Growing up in New Orleans, Hillar Moore III never dreamed of becoming a district attorney, much less the top prosecutor in Baton Rouge. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, except that he did not want to follow his father, Hillar Moore Jr., into the grocery wholesale business.
“The side of the food business I saw was unloading crates off of box cars,” says Moore. “It was a lot of hard work for not a lot of money.”
By the time Moore was a college student at LSU, however, he had found his passion, quite by chance, in the university’s now-defunct department of criminal justice. Forensics, crime scene analysis and putting bad guys away got under his skin.
Some 40 years later, the East Baton Rouge Parish district attorney is still passionate about solving crimes and prosecuting criminals, and he lives his job with a zealousness that borders on the obsessive. He goes to the scene of almost every homicide, attends the wake or funeral of almost every victim, and zips from breakfast meetings with community groups to press conferences on crime-fighting initiatives while fielding an endless stream of calls, texts and emails from office staff, assistant DAs and any of the countless others who have his personal cell number, which he shares freely.
In his spare time, he maintains a high profile by volunteering at community fundraisers and events—parish fairs, for instance, where he sponsors hundreds of gourmet kebob dinners, which he grills himself, or youth sporting events, which he helps coach, though his own kids are grown.
Friends worry he is spreading himself too thin. They caution him against going to sketchy murder scenes at 2 a.m. They encourage him to slow down. They also know he won’t listen because he is fiercely headstrong and very good at doing what he loves.
“We’ve had some good DAs but we have never had one this involved, out in the community with the people on the streets,” says East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, who has worked with five DAs during his career. “He goes way above and beyond. I have never seen a DA like this.”
But while Moore wins praise for being dedicated, easy to work with and able to get along with just about everybody—he has remained on good terms with the mayor, the police chief and the sheriff: no small feat in this city—he also faces some major challenges in his second term. The city’s crime rate is high. Witnesses are increasingly reluctant to testify. Funding is scarce; convictions hard to get.
In other words, Moore may have lots of fans, but in a city that ranks crime as its No. 1 problem, he still has a big job ahead, and the buck stops with him.
“Hillar has the toughest job in town,” observes Metro Councilman Chandler Loupe. “You can arrest all the bad guys you want. Unless Hillar puts them away, they’re right back on the street.”
Moore works hard at putting away bad guys. It’s a job for which he is well-suited in upbringing and temperament. Though many assume he is a Baton Rouge native—largely because his father was well-known locally as the head of Associated Grocers and as an active community volunteer—the Moores are actually from New Orleans and Hillar Moore III grew up in a racially mixed, working-class neighborhood near the Fair Grounds racetrack.
It’s not an insignificant detail. Before his dad moved the family to Baton Rouge and became a bigwig in the city’s tight-knit circle of business leaders, Moore spent his childhood on the rundown, potholed streets of the Crescent City, playing with more black kids than white, and welcoming them all into the family’s modest shotgun home.
That egalitarian upbringing shaped Moore’s view of the world and informed his conscience. It also helps explain his effectiveness in dealing with the poor blacks who comprise most of the victims and perpetrators of crime in south Louisiana, and with the mostly working- and middle-class whites who deal with them in the system.
He also has the right disposition for the job. Moore is blessed with an easy-going demeanor that belies a workhorse-intensity. He gets plenty done without intimidating, and seems more laid back than he really is, which is at once disarming and effective. He also happens to be a genuinely nice guy.
“Hillar has always been a very likable person and has gone out of his way to make people happy,” says defense attorney Mary Olive Pierson. “He is untarnished by scandals or stories or skeletons.”
Moore will tell you he inherited those traits from his parents. His father, a New Orleans native and World War II veteran who retired as a sergeant major in the U.S. Marine Corps, was known for his generosity and made helping others a way of life in the Moore household. As he worked his way up the corporate ladder at Associated Grocers, he and his wife, Bernadine, always opened the family home to people in need—something that made an impression on young Moore and his six siblings.
“He never turned anybody away,” says Moore of his father. “He would loan people in the warehouse money, help them out at Easter and Christmas.”
The family was a typical, south-Louisiana, tight-knit clan and still is. Moore was the third of seven children, and the eldest son. He fits every stereotype of a middle child—friendly, non-confrontational, determined to do his own thing and consumed by a desire to keep the peace. He also has the sense of duty befitting a first-born son and, as a result, has modeled his behavior after his late father’s.
“If you look at Hillar, a lot of stuff that he does is a chip off the old block,” says Jose Delgado, a lifelong friend and former undercover drug agent. “If you look at the obituary of his father, it is similar to the way Hillar lives his life. He is following in his dad’s footsteps.”
While Moore followed his fathers’ example in many respects, he decided against a career in the food wholesale business after spending a semester in the warehouse of Associated Grocers, following a less-than-stellar freshman year at LSU. When he returned to college—where he played on the university’s championship rugby team, incidentally—he started taking classes in the criminal justice department.
“I became very interested in forensics and had some professors with firsthand knowledge of crime scenes,” he recalls.
Before he graduated, Moore landed an internship in the office of District Attorney Ossie Brown. It was the mid-1970s, and the DA’s office was a far different place from what it is today, full of hardened, politically incorrect investigators, many of whom had never gone to college, much less earned a degree. They delighted in throwing Moore to the wolves, sending him out to murder scenes in the middle of the night and introducing him to the underbelly of a Baton Rouge he didn’t know existed.
Moore loved it, and soaked up every bit of institutional knowledge he could from his seasoned colleagues’ collective experience on the streets. After graduating, he joined the office as a full-time investigator, where he stayed for the next 12 years, eventually becoming chief investigator.
“He made himself indispensable,” recalls former DA Doug Moreau, who was an assistant DA in the 1970s when Moore was an investigator. “He trained himself and would find niches that he could fit into. He was very industrious.”
Moore also ingratiated himself with Brown, who he says became a mentor and a friend. During those early years, Brown took Moore under his wing, sending him to out-of-state continuing education and certification programs, where he could hone his skills. Along the way, Moore went back to LSU for a master’s degree in criminal justice, where he wowed his professors.
“I had instructors who told me Hillar was the best student they had ever seen,” recalls retired Dean Jack Parker. “You have to be able to put things together logically and also be just a good clear thinker. Hillar can do both.”
CSI is still the part of the job Moore most enjoys. That’s one of the reasons he personally shows up at every major crime scene. True, it may help make the case. It also sends a powerful message to the community. But there’s a simple reason, too.
“For me, it’s fun,” says Moore. “It’s where I come from.”
Moore might have been content to spend his entire career doing that, too. But somewhere in the back of his mind was a simmering, if not quite burning, ambition to do more. Colleagues sensed the restlessness, and another mentor, Judge Mike Erwin, tapped into it, encouraging Moore to go to law school. In 1989, at 34, Moore graduated from Southern University Law School.
Given his affinity for the prosecutorial side of the criminal justice system, it might have seemed logical to become an assistant DA. But Moore decided to try his hand at criminal defense work and went into private practice. It wasn’t an easy transition, but Moore credits his former partner, Anthony Marabella, now a state court judge, with helping him understand the role of the defense attorney without trying to rationalize what is often the result of the work.
“You are protecting the rights and the Constitution, just like the people in the DA’s office,” Moore says. “It’s rarely the case that you’re trying to get a bad guy off. … We were more interested in helping people … helping them get the best deal possible so they could, hopefully, learn from their mistakes.”
That was evident in the DWI cases Moore worked, which became something of his specialty. While he was known for helping clients cut the best possible deal, given their offense, he was more concerned with addressing the larger problem that led up to the arrest.
“He did a lot of DWI work and really helped a lot of people,” says Delgado. “He would set a lot of parameters for them and make sure they did certain things to address their substance abuse issues.”
Moore was also known for his pro bono work. Pierson, who hired him to help her represent then-state Sen. Greg Tarver, one of several defendants in Edwin Edwards’ 2000 gambling corruption trial, says she could tell whether Moore was billing clients by the kind of car he was driving on any particular day.
“If it was a Cadillac, I knew he was making money,” Pierson says. “If it was an old Ford, I knew he was working for free.”
During his years in private practice, Moore entertained the idea of running for DA, but he didn’t give it serious thought until Moreau announced he would retire after nearly two decades in office. Moore loved the idea of the job; he hated the idea of campaigning.
“I don’t consider myself a politician,” says Moore. “I find it very distasteful to have to run for office and ask people for money.”
That may be; but Moore proved adept during the 2008 campaign at blanketing lawns with his yard signs, making the rounds at community events, and generously sharing free beer from his firm’s game-day tent on the LSU parade grounds. In his race against state Sen. Dan Claitor he won handily with 72% of the vote.
In his four years in office, Moore has done a lot. He has gradually increased the number of jury trials his office litigates—from 37 in 2010 to 48 in 2012. He brought together various law enforcement agencies to form a Violent Crime Unit that meets regularly to discuss crime trends and works collaboratively to solve crimes. He spearheaded efforts to create a truancy center, which houses under one roof various law enforcement and social service agencies. He has also taken the lead on Project BRAVE, an Operations Ceasefire-style program that targets the city’s most violent offenders in the city’s most dangerous ZIP code.
“The spirit of cooperation among the agencies makes our jobs much easier,” says Gautreaux, adding his staff “could not be more pleased with how the DA’s office staff works with them on a regular basis.”
But the challenges facing Moore are many. Crime remains high. Witnesses are reluctant and funding remains tight. (See related story here).
Moore is optimistic, however, that he can make a positive difference, and he believes the DA is uniquely suited, by virtue of the power of the office, to be particularly instrumental in the process. It is not a responsibility he takes lightly.
“The DA’s office has a ton of power,” he says. “We can do a lot of good. We can really hurt people. We have control over a lot of things and have to use the power in this job judiciously.”
