Shots on the Bridge

by Ronnie Greene

  On February 20, 2007, he wrote to the Congressional Black Caucus of the US House of Representatives, “to solicit your support for a federal civil rights investigation by the Justice Department of the circumstances surrounding the police killing of two unarmed African American men and the wounding of four others in an incident on Danziger Bridge in New Orleans on September 4, 2005, in those horrible days following the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. I am especially calling for congressional oversight into the subsequent handling of this case by the New Orleans Police Department and the court.”

  Morial told how a “forty-year-old mentally handicapped African American man named Ronald Madison was shot in the back seven times by police. . . . Mr. Madison died of his wounds, as also did James Brissette, another man who was shot by the police that day on the same bridge. According to witness testimonies, the men and women shot by the police were hurricane survivors merely trying to run away from unidentified men who were shooting at them.” Morial described how, as Ronald lay dead on the pavement, Lance Madison was handcuffed and jailed.

  He referred Congress to a lengthy accounting of events by the National Dental Association, a group once led by Romell Madison. Like the police family that stood up for the accused officers, the Dental Association was putting its might behind Romell Madison. “Their outrage stems from the additional injustice perpetuated by the court by allowing the police officers charged with first-degree murder to be released on bond, and the police department’s decision to allow the officers charged to return to work.”

  Morial wanted action. “As you already know, there is so much pain and tragedy still being experienced by the thousands who were impacted by Hurricane Katrina. So much still needs to be done to restore the many institutions that affect every day life, including the criminal justice system.”

  On March 27, 2007, the National Dental Association sent its own plea for help to US attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales, speaking on behalf of twenty thousand dentists and calling for a federal civil rights investigation into the killing of Ronald Madison. The group detailed the massacre on the bridge and documented concern over Judge Bigelow’s staff ties to the defense and his ruling allowing accused murderers to be released on bond.

  “The tragedy of rogue police officers shooting unarmed citizens, mishandling their investigation of the incident, having a court that allows men charged with first degree murder to go free on bail and even back to work as police officers, and having a judge that has several serious conflicts of interest in this case yet refuses to recuse himself—all of this causes the victims, their families and the community to completely lose faith in the justice system in New Orleans,” the association wrote.

  “Clearly, it is time for federal intervention and oversight in this case. Clearly, the local authorities are not committed to seeking full and complete justice,” wrote Robin R. Daniel, president of the National Dental Association, the position Romell had left just four years earlier.

  Others joined the fight for a federal review, Daniel told the attorney general, from the New Orleans Chapter of the NAACP to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “I ask you to heed these calls for justice. I ask you to take action today to ensure that there is no miscarriage of justice in these horrible murders and shootings.”

  In Louisiana, yet other groups were seeking to get Judge Bigelow removed from the case even as the DA didn’t. On February 22, 2007, a group calling itself Safe Streets/Strong Communities wrote to members of the Louisiana Supreme Court, asking the state’s highest court to recuse Bigelow from the Danziger 7 prosecution.

  “At a time when the national, if not global, spotlight is on New Orleans, it is imperative that the system function in a fair and transparent manner, without a hint of impropriety,” the group wrote. “We take no position as to the guilt or innocence of the officers charged. Our interest is in seeing justice done, in seeing that, the victims, their families and the defendants are treated fairly by the criminal justice system. It is our belief that as long as this case remains under Judge Bigelow’s control, any disposition of the case will remain forever tainted for the majority of New Orleanians.”

  In June, five months after Judge Bigelow’s disclosures and three months after this group’s plea to have him removed from hearing the case, the district attorney sought a new judge to oversee the biggest case of his career. Dustin Davis, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the officers, said he had begun developing concerns, particularly over the law clerk who previously partnered with one of the defense attorneys. Bigelow had removed that clerk from involvement in the case, yet Davis said that move came only after the clerk took part in one meeting on the case and conducted research for the judge. Bigelow had already offered to step aside, but by this time he was deep in the case.

  That September 2007, Orleans Parish judge Julian Parker denied the motion to remove Bigelow, ruling that prosecutors failed to provide evidence showing he shouldn’t preside over the case. The judge blocked Davis from asking another of Bigelow’s clerks—the one married to the FOP spokesman—whether she had contributed to a legal defense fund for the officers. Attending fund-raisers or making donations are constitutionally protected rights, Judge Parker said, cutting off the questioning.

  “You have not put any meat on the bones of your application to recuse Judge Bigelow,” Parker told the prosecutor.

  Soon after, DA Jordan called it quits, resigning his office amid problem cases and the sting of the discrimination verdict.

  ELEVEN MONTHS LATER, on August 13, 2008, Judge Bigelow dismissed the entire case, ruling that prosecutor Davis tainted the grand jury process by showing a sliver of testimony to a supervisor of the officers under review.

  “The violation is clear, and indeed, uncontroverted,” Bigelow said. “The state improperly disclosed grand jury testimony to another police officer.”

  Further, Judge Bigelow said, prosecutor Davis improperly gave immunity to three officers for their testimony before the grand jury—only to have those same officers indicted. One of them was Kenneth Bowen, the officer pursuing his own legal career. And, the judge ruled, the prosecution gave flawed instructions to the grand jurors about the second degree murder charges.

  Judge Bigelow read his ruling from the bench, gutting the state’s case and seemingly setting the police officers completely free. As he read from his ruling, the Times-Picayune told its readers, the accused officers sat silently in the front row of the courtroom, betraying little emotion. Behind them, wives and supporters wiped away tears.

  Moments later, one of the police defense lawyers patted another on the back, beaming widely, as they left the courthouse surrounded by television microphones and cameras.

  Ronald Madison’s family sat in the courtroom, soaking in the latest legal setback. “Our family today still feels that the ruling just proves again that the justice system here in New Orleans is still flawed,” Romell Madison told reporters, after walking down the courthouse steps wearing his blue dentist’s garb, his family trailing behind him. Romell said he would ask the US Department of Justice to take over the case. To the Madison family, the ruling was confirmation of their quest to convince the federal government to become involved. The family never trusted the New Orleans criminal justice system to mete out a fair punishment against its own. Instead, the officers who gunned down Ronald Madison and JJ Brissette were set free.

  The local newspaper’s coverage of Bigelow’s ruling cited the police defense, suggesting to readers not intimately familiar with what happened on the bridge that the facts were in dispute. While noting that the families had brought lawsuits alleging a murder and cover-up, and citing questions about the police department’s fifty-four-page report, the Times-Picayune reported:

  Police officials have acknowledged the officers shot people on two separate sides of the bridge, but said they did so only after first being shot at. A police report said they arrived at the scene that morning in response to calls over the police radio about people
shooting at other officers and rescue workers.

  Judge Bigelow’s ruling meant the law and order story held together, and police celebrated their colleagues as free men, not accused criminals. While the case had remained active, the accused had been required to wear tracking devices to follow their every move. Now those tracking devices were removed, and the officers went back to work, unshackled from the justice system.

  Four months after tossing the case, Judge Bigelow would quietly work his last day on the bench. The onetime prosecutor, who began his career working for Orleans Parish district attorney Harry Connick, hung up his judicial robes. He went to work as a federal public defender and defense attorney handling capital murder cases.

  As the judge stepped aside, some feared the case would fade too. Many in New Orleans believed the book had closed on that bloody Sunday, that there were two sides to the story, as the local newspaper reported, and the answers might never be fully revealed.

  Three years after the Danziger Bridge shootings, truth remained elusive. From the moment the gunfire ceased, only a tiny cluster of people knew the full truth of what had happened that morning: The NOPD officers and phony cop who raced to the bridge, four supervisors in on the cover-up, and the eight city residents captured in their fire. With Bigelow’s ruling dismissing the case, the larger community remained in the dark.

  Behind the scenes, in another wing of the justice system, momentum was building for a deeper look into the events of September 4, 2005.

  On September 30, 2008, nearly two months after Judge Bigelow dismissed the state case, Jim Letten, the US attorney based in New Orleans, announced federal authorities were studying whether any foundation existed for a federal prosecution.

  Even a member of the state district attorney’s office, Keva Landrum-Johnson, had sent a letter urging the federal Department of Justice to become involved. “More likely than not, the court will quash the indictments and the State will be left with no viable option other than to recharge some or all of the defendants on lesser offenses,” Landrum-Johnson wrote presciently on August 8, 2008, five days before Judge Bigelow did just that. “Admittedly, my office bears much of the responsibility for the position we are in now.”

  Landrum-Johnson, who would later become a state court judge, was right on two fronts. She correctly predicted the collapse of the DA’s case, and she correctly called for the federal government to get involved, which it did. “We’re very happy,” Romell Madison told reporters. The families, he said, “have a better playing field now, with a chance of justice being reached more quickly now that we will be without the politics of the local system.”

  For the time being, Letten remained tight-lipped about where any case might lead. “In order to insure the integrity of the process, no additional comments regarding this matter will be made until the review is complete,” the New Orleans US attorney said.

  Soon, an aggressive civil rights prosecutor who put away racists and gang members, and a mechanical engineer turned rookie FBI agent, would begin digging into the events of that Sunday morning. They would be startled by what they found.

  PART III

  THE TRIALS

  CHAPTER 16

  CONSPIRACY CRACKS UNDER FEDERAL GLARE

  RAISED ON THE NEW JERSEY SHORE, William Bezak envisioned two dream jobs growing up: designing airplanes or working for the FBI. Though his family was stocked with law enforcement officers, from cousins to his brother, father, and grandfather, Bezak opted for the former. He studied mechanical engineering at Villanova University and earned a master’s degree in the field.

  Fresh from graduate school, he landed a job in the rotorcraft division at the Boeing corporation. He was a stress engineer, designing the drive systems for military helicopters. Bezak’s dream, it appeared, had been realized.

  But desk work bored Bezak, and the urge to hit the streets pulled at him. Maybe it was in his familial blood, but Bezak felt an unrelenting urge to chase corruption. In 2006 he substituted Plan B for Plan A. He graduated from the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and landed his first post in New Orleans. He’d be pursuing the bad guys, all right, in the agency’s White Collar Crime task force. The targets: financial crime, mortgage fraud, and civil rights violations. Police excessive-force cases were part of the mix.

  Bezak pursued cases like a puzzle, using his skills as a helicopter engineer to unravel loose, fraying ends.

  By January 2009 the Danziger Bridge shootings were three years and four months old and, for many, simply a memory, a story of police responding to gunfire at a horrible time in the city. None of the officers who fired weapons that day had been convicted. The truth gnawed at the victims, but their calls for resolution had not yet been fully heard, and they felt nothing close to closure.

  With the state case dropped, the federal government’s Civil Rights Division in Washington, DC, had decided to take a look. The review was led by Barbara “Bobbi” Bernstein, a career prosecutor with cropped dark hair, transparent eyeglass frames, and a reputation for riveting opening statements delivered without index cards. Bernstein had a way of connecting with jurors, winning points with sharply focused questions while presenting an air of approachability. “This is Bobbi,” she answers the phone in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

  In 2008, just as the civil rights office was officially opening the books on the Danziger Bridge shootings, Bernstein helped put away two men who pleaded guilty to violating the civil rights of a black couple and their white friend by plastering racial threats and epithets on the home where the three lived in Collinsville, Illinois, a city of twenty-six thousand some twelve miles from St. Louis. The men spray-painted “KKK” and “White Power” on the victims’ home, trying to rattle them so deeply they would flee the neighborhood. For their hate crimes, Bernstein helped make sure that one man got six and a half years in prison and the other more than two years.

  Two years before that, Bernstein was part of a DOJ team that helped convict four Latino gang members in Los Angeles for a six-year campaign to assault and kill black residents in the city’s Highland Park neighborhood. The prosecution targeted the Avenues street gang, whose members killed two men, prosecutors said, simply because they chose to live in the neighborhood. One black man, Christopher Bowser, was gunned down while waiting for a bus, and another, Kenneth Kurry Wilson, was killed as he searched for a parking space. “Acts of hateful violence targeted at individuals because of their race will be aggressively investigated and vigorously prosecuted,” a civil rights prosecutor said. Four gang members got life in prison. For her work on that case, Bernstein received the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service, the department’s highest honor, in 2007.

  And now, a year after that recognition, Bobbi Bernstein was becoming engrossed in the Danziger Bridge shootings. As she began exploring the events of that morning, Bernstein was driven by a dual quest to uncover the truth and to find justice for the victims. By the time she was done, she would view the Danziger Bridge shootings as the most egregious case of police misconduct she had prosecuted in fifteen years. She’d see the police cover-up as a stunning betrayal of public trust. Behind those acts were families left to bury two sons, and survivors living with visible scars from the police shootout.

  For the families on the bridge, the civil rights inquiry felt like an answered prayer. Nathan Fisher and Shannon Fay, Lance Madison’s defense team, instantly realized the significance of the federal review. In New Orleans, the local district attorney is an elected official and, as the police bulletin board and street rallies had shown, the NOPD would put its might behind fighting any charges brought locally in New Orleans. The DOJ Civil Rights Division, more than one thousand miles away in Washington, was a world removed from this local friction. The Police Association of New Orleans and Fraternal Order of Police unions held no power over the federal office; street rallies on the case meant nothing in Washington.

  When Fay and Fisher met with the federal investigators, they handed
over a binder an inch and a half to two inches thick containing their case research. They noticed the prosecuting team had already assembled an entire bookshelf of files on the investigation.

  ONE DAY IN JANUARY 2009, still early in the federal government’s exploration, Bernstein invited Bezak to join other FBI agents and prosecutors in a meeting in New Orleans with Archie Kaufman, the NOPD sergeant who helped lead the shooting inquiry. Kaufman was eager to talk. He wanted to make it abundantly clear his colleagues had every right to fire with deadly force. He shared his agency’s findings that day, January 22, 2009, describing how he discovered Lance Madison’s gun at the scene, even leading the agents and prosecutors on a tour of the bridge.

  Bezak was not officially assigned to the case just yet. But as Kaufman talked, the gears in his mind turned. The sergeant’s explanations were curious, Bezak thought, and getting more curious as he spoke. Bezak sat still, not questioning Kaufman, who spoke with his fellow law enforcement colleagues with a friendly, jovial air, as if he were among friends.

  Bezak, with a boyish face, athlete’s physique, and cleanly cropped brown hair, made mental notes of what the visitor was saying. Kaufman said he both witnessed the shootings and was investigating them. That’s curious, Bezak thought. A witness typically doesn’t then investigate the same case. Kaufman said he was not immediately on the scene that morning, but arrived after the shooting had begun.

  Kaufman showed the Feds where and how he found the gun, and said he made the discovery a day after the shootings. Bezak thought this odd. In such a high profile case, wouldn’t officers have done everything possible to find the supposed criminal’s gun on the day of the gunfire?