Gueydan residents arrested in “The Peanut Man” sting for selling wild game were taken to a staging area in town where they were loaded onto buses and transported to Lafayette for arraignment.
Robert “Bobby” de’Perrodil was just a teenager the morning federal agents descended upon his home to arrest his father in an elaborate sting that ended in the arrest of more than 60 residents from the Gueydan area on charges of selling wild game.
The October 1961 edition of Sports Afield included an article by author Paul Kalman that was teased with a cover headline: “Special Expose: I Hunt the Market Hunter.”
‘The Peanut Man’
GUEYDAN — It’s been 64 1/2 years, but Robert “Bobby” de’Perrodil remembers the events that unfolded here on May 5, 1961, as if it were yesterday — and how the infamous “Legend of The Peanut Man” became local lore.
His memories put a different twist on a tale that garnered national headlines, cast Gueydan in a negative light as a place with little or no regard for conservation or wildlife laws, and was lauded by a media that portrayed an ambitious federal undercover agent as nothing short of a super hero.
