The Bartholomews had “laid their hearts open” during their testimony on the stand. Now, they held faith the justice system would right the wrong. “They were hopeful,” said their lawyer, Edwin Shorty. “They could see or feel a light at the end of the tunnel.”
One supporter, draped in dark clothing and wearing a black beret on his head, raised his right fist to the sky, signaling that cries for justice had just been answered. Other residents embraced one another at the foot of the federal courthouse, some wearing placards of police protest around their necks.
Federal jurors had, with their guilty verdicts, officially damned the shootings and the cover-up. For perhaps the first time since the gunfire, the victims and survivors could breathe relief, and savor vindication.
“Jury Gives NOPD Another Strike,” the Times-Picayune’s front page screamed. “Prosecutors garner nearly a clean sweep on charges against 5 Danziger defendants.”
For years, the NOPD’s internal affairs unit, the Public Integrity Bureau (PIB), often closed cases against officers, including cases against several of those standing trial in this case, without bringing discipline. Most of the time, the PIB said evidence supporting punishment did not exist. But following the guilty verdicts, the Public Integrity Bureau would sustain a string of internal charges against Bowen, Gisevius, and Villavaso, three officers still technically on the force. The bureau said evidence existed to sustain charges against other officers who had recently resigned: Hunter, Barrios, Hills, Lohman, Kaufman, and Gerard Dugue, the sergeant who had yet to face trial.
“Clear and convincing evidence existed, based on the FBI and Department of Justice investigation, that the accused officers violated criminal and departmental polices,” the office wrote in a report authored by Sergeant Omar M. Diaz. The top brass, including superintendent of police Ronal W. Serpas, tapped from the Nashville police force to replace the retiring Riley in 2010, signed off on the report.
The PIB case was not a criminal inquiry and drew scant attention, but the battery of sustained charges sent a message. The actions of the officers on the bridge was so untoward, the department itself was brandishing it with a black eye. Two months after the guilty verdicts, the Louisiana Supreme Court suspended the law license of Sergeant Kenneth Bowen.
With his own innocence reaffirmed along with the guilty verdicts for the officers, Lance Madison spoke outside the courthouse, with Bernstein, the lead prosecutor, behind him and the family’s civil lawyer, Mary Howell, to his side. Dressed in coat and tie, he spoke for thirty seconds, reading from paper steadied in place atop a FedEx envelope.
“I am thankful for having some closure after six long years of struggling for justice,” Lance said. “Without the support and hard work of my family, I might still be in prison for false charges and the truth about what happened on the Danziger Bridge might never have been known. We will never be completely healed because we will never have Ronald Madison back.”
As he said his brother’s name, Bernstein nodded her head. Then Lance caught his breath and was finished.
As Bobbi Bernstein stepped into the city’s streets in the days after the trial that had consumed her for three years, more than one resident pulled her aside. Thank you, they told her.
PART IV
JUSTICE HELD UP
CHAPTER 20
THE ONLINE COMMENTATORS
AS IN ANY CITY with big news and impassioned views, the online section of the local newspaper in New Orleans is sometimes filled with angry bluster—the kind of anonymous postings that allow viewers to say what they really think, often shielded behind the online world’s protective cloak of secrecy.
So it was that before, during, and after the trial of the Danziger 5, the comments section at NOLA.com, the news site of the local Times-Picayune, was filled with bluster and venom. Some readers ripped the prosecutors for taking on officers who stayed behind to serve their city. Others praised the Feds for doing the job the locals seemed ill equipped to handle; former DA Eddie Jordan was a steady, ready target. Yet other writers aimed their sights on the police officers and the department they served, describing how the events exposed in federal court finally let the larger world in on a dirty secret: the NOPD doesn’t always shoot straight. The Danziger trial was just one of a string of police misconduct cases drawing these razor-sharp, and seemingly anonymous, critiques.
Yet some careful readers were scrutinizing these online comments and pressing to discover the identities behind the missives, the true names of the writers tapping the keyboards with swift rancor. These interested parties included lawyers for accused criminals, particularly those working for the public sector. They also included defense attorneys for the police officers convicted in court, and now behind bars in federal lockup, in the Danziger shootings. Where others saw angry but meaningless blather, the defense team suspected something more sinister at play, particularly when it was revealed that one of the most frequent scribes was an assistant United States attorney based in New Orleans named Sal Perricone.
Perricone was raised in New Orleans and built a name for himself the hard way. After high school he joined the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office in 1972, starting as a patrolman and rising to become a sergeant, while putting himself through college. In 1975 he became a detective for the NOPD and turned next to law school at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. In 1986 Perricone jumped to the FBI, supervising an antidrug squad operating between LA and Seattle. Then, with his law degree in hand, in 1991 he became a prosecutor for the US Attorney’s Office in his hometown. He put away dirty politicians and mobsters while working the courtroom with a focused intensity.
Even as he rose as a prosecutor, Perricone maintained a keen interest in police issues. He once put his name in the hat for the police superintendent’s job, along with two FBI agents and a Drug Enforcement Administration agent. None got the job. “I never had any intent to be police superintendent,” Perricone wrote me. He said he applied “to test the fairness of the selection process.” He followed police department misdeeds intently and once taught a course to NOPD officers entitled “How to Not Get Indicted,” outlining federal law on civil rights and use of force.
Writing on NOLA.com under multiple pseudonyms, including “Henry L. Mencken1951,” Perricone seemingly chided the NOPD at every turn, in every case of police corruption then in the news. Under a variety of pen names, he targeted the force and onetime superintendent Warren Riley, calling the NOPD out as “corrupt,” “a joke for a long time,” and “totally dysfunctional.”
Perricone was not part of the Danziger prosecuting team, and said he followed the case merely by reading the papers. But to the defense, his missives reflected directly on the US Attorney’s Office that employed him and were relevant to the prosecution at hand. The online comments, the Danziger defense team would argue, were part of a larger government conspiracy to “engage in a secret public relations campaign designed to make the NOPD the household name for corruption.” This conspiratorial plan was created to turn the public against the police, convicting the accused before anyone set foot in court and forcing officers to plead guilty under pressure. And, ultimately, the intent was to “prejudice the defendants during trial through online activities designed to secure their convictions,” they contended.
On March 12, 2012, three weeks before the Danziger police officers would face judgment at sentencing, Perricone was exposed as the writer of rebukes of the department in the Danziger case and others. His identity was revealed in another case then in the courts, but his online persona quickly became relevant for the police officers convicted of killing innocents and covering up their crimes on the bridge.
Perricone would later admit writing under a string of pseudonyms beyond the one named after Mencken, the journalistic sage of Baltimore known for his penetrating prose. Other online names Perricone put to use included “dramatis personae,” “legacyusa,” and “campstblue.”
His criticism began well before the Danziger Bridge prosecu
tion. In 2008, three years before the Danziger 5 case went to trial, Perricone weighed in after a news report about an NOPD officer who was arrested after getting into a fight with a Mississippi River bridge officer.
“There is an old Italian proverb: the fish rots from the head down,” he wrote on June 8, 2008.
A year later another of his online postings called for Riley’s head. “The Government [Department of Justice] needs to take over the police department . . . NOW!!!!!” he wrote.
The comments went on and on, ripping the superintendent and his force. In December 2010, Perricone opined about another case of police misconduct then in the courthouse, in which white New Orleans police officers stood trial in federal court for the savage burning death of a black man shot by police after Katrina.
“This case, no matter how it turns out, has revealed the NOPD to be a collection of self-centered, self-interested, self-promoting, insular, arrogant, overweening, prevaricating, libidinous fools and that the entire agency should be re-engineered from the bottom up,” he wrote. “This case has ripped the veil of respectability away from the police department. . . . Thank God for the Feds [DOJ]—can you imagine New Orleans without a federal presence?”
When that case came back with a split verdict, with the lead defendant officer convicted on some counts, Perricone wrote, “There is no Katrina defense. . . . Danziger is totally different. I am sure the attorneys will proffer this defense, but it will fail.” He called out the “gang of thugs [NOPD] on the bridge that day. They bailed out the rental truck, guns ablazing.”
As the Danziger guilty pleas began to mount, Perricone’s online persona often contributed to the commentary section that built up, comment after comment, once stories were posted involving police controversies. On February 23, 2010, the Times-Picayune disclosed an early plea deal about to surface in the case, involving Lieutenant Lohman. Nine and a half minutes after the scoop, Perricone, using his “legacyusa” online persona, wrote, “Despite defense attorneys’ protestations to the contrary, it would be prudent for those involved to consider the track record of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Letten’s people are not to be trifled with.”
At quarter until eleven that evening, another posting was aimed at Sergeant Kaufman, who had not yet faced charges. “The cover up is always worse than the crime. Archie . . . your time is up.”
Two days later: “I am afraid that the NOPD has inoperable cancer. . . . Indeed, the fish has rotten from the head down.” As other officers began to resign and readied to enter their own guilty pleas and cooperate, Perricone’s online fingers praised them for coming forward. “The Feds never forget . . . this officer is doing the right thing . . . with the others would, then IT would be over,” he wrote on May 20, 2010, as news broke of Ignatius Hills’s resignation and possible plea deal.
Ten minutes before the Danziger Bridge jury selection began on June 22, 2011, at 8:19 a.m., “legacyusa” had some thoughts to share. “NONE of these guys should had have ever been given a badge. We should research how they got on the police department, who trained them, who supervised them and why were they ever promoted. You put crap in—you get crap out!!!”
After Officer Faulcon took the stand, Perricone, using his “dramatis personae” online name, targeted the police cover-up being exposed in court. “Where is Madison’s gun? Come on officer, tell us,” he wrote July 29, 2011.
Once his identity was unmasked, Perricone told a judge these postings were “my little secret.” No one at the Department of Justice knew about it, he said. In all, Perricone had posted some twenty-six hundred comments over five years. Perricone said just a fraction of them dealt with legal matters. “ONLY .44% had anything to do with cases,” he wrote. “Do the math. (99.56% had nothing to do with work.)”
A week after his cloak of online anonymity was revealed, Sal Perricone resigned from the US Attorney’s Office. Perricone said he intended to retire at the end of 2012 to launch a career writing fiction, but left nine months earlier “and pursued that dream.” His first novel, Blue Steel Crucifix, a tale of murder and corruption set in New Orleans, would be published in December 2014.
As he left the US Attorney’s Office amid the glow of scrutiny, the DOJ brass said it would launch an internal inquiry. Jim Letten, the top federal prosecutor in New Orleans, called Perricone’s behavior unacceptable. “Our partners in government and law enforcement and the citizens we serve must know that absolutely none of the comments, criticisms, or characterizations made were in any way reflective of my views or opinions—or those of the Department or this office or our people,” Letten said in a prepared statement. “To the contrary, we resoundingly reject the caustic criticisms and sentiments expressed in these messages.”
Perricone, his secret online life now exposed, hoped to retreat again to the shadows. “I just want to be left alone,” he told a local reporter who reached him for comment.
Defense attorneys would not let him, or the larger DOJ team, get away so easily. Two weeks away, sentencing day loomed for the Danziger defendants, and the defense team prepared to file a battery of court motions seeking to get the verdict overturned, citing early leaks it said impaired justice—and the online postings it portrayed as part of the larger DOJ conspiracy.
Their bids for a new trial seemed like a long shot. While Perricone’s dispatches appeared in the comments section at NOLA.com multitudes of times, presaging his next career turn as a fiction writer, there’s no evidence a single juror saw his postings. And, no tangible evidence was produced showing that such postings impaired justice.
It was a long shot, but with the police officers facing the prospect of decades behind bars, the defense team was pushing any angle it could find. Their motions for a new trial landed on the desk of the judge who had overseen the Danziger case, US district judge Kurt D. Engelhardt.
CHAPTER 21
FROM PREP SCHOOL TO POLITICS TO DANZIGER
A Judge’s Prayerful Path
BORN IN NEW ORLEANS, Kurt Damian Engelhardt donned glasses as a youth, fitting right in at summer band camp and later as a flute, piccolo, and alto sax player in the band at Brother Martin High School, an all-male, Catholic, college preparatory school in the city. As a senior, he was a drum major, proudly donning the school’s crimson and gold colors, and no longer always wearing his dark-framed glasses. He had worked for the school paper, served on the student council, and earned the Golden Crusader Award.
Kurt stayed close to home for his postsecondary schooling, first attending the University of New Orleans before transferring to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. There, he studied history as an undergraduate and served in the Tiger Band, performing at halftime at the prized LSU football team’s home games. When he graduated from LSU in 1982, Engelhardt made a choice. His older brother became a surgeon, but Kurt Engelhardt had a different career path in mind.
“My father suggested the law as a career because I liked to argue,” he later told his high school newspaper for a profile it published. He enrolled in law school at LSU, earning his degree in 1985.
Out of school, Engelhardt served as a law clerk for an appeals court judge, and then became partner in a midsized law firm in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans in Jefferson Parish. With Hailey, McNamara, Hall, Larmann & Papale, he focused on commercial transactions and litigation—handling real estate, bankruptcy, insurance defense, and contract disputes, among other issues. Also on his legal docket: personal injury litigation and white-collar criminal defense work.
He soon became active in civic and political circles, joining the Alliance for Good Government and becoming involved in Republican political campaigns. He backed Republican David Vitter’s first run for the state legislature, a path that would take Vitter to the US Senate representing Louisiana. That friendship would later come to benefit Engelhardt’s own ambitions.
In 1995 the Louisiana governor appointed Engelhardt to the Louisiana Judiciary Commission, a governmental body that explores allegations of misconduct agains
t judges and makes recommendations for action to the state Supreme Court. In 1998 Engelhardt was elected the commission’s chairman.
That experience piqued his interest in becoming a judge and, a year later, Engelhardt eyed a potential judicial opening in Jefferson Parish. Vitter told him to have a little patience and to wait one year. “The Governor of Texas is running for president,” Vitter noted to his lawyer friend.
That governor was George W. Bush, elected to the nation’s highest office in 2000. Engelhardt knew him well; he worked on the Bush for President Campaign and traveled to Washington for Bush’s inauguration in January 2001. Soon Vitter put Engelhardt’s name in the hopper for a federal judgeship. Engelhardt carried support from the Louisiana Congressional Delegation, including Democratic members.
Vitter’s nomination led to a political whirlwind for Engelhardt, with a series of interviews and background checks in Washington. “My neighbors asked me if I was in trouble since the FBI had called on them. They even interviewed my college roommates,” Engelhardt later remarked to the Crimson Shield, the online magazine of his high-school alma mater.
On September 4, 2001, four years to the day before the Danziger Bridge shootings, President Bush appointed Engelhardt to the federal bench. The US Senate confirmed him December 11, 2001, and Engelhardt took the oath of office two days later.
In his time on the federal bench in New Orleans, no case would come close to matching the Danziger trial for its drama, significance, and the attention it drew. And now, with the officers on trial facing sentencing in a month, in April 2012, and the judge’s desk awaiting defense requests to dismiss the verdicts, Engelhardt faced his biggest judicial test. He would issue prison sentences for the five officers convicted by a jury. He’d have to approve, or deny, defense pleas for a new trial.
Shots on the Bridge Page 20