“It was wide-open.”
Frankie Richard, a onetime pimp, strip-club owner, drug dealer, meth addict, and muscle-for-hire, has just eased back into a rocker on the front porch of his family home in South Jennings. “The drugs, the prostitution, the bars, the crooked cops.”1 It was an unusually warm and muggy late afternoon in Jennings in the spring of 2012, and Frankie was reminiscing about the bracing days of the Jennings underworld in the early 2000s. He wore blue jeans and tennis socks. No shoes, no shirt, his paunchy upper body collecting sweat. We were shaded by the blue metal roof of his cramped shotgun-style home. He was mostly motionless as he talked, stopping occasionally to scratch his salt-and-pepper goatee. Frankie’s vacant brown eyes rarely met mine, and as day turned to night, he retreated to the kitchen for water served in mason jars.
The good times for Frankie are long gone. In the summer of 2011, he was temporarily exiled to Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, nearly fifty miles east of Jennings, after years of being fingered as a prime suspect in the Jeff Davis 8 murders. But the exile was merely temporary. Frankie is a true native son. The trajectory of his life has mirrored the rise and decline of Jennings, from the oil fields to the killing fields.
Frankie Joseph Richard was born on July 24, 1955, the son of a trucking-company owner and a housewife. He has four siblings, three brothers and a sister. As with many young men in Jennings, Frankie’s first job out of high school was in the oil business. It was well-paying but dangerous work: an oil-field accident in the late 1980s left him with a broken back, but also a significant legal settlement that he used to start a dump-truck business.
Frankie soon flipped the dump-truck company and opened a strip club. He prefers a more unvarnished description: “I sold my trucks,” he proudly exclaimed in his distinctly raspy voice, “and opened a whorehouse.”
Frankie had a great run with strip clubs in Lafayette during the fizzy 1990s—the Padlock, the Foxy Lady, Club 26, Paradise Island—but his penchant for drinking and violence unwound his success. “Alcohol makes me nigger angry,” Frankie declared. “I think I’m nine foot tall and bulletproof.” His arrest record in the 1990s, on charges ranging from battery to aggravated assault, vividly illustrates the pugilistic path he pursued back then. When the brawling and the beefs in Lafayette became too dangerous, he moved back in with his mother in South Jennings. There, he quickly broke into the burgeoning prescription-pill hustle and garnered a reputation for his raw street muscle, which anyone who dared cross him would encounter. “Let me tell you something. I hope you put this in this interview.” Frankie stabbed a finger into my notepad. “I used to hire me and my fuckin’ pick handle out. If somebody wanted a leg broke and they give me five hundred dollars, you can bet tomorrow you’d be wearing a fucking cast.”
Better still, Frankie’s South Jennings home base endeared him to the poor and working-class whites and African-American pill poppers, drug dealers, and pimps alike, who all saw him as an outsider much like themselves. One of Frankie’s many African-American associates once told me, “Frankie ain’t nothing but a white nigger.”
When Frankie wasn’t hustling at home, he was doing business at the Boudreaux Inn. With its sloping blue-metal roof and white-painted façade, the Boudreaux Inn could be mistaken for a storage facility. But with Frankie running drugs and sex workers out of its rooms, the Boudreaux Inn was one of the key places in town to trade sex for drugs or drugs for sex. Central to the motel’s underworld appeal was its proximity to the highway. It’s just yards from I-10, literally in the shadow of drug trafficking on the interstate. Platinum-selling, Baton Rouge–born rapper Lil Boosie was even known to sport a diamond-studded pendant that read I-10 DOPE ZONE. The Boudreaux Inn sat just down the street from another drugs-and-sex hot spot in Jennings, the Budget Inn, on LA 26.
The Boudreaux lot contained two buildings, a restaurant and bar out front and, just behind it, a tiny motel with fourteen rooms. Both buildings were surrounded by a sprawling gravel parking lot, allowing patrons to pull their cars right up to the door of their room. That the Boudreaux Inn served as both bar and motel allowed transactions to run smoothly. Sex workers could pick up a john at the bar and then have sex with him in one of the rooms. “You bought dope at the bar,” one former Jennings sex worker told me, “and then you rented a room in the back to have sex. If you didn’t have money, you gave head or had sex in the motel so you could buy dope.”
By the mid-2000s, Frankie pimped out a growing cadre of women from the motel, including soon-to-be Jeff Davis 8 murder victims Loretta Chaisson, Kristen Gary Lopez, and Whitnei Dubois. “I would pick ’em up when I seen ’em,” Frankie told me, “get ’em off the street, take ’em, spend my money, get high. If they wanted to go make money, we’d hustle. If they didn’t want to, the party was over.” Though he describes himself as their pimp, Frankie insists that he forged deep bonds with the slain sex workers because of their mutual addictions. “We shared something,” Frankie says mournfully. “When we were at the lowest point of our life and no one wanted to have anything to do with us, we had something to do with each other. And that means something to me. . . . No matter how fuckin’ low their life was.”
But with Frankie and his women deep in the thrall of crack and prescription-pill addiction, business at the Boudreaux Inn rarely ran smoothly. In 2004, Loretta Chaisson (victim one) was banned from the motel after being involved in numerous incidents, including threatening a motel worker. Around the same time, cops were called to the motel when Frankie brawled with Kristen Gary Lopez’s father, Andrew Newman, and broke his nose. (Kristen was victim three.)
To most Jennings residents, the Boudreaux Inn was simply a dingy motel off the interstate. But to workers at the motel and players in the South Jennings underworld, the run-down inn had an outsize reputation. Powerful people, it was whispered, patronized the motel. Those who ran the business were well connected in Louisiana politics.
Frankie Richard may have sat atop the drugs-and-sex trade in South Jennings, but he was not without competition, particularly in prescription pills. Just blocks from Frankie’s McKinley Street base, a hustler named Harvey Lee “Bird Dog” Burleigh moved prescription pills by the thousands from his home in South Jennings. Bird Dog’s business partner was Mike Dubois, a veteran of the South Jennings drug scene.
Dubois was an ideal prescription-pill conduit. He was recovering from two epithelioid trophoblastic tumors in his neck that were, he says, “the size of golf balls,” and as a result he was prescribed a plethora of pain medication. “Lortabs, Xanax, muscle relaxers, Somas, morphine,” Dubois told me, “I had so much stuff that it was unreal.”2 Because of his legitimate medical needs, Dubois was the perfect doctor shopper. He hit medical clinics all over East Texas. “After my cancer surgery, the doctor-shopping thing was big,” Dubois explains. “Harvey Burleigh [Bird Dog] and myself and Wendell Breaux, we were the three original doctor shoppers in town. When Harvey, myself, and Wendell started going to Houston and comin’ back and selling ’em, there was nobody else. We were the only game in town.”
But by the spring of 2005, Bird Dog’s prescription-pill business at 610 Gallup was imperiled. One of his suppliers in Orange, Texas, had its medical license suspended when it was discovered that nearly every patient at the clinic during a six-month period received 120 hydrocodone pills, 90 Soma pills, and 60 Xanax pills.3 And Burleigh dangerously boasted to his street associates that his drug suppliers were troopers from the Louisiana State Police’s Troop D, located just west of Jennings in Lake Charles. Troop D has a long history of drug-related misconduct, culminating in a 2010 internal affairs investigation into its captain, Chris Guillory, for violating the State Police drug policy. (Despite admitting that he obtained prescriptions from three different doctors and that he had “maybe a hundred” pills at his home, Guillory received only a letter of reprimand.)4 Finally, in February of 2016, after years of mounting allegations of misconduct by Captain Guillory, he was reassigned to the Louisiana State Police’s headquarters in Baton Rouge.5
Worst of all, unbeknownst to Bird Dog, one of the men living with him, Jared Sauble, was a confidential informant. Sauble told law enforcement, “There was ongoing narcotics activity . . . at 610 Gallup,” and “Bird Dog, also a renter at the residence, had gone to Houston to acquire a large amount of prescription medication.”6
Sauble also told investigators that a fugitive from the Louisiana Department of Corrections was hiding out at his house. Like many informants, Sauble was himself in deep trouble with the law: in the spring of 2005, he was suspected of robbing an elderly couple. By turning on his roommate and partner, he could soften his sentence.
Working off Sauble’s information, the Jennings Police Department, along with state Probation and Parole agents, and investigators from the DA’s office, plotted a raid. At approximately 6:00 p.m. on April 20, 2005, the multiagency team converged on 610 Gallup. The tiny, raised white clapboard home was typical of the distressed housing that dominates the south side (in Louisiana, homes are often raised off the ground, sometimes even by a foot or two, as a flood-protection measure).
Local law enforcement invited reporters from the Jennings Daily News and the American Press, a newspaper from Calcasieu Parish, to come along for the raid. Around 8:15 p.m., the team began its final preparation for the raid; the reporters were instructed to remain in the cop cars, out of harm’s way and, perhaps more important, with no true vantage point to view the raid.
About two hours later, at 10:20 p.m., the multiagency team stormed 610 Gallup. When they burst through the front door and yelled, “Police,” they found a chaotic scene: more than a dozen drug users crowded inside the darkened home. The electricity had been turned off because, Sauble said, the occupants had spent all of their money on drugs. The only light came from the beams of police flashlights and a battery-powered lamp in the kitchen. Just moments after entering, John Briggs Becton, a Probation and Parole agent, encountered an addict, Leonard Crochet, forty-three, his hair in a ponytail, standing in the living room. Briggs Becton told Crochet to show his hands and claimed Crochet failed to comply. Instead, Crochet “made a sudden movement with his hands toward his belt line.” Believing that Crochet was reaching for a weapon, Briggs Becton fired and struck Crochet with a single shot to the chest. He collapsed. Briggs Becton used his foot to roll him onto his side. “Oh shit, oh shit,” Briggs Becton muttered, according to a statement provided later by one of his fellow agents. An ambulance finally arrived at 11:45 p.m., over an hour after the raid began. Crochet was pronounced dead at a local hospital. Meanwhile, the inhabitants at 610 Gallup were taken into custody and transported to the Jennings Police Department for questioning.
Most of those in the house said they didn’t see the shooting—one said she simply heard someone yell, “Police,” and then heard a gunshot. Another, however, said that Crochet “was standing with his hands in the air when he was shot.” Louisiana State Police investigators were “unable to locate any items in the immediate vicinity of Crochet’s location in the residence which could have been construed as a weapon.”
In the summer of 2005, Jefferson Davis Parish prosecutors presented their case to a parish grand jury. They argued that Briggs Becton committed negligent homicide. The jury came back with a “no true bill” decision—meaning no probable cause or evidence to show that a crime had been committed.7
The outcome of the Crochet case is similar to that in many police-related killings around the country. Grand juries who heard evidence in the 2014 killings of Michael Brown, a Ferguson, Missouri, teenager shot by a cop, and Eric Garner, a New York man who died after being put in a choke hold by NYPD officer, both came back with a “no true bill,” sparking worldwide protests.8 Indictments are extraordinarily difficult to secure in police-killing cases. Police officers have wide legal discretion in responding to perceived threats and tend to have strong relationships with district attorneys over shared criminal cases.
In the rare instances when prosecutors do pursue charges against cops, the DA’s office feels the backlash. In January of 2015, a district attorney in New Mexico filed murder charges against two Albuquerque cops who shot and killed a homeless man, only to have her prosecutor physically blocked by cops from attending a briefing.
Like all grand jury hearings, the Crochet case was held in secret, with no public record. But little in law enforcement’s own accounts of the raid suggest that the killing was justified. Crochet was unarmed, with no weapons of any kind anywhere near him. The claim that he reached for his waistband is disputed by numerous witnesses; at least one law enforcement witness said that Crochet was hiding a crack pipe, not reaching for a weapon, when he was shot. I reached out to Sauble, the informant whose information prompted the raid. He refused my request for an interview, but sent me a Facebook message on August 21, 2014:
Although I know more than people would like to think in regards to this matter that is a chapter in my life that I wish to not discuss. Do like almost everyone else and LET IT GO. Please do not contact me about this matter. I will give you 1 clue: Jennings City Police Department (former employees).
Sauble has, however, talked about the killing of Crochet—and the events that precipitated it—in numerous e-mails and private Facebook messages that I’ve obtained. His motives for becoming an informant, I learned, were twofold. He was facing armed robbery charges and needed to make a deal. But he also claims Bird Dog was stealing from him.
In these e-mails and Facebook messages, Sauble explained that in the spring of 2005 he not only lived with Bird Dog at 610 Gallup, but also played a critical role in his booming prescription-pill business. “Being I was the only one with a valid driver’s license,” Sauble wrote, “I was taking Bird Dog and others all over Texas and Louisiana to doctor shop for doctors who would easily write perscription drug scripts [sic].” Sauble claimed that, despite his bringing in $5,000 per month in drug revenue, Bird Dog was stealing from him. “I was on parole at the time and done [sic] an armed robbery against an elderly man,” Sauble wrote. “I was being investigated for this. To get my ass out of the jam I put myself in I made a deal with the police to set up the bust at Bird Dog’s house.”
Sauble’s account differs from the State Police investigation in one significant respect. He told investigators that he watched the raid at 610 Gallup from a ditch on nearby Jefferson Street, but in the messages I’ve obtained, he said that not only was he inside the home, but he was seated next to Crochet. “I was sitting right next to Leonard Crochet when he was shot,” Sauble wrote. “Leonard just happen [sic] to be an innocent bystander that night and the police told him to stop reaching for whatever he was reaching for under the couch.”
An opportunistic and unreliable snitch looking for retribution against his partner in the drug business initiated a drug raid that yielded, according to the Louisiana State Police’s own account, merely a bottle of ibuprofen, one bottle of tizanidine (a muscle relaxer), and “one bottle of assorted pills.” The negligible haul was made all the more perverse by the profound human cost it carried. Yet Crochet’s fateful encounter with law enforcement was apparently not his first. In the years before his death, Crochet told friends and relatives that cops from the Jennings Police Department were harassing him because he refused to sell drugs for them. “I know a lot about a lot,” Crochet told relatives. “Jennings isn’t a place for me to be.”
By April 2005, Crochet reported that the harassment from local law enforcement had escalated. He told a family member that he encountered a group of law enforcement gathered at a Waffle House in Jennings that included John Briggs Becton, the same officer who would later kill him. “They said they’re gonna kill me,” Crochet said, to which his relative replied, “If you throw your hands in the air, they’re not gonna kill you. They can’t shoot you with your hands in the air.” I left several messages for Briggs Becton on his home phone in May of 2016 seeking comment; he did not return any of my calls.
Crochet’s friends and family insist that he was murdered by law enforcement. As of now, there is not enough evidence to support that claim. But an unarmed man was killed by law enforcement after weeks of clashing with them. That alone begs a new investigation by a more independent body. The Crochet case is particularly critical to the Jeff Davis 8 case because those who witnessed his murder constitute much of the milieu of its victims: Kristen Gary Lopez (victim three), Bird Dog, and Alvin “Bootsy” Lewis, who was related to two of the victims. “The victims were being killed because they were present when Leonard Crochet was killed by the police,” one witness told Taskforce investigators. “The girls were being killed because they had seen something they were not supposed to see.”
At least one of the Jeff Davis 8 victims, Kristen Gary Lopez, witnessed the slaying of Leonard Crochet—a man who had told friends and relatives that he’d refused to sell drugs for the police—at the hands of law enforcement. Crochet’s murder occurred at the Jennings home of Harvey “Bird Dog” Burleigh, a prescription-pill dealer who claimed that much of his supply came from a source within Louisiana State Police’s Troop D. The Leonard Crochet killing was steeped in law enforcement misconduct—it was an unnecessary use of lethal force, and both the victim and his roommate (Bird Dog) claimed to have had close ties to corrupt police—all of which the Jeff Davis 8 were suddenly perilously aware of.