Fighting corruption is hard going in New Orleans

By Nick Carey

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Ask the man assigned to combat corruption and bureaucracy in New Orleans how the fight is going and he will tell you about his telephone problems.

"I started last September and they only switched my phone lines on two weeks ago," said Robert Cerasoli, New Orleans' first-ever Inspector General in a recent interview. "Everything has been a battle since, everything has been a fight."

Cerasoli was appointed by an independent ethics review board last year to root out graft -- in particular as billions of dollars in government aid have flowed into the city following Hurricane Katrina -- in a city that has a reputation for corruption spanning many decades.

Office computers were delivered last month but have not yet been hooked up to a secure network. Cerasoli, a former Inspector General for Massachusetts, said he has only 13 staff instead of the 30 he was promised by city hall.

"We really must get up to 37, but with the hurdles of civil service, the difficulty with getting people through the background checks, and just finding qualified applicants, the process has been much slower than expected," he said.

Cerasoli said either inefficiency or a desire to block his every move has lead to endless problems with the city's bureaucracy.

"This is Louisiana," Cerasoli said with a shrug.

Father Kevin Wildes, president of Loyola University in New Orleans and head of the ethics review board that appointed Cerasoli, said the obstacles the Inspector General has faced show New Orleans' administration is at worst terribly corrupt and at best woefully inefficient.

"Either way, something has to change," he said.

Even before Hurricane Katrina and the levee breaches in 2005 that devastated New Orleans, the city and Louisiana had earned a reputation as being fertile ground for corruption.

"Half of Louisiana is under water and the other half is under indictment," Billy Tauzin, who represented a Louisiana district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1980 to 2005, once famously said of his state.

"Over the course of many decades Louisiana and New Orleans have earned a reputation as being exceptionally tolerant of corruption," said Jim Letten, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana. "This fueled the demise of the local economy as it drove many companies away and kept them away."

Since his appointment by President George W. Bush in 2001, Letten has indicted 213 state and local officials and private individuals and, he said, convicted "almost 100 percent."

Those found guilty include former New Orleans city council member Oliver Thomas for bribery and kickbacks in 2007.

Letten says corruption has contributed to declining city education and health standards, rising crime, and a "brain drain" that saw the city's population decline to 450,000 in 2005 before Katrina from more than 600,000 in the 1960s.