Basketball was Thomas’s ticket out of the Lower Ninth. After graduating from Clark High School, he was recruited as a forward to the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and given a scholarship. Uncomfortable in Wisconsin’s cold climate, Thomas transferred to the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Surrounded by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and finding art galleries even down gravel roads, Thomas flourished. He got involved in drama and studying Native American painters such as R. C. Gorman. Watching the famous dramatization of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road was to him a revelatory experience, poverty transformed into art. “I became an artsy person,” Thomas explained. “Native American art helped me understand my plight; they were always expressing their plight and victories on canvas. I said that I was never moving back to New Orleans. To me New Orleans was a place you could socialize but not advance.”
In 1985, after living in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, Thomas did come back. His mother was ill and he wanted to take care of her. Quick on his feet, he got a job at Hughes Aircraft, dabbled in sales, and eventually found his way working as an assistant to veteran City Councilman Jim Singleton. “Jim was a real hard-edged military person at the time,” Thomas recalled. “A lot of community issues, issues for women, gays, and lesbians—he was hard on those issues. And I was always of the opinion that everyone mattered. Even if you don’t agree with them, they’re human beings. So I think I helped Jim be more tolerant, to understand people.”
Entering politics, Thomas became a spokesperson for the underdog, New Orleans’s tireless proponent of affordable housing for the poor and a lobbyist for all things advantageous to the Lower Ninth. Urban planning became his bailiwick and he spearheaded an effort to refurbish historic homes in the Lower Garden District, transforming the neighborhood from skid row to middle-class prosperity.
But it was the Lower Ninth that had Thomas worried those last days of August. It was New Orleans’s orphan neighborhood, separated geographically from the rest of the city by the Industrial Canal. Historically, the Lower Ninth was grossly neglected. When the rest of New Orleans had running water and sewers, it had open drainage canals. When every other ward had paved streets, it had dirt roads. After Katrina, Newsweek did a story delineating the Lower Ninth’s chronic urban problems, deeming the area fifteen times more crime-ridden than New York City.17 Suspicion of the “white power structure” was part of the neighborhood’s DNA, and in the Family Tree Restaurant on St. Claude Avenue on the eve of Katrina, Lower Ninthers were talking about how rich honkies were going to dynamite the levees (a repeat of 1927) and turn Reynes Street into a river. Ironically, even though the neighborhood was troubled, 60 percent of the residents were home owners, compared with 46 percent in the rest of New Orleans. “Washington D.C., Baton Rouge, the city leaders, they just don’t have any idea of the history of that all-black community,” Thomas said. “They’ve been pissed on before. They’re used to it. They survived it. And that little property down there, it may not be much but it’s theirs. People took pride in owning those little shacks.”
Realizing the inherent stubbornness of the Lower Ninth, Thomas spent Saturday going door-to-door like some college-age canvasser, telling everybody to evacuate. He wasn’t just playing politician. Thomas himself had been a hurricane survivor. Back in 1965, when Betsy came to town, Oliver’s parents had refused to evacuate, and lived to regret their recalcitrance. “I told everybody that as a child, the scariest thing in my life was Hurricane Betsy,” Thomas said. “You listen to the wind coming through the cracks in your house, the breaking windows, the howling sound.” Betsy flooded out the Thomas home; they were stranded, in fact, for a day on their rooftop and had to be saved by the Coast Guard. Forty years later, as a city councilman, Thomas was in a position to make sure Lower Ninth folks like his parents, people afraid to leave the one thing they owned, dropped their antagonism toward municipal warnings.
At one juncture on Saturday, while Thomas was on Claiborne Avenue, he spotted Frank Watson, an old friend, walking down the sidewalk. “Where are you going?” Thomas shouted at him. “I’m goin’ home,” Watson replied. “Why are you still here?” Thomas shot back. A smile broke out on Watson’s face and he shook his head in disbelief; his childhood buddy was acting like an old grandma worrywart. “Oliver, come on now,” he said. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Y’all always talkin’ about leaving and every time we leave and just turn around and come right back.”
Such stubbornness was typical of everybody Thomas knew in the Lower Ninth Ward; they were like mules with no sleep. “Ah, cut it out,” Thomas said. “Come on now, Frank, I don’t feel good about this one.”
Watson never evacuated, and his conversation with Councilman Thomas was the last he was known to have. He was never found after the storm.
III
While the worlds of business, academics, and politics were responding to the latest news, some were strangely isolated from it. Louisiana, and especially New Orleans, like much of America, was divided by class, race, and neighborhood. The rich, for the most part white, were living in Lakeview, Mid-City, Uptown, the Garden District, the Warehouse District, and in the French Quarter. The poor were mostly African American, living predominantly in New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward, Central City, Hollygrove, and Tremé. But there was crossover in all neighborhoods. At least, that is the way it looked at first sight. The truth was far more complex. There were many varieties of African Americans, some of whom were the light-skinned Creoles, who had been the political leaders of the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Wards for decades. The poorest New Orleanians were country folk from the delta, who had been coming to the city looking for jobs since the woeful days of the Great Depression. They were the people of the housing projects; by and large, they didn’t trust whites or cops.
The prisonlike projects of New Orleans were beehives for drug trafficking. Hoodlums armed with AK-47s could make up to $50,000 a week dealing crack cocaine. (The marijuana trade had moved primarily out to the white suburbs.) The drugs would flow into New Orleans via I-10 and I-12. The projects became a virtual farmers’ market of drugs. The NOPD often turned a blind eye to the “rock dealers,” making sure they received a cash cut for their enabling services. The drug suppliers were sometimes Iranians, called Talibans by local African Americans. In some cases, the suppliers were Vietnamese, as were those at the convenience store beside the St. Thomas project, where crack cocaine was sold in bubble gum wrappers. All over the projects five- or ten-dollar bags of heroin were readily available. The rivalry for control of the illegal drug industry turned New Orleans’s housing projects into killing fields. Every week the Times-Picayune would list the names of the dead, casualties in urban gang warfare, with the phrase “gunshot wound” closing the cases on autopsy reports.
Even outside of the projects, there was an imprisoned quality to life for poor blacks. Housing was relatively inexpensive in New Orleans, with an average monthly rent of $488, but it tended to be flimsy wood-frame construction that would be considered substandard in other cities. Small houses, barely more than shanties, and “shotgun” two-family structures were common in the poorer neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods were insulated from mainstream life in a way that made being poor in New Orleans a special hardship. “New Orleans has a 40 percent literacy rate; over 50 percent of black ninth graders won’t graduate in four years,” Michael Eric Dyson explained in Come Hell or High Water, his post-Katrina study of race relations in America. “Louisiana expends an average of $4,724 per student and has the third-lowest rank for teacher salaries in the nation. The black dropout rates are high and nearly 50,000 students cut class every day. When they are done with school, many young black males end up at Angola Prison, a correctional facility located on a former plantation where inmates still perform manual farm labor, and where 90 percent of them eventually die. New Orleans’s employment picture is equally gloomy, since industry long ago deserted the city, leaving in its place a service economy that caters to tourists and that thrives on low-paying,
transient, and unstable jobs.”18
Although New Orleans has been branded “jazz capital” (rightfully so), in truth, on the eve of Katrina, one would be hard-pressed to hear Wynton Marsalis or Irvin Mayfield CDs blaring out of federally subsidized housing. Jazz had become establishment music except for the brass band phenomenon. Times had changed. Louis Armstrong had fled New Orleans long ago, living his last decades in Queens, New York, where he was buried in July 1971. But hiphop and rap were flourishing, angry lyrics being shouted out of Magnolia and St. Bernard and Iberville. Drum machines and turntables had replaced trumpets and trombones as the instruments of choice. Master P, raised in the Calliope Projects, was a true hiphop hero to African-American youths, admired both for such outrageous hits as “99 Ways to Die” and for being CEO and founder of No Limit Records. Then there was B.G., the Baby Gangsta, who at age eleven signed a major recording deal with Cash Money Records. His first album, True Story, released in 1993, graphically depicted life in a crime-ridden, racist New Orleans where schools were like prisons. He was accurately depicting his reality, no matter how uncomfortable his lyrics might make some listeners. Terius Gray, a.k.a. Juvenile, was a pure product of the Magnolia Projects—or “Wild Magnolia” as he called it. His first band was UTP, three letters he has tattooed on his stomach. “UTP,” he explained, “was like a coalition of rappers.” His hiphop lyrics lambasted New Orleans’s racism and classism in a searing, no-holds-barred, in-your-face fashion. Growing up in the Hollygrove section of New Orleans, Lil’ Wayne (Dwayne Carter), also known as Weezy F Baby, Birdman Junior, and Raw Tunes, wrote dozens of gangsta rap hits while still in his teens. To understand the African-American youth culture of New Orleans during August 2005, put aside CDs like The Magic Hour and Half Past Autumn Suite and listen to the bleak, thuggish, violent inner-city lyrics of Lil’ Wayne in such songs as “Shooter,” where he raps: “So many doubt cuz I come from the south / But when I open my mouth, all bullets come out.”19
Hiphop-infused gang members were frequently arrested in New Orleans. They were usually let go before trial. In August 2005, the Metropolitan Crime Commission completed an extensive analysis of the arrest-to-conviction success between the NOPD and the District Attorney’s office, headed by Eddie Jordan. During the preceding year, 2004, the NOPD had made 114,000 arrests. Only 17,004 of those arrests, however, were for state offenses, and the breakdown of that number was about 60 percent felonies and 40 percent misdemeanors. In any case, only 7 percent of those 17,004 people who were arrested were actually sent to jail. The NOPD, in other words, was arresting a lot of criminals, but very few were being convicted. Most arrestees walked in the front door of the city jail and then, after signing a couple of forms, walked out the back door. “So the reason I think that we have a high crime rate is that police measured success by arrests,” explained Rafael C. Goyeneche III, president of the commission, a watchdog group dedicated to keeping repeat offenders off the streets and the NOPD honest, “and not how many of the arrests resulted in incarceration or incapacitation.”20
On the eve of Katrina, New Orleans was a city of 460,000; the 114,000 arrests made there in 2005 reflected a rate of one for every four adult citizens had been arrested by the NOPD. Quite understandably, many citizens felt the NOPD was overzealous in arrests and underzealous in follow-up. New Orleans’s juries often didn’t trust the arresting NOPD officers’ credibility. Often DA Jordan had to drop cases because the arresting officer simply refused to be a witness. Many bad guys—drug kingpins or child molesters—were let go on technicalities because of sloppy NOPD paperwork. To put it simply, the NOPD was high on street action and low on desk work. In 2005 only 12 percent of the people arrested for homicide were convicted, which meant that 88 percent of those arrested were free to walk the streets. Murderers were wandering around New Orleans as Katrina approached, in large measure because the NOPD didn’t know how to work the judicial system.
But there were able officers in the department on the eve of Katrina, cops who were determined to clean up the corruption. “You have to be by the book,” Warren Riley said late in 2005, after becoming superintendent, explaining the need for a new era of public integrity in the NOPD. “That’s the bottom line. I think that accountability is vital, swift punishment is absolutely necessary. Even within an organization, like the law enforcement organization, the officers need to fear the administration. They need to believe that if they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, they’re going to suffer the consequences…termination, prosecution, whatever.”21
IV
At forty-six Warren Riley, as husky as a Russian weight lifter, with the facial features of a puffy Hank Aaron, was in many respects an old-fashioned community cop. The youngest of five children, he was the first person in his family to earn a college degree. Combating racism was a reality the Riley family faced head-on. His father, Sam, who hailed from Wilson, Louisiana, never let verbal slights by whites get under his skin. His mother, Selma, however, was a child of a woman raped by a white man. “My mother was half-white,” Riley explained. “Her mother was an African-American female who worked in a grocery store in Plaquemines. The story that my mother told was that the white Irishman store owner, when his wife left, raped her, at least one time. So my mother was a very fair-complexioned lady, long straight hair.”22
Riley’s father worked three jobs as a maintenance man to keep the family together. A stern disciplinarian, he made Warren take responsibility for household chores. As a student at Booker T. Washington High School from 1974 to 1978, Warren seldom encountered racism, although he admits white gangs and black gangs sometimes fought on Walmsey Avenue. Ironically, it was a white NOPD officer named Tom Fierce who influenced Riley’s decision to become a cop. A true community officer, Fierce would bring football helmets and pads to give to the poorer African-American kids in the playground. This impressed Riley immensely. The police were the good guys, especially Fierce. Riley’s sports hero was also white: quarterback Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts. “Something about the crew cut,” he later reflected on Unitas, “the clean-cut look he had.” Riley’s favorite subject was history, particularly battlefield heroics ranging in time from the Crusades to World War II, but he also enjoyed TV detective shows. He recognized that men in uniform garnered society’s respect. “My mother was a maid somewhere and my father went to pick her up and it was this big house,” Riley said. “That was the first time I saw a community where I realized there was something really different between these homes and my community. But what drove me was I was just the kind of person who wanted the house and the picket fence and the two kids and the car. So, becoming a police officer, initially for me, it was just a stepping-stone. It was a job, an opportunity to get a car, to get an apartment.”
Oddly, Riley would claim that his inaugural encounter with racism came when he joined the NOPD in 1979. “It was clearly an internally segregated system back then,” Riley explained. “You’d go to roll call, blacks would sit on one side of the room, whites would sit on the other side of the room. It was very seldom that blacks and whites rode together in the Sixth District, where I was working…. We merely existed in our own worlds.” Back then, Riley said white officers harbored a death wish for their black colleagues. Over twenty-five years later, he remembered the chilling words he heard from a couple of different white officers: “Don’t call for any help ’cause nobody’s coming.”23
From 1984 to 1989, the NOPD had Riley working vice in the St. Bernard Housing Development in the Ninth Ward. He became an undercover narcotics agent, staying out of Uptown, where folks might recognize him. It was known as the “teas and blues” circuit—a homemade concoction of the barbiturate Talwin (teas) and antihistamines (blues), which, when injected, hyped abusers up, making them violent. Unlike heroin, which tended to make junkies lethargic and easygoing, or marijuana, which the police largely ignored, crack cocaine was something that vice wanted to get off the streets. Eight balls (eight ounces) of crack cocaine were selling for $400.
The NOPD needed somebody young to become an undercover drug dealer, and Riley was in his late twenties. “I was set up in an apartment and I’m selling drugs back to the drug dealers,” Riley recalled.
There was no question that Riley was a tough, uncompromising narc. He believed in swift punishment for drug dealers, whom he deemed scum, just like those who were committing theft, burglarizing homes, and even murdering people. “I was never looking at it in a humanitarian way, so to speak, like ‘these guys need a break,’” Riley said. “I grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood. The big thing then was sniffing glue…. I had two outstanding parents. That’s what made the difference in my life. So there was no regret. Never did I think about what was going to happen to these guys [once arrested].”
On the eve of Katrina, Riley was living in Algiers. He had run against Marlon Gusman for Orleans Parish criminal sheriff in the previous fall and had lost. He was, however, deputy chief of police of the NOPD. Riley was determined to stick out the storm, to start rescuing people if necessary when it passed. With media training by the FBI, he was, in police jargon, a “command presence.” To his credit, Riley tried to be proactive about preparing the department for the impending storm. But as number two, there was only so much he could do. Worried that the NOPD had antiquated radio communication that would have made Marconi jeer, he put out a search for satellite phones. He contacted the National Guard, requesting that they put five boats in each district station so his men could get around if it flooded. But the Guard nixed the idea, preferring to keep them all at Jackson Barracks, its headquarters. Located on St. Claude Avenue, nestled on 100 acres, Jackson Barracks was created in 1834 to offer logistical assistance to far-flung Mississippi River Valley forts. A campus of fine brick buildings with white columns, the facility had been used earlier in 2005 by film director Steven Zaillian as a set for his remake of All the King’s Men. This was where the Louisiana National Guard was going to make its stand during Katrina. Unfortunately that pre-Katrina weekend, feeling safe from the hurricane, the Guard was bringing rescue equipment like boats and high-water vehicles to the compound, not out of it. As fate would have it, Jackson Barracks got wiped out. Good-bye, trucks.
The Great Deluge Page 7