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Joe Lopinto, a low-key voice in a big office, battles to keep title of sheriff in Jefferson Parish
Author Name, ProPublica
2021-11
The 20 or so Hispanic activists and journalists listened politely as Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joseph Lopinto III offered his standard campaign spiel one recent evening at the Iglesia de Dios Getsemani church in Metairie.
But they weren’t really interested in what he had to say. Federal agents are arresting immigrants who are in the country illegally, and the Hispanic community is scared, they told him over and over. Once, twice, three times they asked him what he planned to do specifically for Hispanics if he wins this month’s sheriff’s race.
“The job of sheriff is not to cater to one community over another,” Lopinto replied at one point. “The job of sheriff is to solve crimes regardless of who’s the victim.”
When someone is jailed, he added, the Sheriff’s Office will continue informing federal immigration authorities, even though it may lead to the deportation of undocumented immigrants.
“I realize that’s not necessarily the answer you’re looking for,” Lopinto said, adding a short time later, “I’m a professional.”
Lopinto, 41, is in some ways a break from the past for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, a low-key everyman in a position held for the better part of four decades by outspoken, opinionated and frequently controversial figures: first the legendary Harry Lee, who took over in 1980, and then, following Lee’s death in 2007, Newell Normand, who stepped down last year to host a radio talk show.
And yet in other ways, Lopinto is a vote for continuity. He is, after all, Normand’s hand-picked successor, and he is offering nothing flashy or new as he looks to persuade voters to let him serve out Normand’s term.
As was obvious during his meeting with Hispanic activists, and in other campaign appearances as well, Lopinto is showing no sign of planning to make over the Sheriff’s Office.
“What I try to do every day is work hard,” he told the Hispanic crowd in the type of I-put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other comment that describes his approach to the job he wants to keep.
Rather than a referendum on how to police Jefferson Parish, his duel with former Sheriff’s Office spokesman John Fortunato over the top law enforcement job in the parish boils down to an argument over who has the more appropriate resumé for the role.
Probably the most striking moment of an otherwise mostly quiet race came when Lopinto acknowledged that several of his deputies had retrieved surveillance footage of Fortunato having coffee with a pair of former high-ranking Sheriff’s Office officials. Professing ignorance, Lopinto ordered up an internal investigation — which concluded that Lopinto himself had asked for the footage.
He has a big lead in the money race, having raised more than $1 million. The prominent Jefferson businessman Shane Guidry, one of the biggest Republican contributors in Louisiana politics, has given Lopinto $75,000 through his various companies and raised another $50,000 for him.
But he has nevertheless trailed in the polls, thanks either to campaign missteps or to Fortunato’s advantage in having served as the agency’s public face for years.
A late bloomer
Now angling to hold one of the state’s most powerful offices, Lopinto hasn’t always shown so much ambition, certainly not after he enrolled as a freshman at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
“I was the young 18-year-old kid who didn’t study,” he said between bites of a club sandwich recently at the Chateau Café in Kenner. “I was more worried about my fraternity than the actual school.”
He scored high with the fraternity brothers at Phi Kappa Theta. They named him “pledge of the year.”
Lopinto got an A in Equestrian 101 — and flunked all of his other classes.
“That’s enough,” his father, Joe Jr., a New Orleans cop, told him. “I’m not going to pay for you to goof off at ULL.” Financing their son’s education was a stretch for him and his wife Rita.
Joe III had no choice but to move back home, a small three-bedroom house just off Clearview Parkway in Metairie, with his parents and younger sister.
As a boy, he had hung out at Chag’s Sporting Goods while his mother worked down the street at a dental office, and he took a job at the store when he got back from ULL.
Lopinto stopped back there recently while touring the east bank.
“Don’t talk bad about me,” he called out as he arrived. “I’ve got the press with me.”
Owner Ray Chagnard pulled out a photo of 15-year-old Joe. “It’s not a mullet,” Lopinto said, appraising his haircut. “But there was something wrong with it.”
Other employees and store regulars greeted Lopinto with a, “Hey, Joey, how ya doin’?”
Lopinto took a seat at a spot deep in the store called “the counter” across from Chagnard, who tried to explain how Joey had gone from sporting goods to public office.
“I think he got hit in the head at some point,” Chagnard joked. “He made a real turn. Once he got started, there was no stopping him. He was at an age where he realized he had to make a change. Right, Joey?”
Lopinto came home one day and told his dad that he wanted to become a deputy at the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.
“Haven’t you seen my life?” the elder Lopinto warned. “I often have to work 16-hour days. I’m not home for some of your activities. I see the tragedies of life firsthand.”
Lopinto was undeterred.
“I knew early on I would be a police officer,” he said recently. “You always admire what your father does.”
'3½ years of misery'
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After passing the training academy, Lopinto began a night shift in Fat City, an area then overrun with bars and strip joints. He and the other deputies who worked out of the JPSO’s 1st District building on Hessmer Avenue had a friendly competition to see who could ring up the most felony arrests each month.
“He was fun and down to the earth,” remembered Sgt. Melissa Marion, then a deputy like Lopinto.
He didn’t strike her as an ambitious comer. “If you had said he would be sheriff one day, I would have laughed because I wouldn’t have believed it,” she said.
Patrolling the streets, Lopinto realized that he needed more than a high school education. He obtained a two-year associate degree in criminal justice at Delgado Community College.
While continuing to work full time as a deputy, Lopinto enrolled at Loyola University, where his father had also studied while working as a cop in New Orleans. In 2002, he got his undergraduate degree in criminal justice.
Not sure of his next step, he took the Law School Admission Test on a whim and scored high. He enrolled at Loyola law school at night.
Lopinto switched to the morning shift as a deputy. He worked from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m., studied from 2 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. and was in classes from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
“It was 3½ years of misery,” he said.
Along the way, he paid for his studies.
“My parents gave me my shot,” he said. “I didn’t take advantage of it. After that, I took care of myself.”
It meant graduating with $100,000 in student debt. He began representing deputies, who were sued for one reason or another, on behalf of sheriff’s offices.
Knocking on doors
Three years later, in 2007, he surprised his parents by telling them that he was running for an open seat in the state House. He explained that having lived his entire life in the district — which included St. Christopher Church, where he had attended elementary school and been an altar boy, and Cleary Playground, where he had played football and baseball — his family knew lots of the residents.
“This was not a lifelong dream for me to be a state representative,” Lopinto said recently. “I don’t know what drove me to do it. It was like, ‘Let’s run.’ Sometimes you have to take chances in life.”
The favorite in the race was Glenn Lee, whose uncle Harry would die during the campaign after 27 years as sheriff.
Lopinto decided that he would outwork Glenn Lee and knock on all of the district’s doors at least once. He won with 58 percent of the vote.
“He would always do what I asked him to do and much more,” said Jeff Crouere, who was his campaign manager. “The secret when you met him is that he came across as a guy you could trust.”
In one of his first votes, Lopinto supported a pay raise for legislators that would double his salary, believing that they were underpaid at a base salary of $16,800 per year.
The public outrage that followed prompted legislators to back away from the raise. In the meantime, two constituents, Ira Weber and his son Henry, organized a recall effort against Lopinto.
“We thought it was a bad idea for people in politics to vote themselves a raise. No one else can,” Ira Weber, a self-employed businessman, said recently.
Lopinto said he told them then that the raise should have taken effect after the next legislative election, a position that the Webers supported. Ira Weber is backing Lopinto today in the sheriff’s race.
“He’s got experience as a police officer and experience in the law,” Weber said. “Those things are important for your sheriff.”
For three years beginning in 2012, Lopinto chaired the House Criminal Justice Committee. He was widely praised for an even-handed approach, although some advocates wished he had pushed harder to reduce sentencing minimums for nonviolent offenders, in a state with the highest per capita incarceration rate in the United States.
During his years in the House, Lopinto was a reliable Republican vote, but he did cause some waves in GOP circles when he followed Normand’s lead and endorsed John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, in the 2015 governor’s race over U.S. Sen. David Vitter, a Republican from Jefferson Parish.
Being a CEO
In 2016, Normand asked Lopinto to serve as the Sheriff's Office’s in-house lawyer, which forced him to resign from the House. At the time, Normand said Lopinto “knows the inner workings of the office, and he knows the culture we’re trying to develop.”
Lopinto called it his “dream job.” And with a twin boy and girl, he was also tiring of the daily commute to Baton Rouge while the Legislature was in session.
In July, Normand tapped him again, this time to be interim sheriff after Normand's departure.
“I beg the citizens of Jefferson Parish to give Joe every deference that they gave me and that they trust my judgment that he would be the man to lead us into the future,” the outgoing sheriff said.
As he seeks to continue in the job, Lopinto is counting on the support of 26 of the 40 most important Jefferson Parish elected officials, according to a survey by The New Orleans Advocate.
He sees his job as being less the cop on the street and more the chief executive officer of the Sheriff’s Office. So he makes a point of telling voters about some of the less sexy aspects of running the office, ones that another candidate might ignore: running the jail, serving civil suits, collecting taxes and overseeing a department with 1,500 employees and an annual budget of $125 million.
“My job is to go to work every day and make sure the men and women in the Sheriff’s Office have the tools,” Lopinto said at a campaign forum in Kenner. “It’s my job to review the contracts, the policies, the procedures, the memorandums.”
Lopinto also wants voters to take comfort from statistics showing that crime is at an all-time low in the parish. If it ain’t broke, he seems to be saying, don’t fix it.
Lopinto was driving a white Sheriff’s Office vehicle on Causeway Boulevard recently when he was asked how he went from college dropout to sheriff. He struggled to answer.
“There wasn’t a master plan,” he said.
[END]
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