"Through most of his career, Cannatella got along with the Indians—the Wild Magnolias, the Geronimo Hunters, Fi-Yi-Yi, the Wild Tchoupitoulas, and others. These tribes of working-class African-American men, as formal in their rituals as Masons or Elks, honor the Native Americans who took in escaped slaves. They compete to create the most lavish faux-Indian costumes and the most outrageous songs and dances. In the early years of Mardi Gras, blacks were banned from the main parades, and “masking Indian,” as it’s called, was a ruse for inclusion. The Indians eventually began participating in a second annual parade as well, on St. Joseph’s Night, an Italian-American holiday celebrated on March 19th. Participants whoop through the streets in beaded, primary-colored, threedimensional polyester-fleece costumes, topped by four-foot-wide headdresses of hot-pink or chromium-yellow fake feathers, shot through with rhinestones and multicolored glass jewels. One place they traditionally gather is A. L. Davis Park, in a rough Sixth District neighborhood not far from where Tim Bruneau found the dead woman.
During his first two years as Sixth District commander, Cannatella continued his predecessor’s practice of giving the Indians free police protection on St. Joseph’s Night, though he regularly charged an uptown Irish club thousands of dollars for police services at its annual parades. “Everybody knows Indians don’t do permits,” he told me in October. “There’s a heritage issue here. They’re always drunk, and selling alcohol on the street, and for years everybody looked the other way. But if you try to stop it you’ll have a riot.” In 2005, though, Cannatella allowed his police pride to get the better of him. He made no plans for extra crowd control on St. Joseph’s Night, because, he said, nobody from the Indians called to let him know they would be gathering. The Indians, he insisted, should come to him. “It’s incumbent upon them to do that,” he said, defiantly thrusting out his chin. “I got no letter, no call. How do I know they’re not having it on the eighteenth, or the twentieth?”
Cannatella was at home on March 19th, packing for his first vacation in five years, when a neighborhood resident called to say the park was filling with drunken Indians, one of whom was carrying a shotgun decorated with feathers like a spear. Cannatella radioed the station, then drove to the park. His officers—some only a couple of years out of high school—were using their sirens and loudspeakers to push the Indians out of the street and into the park. They roughed up several people and arrested one. “Did they say dumb, vulgar things?” Cannatella said. “Probably. I wish they hadn’t.”
Community outrage was heated, and refused to subside. Eventually, the city council scheduled a “reconciliation” session, for June 27th. Cannatella, in his white dress-uniform shirt, sat up front, facing the council. A full house of neighborhood activists, reporters, and
the chiefs of the tribes sat behind him. The first chief to speak was the eighty-two-year-old Chief of Chiefs, Allison (Tootie) Montana, the most celebrated craftsman of Indian costumes. Montana walked slowly to the microphone and began recounting forty years of N.O.P.D. mistreatment of Indians. Several minutes into his speech, he coughed once, collapsed to the floor, and stopped breathing. As the room exploded in shouting, Cannatella and another officer performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but Montana was dead. To the Indians, it was as if the Chief of Chiefs had fallen in battle.
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060109fa_fact(as we used to say, only in New Orleans...)
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