Louisiana Voice

Art Briles is out before he ever set foot on campus but observers must be asking what in the world was Grambling State University head football coach Hue Jackson thinking in attempting to bring damaged goods onto campus in the first place?

Were it not for the protests of people like Grambling alumnus and former Super Bowl MVP quarterback DOUG WILLIAMS, the hiring of the former Baylor University head coach might actually have made it up to the University of Louisiana System’s board of supervisors where, hopefully, someone would’ve had the cajones to say hold on just a damned minute here.

Briles had been tentatively hired as the Grambling offensive coordinator, pending board concurrence. Offensive would’ve been the operative word in this case.

Briles is a coach who, like Les Miles and Ed Orgeron at LSU, came with considerable baggage in the form of allegations of sexual assault by as many as 19 of his players at Baylor.

The scandal at the Baptist-affiliated university cost Baylor President/Chancellor Kenneth Starr his job. Starr, who served as the self-righteous prosecutor of Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky Oval Office affair from June 2010 until May 2016.

Accused of “ignoring sexual assault issues on campus” by NPR, Starr on Aug. 19, 2016, resigned from his professorship at the Baylor Law School, completely severing his ties with the university. He next popped up in January 2020 as a member of Donald Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment trial.

What makes that especially interesting is the claim by LSU-Shreveport associate political science professor Jeff Sadow that Democrats were guilty of a double standard at a recent Mardi Gras event by going unmasked.

Baylor’s board of regents said Briles was aware of the sexual assault charges but failed to inform the school’s judicial affairs staff or the Title IX office in charge of coordinating the school’s response to sexual violence. In all, 17 separate sexual and domestic violence cases involving 19 football players were reported at the university between 2011 and 2016.

The NCAA investigated the claims against Briles and the Baylor program but stopped short of punishing him or the program.

Briles was the Baylor coach from 2008 to 2015. He is the author of the 2014 book Beating Goliath: My Story of Football and Faith.

The Grambling gig was not the only abortive job offer extended to Briles. The Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League hired him but let him go soon after his 2017 hire. Then, in 2019, University of Southern Mississippi head coach Jay Hopson attempted to hire him but USM President Rodney Bennett put the kibosh to that effort.

Briles did land a Texas high school coaching job for two seasons but nothing surprises us about Texas these days.

Latest items of interest picked up by LouisianaVoice concerning Louisiana State Police (LSP):

• Four months before the beatings of black motorists Aaron Larry Bowman and Ronald Greene, another black motorist was beaten by troopers from State Police Troops E, F, and G, a beating that LSP has tried desperately to keep from going public. Video in the possession of LSP shows troopers beating Damarirca Mims and hurling racial slurs at him.
• LSP and some members of the Legislative Black Caucus are pushing to retain the services of Theron Bowman, Ph.D, a police and city management consultant, as an effort to prevent the implementation of a federal consent decree for State Police.
• Louisiana State Police high command is said to have delayed firing Trooper John Clary for his role in Greene’s beating death on May 10, 2019, until he reached his three-year anniversary date at the rank of lieutenant last November.
• The LSP IT employee who was ordered to sanitize the cellphones of former – and current- employees is described as “stressed” and is said to have expressed concerns over why the department ordered him to wipe the phones of active employees Lt. Col. Doug Cain and attorney Faye Dysart Morrison. It is still unknown as to ordered that the phones be erased.
• Likewise, questions remain as to why Maj. Jason Turner, who is the Region 3 Officer over Troops E, F, and G, blocked Det. Albert Paxton when Paxton attempted to obtain evidence in the Greene matter. Paxton, ultimately retired from State Police but did not go quietly, giving interviews of difficulties of his investigation to a Baton Rouge TV reporter.
• State Police appear to be attempting to keep a lid on an event involving a trooper from Troop L and a young girl, details of which reflect back onto Louisiana’s First Family.
• A State Police lieutenant has been involved in at least two hit and run accidents in the Lake Charles and New Orleans areas. In the latest incident, he attempted to say he was sideswiped by another vehicle, though there are no paint transfers that would indicate contact with another vehicle, leaving skeptics to believe he struck a guardrail.

The Mims beating took place in Caddo Parish in January 2019, just four months before the Bowman and Greene beatings. One of the troopers involved in the Mims beating was Trooper Chris Hollingsworth, who also was involved in the Greene beating death on May 10, 2019. Hollingsworth was subsequently fired and died days later as the result of an auto accident. Troopers involved in the Mims beating were identified as Brent Hardy of Troop G, and Trooper George Hardy, and others.

The bookshelves of Louisiana state government in general and state agencies in particular are filled with dusty consultant studies on how to make operations more efficient. Basically, all they have done is result in the expenditure of tax dollars for expensive studies that produce few tangible results.

Yet, LSP and the Legislative Black Caucus are pushing to retain the services of Theron Bowman, a police and city management consultant in an attempt to head off the implementation of a federal consent decree to oversee state police operations. Bowman is a member of the Management Partners consulting firm of Cincinnati, Ohio.

That’s not to say that Bowman doesn’t possess the chops for the job, he does. He has more than 30 years’ experience in leading and managing complex and sophisticated police and public safety operations, including New Orleans, Maricopa County, Arizona, Cleveland, Los Angeles County, Newark, and others. He spent more than 30 years with the City of Arlington, Texas, Police Department, rising through the ranks to become chief and later deputy city manager.

But two common sense moves continue to elude those in the decision-making positions: (1) abolish the State Police Commission and move state police into State Civil Service like the rest of the working stiffs and (2) abandon the regulation that the state police superintendent must come from within the ranks and not from outside. Those are two things that continue to keep State Police from entering the 21^st century. Neither is a matter of waving a wand and declaring it so, but it’s worth the bureaucratic necessities involved to get them done.

Clary was said to have boasted to fellow officers that LSP Internal Affairs (IA) provided him with interview questions and answers prior to his interview. He was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing in Greene’s death. Clary lied for more than two years about the existence of body cam footage of the Greene beating but when investigators examined the time/date stamped audit trail of the video, it showed that Clary was periodically going back to check the video to ensure that no one else was seeing it.

No more needs to be said about the concerns of the IT employee over the wiping of State Police cellphones and the concerns of former Det. Albert Paxton have been widely publicized, though Turner needs to be questioned further about his role in blocking Paxton’s investigation of the Greene death.

The identity of the state trooper involved with “inappropriate conduct” with a female member of the LSU band in hotel room during travel to the Mississippi State football game last fall has been kept under wraps like some sort of state secret but LouisianaVoice has learned that the trooper was Thomas Noto from Troop L. Little is known about the complaint filed against Noto other than he and the female band member were drinking in a hotel room while he was on duty.

It’s interesting to note that Noto was also assigned to the security detail for the governor’s son, John Miller Edwards, while he was enrolled at LSU. Noto was placed on administrative leave, but no further announcements of discipline have been forthcoming.

Finally, it is disconcerting that the driving habits of Lt. Chad Lacoste have not come under greater scrutiny. His first incident occurred in Troop L in early 2021 when his patrol unit sideswiped a civilian’s vehicle and Lacoste fled the scene. The civilian, however, got his license number and had a private investigator run it. Rather than arrest Lacoste for hit and run, however, he was merely ticketed.

Then, on Sept. 30, 2021, Lacoste called Troop B and claimed he was traveling on an interstate ramp near the Mercedes Benz Superdome when a white pickup truck sideswiped his unit and fled the scene. Lacoste, a seasoned police officer, failed to get a license plate number and apparently forgot he had a police radio. There was no paint transfer, however, which would have been the case when one vehicle hits another, leaving investigators to believe he sideswiped a guardrail instead and was most likely impaired.

“You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets.”

—Nonsensical tweet by Louisiana’s 3rd Congressional District Rep. Clay Higgins (the contrast between this and the quote immediately below is equally incomprehensibly saddening.)

“I do not want my picture in your offices: the President is not an icon, an idol, or a portrait. Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.”

–Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, in his 2019 inaugural address (if only we had leaders with that mindset today…if only. Instead, we’re stuck with megalomaniacs like the tangerine toddler and his devotees.)

The wheels of justice always turn slowly but in the case of Mangham contractor Jeff Mercer, it’s pretty obvious that “justice” has become stuck in a rut and there’s no apparent hurry to call a tow truck.

In other words, there appears to be a concerted effort to delay justice and to simply out-wait Mercer in his pursuit of money that is legitimately owed him. After all, he has to die someday and the State of Louisiana will have won its 30 pieces of silver.

To say there seems to be some major collusion at play here would be to overstate the obvious.

Collusion between whom, you ask?

To answer that, just ask yourself who has the most to lose in this ongoing drama.

That would be the State of Louisiana, through the Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD), which was hit with a $20 million judgment in December 2015. And Mercer is no nearer receiving his money today than he was when the judgment was handed down six years ago.

Every time state district court Judge Wilson Rambo rules in Mercer’s favor, the Louisiana Supreme Court reverses. The plain, simple truth of the matter is the state has no intention of ever paying the judgment.

How do I know this? Because for 20 years, I worked as a claims adjuster for the Louisiana Office of Risk Management (ORM), the insurance agency for claims against various state agencies.

And while the claim that I “worked” might well come under a valid challenge, considering my less-than-stellar, yet accurate, performance evaluations, there is one important bit of information I picked up along the way.

You see, one of the very first cases I inherited upon embarking on my 20 years at ORM in January 1991 was a class-action suit against the state by victims of the 1983 flood that destroyed a number of residences and businesses in Tangipahoa Parish.

The suit was filed by Jean Boudreaux on the premise that the construction of I-12 through the parish acted as a dam that backed water up onto occupants on the north side of the interstate.

The case of BOUDREAUX v STATE of TRANSPORTATION and DEVELOPMENT is coming up on 40 years of residing in legal purgatory with no resolution in sight.

DOTD was hit with a $91.8 MILLION judgment in 2006. With judicial interest, that award has swollen to more than $300 million.

But before my 2011 retirement, it was brought to my attention by those a little further up the food chain than I that the state had no intention of ever paying the judgment.

And that 2016 flood? Plaintiffs were told by the Louisiana Supreme Court that they waited too late to file their claim even as Boudreaux has been waiting nearly four decades for justice.

So, there you have it, Mr. Mercer. You are left twisting in the wind while the courts play legal chess, denying a single motion at a time rather than taking all the motions as a group and issuing a single ruling. By doing it the way they are, they can stretch things out indefinitely – and that’s precisely what they’re doing.

Funny thing is, Mercer recently recorded a conversation with the general counsel for Second Circuit Court of Appeal who confided in him that former appellate court judge Henry N. Brown, who wrote the opinion overturning the $20 million award to Mercer told her, “Yeah, I woulda challenged it, too.”

She was referring to Mercer’s allegation that Brown, whose father had worked for DOTD for 44 years, should have recused himself from the matter because of a conflict of interest.

It wasn’t Brown’s only brush with a CONFLICT of INTEREST. Another one actually cost him his position on the court as he was forced into retirement after it was revealed he had created a hostile environment toward colleagues who were hearing the appeal of a civil lawsuit against one of his friends from whom Brown had purchased a home.

Mercer is no fool, but he has a point to prove. He was extorted as a contractor for DOTD and DOTD refused to pay him for his work. He has already had to sell off all his equipment and his future as a contractor is worse than bleak.

But the bottom line is he is an honest man who tried to give the state an honest day’s work. The least the state could have done was reciprocate. Instead, DOTD allowed its employees to rip Mercer off and then refuse to pay him more than $9 million for work performed.

And now, it’s more than obvious that the state has no intention of ever paying him for the work or for the $20 million judgment awarded unanimously by a 12-member jury of his peers.

It kinda makes you wonder if there is mischief afoot.