While the army had played an important role post-Katrina, the tide of anarchy loosed during those first seventy-two hours of the flood had been stemmed by snipers operating under wartime rules of engagement. That story could never be told, of course. Rumors had leaked out, as they always did. Police officers on loan from other states had reported encountering significant numbers of corpses with unexplained gunshot wounds (wounds that a Navy SEAL sniper had described as “180 grains of due process”)—but the biblical scale of the destruction had made it easy to write off most of those deaths with only superficial inquiries. Where the public was concerned, Forrest Knox didn’t mind anonymity; it was the foundation of his strength. But a small cadre of powerful men knew that it was officers like him who’d stepped up to provide the last line of defense against chaos, and they were working hard to show their gratitude by having him moved into his boss’s job: superintendent of state police.

At issue now was the future of the city. Unlike most of America, Forrest’s political patrons saw Hurricane Katrina not as a natural disaster but as divine intervention. In less than a week, the apocalyptic storm had purged New Orleans of the human filth that had infected and almost killed it. The flooding caused by levee breaches had triggered the largest forced resettlement of a minority population in America since the surviving Indians were moved onto reservations. The benefits of this mass exodus were plain to see: prior to the hurricane, New Orleans had perennially posted the highest murder rate in the country, as well as the lowest standard of living of any major American city; after three hundred thousand residents fled (among them nearly all the city’s poor blacks), the city’s homicide epidemic disappeared along with them. New Orleans’s murder rate was now lower than it had been in decades. But no one was under any illusions. If those poor blacks were allowed to return to the once-teeming hellholes of the St. Thomas, St. Bernard, Desire, Florida, Calliope, Lafitte, Melpomene, and Iberville housing projects, the blight of violent crime would return with them.

Forrest’s patrons meant to make sure that this did not happen.

Already they were pushing hard to have the housing projects demolished to make way for “mixed-income” developments, which would profoundly alter the demographic landscape of the city, skewing it whiter and more affluent. Any black tenants who did return to the city would be forced to find housing on the periphery, far from tourists and the new breed of citizen. This transformation wasn’t easy. Since the 1940s-vintage projects had been built in the brick barracks style, they were some of the few buildings to survive Katrina with only minor damage. But politics could work miracles: many of the public housing developments had been chained against returning residents, and the wheels were already in motion to condemn most of them.