Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [63]
Earlier in the day I ran into Dr. Phil McGraw. Some volunteers had set up a feeding kitchen for first-responders, and the Dr. Phil Show was there with a couple of cameras. The producer approached and asked if I wanted to speak with Dr. Phil.
“You mean as a therapist or as an interview subject for my show?” I asked.
“Either way.” She shrugged.
The Scientologists are here too. Kirstie Alley arrived with a bunch of them, and John Travolta is around as well. No one beats Steven Seagal, though. He’s not here with any group. I saw him late one night dressed in a cop uniform, out on patrol with some deputies from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department. He’s been going out with their SWAT team. We talk a bit, and when he leaves he puts his palms together in front of his face and bows briefly. Then he hops in a cop car and speeds off.
“Seagal’s tight with the sheriff in Jefferson,” a New Orleans cop tells me later. “There’s a bar where a lot of cops hang out, and I remember a couple years ago Seagal comes in with those guys and takes out a framed eight-by-ten photo of himself and fucking hangs it on the wall.”
“Get out of here,” I say, “no way.”
“I shit you not,” he says. “As soon as he left, a couple of us took out our pistols and shot it. Blew the fucking thing off the wall. One bullet actually went right through and hit a car-rental place next door.”
I don’t really drink, but I like the bar because there’s no bullshit here. For days the chief of police, Eddie Compass, has been blaming some of the problems the police faced after the storm on the fact that the armory got flooded and a lot of their ammunition and supplies were ruined. When I mention this to some of the cops at the bar, they burst out laughing.
“I’ll take you to the fucking armory,” one police officer tells me. “It’s fucking empty. The police force is broke, and it was broke long before the storm.”
A lot of the cops feel betrayed, screwed from above, below, and behind. They’re pissed off that the media has been focusing so much on the police officers who didn’t show up for work during the storm. I don’t blame them. Out of a force of about 1,700 police, only some 120 were unaccounted for. The vast majority of cops came to work, and stayed on duty around the clock. They were barricaded inside their stations, working multiple shifts. Over at the Sixth District, the precinct headquarters was flooded, so the police set up a perimeter in the Wal-Mart parking lot. They chased the looters out, saved hundreds of guns from getting out on the street, and ended up sleeping in their cars for weeks.
I spend a couple hours at the Wal-Mart one night. The police have renamed it Fort Wal-Mart. I tell the cops there about the French Quarter police I met my first day here, who’ve renamed their precinct Fort Apache.
“Let me tell you something,” the Sixth District commander, Captain Anthony Cannatella, tells me. “We are the original Fort Apache. Those guys over in the First District may be using the name, but this is Fort Apache.”
We’re sitting on benches with a half-dozen or so young cops, eating barbeque in the parking lot. Some police from Texas have come to help out, and every night they fire up the grill and barbecue whatever meat they can find. As he talks, Captain Cannatella’s face is backlit; the electricity’s still out, but a generator keeps a single light illuminating the area. Smoke swirls in the air.
“I don’t know,” I say, teasing. “They have a sign and everything—it says FORT APACHE—hanging right over the entrance to the precinct down there.”
“We’ll see about that,” one of the police officers says, and a couple of guys get up and leave.
Captain Cannatella’s been on the police force for more than twenty years. He is a big man with thick arms.
“You don’t want to get slapped with one of those,” a junior officer says, laughing, pointing to the captain’s hands. Captain Cannatella clearly