One night in New Orleans, about 10 years ago, I was unexpectedly called to the hospital downtown. A man named Dan Bright had been shot seven times at close range and was drifting in and out of consciousness. In a waking moment my name had come up, apparently he wanted to speak with me, and two men were soon on their way to pick me up. It was Dan Bright who lay dying, but as I stepped into the street that night to wait for my ride I was struck with a powerful sensation that it was my life that would end.
Living in New Orleans after a certain length of time makes you increasingly aware of how easily you can die here. That maybe the city even wants your death, desires it, will grow stronger by it, more colorful, more New Orleans. Because death out of the blue, be it murder by gunshot, or a hit-and-run by a drunk driver, or an unexplained stroke, aneurism, or strange accident, seems to happen freakishly often in New Orleans, and like the river silt that underlies the city, a colorful and fine new layer of death has been added. People meet friends at cafes and on stoops and in line at the Post Office and they may well talk about the weather, but they will also likely talk about the latest crime, which is to talk about the latest shooting, which is to talk about the latest death. And weather in New Orleans, I need not remind you, can also invite death.
In 2010, I was sent by Audubon Magazine to New Orleans to cover an offshore oil explosion that killed 11 men. I lived in a Westbank Travelodge and every day went down to the coast. Weeks went by until one evening I finally entered the city and wandered the misty streets of the Marigny. I had never seen homes like that, or mist like that, a city where the mood becomes the architecture, and the architecture returns the mood. In Treme, I rented a room—a landing actually—in a home a block from Saint Augustine Catholic Church, where in the garden the shackles and chains memorialize “the nameless, faceless, turfless Africans who met an untimely death in Faubourg Treme.” At the Backstreet Cultural Museum, a unique map of America attempts to name all the tribes that lived here before, with notes on which imported disease or U.S. military maneuver killed them.
The city has a history that goes far beyond me, and yet, like morning glory vines enclosing a balustrade, it quickly wrapped around me. As I waited that night for my ride in the Bywater, I considered not going out. What did this man who had been shot up a dozen blocks from my home want to tell me before he died? The possibilities frightened me. I had moved to New Orleans to write about the oil and gas industry and environmental degradation, and in the end I was led to something else. I was led to Dan.
There are so many people in New Orleans who have been wrongfully convicted of murder and then exonerated that when I first moved to the city in 2012 there stood an organization to help them reenter society, called Resurrection After Exoneration, or RAE. It was on St. Bernard Avenue, and I was looking to volunteer somewhere, so one day I walked in. Maybe, I thought, I could help them write press releases, further exonerate the wrongfully convicted by connecting them to the media. Or maybe I was just a man with a pen and too much time who also showed up with too much sympathy.
RAE founder John Thompson made calls to the exonerated across the region and told them that a writer was in town. I did not expect this sort of welcome. About a dozen men showed up, and they sat around a table and took turns telling their stories, each with the same theme. Police and prosecutors needed to solve a high-profile crime and found the man closest to it to convict. One exoneree had been tied down by an assailant, his wife raped and murdered while he listened as a hostage, and was later himself convicted of the crime.
A simple argument broke out between a man who had been imprisoned for decades after being wrongfully convicted of murder in Mississippi and a sharp, energetic young exoneree. This was Dan Bright. What began as an exchange of words over the appropriate way for a new exoneree to deal with a police encounter—deference and appreciation versus suspicion and contempt—escalated quickly, until I was sure it would come to blows. Bright defended the more confrontational approach. He had started dealing drugs as an 11-year-old in stairwells in the Florida Projects circa 1980, and bought a Cutlass Supreme at age 12 and drove it to school listening to LL Cool J. He made a connection to Colombian drug lords in Miami as a teenager, and eventually must have riled the drug-dealing New Orleans Police Department because they took the opportunity when presented to frame him for murder.
“The source further advised that DANIEL BRIGHT, aka ‘Poonie’, is in jail for the murder committed by ██████████████” reads a document the FBI withheld in his trial, which lasted a day. “The source stated that he/she has heard ██████ bragging about doing the murder and how he is confident that BRIGHT will be able to beat the charge because they don’t have enough evidence against him.” As we sat that afternoon on a bench outside RAE on St. Bernard and Dan cooled off from the fight that had occurred inside and smoked a cigarette, he told me he had begun a diary in prison—could I help turn it into a book?
I knew the reply could reshape my life, and quite possibly my death, but once you acknowledge you are here to tell stories, how could you pass up such a powerful one? So, it was arranged. Our model was The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. Dan’s story, Dan’s words, but I would string them together, fact-check, and fill in the gaps as I could. We met initially at RAE on St. Bernard, then coffeeshops in the Bywater, Jack Dempsey’s Restaurant on Poland, Today’s Cajun Seafood on St. Claude—Dan always positioned himself facing the door—but mostly we met at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library on Fats Domino in the Lower 9th Ward.
That’s because, despite me at one point having a little blue Honda, and Dan at one point having an old Jaguar, eventually neither of us had a car. I would take a bus to the Lower 9th and walk past Fats Domino’s house to the library, and Dan walked from his mother’s place in the Lower 9th. We sat together at the little tables in the library’s media section, and as I pressed Dan with questions, slowly the story of a human life emerged.
When Dan first handed me the notes he had written in prison, it was largely a story of revenge, of how strong and smart he was, and how corrupt and foolish the figures were who colluded to get him on death row. There was drama, but not the full picture of a man. To tell the full story, I saw it as my job to help bring other emotions to the surface—love, spirituality, grace—and other people, his mother, his grandmother, his heroes, to create a book that involved not only drugs, guns, and money, but also relationships and humanity and humor. Dan was witty, appreciated sarcasm, and was constantly cracking me up.
But there was a dark side. Our book laid out the city’s terrible transition during the 1980s and 1990s from cocaine to heroin and eventually crack, as seen through Dan’s eye on the street. He told me he himself never used heroin, until one day after his exoneration while waiting with John Thompson to give a speech at Harvard, crumpled by anxiety, he turned to the drug to calm his nerves. I was never able to confirm this story, but what I do know is on most of the occasions we met to work on the book, he would nod out. He was good for about an hour, then at some point would get up, say he had to go to the bathroom, and return groggy, barely able to keep his eyes open. Our work for that day was done.
I could never muster the courage to confront Dan about his drug habit. I felt that if I forced him into a confession, either shame or pride would jeopardize our relationship and the book. Yet there were hard questions, good questions that I never got to ask: Why are you on heroin? Does being addicted make you feel bad for the people you sold drugs to? Or do you feel as if this drug has granted you, and them, some sort of peace in a world of anxiety and madness?
The Story of Dan Bright: Crime, Corruption and Injustice in the Crescent City was, locally speaking, a success. It was published by University of New Orleans Press, where supportive editors believed in it from the beginning. We had a great opening at Octavia Books, were interviewed on the popular local radio book show The Reading Life, and Maple Street Book Shop read it in their book group. The feedback was fantastic. Dan’s story was covered in The Advocate, and he appeared on the cover of the city’s hip alternative news magazine, ANTIGRAVITY. This one worried me.
Dan had been a bright, handsome young drug dealer in a city where even the police were dealing drugs, but his connections were better and he had more style. He enhanced his celebrity by fixing infrastructure in the Florida Projects that the City had abandoned. When he was sprayed with gunfire while leaving an outdoor concert, surviving seven bullet wounds only elevated his status—as did getting arrested, wrongfully convicted of murder, a death row sentence at Louisiana’s infamous Angola Prison, and eventually beating the charge.
But as Dan says in our book, “New Orleans is like crabs in a bucket.” Meaning, people who pull themselves to the top are constantly being clawed at by those beneath. A kingpin is vulnerable, because knocking them down gains an upstart immediate attention. After his exoneration, Dan told me he had the opportunity to begin dealing again, but he wasn’t going back, and as a result he was left alone. But there was risk in printing his face and story across newspapers. Dan was somebody again, vulnerable to a lesser-known somebody looking to take him down—crabs in a bucket.
I don’t know how valid this rationale was for the shooting, but this urban psychology of New Orleans had been explained to me by Dan himself, and it was on my mind as Abram Shalom Himelstein and G.K. Darby, our two editors at UNO Press, picked me up in the Bywater. They were just as spooked as me, and we took a circuitous route across the city to Tulane Medical Center in an attempt to ensure no one was following. Such precautions were warranted by a suspicious individual who had already been caught sneaking around the hospital’s intensive care unit, apparently looking to finish Dan off. His room had been changed and he now lay in one unmarked, known only to his mother and aunt, and now us.
The return assassin would not have had to do much, as Dan was in terrible shape. He lay slouched in the hospital bed, curled like a soup spoon, his head propped up, his body slumped, and his feet out straight, with white bandages wrapped tight around his mid-section and yellow liquid leaking through them. Tubes ran across his face, and he was unable to speak. His core had been splattered with bullets. His aunt was particularly upset by one that had taken out a chunk of his hand, as this to her indicated that the shooter had been able to get close to him, making the shooter someone Dan knew—he would never have let a stranger get that close.
The bullet that had done the most damage was the one in his gut. Dan had undergone several surgeries to remove fragments and clean the wound, and would need more. He remained unconscious, which meant I could not receive my message. So I sat and waited with the UNO editors and Dan’s family. It was a typical New Orleans interaction—we talked about the latest crime, which is to talk about the latest shooting, only now we were seated right in front of it. While working on the book he had on a few occasions lifted his shirt to show me the gnarly purple wounds from his first shooting, and I now tried to determine the number of bullet holes he had in total. The bullet to the gut that was currently causing him trouble created an entry wound but no exit. Assuming all the others entered and exited, I figured his body contained 27 bullet holes.
Dan came to but he was barely alive, and with tubes in and out of his mouth and sapped of energy, he was unable to speak. His aunt brought over a small white dry erase board. Someone had written out the letters of the alphabet in erasable marker. I sat on the edge of his bed and his aunt began at A and pointed at each letter with her finger, the idea being that when she hit the letter that began the first word he wanted to say, he would nod, she would note it, and they would continue. She ran through nearly the entire alphabet, and Dan was yet to nod approval. Maybe, I figured, he had drifted back into his fog. But then his head bobbed, she had hit upon the first letter—T.
His aunt went through the letters a second time—H. And now a thought brewing in my mind suddenly grew louder. Dan has brought me here to tell me the name of the person who tried to kill him, as shall he die tonight, someone will need to know. The dread I had experienced when I first stepped into the street that night returned. Seated there on his possible death bed it all made sense to me. He will tell me his killer, and since I now know, I will be killed. Like the river silt underneath the city, I too would become a colorful and fine new layer of death added in. Then the third letter—A.
T-H-A. Had he been shot by someone named THAMES? Or, THASSILY? My mind is running.
But there is another New Orleans. And there is another Dan Bright. The board has proved too wearisome. He is drifting back out, but beckons me in. His aunt somehow understands there are words on his lips. Lean closer, she says. I do. It is barely audible above the machine din of the hospital, but it is a human voice. What he summoned me here to say, issued in barely a whisper: THANK YOU.
Today, that all seems like a million years ago. Dan survived his second time being shot, and I no longer live in New Orleans. Last year I spoke to a group of energetic filmmakers in Harlem who wanted to make a movie featuring Dan. Then this summer I received a call from Abram telling me that he was dead. Not from death row or a gunshot wound, but an overdose. Was that justice? Or just New Orleans being herself, adding another layer?
The foreword to our book is written by attorney Clive Stafford Smith, founder of the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center. He represented Dan in the case that got him exonerated, and then returned to his native Britain and co-founded a legal organization called Reprieve that defends people facing human rights abuses at the hands of powerful governments, including men imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. “Justice,” Clive memorably told me during one talk, “erodes at the margins.”
I think his point was that justice lapses at the places where those in power believe they don’t need to uphold it. And herein lies the problem with America’s present moment. To dole out justice should be understood as a privilege and a burden, not a sport as was the case in the office of Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick Sr., and it is certainly not a tool for petty retribution, as the Trump Administration believes. Justice doesn’t spring from power, it springs from powerlessness, and a unifying equality that is more spiritual than constitutional. “Remember especially that you cannot be the judge of anyone,” reads the epigraph that begins our book, from Fyodor Dostoyevsky. “For there can be no judge of a criminal on earth until the judge knows that he, too, is a criminal, exactly the same as the one who stands before him, and that he is perhaps most guilty of all for the crime.”
Dan had his own version of this quote. “In New Orleans,” he says, in the final chapter of our book, “you have politicians and policemen going to prison all the time. That leaves the kids thinking, why can’t everything be fair? So what do you think these kids are going to do, especially the kids at the bottom. They look to the top, to these people who are supposed to be role models, and see that they’re stealing, and they have college degrees and good jobs. Kids are left to think that this is the only way to succeed, cut corners, make quick money, cheat, lie, deal drugs. If you want to find the root of this problem, look to the top.”
I want to go back to that feeling that drew me out that night some 10 years ago when summoned by Dan at the hospital. The feeling of doom in the night. Of death. And the amazing moment of grace at his hospital bedside. Dan is gone, but I comb the pages of our book looking for him. A sign, a certain phrase, something to summon him back. No single line stands out—all the lines stand out. And I find myself laughing uncontrollably. I truly cannot believe he lived all these things, and we met, and he through his struggles was able to produce the words that make these pages. We did it, Dan. I told you then, and I will tell you again: THANK YOU.
The Story of Dan Bright: Crime, Corruption and Injustice in the Crescent City is available via University of New Orleans Press.
All photos by Adrienne Battistella, from the January 2017 ANTIGRAVITY (#150) cover feature, “Escaping Death Row: An Interview with Dan Bright” by Andru Okun.
