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It should have been a night for Jim Leslie to savor. On July 8, 1976, the Louisiana State Senate passed what was known as the Right to Work Bill. One of the most fiercely debated pieces of legislation in decades, the law did away with mandatory union membership and allowed businesses to hire nonunion workers.
Given the interests involved, this was a staggering achievement. Labor had a muscular presence in Louisiana, largely because it was controlled by organized crime. Developers were ordered to kick back as much as 25 percent of the cost of construction, and those who wouldn’t play along sometimes faced dire consequences. Plants blew up and buildings burned. In January 1976, a gang of more than 75 men commandeered a forklift to smash through the gate of a Jupiter Chemical construction site, where the company was building a new facility using non-AFL-CIO crews. The mob fired hundreds of rounds, killing one man and injuring five others.
Hired by the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, Leslie inserted himself into the debate by creating a savvy ad campaign intended to build support for the Right to Work Bill. He was known for creating some of Louisiana’s first sophisticated TV spots. His reputation was as a brilliant influencer, and he was in high demand. He had run about 60 political campaigns by then, winning more than 80 percent of them. He had already opened three satellite offices—in Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Monroe, Louisiana—and seemed destined for the national stage; people speculated that he would spearhead the Southern arm of a presidential campaign, maybe as soon as 1980.
No one in Shreveport was surprised by his success. Leslie was a soft-spoken jokester and spellbinding storyteller with a dimpled chin, a Paul McCartney mop of hair, and a prodigious work ethic. At 20, he’d dropped out of college to become a reporter at the Shreveport Times, where he latched on to daring stories. After wrangling an invitation to a Ku Klux Klan meeting, he wrote a piece describing 60 robed members conducting a cross burning. He exposed after-hours liquor sales and served as the prosecution’s star witness when the city shut down two well-known club operators. Once, while covering a shootout between police and a fugitive, Leslie was so excited that he yelled “Shoot! Shoot!” at the staff photographer behind him, only to look back and see his colleague waving a firearm. “No, no! The camera!” he shouted.
Leslie became a public relations executive in 1964, and when his employer announced a move to Houston in 1967, he remained in Shreveport and opened his own agency. In 1972, he scored a chance to lead J. Bennett Johnston’s long-shot campaign for U.S. Senate; after his man won, Leslie’s phone never stopped ringing. In 1975, he elevated Anthony Guarisco from little-known attorney to state senator by filming a commercial featuring an actor dressed in 18th-century garb, quoting poetry. For the Right to Work campaign, he crafted a TV spot that showed labor leaders dangling state legislators on marionette strings. He was a Dixie Don Draper.
That July night, after the successful legislative vote, Leslie headed to Baton Rouge’s Camelot Club for an after-party, and then to the Sheraton Inn for drinks with colleagues. But he was not in a celebratory mood, according to Stonecipher. Leslie was married, but he slept around and feared he was facing divorce papers back home. “Jim knew what was waiting on him, family-wise, as soon as he got back to Shreveport,” Stonecipher says. “He was depressed.”
Eventually, Leslie said goodnight and made the short drive to the Prince Murat Inn, where he was staying. As he pulled into a parking spot, fireworks detonated close by, vestiges perhaps of the summer’s raucous celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial. It was about 1:50 a.m. when he exited his car. He was still wearing his work clothes: brown checked suit, yellow dress shirt, tie.
He’d taken about a dozen steps when a shotgun blast exploded into his upper back, tearing through his heart and lungs. Leslie staggered sideways and fell face down onto the asphalt, dead before he landed.
Curtis saw a white 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass pull onto the property: Jim Leslie’s car. Moments later he heard the blast.
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