Out-of-state police could not make arrests, Kathy discovered, so on any arrest, a local officer had to be present along with any Guardsmen or contractors. Kathy and Zeitoun decided to name Donald Lima, the officer on the arrest report, in the lawsuit. The Zeitouns’ lawyer contacted the New Orleans Police Department and found that Lima was no longer employed there. He had resigned in 2005, a few months after the storm. The department had no forwarding address.
Gonzales was easy to find. On the arrest report, he was identified as being an officer from Albuquerque, and he was still with that department in the fall of 2008. When he was reached by phone, he told his side of the story.
Gonzales had been a police officer for twenty-one years when, in August of 2005, his captain suggested that they send a team to New Orleans. The New Orleans Police Department had put out a nationwide request for law enforcement help, so Gonzales agreed to go, along with about thirty other officers from Albuquerque.
The New Mexico team arrived a few days after the storm, were sworn in as deputies, and began to assist with search and rescue operations. Before arriving in New Orleans, Gonzales and his fellow officers had heard a lot about the conditions in the city, and they were tense. They had heard about shootings, rapes, gangs of heavily armed and fearless men. They saw no such crime, but they saw plenty of death. They were one of the first units to investigate one of the hospitals. Gonzales didn’t remember which one, but they found dozens of bodies. The smell was indescribable.
Conditions worsened every day. He and his fellow cops wouldn’t go out at night. They could hear windows breaking and shots fired after dark. The entire city smelled of death and decay. “Everyone was on guard,” he said of his fellow cops. “We thought we were in a third-world country.”
On September 6, Gonzales was at the Napoleon–St. Charles staging ground. Cops and soldiers and medical personnel gathered there every day to share information and receive assignments. Gonzales got word that there would be a search of a house down the road, occupied by at least four suspects presumed to have been looting and dealing drugs. It could be very dangerous, he was told, and they needed as many cops and soldiers as possible. It was the first law-and-order assignment he’d been part of since he had arrived.
He jumped on the boat wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a pistol and an M-16. He was one of six cops, National Guard soldiers, and soldiers-for-hire on the boat. When they arrived, Gonzales was one of the first to enter. He saw a pile of computer components and stereo equipment on the dining room table, and he saw the four men. There was something in their attitude, he thought, which signaled that “they were up to no good.”
They arrested the four men, brought them to the staging ground, handed them to the authorities there. They were finished with the assignment in fifteen minutes. That was the extent, Gonzales asserted, of their duties. He never went to Camp Greyhound and was only vaguely aware that a jail had been installed there. Neither he nor any part of the arresting party secured the house or collected any evidence. In fact, none of them returned even once to the house on Claiborne.
The arrest of Zeitoun and the other three men on Claiborne Avenue was one of two arrests Gonzales made while he was in New Orleans. Every other task he performed was related to search and rescue. Ten minutes after bringing the four men to the staging ground, he was on another boat, looking for people in need.
Gonzales was asked how he felt about the fact that Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a middle-aged businessman and father of four, had done a month in maximum-security prison.
Gonzales seemed regretful. “If he was innocent, then I feel very bad,” he said. “Here’s the bottom line: I wouldn’t want something like that to happen to me personally.”
Gonzales talked about how the system is supposed to work: police officers investigate, make arrests, and then hand the process over to the judicial system. Under normal circumstances, if the men were innocent, he maintained, they would have been given a phone call and the opportunity to post bail.
“They should have gotten a phone call,” he said.
Lima was more difficult to track down, but he had not gone far. He had left the New Orleans Police Department in 2005 and was living in Shreveport, Louisiana.
He knew that Zeitoun and the others had spent time in jail. He knew about Zeitoun’s case because he’d been served papers when the lawsuit was undertaken. He didn’t know how long the other men had spent in prison. He was quick to note that their imprisonment wasn’t his doing. He only made the arrest.
At the time of Katrina, he was living in a five-thousand-square-foot house on Napoleon. During and after the storm, he stayed in the city with members of his family, guarding his house. He had two generators and enough food and water for three weeks. He also had over forty pistols and automatic rifles. During the day he traveled the city with other police officers and National Guard troops, making rescues. Each day he met with other law-enforcement personnel, and they would map out a plan of action. They divided up tasks and territory.
The National Guardsmen in the city had plenty of gasoline but were low on other supplies. In exchange for gasoline, Lima and other New Orleans police officers broke into convenience stores and took cigarettes and chewing tobacco. A majority of the National Guardsmen, Lima said, chewed tobacco and smoked Marlboros, so this arrangement kept both sides well supplied. Lima considered the looting a necessary part of the mission. The gasoline, he said, helped them make the rescues they did. He also needed it to power his home generators. When he couldn’t find Guardsmen who had gas, Lima siphoned fuel from cars and trucks. His throat was sore from all the gas-siphoning he did after the storm, he said.
“The whole place was anarchy,” he said.
While making his rounds on a motorboat one day, Lima observed four men leaving a Walgreens carrying stolen goods. They left the Walgreens and put the goods into a blue-and-white motorboat. Lima had two rescuees with him, so he couldn’t pursue the thieves at the time, but he made a mental note. He continued to make rounds, seeing dead bodies and being confronted by angry residents, many of them armed.
“My state of mind was rattled,” he said.
Two days later he passed a house on Claiborne and saw the same blue-and-white boat tethered to the porch. He raced to the Napoleon–St. Charles staging ground and gathered a crew of police and military personnel. They were “heavily armed” with sidearms and M-16s. He didn’t know the other four men or the one woman who joined in the mission. Together they took a flatboat to the house. Lima was the lead cop on the arrest.
When they entered, they saw what they thought were stolen goods on the dining room table. They found four men inside, and something about them and the scene seemed amiss. Lima was sure that these were the same four men he had seen leaving the Walgreens, so they arrested them and brought them to the staging ground.
“It was a fairly routine arrest,” he said. “All four of the guys were very quiet.”
They handed the men over to National Guardsmen, and the Guardsmen put them in the white van. Lima filled out paperwork about the arrest and gave it to the Guardsmen, and they drove the arrestees to Camp Greyhound. Later, Lima went to Greyhound, where he saw the men’s property laid out on a table. He saw Todd’s maps, Nasser’s cash, and the memory chips. “They’d been up to something,” he said.
Lima was not sure what goods he had seen the four men stealing. And he did not see any goods customarily sold by Walgreens in the house on Claiborne. He did not secure the house on Claiborne as a crime scene. No stolen goods were recovered. But he was certain the men in the house were guilty of something, though the extraordinary circumstances of post-storm New Orleans did not allow for the same degree of thoroughness as he would have liked.
Nor was the post-arrest procedure standard or fair, he said. In a normal situation, Lima said, they would have been arraigned properly, given a phone call and an attorney, and would have been out on bail within days. When he was a cop, he was frustrated by the revolving-door nat
ure of the justice system. He would arrest someone in the morning and they would be out on the street in the afternoon. It was maddening for a police officer, but he admitted that this element of checks and balances would have been useful in this case.
“They should have gotten a phone call,” he said.
Lima quit the NOPD in November 2005, and moved with his wife and daughter to Shreveport. He was a police officer in Shreveport for a time, but was treated, he said, “like a second-class citizen.” The officers there assume that all cops from New Orleans are corrupt, he said. So he quit, and now he’s looking for a new career. Before joining the force, he was a stockbroker, and he was considering going back to that.
The Zeitouns were conflicted about what they heard about Lima and Gonzales. On the one hand, knowing that these two police officers had not purposely hunted and arrested a man because he was Middle Eastern gave them some comfort. But knowing that Zeitoun’s ordeal was caused instead by systemic ignorance and malfunction—and perhaps long-festering paranoia on the part of the National Guard and whatever other agencies were involved—was unsettling. It said, quite clearly, that this wasn’t a case of a bad apple or two in the barrel. The barrel itself was rotten.
Soon after, a friend emailed Kathy a document that seemed to shed light on the state of mind of the soldiers and law-enforcement agencies working in New Orleans at the time.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency had been its own freestanding agency for decades, but after 9/11 had been folded into the Department of Homeland Security. FEMA had historically been granted broad powers in the wake of a federal emergency; they could take command of all police, fire, and rescue operations. This was the case after Katrina, where it was necessary for FEMA to assume the responsibility for all prisoners being evacuated from New Orleans. And thus the prisoners, including Zeitoun, were overseen by the Department of Homeland Security.
While Katrina bore down on the Gulf Coast, a four-page document was apparently faxed and emailed to law-enforcement agencies in the region, and to National Guard units headed to the Gulf area. The document, issued in 2003 by the Department of Homeland Security, was written by a “red cell” group encompassing representatives of the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the Marines, corporate security firms, and Sandia National Laboratories.
The authoring committee had been asked to “speculate on possible terrorist exploitation of a high category hurricane.” And though the authors admitted that it was unlikely that terrorists would act during or after a hurricane, they nevertheless enumerated the many ways they might do so. “Several types of exploitation or attacks may potentially be conducted throughout the hurricane cycle—hostage situations or attacks on shelters, cyber attacks, or impersonation of emergency response officials and equipment to gain access.” These terrorists “might even hope that National Guard and other units are less able and well-equipped to respond … because of deployments overseas.”
Then they broke their findings into three categories: Pre-Event, During Event, and Post-Event. Before the storm, the committee wrote, the terrorists would be most likely to use the occasion “to observe precautionary measures to gauge emergency response resources and continuity of operation plans at critical infrastructures.” They also warned that terrorists might target evacuation routes, creating “mass panic” and “loss of public confidence in the government.” Terrorist activity during the storm, the committee felt, was “less likely due to the severe weather, unpredictability of the storm path and the difficulty of mobilizing resources.” After the storm, the options for terrorists were few but potent. They might “build on public panic to further destabilize the system by disseminating rumors” and therefore “increase media coverage” and “stress the public health system.”
The committee had several recommendations to reduce the threat posed by such terrorists. They included: “Institute increased security procedures (e.g. identification checks) at evacuation centers and shelters”; “Advise the first responder community, telecommunications personnel, and power restoration personnel to increase identification procedures to prevent imposters from gaining unauthorized access to targets”; and “Increase patrols and vigilance of staff at key transportation and evacuation points (for instance, bridges and tunnels), including watching for unattended vehicles at these locations.”
The “red cell” committee thought it unlikely that an established terrorist group would work in the United States during a hurricane. Instead, they felt that “a splinter terrorist cell, or a lone actor … would be more likely to exploit a hurricane on site. This includes persons pursuing a political agenda, religious extremists, or other disgruntled individuals.”
Kathy isn’t sure whether hearing things like this is helpful or not. She has moved on from Katrina in many ways, and yet the residual effects arrive at unexpected times. There are plenty of normal days. She drives the kids to school and picks them up, and in between she manages the affairs of the painting and contracting company. When the kids get home she makes them a snack and they watch TV and do their homework.
But the other day Kathy had to ask for Nademah’s help. She was trying to get onto the Internet but couldn’t make it work. She looked behind the computer and the wires were a chaos she couldn’t decipher. “D, can you help me get connected?”
Nademah came to help. It was Kathy who had set up all the computers in the house, Nademah reminded her, and Kathy who had taught Nademah how to use them. Kathy knew this, but at that moment she couldn’t remember which wires went where, which buttons did what, how everything was connected.
Camp Greyhound has been the subject of investigative reports and a source of fascination for the city at large. Even employees of Greyhound and Amtrak are amazed at what became of the station after the storm. Clerks at the Amtrak desk will happily show visitors the place where prisoners were fingerprinted, where their heights were determined. The height chart is still there. Under a poster next to the counter, the handwritten marks are still there. You just have to move the poster to see them, just as they were in the days of Camp Greyhound.
As Zeitoun had suspected, the jail was built largely by hand. When he was incarcerated there, he couldn’t imagine what workers were available and ready to work long hours a day after the hurricane, but the answer makes a certain amount of sense. The work was completed by prisoners from Dixon Correctional Institute in Jackson, Louisiana, and from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
Angola, the country’s largest prison, was built on an eighteen-thousand-acre former plantation once used for the breeding of slaves. Meant to hold those convicted of the most serious crimes, it has long been considered the most dangerous, most hopeless prison in the United States. Among the five thousand men held there, the average sentence is 89.9 years. Historically the inmates were required to do backbreaking labor, including picking cotton, for about four cents an hour. In a mass protest decades ago, thirty-one prisoners cut their Achilles tendons, lest they be sent again to work.
At the time of the hurricane, Marlin Gusman, sheriff of Orleans parish, knew that there was a chance that the Orleans Parish Prison, where most offenders were kept while awaiting trial, would flood. So he called Burl Cain, warden of Angola. An arrangement was made to build an impromptu prison on high ground in New Orleans. Warden Cain rounded up fences and portable toilets, all of which he had available at the Angola campus, and sent the materials on trucks to New Orleans. They arrived two days after the hurricane struck the city.
Cain also sent dozens of prisoners, many of them convicted of murder and rape, and tasked them with building cages for new prisoners and those forced out of Orleans Parish Prison. The Angola prisoners completed the network of outdoor jails in two days, sleeping at night next door to the Greyhound station. Cain also sent guards. When the cages were finished, the Angola prisoners were sent back north, and the guards remained. These were the men who guarded Zeitoun’s cage.
When the prison was completed, Cain said it wa
s “a real start to rebuilding” New Orleans. In the weeks that followed, more than 1,200 men and women were incarcerated at Camp Greyhound.
This complex and exceedingly efficient government operation was completed while residents of New Orleans were trapped in attics and begging for rescue from rooftops and highway overpasses. The portable toilets were available and working at Camp Greyhound while there were no working bathrooms at the Convention Center and Superdome a few blocks away. Hundreds of cases of water and MREs were readily available for the guards and prisoners, while those stranded nearby were fighting for food and water.
There have been times when someone speaks to Kathy in English and she can’t understand what the person is saying. It happened the other day with Ambata, a woman the Zeitouns recently hired to help with office work. The kids had just come home from school, the TV was on, a stereo was playing—there was noise throughout the house. Kathy and Ambata were sending out invoices when Ambata said something Kathy couldn’t understand. She saw Ambata’s mouth moving, but the words conveyed no meaning.
“Can you repeat that?” she asked.
Ambata repeated herself.
The words made no sense.
“I’m sorry,” Kathy said. “I have no idea what you’re saying.” She grew scared. She jumped up and, frantic, she turned off the TV, the stereo, and the computer. She wanted to eliminate any variables. She sat down again with Ambata and asked her to repeat what she said.
Ambata did, but Kathy still could not parse the words.