Washington Post Questions Brian Williams’ Katrina “Criminal Gangs” Story

There’s a story Brian Williams likes to tell. He has told it in a TV interview. He has told it to at least two book authors. But even though it had all the makings of a great yarn — danger, guns, resolve — Williams never reported it to his viewers.

It’s the one about the gangs that Williams claimed had “overrun” a posh Ritz-Carlton where he stayed during Hurricane Katrina.

Williams is an, as WP writer Terrence McCoy terms it, hibernation mode following the revelations regarding his adventures in a military helicopter that was shot down in Iraq, how he “stared down the barrel of an RPG”, which all turned out to be untrue. Stories he told again and again and again.

…few stories illustrated that predilection to talk more than his takes on Katrina — the stories with which he made his bones. But now some of them are taking heat.

Among them: The one he told about witnessing a suicide at the Superdome. Or the one he told about watching a body float past the Ritz-Carlton, perched at the edge of an otherwise dry French Quarter. Or the one about the dysentery he said he got. And, finally, the story he told about the Ritz-Carlton gangs. Three separate sources told reporters no gangs infiltrated the Ritz-Carlton.

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