The Gangs of New Orleans
By Amanda Ripley
On Aug. 29, 2005, New Orleans was on track to finish the year as the deadliest city in America, again. Crime had become atomized here--it was part of the culture, the air, the dark humor of the place. Under normal circumstances, criminologists believe, there are two ways to stop a cycle of gang violence: either dismantle the gangs or disrupt their business. In New Orleans, both happened overnight. Hurricane Katrina sundered what no man could, sending the criminals fleeing in all directions. So now there was a mystery: What would happen next? What would become of the criminal population when stripped of its neighborhood affiliations, its drug suppliers and a well-worn black-market infrastructure? This is a story about what happened to the gangs of New Orleans. But it is also a story about a culture of killing and what it takes to change it.
New Orleans was a disaster site before Katrina. So far that year, 202 people had been murdered. Computer models predicted that about 107 more were going to be killed before the year was out. "We were watching the lid come off," says Peter Scharf, a University of New Orleans criminologist. At that rate, not only would New Orleans have once again ranked as deadlier than New York City or Los Angeles, but it would also have been so much more violent that it really belonged in another country altogether. By the time Katrina hit, most law-enforcement types in the city had come to an unpleasant conclusion: no amount of arrests would stanch the murder rate. Somewhere along the way, despite the best efforts of techno-cop Chief Richard Pennington in the 1990s, despite tens of thousands of arrests for drug and quality-of-life crimes, violence had become normalized.
"It was chaos," remembers Jimmy Keen, a lieutenant with the New Orleans police department (N.O.P.D.) and the former commander of the homicide unit. Keen joined the department at age 19 and has stayed for 30 years. He has white hair swept back off his forehead, gimlet eyes and the bone-dry sense of humor adopted by police officers whose intentions have been knocking up against reality for a long time.
Over drinks and cigarettes at the Carousel Bar in the French Quarter recently, Keen explained New Orleans by telling the story of a 15-year-old named "Caveman." On April 14, 2003, at 10:30 in the morning, high school football player Jonathan (Caveman) Williams was sitting in his gym class. The gymnasium was packed with kids. Without warning, two men with an AK-47 and a handgun walked into the gym, strode up to Caveman and shot and killed him. They fired at least 18 times, blowing off half his face and pockmarking the floor tiles underneath his body. Three girls were injured by stray bullets. Then the men walked out. Police said the attack was probably payback for the murder of another high school student the week before.
Keen's officers went house to house, searching for the killers. They had 150 witnesses in the gym and a dead child on the floor. It was hard to imagine that the case would be a tough one to crack. And yet, Keen says, the officers' questions were met with shrugs and stares. "I asked my sergeant, 'How's it going?'" remembers Keen. "And he said, 'I feel like the Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq. The people in the neighborhoods don't want us here. They don't speak our language. They won't talk to us.'"
As I listened to that story, it struck me as self-aggrandizing to compare New Orleans with Iraq. But I would hear the analogy again and again as I talked with people who had spent years fighting and losing the battle against violent crime in New Orleans. The U.S. Attorney talked about the need to win citizens' hearts and minds. An FBI agent compared the city's gangs to a jihadist movement: small, loosely organized and hard to track.
Most people who study crime in New Orleans see it in the context of a panorama of failures: the broken school system, an economy that hasn't adapted to modernity and shamefully easy access to guns. But the factor that may be unique to New Orleans is a justice system that has lost all credibility.
The N.O.P.D. is too often blamed as the sole source of the problem. That's naive. But there is no denying the department's atrocious history. In the 1990s, a group of officers was arrested for operating a drug-dealing ring within the department. An N.O.P.D. officer hired a hit man to kill a woman who had reported police brutality. Although the department has improved since then, the transcript of the cop ordering the execution, recorded by an FBI wiretap, is lodged in the collective memory of the city.
And the court system compounds the public's distrust. Criminal-court judges in New Orleans are significantly less likely than judges elsewhere to send people--even violent felons--to prison, according to a 2005 study by the city's Metropolitan Crime Commission. Of all the people arrested by the N.O.P.D. during a 12-month period from 2003 to 2004, only 7% were eventually sentenced to prison.
Often, violent-crime charges get dropped by the district attorney's office. The No. 1 reason, says Rafael Goyeneche, president of the commission, is that witnesses and victims who initially agree to cooperate eventually change their mind. They fear for their lives because they know most criminals arrested in New Orleans end up back on the street. In 2004, Keisha Robinson, 29, was gunned down in broad daylight in front of her house shortly after she had testified before a grand jury investigating her younger brother's killing. Police can't be sure why she was attacked, since they never arrested anyone for her murder. But it was perceived by many as a revenge killing. Two months before, Ryan Smith, a key witness in another murder case, was shot dead outside his workplace. Prosecutors, lacking witnesses, back away from all but the most solid cases. And a flaccid judicial system gets weaker still.
In other cases, the problem is the judges. Certain judges tend to set very low or no bail for defendants, especially in drug cases, the commission report concluded. "The vast majority of our judges are good men and women, thank God, who do a tough job. They're inundated with cases," says Goyeneche, a former prosecutor. "[But] a small percentage are doing a disservice to the community and putting people at risk. Corruption explains some of it, also burnout and just callousness."
So people stopped believing in the system. And into the void stepped young men who took matters into their own well-armed hands. Two gangs in particular--the Dooney Boys and 3 'n' G, both associated with poor neighborhoods in the city--were tearing up the streets in a nauseating, perpetual cycle of revenge.
"When a community feels like the judicial system has failed, then a second system kicks in," says Jim Bernazzani, special agent in charge of the FBI's New Orleans division, "and killings beget killings beget killings."
Bernazzani rode out the storm in the FBI office, perched on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. The howling, punishing winds stripped off two-thirds of the roof. He spent five days there in all before being helicoptered to safety.
Bernazzani had arrived in New Orleans from Washington four months earlier. He had spent the previous four years helping the FBI set up the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, and when he came to New Orleans, he decided--in a stroke of either brilliance or desperation--to do the exact same thing. "The violence was so ingrained in the youth, you could not arrest your way out of it," he says. But what he could do was try to get everyone--police, FBI agents, prosecutors--to share information. "The missing piece was not intelligence but the integration of intelligence, just like with terrorism," says Bernazzani. The first step was to identify the most violent criminals and "remove them from the equation."
Two weeks before Katrina, Bernazzani and the police completed a list of 112 "baddest bad guys," as he puts it--people believed responsible for a disproportionate amount of the violence in New Orleans. They weren't all wanted, not in the official sense. But the plan was to track them aggressively and develop cases against them so they could be put away for a long time.
That sounds like a pretty obvious strategy. But it's hard to pull off in reality. It requires that the local police departments develop good sources of intelligence and then, the greatest challenge of all, share that intelligence with one another and with the armada of federal agents in the city--from the FBI to the U.S. Attorney's office to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Then they have to build professional, solid cases that will hold up in court. Finally, they must avoid handing the cases to certain local judges who have what Bernazzani calls "a warped sense of social consciousness."
The list of 112 was compiled in a less than scientific manner. Each of the eight police districts sent the names of their most notorious locals to N.O.P.D. headquarters. "It was a start," says Bernazzani. One person on the list was Ivory (B-Stupid) Harris, then 20. He had been arrested at least eight times in the past two years. He had been charged with murder twice, but nothing ever stuck. No one wanted to testify against Harris, police say.
In the midst of the anarchy following Katrina, Bernazzani suddenly remembered the list. Before he was rescued, he went back into the rubble of the FBI building and scrounged through his senior analyst's desk until he found the computer disc. One of the first things he did after he got to dry ground was send the list to FBI headquarters. On Sept. 10, the list went out to every FBI field office in the country with orders to share it with local law enforcement.
As Jim Letten, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, relocated his office to Baton Rouge, he thought about the fact that New Orleans had just exported its most pathological citizens. "We were approached by the press repeatedly and asked, 'What happened to the bad guys?' We said, 'We don't know.'"
New Orleans police say they still don't know how many people were murdered in those first chaotic days. Certainly the figure was lower than rumors had suggested. But then, a period of remarkable calm began. By the weekend, the National Guard and police had descended on New Orleans like a Kevlar blanket. Crime dropped to an all-time low for the rest of the year. About 100 murders that should have happened never did--at least not in New Orleans. "It gave us an opportunity to have a clear picture of what peace in a city is," says Warren Riley, now superintendent of the police department. "I think even our criminal element for a short period of time had a change of heart."
One of two things can happen when people are plucked out of lawless neighborhoods and put somewhere else, criminologists have found. In the more hopeful scenario, people who parachute into better neighborhoods commit less violent crime. That theory posits that places like New Orleans, where poverty is extreme, are inherently crimogenic--which is to say, they produce deviant behavior, just like alcohol. Gangs are also crimogenic. When people leave gangs, they are generally less violent than they were as gang members. In neighborhoods and gangs, in other words, violence--and peace--is contagious.
In the mid-1990s, the Federal Government conducted a mass experiment that looked, in some ways, like the exodus following Katrina. Some 4,600 families in public housing projects were randomly assigned one of three different destinies. Families in the first group got a golden opportunity: a housing voucher good for relocation to any neighborhood with very low poverty. Those in the second group got a voucher for use anywhere. And a third set, the control group, stayed where it was.
The group that moved to better neighborhoods did not have better lives in every way. But the young people were less likely to be arrested for violent crimes, according to a 2005 study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Their new, safer neighborhoods appeared to make them less dangerous.
But there is another scenario that is less promising. That one predicts that when people lose connections to their old neighborhoods, they also lose something good. They lose reasons to do the right thing. "One of the things that keeps people straight is the fact that there are people who are important to them around. They don't want to embarrass themselves," says Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon. "As you disperse people into unfamiliar environments, without these people they care about, there is less control over them, and they could become more troublesome."
In fact, the closer you look at that grand-scale public housing experiment, the more complicated the results. Yes, young people seemed to commit less violent crime in better neighborhoods. But after a couple of years, the young men actually started deteriorating in other ways. They committed significantly more property crimes than the men who had stayed behind, the study found. "The presumption was, you get these kids in a good neighborhood and, by God, they're going to shape up," says Blumstein. "Well, in part they brought their old habits with them. In part they continued to interact with their old friends through riding public transit or whatever. And they were fish out of water. They didn't have the social control."
In the days before Katrina struck, B-Stupid Harris was in the parish jail--again--accused of shooting a man to death in Central City, a neighborhood between the Superdome and the Garden District, three months before. It was a familiar scenario. As a juvenile, Harris was arrested more than a dozen times, according to the Houston Chronicle. When he was 16, he was charged with killing a 24-year-old in the courtyard of a housing project. A grand jury indicted Harris as an adult on first-degree murder charges, but then two years went by while the court considered his mental competency. In time, the D.A.'s office dropped the charges after a key witness's testimony was deemed inadmissible. Harris went free in June 2004 and, less than a month later, was rearrested on a weapons charge. For the next two years, he cycled in and out of jail.
Finally, he was hit with another murder charge after the Central City shooting in May 2005. But on Aug. 22, a week before Katrina, the D.A.'s office dropped that charge too, after a witness refused to cooperate. "Without a witness, we can't prosecute a case," says New Orleans D.A. Eddie Jordan. Since Harris was still facing an aggravated-battery charge, he remained in jail through the storm, getting transferred to a cell in Shreveport, La. Then, on Nov. 3, on orders from a court judge, he was again released to await a future hearing date. Harris walked out of jail, his hometown in ruins and his friends and family scattered.
It would be a little more than a month before he was heard from again.
For the first two months after the storm, there was relative peace--even in Houston, to which 150,000 people had fled. Evacuees were involved in just three murders in September and October, Houston police say. "Could this mean that hurricanes are actually good for crime?" wondered criminologist Scharf.
But Texas officials were worried from the beginning. On Sept. 1, Governor Rick Perry's communications director e-mailed the state's homeland security director: "Question between you and I, at what point do we go from being compassionate to being taken advantage of (meaning, are they sending us folks we don't want?)," according to records released by the Governor's office.
As of early November, the FBI had located about 80 people on the list of 112. Some had applied for government aid. But most had come in contact with police in some way. A large number had congregated in Houston, just as their law-abiding neighbors had done.
Jorge Johnson, 40, moved to Houston about a month after Katrina, after spending several weeks in a Baton Rouge shelter. A construction worker and painter originally from Honduras, Johnson had lived in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. He evacuated in his 2003 blue Dodge Caravan with his girlfriend, her sister and her sister's boyfriend. The boyfriend, Dwight Robertson, was Johnson's friend as well, so they all stuck together after the storm.
They spent days calling friends to find out where everyone was. One friend suggested that they crash at his apartment in Houston, so they piled back into the Dodge Caravan. Unfortunately, Houston had minimal housing vacancies when Katrina came along, and most of the cheaper apartments were clustered in large complexes in southwest Houston. So as the aid money started rolling out, tens of thousands of evacuees found themselves in the same corner, like it or not.
At first the Catalina apartment complex was nice and quiet, Johnson says. The apartments are bordered by a brick wall with New Orleans--style lamps. But as weeks went by and more evacuees moved in, he started spending more time inside. He and Robertson, who had worked as a cook in the French Quarter, cooked dinner at each other's apartments and watched TV. Soon almost everyone in Johnson's building was from New Orleans.
The shootings started near the tennis courts, Johnson remembers. On Nov. 5, a New Orleans evacuee shot a Houston man in the hand. In December, a stray bullet was fired into Johnson's apartment. It entered through the glass patio door, went through the living room and into the bedroom. Luckily, no one was home. Then on Christmas Eve, a man from New Orleans got into a fight. He was shot in the stomach and killed just after midnight. Police interviewed at least one witness. Twelve hours later, they dropped him back at the apartment building. He was shot in the head before he got inside.
In December, the killings hit a peak in Houston, as evacuees were implicated in 11 murders. As if on cue, B-Stupid Harris resurfaced, according to Houston police, who said he was wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of a New Orleans evacuee--shot to death at a freeway intersection at 4:20 a.m. on Dec. 17 after a fight at a nearby pool hall. Harris' name would become familiar to the entire Houston police department. "Harris was the axle at the center of our wheel. He kept coming up," says Sergeant Brian Harris, a homicide investigator with the Houston police.
Violence picked up around the country at the same time. In January, three New Orleans evacuees were accused of killing two men after a fight at a music hall in Oklahoma City. A juvenile evacuee was charged with accessory to murder in Baton Rouge after a man was found shot dead in the street. In general, New Orleans criminals seemed reluctant to break into the drug market in their new towns. Instead, they dealt to their old customers in a new place. Houston, in particular, had long been a distribution point for drugs coming from Central and South America into New Orleans, so it wasn't hard for dealers to set up shop again. As aid money started rolling in, crime increased. "They were victimizing each other," says Sergeant Harris. "The new crime was to steal one another's FEMA money."
In January, Houston police officers held a press conference and promised to introduce the evacuees to "Texas law." They arrested eight New Orleanians suspected in 11 murders in the Houston area. The department spent $6.5 million on overtime.
But when police interviewed the suspects, they suddenly understood why New Orleans was so violent. No matter what police said, they couldn't get the suspects to talk. They had no leverage because no one took their threats seriously. It was a logical response: in New Orleans, 93% of people arrested from 2003 to 2004 never went to prison. "It was a real eye-opening experience," says Sergeant Harris. "People born and raised in Houston seem to have an understanding of consequences, of punishment. You can show them the options, and they start thinking, Wow, maybe I should start cooperating." With New Orleans evacuees, Sergeant Harris says, "there is no baseline. They have no concept of consequence."
It was the first time the Houston police had heard the phrase "60-day homicide." Suspects would say, "This ain't nothing but a 60-day homicide," meaning that if they kept quiet for 60 days, they would walk--just as they had too often in New Orleans. So Houston police started letting evacuees spend a few days in jail before questioning them in depth. While they waited, the suspects talked with other inmates and had court appearances--which did not end with release. Eventually, for some, the reality of Texas law began to sink in. "As they stay here more, they seem to talk more," Sergeant Harris says.
When I spoke to criminologist Blumstein about what happened in Houston after Katrina, he was not surprised to hear that evacuees were killing one another in a different place. "People who kill one another tend to be people who are like one another," he said. But he was intrigued to hear that the Houston police had noticed such a cultural difference. In that difference, he said, is hope. "Maybe there's a lesson here for how the New Orleans system ought to start shaping up."
During the reprieve in New Orleans, the FBI and the N.O.P.D. had the same thought. In December, about 20 local, state and federal law-enforcement leaders from New Orleans met in Quantico, Va., to plan for a post-Katrina criminal ecosystem. In hopes of staying ahead of the returning criminals, they started setting up a website to share pictures and information about gangs. They agreed to try to hit serious criminals with federal charges, thus bypassing the revolving doors of the local court system. And they promised to share what they knew.
They had made such vows before, of course. But according to Bernazzani, Riley and U.S. Attorney Letten, there was a new commitment in the room after Katrina. "It was a bond," says Bernazzani. "There was a recognition that Katrina broke the old crystal. Let's not go back to the old ways." The trauma created trust, something rare and precious in law enforcement.
Although neither mayoral candidate has talked much about crime during the campaign, everyone in New Orleans knows it is almost as important to the recovery as the levees. If crime returns in full force, many people--as well as businesses--simply will not go back. If people do not go back--feeding the tax base and bringing jobs and stability--the crime rate will become even worse.
Riley was appointed by the mayor to run the N.O.P.D. after Chief Eddie Compass resigned in September, and he may be replaced, depending on the outcome of the mayoral election on May 20. So far, he has created a criminal intelligence bureau of about 100 officers to "focus on the reoccupation of the city by the criminal element," he says. For the most dangerous suspects, officers meet with judges to urge them to impose high bail. For now, the N.O.P.D. has the advantage of numbers. There are about 135 people in New Orleans for every police officer--or about half the number before Katrina.
In the past few months, "legacy" criminals, as the FBI calls them, have begun returning. Ten local gangs have regrouped where once there were 13. "The drug dealers have to have people to sell to, and now that the population is coming back, there's an increase in trafficking. It's the same thing with firearms. It's almost hand in hand," says Mark Chait, special agent in charge of ATF's New Orleans field office.
So far, the police have had some successes. Nationwide, 30 people from the list of 112 have been arrested, according to the FBI. (Two others are dead.) Public defender Dwight Doskey says he has had a couple of clients come back, thinking they could sell heroin without any competition. They got arrested. "The police were the only competition," Doskey says, "and they won."
Bernazzani is obsessively tracking signs, meanwhile, that members of new, better-organized gangs have come to New Orleans. And in the past few months, about 15 people affiliated with MS-13, the Latin Kings and other, largely Latino and Asian gangs have been arrested for mostly nonviolent crimes. Those organizations have not yet set up operations, but the trend concerns Bernazzani, who says they had no presence in the city before Katrina. Houston drug dealers may also be trying to enter the void, says Michele Leonhart, the No. 2 in charge of the DEA. "Houston-based traffickers are using New Orleans refugees as guides to open up the market. They say, 'Hey, why don't you drive with me to New Orleans for the day, and I'll let you in on some profit?'" Leonhart says. "All good traffickers are looking for new markets."
As for B-Stupid Harris, he came home on or before Mardi Gras, at least according to police, who have accused him of shooting a 22-year-old man to death on Feb. 28. On March 20, acting on a tip, police arrested Harris in a New Orleans suburb. Police say they found 3 1/2 oz. of heroin, 3 1/2 oz. of crack cocaine, two loaded assault rifles and a .45-cal. semiautomatic handgun, plus $5,800 in the house. Later that day, as he was paraded in shackles out of central lockup, Harris told reporters, "I ain't have nothing to do with no murders. Nothing." He did not respond to a letter sent to the jail by TIME, and his attorney was unable to reach him for comment.
The Harris arrest was a triumph for Riley, who says locals have been more cooperative since Katrina. But there are familiar, depressing signs too. As TIME was first to report, the murder rate has picked up again in New Orleans and may approach 2004 levels before the year is out. So far, 33 people have been murdered this year--almost half of them in the month of April alone. A man assaulted two women in a bar in the French Quarter last week, and then shot and killed a man who came to their aid, police say. Today there are far fewer people in New Orleans and thus fewer dead bodies. But the number that matters most is the per capita figure. If this rate of killing continues, New Orleans will have an annual crime rate of roughly 45 murders per 100,000 people. (By comparison, New York City's murder rate last year was 7.)
The N.O.P.D. uses a higher population estimate for the city and claims that the murder rate is lower. No one really knows the exact population. But whatever the number, the forces at work in New Orleans change daily, so it is hard to predict the future. For example, last month, under threat of a lawsuit by the National Rifle Association, police began redistributing guns that had been confiscated as an emergency measure after Katrina. So far, 47 out of a stockpile of 942 have been returned. FEMA assistance is expected to drop in the next several months, which could also incite crime. Meanwhile, 300 N.O.P.D. officers are still living in hotels. "It's very difficult to fight crime when you're suffering from the same sources of depression and disruption as everyone else," says Scharf.
The court system is worse off than it was before the storm. The public defender's office is down from 42 attorneys to 21. The D.A.'s office has about 6,000 cases and only 65 prosecutors--compared with 3,500 cases and 90 attorneys before the storm. The office is now run out of a former nightclub, where a mirrored disco ball spins silently over the work space. The criminal court has yet to hold a single jury trial since Katrina.
And at least one judge is back to his old habits of freeing suspects arrested for serious crimes. In March, police and DEA agents arrested Brian Expose, 33, for dealing drugs. Police say they found $186,000 in cash; a pair of assault rifles; five other guns, including an automatic weapon with a silencer; and a large stash of ammunition--not to mention 6 oz. of cocaine.
The same day, New Orleans Criminal District Judge Charles Elloie set him free. From 2003 to 2004, Elloie, one of 12 judges, was responsible for 83% of cases in which a suspect was released after a bail reduction, according to a Metropolitan Crime Commission study. Since Katrina, Elloie has issued either no bail or low bail in at least four cases involving assault rifles, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Elloie did not respond to a call from TIME.
The only bright spot of the Expose tale is that the backlash was swift. Under pressure from local media, Elloie issued a bench warrant for Expose's rearrest--claiming that he hadn't been told all the details of the case. But federal authorities swooped in with their own warrant and arrested Expose themselves. He has since pleaded not guilty and remains in jail without bail.
Chief Riley is still confident enough to vow that New Orleans should never again rank among the 10 most violent cities in America. So far, the odds are against him. But he suggests another, more creative way to judge the health of his city after Katrina. Come back in a year, he says, and see how many from that original list of 112 are still in jail. Then compare the results with Houston. "My understanding is that Houston keeps these criminals in jail. Let's see if our system keeps these people in jail. That will be a great test."
Whatever happens in New Orleans, there are lessons for other places. It will not be the last time that a city is wiped out by a catastrophe, given Americans' preference for living in dense, coastal areas. Some of these lessons are easy to learn: store criminal records and evidence in a secure location above sea level, for one thing. After a calamity occurs, make sure an officer from the evacuated city helps identify notorious criminals in cities receiving refugees. And make sure FEMA is willing and able to help track dangerous evacuees as they move--a commonsense collaboration that took months to set up after Katrina, owing to privacy concerns.
For the first time in modern history, we now know what criminals will do after a mass exodus: just like everyone else, they will spend a couple of months getting their bearings. They will apply for aid and call people they care about on their cell phones. Then they will find one another and start killing one another again. They will go where the housing and the drug users are. Perhaps most important of all, they will carry with them the petty disputes of the past, along with their assumptions about the consequences. [This article contains a complex diagram. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] KATRINA'S DEADLY RIPPLES
New Orleans was a violent city before the hurricane displaced its entire population. Will the crime return with the people? Homicides in selected cities involving Katrina evacuees as either victims or suspects Victims Suspects Minneapolis 1 Victim Oklahoma City 3 Victims 3 Suspects
Dallas 1 Victim 3 Suspects
San Antonio 2 Suspects
Houston 30 Victims 33 Suspects Baton Rouge 3 Victims New Orleans
Columbus, Ga. 1 Victim 1 Suspect
Homicides in New Orleans, by month
2005 2006
Hurricane Katrina, Aug. 29, 2005
Source: New Orleans Police Department
With reporting by Wendy Grossman/Houston, Hilary Hylton/Austin, Russell McCulley/New Orleans