Sunday, March 16, 2025

The DeSoto Parish Matter: “These Are the Facts As We See Them”

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he day before the previous chapter of our investigative series, “F#*ck This,” was published, I received a phone call from Richard Ieyoub, the Commissioner of Conservation at Louisiana’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR), inviting me to meet with him and his staff so they could answer any questions I might have regarding “the DeSoto Parish matter.” During the past two months, The Bayou Brief has investigated allegations of a potential environmental emergency in and around DeSoto Parish, a pocket of rural northwest Louisiana located about 30 miles south of Shreveport. Our first report was published on August 1st. Prior to the discovery of the Haynesville Shale formation, DeSoto Parish had been largely known for its dense forests of pine trees and for being the site of the Battle of Mansfield, a part of the Red River Campaign during the Civil War that left nearly 2,000 dead. Today, it is at the epicenter of Louisiana’s natural gas industry.
“DeSoto Parish is now the largest source of energy-related property taxes in the state with over $47.2 million, a figure that is 11 times higher than the pre-Haynesville period in 2005,” economist Loren Scott noted in April. “Almost 61% of this parish’s property taxes come from energy-related industries, a percentage that is the highest in the state.” According to a report issued yesterday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an agency of the Department of Energy, the Haynesville Shale is one of three regions in the nation (the others being the Appalachian Basin in the Northeast and the Permian Basin in western Texas and New Mexico) that now produce nearly half of the nation’s natural gas. In 2007, the three regions accounted for 15% of production. “After decreasing from its peak in 2012, increasing production in the Haynesville region since 2017 has been driven by improving initial production rates and increasing rig counts,” the report states. “Higher rig counts are likely a result of recovering crude oil prices, which have been generally increasing since early 2016.”
The boom, though, has muted some legitimate environmental concerns: well blowouts, geysering fracking fluids, potential water contamination, ponds that bubbled. DNR quietly declared an emergency and, thus far, has spent more than $1.6 million on fixing the “DeSoto Parish matter.” Now, more than fifty residents are suing the oil, gas, and drilling operators responsible. This isn’t a group of environmental activists. They’re not trying to kick the industry out; it’s been an enormous economic engine in a region that had been contentedly rural. But they are demanding transparency and accountability.   [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-28-at-8.46.34-PM.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Richard Ieyoub” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]
I’ve known Ieyoub professionally for nearly three decades. I lived and worked in Lake Charles when he was Calcasieu Parish District Attorney, before his election to three consecutive terms as state Attorney General. We’ve remained in occasional contact since he left that post in 2004, and I readily agreed to the meeting, which was held the afternoon of Thursday, August 23, in his office. Ieyoub began by introducing his staff: Assistant Commissioner of Conservation, Gary Ross; Director of the Engineering Regulatory Division, Brent Campbell; Supervisory Attorney, John Adams, and Environmental Division Director, Gary Snellgrove. Then, he opened by stating, “These are the facts as we see them.” Ieyoub was at his desk. I sat in a chair to his right, facing the other three in a semi-circle. “Of course, we’ll answer any of your questions as fully as we can,” he said. My first question was, “You have declared this to be an emergency. You’ve notified GOHSEP and DeSoto Parish Emergency Preparedness. You’ve met with the operators. Have you notified or met with all the property owners and residents in the affected area?” “No, we haven’t,” Adams, the attorney, readily admitted. “But the main reason we declared it an official emergency was because the process requires us to do so in order to tap the Oilfield Site Restoration (OSR) program, and get a contractor on it.” [perfectpullquote align=”left” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Like other state programs, in OSR, the government, in order to better safeguard the public’s health, collects a targeted fee from companies that mine or extract natural, non-renewable resources. [/perfectpullquote] Adams and Ieyoub also wanted to emphasize that OSR (the source of the $1.6 million) is “not technically state money,” which is somewhat misleading. The funding for the program (sometimes also referred to as the “Orphan Wells Fund”) does not come directly from individual taxpayers. The talking point also appears on the department’s own website: “No tax-payer (sic) dollars are utilized.” The program, instead, is funded through fees paid quarterly by oil and gas well operators – 1.5 cents for each barrel of oil produced, and three-tenths of a cent for every thousand cubic feet of natural gas produced. All together, the program generates about $4 million a year in revenue. OSR pays for environmental remediation. “The specific focus of the Oilfield Site Restoration Program is to properly plug and abandon orphan wells and to restore sites to approximate pre-wellsite conditions suitable for redevelopment,” the department’s website explains. “Orphan wellsites are prioritized to direct available funding to those sites that pose the greatest threat to public safety and environment.” [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Haynesville-Shale.jpg” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”The Haynesville Shale” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]
[dropcap]“[/dropcap][dropcap]W[/dropcap]e have notified certain property owners (about the emergency),” Adams continued, “in order to get permission to access their property.” “I’ve met with owners,” Snellgrove, the environmental director, stated. “And we have a strong field presence in the area. Further, as regards Mr. Cleon Bryant, he was provided with all the data.” Cleon Bryant is the lead plaintiff in C.L. Bryant, et al v. XTO Energy, et al – a state lawsuit filed in DeSoto Parish, June 15, 2018. Last December, DNR had a nearly two-inch thick envelope of documents delivered to Bryant via certified mail. “But did he understand all the reports and documents that you sent him?” I asked, smilingly, and with a laugh. “That’s not the point,” Snellgrove snapped back. “He has all the data.” [perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]”Gary Snellgrove, here, is our point man on this, and he’s on top of it,” Richard Ieyoub said.[/perfectpullquote] The rest of the men in the room seemed startled at Snellgrove’s exhibiting irritation so early in the meeting, and Ieyoub quickly stepped in, trying to soothe any ruffled feathers. “Remember, gentlemen, the governor asked us to meet with the lady on this matter.” Then, turning to me, Ieyoub said, “Gary Snellgrove, here, is our point man on this, and he’s on top of it. As to your previous question, DeSoto Parish officials have been asked to a meeting to discuss the matter, but we’ve had trouble arranging that.” Assistant Commissioner Ross remarked, somewhat ruefully, “In fact, we were supposed to meet with them today, but several of them couldn’t get here, so I think it’s been postponed to next week.” “Yes, we’ve had several delays in arranging the meeting,” Ieyoub agreed. The roundtrip drive from DeSoto Parish and Baton Rouge takes nearly eight hours, I pointed out. “Why don’t a few of you go there, and meet with them at the parish police jury building one afternoon, and then have a public meeting with property owners and area residents that evening? Or, if you want to keep the info contained, hold the public meeting at the church that’s in the heart of the affected area? I think it’s Smyrna Baptist?” Ross and Campbell looked at each other, shrugged, then nodded their heads in agreement. Yet Snellgrove insisted, “The local officials asked for the meeting. We have to wait for them to find the time to do it.” “If asked to put on a public presentation, we will,” Adams added, placatingly. We moved on to my next question: the hydrogen sulfide readings. Why hasn’t DNR asked the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to bring one of its mobile air monitoring labs out to DeSoto Parish and do grid sampling of the affected area? “There’s no reason to call DEQ. That was a one-time surface expression of gas, at the Mason 1 site,” Snellgrove said. “And as you reported, we found buried material and removed it.”       [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/H2S-handheld.jpg” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]
“Yet one of those readings was ‘off-the scale,’ as your own inspector reported,” I pointed out. “98 parts-per-million of H2S, and the OSHA limit is 1 part per million over 8 hours, with short-term exposure not to exceed 5 ppm over 15 minutes, right?” “Wouldn’t due diligence to protect the citizens suggest that getting an assist from DEQ’s air-monitoring lab might be a good idea?” I asked. “At no time was the breathing of any workers at the site in jeopardy,” Snellgrove was adamant. “The reading you’re referring to was a concentrated sample, collected via bucket sampling. Hydrogen sulfide has never been detected again, and there is no cause for additional sampling.” “Then why is there an orange sign at the entrance to one of the area wellsites, bearing a skull and crossbones and stating ‘Caution H2S: hydrogen sulfide may be present’?” I asked, adding, “I’ve been shown a picture of it.” Campbell and Ross asked if I knew which wellsite it was, and at the time, I could only describe what the picture had shown: the sign on barbed wire next to a gate, a large well pad with plastic fluid tanks at the left edge, and several large box trailers parked in a row behind the wellhead in the center. Adams directed Snellgrove, “Find out from Indigo where this is.” Why – and how – did he zero in on Indigo Materials?   [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/IMG_5614.jpg” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t turns out he was correct to look at Indigo. Subsequently, another version of the picture, seen above, was provided to me, showing the Indigo sign on the fence a few feet from the caution sign. And I received an e-mail from Adams the following day, explaining the site contained a “scrubber” which removes H2S from Haynesville Shale gas, so it can be safely piped elsewhere. But I also further pressed the idea bringing in DEQ, by asking them about the EPA rule requiring the use of OGI (optical gas imaging) to detect “fugitive emissions” from oil and gas well sites. Finalized in June 2016, and signed by then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt this February, the rule is being challenged by the oil and gas industry. Still, it requires state environmental agencies to conduct the monitoring, and in Louisiana, that agency would be DEQ, except for the fact that DNR has all authority over oil and gas drilling. Adams admitted he was unfamiliar with this EPA regulation, but Snellgrove knew about the technology. “You’re talking about FLIR (a brandname) cameras, right? Early on, the operators suggested we bring them in,” he said. “Commonly, they’re used for pipelines, and DEQ has used them on the Mississippi River, conducting flyovers to check for barges that are emitting stuff. But because the ones we have are mounted to planes, we can’t use them effectively in DeSoto. Too many trees to get good clear images.” My next questions involved the affected water wells, and the overall condition of the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer. “Since the standard for remediation of any water problems is ‘drinking water safe’, and that is the purview the Health Department’s Office of Public Health, have you asked them to test the public and/or private wells in the affected area?” I asked. “Yes, we advised them and they came and sampled the Keatchi Water System well nearby – within the last two weeks. We expect that report shortly,” Snellgrove said. “We don’t expect it will show any cause for concern, however, since the public supply is closer to the surface than the Hanson rig water supply well that blew out.” He then added, “Rig supply wells need more water than drinking water wells, so they’re drilled deeper. And those deeper levels of the aquifer are where we’re finding the gas – which, as you know, has been matched to gas from the Hosston formation.” That’s not entirely accurate. In November and December of last year, samples were taken from five gas wells of differing depths in order to test gas in a water sample from the Hanson drilling supply rig. The lab report showed the gas in the water was most like gas from the well in the Hosston formation, but far from identical. “Identification of this gas well as the source of the stray gas in the Hanson water well would be circumstantial,” the report from Weatherford Labs stated. “The geochemistry of dissolved and free natural gases would have to be established in several water wells in the study area to ascertain the comparative character of the Wilcox aquifer gases and produced gases in DeSoto Parish.” (And, interestingly, none of the samples taken came from a well drilled into the Haynesville Shale, which is where Indigo has its wells.) The other problem with Snellgrove’s statement is a simple matter of physics. While a rig supply well may be drawing water from a deeper area of the aquifer than drinking water wells do, that does not mean there’s not gas in the drinking water supplies. After all, gas rises. As the meeting wrapped up, Ieyoub made it a point to say, “These are good people. We need more like them. But we’ve had to absorb so much in the way of budget cuts that it makes it difficult to do our job. As I see it, that’s to protect the health and safety of the people of Louisiana.”     [aesop_collection title=”Previous Reports in this Series” collection=”510″ limit=”5″ columns=”1″ splash=”off” order=”reverse” loadmore=”off” showexcerpt=”off” revealfx=”off”]

How the Trump Administration Went Easy on Small-Town Police Abuses

By Ian McDougal |ProPublica On a chilly morning in December 2016, 12-year-old Bobby Lewis found himself sitting in a little room at the police station in Ville Platte, a town of 7,300 in southern Louisiana. He wasn’t sure exactly how long it had been, but the detective grilling him had been at it for some time. Bobby was a middle school student — a skinny kid with a polite demeanor — and though he got in trouble at school from time to time, he wasn’t used to getting treated like this. He was alone, facing the detective without a parent or a lawyer. A blank piece of paper sat on the table in front of Bobby. He and his friends were thieves, the detective insisted. They sold drugs. They trafficked guns. The detective brushed off Bobby’s denials. She knew what he was up to, and if he didn’t write it all down — inform on his friends and confess to his crimes — she’d charge him. She’d confiscate his dog, Cinnamon, she told him. She’d throw his mother in jail. Bobby was nothing but a “B” and an “MF,” as he later relayed the detective’s words to me, sheepish about repeating them. When his mother finally turned up at the station house, it seemed only to enrage the detective further. “Wipe that fucking smile off your face, and sit up in that fucking chair,” Bobby and his mother recall the detective barking at him. Earlier that day, Bobby told me, he had been walking home from a friend’s house when a police cruiser pulled up alongside him. He recognized one of the officers. Her name was Jessica LaBorde, but like most people in Ville Platte, Bobby knew her only as Scrappy. The sobriquet was too fitting not to stick. Profanity prone in the extreme, LaBorde was known for her tinderbox temper and hostile disposition. She styled herself like a Marine drill sergeant — fastidiously pressed police blues, jet-black hair pulled back tight — and she would become Bobby’s interrogator. (LaBorde did not respond to calls or a detailed list of questions about the incident.) Somebody had put a rock through a window in one of the abandoned houses that litter Ville Platte, and a neighbor had seen three boys taking shelter from the rain under a carport nearby. But, the neighbor later told Bobby’s mother, Charlotte Lewis, he didn’t know which of the boys had thrown the rock. Bobby admitted he had been there but insisted he wasn’t the culprit. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-7.57.10-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountaine” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Northwest Railroad Avenue in Ville Platte. Once the interstate bypassed the town in the 1980s, it became even more isolated. ” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] Police need probable cause — evidence sufficient to show there’s a fair likelihood that a person committed a crime — to take someone into custody. Generally, an officer can’t detain somebody just because that person was near the scene of a crime. “Mere propinquity,” the U.S. Supreme Court has written, “does not, without more, give rise to probable cause.” Whether LaBorde didn’t know that or didn’t care, she ordered Bobby into the back of her squad car. LaBorde didn’t call Bobby’s mother to tell her that her 12-year-old was in custody, according to a complaint Lewis later filed with the police department. But eventually another officer did. Lewis says she told the officer not to let anybody question her son until she got there. She had to wait out a morning downpour before she could walk to the station house. Lewis was familiar with LaBorde’s rough reputation. Still, she told me, she was shocked by how her son was treated. “She cussed him out like he’s a stray dog,” she said. “It’s like my child is a convict or a criminal.” After two hours of pressing Bobby fruitlessly, LaBorde finally let him go — but not before charging him with criminal mischief, police records show. (A judge later dismissed the charge, Lewis told me; a friend admitted throwing the rock.) [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-7.57.27-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Charlotte Lewis was shocked to find her 12-year-old son, Bobby, being detained, interrogated and cursed at by a Ville Platte detective. ” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] Two weeks later, on Dec. 19, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a scathing report on policing in Ville Platte and surrounding Evangeline Parish. The investigation found that, for decades, the city Police Department and the parish Sheriff’s Office maintained an unwritten policy of jailing people without probable cause — for days and even weeks at a time — to pressure them to cooperate with law enforcement. These “investigative holds” ensnared anybody who might know something about criminal activity, from a suspect to a potential witness to a suspect’s relatives. As the Justice Department report put it, “Literally anyone in Evangeline Parish or Ville Platte could be arrested and placed ‘on hold’ at any time.” Many were. From 2012 to 2014 alone, the police unlawfully held at least 700 people in Ville Platte — close to a tenth of the town’s residents. That, the report concluded, amounted to “a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conduct.” To end this cycle of abuses, the report prescribed an array of institutional changes to eliminate investigative holds, such as imposing new department protocols and overhauling training regimens. The case wasn’t merely about Ville Platte. The Justice Department lawyers viewed it as a template. Similar policing practices exist in scores of towns and villages across the country, and Justice Department officials selected Ville Platte precisely because it was a pure embodiment of a widespread problem. They hoped it would provide a model for reform at other police departments. Justice Department officials planned to negotiate a consent decree — a long-term reform plan supervised by a federal judge — with local officials. Systemic police reform was a defining feature of the Obama-era Justice Department, which considered judicial oversight key to dislodging unlawful practices as firmly entrenched as investigative holds were in Ville Platte. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-7.57.47-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Evangeline Parish, whose seat is Ville Platte. The parish sits on the Cajun Prairie, a sprawl of humid farmland in southwestern Louisiana dotted with palmettos and crawfish ponds. ” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] But Jeff Sessions, who took office as attorney general just months after the Justice Department report, has a different view. He considers his predecessors’ reform efforts, particularly via consent decree, to be gross federal overreach that denigrates and demoralizes police. Sessions all but declared that the Justice Department was getting out of the business of meaningful police reform. There would be no consent decree in Ville Platte. Instead, the result is what former Justice Department officials say is an anemic reform plan, announced in June, that largely leaves the future of policing there to the police. There’s little reason, they say, to expect that this plan will induce law enforcement in Ville Platte to change its ways. The town’s policing culture is defined by arbitrary arrest and detention — and it has been for a long time. It’s a culture that’s proven intensely resistant to change. “You do what you know,” one former Ville Platte police official told me. “And that’s all they know.”
When Neal Lartigue joined the Ville Platte Police Department in 1991, investigative holds were part of his training. “I’ve been here 27 years, and that was going on before I started,” he told me when I visited Ville Platte early this year. The practice was never enshrined in any manual, but it was as good as official policy at both the department and the Evangeline Parish Sheriff’s Office, which is headquartered in Ville Platte. (For its part, the Sheriff’s Office didn’t have a policy manual at all until last year.) Lartigue rose to become the Police Department’s narcotics officer, and in that role, he was a regular practitioner of investigative holds, according to a former police official who worked with him during that time. Lartigue would “put people in jail” — people he thought might be drug users or small-time dealers — “and he’d make them sit there, and say: ‘You gonna tell me something? I know you ain’t got the drugs, but you’re getting them from somebody. Who you getting them from?’” the former police official told me. It was an unnerving experience. Lartigue is an intimidating figure — a stern, laconic man with a shaved head and a stout frame. If his detainee pleaded ignorance, the former official said, Lartigue’s response was inevitably, “Well, then you’re gonna sit in jail till you decide you want to talk.” (Lartigue did not respond to requests for comment on his practices as an officer.) Nothing had changed by 2006, when Lartigue was elected chief of police, a position he holds today. Investigative holds remained a basic policing tool in Ville Platte, like dusting for fingerprints or mapping a crime scene. According to the Justice Department report and former local law enforcement officials, the purpose of most investigative holds was to obtain information from a reticent subject: a confession from a suspect, details from a potential witness, denunciations from a prospective informant. On occasion, the point was simpler: to keep a suspect from getting in the way while a detective gathered enough evidence to support an arrest warrant, the probable cause needed to arrest the suspect in the first place. Age was no limiting factor. The Justice Department found more than two dozen instances in which juveniles were subjected to investigative holds. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-7.58.03-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Campaign signs for the local police chief, Neal Lartigue, dot the streets of Ville Platte. Lartigue, who began as a patrol officer in 1991, was first elected chief in 2006.” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] Detainees — even those suspected of no wrongdoing — were strip-searched, booked and thrown in a jail cell, without access to a phone or a lawyer. The intermittent interrogations that followed, the Justice Department noted in its report, carried out “under the threat of continued, secret, indefinite detention,” raised the specter of “coerced statements or false confessions” and, worse, “improper criminal convictions.” In 1991, the year Lartigue became a patrolman, the Supreme Court held that if police make an arrest without a warrant, they have to get a judge to verify that the arrest was based on probable cause “as soon as is reasonably feasible, but in no event later than 48 hours after arrest.” Police are not allowed, the high court said, to delay going to a judge “for the purpose of gathering additional evidence to justify the arrest.” Yet, investigative holds were unilateral in Ville Platte; judges were never asked to determine whether each arrest and detention was in line with the law. Local officials maintain that the holds were an innocent outgrowth of parochialism. “We never intended to violate anyone’s constitutional rights,” Lartigue told local media after the Justice Department issued its 2016 report. The prevailing belief in Ville Platte, the Justice Department found, was that law enforcement could legally jail anybody for up to 72 hours without probable cause — a view of the law that had been wrong for more than half a century.
Ville Platte is a deeply isolated place. It sits on the upper edge of the Cajun Prairie, a plain of humid farmland flecked with palmettos, crawfish ponds and live oak that sprawls north from the marshy cane fields nearer to the Gulf of Mexico. In French, the words “ville platte” mean “flat town,” a name that, legend has it, was conferred by one of Napoleon’s former officers. Passing through in the 1850s, the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted lamented the tedium of the region’s “immense moist plain.” The construction of Interstate 49, in the mid-1980s, bypassed Ville Platte and left it all the more sequestered. Apart from a few annual events, such as the summer Festival de la Viande Boucanée (the Festival of Smoked Meat), Ville Platte has few attractions to draw outsiders. It retains a distinctive sense of place. Gas stations still advertise boudin, cracklin and tasso. It’s not uncommon to run into some locals who speak the regional French dialect. The other side of Ville Platte’s isolation is its poverty. Little gabled houses of shingle and clapboard are left abandoned to rot and collapse in the Woods, south of Main Street. In Crosstown, on the north side, the Parkview Shopping Center sits nearly tenantless, its vast, empty parking lot a reminder of all the spending power there’s not in Ville Platte. This May, an article in USA Today declared the town the poorest in Louisiana. Its median household income is about $18,700, compared with roughly $59,000 for the U.S. as a whole. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-7.58.26-PM.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-7.58.46-PM.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”An article in USA Today declared Ville Platte the poorest town in Louisiana. Its median household income is $18,700, compared to roughly $59,000 for the U.S. as a whole.” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] Ville Platte doesn’t have an organized civil rights community or a legal aid group to investigate policing practices, or any money to fund them. Local criminal defense attorneys might be expected to raise legal challenges to investigative holds, but they, too, thought a person could be held without probable cause for up to 72 hours, former Justice Department officials told me. Some scoff at the notion that the problem was ignorance alone. There has always been an element within the local law enforcement apparatus, particularly in its upper ranks, that didn’t care what courts and statutes required, say five current and former local law enforcement officials. For that set, the guiding principle was convenience. “We call it the Sovereign State of Evangeline,” one parish resident told me. “Our officials don’t follow the law. They make their own law, and we have to follow it.” In fact, those officials even flouted their own mistaken view of the law: the 72 hours they believed to be the legal limit on holds. The Justice Department documented “several dozen investigate holds” at the Ville Platte Police Department that “extended for at least a full week.”
In 2014, attorneys at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which handles police reform cases, received a call from an FBI agent named Steve Krueger. Krueger had been assisting a murder investigation in Ville Platte when he’d learned about investigative holds. The FBI agent had been shocked by the patent illegality of the practice, people familiar with the episode said. He met with Lartigue and his detectives to explain that the holds were unconstitutional. The police chief shrugged off Krueger’s entreaties, according to the Justice Department’s 2016 report. Krueger saw firsthand the harm investigative holds did to public safety in Ville Platte. People with information about his murder case had proved uncommonly hesitant to talk to him, he told colleagues. Citizens worried about getting thrown in jail if the police thought they knew anything of value. As the Justice Department’s report put it, decades of arbitrary detention had bred “deep community mistrust and fear of law enforcement.” [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-7.59.06-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Forms in the break room of the Ville Platte Police Department. ” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] Police reform cases rely primarily on a Clinton-era law that Civil Rights Division attorneys often call 14141, for its original designation in the U.S. Code. The law empowers the Justice Department to investigate and sue law enforcement agencies when they “engage in a pattern or practice of conduct” that deprives people of their civil rights. In 2009, Tom Perez took the helm at the Civil Rights Division and began to breathe new life into 14141, several former Justice Department officials say. (Perez is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee.) The Bush administration had largely sidelined police reform, favoring out-of-court settlement agreements when they entered into agreements at all. The federal government, Bush said, shouldn’t be “a separate internal affairs division.” After studying earlier cases, Perez’s team became convinced that a court-enforceable consent decree was far more likely to produce meaningful change in most instances. Given the time reform can take, “you need to have a sustained effort, and that needs to be supported and backed up by a judge, a federal judge who’s got the authority to force people to comply with their obligations,” said Jonathan Smith, who led the section that handles police reform from 2010 to 2015. A consent decree contains a set of institutional changes a police department has agreed to make, after negotiations with the Justice Department. A judge approves the agreement and oversees the reform process, usually assisted by an independent monitoring team. Intransigent police officials risk being held in contempt of court or even prosecuted. The judge lifts the consent decree only after the department has restructured its practices and ended its abuses. This typically occurs several years after the decree was put in place. A growing (albeit not unanimous) body of empirical evidence suggests consent decrees measurably improve police practices. But nobody argues they’re a panacea. “Consent decrees don’t turn departments into A+ departments,” said Christy Lopez, the supervisor for the Civil Rights Division’s police-reform attorneys during the Obama administration. But, she added, “if, after a consent decree, a department is still a C-, it sure makes a big difference for the people who were living with an F department.” Perez and his successor, Vanita Gupta, had an ambitious vision for what 14141 could achieve. They targeted common types of police misconduct and designed consent decrees to be templates for reform at other departments. “They became models for a set of best practices across the field,” Gupta told me. Another innovation was bringing local communities into the reform process. It was their rights police had violated, and they would be the ones to hold police accountable after a consent decree was lifted. By the time Krueger placed his call to Washington, in 2014, the small group of attorneys handling 14141 cases had their hands full. In all, the Obama Justice Department would enter into 14 consent decrees, more than twice as many as the Bush and Clinton administrations combined. But Ville Platte struck supervisors as worth the time commitment. Moving law enforcement there away from investigative holds — an egregious example of a fairly widespread policing practice — could guide improvements at other police forces that used such tactics. Lawyers at the Civil Rights Division had received reports of similar practices throughout Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, as well as parts of Florida. “The problem in Ville Platte is very common throughout the South,” Smith said. Indeed, court records showed the problem extended across the U.S., from Texas to Michigan and Georgia to Montana. “You would constantly see judges dropping footnotes: ‘I’m not really sure about the constitutionality of this practice, but nobody raised it,’” a former Justice Department official told me. “So, we need to raise it.” [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-7.59.24-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”A shuttered building in Ville Platte.” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] In April 2015, the Justice Department announced an investigation into whether the use of investigative holds in Ville Platte amounted to a pattern or practice of unconstitutional police conduct. In the meantime, the FBI’s Krueger had continued to examine policing practices in the town. In response to the attention from the FBI, Lartigue told me, he told his officers and detectives that they couldn’t use investigative holds any longer. Instead, there was a new procedure: Before they booked anybody, they needed to write up a statement of probable cause, have it notarized and prepare it to be sent to a judge. In December 2014, the Police Department began to require that its detectives and officers become notaries public. That, Lartigue said, would reduce the time it took after an arrest to get a statement of probable cause notarized and sent to a judge for review. “That was our only issue — the holds — and we quickly, swiftly got rid of it,” he told me. (The Sheriff’s Office instituted similar changes.) But what Justice Department attorneys found over the next 20 months indicated that serious problems remained. Local detectives still maintained that all they needed to jail somebody was a “hunch,” a “gut instinct” or “a pretty good feeling” that a person knew something about a crime. Many less senior members of the Ville Platte Police Department acknowledged to Justice Department attorneys that they knew little about proper police procedure. “You haven’t had anybody tell you the right way to do things,” said Jonathon Sparks, a former officer who began working at the Ville Platte Police Department in 2009, when he was 19. “It was only later in life I realized these people’s civil rights were being violated.” There were no beds, toilets, or running water in Ville Platte’s jail cells. Cut off from the outside world, a person on hold spent nights sleeping on a metal bench or on the concrete floor. A woman named Shawana Deville told the attorneys from Washington about the time police had held her overnight as a potential witness to a shooting. Jail guards ordered her to remove her tampon, and she spent the night sleeping on the floor without one. Lartigue confirmed her detention to Justice Department officials. “I just cried the whole time,” Deville would later tell a local television station. Deville is white, but the vast majority of people put on hold were black, former Justice Department officials told me. It wasn’t a simple story of racist white cops, though. Two thirds of Ville Platte’s residents are black, and the local power structure has given ground in recent years to black officials, including the mayor and Lartigue. But that hasn’t uprooted the old dynamic between power and race. “When we were growing up, there was nothing but white cops, and we thought it was bad,” one black Ville Platte resident, Raymond Anderson, told me. “But when the blacks came in, that didn’t make it easier.” (Anderson’s son is in prison — wrongfully, Anderson contends — for the murder that led police to hold Deville.) Local residents, as Krueger had seen, feared what law enforcement would do to them if they spoke out. Nevertheless, at a community meeting in September 2015, about 150 people turned up to share their experiences with the Justice Department attorneys. “When you speak up, you are looked at as a trouble maker,” one of them told a local reporter after the meeting. But optimism overcame fear of police retaliation. If they shared their stories, the Justice Department might bring its power and resources to bear on police misconduct in Ville Platte. As the investigation proceeded, Lartigue told me, he made a few more changes aimed at satisfying the Justice Department — “very few,” he added, to underscore his view that he’d already done all he needed to do. In March 2016, the Police Department revised its policy manual to prohibit detaining witnesses. “Unfortunately,” the policy stated, though the practice is “convenient and effective,” it “can result in civil liability.” Despite such steps, the legal peril for law enforcement in Ville Platte seemed to be rising as 2016 progressed. The feds weren’t the only ones circling; Louisiana state prosecutors had begun their own investigation. Krueger had retired from the FBI in 2015 — and promptly teamed up with the Louisiana State Inspector General, people familiar with the case said. They eventually brought a case to Jeff Landry, the state’s newly elected attorney general. Landry agreed to open a criminal investigation, with assistance from the FBI, into unlawful detention in Ville Platte.
In mid-November 2016, Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Sessions to be his attorney general. The choice didn’t bode well for the Justice Department’s plans in Ville Platte. As a senator, Sessions had made no secret of his antipathy for consent decrees and Obama-era police reform. Critics argued that the Justice Department deployed them too aggressively. Sessions’ concern, however, wasn’t that police reform by consent decree was overused or ineffective. His problem was with the very premise. He saw consent decrees as unconstitutional federal intrusions into state and local affairs. They “undermine the respect for police officers,” he testified at his January 2017 confirmation hearing, “and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness.” [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-7.59.39-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”A sign in a yard along Highway 167 in Ville Platte. ” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] In its December 2016 report, the Justice Department laid out the changes it anticipated requiring of the Ville Platte Police Department and Evangeline Parish Sheriff’s Office: They would need to overhaul policies, training procedures, recordkeeping systems and internal accountability mechanisms. The plan was to implement those reforms through a consent decree, former Justice Department officials said, and in early March 2017, Civil Rights Division attorneys traveled to Ville Platte to discuss reforms with community members and local officials. But on March 31, Sessions issued what many lawyers for the Justice Department saw as the coup de grâce to its police reform efforts. “It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies,” the attorney general wrote in an agency-wide memorandum, which ordered a review of contemplated consent decrees. He expanded on his thinking in an Op-Ed in USA Today: “We will not sign consent decrees for political expediency that will cost more lives by handcuffing the police instead of the criminals.” In April 2017, the Justice Department made its first endeavor to translate policy into practice — an 11th-hour attempt to scuttle a consent decree with Baltimore’s embattled police department. A judge in Maryland swatted it away. Meanwhile, in Ville Platte, the Justice Department went silent.
In an interview with a local newspaper right after the Justice Department report was issued, Lartigue compared investigative holds to an old family recipe for boudin sausage. He meant to highlight the lost provenance of the practice. But the analogy was apt in another sense, too. In Ville Platte, the police were used to making their sausage in particular ways, and they wouldn’t be easy to give up. Even townspeople who’d suffered under the holds saw them as a kind of local custom. “Dat just how dey do,” was the refrain I heard, in patois laced with resignation. In one sense, Lartigue was right that law enforcement in Ville Platte had stopped using investigative holds. There was no longer an open policy of jailing local residents without probable cause. But that didn’t mean local law enforcement had stopped using arbitrary arrest and detention. They hadn’t. As one law enforcement official in Ville Platte put it, “They’re just finding another way.” (“It’s very common,” a former Justice Department official told me, to see unlawful policing practices, in the face of federal scrutiny, “simply morph and take on new forms that are harder to ferret out.”) [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-7.59.53-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Tieberrious Wilson and his mother, Tamika Wilson, at home this summer. Tieberrious was arrested on murder charges and detained for nearly a year before being released for lack of evidence.” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] On May 15, 2017, Robert Wilson and three friends walked into the Ville Platte police station, a squat, salmon-colored bunker that sits just behind City Hall, at the center of town. Three weeks earlier, a stray bullet had killed a bystander down the street from a housing project where Wilson — who is 22 and goes by his middle name, Marquez — and several friends had been wiling away a Sunday evening. A couple days after the shooting, Marquez’s 19-year-old brother, Tieberrious, was arrested on murder charges. Now, Marquez had gotten word that detectives wanted to talk to him. At the police station, Marquez was ushered into the office of the chief detective, Steve Deville. A heavyset man with a dark goatee and a low, soft drawl, Deville turned on a tape recorder and asked Marquez to sign a form to confirm he understood his Miranda rights. Marquez panicked when he saw where Deville was asking him to sign. “Why you — why you got it as ‘suspect’?” he asked Deville. “I’m a suspect?” Deville assured him that was just how the form is designed. Marquez walked Deville through what had happened the night of the shooting, according to a police transcript of the interview. His account largely lined up with what Tieberrious had told detectives the previous month. Marquez had gotten into an argument on the street with a contemporary of his named Santiago Thomas. Afterward, Marquez, Tieberrious, and their companions had gone to a friend’s house to avoid further conflict. Ten or fifteen minutes later, they heard gunshots and ran outside to see Thomas’ car careening down the street. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-8.00.06-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Tieberrious Wilson, whose brother, Robert Marquez Wilson, was briefly jailed after he voluntarily talked to a Ville Platte police detective.” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] Deville wasn’t buying it. “I’m not saying that you are lying,” he told Marquez. “But if you are, I want to just explain something to you, okay? If you are, then there’s nothing that we can do to help later on.” Marquez insisted he was telling the truth. After 14 minutes, Deville turned off his tape recorder. But, according to Marquez, the interrogation didn’t end: “If you lie to me again, I’m going to lock you up,” Deville told him. Marquez again insisted that he wasn’t lying. “All right,” Deville said. “We’re gonna see if you’re lying.” Deville led him to a holding cell. “I was terrified,” Marquez told me. Deville said he’d find out soon enough if Marquez’s story matched the recollections of the friends who’d come with him to the police station. Marquez took a seat on a metal bench and waited. He’d grown up in Beaumont, Texas, and he wasn’t used to how the police operated in Ville Platte. He’d never been to jail before, he told me. When I later reached Deville by phone, he denied having put Marquez in a jail cell. “After he gave us the recorded statement, we walked him straight back to the front lobby, where he waited for everybody to finish, and they left together,” Deville told me. But the friends who accompanied Marquez to the station house that day recall things differently. One of them, Ebony Soileau, said she doesn’t remember seeing Marquez after he went to be interviewed, and Marquez later told another friend, Shawn Thomas, that “they had him in the back,” Thomas said, a reference to the police station’s jail. Marquez didn’t know this, but Deville had a reason to lean on him. The detective had next to no evidence against Tieberrious. In three weeks — with a woman dead, Tieberrious in jail and memories growing no sharper — police had collected statements from only two witnesses, according to Deville’s official summary of his investigation. Neither witness had seen Tieberrious fire a gun. Two hours later, Marquez told me, Deville opened the cell door. Deville had interviewed his friends. His story checked out. He was free to go. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-8.00.18-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Robert Marquez Wilson’s high school graduation photo. Marquez was detained as a witness to a shooting that his little brother, Tieberrious, had initially been arrested for. ” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] This, three former Ville Platte police officials told me, is one of the tactics that has come to replace investigative holds at the police department. In this case the hold is unofficial and it’s shorter, rarely lasting more than a day. “They would bring them in and make the person think they’re being arrested,” one of the former police officials said. The detainee was never actually booked into the jail, and the absence of a paper trail made it harder to prove that somebody had been illegally detained. “The longer-term holds — the overnight holds — stopped by 2016,” Jonathon Sparks, one of the former officers, said. After leaving the Ville Platte Police Department in late 2009 and working at other law-enforcement agencies in southwestern Louisiana, he’d returned in 2016, hoping to find that things had changed. They hadn’t, and he left after a few months. “They were still bringing people in during the day,” Sparks said. “They were very much holding them with no charges and no warrants — just smoke and mirrors.” The tactic remained in regular use for several months after the Justice Department issued its report, said another former officer, Natosha Murphy, who worked at the Police Department until summer 2017. Lartigue disputed these accounts. “That never happened,” he said. (Murphy is suing Lartigue and the department, alleging she was forced to resign after she contacted state and federal authorities to reveal illegal conduct at the department.) Often, Murphy and Sparks told me, detectives hold their quarries in the station house breakroom, where the surveillance cameras don’t work. Sometimes, as Marquez learned firsthand, detectives transfer them to a jail cell for a few hours to scare them into talking. To compel reluctant Ville Platte residents to go with police to the station house — without actually arresting them — detectives developed a separate set of dubious tactics. “You say you’re going to arrest them for interfering with an investigation for not talking or you say, ‘We have a warrant on you,’” Murphy told me. “Ninety percent of the time, there’s no warrant.” (Courts let police lie about a lot of things but not about having a warrant.) When I asked Deville, the chief detective, about this practice, he was silent. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-8.00.33-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”The entrance to the Evangeline Parish Sheriff’s Office.” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] At times, police took this method a step further. When a detective didn’t have enough evidence to get a judge to approve an arrest, the three former Ville Platte police officials said, the detective filled out a probable cause affidavit and got another officer to notarize it, but never forwarded it to a judge. To the untrained eye, a notarized affidavit could pass for an arrest warrant. Other times, detectives would flash an official-looking document that had nothing to do with the case. “They’d show it to suspects, pretending it was a warrant,” Murphy told me. “A lot of people can’t read or write.” When I asked him about notarized affidavits doubling as ersatz warrants, Lartigue grew uncharacteristically animated. “No,” he insisted. “That’s a blatant lie. I guarantee you that’s not the case. No.” Three former Ville Platte police officials, including Murphy and Sparks, told me Lartigue was aware of the practices they described. Those who refused to take part, they said, were threatened with professional reprisal. Sometimes, instead of faking warrants, detectives faked their way to real warrants. The trick was to write — but never issue — a ticket or citation for a fabricated infraction in the name of whomever a detective wanted to talk to, the three former Ville Platte police officials told me. Detectives could get an arrest warrant on the basis of the unissued ticket. A popular choice of infraction was fleeing from the police, Murphy and Sparks told me. “The person might not have been doing anything. They might have been at their house,” Sparks said. Lartigue denied the existence of this practice, too. Deville hung up on me when I asked him about it. By the time Lartigue and I spoke in late February, he hadn’t heard from the Justice Department in nearly a year. He figured that meant the feds were satisfied with what they’d seen when they visited a year earlier. He maintained that he’d gotten his department right with the law a long time ago. “We corrected it, and we’re sticking to it,” he said. “We’re still operating like we were.” In Washington, meanwhile, Sessions and his team continued to dismantle the Justice Department’s police-reform programs. During the summer of 2017, they achieved in Chicago what they’d failed to accomplish in Baltimore: stop a consent-decree process initiated by the previous administration. Despite Sessions’ explicit opposition to consent decrees, attorneys in the Civil Rights Division felt strongly enough about the problems in Ville Platte, according to a Justice Department official, that they drafted a consent decree. Their bosses rejected it. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-8.00.53-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”A Ville Platte Police Department officer, Lucas Griffin, talks with a motorist involved in a minor accident.” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] The Evangeline Parish Sheriff’s Office assists the police in Ville Platte, but it chiefly patrols the further-flung parts of the parish, outside its towns. The consensus among residents and those who’ve seen local law enforcement from the inside is that it’s less prone to arbitrary detention than the Ville Platte Police Department. The Justice Department’s report bears that out: It documented about 200 investigative holds at the Sheriff’s Office from 2012 to 2014, compared with about 700 at the Police Department. Still, unlawful detentions have persisted at the Sheriff’s Office. Detectives and deputies have adapted to the Justice Department probe by holding people by the roadside instead of in the jailhouse, a law enforcement official in Ville Platte told me. “To protect themselves, they strong-arm people on the street,” the official said. It’s relatively easy to avoid documenting a catch-and-release-style street stop. One Saturday in mid-February, Leeann Fontenot witnessed a friend steal a truck. Later that night, she offered to give a statement to deputies from the Evangeline Parish Sheriff’s Office, but they weren’t interested, she told me a few days later. Fontenot drifts between the homes of friends and relatives. “I’m actually homeless,” she told me. Her warbling Cajun accent betrays hints of a hard Texan “r,” the result of a childhood crisscrossing Texas and Louisiana with her mother. Several run-ins with the law have made it difficult to find steady work, she says. When we spoke, she was staying at a house just outside Ville Platte. Rusted gardening implements and propane tanks cluttered the front porch. Two metal crosses and what looked like part of an animal skull hung beside the front door. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-8.01.08-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Leeann Fontenot was detained in the driveway of her friend’s house, pictured, by two sheriff’s deputies who tried to pressure her into finding a stolen truck for them. ” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] By Sunday evening — the day after the truck theft — the sheriff’s deputies had seemingly changed their minds. Fontenot and a friend had just pulled into the driveway of another house where she sometimes stayed when her friend’s pickup truck filled with pulsing light. Two deputies ordered Fontenot and her friend, Jeff Fontenot, out of the truck. (The pair aren’t related; the surname Fontenot is to Ville Platte what Smith is to the rest of the country.) One of the deputies took her aside. Fontenot is 26, but she looks a decade younger; she’s barely 5 feet tall and slight. The deputy handcuffed her nevertheless. “Where’s the truck?” he asked. Fontenot said she didn’t know. As the deputy began searching her pockets, Fontenot says she asked him to stop and call a female officer, but the plea went unheeded. She wasn’t wearing a belt, and as the deputy shoved his hands into her pockets, she told me, her shorts began to slide down her thigh. When she asked the deputy to pull them back up, he told her to wait. The deputy went through her cell phone, Fontenot says, without her permission. (Under a 2013 Supreme Court decision, police need a warrant or permission for such a search.) Fontenot was perplexed. The deputy, whose name she didn’t catch, had seen her the night before. “Why y’all doing all this?” she asked. “Y’all saw me last night.” The deputy called her a liar. “It happens all the time,” Fontenot told me later — law enforcement stopping her on the street for no reason other than to press her for information. In the meantime, the other sheriff’s deputy, Eric Frugé, had taken Jeff behind his police cruiser. Frugé patted him down but didn’t cuff him. When the deputy searched Jeff’s truck, he found a small amount of marijuana. Fontenot admitted it was hers. The deputies ordered her to come in the following morning, a Monday, and tell them where the stolen truck was. Otherwise, they’d charge her with marijuana possession and grand theft auto. The second charge confused her; it was her friend who’d stolen the truck. (Jeff corroborated key details of Fontenot’s account but was standing a squad car’s length away from her, so he didn’t know whether the deputy had searched Fontenot’s phone or threatened to charge her. The Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a detailed set of questions. In response to questions sent to Frugé via Facebook, the deputy responded with an emoji of an angry face.) Fontenot didn’t go to the sheriff’s office that Monday. She didn’t know where the truck was, but more to the point, she was afraid of what might happen to her. She’d been subjected to an investigative hold before, she told me. “I don’t want them to put me on another hold.” [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-8.01.23-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”West Main Street in Ville Platte.” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] On Feb. 27, 2018, after nearly a year of silence, a lawyer from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division sent an email to Eric LaFleur, a powerful state senator who moonlights as the Ville Platte city attorney. The Justice Department, the attorney wrote, had “prepared a proposal to address the findings” in its December 2016 report. Arthur Sampson, arguably the only civil rights activist in Ville Platte, had been a key community liaison. But he was caught by surprise when I told him I’d learned Justice Department attorneys were coming to town in March. The Trump administration had eliminated from the discussions the local community whose rights its police-reform work was meant to protect. “How can they know what we need when they’re not meeting with the community?” Sampson said. (A Civil Rights Division official said community input obtained earlier in the process “played an important role.”) [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-8.01.37-PM.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Civil rights activist Arthur Sampson was a key community liaison for the Obama-era Justice Department but said he was ignored by the department after Jeff Sessions took over as U.S. attorney general.” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] It wasn’t initially a happy moment for local officials, either. I called Lartigue in March to ask about the negotiations. “You’ll have to ask the Justice Department,” he said curtly, before hanging up on me. The tenor would soon change. When I spoke with LaFleur a couple of weeks later, he was evasive about the details of the agreement. But he chuckled and said: “We’re happy with what they’re recommending.” By June 4, it was official: There would be no consent decree and no federal judge to ensure compliance. Instead, the Justice Department announced a pair of out-of-court settlement agreements with the Ville Platte Police Department and the Evangeline Parish Sheriff’s Office. “This is a way to basically allow these departments to go forward just as they were before,” said Roy Austin, who oversaw the department’s police-reform docket from 2010 to 2014. Austin was troubled by the lack of a local independent monitor, a regular feature of Obama-era reform agreements. Combined with the lack of judicial oversight, that meant “there’s no one to hold them accountable in any formal way,” Austin said. “It’s very hard to hide things from a true monitoring team, as compared to hiding things from someone who can’t be there all the time.” The Justice Department disagreed, calling the agreements “stringent.” “The Justice Department monitors and assesses the compliance” of the Police Department and Sheriff’s Office “on a basis similar to an independent monitor team, and reserves the right to take appropriate legal action if we determine that both parties are not in substantial compliance or have not worked in good faith to achieve substantial compliance,” Justice Department spokesperson Kelly Laco said. Laco did not explain what led the department to reject the recommendation of the attorneys working on the case to implement a consent decree. The Justice Department will superintend reforms from 1,000 miles away in Washington. The difficulty isn’t just distance. Even in the best of circumstances, “these cases are really time intensive and very difficult to do,” Austin said. These weren’t the best of circumstances. The Civil Rights Division’s police-reform group has lost a quarter of its staff attorneys during the Trump administration, and those who remain have told former colleagues they’ve grown more deferential in their dealings with local law enforcement. They don’t believe the political leadership will back them if disputes arise. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-8.01.49-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”The break room of the Ville Platte Police Department, where former police officers say detectives took to detaining people illegally after the department came under federal scrutiny over “investigative holds” in its jailhouse.” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] The settlement terms themselves mostly retained only a faint outline of what past agreements would have required. For example, there was a section called “Community Engagement,” which in earlier agreements contained detailed requirements for improving and monitoring police-community relations, sometimes even obligating cities to establish civilian oversight bodies. In the Ville Platte agreements, the section consisted of a single short paragraph calling for a “public education effort.” What does that mean in practice? In early August came the apparent answer: The Police Department held its first “Police and Community Together Fun Day,” an event advertised as featuring face painting, a dunking booth and “LoLo the Clown.” The “outcome assessments” that determine when the agreements are satisfied — usually carried out by an independent monitor under a consent decree — are now self-assessments. “The city is coming up with the metrics, measuring its own compliance with the metrics, and then the parties are deciding on that basis whether the police get out of the agreement,” a former Justice Department official said. “It undermines the whole purpose of the agreement.” Lartigue seemed content with the settlement. As he told a local publication, it amounts to “just a few more documents.” Indeed, the types of reforms the agreements emphasize — “clear policy guidance”; “thorough documentation” of arrests, detentions and interrogations; “supervisory oversight” — amount to just a few more documents if nobody’s making sure they amount to more than that. Policy, for example, is easily flouted. What happened to Leeann Fontenot, Bobby Lewis and Marquez Wilson was already forbidden by policy. It happened anyway. (This year, after a judge ordered Marquez’s brother released from jail for lack of evidence, prosecutors charged Marquez in his place. He has pleaded not guilty, and it’s unclear whether the evidence is any less shaky this time around.) And supervisory oversight is of dubious value if the supervisors themselves — the detectives — are the chief perpetrators of the misconduct. The settlement agreements did change at least one thing in Ville Platte: It raised the likelihood that no police official will be held individually accountable for illegally detaining the town’s citizens. For more than two years, the Louisiana attorney general’s office and the FBI had been collecting evidence of criminal wrongdoing by officials at the Ville Platte Police Department, according to several people familiar with the case. “Their file is like this,” said one person who had spoken repeatedly with investigators, gesturing to indicate a stack of documents a foot high. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-27-at-8.02.11-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Edmund Fountain” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Farmland outside of Ville Platte.” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] All of that fizzled after the Justice Department unveiled its deal. The press release announcing the agreements lauded police officials: they had “cooperated fully throughout this matter, and we are eager to continue to work together,” it read. Investigators saw the agreement as lenient, according to people who have spoken with them. The Louisiana attorney general’s office felt it was untenable to recommend the indictment of officials at a police department the Justice Department had publicly praised and, in the view of investigators, had let off the hook with a lax settlement agreement. That, two people familiar with the decision say, led the office to conclude that it had to close the criminal investigation. (The attorney general’s office and FBI declined to comment. The Justice Department’s Laco said the agreement “does not in any way preclude or prevent any law enforcement agency from taking criminal action against an individual under any other law.”) In Ville Platte, as news of the agreements spread, a familiar fatalism settled on the town. Residents had taken risks sharing their stories because the federal government had promised change. Nobody from the Justice Department had come to explain what the agreements purported to do — another past practice jettisoned — but locals had a pretty good idea that the federal government wasn’t living up to its side of the bargain. After talk of a lawsuit and a federal judge, they got watered-down agreements brokered in secret. “A lot of people stuck their necks out on the promise that the Justice Department was going to do something and that change was coming,” said a former official there who had been involved in the case. “And then they didn’t do anything — they soft-shoed it instead.” Ian MacDougall is a senior reporting fellow at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter.

Louisiana AG Jeff Landry and top aide float conspiracy theory about “deep state bureaucrats.”

After Reed O’Connor, a federal district judge in Wichita Falls, Texas ruled Tuesday the IRS should reimburse Texas and five other states, including Louisiana, a portion of the fees collected from the Affordable Care Act’s Health Insurance Provider Fee (HIPF), Louisiana state Attorney General Jeff Landry and his top legal aide, Liz Murrill, both talked about a “deep state” conspiracy in an interview with the conservative online publication, PJ Media, and a press release issued by Landry on Wednesday.

Murrill claims to be Louisiana’s first-ever state Solicitor General, an office that does not exist under state law.

During the past three years, she has spearheaded Landry’s efforts in federal court to oppose climate change, LGBT rights, and the enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act, among other things. She has also championed cases aimed at dismantling the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare).

Notably, though, Louisiana first became a party to this particular lawsuit during the previous administration, under former state Attorney General Buddy Caldwell.

The case on Tuesday involved a minor technicality in Obamacare, which requires states to cover a portion of federal taxes and fees incurred by for-profit Managed Care Organizations (MCOs) as a consequence of participating in Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

“This is a prime example of how the administrative state works — and how difficult it can be to unravel the work of deep state bureaucrats,” Murrill declared after Judge O’Connor’s decision on Tuesday in a case styled as Texas v. United States.

Although it seems exceedingly unlikely, the decision purports to force the IRS to return $170 million to Louisiana. According to those familiar with the case, the decision will have no effect on the state’s finances and is almost certain to be overturned.

The judge ruled that plaintiff states had not been provided proper notification of their obligation to cover the HIPF and were thus forced to pay an unconstitutional tax.

Louisiana leads the nation in “state government’s dependency” on federal funding, according to a recent analysis, and it receives exponentially more money from the federal government than it contributes in federal taxes. Moreover, the HIPF is not and has never been considered an actual tax, and Louisiana’s payments are essentially an accounting maneuver, not a net burden incurred by the state government or taxpayers.

Judge O’Connor, a far-right appointee of former President George W. Bush, is best known for issuing a nationwide injunction against the Obama administration’s efforts to ensure schools receiving federal funding do not discriminate on the basis of sex; the decision largely was concerned with preventing transgender students from using bathrooms (O’Connor called them “intimate facilities”) not assigned to their biological sex at birth.

O’Connor used similarly tortured logic to justify his order that the IRS reimburse states for the HIPF, overruling previous decisions under a questionable interpretation of a federal procedural rule and then declaring that the HIPF was both statutorily created as a fee- not a tax- but was still a tax for the purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act. Read the ruling here.

In simple terms, the judge conceded that although Congress had created the HIPF to be treated as a “fee” (it’s literally in the title), states could sue under the pretense that it was a “tax.”

The application of the Anti-Injunction Act is a legal strategy encouraged by opponents of Obamacare and is at the center of another case involving Landry, which aims to strike down the mandate preventing health insurance companies from discriminating against Americans with preexisting conditions.

Jeff Landry used nearly identical language as Murrill to describe the decision on Tuesday. “This is a prime example of the deep administrative state doing something that Congress expressly forbid,” he wrote.

“Obamacare has always been an economic house of cards, and this ruling has again exposed it for what it is: a money laundering scheme,” Landry claimed in a separate press release titled “Money Laundering Scheme Foiled as Victory in Obamacare Lawsuit Yields $172,493,095 for Louisiana.”

His statements grossly mischaracterize the facts of the case, distort the statutory definition of “money laundering,” and comically appropriate talking points from the alt-right fringe.

The term “deep state” refers to a conspiracy theory, almost exclusively embraced by the most radical supporters of Donald Trump and primarily promoted by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and the publisher of the online, alt-right news site Breitbart.

Those who believe in the “deep state” argue the United States government is secretly controlled by a small cabal of intelligence operatives and lawyers at the Department of Justice determined to sabotage the current administration.

Landry and Murrill are the first public officials to apply the term to an entirely ministerial accounting procedure or to suggest that career civil servants at the Department of Health and Human Services are somehow actively involved in this conspiracy.

Landry issued his statement on Wednesday, August 22nd, less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was convicted on five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud, and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account and his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, multiple counts of tax evasion, and one count of bank fraud.

Offseason Position Battle: Defensive Backs

Already, some of the predictions I’ve made for the Saints roster and the groups I’ve projected have been shaken up a little. The biggest moves are at wide receiver, where, since we last checked in, the Saints released Brandon Coleman and signed veterans Brandon Tate and Michael Floyd. Coleman was one of my projections for the final roster; although I wasn’t feeling particularly strong about retaining him, the fact that they signed him to a contract after he hit free agency meant, I thought, that the team was interested in retaining him. Coleman was released with a failed physical designation; there is a chance the team would be interested in re-signing him once he’s healthy, but I think it’s more likely that Tre’Quan Smith being further along than expected made Coleman redundant to the passing game. Tate and Floyd will put pressure on Tommylee Lewis and Austin Carr for the final roster spots. Tate appears to be the early favorite for return duties, which would guarantee his spot. Floyd was once a 1000-yard receiver, all the way back in 2013, though his production declined over the next two years before his career went completely off the rails in 2016 and 2017. It’s possible he could be a reclamation project, but it’s equally likely that the team just won’t have room for him, with the top four receivers expected to be the integral parts of the passing game. The Saints also let Terrance West go, thinning out the running back rotation; reports are that Jonathan Williams’ performance in camp and preseason has made him the favorite to pick up snaps and carries during Mark Ingram’s suspension. Pencil him in for a roster spot; I’d still expect Boston Scott and Trey Edmunds to make the team as well. Now, we move on to defensive backs, where the Saints brought in four new bodies to try to shore up some of the question marks behind three good-to-great starters. Currently on roster Cornerback: Marshon Lattimore, Ken Crawley, Patrick Robinson, P.J. Williams, Natrell Jamerson, Kamrin Moore, Arthur Maulet, Justin Hardee, Linden Stephens, Marcus J. Williams, Robert Nelson Safety: Marcus A. Williams, Kurt Coleman, Vonn Bell, Chris Banjo, Sharrod Neasman, J.T. Gray Yes, I’m pretty sure the Saints brought in the other Marcus Williams just to create confusion for all their fans and writers in the preseason. The three entrenched starters, of course, are Marshon Lattimore (already with one Pro Bowl under his belt), Ken Crawley, and The Good Marcus Williams. Williams, in particular, is an underrated member of the trio and has a great chance to come out of nowhere and earn serious accolades. Lattimore’s own play often obscured the incredible range Williams displayed as a rookie free safety often left in single-high coverage, and while most of the public remembers Williams as the player who made the Minnesota Miracle possible, it was his play in part (including a key interception on Case Keenum) that made it possible for the Saints to come back in the first place. With another year under his belt, the second-youngest member of his draft class (he won’t turn 22 until the day before the Saints kick off their regular season) stands to build on those qualities; the sky’s the limit for Williams, who might well develop into the next Earl Thomas-type game-changing free safety. Kurt Coleman was brought in to start alongside Williams, as his athleticism allows him to be a more versatile player and display more range than Vonn Bell, who seemingly will be moving into more of a role as a full-time box safety, filling the shoes of the departed Kenny Vaccaro. Chris Banjo is a valuable fourth safety and special-teams player; he should make the roster, but his spot here could be complicated by Natrell Jamerson (who played both cornerback and safety in college) and the sheer depth of numbers at cornerback, which is going to force some difficult decisions on New Orleans. At cornerback, only three names are guaranteed their spots: Lattimore, Crawley, and Patrick Robinson, the big-ticket defensive back signing of the offseason. Robinson was a flop in his first stint in New Orleans, but after bouncing around the league for a couple of years, he found a home in Philadelphia, excelling as their slot cornerback in 2017. He’ll play the same role for New Orleans, as the Saints hope that wasn’t just a one-year wonder performance from him. P.J. Williams carries the highest draft pedigree of anyone left, as a 2015 third-round pick. Unfortunately, missing nearly his entire first two seasons slowed his development; he played every game in 2017, but his performance as the nickelback was wanting enough that the Saints went out and signed Robinson. With the additions of Robinson, Jamerson, and Moore, Williams’ roster spot is likely in jeopardy. Jamerson has experience at both cornerback and safety, but it’s the former where the Saints seem more interested in using him. He’s also got special teams experience in both coverage and return units. Moore has been quieter this preseason, but the Saints certainly saw something in him to draft him this year. Maulet and Hardee are former undrafted free agents who made serious impacts on special teams when given the chance, and they both have a strong shot of making the roster as well. Everyone else– including the other Marcus Williams– are likely camp bodies. In a sigh of relief for Saints fans, De’Vante Harris, who could never translate his training camp performances into success on the field, was cut well before final roster decisions. Roster Prediction Safety: Marcus Williams, Kurt Coleman, Vonn Bell, Chris Banjo Cornerback: Marshon Lattimore, Ken Crawley, Patrick Robinson, Natrell Jamerson, Kamrin Moore, Justin Hardee, Arthur Maulet Eleven defensive backs is a lot to carry on a regular-season roster, and while I really don’t expect that to happen, the Saints could make it work if they only carry five receivers and go with eight offensive or defensive linemen. Part of the reason this works is that I already project them to only keep six linebackers; the larger linebacker crews of the past have often been a necessity for special teams play, but many of these defensive backs can fill those same roles in coverage and tackling. I think seven of these players are locks. I couldn’t figure out who to cut between Banjo, Moore, Hardee, and Maulet. If the Saints are working Jamerson exclusively at cornerback, that seems to bode well for Banjo holding onto his spot. I tend to err on the side of teams being more committed to players they use draft capital on, but Maulet and Hardee have also proven themselves valuable special teams players over the last year. Admittedly, I’m kind of copping out with this call, because I simply don’t have enough information to determine who stands out among those final spots and who has fallen behind. (This is one area where you may want to trust the team’s beat writers.) I certainly can’t imagine all eleven will be regularly active on game day; this feels like a unit where eight or so players are active each game. Moore is the most likely, I think, to be inactive most weeks; the composition of the game day roster each week will depend on injuries, matchups, and which particular roles will be needed and emphasized. The odd man out is P.J. Williams, who has the talent but has had his role usurped by Robinson and Jamerson and also has an injury history that makes him difficult to rely on. I’m sure New Orleans would like to keep him, but roster space is precious and at some point you have to go with guys you know will be available. Next time: I don’t know exactly when the next column will be, but I do intend to have some more information on preseason games, perhaps another analysis of a position group, and a final 53-man roster prediction before the regular season starts.

An Environmental Emergency in DeSoto Parish? “Perhaps. If It Makes Sense to the Operators”

      [aesop_collection collection=”510″ limit=”6″ columns=”2″ splash=”off” order=”reverse” loadmore=”on” showexcerpt=”off” revealfx=”off”] [dropcap]“[/dropcap][dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s all been resolved.” That’s the public story being told by Louisiana Department of Natural Resources staff, regarding well blowouts and water problems in a segment of DeSoto Parish. It’s what they told me – a member of the press – and according to my conversations with members of the Governor’s staff, it’s the same thing DNR has been telling them. Yet a recent DNR document tells a different story: emergency declarations issued, emergency contract awarded, relief wells drilled, more than $1.6-million state dollars expended. And the problems continue. The official timeline of events – according to DNR’s document – begins in July 2017, with a report of the “abandoned Hanson rig supply water well blowing gas/water/sand to atmosphere.” That’s a description of fracking fluid, geysering out of a water well. Other records however, indicate prior signs that something was amiss underground in this particular section of the Bethany- Longstreet gas field. Keithville Water Well Drilling was called to plug a water well in the same tract, in July 2014 – because it was “blowing gas.” And again in December 2015, the same water well company was asked – by horizontal drilling company Indigo Minerals – to plug another well with a similar problem, in the same tract. Still, according to DNR’s timeline, it took two months from the initial report of the blowout before they issued an “emergency declaration” on the Hanson water well. The next month, another well started exhibiting problems. The Billingsley rig supply water well, already plugged and designated “abandoned”, began bubbling around its well casing. This time, DNR didn’t wait. They issued an emergency declaration for the Billingsley site immediately, even as they were signing an Emergency Response contract with an Arkansas-based well remediation company, Elm Springs, Inc. The entire situation now has a “code name”: Smyrna Area 9, DeSoto Parish. And it’s got a code number: EMER18-003. Additionally, GOHSEP (the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness) and DeSoto Parish OHSEP are notified. In early November 2017, the Hanson well is plugged, but now there’s bubbling in the Hanson’s pond, and along a pipeline right-of-way that runs through that property. Gas pressure is building up in the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer, 150-200 feet below the land surface, and the remediation company “installs” (drills) four “aquifer relief wells” around both the Hanson and Billingsley sites. In early December, they begin 24-hour flaring and monitoring of those relief wells, which will continue for six months, at an average cost of better than $60,000 per month. Ultimately, DNR would decide this approach was “unsustainable.” In February, 2018, (according to the DNR document timeline) “surface bubbling” was detected at another water well nearby, on the Mason property. Again, DNR acts quickly to issue an emergency declaration for that site, and the remediation contractor also begins working there. In March, DNR begins holding a series of meetings – not with the area residents and property owners, but with the gas drillers and well operators in the affected area. Each of them is issued a written “notice of caution” regarding the gas in the aquifer. In April, bubbling activity at the Mason site is increasing, and the remediation contractor “bored four holes to relieve pressure.” In addition, test results from this site confirmed the presence of hydrogen sulfide (H2S, also known as “rotten-egg gas”, and classified by OSHA as “extremely hazardous”, since it is poisonous, corrosive and flammable). According to the DNR timeline, shortly thereafter the contractor “finds the source of H2S (buried hay), excavates and disposes off-site.” The contractor’s itemized billing for EMER 18-003, which accompanied the DNR timeline, shows Elm Springs, Inc., “placed hay bales to contain runoff from the Mason site” on 4-17-18. Two days later, on 4-19-18, they billed $7812.50 to “dig and haul 62.5 cubic yards of soil from the Mason site.” No mention of hydrogen sulfide, and no mention of hazmat suits or respirators which would have been required in the presence of H2S. Since they detailed costs for hoses and tanks, compressors and flanges, it’s a curious omission. They did, however, bill the state $2750 for “legal council (sic)” on June 30. Interestingly, no one with the surnames Hanson or Billingsley appears among the 50 plaintiffs for the lawsuit filed over these issues in DeSoto Parish. The problems are not resolved, though, because the last entries on this timeline show this month, the remediation contractor is preparing both the Billingsley and Hanson sites for “re-entry”. There is, however, a “Gas Source Investigation Action Plan” that’s been developed. Basically, it’s asking the oil and gas well operators to voluntarily investigate their facilities for fluid or gas migration into the aquifer, and take corrective action. The plan “suggests” the ways they can do this: casing pressure tests, “perhaps” noise/temperature logs, “if it makes sense to operators”. Did anyone else notice what was conspicuously absent from all this? Nowhere does it say that area residents or property owners have been notified of the problems. There is no mention of a request to the Louisiana Department of Health (responsible for drinking water safety) to inspect, test or monitor the water wells in the affected area. And there’s no indication the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has been asked to bring one of its mobile air-monitoring labs to the area, to sample and test the air for gases or chemicals. There is precedent for avoiding obvious ways to confirm there is an ongoing problem. The most notorious incident occurred in the mid-1990s, and also involved hydrogen sulfide. [dropcap]I[/dropcap]n 1994, residents of the Lafourche Parish town of Grand Bois sued Exxon and local oilfield waste disposal site Campbell Wells (now owned by U.S. Liquids) over loads of hazardous materials brought in from Alabama. Hydrogen sulfide was the most prominently mentioned effluent in the case. Yet tests ordered by state agencies tested for everything except hydrogen sulfide. CBS national correspondent Ed Bradley asked then-Gov. Mike Foster about it in 1997. “That should have been investigated, but this is not something a lot of people talk about in this state,” Gov. Foster said. “Except in Grand Bois,” Bradley replied. “Yeah, but they’ve got a nice little lawsuit going, too. Remember that,“ Foster answered. U.S. Liquids settled with the Grand Bois residents in late 1997, but even afterward, in 2005, the company’s president William Werdenberg insisted, “The air might smell like rotten eggs, but there has been no evidence found that the disposal site has made citizens sick.” Right. And there was no “evidence” something was horribly wrong beneath Bayou Corne, until the sinkhole opened up in 2012, ultimately swallowing 37 acres of Assumption Parish. Yet the judge in the Bayou Corne case saw it differently. As Judge Thomas Kliebert of the 23rd Judicial District noted in his ruling on that case in January of this year, “The warning signs were present for each party; however, each party was blinded by the financial implications of their actions.”

Shreveport mayoral candidate Steven Jackson receives anonymous, horrific, racist death threat

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]esterday, at his family home, Steven Jackson, an African-American and Caddo Parish Commissioner currently campaigning to become the next mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, received an anonymous death threat suggesting that unless he drops his bid for mayor, he would be lynched. A flyer was left in an envelope outside of his family home in Allendale Lakeside, a centrally-located neighborhood of approximately 7,000 residents, 92% of whom are African-American. Jackson no longer lives at the family home. [perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]”Those are the meanest, most vicious people in the United States. Let’s don’t reward Shreveport.” – LBJ[/perfectpullquote] “The flyer represents one of the most menacing and most direct threats of violence against a sitting elected official in Caddo Parish in recent memory, though Jackson also claims to have received a series of racist phone calls during the past few weeks,” According to The Shreveport Times, “Jackson said he also received a threatening call earlier this week. The call was from an unknown number, he said.” “I’ve also received harassing calls saying ‘Get out of the race, N word, or we will release these reports on you,” he told the paper. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/p420.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”United Daughters of the Confederacy pose in front of the Confederate monument outside the Caddo Parish Courthouse” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] [dropcap]J[/dropcap]ackson’s advocacy and his relentless work in removing a Confederate statue from the grounds of the parish-owned courthouse has earned him national attention and praise, but locally, the effort, which was approved 7 to 5 by the Commission, has been met with enormous backlash by a small  but vocal group of white conservatives and the organization the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Their arguments are typical of those who still believe in championing the Lost Cause. Shreveport, after all, was the last city in the country to lower the Confederate flag after the Civil War. In December of 2017, The Bayou Brief published Jennifer Hill’s definitive history of the history.of “Bloody Caddo.” Quoting:
In the decade following the Civil War, white men in Caddo Parish were killing and terrorizing African-Americans in such high numbers that the parish earned the name, “Bloody Caddo.” In 1896, the same year the UDC Shreveport chapter formed and began raising funds to have the Caddo Confederate monument constructed, violence surged again across Caddo and the state of Louisiana to stop African-Americans from voting for the Republican-Populist candidate for governor. In 1903, when the UDC Shreveport chapter was lobbying the police jury for financial and political support for the monument’s construction, African-Americans had been almost completely disenfranchised, and whites were institutionalizing a system of white supremacy that would leave African-Americans with very few freedoms. Yet the history of what was happening to blacks in Caddo Parish at that time was all but silenced until the late 1960s, and even after that was subsumed to the Lost Cause narrative, which metaphorically and literally whitewashed the history surrounding Caddo’s Confederate monument. The monument, in its current place outside the courthouse, stands for a false and romanticized myth that dominated the historical narrative for far too long. If this monument and monuments like it are finally removed, the Lost Cause narrative will no longer have a hold on Southern culture. Instead of honoring history, Caddo’s monument distorts, perverts, and glorifies the most hateful, bloodiest, and ugliest 212 of the 12,598 weeks that have passed since America declared its independence on July 4th, 1776.
The vestiges of slavery are still impossible to ignore in this city of nearly 200,000 people, 57% of whom are African-Americans, and among many in the white establishment class, there continues to be a thinly-veiled racist attack machine against African-American leaders. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-16-at-3.07.25-AM.png” panorama=”off” imgwidth=”70%” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Elliott Stonecipher” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] [dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast month, Elliott Stonecipher, a right-wing blogger with a track record of publishing dubious conspiracy theories about local public officials and an ardent critic of both the Caddo Parish Commission and the Shreveport mayor’s office, published an article focused, in part, on Jackson’s residency, falsely asserting, without any evidence, that Jackson lived outside of the district and therefore was not qualified to hold his seat on the commission. Jackson currently lives in a nearby apartment complex but remains registered to vote at his fourth-generation family home on Ashton Street, which is perfectly legal considering he does not claim a homestead exemption and both residences are within his current district. “Anything said to the contrary is intentionally misleading,” he told The Shreveport Times. “My voting address at Ashton is a family home that represents four generations of family history. Whatever mistake (was) made at the state level is beyond my control.” The Louisiana Secretary of State had, in fact, mistakenly changed Jackson’s address due to confusion in the aftermath of his mother’s death; the discrepancy was quickly resolved. Stonecipher has yet to apologize for or  correct his erroneous reporting. A month before the 2016 Presidential election, I reported on this mailer being distributed in nearby DeSoto Parish. MSNC’s Rachel Maddow picked it up. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/14907249_10100467690281751_2617412336185975487_n.jpg” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] At 10:40AM EST on January 10, 1965, U.S. Sen, Russell Long called President Lyndon Johnson to convince him to allocate funding for a new post office in Shreveport. You can listen here. Steven Jackson held a press conference last afternoon, Here is what he said: “To the persons who place these racist messages at our doorstep, we love you,” he said. “We want to let you know we love you.”   [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/37367121_2548763821817865_5804938769182228480_o.jpg” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”right” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]

Drill, Baby, Drill!

[aesop_collection collection=”510″ limit=”6″ columns=”2″ splash=”off” order=”default” loadmore=”off” showexcerpt=”on” revealfx=”off”]   [dropcap]“[/dropcap][dropcap]T[/dropcap]his well was a success, and our clients are happy with the money they’re making, and the revenue they’re generating,” attorney Jeremy Shealy told Louisiana Department of Natural Resources hearing officers on Tuesday morning. It was a regularly scheduled public hearing before the agency that oversees oil and gas wells in the state, and Shealy was representing Indigo Minerals LLC to certify their completion of a new horizontal gas well in DeSoto Parish’s Bethany-Longstreet field.   The problem was, the well – serial number 250498, and known familiarly as “Indigo White 1”, ended up somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be. The tail end of the well was nearly a hundred feet closer to the wellhead of a pre-existing fracked well than it was supposed to be. “The issue today is that Indigo White is 247 feet from Churchman H36, instead of the 330 feet that was as permitted,” DNR’s Todd Keating, who was presiding over the hearing, said disapprovingly.   “200 feet from the center internal is the standard,” Shealey said, defending the error. “If we hadn’t done this, the available hydrocarbons would have otherwise been abandoned. Besides, this is all 16-thousand feet deep.” Dave Comeaux, a geologist retained by Indigo as an expert witness, acknowledged the Indigo White well is successfully producing about 16000 mcfs of natural gas per day since the initial frack in April. “As of the end of June, the well had produced more than a billion cubic feet of gas,” Comeaux testified. Besides, Shealy argued, the Churchman well (also operated by Indigo) had been “shut in” – stopping the pumping of pressurized fracking fluid into the well – in January, while drilling and placement of reinforced pipe was completed on the White well. Comeaux explained that the drilling company then pulled the pipe and liner from the Churchman well, and set new pipe and liner in it. Indigo fracked the White well, then refracked the Churchman well just days apart. The hearing officers seemed concerned by the intensity of activity concentrated in one place, and questioned the wisdom of fracking two wells so close together in both time and distance. Shealy insisted it was both necessary and usual practice. “It is wise to treat this as one big project, and it’s common to refrack when a nearby well is coming on line – to minimize the pressure differentials,” the lawyer said, adding, “Of course, I can’t elaborate here – it’s a protection matter, you know?” The hearing officers then asked the geologist if “stimulating converging laterals” was standard practice. “It might be common,” Comeaux said hesitantly and more than a bit reluctantly. “I don’t know. I do know in this case, it was done without incident.” Shealy insisted this is the most economical way for the company to operate. “Indigo considers it necessary to drill the field as essentially one big project,” Shealy said. “We have three wells going out from the White drilling pad, and two wells from the Churchman pad. The cost savings on these five wells is $1.5-million. That’s why Indigo prefers to drill multiple cross unit laterals, keeping our rigs in the field and moving them from pad to pad.” Comeaux confirmed, saying, “Indigo is the most active driller in the Bethany-Longstreet field, with 85 wells currently, and five rigs active.” He added, somewhat uncomfortably, “You could describe their activity as voluminous.” (Full disclosure: due to inheritance, my husband receives royalties from Indigo Minerals, from a conventional gas well in East Texas.) In closing, Shealy stated, “Indigo is trying to maximize the development, and these wells are in the interest of conservation. They will drain the gas, and therefore will prevent waste of the natural resource.” Say what? “Wells are in the interest of conservation”? According to my dictionary, “conservation” is defined as: preservation, protection, or restoration of the natural environment, natural ecosystems, vegetation, and wildlife. There’s more that’s not quite right than just the language being used. Indigo Minerals has allegedly been over-pressurizing some of its other DeSoto Parish wells in the Bethany-Longstreet field, resulting in blowouts. When the first happened in 2015, it abnormally pressurized the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer – the source of drinking water for the parish. The response was to “plug” that particular gas well. This aquifer doesn’t just provide drinking water to DeSoto Parish. Starting in Arkansas, the underground river flows below the northwest corner of our state, and is the source for drinking water in Bossier, Natchitoches, and Sabine parishes, as well. It then cuts diagonally beneath Texas, from northeast to southwest, meeting the Texas-Mexico border at the Rio Grande River, north of Laredo. Sixty Texas counties rely on the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer for their drinking water, as well. And in 2017, more water wells in the Bethany-Longstreet area of DeSoto Parish began to blow, sending up geysers of saltwater, oil, gases, sand, and a wide range of chemicals consistent with the known components of fracking fluid. Including a blowout this year, to date a dozen water wells have been rendered unusable, according to a lawsuit filed in state court in June of this year. Among the gases listed in the suit is hydrogen sulfide. Poisonous, corrosive and flammable, it’s also know as “rotten egg gas”, for its distinctive smell. Unfortunately, the gas quickly deadens the sense of smell, and it’s toxic to humans. It’s heavier than air, and can pool in low-lying areas, or accumulate in poorly-ventilated spaces. Depending on the concentration, it can cause death within minutes, or in up to 48 hours. Following the oil and gas permit hearing, I asked the attorney for the state Office of Conservation, John Adams, about concerns over Indigo Minerals, the current status of the aquifer, water wells, and – in particular – the reports of hydrogen sulfide gas. “That’s all been resolved,“ he said. “Several years ago, a road crew used hay bales for erosion control. When they were done with them, a local farmer said he would dispose of them. Well he buried them in his trash heap, covering them over with dirt, and forgot about them. “Now, as you know, there’s natural gas percolating up through the ground in that region all the time, and as it worked its way up through the decomposing hay bales, it gave off hydrogen sulfide gas. We tracked that down, dug up the rotting hay, and disposed of it properly,” Adams continued. “Problem solved.” It sounded pretty far-fetched to me, but OSHA.gov does say that “Hydrogen sulfide gas can be produced by the breakdown of organic matter and human/ animal wastes (e.g., sewage).” And while I’m no expert in chemistry, I do know someone who is. I reached out to chemistry professor Dr. Brian Salvatore, department Chair for Physics and Chemistry at LSU-Shreveport. “It’s remotely possible,” he said, “But highly unlikely.” Something here stinks worse than rotten-egg gas.

Captain of the Militia

Featured image above: Rep. Clay Higgins addresses the Oath Keepers’s Rally for America on July 27th, 2017.

On June 25, 2017, dozens of neo-facists and white supremacists gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. for an event they called the “Rally for Free Speech.”

The headliner of the rally was Richard Spencer, the virulent white supremacist who had become nationally infamous in the aftermath of the 2016 election. The musical act was a neo-Nazi named Tim Gionet, also known as Baked Alaska, who was best known among the alt-right for his song “MAGA Anthem,” a tribute to Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” campaign.

There was a third name on the official billing of the Rally for Free Speech: freshman U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Republican from Louisiana’s Third District.

“But before the event took place (Higgins) denied ever saying he would attend, claimed that he never even received an invitation to speak, and that he would never share a stage with white supremacists,” reported the publication One People’s Project.

Higgins’ spokesperson, Andrew David, issued a statement.  “We were made aware on Monday,” he said. “We saw this graphic online. So we immediately reached out to the folks posting the graphic [DC Anti-Communist Action], and we were able to trace it back to this one individual who wasn’t really sure how Congressman Higgins was supposedly a speaker. He said someone had told him that our office was interested, which was completely false. We never had contact with these people. We never confirmed, and Congressman Higgins has made it very clear.”

Colton Merwin, one of the event’s organizers, offered a vague explanation about why Higgins’ name had been included, without revealing who, if anyone, from Higgins’ office told him that the congressman was “interested.”

Back in Louisiana, the bizarre and presumably “fake news” story went completely unnoticed and unreported, though, in hindsight, it is probably something that deserved attention.

There is a reason the event’s organizers thought it was plausible that Rep. Higgins had agreed to speak at their rally, particularly considering where he was a month later.

Founded in 2009 by Yale Law School graduate Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers is perhaps the country’s most well-known extremist, anti-government militia group.

It boasts a membership of around 35,000 people, primarily white men with a law enforcement or military background, and its mission is fairly simple: To employ violence or the threat of violence against the government whenever the government engages in what they consider to be wrongful action. They’re not simply vigilantes; they are agitators. And while they cloak themselves in the rhetoric of patriotism, the truth is that the group promotes a profound contempt for the rule of law.

“What’s beneath the surface here is that Obama is going to destroy Western civilization and that they’ve got to somehow help. But, in fact, we’re probably not at the brink of the world and the United States doesn’t need help from Stuart Rhodes,” Mark Potok, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told The Daily Beast in 2013. “These are big boys who like to play with guns and they like to justify that by saying they’re defending the constitution. They’re really just an anti-government group who believe in a wild set of conspiracy theories.”

This isn’t a noble organization. It’s dangerous and toxic.

No reasonable elected official, regardless of their political party, would even consider promoting or legitimizing a violent band of anti-government vigilantes. Yet that is exactly what U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins did on July 27, 2017.

A month after he had been billed as a speaker at a white supremacist rally, Higgins was, instead, the star of another rally, the Rally for America, which was organized by the Oath Keepers.

“(P)lease join us for a great day in our Nation’s capitol, and please spread the word,” Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes urged his members. “You will be among thousands of like-minded American patriots from many groups and many states, with some excellent speakers, including Jan Morgan and Representative Clay Higgins (LA), the firebrand lawman.”

The rally’s promotional poster reminded participants that “this is definitely not a riot,” because, apparently, that needed to be clarified upfront.

Dressed in a red “We the People” t-shirt and a cowboy hat and clutching a Bible, Rep. Clay Higgins rambled on for nearly 15 minutes, at one point telling the audience, “If I go too long, brother, come kick me” and also claiming, bizarrely, that no one had health insurance in the 1970s, as if the country’s push to expand coverage was a liberal conspiracy.

No one in the Louisiana media covered the event. Like the story about Higgins being listed as a speaker at a white nationalist rally, this had also gone completely unnoticed back home.

But, fortunately, a member of the organization recorded his speech, which we have made available on The Bayou Brief‘s YouTube channel.

There is a moment of the video that, to me at least, particularly stood out, and it had nothing to do with Higgins’ speech. It was what was occurring behind him.

Toward the beginning, a white man dressed in a black t-shirt and a baseball cap stands behind Higgins waving a strange- almost cryptic- flag.

I had never seen this flag before; it faintly resembles hieroglyphics, but it is also reminiscent of Nazi iconography. Here’s a still image:

I couldn’t find any answers online, so I reached out to the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. Almost immediately, I got an answer.

“That is the brand used by rancher/extremist LaVoy Finicum, one of the ringleaders of the group of anti-government extremists who conducted an armed takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in January 2016, and who was shot and killed during an encounter with law enforcement during the standoff in an attempt to arrest most of the ringleaders,” the ADL’s Mark Pitcavage explained. “This made him a martyr, and his brand has become a symbol for anti-government extremists, who now use it on the Internet, as tattoos, and even on flags.”

I had only sent Pitcavage a picture of the flag, without any context at all. But there actually is definitive proof that Pitcavage is 100% correct. In addition to promoting Higgins’ participation in the rally, Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers’ founder, also mentioned another “celebrity” who would be in attendance.

“For me, one of the most important speakers at this rally will be Mrs. Jeanette Finicum, the wife of the late patriot cowboy LaVoy Finicum,” he wrote. “I will also be speaking at the rally, and one of my main purposes in doing so will be to support Mrs. Finicum and to help her bring pressure to bear on the Trump Administration to do the right thing by ending the still ongoing prosecutions of patriotic cowboys and veterans related to the 2014 Bundy Ranch standoff….”

It’s worth noting: The Oath Keepers are not the only extremist anti-government militia group that Rep. Clay Higgins has openly and enthusiastically promoted. His participation in that rally was not the result of a scheduling error or a staff member failing to conduct due diligence.

Earlier this year, at a campaign event in Lafayette featuring Dog the Bounty Hunter, Higgins sold t-shirts that prominently featured the logo of the Three Percenters, as documented by The Advocate‘s Elizabeth Crisp.

Make no mistake: This was not an innocent reference to Louisiana’s Third District. It’s the logo used by The Three Percent movement.

The Hate Report‘s Will Carless and Aaron Sankin (who, by pure coincidence, was a friend of mine in college) document extremism and hate groups in America, and in March, they published a report on the Three Percenters.

“Founded in 2008, the Three Percent movement takes its name from the idea that only 3 percent of American colonists took up arms against the British. Members fashion themselves as today’s version of those rebels,” they explain. “On its website, the overarching Three Percent group insists it’s not a militia, nor is its aim to overthrow the government. Instead, the goal is, ‘to utilize the fail-safes put in place by our founders to reign in an overreaching government and push back against tyranny.’”

Perhaps more troubling, Carless and Sankin uncovered the connections between the Three Percenters and a mosque bombing in Minnesota. Quoting:

This week, three men were arrested in connection with the bombing of a Minnesota mosque. While the attack didn’t kill anyone, the reported goal was to “scare” Muslims away from living in the United States.

One of the three suspects, Michael B. Hari, is a former sheriff’s deputy who submitted a proposal to build Trump’s border wall.

JJ MacNab, an expert in the world of far-right extremism, uncovered that Hari ran a group called the White Rabbit Three Percent Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters Militia. The group’s website called Illinois a “failed state” and urged readers to take up “armed resistance” against the government. 

Prior to publication, I reached out to Clay Higgins’ campaign spokesperson, and although he was professional and courteous, he declined comment.

The Devil’s Ransom: Big Oil and the Louisiana Gulf Coast

I.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n 1780, more than two hundred years before Roxanne Hitchcock published a glossary of the oil and gas industry, the unfortunately-titled Lube Lingo, an Irish actor and elocutionist named Thomas Sheridan (who also happened to be the godson of Jonathan Swift) defined the word “petrolium” in his book, A General Dictionary of the English Language. Sheridan’s dictionary- really more of a thesaurus- is now considered a foundational text in contemporary Western civilization, even though its author remains a relatively obscure historical footnote. “Petrolium,” according to Sheridan, can be defined by an almost messianic metaphor: “floating on the water of springs.” Oil doesn’t walk on water, but Sheridan is right: It definitely floats, and because of its unique properties, here in Louisiana, trillions of dollars have been extracted deep underground and deep under the ocean in order to fuel, literally, an enormous segment of the American and global economy, even if it is at the expense of the sustainability and viability of  the entire Gulf Coast ecosystem. Hitchcock, in Lube Lingo, uses another, more sinister euphemism to define petroleum: “The devil’s tar.” [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-09-at-9.30.19-PM.png” panorama=”off” credit=”Credit: Roxanne Hitchcock of Oil City, PA” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”The cover of Roxanne Hickcock’s 28-page glossary on the oil and gas industry, Lube Lingo. ” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] [dropcap]J[/dropcap]uan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, the Venezuelan energy minister and the so-called “Father of OPEC” (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), was more blunt: “Ten years from now, 20 years from now, you will see, oil will bring us ruin,” he famously and presciently declared in 1976. Oil, he said, wasn’t the devil’s tar; it was “the devil’s excrement.” “Far from an anomaly, Venezuela is a classic example of what economists call the ‘natural resource curse,'” Jerry Useem writes in a 2003 article for Forbes about Perez Alfonzo’s prophetic words (emphasis added). “…. Oil is not an economy. Creative economic activities have spillover effects that become self-sustaining. Oil spills only into a barrel–and from there usually into the hands of a favored few.” The spoils may belong to “a favored few,” but in Louisiana, we know that oil doesn’t spill only into a barrel. Sheridan was right: Oil floats on water. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/shutterstock_54991534.jpg” panorama=”off” credit=”Credit: Katherine Welles” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”GRAND ISLE, LA: Signs on the front lawn of a home on June 5, 2010 in Grand Isle, LA. The BP oil spill that began April 20th, 2010, has resulted in oil washing up on the shores of Louisiana.” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]

II.

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]uring our first 14 months, The Bayou Brief has published nearly two dozen reports and commentaries about environmental justice and the historic, ongoing litigation that alleges Big Oil illegally damaged the fragile Louisiana coast and its ecosystem. No other single issue represents a greater and more critical existential threat to the future of Louisiana, and with a few notable exceptions, the state’s establishment media has largely followed the industry’s talking points. Just last week, for example, in an editorial, The Advocate naively argued in favor of consolidating the 42 different lawsuits currently working their way through the court system, completely overlooking that each case presents a unique set of facts, circumstances, arguments, and defenses. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-10-at-12.52.46-AM.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] The editorial also erroneously claimed that lawyers representing the plaintiffs- almost exclusively parish governments in these cases- would likely earn a fortune of any potential settlement. “It’s a complicated crisis, and the legal system will now have a hand in determining specific degrees of culpability among the players,” The Advocate falsely asserted. “But that could take years, with a big chunk of any potential financial settlement going to the trial lawyers. That’s not the best way to make the coast and its communities more resilient.”
It is actually not nearly as complicated as The Advocate‘s editorial board suggests, which they likely would have discovered had they read the reporting of one of their colleagues, the investigative journalist Tyler Bridges. None of the attorneys involved in this litigation could be compensated through a contingency fee arrangement tied to the total amount of an award for damages. Bridges and his colleague Gordon Russell clarified this misconception nearly two years ago in a report for The Advocate, writing (emphasis added):
Don Carmouche said the contracts do not guarantee the lawyer any specific percentage of a settlement, and points to language that says “that this contract shall not be construed to create a right in Attorneys to claim as a fee any portion of any cash recovery.” In an interview Sunday, Carmouche added that a judge would decide any money his law firm receives in a settlement, and that the fees awarded would not come out of the money paid to the parishes. ….While lawmakers could choose to ignore the cap they themselves set, Price said, there’s little reason to expect such an outcome. Legislators would have have to ultimately sign off on any payout, and business-friendly Republicans control the House, meaning the lawyers cannot count on a bonanza. “It’s a heckuva risk for the four law firms in going forward with this,” said lawyer Bernie Boudreaux, a former executive counsel to Gov. Mike Foster who now works for Jones Swanson, one of the firms representing the state. “The state will benefit if we accomplish something. I think some compensation will be afforded.”
Despite the fact that the stories of mega-billion dollar settlements with attorneys “trial lawyers” amount to nothing more than paid propaganda by Big Oil and their lobbyists, the public disinformation campaign has been remarkably effective. “Billions and billions of dollars,” Gifford Briggs, the president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, told the Chamber of Commerce website Louisiana Record in a story published yesterday. “The plaintiffs have a 16-point compensation schedule, that basically ends up with them [the attorneys] having a 30 percent contingency fee. It’s not that hard to see why they are so interested in the litigation.” Again, however sensational it may sound, this is simply false. Attorneys fees will ultimately be determined separately by a judge.

 III.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]oday’s multi-trillion dollar Gulf Coast oil and gas industry may not have ever existed if it were not for a newly-minted Louisianian named Anthony Francis Lucas, who arrived in 1893 from his native Croatia. Lucas took a job with a New Orleans-based salt exploration company on Avery Island, which is most famously known as the headquarters for the McIllheney Company, makers of Tabasco. He was 38 years old. Seven years later, on Jan. 10th, 1901, and only a short trip across the Texas border, Anthony Francis Lucas discovered something that would dramatically change the future of both Texas and Louisiana and completely revolutionize energy production across the world. Its name was Spindletop, an oil well outside of Beaumont, and Lucas found the motherlode, named in his honor as the Lucas geyser. It produced an astonishing 100,000 barrels of oil a day. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Lucas_gusher.jpg” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”The Lucas Gusher at Spindletop. January 10, 1901″ captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] Eight months later, on Sept. 21st, 1901, the 29-year-old W. Scott Heywood found Louisiana’s first oil well outside of Jennings; the Jules Clement No. 1 sat on only 1/32rd of an acre, but produced more than 7,000 barrels a day. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-10-at-1.32.33-AM.png” panorama=”off” imgwidth=”75%” credit=”Photo courtesy Louisiana Geological Survey.” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”The Jennings Oil Company No. 1 well, which discovered the first commercial oilfield in Louisiana on September 21, 1901. ” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]

Louisiana would never be the same.

IV.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]ccording to his April 2018 report, “The Energy Sector: Still A Giant Engine for the Louisiana Economy,” economist Loren Scott, a favorite of the industry, boasted that Louisiana is the nation’s second largest producer of oil, second only to Texas and accounting for more than 16% of all domestic production. Louisiana is also the fourth largest producer of natural gas; more than 8.6% of the country’s domestic production occurs in the Bayou State.
“The tasks of exploring for and lifting these two resources to the surface — what economists label oil and gas extraction — have created thousands of jobs and billions in household income for Louisianans each year,” Scott writes (emphasis original). It has also attracted closely related industries to the state as well. For example, Louisiana ranks number two among the 50 states in petroleum refining capacity. Louisiana ranks below Texas and ahead of California by this measure.” Nearly 45,000 people in Louisiana work directly for the oil and gas industry, and their wages are significantly higher, on average, than any other manufacturing-related industry in the state. Although Dr. Scott is unquestionably a favorite of the industry (he wrote the report for the Grow Louisiana Coalition, a consortium of industry lobbyists and affiliated organizations like the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association (LOGA) and the Louisiana Mid-Contintent Oil and Gas Association (LMCOGA), among others), he refused to even acknowledge the lie that has animated so much of the communications work in which they have invested a considerable amount of time and energy: The notion that the industry is losing jobs because of the state’s “legal climate.” There’s a much simpler and much more obvious explanation, the global market. Quoting (emphasis added):
(N)ote that employment and earnings in these energy sectors remains very significant despite the fact that Louisiana’s oil and gas extraction sector — and its related support activities — have been in a major recession since late 2014 when the price per barrel of oil fell from $100+ to under $30 at one point. Employment in the top two rows of Table 4 fell 39% since our last report. Still, a very significant 30,731 people were employed in the extraction (industry) and its support activities in 2017 – II — a figure almost equivalent to employment in the state’s chemical and shipbuilding industries combined (32,125). The extraction industry and its supporting companies are still generating $2.7 billion in wages for Louisianans despite being in the third year of a very bad recession.
Dr. Scott did not even bother to speculate on whether the hypothetical, presumably psychological impacts of ongoing coastal restoration lawsuits has a role to play. The numbers speak for themselves. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-10-at-2.52.15-AM.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-10-at-2.51.55-AM.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-10-at-2.51.29-AM.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]

V.

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast month, the organization (ostensibly a nonprofit, though they have not filed 990 reports for more than a decade) Louisiana Lawsuit Abuse Watch hired a new executive director, Lana Sonnier Venable, a former communications and government affairs strategist for Exxon-Mobil, to replace the organization’s long-time leader, Melissa Landry. Director Venable seems determined to hit the ground running. Yesterday, she interviewed with Louisiana Record. “Lawsuits like the current parish suits, led by a handful of politically powerful, well-connected plaintiffs’ lawyers and environmentalists, breed unpredictability for business, hurt our economy and cement Louisiana’s reputation as one of the worst states to be sued in the U.S.,” Venerable wrote, without a shred of objective evidence. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-10-at-3.36.35-AM.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Former Exxon communications and governmental affairs director Lana Sonnier Venable is now the Executive Director of Louisiana Lawsuit Abuse Watch” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] That same day, Venable repeated her arguments in an editorial published by The Advocate. “These politically powerful plaintiff’s lawyers are targeting Louisiana’s energy industry alleging damages from production activities conducted decades ago,” she writes. “The absence of real political leadership in the state has left a very lucrative void for those lawyers, many of whom are large donors to the governor. They stand to receive a substantial amount of any funds received in these cases.” The argument is fatally flawed for two obvious reasons: First, there is scant evidence that any law firm involved in these cases would be allowed to earn more than their hourly rate and all costs incurred. Second, the argument unwittingly implies that these lawyers will likely prevail in court, which, of course, means that the defendants in these cases are likely guilty.

VI.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here is one other character in this cast worth remembering, the Baton Rouge super-lobbyist and political consultant Jim Harris. [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-10-at-4.33.10-AM.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Jim Harris” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] Harris’s fingerprints are all over the place. Among other things, he is the founder and managing member of Louisiana Coalition for Common Sense, a nonprofit advocacy organization that seeks to limit a victim’s access to a courthouse. Organizations like these claim to be only interested in expediting and ensuring greater efficiency the judicial process; however, their ultimate aim is to either dramatically reduce or completely eliminate a victim’s right to collect damages for harm suffered as a direct consequence of someone else’s negligence. Harris lists the Coalition’s sponsors on his website: [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-10-at-4.08.48-AM.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] But perhaps more importantly, here are the clients for whom Harris is currently registered to lobby in the Louisiana state Capitol: [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/jh1.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/jh2.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/jh3.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Screen-Shot-2018-08-09-at-3.28.52-PM.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”] [aesop_image img=”https://www.bayoubrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/jh9-1.png” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]

VII.

[dropcap]I [/dropcap]have written about this before, in a report published last August and titled “Rigged: The Lies and Contradictions of Big Oil’s Campaign Against Protecting and Restoring Louisiana’s Coast. I will also readily admit that, despite my years in law school, phrases like “tort reform” seem defiantly vapid to me. There is nothing reformative about any attempt to change a law in order to ensure that a convicted criminal isn’t adequately punished for negligently destroying someone’s entire life, and much like medical malpractice claims, we are told that cases exhaustively documenting environmental harms caused by gross negligence are somehow sacrosanct. In its latest round of back-and-forth, attorneys representing Big Oil suggested they should effectively be immunized from prosecution, as a consequence of WWII. The trusty old Pottery Barn Rule, for some reason, doesn’t apply to Louisiana’s most important natural assets. Unless things change, we will continue to float on the water of the springs until we sink permanently into the gulf.

Frack Soup

[aesop_collection collection=”510″ limit=”6″ columns=”2″ splash=”off” order=”default” loadmore=”off” showexcerpt=”on” revealfx=”off”] [dropcap]O[/dropcap]n Tuesday, April 28, 2009, 17 cows, panting and bellowing, dropped dead in a northwest Louisiana pasture. They had been foaming at the mouth, bleeding from their eyes and rear ends. Less than an hour before, they had been drinking from puddles of runoff from the deep natural gas well being drilled 150 feet from their pasture fence. The recently-drilled well was in the process of being fracked. A necropsy conducted by the veterinary school at Texas A & M listed the cause of death as “respiratory failure with circulatory collapse.” The drilling company which took soil samples for testing the day after the herd died, said only that they found “elevated levels of potassium chloride.” But it takes 2600 mg. of potassium chloride per kilogram of weight for toxicity, or nearly 4 pounds of pure potassium chloride per cow. And state officials’ requests for listing of what’s in fracking fluid were denied, because “it’s proprietary – trade secrets”. Reports of more cattle deaths, stillborn calves and other farm livestock fatalities began surfacing from other states – Colorado, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota, Wyoming – where fracking of deep shale deposits was a booming business. There were also reports of mystery illnesses plaguing residents near the wells: respiratory and cardiovascular problems, blood and nervous system disorders, and birth defects. Well workers,too, developed similar problems, which their employers endeavored to handle quietly – all the while refusing to divulge the chemicals used to frack open the shale. Monday morning, April 19, 2010, deputies began knocking on doors at 5 a.m., warning hundreds of residents in rural south Caddo Parish that they needed to evacuate. A fracked natural gas well nearby had blown out, contaminating their drinking water aquifer. Residents of 145 area homes were told not to drink or bathe in the water, nor to wash their dishes or clothes in it. Finally, in October 2011, Louisiana’s Department of Natural Resources began requiring those seeking permits to drill horizontal wells to disclose chemical additives in their fracking fluids “that are not deemed trade secret.” What’s in Fracking Fluid? The primary ingredient in fracking fluid is water – a lot of water. In the Haynesville field, where the gas-bearing shale is 11,000 feet deep, on average, five million gallons are needed per well. When the fracked well frenzy was at its early peak in 2009, production companies were using the same underground rivers (known as aquifers) that supply the entire northwest Louisiana region with drinking water. The aquifer levels dropped precipitously, causing water well pumps to burn out and water pressures to drop all across the area. Since then, Louisiana DNR has “encouraged” (but not required) “the use of surface water.” Fracking fluid also contains sand (known as “proppant” in the trade – more on that in a bit), and chemicals, collectively referred to as “surfactants”. While most of us are familiar with relatively safe surfactants like detergents and soap, the chemical compounds used for fracking are far from harmless, both individually, and when all mixed together. Here’s a sampling from current drilling permit applications on file with DNR: 1. Ethoxylated 4-nonylphenol (10%): an emulsifier and surfactant, used in detergents. An endocrine disruptor (mimics estrogen and disrupts the natural hormone balance), it is bioaccumulative. It degrades in sunlight, but is known to persist in sediment for more than 60 years. 2. Ethylene glycol (5%) : a colorless, odorless sweet liquid, commonly used in antifreeze. More than 5000 cases of poisoning from ethylene glycol occur in the U.S. annually. An outbreak of deaths in 1937 due to a medication mixed in a similar compound, diethylene glycol, resulted in the 1938 enaction of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. 3. Hydrochloric acid (36%). 4. Sodium hydroxide (3%): lye 5. Naphthalene (1%): mothballs, basically. 6. Heavy Aromatic Naphtha (5%): The European Union’s chemical registry classifies this extremely flammable liquid and its vapor as “dangerous”. It causes eye irritation, skin irritation and may be fatal if swallowed or enters airways. Prolonged or repeated exposure can damage internal organs, and it is a suspected cause of birth defects. It is extremely toxic to aquatic life. 7. Dazomet (24%): a common soil fumigant that acts as an herbicide, fungicide, and nematicide. Used to kill pests that inhibit plant growth. As it decomposes, it releases methyl isothicyanate – a gas. Acutely toxic to mammals, it persists in water runoff. 8. Formamide (30%): A solvent which can decompose into hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid) and water at 78.1F (25.6C). Prussic acid was as the killing agent in Nazi extermination camps’ gas chambers. 9. Benzyl chloride (1%): Made by combining toluene with chlorine, it reacts with water to form benzyl alcohol and hydrochloric acid. Classified under federal law as an “extremely hazardous substance”, it is required to carry an absolute warning: “Do NOT let this chemical enter the environment.” These toxic chemicals are mixed into the water and frack sand slurry, creating a volatile soup. It’s all pumped under high pressure down 11,000 feet underground, then makes a 90-degree turn into the horizontal well bore. The finely-grained sand acts as both the abrasive agent (propellant) to fracture open the shale layers, and a prop to hold them open, releasing the gas (or oil). Hence, the name “proppant”. Once the well is fracked, something has to be done with the chemical-laden fracking wastewater. State law allows “on-site disposal, well injection, commercial disposal, or recycling”. At one time, fracking fluid was taken to local sewage treatment facilities, but in June 2016 the US EPA banned the practice as hazardous. Now the preferred method is disposal of the fluids in injection wells, and as of the end of 2015, Louisiana had nearly 3700 of them. Injection wells have become increasingly controversial in other states. Most of them are repurposed old, inactive wells, with casings that weren’t engineered for the volume of “brine” (as drilling wastewater is often euphemistically called) or types of chemicals they’re being expected to contain. And now scientists have confirmed that they are the source of “induced earthquakes” in those areas. “Proppant-geddon” As previously reported in this series, natural gas and oil prices today aren’t what they were a decade ago. So the oil and gas industry has been searching for ways to make these wells – which cost $8 to $10-million each to drill and frack – more profitable. One way they’ve done this is by drilling longer horizontal runs, with laterals of 10,000 feet or more. The other way is by increasing the pressure at which they fracture the shale, increasing the amount of sand used. In 2016, Chesapeake Energy fracked a Caddo Parish well using 30-million pounds of sand. Announcing the results on a conference call, Chesapeake CEO Doug Lawler said they intended to have greater success by increasing the proppant in future wells to 50-million pounds of sand, gleefully referring to the next step in fracking the Haynesville field as “proppant-geddon.” It’s not a foolproof process. There can be microscopic stress fractures in the metal well-casings, and voids in the concrete that surrounds and supports it. A little seepage of the pressurized fluid into the surrounding geology deep underground can travel outward and upward, migrating over time along previously unknown geologic micro-faults, into the aquifer, into water wells, and into active or abandoned oil and gas wells nearby. More pressure means more leakage when the integrity of the wellbore itself is compromised, and that means a myriad of problems. In December 2013, Shreveport TV station KSLA reported on two northern Caddo Parish families whose tap water had suddenly become flammable. The homeowners blamed it on leakage from a recently fracked natural gas well nearby. DNR officials said they would investigate. In DeSoto Parish, where much of the current Haynesville Shale drilling is occurring, there have been numerous blowouts of these new “proppant-geddon” wells over the past year – particularly in the Bethany Longstreet oil and gas field, located 15 miles north of Logansport, and about 5 miles east of the Texas-Louisiana state line. Drinking water from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer has become contaminated, while waterwells and old capped oil and gas wells have ruptured, spewing geysers of gas and fracking fluid into the air. Ponds are bubbling and forming sandboils. Wildlife and fish have been killed, while soil tests show the land itself is contaminated – by chemicals that match the list of hydrofracking additives. More than fifty area residents have now joined together to sue the oil, gas, and drilling companies involved. The primary defendants in that suit are applying for more permits to drill in the Bethany-Longstreet field. More on that in part 3, next week.