‘Business Report’: DA Moore maintains an easygoing demeanor that belies his workhorse intensity

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. Read the full cover story from the new issue of Business Report by Stephanie Riegel here.