New Orleans has always turned a blind eye to sin. But now you can even get away with murder

This article is from the April issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here

Mardi Gras season arrived in New Orleans this year with huge promise. With more than 800,000 visitors expected and 90 percent of hotel rooms booked, the city's Katrina-ravaged tourism industry was watering at the mouth. On February 2, the Krewe of Endymion, a neighborhood organization that has participated in Carnival since 1966, rolled out its massive floats for the first time since the hurricane, with Kevin Costner leading the way as grand marshal. Local officials touted the third festival after the storm as another hopeful step toward the city's full recovery. From a perch along the route, Mayor Ray Nagin worked the media. "This one feels a lot like what we had pre-Katrina," he announced before a throng of television cameras. "It looks like we're continuing to get stronger every day."

"I don't know that there would be many more murders here if there were no police at all," says one defense attorneyBut his prediction turned out to be premature. Just hours later, as the procession rolled down Canal Street, an outbreak of violence shattered the city's carefully orchestrated comeback. Five people were shot when an argument erupted between two teens. It was just one of five separate incidents along the parade route that resulted in nine people being hospitalized with gunshot wounds—including one unsuspecting hotel guest who was struck in the head by a stray bullet in the lobby of a Holiday Inn near City Hall. By the time it was over, Mardi Gras 2008 turned out to be one of the most violent in New Orleans' history. The unprecedented outbreak of mayhem shocked even the city's battle-hardened police chief, Warren Riley, who shakily held a press conference denouncing the "young, brazen thugs" ruining Carnival season. The camera crews that were supposed to trumpet the city's return to pre-Katrina glory instead recorded yet another step in its steady descent into chaos. "New Orleans Nightmare," blasted Drudge in a headline picked up far and wide. By week's end, to the dismay of Nagin and the city leadership, the celebration had become a nationally publicized fiasco.

Overrun by competing gangs and guarded by a notoriously corrupt police force, New Orleans has never been a peaceful city. But since Katrina, its crime rate has spun out of control. In 2006, after racking up 162 homicides, the Big Easy eclipsed gang-plagued cities like Compton and Detroit to claim the crown as the murder capital of the United States. By the end of 2007, the total number of homicides jumped to 209. And this year, the city is well on its way to topping that ignominious record again. Philadelphia—aka Killadelphia—had about 27 murders per 100,000 people in 2007; Baltimore recorded 44 per 100,000; and New York City had only six per 100,000. By way of comparison, conservative estimates put the city's 2007 murder rate at more than 63 per 100,000. That places it somewhere between the gang-infested favelas of Rio de Janeiro and the war-ravaged streets of Baghdad. As one prominent criminal defense attorney puts it, "I don't know that there would be many more murders here if there were no police at all." Meanwhile, killings have become so commonplace that the epidemic now touches just about every corner of New Orleans, from the devastated Ninth Ward and bohemian Faubourg Marigny to the tonier neighborhoods uptown. "Murder in New Orleans is becoming more democratic," says Tulane University criminologist Peter Scharf, acidly. "Now, even white people have a chance to get killed."

The socioeconomic devastation wrought by Katrina has had wide-ranging consequences, made worse by catastrophic failures in political leadership. In the days following the storm, 50 percent of the population fled. Many former residents never returned, and those who remained are disproportionately poor. The disaster also devastated the police department, which saw a sizable number of its members desert their units, some of them fleeing town in expensive vehicles looted from New Orleans lots. In the aftermath, the criminal justice system has all but collapsed.

Though police make arrests, the city's inept District Attorney's office seems unable to successfully prosecute the suspects. Of those 162 murders committed in 2006, they managed to secure just a single conviction (rates for 2007 were not available at press time). Harry Tervalon, Jr., a prosecutor in the DA's elite Violent Offenders Unit (VOU), quit last year after only two months on the job because he wasn't provided with a phone, a computer, or an e-mail address of his own. The demoralized VOU didn't even have its own Xerox machine, which meant Tervalon spent large parts of his day waiting in line to use the machines in other departments. "I was hired to try serious violent offenders," Tervalon explains. "I didn't think it was right to pay me what they were paying me to make copies."

Mayor Ray Nagin promised to make murder his number one priority. But several months later, he seemed to have found a silver lining to the crisis, telling reporters that the murder rate "keeps the New Orleans brand out there" The problem is exacerbated by Article 701 of Louisiana's criminal code, which states that felony suspects cannot be held for longer than 60 days without an indictment. As a result, the DA was forced to put nearly 3,000 drug, rape, robbery, and murder suspects back on the streets in 2006 (2007 numbers are unavailable). The police department attributes much of the blame for its low clearance rate to a "no snitch" ethos on the streets, but Tervalon argues that witnesses don't come forward because they've lost faith in the criminal justice system. "When the system isn't working, you don't participate in it," he says. "There was one case recently where a mother would not cooperate in the investigation of the murder of her own son. It scares me."

Oblivious to the growing wave of death, the city's political leaders rise to the occasion only when forced to by particularly gruesome events. In January, a 24-year-old police officer was killed with her own weapon by a rape suspect who had been released from a state mental facility just days before. Even more alarming was the death of Helen Hill, an independent filmmaker who was murdered in front of her husband and two-year-old son during a botched home invasion last year. Hill's husband, Paul Gailiunas, a physician at a health clinic for low-income residents, was awakened by his wife's screams just after 5 a.m. He rushed out of the bedroom with his son in his arms to find Helen struggling with an intruder. Before he could intervene, the attacker shot and killed her. Then, as Paul ran for cover, the gunman shot him in his left forearm, right hand, and cheek. (Miraculously, the child escaped from the barrage unscathed.) Hill's death, which was covered on Oprah and 48 Hours Mystery, sparked a public outcry and an angry march on City Hall calling for an end to violence.

Appearing before the jeering crowd, Mayor Nagin promised to make murder his number one priority. But several months later, he seemed to have found a silver lining to the crisis, telling reporters that the murder rate "keeps the New Orleans brand out there." Nagin was looking on the bright side again when he reassured a group of Carnival Cruise executives that they needn't be concerned with the killings, because only black drug dealers were being slain. "You don't have anything to worry about," Nagin told the crowd. "I'm looking at this audience and you all don't look like young African American males who are involved in drug activity."

Even though I had been writing about street crime for nearly a decade, nothing could have prepared me for the lawlessness I encountered when I first arrived in New Orleans in late July 2007. It was murder that brought me there in the first place; I moved to the city to begin working on a book about a troubled Iraq war veteran named Zackery Bowen, who returned to the French Quarter after a nine-month tour of duty to kill and dismember his girlfriend before leaping off the roof of the glitzy Omni Royal hotel. My decision to relocate was not popular among my friends and family members. Even one of my local sources, a friend of Bowen's, warned me, "It's going to be a trial by fire, man."

"Given the number of shootings, robberies, and murders, it's hard to say we are in control of New Orleans right now," admits one detective Summertime is always high crime season in New Orleans—released from school, the city's teenagers are hot and restless. Meanwhile, a scarcity of tourists stumbling down Bourbon Street puts service-economy workers in the criminals' crosshairs. The summer of 2007 promised to be worse than most. A rash of robberies had shaken the French Quarter that spring, many perpetrated by a sadistic mugger who prowled the neighborhood in his car looking for female marks, then beat them senseless and took their cash. My wife and I found an apartment in the lower French Quarter—the more residential end of the neighborhood, full of small restaurants, gay bars, and Creole cottages, and home to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Soon after we moved in, the neighborhood was hit by a rash of violent crimes. On August 10, a group made up of two men, three women, and a 14-year-old boy committed three armed robberies in the Lower Quarter in just 90 minutes.

One August afternoon, my wife went out to do errands on Decatur Street and found herself watching helplessly as a waitress coming off her shift was robbed and savagely beaten on the sidewalk just steps away. She came home shaken. Decatur is one the busiest streets in the French Quarter, close to an Urban Outfitters and a Hard Rock Café, which made the daytime holdup all the more unnerving.

I learned quickly that in post-Katrina New Orleans, you can never let your guard down. Along with my friends in the Quarter and Marigny, I began to obsessively check blogs like NOcrimeline.com and Citizen Crime Watch, which often provide a more realistic view of street crime than the city's sole paper, the Times-Picayune. ("Violence Claims More Victims," read a typically tepid Picayune headline in late October, after a week's worth of shootings culminated in three deaths.)

By summer's end, fear had caused me to completely alter my day-to-day lifestyle: I no longer carried a wallet, preferring instead to stick a single credit card and a few dollars in my front pocket. After dark, I walked down the middle of the street to avoid muggers crouched behind parked cars. And I rarely allowed my wife to venture out alone at night, an anachronism with which I became entirely comfortable.

In February, a day after Fat Tuesday, I was walking my three dogs when a scruffy man in his twenties passed me on an old squeaky dirt bike, glaring when I offered a wave. In New Orleans, this is unusual—it's still the Deep South, after all—so I stood on the corner and watched him slowly pedal away. Just before he reached the next street, he rode up to a middle-age woman carrying a large purse and suddenly threw a mighty punch, striking her on the side of her face. She fell down screaming; he leaped off his bike and landed on top of her, grabbing for her purse. But the woman wouldn't let go. As I dialed 911, her screams attracted the attention of several nearby residents, who came rushing out of their homes to help. Surrounded, the man took off running, leaving his bike, the battered woman, and her purse on the side of the street. By the time the NOPD arrived on the scene 15 minutes later, he was long gone. This is what it's like to walk your dog in New Orleans.

Assigning and dodging blame for this deterioration has become a favored municipal pastime. Though the town's famously corrupt police department has taken much of the heat, many cops claim it's the city's entrenched leadership that should be held accountable. "Nagin's been nonexistent," says Officer Ed Cirillo, a homicide detective in the 2nd District who requested a pseudonym due to the department's policy restricting interviews. "We need someone to step in and get aggressive with the crime problem. We're still waiting for that to happen." On a humid evening in late fall, Cirillo is sitting at his desk uptown when the code for "shots fired" crackles over the radio. He shakes his head.

A dark-haired, broad-shouldered Louisiana native, Cirillo knows all too well that he's caught up in an epic losing struggle. He crams his hulking frame into an NOPD cruiser and heads toward the location of the shooting, a dangerous section of the Irish Channel neighborhood that has recently been the scene of multiple shootings. By the time he arrives, the perp has fled and there is no victim in sight. Cirillo begins searching the garbage-strewn vacated residences on the block, many of which serve as stash houses for drugs and guns. He pays special attention to the knee-high grass in front of abandoned homes, mindful that gunmen have taken to using the weeds as cover. After a half hour, he spots a dreadlocked 16-year-old crouched in a narrow alleyway between two vacant buildings. As Cirillo pulls the youth from his hiding place, he sees an AK-47 and a 9mm rifle lying on the ground by his side. Apparently, the teenager had been attempting to take out a rival, but missed. The suspect insists the weapons aren't his. Cirillo ignores him, taking note of the tattoo of the number 13 between the boy's eyes, a sign that he's repping the 13th Ward—a rough uptown neighborhood along the Mississippi River. It's famous for being the birthplace of Cash Money rapper B.G., who once dubbed New Orleans "Chopper City" ("chopper" is street slang for an AK-47).

Cirillo handcuffs the 13th Ward gangster, who is also wanted for armed robbery, but he has little faith that the kid will be behind bars for long, and not just because of the 60-day rule. The city's juvenile system has been crippled by a sprawling population of "emancipated youth"—parentless kids sent from post-Katrina exile in cities like Houston and Atlanta back to New Orleans to attend school. In December, six inmates—including a 17-year-old awaiting trial in a murder case—escaped from the New Orleans Youth Study Center by simply wriggling out a window. Ten other prisoners escaped from the facility the year before.

In December, six inmates—including a 17-year-old awaiting trial in a murder case—escaped from the New Orleans Youth Study Center by simply wriggling out a window. Ten other prisoners escaped from the facility the year beforeFailures like these have made New Orleans a haven for criminals across the country. "A lot of these thugs came back after Katrina because they know how easy it is to commit crime in New Orleans," says Cirillo. "They know that if they're caught, there are rarely repercussions." He sighs heavily. "The minute people start thinking this situation is normal, we've lost control," he says. "But given the number of shootings, robberies, and murders, it's hard to say we are in control of New Orleans right now."

The extent of the chaos was brought home last October by the much-publicized murder of Thelonious Dukes, a 19-year NOPD veteran. Late one night, Dukes was working on a project in his driveway in New Orleans East, a middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of the city (mostly abandoned since Katrina), when two gunmen ordered Dukes into his home and awoke his wife. They pushed the couple to their knees and demanded cash and jewelry. Dukes complied, but when the men began to threaten his wife, he lunged for his sidearm, squeezing off two shots before the intruders returned fire. His wife was hit in the foot; Dukes took two bullets to the torso and leg, and died soon after.

If the notion of a cop murdered in his own home wasn't chilling enough, the kicker came two weeks later. One of the suspects in the case, 20-year-old Elton Phillips, who was also wanted for armed robbery, was found to have briefly taken refuge in an unlikely hideout: the home of District Attorney Eddie Jordan. Though Jordan, the first African American DA in New Orleans' history (whose penchant for flashy haberdashery earned him the nickname The Hat), soon resigned, the damage the city sustained during his tenure endures. His disastrous years in office were marked by thousands of Article 701 releases, abysmal conviction rates, and a race discrimination lawsuit—brought by dozens of white former employees who claimed they were wrongfully terminated due to race—that resulted in a $3.7 million judgment against the DA's office. Elton Phillips was a friend of Jordan's live-in girlfriend. To this day, Jordan insists he was unaware that his houseguest was wanted by the cops.

"If you look at the state of the state, we are virtually last in everything that is good, and first in everything that is bad," wrote C.B. Forgotson, the former chief counsel for the Louisiana State Legislature House Appropriations Committee. Katrina may have taken nearly 2,000 lives, destroyed billions of dollars in property, and forced thousands of people into a diaspora from Atlanta to Houston, but the lasting and most devastating blows weren't the kind that make it onto Anderson Cooper 360°. The homeless population of New Orleans, for example, nearly doubled after the storm, from 6,300 to 12,000. The already ailing public health and education systems were crippled. And 38 percent of children now live in poverty, more than twice the national average.

Despite the emphasis on revitalizing the tourism industry, perhaps the only business truly thriving in the city right now is the drug trade
Despite the emphasis on revitalizing the tourism industry, perhaps the only business truly thriving in the city right now is the drug trade. The bulldozing of the St. Thomas housing projects in 2002 dispersed hundreds of small-time hustlers across the city, who then battled for turf with entrenched dealers in other neighborhoods. The same cycle will likely be repeated when 4,500 apartments at four more public housing complexes are demolished later this year. In Katrina's wake, drug dealers who had taken refuge in Atlanta and Houston made new wholesale drug connections, then returned home to battle it out with the established players. Ironically, the spike in murders may have been driven in part by successful federal prosecutions of the city's kingpins before the storm.

"Pre-Katrina, the feds targeted a select group of people who controlled a large part of drug trade in New Orleans," explains criminal defense attorney Rick Tessier. "They thought that if you picked off the lieutenants and got to the top of the cartels then you would solve the problem. But what ended up happening is what happened when Pablo Escobar was killed. They just created a whole new beast—micro-cartels fighting over the action."

With state authorities powerless and the body count rising, a federal prosecutor felt compelled to step in. A veteran of the Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Strike Force, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten has taken a leading role in the battle to stem the tide of criminals slipping through the DA's fingers. A lanky man with cropped hair and a bushy mustache, Letten has adopted a pragmatic approach to his daunting task—going after the city's drug players by taking advantage of stricter federal sentencing guidelines.

"We don't have large, structured gangs here," says Letten, who won acclaim as a corruption fighter after he successfully prosecuted Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards in 1998. "We have small street gangs, 'gangs of convenience.' The lack of structure makes the gangs difficult to penetrate, but it doesn't mean that we can't reach them."

Since 2006, Letten's office has indicted nearly 400 defendants on drug-related charges and at least 250 more on weapons and violent crime charges, with a nearly 100 percent conviction rate. It also bears noting that interim DA Keva Landrum-Johnson, who replaced Eddie Jordan, appears to be making improvements, including a reduction of 701 releases. But even Letten admits that a "lock 'em up" approach is unlikely to make a substantial difference in the long run. "We cannot arrest and prosecute our way out of this problem," Letten insists. "We need social and economic solutions. Otherwise we'll be having this exact same conversation five years from now."

The murder of Chris Roberts last year did not generate huge headlines, but it illustrates the story of New Orleans' current plight more vividly than any set of statistics.

After 15 months of post-Katrina exile in Huntsville, Alabama, the 33-year-old Roberts had moved back home with his girlfriend, Jeanette Kelly, and her young daughter. On the return trip, the family let out a loud cheer as they crossed the Louisiana state line. Though their friends in New Orleans had warned them repeatedly of the town's growing perils, they wanted to be part of its recovery. It was in New Orleans, after all, that the couple first met and fell in love. They were weeks away from the birth of their first child, and Chris had recently been promoted, though his job was just a way to earn money while he made plans to study electrical engineering and pursue his passion for building custom motorcycles.

At around 8 p.m. on June 17, Roberts was in his ground-floor apartment when he heard what sounded like gravel crunching under wheels. He jumped up and rushed to the door, where he found a man quietly attempting to steal his new motorcycle. The thief fired one bullet into Roberts' head and another into his heart, then pedaled away on his bicycle, leaving Roberts to die at the scene.

For Jeanette Kelly, it was the final blow. Less than a week earlier, her hairdresser and friend, Robin Malta, had been bludgeoned to death in his home. Authorities recovered Malta's gold 1997 Nissan Maxima burned and abandoned on a desolate side street near U.S. 90. A few months before that, Helen Hill's murder had occurred just blocks from Kelly's apartment. Now Chris was gone. "I have to get out of here," Jeanette said to herself.

Jeanette Kelly's boyfriend, Chris Roberts, was shot in the head in a robbery gone wrong. Less than a week earlier, her hairdresser and friend, Robin Malta, had been bludgeoned to death in his homeIn August, she and the kids flew home to Detroit, the city she had grown up in but traded for New Orleans in the mid-1990s because, ironically, it had grown too dangerous. In September, though, she returned to New Orleans because her elder daughter had been accepted at one of the city's best schools, an opportunity too important to pass up. Then, in January, it happened again. A friend was walking home from a bar when he was mugged by a crazed man in a blond wig. As he handed over his wallet, he was shot for no apparent reason. (Though wounded, he lived.)

In mid-January, Jeanette gathered with representatives from a local anti-violence group to march on City Hall once again. Alongside her was Helen Hill's brother, Jake, and Nakita Shavers, whose brother Dinerral—a snare drummer for an acclaimed brass band who was featured prominently in Spike Lee's Katrina documentary, When the Levees Broke—was shot and killed last year. They took turns reading the names of the more than 200 New Orleanians who had been slain in the year since the last City Hall protest, in 2007. But this time, despite the fact that 10 people had been murdered in the first half of January 2008 alone, just 50 attendees turned up, including a handful of local reporters. Whether borne out of denial, exhaustion, or frustration, the apathy was palpable.

Five months after Chris Roberts' murder, the homicide detective assigned to the case abruptly quit, leaving no contact information. But Kelly was used to that sort of thing. She had pinned her hopes for a corruption-free New Orleans on City Councilman Oliver Thomas, only to be crushed when he was indicted in August by U.S. Attorney Jim Letten on bribery charges. A new detective was recently assigned to Chris' case, but "there are still no leads and no suspects," Kelly says.

In the meantime, crack dealers have taken up residence in abandoned shotgun houses near Kelly's home and armed robberies in the neighborhood have skyrocketed. She rarely ventures outside her Marigny apartment these days, even to buy cigarettes (she has them delivered from a deli in the French Quarter). "Hopefully I won't stay this way forever, because it's not functional," she says, nervously puffing on a Marlboro before turning away in tears. "I'm still completely flipped out by what happened. Chris was good at protecting himself—and he didn't have a chance. People here are no longer satisfied with taking your money. Now they want to kill you; that's what changed. Nobody is safe in New Orleans anymore."






This article is from the April issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here