The Evil Men Do

Not Jordo. Please. (Although I did have a dream recently and he was a real jerk in it but he seems to think that he shouldn't be responsible for the things he does in my dreams. What kind of logic is that?)

I'm talking about the men (and women) who take advantage of people while they're down. The people who flocked to New Orleans in the aftermath of the storm with the soul purpose of benefitting from the misery of others.

People from outside the city will ask me, "What's wrong with the people down there? Why don't they have their lives together yet?" And there are a million answers I can give: federal aid that isn't yet; insurance money that may never be; the incredible, often paralyzing, stress of losing everything, possibly including your job or a loved one; the shortage of construction workers and contractors in the city.

Or, at the least, reliable contractors. The group leader of the organization I was working with this week told me there are hundreds, if not thousands, of homeowners who have found themselves robbed by the people who were being paid to help them.

Now meet Miss Dorothy, the reason for this post.

I helped gut Miss Dorothy's Gentilly home this week. No big. I gut houses all the time. Miss Dorothy's story was sad, but at this point, sad is almost standard. She's in her 80s, born and raised in New Orleans, a mother and grandmother with one true apple of her eye, grandson Paul, in his 30s, who lived on the other side of the shotgun double she bought about a dozen years ago. Before the storm, Miss D was active and mostly healthy and worked at a local nursing home as a "senior helping seniors." She evacuated with them. For a few days, they bounced around Louisiana, at one point staying in a school that partially collapsed during the storm. She didn't have a cell phone and she didn't have all of her children's cell phone numbers. In fact, she was so busy taking care of others that she didn't even realize what had happened in New Orleans until someone told her about it at one of the shelters.

"I said, 'You lying! New Orleans?' and he said, 'You're never going home again," Miss Dorothy told me and the other volunteers as we stood on the street outside her home this week. She was neatly dressed in black pants and a black and white button-down shirt, with silver earrings. gold rings and a gold and silver watch. She leaned on a cane while she spoke until Paul, her grandson, found her a battered lawn chair. "I went to watch the television and I couldn't believe what I was seeing."

She got choked up while she was talking, especially when she described how, for days, she didn't know if her children and grandchildren were alive and dead. It was more than a month before she was finally able to speak to Paul on the phone. She bounched around the country, spending months with nieces in California, before returning to her son's home in Louisiana. She was weaker, sicker than she'd been before the storm and unable to be a "senior helping seniors" any longer, but she was determined to be home again. She had flood insurance. She thought she could rebuild.

She hired a contractor her son had met. He was licensed AND he was a minister in his chuch back in Alabama. He seemed godly and kind.

So she paid him more than $44,000.

It was only later -- after he'd left town, the job about 3/4 of the way done -- that she realized she'd been taken. The work was beyond shoddy: It would have been dangerous for her to live in that house. As we ripped down the sheetrock, we found another layer of mold-covered plaster attached to slats of mold- and sometimes termit-shredded wood.

Miss Dorothy went to Alabama, to the contractor's church, to ask for her money back. She met his wife, his children, and he looked her in the eyes and told her he was sorry if she was unsatisfied but he had no money to refund her and he had filed for bankruptcy. She described sitting in the church, watching this man at the front, with everyone looking at him with respect. And she knew what he really was.

Paul stood next to his grandmother's chair while she spoke. He smiled at her, filled in some details, brought her some water. But Paul, so amiable with us and gentle with his grandmother, got more serious when he and I spoke privately during lunch. I told him I'd had problems with an unscrupulous contractor, too. (Not you, Mike Armstrong, but if you are reading this, that means you are not at my house fixing my moldy ceiling/roof, which could mean a future hostile post about you. You have been warned.) The loss of money was upsetting, I told him, but what was worse was how stupid I felt, gullible, used.

Paul said he understood. His face darkened and grew more tense as he spoke, "I don't know what we're going to do if we can't get that money back. This is going to kill her. The storm was bad but this is going to kill her. And if something happens to my grandma ... she's my heart. I don't know what I'm going to do without her. But I know I'll do something. Nobody's going to get away with this."

I said, "No jury would convict you. Call me if you get in trouble. I know some defense attorneys."