Louisiana Voice

To say Lafayette wealthy used car dealer Donald Mendoza leads a charmed life would be something of an understatement.

Nineteen years ago, he was shot twice at his dealership, Don’s Sports & Imports car lot.

In March, he walked away from a helicopter crash that has raised some unanswered questions.

The National Transportation Safety Board recently released a nine-page report on the crash of the million-dollar-plus helicopter Mendoza was piloting without a license.

The NTSB report said Mendoza, 51, was piloting the Roberson R-66 craft from a maintenance facility to a concrete driveway near his hangar at 3:28 p.m. on March 9 when a gust of wind during his hover maneuver caused him to lose control.

He told investigators that the helicopter, which is equipped with Rolls-Royce 300 engine, “nosed over and struck the driveway” and ended up resting on its left side. He said he was unable to recall how the helicopter ended up on its side. He was able to exit the craft on his own power, the report said.

The helicopter’s rotors were destroyed, the tail was snapped off and the hub sustained damage, the report said. The helicopter was deemed a total loss.

Other than noting that he had no pilot’s license, the report did not elaborate on the fact that Mendoza was operating the craft without a pilot’s certificate, nor what the penalty, if any, was for such an infraction.

The report indicated the helicopter was registered to Trinity Paul Air, LLC, though the Louisiana Secretary of State’s records had no corporate listing for a Trinity Paul Air. Mendoza is listed as a principal of a number of corporate entities, including DW Don’s Automotive Group which apparently has replaced Don’s Sports & Imports, which was listed as inactive.

Mendoza was also listed as an officer of DW Air Service, LLC. Both DW Don’s Automotive Group and DW Air Service are domiciled at the same address in Lafayette.

Danielle Mendoza is listed as an officer of DW Don’s Automotive Group. Her name also surfaced in an incident in 2002 in which Don Mendoza was SHOT TWICE, in the back and leg, at his import car lot.

A man identified as Ben Broussard, a veteran of the French Foreign Legion, appeared at the dealership demanding to speak to a woman he identified as his cousin, whom he indicated was Danielle Alleman, Mendoza’s then-girlfriend.

mis·in·for·ma·tion

/ˌmisinfərˈmāSH(ə)n/

noun

1. false information that is spread, regardless of intent to mislead.

dis·in·for·ma·tion

/ˌdisənfərˈmāSH(ə)n/

noun

1. false information which is intended to mislead, especially knowingly spreading misinformation.

Misinformation:

• When you discuss the Jan. 5 insurrection;
• When you argue incorrectly, as did an acquaintance, that Bobby Thompson history home run  in a pennant-clinching playoff game against the Brooklyn Dodgers was in 1952;
• When you write, as did a capable and reputable sportswriter; that Billy Cannon won the Heisman Trophy in 1958;
• When you voice your disgust with Barrack Obama when you find the post office is closed on Columbus Day (it was Eisenhower who made it a holiday);
• When you earnestly believe it’s unfair for Democrats to want to raise the tax rate on millionaires to 39.6 percent (again, under Eisenhower, the tax rate on the richest Americans was 91 percent);
• When you attempt to invoke your rights as an individual to resist the vaccine because you believe mandatory vaccines are unconstitutional or are unproven (the polio vaccine was unproven at the outset, but it eradicated the virus; vaccines for other diseases, such as smallpox, measles, etc., have been mandatory for decades)

Disinformation:

• When you claim the Jan. 6 insurrection was nothing more than a routine Capitol tour;
• When you claim forest fires in California were started by Israeli laser beams;
• When you insist the coronavirus vaccines can alter your DNA, that the door-to-door survey is to document unvaccinated Americans, that the vaccine is an “experimental gene therapy” that has killed thousands in the U.S., or that the vaccines insert tracking devices into your body (cell phones already do that and I don’t see anyone giving those up);
• When you claim that Biden is not really president but instead, he is actually an actor on a sound stage in Hollywood;
• When you forward the photo of Biden in the Oval Office with Trump staring in the window from outside;
• When you claim that federal office buildings in Washington are deserted and boarded up;
• When history lessons about race, slavery and women’s suffrage that make you uncomfortable, your answer is to literally alter history by banning their teaching;
• When you claim that military armaments are being moved into urban areas in preparation for a federal takeover, and
• When you claim that Trump will be reinstated on Aug. 13.

Louisiana, along with Arkansas and Florida, currently lead the nation in the surge in infections of the Delta variant and Alabama has the lowest vaccination rate in America. Mississippi has cited an “astounding” rise in Covid-19 cases. Those states are all, coincidentally, states that voted heavily for Trump.

What’s that got to do with anything? Well, first and foremost, Trump holds franchise rights on disinformation, claiming, among other things that (a) the virus will disappear in a few days and that (b) drinking bleach was a reasonable treatment for Covid.

The irony, the real oxymoron here, is that Trump wants to claim credit for developing the vaccine “in record time,” but refuses to encourage his base to take the shots. He doesn’t trust the scientists. That’s disinformation, just as it was disinformation to proclaim that he knew more about war than his generals, or that he accepted Putin’s word that there was no Russian interference in 2016 over that of U.S. intelligence agents.

It would be easy to dismiss his base as a pack of mouth-breathing redneck KKKers, but the truth is, many of his followers are highly-education individuals – including many of my own close friends and family members.

There can be no denying that there is a deliberate and concerted effort to distort facts by inundating us with lies and distortions so far-fetched that they would have been laughable 30 or even 15 years ago. The conspiracy whackos rule the day now. There are several reasons for that.

Like anyone with a computer, I have an easily-accessible platform from which to express my viewpoint. I know I’m more than a little biased on this, but I believe I attempt to examine issues from all sides before offering my opinion. There is little that I agree with Trump on, for example, but as I said recently, I agreed with him when he said we routinely orchestrate coups and insurrection in other countries and that we had no business in Afghanistan. (If we didn’t learn that the collapse of the Soviet Union was at least indirectly tied to its own frustrated efforts in that country, what made us think we could succeed, especially after our experience in Vietnam?)

And while I, in my less-than-objective opinion, believe I take a level-headed approach to issues, there are those who use social media as a launching pad for conspiracy theories that are so far out there as to make Jeff Bezos’ recent trip into space seem like a walk in the park.

These people don’t use misinformation, they deliberately use disinformation to try and get their nut-job ideas across.

Besides the popularity and accessibility of the internet, there are two other developments that have helped move the process along:

The sad decline of newspapers and news magazines like Time and Newsweek (a direct result of the internet) and the explosion of television news networks that depend far too heavily on sound bites and talking heads who really have little to say.

The Shreveport Times, Monroe News-Star (and its predecessor, the Monroe Morning World) and the New Orleans Times-Picayune once were proud newspapers that had full-time bureaus in Baton Rouge. Today, thanks to the internet, they are skeletons of their once proud selves. The Times-Picayune was swallowed up by The Baton Rouge Advocate while the Shreveport and Monroe papers, along with several other Louisiana publications, were absorbed by Gannett, aka McNewspapers.

Thankfully, The Advocate has committed itself to in-depth investigative reporting that can – and has – exposed and embarrassed public officials who desperately needed to be exposed and embarrassed. And thankfully, there are still publications like The New York Times, Boston Globe, and The Washington Post to keep the national power brokers in line.

But their job is made infinitely more difficult by the proliferation by the purveyors of disinformation and as a result, we’re now looking down the barrel of another national lockdown.

If you ever need an object lesson on how administrative retribution can be meted out in the form of selective discipline on subordinates with targets on their backs, then I would suggest you attend, like I did on Monday, a 13-hour exercise in attorney grandstanding, administrative pseudo-indignation, and all-too-obvious lessons on what happens when you cross your boss – even if you are doing your job by the book.

Baton Rouge Police Sergeant John Dauthier was busted down to corporal and suspended for 60 days before the Municipal Fire and Police Civil Service Board voted almost at the stroke of midnight to restore his rank and to shorten his suspension to 39 days in direct contradiction to the wishes of the Internal Affairs commander Orscini Beard, Deputy Chief of Police Myron Daniels and Chief Murphy Paul, aka “SAN DIEGO PAUL.”

Dauthier called the outcome a victory but nonetheless indicated he will appeal the 39-day suspension which was approved following a 4-1 vote by the board. No word on whether or not Paul and Co. will appeal.

The vote followed a marathon session during which BRPD attorney Jim Raines of the Baton Rouge law firm Breazeale, Sachse & Wilson, appeared be keeping the meter running by constantly asking the same questions and making the same points often, frequently, over and over, repeatedly and ad nauseam. To say he was redundant would be to say he was repeating himself and saying the same thing over and over in an attempt to trick adverse witnesses into contradicting themselves – an old lawyer trick often employed when there’s no valid argument to fall back on.

At one point, with Raines attempting to ask the same question for the umpteenth time, board attorney Floyd Falcon was moved to cut him off with a terse, “Asked and answered. Move on.”

At one juncture during the seemingly interminable session, Raines attempted to match wits with Dauthier – and came up embarrassingly short as Dauthier more than held his own.

So, just why did it seem that Paul, Daniels and Beard seem so determined to break Dauthier?

Well, it seems that Dauthier previously had filed formal complaints against all three, the basis of which was not immediately known – but not a particularly wise thing to do to someone who learned at the feet of Mike Edmonson about ways to game the system.

And while Paul did not appear at Monday’s hearing and though Beard denied any undue influence from the other two, it seems pretty obvious the three had talked and wanted to make an example of Dauthier: file your complaint and pay the price.

But perhaps it would be appropriate to discuss why Dauthier found himself in his predicament.

It seems back last February, BRPD received a call about an elderly man being found unresponsive on the floor of his home in North Baton Rouge. Dauthier, a supervisor, embarked to the scene but was notified by a subordinate already at the scene that he need not bother because the man, later identified as Arthur Brady, was being transported to a hospital.

Dauthier, however, instructed the two officers already at the scene to remain and that he still needed to come to the home and determine for certain that the man was the not the victim of foul play – a determination he described repeatedly under Raines’ relentless but boring cross-examination as routine and necessary under departmental policy. He said Brady’s brother indicated the door was unlocked, no one else was in the dwelling and that he (Dauthier) should leave the door unlocked because Brady’s daughter was on her way.

At the scene, the two officers, Brady’s brother and EMS personnel indicated the man lived alone in a nearby trailer. As Dauthier approached what he said he believed to be an unoccupied residence, he was suddenly confronted by an irate pregnant woman, Mikia Smith, who demanded to know why he was on her porch.

Video was shown and admitted into evidence that plainly showed Smith, who was black verbally attacking Dauthier, who is white. Unlike recent incidents between black victims and white police officers, Dauthier never threatened the woman, never cursed, nor was anyone shot or tased. Instead, as Smith attempted to close the door in his face, Dauthier, with assistance from one of the other officers, blocked the door, took her arm and pulled her outside onto her porch.

She claimed the officers threw her across the porch railing as they cuffed her hands behind her but Dauthier insisted she leaned over the railing as she attempted to pull from officers’ grip.

When she was restrained, Dauthier guided her to a chair on the porch and another officer draped a blanked around her shoulders to protect her from the February cold. Dauthier was shown on the video exercising self-restraint as he attempted to explain that he was obligated to “sweep” the dwelling to be certain that the man had not been abused. Smith insisted that only she and her grandmother lived in the trailer so, after several minutes, Dauthier left to obtain additional information a neighbor.

It was only then that he learned that Brady actually lived across the street from Smith, not in a trailer but in a run-down house. He returned and began explaining to Smith that there had been a “terrible mistake” brought about by “incorrect information” made available to him but that he was the supervisor and “I am fully responsible because I’m in charge here.”

He then took out a pen and paper and began writing. “This is my name, my badge number and the phone number for Internal Affairs if you wish to file a complaint.” In all, he apologized no fewer than seven times and called the incident an “unfortunate misunderstanding” at least six times, appearing genuinely contrite during the entire exchange.

Following that encounter, he huddled with the other two officers, one of whom was in training, and said, “She (Smith) is pissed and she has every right to be pissed.” But he was clear in telling the other that there was going to be no effort to gloss over the incident. “We messed up and I’ll take full responsibility,” he said.

The biggest criticism he received from board members was that as he was explaining the miscommunication to Smith and as one of the officers started to remove the cuffs, he stopped the officer and said, “I want her to hear my explanation.” Never raising his voice, he nevertheless kept her restrained another four minutes as he wrote his name, badge number and explained what had happened. He appeared to agree with board members that he should not have kept her restrained once the facts about Brady’s correct address emerged.

Former ATF and DEA agent Lloyd Grafton of Ruston, retained by Dauthier as an expert on procedure, testified that Dauthier had violated no procedural methods in attempting to defuse what could have been a volatile situation.

Despite Grafton’s credentials, which included a Ph.D. in criminal studies, Raines attempted to engage him by challenging his opinions but Grafton held his ground and refused to concede any of his points. He contradicted Raines’ contention that Dauthier had entered Smith’s home illegally, saying there was never a “search” conducted of her home and that Dauthier was within his rights to reach in and remove her because “he didn’t know if there was someone else in that residence with a gun and he was acting on the information available to him at the time.”

Nine persons from the audience spoke with seven of those, mostly BRPD retirees, supporting Dauthier, as opposed to one who opposed him and one other, a retired police officer, who simply accused Beard of having himself violated the rights of suspects during his time on the streets as a Baton Rouge police officer.

Dauthier’s biggest endorsement came from retired BRPD Capt. Don Kelly, a veteran of 32 years in the department, who called the department’s punishment an “unwarranted action against a good police officer.” He said if he were chief, he would issue a letter of commendation for the manner in which Dauthier handled himself and that he would make the video of the encounter “mandatory viewing” for the entire department as a “textbook example” of how best to defuse a tense situation.

Brent Arceneaux, who has been with BRPD for 18 years, also spoke in support of Dauthier, saying, “I was warned not to come here. I have everything to lose. Remember my face because I’ll probably be appearing before you myself someday.”

Among other things, Dauthier was being punished for being late in filing his report on the incident, for a warrantless search (there was no search conducted), for use of force, for conduct unbecoming an officer (one critic who spoke noted that there had been an officer who got into a barroom fight and received only a one-day suspension) and for not disciplining one of the other officers for failing to have her body camera on her person. “You got me on that one,” Dauthier acknowledged to Raines.

Dauthier noted that part of the investigative report which recommended no action on one of the charges had been redacted by Beard and “Sustained” inserted in its place. While Dauthier implied that the change was made at Paul’s behest, Beard denied that there had been any undue influence exerted from higher up – a claim that few in the room appeared to believe.

It’s interesting to note that while Baton Rouge has the sixth-highest murder rate in that nation, behind only St. Louis, Baltimore, Birmingham, Detroit and Dayton, Ohio. Baton Rouge’s murder rate is higher than such places as nearby New Orleans, (7^th highest), Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Atlanta, Shreveport (25^th), Chicago, Oakland, Dallas, or Houston.

Despite that abysmal distinction, Paul still seems to have sufficient time to devote to a shaky quest to single out for punishment the one officer who refused to lose his cool in a standoff situation and who appeared to do everything in his power to calm an irate homeowner and to even admit fault and instruct her how to file a complaint – not against the department, but against him personally.

Where I come from, that’s called accepting responsibility. And in the wake of the embarrassments of the George Floyd and Ronald Greene deaths, that’s a damned welcome – and refreshing – change.

If Ray Garofolo (R-Chalmette) and others of his ilk have their way, Louisiana public schools will soon be teaching Grimm’s Fairy Tales in social studies classes that once touched on the real history of this country.

And while they’re at it, they may as well bring back the House Unamerican Activities Committee’s sixties-era propaganda film Operation Abolition and the classic Reefer Madness.

The latter is a classic camp film about the (inaccurate) potential of marijuana to induce acts of violence in its users, a film of which most people have at least a passing knowledge. Operation Abolition, on the other hand, may not be as familiar to younger readers. Basically, it was the product of the anti-communist fervor that swept the country, a fervor fueled by the alcoholic mind of Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin). And it was part of the old “Americanism vs. Communism” non-credit class that the Louisiana Legislature mandated in its hysteria as a requirement for high school graduation back in the early 1960s.

It was propaganda then and what Garofolo is advocating is propaganda now.

Donald Trump loves to toss about the term “witch hunt,” and that two-word catch-phrase was never more appropriate than during the actual Salem witch trials or later, during the red-baiting days that saw Hollywood actors black-listed for their political persuasions. Thanks to the likes of Ronald Reagan and John Wayne, anyone with a modicum of sympathy for the poor, gays, the working class, minorities, or even women, was automatically considered to be a communist sympathizer and was ostracized accordingly, their careers and lives ruined.

That, in essence is what Garofolo and his Republican cohorts in the Louisiana Legislature are attempting to do now. They want to return to the sterile era of Doris Day and Roy Rogers, to the days where the nation’s gravest concern was Nixon’s dog Checkers.

What’s wrong with Doris Day, you say? Nothing, except in those movies, she apparently had a thing for Rock Hudson. Let’s see Garofolo square that one up with his agenda.

Let’s eliminate all teaching about the Civil War, how the West was really settled, the Trail of Tears, women’s suffrage, the Great Depression (after all, the business of America is business – Herbert Hoover said so), and the civil rights struggle.

Those are negative guilt trips. Garofolo said so himself: “There is no reason to make students feel guilty,” he proclaimed last month. “That is exactly what we are hearing today. We should teach the good things about this country.”

Well, Rep. Garofolo, that is exactly what they do in North Korea. Nothing but “good things” are taught about Dear Leader there. Likewise, you’d be hard-pressed to find critical teachings in Russia or China or in Islamic states or in most Latin American countries. Funny thing is, in those countries, we call it propaganda or brain-washing. Garofolo wants to call it social studies here.

I’m not advocating that we teach only the negative aspects of our history; quite the contrary. I’m suggesting that we paint an accurate portrait of our country when we teach its history, and not gloss over inconvenient facts simply because they are…well, inconvenient. We can be supportive of our country and still hold our leaders accountable.

Instead of portraying Charles Lindbergh as a hero who could fly an airplane across the Atlantic, we should let kids know that he was also a Nazi sympathizer, as was Joseph Kennedy, in the lead-up to WWII. Why not let students know that the American West was won through our own unique form of genocide carried out against Native Americans? And when we didn’t complete the job, we stuck them on barren reservations?

Andrew Jackson delayed the Civil War by preventing South Carolina from seceding long before Lincoln arrived on the scene but his treatment of Native Americans far overshadowed any of his other accomplishments.

Teddy Roosevelt was a great conservationist and was credited with breaking up big trusts and championing consumers and the working class, but he also had a huge ego and was something of a warmonger.

It’s not pretty, but it’s a fact that Article I, Section 2 or our very own Constitution proclaimed that blacks were considered three-fifths of a citizen of a country where “all men” were otherwise “created equal.”

Garofolo obviously prefers that students not know that shameful part of America’s legacy which said it was just fine to “own” another human being, that the slaughter of millions of Native Americans was somehow justified, that women were denied the right to vote until the 20^th century, that maybe this country should not be interfering in elections or encouraging revolutions in other countries (much as I despise him, Trump was right about that last one).

“My country, right or wrong” is not the lesson we should be teaching our young people.

Winston Churchill, in paraphrasing Spanish philosopher George Santayana, said, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

Garofolo not only has learned little from our history but he now wants to completely redact it.

“Republicans at state level have moved from pursuing conservative economic policies to pushing measures designed to cripple the opposition and undermine democracy. The Republican party used to be anti-Democratic, now it’s anti-democratic.”

–Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker.

“Before social media, before online contributions, it would have been very, very difficult for backbenchers to get that kind of visibility and raise that kind of money.”

–John Pitney, Jr., professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, discussing how Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz rank among the biggest fundraisers in Congress. The lesson learned from Trump: Truth doesn’t matter. Just run your mouth and beg for money – like some cheesy televangelist.