by Gary Rivlin
Federal prosecutors had assembled a strong case—so seemingly airtight that the legal experts trotted out by the media all seemed to assume the former mayor would accept the lighter sentence the government was offering him in exchange for a guilty plea. One by one, others indicted by the US Attorney’s office in New Orleans had agreed to testify against the mayor in return for leniency. Those included not only Greg Meffert, the former chief technology officer and close Nagin confidant who had pled guilty to taking more than $600,000 in kickbacks,I but also several executives who had done business with the city. One, Rodney Williams, the owner of Three Fold Consultants, claimed his firm had had no success securing city business until he and his partners invested $60,000 in Stone Age, the countertop-installation business Nagin owned with his two sons. After that, they secured nearly two dozen city contracts worth $3 million. Williams pled guilty to bribery in 2012. Frank Fradella, the former CEO of Home Solutions of America, told a similar story. Eager to capitalize on the billions in recovery dollars being spent in New Orleans, Fradella, who’d pled guilty to bribery charges in 2013, invested $50,000 in Stone Age, sent the company two truckloads of free granite, and picked up the tab for the private plane that flew Nagin, Meffert, and others to a Saints play-off game in Chicago in 2007. Home Solutions of America received $4 million in contracts for post-Katrina repair work.II
If found guilty, Nagin was looking at the possibility of twenty or more years in jail, but the former mayor denied he had done anything wrong. “I really think he believed he could Ray-Ray his way out of a jail sentence,” Ron Forman said.
The morning Nagin was slated to testify, he arrived at court looking carefree, carrying a take-out cup of coffee. He joked with people he knew in the hallway and winked at others. Inside the courtroom, his lawyer walked him through his story, and Nagin, looking relaxed, spoke to the jury. On the witness stand, he was again the affable elected official boasting of all he had done to help the citizens of New Orleans in a crisis. He assured the jury that the safeguards he had put in place meant that not even he, as the city’s chief executive, could show favoritism to any contractor. He made jokes and maintained his breezy attitude even after the prosecutor began his cross-examination. Nagin’s lawyer complained that Assistant US Attorney Matthew Coman was crowding his client, but Nagin said he didn’t mind. He invited his adversary to get as close as he’d like. “I can deal with it,” the former mayor said. “We’re friends.”
Nagin’s facade began to crack his second day on the witness stand. The mayor’s smile grew thin as Coman walked Nagin through the trove of text messages, e-mails, and other incriminating documents the government had unearthed. The more Nagin denied Coman’s accusations that he had sold his office for personal gain, the testier he grew. “Come on, man,” Nagin snapped, “you’re a very seasoned attorney. Let’s do this right.” The former mayor refused to agree to basic facts, questioning even his signature at the bottom of a letter. He blamed others—his secretary, his accountant, a city attorney—for documents that cast him in an unflattering light. Katrina was his excuse for personal flights that had been purchased with a city credit card (who had time for accurate record keeping in the midst of a crisis?) and his explanation for why he wouldn’t know that a city contractor had picked up the cost of a private jet. He was working twenty hours a day to rebuild his broken city, he said. So what if sometimes he had the city pay for a meal with his family? “You have no idea what it was like,” an exhausted Nagin told Coman.
The jury convicted Nagin on twenty of the twenty-one counts brought by the government. Six months later, Judge Ginger Berrigan sentenced the former mayor to ten years in prison. Prosecutors had been pushing for a stiffer punishment, but Berrigan, a former defense attorney appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton, cited Nagin’s age (fifty-eight) when announcing her sentence, along with the irreparable harm he had done to his own reputation, and the unlikelihood he would ever again be in a position to violate the public trust. The Nagins had lost their Dallas town house through a foreclosure sale and were living on food stamps, according to a letter Seletha Nagin had written to Judge Berrigan prior to her husband’s sentencing. Despite their pleas of poverty, Berrigan ordered the former mayor to pay more than $500,000 in fines. Nagin would appeal his conviction, said his high-priced defense attorney, who then filed paperwork removing himself from the case. “The defendant in this matter is indigent,” he wrote, and therefore eligible for representation by the federal public defender’s office.
Nagin, defiant to the end, refused to apologize for violating the public trust. Instead he tied his prosecution to his outspokenness in the days and weeks after his city had flooded. “Some of the stances that I took after Katrina didn’t sit well with some very powerful people,” Nagin told a local television reporter the day of his sentencing. “So now I’m paying the price for that.” In September 2014, Nagin began serving his sentence in a federal prison in Texarkana, Texas.
MITCH LANDRIEU WAS ELECTED to a second term—two days after opening arguments in Nagin’s trial. Landrieu’s chief challenger was a sixty-one-year-old black man named Michael Bagneris, a district court judge who relinquished his post to enter the race. Bagneris spoke often about the “forgotten New Orleans” and hammered at a police department where morale was so low, the city was nearly four hundred officers short of its hiring goals. The number of people murdered fell in 2012 and 2013, mirroring national trends, but the city’s homicide rate was still nine times the national average and nearly four times higher than that of similar-size cities. Bagneris fared well in lower-income precincts and parts of New Orleans East, but Landrieu, who had been endorsed by Barack Obama, trounced his foe in the rest of the city. Landrieu captured 82 percent of the white vote and 44 percent of the black vote, allowing him to claim broad support in this majority-black city.
The African-American community was not without its victories in 2014. In that election season, blacks reclaimed the majority in the City Council, and Sheriff Marlin Gusman, one of the few African Americans to hold parishwide office, was reelected to another term. That summer, police chief Ronal Serpas resigned, allowing Landrieu to replace him with a black man, a popular district commander with twenty-three years on the force. WBOK’s John Slade, however, was not impressed. “Lord Little Mitch decides to do something, finally, about a police chief he should’ve gotten rid of years ago?” Slade said. “And we’re supposed to be happy?”
CONNIE UDDO LINGERED OVER coffee at a café in Lakeview a few days before the ninth anniversary of Katrina. She felt proud of all that she had accomplished, but mainly she felt at peace. Each year since the fifth anniversary, she had thought that would be the last she saw of the church groups and college kids who descended on New Orleans to help during spring break and the summer months. But even eight years after the storm, she was coordinating crews of sixty to eighty volunteers a day all that summer. “This is the first year we didn’t get a huge influx of volunteers,” she said in August 2014.
Uddo was playing tennis again. She chatted about the big trip she was taking with Mark to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. With a sense of wonder, she realized that her phone had not rung once in the two hours she had been sitting there. At 11:00 a.m. on a workday, there was no place she needed to be. Her eyes were bright, her face relaxed. “This is the first time I feel truly rested since the storm.” Finally, nine years after Katrina, Uddo said, “I don’t cry at everything.”
Mack McClendon bought a 1959 Austin-Healey in August 2014. He still couldn’t bring himself to attend an antique-auto show all these years after Katrina, but he was looking forward to tinkering on a car again. “My plan is to start working on it this week,” he said four days before the ninth anniversary of Katrina. “It seems time.” By then, the bank had seized the strange-shaped, multicolored building that had come to symbolize the Lower Ninth’s struggle to rebuild. McClendon was living in a borrowed home a few blocks away. Where he would be living in a year wasn’t clear.
McClendon seemed more resigned than angry with the approach of the ninth anniversary. Sitting in Café Dauphine, the Lower Ninth Ward’s lone restaurant, he spoke with ambivalence about the newcomers who had discovered his corner of the city. New Orleans had always been a gumbo, he said, “a mix of everyone and everything.” In a community only one-third occupied nearly a decade after the storm, how could he resent the smattering of whites who had moved there to help them rebuild?
Yet he thought of Bywater, which he still considered part of the Upper Ninth Ward, on the other side of the Industrial Canal. People he knew there had been priced out now that the modest-size cottage that was selling for $80,000 before Katrina cost more than $200,000. He said that more whites would inevitably cross the bridge in search of cheap housing and transform the Lower Ninth into a majority-white community. “I give it twenty years,” he said.
McClendon, however, wouldn’t live long enough to see whether he was right. He had lost his home through foreclosure and then his center. And at the end of 2014, he was told he had terminal brain cancer. He died less than three months later, in February 2015.
THE USUAL MEMORIALS, MASSES, and speeches marked the ninth anniversary of Katrina in August 2014. That morning the mayor spoke at a wreath-laying ceremony at a Hurricane Katrina memorial in Mid-City, where nearly a hundred unclaimed, unidentified bodies were entombed in a semicircle of black-marble mausoleums. There, Landrieu performed his usual balancing act, declaring New Orleans “America’s greatest comeback story,” while also noting that his administration had more work to do. At an event in the Lower Ninth Ward, a malfunctioning sound system forced the roster of speakers to shout. Their speeches were followed by a second-line parade to the site of the levee breach that had flooded the Lower Ninth, in honor of those who had lost their lives that day.
At 1:00 p.m., an advocacy group called the African American Leadership Project held a press conference in front of City Hall. Their purpose, two of its founders announced in an op-ed appearing in the previous day’s Times-Picayune, was to challenge the city’s “self-medicating illusion of progress.” “We believe that insufficient attention is paid to the uneven outcomes of the city’s so-called grand transformation,” said Gail Glapion, the group’s founding chairwoman. A doctor spoke of inequities in the health care system, a parent advocate decried a school system she believed was leaving too many black children behind. Nine years after the state’s seemingly temporary takeover of New Orleans’s failing schools, she noted, not a single one had been returned to local control. To help stir media interest, the organizers had also enlisted Oliver Thomas, the former City Council president, who, postprison, had reinvented himself as the drive-time morning host on WBOK.
Organizers had asked Thomas to talk for a few minutes about the growing disparity between black and white in a time of growth. Yet what struck Thomas when it was his turn to speak was the lack of local media. A single reporter had shown up for their press conference—an out-of-town author who was scheduled to eat lunch with him afterward. “Had this been a press conference about a young black boy or black girl doing something wrong, every news station in town would be here,” Thomas said. “But when we hold a news conference about the state of things in black New Orleans? When we want to talk about what’s going on with the majority of the population and that’s not news? That, ladies and gentlemen, shows you how much they care about us.”
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I. Meffert was sentenced to thirty months in prison.
II. Both Williams and Fradella received a one-year prison sentence.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has been in the works for some years and therefore my debt load is high. My eternal gratitude is owed to those who gave so generously of their time, starting with Alden McDonald, who was harried and overburdened the first time I met him but nonetheless allowed me in his life in the midst of the chaos. Thanks as well to the Wall sisters, Mack McClendon, Connie Uddo, Jacques Morial, Bill Hines, and a long list of others I’ve gone back to so many times that I feared I was becoming a pest.
I’ll be forever grateful to the New York Times for sending me to New Orleans post-Katrina. I want to thank Larry Ingrassia, Tom Redburn, and Kevin McKenna for the trust they showed in me, and Jill Abramson for making me part of the storm team. Paula Dwyer was a terrific editor who always made my copy smarter in those first crazy weeks after the levees broke, and I can’t say enough about David Firestone, the storm editor and our fearless, implacable leader. The Times made an extraordinary commitment to the rebuilding story under executive editor Bill Keller. I feel lucky to have been enlisted in the cause.
I was fortunate to have found an ideal home post-Times with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. The Investigative Fund was no stranger to the New Orleans narrative, having given A. C. Thompson the first rounds of funding he needed to report his extraordinary, groundbreaking piece, “Katrina’s Hidden Race War.” My editor at the Investigative Fund, Esther Kaplan, was wonderfully supportive even as this book intruded on other projects. Thanks as well to Joe Conason, Sarah Blustain, and Taya Kitman.
I’ll love forever Lori Cobb of Lori Cobb Reporting in Baton Rouge for sharing with me the depositions that let me begin puzzling together what happened on the Crescent City Connection in those first few days after Katrina. I’m also indebted to Allison Plyer, executive director of the Data Center; Richard Campanella, the city’s unofficial official geographer and a professor at Tulane; Lawrence Powell, an emeritus professor at Tulane and author who agreed to read the passages I had written about the city’s history; and Edward E. Chervenak, a professor of political science at the University of New Orleans and director of UNO’s Survey Research Center. Beverly McKenna, the publisher of the New Orleans Tribune, did me a great kindness by allowing me to spend long blocks of time inside the Tribune’s offices, going through archives. So, too, did marketing maven Bill Rouselle, when he made me copies of videotaped interviews with Alden McDonald and Norman Francis in anticipation of Liberty Bank’s fortieth anniversary. Thanks, too, to Liberty’s Ann Marie Allen.
Somewhere between the sixth and seventh anniversaries of Katrina, I wrote a fan letter to a political science professor named Caroline Heldman. In a single blog post, Heldman, who teaches at Occidental College, had seemed to capture the entirety of the New Orleans story post-Katrina. Heldman helped give shape to this book and then proved a careful and demanding reader after she generously agreed to read a draft manuscript. As if that were not contribution enough, she also recruited to the cause two of her more promising, New Orleans–loving students. Rebecca Cooper and Aaron Silvers proved great research assistants: smart, able, diligent.
I wish in the life of every writer an editor like Jon Karp—sharp-eyed, supportive, loyal. The two of us first began talking about a book about the rebuilding of New Orleans post-Katrina a few months after the storm—and rather than tire of the topic, Jon encouraged me to resurrect the idea for Simon & Schuster. He compounded this gift to me by assigning the book to Ben Loehnen, who has sometimes seemed more collaborator than editor in the three years we’ve been working together. I couldn’t have asked for a more talented, incisive, and committed editor. My watchwords throughout: In Ben I trust.
My thanks also to Steve Boldt, Brit Hvide, and Jonathan Evans for the care they showed in going through my manuscript. And thanks to my mother, Naomi Rivlin, whose boss considers her the best proofreader with whom he has ever worked. As always, she gave the book one last read to catch those pesky mistakes that somehow had gotten by the rest of us.
I was lucky early in my writing career to have teamed up with Elizabeth Kaplan, superagent. Elizabeth is wise, kind, and always there for me—even serving as occasional aunt when I’ve needed extra writing time. I also want to thank John Raeside, who has always played a special role in my writing life.
Geoff Sanborn played hero by giving my draft a speedy read at an anxious time—and then served as English professor with useful comments,
suggestions, and corrections. This manuscript was also improved by suggestions from the two Mikes, Loftin and Kelly. I also want to thank others who helped me keep my moorings through this project: Jonathan Rabinovitz, Sue Matteucci, Mike Buchman, and Jeff Cohen. Thanks, too, to Jackie Stewart and Dina Harris, keeper of the cabin where large sections of this book were written. Thanks as well to Linda Santi, my sometime New Orleans landlord.
My two sons, Oliver and Silas, kept a smile on my face through the endurance test that is the writing of a book. And my spouse, Daisy Walker—this book wouldn’t be possible without my Daisy. She picked up the slack when I needed more writing time. She provided the love and support when that was what I needed. And she also proved a terrific editor, if not a sometimes brutal one. For Daisy, who provided every kind of help I needed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary Rivlin, an investigative reporting fellow at The Nation Institute, is a former New York Times reporter and the author of five books, including most recently Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.—How the Working Poor Became Big Business. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, GQ, and Wired, among other publications.
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