Shots on the Bridge

by Ronnie Greene

  The witnesses nagged at him too. Kaufman regaled the Feds with stories of his star witnesses, describing Lakeisha Smith as so attractive “the lady could have been a stripper,” one meeting participant said. Smith and James Youngman, said to have seen citizens fire first, were seemingly golden witnesses for police. They saw it happen with their own eyes. Yet the police report included scant information about them—not even their phone numbers—and little in their own words. Kaufman said they might be impossible to find.

  “His description of her was so complete you could practically see her in front of you,” Kelly Bryson, an FBI special agent at the meeting, later recalled. “But then the next second he was like, ‘I have never seen her before, I have never seen her since.’ It was almost like she was instantly right in front of you and then she was gone.”

  Agent Bryson was taken aback when Kaufman described a hospital interview he conducted with the Bartholomews, confiding how at ease the family appeared in talking with him. “He said it was the most comfortable in all his thirty years of doing interviews as a police officer,” Bryson recounted. “He said it was the best interview—the best one he had had in thirty years.”

  The FBI agent was stunned by what she heard. “Susan Bartholomew and Leonard Bartholomew Sr. had multiple gunshot wounds. They were actually in their daughter’s room, who had been shot but not yet released from the hospital. Neither had their nephew Jose Holmes been released from the hospital. It was extremely surprising to see that he would describe it as a, you know, comfortable, wonderful interview,” Bryson said. “It just doesn’t seem consistent with how people would react under their circumstances towards a New Orleans police officer.”

  Another glaring hole involved the Budget truck that ferried officers to the scene. “Did you look at the truck?” the federal team asked their visitor. “And he said he didn’t. The truck was actually brought back to the Crystal Palace too, and he didn’t look at it. He didn’t inspect it, and it went back into service. That’s a huge truck,” Bryson said. “Because the officers would have been in that area, it would have been something to, at a minimum, look at even if you are going to let it go back into service.”

  As Kaufman talked, Bryson’s view of the case, like Bezak’s, began to shift. Archie Kaufman’s tale “just didn’t sound right,” said Bryson, then the supervisor of the Civil Rights unit in the FBI’s New Orleans office.

  The fifty-four page police report included no reference to Leonard Bartholomew IV, the fourteen-year-old who fled the shootings and lived only because officer Ignatius Hills missed his back. Bezak noted this discrepancy as well, but did not yet press the contradictions with the affable visitor from the New Orleans Police Department.

  Not long after the casual sit-down, Kaufman bumped into Lieutenant Lohman, the supervisor ultimately in charge of the internal review, at work. He told Lohman he had huddled with the FBI. “It’s all cool, babe,” Kaufman confided.

  A day later Bezak sat in on a second interview with another NOPD supervising investigator, Sergeant Gerard Dugue, who had shared the investigative reins with Kaufman. Again sitting as a spectator, he listened quietly as prosecutor Bernstein carved the first cut into the department’s fiction.

  The fifty-four-page report used to justify police actions listed “Deputy Sheriff” David Ryder as the first witness in the case. Ryder was the man, dressed in police garb, who flagged down Detective Jennifer Dupree as she descended the I-10, telling her armed gunmen were firing. Later that day Ryder fingered Lance Madison as one of the shooters.

  Prosecutors confirmed the fraud. Ryder was no police sheriff but a convicted felon who convinced police he was one of them in the chaotic post-Katrina frenzy. Bernstein confronted Dugue with this revelation. Dugue began to stammer, and sweat streamed down his face. Bezak saw huge sweat stains on the sergeant’s shirt.

  One thread of the story was beginning to unravel under outside scrutiny.

  Within a few weeks, Bezak was officially assigned to a case that hadn’t stopped turning in his mind. He gathered every piece of paper NOPD filed to justify the shootings, building a body of research that would grow to four bookshelves of files. Using his mechanical engineering background, he worked to pinpoint weaknesses. He found them. The fifty-four-page report noted that five .223 caliber rifle casings had been found on the ground, but not a single officer admitted to carrying such a weapon. Yet another report Bezak ran across showed that Sergeant Robert Gisevius Jr. carried an M4 rifle. It can fire .223 caliber bullets. Gisevius never turned it over to investigators.

  Bezak tried to find star witnesses Lakeisha Smith and James Youngman. He struck out. Not a single person from New Orleans matched their descriptions.

  Next, he obtained a video shot by an NBC News affiliate that happened to be near the bridge that morning, the footage retrieved earlier by the defense team for Lance Madison. The video did not capture every scene of the shooting, just glimpses of it, and from a distance, but it helped Bezak connect pieces of the puzzle. From the start, officers said they were engaged in a pitched battle. The grainy, distant footage showed police in pursuit, firing their weapons—literally standing tall.

  The FBI agent spotted conflicts in two statements Sergeant Bowen gave just after the shootings. In one, Bowen said he kicked the shooters’ guns from a pedestrian walkway into the grass and then stood over the weapons. In the other, he said he kicked the guns and then pursued the shooters. Which was true?

  Bezak and the FBI team followed every thread of potential evidence and contacted witnesses never questioned by police. The Friendly Inn near the bridge had closed after Hurricane Katrina, but agents tracked down the hotel’s former maintenance worker and his wife, who had also worked at the hotel as a manager, to their new home in Tampa, Florida. One day an agent knocked on the couple’s door and asked what they knew about the shootings on the bridge in New Orleans the first Sunday after Katrina. Robert Rickman described how an officer stomped on his camera that morning and how police never asked him a single question. Rickman told agents he had a second camera in his pocket and snapped pictures. The FBI collected the snapshots as evidence.

  FOR THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, it was time to act.

  They began on the outside, approaching Detective Jeffrey Lehrmann, who worked closely with Kaufman in crafting the initial reports. The Feds could have subpoenaed Lehrmann to appear before a grand jury, but they invited him to come in voluntarily with his lawyer. At the meeting, agents and prosecutors pressed buttons, saying the official police story was pockmarked with holes.

  Lehrmann rose from his seat and began pacing the room. He did not agree to cooperate, as least not yet, but Lehrmann did share a nugget. He told authorities that Kaufman and Dugue had written yet another, thirty-two page police report about the shootings, but never released it. That nugget fueled Bezak and Bernstein.

  On August 5, 2009, eight months after the first cordial chat with Kaufman, the FBI obtained a search warrant to seize Kaufman and Dugue’s offices and computers. Bezak found the thirty-two-page report in one of Kaufman’s thumb drives and portions on a diskette in Dugue’s desk. It was investigative gold, infused with details left out of the official fifty-four-page report, including the fullest description to date of which officers fired which weapons.

  The media got wind of the searches and suddenly the story was back in the press. And now it came with a provocative question: Was the US Attorney’s Office exploring a cover-up in the Danziger Bridge shootings?

  “FBI Seizes Police Files in Bridge Shootings,” the Times-Picayune reported two days later, telling its readers:

  Federal agents this week raided the office of the New Orleans Police Department homicide division, seizing the files and computer hard drives of two officers assigned to investigate police conduct in one deadly post-Katrina shooting episode, law enforcement sources told The Times-Picayune.

  Representatives of the FBI and NOPD confirmed the seizure late Thursday.

  FBI agents served a search wa
rrant Wednesday afternoon for files in the offices of two supervisors, Sgt. Gerard Dugue and Sgt. Arthur Kaufman, the sources said.

  The two sergeants were the lead investigators who examined the shooting of civilians by police on the Danziger Bridge days after Hurricane Katrina. Gunfire from police, who were responding to reports of shots fired at officers, left two men dead and four people wounded.

  Bezak savored the publicity. It could potentially turn up the heat on the insiders—the police on the bridge, the supervisors who concealed the truth.

  Pressure was a powerful tool. If you corner your targets, convincing them the evidence gathered is unimpeachable, they just might crack.

  The US Justice Department pressed another, very public pressure point. Four years after the shootings, on September 26, 2009, authorities shut down the Danziger Bridge and launched an hours-long search for evidence. The search didn’t turn up any new evidence, but it sent a message. The government would dig for the truth, and now everyone in New Orleans knew what was happening. The US Attorney’s Office and FBI were hunting a massive civil rights cover-up.

  Lehrmann broke and became the first insider to cooperate. “At that time, no one had cooperated with the government. And the government was trying to get someone to cross the line. And they were having a very difficult time,” said Davidson Ehle III, the Louisiana attorney representing Lehrmann.

  To Ehle the choice was clear. If you’re going to cooperate, be the first, and set yourself up for the best plea deal possible. “If you’re going to do it, do it sooner than later,” he said. “Jeffrey was the first one, but there were some close seconds.”

  Roiled by the events on the bridge and his role in the cover-up, Lehrmann felt “great relief” when he finally turned, Ehle said. “He knew there were some miscarriages of justice. He seriously felt bad. Terrible, in fact.”

  Once he turned, Lehrmann told agents how the gun, listed in evidence as fired by Lance Madison, had actually been retrieved from Kaufman’s garage. He told them about the phony witnesses, and he started wearing a wire.

  For three hours Lehrmann broke bread with Gisevius at Lucy’s Retired Surfers Bar & Restaurant on Tchoupitoulas Street two blocks from the Convention Center downtown. The tape recorder, hidden on Lehrmann, rolled the entire conversation as they huddled in a local haunt that stays open Saturday nights “till the cock crows.”

  “Archie submitted a bullshit report,” Gisevius told Lehrmann. “Now, if he was fucking dumb enough to put the report you and him wrote on that fucking computer a year or so afterwards.”

  “I don’t think he would do that, would he?” Lehrmann replied.

  “I hope he wouldn’t,” Gisevius said.

  “I would think he would have fucking deleted it, to be honest with you,” Lehrmann surmised.

  “What weak link could sink the ship?” Gisevius wanted to know, and one by one he went over the names of other officers under the federal microscope. He had no clue Lehrmann had already turned.

  With the tape rolling, Gisevius delivered an expletive-filled description of the prosecutor pursuing the case, Bernstein. “You’ve never been hit like that by the fucking grand jury,” he told Lehrmann. “You never had a D.C. zealot coming after you who thinks you’re a dirty cop.”

  Bernstein, he noted, was based in Washington, occupied by “tree huggers” and “old Jewish families” who, in Gisevius’s view, had no earthly clue what life was like patrolling the streets of New Orleans.

  “They want a fight, dude? I’m ready to fight,” he charged.

  Gisevius, wary of the federal investigation, asked Lehrmann if he thought the Feds were tapping his phone. They weren’t. But the tape recorder was rolling that night. For the federal team, it was another notch in their investigative belt. An officer under investigation admitting the police report was “bullshit”—confirming, in the process, that a cover-up had been hatched.

  The next to flip was Lieutenant Michael Lohman, Kaufman’s boss. The federal investigators first met with Lohman on May 27, 2009, probing his role in the cover-up. Lohman turned them away. Several months later, the federal government came back with a subpoena, and a message. “You’re in trouble,” Bernstein told him. “We got you.” Lohman was about to be indicted. At first the lieutenant thought Bernstein was bluffing. Then he realized the Justice Department, indeed, had him. He was guilty. He agreed to cooperate. It was, he knew, “the right thing to do.” Lohman had read the initial police justifications and spotted so many contradictions in the reports, they flunked the laugh test. One day he pulled Kaufman and Bowen aside. “You all go get your story straight, go decide what happened, and then come back and tell me,” Lohman said. In deciding what happened, the police brass wrote multiple drafts before filing the finished fifty-four page document. Those earlier drafts, not released publicly, contradicted the later version. They were proof of a cover-up. Now Lohman, who had quietly kept copies of all the reports generated in the days and weeks after the shootings, was turning over yet another such police report and telling Bernstein and Co. the back story of the cover-up.

  The agreements with Lehrmann and Lohman marked a significant—but not complete—break for investigators. Agents had yet to convince any of the officers who fired their weapons to cooperate. Getting supervisors to unravel the cover-up was huge. Yet getting the shooters themselves would elevate the inquiry to another level. It would take agents and prosecutors inside the Budget truck and help them retrace the footsteps as police spilled out of the vehicle and began shooting at families.

  On March 4, 2010, agents applied pressure directly to the source, fanning out to the homes of three of the seven officers who stepped on the bridge with their weapons drawn and helped hatch a criminal cover-up: Robert Barrios, Anthony Villavaso, and Michael Hunter. They knocked on Barrios’s door and chatted with Villavaso on his front porch.

  At nine that evening, agents tapped on Hunter’s door. He peeked out the window and then came out through the garage. “Am I under arrest?” Hunter asked, shaken. “No,” Bezak said.

  “Am I a target of the investigation?”

  “Absolutely,” the agent replied.

  Hunter had been wrestling with demons from that morning in September 2005. After officers were first charged in state court, he was assigned desk duty doing paperwork while the criminal matter coursed through the court system. Villavaso worked alongside him.

  Each day officers would come by the office, shaking their hands and ripping into the DA for persecuting police doing their job. One day Hunter had enough. As Villavaso and fellow officers celebrated the police actions of that morning, Hunter rose from his desk and stormed to the bathroom. Villavaso followed him.

  “What’s wrong?” Villavaso asked. Standing inside the men’s room, Hunter turned to the officer. “There’s nothing cool about being indicted,” he said. “We’re not heroes.”

  Michael Hunter never wanted to climb the police ladder to stardom. He wanted to be a cop, nothing more. The officer had sent his four children, from his infant to his eight-year-old, out of town and reported to work during Katrina. His radio was promptly ruined by saltwater. His cell phone, stuck in his pocket as he patrolled the streets, was ruined too. Each day he headed out for duty, heavily armed. When the 108 call came, Hunter raced to the driver’s seat.

  “He wasn’t an opportunistic guy or an ass kisser,” said Townsend Myers, Hunter’s lawyer. “He was a quiet, solemn sort of guy. A go out there and do the police work kind of guy.”

  Now Hunter faced the most wrenching choice of his life. From the start, he had gone along with the cover-up. He looked himself in the mirror and admitted he hadn’t had the courage to tell the truth.

  But now, with FBI agents knocking on his door unannounced and word spreading that supervisors had already begun cooperating, everything had changed. “The truth had gotten out,” he said. “And it was just a matter of time.”

  If he agreed to testify, Hunter would have to lay bare the truth of that morning, a
nd admit that he was a criminal too. He’d also have to cross a very personal line. A Seventh District officer who worked narcotics, night watch, and other duties, he had reported to both Bowen and Gisevius as his supervisors.

  His lawyer, Myers, had represented New Orleans police officers before Hunter and was close with other lawyers signing up for other NOPD officers on the bridge.

  The officer and lawyer put those personal issues aside, Hunter working through the “internal conflict and demons he had to deal with,” his lawyer said. What was the smartest legal step he could take, for himself and his family?

  Hunter agreed to cooperate, and the stories he told were harrowing. He told the federal team how Bowen shot at citizens as they lay defenseless on one end of the bridge, and he described how his former supervisor stomped on a wheezing, dying Ronald Madison on the other. Hunter was guilty too, of aiming fire at innocents on the bridge and taking part in the cover-up. And, he told agents another crucial fact they did not know. Hunter himself was the first officer to fire that morning.

  Soon enough Michael Hunter’s stories would become central not only to prosecutors but also to defense attorneys for his former brothers on the force. They would describe him as a liar looking to save his own skin. Hunter braced for what would come.

  Now that he had agreed to plead guilty, two other officers soon followed, the police dominos tumbling under federal pressure. Robert Barrios agreed to cooperate and, like Hunter, had to cross the blue line of police brotherhood—and deceive his former partner, Villavaso. The two were so close they were “like bread and butter,” Barrios said. Now he was agreeing to tape-record his former partner as they met in the French Quarter.

  “Vil, there were no guns out there, bro,” Barrios told his partner repeatedly, trying to lure him into admitting guilt. He reminded Villavaso they were the outsiders—black officers from District Five, in an investigation led mostly by white supervisors from the Seventh.