Update: Meffert indictment is here

Gotta love that big bold "FELONY" dominating the page.


Meffert Indictment

Federal Charges, Brah

Mef lab goes down. US Attorney Jim Letten will be holding a press conference at 12:30.

It is starting earlier than one might expect because it will take so much time to read off the counts. Don't they normally do these things starting at 1:30 or 2?


The Times-Pic is reporting that it isn't just Greg Meffert and Mark St. Pierre who will face a rap sheet. His wife Linda Meffert will also be indicted for accounting work that she did for the St. Pierre syndicate.

David Hammer describes the charges for Linda as "a surprise," which I think is accurate.

It tells you something that Letten is going after Mrs. Muppet.

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This bit is unadulterated speculation but nonetheless, the charges against Lady Mef indicate to me that Greg Meffert has refused to cooperate or turned down generous plea agreements. I imagine that Letten and his people used the threat of charges against his wife to get him to talk and now they're making good on the threat.

Greg Meffert, as AZ, as pointed out earlier in the week, has seemed in denial about what was coming down the tracks.

I hope for the sake of their young kids that Greg and/or Linda Meffert capitulate to inquiry from prosecutors.

What combination of fraud, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy counts are we going to see on the rap sheet?

--

Because this has been anticipated for so long, it is perhaps easy to lose track of just how disgusting this is.

Greg Meffert wasn't just in charge of the Office of Technology. This guy was Deputy Mayor. He was almost Recovery Director. He was the Mayor's right hand man. It's not just the millions of dollars lost to the Russian nesting doll contract schemes these people were facilitating, it's also the unquantifiable corruption of the city decision-making engine and the cynical truth that our city's recovery effort rested in hands that dropped us to satiate the impulsive desires of their own sticky fingers.

Hot on HANO

Just in case you don't remember our friend Elias Castellanos, I wrote about him recently.

I have been meaning to do some follow up on this amazing article by the T-P's Katy Reckdahl, which I think people may have missed because all of the goodies are buried after the fold. While I work on that, I want to make sure you've seen this. (Emphasis mine; bizarre formatting theirs)

Letten's office last month charged Castellanos with embezzling the money over three years. During the same time period, the indictment noted, Castellanos had bought a $1.6 million mansion in Davie, Fla., just north of Miami, and five high-end cars -- a Lamborghini Gallardo worth more than $200,000, a Ferrari F430, a Porsche 911 and two Mercedes-Benzes.

It's not clear whether Castellanos has sold any of his luxury items, but he has repaid $675,037 so far, Letten said.

Alan Baum, Castellanos' attorney, said that his client had no comment.

FBI agents and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's inspector general's office spent a year sifting through Castellanos' invoices and transactions. Letten said that Castellanos' theft was discovered during an unrelated inquiry. He added that the authority is the subject of other investigations -- "plural" -- that he could not discuss.

--

Castellanos' successor, Edwin Jamora, said that earlier this year, he had put a stop to years of routine payments made from HANO to Genalyn Duka, a subcontractor with a Florida address who colleagues told him was Castellanos' wife.

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Three years ago, HANO hired Cabellero & Castellanos to clean up its finances, and Castellanos soon made the department his own.

"There was a complete turnover of personnel responsible for the accounting and finance activities of HANO, " according to HANO's independent audit that year.

It's unclear how much progress Castellanos made in the department, which had to be re-created from the ground up after the post-Katrina levee breaches inundated HANO's Gentilly offices.

But when Jamora took over the department more than two years later, he found it in disarray.

By then, HANO had cycled through two annual contracts with Castellanos totaling $6 million and was in the middle of a third, this one worth $2.4 million.

Despite that investment, when Jamora arrived in February he found no monthly statements and no general ledger. Annual state-required audits hadn't been correctly filed for years, he said.

The conditions made it "truly difficult" to detect both well-meaning errors and intentional corruption, said Jamora, who was fired from HANO earlier this month and agreed to an interview.

Jamora, who felt he made real progress in cleaning up the mess he found, was told by federal housing executive Karen Cato-Turner that he "wasn't a good fit" for HANO, he said.

Upon his arrival, Jamora, who had been a financial director at Philadelphia's housing authority, was shocked to find HANO paying $8,000 a month for what he called a "Jurassic" computer package, so outdated that it couldn't run financial statements.

Jamora said he began an inventory of HANO's fixed assets, which hadn't been done since 2002. And he recommended that HANO hire independent accountants to implement past audit recommendations, he said.

Audits from each of the past seven years have outlined significant financial problems, but the problems appear to have been ignored.

Terry R. Cassreino, communications director for HANO, issued a statement after Castellanos pleaded guilty.

"HANO and HUD are pleased to see this case come to a quick resolution with Mr. Castellanos pleading guilty. HUD has clearly and consistently stated that neither HUD nor HANO will tolerate any fraud, abuse or misuse of our funds as we carry out our mission of providing housing options for the citizens of New Orleans." Castellanos' plea comes in the midst of a string of scandals at HANO. Early this year, HUD's inspector general found that HANO's financial statements improperly documented or reported at least $7.2 million in voucher and housing expenses.

In May, the housing authority placed three employees on leave because of a ruse that siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars to an employee's son and former boyfriend.

More recently, the man running HANO's Section 8 program -- designed to help the poor afford rent -- resigned amid allegations that he was benefiting from a voucher administered by HANO, despite earning a $100,000 salary.

Jamora said that agency policies sometimes frustrated his efforts to root out problems. For instance, he said, he wasn't allowed to speak directly with HUD or its inspector general; all conversations had to be routed through Cato-Turner.

HUD spokeswoman Melanie Roussell, speaking on behalf of HUD and HANO, said last week that anyone could talk with auditors.

"Consistent with HUD policy, all staff are encouraged to be responsive to investigative inquiries, " Roussell said.

But a May 1, 2008, memo from Cato-Turner to the staff prohibits anyone from talking to "governmental officials."

That didn't make sense to Jamora. "I used to be an auditor. I speak the same language, " he said.

This sounds like a pretty big deal. Castellanos was stealing money - a million bucks - from HANO in the most blatant way but his graft was stumbled upon accidentally in the midst of "plural" other investigations into white collar crime at HANO.

I'm looking for more information about her, but this Karen Cato-Turner character already sounds like a real winner.

She was appointed as the administrator of HUD's receivership of HANO in November, 2007, at the height of the public housing controversy, by disgraced former HUD chief Alphonso Jackson.

OIG office in crisis

I apologize for my infrequent posts lately, this one may have been more timely if I had written it a week ago. Oh well.

Anyway, things are not going very well at the fledgling Office of Inspector General.

It is both depressing and embarrassing that the office seems to have devolved before ever really becoming an intelligent life form in the first place.

To quickly recap, the original inspector general, Robert Cerasoli resigned for health reasons last winter, leaving the office on an interim basis to his number two guy, Len Odom. Over the summer, Interim IG Len Odom circumvented process to select an Independent Police Monitor, Neely Moody, just before the Ethics Review Board was to make a final decision on Odom's position as temporary head honcho. This undermined the credibility of the new police monitor with those that had fought for the creation of the position. After the new IG was selected, Odom was pushed out entirely by Ethics Review Board Chairmen Rev. Kevin Wildes before being promptly reinstated on a temporary basis by new IG Edouard Quatrevaux, who himself then immediately took a leave of absence. Odom resigned within a week. Immediately following that, the police monitor, Neely Moody resigned.

In between, Moody and Odom collaborated on a report bashing Robert Cerasoli's handling of the office and released it to the press. Quatrevaux claimed Moody told him he would "take the office down with him" during a heated argument preceding his resignation and the release of the report on Cerasoli.

Do you got all that?

It is a gigantic mess. And it's shameful. For all of those that fought for the creation of the Office of Inspector General, this sideshow basically proves the naysayers correct. It has become what they said it would become - an ineffective joke of an office that drains city resources while providing little of value in terms of exposing municipal inefficiencies and advising lawmakers and the public on how to improve governance.

Perhaps more upsetting, it has become yet another ridiculous racial lightning rod, another battleground in a never-ending and sometimes fictional turf war between dying political factions of various complexions.

Central to this is a never-ending disagreement over who is responsible for corruption and injustice in New Orleans This debate is almost always counterproductive because it is simultaneously oversimplified and overcomplicated by partisans for one side or another.

African Americans are not being unreasonable when they complain about the media and a lot of the white establishment's never-ending crusade against perceived corruption within African American political and business classes. It is unambiguously hypocritical for whites to moralize about perceived African American corruption while turning a blind eye to or openly advocating for the continuation of the structural and historic racism that has created an entire economy of white privilege and an almanac of horrible outcomes for black children born into it. Besides, it is not as if there isn't plenty of entrenched corruption amongst white political and industrial elites - superfluous boards, tax assessment treats, and the like.

However, that certainly doesn't mean that corruption in what are generally perceived as African American hustles in the municipal game should just be ignored or brushed under the rug. Not everyone who wants the law of the land enforced against crooks of color is party to white tribalism.

The whole concept of the Office of Inspector General became part of this never-ending tug of war from the moment the City Charter was changed to authorize it many years ago. That's why it took damn near a decade between the authorization of the office and it's actual creation.

Who's corruption would the OIG prioritize?

Black or white?

It's a circular firing squad and nobody feels safe enough to be the first to put down their gun.

--

Robert Cerasoli once had the credibility and goodwill to create an effective culture and reliable systems within the Office of Inspector General. He had the chance to staff the office with responsible, dedicated, and selfless auditors and investigators.

He was the general manager and head coach of the team. He not only did the hiring and firing, but he was also in charge of how his employees operated on the field.

When he and his health failed, the team lost.

I don't know what it was that caused the rift between he and Len Odom. I don't know if it resulted from how Odom went about hiring the police monitor, but it seemed to have happened sooner.

Perhaps the rift appeared immediately.

When Cerasoli turned down access to a city car upon arrival and began to audit how the city distributes cars, maybe Odom disagreed with that prioritization. The IG's office did indeed hook up some cars after Cerasoli left.

I don't know how it happened exactly.

It certainly does seem like Mr. Odom hijacked the power of the office. He totally blew the Independent Police Monitor process, hiring someone with whom he was personally close and undermining an effort by police brutality and corruption watchdogs that had been in the works for a decade. He used his office to pursue what largely appears to be a personal vendetta against Mr. Cerasoli. He decided to sandbag the OIG on his way out of the door by releasing that report to the public and otherwise conducting himself like a child.

The report on Cerasoli could have been useful if it had actually been an audit of OIG systems to date, one that had recommendations on how to improve office operations. But it isn't. Instead, it's a largely personal hatchet job. That doesn't mean that some of the observations made don't expose mistakes for which Cerasoli is responsible - there are some bad bits in there - but you only have to read the 15 page report to realize that it's personal. So many of the issues examined are a direct result of the city's efforts to obstruct progress at the OIG not Cerasoli's shortcomings.

Yet the Odom-Cerasoli dynamic isn't the only thing at play here.

I was also struck by the way Odom was asked to step down upon Quatrevaux's hiring. Again, Rev. Kevin Wildes told Odom to pack up his things and get out even though Odom's resignation wasn't to be effective until sometime in October. Quatrevaux reinstated Odom and then Odom voluntarily resigned at the end of the week.

I don't know what got into Reverend Kevin Wildes but the Chairman of the Ethics Review Board does not have the despotic authority to fire the Inspector General.

His anger is what caused the ridiculous and embarrassing gymnastics that lead to Odom in and out dance.

The whole sad affair has created the political room for Mayor Ray Nagin to launch into one of the more insulting and hypocritical tirades of his administration.

The credibility of two of the most important reform offices of the city, the OIG and the Independent Police Monitor, is at risk. That is something that should alarm all of us.

We need working systems for accountable governance, not a total retreat from of the concept.

I fear that the latter is more likely than the former.

So how do we clean this mess up?

I have no doubt that the offices will remain, but that's not enough. We need them to have credibility so that they can actually be effective. They cannot be a lightening rod offices.

1. Reverend Kevin Wildes might need to fall on the sword. I don't know if people were insulted by his behavior but it didn't look classy from afar. He may not have "started it," but he took it public and that was inappropriate. His actions demonstrate his ease over the Ethics Review Board that makes me wonder if the length of his tenure there has lead him to treat it too much like a personal fiefdom. Other members of that Board should assert themselves.

2. Eduard Quatrevaux should be given a chance to stabilize the office with the support of our elected officials and the public. I wonder if he might need to agree to a sunset date for his administration of that office if a cloud of mistrust remains overhead.

3. The new Independent Police Monitor should be selected by a commission independent of the Inspector General and the Ethics Review Board.

4. City Council has got to band together and create an uninhibited consensus on how to proceed. They must resist all efforts by the Mayor to further undermine or de-fund the OIG or the Independent Police Monitor as the 2010 budget proceedings begin. However that needs to happen - let it happen. The Council factions, too often divided by race, need to set all their BS aside and agree to act as one. Each side must compromise to do so.

-

It really really sucks that we're starting from scratch again. It's pathetic.

Given the elections and investigations underway and on the horizon, we'll have plenty of ridiculous politics over the next year that we'll be just fine if we do this one thing the right way.

Elias Castellanos indicted, questions about HANO-backed nonprofits abound

Don't know if you caught this but Mr. Castellanos, a former CFO of the Housing Authority of New Orleans while it was under HUD's federal receivership, was charged with embezzling nearly a million bucks.

HANO was notoriously corrupt for about three decades before it was finally taken over by HUD under President Bush. Unfortunately, it has emerged from that receivership as bad or worse than before because of the corrupt leadership Alphonso Jackson, who was GW Bush's HUD chief.


Jackson resigned in disgrace toward the end of the Bush administration after Philly's top housing guy blew the whistle on Jackson's move to withhold federal money from Philly public housing residents in a transparent attempt to extract payments for a derelict contractor and Bush supporter. Carl Greene of PHA knew how to save emails.

There have been widespread allegations of corruption in Jackson's office and some of them involve his stewardship of HANO.

I've worked on this a lot. Check out my archives for Alphonso Jackson for more.

Anyway, the little T-P blurb gives absolutely zero context on Mr. Castellanos, who worked at HANO under Jackson.

But the minutes of March 19th meeting of the Legislative Audit Advisory Council in Baton Rouge provides some details.

LAAC03172009

Crescent Affordable Housing Corporation and Lune d'Or Enterprises. LLC

Elias Castellanos with Crescent Affordable Housing Corporation, a nonprofit of the Housing Authority of New Orleans, and Jamora Erwin with the Housing Authority of New Orleans and Crescent Affordable Housing came forward to state their case. Mr. Castellanos said that like most of the entities that they oversee, HANO has been in a continuation of rebuilding from Hurricane Katrina. Crescent Affordable is a managing member of some of their operations that were going through the mixed planned development. As those audits were held back and must be completed so that the audit of Crescent Affordable could be finished. They are in the process of completing those audits. Crescent Affordable audit for 2006 should be delivered to them today, and upon their review and approval it would be released to the Legislative Auditor. They will have all related audits completed within the next month and ready upon approval and release from the auditors, will then be released to the Legislative Auditor. He further stated that Lune d'Or Enterprises, LLC is a member of Crescent Affordable Housing Corporation.

Mr. Purpera said that the report pending is the 12/31/2007 reports. Mr. Castellanos said that their auditors have indicated that Lune d'Or will be released on April 30th • Crescent Affordable audit will be released to them today for review. Senator Murray asked if Crescent Affordable Housing is an affiliate of HANO in New Orleans. Mr. Castellanos said that it is a nonprofit organization created by HANO to help support the redevelopment effort. The mixed plans developments they are entering into require separate partnership entities to initiate the financial transaction and because HANO is an agency funded through HUD, and they have certain restrictions on obligating our resources, they have to create the nonprofit in order to facilitate these mixed line developments.

Senator Murray asked if each one of the nonprofits is responsible for a separate development in New Orleans, or if all combined together. Mr. Castellanos said Crescent Affordable is generally the parent and then the nonprofits and related LLC's are under Crescent. Senator Murray asked if Crescent Affordable Housing was standing in the shoes of HANO overseeing all. Mr. Castellanos said it is the nonprofit parent entity for all mixed plan developments that they enter into. He explained that Lune d'Or Enterprices, LLC was the managing member for the Fisher 1, Fisher 3 and Gus 1 properties. Also Crescent Affordable is the sole owner of Lune d'Or, and throughout the audit it is still Crescent Affordable

Senator Murray asked if all are private nonprofits. Mr. Castellanos responded that the sole owner of Crescent Affordable is the Housing Authority of New Orleans, but it does not stand in the shoes of HANO. Senator Murray asked if HANO owned Crescent Affordable Housing and Mr. Castellanos said yes. Senator Nevers moved to grant the extension and with no objections, the motion was granted.

Senator Murray asked Mr. Castellanos to provide to himself the names of the board members of the respective nonprofits for Crescent Affordable Housing and Lune d'Or and any other ones that are in the City of New Orleans that are operating under these housing redevelopments. Mr. Castellanos said he can provide the information through the Legislative Auditors. Senator Murray said they can provide it directly to his office on Broad Street in New Orleans.

For more on Lune D'or and Crescent Affordable Housing, I found this HANO RFP (pdf) from 2007 that includes some helpful background information.

Crescent Affordable Housing Corporation (CAHC), a non-profit corporation, was created in December 2003 by HANO to facilitate the development of affordable housing. CAHC is the sole member of Lune d'Or Enterprises LLC, a for profit entity created by HANO that serves as the managing member of several for-profit Limited Liability Corporations (LLC's) that own and operate affordable housing projects developed on HANO properties. Through Lune d'Or, CAHC serves as the managing member of each of the LLC's, including those named in this Request for Proposals (RFP). Each LLC owns a phase of development at the given site. Those sites are part of the new comprehensive redevelopment strategy HANO has developed to accelerate the revitalization of low income and affordable housing. HANO and eighteen (18) affiliates of HANO have received or expect to receive tax credit allocations for Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) to assist in its redevelopment efforts and are seeking a qualified, full service certified public accounting firm with expertise in affordable housing and tax credits to conduct full spectrum audits, cost certifications, tax credit carryover, 10% tests, financial statement audits, tax valuation, and provide litigation support, trust and general consulting services.

The services contemplated herein are also required for any future affiliates created by HANO in 2007.

The current Housing Authority of New Orleans affiliates include the following:

Crescent Affordable Housing, LLC

Lune D'Or Enterprises, LLC

Place D'Genesis, LLC

Fischer I, LLC

Fischer III, LLC

Guste I, LLC

Florida IIA, LLC

Mazant Royal, LLC

General Ogden, LLC

Imperial I, LLC

Imperial II, LLC

Guste ll-B, LLC

Fischer IV-3, LLC

Tchoupitoulas, LLC

CJ Peete I, LLC

St. Bernard I, LLC

CJ Peete III, LLC

BW Cooper I, LLC

HANO is currently designated by HUD as a Troubled Agency. Further, H ANO has been placed under an administrative receivership, whereby an Administrative Receiver has been charged with the responsibility of quickly transforming the agency's overall operations and performance into one reflective of a standard or high performing public housing authority. To that end, HANO's success will, in part, be contingent upon verification of its compliance with laws and regulations applicable to all federal assistance programs.

That's all for now. This is not the first time in recent memory that a quasi-governmental nonprofit in the housing field has allowed massive graft and corruption to go under the radar. I hope that major audits of all affiliated non-profits are underway.

Would appreciate any tips in the comments section. I won't be able to google through all of these by myself. There are lots of other pdf docs online that will at least provide better context on this.

I'm curious how Mr. Castellanos came to be employed at HANO and wonder if he had a personal relationship with Mr. Jackson directly or through the contractors that were awarded funds to redevelop the Big 4.

In Which 'Going Green' Is Not A Reference To Corruption

The City of Philadelphia recently took advantage of a state grant to replace - at no cost to municipal coffers - Center City's metal wire garbage cans with new solar powered trash compactors.

Called "Big Bellies," the new cans harness solar energy to compact refuse, so that each is able to hold more of it. Thus, they don't have to be emptied as often, which saves gas and manpower. Whereas the old wire cans held 55 gallons of trash, the new compactors can hold four times as much. They also are not open air like the old cans, eliminating the litter blown out onto the streets from overflowing receptacles.



The city is also installing solar recycling compactors at some sites, marking the first time pedestrian recycling services have been made available in Philadelphia.

--

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and his allies on City Council fell just short in the most recent attempt to ban plastic shopping bags after late lobbying from plastics interests and big supermarket chains. The bags take forever to break down in landfills, are often littered on city streets, and are especially damaging when they end up in waterways.

Though the measure fell short, even opponents acknowledged such a step was inevitable and would succeed in some form soon.

San Fransisco was the first American city to institute such a ban, in 2007. Hundreds of towns and cities around the world have already done so or may soon follow suit. San Fransisco has banned the bags outright, while other cities are levying mandatory surcharges in order to discourage their use.

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San Fransisco, true to form as the nation's most progressive city on environmental issues, very recently became the first city to enact a mandatory composting program. By requiring residents to separate biodegradable foodstuffs from the garbage, San Fransisco appears on its way to fulfilling its goal of eliminating landfill waste by 2020.

When food scraps go to landfills, they unnecessarily take space and release methane gas as they break down. Compost is, of course, very useful to farmers and gardeners.

--

In January, Philadelphia debuted single stream recycling. The new initiative means an end to separating plastic from paper from glass and combines recycling day with regular trash pickup schedules.

Philadelphia has long had a reputation for filth, dating back to colonial times. Residents are notorious litterers and even though there has been curbside recycling pickup for a decade-ish, the city had embarrassingly low recycling rates.

Since the institution of single stream, recycling rates have doubled.

--

It's a good thing when cities reduce the amount of trash they produce. Not only does trash strain natural resources end energy, but it contributes to air and water pollution. It also costs a lot of money. Cities like Philadelphia and New Orleans pay landfills to take our waste based on weight. Reducing the amount of trash we produce reduces the amount we pay out of taxes for landfills.

Philadelphia has reversed a longstanding reputation for overall uncleanliness and residential indifference toward the environment. Mayor Nutter promised to set the city on a pathway toward becoming one of the nation's greenest and his initiatives since his inauguration indicate that the city is on a path to success.

New Orleans' very existence, more than any other city on the planet, partially depends on the world's ability to reduce greenhouse gases. New Orleans, more than any other city in the nation, depends on massive federal spending to protect it from the specter of rising seas and vulnerability to hurricanes. New Orleans, more than any other city in the nation, badly needs to take advantage of federal incentives promoting green industries by making itself attractive to environmentally-oriented start-ups.

Yet New Orleans is not examining mandatory composting laws, single stream recycling, plastic bag bans, or rain barrel distribution programs.

In fact, the City of New Orleans does not have any recycling services.

We're practically begging for the environmental movement to somehow solve our existential crisis while we continue gorge ourselves on the most wasteful consumption practices.

What kills me is more than simply not having the laws, is not even having a discussion about them on the agenda.

It's exceedingly hypocritical.

It's embarrassing and it's pathetic.

--

New Orleans pays exorbitant fees to dump trash at Old Gentilly Landfill, which of course, is co-operated by sanitation dept. contractor Jimmie Woods of Metro Disposal and construction caballer Steven Stumpf.

Though the city owns the landfill, they 'tip' the operators based on the amount of trash they handle. See the T-P:

In 2001, Stumpf and Woods formed a joint venture and submitted the only proposal to operate the new facility. In the final days of the Morial administration in early 2002, they signed a deal under which -- provided the landfill received a state permit -- they would keep 97 percent of the proceeds, with the city getting the other 3 percent.

Stumpf and Woods, as well as other contractors dependent on sanitation department contracts, are major contributors to political campaigns at all levels. Moldy City has blogged extensively about this over many moons.

It is not in the personal interests of private trash hauling and landfill operating contractors and their political allies to do anything that might jeopardize the volume of waste produced in the city of New Orleans.

--

Anyone considering a run for Mayor better have a detailed plan for how we can make up for lost time on these environmental quality issues, one that acknowledges the difficulty to navigate through the poisoned political waters that have contaminated all discussions around reforming how we do sanitation.

These are the types of things Mayoral candidates should start offering right now so that citizens have an opportunity to see if there is any substance to these people before the campaign gets reduced to lawn signs and robo-calls.

--

See also these two (1, 2) articles in the New York Times magazine about inner-city minorities taking charge of local green and good food initatives, busting negative stereotypes that poor people don't care about the environment.

Ink Still Wet

On the indictment of Renee Gill Pratt.

Pratt lost her Council reelection bid in 2006 to none other than Stacy Head. Pratt was, by every single account I've ever heard, an absolutely horrendous representative. A class act.

It's important to learn to catch these crooks in the act instead of after the fact.

Endemic, systemic corruption - it's killing us.

E-maelstrom: Double Vision

Given my apparent famousness, it should be obvious to readers that I'm pretty much constantly having fancy orgy cocaine parties with other talented celebrities. We do drugs you've never even heard of, drugs that aren't even named until we name them. One thing that's really hot on the scene - excuse me - was hot on the scene, was something we called human ecstaopiajuana, which required a willing female to donate her body for use as something best described as a soft bong. Where on earth do we find these girls?

--

Back on April 6th, parts of former Chief Technology Officer and Deputy Mayor Greg Meffert's deposition in a civil suit related to stolen crime camera technology began to leak. I picked up on one new disclosure rather quickly, Mr. Meffert's admission that he'd let city vendors pay for his excursions to Visions, a gentleman's club known for its 2683 Myspace friends.

Specifically, Meffert said, "sometimes they'd pay."

--

Meffert and me, we're a different kind of famous.

He borrows his friend's Ponchartrain yacht for a party with the Mayor.

I, on the other hand, own my own yacht.

In space.

Gregory Meffert might have thought he was the cock of the walk getting to go out to Visions using "OPM," otherwise known as "Other People's Money" or the Vince Fumo Memorial Payment Plan.

But real celebrities, we don't go to Visions.

Visions comes to us.

--

I was sitting outside eating breakfast and recovering from one of my fancy sexy space-yacht parties over this past weekend when up walks this nice young lady who seemed determined to sit nearby. No complaints. It always feels good when blonds feel compelled to bask in my aura.

But when she decided to strike up an unprovoked conversation about the high price of mangoes in the Greater New Orleans area compared to the Austin market while I was so clearly busy looking for pictures of myself in Rolling Stone magazine, I became a little annoyed.

How do I get out of this conversation?

She uncrossed her legs to get up, "I have to go home to get ready for work."

Problem solved!

"I'm sorry to hear that, where do you work?"

"Visions on the East Bank."

At this point, the biggest, dumbest smile imaginable took over control of my face.

Visions on the East Bank

"You guys out there have done us a great service."

She made me explain at this point, after which she got defensive because I think she took away from my abridged summary that I was saying that Visions was somewhat at fault.

"Strip clubs get a bad rap."

"I agree. That's not what I meant."

Pause

"So do you know anybody named... eh never mind."

--

Mr. Meffert said "sometimes they'd pay."

Who paid all the other times?

I think we could find out pretty soon.

--

In other news, yesterday Mayor Ray Nagin was deposed in that same civil suit over stolen crime camera technology. I actually don't expect too much scandalous stuff to come out when the transcripts are released to the public. I imagine that lawyers for the plaintiffs will explore more than just the trips to Chicago and Hawaii - it won't just be stuff that's already been in the paper. But I don't think there will be anything earth-shattering.

I do think that we've now officially entered into some really bizarre legal territory that I hope someone can comment about.

Mayor Nagin has not yet retained private council. This has struck me as peculiar not because I'm assuming that Mayor Nagin is guilty of some criminal behavior, but because it seems inherent that there might be conflicts in terms of the interests of the Office of the Mayor compared to the interests of Mr. Ray Nagin. Bob Ellis is not Mayor Nagin's personal attorney. He's a city attorney.

And now that the city has taken legal action against Dell Inc., one of their own co-defendants in the crime camera civil case, it would appear that much more important for the Mayor to retain a separate criminal defense attorney. I mean, the City Attorney's office is simultaneously fighting charges with Dell while leveraging charges against Dell. I think that the T-P's Michelle Krupa asked about this in one of her most recent pieces but I can't find precisely where now that I'm trying to link to it... Michelle Krupa indicates that indeed that question was asked of Penya Moses-Fields in her article about the cross-suit.

Moses-Fields said Nagin's testimony Monday about the travels squares with what he has said previously and should dispel any notion that the mayor acted inappropriately. She added that Nagin was not a party to the conspiracy alleged by the plaintiffs and should be dropped as a defendant.

"It's very clear that the city believes that the mayor has done nothing wrong, " Moses-Fields said.

Responding to questions, Moses-Fields said neither she nor the mayor has received subpoenas from a federal grand jury investigating the crime camera program. She said she believes Nagin has no criminal exposure in the case and that he has not retained his own defense attorney; the city attorney's office will continue to represent him, she said.

--

One more thing to watch is the impending release of the City Council emails. Yesterday, a judge blocked their release after finding the action taken by the City Attorney's office to retract privileged information to have been "inadequate."

But that stuff is going to come out soon. Within a couple of weeks. I would advice you not be surprised if release of the Council emails was timed conveniently with the unsealing of Mayor Nagin's complete deposition transcript.

--

We're always receiving these improper gifts of coincidence in New Orleans.

Sometimes they pay. Sometimes we pay.

Checkered Past Comes Full Circle

Maybe you saw this in the paper on Friday:

The City of New Orleans must release to The Times-Picayune police department records of 10 officers, including Superintendent Warren Riley, related to any misconduct investigations or complaints, a judge ruled this morning.

"They're entitled to these records," Civil District Court Judge Robin Giarrusso said after a hearing in her courtroom. "Public records are public records are public records, and the citizens of this city have a right to know what's in them."

Yes, the public needs to know that it can trust the public integrity bureau. Given the NOPD's horrendous relationship with the public at present and by historic reputation, one would think that if the NOPD had nothing to hide, they'd be anxious to open up to the media about how they do business.

But as the article continues, we learn that it's not just the media that's been spurned by NOPD record keepers:

NOPD advocate groups tried to block another person's request for 16 decades' worth of police complaint records, suing the city and arguing in court Friday that the officers are entitled to a "right to privacy" that goes back to the framing of the U.S. Constitution. Their attorneys suggested at the hearing that they would appeal Giarrusso's ruling to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeal.

The newspaper intervened in an effort to allow the city to answer McCarthy's request.

Other parties, including the Orleans Parish Public Defenders, were also asking for the NOPD Public Integrity Bureau records. One woman had asked the city for every Public Integrity Bureau file dating to 1992.

So it doesn't seem to be Riley's reactionary stance to the "Times Pick-on-you," it's actually long standing NOPD policy. What might it be specifically about the public integrity bureau?

Again, the T-P's Gwen Filosa provides some historical context:

In 1954, the New Orleans police department created an "internal affairs" division, Mince said, but in 1995 then-Police Superintendent Richard Pennington abolished it.

"He said, 'We're going to have a public integrity bureau," she said. "He recognized the need to restore public trust in the New Orleans Police Department."

Riley in 2002 was part of a task force charged by Mayor Marc Morial to review law enforcement's performance, Mince added. The task force members agreed that "an educated and informed citizenry" was key to following the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

But there is A LOT more to it than what was included in yesterday's paper.

You have to remember what precipitated Pennington's move, or really what even brought Pennington into town in the first place. A few months ago, I happened to be digging into a little bit of NOPD history and became very much fixated on what was going on in the early '90's. Certainly these are not good times at the NOPD but what was going on before Pennington joined the force was mind-boggling. We're talking about some Wild West bullsh!t going on - from the rank and file all the way up to the top of the force.

Using Lexis-Nexis, I came across a 60 Minutes transcript from the fall of 1994 that gets at some of what was going on at the time. At that time, Joseph Orticke was police superintendent and the Department of Justice had just named the NOPD worst in the nation for police brutality. Without excerpting large segments of that transcript, Mike Wallace profiled several visionary crime fighters who deserve some description:

• Former NOPD officer Michael Thames was imprisoned for skimming from illegal gambling, drug, and prostitution rackets to the tune of $100,000 per year. When asked about the Rodney King beating in L.A., Thames responded that he didn't know what the big deal was because that was "kiddie-land" compared to New Orleans.
• Dr. Frank Minyard, New Orleans coroner (to this day - more on him some other time) defended his office against charges that it fudged an autopsy of Adolph Archie who wounded after killing a cop only to be intercepted by a mob of police officers on the steps of Charity Hospital, taken to a police station, and beaten to death while in custody.
• Antoine Saacks was a 28 year veteran of the force and the NOPD's second-in-command under Orticke before getting fired a week before 60 Minutes got to town. On a salary of $50,000 per year, Saacks boasted millions of dollars in assets related to number of schemes including a vice-squad extortion racket in the French Quarter, exacting 'fees' for permitting officers to moonlight as private security in the film industry, and by setting up an operation to capitalize on video poker by connecting Vegas firms to a mafia-connected Bourbon St. landlord named Frank Caracci.

In 1994, the Clinton Administration granted the Civil Rights division of the Department of Justice new powers to take over troubled local police forces with poor track records on civil liberties, brutality, and racism. Only a handful of police forces were ever taken over but a certain degree of the law's effectiveness is derived from police policy adjustments made under threat of takeover. Given some of the issues illuminated above, certainly the NOPD was an early candidate for receivership takeover. Mayor Morial's decision to search outside the city for a new police chief in '94 resulted partially from this downward pressure out of Washington D.C. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, the man he picked, Richard Pennington, was plucked from D.C.'s force.

After police pay was frozen for some time in 1982, starting salaries for NOPD officers was still so low when Pennington came in that they had to be doubled. Internal affairs was liquidated and the officers were dispersed. Pennington then created the public integrity bureau, moved it outside of precinct HQ and added FBI agents to its staff.

Chief Pennington's adjustments weren't a cure all by any stretch, as issues with brutality and corruption continued to plague the force to the point that the Department of Justice opened up an official investigation into New Orleans in 1996 to monitor the reform efforts.

The general consensus of the city seems to be that the Pennington era of the NOPD was a success. Significant progressive reforms were instituted that made a pretty noticeable dent in the city's crime stats and in public perception of safety.

-

It is crucial to understand the context behind the decision to scrap internal affairs for the public integrity bureau.

Though those changes may have come regardless, the most direct catalyst was the murder of Kim Groves, which occurred just six hours after Pennington was sworn in.

Groves was murdered as a result of an execution order from NOPD Officer Len Davis, who was tipped off from within internal affairs after Groves filed a report that she had witnessed Davis senselessly beating a teen aged suspect.

At the time Davis ordered Groves' death, he was also one target in a wide-ranging federal drug investigation. Officer Davis was apparently one of at least 15-20 officers helping to guard cocaine warehouses run by undercover federal agents. Groves' killing ultimately short-circuited the drug case, as only ten officers ended up being charged. (At least according to the July 13, 1996 Washington Post article that helped me guide the narrative of this case.)

-

So let's get back to Superintendent Warren Riley's defensive protection of records related to internal affairs and the Public Integrity Bureau. What was Warren Riley doing back in the early '90s?

Well, he was at Internal Affairs, assigned there in 1991 after several years between the maligned Narcotics and Vice squads.

In late 1997, Riley was suspended for three days without pay after an investigation of an incident that occurred in the months after the Groves killing and two weeks before he had been reassigned out of the new public integrity division that Pennington was creating.

Riley was on duty on February 17th, 1995, when Sharon Robinson came forward to report that she feared for her life because she'd just ended things with her then-boyfriend, NOPD Officer Victor Gant who had a long history of physically abusing her and had repeatedly threatened to kill her in the event that she left him.

Officer Riley did not file a report or open an investigation.

Months later, on April 27th, 1995, after Riley had been transferred to the 6th District, Officer Gant approached Riley to discuss Robinson's coming forward to Riley, for which she had apparently confessed. Gant told Riley that the couple's issues had been resolved.

Sharon Robinson's body was found drowned in a swamp days later.

Here's a 1995 article from UK Independent that profiled Officer Victor Gant after he was named a suspect:

The target of the hunt is a serial killer who, investigators believe, has struck at least 24 times. The FBI think that Gant may be the killer but they don't have enough evidence for an arrest. So Gant sits at his desk, suspended from patrol duty. If you have his telephone number, you can call him and hear his Louisiana drawl: "I can't really discuss the case, you'll have to talk with my lawyer."

Gant became a suspect after Karen Ivester was found strangled. Her body was dumped in the swamp about half a mile from Interstate 55, just 30 minutes from the French Quarter of New Orleans. As local police combed the scene they found a second corpse, another young woman. Sharon Robinson had been drowned. She was still dressed in her work clothes, a uniform from the Harrah's Casino in New Orleans. Before death, her head had been shaved. In life, Robinson and Ivester had been best friends.

Police inquiries at the casino revealed that Robinson had left work on 29 April this year at 3am accompanied by Gant, a 33-year-old officer who was once her boyfriend. The New Orleans Police Department immediately named Gant as a suspect. Then the FBI announced that the man who killed Robinson and Ivester had also claimed 22 other victims.

Twenty-one of the killer's victims had ties to prostitution, Ivester included. Nineteen were known prostitutes, including one man. There were two other male victims and there is evidence to suggest they were also prostitutes. According to NOPD sources, each body carried some distinctive marks that matched through all 24 deaths.

--

Gant used to patrol in Treme and Algiers. Several residents say a group of New Orleans police officers has operated a string of prostitutes in the area for years. Some say they've seen brutal beatings and threats of murder and a few have claimed Gant was an associate of one suspect group which allegedly ruled through intimidation.

On a recent Friday night the bars along Treme's Claibourne Avenue were busy and outside each one there was a small clutch of women working the street. Many are scared, some are aggressive and few were willing to speak. When they do, they insist on anonymity.

"The police and the politicians don't really care about us," said one. "It took over a dozen deaths before those motherfuckers lifted a finger to find the killer. I knew two of the three girls who died but I wouldn't tell the police about it. I'd be the next one dead if I did." The woman then went further. "I saw the girl called Peach just a couple of days before she was murdered. The thing is, some of the cops were running the girls around here, they were pimping. Some people say Peach got out of line."

"Peach" was the name used by Karen Ivester. According to FBI investigators, Gant had told some acquaintances that he disliked Karen Ivester because she had persuaded her friend not to join her in prostitution. Local papers report that the Treme prostitutes have been victims of an intimidation campaign by a group of rogue police officers.

Upon the discovery of Robinson's body, Officer Riley wrote a letter to Major Loicano at the Public Integrity Bureau, telling him of Robinson's visit the previous February.

It was Major Loicano who ultimately reported Riley's violation, as we can see from the Major's testimony at Riley's appeal of the suspension to the Civil Service Commission in 1998:

---

Now to bring it all back, lets get back to Filosa's article:

At issue was a request by newspaper reporter Brendan McCarthy to view any Public Integrity Bureau records kept by the New Orleans Police Department on Riley, along with his top three officers and the officers involved in the Jan. 1 fatal shooting of 22-year-old Adolph Grimes.

Certainly, we can understand how it is in the interests of Superintendent Riley and PANO (Police Association of New Orleans) to deny public records requests related to Internal Affairs and the Public Integrity Bureau. And we can also understand how it's in Superintendent Riley's interests to deny the public the right to inspect his own complaint records.

But I think it will be very interesting to examine common threads possibly bind all ten officers in McCarthy's request together. How many of Riley's top Lieutenants came from the old internal affairs outfit of the early '90s? What about from narcotics and vice of the '80s?

The most disturbing thing to think about is how the NOPD in total seems to have gone full circle back to the old pre-Pennington days. How many brutality cases have we heard about since Katrina? How many arrests of uniformed officers? And how much never sees the light of day?

E-maelstrom

Okay guys, that's the name of this scandal, at least as WCBF is concerned. I need something to tag these posts with and I just can't wait around anymore for the proper democratic process to provide a better idea. It's all happening too fast. So there you have it: E-maelstrom.

I think that's pretty good. It describes the email controversy AND the larger scandal-sucking vortex that the email controversy seems to be precipitating, which is what I'll be discussing at length in this post.

Fair?

Fair.

Many of us have been on the edge of their seats as confirmed and rumored reports of Federal raids and computer seizures have proliferated between City Hall whisperers and blogging interneters.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate known fact from unconfirmed report and reasonable speculation from straw grasp.

I won't promise to do that here but I will attempt to express a little bit of what I know, what I want to know, and what I expect to know.

If you've been reading the blogs this week, there's a certain difference between what has been discussed online and what has been good enough to print in the mainstream press. WWL, WDSU, the Times-Picayune, and the like aren't totally missing the boat. I think they're wise to be cautious. Certainly the Mayor's people are anxious to find bad reporting on which they can capitalize to obfuscate what's really going on.

But us web operators can help make up for whatever analytical boldness might be lacking in the mainstream press during these early public stages of what is clearly a very complicated scandal.

Mr. Clancy DuBos is straddling those two worlds quite nicely and has been a great read lately, particularly his coverage and analysis of Judge Ledet's court and the legal angle of the Council email leak element of this. In fact, his superb post today is the impetus behind my post now.

One thing we're all seeming to be in agreement about is that this is only partially about the 'unusual' leak of City Council's emails to Attorney Tracie Washington and the Louisiana Justice Institute.

Briefly for the uninitiated, Tracie Washington went around City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields and the normal protocol for a public records request by submitting a request for three years worth of Council's emails through Sanitation Director Veronica White. This occurred in early December, just hours after WWL's Lee Zurik submitted a request through the City Attorney for a year's worth of emails and calendar appointments from the Mayor. That request remains unfulfilled after the Mayor's office claimed that the emails had been lost or inadvertently deleted, though it is important to point out that city policy mandates that emails are backed up on a remote server every three months.

This was also amidst a political storm around Veronica White, who was clashing with Council over poorly kept records and her department's 2009 budget.

The Nagin administration and those associated with Washington's Louisiana Justice Institute have been couching the release of Council's emails as unorthodox and unusual but totally above board. Beyond that, they've described the controversy around the release of the emails as exposing the hypocrisy of Council's repeated calls for transparency from the Mayor's office.

In truth, there is no love lost between LJI and the Mayor's office. Washington has habitually expressed her distaste for Mr. Nagin and his destructive policies. But on this matter, the early noise in the press was pretty similar.

So why is it such a big deal that Council's emails were released anyway?

Well, if the records request had been fulfilled following proper procedures, nothing would have been wrong with it. We all have a right to see what our public officials have been doing with their time. However, because the disclosure of records was done without the knowledge of Council or Council's attorney, there could be any number of things released to the public that would have otherwise been redacted, and for good reason.

Email correspondence with federal law enforcement, email correspondence about federal investigations, email correspondence with whistle-blowers should be protected from public release because of the possibility of criminal obstruction of justice.

And as Clancy points out, there was likely correspondence between Council and Council attorney's about a lawsuit AGAINST the Mayor and City Attorney:

Why did Moses-Fields meet with Hatfield and Boyd to discuss how to protect privileged information? In fact, why did Moses-Fields get involved at this or any other point in a request for City Council records — particularly when she knew full well that the council has its own independent legal counsel? Moreover, she knew at the time that the reason the council hired its own lawyers is because it was considering litigation against Moses-Fields and her client, the mayor. Moses-Fields obviously knew or should have known that some of the council emails would contain attorney-client communications, which are privileged, and she also knew damn well that she had no right — and no authority — whatsoever to review or even to see those privileged communications, particularly when she is legally adverse to the parties and the attorneys who are engaged in those communications.

So there may be criminal activity involving the release of the emails at a number of contact points. Certainly a bigger issue would be that the Mayor's Office of Technology has direct 24/7 access to Council's email files. This seems like a huge breach of basic municipal separation of power and opens a lot of troubling doors. I can confirm from knowledgeable sources that many members of Council and Council staff have operated as though their emails were tapped and being read by the Mayor's people for some time. I can't accurately say if that means three months, six months, or twelve months but my best guess is that this has been going on for longer than the time line of the e-maelstrom scandal.

Yet, one wonders whether Councilors were as careful with their words one would think they'd be knowing that their correspondence was being read - given the excitement one can infer on LJI's end about the bounty of information that could be in those emails related to the demolition of public housing, the LSU/VA site selection process, or whatever other nefarious words or dirty deeds could have conceivably been discussed via email.

Nevertheless, it would appear to me that even in isolation of some of the other issues I'll get to in this post, the release of Council's emails by the Office of Technology and the Sanitation Director represents more than a procedural anomaly. Criminal behavior seems a very likely possibility.

Let's take a look at some of the players on the email leak side of things and see where that takes us in terms of the larger scandals to which we've been alluding...


1. City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields

Clancy's analysis seems pretty clear:

The law is crystal clear on this: attorneys who come into possession of adverse parties’ documents or communications that may be privileged have an ethical duty to notify the attorneys for those parties immediately — and to avoid opening, reviewing or otherwise violating the privileges that attach to those documents or communications. So, why exactly did Moses-Fields admit to an intent to review (and perhaps actually review) emails that she absolutely knew contained privileged information and/or communications between an adverse party (the council) and that party’s attorneys? [snip]

Why did it take Moses-Fields, by her own admission, two weeks to notify the council’s attorneys that a public records request had been filed for documents that probably contained privileged communications between the council and its attorneys? What was she thinking? Or better yet, what was she reading?

Beyond that, Moses-Fields has already given a sworn deposition on the matter that is extremely vague but still exposes certain vulnerabilities depending on how facts play out. Either way, it is probably reasonable to speculate that Penya Moses-Fields could find herself in much hotter water than she's been in to date.


2. Louisiana Justice Institute Attorney Tracie Washington

City Council's own attorney Steven Lane has seemingly, on a few different occasions, largely exonerated Ms. Washington in terms of her role in acquiring the emails from Sanitation Director White. However, Washington has indicated in interviews that she's proliferated some of the emails to unknown people or groups that have asked for them. I'm not a lawyer but it would appear to me that she exposes herself to a certain degree depending on the parties to whom she passed on the emails and depending on whether she bares any legal responsibility for the content in the emails, whether she's read them or not.

The other issue for LJI involves optical perception. The narrative of events also lends to questions related to Washington's awareness of White's pull in the Mayor's Office of Technology. Washington's past willingness to get involved in Bill Jefferson's legal defense and other similar efforts has seemed to undermine her credibility on this issue as an impartial seeker of public records, even amongst some regular allies. On the other hand, Jay Arena has started a petition on her behalf that has seen low traffic but has yielded some high impact signatories, such as former Mayor Marc Morial and Color of Change's James Rucker.

(I don't think anybody is disputing Washington or anyone else's right to see Council's emails but the petition text seems to consider some of these legal issues to be totally without merit or implicitly directed at Washington herself, which makes no sense given that Council's attorney Steven Lane has repeatedly reiterated the legitimacy of Washington's request and has not alleged wrongdoing on her part that I'm aware of. In short, and as someone that has supported a lot of Washington's work around social justice issues and who has tried to understand the argument coming from the LJI side, I think that the communications strategy at work here is absolutely ludicrous given the legal nuance and the emerging federal criminal investigation. I also, however, would like the legitimate public information within Council emails pertaining to actual important stuff - like the LSU/VA site selection process - to be released as soon as possible.)


3. Sanitation Director Veronica White

White has drawn the brunt of the legal activity related to this case so far, as it has been confirmed that federal agents have seized her computers. White has retained the services of a high profile criminal defense attorney and the Nagin administration has not been as publicly protective of her as they usually are for employees that have come under fire in the past, including White herself on a number of previous occasions.

Given the tenuous political situation in which she found herself back in early December, many are suspicious that she maliciously circumvented municipal protocol and potentially broke the law in order to prematurely leak these emails as a result of her professional troubles with Council and personal troubles with Councilwoman Stacy Head in particular.

A couple of related unanswered questions:

(a) Did White communicate to Washington that she would be willing and able to expedite a public records request pertaining to Council's emails and how?

(b) Did White see any email content? [Especially important given that much of the most recent correspondence included was likely to pertain to her own performance as Sanitation Director]

(d) Who else was aware of the request and when? [Did White collude with other administration officials in the Mayor's Office of Technology or elsewhere in the administration to expedite the records request or view the data herself?]

Another issue for White, is an emerging investigation into a bodyguard assigned to her who has ended up aiding a recall movement against White's enemy Councilwoman Stacy Head. From my view, this is tangential. It's not totally irrelevant but doesn't necessarily appear to have much bearing on some of the other elements under consideration.


4. Chief Administrative Officer Dr. Brenda Hatfield


Dr. Hatfield essentially acts as the Mayor's Chief of Staff and is heavily involved in every function of the executive branch. She was present at many of the meetings about the Council email release and will likely have to corroborate the testimony already provided by Moses-Fields and otherwise disclose what she knew and when. The Mayor has delegated the responsibility of investigating the matter and recommending disciplinary action in this matter to Hatfield but it isn't entirely clear that Hatfield herself might be deserving of reprimand for, at the very least, being totally unaware of what was occurring between White and the Mayor's Office of Technology over a two month period.

She's certainly going to be asked what she knew and when she knew it. The known details of her involvement remain sketchy at best.


5. Interim Chief Technology Officer M. Harrison Boyd

In the deposition(pdf) given under oath by Penya Moses-Fields, it was on February 28th that someone from the Mayor's Office of Technology finally came forward to disclose that Council's emails had already been placed on CDs and released to Tracie Washington.

8. On February 28, 2009, the Director of the Mayor's Office of Technology informed the City Attorney's Office that at some point in time prior to February 28, 2009, he had provided Veronica White with one set of discs containing emails of the City Council.

It has been assumed that this is a reference to M. Harrison Boyd and this has been repeated in accounts in the mainstream press. I'd like to know if in fact anyone has explicitly confirmed that it was Boyd who produced the emails on discs to White.

The reason I'm skeptical is that it seems extremely counter-intuitive that Boyd, a recent hire from out of state, would knowingly take part in such blatantly legally ambiguous activity involving the emails of a separate branch of government.

Assuming that he was in fact responsible for obtaining Council's emails from the server, putting them on a disc, and handing that disc to White, well then he's going to be in some serious hot water. Some questions related to this scenario:

(a) Why weren't White's request for records on behalf of Washington greeted with skepticism?
(b) Were their orders to produce the emails from elsewhere in the administration?

However, I wonder whether the deposition refers to someone else entirely from the MOT, or if Boyd was holding himself accountable for the actions of another staffer within his department.

And that brings us to...


6. Former Chief Technology Officer and current Management Information Services Enterprise Director Anthony Jones

Now we're cutting closer to the heart of the matter.

It is believed, though it has not been confirmed by the mainstream press, that Jones' computers have also been seized by federal agents. Now, this could be because Jones was in fact responsible for the release of Council's emails, not Boyd as implied by the deposition of City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields. But it likely has a lot more to do with Jones' illegal activities during his time as CTO from 2007-2008. Both the Inspector General and a separate auditor contracted by the city have issued reports highly critical of Jones' conduct around the award of contracts related to the city's crime camera program.

From the Times-Picayune's David Hammer:

Last week, when the city's independent inspector general alleged years of questionable contracting and $4 million in overpayments for an often-inoperable network of crime cameras, Mayor Ray Nagin's administration released its own audit of the camera program. It focused almost entirely on the last two years of the project, when Jones was interim chief technology officer.

The most troubling findings by PFM Group of Philadelphia were that Jones filed false invoices to hide the camera project's costs, and accepted plane tickets to a conference in Colorado from a contractor that earned millions on the camera project in a no-bid arrangement. The report called those actions, which Jones denies, "potential misconduct and unlawful activity" and recommended that the city inform law enforcement.

Jones was demoted in August, mainly because he had falsely claimed to have a college degree. He also overstated the number of college credits he earned on at least one job application.

Jones is almost certainly going to be charged with several crimes, that is, unless he agrees to testify against others. What others?

That the Mayor's audit focused only on Jones' administration of the MOT and crime camera program is indeed quite telling.


7. Mark Kurt, Former Chief Technology Officer
8. Greg Meffert, Former Chief Technology Officer

Greg Meffert was a huge donor to both of Ray Nagin's mayoral campaigns and served as CTO and as something of a Deputy Mayor from 2002-2006. Kurt was a private sector associate of Meffert, was brought in by Meffert to serve in the MOT, and was subsequently named as Meffert's successor. The two gentleman, along with other private sector associates, are involved in a tangled web of insider contracting involving all aspects of the city's push to modernize technology and information systems under Ray Nagin. Blogger Ashe Dambala from American Zombie has cultivated a number of knowledgeable sources and has systematically broken down the graft starting in the summer of 2006 with the publication of a story detailing some of the contract trading and the existence of a corporate yacht owned by Meffert associates and enjoyed by the Mayor himself. He stayed on the issue through 2007 as the crime camera program was expanded and his breakdown of the IG's recent report helps illuminate the systemic corruption in the Mayor's Office of Technology.

Some areas in which contracts were handed out between associates of Meffert and Kurt involve the design and maintenance of several city websites - including the tax assessor's database and cityofno.com; the design, implementation, and maintenance of the city's short-lived wifi service; the design, implementation, and maintenance of the city's maligned 311 call system; installing and maintaining the crime camera system; maintaining city email servers across all departments including City Council; and much more.

The city contracts, which bilked the city out of tens millions of dollars or much more, provided affiliated individuals and corporations a spring board to national prominence and untold wealth.

Scariest is what we might find once investigations begin to reveal the lengths to which cronies went, not just to conceal their crimes, but first and especially to maintain the power necessary to continue to wring the city of every last penny though various no-bid and bid-rigged contracts. What we do find, we'll find first on American Zombie, so make sure to bookmark him.


9. The Honorable C. Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans


Ray Nagin and Greg Meffert are neighbors on Park Island, an exclusive and obscure cul-de-sac off of City Park.


View Larger Map

Meffert and various associates from the city's fledgling IT community bankrolled Nagin's campaign in 2002 and his reelection in 2006 with tens of thousands of dollars in contributions.

The chief target of the federal investigation must ultimately Mr. Nagin. It has been reported on AZ but unconfirmed by the mainstream press that the Mayor's computers have also been seized by federal agents.

The ultimate legitimacy of all of these investigations and possible seizures will rest on whether or not US Attorney Jim Letten is able to gather enough evidence of collusion/conspiracy between the Mayor, Meffert, and Meffert's associates to file charges that stick. Thus, all the interest in the Mayor's email archives.

--

What is increasingly clear is that there is else behind the swift action by federal investigators in regard to the release of Council emails, something else that has is only tangentially related to this one procedural miscue by the administration.

(Though it does seem like there may be criminal activity involved with it specifically, possibly on a number of levels.)

Rather - and I this most certainly isn't the first time I, Clancy, Oyster, or Zombie have made this point - the council email release controversy is a convenient pretext to fast track an ongoing and incredibly grave longer-term investigation into the overall politicization and corruption of the Mayor's Office of Technology.

Perhaps more consequential in the most immediate short term is what this e-maelstrom means in terms of the operation of municipal government. Where there was once a high-tension environment toxic to coalition building, now it is probable that there is only totally demoralized gridlock. Even now, though the e-maelstrom has only begun to escalate, it is simply impossible to imagine Council being able to do anything in concert with the Mayor's office.

Drip Drip Drip

The HIM Store at Canal Place has shuttered.

Update: Wait, did they really open up a new location on Magazine?

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Update Dos: Drip drip drip anyway.

More computers have been seized, including the Mayor's. He's out of town right now. Coincidentally, he's delivering a speech to lawyers.

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Update Tres: City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields throws White overboard.

Selectively Understood

The Feds have selected Veronica White's computers for seizure to better their own understanding.

A Grand Jury has been convened.

*And Big Red Cotton reports that Veronica White has been Defense Attorney shopping.

The White-t0-Washington email leak has turned out to be quite the catalyst for solving some of our other favorite mysteries.

I doubt this is so much about leaked emails as it is about, well, so many other horrible things.

Hats off to the American Zombie ten times over.

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It's not going to stop. I wouldn't look away.

I'll certainly have more to add soon 'nuff.

Snowball

I'd love to put this Mayor Nagin interview side by side with some of the other he's given over the last few months.

So many contradictory statements, such denial. It's incredible. Another classic.




(Props to Fox 8 for making their video embeddable. More of our local stations should do this.)

The best part (if one can even choose) is toward the end when he discusses the crime camera investigation.

Kim Holden: Let's switch gears a little bit -

Ray Nagin: (interrupting): Really?

Holden: Another controversy involving the crime cameras -

Nagin: (agitated interruption): Controversy?

Holden: - That came up this week. The IG report blasting your office for basically failing to hold the contractors accountable for the work they did, way too much money being spent on this, and the fact that maintenance costs are going to be astronomical from this point on. At some point do you say let's just abandon this whole project?

Nagin: I wouldn't do that. I mean, you know, one of the things I want to remind the public is that this is something that we pioneered. This was a research and development kind of project that the city of New Orleans really hadn't done. And when you do research and development and you pioneer things, you know, you're going to have some issues. I want to tell you I was just in Washington and Mayor Daley came up to me and he said, "look, I like these crime cameras that you guys are doing in New Orleans. They're cheaper than hiring more police officers and we're going to do them in a big way in Chicago."

Now, have we had issues? Absolutely. It's been well documented. We started to look at it back in August and make some changes. The gentleman who was in running the department is no longer in charge of that, no longer in charge of contracting, and we're cleaning this up. We have had some issues and we are going to do better.

Jonathan Carter: Well right now there have been a reported three prosecutions coming off of the crime cameras. With a cost of $6.6 million, Raphael Goyaneche of the Metro Crime Commission, I mean, he said that's basically $2 million for a prosecution and... and... in his words, he says, "that's not much bang for your buck."

Nagin: Well, Raphael is not really a crime expert so, I mean, you have to take what he says with a grain of salt. I will tell you that three number I don't think is accurate. I know for a fact the US Attorney's office has used the crime cameras to solve cases. The Police Department has many more cases than three that they've used. Now, whether one case where you prevent a murder or you solve a murder is worth $6 million dollars, I mean, we're going to have that debate for a long time.

Holden: How do you feel about the US Attorney looking into this whole issue and the IG's report reviewing it -

Nagin: The IG? I mean, I'm happy to see that the IG has produced another report. It's the second one in eighteen months, so that's a good thing. The first one we thought was, um, not well written but this one is better. It confirms our forensic audit. As far as the US Attorney, I, I welcome it. We've always said if there's something wrong that we have done or one of our employees [has] done and if there's anything that crosses the line of the law, we were going to turn it over and that's what we're doing here; and we'll get to the bottom of it.

But, my read of this is that I'm not sure what criminal violations happened. But I'm not an attorney so we'll see.

Another interesting exchange came as Nagin tried to downplay the insufficiently nicknamed email controversy.

Carter: Do you have any plans to talk to Veronica White about what happened?

Nagin: Uh, I...I'm, that's... she reports to the Chief Administration Officer Dr. Brenda Hatfield. And I've asked Dr. Brenda Hatfield to look into this a little further and if there's any, you know, thing we need to do from a disciplinary standpoint, we will do that. . .

Very interesting defensive posture to take to a very basic, non confrontational question. He won't even discuss the matter with his own Sanitation Director. That's how isolated this guy is. He won't even directly "talk" to his own sanitation director, who controls one of the city's largest and most consequential service departments and who controls a budget of tens of millions of dollars. Is Brenda Hatfield the only person the Mayor talks to on his own staff?

Not one of the questions he was asked was particularly probing. They're all open-ended. They just ask "well what about this thing" and give him a platform to get out his message Imagine if a reporter actually pegged him with some tough questions that ask him about specific names and dates or specifically confront some of the bogus claims he makes.

For instance, he got angry during the interview when Holden asked him if it was "fishy" that all of council's emails had been leaked when he himself has been subject to a records lawsuit because his administration had refused to hand over his own emails before it was revealed that they had been deleted. He went on some long explanation about how the council and mayor's emails are stored on different servers (which doesn't really appear to be true) and how all of his emails are now available for public consumption (which almost certainly isn't true).

Overall, it's gotten to the point that even the mere suggestion that one of these issues be labeled a "controversy" is out of bounds.

And this is pretty much the only media outlet that Ray Nagin still talks to at this point.

--

At onset, I thought Nagin would be able to once again out maneuver Council in terms of political tactic but there are just too many 'fishy controversies' confronting his administration at the same time. It's really looking disorganized over there and there's too much bad press coming all at once. This Mayor was and is deeply unpopular. Council isn't fighting itself over the emails matter. He needed that in order to "win" on the transparency/emails kerfuffle and by proxy, obscure the crime camera disaster and now this new expenditure issue.

It's too much at once.

The Mayor is on very shaky ground right now. He might have been better off just staying in the bunker.

Laughter Obscures Need for Introspection

Everyone has just had a ball teeing off on the corrupt Rod Blagojevich and crooked state of Illinois over the last week or so. Intelligent bloggers and bombastic blowhards came together to share a laugh.

How could he be so stupid?
In this day and age?
Hasn't he ever seen a movie or television show before?
Which state is the most corrupt?

Hardee har har.

I enjoyed it too, but at this point, I'm totally over it.

And no, it's not because I think Louisiana isn't getting enough credit for it's foibles.

It's because I think there is some wisdom to take away from the situation that is obscured when we marginalize Blagojevich or Illinois as anomalies.

Blogojevich is a thug and he should be put away for a good long while but I think it's useful to actually think about the different ways pay-to-play works instead of just laughing at Legojevich.


Everyone was just so appalled, not so much by the corruption but by Blagojevich's stupidity in getting caught. One of the things that I noticed some cable talking heads doing when discussing the Blagojevich scandal was a sort of half-hearted line drawing when it came to what was crime and what was just plain old politics. Some amount of political horse-trading is normal and sometimes necessary even, whereas trading a political horse for a personal money cow is a crime, or so the talking heads said on Hardball or whatever show I was watching.

But perhaps it's worth parsing this out a little bit.

I've noticed a pattern about the way some crooked or ineffectual politicians ultimately get taken down by the FBI. Guys like Edwin Edwards in Louisiana, Kwame Kilpatrick in Detroit, Vince Fumo in Philadelphia, or Rod Blagojevich in Illinois don't just get caught up in corruption indictments out of the blue. Rather, these politicians develop grand reputations for thuggery and graft far in advance of any kind of criminal investigation. That reputation coincides with a certain celebrity-centered political lifestyle. Power provides, reputation develops, power erodes and then lifestyle become unsustainable. This leads to increasingly desperate and risky shake-downs that often occur in earshot of federal investigators that have by this time found an actionable complaint from someone no longer intimidated or dependent upon the boss' political power.

This helps explain why politicians that develop vast public reputations for crookedness, even if they never end up getting accused of anything by a prosecutor become so defensive or walled off as time elapses. Ray Nagin might be demonstrating this kind of bunker mentality. Other good examples are former Mayor John Street in Philadelphia or, I dunno, President Bush and all of his lackeys. They exercise their right to remain silent, taking that route over the desperate 0-60 cliff dive demonstrated by Governor Blagojevich, or by former State Senator Shepherd, who had his own unique style.

Allegedly, one of things Blagojevich tried to do by leveraging this Senate appointment was to obtain a plum foundation board salary for he or his wife.

The governor, already dogged by allegations of crookedness and low approval ratings, was likely becoming quite concerned with his prospects for income after his term. Forget his delusions about running for President in 2016, I think the desperation for six figure cash is a way more telling indicator of where he really knew he stood deep down.

This allegation was for some reason treated as among the most shocking in Fitzgerald complaint. That's not to say the behavior isn't deplorable, because it is. But it isn't entirely out of the ordinary.

Or at least, it is treated as regular political behavior in some parts of the country.

Like in Louisiana.

I think back to District Attorney Eddie Jordan's resignation in October of 2007. The writing had been on the wall for quite some time at that point but he remained in office, determined to stay on the job even as veteran prosecutors quit and accused murderers were released on 701s.

Do you remember how his resignation was finally arranged?

Remember this headline:

Jordan's new job part of resignation

Jordan resigned from his post two weeks ago, saying he hoped his absence would allow people to work out some way for the judgment to be paid, forestalling a crippling shutdown of the office he led for almost five years. Though the settlement still looms over the office, Jordan's resignation assured him a private sector job arranged by business leaders.

"It is part of the package that was developed," said Robert Stellingworth, executive director of the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation, a nonprofit group. The business community will pay for Jordan's consultancy, Stellingworth said.

The consulting gig, cemented through a contract signed last week, is not a full-time job, said Stellingworth, who declined to give the amount Jordan will be paid.

"We believe he can add some perspective" to the foundation's work, Stellingworth said. The business community has remained in talks about the legal settlement but committed no private money to pay it. Lapeyre, who described himself as an "adviser" to the city on the issue, last week sat in on a meeting between Mayor Ray Nagin and Landrum-Johnson.

Quite literally, the former District Attorney Eddie Jordan nearly forced a total shut down of the criminal justice system, relenting only when he was able obtain a well-paying foundation job for himself.

Mayor Nagin needed to call in "the business community" to do him this favor, to find a job for Eddie Jordan. And "the business community" came through for the Mayor, placing him under Richard Stellingsworth at the Police and Justice foundation. His salary would be paid, not by the foundation, but by "the business community," all as arranged by "adviser" Jay Lapeyre, President of the New Orleans Business Council.

Isn't this exactly what Mr. Blagojevich was trying to arrange for himself in Illinois in exchange for the Senate seat?

Here in New Orleans, we allowed the same exact thing to occur out in the open. It was reported right there in the paper and nobody really batted an eye.

We never did learn if Mr. Lapeyre or "the business community" asked for or received anything in return.

Lucky for us Mayor Nagin doesn't get to pick Senators. He only gets to decide municipal policy.