(continued)

"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

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