Louisiana Voice

It was on March 22, 2016, less than two months after taking office as Louisiana attorney general that Jeff Landry posted on his webpage CAJUN CONSERVATISM the message that there was “a new sheriff in town” and that he, Jeff Landry, was the one-man citadel of ethics, morality and straight-shootin’.

The headline to the post noted that Landry had moved to end the “Buddy System,” a not-so-subtle jab at his predecessor, Buddy Caldwell, whom Landry said had awarded no-bid legal contracts to his top campaign contributors, primarily attorneys contracted to defend state agencies in multiple litigation cases.

Landry noted that he had “put an end to many of those ‘good old boy’ deals, cancelling dozens of legal contracts that benefited two of Caldwell’s top campaign contributors and nearly 50 contracts with the private law firms of district attorneys around the state.” He also announced a new policy that prohibited attorneys on his staff from doing private legal work on the side, a step that will help avoid even the perception of impropriety.

Just three months earlier, on Dec. 16, Landry announced following his defeat of incumbent Caldwell that Republican super-donor Shane Guidry would chair his TRANSITION COMMITTEE. Guidry will be discussed in far more detail presently.

In the FIRST PRIMARY in 2015, Landry trailed Caldwell by two percentage points. Caldwell polled 35 percent to Landry’s 33 percent. Geraldine “Geri” Broussard Baloney of Garyville in St. John the Baptist Parish finished third at 18 percent.

On Nov. 2, three weeks before the Nov. 21 runoff, Landry posted another story in which he quoted BALONEY as saying, “After meeting with Jeff Landry, followed by prayerful consideration with my family, I have decided to endorse Jeff Landry because of his willingness to embrace forward thinking policies, his desire to actually transform and change the way the Attorney General’s office does business…”

But in Louisiana, the more things change, the more they stay the same. While Landry was running around boasting that he had restored some semblance of respectability and ethics to the attorney general’s office, he apparently had cut a deal with Baloney to HIRE BALONEY’S DAUGHTER. Quendi Baloney as a consolation prize in exchange for her endorsement.

Quendi was hired at $53,000 per year despite the fact that at the time of her hire, all potential employees of the AG’s office were required to sign a form agreeing to background checks. They were also asked, in writing, if they had in any criminal record.

In her case, she did. In 1999, she was charged with 11 felony counts of credit card fraud and theft, eventually pleading guilty to three counts, according to court records from Henrico County, Virginia. She was sentenced to six years in prison, all of it suspended.

Her new job? Well, irony of ironies, it was in the AG’s fraud section.

Fast forward to February 2020 and we find that Landry, who railed against so-called “sanctuary cities” that protect illegal immigrants, was in fact, AN OWNER, along with his brother, of firms that imported undocumented workers with assistance from a convicted felon who had violated immigration laws.

Three months later, the Baton Rouge Advocate REPORTED that Landry had (a) put political crony and one-time legal client Guidry on the AG’s payroll as some sort of “special agent/investigator” at $12,000 per year, though it was never quite clear just what Guidry was supposed to be investigating. As if to defend the expenditure of taxpayer money for such questionable purposes, it was said the money paid Guidry was given to charity. Well, that certainly is all the explanation Louisiana taxpayers are due.

But wait. That same story reported that Landry had received a spot on the board of Guidry’s oil services firm, Harvey Gulf at a remuneration of between $50,000 and $100,000, according to Landry’s FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE REPORT.

What was that again about the “Buddy System”?

Besides being a major contributor to Donald Trump, Guidry has poured tons of money into the campaigns of people like Steve Scalise, Landry, Jeb Bush and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Let’s take a closer look at Harvey Gulf and some of Guidry’s business and political connections to people like former Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand, Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser.

In a seemingly unrelated move, Newell abruptly announced that he was stepping down in 2017 after 37 years with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, the last ten as sheriff, to move into his new career as a talk show host for a New Orleans radio station. Making his announcement on July 25, he set his retirement date as August 31. Normand insisted the timing of his announcement was “a coincidence at best,” and had nothing to do with the federal indictment of his veteran chief deputy Craig Taffaro.

Taffaro, Nungesser’s father-in-law, was indicted by a federal grand jury just five days earlier, on July 20 for tax evasion and filing a false tax return in connection with CTNN, an offshore supply company that he co-owned with Normand. His indictment in turn, came a little more than a month after his retirement following nearly 50 years with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.

CTNN (Craig Taffaro, Newell Normand) apparently did little but collect commissions on sales between two other companies. Equipment and goods were actually purchased by Harvey Gulf, the billion-dollar marine transportation enterprise owned by Guidry. They were purchased from a company called Pelican Marine which was owned by Nungesser, Taffaro’s son-in-law, who upon his election as lieutenant governor, placed Pelican’s assets in a blind trust assigned to….Taffaro.

Normand and Guidry contributed $5000 each to Landry’s 2015 campaign and Harvey Gulf chipped in another $5000 in 2020. In addition, Guidry contributed $100,000 to a super PAC that supported Landry.

All of which may seem apropos of nothing but now we learn, to no one’s surprise, that Landry’s not above using state resources to intervene on behalf of political allies who experience legal troubles – especially allies who open their purse strings to him.

Take the most recent case involving Guidry, as REPORTED by Advocate writter John Simerman, for example.

How many hard-working Louisiana citizens earnestly believe they could pick up the phone and convince Landry to dispatch agents from his office to a neighboring state to track down an individual who has offended them in a strictly civil matter?

Well, apparently Shane Guidry has that kind of stroke and obviously, he’s not above calling in his chits.

When the birth mother of his adopted daughter contacted her, apparently in violation of some sort of agreement at the time of adoption, Guidry went running to Landry and Landry responded – with the full force of the Louisiana Attorney General’s office, even to the point of sending agents to Mississippi to talk to the woman’s brother to find out where she was.

That’s the kind of abuse of office that we found in the days of Huey Long – not in the 21^st century.

Even for Louisiana, with its ethics-lite laws, that kind of heavy-handedness is verboten.

The next statewide election isn’t until 2023, but Louisiana voters should keep in mind until then that there’s a new sign out front at the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office:

“The people did not give Democrats the House, Senate and White House to compromise with insurrectionists.”

—Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley.

“We are very likely to see many more shoes dropping over the foreseeable future – and Trump knows it. He has never more desperately needed top legal talent, and that’s not who he has representing him.”

—Former Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich, on the myriad legal problems facing the former guy.

“Critical Race Theory goes against everything Martin Luther King Jr. taught us – to not judge others by the color of their skin. The Left is trying to take America backward.”

—House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, twisting logic to the extreme in the face of ongoing Republican efforts to restrict voting rights of minorities.

“There’s not another legislative bill… that can get passed and has the kind of support of the American people if you don’t fundamentally deal with the right to vote. Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you pass another infrastructure bill, it doesn’t matter if you pass all these other bills, because back at home, those citizens are watching their constitutional right – not your constitutional right to have a pothole filled, but your constitutional right to have a vote stripped away systematically by the minority party. And you’re either going to step up and push back against that and shut it down, or you’re not. And that’s what the Texas legislators are saying… ‘y’all need to shut this down now’” 

– Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, on MSNBC

“He loved what happened on Jan. 6th because it was all about him. These people were fighting for him ― and fighting against democracy and against free elections, to be sure ― but they were fighting for him, and that’s what he cares about.”

–Longtime Trump critic George Conway, saying that Trump uttered “one fundamental truth” about the Jan. 6 insurrection when he told rioters he loved them.

Before beginning our second installment, it might be appropriate to point out a couple of clarifications to our first story as provided by Ashton O’Dwyer, the victim of some especially roughshod justice meted out in the days and weeks following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

O’Dwyer was kind enough to inform LouisianaVoice that Chales Talley, one of his former law partners at Lemie and Kelleher, “unequivocally reported to me over the telephone during the week of the 11th, in a conversation which he initiated in order to attempt to intimidate me into silence, that I had, indeed already been suspended from the practice of law by Plattsmier.

“However, Talley said that the firm (Lemle & Kelleher) had ‘influence’ with [Charles] Plattsmier, and could get the suspension ‘lifted,’ but only if I quit giving interviews, surrender my weapons to ‘lawful authority’ (armed looters were still roaming parts of the City at this time, almost at will, without intervention by law enforcement), and vacate my property on St. Charles Avenue and join my law partners … wherever the heck they happened to be (other than in New Orleans). This same ‘message’ was delivered to me by Foti’s ‘hatchet man’ and Chief of the LDOJ Criminal Division, Burton Guidry, during his unannounced visit to my home on Saturday the 17th. However, during that visit, [Frank] Neuner, when asked, denied that I had in fact been suspended, proving that Talley was a liar. Plattsmier later (months later) confirmed to me that ‘Nobody has authority to use by name and the stature of my office without express permission,’ which he has never given to anyone (but Plattsmier’s a liar, too, about many other topics).

O’Dwyer also said that attorney Joseph Bruno “didn’t actually represent the State, like some of the others who Duval anointed to ‘control and manage’ the litigation. Bruno was ‘Plaintiffs’ Liaison Counsel,’ who was willfully doing the bidding of the real puppet masters, i.e., Calvin Clifford Fayard, Jr., Jim Roy of Domengeaux & Wright, Danny Becnel, and a host of others that I specifically named as defendants in what I have called ‘the biggest legal malpractice Class Action lawsuit in the annals of American jurisprudence,’ namely Civil Action No. 08-4728, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana on Oct. 23, 2008.

“Exactly two weeks to the day later, on Nov. 7, I was summarily suspended from the practice of law in Federal court by Judge [Ivan L.R.] Lemelle, and haven’t been able to practice law since.”

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

At five minutes after midnight on Tuesday, Sept. 20, only 12 hours after O’Dwyer had filed his class-action lawsuit against the US, Gov. Kathleen Blanco, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, former New Orleans Police Superintendent Edwin Compass and Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman, and others, he was watching television and preparing to retire for the evening.

Suddenly, a dark SUV emblazoned with the Louisiana State Police (LSP) logo on its front doors blocked O’Dwyer’s driveway. Three individuals, believed by O’Dwyer to have been state troopers (they were clad in dark “swat-like” uniforms, he said, and armed with both pistols and automatic weapons, emerged and approached O’Dwyer.

O’Dwyer told the officers they were not authorized to be on his property and that they should retreat to the sidewalk. Instead, one of the officers replied, “Sir, you are coming with us. You can either come with us voluntarily or we will remove you from here by force. Now, what’s it going to be?”

O’Dwyer responded, “I will not resist, but you will have to remove me from my property by force.” He says he repeatedly asked officers what was going on, who sent them and was he under arrest and if so, what were the charges against him? The only response he received was, “Shut the f*** up.”

He was thrown face-down onto the ground and while he was in a prone position with his hands bound behind his back, one of the officers attempted to enter his residence but was blocked by houseguest Gerald Guice, who was visiting O’Dwyer at the time and had opted to spend the night rather than violate the 6 p.m. curfew. “The reasons for the officer’s attempt to gain entry into plaintiff’s residence were unknown,” O’Dwyer would claim in a subsequent lawsuit, “but the officer clearly had no legal right to enter plaintiff’s residence because he had no search warrant to plaintiff’s knowledge and no arrest had been made or announced.”

O’Dwyer sustained non-permanent but painful bodily injuries when thrown to the ground at his home and was under the impression that he was the victim of a cruel joke. But then he was taken to a remote area of the Union Passenger Terminal in downtown New Orleans, which had been converted into a holding area where, clad only in a pair of shorts and deck shoes, he was pepper sprayed “in the face and over his entire body” by who he believes was a member of the Donaldsonville Police Department. His protests were met with more pepper spray.

As he began to taunts officers, calling them “gutless dogs,” and not men enough to break his nose or jaw, one officer broke out a 12-guage, 18-inch barrel shotgun and fired several bean-bag rounds at his thighs.

Finally, at the end of his 16 ½-hour ordeal, Odwyer was given a slip of paper upon his release. The paper suggested that he had been arrested for “public intoxication,” which he said in his lawsuit “is a lie. Plaintiff does not allow himself to become intoxicated,” a condition he says “demonstrates a lack of character.”

When asked by LouisianaVoice to provide names of the state troopers who detained and/or tormented him, he identified Trooper John Nelson and Sgt. Christopher Ivy, both of the beleaugured Troop F, headquartered in Monroe.

He said the claims he filed against all defendants except State Supreme Court Chief Justice Catherine “Kitty” Kimball, Plattsmier and troopers Nelson and Ivy were dismissed by Federal District Judge Helen “Ginger” Berrigan.

“It was left to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss the claims against the remaining named defendants on the basis that [the claim] failed to establish ‘the requisite causal connection’ between the acts committed by them and the events of his arrest,” O’Dwyer said. “An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court also proved futile.

“In dismissing [my] claims, the federal courts established that no one involved in the administration of justice or law enforcement would be held responsible for the illegal abduction and torture of citizen Ashton O’Dwyer, and by extension, other critics of the government who might follow in his footsteps,” he said. “This is a characteristic of a police state.”

So, in recapping, we have an attorney who decided to remain in his home that suffered only minimal damage from Hurricane Katrina. He did so to protect his possessions from looters and he did so legally.

But then he was vocally critical of the federal, state and local governments’ responses to the storm and to make matters worse, filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Katrina victims, a move that upset the legal community, some of whom were already conspiring to file a $400 billion claim against the federal government. But because those lawyers were working with then-Attorney General Charles Foti, they were, in effect, representing the state in recovery efforts. So, when the federal government was determined to be immune under a 1928 law, they were precluded from suing the state.

To shut O’Dwyer up, they sent state troopers to bring him in. At least two of those troopers were identified as members of the infamous Troop F which is currently under a microscope for the beating of one African-American after a traffic stop and the death of another following a similar traffic stop a year before that.

And of course, the legal community, including state and federal judges, closed ranks to protect themselves from O’Dwyer’s wrath and the only way to do that was to suspend his license and to permanently disbar him, thereby not only “shutting him up,” but destroying his ability to earn a living at something he’d been doing for 35 years, destroy his marriage, cost him his marriage, his home, and robbed him of the only thing he had left: his dignity.

As a bitter footnote to all this, the paltry $20 MILLION SETTLEMENT eventually reached over the inadequate protections from Katrina, netted some claimants payments ranging from as little as $1 to $463, while attorneys representing the claimants got up to $3.5 million and an additional $2.4 million to $3.5 million was set aside for administering between 200,000 and 800,000 claims.

That’s the Louisiana political and justice systems in a nutshell, folks. If you’re politically-connected, you’ll do quite well. But cross the wrong people and you’ll pay the price.

I suppose every reporter who ever covered the State Capitol or a political campaign has his or her favorite Edwin Edwards story. In that regard, I know I’m not unique, but I happen to have had two interactions with the man that impressed me deeply. And there’re two other stories that, while I was in no way involved, remain among my favorites.

Gov. Edwards died this morning at 93 and like him or not, there will not be another quite like him in Louisiana politics. He was not, as some might like to paint him, a throwback to the Huey Long era. He was his own man who built his own legacy – good, bad, or indifferent – without any help from the Kingfish.

My experience with the man goes all the way back to the mid-1970s when I was a snot-nosed reporter for the Baton Rouge State-Times. (Some say little has change in my personality over the ensuing half-century, but that’s another story.)

Jim Hughes, then-managing editor of the State-Times, approached my desk one morning to say he’d received a call that things were amiss at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, where school president Clea Parker was said to be stealing the university blind through a combination of chicanery and mismanagement. He asked me to drive over and snoop around.

I did, spending the better part of a week on the campus talking to various officials and examining financial records. I even interviewed Parker, who broke down and wept during our interview at the idea that he would be accused of wrongdoing. If Parker was guilty of anything, I concluded, it of being too trusting of those in his inner circle.

I reported back to Hughes that I could find nothing that warranted a story and he said not to worry about it anymore.

A couple of weeks later, I visited family in Ruston for Christmas and dropped by the offices of the local newspaper, The Daily Leader, where I had begun my journalistic odyssey back in 1966 (I would work for the paper on four separate occasions during my career). I mentioned to publisher Tom Kelly, who had first hired me off the street as an advertising account rep, the dead-end I’d encountered at SLU.

He suddenly snapped his fingers and said, “My brother-in-law teaches there and he recently told me that a fellow professor (who Kelly named, but I won’t after so many years because, frankly, it would serve no purpose) had stopped at his table in the student center and announced that he was going to be the next president of Southeastern. He said Gov. Edwards had promised him the job.”

Now I had a hook on which to hang my story – provided I could get confirmation from Edwards, whom I’d never met.

When I returned to work on Monday, I naively walked over to the Capitol, rode the elevator up to the fourth floor and announced I wanted to see the governor (keep in mind, I was not a Capitol beat reporter, nor had I called for an appointment).

The receptionist replied, “Certainly. Have a seat and I’ll let the governor know you’re here.” (Years later, it would literally prove impossible to get Bobby Jindal to even return a call, much less acknowledge your presence). I waited all of five or six minutes before being ushered into the governor’s office. I sat down in front of his desk which was unoccupied. I sat alone in the room for just a minute or two before I became aware of someone walking behind me, coming up on my right side. I looked up to see Edwards stride past holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee. He stepped up into the seat of his chair and sat on top of the backrest, a most unconventional position for the chief executive for the State of Louisiana, or any other state, to say the least. “May I help you?” he asked.

“Governor, did you promise the presidency of Southeastern to _________?” I blurted. So much for subtlety.

The man never blinked nor did he hesitate. “What I promised _______ was that if the presidency became vacant, I would recommend him for the position and since I appoint all the members of the Board of Trustees (of State Colleges and Universities), my recommendation would carry a certain amount of weight. Does that answer your question?”

Boom! I had my story straight from the horse’s mouth.

That afternoon, after the paper came out with my story splashed across the front page, I got a call from the furious professor. He was screaming at me, denying the content of the story. I waited until he finished and then said as calmly as I could, “Sir, if you have a problem with the facts of the story, please take it up with the governor. He was my source.”

I never heard another word about it.

Another time, when I was editor of the Daily Leader (on my fourth tour there) I had occasion to call Edwards about a story I was working on. He was not in and I left a message for him to return my call. An hour or so later, the phone rang and a voice on the other end said, “This is Edwin Edwards. You wanted to talk to me?” No secretary calling to tell me to hold for the governor. Just EWE his own bad self returning his own calls. Years later, he told me that was his policy with the press. “I figure they’re busy and want to talk directly to me and I found I got much better treatment if I didn’t make them talk to an intermediary first,” he explained.

Now for those other two stories.

In 1971, when Edwards ran for governor the first time, his chief opponent was State Sen. (later US Sen.) J. Bennett Johnston of Shreveport. As usual in Louisiana’s gubernatorial campaigns, there are about a dozen or so minor candidates. One of those was a guy named Warren J. “Puggy” Moity of New Iberia. Moity was a colorful character who added a dash of spice to any campaign he was involved in and ’71 was no different (he would receive 0.76% of the vote in that election).

Among the charges he threw out with reckless abandon during the campaign was his claim that Edwards was gay.

A few days after Moity made his outlandish claim, the candidates were scheduled to debate at the old Capitol House Hotel (formerly known as the Heidelberg Hotel where Huey Long liked to hang out in the day). When Edwards walked into the lobby, one of the first people he saw was Moity. He never broke stride as he walked up to Moity and planted a wet one on his cheek.

The other story involved former Gov. Jimmie Davis, who lived in retirement behind the governor’s mansion, across the lake from the State Capitol. Davis regaled in telling the story of how he was outside working one day, “knocking down dirt-dobber nests and spider webs when I saw Gov. Edwards walking straight toward the lake. I realized that he was going to try and walk across the water on his way to the Capitol. I stopped and watched in horror and sure enough, about halfway across, he sank like a rock. There wasn’t anything I could do but walk out there, pull him up out of the water and carry him the rest of the way.”

Rest in peace, Governor.