by Gary Rivlin
Sometimes the comments Hill heard while making the rounds were overtly racist. He watched as two white men thanked a white National Guardsman for helping to protect their city. “Now if you can just keep the blacks from coming back,” one called out. But mainly Hill’s time passing as a member of the tribe revealed more of a general good-riddance as they learned details of the disaster taking place in the eastern half of the city. “It was impossible not to pick up on this sentiment that this was our chance to take back control of the city,” Hill said. “There was virtually a near consensus among whites that authorities should not do anything to make it easy for poor African Americans to come back.”
People eventually figured out that Hill wasn’t one of them. Maybe it was the way he elongated his words or his habit of averting his eyes upward as he spoke, as if delivering a lecture in the classroom. Yet rather than shunning him, “they made more of an effort to make me feel comfortable,” Hill said. For some, his association with Tulane increased his stock. Others no doubt noticed this adopted member of their tribe caring for some of their older neighbors. It helped, too, that Hill was handy with tools and comfortable around machinery. One blue blood, Ashton O’Dwyer, a prominent lawyer in town with a big house on St. Charles, even stopped by Hill’s apartment building, where he left a message with Hill’s wife. O’Dwyer was having trouble with his generator and had heard that Hill might be able to help. Could Hill stop by his place on St. Charles?
O’Dwyer was hard to miss after Katrina—the “silk stocking lawyer,” wrote Jed Horne, then the city editor of the Times-Picayune, who had “taken up a sentinel’s post” on St. Charles Avenue. O’Dwyer had dragged a black wrought-iron table to his driveway, and there, with a shotgun visible, he sat watching a small portable television. A jowly man with short-clipped, steel-gray hair and thin lips set into a permanent frown, he offered visitors ice cubes for their drinks. That was where Hill found him around a week after Katrina hit. Christopher Cooper of the Wall Street Journal was also there the day Hill showed up to fix O’Dwyer’s generator.
“OLD-LINE FAMILIES ESCAPE WORST of Flood and Plot the Future,” read a headline on the front page of the Wall Street Journal ten days after Katrina. Cooper, who had spent a decade in New Orleans working for the Picayune before going to the Journal, began the article by describing O’Dwyer, dressed in nothing but a blue bathing suit, dipping a pair of plastic milk jugs into a neighbor’s swimming pool for water to flush his toilet. “The mostly African-American neighborhoods of New Orleans are largely underwater,” Cooper reminded his readers, and its residents scattered across the country. Yet the people living in “the fashionable district surrounding St. Charles Avenue”—the Kings and Queens of Carnival, many who “have ancestors who arrived here in the 1700s”—were maneuvering to play a central role in the recovery.
“New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt,” O’Dwyer said. “Let’s start right here.” O’Dwyer uttered those words, Cooper wrote, “standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry.”
The next person Cooper quoted was Jimmy Reiss. “I might’ve spoken to the guy for all of two minutes,” Reiss said of his conversation with Cooper. But that was enough. In the months and years ahead, it wouldn’t be the image of O’Dwyer in his swim trunks, nor his words, that Hill and the drive-time hosts on black talk radio would repeat but those few thoughts Jimmy Reiss shared with Cooper about the recovery. “He told us everything that was going to happen before it did,” Hill said.
Like O’Dwyer, Reiss was a product of old-money New Orleans, except Reiss was wealthier, better looking, and enjoyed a higher perch on the city’s social ladder. He was New Orleans royalty invited into the family business after earning his MBA at Tulane. A charming rapscallion with twinkly blue eyes and a well-earned reputation within his social set as a ladies’ man, Reiss had taken a bachelor pad in the French Quarter and seemed determined not to follow his father and his father’s father into the wholesale candy business that his great-grandfather had started a century earlier. “I was trying to drink and fuck myself to death and doing a pretty good job of it,” Reiss said. “And my father asked me to leave.”
Reiss and a fishing buddy started a business selling fire-suppression equipment to offshore oil rigs and shipbuilders in the area. Eventually they got into the electronics business, selling specialized automation and control systems to large businesses. A large multinational bought their company, and then Reiss, who had stayed on as a division president after the sale, bought back the company with a loan from the Whitney Bank, which had been taking care of the Uptown elite since his great-grandfather’s time. “That’s when I made the bulk of my fortune,” Reiss said. Reiss had elected to ride out the storm at a second home he owned in Aspen, Colorado. A week after Katrina, he hired a helicopter to fly him into the city.
Reiss was in his mid-sixties when Katrina hit. Yet his friends all said it: he was the same Jimmy they knew growing up, naughty and outspoken, the man at the cocktail party who made people laugh by uttering what decorum dictated be kept to oneself. But this Jimmy owned a big house on Audubon Place and was one of the best connected people in New Orleans. Sally Forman was a young mom when she volunteered for an organization Reiss cochaired called Dollars for Scholars. Forman watched with awe at Reiss’s gift for convincing the wealthy of Uptown to write big checks for their cause. Reiss sat on the Tulane Board of Trustees and ran the Business Council, an organization made up of most of the city’s top CEOs. He was even nominally a member of the Nagin administration as the chairman of the city’s Regional Transit Authority, an agency with thirteen hundred employees and a $110 million budget.
Reiss and Nagin had met late on the Friday night before the storm. In retrospect, they should have been talking about running more buses that weekend to shuttle people out of town, but they stuck to the agenda: the city’s crime problem. Only Camden, New Jersey, had a higher homicide rate than New Orleans in 2004. Property crimes had soared under Nagin. Yet rather than offer any solutions, Reiss said, the mayor vented about the city’s substandard schools and an unemployment rate among black men that hovered around 50 percent. Their meeting broke up at around 8:00 p.m.
Reiss started phoning friends and other members of the Business Council in the days after Katrina. The city’s crime rate, the lousy schools, the unemployment, and maybe even the mayor’s lackadaisical attitude toward these social ills were a topic of almost every conversation. By the time Cooper phoned, Reiss figured he had probably spoken to forty business leaders. They were all fed up, Reiss told Cooper. New Orleans would need to be a city with fewer poor people and better-run services if people such as himself were going to participate in the recovery efforts.
“Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically,” Reiss said. “I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.”
In time, Hill would dub it the “exclusionist movement”—the efforts by some within the white community to prevent the city’s poor from returning. A large portion of the city’s black community had been given one-way tickets out of town to places hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away, often with nothing but a garbage bag of belongings. “You had this old-line economic elite reassert their position of dominance the moment the city flooded,” Hill said. “It was like I was watching them revert to their original state.”
4
A FIRST BURST OF OPTIMISM
At 9:00 a.m. on the first Sunday after Katrina, Liberty Bank’s jack-of-all-trades, Russell Labbe, pulled into the parking lot of an International House of Pancakes just outside Baton Rouge. Labbe had driven from Lafayette, one hour to the west, in a brown 2005 Ford pickup truck he had bought a couple of months earlier. At IHOP he met Joe James, who had driven from Abita Springs, one hour to the east. The two men had known each other for years, but if they said ten words by way of greeting
on this morning, Labbe would be surprised. “We were anxious to get going,” he said.
James oversaw Liberty’s computer operations and would be going with Labbe into the city. James buckled himself into the passenger seat of Labbe’s truck and the two drove south and east to New Orleans. Water still covered much of the city, but they also both knew that the bank’s odds of survival depended on their picking up the computer tapes and other items they needed to get the bank back on the interbank network.
They made their first stop at a McDonald’s on the other side of Baton Rouge to meet Arthur Morrell. A black legislator and a friend of the bank’s, he represented the black, middle-class enclave of Gentilly. Morrell would ensure that Labbe and James had no trouble getting through the checkpoints set up around New Orleans. A deputy sheriff rode shotgun next to Morrell. Both were carrying a gun, as was Labbe but not James. “Follow me,” said Morrell, who was towing the boat they would need to reach the bank’s headquarters.
The interstate was quiet. They encountered water on their drive but only when the highway dipped. The first checkpoint they encountered was at the Bonnet Carré Spillway, a dozen miles west of New Orleans. The soldiers had parked their vehicles to pinch traffic to a single lane. Morrell flashed his credentials and explained that the people in the truck behind him were with him. They encountered no trouble at that roadblock or any other along the way.
The first detour came at the split in the highway that would take them to the eastern half of the city. Several feet of water prevented them from taking the turnoff for the East, forcing them to take a circuitous route. They encountered their first long delay a couple of miles east of downtown: the elevated highway was being used as an impromptu landing pad to refuel rescue helicopters. Labbe and Joe James stepped out of the truck, walked to the highway embankment, and looked at the water still covering much of the city. “What’s that over there?” James asked, pointing at the water. A body was floating face down, and then they noticed that the National Guardsmen were fishing bodies out of the water. “They had four or five bodies stacked up and ready to be shipped out,” Labbe said.
Their contingent reached the edge of New Orleans at a little past noon. The police had set up an impromptu marina at the edge of the water, with a small armada of borrowed boats. Morrell knew several of the cops. “Take your pick,” one offered. Abandoning the smaller boat they had towed, the four of them rode in a sixteen- or eighteen-footer piloted by a New Orleans police officer.
The water was as deep as twelve feet, but they still needed to follow the road grid to avoid rooftops and second stories. When they reached Liberty’s headquarters, Labbe navigated them to the back of the building. There, a set of metal stairs led to a back door a few feet above the waterline. In different circumstances, Labbe might have tried phoning the man they had hired to stay with the building to let them in, but cell phones were not working. Labbe grabbed the two-by-four he had brought with him and smashed the glass part of the door. They tied the boat to the staircase and everyone except the police officer went inside.
There was no power. The sun outside was bright, but inside the building it was gloomy and dark. Labbe’s eyes were still adjusting to the change in light when he heard breaking glass. He looked over to see the deputy sheriff who had accompanied them on their journey smashing windows with the two-by-four. “What are you doing?” Labbe yelled. The deputy asked Labbe to feel the moisture in the air. “You need to get some cross-ventilation going or you’re losing this building,” the deputy said. Labbe later said the deputy had probably saved them from writing off the building as a total loss.
Labbe and James headed for the third-floor computer room, relieved to find it dry and the mainframe looking pristine. James found the computer tapes they needed and grabbed other equipment that he thought they might need in Baton Rouge. Labbe left him and checked the rest of the building. Except for some water damage near a few windows broken by the wind, everything seemed as it should be. The guard they had hired to watch the building had somehow made it out on his own.
Back on the boat, the group headed a couple of miles deeper into New Orleans East to check on the bank’s old headquarters and the branch next door. They could do nothing but shake their heads over a pair of buildings with six feet of water inside. Doubling back the way they had come, the police officer motored through Lake Forest Estates—Alden McDonald’s subdivision. There, the water was still so high that the only clue that cars were parked along the street was the occasional antenna poking up.
Once back on dry land, they doubled back the way they had come. After a few miles, they jogged north and west to look at Gentilly. Liberty had another two branches in the area. It was also where Labbe lived.
They found water inside both of Liberty’s branches in the area, but Labbe discovered that he and his wife were among the lucky ones. Their house was built on a slight ridge. Their home, set up a few feet on a foundation, had been spared.
DURING THOSE FIRST WEEKS after Katrina, Alden McDonald worked when he wasn’t sleeping. He arrived at the Southern branch before 9:00 a.m., driving the putty-colored minivan that he chose from the scant inventory the car-rental company was offering. He sometimes had cell phone coverage in those first days after the storm but often he didn’t, which made for a frustrating half-hour drive each morning. That was prime time to call the East Coast, where it was one hour earlier, or to steal a few private moments with Rhesa. The workday ended well after 9:00 p.m., if not later.
Nothing proved easy during those first weeks. McDonald may have had the foresight to outfit the Southern branch with an extra ten phone lines to handle diverted customer-service calls, but he had not counted on the telephone company’s being overwhelmed by service calls. So many businesses and people had relocated to Baton Rouge that it took BellSouth until the second Thursday after Katrina—ten days after the storm—to rerate the bank’s customers to its 1-800 lines.
Putting together even a skeletal crew meant finding a place to live for each additional employee McDonald brought on—this in a city where every hotel was sold-out. “In some cases, it wasn’t just employees but entire families,” McDonald said. And it wasn’t just a matter of finding them housing but also paying them an extra stipend to cover their costs. Post-storm, even a modest apartment could cost a displaced employee thousands of dollars a month. “You need to worry about how they’re going to cover their expenses,” McDonald said. “You have to make sure their families will be all right.”
McDonald had around twenty people helping him in those first weeks after Katrina. Most worked in the open office space in back of the Southern branch. The bank’s loan department comprised two people sitting in mismatched chairs at a folding table. Next to them sat the one-person department assigned the task of figuring out which homeowners with a Liberty loan had flood insurance and which did not. Four tables pushed together in the middle of the room served as a makeshift call center. Even with the extra phone lines, customers had to listen to busy signals for hours before getting through. Some callers were worried about past-due bills (Liberty granted every customer affected by the storm a four-month grace period on home and car payments), while others called to see about a bump in the limit on a Liberty-issued credit card. Desperate to know how much money they had, many phoned for an account balance, not realizing the bank itself didn’t know. Several times a day, a car pulled into the parking lot driven by someone coming from Houston or Dallas or somewhere else far away. They were customers worried about the large sum of money they still owed on a seemingly worthless house or car or business who had driven a half a day or more in the hope that someone could answer their questions.
McDonald himself set up shop at a small table in a windowless conference room. Piles of cardboard boxes lined the floor in this space, which doubled as the bank’s records room. McDonald had a door but it usually remained open. Every minute or two, someone else would be seeking guidance or passing along a message. He had two cell phones, and often o
ne would ring while he was already talking on the other. The bank’s chief operating officer had resigned earlier that year, and Liberty was without a chief financial officer. McDonald, who was doing the job of three people, seemed to be in perpetual motion, bouncing between the main room, the branch lobby, and his own office, where only occasionally did he allow himself to sit exhausted in his chair and do nothing before the inevitable next request for his attention.
At around 7:00 p.m. each evening, McDonald convened a small group in his office for what he called “my daily crisis-management meeting.” McDonald, a practicing Catholic, prayed. “I said to myself, ‘Lord, you have to help me out here because I’m not one hundred percent sure we’re going to make it.”
THE BANK STILL HADN’T heard from a large portion of its employees. In the silence it was hard not to think the worst. One week after the flooding, the mayor speculated on the Today show that about ten thousand of his fellow citizens had likely perished—and Liberty’s people generally lived in the city’s hardest-hit areas.
Finding the employees wasn’t easy. People’s home phones didn’t work and of course work extensions were worthless. The bank had some cell phone numbers but that usually meant listening to the rapid busy signal everyone in the 504 area code was hearing. Weeks passed before anyone heard from Pete, an appraiser for the bank. He had been rescued from his roof in New Orleans East. Others had endured the hell of the Convention Center or the Superdome. A month passed before McDonald was able to say with certainty that no Liberty employee had perished in the storm.
CELL PHONES STARTED WORKING more reliably nine or ten days after the storm. That made communication easier, and as people’s phones chirped to life, a corresponding burst of hope occurred among the city’s business leaders. That only brought into greater relief the disparity between McDonald’s life and that of most of his corporate peers.
