by Gary Rivlin
Tales about what happened inside the Convention Center had been similarly overblown. The police were largely absent from inside the building,VI but the scene wasn’t so much Lord of the Flies as a made-for-TV movie. As reported, bands of young black men, many of them armed, roamed the corridors of the Convention Center. However, they acted as self-deputized sheriffs rather than gangs of marauders. Teams of scouts were dispatched to search for food and water. Others collected luggage carts from nearby hotels so they could move the trash into big piles. Once the buses started to arrive, these same young men organized the crowds so that the older people were placed at the front of the line, followed by women with children.
The stories of widespread looting were real. Anyone out on a boat long enough was bound to encounter someone breaking into a store or someone’s home. City Council president Oliver Thomas was on the water with members of the Kentucky National Guard when they came across three young people on a raft going into the second floor of someone’s home. The trio claimed to be helping out with the rescue, but Thomas, a streetwise pol who had grown up in the Lower Ninth, knew better. “They were breaking and entering, plain and simple,” Thomas said. Liberty Bank was hit by looters as were scores of businesses, including an Uptown Walmart.
Some of the worst perpetrators, though, ended up being those who were supposed to be keeping the peace. Police in uniform appeared in a video taken inside the Uptown Walmart after Katrina. One cop was shown in the shoe section pushing a loaded cart. Prior to the storm, Nagin had signed an emergency order giving law enforcement the right to commandeer private property—yet even before the levees broke, witnesses saw cops driving Cadillac Escalades with dealer plates. The president of Sewell Cadillac Chevrolet told a reporter that he lost more than two hundred cars during the storm—many because the cops were in so much of a hurry, they failed to properly secure the lot before driving away.
Yet even the looting was overblown by an overzealous media. There’s no doubting that the person walking off with a flatscreen television in a city with no electricity is guilty of looting (though at least one man used a pilfered TV to buy a spot on the back of a truck headed out of town). Someone taking clothes or shoes from a Walmart presented a trickier ethical question. But nothing seemed complicated about the morals of a man stepping into a darkened store to get food for his hungry family. The press, however, seemed to judge a person’s behavior based on race rather than the immediate need for the item taken. Van Jones, an environmentalist and civil rights activist, juxtaposed a pair of wire-service photos he had found online. The caption on one picturing a young white couple: “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area.” The caption accompanying a photo of an African American: “A young man walks through chest-deep floodwater after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, August 30, 2005.” Apparently, “black people ‘loot’ food,” Jones concluded, while “white people ‘find’ food.”
Eventually, Eddie Compass, the city’s top cop, would help clear the record—sort of. Sally Forman was in a borrowed house in Baton Rouge, spending a couple of days with her family, when Compass came on the TV. He spoke during a press conference carried live on CNN and MSNBC about the “vicious rumors” of children being found murdered and other wild claims made in the days after Katrina. Forman couldn’t help herself. “Chief,” she yelled at the television, “this would be a perfect time to apologize for perpetuating those rumors!” Four weeks after the storm, Nagin announced that he had accepted Compass’s resignation.
The department’s number two, Warren J. Riley, was now in charge.
RON FORMAN, SALLY’S HUSBAND, was thinking a lot about his late-night conversations with Ray Nagin in those first days after Katrina. His wife would be there, of course, and also a couple of others. The mayor would be in the corner of his suite, fiddling with his hand-cranked radio, pumping its handle, seeing if he could pick up any bits of news. Eventually, the hotel would send up some food. At first it was sandwiches and a few pieces of fruit, but then it was the military-issued MRE. “We’d eat by candlelight or flashlight and talk about what needed to be done to rebuild the city,” Forman said. “At that point, I would’ve said Ray was focused on what needed to get done. I was still a believer.”
Ron Forman tried not to feel frustrated when a week later the mayor had still failed to act on some of the ideas they had discussed. Between the zoo and the aquarium, Forman had plenty to keep him busy as head of the city’s Audubon Nature Institute, but it was hard not to think the mayor was procrastinating. The two had talked about the idea of a citizens’ commission that would oversee the rebuilding plan, and the mayor had even told Forman that he would give him first consideration as chairman. Yet there had been no movement on that idea, nor any progress on a more pressing project that the mayor had asked Forman to spearhead. CEOs of some of the globe’s best-known companies were offering help. So, too, were the famous and fabulous, from pop stars to Prince Charles to Bill Gates. The mayor said it was a great idea when Forman volunteered to take on coordination of that. Forman had even found a New York–based firm willing to log the offers and help the city sort through them all. “I’d call for follow-through,” Forman said, “but he’d just do his whole Ray-Ray thing: ‘Hey, man, what’s up, how you doing?’ Then he’d tell me he’ll need to get back to me.”
Forman had enough sense to avoid Dallas and the Business Council’s meeting with Nagin. “I stayed away from that mess,” he said. But plenty of the participants had described for him the petulant mayor who made no effort to reassure them that he was in control. Forman’s Uptown neighbors started calling him. “Where’s Ray?” neighbor after neighbor asked, and Forman would respond in a way both loyal and disloyal to a mayor he also described as a friend. He shared his own frustrations with a man who didn’t seem to want his help—who seemed to vanish when his city needed him most. But then Forman gave each the same spiel: He’s our mayor. He understands the central role business can play. He must recognize that he can’t do this by himself. “He knows he has to include us in any recovery efforts,” Forman would reassure people.
DAVID WHITE, THE FRIEND who had served as the mayor’s campaign treasurer, was in Houston when Nagin called. White didn’t hesitate when his friend asked for his help. White waited for the National Guard to gain control of the city and then headed to New Orleans. Ten days after Katrina, White set himself up in a room in the Hyatt near Nagin’s.
White was from Cleveland and had spent much of his career in Memphis, where he worked as a logistics executive for Federal Express. He didn’t arrive in the New Orleans area until the late 1980s, when he bought a pair of McDonald’s franchises in Central City—a part of New Orleans as poor as the Lower Ninth, if not as well-known. The stores were so profitable he bought two more, then sold them for a lot of money a few years before Katrina. Nagin and White had met only a couple of years before Nagin became mayor, when both joined a group of black and white businessmen working to bring professional hockey to New Orleans.VII The two had started a car-rental company together while Nagin was still running Cox in New Orleans, but the business never panned out. “I was the unofficial guy the mayor bounced ideas off of,” White said. People in City Hall described him as the mayor’s closest confidant, but that’s not to say, White said, that they were close. “Ray is a very private person,” he said. “I’m not sure he had anyone he was really close to when he was mayor.” At the Hyatt, the group around Nagin was basically his bodyguards, White, and a few key aides, such as Greg Meffert, who described his boss as “hermetically sealed.” Meffert noted, “Ray isolated himself big-time. It got very bin-Laden-in-the-cave there for a while.”
White, a practical man, figured that as bad as things were in New Orleans, they weren’t unprecedented. He researched other cities that had experienced calamity. He spent time reading up on Kobe, Japan, a city that used a catastrophic earthquake to redesign it
self, but he zeroed in on New York after September 11. The physical damage in New York was limited to a small corner of the city, whereas New Orleans saw damage to more than one hundred thousand of its homes, but he had found his template. New York had used special “Liberty” bonds, tax credits, and other tax incentives to fund its recovery. “I told Ray that’s the way I thought we should proceed, and he agreed,” White said.
But White went one step further with an idea he thought would push the bureaucrats to the side and put entrepreneurs like himself at the center of the recovery. Rather than follow the expected route and fight with the federal government over the proper size of a bailout check, he asked Nagin, why not suggest a ten-year tax holiday to any individual or business willing to move into the city limits? That represented billions in lost revenues for the US Treasury, but, as White saw it, it would short-circuit a process that otherwise would take months, if not years.
“I thought that we could get the rebuilding moving quicker than if we had to wait for an infusion of money through a government bureaucracy,” White said. The mayor loved the idea, White said, but despite pushing it hard among his new friends in Washington, his pitch never got anywhere.
White lived on the North Shore, in Mandeville, thirty-five miles north of the city. The mayor’s other key adviser early on was also a suburbanite, Joe Canizaro, who was the personal friend of the president and had Nagin scribbling over the phone while others waited in Dallas. To Canizaro, Nagin would delegate primary responsibility for putting together the blue-ribbon panel Karl Rove had said was needed to win the Bush administration’s sign-off. Jimmy Reiss, too, recommended names for what would become the Bring New Orleans Back Commission. But it was Canizaro’s commission to shape. “It was very clear to us that Joe knew what we had to do and he had the connections to do it,” Meffert said.
JOE CANIZARO WAS NOT yet thirty years old in 1965, a relative newcomer to the city, when he caught a glimpse of New Orleans that changed his life. He was working as an $800-a-month junior appraiser for a real estate company who somehow talked his way to the thirty-third-floor observation deck in a tower being built on Canal Street near the river. Most people, when atop the International Trade Mart (now the World Trade Mart), take in the views of the Mississippi and the Quarter to the north or east. Canizaro fixated on the view west. Canal and Poydras Streets converged just below him but where Canal was lined with stores and office buildings, Poydras was a narrow street of warehouses, bars, and low-rent buildings. Two years later, Canizaro had convinced the New Orleans–based Lykes Brothers Steamship Company to partner with him on a twenty-two-story building on Poydras they would call the Lykes Center. Canizaro built several towers on Poydras and also the massive—and massively successful—Canal Place at the foot of Canal Steet.
Canizaro had grown up in Biloxi, an outsider in a city that can be parochial. Even once he had made a name for himself, he still needed to go to Baton Rouge or Jackson, Mississippi, to raise funds for a new project. In some lean years Canizaro felt so overleveraged that he feared everything would crumble. Alden McDonald and Liberty were among those who over the years helped Canizaro stay afloat. By the mid-1990s, though, Canizaro was charging some of the city’s highest rents on a street crowded with high-rises. Canizaro bought a bank and funded his own venture-capital outfit. He sold two of his office towers for $133 million and made another $25 million on a suburban office park he owned. “The grandest palace in Old Metairie,” the Times-Picayune said of the house Canizaro and his wife, Sue Ellen, had built a few doors down from the Metairie Country Club. A “magnificent neoclassical mansion influenced by Palladio’s sixteenth-century Italian villas,” said the couple’s interior designer. The couple moved into the home Christmas of 2004—nine months before Katrina.
The Canizaros had talked about retreating to Crawford ahead of the storm, where they owned a spread only a few miles from George W. Bush’s ranch, but they thought it would be too hot in late August. The couple decided to ride out the storm in a $400-a-night hotel in Dallas. They told Curtis, their house manager, to expect them home as early as Tuesday. Curtis, who was black, doubled as Canizaro’s valet and driver.
Curtis called midmorning on Monday when he noticed water in the street. He called again a couple of hours later to say the water was at the front door, and then again a few hours after that to tell them he was on the second floor because the first had taken on two feet of water. The wealthier suburbs of New Orleans had remained dry; the exception was a large stretch of Old Metairie, which sat just west of the Seventeenth Street Canal. The Canizaros decided to continue west to the Utah mountains, where they also owned a home. That would be the couple’s home base for the next four months. Canizaro’s fractional ownership of a private jet helped cushion the hassles of the repeated trips he would make between Utah and Louisiana.
Canizaro spoke directly with the president in those first weeks after Katrina. Canizaro had been one of Bush’s earliest financial supporters when the then governor was first creating a presidential exploratory committee. Canizaro had attained Ranger status—that of someone who raised at least $200,000—during the president’s reelection campaign. In 2008, Canizaro would rank as one of John McCain’s top bundlers, raising more than $500,000 for the Republican nominee. In 2012, Canizaro hosted a $50,000-a-plate fund-raiser at his home for Mitt Romney, the evening’s special guest.
Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Canizaro as just another wealthy white businessman serving as a banker to the Republican Party. Maybe it was because of his daughter, whose struggles with addiction he spoke about so openly. “It makes you humble,” Canizaro said. “It makes you stop and realize it’s not just the problems of these ‘other people.’ ” Perhaps it was because of his experiences as a developer in a majority-black city, which had made him recognize that if you wanted to get anything done in modern New Orleans, it helped to have allies in the African-American community. “Joe has proven a good friend to our community,” Alden McDonald said.
Canizaro’s first big foray into the civic arena came five years before Katrina. He put up the seed money for a group he called the Committee for a Better New Orleans. The old Canizaro would have put himself in charge, certain he knew what was best for the city. He still named himself chairman, but added two African-American cochairs—Norman Francis, the president of Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation’s only historically black Catholic university, and the founding chairman of Liberty Bank; and also Barbara Major, a local community activist. “We had serious problems in this city,” Canizaro said. “Education. Crime. Housing. I came to appreciate that no way were we going to get to a solution unless we included everyone.” To round out the group, he appointed a long list of local African-American leaders, including Alden McDonald, as well as Uptown blue bloods and downtown business interests. “We have enough people in here who hate each other,” Major said at an early meeting, “to make sure this process works.” The resulting report, “Blueprint for a Better New Orleans,” released in 2002, was impressive in its breadth and specificity, even as it was ignored by the new Nagin administration. For his efforts, the majority-black City Council declared September 10, 2003, “Joe C. Canizaro Day.”
Nagin and Canizaro met around two weeks after Katrina in Baton Rouge at the executive center where Canizaro would stay when he was in town. The rich white Republican from the suburbs seemed to care more about getting a diverse mix on the citizens’ commission Nagin would soon be naming than Nagin himself. Nagin’s initial list seemed as if it had been drawn up by Jimmy Reiss—predominantly white with a few token blacks. “Mr. Mayor,” Canizaro counseled, “you need to better reflect the community if this group is going to have any legitimacy.” It would be a struggle, Canizaro said, “because the mayor was allowing himself to be pulled by these other interests.” A final decision came “at least ten days later than it should have,” by Canizaro’s reckoning, but in the end eight African Americans were on the seventeen-member commission and eight whites, wi
th a single Latino. The list included David White, who said he was “chosen to be the mayor’s eyes and ears on the commission.” Ron Forman would not make the cut, though the mayor acknowledged he had told Forman he would give him “first consideration” as chairman, but Jimmy Reiss, persona non grata in some circles after his comments to the Wall Street Journal, was included. “I’m not one to throw people off because they’re controversial,” Nagin said of the Reiss selection. “You need some edginess, especially in this town.”
There was no edge to Mel Lagarde, whom Nagin chose as one of two people to cochair the commission. Lagarde—or, more formally, Maurice L. Lagarde III—was a top executive at HCA, the health care giant. He was a member of the Uptown royalty, a blue blood in good standing with a big house on St. Charles. He was a Nagin ally and a friend of Canizaro with a seat on his bank’s board of directors. With his bland good looks, Lagarde was a chubby-faced son of Uptown who never uttered a controversial word if he could help it. “Mel,” said a fellow member of the commission, “was the white rice you throw into a gumbo to cut the spice.”