The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  This is the kind of destruction Drew and Brittany Brees saw on their drive through the city, and instead of feeling repelled, they felt called. They didn’t move to the suburbs like most players and coaches, instead rehabbing a big white house in Uptown, near St. Charles. And when Drew wasn’t practicing or playing football, he was donating or raising money, much of it aimed at the 9th Ward. He wrote a $100,000 check for the new field at Carver.

  When the team started winning, kids would write signs and tape them to the iron fence at his property line, like something that might happen to the high school quarterback. After the Super Bowl, Brees arrived home to find a few six-packs of beer on his front walk. He took them inside. Hidden among the big poster-board and butcher-paper banners, there hung a note signed by the Argus and DiPaola families, written on printer paper torn in half: “My family lost everything in August 2005. Last night you and our beloved boys gave us everything back.”

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  The Saints matter deeply to the people of New Orleans, but in the year after the storm, the man who owned the team did not. Tom Benson became public enemy No. 1 because people saw him threatening to move the team to San Antonio. Fans booed him when the Saints played at LSU’s Tiger Stadium, and he threw a temper tantrum over the abuse. With the city filled with rancid refrigerators, a meme emerged: People spray-painted them with the words DO NOT OPEN: TOM BENSON INSIDE.

  Former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said that Benson wanted the team based in San Antonio for the 2006 season and that team officials were telling employees to prepare to move. The mayor of San Antonio pushed for the relocation. One of President Bill Clinton’s Cabinet secretaries—HUD director and former mayor of San Antonio Henry Cisneros—reached out to the commissioner, arguing on behalf of moving the franchise. The Saints fiercely deny the team tried to move. “It was the priority of Tom Benson to get the Saints back to New Orleans as soon as feasibly possible,” Saints spokesman Greg Bensel says. “His only public statement back in 2005 was that we were returning home and that we would lead the charge to rebuild. In fact, many other businesses did not and have not returned. But following Katrina, we can proudly argue that Tom Benson has led a renaissance in our city.”

  Citizens worried because Benson kept a ranch in Texas and spent much of the time there. He is not, however, a Texan. He grew up poor in New Orleans’ 7th Ward, near the corner of North Johnson and Elysian Fields—on the wrong side of a divided community, in one of many blue-collar families who made the rich elite of St. Charles Avenue richer and more elite. Anyone who expected him to be civic-minded in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane does not know Tom Benson. The city exists in his memory as a place he escaped. He fought his way out. Call it greed or focus or drive. The ancestors of the blue bloods who curry his favor today would have looked right through his father, who worked as a clerk in a department store and would give Tom 7 cents to ride the streetcar to school.

  Tom walked and saved the money.

  Much of Benson’s past remains hidden, and only a 2001 profile in The Times-Picayune managed to partially reveal him. He served in the navy, a yeoman on a battleship in the months after Japan surrendered, and when he returned home, he started work as an accountant at a local Chevrolet dealership. He moved up, managing the office, then the sales staff, and soon his own dealership. He turned one into more than 30, the start of a sprawling financial empire. He hired his three best friends from the 7th Ward and fired two of them—ultimately cutting ties with all three. Nobody would stop his rise to success. Eventually, he’d spend much of his time on a ranch in Texas, the open space as far from the cramped streets of a New Orleans slum as a little boy could travel. The Saints coaches and executives of the past decade are a reflection of Tom Benson’s bruising approach to business and life—the Bountygate scandal, and the team subsequently shrugging off the NFL’s inquiries, a perfect Bensonian moment.

  In Tom Benson’s mind, Tom Benson is a winner, and he doesn’t care whether people like him, which is lucky because after Katrina nobody did. Even before the storm, he’d been publicly pushing for a new lease, saying he needed millions in concessions from the state to stay competitive in the New Orleans market. His offensive burned bridges, and after Katrina, the business community believed he was using the disaster as the final piece of leverage. Tagliabue decided to meet businessmen from New Orleans to hear directly from them. He’d heard the Saints complaining that the storm had made the tough economic climate in the city even more difficult. Another NFL owner, Robert McNair of the Texans, set up the meeting. They gathered at the river camp owned by shipping magnate Thomas Coleman, at one of a dozen exclusive shacks built on the thin, fragile strip of land, called the batture, running between the levee and the river. Generations of New Orleanians have used these shacks, just a couple of miles from Audubon Park and the mansions on St. Charles, for whiskey drinking and holding meetings too secret for the public exposure of an office.

  Everyone ate dinner and admired the Louisiana folk art on the walls. No politicians were invited, just businessmen and bankers. Tagliabue listened to the men’s belief in New Orleans and their frustration with the Saints. Their hope for the city underscored what he already thought and what he’d told Benson. In a recent phone interview, Tagliabue recounted the conversation.

  “There is no way this team is going to be in San Antonio for the 2006 season,” Tagliabue said.

  “How can you say that?” Benson responded.

  “It takes three-fourths of the owners to move a team,” he replied, “and there’s no owner out there who is prepared to abandon New Orleans.”

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  Two women helped change the way New Orleans felt about Tom Benson after the Saints returned. The first, his granddaughter Rita Benson LeBlanc, made him finally seem in tune with the city. Rita’s rise to power in the organization was primarily about repairing relationships between the family and New Orleans.

  She grew up in Texas, spending summers running around the Saints’ practices, until she went to college and spent her summers interning at the NFL office in New York. Tom Benson, whom she called Paw-Paw, adored her and saw in her his best chance to turn the Saints into a family dynasty. With each year, he gave her more responsibility and the titles to go with it. Between 2006 and 2010, when the Saints were still building toward something, the now 38-year-old Rita became the public face of a youthful, modern corporation, fully in tune with the city it represented. Actors and celebrities watched the games in her suite, everyone’s place arranged according to a seating chart she closely managed. The art museum wanted her for its board, and she found herself at the nerve center of the city, drinking whiskey and talking politics in James Carville’s living room.

  Better than anyone else at the Saints’ facility on Airline Drive, Rita saw the connections between the town and the team in the years after Katrina, and she talked about them in ways that weren’t ham-fisted and trite. At a meeting as the team prepared for its first season back in the Superdome, she listened as marketing people pitched pop-culture slogans and themes that ignored the drowning elephant in the room. She said the team’s slogan needed to be something that reflected the goals of a football team and, subtly, of New Orleans itself. They hung a banner on the Superdome that read OUR HOME. OUR TEAM. BE A SAINT.

  Over the years, in the news stories leaked to local reporters by the Saints, a counter-narrative has emerged. Rita has been described as a tyrant, burning through dozens of personal assistants. Even in the run toward the Super Bowl, she showed signs of the strain that would come out in later years; after one big victory in 2009, she got agitated when a guest in her suite, a famous painter from New York, opened the bottle of Perrier-Jouet Fleur de Champagne that had been icing down during the game. The bottle was hers to open.

  The night of the Super Bowl, she reveled in her glory, holding court at the team’s victory party inside Miami’s Int
erContinental Hotel, dancing with her friends by the stage to New Orleans frat-rock band Better Than Ezra. She’d protected and resurrected her family’s name in the community, especially with Uptown businessmen who never trusted her 7th Ward grandfather. The party raged all night. Jimmy Buffett laughed with Carville out in the hall, and Sean Payton cradled the silver Vince Lombardi Trophy, now covered with smudges and fingerprints. He took a picture with anyone who wanted one.

  That victory party was the end of the Saints as the standing army of the Rebirth of New Orleans, less a pro sports franchise and more the 1980 Olympic hockey team, a vessel for hopes and dreams. The team had served as a life-support system, nearly as essential as the one strapped to Steve Gleason’s wheelchair, keeping the city breathing until it could breathe on its own. Rita danced and Payton raised a glass, and in the city of New Orleans, and everywhere its sons and daughters had been scattered, people remembered their journey away from the flood.

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  Tom Benson met the other woman who’s shaped his past 10 years, his third wife, Gayle, at Mass. They married a year before the storm, and in the decade since, she’s made him into one of New Orleans’ most generous philanthropists, giving away the millions he worked so hard to make. The couple gave $5 million to Team Gleason. Tens of millions have gone to hospitals, churches, high schools, and universities. He cried when the team unveiled a statue of him outside the Dome, and in all the photos, Gayle was by his side, wiping away the tears. The years between spray-painted refrigerators and a big bronze statue of Tom Benson were dominated by Gayle.

  She herself is a character in a supermarket novel; married twice before, nearing financial peril and without prospects, and suddenly pulled into a world of privilege and luxury. She shares with Tom a deep Catholic faith; both clearly nurse the wounds and insecurities all poor kids carry with them through life.

  She grew up in Old Algiers, directly across the river from the French Quarter, her father a janitor at a local store. They lived in a small shotgun house in a working-class neighborhood, where generation after generation tried to inch out of the mosquito bogs and sugarcane plantations. The money spent on the big Uptown mansions is made down here. The air smells like sugar or sulfur, depending on the wind and the century, and the flare stacks of the refineries throw shadows onto the fields and levees. You can always see the skyline of the French Quarter, and in the other direction you can see the cities of pipe and smoke out in the marsh, stretching mile after mile, bracketed by where you’re going and where you’ve been.

  Brenda LaJaunie says her sister always wanted a better life than the one they had growing up. Gayle barely appears in her high school yearbook, one of those nowhere girls who doesn’t find a place with any group. “Sometimes people are sufficiently motivated to change their lives so thoroughly that they abandon any trace of their previous existence,” says Dave McBane, who graduated in the Class of ’66.

  Gayle Benson says, through a Saints spokesman: “Mrs. Benson has provided for her family for years and now she continues to give and offer her time and focus to charities throughout our city. She has no comment about what others may say about her. Her focus remains taking care of her husband and doing what she can to help our city grow and prosper.”

  Rita Benson LeBlanc and Gayle Benson, it is fair to say, have never gotten along—Rita, by many reports, was convinced that Gayle was using her grandfather for his money. Last December, during a Saints game versus Atlanta, the contentious relationship finally reached the public. Rita had learned that, for the first time in her life, she would not see Tom Benson on Christmas. Rita and her mother, Renee Benson, blamed Gayle for splitting the family apart. In the suite this past December, witnesses say Rita shook Gayle and screamed at her. Rita denies this, calling it a fabrication of the Saints’ spin machine. She says she merely begged Gayle to let them see Tom during the holidays. Six days after that game, Tom Benson sent a memo to his daughter and grandchildren saying he never wanted to see them again because of, among other things, their disrespectful behavior toward Gayle. He also said he wanted to take the shares of the team out of the trust he’d set up for them and give the Saints to Gayle.

  Before the memo, Gayle stood to inherit a few million dollars upon his death.

  Now she stands to receive assets worth almost $2 billion.

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  On the first of June, the Benson family feud hits Louisiana district court—the family tearing itself apart, in New Orleans and in Texas, through a series of lawsuits challenging Benson’s competency and right to disown his daughter and grandchildren. Benson has placed shares in the Saints in an irrevocable trust, which means he’ll need to replace them with assets or cash of an equal value. And before fighting over that amount, his granddaughter is taking him to court, challenging his mental capacity to make such a draconian decision. The battle, when whittled to its essence, pits Gayle Benson against Rita Benson LeBlanc, fighting over money, over love, and out of spite.

  “Psycho,” an insider on Gayle’s side says about Rita.

  “Not sane,” an insider on Rita’s side says about Gayle.

  It’s the first day of hurricane season, and in another courtroom in the same building, a lawsuit over the 22 Katrina-related deaths at the Lafon nursing home begins. Family members of the dead believe the nuns and nurses who ran the facility effectively killed their patients by refusing to evacuate ahead of the hurricane. Nurses had stood in the streets and tried to flag down the passing National Guard. No one had stopped. A nun still wearing her habit had found a New Orleans police officer who’d promised to help but never actually did. Now, in the courthouse, nuns and priests walk through the lobby, some quietly waiting by the vending machines for their turn to testify. They carry rosaries.

  The crowd of television cameras and newspaper photographers isn’t there, though, for the nuns—the 22 awful deaths holding none of the fascination of an intrafamily battle over billions, the whole scene feeling like a piece of performance art about the state of America. Reporters wait on the first day to finish, everyone turning to the elevators at the far end of the long hall whenever they open, waiting to hurl questions at a Benson. A black Mercedes pulls into the sally port and parks by the curb, and Tom Benson’s driver, Jay, comes inside to wait on his boss. Upstairs, family members face one another, the first time they’ve all been in a room together since everything collapsed in January. Renee Benson, Tom’s last living child and Rita’s mom, clutches religious medals and photographs of their family, before money and time tore it apart.

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  Outside, people smoke on the steps of Loyola Avenue, two blocks from the corner where an 11-year-old Louis Armstrong fired a pistol and got arrested, learning to play the horn while incarcerated. He first performed in jazz clubs that were torn down to build this courthouse. Perdido Street was flooded during Katrina, and if you’d been here 10 years ago, you’d have ducked and covered from the noise and toxic spray of fan boats cutting through the water.

  Their turbines threw a mix of human waste and chemicals into the air. The survivors from Charity Hospital a few blocks away were headed toward safety, finally. The staff had been abandoned for three days after the storm, watching helicopters land at every nearby medical facility where the patients paid for their care, the rescuers leaving behind those at the hospital where care was free. Among the last to leave Charity was NOPD officer Daryle Holloway, who’d weathered the storm with his mother, one of the head nurses at the hospital.

  Holly, as his friends called him, worked the Desire and Florida projects. The people in the community respected him and thought he was fair. His fellow officers still talk in hushed tones about the morning, years ago, when they responded to a shootout in the Florida project. They arrived to find total chaos, people bleeding and screaming. One of the gunmen’s young sons had been hit in the crossfire and died. The boy’s mot
her wailed over his body as the cops tried to figure out what had happened. They sent Holloway into the apartment of the dead boy to see whether anyone else was armed. Holloway saw four or five kids inside, looked around at the empty cupboards and fridge. He walked back outside, and everyone stopped for a moment to see him go into a corner store; buy cereal, eggs, and milk; then walk back through the active crime scene to feed the hungry kids stuck in an apartment with no food.

  That’s Holloway.

  In the days after Katrina, he and Charity staffers went out in a boat to find survivors. They passed a man sitting on his porch with his dog, drinking a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The man refused to get into the boat. They found girls on the roof of a house and brought them in the boat to the Superdome. On one trip, the prop hit a floating body, and the body, filled with gases brought on by decomposition, exploded—the foulest smell and sight any of them ever saw, and on the emergency room loading dock afterward, someone snapped a photo of Holloway, staring out at the city, his eyes empty and hollow.

  The bonds of community, and even civilization, frayed and broke during those long days, but the bonds of family held strong. Holloway refused to leave his mother, even though he’d later be suspended by the police department for abandoning his post. On Day 3 in Charity, a nurse named Jewel Willis worked in what had turned into a sort of Civil War triage hospital: no power, little medicine, the big brick building an oven during the day and not much cooler at night. One day, a man with a thick Cajun accent showed up in his fishing boat. He’d somehow navigated his way through the disaster, pulling right up to the emergency room doors.

  “I came to get my daughter,” he said.

  Willis came outside, and there he was. Her dad had come to save her.