Court to Decide If He Won by Hook or by Crook

Apparent winners of two bass tournaments were disqualified last weekend, and one of them became the first person to be arrested in Louisiana on felony charges growing out of a fish story.

At a tournament on Lake St. John near Ferriday, La., Alva W. Anding of Baton Rouge was arrested and charged with theft by fraud. Authorities said his 15.1-pound string of bass included fish that had been caught before the tournament.

An official of the Louisiana Bass Casters Assn. got a report that five bass were staked out on the lake before the tournament.

He checked and found four bass in a wire fish basket tied to a cypress tree, and another bass on a stringer attached to the basket, said Emmett Bonner, an agent with Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

The night before the tournament, officials marked the bass by cutting the tip off the second spine on the dorsal fin of each fish, Bonner said.

Bonner said that he and Hugh Burks, LDWF information specialist, contacted the district attorney. “He advised us to proceed, and said that if an arrest was made, to charge the individual with theft by fraud,” the agent said.

Burks posed as a biologist at the afternoon weigh-in, supposedly checking all tournament-caught bass for parasites.

“At 2:54 p.m., the subject presented six fish to tournament officials,” Bonner said.

The agent added that Anding posted a total weight of 15.10 pounds of fish, including a marked 4.31-pounder that was the third-largest bass brought in during the tournament.

After accepting the first-place prize of a new fishing boat, custom trailer, trolling motor and depth finder, he was arrested. He later was released on $3,000 bond.

Ross Cagle, co-director of the tournament circuit, said that Anding had fished tournaments several times previously. “And to our knowledge, he has never won a nickel,” Cagle said.

Truman Hudnall of Vidalia was declared the winner of the tournament with a stringer weighing 14.72 pounds, and Harold Biggers of El Dorado, Ark., caught the biggest bass, one weighing 5.67 pounds.

At Lake O’ The Pines, near Longview, Tex., another apparent winner failed to pass a lie-detector test on whether his 8.05-pound bass was caught under the proper circumstances at the proper time and place. No charges were filed.

The $105,000 first-prize money, however, went to Joe Travis of Longview, a middle-school history teacher, who weighed in a 6.79-pound largemouth.

Two other contestants were also disqualified when officials ruled that their fish did not appear to have been caught during the Lake O’ The Pines tournament.