Katrina: After the Flood (21 page)

But White went one step further with an idea he thought would push the bureaucrats to the side and put entrepreneurs like himself at the center of the recovery. Rather than follow the expected route and fight with the federal government over the proper size of a bailout check, he asked Nagin, why not suggest a ten-year tax holiday to any individual or business willing to move into the city limits? That represented billions in lost revenues for the US Treasury, but, as White saw it, it would short-circuit a process that otherwise would take months, if not years.

“I thought that we could get the rebuilding moving quicker than if we had to wait for an infusion of money through a government bureaucracy,” White said. The mayor loved the idea, White said, but despite pushing it hard among his new friends in Washington, his pitch never got anywhere.

White lived on the North Shore, in Mandeville, thirty-five miles north of the city. The mayor’s other key adviser early on was also a suburbanite, Joe Canizaro, who was the personal friend of the president and had Nagin scribbling over the phone while others waited in Dallas. To Canizaro, Nagin would delegate primary responsibility for putting together the blue-ribbon panel Karl Rove had said was needed to win the Bush administration’s sign-off. Jimmy Reiss, too, recommended names for what would become the Bring New Orleans Back Commission. But it was Canizaro’s commission to shape. “It was very clear to us that Joe knew what we had to do and he had the connections to do it,” Meffert said.

JOE CANIZARO WAS NOT
yet thirty years old in 1965, a relative newcomer to the city, when he caught a glimpse of New Orleans that changed his life. He was working as an $800-a-month junior appraiser for a real
estate company who somehow talked his way to the thirty-third-floor observation deck in a tower being built on Canal Street near the river. Most people, when atop the International Trade Mart (now the World Trade Mart), take in the views of the Mississippi and the Quarter to the north or east. Canizaro fixated on the view west. Canal and Poydras Streets converged just below him but where Canal was lined with stores and office buildings, Poydras was a narrow street of warehouses, bars, and low-rent buildings. Two years later, Canizaro had convinced the New Orleans–based Lykes Brothers Steamship Company to partner with him on a twenty-two-story building on Poydras they would call the Lykes Center. Canizaro built several towers on Poydras and also the massive—and massively successful—Canal Place at the foot of Canal Steet.

Canizaro had grown up in Biloxi, an outsider in a city that can be parochial. Even once he had made a name for himself, he still needed to go to Baton Rouge or Jackson, Mississippi, to raise funds for a new project. In some lean years Canizaro felt so overleveraged that he feared everything would crumble. Alden McDonald and Liberty were among those who over the years helped Canizaro stay afloat. By the mid-1990s, though, Canizaro was charging some of the city’s highest rents on a street crowded with high-rises. Canizaro bought a bank and funded his own venture-capital outfit. He sold two of his office towers for $133 million and made another $25 million on a suburban office park he owned. “The grandest palace in Old Metairie,” the
Times-Picayune
said of the house Canizaro and his wife, Sue Ellen, had built a few doors down from the Metairie Country Club. A “magnificent neoclassical mansion influenced by Palladio’s sixteenth-century Italian villas,” said the couple’s interior designer. The couple moved into the home Christmas of 2004—nine months before Katrina.

The Canizaros had talked about retreating to Crawford ahead of the storm, where they owned a spread only a few miles from George W. Bush’s ranch, but they thought it would be too hot in late August. The couple decided to ride out the storm in a $400-a-night hotel in Dallas. They told Curtis, their house manager, to expect them home as early as Tuesday. Curtis, who was black, doubled as Canizaro’s valet and driver.

Curtis called midmorning on Monday when he noticed water in the street. He called again a couple of hours later to say the water was
at the front door, and then again a few hours after that to tell them he was on the second floor because the first had taken on two feet of water. The wealthier suburbs of New Orleans had remained dry; the exception was a large stretch of Old Metairie, which sat just west of the Seventeenth Street Canal. The Canizaros decided to continue west to the Utah mountains, where they also owned a home. That would be the couple’s home base for the next four months. Canizaro’s fractional ownership of a private jet helped cushion the hassles of the repeated trips he would make between Utah and Louisiana.

Canizaro spoke directly with the president in those first weeks after Katrina. Canizaro had been one of Bush’s earliest financial supporters when the then governor was first creating a presidential exploratory committee. Canizaro had attained Ranger status—that of someone who raised at least $200,000—during the president’s reelection campaign. In 2008, Canizaro would rank as one of John McCain’s top bundlers, raising more than $500,000 for the Republican nominee. In 2012, Canizaro hosted a $50,000-a-plate fund-raiser at his home for Mitt Romney, the evening’s special guest.

Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Canizaro as just another wealthy white businessman serving as a banker to the Republican Party. Maybe it was because of his daughter, whose struggles with addiction he spoke about so openly. “It makes you humble,” Canizaro said. “It makes you stop and realize it’s not just the problems of these ‘other people.’ ” Perhaps it was because of his experiences as a developer in a majority-black city, which had made him recognize that if you wanted to get anything done in modern New Orleans, it helped to have allies in the African-American community. “Joe has proven a good friend to our community,” Alden McDonald said.

Canizaro’s first big foray into the civic arena came five years before Katrina. He put up the seed money for a group he called the Committee for a Better New Orleans. The old Canizaro would have put himself in charge, certain he knew what was best for the city. He still named himself chairman, but added two African-American cochairs—Norman Francis, the president of Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation’s only historically black Catholic university, and the founding chairman of Liberty Bank; and also Barbara Major, a local community activist. “We had
serious problems in this city,” Canizaro said. “Education. Crime. Housing. I came to appreciate that no way were we going to get to a solution unless we included everyone.” To round out the group, he appointed a long list of local African-American leaders, including Alden McDonald, as well as Uptown blue bloods and downtown business interests. “We have enough people in here who hate each other,” Major said at an early meeting, “to make sure this process works.” The resulting report, “Blueprint for a Better New Orleans,” released in 2002, was impressive in its breadth and specificity, even as it was ignored by the new Nagin administration. For his efforts, the majority-black City Council declared September 10, 2003, “Joe C. Canizaro Day.”

Nagin and Canizaro met around two weeks after Katrina in Baton Rouge at the executive center where Canizaro would stay when he was in town. The rich white Republican from the suburbs seemed to care more about getting a diverse mix on the citizens’ commission Nagin would soon be naming than Nagin himself. Nagin’s initial list seemed as if it had been drawn up by Jimmy Reiss—predominantly white with a few token blacks. “Mr. Mayor,” Canizaro counseled, “you need to better reflect the community if this group is going to have any legitimacy.” It would be a struggle, Canizaro said, “because the mayor was allowing himself to be pulled by these other interests.” A final decision came “at least ten days later than it should have,” by Canizaro’s reckoning, but in the end eight African Americans were on the seventeen-member commission and eight whites, with a single Latino. The list included David White, who said he was “chosen to be the mayor’s eyes and ears on the commission.” Ron Forman would not make the cut, though the mayor acknowledged he had told Forman he would give him “first consideration” as chairman, but Jimmy Reiss, persona non grata in some circles after his comments to the
Wall Street Journal
, was included. “I’m not one to throw people off because they’re controversial,” Nagin said of the Reiss selection. “You need some edginess, especially in this town.”

There was no edge to Mel Lagarde, whom Nagin chose as one of two people to cochair the commission. Lagarde—or, more formally, Maurice L. Lagarde III—was a top executive at HCA, the health care giant. He was a member of the Uptown royalty, a blue blood in good standing with a big house on St. Charles. He was a Nagin ally and a
friend of Canizaro with a seat on his bank’s board of directors. With his bland good looks, Lagarde was a chubby-faced son of Uptown who never uttered a controversial word if he could help it. “Mel,” said a fellow member of the commission, “was the white rice you throw into a gumbo to cut the spice.”

The other cochair of the mayor’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission was Barbara Major, a Canizaro favorite. The two had met in the late 1990s during the pitched fight over a housing project in the lower Garden District. A local developer named Pres Kabacoff had proposed that it be torn down and replaced with a mixed-income housing project. Major, who ran a low-income health clinic in the area, was among those leading negotiations for the tenants. Canizaro got involved because he owned an adjacent parcel and stood to make a lot of money if the city approved Kabacoff’s proposal. Major sought out Canizaro after growing fed up with Kabacoff, the son of a local liberal champion, who kept talking about all the benefits to the community of a plan that would see a large portion of the project’s residents lose their homes. “Pres Kabacoff wanted to come and save the black folk,” Major said. “And Joe Canizaro came and said I want to make money. So we said, ‘That’s the one we want to talk to.’ ”

Canizaro was blunt at their first meeting. “People tell me you’re difficult to work with,” Canizaro said to Major.

“I can be.”

“You might hear things about me.”

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“Well, because my last name is Canizaro, you might hear I have some affiliation with organized crime.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what. I’d love some organized crime because this disorganized shit is driving me crazy.”

Through contacts in the social service world, Major learned about Canizaro’s generosity—the bikes he bought for underprivileged kids for Christmas, the help he gave families in need. “Stuff he never talked about but stuff I knew he had done. Christian things,” she said. Major, who was raised in the Ninth Ward by a great-aunt who stopped going to school after the fourth grade, saw a little of herself in this local mogul. He would become her champion.

The Bring New Orleans Back Commission included an archbishop, the City Council president, and the president of Tulane University. Yet because of Canizaro, it was co-led by this woman who had spent part of her youth in a housing project and seemed to accept lip from no one. “People tell me, ‘You have a New York attitude,’ ” Major said. “I tell them, ‘No, I have a Ninth Ward attitude.’ ”

Alden McDonald was an obvious choice for the commission. McDonald didn’t have time to sit around talking in New Orleans for several hours every week, but he also couldn’t afford to pass up a seat. “I always tell young people, ‘You want to be on the design side, not the behind side. Because when you’re on the behind side, you get shit on,’ ” McDonald said. The mayor asked him to serve and he agreed.

The mayor unveiled the Bring New Orleans Back Commission at a press conference held at the Sheraton Hotel on September 30—one month and a day after the flooding. The seventeen-person panel included two women: Major and a corporate attorney with a big downtown firm. Of the fifteen men, no fewer than seven were CEOs, and three were bank presidents, including McDonald. From the start, Nagin reflected the comfort level of a mayor who had spent his career inside corporate America. “The importance of this group,” said J. Stephen Perry, the head of the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau, “is that it will give the federal government the confidence that the city is harnessing the private sector to do a lot of its work.” Barbara Major wasn’t nearly as impressed. Blacks represented two-thirds of the city’s population, not half. “I think some people don’t understand that an equal number of black and white isn’t the same as equity,” Barbara Major said on the day the commission was announced. “But I tell you what, I give them credit, at least it’s fifty-fifty.”

I.
Katrina caused an estimated $135 billion in damages.

II.
Or selectively enforced the curfew laws. Five weeks after Katrina, Robert Davis, a sixty-six-year-old former teacher, black, was walking on Bourbon Street at around 8:00 p.m. He approached a small clot of police officers to ask about the curfew, and when he received no response to his question, he called them “unprofessional and rude.” A cameraman working for the Associated Press captured on video a trio of policemen, all of them white, punching and kicking Davis until they had him on the ground and in handcuffs—and still one officer delivered two more blows to his face. The police said they were detaining Davis on suspicion of public drunkenness (Davis claimed he hadn’t had a drink in twenty-five years) and for violating the city curfew. Two of the officers were fired and a third received a four-month suspension. The city would settle with Davis for an undisclosed amount.

III.
Several days after the flooding, the National Guard forced an exhausted pump operator named Ricky Ray to leave his post running a pumping station that sat astride the Orleans Avenue Canal, near Lakeview. He returned a few days later. The city’s pumps were so old and idiosyncratic that some still operated on Edison’s direct-current electrical system and were therefore incompatible with the alternating-current electrical system that the rest of the city used. Ray, who told his story to the
New York Times
’ John Schwartz, knew the sound and the feel of these ancient warhorses. He stayed until the city was dry.