By: Allen  Johnson  

Where is the DA’s audit? It’s been six months since then-Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan Jr. vowed to approve an independent management audit of his much-maligned office. Instead, Jordan announced his resignation three weeks later (Oct. 30), leaving Acting DA Keva Landrum-Johnson to oversee the $25,000 study by the standard-setting National District Attorneys Association (NDAA). The audit began in earnest, but only after Jordan left and the DA’s office made a long, dramatic return from the brink of bankruptcy. The NDAA’s team of experts was supposed to make its report public earlier this year. However, a change of leadership in the national organization delayed the report. Sources say Landrum-Johnson reviewed a draft last week, which insiders expect will read more like an organizational autopsy than a management audit. The report’s grim conclusions are not expected to fault Landrum-Johnson. The interim DA will release a final report to the public “very soon,” one source says.  

by Sam Winston

During any other year, having all four number one seeds reach the NCAA final four would have been the end of the world as I know it. It is after all the first time in the history of the tournament that it has ever happened. Nevertheless, America’s perennial underdog showcase will never wither, at least not in my mind.

I’ve been watching and playing basketball since I was old enough to dribble a ball. Before my family moved from Manhattan to New Orleans when I was 7, my father took me to the Big East tournament in Madison Square Garden, one of the great precursors to the Big Dance. My dad said we were rooting for Syracuse, but I was secretly pulling for Georgetown. What a raucous place it was during the Big East glory days of Ewing, Coleman, Mullin, Villanova, and others in the mid 1980s. Read the rest of this entry »