What a swell city
Former New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan looks like he is both an incompetent and a crook, according to this WSJ piece by Douglas McCollam:
the disarray in the DA’s office can be traced to a decision Mr. Jordan made shortly after being elected to a six-year term in 2002. During the campaign, Mr. Jordan pledged to make the DA’s office look “more like New Orleans,” code words, many assumed, for hiring more black staffers and attorneys. Using a “cultural-diversity report” compiled by his transition team, Mr. Jordan proceeded to systematically fire veteran white staffers and replace them with African Americans with little or no experience.
A later analysis showed that, after about two months in office, Mr. Jordan altered the racial composition of the staff, going to 27 whites and 130 blacks from 77 whites and 56 blacks. Among the 56 staffers who were fired, 53 were white, two were black, and one was Hispanic. Among the 20 case investigators fired (many retired police detectives), all were white.
The committee making firing recommendations for Mr. Jordan was run by Stephanie Butler, an aide to Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson. This is the congressman who drew national attention when federal agents found $90,000 in his freezer, which led to his indictment this year on bribery and obstruction of justice charges. Mr. Jefferson has pleaded not guilty.
When challenged in court, Mr. Jordan claimed the firings were “random,” with no intentional racial component. They were, he said, part of the standard turnover officials are entitled to make under the patronage system.
But in 2005, a federal jury disagreed, finding that 35 of the fired workers had been let go solely because of their race, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The jury awarded them close to $2 million, which ballooned with interest and attorneys’ fees to about $3.5 million–more than the DA’s annual budget.
Following Mr. Jordan’s resignation, attorneys for the plaintiffs seized the DA office’s bank accounts and threatened to foreclose on all its property to satisfy the judgment. That threat prompted city and state leaders, who for months had refused to negotiate, to pony up $2.9 million last week to settle the case. The majority of the payment requires the approval of some key state legislators, who are usually hostile to anything that involves spending money to bail New Orleans out of a jam.
This DA Jordan even makes the former governor and the mayor look good by comparison. Now that’s really saying something.