Katrina: After the Flood (59 page)

Government, after pressure from community groups around the city, was doing a better job of maintaining properties under its control, though at a steep cost. The state was spending millions a year cutting the grass and maintaining the insurance on homes that had ended up in the Louisiana land trust because their owners had opted to give up their property under the Road Home program. The city launched a Nuisance Lot Maintenance program with work crews trying to combat the underbrush in those patches of the city where the vegetation was threatening to take over.

A TEACHER NAMED GWENDOLYN RIDGLEY
received welcome news a couple of months before the seventh anniversary of Katrina. Ridgley, who had been trapped in her attic for two days after Katrina, had worked for the Orleans Parish schools for thirty-two years when, along with seven thousand of her fellow employees, she was fired by the school district. In June 2012, a state judge ruled in favor of Ridgley in the class action lawsuit she and other teachers had filed. The district didn’t follow
its own rules before terminating its employees, the judge ruled, and then compounded its mistake by failing to give tenured preference as new schools opened after the storm. The judge awarded Ridgley $480,000 in back pay and damages, a decision that meant the schools faced a possible $1.5 billion judgment.
^III

The Super Bowl was held at the Superdome—now officially the Mercedes-Benz Superdome—at the start of 2013. New Orleans had hosted nine of the first thirty-six Super Bowls, but this was its first since Katrina. Mitch Landrieu seemed intent on showing off his city. Banners were hung throughout the central business district while crews spent a month giving the airport a makeover. A new streetcar line connecting the stadium to the French Quarter and other tourist spots was inaugurated days before the game. They even prettied up the Lower Ninth with palm trees along St. Claude and Claiborne Avenues. “Now, isn’t that ridiculous?” asked school principal Doris Hicks. Her school was still teaching some students in trailers, and blight was everywhere. “And here the city is spending all these millions of dollars for the Super Bowl while people around the city want to know when the city might have the money to fix the streets or fix a sidewalk?”

RAY NAGIN CONTINUED TO
make the occasional cameo. He released a memoir,
Katrina’s Secrets: Storms after the Storm
, about those few weeks he was the best-known mayor in America. “It was towards the end of my final term as mayor that I started to get significant encouragement to document what really happened after Hurricane Katrina,” he wrote in the opening pages. Apparently, though, none of those doing the encouraging were in the book business as Nagin needed to pay to
self-publish his work. He was invited on the
Today
show to promote it and also
The Daily Show
, where Jon Stewart asked him what he’d been up to since leaving office. “I’m doing disaster consulting,” Nagin began. Stewart laughed, thinking the former mayor was making a joke, and then launched into his own shtick: “I do disaster recovery. I sell hair-care products.”

Nagin had been out of office for nearly two years when the news broke that he was the target of a federal investigation. A grand jury, the
Times-Picayune
’s David Hammer reported in February 2012, was looking at whether the former mayor accepted bribes and favors from people doing business with the city. By then, Greg Meffert had cut a deal with the US Attorney’s office and was telling prosecutors everything he knew. So, too, were several city vendors facing federal indictment. Meffert claimed his former boss knew that a city contractor was paying the bill for the trips to Hawaii and Jamaica that he, Meffert, arranged on behalf of Nagin and his family. (Meffert also claimed this same city contractor paid for $1,500 in landscaping work at the mayor’s house after Katrina.) In a more damning line of inquiry, federal investigators were asking if Nagin arranged for the president of a home-restoration company to secure tens of millions in city contracts in exchange for help with the countertop-installation business Nagin and his sons had founded.

The former mayor would again be in the news when he and his wife sold their Park Island home. The Nagins initially asked $729,000 for a place they had bought for $345,000 in 1998, but ultimately lowered the asking price to $525,000. The house sold for $485,000 in July 2012. Seven years after Katrina, the public face of New Orleans to much of the world lived in a two-bedroom town house in a Dallas suburb. There, five hundred miles from New Orleans, the former mayor learned the news, in January 2013, seven-plus years after the storm, that the federal government was indicting him on twenty-one counts of public corruption, including fraud, bribery, and tax evasion.

SUPERSTORM SANDY ALSO PUT
New Orleans back in the national news in October 2012, seven years after Katrina. Sandy caused 160 deaths
compared to the 1,800-plus who died because of Hurricane Katrina. Dubbed a
superstorm
because its winds were below hurricane strength when it hit the Northeast, the extreme weather in a heavily populated section of the country still caused an estimated $65 billion in damages. That compared to the $135 billion attached to Katrina. Eighty percent of New Orleans had flooded compared to relatively small stretches of New York or New Jersey, yet that didn’t stop Senate majority leader Harry Reid (frustrated that the House Republicans were blocking a $60 billion emergency-aid package he had proposed) from taking the Senate floor to declare that Katrina was “nothing in comparison to what happened to the people in New York and New Jersey.”

Connie and Mark Uddo were among those traveling to the East Coast to help. “We flew up with Mitch [Landrieu],” Connie Uddo said. She spoke with people in Toms River, New Jersey, to prepare them for the work ahead and offered to help any way she could. Mark cooked for seven hundred in the Rockaways in New York. “People on the East Coast have no idea what they’re in for,” said Cassandra Wall after the storm.

DON’T CALL HIM A
white mayor. That’s what Mitch Landrieu told an interviewer. And don’t describe New Orleans as a majority-black city. “New Orleans has never been a white city or black city,” Landrieu explained. “It’s a melting pot. The people of the city have received me that way, and we are making this a place for everyone.”

Plenty of people in the black community looked favorably on Landrieu. He at least tried to project himself as the mayor of all New Orleans, and his work ethic was admirable. Black New Orleans disproportionately benefited from every extra dollar the mayor and his team wrested from FEMA, and blight reduction—a top priority for this mayor—was a far more severe problem in the city’s black communities than in its white ones. The mayor endorsed an outspoken black woman, Cynthia Willard-Lewis, over an outspoken white woman, Stacy Head, in their run for the always-contentious at-large seat (Head won by 281 votes) and angered supporters in Lakeview when he announced the city was spending $45 million on road repairs in the Lower Ninth Ward
and only $14 million in their neighborhood. The streets in Lakeview were bad but not nearly as treacherous to drive as those of the Lower Ninth. But the relative state of the roadways wasn’t the point to people in Lakeview.

“I took the mayor to task in a public forum,” said Robert Lupo, who owned multiple commercial properties in Lakeview. “I told him, ‘Here we’re back and dealing with streets so bad that people are getting flat tires, but instead of investing in us, you’re putting all this money into a part of the city the marketplace has rejected.’ ”

Yet Landrieu was a white elected official in a majority-black city, even if he rejected those labels, and some would always have a hard time seeing beyond his skin color. During the 2010 election, Troy Henry had asked if maybe it was “unhealthy” for a majority-black city to be run largely by white officials, and more than a few people in New Orleans were inclined to believe it. Landrieu won friends in black New Orleans when he sided with Willard-Lewis over Head, and then lost them a couple of years later when he endorsed a conservative white woman over a black woman, a former district court judge, in a majority-black district. At a high-profile ceremony, Landrieu signed a consent decree with the Justice Department that committed the city to overhauling its dysfunctional police department—but then he claimed it would cost too much and asked a federal judge to release New Orleans from the agreement. Aside from the president himself, no member of the Obama administration was more often criticized on Fox News and in the conservative media than Attorney General Eric Holder. Yet the Democratic mayor of New Orleans gave them their talking points for a couple of days when he labeled Holder’s Justice Department “a kind of rogue agency.”

Beverly McKenna, the publisher of the
Tribune
, confessed that she felt exhausted by the promises made by white politicians. “I had kind of had it by the time Mitch was elected,” she said. Twenty-five years earlier, her husband had been voted onto the school board. There, he met fierce resistance whenever he agitated for blacks to be included among the architects, construction firms, and suppliers used by district officials. It was like nothing had changed, she said. Landrieu, she said, had done
“almost nothing” to help along other minority-run companies vying for the city of New Orleans’s business.
^IV
“He might cast himself as this liberal champion,” McKenna said of Landrieu, “but once in office, people show who they really are.”

Barbara Major, the former cochair of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, was also frustrated by Landrieu. “You have all this money coming into the city,” Major said. “A hospital being built. Schools. Roads. These other projects. But you look at the crews working on these projects, and they don’t look like New Orleans.” A vibrant black community needed a healthy business sector, yet she didn’t see that as a priority to Landrieu. “Here’s this mayor known for cracking heads and throwing tantrums when his people don’t give him what he wants,” Major said. In 2010, the City Council passed an ordinance that said that at least half of all recovery dollars should end up in the hands of locally owned businesses and 35 percent needed to go to “socially and economically disadvantaged business.” Yet the Collaborative, a local group that Major and others created to help minority- and women-owned enterprises secure more government contracts, estimated that established, white-owned businesses still accounted for more than 95 percent of the contracts let by the city.

No issue seemed to rile up WBOK’s John Slade as did Landrieu’s pick for police chief, Ronal Serpas. On
Showtime in the Afternoon
, he would review the chief’s résumé. Left the NOPD in 2001 after a reprimand for deceptive bookkeeping practices (to buy tactical equipment for the department’s Special Operations unit). Hundreds of misdemeanor sex assaults had been reclassified as more serious sexual crimes after he stepped down as Nashville’s police chief, and some complained that the New Orleans police were doing the same under
his tenure—downgrading rapes to assaults.
^V
The city’s homicide rate was still one of the worst in the nation, and so many cops were quitting that in 2012—two years into Serpas’s tenure—the police union paid for a survey to isolate the problem. The answer in part was a lack of faith in Serpas, whom some in the City Hall press corps had dubbed Chief Wiggum from
The Simpsons
. Only 12 percent of the force, the survey found, agreed with the statement that Serpas’s policies “made the NOPD a more effective crime prevention and public safety organization.” By the end of Landrieu’s term, the city would be some 400 cops short of its goal of 1,575 officers.

Slade was mugged on Good Friday 2013—the first time in his life that he was a crime victim. The assault left him shaken but also proved fodder for his show. He blamed the mugging on school reform and also used the crime to flip on its head the white fears invariably stirred up when someone black takes over as mayor. “Thirty-two years of black mayors and I’ve never been touched,” he would say. Yet with a white mayor in office, he’d ask, how can I ever feel safe?

I.
Pierce is an actor best known for his roles in
The Wire
and
Tremé
.

II.
Shortly after Phelps’s announcement, the
Advocate
in Baton Rouge announced that it would publish a daily New Orleans edition and then poached many of the
Times-Picayune
’s best people.

III.
A five-judge panel would unanimously uphold the lower court’s ruling, but news accounts made clear that this victory would be hollow. The appellate court slashed the damages due the former employees, but even this $750 million or so in back pay was greater than the district’s annual budget. In November 2014, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled against the teachers, who vowed to appeal the ruling to the US Supreme Court.

IV.
The Landrieu administration boasted that between 2012 and 2014, DBEs—disadvantaged business enterprises—received $100 million in city contracts, but 80 percent of that total went to the two garbage-collection firms engaged under Nagin, and the rest included a mix of women-owned firms and others qualifying as DBEs.

V.
In November 2014, the city’s inspector general charged the department’s special victims unit with failing to investigate hundreds of sex-crime complaints, dismissing them as misdemeanors not worth their time.

27

RETURN TO SPLENDOR

“Everything is coming up roses!” exclaimed real estate developer Pres Kabacoff. It was eight years after Katrina and Kabacoff was holding forth on the hidden blessings of New Orleans’s near-death experience. The sixty-eight-year-old Kabacoff, sitting in a dark wicker chair in his resplendent offices on Gravier Street in the central business district, reminisced about the New Orleans of his youth, when the Crescent City’s 630,000 people ranked it as the largest in the South. School integration, white flight, an oil bust, crime—from the 1960s onward, the metropolis he loved was on a “continuous downward path.”