If you look to the left as you travel south down Highway 1 at Wayside,
you will see beautiful, historic Belmont plantation. The home itself
causes the passerby to wonder about its origins and what may have happened
within those walls since it was built prior to the Civil War. The
most interesting aspect of the home, however, may be the man behind the
antebellum mansion’s two-year renovation.
Sometimes in life you cross paths with people who seemed to have lived a great deal more than the rest of us. They have “larger than life” experiences of which others of us only dream. Fernando Cuquet is one such person.
Fernando J. Cuquet, Jr.’s unpublished biography, The Holy Ghost: The Life of an Unknown, Unlikely Entrepreneur Who Ate Meat on Good Friday and Survived, is a look at the life of a man who has done a little bit of everything and most of it has been quite interesting. The title of the book came from his grandfather’s declaration of himself as the Father, his
father as the Son, and Cuquet himself as the Holy Ghost. Irreverent though it may be, it is an insight into the background that has made Cuquet who he is at 81 years of age.
Cuquet’s Creole heritage included a Spanish grandfather from Barcelona, a French grandmother, a Creole father and mother of German extraction. This combination of heritages allowed him to be brought up in a cultural melange that served him well throughout his many endeavors.
“I grew up in New Orleans and it was a wonderful thing. There was a great potpourri of people that gave me a broader attitude, a less prejudiced view of people and life,” he says.
In his varied career, Cuquet has been a lawyer, a G-man and a spy. As a G-man, Cuquet handled and solved one of the largest white slavery cases in United States history. This success with the FBI brought him to the attention of the National Security Agency (NSA). He served as a spy in Columbia during World War II when the neutral country was overrun with
agents from all sides of the war.
He at one time had acquired a “sizeable portion of a 75 square mile tract of metropolitan New Orleans and a substantial interest in 50 oil wells in southwest Louisiana.” He was one of the larger contractors in America and became involved with Howard Hughes. And this is all just the beginning.
Cuquet owned and operated a shipping company and became the controlling stockholder in one of the largest banks in the New Orleans area. If that wasn’t enough to keep him busy, he also owned and operated, with two partners, a 3800-acre muck farm in central Florida. This doesn’t even take into account the office building he acquired in Los Angeles and
“participating in acquiring one billion, eight hundred million dollars of financing to acquire the All American Pipe Line extending from Los Angeles to Houston.”
And, after all of this, Cuquet says that his greatest success didn’t come until he established casino gambling on the Mississippi River in Tunica County-pretty amazing for a person who didn’t know how to play dice, black jack or cards. He opened the Splash Casino in 1993 with the help and guidance of his partner, E. Everett McCarlie, and a multitude of
others. The casino began a gaming industry in Tunica that birthed 20,000 jobs and a multi-million dollar industry to rival Las Vegas. The Splash closed its doors in 1995, but that did not end Cuquet’s foray into gaming.
He is now in the process of opening another casino in Tunica County, Mhoon Landing Casino, using a vessel he purchased in Boston in 1989 that is fully equipped. The placement of the boat has been delayed six months because of the low level of the Mississippi River. As soon as the water rises to an appropriate level, however, the boat will be slipped into place and
a coffer damn will be built. The casino should open in about five months from the time the boat is placed.
“The idea of creating something from nothing is very interesting to me, but it takes so long for one of these things to come about that it is an exhausting process. But, when it comes to fruition, it is very exciting,” Cuquet says.
He and his wife are now selling Belmont for practical purposes-12,000 square feet is a great deal of space for three people, He claims his wife is ready to forego the romanticism of living in an antebellum mansion and live in a more practical abode and Cuquet himself sees the need for a little more practicality. But that doesn’t mean you can take the romanticism
out of the man and many portions of his book exemplify this.
In the “In Requiem” portion of his book he says, “Today, we still scoff at the conquistadors for seeking their El Dorado, the golden land. Hell, they were right, but just a little premature; today, America is one great big fabulous El Dorado, the land of golden opportunities.”