WHAT WERE JEFF COPS SMOKING?

The detectives who arrested Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputy Duane Landry
were not at all surprised to find marijuana stuffed into the pack of
cigarettes in his pocket.

One of them, after all, had helped their supervisor put it there. It had
been borrowed from the evidence room.

Detectives no doubt pull this kind of stunt from time to time, although it
is rare for them to admit it. In this case, however, Jefferson Parish
detectives seem to have regarded it as a standard investigative technique.

Landry had just reported for work at the parish jail in 1998 when he was
arrested and fired. He would be charged, a Sheriff's Office spokesman said,
with "possession and intention to distribute marijuana, introducing
contraband into a correctional facility and malfeasance."

The evidence was so dubious that the DA's office declined to prosecute, and
Landry filed suit seeking damages for false arrest and defamation.

His suit claims that the "the entire incident was staged by the Jefferson
Parish Sheriff's Office for purposes unknown to your petitioner," although
this is clearly disingenuous because detectives did have reason to suspect
he was running drugs into the slammer.

An inmate called Robert Allen tipped off the officers in charge of the
jail, who in turn notified the investigations bureau, detective Sgt. Joseph
Williams said in a deposition. Although a jailbird's word is not
necessarily his bond, nobody could fault detectives for putting Landry
under surveillance.

But detectives were too impatient to wait for Landry to commit a crime.
Instead, they recruited Allen to set him up with a pack of Kools.

Williams related in his deposition, "I extracted some of the cigarettes
out" and his supervisor "put some of the marijuana obtained from the crime
lab inside the pack." The idea, Williams testified, was to make it obvious
that the pack had been tampered with and to see how Landry would react.

Allen was let out of jail with instructions to approach Landry on the
street outside the jail when he turned up for work and ask him to take the
Kools to an inmate named Kenneth Hill. Allen was wired up, and deputies
parked the surveillance van nearby and prepared to videotape proceedings.

If investigators had thought to check the duty roster at the jail, they
would have realized that this was Landry's day off. Everyone had to come
back the next day, and Landry was videotaped chatting with Allen and
putting the doctored pack of cigarettes in his pocket before heading for
roll call.

Drugs or no drugs, Landry was asking for trouble. Taking an open pack of
cigarettes to an inmate is against the rules, but Landry did not want to
argue with a former inmate on the street, his attorney Robert Garrity said.

When Landry got inside, detectives were waiting for him and his career as a
jailer was over. No contraband apart from the Kools was found on him, two
deputies have testified.

The audio tape did not catch any incriminating remarks from Landry and is,
in fact, largely unintelligible. Prosecutors cannot have taken long to
decide they did not wish to touch the case. Detectives were instructed to
arrest Landry before he reached the jailhouse "pod," so there is no proof
that Hill was going to get the pack of Kools anyway. So all that work
planting evidence was for nothing.

Still, Landry is not exactly above suspicion, at least in the eyes of
Jefferson Parish detectives, and taking an open pack of cigarettes into the
jail might have been grounds for dismissal anyway, although not for arrest.
That wouldn't have got his name in the paper either, and he might well win
his suit. He should not, however, count on a major payday.