“I grew up in Metairie, before the projects really took hold in this city,” he began. “I can’t say any of my best friends were black or nothing-most of the blacks went to public schools, I didn’t-but we got along together.

“But when the projects went up, that was the end. Desire, Iberville, Lafitte, those were places you didn’t want to end up, ’less you were armed to the teeth. Then fucking Reagan came along and the place got worse. You know, they say there’s more syphilis now than there was fifty years ago. Most of these kids ain’t even been immunized against measles. If ya have a house in the inner city, might as well abandon it and let it rot. It ain’t worth shit.” He shook his head and slapped the steering wheel.

“When you got that kind of poverty, a man can make a lot of money from it if he puts his mind to it. Lot of people fighting for a slice of the projects, fighting for a slice of other things too: land, property, booze, gambling.”

“Like who?”

“Like Joe Bonanno. His crew’s been running things down here for the past decade or so, controlling the supply of crack, smack, whatever. They been trying to expand into other areas too. There’s talk that they want to open a big leisure center between Lafayette and Baton Rouge, maybe build a hotel. Maybe they just want to dump some bricks and mortar there and write it off as a tax loss, launder money through it.”

He cast an appraising eye around the projects. “And this is where Joe Bones grew up.” He said this with a sigh, as if he could not understand how a man would set out to undermine the place in which he had grown and matured. He started the car again, and as he drove, he told me about Joe Bones.

Salvatore Bonanno, Joe’s father, had owned a bar in the Irish Channel, standing up against the local gangs who didn’t believe that an Italian had any place in an area where people named their children after Irish saints and an “oul sod” mentality still prevailed. There was nothing particularly honorable about Sal’s stance; it was simply born out of pragmatism. There was a lot of money to be made in Chep Morrison’s postwar New Orleans, if a man was prepared to take the knocks and grease the right palms.

Sal’s bar was to be the first in a string of bars and clubs that he acquired. He had loans to pay off, and the income from a single bar in the Irish Channel wasn’t going to satisfy his creditors. He saved and bought a second bar, this time in Chartres, and from there his little empire grew. In some cases, only a simple financial transaction was required to obtain the premises he wanted. In others, some more forceful encouragement had to be used. When that didn’t work, the Atchafalaya Basin had enough water to hide a multitude of sins. Gradually, he built up his own crew to take care of business, to make sure the city authorities, the police, the mayor’s office were all kept happy, and to deal with the consequences when those lower down the food chain tried to better themselves at Sal’s expense.

Sal Bonanno married Maria Cuffaro, a native of Gretna, east of New Orleans, whose brother was one of Sal’s right-hand men. She bore him one daughter, who died of TB at the age of seven, and a son, who died in Vietnam. She died herself in ’58, of breast cancer.

But Sal’s real weakness was a woman named Rochelle Hines. Rochelle was what they called a high yellow woman, a Negress whose skin was almost white following generations of interbreeding. She had, as Morphy put it, a complexion like butter oil, although her birth certificate bore the words “black, illegitimate.” She was tall, with long dark hair framing almond eyes and lips that were soft and wide and welcoming. She had a figure that would stop a clock and there were rumors that she might once have been a prostitute, although, if that was the case, Sal Bonanno quickly put an end to those activities.

Bonanno bought her a place in the Garden District and began introducing her as his wife after Maria died. It probably wasn’t a wise thing to do. In the Louisiana of the late 1950s, racial segregation was a day-to-day reality. Even Louis Armstrong, who grew up in the city, could not perform with white musicians in New Orleans because the state of Louisiana prohibited racially integrated bands from playing in the city.

And so, while white men could keep black mistresses and consort with black prostitutes, a man who introduced a black woman, no matter how pale her skin, as his wife was just asking for trouble. When she gave birth to a son, Sal insisted that he bear his name and he took the child and his mother to band recitals in Jackson Square, pushing the huge white baby carriage across the grass and gurgling at his son.

Maybe Sal thought that his money would protect him; maybe he just didn’t care. He made sure that Rochelle was always protected, that she didn’t walk out alone, so that no one could come at her. But in the end, they didn’t come at Rochelle.

One hot July night in 1964, when his son was five years old, Sal Bonanno disappeared. He was found three days later, tied to a tree by the shore of Lake Cataouatche, his head almost severed from his body. It seems likely that someone decided to use his relationship with Rochelle Hines as an excuse to move in on his operation. Ownership of his clubs and bars was transferred to a business consortium with interests in Reno and Vegas.

As soon as her “husband” was found, Rochelle Hines vanished with her son and a small quantity of jewelry and cash before anyone could come after them. She resurfaced one year later in the area that would come to be called Desire, where a half sister rented a property. The death of Sal had destroyed her: she was an alcoholic and had become addicted to morphine.

It was here, among the rising projects, that Joe Bones grew up, paler yet than his mother, and made his stand against both blacks and whites since neither group would accept him as its own. There was a rage inside Joe Bones and he turned it on the world around him. By 1990, ten years after his mother’s death in a filthy cot in the projects, Joe Bones owned more bars than his father had thirty years before, and each month, planeloads of cocaine flew in from Mexico, bound for the streets of New Orleans and points north, east, and west.

“Now Joe Bones calls himself a white man, and don’t nobody differ with him,” said Morphy. “Anyway, how’s a man gonna talk with his balls in his mouth? Joe got no time for the brothers now.” He laughed quietly. “Ain’t nothin’ worse than a man who can’t get on with his in-laws.”

We stopped at a gas station and Morphy filled the tank, then came back with two sodas. We sipped them by the pumps, watching the cars go by.

“Now there’s another crew, the Fontenots, and they got their eyes on the projects too. Two brothers, David and Lionel. Family was out of Lafayette originally, I think-still got ties there-but came to New Orleans in the twenties. The Fontenots are ambitious, violent, and they think maybe Bonanno’s time has come. All of this has been coming to a head for about a year now, and maybe the Fontenots have a piece of work planned for Joe Bones.”

The Fontenots were not young men-they were both in their forties-but they had gradually established themselves in Louisiana and now operated out of a compound in Delacroix guarded by wire and dogs and armed men, including a hardcore of Cajuns from back in Acadiana. They were into gambling, prostitution, some drugs. They owned bars in Baton Rouge, one or two others in Lafayette. If they could take out Joe Bones, it was likely that they would muscle in on the drugs market in a big way.

“You know anything about the Cajuns?” asked Morphy.

“No, not beyond their music.”

“They’re a persecuted minority in this state and in Texas. During the oil boom, they couldn’t get any work because the Texans refused to employ coon asses. Most of them did what we all do when times are tough: they knuckled down and made the best of things. There were clashes with the blacks, because the blacks and the Cajuns were competing for the same few jobs, and some bad things went down, but most people just did what they could to keep body and soul together without breaking too many laws.