In downtown New Iberia, where the millionaires lived, and in the less ostentatious, leafy City Park neighborhood, north of the Bayou Teche, Louis Ackal was welcomed home in 2008 as a savior. Most New Iberians grew up knowing his family, which arrived in south Louisiana in the late 1880s, during the first wave of Lebanese immigration to the United States. For 60 years, the Ackals owned a department store and a shoe store on Main Street. A local bridge that spans the Teche is named for Elias Ackal Jr., known as Bo, who served for more than two decades in the Louisiana House of Representatives. “They were part of the old guard,” says Jarrod Alleman, an oil-field safety specialist who attended school with members of the Ackal family. “All of our elected officials came out of a pool of people who were connected, and it had been like that forever. He was part of the ruling elite.” Yet Alleman, like many on the north side, saw Ackal as a reformer. “He was worldly. He had been places, had done other things. He seemed like a professional, not just someone’s brother-in-law.”

Ackal passed for worldly in New Iberia because he left town three decades earlier to work as a state trooper, serving at one point in the governor’s office, before retiring to a small mountain town in northwest Colorado. He came out of retirement, he said, because he was disturbed by the “horror stories” he had heard about residents’ encounters with the police in his hometown. There was a sense in the community that crime rates were unusually high for a place the size of New Iberia. “I’m not a big fan of politics,” Ackal said in a campaign speech. “The reason I ran was because people told me they were scared in their own homes.” Besides, he added, he missed the “crawfish and crabs and gumbo, and Cajun music.” Ackal ran as a change candidate, pledging to strengthen the internal-affairs unit and repair the relationship between the Sheriff’s Department and residents. He vowed to hire a public-information officer to communicate regularly with the press. He promised transparency, professionalism, strength.

“A lot of people had faith in him,” Julie Comeaux, a stay-at-home mother in the City Park neighborhood, told me. “People looked to him to move us forward.” If anyone could move the community forward, it was the sheriff. Louisiana sheriffs have a staggering measure of power and few checks on it. They collect taxes, run the jails and command the police force. In the smaller cities and parishes, they often hold greater political clout than mayors, parish presidents and businessmen — a power that derives in no small part from their ability to pursue criminal investigations of mayors, parish presidents and businessmen. As Sheriff Harry Lee of Jefferson Parish once put it, when asked why he declined to run for statewide office: “Why would I want to be governor when I can be king?”

It helped that Ackal’s family was respected on both sides of town. “The Ackals I knew were just wonderful people, personable, sweet,” says Phebe Hayes, a former professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and amateur historian of African-American life in the parish. “They didn’t feel very Old South. More Old World.” Two generations earlier, when black-owned restaurants, upholstery shops and pharmacies thrived in the West End and Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald played in the nightclubs, before it fell into an eerie dilapidated vacancy, the Ackals ran a general store on Hopkins. Ackal boasted of the store while stumping for votes on the West End, White says, which made him suspicious.

“He was intimidating, very arrogant,” White says. “He walked into peoples’ yards. He’d say: ‘My grandfather owned that store. When y’all went in to go shopping, who you think it was? That was my people. We were helping y’all. Y’all owe me.’ ”

White was appalled to find that this argument was persuasive among his neighbors. They told him that he didn’t understand, because he was an outsider. “I said: ‘I do understand. This is what I’m trying to get you out of. Y’all are 40 years behind Alexandria.’ But they thought he was going to help them. That was when I became the villain.”