April 1998 to October 2000

Operations Bureau (Serpas)

It all started, as many questionable career moves do, at a crawfish boil. I was at Le Bon Temps Roule on Magazine Street—beer in hand, elbows deep in crawfish juice, surrounded by co-workers. Second District Captain Louis Dabdoub was talking with Chief of Operations Bureau Ronal Serpas. My best friend, Doug Baudier, had somehow landed a gig working for Serpas at the Operations Bureau. Office job. Big title. Coffee with the brass. That sort of thing.

Doug, ever the overachiever, was about to leave for a much better job with Cox Communications. On his way out, he casually recommended me as his replacement. So, Serpas looks at me and says something like, “You interested?” I, very stupidly, responded with something like, “Ah, no thanks, Chief. I really like what I’m doing.” Serpas looked at me and said words that would stick with me forever: “I wasn’t asking.” And that was that.

My First Day:  The Hostage Situation

The night before I was to report to Operations Bureau, I made a small tactical error in judgment—namely, sneaking into a girl’s house while her parents were home. Romantic? Sure. Smart? Not even a little.

Morning comes. I’m up early, ready to sneak out, go home, shower, and report to my new post with the literal Chief of Operations. Except—plot twist—her parents are awake. And I’m not going anywhere. I’m trapped. Hiding. Like a teenage boyfriend in a sitcom.

I panicked and did what any self-respecting adult in law enforcement would do: I called Doug. “DUDE. What do I tell Serpas?!” Doug, with the calm and wisdom of a man who was leaving this job forever, said: “Tell him exactly what you just told me.” Now, this felt like terrible advice. But I had no other cards to play.

So I showed up late, heart pounding, and laid it all out. Serpas listened. Stared at me. Then cracked a smile. He laughed and said he was just glad I didn’t feed him some lame excuse like a flat tire. From that moment on, we got along just fine. Trust built on honesty, and a shared appreciation for not being lied to first thing in the morning.  

The Job: Office Life, Intelligence, and Invisible Value

The assignment itself? Not much to write home about. Office work. Admin stuff. Memos. Meetings. Graphs. I was the human equivalent of a filing cabinet for a while. But I learned a lot. I got to see how the department actually functioned—where the gears turned, where the rust was, who really made the calls.

I had access to all kinds of inside information, and I kept every bit of it to myself. That part ended up mattering more than I realized. It built trust. It showed people I could be discreet, even when I didn’t want the job in the first place. And it gave me the tools I’d use later, as I moved up through the ranks.

I’d seen firsthand what worked, what didn’t, and what kind of BS to look out for when the PowerPoint started rolling. So yeah, I didn’t ask for the job. But it ended up being a pretty solid gift wrapped in paperclips and bureaucratic nonsense. Thanks, crawfish.