The Can Man Can't is not in the vocabulary of John Keller, the ex-Marine who shepherded hundreds of American Can Company residents to safety after Hurricane Katrina and now has film producers eager to tell his story Sunday, March 25, 2007 By Elizabeth Mullener Staff writer John Keller was hanging out in his apartment at the American Can Company on the Wednesday after Hurricane Katrina when he heard an explosive noise at his door -- slow and rhythmic. "Boom! Boom! Boom!" is the way he recalls it. Somebody, he figured, was trying to kick down his door. Keller's instinct was to outsmart the intruder. So he got the timing down and then, just as the next kick was about to fall, he flung open the door. A young man about 25 years old came staggering through it, followed by two others. They were people from the neighborhood who had been in the building for a couple of days by then, people who came to seek refuge and wound up stuck in the place. "He fell in my door and hit the floor," Keller says. "Rabble-rousers, kicking down doors to get what they could get, ready to seize control. "I marched them out of the building and told them to stay out. I followed them out to the gate. I didn't care if they couldn't swim." That moment was a turning point for Keller. It was then he began to emerge as the man in charge at the Can Company, a solid, five-story hunk of a building that normally houses about 500 mixed-income residents, many of them elderly or handicapped. Isolated by the water that rose 11 feet and crept into the lobby the day after the storm, the building became a tiny kingdom unto itself on Orleans Avenue in Mid-City. For five days, Keller was its undisputed monarch. At 6-foot-7 and 260 pounds, he seems exactly like the ex-Marine he is: brawny, tough, canny, resourceful and non-stop funny. By the sheer power of personal authority, he faced down the crisis and kept the Can Company calm and controlled, safe from the floodwater, from the impending chaos and from the menacing visitors. "I could have got in that boat and paddled my ass out of here," Keller says. But he didn't. He stayed. "It sure wasn't for money," he says. "It wasn't for recognition. It wasn't to be no damn hero. "What made me stay was the old people. I just realized that nobody else in here could have gotten those people out. They would have sat in here for five more days. And they didn't have five more days. "When I looked at all those old people, I thought about my grandmother and I wondered: Would I entrust my grandmother to be stuck out here at the mercy of these thugs?" Trained by the Marines to work on a reconnaissance team, he had perfect confidence that he could do the job. "I couldn't have lived with myself knowing I could have saved everybody in here but I left," he says. "You know what I'm saying? How could I have done that?" By Keller's count there were 170 residents who remained in the building through the storm. More than half of them, he says, were elderly, about a third couldn't walk unassisted, about a quarter were in wheelchairs. The refugees from the neighborhood numbered 74; one in four of them, he estimates, seemed dangerous to him. By late afternoon on Friday, Sept. 2, Keller had overseen the evacuation of all 244 people in the building, save for 19 who chose to stay. Miraculously, nobody died. In the course of his adventures, Keller and his cousin, Chris Roberts, took 600 photographs and shot 75 minutes of videotape, documenting the ordeal at the Can Company from start to finish. In the immediate aftermath, Keller was courted ardently by the media -- NBC, the BBC, Spike Lee, Oprah Winfrey, Anderson Cooper. A film company called Ruby Red produced a 10-minute documentary about him that ran on Black Entertainment Television and was later posted on the Internet, where it got 6 million hits. Recently, Keller sold the rights to his story to an independent producer, Back Door Films, which is developing a theatrical feature movie on the subject. Producer Adetoro Makinde hopes to begin shooting in New Orleans in the fall. "Everybody has their own Katrina story, but this one is a little different," Keller says with his characteristic bravado. "There were other people rescuing people. But they didn't hot-wire boats, hot-wire cars, swim to the grocery store, come back with food, cook for all those people, organize them, get the thugs off them. "This story has juice. It does." . . . . . . . For the first couple of days after the storm, the situation at the Can Company was uncomfortable but not alarming. There were critters swimming around in the lobby: turtles, snakes, bass, perch -- schools of perch, Keller says. Bayou St. John nearby had swelled and then overflowed. And the water was coming up fast in the building's parking lot. Early on, Keller organized a group to go door-to-door in the building and take a head count. Then he took a fire extinguisher and used the powder to write a message on the roof for passing helicopters: "DRP MRE AND H2O FOR 170." He suggested the security guard take the box of keys in the office, put them in one room and lock the door. And he confronted the outsiders who seemed to be bent on ransacking the place. One man was trying to crash his way into the restaurant, the coffee shop and the wine store that line the building's façade. "Man, that's our last resort, that walk-in cooler," Keller remembers telling him. "That food will last for a week. You go in there and break the seal and we're out. Just because you're hungry? Uh-uh, you ain't going to do that." He was too late to stop another man who had broken into the vending machines. "I found out who was doing it and I made him go get all the food he had taken," Keller says. "Just because he could take it doesn't mean he can keep all that." And he was likewise too late to stop another group of outsiders from harming one of the residents. "I heard somebody kicking on a door in an empty hallway," he says. "When I got there, they were already in his apartment. They had busted his mouth. He lost some teeth. "I told him to come and stay with me -- rack out on the couch. He stayed there the rest of the time." On Tuesday, Keller called all the residents together and asked them to get the food out of their freezers before it went bad. He said if they cooked it, it would last longer. Then he swam to the Winn-Dixie on North Carrollton Avenue -- he has been a strong swimmer since childhood -- for charcoal and supplies. "I found nine ice chests in front of the store and I tied them together like a Slinky," he says. "I put the stuff inside and dragged it home through the water." In the building's breezeway, he and his friends set up eight grills, then stood in thigh-high water and cooked all the food. As for Winn-Dixie, he admits to his deeds, without remorse. "I looted," he says. "I did. I got beef jerky, Gatorade, water, batteries, film, bread, Bombay Sapphire gin, Patron tequila and Ketel One vodka. I kept one ice chest and gave the other eight away to the people in the hallways." The next day, growing anxious, he decided he had to check on his mother and grandmother. Using a kayak he found chained to the steps in the back of the building, he paddled to eastern New Orleans. He went alone. It took him seven hours. "It was killing me," he says. "I wasn't in shape for that." He saw gruesome sights along the way. "When I got to the 9th Ward," he says, "I saw people on their roofs, houses floating by, people desperate. No boats around, no help. I saw people in trees, people in desperation. I saw people floating." When he got to his mother's house, he discovered it had been boarded up. She had evacuated to Methodist Hospital, he found out later, along with her mother. Tired and sore, Keller paddled back home. Meanwhile, two days had gone by and, except for a drop of only 96 MREs, the sign on the roof hadn't provoked any response. Keller was disappointed that the cavalry hadn't arrived. "It's ridiculous. Made me feel like a second-class citizen," he says. "I was in Iraq during Desert Storm. They dropped me food and water in the middle of nowhere. But you can't get food and water to residents in a big city? "Bush and the government abandoned us all." . . . . . . . By virtue of his size, his constitution and his body-build, Keller can be intimidating. By virtue of his charisma, his crinkly smile and his comical take on life, he can be the opposite. At 38, he is verbally dazzling, a master of both street slang and formal English, and he combines the two with wit and style. His words spurt out at machine-gun pace, in a blast of hilarity, profanity and shrewd observations. He is dark and ironic, frequently sarcastic, sometimes brilliant and always a little askance. Around the edges, there is a hint of courtliness to him. He is not the least bit shy about his emotional struggles -- about suffering from post-traumatic stress since his days in Desert Storm, about shedding tears for his comrades who didn't make it back, about finding solace in a psychiatrist's office, about frustrations with family and friends, about his profound attachment to his daughter. But most of all, he is powerful, with his massive shoulders, his gristly neck, his forceful handshake and his get-out-of-my-way swagger. By the Wednesday after Katrina, Keller needed every bit of that swagger and then some. The situation was growing grave. One of the residents was running out of oxygen in her tank. A heart patient was short on nitroglycerine. Diabetics were low on insulin. And a pregnant woman was dangerously close to her delivery date. "I had done enough," Keller says. "I did not want to deliver that baby." They were all turning to him for help. Finally, he told them to bring him their prescriptions. Then he got in his kayak and paddled over to Lindy Boggs Hospital to see if he could round up some drugs. But the staff at the hospital was overwhelmed dealing with its own emergencies and couldn't do much for him. On his way back, he stopped by the embankment of Bayou St. John on Moss Street -- or at least the skinny strip of it that was above water -- where hospital patients were gathering to be picked up by an Army Blackhawk helicopter. Keller talked with the crew chief, told him there was trouble brewing at American Can and asked if he could add the most vulnerable people to the line for helicopter rescue. The Marine in Keller understood when the crew chief said his orders were to pick up only hospital patients. He thanked the man and paddled back home. He arrived to a chorus of questions -- as he did every time he left and returned to the building -- and he did his best to keep apprehension at bay. "I fed them bull, just to keep their hopes up: Don't worry, they're going to come check on us, tell us what to do," he says. "I didn't want them getting all sad on me." Then he got the food that had been swiped from the vending machines -- the security guard kept it under lock and key -- and he started doling out candy to the diabetics. "It worked for the time being," he says. "But it was a short fix." In addition, the level of anxiety in the building was rising. "Everybody deals with stress differently," Keller says. "This was the most traumatic thing that had happened to a lot of people. For me, compared to Iraq, this was nothing. Nobody shooting at us all day long, I wasn't in fear for my life all the time. I never did think I wouldn't get out of here. And that alleviates a whole lot of stress. If push had come to shove, I still had my kayak." . . . . . . . Meanwhile, the tension between the residents and the outsiders had grown sharper and taken on racial overtones. Of the residents remaining in the building, about 100 were white and 70 black. The 74 outsiders were nearly all black. "About 15 or 20 bad ones among them," Keller says. "Thugs: gold teeth, medallions, diamonds, pistols. They were living on the roof and in the hallways. The others were just poor -- elderly, kids, everybody." The tension came to a head late that Wednesday on the building's roof when one of the outsiders took offense, saying a white resident had dissed him. Keller walked out on the roof just as the contretemps began. "It wasn't white-boy day on that roof," he says, shaking his head. He remembers the dialogue this way: "White bitch better keep my name out of her mouth," the man said. The woman turned to Keller for protection. "Why does he hate me, John?" she asked him. "They don't like white people," Keller told her. "The only time they ever see white people is when they're chasing them through the projects to lock them up in jail." The man was fuming, cursing at the white woman. Keller applied some pressure. "I went buck crazy on him," Keller says. "I told him I'd whip his ass on this roof and toss him off. When you're in control of lunatics, you know, you've got to be the biggest lunatic. "The guy was shouting out racial slurs to all the white people," Keller says. "And I didn't see any white people telling him anything." The son of a lawyer and a florist, Keller grew up privileged and got most of his education at St. Stanislaus in Bay St. Louis, Miss., -- a boarding school for rich troubled kids, he calls it -- where he, a black student in a predominantly white school, was elected class president. The experience, he thinks, left him with an idiosyncratic perspective. "I was raised with the rich white boys," he says. "I know both sides of the spectrum." He feels that his upbringing made him more effective at moments like the confrontation on the roof. "When I'm explaining to the white folks why the black folks don't like them, I was able to get them to understand the animosity. "I know what the deal is: It's fear. They fear us; we fear them." Keller was likewise able to offer the black man an explanation. "Look, man," Keller told him, "these white folks didn't do this to you. They're stuck out here just like you're stuck out. "This is our house. We live here. You're seeking refuge." The moment of crisis passed. . . . . . . . On Thursday morning, Keller had an idea for attracting attention to their plight: Take all the black people off the roof and put some of the white people up there -- especially the elderly ones, especially the ones in wheelchairs. He got hold of his cousin and a few other men who had been working with him and together they began moving people around. It was astoundingly successful. Within 15 minutes, Keller says, a helicopter had landed on the roof and asked him what they needed. Before long, food and water began dropping from the skies. "All the thugs were on the roof, so they wouldn't land there," Keller explains. "They were flying close to the building for days -- maybe 50 feet away. They would hover for a minute, read the message, then take off. "I wouldn't have landed there either. Someone might have jumped on the helicopter with a gun and said, 'Fly me to Baton Rouge.' " From then on, things changed. "After that, it became a rescue operation," Keller says. Worried about the state of the most critically ill residents, Keller went back to the neutral ground and talked with the crew chief. "I told him, 'Look, man, we're about to have a morgue over in our building,' " he says. " 'We have lots of old people there, turning colors before my eyes. It's going to be a morgue by tomorrow.' " Without asking the man to violate his orders, Keller suggested that if he added some of his people to the mix on the neutral ground, the crew chief would have no way of telling who was who. "I said, 'If I get these people up here, will you get them out? You don't have to know where they came from.' " They reached an unspoken agreement. Then Keller went back to American Can, got his hands on a queen-size air mattress and transported the four sickest people, one at a time, the old-fashioned way. "Backstroke," is how he puts it. Because the Blackhawk helicopter was too heavy for the American Can building -- it began to sink into the roof when it landed -- a lighter Coast Guard helicopter came around. The pilot told Keller to have all the sick, the elderly and the children on the roof at 6 the next morning and he would begin evacuating them. . . . . . . . Getting people to the roof was no easy task. The elderly and handicapped had to be carried, some of them up five flights of stairs. Keller organized a group to get it done. True to his word, the Coast Guard pilot showed up Friday morning and started moving people out. But because the helicopter was so small, it was slow going. It could carry only three people at a time and each trip -- to Armstrong Airport or Lakefront Airport -- took about half an hour. With 244 people on his hands, Keller knew the operation was problematic. "You do the math," he says. "We would have been there for a week." From the roof, Keller had spotted some motorboats and trucks on the roof of the building next door. At this point, he decided he needed them. "I told them I was going to go hot-wire those boats and bring them over here. They were like yeah, whatever. You're just stunting." Keller had gone to coxswain school in the service, so he knew his way around a boat and he had confidence he could pull it off. "But I didn't want to get shot in the back while I did it," he says. By this time, Keller says, there were several New Orleans Police Department officers at American Can -- one of them had a mother and grandmother living in the building -- and Keller asked them to cover him. He asked his cousin to start rounding up the residents who were ambulatory and get them to the front of the building, ready to leave. Then he found his way onto the roof of the Pel Hughes building and went to work. It took some jimmying. "I had to take a couple of boats apart but finally I found a hot battery and a toolbox," he says. "I was having problems at first. I was fumbling with it. Then all of a sudden, I got the starter to spin. "Buhdddddddd, it was spinning. Then gawwwwwwww." He grins at the thought of it. "I was like, 'Yep, we're out of here,' " he says. He got two boats going -- a jet boat and a motorboat. He took them down the ramp and pulled up in front of American Can. It was a memorable moment for him. "Everybody was cheering like I had scored a touchdown," he says. "Yep. We're out of here." . . . . . . . On the first trip out, at 8 in the morning, Keller put the police officers and their families in the two boats. Before they started out, the officers bestowed some gifts on him. "They gave me guns and a uniform -- a navy blue polo shirt that said POLICE on the back -- and they said, 'You're going to need this to get out of the city,' " he remembers. "I didn't understand what they meant." Until later that day. On his second trip out, with a boat full of American Can residents, Keller ran into trouble. "We were going by a project. I don't know which one. Maybe Lafitte," he begins. "And some guy said to me, 'Say, Red, put the white folks out of the boat. I need that boat.' "I said, 'Hey, man, I'll come back and get you and your family, but you can't have my boat.' "He said, 'Yeah? I'll take your boat.' "I said, 'I've got 45 reasons why you can't have this boat.' "He said, 'I've got an AK47 says I can have it.' "I said, 'I've been battle-tested and I don't miss. Don't try me.' " Keller declines to go into detail about the outcome of the confrontation. "You could say I prevailed," he says. . . . . . . . For the rest of the day, Keller made one trip after another in the motorboat, ferrying people from the Can Company to the embankment on Moss Street, from which they were helicoptered to the Superdome. "No breaks, no food, no rest," he says. "Six is supposed to be the maximum in that boat but I took 12 at a time. I had to sardine them up in there. When I would turn a corner, the boat would dip. If the weight would have shifted, we would have capsized." The jet boat didn't last long. A plastic bag got sucked into its motor and it was a goner. But the motorboat went all day, after Keller siphoned some gas out of a car in the garage. "Gas tastes like hell," he says. On the Can Company roof, meanwhile, the Coast Guard helicopter was slowly but surely winnowing the group of the youngest and oldest and sickest. "I'll say one thing about the Coast Guard: They never stopped flying," Keller says. "Just kept coming back to get people. Just didn't stop. They were relentless." Finally, about 5 in the evening, everybody was out who wanted out. Then it was Keller's turn. He barked out final orders to the people who had been helping him: "Go pack up a small bag. We're out of here. You've got five minutes. Not five minutes and one second. If you see the boat going up the street, you'd better swim fast. I'm not turning around." In a last bit of drama, a man who had heart trouble got on the boat with his son, then panicked and got off, afraid of the stress because he had run out of his medication. Dressed in the NOPD uniform he had been given, Keller piloted his way out of the city with 12 people in his boat. The first hitch he ran into was at South Carrollton and Tulane, where he parked his boat and then encountered a sheriff's deputy who tried to steer him to the Superdome. "I said, 'Look, man, I've got my family in there,' " Keller lied, pointing back at his boat. " 'Would you take your family to the Superdome?' "I had seen the people up on the ramps at the Dome. I knew I didn't want to go there. I mean, 20,000 people and no bathrooms? Uh-uh." His argument -- and his police uniform -- worked. The deputy steered him to a flotilla of small rubber boats hidden under the overpass that were manned by volunteers from Pennsylvania. The volunteers delivered the group to Airline and Causeway, where they ran into another glitch. "A cop stopped me and asked me for my ID," Keller says. "I gave him my driver's license and he said, 'No, I need your badge.' "I said, 'Look, man, I'm not a cop.' "And then I'm like, 'Oh damn, what did I just say?' " Eventually, Keller persuaded the man to let them pass. They caught a bus to LaPlace and spent the night with some friends. It had been a long day. "I felt good that night that I was able to get everybody out of there," he says. "It's like this: When I strapped the Can Company on my back for those days, it was like a mission in the military. That was my job in the military -- we'd go in and get your ass out of there. "And I thought to myself, what would those people have done if I wouldn't have been in that spot? They were in trouble." . . . . . . . These days, Keller is living at American Can and making his living as a carpenter again, as he did before the storm -- frequently on movie sets. He is also working with Makinde, the producer from Back Door Films, who comes to town regularly to scout locations, interview eyewitnesses and raise money for the project. "When I first heard about this story, I was just moved. With every detail, I was moved," Makinde says. "I have got to make this movie. I have to. "Every time I talk about this story and about John, it brings joy to my heart. I'm so excited to share this story." Like so many of the heroes of Katrina, Keller greeted the crisis with exactly the right set of skills: a penchant for action, an unshakable self-confidence, a willingness to sublimate his own needs, a capacity for empathy, a particular sense of racial awareness, a remarkable store of resourcefulness and a long career as a self-confessed adrenaline junkie. When he looks back now on his adventure in the summer of 2005, he can take a long perspective on it. "I needed Katrina then," he says. "I was bored to death." When he looked back on it a couple of months after the storm, he had a different reaction: He wrote a poem -- a poem that speaks for all of New Orleans: "I once met a girl named Katrina "Never met a bitch that was meaner "She blew into town, knocked all my shit down "And now I'm fooling with FEMA." . . . . . . .