CenLamar | Est. 2006

On August 7, 2007, Barry Lamar Bonds, left fielder for the San Francisco Giants, broke baseball’s most important record, blasting a 435 foot home run off of Washington Nationals’s pitcher Mike Bacsik over the right center wall at San Francisco’s AT&T Park. It was the 756th home run of Bonds’s career, surpassing Hank Aaron, who, 33 years prior, had made history by snatching the all-time home run record from baseball’s most famous demigod, Babe Ruth. Barry Bonds became baseball’s undisputed all-time home run king. Well, sorta. Bonds, as we later discovered (though had already strongly suspected), was cheating, using performance-enhancing drugs…

On February 3, 1959, a Beachcraft Bonanza carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper crashed in a field in the outskirts of Clear Lake, Iowa, killing three of the most promising young American musicians this country has ever known. When the news broke, the press called it “The Day the Music Died.” That date has always carried special resonance for me: My father was born in 1959, two months after the crash, and he passed away in 2001, on February 3rd. But most of us remember The Day the Music Died because of Don McLean’s 1971 classic song, “American…

In 1993, when Jeff Landry, the future Attorney General of Louisiana, was 23 years old, he and one of his roommates, Biff James, worked as deputies in the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department, deep in the heart of Cajun Country. At some point, their superiors realized that a large quantity of confiscated cocaine had gone missing from the evidence room, and it quickly became obvious that James was the most likely suspect. A search warrant wouldn’t be necessary. Landry allowed officers to comb through his home on Berard Street in tiny St. Martinville, presumably without consulting his roommate, and there they…