6 Real Scandals Crazier Than Anything On 'House Of Cards'

6

The Governor Of Louisiana Chained An Opponent To A Tree On A Pirate Island

Huey Long became governor of Louisiana in 1928, and utterly dominated the state's politics with the simple tactic of "firing every government employee not personally loyal to him." He further demanded a 20 percent cut of all state contracts, and tended to declare martial law when things didn't go his way. Not a super reasonable guy, is what we're getting at here.

Library of Congress“Assemble the men; I lost at Monopoly again.”

When Long was running for the Senate in 1932, he heard that a disgruntled former employee named Sam Irby was preparing to reveal evidence of his corruption. Long did the only reasonable thing: He had the guy abducted. Huey's brother, future governor Earl Long, wanted to have Irby killed, but the governor had a better idea. He had his personal goon squad of corrupt cops drag Irby onto a boat, which ferried him to Grande Isle, a former pirate hideout in the Gulf of Mexico. There, Irby was kept chained to a tree and attacked by clouds of mosquitoes until he became more sympathetic to Long's ideas.

Meanwhile, every anti-Long politician in Louisiana was going berserk trying to find Irby, who was rumored to be dead at the bottom of a swamp. With kidnapping charges looming, Long forced Irby to do a radio interview claiming he had merely gone on a spontaneous fishing trip. His bodyguards then brandished guns at reporters and sped off with Irby in a car, pursued by New Orleans police in a Fast & Furious-style chase that ended with the governor's limo giving the cops the slip in a network of alleys.

By the time Irby escaped captivity and spilled the beans, Long had won election to the Senate, where he became a serious rival to FDR and began planning a run for president. He was assassinated by a disgruntled dentist in 1935, as was the style at the time.

5

Lyndon B. Johnson Stole A Senate Election With His Shady, Potentially Murderous Friends

Before he was the 36th president of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson was a Texas senator, and his road to that position was a bit bumpy, to say the least. In 1948, LBJ's opponent in the Democratic primary was former governor Calculatin' Coke Stevenson, who was favored to win, if only because his name was "Coke." But Johnson had powerful allies, including the monumentally corrupt George "The Duke of Duval" Parr, whose influential family had already been tied to some pretty suspicious deaths. On election night, the counties that Parr controlled voted for Johnson by a totally-not-suspicious 10,547 votes to a mere 368 for Stevenson. When the election bureau announced that Stevenson was still winning by a few hundred votes statewide, Parr realized he had been a little too generous.

4

One Australian MP (Probably) Threw Another MP Off A Cliff

Thomas Ley couldn't stop at the store without shopkeepers trying to pay him protection money, just in case. Every time this guy redid his patio, all the neighbors sold their houses and moved. Naturally, the good people of Sydney elected him to Parliament, where he quickly earned the nickname "Minister for Murder," after his political rivals started dying in extremely suspicious circumstances.

National Library of AustraliaThis guy, a criminal? No!

3

A British Politician Had A Dog Killed While Trying To Assassinate His Ex-Lover

In the 1970s, Jeremy Thorpe was the leader of Britain's Liberal Party (later rebooted as "the Liberal-Democrats") and one of the most popular politicians in the country. There was only one problem: He was being blackmailed by his ex-lover, Norman Scott. You see the problem here. Thorpe paid off Scott for years, but when the blackmailer became erratic, the politician began looking for a more permanent solution.

Thorpe discussed the problem with a small number of other Liberal politicians, insisting that killing Scott "would be like getting rid of a mad dog." Those words would turn out to be bizarrely prophetic. In 1975, Thorpe asked a businessman to donate 20,000 pounds to help with election expenses, by which he meant "murdering my ex." Holmes used the money to hire a man named Andrew Newton, who, not content with his salary as an airline pilot, aspired to become a hitman on the side. Scott was to be his first victim.

2

The Mayor Of Biloxi, Mississippi Tricked The Mob Into Murdering His Opponent

In the late 1980s, Pete Halat was a prominent Mississippi lawyer with ambitions toward the mayor's office in Biloxi. As luck would have it, he was also the lawyer for "Dixie Mafia" kingpin Kirksey Nix, who was whiling away a life sentence for murder by running a "lonely hearts" con.

McNairy County IndependentNix was also suspected for killing the wife of Buford “Real-Life Liam Neeson Character” Pusser, so prison was really a best-case scenario.

1

French Health Officials Gave People AIDS Just To Spite The USA

There are a lot of ways a politician can screw you over, but "literally giving you AIDS" takes it to a whole new level. Like, it's hard to imagine a worse scandal that doesn't involve the words "orphanage" and "giant metallic crab." So the people of France were understandably pretty upset to learn that health officials had allowed around 1,250 hemophiliacs to be given HIV-infected blood in 1984 and 1985, 400 of whom had died by 1994. This wasn't the work of some low-level bureaucrats, either. Health Minister Edmund Herve and Prime Minister Laurent Fabius were both charged with manslaughter over it.

What could they possibly get out of this? Well, they wanted all the honor (and profit) of leading the charge ... in the fight against AIDS.

Yes, seriously.

By 1984, an American company had already developed a way to treat plasma products to make sure they were free of HIV, but a French company wanted time to develop their own method. So, as shown in leaked letters, French officials deliberately dragged their feet in approving the foreign method, despite knowing that the blood banks used by hemophiliacs contained contaminated blood.

When evidence of the scandal started stacking up (along with the corpses), the courts finally had to get involved. Herve was convicted of manslaughter in 1999, but received no jail time, while former PM Fabius was outright acquitted. Most of the officials involved were charged with "fraudulent description of goods," which is a pretty weak punishment for giving people AIDS. If you ordered a pizza and Papa John came over to your house and personally blew up your car, you'd hope he'd be charged with more than "failure to deliver pizza," you know?

If only Calculatin' Coke Stevens had been able to read How To Fight Presidents. Could've saved his life.

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