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has long since closed, and now looks as if it is being devoured by trees; parts of it appear to have been swatted to the ground by some giant hand. Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market continues to deteriorate; when I last saw it, in the fall of 2004, the roof, windows, interior walls, and floors were entirely gone, and trees were growing inside it. The second-story porch had been reduced to some dangling weather-beaten timbers, and the front doors had vanished; someone had already put them up for sale on eBay, with an opening bid price of five hundred dollars. There were no takers.

For much more on the subject, including an account of my 1989 encounter with Roy Bryant, see Confederacy of Silence.

Chuck Hustmyre

BLUE ON BLUE

Murder, Madness, and Betrayal in the NOPD

FROM New Orleans MAGAZINE

SATURDAY, MARCH 4, 1995. 1:55 A.M. EASTERN NEW ORLEANS

Antoinette Frank stood in the cramped kitchen of the Kim Anh restaurant, a 9mm pistol clutched in her hand. Kneeling on the dirty floor at Frank’s feet were seventeen-year-old Cuong Vu and his twenty-four-year-old sister, Ha.

Cuong was an altar boy at St. Brigid Catholic Church. He played high school football and wanted to be a priest. Ha was considering becoming a nun. Both worked long hours at their parents’ restaurant.

Frank fired nine bullets into them.

Ha Vu died instantly. When detectives found her, she was still on her knees, her forehead resting on the floor.

Cuong took longer to die. Frank shot him repeatedly in the chest and back, but his young athlete’s heart continued to beat. Frank heard him trying to talk, so she shot him again, this time firing two bullets into Cuong’s head.

Frank and her partner in crime, an eighteen-year-old named Rogers LaCaze, ransacked the Bullard Avenue restaurant until they found what they were looking for—money.

Frank and LaCaze bolted through the dining room. On their way to the front door they passed Ronnie Williams. Williams was a twenty-five-year-old New Orleans police officer assigned to the Seventh District. He had gotten off work at 11:00 P.M. and had gone straight to the restaurant to work a security detail. Williams needed the extra money the detail paid. Ten days earlier, his wife had given birth to the couple’s second son, Patrick.

Still in his police uniform, Williams would be found face down behind the bar in a pool of blood. He had been shot twice in the head and once in the back.

LaCaze took Ronnie Williams’s gun and wallet.

Outside, Frank and LaCaze piled into a battered 1977 Ford Torino. As the car screeched out of the parking lot, a sun-yellowed cardboard sign fluttered on the dashboard in front of the steering wheel. Printed on either end of the foot-wide rectangular placard was the star-and-crescent symbol of the New Orleans Police Department. In the center of the sign, between the symbols, were the words NEW ORLEANS POLICE OFFICER ON DUTY.

The sign and the car belonged to officer Antoinette Frank, a New Orleans cop who worked out of the Seventh District. She, too, had just gotten off at 11 o’clock. Frank was on the same platoon and worked the same shift as Ronnie Williams. The two officers had worked together every day for more than a year.

A POLICE DEPARTMENT IN DESPAIR

Few would argue that by the time 1995 rolled around, the New Orleans Police Department was in sad shape. The department was losing about one hundred officers per year—many of them fired or arrested—and hiring only half that many. In 1994, two officers had been arrested for murder, one for killing a man the officer suspected of having broken into his apartment; the other for ordering the execution of a woman who had filed a brutality complaint against him. Then in December 1994, the FBI arrested ten New Orleans cops on federal drug-trafficking charges.

CBS’ Mike Wallace branded New Orleans “The No. 1 city in the nation for police brutality and corruption.” Newly elected Mayor Marc Morial told Time magazine, “I inherited a police department that was a shambles.” By the start of 1995, things were bad, but they were about to get