Posted in Corruption, Courts, Ethics, Notable Quotables, Politicians on June 26, 2016| 3 Comments »
DISTRICT ATTORNEY JERRY L. JONES
“I refuse to ruin the lives of two young men who have spent their adolescence and teenage years working and sweating while we were all in the air conditioning.”
—Fourth Judicial District Attorney Jerry L. Jones, on why he declined to prosecute two University of Alabama football players from Ouachita Parish on drug and weapons charges.
Posted in Corruption, Courts, Ethics, Politicians, Prison on June 26, 2016| 12 Comments »
An important legal breakthrough for anyone in Ouachita and Morehouse parishes facing prosecution for drugs and/or weapons charges: your charges will be dismissed if you sweat.
So says no less an authority than 4th Judicial District Attorney Jerry L. Jones.
According to Jones, if you are a grave digger, a landscaper, bricklayer, carpenter, roofer, highway construction worker, or anyone involved in a myriad of occupations and endeavors that result in your exposure to sun and sweat, you are good to go with illegal weapons or the drug of your choice.
Hell, even if you’re a jogger, a tennis player, or an Alabama Crimson Tide football player, you get a free pass on drugs and weapons charges. Like fishing in the hot sun? Grilling out on July 4 is certain to get those sweat pores working overtime. But don’t worry. By the newly defined legal standards of the 4th JDC District Attorney’s office, sweat is like a Get Out of Jail Free card in the real-live game of Monopoly.
Did you break a sweat trying to chase the garbage collector down the street in your robe because you were a little late taking out the trash? Don’t worry about it. Both you and the garbage collector are good to go; you’re both outside, working up a sweat while Jones is in his air-conditioned office. Light up, wave that gun around, do a line. Together. Jones won’t prosecute. He said so himself.
This is the logic Jones himself expressed in dismissing charges against two Alabama football players who happen to call the Monroe area home.
All-Southeastern Conference offensive tackle Cam Robinson of West Monroe and reserve defensive back Laurence “Hootie” Jones of Monroe were arrested after a Monroe police officer smelled marijuana coming from their parked car in a closed public park. The officer spotted a handgun in Jones’ lap. A search of the car produced marijuana and a handgun that had been reported stolen in Baldwin County, Alabama.
Baldwin County is immediately east of Mobile County and includes the cities of Gulf Shores, Foley, Loxley and Orange Beach.
Prosecutor Neal Johnson of the DA’s office first said there was insufficient evidence in court documents to proceed with charges. Hence, there would be no grand jury and no bill of information from the DA’s office. http://sports.yahoo.com/news/somehow–bizarre-and-clumsy-handling-of-alabama-players-could-be-justice-001548496-ncaaf.html
Had Jones let it go at that, the decision not to prosecute probably would have received little attention. After all, who better to determine if there is enough evidence to proceed with a trial than prosecutors themselves?
But Jones, inflicted with a bad case of diarrhea of the mouth, just couldn’t shut up when shutting up would have been the prudent path to follow.
“I want to emphasize once again,” he told KNOE-TV in Monroe, “that the main reason I’m doing this is that I refuse to ruin the lives of two young men who have spent their adolescence and teenage years working and sweating while we were all in the air conditioning.” (Emphasis added). http://theadvocate.com/news/16165207-65/report-da-drops-drug-weapons-charges-against-alabama-football-players-louisiana-natives-cam-robinson
So there you have it. You work and sweat and Jones will look the other way. Hell, you might even be allowed to rob a bank except that’s a federal offense over which Jones has no authority. So, instead, go knock over a convenience store. Just make sure you’re sweating when you do so.
Unanswered (unasked, actually) was the obvious question: How many persons has Jones prosecuted on similar drugs and weapons charges who did not happen to be members of a big-time collegiate football program?
How many non-football-playing black kids from Monroe’s low-income, unemployed population are housed in the Ouachita Correctional Center for the sin of being caught with a single marijuana cigarette?
Well, an Internet post on the Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Web page in August 2012 lists the results of the Ouachita Parish Task Force seizures:
Just last week, A West Monroe man (gasp) drove through a private parking lot to avoid a stop sign. He gave officers his consent to search his backpack and a vitamin bottle was found to contain “one to two grams” of marijuana and a marijuana smoking pipe. He was booked into the correctional center.
In 2014, Bernard Noble, 48, was sentenced to 13 years of hard labor for possession of the equivalent of two marijuana cigarettes. Neither Noble nor the West Monroe man played football and probably did not sweat until they were arrested. http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2014/04/louisianan-given-13-year-prison-sentence-possession-two-marijuana-cigarettes
We stumbled across an online report that admittedly, is rather dated but interesting nonetheless. In 2007, there were 18,535 arrests for marijuana offenses in Louisiana. That represents an arrest rate of 432 per 100,000, which ranks Louisiana at number 5 in the nation.
http://www.drugscience.org/States/LA/LA.pdf
(We have to keep those private prisons occupied for their owners somehow.)
While we’re in no position to challenge Johnson’s contention of insufficient evidence, Jones’s justification for not prosecuting the two is certainly sufficient reason for demanding his resignation and disbarment. No one, not even an idiot like Jones, should be able to use sweat as a barometer for deciding whether or not to enforce the law with a blind eye to social status or celebrity.
In the case of Jones and the 4th JDC District Attorney’s office, justice isn’t blind; it’s stoned—stoned on the deranged notion that certain among us are above the law.
Posted in Campaign Contributions, Corruption, Courts, Crime, Elections, Ethics, Finances, Fraud, PACs, Politicians, Transparency on June 21, 2016| 14 Comments »
When it comes to financial shell games and political flim-flam, it seems that the two have a lot in common, oftentimes including the same personality mixes whose names keep cropping up. Sometimes those names can materialize like a deadly vapor in proceedings separated by a couple of decades. And somehow, those years and events mysteriously converge to affect the lives of thousands—or millions—of people.
It was in late 1990 that the late John Hays, the cantankerous publisher of the weekly Morning Paper in Ruston began writing stories that raised questions about Towers Financial Corp. and its chairman, one Steven Hoffenberg.
At first, his stories attracted little interest. On paper, as the sportswriters would say, it was a mismatch. Hays, described by NEW YORK TIMES in an April 1993 story as “a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, cowboy-booted newspaper publisher” was pitted against Hoffenberg, who briefly ran The New York Post, eventually taken over by Rupert Murdoch. Hoffenberg owned two jets, a yacht, limousines, mansions, and a Fifth Avenue office. Hays drove an old van well past its prime. It quickly shaped up as an epic battle between a small-town publisher operating on a shoestring and a sophisticated New Yorker who had, it seemed, more money than God.
But investors were getting nervous in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some of them called Hays who had a penchant for taking on phony investment schemes. Hays, as was his wont, began making calls that piqued the interest of Securities and Exchange Commission investigators as well as state regulators. He had worked with these same regulators in other scams, so he had the credentials necessary to make them sit up and pay attention whenever he called.
Hays even managed to attract the attention of major newspapers like the WASHINGTON POST
Hoffenberg had all the right political connections. He was a business ally of former Texas Gov. John Connally and with a former co-chairman of the Republican National Committee. Other friends in high places included Victoria Reggie, daughter of powerful Crowley Judge Edmund Reggie and the future wife of Sen. Edward Kennedy, New York City Mayor Mario Cuomo, and Mickey Kantor, President Bill Clinton’s trade representative. Heavy hitters, one and all.
Some of his connections, however, tended to hang back in the murky shadows of a darker side of society. https://porkinspolicyreview.com/tag/steven-hoffenberg/
http://gawker.com/501354/exposed-the-leon-black-jeffrey-epstein-connection
When a Shreveport brokerage firm started peddling high-yielding notes for Towers in 1990, Hays said he immediately wondered “if some fellow up in New York has such a good deal, what would inspire him to come down here to northern Louisiana and make the local people rich?”
He started making calls and writing stories—stories that obviously did not sit well with Hoffenberg.
If Hays was suspicious of Hoffenberg, the feeling was more than mutual. “He’s not a credible person,” Hoffenberg said of Hays. “He runs a newspaper that is full of lies. I have never heard from anybody that John Hays was somebody we should take seriously. I mean, he gives his newspaper away; he throws it on people’s driveways.” Twenty-five years later, one could close his eyes and almost hear Donald Trump talking about another candidate or some reporter covering his campaign.
(Oh, just as a heads-up, keep that Trump comparison in mind. He’ll come up later in this story.)
Hoffenberg was correct in that last statement. Hays did indeed toss about 25,000 free copies a week in the driveways of Lincoln, Union, Bienville, and Jackson parishes.
But Hays also became a national clearinghouse for information between state regulatory agencies. He was credited by Arkansas authorities as providing information to them that allowed them to keep Hoffenberg and Towers Financial Corp. out of that state.
But not all states. Hays began making calls to regulators and learned that Towers was selling notes in states where it had failed to meet registration requirements. Enter the feds. More stories followed.
So, who won the war of words?
Well, Hoffenberg eventually entered a guilty plea to running a $475 million Ponzi scheme, the largest on record until Bernie Madoff dwarfed Hoffenberg’s financial chicanery. In 1997, Hoffenberg was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for defrauding thousands of investors. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/08/business/hoffenberg-gets-20-year-sentence-in-fraud-case.html
His nemesis who he said “runs a newspaper that is full of lies” and a man he said he never heard “from anybody that John Hays was somebody we should take seriously,” was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Someone once said never start a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel and newsprint by the boxcar. Apparently Hoffenberg wasn’t listening.
The Hoffenberg/Towers Investment saga was the subject of a lengthy abstract by Gene Murray, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Grambling State University. http://list.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind9710a&L=AEJMC&E=7BIT&P=1328897&B=–&T=TEXT%2FPLAIN;%20charset=US-ASCII
But let’s fast forward to 2016. John Hays has been dead for a year now, the Morning Paper stopped publication several months before his death when his cancer weakened him to the point he could no longer peddle his ads or chase down a good story.
Hoffenberg couldn’t get out of jail in 1996 because, he said, he was so broke he couldn’t post the $100,000 bail. http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/money/sec-hoffenberg-pay-stay-jail-article-1.730715
Twenty years later, however, he is back in the money—and he wanted everyone to know it. It’s almost enough to make you wonder if he may have had a few dollars stashed safely offshore all that time.
The man who couldn’t make $100,000 bail a couple of decades ago has recently pledged $50 million to his super PAC set up to coordinate a marketing campaign in support of Donald Trump. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ponzi-schemer-steven-hoffenberg-pledges-50-million-to-help-trump/article/2593931
Hoffenberg, who professes to be a born-again Christian (funny how prison can do that; just ask Chuck Colson), is also in the business of marketing something called the Christ Credit Card to more than 700,000 registered Christian churches through Towers Financial.
http://whaminc.us/investor-questions-wham-answers
In addition to pledging $50 million of his own money to his super PAC, he also says he intends for his PAC to raise more than $1 billion in support of Trump. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/convicted-ponzi-schemer-ill-conduct-50-million-marketing-campaign-for-trump-224350
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-super-pac-predicts-raising-1-billion/article/2592210
So much for Trump’s claim that he is financing his own campaign—or for Hoffenberg’s earlier claims of poverty.
The announcement by Hoffenberg was the first time he has explained why he founded the Get Our Jobs Back, Inc. PAC back in April. He is listed as treasurer and custodian of records by the Federal Election Commission. http://docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/forms/C00616078/1070515/
Could this be déjà vu all over again? Can you imagine someone like Hoffenberg having the ear of a President Trump?
We have only a few random observations to make about this latest development, this unholy alliance between two high-rolling carnival hucksters of dubious trustworthiness:
Posted in Attorney General, Corruption, Courts, Education, Ethics, Governor's Office, Guest Columnist, Judges, Lawsuits, Politicians, Public Records, State Police, Transparency, Uncategorized on June 12, 2016| 6 Comments »
By Ken Booth
Guest Columnist
Under the provisions of Louisiana 44:1 et seq. (The Public Records Law), should any local or state government official raise questions as to whether requested records are public, the agency’s custodian of public documents is required to notify in writing the person making the request of the custodian’s determination and the reasons, including the legal basis. Said notice shall be made within three days of the request exclusive of Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays (emphasis added).
The law is pretty plain. It doesn’t say “may be made,” “might be made” or “should be made” within three days. The word used was shall.
But with the introduction of the new administration, elected and appointed officials in Louisiana seem to have decided they are exempt from provisions of the state law…one of them, the head of the State Police, of all people, even having “manufactured…own loophole for denying public records requests,” as reported by Louisiana Voice. https://louisianavoice.com/2016/06/01/lsp-stakes-out-claim-that-investigations-records-are-exempt-from-public-records-law-if-no-disciplinary-action-is-taken/
Are they perhaps taking their cues from federal officials? Within the past week, for instance, the State Department told a federal court that processing a demand for documents relating to Hillary Clinton and her aides would take as long as 75 years and would stretch “generations.”
Besides Obama, of course, Nixon, both Bushes and Bill Clinton have regularly invoked executive privilege as a means of protecting documents from public scrutiny.
What brings this to mind are a series of demands for public records recently involving three areas of significant public interest but which have either gone unacknowledged or denied or even fought with lawsuits against the public seeking the records. That’s a mean stretch even by Louisiana’s political and corruption standards.
When the weekly Ouachita Citizen sought to follow-up on a state audit that pointed to possible payroll fraud involving a law clerk for the 4th Judicial District Court, the court’s judges balked and denied the paper’s request for disciplinary action taken against court clerk Allyson Campbell over her alleged falsification of time sheets and other public documents.
When the newspaper filed a complaint with the District Attorney, the court filed a lawsuit against the newspaper which from a financial standpoint would effectively throttle further attempts to litigate the issue.
The paper has multiple public requests in at the office of state Attorney-General Jeff Landry which have for weeks gone unanswered.
Similarly, a couple of my own requests (shown here) to the new “transparency-minded” and “aggressive” Republican Attorney-General remain without result except for one letter which said it “may take some time.”
In a June 7th E-mail to Landry’s office, I wrote: “I would very much appreciate either the documents requested sixteen days ago or an opinion from that office on why they cannot be produced. Please know this is a public records request that will not go away silently.”
Landry’s press secretary Ruth Wisher has made sure that reporters know that her boss doesn’t always return her texts. Well, that certainly makes everything hunky-dory.
Known records requests to the AG’s office also demand access to a state police report on its investigation into the allegations of possible payroll fraud and destruction or concealment of court documents. A report on the findings from a companion investigation by the Inspector General’s office was released back on April 15th. The state police report is known to be in the hands of the Attorney General.
All of this is at odds with the very public Landry who has been throwing his weight around the capitol lately pushing for control of his agency’s own finances, making national headlines while trying unsuccessfully to crack down on illegal aliens, and squaring off (at least publicly) with the Gov. John Bel Edwards as if he hopes to succeed him some day.
But Landry and the 4th Judicial District Court in Ouachita Parish are not the only ones playing keep-away with public records.
LouisianaVoice has been repeatedly stymied by the Louisiana State Police with respect to sought after records.
In fact, as a recent LouisianaVoice post notes, Edmonson has manufactured his own loophole for denying public records requests after tiring, he suggests, of the public learning of “far too many instances of misconduct at LSP followed by a mindset of circling the wagons.”
Several high-profile cases of alleged improper State Trooper conduct have been determined to have been free of wrong doing and are therefore exempt from public records laws if no diciplinary action is taken. That’s staking out a rather questionable claim by the Supertindent.
Curiously, however, his agency did release records showing payroll fraud had occurred at Troop D headquartered in Lake Charles when the lieutenant there was accused of having instructed the men under his command to pad their time sheets to reflect work that had not been performed.
Ironically, that’s the same charge investigated by the same LSP against the law clerk in Ouachita Parish, the report of which has been hidden from public scrutiny even amid growing speculation nothing will come of the charges against her or the Judges who approved her bogus time sheets. It should be noted that the Troop D lieutenant was found to have engaged in “no wrong doing” and access to any investigation findings with respect to him has been denied. However, a trooper he supervised and who figured in the padded time sheets was fired.
The Superintendent of the Louisiana State Police is appointed by the Governor with consent of the State Senate. Edmonson had—and continues to have—the support of Gov. Edwards.
Edwards is also credited with preserving through his influence, at least indirectly, the job of another Jindal administration hold-over department head, Education Superintendent John White. While White actually is appointed by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education over which the governor has little control since most board members are elected, his stated support of White certainly didn’t hurt.
White, a 2012 BESE appointee, has been under considerable public fire over his steadfast defense of the Common Core program.
White has filed a lawsuit against two individuals seeking public records in five different requests from the Department of Education, presumably to block their access to dirty laundry in that agency as might be said of the lawsuit by the Judges in Monroe against The Ouachita Citizen.
Even considering Louisiana’s notorius reputation for politial scandals, suing private citizens or even the news media by government agencies has plunged the state’s standards to a new low.
As has been pointed out elsewhere the use of unlimited financial and legal resources—all paid for by the taxpayers—to block citizens with limited financial means is a dangerous threat to the very notion of checks and balances that are supposed to protect the public from abuse.
For those elected Louisiana officials to sit back and do nothing to put a stop to this unprecedented assault on the public’s right-to-know is pretty much tantamount to an endorsement of such actions.
And if the civilian public looks the other way when this kind of mess is exposed and doesn’t demand that it stop then expect the level of distrust to grow.
Posted in BESE, Boards, Charters, Education, Ethics, Finances, Guest Columnist, Lawsuits, Politicians, Privatization, Public Records, Transparency, Vouchers on June 11, 2016| 9 Comments »
By James C. Finney, Ph.D.
Guest Columnist
(Editor’s Note: James Finney is one of two Louisiana citizens (Mike Deshotels is the other) who was named as a defendant in a lawsuit by State Education Superintendent John White in an effort to thwart efforts by the pair to obtain public records from the Department of Education. White has defended his action by pointing out he is not seeking monetary damages from Finney or Deshotel. He failed to mention, however, that it will cost them money from their personal funds to defend the lawsuit while White has the financial resources of the State of Louisiana at his disposal.)
Much has been written about the Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence Program, otherwise known as the Louisiana Scholarship Program, or the voucher program. To summarize: The Department of Education allows vouchers for almost any private school that wants them (or so it seems) and then performs minimal oversight.
The students are tested, but the Department works hard to make sure taxpayers don’t get to see any useful data. The program is based on a premise that it helps poor kids access private schools. But “poor” is 2.5 times the poverty level which, for a family of four, means an annual income of $59,625 is low enough to put a kid in a private school at taxpayer expense. And, of course, the state refuses to release any data about how many children are at which ends of that range of income. And the point is, allegedly, to allow kids to escape failing public schools.
Never mind that the students may have never attended a public school. Ever.
But this post isn’t about that voucher program. It’s about the sneaky alternative that funds private schools by way of tax rebates. The Tuition Donation Rebate Program allows donors to fund private school tuition and recoup most of that donation as a tax rebate.
As might be expected, there are middlemen taking their cut of the money. At the beginning of the program, there was only one such organization—Arete Scholars Louisiana. The registered agent, Gene Mills, he of the Family Forum, has apparently neglected the paperwork required to keep charter 41200779N active with the Louisiana Secretary of State.
Mills, founder of Louisiana Family Forum, was the centerpiece of an extraordinary post by Jason France on his Crazy Crawfish blog in October 2012. https://thecrazycrawfish.com/tag/louisiana-family-fourm/
Founded in 1998, Louisiana Family Forum included as its “Independent Political Consultant” and “Grassroots Coordinator,” former State Sen. Dan Richey. http://www.lafamilyforum.org/about/
As an example of the family values for which Family Forum supposedly stands, Richey, while serving as a state senator from Ferriday in the 1980s, gave his allotted Tulane scholarship to a Caddo Parish legislator’s daughter in exchange for that legislator’s awarding of his scholarship to Richey’s brother as a means of circumventing the informal prohibition against giving the scholarships to immediate family members.
Superintendent John White’s Department of Education, with the approval of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), thought it was critical that there be multiple organizations available to help people support private education rather than pay taxes. So they gave grants of up to $499,750 to ACE Scholarships Louisiana (charter 41590796K) and up to$500,000 for New Schools for Baton Rouge Excellence Scholarship Fund (charter41726088K) so that these limited-liability corporations could each set up their business of accepting donations, funneling them to private schools, and providing the documentation required for the donors to get tax rebates from the Louisiana Department of Revenue.
According to the Louisiana Nonpublic School Choice 2015 Annual Report, which was submitted to BESE but not accepted, the tuition donation rebate program started in 2013-14 with Arete.
Arete’s 2013-14 Arete’s 2014 Annual Report indicates that the organization disbursed 14 scholarships, worth a total of $60,975.02, and all funded by the Atlanta Falcons.
No, that’s not a typo: Those Atlanta Falcons. That amount was confirmed by the Louisiana Department of Revenue: One unnamed taxpayer was issued a rebate in the amount of $60,975.02 in tax year 2014.
According to the state’s 2015 annual report cited above, there were two Student Tuition Organizations active in 2014-15: Arete and ACE. Arete’s 2015 Annual Report confirms the number of scholarships reported by the state, 50, at 24 schools, with a total value of $180,381, while ACE Scholarships Louisiana LLC’s 2015 Annual Report reports 13 scholarships, three schools, and a total of $40,780.67.
The donors of note on Arete’s annual report include the Atlanta Falcons, Chik-fil-A, James Garvey and several other individuals. ACE’s donors were David George and Edward Rispone. According to the Louisiana Department of Revenue, the total of rebates awarded in 2015 was $101,659.85, and they ranged in size from $950 to $47,105.
The numbers exploded in 2015-16, though, especially for ACE. The state’s voucher report indicates that Arete awarded (as of March 2016) 205 scholarships at 50 schools, ACE awarded 558 scholarships at 77 schools, and New Schools awarded 13 scholarships at four schools. The names of the schools, donors and dollar amounts likely won’t be available for several months, however.
The targets for total scholarship awards (remember those half-million dollar contracts a few paragraphs above) were 1,000 for this year and 1,250 for 2016-17 (ACE) and 75 and 125, respectively for New Schools. So apparently New Schools aimed low and shot lower. Perhaps that’s a good thing, in that taxpayers will see less revenue diverted away from the state’s coffers. On the other hand, this spreadsheet indicates that, as of the end of 2015, New Schools had already collected $300,000 on its contract, and ACE had already collected $249,874.98.
It’s interesting what a person can learn from availing themselves of their rights under Louisiana’s public records law (Title 44).
$2.50 each or three for $6.00
Louisiana Voice 