The Black and the Blue

by Matthew Horace

  Less than 48 hours after Groves visited Internal Affairs, she was dead.

  Davis greeted the news of her death with an exultant cry, “Yeah! Rock, rock-a-bye.” The shooter, Hardy, was happy to do a $300 favor for his friend. He and Davis had been partners in crime for at least the past year. Davis led a group of corrupt cops who protected the drug dealers who worked for Hardy. The cops would warn Hardy and his crew of any police plans that might interrupt their drug-trafficking operations. Davis’s help gave Hardy a leg up on rival drug dealers in the turf wars that drug trafficking fueled.

  FBI agents had gotten wind of Davis’s drug operation even before Groves’s murder and had set up a sting to bring him down. The agents pretended to be drug traffickers, and approached Davis for protection of a phony cocaine storage facility they had set up as bait. Davis agreed. When FBI agents, acting as drug dealers, told Davis they needed more protection, he supplied nine more cops. When the officers showed up to provide 24-hour protection for 280 kilos of cocaine, they were dressed in their police uniforms and were legitimate, reflecting the blatant corruption among New Orleans police. Davis was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He is still awaiting execution at federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Even as the city was reeling from the news of Davis’s arrest and trial, things went from bad to worse. Worse was named Antoinette Frank.

  Everything about Antoinette Frank said she shouldn’t be a cop. During her application in 1993, there were several warning signs. First, she was caught lying on several sections of her application. In one instance, she claimed that the reason her employment ended at a Walmart store was because she had transferred to another Walmart. When police did a background check, they found she had been fired from the first store, which would make her ineligible under Walmart’s rules to work at any other Walmart stores.

  Frank also scored so poorly on two of the police department’s psychological evaluations, the psychologist who reviewed her results recommended a psychiatric interview. Dr. Philip Scurria, a board-certified psychiatrist, evaluated Frank on 14 characteristics needed to be a police officer. She rated unacceptable or below average in most categories. In his report, Scurria concluded, “I do not feel… that the applicant is suitable for the job of police officer.”

  Depressed over her faltering job prospects, Frank briefly disappeared. She left a suicide note addressed to her panicked father, who filed a missing-persons report with the police department. But she turned up the next day.

  When I was in charge at the Bureau’s Office of Personnel Security, I analyzed police applicants throughout the hiring process. Our applicants went through similar screenings, written tests, psychological examinations, oral panel interviews (as many as 8–10 people), polygraph examinations, and full-scope background investigations. In many departments throughout the United States, an applicant need only fail one of these checks to be eliminated from contention as a police officer. Any applicant who had failed as many checks during the hiring process as Frank would have not been brought aboard at the Bureau.

  Despite the lies on her job application, the psychologist’s and psychiatrist’s warnings, a suicide note, and a confusing missing-persons report, Frank was hired by the department less than three weeks later. Her hiring was indicative of the department’s lax standards. In 1993, the NOPD was chronically shorthanded, and it was losing officers faster than they could be replaced. Part of the problem was money. Its officers were dramatically underpaid, much lower than in similar-sized cities. A 1992 study showed that New Orleans police, whose starting salary was $17,000 a year and who had to furnish their own uniforms and sidearms, were the 319th-lowest paid of 322 departments it examined.

  Additionally, Frank was a black woman, and some police officials thought having more African-Americans on the force would ease the city’s long-standing racial tensions. Frank was hired on February 7, 1993. Although she graduated near the top of her academy class, many of her fellow officers thought she had no idea what police work really entailed and lacked the decisiveness to be a good cop. At times, they thought, she veered into irrational behavior. Less than 10 months out of the academy, her superiors wanted to send her back for further training.

  Frank had been on the job for a little over a year and a half when she was called to investigate a shooting involving Rogers LaCaze, a known 18-year-old petty drug dealer, and his friend, Nemiah Miller. LaCaze told police a 19-year-old known as “Freaky D” just came up and started blasting away. LaCaze was injured in the hand. Miller was shot and killed. LaCaze’s mother, Alice Chaney, said she had evicted her son from the house a year earlier for selling dope. The shooting, she said, was most assuredly a result of a drug deal gone bad, she told police.

  Frank, however, became smitten by LaCaze’s “bad boy” persona, even though he was only 18 and she was 24. After LaCaze got out of the hospital for his gunshot wound, he began receiving regular visits from Frank. She eventually took him shopping for new clothes. She bought him a pager and a cell phone. She rented him a Cadillac. Other police officers saw her hanging out with LaCaze. He drove Frank’s personal vehicle and once was seen moving her police car at the scene of an accident she was investigating. On another occasion, LaCaze went with her on a complaint call, where she introduced him as a “trainee.” No one, however, reported to higher-ups the cozy relationship between a police officer sworn to uphold the law and a known drug dealer. In a department as corrupt as New Orleans’s was then, who would care? Ultimately, Frank and LaCaze began pulling over motorists while in her police squad car, and then robbing them.

  Sometime around 2:30 a.m., on March 4, 1995, Richard Pennington, New Orleans’s new reform police superintendent, was awakened by a call from the department about a particularly gruesome murder at a Vietnamese restaurant in New Orleans East. The Kim Anh Restaurant, run by the Vu family, had been robbed and the owner’s 17-year-old son and 24-year-old daughter had been murdered. A New Orleans cop who was moonlighting at the restaurant was also killed. Pennington had been on the job less than six months. He already had his hands full with the scandals involving Len Davis and other bad cops throughout the department. Now, one of his men had been murdered. He needed to be there.

  Pennington pulled on his uniform quickly and a police car met him at his door and sped him to the scene. By the time he arrived, forensics and detectives were busy working the crime scene. Outside, police cars, officers, and technicians crowded the tan concrete and gravel parking lot. Sergeant Eddie Rantz was supervising the investigation. He could be seen inside the restaurant talking to witnesses just past the wall of windows that made up the storefront. At one of the tables was Officer Antoinette Frank, who was explaining to Rantz how she had been in the kitchen getting something to drink when she heard the shooting. She said she tried to push all the employees out through the back door, but the boy and his sister wouldn’t leave. She told Rantz that she drove from the restaurant to the 7th District station to report the shooting and then returned to the scene—and that’s why she was there when other police arrived.

  Her explanation raised numerous questions. Frank had a cell phone and a police radio with her. Why didn’t she call it in instead of driving to the station? Why did she leave civilians behind at a murder scene, including a wounded police officer? None of it made sense. But then, one of the Vietnamese workers, so frightened that she initially could only speak in her native language, regained her composure. She sat at one of the restaurant tables talking with Sergeant Rantz, tears in her eyes. Then it all became clear. Frank wasn’t a witness. She was the killer.

  Rantz, sick to his stomach by now, walked out the glass front door into the parking lot and found Superintendent Pennington. “We’re about to book this motherfucker with three counts of first-degree murder,” he told the chief.

  Rantz had put it all together. Shortly after midnight, Frank and LaCaze had come to the restaurant with the intention of robbing it. Frank knew the restaurant and the owners well. She had moonlighted there oft
en as a security guard. She had been brought into the sideline job by fellow Officer Ronald Williams. Williams was on security duty at the restaurant that night. Frank knew he would be there.

  One of the owners, Chau Vu, had gone to pay Williams when she noticed Frank and LaCaze approaching the restaurant. The two had been at the restaurant twice earlier in the night to eat. After Frank’s last visit, Chau could not find the front door key after manually locking the door. With Frank returning for a third time, she sensed that something was very wrong. Chau ran to the kitchen to hide the money in the microwave. Frank entered the front door using the key that she had stolen from the restaurant earlier, and quickly walked past Williams, pushing Chau, Chau’s brother Quoc, and a restaurant employee into the doorway of the kitchen.

  Williams started to follow, but LaCaze slipped in behind him and shot him in the head, severing his spinal cord and instantly paralyzing him. As Frank, distracted by the gunshots, went back into the dining room, Chau, Quoc, and the employee hid in the rear of a large walk-in cooler in the kitchen with the lights out. They did not know the whereabouts of their other sister and brother, Ha and Cuong. The two had been sweeping the dining room floors when Frank entered the restaurant.

  From inside the cooler, they heard more shots. LaCaze had shot Williams in the head again, mortally wounding him. Chau could see Frank looking for something in the kitchen where the Vus usually kept their money. Frank and LaCaze were shouting at Ha and Cuong, demanding the restaurant’s money, but they did not know where Chau had hidden it. Frank pistol-whipped 17-year-old Cuong when he hesitated. Finally, Frank got the money out of the microwave, then shot 24-year-old Ha three times as she knelt pleading for her life. Then, she shot Cuong six times.

  After Frank and LaCaze left the premises, Quoc emerged from the cooler and ran out the back door of the restaurant to a nearby friend’s home to call 911. Frank dropped off LaCaze at a nearby apartment complex. He had taken Williams’s weapon with him. She heard the 911 call on her portable police radio, saying that an officer was down at the Kim Anh restaurant. She knew she and LaCaze had left witnesses alive. So, she borrowed a patrol car and rushed to the scene. Posing as a responding officer, she intended to kill Chau and Quoc.

  Parking in the rear, Frank entered through the back door of the restaurant and made her way through the kitchen to the dining room where Chau waited for help at the front door. Police showed up almost simultaneously, and Chau bolted through the restaurant’s front door to the safety of the arriving officers. After finally gaining her composure, Chau fingered Frank as the person who had murdered two siblings and stolen the money. LaCaze was arrested shortly afterward at his apartment. He and Frank were later convicted and sentenced to death.

  Corruption within the department abated briefly, then came Hurricane Katrina, and, by far, the most brutal and pervasive case of police corruption in the city’s history.

  On September 4, 2005, six days after the hurricane hit the city, five New Orleans police officers, none in uniform, drove in a Budget rental truck to the Danziger Bridge. The bridge carries thousands of cars and trucks daily along seven lanes of US Route 90, locally known as the Chef Menteur Highway. Today, however, it was closed, as was so much of New Orleans immediately following Hurricane Katrina.

  Leonard Bartholomew, and his wife, Susan Bartholomew, their teenage daughter, Lesha, and some friends had just walked back from a grocery store and were then sheltering behind a concrete barrier. Like tens of thousands of New Orleans residents, they had been left homeless by the storm. Armed with assault rifles, including AK-47s, the cops lined up along the bridge “like at a firing range,” one witness recalled, and began shooting at the Bartholomew family.

  As the officers opened fire, James Brissette, 17, a family friend, was killed immediately. Four others were wounded. Susan Bartholomew’s arm was partially shot off and later required amputation. Her husband was shot in the back, head, and foot. Lesha Bartholomew was shot four times. Jose Holmes Jr., a friend of Brissette’s, was shot in the stomach, hand, and jaw.

  When two brothers, Ronald and Lance Madison, tried to escape, they were pursued down the bridge by officers in an unmarked state police vehicle. One officer fired his shotgun from the back of the car at the men. Ronald Madison, who was developmentally disabled, was shot seven times—five times in the back. One officer stomped him before he died.

  Homicide detective Arthur Kaufman was made the lead investigator on the case. Instead of investigating the crime, Kaufman told the officers to conceal evidence in the shootings to make the event appear justified. He also fabricated information for his official reports to help cover up the crime. Lieutenant Michael Lohman encouraged the officers to make up a cover story about what happened and to plant a firearm near the scene.

  It took nearly two years for investigators to figure out what really happened on Danziger Bridge. The police officers involved in the shooting were taken into custody on January 2, 2007. Sergeant Robert Gisevius, Sergeant Kenneth Bowen, and Officer Anthony Villavaso were charged with the first-degree murder of one victim. Officer Robert Faulcon was charged with the first-degree murder of another. Officers Michael Hunter, Ignatius Hills, and Robert Barrios were indicted on charges of attempted murder relating to the other four victims. In August 2008, however, the charges were dismissed by District Court Judge Raymond Bigelow, due to prosecutorial misconduct. Two weeks later, the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice and the FBI began investigating the case. Ultimately, the five officers involved in the shooting pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison. The city paid $13 million to settle claims against it in the incident.

  Another resident, Henry Glover, was also killed by a New Orleans police officer during the turbulent days after the hurricane. His body was found in a burned car. The officer who shot him, David Warren, was initially found guilty of manslaughter and civil rights violations for use of excessive force. The officer who aided Warren by burning the body, Greg McRae, was found guilty and sentenced to 17 years in prison, far longer than Warren’s 3 years. Much later, New Orleans police captain Jeffrey Winn was fired. He testified in court that he told McRae to burn the body because he didn’t want it decomposing around his police officers. A number of other officers were reassigned for concealing details concerning Glover’s killing.

  Katrina-related misconduct didn’t stop there; 91 officers resigned or retired for abandoning their posts during the hurricane and another 228 were investigated.

  All the madness finally caused the Department of Justice to launch a 10-month investigation of the department in 2011 as the number of fatal police shootings and other crimes committed by police continued unabated. The report based on the investigation chronicled a pattern of unconstitutional conduct, rampant use of excessive force, and unwarranted stops and searches that I found stunning. It also found widespread discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. A year later, under pressure to clean up its act, the city and the department entered into the most extensive federal consent decree in the nation’s history.

  8.

  CULTURE VERSUS STRATEGY

  New Orleans’s history of malfeasance is accompanied by successive efforts by ambitious mayors and earnest police superintendents to rein in the city’s runaway police department. Those efforts serve as an object lesson in the difficulties of reforming police departments, particularly those with extremely caustic cop cultures, like New Orleans’s. It provides a window into aberrant behavior and bad policing practices that plague all too many departments. It also sheds light on needed changes, such as:

  establishing core principles

  implementing broader and more extensive and effective training

  putting in place better use-of-force standards and de-escalation procedures

  looking for better candidates in recruitment and hiring

  sustaining citizen involvement and community interaction

  requiring officer accountability

  As heads o
f law enforcement, civic leaders, and community members try to revamp their departments, they must do so across a landscape of seemingly intractable poverty and neglect that fuels crime in the neighborhoods most in need of police protection and at the same time most affected by police misconduct. At issue are problems that have very little to do with police. Police chiefs or sheriffs are confronted with underprivileged neighborhoods, lacking in jobs, quality education, transportation, decent housing, and parks and recreation activities. The absence of those core community elements drives crime and pervasive violence. The paucity of money and opportunities gives rise to alternative criminal economies and desperate people who engage in dangerous behavior—drug dealing, burglaries, purse snatching, armed robberies, and theft of anything that’s not nailed down. The strong prey on the weak. Despair and confusion create despondency; frayed nerves and absence of self-worth lead to anger, abuse, assault, and murder. Just look around. We don’t have drive-by shootings, street corner drug sales, or high murder rates in affluent neighborhoods. The working poor are hit the hardest.

  New Orleans is no different. Despite the city’s endearing image of fun and frolic, of Bourbon Street, Mardi Gras, the Essence Festival, the Bayou Football Classic, and the city’s incredibly rich musical culture, it is a town where too many of its residents remain locked in poverty’s crushing embrace. The overwhelming majority of them are African-American. Nearly 40 percent of the children in New Orleans live in poverty, 17 percentage points higher than the national average, even though 82 percent live in a house where at least one person is employed. Their parents are working, but they are earning poverty wages. Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, the black household income dropped to the point of wiping out the black middle class. The median income for white families is $60,553; the median income for black families is $25,102. That is a $35,451 difference, more than the amount most black families earn. Consequently, New Orleans, like cities with similar income disparities—Baltimore, St. Louis, Kansas City, Memphis, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Detroit—struggles annually with unacceptable rates of murder, robbery, rape, and assault.