The Kingfish Project takes a data-centered approach to the news. I've spent a long career as a senior data and DevOps engineer — I know ball when it comes to data — and I built this newsroom the way I build production systems: collect everything, structure everything, connect everything, and let the stories fall out of the records.
The Deduct Box is our answer to a government that would prefer the great people of Louisiana not look too closely. It's an intelligence platform for the public interest: a permanent, searchable, cross-referenced archive of what central Louisiana's public bodies do, say, spend, and sign — built almost entirely on open-source tools, running on hardware we own, stitched together with a tremendous amount of custom code that we'll be opening up ourselves.
Huey P. Long ran his machine out of a strongbox at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. Into it went the \"deducts\" — a slice of the paycheck of nearly every state employee who owed a job to the machine. It was crooked as a cypress root, and Huey would have told you to your face that it got done what Louisiana needed done.
Ours runs the inversion. We don't take a dime from anybody. We deduct information from public officials — the disclosures, votes, minutes, contracts, budgets, and filings they owe the people as a condition of the power they asked for — to force the future Louisiana deserves.
When you run for office, accept an appointment, or take a government job, you enter a position of public trust. Nobody drafts you into it. It's a choice, made freely, based on the job or responsibility you went looking for — and transparency is the price printed on the tag.
I know, because I've paid it. When I ran for Congress in 2024, I knew I would lose. I ran to make a point about transparency and openness, and that meant filing a personal financial disclosure. It's all sitting on a federal server for anyone to read: what I earned, what I held, my entire financial life at the start of 2024.
Was that fun? No. Was it necessary — good for the government and for the political system that any voter could see exactly what financial influences sat behind a would-be congressman? Absolutely.
The Deduct Box runs on the same principle. Every record in it exists because somebody chose a public role. This isn't about party, and it isn't personal — the box reads one official's ethics filing exactly the way it reads the next one's. If an official wants that level of privacy back, private life is hiring.
A few of the rooms:
The Library. The document corpus, built on OpenAleph and Elasticsearch: every agenda, minute book, contract, and filing we scrape, request, or receive — OCR'd, entity-extracted, and searchable in one place, with the connections between people, companies, and payments stored as data instead of trapped in PDFs.
The Roosevelt. Object storage (SeaweedFS), where the original files live untouched — named for the hotel where the real box sat.
Round Robin. A graph database mapping who's connected to whom: officials, boards, LLCs, contracts, donors. It's named for the document that fifteen state senators signed in 1929 pledging to acquit Huey before the impeachment evidence was even heard. Loyalty maps decided Louisiana's fate then. They still do.
Win or Lose. The collection engine, named for Huey's oil company: a scheduler and a growing stable of adapters that pull records from public bodies on their own clock, so nothing depends on a human remembering to check a website.
The Advance. A structured record of public meetings across the region — what's on the agenda, when and where, and what actually happened — feeding the meeting coverage on this site so you can show up too.
Pot Likker. The meeting-video pipeline: transcription and speaker attribution, so what an official says on the record in a public meeting becomes searchable text with a name attached. Permanently.
Alice. Our in-house AI — self-hosted, built and maintained on our own hardware. She reads what's in the box so we can ask better questions. Alice is built and maintained by Bentley; she also runs his household and keeps his personal life somewhat in check.
Underneath it all sits the unglamorous plumbing — databases, queues, identity and access infrastructure — that keeps the box locked until something in it is ready to be public.
The box is built to grow. Coming next: cross-referencing officials' financial disclosures against their votes, contracts, and public statements. When a disclosed holding shows up next to an agenda item, that's a question we'll ask out loud. And when the market turns, and a man's votes start drifting toward the money — when he suddenly can't lift his truck quite as high as he'd like — the records will tell us where to start asking.
Also on the road: screening vendors, contractors, and counterparties against sanctions and politically-exposed-persons watchlists; graph analysis that can walk the path from a campaign donation to a contract award and show its work; and the Sound Truck — a public intake app for tips, photos, and documents, joining the channels we already run (email, Signal, SecureDrop, and the web form). Huey drove his sound truck to the people. We're parking ours where you can reach it.
We spend our days demanding transparency from public bodies, so here's ours: every service in the Deduct Box reports its status publicly, live, at status.deduct.kingfish.la. If the box goes dark, you'll see it the same moment we do.
Until Louisiana's public officials truly represent the people — and are truly open to them — the Kingfish Project will keep expanding and sharpening what the Deduct Box collects, connects, and can see. They chose the office. We choose to watch.
Every record a king.
", "date_published": "2026-07-17T18:43:06.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-17T18:43:06.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "About Us" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/the_deduct_box.png", "_license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" }, { "id": "https://kingfish.la/how-to-read-the-kingfish-project/", "url": "https://kingfish.la/how-to-read-the-kingfish-project/", "title": "How to read The Kingfish Project", "summary": "The Kingfish Project publishes six kinds of pages — Investigations, Records, Meetings, Explainers, Briefs, and Documents — built on one rule: every claim links to a document you can check yourself. ", "content_html": "The Kingfish Project is an accountability journalism newsroom covering central Louisiana. The name is Huey Long turned inside-out: Long earned the nickname \"the Kingfish\" by paying ferociously close attention to Louisiana power and bending it to his will. This outlet pays the same close attention and points the light the other way — at the institutions, not from them. The founding manifesto is titled \"Every Man a King.\"
This page explains how the site is built and how to use it, so you can find what you need and check the work yourself.
Everything here runs on a single principle: claims link to documents. If we say a board voted a certain way, spent a certain amount, or made a certain promise, the sentence carries a link to the record that proves it. Requests are tracked publicly. Meetings get permanent pages that we keep updating. And you can verify the underlying documents yourself. You should not have to take our word for anything — that is the whole idea.
Investigations are the long-form accountability reporting, organized as series or cases rather than one-off articles. An investigation is a hub: a running body of work on a single subject that grows as we learn more, with the individual stories, records, and documents that feed it linked in one place.
Records are the heart of the operation. Every public records request we file gets its own living page — one page per request — tracked in the open. Each carries a status badge so you can see exactly where it stands: pending, partial, fulfilled, denied, appealed. As an agency responds, we update the page. You can watch a request move through the system in real time, including when it stalls. A denied request is not a dead end; it is part of the record.
Meetings get one living page per public meeting. Before the meeting, the page holds the agenda. After, it holds the video, a transcript, and a plain-language summary of what happened. Because it is one canonical page that updates, you always have a single place to go for a given meeting rather than chasing scattered notices.
Explainers are evergreen, plain-language guides to the institutions of central Louisiana — what an entity is, who controls it, and what powers it holds. The pieces you may have read on the England Authority, the police jury system, and the public records law are explainers. They are meant to stay useful and to be linked from news coverage that assumes you already know the basics.
Briefs are short quick hits between the big stories — a single development, a document worth flagging, a heads-up on something coming. They include a weekly Records Desk roundup of what we filed, what came back, and what changed.
Documents are the primary sources themselves: the PDFs behind the reporting. Each is cryptographically signed and carries a verification page, so you can confirm that a document is authentic and has not been altered since we published it. If a file's signature checks out, you know you are looking at exactly what we published, byte for byte.
Most news asks you to trust the reporter. This outlet is built so you do not have to. When a request is tracked in the open, you can see whether an agency is cooperating or stonewalling. When a meeting has a canonical page, the record does not disappear when the livestream ends. When a document is signed, it cannot be quietly swapped later. And when every claim links to its source, the reporting is checkable line by line.
That is the standard central Louisiana power should be held to, and it is the standard we hold ourselves to. Every man a king.
", "date_published": "2026-07-16T21:49:41.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-17T22:25:06.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "About Us" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/how-to-read-kingfish.png", "_license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" }, { "id": "https://kingfish.la/we-are-kingfish/", "url": "https://kingfish.la/we-are-kingfish/", "title": "We are Kingfish", "summary": "An introduction to The Kingfish Project — and an argument that the most expensive thing Louisiana owns is its secrets.", "content_html": "Huey Long gave Louisiana its paved roads, its free schoolbooks, its charity hospitals, and a capitol tall enough to see the future from. He also gave it a lesson the state has never quite unlearned: that a man who promises to deliver for the forgotten can ask, in return, that you not look too hard at how he does it.
They called him the Kingfish. He delivered. And he built the machine that delivered in the part of the room the light didn't reach.
We took his name on purpose — not to praise the machine, but to turn his own talent back on him. Long understood Louisiana power better than anyone before or since: where it pools, who it answers to, how it moves a deal through a back room before the public has finished reading the headline. The Kingfish Project means to pay that same close attention to Louisiana power. The difference is the direction we point the light.
Newspapers up north like to say democracy dies in darkness. Down here we should know it better than anyone, because down here the darkness is a feature. It is warm, and familiar, and it has paid for a lot of bridges.
This spring, the Kingfish's deal got offered again, almost word for word.
A long-neglected stretch of the state — the \"hole in the donut,\" the part that watches investment land everywhere but here — was promised prosperity. Jobs. Tax base. A seat, finally, at the table. The promise came from a governor who told a poor region it had \"lived in abject poverty because of missed economic opportunities,\" and that this time, by will and perseverance, the state would \"deliver for them.\" He waved off the doubters in the same breath: there's \"misinformation\" out there, he said. Trust us.
If that cadence sounds familiar, it should. It is the oldest sales pitch in Louisiana politics, and it works because it is built on something real. The neglect is real. The frustration is real. The hunger for one project, just one, to break the cycle — that is as real as anything in Central Louisiana, and the people who feel it are not fools or cranks. Many of them are our neighbors, and they are right that doing nothing has a cost.
So nothing here is a rebuttal of anyone who wants this region to win. We want it too. This is the part of the conversation that keeps getting left out — not because anyone is lying, but because the facts that would complete it are locked in a drawer.
Every big deal in Louisiana arrives wrapped in reassurances. The water use is minimal. The ratepayers are protected. The company pays its own way. Maybe all of it is true. But notice that nearly every one of those reassurances is a claim made by the people who profit from the deal — and notice how much of the paper that would let you check the claim is the paper you are not allowed to read. Electric service agreements that decide who pays when the bill comes due. Contracts sealed by nondisclosure agreement. Financial structures built, by design, to be hard to follow.
You cannot right-size a concern you are not allowed to measure. That is the whole trick, and it is older than any of us. It is not that the answers are bad. It is that the questions are sealed, and then we are scolded for asking them.
In the weeks ahead we will take these promises one at a time — the projects, the permits, the power bills — and lay the documents next to the talking points so you can do the measuring yourself. That is the work. This is just the reason for it.
Louisiana has, on paper, one of the strongest guarantees of open government in the country. Our state constitution gives every citizen the right to examine public documents — \"except in cases established by law.\" The whole tragedy of the state is hiding in that last clause. The legislature has spent fifty years establishing exceptions, the executive branch claims privilege by reflex, and enforcement means hiring a lawyer and waiting out a public body that knows delay is free. The right is real. The access is theater.
This is not abstract, and it is not an accident that Louisiana wears the reputation it does. We are the state that elected Edwin Edwards four times and then sent him to federal prison; the state whose corruption is a punchline everywhere but here, where it is a way of life. Corruption is not a Louisiana character flaw. It is a Louisiana operating condition, and the condition it requires is darkness. Sunlight is the cheapest anti-corruption tool ever invented — cheaper than an inspector general, cheaper than a special prosecutor, cheaper than a single one of the power plants we are about to build for these deals. States that make their records genuinely easy to get leave less room for the back-room arrangement, because the back room has a window. We left ours bricked over and called it tradition.
We are here to pry the records loose and put them where you can read them. Not to be against progress — to insist that progress survive daylight, the way a good deal can and a bad one can't. When an agency blows a statutory deadline, we will say so. When a contract that shapes your power bill is hidden behind an NDA, we will go get it. When the numbers behind a press release don't add up, we will show the arithmetic.
Huey Long promised every man a king. He meant a benefactor who would take care of you so you wouldn't have to mind the details.
We mean it the other way. Every man a king means every citizen sovereign enough to read the books, check the math, and decide for himself — no benefactor required, no trust extended on faith. The crown is the public record. We just intend to hand it back.
Welcome to The Kingfish Project. Bring a flashlight.
", "date_published": "2026-07-07T20:32:00.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-18T02:06:59.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "About Us" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/9d65499b-2857-40a8-a086-2a4ccdfdfb5b.png", "_license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" } ] }