I’d been trying for a month to hook up the ride-along through the sheriff office’s
public information guy, Glen. However, primarily due to other obligations on my behalf, I’d been unable to do this.
I bumped into Glen at the Mandeville City Council meeting on Thursday night and reminded him that this was absolutely, positively, beyond every conceivable shadow of a doubt - the weekend - I would finally do the ride-along and write a story for The Weekly News, the weekly paper I was managing editor for.
When I saw him on Thursday night, I told him I was ready to do the ride-along on
Saturday.
On Friday night, long after I’d left the office for the weekend, I noticed that the atmosphere seemed sort of heavy. Andrea and I went to bed late, but it was still only “threatening rain” when we finally fell asleep.
I was woken around five in the morning by a blast of thunder that rattled windows and shook me from a deep sleep. I sat there, awake, wondering what this was going to do for my boat trip.
By 10:30 a.m. I woke fully and got Alex and Andrea out the door to go see Nemo on Ice and paged Glen. He didn’t respond with his usual speed. But it was the weekend too, and he’d recently sent out a media alert informing the press of his right to take back his “Glen Time” (How creepy is that?), so I was surprised when he actually called me back around 20 minutes later.
“What’s up with the boat for today?” I asked him.
“You want to go out in this weather?” he asked me.
He strongly advised me against this because, for starters, there were certain liability issues to be concerned with in hauling a professional journalist, a news editor no less, out o sea in the middle of a raging storm.
He also said that with the exception of a few stubborn fishermen, there probably
wouldn’t be many people actually out on the water.
“It’s supposed to be sunny and warm tomorrow, do you just want to do it then?” he asked me.
I told him that was fine. There were a lot of things that needed to get done around the house. However, it was still early. I wanted to go out to the fishing pier. The weather outside was nasty and I wanted to be out in it, hopefully catching some fish.
What happened next was like something you’d seen in an old Biblical movie starring Charleton Heston.
The fishing pier, at Sunset Point, was dead save four a small group of men huddled under a covered section of the pier about 250 feet out over Lake Pontchartrain. I’d just walked up when one of the guys nodded at another guy standing next to me and said, “Your line, your line.”
The guy next to me quickly ran over and reeled in small croaker. Not a minute had passed by when his other pole jerked spasmodically. He checked it and, sure enough, there was another fish. He did this again around three times in quick succession.
After a few moments, I felt a fish tag my line, but when I reeled it in, the bait had been taken. Foiled again.
I re-baited and cast the line back out. I didn’t introduce myself to them and they didn’t introduce themselves, and that was cool.
I was listening to their idle chatter when the talk took on an ominous tone.
“Yep, Wildlife and Fisheries were out here checking licenses again this morning,” one of them said.
“I hear they’ve been coming every day breakfast, lunch and dinner” said another one of them, who was missing a few of his front teeth.
Suddenly the guy next to me exclaimed, “Holy shit!” He reeled in his line and had successfully managed to pull out two croakers on his double-rigged line.
The talk about the fishing license thing was making me nervous because I had no fishing license. Meanwhile, the maniac next to me was pulling them up like there was no tomorrow. Another guy added, “You gotta be stupid to fish off a public pier with no license anyway.”
Indeed. The fish-head boy had a point.
Weeks ago, when the pier celebrated its grand opening, it was announced that the Wildlife and Fisheries guys would be patrolling the pier regularly.
I suddenly began scanning the parking lot for dark green SUV’s that looked like
Wildlife and Fisheries trucks. Seeing none, I packed up my gear and rolled out, sorry to be leaving behind the good fishing, but not thrilled about now having to go out in the rain, to K-Mart, to buy a fishing license.
The rain got really hard again, though, so I went home.
My friend Kessler called me the night before I went out to meet the sheriff’s boat.
I met Kessler around seven years ago at a gun show in Slidell. I was a fledgling reporter at the Northshore Daily News and the timing of the gun show was directly in the wake of the school shooting in Columbine, Co.
Needless to say, it seemed as if gun shows and the folks who ran them were under
heavy fire (pun intended) from lawmakers, law enforcement and news analysts. It seemed to me that arms dealers weren’t really getting a fair shake, so I wanted to go down to a gun show and check out the scene for myself.
I’m big into scenes. I always have been.
Sometimes the “thing” isn’t as interesting as the culture and the origins of the “thing” itself. Weird sub-cultures, like Louisiana politicians, fishermen and off-track betting junkies, are my forte and this was what was prompting me, anyway, to want to get out in a boat, in the first place.
There are a tremendous amount of waterways in southern Louisiana, but my primary area of focus was on the waterways on the western end of St. Tammany Parish; namely the Madisonville Harbor.
There’s a serious amount of wealth in western St. Tammany Parish. The city of Mandeville, which basically borders one end of the Tchefuncte River, is one of the most affluent municipalities in the entire southeast region of the state.
Most of these folks own boats- big ones, which they keep anchored at either the Beau Chene marina, off of Louisiana Highway 22 or at Marina Del Mar, which lies at the foot of the Madisonville Harbor Bridge. Most of these folks also seem to like a good time and there are always stories of wild goings on that take place along the river.
Apparently mild mannered folks, doctors and lawyers during the weekdays, turned into sloppy, crazed drunks and drug fiends on the weekend, as they hit the waterways where the mouth of the Tchefuncte River meets Lake Pontchartrain. Tales of excess, parties and other tomfoolery were too rampant not to at least have a few grains of truth and wanted badly to get out there ad check out the scene.
River Rats, a bar near the end of Lake Road in Madisonville, is a favorite hangout for a lot of folks. The rear of the place has docks, and people spend entire weekends shuttling back and forth between the back dock at the bar and a sand-bar (That looks more like a small island) on the other side of the river.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
I was talking about Kessler. Most of the folks I met that day at the gun show were a little paranoid about talking to a newspaper man, and far be it for me to make edgy people with guns even more nervous.
Kessler wasn’t like this though. He had a “kill’em all, let God sort them out” attitude and mentality that I found easy to deal with. Kessler liked to talk.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” he said to me as I walked up to his booth and shook hands with him. “I can teach you 1,001 ways to kill a man and 5,000 ways to make it look like an accident.”
He said this with a sly smirk and I wasn’t sure whether to take him seriously or not.
“I can also teach you how to bring a person to their knees by using just your thumb and your index finger,” he added, chuckling. “Don’t trust any of these other freaks
here. They’re all a bunch of 2nd Amendment faggots and gun rights wannabe’s. Not one of them have ever been there.”
I didn’t ask him where there was, but had the idea he’d seen some sort of heavy action somewhere. He told me he was an arms dealer, but that he also had an interest in St. Tammany Parish for some possible real estate development endeavors of his.
I kept in touch with him over the years, usually when he came to town to check on his investments.
He was in a heavy, brooding mood when he called me Saturday night.
“You know what those little serrated edges are for on the back of a Rambo knife?” he asked me when I answered the phone.
There was no hi, no greeting, just this weird question.
“Scaling fish,” I said, venturing s guess.
Kessler let loose with a wet, slapping fart noise and said, “Wrong answer. Do you want to know what they’re for?”
“Even if I didn’t, you’d tell me anyway Kessler,” I said.
“You’re right on that chief,” he said. “They’re for snagging the entrails during a gut jab. You thrust the knife up and in and then twist it round and round, just like you do with a fork in pasta, and then you just yank outward. The serrated edges help the entrails catch on the knife. The result is practically total disembowelment with not so much as a single stab wound. It’s quick and efficient. It can get messy though.”
“That’s the most disgusting and disturbing thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” I told him, which only made him laugh.
“These are disturbing times chief,” he told me. “It’s a dangerous time to be alive. I don’t know how you do it; raise a family in this day and age. I couldn’t do it. I’m too high strung for that sort of shit.”
“It’s not easy,” I said. “The shit kids have to worry about today are things we didn’t even think about when I was a kid.”
He agreed.
“Yeah,” he said. “The worst thing that happened when I was a kid was that you might get your ass beat. And the worst weapon anybody ever brandished was a baseball bat. Nowadays, they have to worry about some mope bringing a shotgun to school and mowing down the entire faculty and staff. And don’t get me started about airport security.”
“Don’t get me started about airport security,” I said to him. “No lighters, no nail clippers and they can just rip your bag open and detain you for no apparent reason - all in the name of U.S. security.”
“You’re not going to whine about your Fourth Amendment rights are you?” he asked
“Well, yes,” I replied. “As a matter of fact I am.”
“Be careful with your wording their chief,” he said to me, laughing. “Langley is only a phone call away. I have them on speed dial. I’d hate to have to report you as a dissident, subversive and a pervert.”
Despite his sullen tone, he laughed softly at this in a creepy voice.
“No. I was just going to say is that it all boils down to the loss of our rights, all in the name of national security,” I said. “It’s going to become worse than McArthy-ism.”
“Going to become?” he asked. “It already is. Terrorists are still boarding planes, still slipping on, while airport security is messing around with dopes like you.”
“No need to get nasty about,” I told him.
“That’s the war on terror for you bubba,” Kessler said. “The fact of the matter is, a trained assassin or professional mercenaries could overtake a plane using nothing but their hands as weapons. Terrorists, at best are just cheap thugs. Besides, any of them worth their gram in salt are probably on U.S. soil and have been since well before 9-11.”
The conversation tapered off and I asked him why he was calling.
“I’m going to be in town here shortly,” he said. “What do you have cooking?”
“I’m going out on the river with the boat cops tomorrow,” I told him.
“Are you sure that’s the wisest thing to do,” he said. “I mean for a man with your tastes.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s not like I’m going to meet them at the pier with an ice chest of beer in one hand and a bong in the other.”
“What if they have the K-9’s with them?” he asked.
“I’ll just medicate myself before I go,” I said.
“What sort of story are you working on?” he asked me. “Anything that might excite an old geezer like me?’
“Boater safety story,” I said. “There might be something more to it than that though.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“Out of control rich people with big boats and coke whores,” I said. “There may also be a little white slavery, voodoo and pirates involved. I’m not sure what I’ll really find until I get out there. I think there’s definitely a sub-culture out there though and I want to infiltrate.”
“You’re going to infiltrate by pulling up to them in a cop boat?” he said with a hearty chuckle. “The coke will be flushed and the girls will be back in their Sunday School dresses before the cops even get within 20 feet of their yachts.”
“This is more like recon work,” I told him. “I have to pull a story out of it, so that will be on boater safety for the newspaper. But, like I said, I have a feeling there is more to it than that.”
“Hmm, recon only you said right,” Kessler said, mulling it over in his head.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“I think it’s fucking ingenious,” he said. “People may keep an eye on cops, to make sure where they’re at, but very seldom do they ever make eye contact when they get up close to one. I still think you’re going to need a consultant on this thing before it’s over though; probably a massive cash infusion too. It’s kind of hard to talk shop with people when you’re ordering draft beer and they’re ordering Long Island iced teas and boat drinks.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“You have to run with the big dogs if you wanna get the fleas. You won’t even get close unless you’re throwing cash around like they are,” he said. “You’ll stick out like a turd in the punch bowl if you sit around, rationing out dollar bills for cheap beer. You have to deal with these people on their own terms.”
He was right, of course, but I had no buyers for anything beyond what I was going to write for the newspaper.
“Don’t worry about that,” Kessler told me. “I have a friend in the publishing business, who will probably buy the story. I can probably even get a little advance money out of her too. I have some photographs of her. Well never mind that. You’ll have to forgive me my friend. I am suffering from a broken heart.”
This threw me.
I hadn’t known Kessler to ever be much of a ladies man. He told me he was married once, in another life, but that his young bride had been killed in an explosion in Danang. In his line of work, he often told me, there just wasn’t enough time or liability for a family.
To suddenly hear him, the man who only moments ago was telling me how to disembowel someone with my Rambo knife, suddenly start moaning about heartache made me feel ashamed and almost violated in some weird way.
“Anything serious?” I asked.
“You don’t worry about these things,” he finally said, seeming to snap out of his reverie. “I’ll see to the expenses. You just follow your instincts. You have better instincts than most people your age do and a lot better than the entire combined staff at CNN and Fox News put together.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Call me when you get to town.”
“Will do chief,” he said, and hung up the phone.
