The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  No sooner had the Katrina winds dissipated than one of Foret’s employees, thirty-seven-year-old George Morales, part of New Orleans’s Guatemalan community, ventured from his Dauphine Street house to Ace Hardware to check the store’s pulse. The structure was in pretty good shape: a little wind damage to the electric Ace Hardware sign, which was still hanging, but nothing major. He took a quick drive to Kenner to inspect some rental property he owned and then headed back to Oak Street for a second glance. Things had changed. What he encountered at Ace Hardware made his blood boil: between twenty and twenty-five African Americans, many of them women and children, were looting the store. It was a bad dream. There was an old woman carrying out a power saw and a middle-aged man carting out a $600 power washer. Before being hired by Foret, Morales had been a bouncer at two French Quarter bars: Razoo’s and Cat’s Meow. Confrontation was part of his nature, flexing his muscles a component of his work regimen. “I parked, slammed my door, walked to the storefront, and told a looter to put the merchandise back,” Morales recalled. “He didn’t like that. He jumped all over me with ‘Fuck you’ and ‘Who do you think you are?’ I told him he was robbing my store. Then he got in my face. He broke my two-foot line, getting within eighteen inches of my face.” Incited, Morales snapped and punched the looter with a quick right, knocking him backward three or four feet and cutting his lip. “He then ran off,” Morales said, “and I went to stop the others from stealing. My mistake was I didn’t have a gun.”4

  Shouting loudly at the looters had a positive effect. Many of them dropped the merchandise and quickly fled the scene. For a moment, Morales thought he had control of the bedlam. But then the looter he had punched returned, running at him, head high, waving a crowbar frantically in the air like a tomahawk. Morales ducked, the crowbar coming within inches of his skull. Using an old wrestling move, he laid his body into the looter’s torso, struggling all the while for control of the weapon. Morales absorbed one blow to his arm, which became bruised and swollen, but was able to get the attacker in a headlock. He started squeezing the life out of the looter, choking him breathless. Before Morales broke his neck, however, he let go. He just shoved the thief aside. Some little voice told him that manslaughter equaled Angola State Prison. “I let him go, and he ran,” Morales said. “Other merchants had now congregated on the street and all the looters left.” Round one of the Battle of Oak Street was won by Morales. “That was just the beginning of a week of trouble,” he said. “I owed my boss to defend his business. He’d been good to me. And any way you sliced it, looting expensive power tools was wrong.”5

  When Foret arrived at Ace Hardware on Tuesday morning and saw his front window bashed in, he realized that a turf battle was on for control of the Riverbend area. It was white versus black, merchants versus neighborhood residents. Foret encountered Morales pacing about, holding his hurt arm. A few other merchants, including Hank Staples from the Maple Leaf Bar, Ralph Driscoll of Driscoll Antiques Restoration, and John Burwick, who worked at Jacques-Imo’s Cafe, were pacing up and down Oak Street. With the NOPD in disarray, they would have to fend for themselves. The white business owners of Oak Street spontaneously formed a so-called community watch. Morales had already grabbed a loaded pistol and an unloaded shotgun from Ace Hardware; he knew where his boss kept them hidden. An enraged Morales explained to Foret how, in addition to the crowbar bandit, about twenty-five African Americans had come marching up Baronne Street looking to steal merchandise. Many were waving guns. The word was out: Ace Hardware was an open store. According to Morales, he had aimed his shotgun at these potential looters and they had quickly turned around, full of curse words. Slapping him on the back, Foret told his employee he had done the right thing. The other white merchants nodded their heads in agreement. “I used to be kind of a gun dealer, so I had four or five pistols,” Foret recalled. “I gave pistols out, so everybody was pretty much armed. Hank Staples had a .38 pistol that he keeps, his personal gun. The antiques dealer on the street, he had a 9mm which he kept hidden under his clothes. He had it on him that whole week.”6

  Both of Ace’s front doors had been blasted out by the looters, and there was glass everywhere. Foret was determined to repair the front of his building before nightfall. He paid John Burwick fifty dollars to stand over him with a shotgun, to chase potential looters away, while he diligently and secured his storefront with wire mesh and plywood. There was also the back door to barricade. “It was so hot and miserable, and I only had cordless tools, which didn’t have any charges, because they were new tools from my store,” Foret recalled. “Luckily, one of my Oak Street neighbors had a generator, so he would charge them. I worked from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon.”7

  During the day, while Foret was boarding up his storefront, two pickup trucks full of young men kept cruising down Oak Street, taunting the merchants. “I thought we were going to get sprayed,” Foret said. “I felt outnumbered and outarmed.” Some of those on the street had been part of the group looting the store when Morales had arrived that morning. “They were trying to intimidate us,” Foret recalled. “I never did see any guns with those young black guys, but they were just looking to see what they could get come nightfall. George kept saying, ‘That’s them sons of a bitch right there. They stole stuff.’ Their brazenness was self-evident. They were mocking us, a bunch of old white guys.”8

  Quite predictably, given the psychological black-versus-white dynamic that had developed, racial gamesmanship engulfed the entire area. The looters again broke into Ace Hardware in the middle of the night, around three o’clock on Wednesday morning. Besides ransacking the hardware store, they stole a forklift from Maximilian’s Rugs on Oak Street, which they ran through the front entry of the Rite Aid. Within an hour, over one hundred African Americans poured into the drugstore, stealing or commandeering everything in sight. When Foret returned at eight Wednesday morning, he was flabbergasted by the shattered storefronts. Oak Street had been vandalized beyond recognition. About five blocks of it looked like a chicken bone picked clean. Another “community watch” meeting was held. This was urban war. It had become a matter of principle.

  Some of the city’s richest residents took security into their own hands. In New Orleans’s upscale Uptown neighborhood, well-heeled and well-armed property owners, sometimes with security guards to assist them, kept possible looters at bay, carrying firearms openly in their neighborhoods and looking after neighbors’ homes and valuables—keeping a close watch on friends’ irreplaceable art collections. Calvin Fayard—one of the region’s major political fund-raisers for the Democratic Party, and the owner of the so-called Wedding Cake House, one of the city’s grand mansions—would remain at home and on guard with a coterie of like-minded friends. Some would use their powerboats to rescue those who’d lost their homes. Their neighbors would dine on gourmet food from nearby specialty stores. Some would bathe in their stagnant swimming pools. One or two would take the opportunity to fly by helicopter to the office to shred potentially sensitive business documents—just in case the papers were to fall into the wrong hands, should law and order break down altogether. “We were, thank God, on high ground,” Fayard recalled. “Most of Uptown just didn’t flood.”9

  Unlike Uptown, all the residents of Hollygrove used to complain that their neighborhood flooded terribly even during a summer thunderstorm. The residents demanded drainage projects. Hollygrove recording artists like R&B great Johnny Adams and rapper Lil’ Wayne sang about how nobody ever listened to their flooding woes. In 1996, however, a new pumping station came to Hollygrove. It was supposed to keep the streets dry. “Damn thing never worked right,” Ivory Clark said. “Hollygrove still flooded from a few raindrops.”10

  When Katrina hit, the Hollygrove neighborhood took in up to eight feet of water. The residents lost everything they had. Anger welled up at white New Orleans, particularly the merchants on Oak Street. How come every African-American family in Hollygrove had gotten flooded while the white businesses were
dry? Some in the neighborhood felt victimized, as though all their worst dreams were suddenly coming true. Stranded on rooftops or crammed into attics, the Hollygrovers felt justified in looting or commandeering. It was their way of lashing out against the backed-up sewers and failed pump house. “They just marched down our streets and stole whatever they pleased,” Hank Staples recalled. “They had just lost all good sense. The flood triggered a deep resentment. Hell, we didn’t cause their homes to flood. I run a bar and employed black musicians. Why make me suffer?”11

  The most important thing, Foret decided, was that the forklift had to be decommissioned at any cost. He grabbed electrical clippers, about five or six merchants loaded their guns, and they marched together to the front of the Rite Aid, where the forklift had been abandoned in the doorway. A mob of African Americans was actively stealing merchandise, so Jimmy Deleray, standing next to Foret, fired a warning shot in the air from a .45. “This caused the looters to scatter,” Foret recalled. “A little black girl thought Jimmy was shooting at her and she started screaming.” Boldly, with anger in her eyes, the girl, undeterred by the guns, threatened Foret and Deleray, saying that she was going to get her brother and he was going to shoot the Oak Street merchants dead. “It was unbelievable,” Foret recalled. “Then one of my black customers, a guy who was watching the showdown, said to me, ‘She ain’t kidding; her brother’s a murderer. You better get out of there.’ So I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ We all got really concerned at that point. This was on Wednesday.”12

  Foret spent Wednesday evening at his mom’s house in Harahan. The battle for Oak Street and, to his mind, for the future of the city, was brewing along the levee. There were no NOPD officers or National Guard to save the day. It was the OK Corral, and he was willing to risk his life for Ace Hardware. The dynamic that had developed was a slightly tilted version of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Suddenly he was pitted against his former black customers. He didn’t harbor them any ill will. He wasn’t a racist. But he felt his honor was at stake. If he let hooligans own his store, then they owned him. “I got up early Thursday with my pistol,” Foret recalled. “I had gotten used to having my pistol with me wherever I went. As I drove up to the hardware store, I caught a looter coming out the front with a handful of supplies.” Spontaneously Foret swerved his Dodge pickup right over the curb, just ten feet from the looter. “Is that shit worth dying for?” Foret shouted at the looter. “Is it?” Terrified to be caught red-handed, the looter, an African-American man in his thirties, dumped the goods and took off running. Another African American, an unexpected ally, shouted out from across the street, “Man, there’s plenty more inside!” This was the moment Foret dreaded. A panic swept over him. Cautiously, he crept forward. He pointed his pistol at the smashed storefront doors. Then, in a few steady, long paces, he walked into Ace Hardware. “Whoever is in here,” he screamed, “better get the hell out!” He then fired his .38 automatic into the ceiling. “I figured that would scare them,” he said, “shake ’em up.”13

  Everything was dark inside the store. Nothing moved. He kept aiming the pistol down the aisles just in case an armed intruder was hiding. Eventually he realized the coast was clear. The store was empty. There had only been one looter. Clamps, drill bits, chisels, handsaws, fuses, and screwdrivers were scattered all over the floor. The looters hadn’t been content with just stealing; they had vandalized the store for sport. Foret’s cash registers were flipped over, his computers smashed, and his office files in utter disarray. “Just malicious stuff,” Foret recalled. “They had gone on a frenzy.” He surveyed the interior. He walked down the aisles. Like Job, Foret started again: cleaning up the store and resecuring the doors. “They weren’t going to get the best of me,” he said. “They weren’t.”

  The Battle of Oak Street even carried over into Houston, to which Jeff Amann, owner of a popular outdoor landscaping company headquartered at 8616 Oak Street, had evacuated. His business was responsible for the care of many exquisite yards in Uptown and the Garden District. Tourists would photograph his mazelike hedges and exotic swimming-pool areas. He owned five specialized service vehicles and dump trucks, painted with his logo. Amann was in Houston with his family when he received a telephone call from his friend Patrick Berrigan, a contractor based on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Berrigan, who had also evacuated, was driving down a Houston street when he saw an Amann Landscaping truck full of African Americans. The logo had been spray-painted over but was still visible. Berrigan hopped out of his car, pulled his gun, and forced the truck to the side of the road at gunpoint. There were eight men in the box and three in the truck cab. According to Amann, all but three of them fled the vehicle. “Berrigan made a citizen’s arrest,” Amann recalled. “At first the Texas State Troopers were about to arrest him for holding a gun on I-10, but when they found out what had happened, how he saved my stolen truck, they congratulated him on a job well done.”14 Amann had kept all five of his trucks behind a barbed-wire fence on Oak Street. The looters had stolen bolt cutters from Ace Hardware and used them to break into Amann’s property. “They turned over all my files and took shits on them,” Amann recalled. “They stole everything from my office, including cell phones, checks, tools, office supplies, everything.”15

  Word on Oak Street was that three of Amann’s other landscaping trucks were constantly pulling up to a boarded-up house on Willow Street, and merchandise was being unloaded. Eventually, a combined contingent of NOPD and National Guard conducted a raid on the house. Stolen merchandise was piled high in every direction, in sitting rooms, the kitchen, and the bedrooms. The place looked like a warehouse. “Those guys were using my trucks to cart off every kind of electrical equipment you could imagine,” Amann said. “These weren’t poor Katrina victims. They were hardened professional felons.”16

  Tensions in the Riverbend neighborhood were rising. Deleray, for example, ran into a clique of looters robbing thirty boats from the Aqua Marine Inc. store on Oak Street. The looters were carrying the boats out in rickshaw fashion, trailers and all. When Deleray decided to confront them, to challenge them eyeball to eyeball, he had two AK-47s pulled on him. “He backed off,” Foret recalled. “I told him saving boats wasn’t worth getting shot over.”17 But Deleray, besides patrolling the neighborhood with his gun, also turned first responder. Starting on Thursday, and for the next two weeks, he went out in a boat rescuing hundreds of New Orleanians, most of them African Americans. He was also hired by CNN to take reporters like Anderson Cooper and Karl Penhaul to newsworthy disaster sites.

  That Thursday Foret had an encounter with another looter. It was an African-American gentleman who called him Mr. Ace. Although Foret didn’t know him by name, he liked the cut of his jib. He was surprised such a seemingly decent man would participate in massive, wholesale thievery. “Why you doing this?” Foret asked. “Why? Because,” the looter told him, “it’s our city. It’s our time now.” Foret stared back at him. “Everything but Oak Street,” he said. “Oak Street is still ours.”18

  II

  Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee was determined to stop looters under his jurisdiction. His police officers, for the most part, hadn’t left, and the flooding in the parish was minimal. Sheriff Lee ordered his officers to arrest or shoot anybody breaking into businesses or homes. The criminals needed to know that the law still ruled on the streets of Jefferson Parish. He also ended up sending ammunition to Orleans Parish, trying to help the NOPD to reclaim the upper hand. “Jefferson Parish did a great job,” NOPD police chief Warren Riley recalled. “Harry did a great job. We needed assistance from him and he came through. He got a helicopter for us, flew it in from Tennessee.”19

  At a 7-Eleven store on the West Bank, Sheriff Lee himself broke up a looting ring. Instead of being angry, he was more inquisitive. “Why are you stealing from this store?” Lee asked the thieves. “Because we missed out on the Wal-Mart,” a looter responded. “We got there too late. Everything was gone. It made us mad.”20

&n
bsp; It was their time now.

  Everyone was mad at someone in Louisiana. Governor Kathleen Blanco, for her part, was incensed at the seemingly gratuitous breakdown of order in New Orleans. In any crisis, it was taken for granted that criminals would be on the loose, but in the sections of New Orleans that were above sea level, like the Carrollton-Riverbend area around Ace Hardware, a significant proportion of those who remained turned delinquent. It was distressing that so many people were taking cruel advantage of the disaster circumstances. The robberies and marauding were paralyzing the progress, such as it was, of recovery. Gun violence—usually random firings into the sky—interfered with the rescue of tens of thousands of stranded people. Buses that straggled into the city drew anarchist gunfire. In response, bus drivers took evasive action: they just returned home. As any National Guard or Coast Guard first responder could attest, it was the sniping—or rumors of it—that slowed down rescues more than anything else. Because of snipers, Governor Blanco truly believed federal forces were needed in New Orleans to quell the unrest. As of Thursday morning they had yet to arrive, though. “They have M-16s, and they’re locked and loaded,” Blanco said of the fresh National Guard troops entering New Orleans at a Friday-morning press conference. “I have one message for these hoodlums: these troops know how to shoot and kill…and I expect they will.”21

  Embracing General Bennett C. Landreneau of the Louisiana National Guard as her top advisor, Governor Blanco could barely contain her anger at the lawbreakers, warning them that Arkansas National Guardsmen had just arrived on the scene “fresh from Iraq,” and they were “more than willing” to kill anyone breaking the law in the city. Unfortunately, it was only three hundred Guardsmen who were arriving that day, hardly enough to take control of the tinderbox that was New Orleans. Governor Blanco vented her fury at the disintegration of society in New Orleans and then stalked out of the news conference.22 No sooner had she left than state police superintendent Henry Whitehorn stepped to the podium. Among his announcements was the fact that NOPD officers were quitting the force and surrendering their badges and the city. It was old news with a new twist. “They lost everything,” Whitehorn said, “and they didn’t feel it was worth taking fire from looters and losing their lives.”23