Zeitoun (34 page)

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 was “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.

One day, in 2006, Zeitoun was visiting his cousin Adnan at his Subway franchise downtown. Zeitoun occasionally stopped there for lunch, and was eating there that day when he saw an exceptionally tall African American woman enter. She was in tan-and-green fatigues, evidently a National Guard soldier. She looked very familiar.

Zeitoun realized why he recognized her. She was, he was almost certain, one of the people who had arrested him. She had the same eyes, the same short hair. He stared for a few long moments and tried to muster the nerve to say something. He couldn’t devise the right thing to say, and soon she was gone.

Afterward he asked Adnan about her.

“Have you seen her before?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

“If she comes in again, you have to ask her questions. Ask her if she was in New Orleans after the storm.”

Zeitoun spent the day reliving his arrest and the weeks afterward. It wasn’t every day that the arrest came to him, but late at night it was sometimes difficult to send away his anger.

He knew he couldn’t live in the city if he felt he would continue to encounter people like this soldier. It was painful enough to pass by the Greyhound station. It was almost unavoidable, though, given how central it was—within sight of the Home Depot. He had adjusted his habits in a dozen small ways. He was exceedingly careful not to commit any minor traffic infraction. He feared that because of the lawsuit he would be a target of local police, that they would manufacture charges against him, try to justify his arrest. But these were fleeting thoughts. He fought them off every day.

One confrontation was unavoidable.

Four days after his release, Zeitoun had had time to sleep, and to eat a bit. He felt stronger. He didn’t want to return to Camp Greyhound. But Kathy had insisted, and he knew she was right. They had to get his wallet back. It held his driver’s license, and without it the only identification he had was the prison ID he had been given at Hunt. He and Kathy needed to fly to Phoenix to gather their children and drive home, and the only way he could do so was with his driver’s license. They thought about it a dozen ways but couldn’t find a better way. They had to return to the Greyhound station and retrieve the wallet.

They pulled into the crescent-shaped drive. All around were police cars, military Humvees, jeeps, and other military vehicles.

“How do you feel?” Kathy asked.

“Not good,” Zeitoun said.

They parked and stayed in the car for a minute.

“Ready?” Kathy asked. She was primed for a fight.

Zeitoun opened his door. They walked toward the station. Outside the entrance, there were two soldiers.

“Please don’t say anything,” Zeitoun said to Kathy.

“I won’t,” she said, though she could barely contain her rage.

“Please don’t,” he repeated. He had warned her repeatedly that they could both be put in jail, or he could be returned to prison. Anything could happen. Anything
had
happened.

As they approached the bus station, Zeitoun was trembling.

“Please be calm,” he said. “Don’t make it worse.”

“Okay, okay,” Kathy said.

They walked past a dozen military personnel and into the building. It looked much like Zeitoun remembered. For the first time in his life, he tried to shrink. Trying to hide his face—the very people who caged him might still be there—he followed Kathy through the doors.

They were stopped by a pair of soldiers. They patted Zeitoun down and searched Kathy’s purse. They directed them both through a metal detector. Zeitoun’s eyes darted around the building, looking for anyone he recognized.

They were directed to a set of chairs, the same chairs Zeitoun had been questioned in, and were told to wait for a chance to meet with the assistant district attorney. Zeitoun wanted badly to get out as soon as possible. The situation was far too familiar. He had no faith that he would leave again.

As they waited, a man holding a tape recorder approached them. He told them that he was a reporter from the Netherlands, and that his friend had been held overnight at the station in one of the cages, and had just been released.

He began asking Zeitoun and Kathy why they were there. Kathy didn’t hesitate, and began to tell him that her husband had been wrongfully arrested, sent to a maximum-security prison, held there for twenty-three days, and that now they were trying to retrieve his possessions.

“Get away from them!”

Kathy looked up. A female officer in her fifties, wearing full camouflage, was glaring at them, and barking at the Dutch reporter. “Get out of here,” she said to him. “Interview’s over.” Then she turned to a pair of National Guardsmen. “If that man is seen in here again, arrest him and put him in a cage.” The soldiers approached the reporter.

Kathy stood up and strode toward the woman.

“Now you take away my freedom of speech? Really? You took away my husband, you wouldn’t let me speak to or see my husband, and now you take away my ability to speak freely? I don’t think so! You know anything about freedom of speech?”

The officer turned away from Kathy and ordered that the reporter be removed. Two soldiers guided him to the front door and led him outside.

The assistant district attorney, a heavyset white man, approached them and asked how he could help. Kathy reiterated that she needed her husband’s wallet. The man led them to the gift shop, which had been converted into an office. It was a glass box in the middle of the station, full of Mardi Gras T-shirts and paperweights. Kathy and Zeitoun explained their situation.

The assistant DA said he was sorry, but the wallet was still being used as evidence. Kathy blew up. “Evidence? How could his ID be used as evidence? You know his name. Why would you need his ID? He didn’t commit a crime with his wallet.”