Haunted by the Recent Past

Some fascinating reads out there recently. Don't miss these 4 articles:

Mystery surrounds post-Katrina death, and some point to involvement of NOPD officers Saturday's cover story on the Times-Pic. All about some shady shit that went down in the aftermath of Katrina. A bunch of cops allegedly killed a man, beat up the witnesses, stole a car, and tried to hide their crimes by burning the body in a car. I think articles like this will continue to leak out for a long, long time. Lots of incredibly sketchy shit went down after the levees broke and there will never be a full accounting of what went down.

Flashback to the Interoperability Grant. Out of everything the Nagin administration has done, nothing compares to what Meffert and crew did in this fiasco. After 9/11, it was learned that communications failures cost hundreds of lives, so the Feds set up a grant to several cities to purchase a fully inter-operable communications system on specially reserved bandwidth. Minnesota was one of those cities and so was New Orleans. Minnesota's system worked almost flawlessly and saved lives. What happened in New Orleans? Greg Meffert, the crooked muppet, tried to steer the contract towards one of his cronies. The Feds figured out what he was up to an yanked the grant. No grant, no radios, no bulletproof communications system. A year or so later, Katrina hits, thousands die, and communications failures were one of the biggest complaints after the storm. Out of everything the Nagin administration has done, from NOAH, to Tracie Washington, to Veronica White, to Chocolate City, nothing compares to the Interoperability Grant. That fuckup probably cost hundreds of lives. Someone deserves to get lethal injection for it, unfortunately it looks like Jim Letten is looking primarily into more recent activities. Too bad. I'd love to see Meffert indicted with a thousand cases of negligent manslaughter (Mass Murder?).

Reversal of something or other. Tracing Tracie Washington's history in Dallas. I'd heard some of this, too. I was also reading around the archives of the the archives of the Austin American Statesman and Austin Business Journal. I got beat to the punch on posting. The only other things that I'll add is Tracie Washington allegedly called one of the attorneys suing Cap Metro a son of a bitch in front of a huge number of media people (TV, paper, radio, etc.). That was the final straw that got her fired. Also, the parking lot that drew all the attention was owned by the Praise Tabernacle Church. Tracie Washington allegedly had some sort of connection to the minister. Wasn't really made clear in the articles I read, but they alluded to a connection. The point of the story is Tracie Washington has a very dirty history, but then, we already had indications.

Checkered Past Comes Full Circle. Eli exposes Warren Riley's past. Wow, you talk about some bombshells. Warren Riley was once suspended for hiding a domestic violence call from a cops wife days before the other cop kills the wife and dumps her body in the swamp. I'd always heard that Warren Riley knew where the bodies were hidden because of his days with IA, but never any details. Warren Riley/Eddie Compass/Ray Nagin have supervised the demise of what was once a model police force and its replacement with it's national-nightmare predecessor. The thing is, the people that should be the most afraid of this is the cops themselves. I'm betting it's 6 months until you get another Antoinette Franks (cop that kills another cop).

I'll end with a quote from when Pennington lost after losing to Nagin in 2002:

"Pennington professed to have information abut Nagin that ‘sickened him to the core’, without specifying its nature."