THE CASE FOR MR. COOL

by Shanon Weaver

Ask Joel Lanoux a question…and settle in. His answers arrive with detours, punch lines, and Carol—his wife of 66 years—laughing nearby. But beneath the stories is the sharp memory of a lawyer and federal investigator who learned his cases cold. During the biggest trial of his career, a newspaper reporter gave him a fitting nickname: “Mr. Cool.”

Joel’s story began in a tiny Louisiana community along the Mississippi River, about 40 miles north of New Orleans. He was born in a plantation-owned house provided to his grandfather, who oversaw the sugarcane-grinding operation. The house had no indoor water, plumbing, or electricity—only coal-burning fireplaces, kerosene lanterns, and an outhouse. “We were dirt poor,” Joel says.

His family moved to New Orleans when he was four. Joel spent eight years in Catholic school before attending De La Salle High School. He planned on LSU, but a partial scholarship led him to Loyola instead. He earned combined degrees in business and law, graduated in 1961, and was admitted to the Louisiana bar—although he already knew he did not want to practice law.

Loyola also brought him together with Carol, although they had unknowingly shared streetcars, buses, a neighborhood, and even a dentist before formally meeting over lunch. They married in 1960, while Joel still had a year of law school remaining, and eventually raised four children.

Joel had also completed ROTC at Loyola, but his active-duty orders did not arrive right away. While he waited, he applied for an IRS position in estate and gift tax. The hiring manager steered Joel toward Ed Russell, chief of Criminal Investigation, who needed special agents. “I didn’t know a thing about criminal investigation,” Joel admits. The two connected immediately, and Joel was hired at $5,155 a year.

Before any training, Chief Russell gave Joel his first assignment: accompany him to a club and visually identify someone. A very pregnant Carol went along. They packed her hospital suitcase, and Russell assured them his car—with lights and a siren—could get her to the hospital if needed. Federal investigations do not always resemble the movies.

By the time Joel’s Army orders finally arrived, Mike, their first child, was six months old. “When I told Carol goodbye, I had never flown in my life,” he recalls, “and I flew halfway around the world to Korea.” He spent 13 months in the Army Transportation Corps, supervising port operations at Inchon. Within six months, he was promoted to first lieutenant and given command of a company in Pusan.

Born beside the river and raised in New Orleans, he found port work unexpectedly fitting. His platoon of stevedores and longshoremen worked around the clock, overseeing Korean labor as cargo came ashore through extreme tides and a winter so cold that ice piled more than four feet high.

After Korea, Joel returned to New Orleans and resumed the IRS career he had barely begun. He later completed special-agent training in Washington and settled into casework.

Joel’s largest case came through a multiagency organized-crime strike force. For nearly two years, he investigated New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison—who prosecuted Clay Shaw in connection with President Kennedy’s assassination—and nine others accused of taking protection money from illegal gambling operations. Surveillance produced recordings, photographs, memoranda, and one afternoon kneeling on an asphalt roof in a suit to photograph money hidden in a car. Joel is fairly certain the suit never recovered.

When Garrison stood trial alone, Joel became the government’s primary witness. Every piece of evidence passed through him. Defense attorneys tested him repeatedly over days of testimony, but he answered from memory and rarely opened his backup binder. “They never got to me,” he says. “They never touched me. And it all had to do with preparation.”

The prosecution did not prevail, but Joel’s work advanced his career. He soon became a group manager and reached GS-13 within ten years—an unusually rapid rise to such a high federal government level at the time. Management assignments followed, including a temporary post in Albuquerque, before his career later brought him to Dallas, where he still lives. He retired in 2000.

Through every chapter, Carol remained his partner. This July marked their 66th wedding anniversary, although Joel cheerfully rounds up. Add the years they dated, he reasons, and they may as well call it 70.

That arithmetic sounds exactly like Joel: technically defensible, warmly delivered, and supported by plenty of evidence. Mr. Cool, indeed.