Louisiana Voice

When I decided to write a book about corruption, malfeasance and mismanagement in sheriffs’ departments, I could have written a book about the worst of the worst in all 50 states. A book of that magnitude would, in all likelihood, comprise several volumes.

Instead, I decided to narrow the focus to just Louisiana when I wrote Louisiana’s Rogue Sheriffs: A Culture of Corruption.

BOOK COVER

Turns out, it’s downright uncanny how similar a Louisiana sheriff’s office is to sheriffs’ offices in other states.

Take the former sheriff of Covington County, Alabama, which sits adjacent to the Florida panhandle, just a few miles due north of Destin.

When challenger Blake Turman defeated incumbent sheriff DENNIS MEEKS, Turman walked into his new office only to find that records had been destroyed and that tens of thousands of public dollars were missing from sheriff’s office public accounts. Also missing were more than $100,000 of military surplus equipment and a $2,800 closed-circuit camera system.

It was pretty much the same story in Marshall County, Alabama, when Phil Sims defeated longtime Sheriff J. SCOTT WALLS. When Sims took over for Walls, he found a box of government-issued smartphones, each with multiple holes drilled through them. Hard drives had been removed from computers in the former sheriff’s and his chief deputy’s offices. As with the case of Covington County, reams of records were missing. Even more alarming, Sims discovered that in the months following Walls’s loss, tens of thousands of dollars from the sheriff’s office’s general fund had been wired to the outgoing sheriff and more than $30,000 was missing from the commissary fund.

In fact, nine outgoing sheriffs in ALABAMA took steps that their successors said negatively affected their ability to perform their new jobs.

Chapters 10 and 26 of Louisiana’s Rogue Sheriffs describe similar events in two Louisiana parishes, Tangipahoa and St. Tammany.

When Daniel Edwards defeated Edward Layrisson in 2003, he didn’t take office until mid-2004 and when he did, he found an office that was suffocating under a $722,000 IRS lien, frozen bank accounts and computers wiped clean and serving no function other than “oversize paper weights.”

Before that, when Layrisson defeated Daniel Edwards’s father, Frank Edwards, back in 1979, the office was in dire financial straits. Deputies had been laid off and equipment sold off to the point that the department had only two patrol units, a few rifles, and some microfilming equipment. This despite the fact that Frank Edwards, while in office, had somehow found the funds to purchase 35,000 sportsman license holders embossed with “Compliments of Frank M. Edwards, Sheriff,” 20,000 pocket-sized first aid kits and 200 boxes of candy-coated gum. A state auditor’s report said that Edwards rented his own farm to the sheriff’s office for “undercover investigations” for $500 per month and paid Tom Gillen, who managed his unsuccessful re-election campaign, $20,000 for a history of the parish which was never published.

Just down I-12 a few miles is St. Tammany Parish where, in 2015, Slidell Police Chief Randy Smith pulled off an improbable upset of incumbent Sheriff Jack Strain.

The night he took the oath of office, he dispatched several deputies to enter the parish work release building in Slidell to take control of the center. What they discovered were missing security cameras and televisions and computers containing information about inmates gone, all removed by St. Tammany Workforce Solutions as its personnel walked out the door. While legal since the company had purchased the equipment, it made for a difficult transition for the new administration.

Of course, Strain had other problems as well, having been recently arrested on June 11 on state charges of rape, incest and indecent behavior with a juvenile. As it happened, I had submitted the manuscript to the printer earlier that day and, upon hearing of the arrest, had to retrieve it and update the chapter on Strain.

These are just two of the stories contained in the 44 chapters of the 370-page book. There are even a couple of humorous stories involving sheriffs of two northeast Louisiana parishes.

If you really want to know how Louisiana sheriffs’ departments can skate on the thin edge of the law, you will want to read this book. The cost is $30. You can order by clicking on the yellow button to the upper right. Be sure to send an email to louisianavoice@outlook.com giving me your mailing address. If that doesn’t work for you, you can mail a check to me, Tom Aswell, P.O. Box 922, Denham Springs, Louisiana 70727 for your signed copy.