that was going to happen before it did,” Hill said.
Like O’Dwyer, Reiss was a product of old-money New Orleans, except Reiss was wealthier, better looking, and enjoyed a higher perch on the city’s social ladder. He was New Orleans royalty invited into the family business after earning his MBA at Tulane. A charming rapscallion with twinkly blue eyes and a well-earned reputation within his social set as a ladies’ man, Reiss had taken a bachelor pad in the French Quarter and seemed determined not to follow his father and his father’s father into the wholesale candy business that his great-grandfather had started a century earlier. “I was trying to drink and fuck myself to deathand doing a pretty good job of it,” Reiss said. “And my father asked me to leave.”
Reiss and a fishing buddy started a business selling fire-suppression equipment to offshore oil rigs and shipbuilders in the area. Eventually they got into the electronics business, selling specialized automation and control systems to large businesses. A large multinational bought their company, and then Reiss, who had stayed on as a division president after the sale, bought back the company with a loan from the Whitney Bank, which had been taking care of the Uptown elite since his great-grandfather’s time. “That’s when I made the bulk of my fortune,” Reiss said. Reiss had elected to ride out the storm at a second home he owned in Aspen, Colorado. A week after Katrina, he hired a helicopter to fly him into the city.
Reiss was in his mid-sixties when Katrina hit. Yet his friends all said it: he was the same Jimmy they knew growing up, naughty and outspoken, the man at the cocktail party who made people laugh by uttering what decorum dictated be kept to oneself. But this Jimmy owned a big house on Audubon Place and was one of the best connected people in New Orleans. Sally Forman was a young mom when she volunteered for an organization Reiss cochaired called Dollars for Scholars. Forman watched with awe at Reiss’s gift for convincing the wealthy of Uptown to write big checks for their cause. Reiss sat on the Tulane Board of Trustees and ran the Business Council, an organization made up of most of the city’s top CEOs. He was even nominally a member of the Nagin administration as the chairman of the city’s Regional Transit Authority, an agency with thirteen hundred employees and a $110 million budget.
Reiss and Nagin had met late on the Friday night before the storm. In retrospect, they should have been talking about running more buses that weekend to shuttle people out of town, but they stuck to the agenda: the city’s crime problem. Only Camden, New Jersey, had a higher homicide rate than New Orleans in 2004. Property crimes had soared under Nagin. Yet rather than offer any solutions, Reiss said, the mayor vented about the city’s substandard schools and an unemployment rate among black men that hovered around 50 percent. Their meeting broke up at around 8:00 p.m.
Reiss started phoning friends and other members of the Business Council in the days after Katrina. The city’s crime rate, the lousy schools,the unemployment, and maybe even the mayor’s lackadaisical attitude toward these social ills were a topic of almost every conversation. By the time Cooper phoned, Reiss figured he had probably spoken to forty business leaders. They were all fed up, Reiss told Cooper. New Orleans would need to be a city with fewer poor people and better-run services if people such as himself were going to participate in the recovery efforts.
“Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically,” Reiss said. “I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.”
In time, Hill would dub it the “exclusionist movement”—the efforts by some within the white community to prevent the city’s poor
Like O’Dwyer, Reiss was a product of old-money New Orleans, except Reiss was wealthier, better looking, and enjoyed a higher perch on the city’s social ladder. He was New Orleans royalty invited into the family business after earning his MBA at Tulane. A charming rapscallion with twinkly blue eyes and a well-earned reputation within his social set as a ladies’ man, Reiss had taken a bachelor pad in the French Quarter and seemed determined not to follow his father and his father’s father into the wholesale candy business that his great-grandfather had started a century earlier. “I was trying to drink and fuck myself to deathand doing a pretty good job of it,” Reiss said. “And my father asked me to leave.”
Reiss and a fishing buddy started a business selling fire-suppression equipment to offshore oil rigs and shipbuilders in the area. Eventually they got into the electronics business, selling specialized automation and control systems to large businesses. A large multinational bought their company, and then Reiss, who had stayed on as a division president after the sale, bought back the company with a loan from the Whitney Bank, which had been taking care of the Uptown elite since his great-grandfather’s time. “That’s when I made the bulk of my fortune,” Reiss said. Reiss had elected to ride out the storm at a second home he owned in Aspen, Colorado. A week after Katrina, he hired a helicopter to fly him into the city.
Reiss was in his mid-sixties when Katrina hit. Yet his friends all said it: he was the same Jimmy they knew growing up, naughty and outspoken, the man at the cocktail party who made people laugh by uttering what decorum dictated be kept to oneself. But this Jimmy owned a big house on Audubon Place and was one of the best connected people in New Orleans. Sally Forman was a young mom when she volunteered for an organization Reiss cochaired called Dollars for Scholars. Forman watched with awe at Reiss’s gift for convincing the wealthy of Uptown to write big checks for their cause. Reiss sat on the Tulane Board of Trustees and ran the Business Council, an organization made up of most of the city’s top CEOs. He was even nominally a member of the Nagin administration as the chairman of the city’s Regional Transit Authority, an agency with thirteen hundred employees and a $110 million budget.
Reiss and Nagin had met late on the Friday night before the storm. In retrospect, they should have been talking about running more buses that weekend to shuttle people out of town, but they stuck to the agenda: the city’s crime problem. Only Camden, New Jersey, had a higher homicide rate than New Orleans in 2004. Property crimes had soared under Nagin. Yet rather than offer any solutions, Reiss said, the mayor vented about the city’s substandard schools and an unemployment rate among black men that hovered around 50 percent. Their meeting broke up at around 8:00 p.m.
Reiss started phoning friends and other members of the Business Council in the days after Katrina. The city’s crime rate, the lousy schools,the unemployment, and maybe even the mayor’s lackadaisical attitude toward these social ills were a topic of almost every conversation. By the time Cooper phoned, Reiss figured he had probably spoken to forty business leaders. They were all fed up, Reiss told Cooper. New Orleans would need to be a city with fewer poor people and better-run services if people such as himself were going to participate in the recovery efforts.
“Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically,” Reiss said. “I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.”
In time, Hill would dub it the “exclusionist movement”—the efforts by some within the white community to prevent the city’s poor
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