Something rotten in the state of Louisiana

I have mixed memories of New Orleans. The hospitality was gracious and the cuisine was fine, but there was a pervasive whiff of something rotten which must have a bearing on the city’s lack of preparedness for the present disaster. I once spent an afternoon in the police headquarters hearing about efforts to eliminate corruption in the local force, and I recall an earlier visit in my days as a banker in the 1980s: I found myself being lunched in a dark corner of a restaurant by an adviser to four-term Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, who confidentially offered me a slice of the action in a gas pipeline project across the state. Eager as I was to bring home new business, I knew enough of Governor Edwards’s reputation to make an excuse after the gumbo and leave. Edwards had huge support among poor black and Cajun voters — he once claimed that the only way he could lose a Louisiana election was ‘if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy’ — but was eventually jailed for 10 years for racketeering in connection with licences for the riverboat casinos now wrecked by the hurricane.

A Corporate Crime Reporter study published in Washington last year noted that Louisiana’s last three insurance commissioners had also served time, and the state agriculture commissioner was under indictment for allegedly receiving bribes; Mississippi and Louisiana ranked respectively first and third in a 10-year survey of state corruption — separated, curiously, by North Dakota in second place, and beaten outright only by the District of Columbia which, as the seat of the federal government, notched up no fewer than ten times even Mississippi’s rate of graft convictions per head of population. Comments about New Orleans’s sudden descent into Third World chaos have tended to overlook the fact that in matters of local public administration parts of the world’s greatest democracy are habitually run little better than Lagos or Caracas or — dare one say it? — pre-war Baghdad.