Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for March, 2016

Sadow stretches credibility to breaking point in blaming Edwards for Moody’s state credit downgrade, other ills

Posted in Uncategorized on March 6, 2016| 42 Comments »

Ph.D., it seems really does stand for “piled higher and deeper” in some quarters.

And Jeff Sadow, Ph.D., proves it in spades.

After all, no self-respecting snake oil salesman would attempt to sell what Sadow was hawking in Sunday’s Baton Rouge Advocate.

Normally, we don’t take issue with other bloggers in this space because it is our firm conviction that everyone has the right to his own opinion.

But no one has the right to his own facts and that’s where Sadow has crossed the line with his latest attempt at political erudition of the masses—or at least that part of Louisiana’s masses who subscribe to The Advocate. (And no, that’s not a dig at The Advocate. The fact is, each major metropolitan area of the state has its own newspaper to the general exclusion of all the others, so that necessarily limits the sphere of influence of any given publication.)

There’s an old joke that says 87.3 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot and unfortunately, the Baton Rouge Advocate has provided him a forum to toss out any figures he can conjure up and feed them to us as facts.

Southeastern Louisiana University associate professor of political science Kurt Corbello recently took him to task in a LouisianaVoice guest column, exposing his LSU-Shreveport counterpart as more than a little off base with his data. https://louisianavoice.com/2016/03/01/slu-associate-professor-says-advocate-columnist-can-only-arrive-at-state-expenditure-numbers-by-making-them-up/

Sadow had published the absurd claim that Louisiana ranked “well above the national average in per capita spending when in fact, the state spent $6,365 per capita in spending, $352 below the state average nationwide.

“The only way to arrive at the columnist’s (Sadow’s) conclusion that Louisiana ranks “well above the national average in per capita spending” is to make it all up, Corbello wrote.

Only a week later, Sadow has gone completely off the reservation by blaming the recent Moody’s downgrade of the state’s credit rating on John Bel Edwards who has been governor less than two months.

http://theadvocate.com/features/recipes/15072709-63/jeff-sadow-markets-not-looking-kindly-on-louisiana

Jindal systematically wrecked the state’s economy for a full eight years. And Moody’s and Standard & Poor each put the state on its critical watch list last year. Where the hell was Sadow with his self-righteous indignation during those years?

Remember, Jeff, Louisiana had a Republican governor and Republican majorities (big majorities, we might add) in both the House and Senate during those eight years. Remember also, Jeff, Jindal & Co. managed to incur budgetary shortfalls every single year he was in office even as he kept up the drumbeat to “do more with less.” He cut higher education more than any other state in the nation.

He cut services to the developmentally disadvantaged (but he managed to give $4.7 million of their money to one of the richest families in Louisiana for their Indy racetrack in Avondale. That family, the Chouest family, we should add, was a generous donor to the Jindal campaigns, pour in more than $130,000 to his state campaigns and a cool $1 million to his Believe Again super PAC.

He gutted funding for the Department of Children and Family Services to such an extent that the agency cannot even repair its state vehicles and the overworked staff finds it impossible to properly work its caseloads to protect the state’s foster children.

He did make sure that nursing homes received adequate per bed funding but when you peel back the layers, you see that the industry contributed generously to his campaigns.

A recipient of megabucks from the oil and gas industry, he made sure to kill the lawsuit against 97 oil and gas and pipeline companies for destroying the state’s marshlands.

He vetoed bills passed unanimously in both the House and Senate to ensure transparency in public records, including those of the governor’s office.

He likewise vetoed unanimous legislation that would have made the Louisiana Department of Economic Development justify those billions of dollars of tax breaks, exemption, credits and incentives awarded to businesses and industries who in turn, created only minimum wage, or worse, no new jobs.

Yes, the oil patch dried up virtually with no warning—much like it did in the early 1980s, creating an additional strain on the state budget.

And yet, Jeff, you see all this as the fault of one John Bel Edwards, governor of the State of Louisiana for a full two months?

And you place none of the fault with Jindal? Or the legislature?

Jeff, you’re an educated man, with a Ph.D. on your wall to prove it.

Well, Jeff, I have a degree, too. I have a B.S. degree from Louisiana Tech. You probably graduated with honors while I graduated Magna Cum Barely. But Jeff, I live out here in the real world. I get out and talk to people. You obviously do neither.

If you can convince anyone that Edwards, with two months under his belt, is responsible for all of Louisiana’s ills after eight years of Jindal’s reign of error, then you have truly missed your calling.

You should have been a stage hypnotist or better yet, a televangelist. If you can sell what you’re peddling, you could make a linebacker cluck like a chicken or a heathen throw away his crutches.

 

Read Full Post »

Jindal, after gutting OGB, breaks the rules by changing plans in mid-stream—with help of obliging OGB administrators

Posted in Uncategorized on March 4, 2016| 10 Comments »

He may be gone but he’s certainly not forgotten.

Bobby Jindal, who did his dead level best to destroy the Office of Group Benefits, is now doing his best to take advantage of the agency for his health insurance.

Meanwhile, LouisianaVoice has learned that OGB Director Susan West went a little ballistic over our post of Thursday (March 3), even saying we didn’t know what we were talking about. But…but, Susan, we were only quoting from the letter that was sent out with your office’s letterhead on it (admittedly, your name, conveniently, was nowhere in the letter).

The person who contacted initially and a second person who contacted us on Friday (March 4) each said that West directed OGB’s fiscal office to ignore the “pay flags” which indicate non-payment of premiums. (In our story, we called them “stop flags,” but we’re told the correct term is “pay flags.)

Now, of course, OGB is scrambling to recoup all the money (at least $10,511 in a single case we have verified) it paid out in claims for employees and retirees who have either switched to other plans or for whatever reason, ceased paying premiums.

LouisianaVoice has learned that Jindal and family had an HMO plan but that he wanted to change to OGB coverage under COBRA, specifically, a health savings account (HSA). Changing a plan is strictly forbidden except during open enrollment which is in October. But the rules, you see, don’t apply to Jindal; they never have. (Perhaps he learned that trick from State Police Superintendent Mike Edmonson who almost got away with getting the legislature to approve an amendment to an obscure bill on the final day of the 2014 session that would’ve given him an illegal $55,000 bump in his retirement pay.)

And let’s not forget that Jindal, after attempting and failing to dismantle LASERS, the retirement system for state employees, quietly purchased time from the system to enhance his own retirement. (Never let it be said that he is lacking in duplicity and cunning.)

No matter. OGB management obligingly approved the switch to the HSA which features low premiums and higher deductibles—basically a major medical-type policy that most people can’t afford. Our source described it as “the Bill Cassidy answer to ObamaCare—sock away a minimum of $10,000 in an HSA and use that for regular medical expenses, except most people don’t have $10,000 to put away and tie up for healthcare alone.”

Not only did Jindal and OGB management skirt the law in changing Jindal’s plan mid-stream, but Jindal also purchased a flexible spending account (FSA). FSAs are highly-regulated by the federal government (which should have gone against Jindal’s very fiber, considering his opposition to everything federal during his term of office). Up to $2,400 a year may be put into an FSA account for a specific purpose such as healthcare expenses or dependent care costs such as daycare. The $2400 is tax deductible so the policy holder saves a bit on state and federal taxes and gives the policy holder free use of the money for the specified purposes.

For state employees, FSA accounts are administered by Discovery Benefits and Jindal, apparently without the sage advice of sidekick Timmy Teepell, submitted his checks for his FSA incorrectly for his COBRA policy, causing “a lot of heartburn” at OGB.

“Discovery Benefits, Inc., is beyond inefficient and impossible to work with,” our source, a retired state employee, said. “There have been many complaints about DBI, including from a state legislator who is outraged over the mess the company has made of her account.

“I made a formal complaint to OGB over DBI’s lack of acceptance of documentation of my dentist’s care, having sent them the requested documentation three times myself, and they had no record either from the dentist or from me. They then locked my account and I could not access my own money. I called DBI and got through after being placed on hold for 20 minutes. I demanded access to my account, which they temporality unlocked.

“OGB staff sent DBI my documentation by email TWICE – DBI never acknowledged either email to my knowledge and demanded that I repay the $100 or so they had paid my dentist, which I refused to do.  So they said they sent a notice to the IRS that I have this $100 taxable income. Idiots.”

Read Full Post »

OGB sending out letters in attempt to recoup wrongfully paid claims; seeking to blame retirees, own workers for problems

Posted in Corruption, Ethics, Finances, Fraud, Health Care, OGB, Office of Group Benefits, Privatization, Public Records, Revenue, State Agencies on March 3, 2016| 12 Comments »

What happens when a former governor’s privatization plan goes terribly wrong?

Okay, perhaps we need to be a little more specific, given so many things have gone so terribly wrong with so many of Bobby Jindal’s half-baked privatization schemes.

In the case of the Office of Group Benefits, the answer is plenty and none of it is good.

As chronicled in several posts, LouisianaVoice told of then-Commissioner Paul Rainwater first saying OGB would be sold, then saying it would not be sold, and in the end, its operations were turned over to Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Louisiana, throwing about 150 OGB employees to the curb.

Tommy Teague, who had taken over the debt-ridden agency and transformed it into a smooth-running outfit which managed to build a $500 million fund balance from which it paid claims promptly, giving state employees and retirees and their dependents little cause for concern, is a case in point.

For his trouble, he was fired (teagued) because he didn’t fall immediately in line with Jindal’s Milton Friedman-inspired doctrine of privatization. Teague’s successor lasted barely six weeks before he threw in the towel and departed for another state.

Along the way, the administration went against the advice of its own expensive consulting firm and lowered premiums to OGB members. That looked good for the covered employees but what the move really accomplished was the state’s being obligated for a lowing matching amount. The state pays 75 percent of the employee premium and by lowering the premium, it simultaneously reduced the state’s obligation and the money saved was used to patch one of those gaping holes that appeared in the state budget every single year of the Jindal administration. It was, in short, a shell game run by a con artist with one eye on the big score—the presidency.

Of course, that also had the effect of creating a heavy drain on that $500 million reserve fund, since premiums could no longer keep up with the cost of claims.

Accordingly, the $500 million evaporated to something around $100 million and Rainwater’s successor Kristy Nichols tried to implement a plan to simultaneously raise premiums and lower benefits to build the reserve back up—a plan that was revealed first by LouisianaVoice and which met instant opposition from employees, retirees and legislators.

The administration backed off that plan somewhat but the final compromise version left some retirees who lived out of state without coverage.

It also drove other retirees to other plans like People’s Health where premiums were cheaper and benefits better.

And that’s where the latest snag rears its ugly head.

Because the agency has been gutted of those employees who made it into such an efficient operation, things—big things—are starting to fall between the cracks and the plan apparently is to blame retirees and OGB’s fiscal collection department.

What has happened, according to word received by LouisianaVoice, is that OGB has failed to cut off coverage for retirees who self-pay for their coverage (through other programs) and who are “delinquent” in their premium payments.

It seems that OGB has not put “stop flags” on self-pay accounts that are in arrears for months but continued to pay claims. “Group Benefits has dozens of people who are late and they (OGB) are still paying claims to doctors and hospitals for X-Rays, MRIs, surgeries and prescriptions,” our source told us, adding that OGB initially told its fiscal collection department to ignore the delinquencies.

Now, though, OGB is sending out letters demanding payments for unpaid premiums.

OGB LETTER

(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE)

One such letter provided to LouisianaVoice demanded payment of $10,511 in premiums dating back to October 2014 and pharmacy benefits of $425.

The Feb. 18, 2016, letter to the retiree said coverage “on OGB-administered health plans will terminate in October 2014 for non-payment of the full premium. During this period our records show that you continued to use the health and pharmacy benefits of the plan.”

Notice that the letter was dated Feb. 18, 2016 but said coverage “will terminate” in October of 2014.

No reason was given for a 2016 letter warning of pending termination of coverage in 2014. But that is somehow typical of any holdover from the Jindal years.

The individual was told if the plan was to be retained, the retiree would owe $10,511.29. “Should you not wish to retain your coverage through OGB, any medical claims incurred by you since Nov. 1, 2014, will be re-adjudicated and you may receive bills from your providers for services rendered,” the letter said.

“Pharmacy benefits cannot be re-adjudicated; accordingly, OGB will recoup costs incurred…by you,” it said, adding that the cost of pharmacy benefits “wrongfully used by you” is $425.49.

“Please consider this as demand to pay the respective amounts in full to OGB by March 4, 2016,” the letter said. “Should we not receive full payment on or before March 4, 2016, we may initiate further action to collect this sum, including but not limited to referral of this matter to the Office of Debt Recovery, the Attorney General, and/or other collection means.”

Below that was an ominous warning in boldface and all capital letters that read, “THIS IS A DEMAND FOR PAYMENT OF MONIES DUE. PLEASE TAKE NOTICE AND GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY.”

Our source said that OGB administrators plans to place the blame for the latest fiasco on retirees and its own fiscal collection department. “They have a plan to hide this because they are scared the public, the commissioner of administration (Jay Dardenne) and the governor will find out.” The collections department, the source said, has maintained a paper trail which will absolve it of any fault in the matter.

“OGB is trying to get money back on the sly,” the source added. “They (OGB) are mismanaged and there are a lot of people in this condition who were allowed to keep insurance and paid no premium for years.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: We would love to hear of any similar difficulties you may have had with OGB. Send your stories to:

louisianavoice@yahoo.com

 

Read Full Post »

Between beating guilty pleas, sexual harassment lawsuit and ethics complaint, Iberia Sheriff Louis Ackal has his plate full

Posted in Courts, Crime, Elections, Ethics, Lawsuits, Politicians on March 3, 2016| 1 Comment »

The hiring of David “Spike” Boudoin by Iberia Parish Sheriff Louis Ackal to the newly-created position of director of community relations, while prompting an official complaint with the State Board of Ethics, would appear to be the least of Ackal’s problems.

Boudoin finished in third place behind Ackal and parish jail warden Roberta Boudreaux in the October 24 primary election and on Oct. 30 Boudoin was hired and simultaneously announced his endorsement for Ackal’s re-election.

And though Boudreaux fired off a three-page letter to the ethics commission in filing an official complaint of a possible felony in connection with the hiring/endorsement, Ackal has plenty other matters on his plate.

For starters, a half-dozen current and former Iberia Parish deputies recently entered guilty pleas to five felony charges and one misdemeanor in Western District Federal Court in Lafayette in connection with inmate beatings. http://theadvocate.com/news/acadiana/14969306-123/three-former-two-current-iberia-parish-sheriffs-employees-plead-guilty-in-beating-inmates-at-the-par

This, of course, was after a prisoner allegedly managed to shoot himself in the chest, according to a coroner’s report, as he sat in a sheriff’s department patrol car with his hands handcuffed behind his back.

Five of the six, former deputies Wade Bergeron, 40, of Milton, Wesley Hayes, 36, of St. Martinville, and Jesse James Hayes, 36, of St. Martinville and current employees Ben LaSalle, 34, of Erath, and Brett Broussard, 35, of Broussard, face up to 10 years in prison and fines of $250,000 each while former deputy Robert Burns, 46, of Youngsville, could be sentenced to up to a year in prison and fined $100,000.

Along with Boudreaux’s ethics complaint and the federal indictments and resulting guilty pleas, Ackal also has just been hit with a federal sexual harassment lawsuit by a former female employee who says one of Ackal’s protégés made repeated sexual advances even though Ackal was aware of the problem but did nothing to stop it.

In her ETHICS COMPLAINT, Boudreaux, who said she intends to seek the sheriff’s office again, cited a Louisiana statute which addresses election offenses involving bribery, threats or intimidation of election officials or candidates.

The section referenced by her says “No person shall knowingly, willfully, or intentionally:

“Give or offer to give, directly, or indirectly, any money or anything of apparent present or prospective value to any person who has withdrawn or who was eliminated prior or subsequent to the primary election as a candidate for public office, for the purpose of securing or giving his political support to any remaining candidate or candidates for public office in the primary or general election.

“When such person is a candidate for public office who has withdrawn or was eliminated prior to or subsequent to the primary election, accept(s) or offer(s) to accept directly or indirectly, any money, or anything of apparent present or prospective value that is given for the purpose of securing or giving his political support to any remaining candidate or candidates for public office in the primary or general election.

“Whoever violates any provision of this section shall be fined not more than $2000 or be imprisoned, with or without hard labor, for not more than two years, or both, for the first offense. On a second offense, or any subsequent offense, the penalty shall be a fine of not more than $5,000 or imprisonment at hard labor for not more than five years, or both.”

What makes this particularly knotty for Ackal is this is his second trip down that same road. The good news is no complaint was filed when he did the same thing four years ago. In the 2011 election, he hired third place finisher Bobby Jackson as an intelligence analyst but never gave him working space, equipment or any direction as to his duties, said Jackson, who quit after only two months on the job because he said he had no desire to walk around “with my thumb in my rear.” As for Ackal’s most recent hire of third-place finisher Boudoin, Jackson said he sees “history repeating itself.”

Boudreaux said she believes that Ackal violated the provisions she cited by offering Boudoin the captain’s position at a salary of $50,658 “in exchange for Mr. Boudoin’s endorsement in the Nov. 21, 2015, runoff election.

Boudoin signed his oath of office as Iberia Parish deputy on Nov. 2, 2015, only two weeks after the primary election and less than three weeks before the runoff, records show. DAVID BOUDOIN OATH OF OFFICE

(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE)

            The SEXUAL HARASSMENT LAWSUIT, filed by former employee Laurie Segura, said Bert Berry, Chief of the Criminal Department began in 2012 and lasted for 10 months. She said she attempted to avoid Berry when possible but did not report him for 10 months because she feared retaliation, a fear she said was realized once she did complain.

Segura, who began working at the sheriff’s office in July 2008, resigned in January 2015 when the work environment became intolerable, she said.

She says in her petition that Berry, who moved into her suit of offices in 2012, rubbed his hands and crotch against her body and that he would sneak up on her and kiss her and that he made “inappropriate inquiries” about her sex life. She said he talked “graphically about his fantasies of having sex with her, (tried) to convince her to engage in phone sex with him,” and that he simulated sex acts in her presence and talked about his penis.

She said he ignored her repeated requests that he leave her alone, so she began evasive tactics. “When the security cameras showed he was coming into the office, she immediately picked up the phone and pretended she was in the middle of a phone call,” her petition says.

“In order to intimidate her from taking action,” the suit says, “Berry constantly brought up his relationship with Sheriff Ackal and how the sheriff had practically raised him.”

After she finally reported him to Human Resources, “retaliation was swift and sustained,” the petition says. She said that Ackal “sanctioned” Berry’s behavior even though Berry admitted to Ackal that he had committed the harassment.

Instead of reprimanding Berry, Ackal instead met with the sheriff office’s legal counsel, Ackal’s chief deputy and Berry (by telephone), and prepared a letter of accusations against Segura in an effort to get her to drop her complaint.

Ackal met with Segura the following day, the petition says, and accused her of exposing her breasts in public and of bragging about her sexual activities. “Even though Segura had anticipated retaliation, she was shocked at this letter and asked who had made these false allegations,” the lawsuit says. While Ackal refused to reveal his source, he did tell her that he would communicate with Berry that she denied the allegations, “making clear that Berry was involved with the letter,” she said.

“Instead of taking action and dismissing a man who had admittedly engaged in egregious harassment, the sheriff tried to make Segura guilty for making the complaint,” the petition says. “He talked about how hard this situation was for him because he basically raised Berry. He would not even put a reprimand in Berry’s file after he learned it would be part of Berry’s public record.” She said Ackal refused to move Berry, claiming there was nowhere to put him, “which was absolutely untrue,” she said.

She says Ackal gave raises totaling $35,000 a year to three subordinates who immediately “tried in a variety of different ways to intimidate Segura into dropping her complaint” and that the sheriff’s legal counsel tried to pressure her to quit her job.

She said Ackal approached the situation not as her problem but one that might hurt his chances of re-election “and he needed four more years on the job.”

She said that Berry ordered an audit of her computer following her filing of an EEOC complaint against him.

After the retaliation reached the point of physical threats, she said, she finally left her job in January of 2015. “But even then the retaliation did not cease,” she said. Instead Ackal began “falsely accusing her of stealing his campaign funds.”

When Ackal failed to respond to her EEOC complaints, she finally resorted to her federal lawsuit.

 

Read Full Post »

Iberia Sheriff’s life is hotter than Tabasco on a fever blister after beatings, deaths, political payoffs, fight with reporters

Posted in Campaign Contributions, Congress, Corruption, Courts, Crime, Elections, Ethics, Jobs, Lawsuits, Media, Politicians, Prison, State Police on March 2, 2016| 3 Comments »

Though it is probably far too late, Louis Ackal would be wise to take the advice of an adage steeped in indisputable wisdom of the ages.

The sheriff of Iberia Parish, however, apparently has never heard the expression attributed to a host of well-known politicians, amateur philosophers and gifted writers: “Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”

We’ll get to Ackal momentarily, but first a little background on that famous quote.

Mark Twain didn’t say it, though he is often cited as the one who coined the phrase. Neither was the quote original with publicist William Greener, Jr., as quoted in the September 28, 1978, Wall Street Journal.

The phrase of uncertain origin has also been attributed to the late Louisiana Congressman F. Edward Hebert, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1941 to 1977. A former newspaper reporter and editor for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Hebert, who died in 1979, covered the Louisiana Hayride scandals of 1939 that led to the convictions of Gov. Richard Leche and LSU President James Monroe Smith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Edward_H%C3%A9bert

Hebert, according to legend, added to the phrase when he said, “I never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel and paper by the trainload.” (Emphasis added.)

The quote was intended to illustrate just how futile it is to pick a fight with a crusading newspaper. Some clarification is needed here for our younger readers: the term crusading newspaper is passé, long gone from the vernacular used to describe the style of journalism depicted in the classic movies The Front Page (the 1931 original starring Pat O’Brien and Mae Clark or the 1974 remake starring Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Susan Sarandon, Charles Durning, and Carol Burnett); 1940’s His Girl Friday, starring Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell and Ralph Bellamy; or of course, All the President’s Men, the 1976 movie about Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon, starring Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Robards, Jack Warden, Hal Holbrook, Martin Balsam, Ned Beatty and Jane Alexander.

No, sadly, those days are long gone. Newspapers have felt the impact of the perfect storm of shrinking ad revenue and declining circulation along with waning influence as reflected in inverse proportion to the explosion of the Internet and the fourth estate. Once the epitome of independence, newspapers now find themselves subjected more to corporate pressure than to any need to inform its readership. The same gots for television news, of course, only if anything, to an even greater degree.

That famous and once chillingly accurate phrase could now be replaced by any one of several similar but equally relevant versions currently floating around out there in cyberspace:

  • Never pick a fight with someone who buys their bandwidth by the gigabyte.
  • Never pick a fight with someone who has a camera and a Twitter following.
  • Never pick a fight with someone who knows how to use the Internet better than you.
  • Never pick a fight with someone who has access to Google to prove you wrong immediately.
  • Never pick a fight with someone when your own video cameras or those of witnesses may contradict you.

To those might be added another pearl of wisdom: Never underestimate the intelligence of your constituency (the emergence of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz notwithstanding).

Ackal previously served as a Louisiana State Trooper where he served for awhile as a captain and Commander of Troop I. He retired abruptly in 1984 after being placed in charge of the narcotics squad of Region II which covered all of Southwest Louisiana.

He later resurfaced as a private investigator before running for High Sheriff of Iberia Parish in 2007. Now, not even four months from winning re-election sheriff, he seems not to have absorbed an iota of any of that advice about picking quarrels with those possessing generous supplies of ink and paper—and online access.

Even before he beat challenger Roberta Boudreaux last November in a runoff election, Ackal was already fighting a public relations disaster that culminated in his choosing to pick a fight with the Acadiana Advocate, sister publication of the Baton Rouge Advocate.

In March of 2014, a 22-year-old black man, Victor White, III, died after being shot while handcuffed in a sheriff’s department patrol car. Deputies said he pulled the gun and fired one round, striking himself in the back. The Iberia Parish coroner, however, ruled he was shot in the chest, immediately raising the question of how he could shoot himself in the chest with his hands handcuffed behind his back. The Iberia Parish district attorney, following a State Police report that the wound was self-inflicted, has declined to pursue criminal charges against deputies. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/da-charges-handcuffed-man-police-car-shooting_us_56b8f75de4b08069c7a8548b

The U.S. Attorney’s office likewise concluded an investigation of more than a year with the announcement that it would not pursue charges against the sheriff’s office. http://www.iberianet.com/news/feds-no-charges/article_087eda70-9e8f-11e5-a1e6-03aa54a2fd19.html

None of those findings, however, kept the Advocate group from publishing a May 6, 2015, story revealing that eight prisoners had died in Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office custody over a 10-year period. http://theadvocate.com/news/neworleans/neworleansnews/12248374-123/8-die-in-custody-of

The family of one of the victims, Robert Sonnier, settled its resulting lawsuit with the sheriff for $450,900 and the family of Michael Jones was awarded $61,000 in his wrongful death. There were other incidents, all of which prompted U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond’s May 19, 2015 LETTER TO ATTORNEY GENERAL LORETTA LYNCH requesting an investigation “into alleged civil rights violations of members of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office.”

Moreover, incriminating video of beatings of and dog attacks on prisoners were reported on by the Acadiana Advocate https://photographyisnotacrime.com/2015/05/04/disturbing-video-surfaces-highlighting-pattern-of-abuse-and-death-in-louisiana-jail/

Easy to see why Ackal may not be too enamored with the Acadiana Advocate, but to declare the paper and its reporters as “persona non grata” is foolish at best. http://theadvocate.com/news/acadiana/13886833-37/iberia-sheriff-mum-on-salary

It’s a war he can’t possibly win. As much adverse publicity as LouisianaVoice has given to the Louisiana State Police administration, Superintendent Mike Edmonson has never gone that far.

But, as those cheesy late-night TV commercials say: wait, there’s more.

First, there was his re-election campaign last fall.

He nearly won in the first primary, pulling in 47 percent of the vote. Parish Jail Warden Roberta Boudreaux got 25 percent and Spike Boudoin received 18 percent. Joe LeBlanc and Bobby Jackson won 7 and 3 percent, respectively.

That was on Oct. 24. On Oct 30, just six days later, Ackal hired Boudoin as something called director of community relations at a salary of $50,658 a year. http://theadvocate.com/news/14013818-123/iberia-sheriff-to-pay-defeated

Coincidentally, Boudoin announced at the same time his endorsement of Ackal in the runoff against Boudreaux. But other than the distribution of a news release announcing Boudoin’s hiring, Ackal said he would not entertain questions about the newly-created position.

Ackal won the runoff election on Nov. 21, receiving 56 percent of the vote against Boudreaux’s 44 percent.

To Jackson, it was déjà vu all over again. In 2007, he finished third with 11 percent of the vote behind Ackal and David Landry, both of whom got 42 percent. LeBlanc, who also ran in 2007, got the remaining 5 percent. After that primary, Jackson endorsed Ackal and was rewarded with a job as intelligence analyst, a role he had held in the U.S. Army. The difference with the sheriff’s department was he was denied working space, equipment and any direction as to his duties, all while being paid. He quit in disgust after little more than two months walking around “with my thumb in my rear,” he said, adding that he now sees “history repeating itself.”

Public servants are prohibited from using their positions to “compel or coerce any person or other public servant to engage in political activity,” according to the Louisiana Code of Governmental Ethics. Political activity is defined, in part, as “an effort to support or oppose the election of a candidate for political office in an election.”

It is also illegal for anyone to give money or anything of value “to any person who has withdrawn or who was eliminated prior or subsequent to the primary election as a candidate for public office, for the purpose of securing or giving his political support to any remaining candidate or candidates for public office in the primary or general election.” (Emphasis added.)

Robert Travis Scott, president of the Public Affairs Research Council, told the Acadiana Advocate that Ackal’s simultaneous hiring and endorsement raises questions of whether taxpayer money, i.e. Boudoin’s salary, was used to secure an endorsement.

Tomorrow: ethics complaint, sexual harassment lawsuit and guilty pleas over beatings and dog attacks are beginning to clutter embattled Louis Ackal’s desk.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »