Brian Fairbanks | The Atavist Magazine | April 2024 | 1,395 words (5 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 150, “The Last Shall Be First.”
A few weeks before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Len Davis rose to face a jury. A former policeman, Davis was a big man who’d once exuded toughness and sometimes thrown himself in harm’s way on the streets. He became known around New Orleans’s Ninth Ward as Robocop, but that wasn’t his only nickname: People also called him the Desire Terrorist.
In the early 1990s, Davis earned a fearsome reputation in and around a public housing complex called the Desire Development for helping drug dealers move product and cover up violent crimes. Murder is what landed Davis in court, but the victim wasn’t in the drug game. She was a single mother who had filed a brutality complaint against Davis. The next day, he ordered a hit man to kill her.
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The murder is the most notorious of the 424 that were committed in New Orleans in 1994, the city’s deadliest year on record. After Davis was arrested, he became a national symbol of the depths of corruption and depravity the New Orleans Police Department had sunk to, and he was convicted by a jury of his peers and sentenced to die. The verdict was affirmed on appeal, but the death sentence was tossed out. In 2005, a resentencing trial was scheduled to determine Davis’s fate once more.
Davis represented himself in court, delivering an opening argument and even cross-examining witnesses. Despite damning evidence to the contrary, including recorded phone conversations between him and the hit man immediately before and after the murder, Davis claimed that he was innocent, that the witnesses testifying against him were lying. “When this case is over,” he said, “you will be filled with reasonable doubt.”
The jury was unmoved. On August 9, it recommended the same punishment as the previous panel: death. A judge affirmed the recommendation two months later.
For many people in New Orleans, the resentencing marked the end of the saga of Len Davis, and news of it was all but swept from the headlines by the worst disaster in the city’s history—a disaster that spurred shocking new instances of police brutality. For at least five incarcerated men, however, the story wasn’t over. In their view, that high-profile murder case from 1994 only scratched the surface of Davis’s wrongdoing. Were it not for him, the men claimed, they might not be behind bars. In a sense, they were the Desire Terrorist’s other victims.
No one seemed interested in their side of the story. Their appeals stalled or failed. In time the men came to understand that their only chance of getting out of prison was for someone to recognize the wrong done to them and take the extraordinary steps necessary to make it right. So they waited. For 17 years after Davis’s resentencing they waited.
Part I
Locals like to point out that the most infamous cop in New Orleans history isn’t from Louisiana at all. Born in Chicago in 1964, Len Davis moved to the Crescent City with his mother upon his father’s untimely passing. After he graduated high school, Davis drove a candy truck for several years. He also racked up a criminal record, including battery charges.
At 22, Davis enrolled in the NOPD’s training academy. Amid the crack epidemic and white flight from the city, the department was desperate for recruits. It loosened employment standards, allowing some individuals with criminal histories to attend the academy, and made getting through training easier than ever. “They created a situation where if you could not pass the final exam, you could still graduate,” Felix Loicano, a former acting chief of detectives with the NOPD, said in an interview.
Davis wasn’t at the academy long before he got in trouble for unspecified reasons and was given the heave-ho. But after taking a job guarding academy property, he was allowed to reenroll. He graduated in 1988.
At the time, the NOPD was plagued by misconduct and graft. Deputies vying for the department’s top job had loyal factions committed to protecting their own. “We had the equivalent of four Mafia crime families running the police department,” a city official told The New York Times. Pay was so low—the starting salary for an officer was less than $20,000—that many cops worked security on the side. Enterprising officers known as detail brokers even hired fellow police to work gigs for clients and took a cut of their earnings. Moonlighting, which often paid well, created perverse incentives. “The allegiance becomes to this seedy, after-hours establishment that you are guarding,” historian Leonard Moore has said, “as opposed to your particular shift at the precinct.”
Meanwhile, among city residents the NOPD was known to be ruthless. Between 1985 and 1990, the federal government received 26 civil-rights complaints for every 1,000 officers on the force. That was more than 50 times the rate for the New York Police Department.
Davis landed in the NOPD’s Seventh District after finishing the academy, and in some ways he distinguished himself. Once, after responding to the scene of a mugging, the victim wrote a letter to the department praising his courtesy. In another instance, Davis talked a woman out of shooting herself and into giving him her gun. For his efforts, Davis received commendations but not promotions, a fact that may or may not have been related to the infractions that were beginning to accumulate on his employment record: ignoring orders, failing to complete paperwork.
In May 1989, Davis was transferred to the Fifth District, known as the Bloody Fifth. Violence was rising as gang recruitment and drug use proliferated in the district’s public housing, including the Desire Development. One criminal group did business out of a black pickup emblazoned with the word “Homicide” in gold lettering.
On July 19, 1991, while Davis was chasing three armed suspects, a bullet shattered the windshield of his cruiser, causing him to lose control of the vehicle. He spun into a fence, then burst out of the car with his gun raised and collared one of the suspects. A moment later, a gun fired and Davis crumpled, groaning from a gut shot. The suspect he’d grabbed tried to shake free, but Davis managed to pin him down until backup arrived, all while blood flooded the front of his uniform.
Davis received a medal for sustaining injury in the line of duty, and after three months of recovery he rejoined the force. His return was far from triumphant. He cycled through a succession of partners. He had an alcohol problem. He was accused of brutality, physical intimidation, and stealing from the department. Once, when he was stopped for driving on the shoulder of a road, Davis threatened to beat up the officer who’d pulled him over. In 1992, he was suspended from work for 51 days on battery charges after he assaulted a woman with his flashlight, leaving her with a head wound and two black eyes. According to Davis, she had criticized and hit him as he made a drug arrest outside her house.
Attorney Carol A. Kolinchak, who later represented Davis, would argue that no one could have emerged from her client’s tribulations as a cop unaffected. “It’s well documented. It’s in [the] literature, it’s been published by experts who have studied law enforcement,” Kolinchak said in court. “The symptoms are common and they’re universal: stress, irritability, aggression, depression, alcohol, substance abuse, and increases in citizen complaints.”
At some point, Davis’s behavior became devious. His cousins Little June and Charles Butan dealt drugs in New Orleans, and they began funneling cash to Davis for accompanying them as they transported their product. He came to these jobs armed and in his NOPD uniform. “I’m sure not the police no more,” Davis once told a girlfriend. “They lost me a long fucking time ago. I’m on this bitch strictly to get what I can get, use my job to benefit me.”
Davis wasn’t the only New Orleans cop who crossed the line between enforcing the law and breaking it. The NOPD’s vice squad, for instance, was well on its way to being disbanded for thefts and shakedowns—the deputy in charge would eventually be convicted of snatching cash from the till during raids on strip joints and bars in the French Quarter. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Davis found a co-conspirator, another corrupt cop to be his partner in crime.
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