A former political operative from the bayou once tried to tell me the difference between the corruption that built Louisiana and the type that drags at Alabama.

It went something like this:

In Louisiana, a group of business tycoons and politicians will gather in a back room - the kind that used to be filled with cigar smoke and hubris and still smells that way in the mind's nose. They take a big bag of money and plop it right there on the tabletop for everybody to see.

They talk of projects that need to be done - roads or bridges, hospitals, schools or casinos - and figure out what must be done to get everybody paid, and who has to be paid to get everything done. Then they divide the cash, because the politicians around the table must be paid first, and they go off to build.

Dirty. But productive.

We get it, Louisiana. It comes from a long and illustrious history. Louisiana is to corruption what Alabama is to football. It would take 500 years and we still couldn't match that kind of tradition.

Huey Long set the tone and Edwin Edwards embraced it with all the gusto a serial extorter could muster. After being indicted three separate times, he won his final race for governor with the help of campaign stickers that read "Vote for the Crook. It's Important." Then he went to prison for extorting money from riverboat casinos.

Of course he was running against a former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, so maybe a crook is better.

Ah, Louisiana.

Alabama, however, carries out its corruption in a very different way. But it starts out much the same.

Business tycoons - usually the Big Mules that run the place, but not always - gather their politicians in a back room that once was filled with smoke but now just reeks of overwhelming greed. They take out a big bag of money and set it under the table.

Oliver Robinson, the latest Alabama politician to disappoint, sat silent Thursday as lawyer Richard Jaffe said his client was sorry. (Kyle Whitmire)

Then they bicker. And barter. They wind up kicking each other under the table until the one who kicks the hardest grabs the cash and heads home. Nothing gets done. Except the stuff the tycoons want.

That's pretty close to true.

They don't use smoke-filled rooms anymore. They use PACs and dark money non-profits and privately held interests with legislatively approved secrecy. They use foundations and law firms and contracts that are worth more than a bag of money could hold.

One can rightly argue that Louisiana really doesn't benefit from the kind of corruption it has seen over the decades. After all, construction and roads are but one kind of progress, and education and health are another. When it comes to those kinds of rankings, Louisiana thanks God for Mississippi as much as Alabama does.

There's no arguing about Alabama, though.

Alabama is worse because of its corruption. Because those who pay - the Big Mules who pass their bags of money to people like former Rep. Oliver Robinson or the big players who passed it to former House Speaker Mike Hubbard - care not about building anything but themselves.

They corrupt the state to protect and insulate themselves, to bolster their bottom lines and strengthen their strangleholds on the politicians - who in turn work with all their might to protect and insulate their benefactors.

It doesn't matter which party is in charge, because it's always the same. It's a protection racket, a cycle of corruption, propaganda and greed.

Alabamians are left to kick themselves beneath the table. And the guy who started off with the bag of money walks away with more.