Louisiana Voice

One week ago, Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff Gerald Sticker posted the following message on Facebook following the defeat of a tax proposal aimed at bolstering the sheriff’s department’s financial position:

Well, a week later, it appears the number of patrolling deputies has been reduced to eight:

Former Deputy Arrested on Multiple Charges

HAMMOND (November 21, 2025)- A former deputy has been arrested following an indecent behavior investigation.

Mike Johnson, 61, has been booked on four counts of Indecent Behavior with a Juvenile and one count of Malfeasance in Office. He had been a TPSO deputy for almost 4 years. This week, TPSO received information that during a recent security detail, Johnson had shown inappropriate pictures to juveniles. He was immediately placed on administrative leave, and following a thorough investigation, he was terminated this afternoon and then placed under arrest.

This investigation is ongoing.

Maybe there’s a reason voters reject additional taxes for sheriffs’ offices.

Maybe folks are finally getting fed up with the good ol’ boy way of doing things, especially when unresisting citizens are being beaten, tased, kicked and even murdered by rogue deputies and state police.

Maybe Louisianans are a little skeptical about the so-called need of all these local prisons popping up all over the landscape that are little more than a means to enrichment for sheriffs offices that are paid by the state, by ICE and Homeland Services to abduct, beat and house innocent, hardworking individuals, many of whom are citizens or have legal status.

Maybe it’s time we started asking some questions and demanding some damned answers.

Read Full Post »

What’s with these sheriffs’ departments in Louisiana? It appears that they really believe that, like a certain POTUS, they can just ignore laws they don’t like and enforce whatever they think the law should be, the hell with appearances.

That’s because they can—and do. Sheriffs answer to no one but the voters and as long as they can con the citizens of a parish, their jobs are secure. To give you some idea as to just how powerful they are, no candidate for governor of Louisiana can hope to win without the endorsement of the Louisiana Sheriffs Association. Sheriffs’ departments are one of the last vestige of pure political patronage: Supporters get jobs, opponents get shown the door.

I saw abuses so bad that I wrote a book about Louisiana sheriffs: Louisiana Rogue Sheriffs: A Culture of Corruption. Lately, it seems that new scandals have justified a comprehensive update of that book. The sordid stories pop up so fast that when I dropped off the final manuscript for publication, I returned home to find a breaking story about the arrest of then-St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Jack Strain on charges of child molestation and incest. I had to call my publisher to instruct him that another chapter was on its way.

In recent days, I’ve published stories about sheriffs in Jackson and Tangipahoa parishes. Immediately following the Jackson Parish story, Sheriff Andy Brown and his third in command, deputy Donovan Shultz, abruptly announced their retirements. Now, we have sheriffs’ officers in Rapides and Caldwell parishes. None of the sheriffs of these four parishes were mentioned in my book so you see, it’s an ever-developing subject.

Yesterday, Chris Nakamoto, an investigative reporter for WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge had a story about a former State Trooper who, while driving drunk, crashed her state vehicle into a Baton Rouge police officer. Belinda Murphy retired in February 2025 following the incident, ending a 23-year career with State Police.

Not to worry, though. Even as two counts of negligent injury, and one count each of DWI, disregarding traffic signals and crashing into the police car remain pending (she was never even booked after the crash the way any other driver would be), she appears to have landed on her feet.

She joined the Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Office two months ago at a salary of $45,000 per year (in addition to her state retirement) even though a sheriff’s office spokesperson confirmed that the agency was fully aware of her arrest at the time of her hiring.

Now, LouisianaVoice is receiving word of yet another sheriff’s department that may warrant a closer look. The Caldwell Parish Sheriff’s Office has a deputy in its employ whom we’ve had difficulty in contacting.

We wanted to talk to Deputy Jared Graham and his boss, Sheriff Clay Bennett but Graham has not returned our phone calls and Bennett has apparently ignored our email requesting information about several incidents involving his deputies.

The northwest corner of Caldwell, by the way, abuts the southeast corner of Jackson. All three—Jackson, Rapides and Caldwell—are situated in the central and north-central areas of the state, only a short drive apart.

On September 7, 2017, a Jared L. Graham, then age 29 and a resident of West Monroe, traveled with two other men to a residence in Downsville in nearby Union Parish to confront a man who was visiting the estranged wife of one of the men. One of three men (unspecified by name) kicked in the door and two (again unidentified) entered the house. The victim was beaten inside the house, then dragged outside where the beating continued. He suffered two skull fractures, two sinus fractures and displacement of both sides of his jaw, according to a NEWS STORY about the incident.

The story quoted Union Parish Sheriff Dusty Gates as saying all three men wee charged with felony second degree battery and that Graham was also charged with misdemeanor simple battery. He was not arrested for nearly a month, on Oct. 2.

Fast forward to March 26, 2021, and arrest records for the website LOUISIANA.ARRESTS.ORG indicate that a Jared Lance Graham of West Monroe was arrested for possession of a controlled dangerous substance and simple burglary of an inhabited dwelling. A search of Ouachita Sheriff’s Office website of bookings yielded no records of Graham’s arrest but a local observer said he knows of several who were arrested during the same time frame but their names no longer appear, either. “A lot of arrest records had been removed entirely,” he said. This was four years after the Downsville incident and Graham was listed as being 33 years of age. Today, he would be 38.

Today, there also is a Jared Graham employed as a deputy for the Caldwell Parish Sheriff’s Office. A spokesman for the sheriff’s office confirmed that he resides outside Caldwell Parish but was unable to confirm if he lived in West Monroe. But the same source cited in the previous paragraph said he drove past the West Monroe Rogers Road address of Jared Lance Graham and observed a Caldwell Parish Sheriff’s Office patrol unit bearing deputy Graham’s number (42) parked in front of the residence.

Less than a year later, on Jan. 17, 2022, we have the Wayne Spicer incident in which deputies beat Spicer in the head and back with their flashlights and tased him repeatedly – including the insertion of laser prongs into his spine, according to a LAWSUIT filed by Spicer against the department, three of its deputies and a Grayson police officer. In his lawsuit, Spicer contends that he was not in possession of a weapon of any kind, and did not present a risk of injury or bodily harm to deputies before or during the arrest. He contends that he was struck in the face with one or more flashlights, sustaining fractures to his skull and eye socket. He contends that after undergoing facial reconstruction surgery at Ochsner LSU Shreveport and being returned to the Caldwell Correctional Center (CCC), he was placed in a restraint chair in retaliation for requesting pain medication. He also contends that only two of the four officers had functioning bodycams, the two officers (not specified by name) who made initial contact did not have functioning bodycams, and only a portion of the incident was captured on bodycam.

Significantly, it was jail personnel, not the arresting deputies, who transferred Spicer to the hospital.

So, what, exactly, did Spicer do that warranted such a reaction from six deputies?

It seems he’d missed a court date for an unspecified charge. Wow. Call in the SWAT team.

One of Spicer’s arresting officers was Piper Barton, an officer with the Grayson Police Department. Barton himself was arrested in a domestic dispute over child support just three months later, in April 2022, during which Barton told Taylor Barton, “I am gonna f**king kill you.” Both individuals were arrested for domestic abuse battery and Piper was also charged with simple assault.

Sheriff Bennett, in November 2022, posted on Facebook, “Right now, it’s a fad to hate the police” and described news reporters as being on the “hate police bandwagon.”

But he still ignored our email inquiry.

Read Full Post »

It’s in every major daily newspaper, you can’t avoid it on TV news programs and it’s spread all over the internet. The Jeffrey Epstein ongoing saga is literally a story you cannot avoid unless you live under a rock or on some remote uncharted island.

Yet, Florida’s sex trafficking story goes much deeper than the Epstein/Trump angle and along with that goes the age-old story of political hypocrisy.

Take, for instance, a study by the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA released last July indicates that more than half-a-million people were exploited in labor trafficking and another 200,000 in sex trafficking in the Sunshine State in 2024.

Just today, when I opened and began reading my daily news dispatches, a STORY jumped out at me, proclaiming that the Florida attorney general “threatens child predators with ‘death penalty’ after announcing rescue of 122 children.”

That sound pretty impressive on the face of it. But when one takes a closer look at sex trafficking in the state of Florida, one realizes that all those news stories about nabbing traffickers in sting operations is little more than window dressing to give appearances of progress against what has become a national cancer.

With sex trafficking estimated to be enslaving 200,000 just in Florida, 122 rescues, while a positive note, certainly doesn’t appear to be a significant breakthrough in fighting sex trafficking.

Especially when another news story almost three years ago to the day reveals a trend of official neglect bordering on malfeasance. On Nov. 20, 2022, The South Florida Sun Sentinel revealed that the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (affectionately known as Rhonda Santis) declined to issue fines after 14,000 violations of a sex trafficking law by Florida hotels and lodging establishments.

Could that possibly because the state’s tourism industry must be protected at all costs? Nah, couldn’t be, but an INVESTIGATION by the newspaper found that 6,669 hotels and lodging establishments had received 14,279 citations since a 2019 sex trafficking law mandated that they make modest changes to protect victims.

But not a single fine for the violations? Wow.

Then, there’s the case of ANDREW TATE and his brother Tristen. The two had been held in Romania on charges of trafficking women in three countries but strings were pulled and the charges were dismissed (know of anyone powerful enough to get charges in Romania dismissed?). The pair next showed up in Fort Lauderdale. “The Tates will be free, Trump is the president. The good old days are back,” Andrew Tate posted in X in February.

Their attorney was a man named Paul Ingrassia. That was before he joined Trump’s White House, however, as its Department of Homeland Security liaison.

From his DHS desk, Ingrassia scolded authorities in Fort Lauderdale for the seizure of the Tates’ devices and asked that their property be returned to them. He was careful to note that the “request” was coming from the White House. Never mind that Ingrassia’s intervention on behalf of the accused sex traffickers could be construed as interference with a federal investigation.

Finally, we have this STORY. Note the three individuals in the photo are all from Florida: Attorney General Pam Podi, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Pedo-POTUS Trump.

 And yet…and yet, there are legions of Americans who have convinced themselves that Agent Orange can do no wrong – people like U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, the only member of the House to vote no on releasing the Epstein files, and Gov./LSU Athletic Director Squeaky Toy Landry who will unquestionably take up any cause that his Dear Leader tells him to.

We can now assume that Higgins and Landry support misogyny, up to and including rape and sex trafficking, bribery, getting in bed with despotic dictators like “Bone Saw” MBS, kidnapping of innocent persons and zip-tying children.

Read Full Post »

I don’t make it to movie theaters much anymore, though I admit I really miss the smell of that delicious popcorn that goes with theater presentations. I now resign most of my movie-watching to Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc., and nibble on vastly inferior microwave popcorn.

I watched a very good movie over the weekend that, while it was actually released last March, has just been offered on my streaming services, namely Amazon Prime in this particular case.

The movie was called The Alto Knights and featured one my favorite actors, Robert DeNiro, playing dual roles as Mafia bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese.

Genovese, fearing prosecution for a 1934 murder, fled to Italy in 1937 where he supported Benito Mussolini. But when the Allies invaded Italy, he switched sides and offered his services to the U.S. Army, an act that help facilitate his return to the U.S.

Upon fleeing to Italy, he named childhood friend Frank Costello boss of bosses. But when he expected to reclaim his position upon returning to the U.S., Costello resisted, prompting an attempted hit on Costello. Costello was only wounded, but the attempt on his life convinced him to retire. Along the way, there was the barber shop assassination of Albert Anastasia and the infamous Apalachin meeting that ultimately forced J. Edgar Hoover to finally face the fact that an organized crime syndicate did indeed exist – a contention he’d denied up to that point, preferring instead to focus the FBI’s efforts on rooting out communists.

Written by Nicholas Pileggi who also wrote Goodfellas, the two-hour Alto Knights movie is riveting and certainly entertaining – especially to those familiar with the names of America’s old crime bosses like Lucky Luciano, Carlo Gambino, Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis, Joe Valachi and Bugsy Siegel.

While the story is mostly told from Costello’s vantage point, it does leave out what I consider to be an important occurrence that tied Costello’s name to New Orleans and Louisiana – AS RELATED IN A POST by LouisianaVoice in September 2021, more than four years ago.

In 1934, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia confiscated thousands of illegal slot machines being operated in the Big Apple by Costello. La Guardia had the machines dumped into the East River, crushing a major source of Costello’s cash flow.

Undeterred, Costello looked southward to Louisiana where he cut a deal with then-Sen. Huey Long, giving Long 10 percent of the gambling revenue should Costello choose to move his slot machine operations to New Orleans. Thus, was born Bayou Novelty Co. as a front to spearhead what would eventually be a statewide gambling operation, stretching from New Orleans to Bossier City – until the campaign of State Police Superintendent Francis Grevemberg to eradicate illegal gambling in the state in the 1950s and ‘60s..

When the manager of Bayou Novelty died in 1937, Costello’s brother-in-law Dudley Geigerman, Sr. (his sister was marred to Costello; her part was played in the movie by Debra Messing) took over the operation which by 1939 generated revenues of $800,000. In October of that year, however, a federal indictment charged six men of evading more than half-a-million dollars in income taxes. That’s more than $10 million in today’s dollars. Named in that indictment were Costello, Dudley Geigerman, brother Harold Geigerman, James Brocato (alias Jimmie Moran), Phillip Kastel and Jacob Altman. Costello and Kastel were only two of the six not from New Orleans. Moran had once served as a bodyguard for Long.

By 1954, Costello was also on trial for evading $73,437 in income taxes on income from his 22½ percent ownership of Louisiana Mint Co., a slot machine rental firm in New Orleans. It was further learned that the Beverly Country Club in Jefferson Parish was a partnership divided between Kastel (35 percent), Costello and Lansky (20 percent each), Kastel associate Alfred “Freddie” Rickerfor (17½ percent), Dudley Geigerman, Sr. (2½ percent) and Carlow Marcello (15 percent).

Also omitted from the movie was the fact that when Costello died in February 1973, his wife of 59 years moved to New Orleans to live with her brother, Dudley Geigerman, Sr. Geigerman Sr. died in August 1985.

Dudley Geigerman, III at various times has partnered with Marcello associate and convicted organized crime figure Anthony Tusa and former Louisiana State Police Commission member Jared Caruso-Riecke of St. Tammany Parish.

Business enterprises in which Dudley Geigerman III was involved – and his partner(s) – included:

• Crown Entertainment, Metairie (Anthony Tusa, partner);
• Decatur Entertainment, Slidell (Tusa);
• Southeastern Louisiana Entertainment, Houma (Tusa);
• Video Village, Slidell (Tusa);
• Mr. Binky’s Video Store, Kenner (Tusa);
• Paradise Video, Kenner (Tusa);
• GDH International. Covington (Jared Caruso-Riecke).

The first six businesses were video stores that specialized in pornographic videos and literature as well as various sex toys while GDH was a real estate investment company. Other officers in GDH besides CEO Riecke and Director of Housing Geigerman were Director Daniel E. Buras, Jr., Chief Operating Officer Richard Sharp and Chief Financial Officer Bruce Cucchiara.

Cucchiara was murdered in an apartment complex parking lot in New Orleans East on April 24, 2012, while looking for investment property. His killer has never been found.

Read Full Post »

Last year my book about wrongful convictions, 101 Wrongful Convictions in Louisiana, was published. It was a work I had been considering for several years and I finally was able to write about an issue I felt passionately about.

One of the exonerees I profiled in that work, a chapter that began on page 172 and continued for three full pages was about a man named Calvin Duncan who stands out as possibly pulling off the single greatest turnaround of one’s life and overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.

Duncan was that rare individual who made the most of his opportunities once freed from years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Accused of a 1981 murder, he was convicted because of the perfect trifecta of injustice. Orleans Parish then-Assistant District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro withheld exculpatory evidence and because a hostile judge threw up obstacles for Duncan’s defense counsel and to top it all off, a corrupt Oregon police officer lied to Duncan during questioning following his arrest in that state (the officer, Clackamas County sheriff’s deputy Roy Reed, would, six months following Duncan’s August 1982 arrest, plead guilty in federal court to a single count of wiretapping in an unrelated case).

The short version of Duncan’s story is he was convicted of first-degree murder in 1985 and affirmed in affirmed in 1987. You can read the longer version HERE:

Appeal after appeal was routinely denied and in order to hire an investigator, he sold his plasma. The investigator, after taking his month, then failed to perform any work on his case.

In 2004 the Innocence Project New Orleans (author John Grisham sits on the national organization’s board) took up Duncan’s case and began filing public records requests for documents from police and prosecutors, eventually forcing the release of exculpatory evidence and false police reports.

On Jan. 7, 2011, after serving 26 years in prison, he was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter and attempted armed robbery and was released on time served. It’s called an Alford Plea. This tactic is a favorite ploy by prosecutors since the guilty plea prohibits the defendant from collecting damages for his wrongful conviction. It’s a cruel, underhanded deal: trade your freedom for any future claim of damages.

Duncan, though, played a critical role in assisting attorneys to gather evidence and frame arguments for a successful challenge to Louisiana’s use of non-unanimous juries. Louisiana and Oregan were the only states that had continued to recognize such verdicts until 2020, when the U.S. Supreme Court barred such verdicts.

Meanwhile, Duncan had enrolled and graduated from Tulane University and then attended Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore. despite knowing that if his conviction for manslaughter and attempted armed robbery were allowed to stand, he could not be admitted to the bar following his graduation from law school.

Fortunately, Judge Nandi Campbell in August 2021 said in her ruling, “Given the state’s prior suppression of evidence relating to the Oregon officers’ possible criminal activity, the inconsistencies of the …eyewitness identification and Mr. Duncan’s extensive service and numerous contributions to the community post-release, the sentence imposed on Jan. 7, 2011, is unconstitutionally excessive.” Following her ruling, the state dismissed all charges against Duncan.

Fast forward to this past Saturday. Duncan, 62, who worked at Loyola University’s Jesuit Social Research Institute, won his race for Orleans Parish Criminal Clerk of Court in an astounding upset of an established political opponent, pulling 68 percent of the vote.

He attributed his win partly to his opponent’s attack on his “claimed” exoneration. “That (the election result) was a message by New Orleans people for sure, that we’re not goin to tolerate politics being an institution where people display their meanness,” he said, perhaps a bit more optimistically than the political realities as they currently exist.

Duncan pledged to protect the rights of all citizens “like I would protect mine.”

If I ever write an update to my book, I know where I’ll begin.

Read Full Post »