COPS AND ROBBERS

By S.C. GWYNNE NEW ORLEANS

NEW ORLEANS AUTHORITIES TELL THIS story. On Saturday, March 4, at 1:50 a.m., police officer Antoinette Frank, 23, entered a Vietnamese restaurant in eastern New Orleans to commit robbery and murder. She put a bullet into the head of the security guard-her sometime police partner Ronald Williams, who was off-duty. She then executed the son and daughter of the restaurant's immigrant owners; the girl was kneeling in prayer when she died. Frank fled with an accomplice in a battered Toyota. She returned later in a patrol car, ostensibly in response to emergency calls on her police radio. What she did not know was that a third sibling, hiding in a walk-in refrigerator, had witnessed the murders. She identified Frank as the killer.

Not only was it the first time in memory that a New Orleans police officer had been accused of shooting and killing another officer; but it also represented the terrifying congruence of murder with police corruption on a scale unseen anywhere else in the country. The New Orleans police department has long had a reputation for brutality, but the past few years have seen an explosion of police-corruption cases. Frank became the fourth New Orleans police officer to be charged with murder in the past 12 months. Since 1993, 40 officers have been arrested on charges including bank robbery, auto theft, narcotics, rape and aggravated assault. In the past 18 months, the city's chief of detectives was dismissed for unethical behavior, and its vice squad was disbanded after a deputy supervisor was convicted of robbing bars and strip clubs.

After years of official denial, city authorities now admit they face a monumental problem. "I inherited a police department that was a shambles," says Marc Morial, 37, who was elected mayor last year. "The first step is to expose it, and that is painful for the community." The local U.S. attorney, Eddie Jordan, has called corruption in the department "pervasive, rampant and systemic." Jordan and several watchdog groups estimate that between 10% and 15% of the 1,500-officer police department is crooked.

While the triple murders stunned residents, they had been even more shocked by an FBI sting operation late last year that resulted in the indictment of 10 police officers. Undercover agents found cops ripping off drug dealers, and as many as 29 police officers who were willing to guard a warehouse containing 130 kilos of cocaine during their off-duty hours. They also discovered that one of the officers caught in the drug sting, Len Davis, had allegedly arranged the murder of a woman who had filed a police-brutality complaint against him. "When people heard about the Davis case, there was universal revulsion," says Mary Howell, a civil rights lawyer.

Why are New Orleans cops, in particular, so corrupt? Both the Frank case and the drug-ring case suggest part of an answer. Frank and the fellow officer she is charged with killing both worked in that eastern New Orleans restaurant as security guards during their off-duty hours; Davis and his colleagues were also working off-duty security jobs. This sort of moonlighting is known in police jargon as "detail" work and is a fixture of the New Orleans police department. Because police there are among the lowest paid in any major city in America--a fresh recruit makes $14,900 a year, for example, and a 20-year veteran makes $30,000--it has long been assumed the officers would supplement their wages with detail work, which they perform in full uniform. They usually make between $10 and $15 an hour, and many work 40 or more extra hours a week. The department's pay scale has also led to problems in recruiting qualified applicants. "Everybody knows they are grossly underpaid," says Neil Gallagher, FBI special agent in charge of the New Orleans office. "And still people wonder why there is corruption."

"A lot of officers came to look at the detail as their main job, and the police job just became a way to rest, to let it slide by," says Rafael Goyeneche III, managing director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a police-watchdog group. "Some just slept in their patrol cars." Details also gave rise to brokers in the department, who would organize outside work for a fee. This led to sergeants dispatching higher-ranking officers on plum off-duty jobs. "The real command structure of the department became the detail," says Howell.

The new mayor has fired, suspended or reprimanded 74 officers and has hired a new police chief, Richard Pennington, from Washington. Morial and Pennington have also taken the unprecedented step of inviting the FBI to help them clean up the department. Pennington has limited the amount of detail work that officers can do, forced them to report all details through official department channels and outlawed detail brokers. Perhaps most significant, Morial gave police their first raise-5%-in eight years. Says Morial: "We knew people were going to scream and holler about the detail work. But it was something we had to do." He will have to do still more before New Orleans again trusts its police department.