Author: ProPublica

By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica

A whistleblower filed a lawsuit this week to force the federal government
to halt operations at another massive BP oil platform in the Gulf of
Mexico, alleging that BP never reviewed critical engineering designs for
the operation and is therefore risking another catastrophic accident
that could “dwarf” the company’s Deepwater Horizon spill.

The
allegations about BP’s Atlantis platform were first made last year, but
they were laid out in fresh detail in the lawsuit filed in U.S. District
Court in Houston against Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the
Minerals Management Service, the agency responsible for regulating
offshore drilling in the Gulf.

The whistleblower is Kenneth
Abbott, a former project control supervisor contracted by BP who also
gave an interview to “60
Minutes” on Sunday night. In a
conversation last week with ProPublica, Abbott alleged that BP failed to
review thousands of final design documents for systems and equipment on
the Atlantis platform — meaning BP management never confirmed the
systems were built as they were intended – and didn’t properly file the
documentation that functions as an instruction manual for rig workers to
shut down operations in the case of a blowout or other emergency.

Abbott
alleges that when he warned BP about the dangers presented by the
missing documentation the company ignored his concerns and instead
emphasized saving money.

“There were hundreds, if not thousands,
of drawings that hadn’t been approved and to send drawings (to the rig)
that hadn’t been approved could result in catastrophic operator errors,”
Abbott told ProPublica. “They turned their eye away from their
responsibility to make sure the overall design works. Instead they are
having bits and pieces fabricated and they are just hoping that these
contractors who make all these separate pieces can pull it together and
make it safe. The truth is these contractors see a piece of the puzzle;
they don’t see the whole thing.”

BP did not respond to a request
for comment from ProPublica, but has previously addressed Abbott’s
concerns in a January letter to congressional investigators stating that
the allegations are unfounded and that the Atlantis platform had final
documentation in place before it began operating.

According to an
e-mail sent to Abbott by BP’s ombudsman’s office, an independent group
employed by the company to address internal complaints, BP had not
complied with its own rules governing how and where the documentation
should be kept but had not necessarily violated any regulations for
drilling. The e-mail does not address the specifics raised in the
lawsuit.

A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior said
the agency would not comment on pending litigation.

Congress and
the Minerals and Management Service have been investigating Abbott’s
concerns since last year, when he and Food and Water Watch, an
environmental organization based in Washington, D.C., first filed the
complaints. But according to both Abbott and FWW, little has been done.
After the Deepwater Horizon Gulf spill underscored their concerns, they
decided to jointly file the lawsuit. Abbott was laid off shortly after
he raised the concerns to BP management.

According to the
lawsuit, by Nov. 28, 2008, when Abbott last had access to BP’s files,
only half of the 7,176 drawings detailing Atlantis’ sub-sea equipment
had been approved for design by an engineer and only 274 had been
approved “as built,” meaning they were checked and confirmed to meet
quality and design standards and the documentation made available to the
rig crew. Ninety percent of the design documents, the suit alleges, had
never been approved at all.

The Atlantis rig is even larger than
the Deepwater Horizon rig that sank in April. It began producing oil in
2007 and can produce 8.4 million gallons a day.

The components
include some of the critical infrastructure to protect against a spill.
According the suit, none of the sub-sea risers – the pipelines and hoses
that serve as a conduit for moving materials from the bottom of the
ocean to the facility — had been “issued for design.” The suit also
alleges that none of the wellhead documents were approved, and that none
of the documents for the manifolds that combine multiple pipeline flows
into a single line at the seafloor had been reviewed for final use.

Directions for how to use the piping and instrument systems that
help shut down operations in the event of an emergency, as well as the
computer software used to enact an emergency shutdown, had also not been
approved, the lawsuit says. According to the lawsuit, 14 percent those
documents had been approved for construction, and none received final
approval to ensure they were built and functioning properly.

“BP’s
worst-case scenario indicates that an oil spill from the BP Atlantis
Facility could be many times larger than the current oil spill from the
BP Deepwater Horizon,” the lawsuit states. “The catastrophic Horizon oil
spill would be a mere drop in the bucket when compared to the potential
size of a spill from the BP Atlantis facility.”

It is not clear
from the lawsuit or the limited statements made by BP or federal
regulators if BP has corrected the documentation problem since Abbott
was laid off.

Abbott told ProPublica he raised the documentation
issues repeatedly in e-mails and conversations with management, “saying
this was critical to operator safety and rig safety.”

“They just
ignored my requests for help,” he said. “There seemed to be a big
emphasis to push the contractors to get things done. And that was always
at the forefront of the operation.”

(Photo of the Atlantis rig from GVA’s website.)

By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica

BP, the global oil giant responsible for the fast-spreading spill
soon to make landfall in the Gulf of Mexico, is no stranger to major
accidents.

In fact the company has found itself at the center of several of the
nation’s worst oil and gas-related disasters in the last five years.

In March 2005 a massive explosion ripped through a tower at BP’s
refinery in Texas City, Texas, killing 15 workers and injuring 170
others. Investigators later determined that the company had ignored its
own protocols on operating the tower, which was filled with gasoline,
and that a warning system had been disabled.

The company pleaded guilty to federal felony charges and was fined more
than $50 million by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Almost a year after the refinery explosion, technicians discovered that
some 4,800 barrels of oil had spread into the Alaskan snow through a
tiny hole in the company’s pipeline in Prudhoe Bay. BP had been
warned to check the pipeline in
2002, but hadn’t, according to a report in Fortune. When it did inspect
it, four years later, it found that a six-mile length of pipeline was
corroded. The company temporarily shut down its operations in Prudhoe
Bay, causing one of the largest disruptions in U.S. oil supply in recent
history.

BP faced $12 million in fines for a misdemeanor violation of the federal
Water Pollution Control Act. A congressional committee determined BP
had ignored opportunities to prevent the spill and that “draconian”
cost-saving measures had led to shortcuts in its operation.

Other problems followed. There were more spills in Alaska. And BP was
charged with manipulating the market price of propane. In that case, it
settled with the U.S. Department of Justice and agreed to pay more than
$300 million in fines.

At each step along the way, the company’s executives were contrite.

“This was a preventable incident… It should be seen as a process
failure, a cultural failure and a management failure,” John Mogford,
then BP’s senior group vice president for safety and operations, said in
an April 2006 speech about the lessons learned in Texas City. “It’s not
an easy story to tell. BP doesn’t come out of it well.”

In a 2006 interview with this reporter after the Prudhoe Bay spill, published
in Fortune, BP’s chief executive
of American operations, Robert Malone, said “there is no doubt in my
mind, what happened may not have broken the law, but it broke our
values.”

Malone insisted at the time that there was no pattern of mismanagement
that increased environmental risk.

“I cannot draw a systemic problem in BP America,” he said. “What I’ve
seen is refineries and facilities and plants that are operating to the
highest level of safety and integrity standards.”

Nonetheless Malone, who spent three decades at BP and was promoted to
the CEO of BP America shortly after the Texas refinery blast, promised
to increase scrutiny over BP’s operations and invest in environmental
and safety measures.

He told Congress that it was imperative BP management learn from its
mistakes.

“The public’s faith has been tested recently,” he said. “We have fallen
short of the high standards we hold for ourselves and the expectations
that others have for us.”

Time will tell whether the accident that killed 11 workers and sent the
Transocean Deepwater Horizon drilling rig — a $500 million platform as
wide as a football field — floating to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico
was simply an accident or something else.

Malone, who retired last year, declined to comment for this article. A
spokesman for BP was not available for comment.

Families of workers who died in the accident have already filed lawsuits
accusing BP of negligence. Congress, as well as the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency that regulates drilling in the
Gulf, were already separately investigating allegations that BP has
failed to keep proper documents about how to perform an emergency
shutdown of the Atlantis,
another Gulf oil platform and one of the largest in the world.

There are also indications that BP and Transocean, the owner of the
Deepwater Horizon rig that burned and sank, could have used backup
safety gear — a remote acoustic
switch that would stanch the flow of oil from a leaking well 5,000 feet
underwater — to prevent the massive spill now floating like a
slow-motion train wreck towards the Mississippi and Louisiana coastline.
The switch isn’t required under U.S. law, but is well-known in the
industry and mandated in other parts of the world where BP operates.

In the year before the accident, BP once again aggressively cut costs. A
reorganization stripped 5,000 jobs from its payroll, saving BP more
than $4 billion in operating costs, according to a report sent to
ProPublica by Fadel Gheit, an investment analyst for Oppenheimer.

On April 27, as the U.S. Coast Guard worked with BP engineers to guide
remote control submarines nearly a mile underwater in a futile effort to
close a shut-off valve, BP told investors that its quarterly earnings
were up more than 100 percent over the last year, beating expectations
by a large margin. After underperforming its competition throughout the
last decade, Gheit wrote, BP was the only major oil company to perform
better than the S&P 500 last year.

(Photo of fire on Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig from the U.S. Coast Guard.)

By Ryan Knutson, ProPublica

Federal investigators charged
another New Orleans police officer in connection to the Danziger
Bridge shootings, in which two civilians were killed and four were
wounded in the days after Hurricane Katrina. The Danziger Bridge
shootings are among a string of violent post-Katrina police encounters
we’ve investigated in collaboration with PBS “Frontline” and the New Orleans
Times-Picayune.

Officer Robert Barrios, who was charged with conspiring to obstruct
justice, became the fourth police officer charged in the case, and the
fifth person overall. Three former officers have already pleaded guilty
to charges related to the shooting. Barrios reportedly
resigned from the force shortly after being charged.

Marion David Ryder, a civilian who impersonated a police officer the day
of the shooting, also was indicted
this month on charges of lying to federal agents and unlawful
possession of a handgun.

The charge against Barrios came in a bill of information, which is only
allowed in cases where the defendant has waived the requirement that a
grand jury issue charges. That usually indicates the defendant is
cooperating with the case.

The Times-Picayune reports
that Barrios was in the back of a vehicle with four other officers when
they responded to a report that officers were shot while on Interstate
10, which is parallel with the Danziger Bridge.

By Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica

When Sen. David Vitter persuaded the EPA to agree to yet another
review of its long-delayed assessment of the health risks of
formaldehyde, he was praised by companies that use or manufacture a
chemical found in everything from plywood to carpet.

As long as
the studies continue, the EPA will still list formaldehyde as a
“probable” rather than a “known” carcinogen, even though three major
scientific reviews now link it to leukemia and have strengthened its
ties to other forms of cancer. The chemical industry is fighting to
avoid that designation, because it could lead to tighter regulations and
require costly pollution controls.

“Delay means money. The
longer they can delay labeling something a known carcinogen, the more
money they can make,” said James Huff, associate director for chemical
carcinogenesis at the National Institute for Environmental Health in the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The EPA’s chemical risk assessments are crucial to protecting the
public’s health because they are the government’s most comprehensive
analysis of the dangers the chemicals present and are used as the
scientific foundation for state and federal regulations. But it usually
takes years or even decades to get an assessment done, or to revise one
that is outdated. Often the industry spends millions on lobbying and on
scientific studies that counter the government’s conclusions.

The
EPA has been trying since 1998 to update the formaldehyde assessment, which was first written in 1989. But the
agency’s efforts have repeatedly been stalled by the industry and
Congress.

This time, the resistance came from Vitter, a
Republican senator from Louisiana, where, ironically, thousands of
Hurricane Katrina victims say they suffered respiratory problems after
being housed in government trailers contaminated with formaldehyde. Last
year Vitter blocked the nomination of a key EPA official until the
agency agreed to ask the National Academy of Sciences to weigh in on the
assessment. Vitter’s spokesman, Joel DiGrado, told the media that
“because of the FEMA trailer debacle, we need to get absolutely reliable
information to the public about formaldehyde risk as soon as possible.”

Vitter’s ties to the formaldehyde industry are well known. According
to Talking
Points Memo, his election
campaign received about $20,500 last year from companies that produce
large amounts of formaldehyde waste in Louisiana. But ProPublica found
that Vitter actually took in nearly twice that amount if contributions
from other companies, trade groups and lobbyists with interests in
formaldehyde regulation are included. Among those contributors is
Charles Grizzle, a top-paid
lobbyist for the Formaldehyde
Council, an industry trade group that had long
sought a National Academy review
of the chemical.

Congress stalled the formaldehyde risk
assessment once before. In 2004, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., persuaded (PDF) the EPA to delay it, even though
preliminary findings from a National Cancer Institute study had already
linked formaldehyde to leukemia. Inhofe insisted that the EPA wait for a
more “robust set of findings” from the institute.

Koch
Industries, a large chemical manufacturer and one of Inhofe’s biggest
campaign contributors, gave Inhofe $6,000 that year. That
same year Koch bought two
pulp mills from Georgia-Pacific, a
major formaldehyde producer and one of the world’s largest plywood
manufacturers. The next year Koch bought all of Georgia-Pacific.

The “more robust” findings that Inhofe asked for weren’t released until
five years later — in May 2009 — and they reinforced the 2004 findings. Of the nearly 25,000
workers the National Cancer Institute had tracked for 30 years, those
exposed to higher amounts of formaldehyde had a 37
percent greater risk of death
from blood and lymphatic cancers and a 78 percent greater risk of
leukemia than those exposed to lower amounts.

The Formaldehyde
Council immediately released a statement disputing those findings and calling for
a full review by the National Academy of Sciences. Such an evaluation
could take as long as four years, according to an EPA spokesperson.

But
this time it wasn’t Inhofe who stepped in on the industry’s behalf, but
Vitter, who like Inhofe sits on the Environment and Public Works
Committee.

On the day the study came out, Grizzle, the
Formaldehyde Council lobbyist, donated
$2,400 to Vitter’s re-election
campaign, the maximum an individual can give to a federal
candidate in a single election cycle. Grizzle didn’t respond to phone
calls and e-mails asking for comment for this story.

Grizzle
started his own lobbying firm in 1993, after serving as an EPA assistant
administrator in the late 1980s. He joined George W. Bush’s transition
team in 2001, and raised
more than $500,000 for Bush’s
2004 campaign, earning the title of fundraising “pioneer.” A
Philadelphia Inquirer investigation found that Grizzle used his friendship
with Bush aide Karl Rove to help get Stephen Johnson the job as
assistant administrator for the Office of Prevention, Pesticides and
Toxic Substances at EPA. When Johnson went on to lead the EPA, he
changed the risk assessment system so other federal agencies could
comment more frequently and forcefully on the EPA’s science, a move that
prolonged the process. In the waning days of the Bush administration,
Johnson asked the National Academy of Sciences to do a full review of
the formaldehyde assessment.

DiGrado, Vitter’s spokesman, didn’t
respond to questions about Vitter’s ties to the industry. Instead, he 
sent ProPublica copies of two letters. One
showed that three Democratic lawmakers
also wanted the review. The other letter was written by an EPA official
in the final week of the Bush administration, saying that the agency
would “seek input” from the academy.

Several public health
experts interviewed by ProPublica think the industry’s goal is to delay
the assessment as long as possible and to undermine the credibility of
the EPA’s chemical risk assessment program.

“This gives the
appearance of another congressman being more interested in industry than
the health of the public,” said Dr. Peter Infante, a former director of
the Office of Carcinogen Identification and Classification at the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “The public should not
think that because a government document is undergoing NAS review, that
that review is going to be competent.”

Other public health
experts point to the National Academy’s recent review of the EPA’s assessment of
perchloroethylene, or PCE, as an example of how additional studies can
drag out the assessment process.

PCE is used in dry cleaning and
is found in high concentrations at military bases. Like formaldehyde, it
has been linked to leukemia, and the EPA has been trying to update the
chemical’s assessment since 1998. In 2008 the agency submitted its
findings to the National Academy, and in February the academy sent the
assessment back to the EPA with a long list of questions. Although the
academy agreed with the EPA’s conclusion that PCE was a “likely”
carcinogen, it suggested that the safety standards should be
significantly weaker than those the EPA had proposed. The EPA is now
responding to the academy’s comments.

Democrats in Congress and public health watchdogs
have criticized the academy in the past for being slanted toward
industry, because some of the scientists who serve on its review panels
have written studies paid for by chemical companies whose products they
are evaluating. An academy spokeswoman said it thoroughly vets its
panelists and has strict financial conflict of interest rules.

The
Road to Review

Vitter began his push for a National
Academy review of formaldehyde in a June
29 letter to the EPA. It
included a list of questions about the formaldehyde assessment and urged
the EPA
to ask the National Academy to
weigh in on it, according to documents ProPublica obtained through a
Freedom of Information Act request.

The EPA responded on July 8,
defending its plan to have the assessment reviewed by its own external
peer review panel, the Scientific Advisory Board. The letter noted that
the advisory board could do the review in 12 to 16 months for about
$200,000, while the average National Academy review takes 18 to 24
months and costs $800,000 to $1 million.

In September, two more
major scientific reviews raised concerns about the dangers of
formaldehyde. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a
division of the World Health Organization, concluded it had enough
evidence (PDF) to show that
formaldehyde exposure can cause leukemia. And the National Toxicology
Program changed its categorization
of formaldehyde from
“reasonably anticipated to be a carcinogen” to “known carcinogen.”

But
Vitter continued pressuring the EPA for more review.

On Sept.
23, he confirmed to reporters that he had placed a hold on the
nomination of Paul Anastas, the Obama administration’s choice to head
the EPA’s Office of Research and Development. He said he wouldn’t
release the hold until the EPA agreed to send the formaldehyde
assessment to the National Academy. To smooth the way for that review,
he tried to add an amendment (PDF) to an EPA appropriations bill
mandating that the agency set aside $1 million for a National Academy
review. Grizzle, the Formaldehyde Council lobbyist, worked to get
support for the amendment, according to one of his lobbying disclosure forms (PDF). (The amendment wasn’t included in
the final bill.)

On Sept. 24 EPA chief Lisa Jackson met with
Vitter and offered a compromise: She would ask the National Academy for
its advice on the formaldehyde assessment.

That same day, an EPA
spokeswoman told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that the chemical didn’t
need more review, and that the
EPA was ready to begin finalizing its assessment.

“This is not
the time for more delay,” said EPA spokeswoman Adora Andy.

But Vitter didn’t budge.

In November, a political action
committee created by the American Chemistry Council, whose members
include formaldehyde producers Hexion Specialty Chemicals and DuPont, gave
Vitter a $2,500 campaign
contribution, in addition to the $1,500 it had given him earlier in the
year. On Dec. 2, Koch Industries gave Vitter’s political action
committee a check for $5,000. On Dec. 7, Grizzle gave
Vitter (PDF) $200. On Dec. 17,
the Society of the Plastics Industry, which represents formaldehyde
manufacturers BASF and DuPont, hosted a fundraiser for Vitter at its headquarters,
recommending donations of $1,000 per person.

On Dec. 23, Vitter
got what he wanted. Jackson agreed to send the study to the National
Academy. But
in a letter Jackson sent to the Formaldehyde Council that day, she indicated it would not be
the exhaustive study the industry had pushed for but would instead be
done under a “compressed timeframe.” Dr. Peter Preuss, who heads the
EPA’s chemical risk assessment program, said it will likely be completed
in a year.

Vitter removed his hold on Anastas’ nomination on
Christmas Eve, and the Formaldehyde Council released
a statement praising his work.

“Overcoming the agency’s intransigence in engaging NAS on
formaldehyde would have been impossible without the timely intervention
of U.S. Senator David Vitter,” Betsy Natz, the council’s executive
director, said in the news release. The statement said Jackson had
contacted the council directly to notify it of the news.

Last
month the National Academy began gathering public comments about the 13
scientists it has selected for the formaldehyde panel. The Natural
Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, has already
written a letter raising questions about two of the
candidates. One worked for the Hamner Institute, an industry-supported
laboratory that lists the Formaldehyde Council as one of its sponsors.
The other worked for more than a decade at Dow Chemical, which is a
member of the Formaldehyde Council and has contributed to Vitter’s
campaigns.

On March 24, Grizzle, the Formaldehyde Council
lobbyist, co-hosted a fundraiser for Vitter at the Capitol Hill Club, an
exclusive Republican gathering place. The suggested donation was $1,000
per person.

by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica, and Brendan McCarthy, Times-Picayune

Three days after Hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans into a ghost
town, somebody shot Donnell Herrington twice in Algiers Point, ripping a
hole in his throat.

Herrington, who is African-American, says he
was ambushed by a group of armed white men who attacked without warning
or provocation. He barely survived the shooting, which shredded his
internal jugular vein, a key vessel that transports blood from the brain
to the heart. He believes the assault was racially motivated.

No
one has ever been charged in the incident, but now, more than four
years later, at least two figures have come forward with information
implicating a neighborhood man in the attack. These two people linked
Roland Bourgeois Jr. to the shooting in interviews with ProPublica, the
Times-Picayune and PBS’ “Frontline.”

Terri Benjamin, who lived in the area,
said she saw Bourgeois, 47, pledge to shoot anybody with skin “darker
than a brown paper bag” while
clutching a shotgun. At one point, she said, he held up the
blood-drenched baseball cap of a man who’d just been shot.

Bourgeois’
mother, Pam Pitre, said her son did fire his shotgun at an
African-American man that day in Algiers Point, and acknowledged that he
kept the man’s hat. Pitre, who insists her son “is not a racist,” said
Bourgeois was accompanied by another man who also fired shots.

Herrington,
whose story closely tracks with the accounts of Pitre and Benjamin,
lost his navy blue baseball cap when he was shot. After viewing a photo
of Bourgeois, Herrington identified the man as one of his attackers.
Bourgeois, he said, “definitely was one of the guys I saw that day. … I
definitely remember him. He was one of ’em.”

Bourgeois, who has
not been charged with any crime, declined to be interviewed.

The Herrington
shooting is the subject of an
ongoing probe by U.S. Department of Justice attorneys and FBI agents, who
are examining claims that white
residents of Algiers Point attacked African-Americans in a spate of
racially motivated violence in the days after Katrina tore through
Louisiana. Over the past several months, federal prosecutors have
questioned numerous witnesses about the alleged hate crimes in grand
jury proceedings.

At the U.S. Department of Justice, spokesperson
Xochitl Hinojosa said she couldn’t comment on the investigation.

So
far, the hate crimes probe has been overshadowed by a sprawling federal investigation of
the New Orleans Police Department,
an effort that’s snared guilty pleas from three former officers for
crimes committed in the aftermath of the storm. But the accounts of what
transpired in Algiers Point may soon force the city to revisit another
painful episode from those grim days.

‘I thought it was
over’

The floodwaters that spilled over much of New
Orleans didn’t touch Algiers Point.

Still, the catastrophe
prompted the neighborhood’s residents — most of whom are white — to
take action. Within days, a band of 15 to 30 locals had taken up
weapons, barricaded the streets with downed trees and debris, and begun
regular patrols of the area. Residents say they were trying to keep
their homes from being overrun by thieves and outlaws.

“There’s
no black and white issue here,” said Clyde Price III, a white man who
lived next door to Bourgeois for many years.

But others,
including Malik Rahim, the co-founder of the activist group Common
Ground Relief, who was in Algiers Point in the days after the storm,
believe the neighborhood militia carried out a series of hate crimes,
threatening and shooting black people who walked into the area.

Herrington
said that the attack on him occurred on Sept. 1, 2005, as he strode
toward the Algiers Point ferry terminal with his cousin, Marcel
Alexander, and a friend, Chris Collins.

As part
of a rescue mission called Operation Dunkirk, the U.S. Coast Guard had
created a makeshift evacuation center at the terminal. Using an array of
watercraft, sailors transported thousands of flood victims from St.
Bernard Parish and East Bank neighborhoods to the ferry terminal; from
there, they were bused out of town.

Herrington, 33, and his
companions say they were aiming to get on one of those buses.

But
as the trio approached the intersection of Pelican Avenue and Vallette
Street, a white man pointed a shotgun at Herrington and, without saying a
word, squeezed the trigger, according to Herrington. “I thought I was
about to die,” he said. “I thought it was over.”

The first
shotgun blast ripped into his throat, torso and arms. Somehow,
Herrington got to his feet and began running. He remembers two more
armed men joining the first gunman. As he tried to escape, he says, a
second blast struck him in the back.

Both Alexander and Collins
witnessed the shooting — and both also suffered minor gunshot wounds. “I thought Donnell was dead,” recalled Alexander, who backs up his
cousin’s account. “I thought that I would never see Donnell no more.”

Alexander, who was 17, said he and Collins were briefly taken
prisoner by a group of about five armed white men, one of whom
threatened to set them on fire. Eventually, though, the men let
Alexander and Collins go.

Bleeding, Herrington staggered to the
home of an African-American couple who drove him to West Jefferson
Medical Center, where doctors discovered buckshot in his arms, chest,
abdomen and back, X-ray reports show. A cluster of pellets had torn open
the internal jugular vein along the right side of his throat, according
to medical records and one of Herrington’s surgeons, Dr. Charles
Thomas. At 3:43 p.m., he underwent surgery to repair the shredded vein.

Herrington is adamant that he and his companions did nothing to
provoke the incidents. “We were just in the neighborhood for a few
minutes,” he said. “We were just passing through.” The only way to the
ferry terminal from his home, he noted, was through Algiers Point.

Over the course of several interviews,
Herrington remembered one last detail about his ordeal: He’d been
wearing a navy blue baseball cap bearing the logo of either the New York
Yankees or the Detroit Tigers. During the scramble, he said, the hat
must have fallen off his head.

‘Big-game hunting’

As Terri Benjamin and her aunt, Eudith Rodney, walked along Pelican
Avenue that day, the reverberating boom of gunfire echoed through the
thick, humid air.

Fearful, the women began running toward the
safety of Benjamin’s home. As they neared Vallette Street, they
encountered a group of armed white men, Benjamin said in an interview.

Among the men, Benjamin recalled, was Roland Bourgeois Jr., who
lived just two doors down on Vallette Street. Bourgeois was gripping a
shotgun and celebrating.

“My neighbor was jumping up and down,
hootin’ and hollerin’ like he was big-game hunting and he got the big
one,” she said. “All of his friends were rallying him on, and they were
cheering.”

A beefy character with a shaved head, Bourgeois
screamed “I got one!” and boasted that he’d shot a “looter,” said
Benjamin, who shared her story with a federal grand jury on March 25.

Before long, she said, another armed man — someone Benjamin didn’t
recognize — showed up with news: The person Bourgeois had shot was
wounded but alive a few blocks away.

According to Benjamin,
Bourgeois said, “I’m gonna kill that nigger,” and ran, barefoot and
shirtless, down the street before turning and jogging out of view.

Benjamin
heard another gunshot.

Bourgeois ran back to join the group of
gun-equipped men standing in the street, she said. “He came back with a
baseball cap that had blood on it. And I knew there was blood on the cap
because it ran onto his arm. And he brandished the cap for all of his
friends,” Benjamin said. “Everybody cheered. They were happy for him.”

Benjamin, who is ethnically mixed — white, Latino and
African-American — was waiting for an uncle and cousin, both of whom
are African-American, to come to her house. She feared Bourgeois and the
other men would attack her relatives.

“I went to him and asked
him to spare their lives,” Benjamin remembered. “He said, ‘Darlin’, anything
coming up that street darker than a brown paper bag is gettin’ shot.’”

Traumatized,
Benjamin moved out of the state after Katrina, but just weeks ago, she
made two trips to the neighborhood, accompanied by a federal prosecutor
and an FBI agent who asked her to retrace her steps.

The
investigators, she said, were interested in Bourgeois. “They asked me
specifically about him,” Benjamin said. Assistant U.S. Attorney Forrest
Christian also questioned her about a “sidekick” of Bourgeois, she said.

‘Like gang members’

Bourgeois may be guilty
of poor judgment, but he didn’t commit a hate crime, according to his
mother, Pam Pitre.

In a recent interview, she explained her
understanding of the shooting her son participated in. Pitre said she’s
discussed the shooting in detail with Bourgeois, and testified before
the grand jury about it.

In Pitre’s telling, Bourgeois
encountered three dangerous and “arrogant” African-American males who’d
been trying to break into parked cars, Pitre said. “He said they looked
like gang members to him,” she recalled.

After the trio of black
men tried to move one of the barricades blocking the street, Bourgeois
and another man began shooting at them, said Pitre. “Both men had guns.
Both fired,” she said, adding that she didn’t know the name of the other
shooter.

According to Pitre, the shots were meant to “scare,”
not to kill.

When the gunfire stopped, Bourgeois “picked up the
baseball cap” that had fallen from the head of one of the shooting
victims, according Pitre, who said her son kept the hat until she
convinced him to get rid of it.

Pitre says the shooting had
nothing to do with skin color. “If they want to say it was a bad
decision — yes, it was. But it wasn’t a hate crime,” she said. “He is
not a racist — and that’s what bothers me more than anything else.”

Bourgeois
was terrified by the lawlessness that followed the storm and flooding,
she said. He was threatened by a group of African-Americans, she said,
and “pelted with bottles” in the days before the shooting occurred.

The
only reason the matter came to the attention of federal authorities,
Pitre maintained, is that “this man Roland shot survived and is telling
his tale.”

Bourgeois’ family has owned property in Algiers Point
for decades, and around the neighborhood he’s known as a dog lover.
Aside from a 1992 arrest for possession of marijuana, he has no criminal
record in Orleans Parish.

Civil court records show Bourgeois has
at least two children. He is now residing with his mother in
Mississippi.

Price, his former neighbor, said Bourgeois has been
unfairly tarred as a racist. “Everyone paints a bad picture of him
because he’s a big, white bald dude and a gun fanatic,” said Price. “They think it was all racism. But it wasn’t.’

Still, Price
acknowledged, Bourgeois has a habit of referring to African-Americans as “niggers.”

‘A racial statement’

Over the
past year, FBI agents have interviewed Herrington numerous times and
have canvassed the neighborhood, going door-to-door in an effort to
locate witnesses to the shooting. One local who was questioned by agents
said they were seeking information about approximately 30 Algiers Point
residents.

At this point, however, it’s unclear whether the
probe will lead to criminal indictments.

Herrington continues to
feel anger about what happened to him.

“To me, it was a hate
crime,” he said. “It was a racial statement.” He thinks if his skin was a
different hue — if he’d been a “white guy” striding through the
neighborhood, en route to the ferry terminal — “it wouldn’t have
happened to me.”

Editor’s note: The Roland
Bourgeois Jr. in this story should not be confused with the Metairie,
La., physician of the same name.

FRONTLINE Producer
Oriana Zill de Granados contributed to this report.

(Photo of the Algiers Point neighborhood by Muffuletta via Wikipedia.)

By A.C. Thompson, ProPublica

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the Baton Rouge Police
Department’s actions in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according
to the Baton Rouge Advocate. The newspaper says Alejandro Miyar, a
spokesperson for Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division,
acknowledged the probe on Thursday. 

Word of the federal investigation follows reports
in the Advocate detailing allegations that Baton Rouge police
“routinely harassed black people, resorted to unnecessary violence and
conducted illegal searches in the days after Hurricane Katrina.” The
stories, based on complaints made by out-of-state police sent to
Louisiana to assist local officers, have been challenged by Baton Rouge
police officials.

The new probe further expands the Justice Department’s workload in the
state. Prosecutors are already examining a string of incidents in which
New Orleans Police Department officers
shot at least 10 civilians during the week after Katrina roared
ashore. Two former New Orleans cops recently pleaded guilty to federal
charges stemming from the shooting of six people on the Danziger
Bridge on Sept. 4, 2005.

With our partners at the New Orleans
Times-Picayune and PBS
“Frontline,” ProPublica scrutinized the NOPD in “Law & Disorder,” a
series of stories looking at the shootings of Matthew
McDonald, Keenon McCann
and Danny
Brumfield. Those shootings are among the incidents now being
investigated by the Justice Department.

By Marian Wang, ProPublica

In a blog entry over the weekend, John
Hempton (once dubbed “financial
blogger extraordinaire“) explains
that before there was Lehman Brothers’ now-maligned maneuver called “Repo
105” … there were, well, a lot
of other banks also trying to do the very same thing.

Such as
Bank of America, for instance.

As you may recall, Repo
105 is the accounting maneuver
Lehman Brothers used to move billions in assets off its balance sheet,
giving the appearance of greater liquidity, less risk, and therefore a
healthier company profile.

Hempton runs us through some numbers
from Bank of America’s 2006
annual report. See below:

(US dollars – millions)	Q4 2006	Q3 2006	Q2 2006	Q1 2006
Average total assets	1,495,150	1,497,987	1,456,004	1,416,373
End period total assets	1,459,737	1,449,211	1,445,193	1,375,080
end period less average assets	-35,413	-48,776	-10,811	-41,293

In each of these years, the bank’s assets at the end of the quarter
were lower than its average assets throughout the quarter. This had been
happening for a while, according to Hempton. But if the bank was moving
its assets off its balance sheet, where was it moving them to? Hempton
found the counterparty he believes was assisting Bank of
America — Japanese bank Mitsubishi UFJ, which ended each quarter with
higher assets than its average throughout the quarter.

Reuters
blogger Felix Salmon points out that the numbers we’re talking about
here are
big — on par with Lehman’s Repo
transgressions.

I put in a call to Bank of America, and the media
rep there told me he needs “to talk to a number of people,” seeing as
the bank will “want to be thoughtful about it.” I’ll update as more
information comes in, but given all the financial insiders talking about
how Repo 105 was an “old
trick,”
this subject is one to keep watching.

Update:

Tuesday
afternoon, Bank of America’s media rep Scott Silvestri responded to my
inquiries with this statement:

“Efforts to manage the
size of our balance sheet are routine and appropriate, and we believe
our actions are consistent with all applicable accounting and legal
requirements.”

My only thought is that this is very
similar to what Lehman’s auditors, Ernst & Young, said in response
to criticism about their review of Lehman’s accounting, right after Repo
105 hit the news earlier this month. Here’s what the auditor’s
spokesman, Charles Perkins, said
at the time:

“Our
opinion indicated that Lehman’s financial statements for that year were
fairly presented in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting
Principles, and we remain of that view.”

By A.C. Thompson, ProPublica

On Sunday, the Baton Rouge Advocate published a
damning exposé detailing allegations of misconduct by Baton Rouge
police officers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

After a four-year legal battle, the paper finally got a cache of police
department documents describing a pattern of racist and abusive behavior
by Baton Rouge officers in the days after the storm ravaged the Gulf
coast. The cops are accused of using demeaning language; routinely
harassing African Americans; physically abusing citizens; and seeking to
“make life rough for New Orleans evacuees so they would leave town,”
according to the Advocate, which has posted the documents online.

Here’s the twist: The accusations were made by other cops, 55 state
troopers from New Mexico and Michigan who had been sent to Baton Rouge
to assist with post-storm policing. The out-of-state cops were yanked
out of Baton Rouge after only two days because of their concerns about
misconduct.

The visiting officers said Baton Rouge cops referred to African
Americans as “heathens” and “animals” that “needed to be beaten down.”

In response to the newspaper’s questions, Baton Rouge Police Chief Jeff
LeDuff said some of the allegations against his officers were “maybe
blown out of proportion.” He also said his department had investigated
the incidents and dealt with any policy violations uncovered.

Five years after the hurricane, controversy about police tactics in the
aftermath of the disaster continues to swirl. In recent weeks, two
former
New Orleans cops have pleaded guilty to federal charges in connection
to high-profile shootings on the Danziger
Bridge. Federal agents are investigating four other police shooting
incidents from the time period.

We’re covering these violent encounters in an ongoing series with the New Orleans
Times-Picayune and PBS
“Frontline.”

By A.C. Thompson, ProPublica

A second former New Orleans Police Department officer has been charged in federal court
in connection with the Sept. 4, 2005 shootings on the Danziger Bridge.
Jeffrey Lehrmann, who left the NOPD to work for U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, was charged last month with concealing a crime,
according to court documents unsealed Tuesday and obtained by our
partners at the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Late last year, ProPublica, PBS “Frontline” and the Times-Picayune teamed up to examine a string of violent encounters between police and civilians that occurred in New Orleans during the week after Hurricane Katrina made landfall.

The bridge incident was particularly notorious. Police officers shot
six citizens, killing two. Lehrmann, tasked with investigating what
happened on the bridge, “participated in the creation of false reports”
and provided “false information to investigating agents,” according to
the bill of information filed by the U.S. Department of Justice. 

As the Times-Picayune noted, Lehrmann also plays a central
role in another ongoing controversy: While working as an NOPD detective
he helped build the case against Michael Anderson, whose murder conviction was overturned recently when a judge found that prosecutors had failed to turn over key evidence to defense lawyers.

Last month, former NOPD Lt. Michael Lohman pleaded guilty to conspiring to obstruct justice in connection with the bridge shootings.

By A.C. Thompson, ProPublica

If you’ve been following our Law & Disorder series, there are a couple of fresh developments.

Our partners at the Times-Picayune have some new information about the expanding federal probe
of the New Orleans Police Department, confirming that the FBI is
investigating two more shootings described in stories we published in
December. 

Also, the city’s inspector general publicly accused
(PDF) Police Superintendent Warren Riley of illegally obstructing
attempts to scrutinize police misconduct and disciplinary files.

“As you know, the relationship between the New Orleans Police
Department (NOPD) and the citizens of New Orleans has been poor,” wrote
Inspector General E.R. Quatrevaux in a letter sent this week to
outgoing Mayor C. Ray Nagin and posted on his office’s Web site.

Quatrevaux is in the process of establishing an independent monitoring
body to oversee the NOPD. In the letter, he faults Riley for barring
his staffers from reviewing records on police misconduct, discipline
and shooting incidents. The Times-Picayune has more on the controversy.

By A.C. Thompson, ProPublica

Former New Orleans Police Department Lt. Michael Lohman pleaded
guilty to a single count of conspiring to obstruct justice, in
connection with one of a string of violent encounters between police
and civilians in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Police
shot at least 10 people during the week after the storm made landfall.
(We have been investigating the shootings, along with our partners the New Orleans Times-Picayune and PBS “Frontline.”)

Lohman’s guilty plea stems from the so-called Danziger Bridge incident
of Sept. 4, 2005. Responding to an emergency call that day, New Orleans
police officers shot six citizens — killing two — on and around the span.

The Times-Picayune has been covering the Danziger Bridge shootings from the start and it has the latest.

Lohman helped orchestrate the police’s investigation of the
shooting, a probe portrayed in the bill of information as an attempted
cover-up. The former lieutenant was involved in planting a handgun at
the scene, drafted phony police reports, and lied to federal agents,
according the court document. (The New York Times has good details on the alleged cover-up. And we at ProPublica have posted the bill of information in our easy-to-read document viewer.)

Lohman’s plea is the clearest indicator yet that the federal
government — which for more than a year now has been investigating the
New Orleans Police Department’s actions in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina — is mounting a two-pronged probe: federal prosecutors and the
FBI are scrutinizing incidents in which police shot civilians in the
chaotic days after the storm, as well as the alleged efforts of other
officers to cover-up those shootings. 

Defense attorneys familiar with the widening federal probe say the Justice Department is looking at the death of Henry Glover as a possible cover-up, as well. Glover was shot on Sept. 2, 2005 — possibly by NOPD officer David Warren — and
died, according to three witnesses, at a makeshift police compound in
the Algiers section of New Orleans. His charred remains were later
discovered in an incinerated car dumped on a Mississippi River levee.

Federal agents began examining Glover’s death after ProPublica, in conjunction with The Nation magazine, reported on the case in late 2008.

In recent weeks, the Justice Department has begun looking at three other post-Katrina incidents — the shootings of Danny Brumfield, Matthew McDonald and Keenon McCann,
all of whom were shot by NOPD officers in the week after the hurricane
made landfall. Brumfield and McDonald died; McCann was injured but
survived to file a lawsuit against the police department. He was shot
to death by an unknown assailant in 2008 while the suit was pending.

The NOPD, like most police departments, conducts an investigation every
time an officer opens fire on a citizen — the goal is to make sure the
shooting was proper and justified. As a general rule, officers are
allowed to use deadly force only when confronted by a person posing a
physical threat, either to the officer or another civilian.

However, a joint effort by reporters with ProPublica, the New Orleans Times-Picayune
and PBS “Frontline” found that NOPD investigators did little to
determine whether officers acted appropriately when they shot
Brumfield, McDonald and McCann. NOPD detectives collected little
physical evidence, spoke to few civilian witnesses, and conducted brief
interviews — ranging from seven to 12 minutes — with the officers involved
in the shootings.

By Brendan McCarthy and Laura Maggi, Times-Picayune with additional reporting by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica

A rookie New Orleans police officer who had been on the force for just a year is under investigation in the shooting of Henry Glover outside an Algiers strip mall four days after Hurricane Katrina, the first act in a bizarre chain of events that has led to a massive federal probe into the city’s Police Department.

Glover’s
burned remains were found weeks after the August 2005 storm inside an
abandoned, nearly incinerated car on the Algiers levee

During the past year, the U.S. Department of Justice has interviewed scores of officers in an effort to determine how the 31-year-old Glover died, as well as whether officers may have tried to cover up his death.

William Tanner, an Algiers man, has described his effort to get
medical treatment from police for Glover’s gunshot wound. Tanner has
alleged that a group of officers from the SWAT unit detained and beat
him and two other men, refused medical care for Glover, and eventually
drove off in Tanner’s car, with Glover’s body inside.

But it was
never known who had shot Glover. Now, several sources and a defense
attorney confirm that federal investigators believe that then-NOPD
officer David Warren shot Glover.

It’s unclear if Warren’s
bullet killed Glover. It’s also unclear whether another group of
officers under investigation for setting the car on fire–including two
leaders of the NOPD’s high-profile SWAT unit, Capt. Jeff Winn and Lt.
Dwayne Scheuermann–knew that Glover had been possibly shot by a fellow
cop.

What is clear is that the shooting was the first in a
string of questionable actions by NOPD officers now at the center of a
sprawling probe.

Rookie reassigned in days after Katrina

Warren,
47, was a rookie on the force assigned to the 7th District in eastern
New Orleans when the storm struck. He was unable to get to his post and
was directed to the 4th District in Algiers, according to his attorney,
Joseph Albe.

On Friday, Sept. 2, 2005–four days into the
flood–Warren and his patrol partner encountered two men behind a Chuck
E. Cheese’s restaurant near the intersection of Seine Drive and Texas
Drive, Albe said.

Glover was at that location that afternoon with a friend when he was shot, according to family members.

Warren,
in uniform, saw two men ge out of a truck and “charge” toward a
business, Albe said. Warren believed they were going to loot the
business.

“He yelled stop, halt, whatever,” Albe said. “They didn’t.”

Warren, an expert marksman, pulled the trigger on his rifle. A shot rang out.

“After he fired, the guys turned around and ran off,” Albe said.

Warren, who Albe said doesn’t know exactly where the bullet landed, then called ranking officers and reported the shooting.

“He did exactly what he was supposed to have done,” Albe said.

Though
the location, the date, time and circumstances square with civilian
accounts, Albe maintains there is no evidence that shows Warren shot
Glover.

“Did David Warren shoot his gun? Yes. He shot one shot. Do we know whether it was Henry Glover? No … We may never know.”

Warren never wrote a report on the shooting incident.

“He was told not to” by ranking officers, Albe said. “Plus, an officer involved in a shooting doesn’t write his own report.”

A
report written more than a week after the incident classified the
shooting as a “miscellaneous incident,” a designation given to minor
matters that typically receive no follow-up, the attorney said.

Albe
and other attorneys representing the officers under investigation have
said the chaotic circumstances after Katrina need to be taken into
consideration when judging officers’ actions.

“It wasn’t ‘protect and serve,’” Albe said Friday. “It was protect themselves. It was a question of survival.”

An unconventional officer

Warren is no longer with the NOPD. He joined the department as a
recruit in December 2003 and was sworn in as an officer in May 2004. He
left the force in 2008, according to civil service records.

He
was an unconventional rookie: He joined the force mid-career and holds
several degrees, including a master’s of business administration degree
from the University of Wisconsin, according to his personnel file.

His
resume also states he has worked in the armed services, and
participated in “use of force and threat assessment” training at the
Lethal Force Institute Inc. At the NOPD’s graduation for his recruit
class, Warren was honored with a precision shooting award for having
the highest cumulative score during firearms training.

Civilian witnesses have already given their version of the events of Sept 2, 2005, to federal agents.

Glover’s fiancee, Rolanda Short, said last fall that Glover had gone
out that morning to scavenge for supplies. After Katrina, with no
stores open, he had been in charge of getting food, water and charcoal
for the couple’s extended family, several of whom lived near their
apartment on Garden Oaks Drive, she said.

Short heard someone in
the street shout out that Glover, who was known as “Ace,” had been
shot. Short said the man on the street indicated a police officer–maybe
a state trooper–had shot the father of her young daughter.

Hearing
the news, Short ran out into the street and saw Glover lying face down
on the pavement with blood pouring from his chest. Short said as she
held Glover’s hand, a car pulled up and two police officers got out.
They ordered Short to back away from her fiance, but she refused.
Eventually they left, said Short, who was interviewed by FBI agents
last year.

At that point, a potential savior appeared, Short
recalled. Tanner, a maintenance man on a quest for gasoline for his
car, stopped his white Chevrolet Malibu at the behest of Glover’s
brother, Edward King. Though he didn’t know Glover, Tanner agreed to
try to help.

A search for help

Tanner decided that driving several miles to West Jefferson Medical
Center, the original plan, was a bad idea. With Glover in the car’s
back seat, and the injured man’s brother and another man in the car,
Tanner drove to a nearby school where the NOPD’s SWAT unit had set up
camp during the storm.

Instead of helping them, Tanner alleges
that SWAT team members at Paul B. Habans Elementary School handcuffed
the three uninjured men, interrogating them about what they were doing.

The
officers jumped to the conclusion that the men were looters, and beat
them, with officers kicking Tanner in the ribs, and one officer hitting
him in the head with the butt of a gun, Tanner said.

Officers did not tend to Glover, who lay wounded–or possibly dead–in the back seat of the car, Tanner said.

At
one point, an officer in a tactical uniform took Tanner’s key chain,
removed the key to his car and headed toward his Malibu, with flares
sticking out of the front pocket of his cargo pants, Tanner recalled.
The officer took off in the car, following other officers who were in a
white truck, he said. Glover was still in the back seat of the car.

Eventually, Tanner and the other men were released. They fled the city.

Scorched bone fragments recovered

Soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne recovered Glover’s remains,
mostly scorched bone fragments with “minute fragments of metal,” from
inside Tanner’s charred car, which had been left beside the levee near
Patterson Drive and Gen. Collins Avenue. The site was blocks away from
the NOPD’s 4th District station and a U.S. Border Patrol office, about
a mile and a half away from the elementary school where SWAT encamped.

Coroner
Frank Minyard said DNA from family members helped confirm Glover’s
identity. The autopsy shows Minyard did not classify the death as a
homicide or flag it for police investigation.

Minyard’s inaction in classifying the death a homicide is one reason police didn’t begin an investigation, Albe said.

Six
days after Glover’s shooting, a pair of volunteer first responders from
the Pittsburgh area, armed with a video camera, stumbled upon the
vehicle. The two men videotaped what they found inside: a skull with
two holes in it, according to a Pittsburgh television news report.

The
skull went missing sometime between the pair’s discovery and when the
82nd Airborne recovered the remains. No skull is mentioned in Glover’s autopsy, which consisted of an examination of five biohazard bags containing bones and clumps of flesh.

Tanner
learned about the location of his vehicle months after the storm from
an agent with the federal Immigration Customs and Enforcement agency.
The car remained on the levee through early February 2009. A neighbor
said it was towed away by an NOPD truck a month later.

Although
Tanner made several appeals to the NOPD in the time since Katrina to
find out what happened to his car, he never got anywhere.

Two veteran cops also under investigation

Two veteran officers, both highly decorated, are under investigation
by federal authorities for playing possible roles in the disposal of
Glover’s body. Winn and Scheuermann of the SWAT team are two targets of
the investigation, Eric Hessler, an attorney representing Winn, has
previously said.

Winn, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq,
and Scheuermann are widely respected in the department. They have
worked in the some of the NOPD’s most proactive and dangerous units,
volunteering for harrowing assignments time and again. The SWAT team
responded to numerous reports of violence in the city immediately after
the storm.

Hessler has defended his client in interviews,
saying Winn and the officers he commanded were the ones who stepped up
during the chaos after Katrina.

“Jeff Winn addressed everything
properly by the guidelines the NOPD was working under during Katrina,”
Hessler said Friday. “By all accounts, he did a great job.”

Tanner’s account of what happened to Glover first appeared in a 2008 article published in The Nation magazine and on the Web site of ProPublica,
an investigative newsroom. Despite repeated inquiries by Tanner about
what happened to his car, the New Orleans Police Department had not
previously opened an investigation into Glover’s death or the
incineration of his corpse.

The story prompted a federal inquiry.
Since then, dozens of officers, including the current and former
superintendents, as well as other top brass, have appeared before a
federal grand jury. The U.S. Department of Justice, working with the
local FBI office and the U.S. attorney’s office, has issued countless
subpoenas to the NOPD, and interviewed several officers.

The
federal investigation into Glover’s death is one of several active
probes into the NOPD. A grand jury examining the well-publicized Danziger Bridge shooting–in
which two men were killed by police and four others were shot–commenced
last spring. The FBI also has an open investigation into the fatal
police shooting death of Adolph Grimes III, 22, who was killed in an encounter with officers on New Year’s Day 2009.

(For additional documents about this case, visit ProPublica’s website.)