever known; and Outsiders, the vote-getting political front of the Long machine which rarely lost a ballot battle in Louisiana since the Kingfish took over in 1928. Last week, after a solemn meeting in Governor Allen's office in which they shook his hand, loyally pledged him their fealty for the time being, these were the men who began measuring each other and themselves for the Kingfish's shoes:
No. 1 Insider was Seymour Weiss, one-time barbershop manager who now runs New Orleans' biggest hotel and the Dock Board, a plump, baldish, suave, natty Jew credited with handling the Long money bags so adroitly that, while he himself is under Federal indictment for income tax evasion, a four-year Treasury search has yet to turn up any charge against the Kingfish, whose fortune last week was variously estimated from $0 to $5,000,000.
No. 2 Insider was Robert Maestri, Louisiana Conservation Commissioner. Between him and the Kingfish existed complete understanding and a private joke. When Long was elected Governor in 1928 a New Orleans publisher collected a fund to buy him a set of table silver. Mr. Maestri's check, however, was righteously returned because nice people looked askance at the source of his family's fortune. Thereupon Mr. Maestri purchased a $2,500 emerald & diamond scarf pin for the Governor which the Governor wore and laughed about all over the State.