Louisiana Voice

What’s going on in the 22^nd Judicial District of Louisiana?

Comprised of the parishes of Washington and St. Tammany, it’s beginning to appear that anything goes in those two Florida parishes that abut the Pearl River in the easternmost part of the Louisiana toe.

There’s the going on nine-year-old as yet unsolved murder of NANETTE KRENTEL.

 And while the 2012 murder of St. Tammany native businessman BRUCE CUCCHIARA did not occur in either of the two parishes (it happened in New Orleans East), his ties to Covington’s Jared Caruso-Riecke continue to raise questions while providing no answers.

It didn’t help when Sheriff Randy Smith arrested Jerry Rogers in 2019 for “criminal defamation” (a law that does not even exist) when Rogers, an investigator for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, criticized the lack of progress in solving the Krentel killing.

Rogers filed a LAWSUIT against Smith and two of his deputies in federal court in 2020. Rogers prevailed in his lawsuit when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5^th Circuit RULED IN HIS FAVOR in 2023.

Nor did it help burnish the local image when Smith’s predecessor, Jack Strain, was arrested in 2021 on state charges of rape, incest and indecent behavior with a juvenile. He was subsequently SENTENCED to life imprisonment for those offenses and for 10 after entering pleading guilty to soliciting and receiving bribes involving contracts for privatization of a work release program in St. Tammany Parish.

We’re rehashing all those past stories as a way of bringing events to the present day as they pertain to the City of Bogalusa and apparent reluctance by the district attorney’s office to investigate claimed irregularities in the previous city administration.

A Jan. 22 posting on Facebook by The Parish Spectator called into question the apparent lack of interest in investigating claims of bid irregularities that allegedly occurred during the administration of former Mayor Wendy Perrette.

Early in the tenure of Perrette’s successor, Mayor Tyrin Truong formally requested that District Attorney Collin Sims “investigate potential contractor fraud” connected to the administration of Perrette, the Facebook post said, adding that among the questionable transactions were “more than $1 million spent between two contractors without bids or quotes, with work allegedly awarded directly to individuals described by many as friends of the former administration.”

Instead, an investigation was initiated into Truong himself. Truong was indicted last October on multiple charges, including malfeasance of office, public intimidation and theft. The charges were tied to a drug trafficking investigation. Truong, incidentally, supported Sims’s opponent. Sounds much like a scaled-down version of Cankle Ankles Trump.

“It is not unreasonable for the public to ask whether that political reality has influenced what followed,” the Facebook post said. When prosecutorial power is exercised in a way that appears retaliatory, public trust erodes—and with it, confidence in the justice system itself.”

Fast forward to today. The results of a 71-page INVESTIGATIVE AUDIT conducted by the Legislative Auditor’s office has revealed a plethora of violations of state laws and regulations as well as a violation of the Louisiana State Constitution and the city charter.

The question that must be asked, then, is just where has the district attorney’s office been all this time?

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There’s a woman out there named Hannah Silveira who is searching for her husband.

ICE has him but they won’t tell her where he is.

It took a fellow detainee to communicate with her that he was removed to a facility in Louisiana.

But where in Louisiana? That remains unknown.

But here’s the really weird part: while she is a citizen of the U.S., he is Brazilian. Because of the turmoil foisted by Dorito-face Trump, they made their own decision that he would self-deport to Brazil and she would follow so they could start their lives over.

And here’s the really frightening part: As Mrs. Silveira has learned, her voice is already being silenced via a state-sanctioned takeover of the new TikTok spinoff that will be controlled by Trump billionaire allies.

She recently went on TikTok to explain that her husband, who had been detained by ICE, was going to take a regular commercial flight from San Diego to Brazil and that she would follow him at a later date. A judge ordered that he be allowed to do so.

She learned, however, through an app they had been using to communicate that he was “no longer in the system.” She called Otay Mesa Detention Center near San Diego where he supposedly was being held and asked why she was no longer able to communicate with her husband. The Otay Mesa representative told her, “We don’t know where he is.” The ICE spokesperson said that meant he was likely “in the process of being discharged,” which normally would have been good news for the couple.

“However,” Mrs. Silveira said, “he does not have a flight which was supposed to be arranged while he was in detention. You have not communicated with his attorney to organize his flight home,” she told the ICE rep. “I just received a call from one of his friends who is in the facility with him and he said they took him in the middle of the night to bring him to Louisiana.

“This means ICE is going against the judge’s order to allow him to take a commercial flight. Instead, they’re going to take him to Louisiana and put him on a deportation flight from Louisiana to eventually end up in Rio.

“One, why is [his] friend the one who has to communicate that information to me? Two, why do you tell me you don’t know where he is; you know exactly where he is and you’re not telling me because you know he’s not supposed to be there?

“I don’t know if he’s on a plane, if he’s on a bus, the next time I’ll speak to him. This was not what was agreed on by the court. If I am so on top of his case, I can’t imagine what’s happening to those people who don’t have the luxury of having someone who is trying to track them down. The reason I am so diligent about trying to figure out where he is, is because I know people are getting lost in the system and I cannot imagine the families they [ICE] are taking advantage of when people don’t have the means to simply communicate with their loved ones.

“I am sick and f**king tired of this administration jerking people around.”

Okay, that’s pretty straightforward and easy to understand. But wait. It seems her Tik Tok message is getting “glitched” in areas outside the U.S. Here are some of the responses she received:

• “It’s glitching. BLOCK ORACLE.”
• “We are watching censorship in real time with our own eyes!”
• “Canadian here. All ice videos have started to glitch.”
• “I’m in Spain and all videos talking about ICE are glitching!!”
• “America is silencing you guys.”

A little paranoia, perhaps? Maybe. And also maybe, a funereal portent of things to come.

Take THIS STORY,  for instance.

For years, there was this demand that China sell TikTok to American investors or face banishment in the U.S. Well, be careful what you wish for. The all-new TikTok we eventually got is one to be owned by close-knit billionaire ech leaders with direct business ties to Trump and/or members of his administration and/or family. These include Oracle’s Larry Ellison, X’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Besides the complaints above, other TikTok users have lodged complaints of alleged censorship of content, much of which consists of criticisms of the killings in Minneapolis and allowing the Department of Homeland Security to enter homes without judicial warrants.

The ANNOUNCEMENT came down just a week ago today (Jan. 22) of the TikTok United States Digital Services (USDS) joint venture. The LLC was created with the executive order signed by Trump last September.

One of the features touted in the announcement of the venture was “The Joint Venture will safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem and have decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and content moderation.”

There you have it: there is now a state-sanctioned communications system owned by political and business allies of Trump—and they will have control over content.

It’s almost as if George Orwell was speaking directly to us when he wrote in his classic 1984:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”

“There was no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any moment… You had to live assuming every sound was overheard, every movement scrutinized.”

“BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.”

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Funny how things can come full circle sometimes.

It was way back in April of 2017 that LouisianaVoice FIRST ALERTED YOU to the cruel, hard fact that you weren’t always in good hands with Allstate, that you didn’t necessarily have a good neighbor in State Farm and Nationwide wasn’t necessarily on your side.

Now, nine years after we first sounded the alarm, The Guardian has taken up the mantra that, as the Rolling Stones song goes, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. But unlike the song, you also don’t always get what you need, either.

While the emphasis of the LouisianaVoice story was on floods and hurricanes, The Guardian today ran a STORY about the problems homeowners have had with insurance claims from the devastating Los Angeles fires of a year ago that reads very much like the story we ran nearly a decade ago. It was the familiar story about delays, lowball settlement offers and outright denials of claims.

Right after Hurricane Katrina inflicted catastrophic damage on New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast in September 2005, State Farm instructed its adjusters that “where wind acts concurrently with flooding to cause damage to the insured property, coverage for the loss exists only under flood coverage.” That was a convenient (for State Farm) way to deny a claim even though the flooding may have been caused, say, by the wind ripping the roof off a home.

Allstate likewise relied on “insufficient physical evidence to determine the proportion of wind versus storm surge that destroyed [a] structure.”

Not to be outdone in denying claims, Nationwide said less than a week after Katrina, “If a loss is caused by both flood and wind, there is no coverage.” So, in other words, regardless of how much damage may have been cause by wind, if there was any damage at all from flooding, then all bets were off and the property owner was SOL.

It’s not like insurers hadn’t already taken measures to protect themselves by declaring if damage is caused by a named storm, the homeowner’s deductible, instead of being a set fee of say, $1,000 or even $5,000, immediately converts to a PERCENTAGE of the home’s insured value. So, a homeowner’s deductible could suddenly become somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000—or more—for a $250,000 home. And the sad truth is our Louisiana politicians sat back and let the insurance companies dictate the policy terms despite the existence of a so-called Insurance Rating Commission.

It didn’t take long for the perils of “DELAY, DENY, DEFEND” strategy of insurance companies that we warned about back in 2017 to become stark reality to Louisiana residents. A year after successive hurricanes slammed southwest Louisiana, homeowners were still wrestling with insurance companies to get claims settled while the insurance companies were offering pennies on the dollar.

The strategy is no secret. A Baton Rouge injury attorney has an effective TV ad in which he poses the questions, “Why do billion-dollar insurance companies constantly delay and deny claims?” Then he answers his own rhetorical question, declaring, “because that’s how they got to be billion-dollar insurance companies.”

No matter how warm and fuzzy those insurance companies’ TV commercials may appear, it’s important to remember when it comes to paying out claims, they ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS.

Of course, it’s not like the politicians don’t get in on the act themselves. When an attorney, a former state senator, told the State Licensing Board for Contractors that companies bidding for a contract to manage the state’s $1.6 billion flood-recovery program following the 2016 flooding in south Louisiana needed to have a residential contractor’s license, it meant the two low bidders for the work were immediately disqualified.

But the attorney FAILED TO MENTION that his son worked as an affiliate for the number-three-ranked bidder, which, by default, was in a position to be awarded the work for about $350 million. That company, SLS, was owned by three Texas brothers who also owned DRC Emergency Services, for whom the attorney’s son worked as a regional manager.

So, while The Guardian is one of the most reliable and most credible news sources out there, it was not exactly breaking new ground with its story about what it called a “broken insurance industry.”

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“You just can’t make this stuff up!”

—C.B. Forgotston

Donald Trump Once Again Asks Supporters for Donations to Help Him ‘Get to Heaven’ in Bizarre Mass Email

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When last we visited the ACCREDITATION RACKET on Jan. 14, the emphasis was on college accreditations and the fact that college presidents like Southeastern Louisiana University’s William Wainwright may serve on the board of trustees for the accrediting entity, in this case the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCC).

Added to that built-in conflict is the fact the colleges and universities pay memberships to SASCC—and pay for the privilege of being accredited.

But it’s not just colleges and universities that have cozy relationships with their accrediting agencies, but hospitals do so also.

And so do prisons, though one might never know it from reading headlines about substandard care, filthy conditions, inadequate or even spoiled food fed prisoners, unqualified staff, poor medical care, seemingly nonexistent oversight for contraband and frequent DEATHS.

From 2019 to 2024, Louisiana Department of Safety and Corrections FIGURES SHOW there have been 911 deaths inside state prisons. The leading cause, department statistics show, is heart attacks (205), followed closely by cancer (197) and overdoses (115). Homicide accounted for 22 deaths of incarcerated individuals.

Prison Legal News, an online publication dedicated to Louisiana prison news, reported in January 2024 that deaths while incarcerated in Louisiana INCREASED BY 18 PERCENT from 2020 to 2021.

A web page called simply INCARCERATION TRANSPARENCY, however, takes the research a step further by counting the number of deaths in the seven-year period of 2014-2020. The number is an astounding 1,718. The report lists five reasons for death: violence, medical, suicide, drugs and “other.”

No data are available for the numerous private prisons operating in the state, though most of those have spotty records at best.

Yet, the Louisiana Department of Corrections invariably churns out glowing press releases each time one of the state prisons under its jurisdiction achieves accreditation from the American Correctional Association (ACA).

What those press releases do not reveal, however, is that Richard Stalder, who served as 16 years as DOC secretary, was the ACA president from 1998 to 2000.

Other factors not often mentioned about the ACA:

It is the lobbying arm of America’s prisons, often going to bat for support legislation favorable to the prison industry.

States—and presumably private and local prisons pay a fee to obtain accreditation.

Louisiana, for example, in addition to paying customary membership dues to be a member of the association, paid out more than $134,000 last years to have 10 of its prisons and its headquarters accredited. Those fees ranged from $7,350 for the state’s Prison Enterprises, a DOC department that operates a diverse group of industry, agriculture and service programs in eight correctional facilities throughout the state, to $21,750 for Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

So, basically, what we have is a state agency that pays to be a member of the association that accredits its correctional facilities, pays them to conduct accreditation and political lobbying and occasionally has its director chosen to preside a two-year term as president of the association.

How likely is a facility to emerge with a negative rating, given such an incestuous relationship?

To see the costs for each facility, go to these links:

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