Shots on the Bridge

by Ronnie Greene

  When he left the force in 2001, Hessler did not slip quietly into retirement. He became a lawyer, with a specialty of defending police officers. Hessler tells his clients he knows what it’s like to sit in the defendant’s chair. “It’s easy to stay out of trouble if you stay behind your desk,” he said.

  In 1989 he and a partner were charged in state court for failing to protect an inmate in their custody who suffered a battery, allegedly at the hands of another officer. The trial judge tossed the charges. Then the federal government took up the matter. Again, Hessler persevered and was acquitted at trial. Years later, he said, the victim tried to hire him as his attorney.

  Late one night in 2000, after searching for a suspect earlier that evening, Hessler fired a shot that killed a black man running with a gun. Hessler said he was driving home, passing through a rough neighborhood, when he looked up and saw a man firing a gun. Hessler said he pulled over and, as he exited his Jeep, the gunshots continued in his direction. He fired five shots, striking the man once. A witness called the shooting a tragic mistake, saying the victim, Steven Hawkins Jr., and his girlfriend had been carjacked at a tire shop, and Hawkins was racing back to his car. The sole witness said he told Hessler he had shot the wrong man, and the officer replied that he couldn’t have shot the wrong man because the subject was firing a gun. The witness said Hawkins—though he did fire his gun—did not aim at the officer. Hessler said he yelled, “Police! Drop the gun,” but the witness reported not hearing that warning. The police force cleared Hessler. A civil judge granted Hawkins’s family a $700,000 judgment, but an appeals court overturned that ruling.

  Hessler had fired his weapon before, but this was his first fatal shot, a stark reminder that police sometimes face split-second decisions. “It happens so quickly you don’t have time to think of the danger. You just react.” He wonders if politics played a part in the earlier state battery case, which was filed by the office of then district attorney Harry Connick Sr. The NOPD’s vice squad had investigated the DA. “Police work is a challenging job by any measure,” he said. “In New Orleans, you have the politics: political politics, racial politics. All of which I find more dangerous. That’s what I worried about the most, the political side.”

  Hessler served through a series of mayors, and the biggest reform plus, he said, is having a mayor who allows the superintendent to call the shots. He saw that under Marc Morial and was promoted during his tenure. “Morial, he brought in an outsider. He let the chief be the chief,” Hessler said. With subsequent mayors, “you had a police chief, but he was the puppet. That’s where the problem comes in.”

  And now, after Katrina, the force felt rudderless.

  Hessler served as legal counsel for PANO, the Police Association of New Orleans. And, with the officers charged in state court after the Danziger Bridge shootings, Eric Hessler signed on as lawyer for Sergeant Robert Gisevius Jr.

  Before Katrina, police files show Gisevius had run into more than his share of abuse complaints—seven in a five-year period from 1999 to 2004. “Allegedly spit on subject,” said one report from 2004. “Officer allegedly used unnecessary force,” said another complaint a year earlier. Each time, the department cleared him of wrongdoing.

  Hessler sees a different side. A solidly built cop with crisply cut dark hair, Gisevius had graduated from a Catholic high school in the area in 1990, then enlisted in the Louisiana Army National Guard Reserve. He went on to raise two sons, tended to his ailing parents, and joined the force.

  Trapped inside a hotel room by Katrina, Gisevius swam to safety, using fence posts as paddles to rescue colleagues.

  Racing to the bridge that morning, expecting a shootout, the officers did as they were trained to do, Hessler said. The call came at a time Mayor Nagin, his police chief Compass, and the national media were relaying horror stories of lawlessness in New Orleans, telling tales of rapes and brutality at the Superdome. Many of those tales proved to be just that. The officers did not know that: the mayor and superintendent were saying it was true. Then came the 108 call.

  “When you’re dispatched you realize this is the call, and this is real,” Hessler said. “Perception is this guy’s reality. The reality of what was occurring during Katrina. I think it became really real when you are in the back of a boxed-in truck” barreling ahead, and officers up front have already begun firing their weapons. When he stepped out of the back of the truck, Gisevius believed he and his fellow officers were under fire, Hessler said. “It combined for the perfect storm for a situation like this to occur.”

  Handling the case now from the other side, as a lawyer representing an accused officer, Hessler came to a conclusion about what happened that morning on the bridge.

  “I believed firmly this shooting was justified,” he said. A fighter who had beat back cases when he was on the force, Hessler would join the defense counsel representing the other officers, and the larger police department family, to make that case.

  CHAPTER 15

  JUDICIAL TIES, PROSECUTORIAL ERROR, AND THE NOPD WALKS FREE

  IN THE ORLEANS PARISH Criminal District Court, the case of State of Louisiana v. Kenneth Bowen et al., was assigned to Criminal District Court judge Raymond Bigelow. Three days after the police officers were hailed as heroes in the streets, Judge Bigelow was filing a report in the courthouse disclosing the many ties between his office, the officers, and their counsel. Suddenly the criminal justice system in Orleans Parish was feeling very much like a family affair, according to the January 5, 2007, report the judge prepared.

  “In an effort to apprize the prosecutors in the captioned matter of relationships which exist between members of my staff and individuals identified with defense, the Court files this notice into the record,” Judge Bigelow declared.

  Sergeant Bowen, the judge noted, was represented by the law firm DeSalvo, DeSalvo, and Blackburn. “These attorneys are the father, brother and husband, respectively, of one of my minute clerks, Emily DeSalvo Blackburn,” Judge Bigelow reported. A minute clerk helps keep the court’s official records.

  The spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police, Sergeant Donovan Livaccari, “is the husband of my other minute clerk, Claire Livaccari.” The FOP was a major source of support and fund-raising for the officers facing charges.

  The lawyer for Officer Ignatius Hills, Bruce Whittaker, “was the longtime law partner of my law clerk, Michael Riehlmann, until August, 2005.”

  The judge said these tentacle-like ties would not impede his handling of the “Danziger Bridge 7 Indictments,” among the most closely watched police corruption cases in New Orleans history. “Notwithstanding these relationships, the Court, confidently assures all parties in this matter that it can conduct all necessary proceedings in an entirely fair and impartial manner,” the judge wrote, signing his name, Raymond Bigelow, at the bottom of the one-page report.

  Bigelow was not overjoyed when the case landed on his desk through the random allotment of cases on the criminal docket. “I wasn’t real thrilled. I knew it was going to be a headache of a case,” he said. Bigelow felt it unfair to simply recuse himself and shuffle the case over to another judge. So, he disclosed the ties between his office and the defense team and would have stepped aside if either side asked him to.

  The defense was not likely to make the request. DA Eddie Jordan’s office, the side far more likely to object to ties between the judge’s office and the defense team, didn’t file a motion either, at least not right away. “I felt I was elected to handle the easy cases as well as the tough cases, so I didn’t want to dump this on any other judge. It wasn’t like I tried to hide anything from anyone in the public,” Bigelow explained. “If any one person had made the motion I would have recused myself from the case.”

  The case stayed with him.

  That same Friday afternoon Bigelow issued a first important ruling. After each of the seven officers pleaded not guilty, the judge granted bond to all the accused, including the four facing first degree murder charg
es, setting them free from spending time behind bars while their case traveled through the system. Bond in a murder case is highly unusual, but Bigelow granted it to all of them.

  The district attorney’s office did not challenge the bond ruling, just as the office of DA Jordan had not filed a motion requesting Judge Bigelow step aside and allow another judge to hear the case—another judge without three clerks with ties to the law firm for one accused officer, the lawyer for another, and the FOP union that had lambasted the charges now before the bench.

  “Everyone is entitled to a bond, you don’t automatically get a bond, but the defense had filed a motion for bond in the case,” the judge said. “And I met with the DA and the defense attorneys. Mr. Jordan, do you wish to agree to have a bond set? And he agreed to have a bond set in the case.”

  His bond ruling was welcome news to the police association. “The officers were released and reunited with their families. There are some restrictions and court imposed requisites relative to the bond, which will not interfere with the officers’ ability to return to work in administrative capacities, pending final resolution of the matter,” wrote Glasser, the association president. “The officers wish to thank everyone for their support and I would like to remind everyone that the fight is just beginning and continued support will be crucial.”

  EVEN AS THE CASE sprung to life with the state court charges, the Madison family did not sit idly by and watch the Orleans Parish legal system unfold. The family was troubled that the judge granted bond, troubled by his office’s ties to the defense team, and troubled that the DA was doing nothing about it, at least not yet.

  By February 2007, a month after Judge Bigelow’s disclosures, Romell Madison and his supporters were pressing for a federal civil rights investigation into the shootings on the bridge. They didn’t trust the local DA’s office to right the wrong.

  One of Madison’s phone calls was placed to Marc H. Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who had risen to become president and chief executive officer of the National Urban League in New York. Morial was twice elected mayor of New Orleans, following the path cleared by his father, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, the first black man to hold the office. The younger Morial entered city hall in 1994 vowing to clean out corruption “with a shovel not a broom,” and eyeing the police department in particular. He had hired Pennington to help clean the mess and, on Pennington’s first day as superintendent, introduced him to FBI investigators embedded in the department’s Public Integrity Bureau.

  Morial was outraged by what happened on the bridge, by the shootings of innocents trying to survive the hurricane. What most troubled him was the cover-up.

  “It’s almost as though a bad police department has an instinct and a culture of covering up misconduct,” he said. “When a department is covering up corruption they are operating like a criminal enterprise. Because that’s how the Mafia operates.”

  Morial knew the justice system in New Orleans had a spotty record of convicting rogue officers. Convictions in the Algiers 7 case, when officers responded to the death of a white colleague by killing four black residents, came only when the case moved out of New Orleans and was held in Dallas. Algiers 7 unfolded while Morial’s father ran the city.

  “In order to convict a police officer, you don’t have to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt. You have to convict him beyond all doubt,” the younger Morial said. “The history of New Orleans in police corruption is you have to have the Justice Department in order to have a just outcome. History teaches us that.”

  A police brutality case that came to light shortly after he took office showed how outlaw officers had been allowed to wear the badge and rule with impunity. In December 1994, in a corruption case touted as the largest in the city’s history, nine police officers were charged in federal court with pocketing nearly $100,000 in bribes to protect a vast cocaine operation. The problem, for police: the cocaine center was actually run by undercover FBI agents. The investigation began a year earlier when two officers, one named Len Davis, began extorting bribes and offering protection to a drug dealer. That dealer then turned federal informant, and the sting was hatched. As the undercover operation unspooled, even federal agents were taken aback by the brazen police tactics. Davis, his partner, and seven other friendly officers they recruited stood guard over the supposed cocaine center, sometimes while on duty and in uniform. The federal sting prosecution was led by the same Eddie Jordan now serving as the city’s DA.

  The undercover probe was abruptly halted after federal investigators discovered that Davis, in October 1994, had ordered the execution of a thirty-two-year-old woman who had filed a battery complaint against him. The woman, seeing Davis and other officers manhandling a neighborhood boy, had tried to come to the teen’s rescue when, she said, Davis roughed her up. Kim Groves filed a complaint against him. Seething, Davis turned to one of his criminal informants. “Get that whore!” he told the triggerman, who killed the young black woman in front of her home in the city’s Ninth Ward, firing a bullet into her head.

  When the victim was killed, Davis uttered words Sergeant Kaufman had replicated on the bridge. “NAT,” Davis said. Necessary action taken. Before the shooting, Davis had been the subject of at least twenty brutality complaints over five years; nearly all were dismissed by police. “He’s got an internal affairs jacket as thick as a telephone book,” an officer told a reporter covering the case, “but supervisors have swept his dirt under the rug.”

  After the hit on Kim Groves, victims of police brutality were wise not to complain about abusing officers. The execution of Groves made sure of that. The police-ordered hit may never have come to light had the FBI not been monitoring Len Davis and his troupe of badge-wearing cocaine protectors.

  Davis, who had already come to be called Robocop, was sentenced to death for the murder, but that sentence became entangled in appeals and legal wrangling for decades. Sentencing for the gunman had not even been finalized thirteen years later in 2007 as Morial set his sights on the newest police scandal in New Orleans after receiving a call for help from the Madison family.

  Morial had staked his two terms on uprooting corruption—winning widespread voter support and minimal political opposition. His handpicked police superintendent, Pennington, tried to rise to the mayor’s office. Pennington lost to Ray Nagin, and Morial contends that moment set back efforts for lasting reform within the department. “There were incidents before Katrina involving black men and excessive force by police that I would not have tolerated. So the seeds for Danziger were planted before Katrina,” Morial said.

  “Danziger is a symptom. The cancer is police corruption,” agrees Rafael Goyeneche III, a former prosecutor who is president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a nonprofit watchdog group focused on spotlighting corruption and that operates directly across from the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. “You look at fifteen years before Danziger and the pattern is clear. The culture predicted Danziger.”

  City watchdogs say there’s no question police discipline improved under Morial. Goyeneche believes the department celebrated success too soon, saying widespread change requires lasting commitment.

  During Morial’s tenure, the Department of Justice threatened to step in with a lawsuit that would demand change. Morial convinced the DOJ not to take that formal step. He said his reforms were more sweeping than any the federal government could adopt. The department won accreditation, stressed community policing, and took, for New Orleans, a hard line on police wrongdoing. But by not allowing the Justice Department to formally stake a role in the city, Morial left office without any guarantee of permanent change. “Had I had any inkling that Nagin would have engaged in a systematic dismissal of police reforms, I would have taken any step necessary to try to lock in the reforms on a more permanent basis,” he said. “In hindsight I would have taken any step, any step to lock in those reforms had I had any sense that the retrenchment and the reversal would have been so massive and swift.”

  Mori
al knew Nagin’s new superintendent, Eddie Compass, as a talented and respected district commander. Compass’s tenure atop the force lasted only past Hurricane Katrina, and he left with the department under fire. Today Compass said he doesn’t want to dwell on the past. When I asked him to talk about what happened, he replied tersely, “I really don’t discuss Danziger, I had nothing to do with it.” Compass said his attention during Katrina was focused on the human suffering at the Superdome. “Once Ray Nagin fired me from the police department, I don’t discuss the police department. I’ve gone on with my life, thank you.” Then he hung up. Nagin is now in federal prison serving a ten-year sentence for corruption for selling out his office for personal perks.

  Out of the mayor’s office for five years when Romell Madison reached out to him, Morial maintained a keen interest in police abuse cases in New Orleans. He knew the culture crossed racial lines among members of the force. When the Madison family contacted him, the New Orleans Police Department’s racial makeup nearly mirrored that of the city. In 2007, in a city where 60 percent of residents were black, 57 percent of the force was black. Forty percent of NOPD’s officers were white. But the bond between officers was based on the color of their uniform, not their skin.

  “They call it the blue code. When the blue code becomes an operating principle in the department, it affects all the officers,” Morial said.

  And now the state judge overseeing the Danziger case was acknowledging his office’s ties to the defense and granting bond for men accused of killing unarmed victims. Morial pushed for federal intervention. “I’m very, very proud and just respectful of the way [the Madisons] have refused to let this go. They have done it very intelligently, they have done it very forcefully. The fact they have suffered a tragedy beyond their control . . . It’s clear you can’t bring [Ronald] back, but they can get justice for him,” Morial said.