NOPD
08-25-2006, 03:15 AM
By Trymaine Lee
Staff writer
A month after Katrina drowned his hometown and traumatized his troops, then-New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass stood before a throng of media inside a downtown hotel, preparing to deliver his resignation.
By then his public gaffes and stirring, misinformed monologues of a city under siege, where killers ran amuck and rapists violated “babies,” had been debunked mostly as myth. Compass soon became a worldwide scapegoat for rumor-mongering that had possessed post-Katrina New Orleans.
Through a series of emotional flare-ups, he’d become a lamb who seemed to lead himself to slaughter. Images of his teary breakdowns would be forever seared into the city’s collective memory, in ways both inspiring and troubling.
The media in the hotel that day would cut him little slack, punishing him with his own words.
To the outside world, Compass came to symbolize the dysfunction and exaggeration of city officials, including Mayor Ray Nagin, who after the storm had little time or means to corroborate wild claims of lawlessness both men helped spread during those chaotic days, when all standard communications had failed.
The catastrophe, the relentless media, it all overwhelmed Compass, the hometown cop who vigorously scaled the ranks of the department to become chief.
A fog of tension hung in the room that September day, as Nagin strode confidently to a podium in a ballroom at the downtown Sheraton Hotel.
Compass stood behind him, flanked by a handful of deputy chiefs and NOPD commanders.
A smiling Nagin painted a portrait of a man leaving at the top of his game, quipping that Compass would go on to make a lot of money. He even requested the occasional Christmas card.
Although Compass affirmed Nagin’s ruse with his own measured words from the podium, his mannerisms told a different tale. His usual jovial, frat-boy-like exhuberance gave way to clenched teeth and wet eyes as he delivered a humble farewell.
“Since I was a little boy, my whole life, I wanted to be the superintendent of police,“ Compass said, his eyes welling. “In the life of every leader the time comes to reflect on his life, and I’m very, very thankful God gave me the wisdom and discernment to make tough decisions.”
Compass and Nagin, who equally became heroes and villains at different points during Katrina, split ways that day and never looked back.
But inside, Compass has been tormented by a truth he swallowed 11 months ago at that podium and hasn’t spoken publicly about since: In his view, Nagin pushed him out, straight up, in the middle of the darkest hour of his career and his department’s history. He believes his ouster is at least in part based on miscommunications and misunderstandings traded in the impersonal medium of e-mails.
Nagin’s account differs in the details, but he now confirms he asked the chief to step aside.
In an exclusive interview with the Times-Picayune, Compass recounted his rise through the ranks, his spectacular fall, and his renewed devotion to being a husband and father.
“I never saw my career ending like this,” Compass said over the rising din of the lunch-time crowd at Byblos, a Magazine Street restaurant. “It just wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
Mayor not pleased
The night before Compass’ impromptu resignation, he got an e-mail from Nagin on his Blackberry.
The chief held the oversized contraption in his hand that night and scrolled through several paragraphs before any of it made any sense. Each sentence burned slowly into the next.
“Myself as well as many others including people very close to you started to notice very erratic and overly emotional behavior from you...exploding on TV,” Nagin wrote.
Compass kept reading in disbelief.
“I ordered everyone not to talk to the press unless approved by myself or Sally Forman,” then Nagin’s spokeswoman, Nagin wrote. “Then I hear you on the Dr. Phil Show and in New York on the NFL show before the Saints game... This is not subtle, and deceit is very disappointing and hurtful... You need to start thinking about your future,” the mayor wrote.
Nagin told Compass he needed to come up with a 30- to 60-day “exit plan.”
After 27 years in the NOPD, Compass sat stunned, struggling to grasp the fact that his untimely departure had been ordered in a few hastily written words displayed on the tiny screen he held in his hand. Not face-to-face, man-to-man, or even on the phone, but in an e-mail.
Compass read on, increasingly incensed.
“Maybe this is a transition time while you are still on top,” the mayor wrote. He urged Compass to “go on the speaking circuit or run for criminal Sheriff.”
Finding his family
Compass wasn’t surprised by some of Nagin’s points. He knew at times he’d become wrought with emotion unbecoming his lofty rank.
But who could blame him?
He watched from a front row seat as his city descended into chaos, drowning with nothing to buoy it from a slow, watery death. His wife was 8 months pregnant and exiled in Denham Springs with his 3-year-old daughter. For three days, he said, he took to heart rumors that his 19-year-old daughter had been raped at the downtown hotel where she, his ex-wife and 24-year-old daughter had been holed-up during the storm.
And his soul ached over the suicide of Paul Accardo, one of his top public information officers. Worse, the rumor mill, the same one that had so consumed Compass, had given Accardo a shove over a psychological cliff: Someone told him that his wife had drowned in the deluge, Compass said.
Compass had seen Accardo’s eyes go blank in a thousand-yard stare, projecting the despair in his heart.
Compass told him to take a few days off, to gather himself. A half-hour later, Accardo sat in a squad car just outside of the city with a gun to his head. He squeezed the trigger.
News of the suicide crushed Compass, setting him adrift in a sea of grief and guilt. As a police chief, he knew he had to handle himself professionally, to maintain calm and confidence. But that would’ve gone against the core of his nature.
“Sometimes you have to give up your human side,” he said, recalling the incident recently. “But I think because I talked to Paul 30 minutes before he committed suicide, because I was the one who told him to take a break ... I blamed myself for giving him off and not keeping him with me.”
Like the presumed demise of Accardo’s wife, the reported rape of Compass’ daughter proved false. His girls were fine.
Tiffany Compass, 24, and her sister Kandice, 19, said they watched from a second story window at the Ritz Carlton hotel as their father, in their eyes a super-hero, came to the hotel looking for them.
For days, while trapped in the hotel, she heard the same wild reports of violence that her father had.
“We just cried and cried... We had no radio, no TV. I know how scared we were ... To know he was hearing the same stuff, and from policemen nonetheless, it must’ve been a thousand times worse,” Tiffany said.
When her father finally rescued them from the hotel, he arrived with a small army of police .
“It was like he came with the whole cavalry,” Tiffany Compass said. “My sister was screaming, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’... He just looked up and smiled and then like an entire SWAT team came rushing in for us.”
But even then, she could see the sadness in him.
“I saw in his face all that he had been through, and I could see the despair in those officers’ faces, the disbelief,” Tiffany Compass said.
The pain bubbled inside Eddie Compass, and poured from his eyes and tumbled from his lips in front of the cameras. And there were thousands of cameras, each hungry for the next wrenching shot of the city, its beleaguered residents, or those like Compass, shouldering the full weight of the tragedy.
Still, emotions and all, Compass said unapologetically that he left all of himself in the streets of New Orleans.
“I think I did the best that I could do under the circumstances,” he said. “There are many things that the public didn’t know I was dealing with at that time.”
Staff writer
A month after Katrina drowned his hometown and traumatized his troops, then-New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass stood before a throng of media inside a downtown hotel, preparing to deliver his resignation.
By then his public gaffes and stirring, misinformed monologues of a city under siege, where killers ran amuck and rapists violated “babies,” had been debunked mostly as myth. Compass soon became a worldwide scapegoat for rumor-mongering that had possessed post-Katrina New Orleans.
Through a series of emotional flare-ups, he’d become a lamb who seemed to lead himself to slaughter. Images of his teary breakdowns would be forever seared into the city’s collective memory, in ways both inspiring and troubling.
The media in the hotel that day would cut him little slack, punishing him with his own words.
To the outside world, Compass came to symbolize the dysfunction and exaggeration of city officials, including Mayor Ray Nagin, who after the storm had little time or means to corroborate wild claims of lawlessness both men helped spread during those chaotic days, when all standard communications had failed.
The catastrophe, the relentless media, it all overwhelmed Compass, the hometown cop who vigorously scaled the ranks of the department to become chief.
A fog of tension hung in the room that September day, as Nagin strode confidently to a podium in a ballroom at the downtown Sheraton Hotel.
Compass stood behind him, flanked by a handful of deputy chiefs and NOPD commanders.
A smiling Nagin painted a portrait of a man leaving at the top of his game, quipping that Compass would go on to make a lot of money. He even requested the occasional Christmas card.
Although Compass affirmed Nagin’s ruse with his own measured words from the podium, his mannerisms told a different tale. His usual jovial, frat-boy-like exhuberance gave way to clenched teeth and wet eyes as he delivered a humble farewell.
“Since I was a little boy, my whole life, I wanted to be the superintendent of police,“ Compass said, his eyes welling. “In the life of every leader the time comes to reflect on his life, and I’m very, very thankful God gave me the wisdom and discernment to make tough decisions.”
Compass and Nagin, who equally became heroes and villains at different points during Katrina, split ways that day and never looked back.
But inside, Compass has been tormented by a truth he swallowed 11 months ago at that podium and hasn’t spoken publicly about since: In his view, Nagin pushed him out, straight up, in the middle of the darkest hour of his career and his department’s history. He believes his ouster is at least in part based on miscommunications and misunderstandings traded in the impersonal medium of e-mails.
Nagin’s account differs in the details, but he now confirms he asked the chief to step aside.
In an exclusive interview with the Times-Picayune, Compass recounted his rise through the ranks, his spectacular fall, and his renewed devotion to being a husband and father.
“I never saw my career ending like this,” Compass said over the rising din of the lunch-time crowd at Byblos, a Magazine Street restaurant. “It just wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
Mayor not pleased
The night before Compass’ impromptu resignation, he got an e-mail from Nagin on his Blackberry.
The chief held the oversized contraption in his hand that night and scrolled through several paragraphs before any of it made any sense. Each sentence burned slowly into the next.
“Myself as well as many others including people very close to you started to notice very erratic and overly emotional behavior from you...exploding on TV,” Nagin wrote.
Compass kept reading in disbelief.
“I ordered everyone not to talk to the press unless approved by myself or Sally Forman,” then Nagin’s spokeswoman, Nagin wrote. “Then I hear you on the Dr. Phil Show and in New York on the NFL show before the Saints game... This is not subtle, and deceit is very disappointing and hurtful... You need to start thinking about your future,” the mayor wrote.
Nagin told Compass he needed to come up with a 30- to 60-day “exit plan.”
After 27 years in the NOPD, Compass sat stunned, struggling to grasp the fact that his untimely departure had been ordered in a few hastily written words displayed on the tiny screen he held in his hand. Not face-to-face, man-to-man, or even on the phone, but in an e-mail.
Compass read on, increasingly incensed.
“Maybe this is a transition time while you are still on top,” the mayor wrote. He urged Compass to “go on the speaking circuit or run for criminal Sheriff.”
Finding his family
Compass wasn’t surprised by some of Nagin’s points. He knew at times he’d become wrought with emotion unbecoming his lofty rank.
But who could blame him?
He watched from a front row seat as his city descended into chaos, drowning with nothing to buoy it from a slow, watery death. His wife was 8 months pregnant and exiled in Denham Springs with his 3-year-old daughter. For three days, he said, he took to heart rumors that his 19-year-old daughter had been raped at the downtown hotel where she, his ex-wife and 24-year-old daughter had been holed-up during the storm.
And his soul ached over the suicide of Paul Accardo, one of his top public information officers. Worse, the rumor mill, the same one that had so consumed Compass, had given Accardo a shove over a psychological cliff: Someone told him that his wife had drowned in the deluge, Compass said.
Compass had seen Accardo’s eyes go blank in a thousand-yard stare, projecting the despair in his heart.
Compass told him to take a few days off, to gather himself. A half-hour later, Accardo sat in a squad car just outside of the city with a gun to his head. He squeezed the trigger.
News of the suicide crushed Compass, setting him adrift in a sea of grief and guilt. As a police chief, he knew he had to handle himself professionally, to maintain calm and confidence. But that would’ve gone against the core of his nature.
“Sometimes you have to give up your human side,” he said, recalling the incident recently. “But I think because I talked to Paul 30 minutes before he committed suicide, because I was the one who told him to take a break ... I blamed myself for giving him off and not keeping him with me.”
Like the presumed demise of Accardo’s wife, the reported rape of Compass’ daughter proved false. His girls were fine.
Tiffany Compass, 24, and her sister Kandice, 19, said they watched from a second story window at the Ritz Carlton hotel as their father, in their eyes a super-hero, came to the hotel looking for them.
For days, while trapped in the hotel, she heard the same wild reports of violence that her father had.
“We just cried and cried... We had no radio, no TV. I know how scared we were ... To know he was hearing the same stuff, and from policemen nonetheless, it must’ve been a thousand times worse,” Tiffany said.
When her father finally rescued them from the hotel, he arrived with a small army of police .
“It was like he came with the whole cavalry,” Tiffany Compass said. “My sister was screaming, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’... He just looked up and smiled and then like an entire SWAT team came rushing in for us.”
But even then, she could see the sadness in him.
“I saw in his face all that he had been through, and I could see the despair in those officers’ faces, the disbelief,” Tiffany Compass said.
The pain bubbled inside Eddie Compass, and poured from his eyes and tumbled from his lips in front of the cameras. And there were thousands of cameras, each hungry for the next wrenching shot of the city, its beleaguered residents, or those like Compass, shouldering the full weight of the tragedy.
Still, emotions and all, Compass said unapologetically that he left all of himself in the streets of New Orleans.
“I think I did the best that I could do under the circumstances,” he said. “There are many things that the public didn’t know I was dealing with at that time.”