The GAO reported today that certain federal Katrina and Rita relief funds were misused by storm victims. The accounting office describes its findings as “Purchases that did not appear necessary to satisfy immediate emergency needs.” While the definition of “immediate emergency needs” appears unqualified, the schedule of illicit purchases reads more like a credit card receipt for a bachelor party than a disaster relief effort.
While the amounts in controversy, a paltry several thousand dollars, pale in comparison to the millions dispersed to the region’s storm-stricken residents, the GAO does expose what can happen when dollars, and not solutions, are thrown at a problem. However, despite the openness and candor of the report, the GAO failed to disclose in its findings that all of its identified suspect purchases contained in the released schedule were made by one individual, Theodore S. Kiegals of Baton Rouge, LA. According to unpublished reports and several incoherent interviews, Kiegals, an out of work roofer, left a trail of economic activity throughout the post-hurricane southern US, funded entirely through government issued debit cards in what Kiegals later described as “the search for the perfect cat tattoo.”
What little record there is of Kiegals before the hurricane season of 2005 is housed in court documents from New Orleans which indicate that he was arraigned in 1992 for impersonating an animal control officer to gain entry into a restricted area. The rest of Kiegals’ background comes from his own words. Kiegals apparently survived Hurricane Katrina by locking himself in his trailer closet and consuming crystal meth for three days straight. When he emerged, he had an intense desire to walk to the ocean, which he did, and ended up somewhere along the coastline on the Texas/Louisiana border. He was unconscious when Rita struck his beach shanty, having been involved in some type of brawl over a domestic dispute earlier in the day. When he awoke, he was standing in line at a federal relief station in Plano, TX. It was in that line that Kiegals luck would change, for the moment. Due to a clerical error, Kiegals was issued over $25,000 in debit cards by federal officials. Although he had never established a bank account, registered for a social security number, and possessed only a suspended driver’s license, Kiegals did have over thirty five major credit cards issued to him by U.S. banks, and so was familiar with the debit card concept. However, he lost almost $20,000 of his windfall in a dice game behind the relief station within 10 minutes of receiving the cards. Determined to save what was left of his fortune, he decided to invest a portion in a series of diversified instruments, beginning with jewelry. He spent an afternoon at a jewelry store where he was “treated like a man about town” and left with an engagement ring, which he still wears as an earring to this day. Kiegals doesn’t recall much of the next week he and a tramp named Roscoe spent traveling Texas, debit cards in hand. Trips to Dallas and Houston were marked by evenings at “Gentleman’s Clubs” and massage parlors. When funds began running low, the men centered their odyssey around the Dallas Green Motor Lodge, where a beer and porno mag binge carried them through a waning post-Katrina depression. It was at this time that Roscoe sketched a drawing on the motel bathroom wall of a cat lapping up water from a broken New Orleans levee. Inspired by the vision, Kiegals decided to purchase a tattoo of the drawing. Today, Kiegals proudly displays the tattoo on his back and comments that it and his engagement earring are the only things left of his adventures with Roscoe. But the story doesn’t end there. Kiegals and Roscoe returned to Louisiana after several arrest warrants were issued for them in relation to an incident that occurred in the men’s bathroom at the Astrodome. Roscoe was picked up by Louisiana police on an unrelated charge, and Kiegals bailed him out, causing his funds to run dangerously low. The two men parted ways, but not before Kiegals, after spending several days waiting for the government mandated handgun waiting period to expire, purchased a pistol for Roscoe, to help him “to fight the men who insult me in my dreams.” Kiegals, now alone and carrying a balance of approximately $1700, returned to his hometown of Baton Rouge and his live-in girlfriend Penelope. Because the state had recently begun its “It’s no jive, we card through 75” program, Kiegals needed to obtain a valid driver’s license in order to frequent his favorite drinking establishments. After spending $700 to clear up years of fines and parking tickets, he was admitted to the Argosy Casino. It was here where the adventure ended. Kiegals, unfamiliar with the newly installed ATM machines at the casino, mistakenly thought they were gambling machines, and proceeded to “lose” his remaining stake of $1000. Fast forward to February 2006 where Kiegals lives alone in his trailer, Penelope having left him to join the U.S. Army. Kiegals himself washed out of basic training when army officials realized his entry physical, recently outsourced to a private company, failed to reveal the seven various std’s he had contracted on the bus to Ft. Benning. Today he is friendless, his only communication with the outside world being conducted with Roscoe, now wanted by several Federal agencies, through thinly veiled secret messages in Auto Trader magazines. He has been unemployed since the late nineties, but blames the storms of ’05 for his situation. In his most recent interview, he lamented “Well, as you well know, it is difficult to find a job as a roofer in these parts now a days.” At nights he stares at the ceiling and wonders what the later summer of 2006 will bring.
