This Guy Is a Legend

A 93-year-old Bourbon Street con man ran a rigged tourist scam that took in a million dollars a year with New Orleans police allegedly on his payroll, and he beat his own sentencing by dying first.

On March 9, 2004, Louisiana State Police pulled back two pieces of carpet behind the counter of a Bourbon Street souvenir shop and found more than 350 pills, hydrocodone, stuffed into bottles with the labels torn off.

The shop sold T-shirts and hot sauce up front. In the back room, it ran one of the oldest cons in the business, dressed up fresh for a new century of tourists.

Bourbon Street runs twelve blocks, jazz trumpets and hurricane cups spilling out of every doorway, and it has swallowed grifters like this one for two hundred years.

Carnival men used to call the game Razzle Dazzle: a rigged betting contest with an unwinnable jackpot, worked by a barker who never lets the mark walk away ahead. Bet a little, the barker says, and you’re one roll from the big prize. The version running out of Happy Days, at 335 Bourbon Street, pulled in more than a million dollars a year, according to the State Police Gaming Division.

Running it was Mitchell “Mitch” Schwartz, ninety-two years old. What he looked like that year, the record does not say. His rap sheet says plenty.

It starts in 1930, with a bootlegging charge. A sodomy conviction followed in 1942. An arrest came in 1943 under the White Slave Traffic Act, a Thompson submachine gun conviction in 1946, an attempted burglary conviction in 1951, and, in 1976, eight counts of distributing drugs stolen from pharmacy burglaries.

At that 1976 trial, the district attorney wanted 180 years. Schwartz’s lawyer asked the judge for mercy, citing his age. Then-Metropolitan Crime Commission president Aaron Kohn wrote the trial judge, Frank Marullo, urging him to refuse it, calling Schwartz “a major figure in organized crime in New Orleans.”

The judge showed mercy anyway. Forty years, at sixty years old, amounted to a life sentence for a man Schwartz’s age. In 1984, Governor Edwin Edwards pardoned him. Four years later, police arrested him again, in a drug bust, at the same Bourbon Street address.

By 2004, Schwartz was back at 335 Bourbon Street, and the shop was clearing a million dollars a year off what the department called “pigeon complaints”: tourists who realized, usually somewhere around the airport, that they had been had.

The record does not name a single one of them. That absence is its own kind of wrong: thousands of vacations dented, and not one victim’s name survives to tell about it.

State Police said New Orleans officers assigned to field those complaints may have been in on the game. Four of them, investigators said, took $1,000 a week from Schwartz to make the complaints disappear. Not investigate them. Perform the motions of investigating them, then close the file.

Charles Loescher had spent twelve years on the force, working now as the district’s crime prevention officer, while Michael Eskine, eight years in, worked hotel crimes. Krister Vilan, the youngest of the three at six years, handled traffic and served as liaison to the district attorney’s office. All three worked the Eighth District, the one that covers the French Quarter.

A fourth officer, Sergeant Samuel Poole, a twenty-five-year veteran assigned to public housing patrols, got reassigned too, though NOPD never quite explained why. Police spokesman Captain Marlon Defillo called it “a separate, but parallel investigation,” an offshoot of the Schwartz probe that reached a man who worked nowhere near Bourbon Street. NOPD never spelled out what investigators believed Poole had done. It never had to.

The investigation grew to include the U.S. attorney’s office, the FBI, and the Public Integrity Bureau. Investigators never charged a single officer. NOPD reassigned all four men to other districts and called the matter handled.

I have covered Louisiana crime for the better part of forty years, and I still cannot decide which took more nerve: running a million-dollar scam out of a T-shirt shop, or reassigning four cops to a new zip code and calling it justice.

Rafael Goyeneche had seen this act before. “You look up career criminal in the dictionary, and there’s his picture,” the Metropolitan Crime Commission president told reporters. “We have complaints about this guy going back to the 1940s.”

“They’ve been using the old man excuse since he was sixty-four years old,” Goyeneche said. “You look at this guy and think he should be in a retirement home, but he’s supposedly pulling in a million dollars ripping people off. Amazing!”

Police already knew Schwartz well before the T-shirt shop bust. By the time troopers pulled up that carpet, veteran officers considered him one of the French Quarter’s most notorious old-time hoods, the kind whose name still worked as a password in certain back rooms.

One of them, briefed on the arrest, could only marvel. “This guy is a legend,” he said. “A professional, safe-cracking elite among criminals. I thought he was dead.”

A federal judge convicted Schwartz in December 2004, along with codefendant Terrence “Scotty” Border, sixty-three, of running the game and paying off police. In a separate trial, the FBI called Border “a career carny with fifteen aliases.” He served eight months.

In court, investigators laid out the mechanics. Barkers in the back room worked tourists with a rigged betting game and a single promise: one more bet, and the big money was theirs.

The big money never came.

The court set Schwartz’s sentencing for Wednesday, April 13, 2005. He did not make it.

That morning, shortly before nine o’clock, Mitchell Schwartz lies in a bed at Ferncrest Manor Nursing Home, in New Orleans East. He is ninety-three years old, seventy-five years into a criminal career that survived a life sentence, a governor’s pardon, and a federal indictment. The marshals have not yet left to bring him to court. He stops breathing first.

The sentencing never happened. At ninety-three, Mitch Schwartz had run his last game, and he had won it.