Though neither the Iberia parish president nor the mayor of New Iberia called for Ackal’s removal from office, the Louisiana Sugar Cane Festival
replaced his department on the security detail for last year’s festival with officers from Youngsville, a small town 15 miles northwest.
The judge stripped Ackal of his gun, but he continued to serve as sheriff — even after, according to court papers, he was recorded threatening to shoot a federal attorney prosecuting his case, Mark Blumberg, “right between
your [expletive] Jewish-eyes-look-like-opossum bastard.” Last May, after White helped to organize a protest demanding he leave office, Ackal released a one-sentence statement: “It’ll be a cold day in hell when I resign.”
On a hot day last July, White joined a fledgling effort to recall Ackal.
When a deputy said he could not make that promise, White said to “tell his people
that he loved them.” He said: “I don’t want to go to jail,” and “I’m gone.” Next, the deputies claim in the police report, they heard a gunshot.
“If there is no God,” he said, “then we don’t have a good police officer, do we?” There were rumors
of police brutality, though most people on the north side didn’t know anyone who had suffered.
It’s the Iberia Parish Jail.’ ” At the 2011 Sugar Cane Festival, Ackal sent his officers to the West End to break up the celebration.
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.
But the man best suited to investigate the strange death of Victor White III — the man with the most intimate knowledge
of New Iberia, its legacy of racial conspiracy, the inner workings of the sheriff’s office — was the victim’s father.