End of an era....

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee dies

Posted by The Times-Picayune October 01, 2007 11:40AM

 

By Bill Walsh and Stephanie Grace

Staff writers

 

Harry Lee, Jefferson Parish's irrepressible sheriff since 1980 and one of the most famous politicians in Louisiana history, died Monday at Ochsner Medical Center after a five-month battle with leukemia. He was 75.

 

 

Mr. Lee had returned five days earlier from M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and seemed to be faring well until Sunday, when he was rushed to the Jefferson Highway hospital with labored breathing. Within 24 hours, the state's most populous parish lost the only sheriff it had known for a generation.

 

"His passing was peaceful, with much love," said Chief Deputy Newell Normand, who was sworn in as sheriff Monday afternoon.

 

Mr. Lee was the second longest-serving sheriff in Jefferson Parish history, after Frank Clancy, whose 1928-56 tenure he would have surpassed in April. His death comes three weeks before he hoped to win an eighth term in office. He had signed up to run in the Oct. 20 election against Harahan Police Chief Peter Dale and Harvey contractor Julio Castillo.

 

In keeping with state law, the clerk of court moved the election to Nov. 17 and announced that the qualifying period for candidates would reopen today, Wednesday and Thursday.

 

'I tell it like it is'

 

Despite his ill health, Mr. Lee had been the heavy favorite to win re-election this year. Indeed, during the past 27 years he was re-elected regularly by huge margins even as he managed to become embroiled in controversy.

 

Defying every notion of political good sense, he unabashedly -- and often indelicately -- took stands considered taboo by most politicians. His shoot-from-the-hip style often made his closest advisers cringe even as it endeared him to many voters.

 

"I think people like me because I do a good job and because I tell it like it is," he once said. "If you ask me something, I'll give you an answer, straight up. People may not like it, but I'm not going to sugarcoat it."

 

One of Mr. Lee's most famous assaults on political sensibilities came in 1986 when, amid a suburban crime spree, he ordered his deputies to stop black men for no reason other than driving "rinky-dink cars" in predominantly white neighborhoods. The order, later rescinded, prompted calls for his immediate resignation and landed him in the national news.

 

"The sky was falling in," said Mr. Lee, admittedly shaken by the criticism. "I almost resigned." Years later, he said he really didn't understand what all the fuss was about and blamed the news media for blowing his order -- which he called "good police practice" -- out of proportion.

 

His political start

 

The son of Chinese immigrants, Mr. Lee was born in the back room of his family's laundry on Carondelet Street in New Orleans in 1932. When they were old enough, he and his siblings, eventually numbering eight, were given jobs in the laundry and later in the family's restaurants, including the House of Lee in Metairie.

 

He got a firsthand taste of politics early, at age 12, when he was elected president of the newly formed student body government at Shaw Elementary School. Each year after that, he was elected to class office. During his senior year at Francis T. Nicholls High School, now Frederick Douglass Senior High School, he was president of both his senior class and the student body, a school first.

 

Mr. Lee received a bachelor's degree in geology from Louisiana State University, did a short stint in the Air Force in Texas and married Lai Lee, then returned to Louisiana in 1959. That was the year that the family began construction on the House of Lee, where Mr. Lee would meet the man who became his political mentor, U.S. Rep. Hale Boggs, D-La.

 

He learned the art of politics from Boggs and Boggs' widow, Lindy, who succeeded her husband in Congress. For six years he worked as Hale Boggs' driver and confidant when the congressman was home in Louisiana.

 

Soon, Mr. Lee decided that public service was the career for him and saw law school as an entree. He took classes at Loyola University School of Law while working 12-hour days at the family's restaurant.

 

After law school, Mr. Lee set up a small practice with classmate Marion Edwards, now an appellate judge. With Boggs' help, Mr. Lee was appointed the first magistrate for the U.S. District Court in New Orleans, and in 1976 he became chief attorney for Jefferson Parish.

 

Four years later, with Sheriff Al Cronvich embroiled in a wire-tapping scandal, Mr. Lee saw a chance to plunge into electoral politics. Assailing the corruption and inefficiency of the Sheriff's Office, he ran as a reform candidate, led the five-candidate primary and took 57 percent of the runoff vote to defeat Cronvich.

 

'I don't give a ######'

 

He immediately gave deputies raises and poured money into the Sheriff's Office, computerizing it for the first time. He also began to build a political machine that would become one of the largest in southern Louisiana, although his record of helping others get elected was spotty.

 

By the late 1980s, as fear of crime became the No. 1 concern of Jefferson Parish residents, Mr. Lee sensed his continued political fortunes would have less to do with reforming the Sheriff's Office than with making his suburban constituents feel safe from the big city ills. As recently as last month, he touted the safety of predominantly white Jefferson Parish -- and the work of his office -- by contrasting it with headline-grabbing violence in majority-black New Orleans.

 

Once Mr. Lee was blamed for trying to separate the races by ordering that a barricade be erected on a street at the parish line dividing majority-black New Orleans and majority-white East Jefferson. Mr. Lee turned the story -- though false -- into political capital. "Depending on who I'm talking to," he said, "I either take credit for the barricade or I don't."

 

On another occasion, he defended his decision to yank deputies out of an all-black neighborhood in Avondale after residents complained about police brutality. And when an 8-year-old girl Harvey girl who was raped in March 1998 initially described two black men as her attackers, Mr. Lee was criticized for declaring every black man in the subdivision a suspect.

 

He apologized for any offense but insisted the practice was not racist. In fact, friends said the sheriff was so shaken by the vicious attack on the girl, who was black, that he pulled out all the stops to solve the case. "I'm going to catch that "friend", and when I catch him, he is going to be black," he said. "I just don't give a ###### what people think of me anymore. If that was their daughter and we weren't doing that, they would be on our ######."

 

Several days later, Mr. Lee personally arrested the girl's stepfather in the . In 2003, a jury sentenced the stepfather to death.

 

While he enjoyed the political return that his loaded comments generated, Mr. Lee was unhappy with the image that they created. He viewed himself as a progressive Democrat, simply more honest than the "empty-headed" liberals in his party.

 

To combat his image as a racist, he once drew up a lengthy list of charitable contributions he made to black people, including a family burned out of their home and a girl with leukemia. "You're not hurting me when you print those things," he once told a reporter. "You're making me a hero. But I don't want to be that kind of a hero."

 

'King of the mountain'

 

Despite what would be considered missteps for other politicians, Mr. Lee's popularity grew from the time he took office, particularly among white people. In 1994, a survey for The Times-Picayune showed that an extraordinary 84 percent of Jefferson Parish residents had a favorable impression of the sheriff, including 91 percent of white people.

 

The same poll showed that, while almost nine out of 10 people thought he "tells it like it is," six of 10 thought he should sometimes keep his mouth shut. Numbers such as that, along with his dual role as top law enforcement officer and chief tax collector, made Mr. Lee stand out even in a state known for its political kingfishes, said Ed Renwick of Loyola University's Institute of Politics.

 

"There are very few people that are as powerful as he was within his domain," Renwick said. "He seemed to be sort of king of the mountain."

 

His widespread popularity gave Mr. Lee some wiggle room in the face of criticism about his management of the Sheriff's Office. A 1993 study by one government watchdog group lambasted his handling of the Sheriff's Office then-$60 million budget but stirred nary a ripple of public criticism. The same group gave him higher marks in a follow-up study a few years later.

 

Mr. Lee understood what was important to Jefferson voters. Until Hurricane Katrina depleted the Sheriff's Office ranks, he made sure a deputy showed up at a resident's house within five minutes of an emergency call, and he gave deputies take-home cruisers ensuring that marked cars were always visible around the parish.

 

Indeed, the most serious political scare of his career had everything to do with crime and nothing to do with race, his fiscal management or his penchant for controversial remarks. It came in 1985, when voters learned that a convicted rapist named Brian Busby was allowed to wander Jefferson Parish unsupervised during the day, instead of being locked up in state prison.

 

Mr. Lee had granted Busby special privileges as a favor to a Parish Council member. Ten days after the disclosure, Busby was sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Mr. Lee's approval rating plunged.

 

A year later, however, after a series of Metairie robberies in which white shoppers were followed to their homes and held up at gunpoint in their driveways by African-American men, Mr. Lee made the statement that either almost ended or saved his career, depending on who judges it. "If there are some young blacks driving a car late at night in a predominantly white neighborhood, they will be stopped. .¤.¤. There's a pretty good chance they're up to no good. It's obvious two young blacks driving a rinky-dink car in a predominantly white neighborhood -- I'm not talking about on the main thoroughfare, but if they're on one of the side streets and they're cruising around -- they'll be stopped."

 

Outrage was immediate, and Mr. Lee quickly canceled the order and apologized as the NAACP called for his resignation. But there are those who think the statement reversed Mr. Lee's slide in popularity in what at the time was an overwhelmingly white parish. When he ran for his third term the next year, Mr. Lee failed to win the primary, but he defeated Art Lentini in the runoff with 54 percent of the vote. Never again would he be forced into a runoff.

 

Walk the walk

 

Early on in his administration, the sheriff realized that Jefferson voters wanted a lawman who didn't just talk tough, but looked tough, also. At times he appeared in public in full dress uniform with gold stars on the shoulders or wore his Sheriff's Office bomber jacket while riding with his deputies on early morning drug raids. At public events, he often sported a Stetson and custom-made cowboy boots with the Sheriff's Office emblem sewn into the front.

 

During his tenure, Mr. Lee spent heavily on computer services and modernized the Sheriff's Office. Flush with money to pay deputies overtime, his office usually boasted an impressive homicide solve rate of more than 90 percent, and he oversaw an aggressive strategy of tracking down and prosecuting career criminals.

 

He used his ample resources to push the boundaries of his job description. In late 1996, for example, he temporarily dispatched his own deputies into New Orleans after several particularly brutal, high-profile murders set the city on edge. While he took some heat for the move, Mr. Lee defended it as both good for neighboring Jefferson Parish and simply the right thing to do.

 

He also stepped in and took over when other agencies investigating a string of serial killings, most not even within his jurisdiction, dropped out of a regional task force, and he stayed with it when one of his own investigators was accused of destroying evidence. Rather than fold, Mr. Lee put his chief of detectives on the task force. He eventually fired two investigators on the case, one for destroying evidence and another for not promptly reporting the destruction. The murder suspect, Russell Ellwood, once implicated in as many as 15 homicides, was convicted of one.

 

Hunting nutria

 

Mr. Lee also put his deputies to work in some unconventional ways. One of the strangest started out as what many considered a joke.

 

The Parish Council was in the midst of a long-running and rancorous debate in 1995 over how to stem the rapidly growing nutria population, which threatened to undermine the parish's all-important drainage network, when Mr. Lee sauntered to the microphone at a council meeting and appeared to grab an idea out of thin air.

 

"I could do it for $50," he told the council. "I could buy a lot of .22 (bullets) for $50, and my SWAT team could shoot them."

 

But Mr. Lee was dead serious, and lo and behold, the sharpshooters' late-night rides alongside drainage canals put a dent in the infestation, and drew national and international press in the process.

 

An avid hunter whose offices were well-stocked with trophies, Mr. Lee himself sometimes rendezvoused with deputies at a Metairie donut shop and got in a little target practice on the nutria. He also poked fun at his trigger-happy image by appearing in a New Orleans Zephyrs television commercial pretending to go gunning for Boudreaux, the team's nutria mascot.

 

Mr. Lee was equally aggressive about pursuing his political agenda, and he was willing to take advantage of every sliver of authority the state Constitution bestowed on him.

 

In 1993, anticipating a low turnout for his sales tax referendum, Mr. Lee and his inner circle hatched an elaborate strategy to get out the vote by requiring each of his 1,300 deputies to deliver 20 sympathetic voters to the polls. The deliveries could be made in police cars, Mr. Lee decided. The tax passed easily.

 

Deeply loyal to his own political friends, Mr. Lee demanded loyalty from his employees. He deftly tip-toed around election laws while persuading deputies to campaign for him. The tactics were subtle, but the message was clear.

 

"Any guy that doesn't help out shouldn't expect advancement in the department," he said. "The Sheriff's Office is very unique. They serve at my pleasure, and pleasure means pleasing me."

 

Mr. Lee once boasted that a poll showed he was the most popular politician in metropolitan New Orleans, and candidates routinely sought his endorsement. In 1995, after Edwin Edwards, a close friend and hunting buddy, announced he would not seek another term as governor, Mr. Lee himself briefly ran for the state's top post. But in the end, he was reluctant to give up a job that gave him enormous latitude in raising and spending money and hiring and firing deputies. He boasted that he could legally spend public funds to buy his personal secretary a Mercedes. "Why would I want to be governor when I can be king?" Mr. Lee asked.

 

Although never elected in any district larger than a single parish, his reputation was broad enough that in 2001 he was inducted into the Louisiana Political Hall of Fame. Such was his popularity with the public that he could occasionally keep company with convicted felons yet never suffer politically. Among his questionable associates were organized crime figures Carlos Marcello and Frank Caracci; Al Payne Sr., a former warden whom Mr. Lee rehired despite a conviction for protecting a bookmaking operation; and Robert Guidry, who pleaded guilty to an extortion conspiracy and testified that he paid off former Gov. Edwin Edwards for the license to open the Treasure Chest casino.

 

Within the Sheriff's Office itself, five of Mr. Lee's deputies admitted to crimes exposed in the federal government's Wrinkled Robe investigation of Jefferson Parish Courthouse corruption. Despite internal investigations, Mr. Lee's staff had failed to uncover the systematic bribery that the FBI found.

 

Mr. Lee himself was convicted of a misdemeanor in 1998 for unknowingly hunting mourning doves over a baited field in Pike County, Miss. "I am a victim of circumstances," Mr. Lee said afterwards. "I find no irony. I feel no remorse. This is just another day in the life of Harry Lee."

 

Couldn't transfer popularity

 

Mr. Lee's political success was driven by an impressive vote-getting and money-generating machine. His annual fais do do fundraiser drew more than 5,000 guests each paying $100 for a seat -- even in non-election years. He also invested in votes. He routinely dipped into his campaign coffers to give money to local charities and social organizations -- and he expected a return.

 

"Do you know how much I give to charity every year?" he asked. "I give to the church. I give to other things, and all of that helps me politically. Every time I do that, someone says, 'That was nice of him to do that,' and when the election rolls around, they remember that."

 

Yet for all his personal popularity, Mr. Lee's efforts to transfer support to hand-picked candidates and causes proved less successful. The candidates routinely fell flat at the polls, and Mr. Lee failed three times in the 1990s to persuade voters to raise taxes to expand the parish jail. Only after other parish officials put together a campaign to keep video poker legal in Jefferson, by pledging the gambling tax revenue to the jail expansion, did voters agree.

 

Renwick said Mr. Lee's endorsement record is just another example of how he defied conventional wisdom. Most politicians put their reputation on the line only if they think their cause is a winner, Renwick said, while Mr. Lee backed anyone and anything he felt like backing.

 

A nice guy

 

Despite his rough-hewn political style, most people -- even his political enemies -- thought of Mr. Lee as a genuinely nice guy. Just before he entered the hospital for chemotherapy treatment for leukemia in May, a group of his most persistent critics, seven black ministers affiliated with local churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, paid Mr. Lee a visit in his office to pray for his healing.

 

"When we were done," said Rev. Norwood Thompson, "there were tears in his eyes."

 

Long before that moment, Mr. Lee had attained the local celebrity status usually accorded to music and movie personalities. When he stepped foot into a schoolyard, children clamored around him screaming, "Harry Lee. That's Harry Lee!"

 

He was a fixture in Carnival parades, tossing plastic Sheriff's Office badges and cups from a float bearing his own larger-than-life image, a giant paper mache head that also briefly graced his campaign headquarters in the 1995 governor's race.

 

Mr. Lee, a voracious eater, even turned his weight in to an asset, although it was a painful handicap to him. He often joked about his considerable girth and once joined his fattest deputies in a (short-lived) weight-loss program. When a cartoon was published depicting him as a rotund lawman with Ultra-Slim Fast in his belt, Mr. Lee made copies and sponsored a "Color Fat Harry" contest for school children.

 

Simultaneously summing up Mr. Lee's appeal and his waistline, former University of New Orleans Chancellor Gregory O'Brien once considered naming the five most influential people in the New Orleans area and remarked, "Harry Lee would be three of them, and I'd be hard pressed to name the other two."

 

Mr. Lee weighed closer to 200 pounds when he took office in 1980. But he soon grew corpulent and, despite trying everything from Weight Watchers to hypnotism, never could slim down permanently. Finally in 2003, weighing about 375 pounds, he opted for gastric bypass surgery to reduce the size of his stomach. Within 10 months, he lost 90 pounds.

 

By this time he had already replaced both knees and both hips, all casualties of arthritis. Type 2 diabetes and hearing loss were other ailments, and his cancerous prostate gland was removed in January. He was diagnosed with leukemia in April and, as with almost all his medical maladies, used the occasion to try to educate the public on health, medical testing and early intervention. His health, he said, was the public's business.

 

The line between stage performers and Louisiana politicians has always been perilously thin, and not too far below the surface in Mr. Lee was a lounge singer crying to get out. On more than one occasion, he sang at a popular West Bank honky-tonk, Mud Bugs, and at the 1994 Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans, he took the stage for a duet with his friend, Willie Nelson. "I'd like to do what he does," Mr. Lee said once, referring to his famous friend. "I'd like to travel around and make people happy."

 

For one of his famous fais do dos, Mr. Lee handed out to all his guests a complimentary cassette tape featuring his own silky voice singing such tunes as "Wind Beneath My Wings" and his personal favorite, which one associate called the sheriff's theme song: "Welcome to My World."

 

Funeral arrangements were incomplete Monday.

 

Bill Walsh can be reached at bill.walsh@newhouse.com or (202) 383-7817. Stephanie Grace can be reached at sgrace@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3383.

All of the comments in the NOLA.com blog I copied are well-wishing.

Except one: one guy made the comment that Jefferson Parish will become the new New Orleans: all the thugs that he kept out for 20 years will be moving in.

-KIE