February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
And if they prove to be correct and legally sound, he stands to lay claim to a fortune many times larger than the $15 million that the U.S. paid Napoleon back in 1803 for a slice of real estate that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border.
Larrieu tells a dark tale of the bayou that stretches back into the middle of the 19th century and the arrival in New Orleans of his great-grandmother Mary Clarke.
Mary was from Galway, and like so many single Irish women of her time she took her chances with the stormy Atlantic and the new continent by striking out alone at some point in the 1860s. Her gamble paid off when she met and married a man named August Larrieu.
Mary and August had four children and the family made itself financially comfortable by means of a thriving dairy business. They purchased a considerable amount of land, a logical move given that cows were putting the gumbo on the table.
What was fertile delta soil is now covered by the asphalt and concrete of a vastly expanded city of New Orleans.
According to Lloyd Patrick, or Patrick as he generally goes by, part of the old family estate also covers City Park, a 1,500-acre botanical oasis in the heart of the Big Easy’s present day downtown area.
Mary’s idyllic life was shattered in 1890 when her husband died. Certain matters surrounding August’s death remain a matter of some controversy as far as Patrick is concerned. One is a document purporting to be August’s will. Patrick is certain that the document was a forgery, part of a plan by a nefarious cabal of New Orleans hustlers to relieve a now rich Irish widow of her considerable inheritance.
Part of that inheritance was land that now makes up a considerable portion of New Orleans, including the aforementioned City Park.
Despite its name, City Park is not actually run by the city of New Orleans as, say, Central Park in Manhattan is owned and run by New York City. And neither is it owned by the city, a polite voice at the end of the City Park phone line told “IF.”
It rather comes under the auspices of a Louisiana state agency, the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism.
But is not actually a state park either.
“Not one of ours,” said a very nice person at the Louisiana State Parks number.
The park receives no tax support for its operations from either New Orleans or the state of Louisiana.
How it explains itself then, both on the phone and on its Web site, is that it is “operated” by a state agency of the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism.
That agency is called the City Park Improvement Association and it is run by a board of 34 commissioners, 12 of them appointed by the likes of the governor of Louisiana and mayor of New Orleans, while 22 members are elected.
The way the park is administered might be simply unusual and nothing more than that, but it’s the origin of the improvement association itself that sends up a red flag before the eyes of Patrick Larrieu.
It was established in 1891, just months after the death of his great-grandfather. Five years later, in 1896, the Louisiana Legislature placed the park under the full control of the association and invested in it the authority to operate and develop the park.
It was around this time, according to Larrieu, that Mary and her children found themselves fending off an organized effort by various individuals — he likes to use the word “nefarious” — to carve up the family’s estate.
The forces arrayed against the family were overwhelming. The young woman who had set out from Ireland with hope in her heart, who had married well and prospered, was to die penniless in 1938.
The saga didn’t end with Mary’s death, however. Her children’s claims on the family estate were also dissected and destroyed in the following years, according to Larrieu.
For example, a judgment of possession which followed the death of Mary’s daughter Marie under mysterious circumstances in 1956 was, he says, deliberately held back from the family.
Larrieu managed to get his hands of the document some years ago when his quest for justice was in its early, and most quixotic stage. The murky circumstances surrounding Marie’s death, Larrieu says, center on incomplete burial records and two different descriptions of her in hospital records. The recorded date of her death was June 20, 1956.
Oddly enough, indeed very oddly, Mary’s son and Larrieu’s grandfather, also August Larrieu, passed away on that very same date.
Grandpa Larrieu suffered serious injuries after apparently falling down the steps in front of St. Jude’s Catholic Church in New Orleans. His grandson reckons he was pushed.
More than that, he believes that when his grandfather declined to die quickly enough from his injuries, he was slipped a little helper as he lay on his hospital bed. Larrieu reckons that an exhumation of the remains, and tests using present day forensic techniques, could well reveal the presence of arsenic or a similarly lethal poison in August’s bones.
When “IF” first came across this bizarre tale some years ago, Patrick Larrieu was battling his way through the morass of Louisiana’s archives and property law without the aid of an attorney. He became a self-taught expert and began filing claims all by his lonesome in the Pelican State’s court system.
Things have move on a bit. He now has a lawyer, indeed more than one, and he has been joined by a growing band of relatives, close and distant, who see a gleam of light where once there was a deep well of legalistic swamp water.
In recent days, to his surprise and joy, he discovered that the old family house where Mary Clarke had loved and lived was still intact. He had long ago been informed that it had been leveled.
“My 25-year investigation has yielded voluminous documentation from public records, forensic evidence and engineering land surveys that support these claims of fraud, probable murder and corruption,” he said.