Guilty, Guilty, Guilty

Guilty, a photo by Noladishu on Flickr.

I got the opportunity to be in the courtroom today. I was a little late for the reading of the verdict.

I've been thinking about it and the one thing that still makes me a little sad: out of everything Meffert, Nagin, and St. Pierre did, nothing was more evil than the Interoperability Grant.

One thing we learned from the I-35W Bridge Collapse was what a difference a good, interoperable communications system can make. Despite the fact a damned interstate fell into the Mississippi and dozens were in danger, only 13 people died. Dozens were swiftly rescued from the water by adept, well-coordinated rescue work. Minnesota had the system that New Orleans lacked after Katrina.

Of all the charges today, not a single one related to the Interoperability Grant. In all likelyhood, nobody will ever to go to jail for it. Think of the lives in Katrina that could have been saved.

"On the websites"

In honor of C-Ray:

Labou via Hulu.

Note C-Ray's speech at about 1:24-1:25 or so.

"...and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids!"

Check out AZ for the juicy details from the St. Pierre trial. Some of the best blogging I've ever read.

UPDATE- Much more to read at my new favorite site, Slabbed

Sunday Reading Assignments

For you while you're waiting on the afternoon Saints game:


An Administration Run Amok. By Clancy DuBos. Goes over the Meffert indictment and what it illustrates about Nagin's 'leadership abilities.'

After Friday’s 63-count corruption indictment against former city technology chief Greg Meffert — once Nagin’s top aide and close friend — it’s hard to distinguish our present mayor from his predecessor.

What Gets Measured Gets Done. By Brian Denzer. Talks about crime, accurate statistics, and successful reform. More on NOLA Stat here.

Blakely Redux. By James Gill. The politician-skewering maestro's first column in a while gets an above-the-fold-headline in the dead tree edition and a well deserving target. Although one contributor on the idiot page disagrees with Gill's assessment of Dr. Blakely.

Deadspin- Why Your Stadium Sucks: Yankee Stadium. Yuck the Fankees.

And two final ones: The Case for Inflation vs. The Case for Deflation. Which will have a greater effect on the economy: Barack Obama "printing money" or Wall Street's financial wizardry going kablooey?

Local Politics Roundup - Cinco De Mayo Hangover Edition

Bobby "My middle name is ethics" Jindal kills effort to shine light on Governor's records. Trying to reverse a loophole in his "gold standard" ethics laws that make the Governor's records MORE secret than before.

Mark St. Pierre dropped from suit. Did he just turn snitch?

Mayor Ray Nagin and family went to Jamaica courtesy of Greg Meffert and NetMethods. David Hammer brings the hammer down. Big cover story about Nagin/Meffert and the trips and credit cards. Lots of details about strip clubs.

Nagin's 2008 calender. Analysis by Clancy DuBose, et. al. Works few hours, rarely meets with important individuals (his COO, and his soon to depart Recovery Chief). Nagin tries to hide 2008 meetings with Meffert and Bernardo? I get hiding the Muppet meetings, but why Bernardo? Was Bernardo delivering the mayor some Colombian nose powder or something?

At the end of this article about the red light cameras, TP drops a juicy little tidbit:
ATS, linked to the infamous Johnson Controls (Morial/Pampy Barre energy contract), runs part of the red light cameras.

John Colvin arrested for defrauding Katrina victims in prefabricated housing scheme. None of the articles mention his party affiliation, but from the NY Times archive, I found an article from the 90's saying he was part of a G.O.P. plan to take the legislature in Alabama. Could this guy have some interesting stories to tell? Maybe.

Famous political party switchers: Jim Jeffords, Michael Bloomberg, RAY NAGIN, Loretta Sanchez, Jim Webb, Charles Barkley, Teddy Roosevelt, Rick Perry, and Norm Coleman.

Mitch Landrieu mulls run for mayor. Hmmm... Wonder what the magic 8 ball says about that one.

Greg Meffert's Complete Deposition

Here's the link for the total (~1000 page) deposition. Here's the great thing about it: it's searchable text!!! Hit Control-F and search for all the references to 4000 Downman Road.

Most of the last 300 or so pages, up until now unpublished, concern various trips paid for by Mark St. Pierre.

Page 921:

For example, the Chicago NFC trip. Here's Dambala's post about it from over a year ago.

Page 909:

Ah, the infamous Hawaii trip. There's an interesting claim that Meffert claimed all these trips on his income taxes. Feds, you interested in some income tax evasion? Maybe get some restitution to shore up the deficit? I'm sure you could not only squeeze a few G's out of Meffert, but you could also squeeze some out of much bigger fish.

Page 963:

The company suing Greg Meffert, et. al. never paid for anyone to go on any trips. Gee, I guess they just didn't know how the Nagin administration likes to run their business.

Haunted by the Recent Past

Some fascinating reads out there recently. Don't miss these 4 articles:

Mystery surrounds post-Katrina death, and some point to involvement of NOPD officers Saturday's cover story on the Times-Pic. All about some shady shit that went down in the aftermath of Katrina. A bunch of cops allegedly killed a man, beat up the witnesses, stole a car, and tried to hide their crimes by burning the body in a car. I think articles like this will continue to leak out for a long, long time. Lots of incredibly sketchy shit went down after the levees broke and there will never be a full accounting of what went down.

Flashback to the Interoperability Grant. Out of everything the Nagin administration has done, nothing compares to what Meffert and crew did in this fiasco. After 9/11, it was learned that communications failures cost hundreds of lives, so the Feds set up a grant to several cities to purchase a fully inter-operable communications system on specially reserved bandwidth. Minnesota was one of those cities and so was New Orleans. Minnesota's system worked almost flawlessly and saved lives. What happened in New Orleans? Greg Meffert, the crooked muppet, tried to steer the contract towards one of his cronies. The Feds figured out what he was up to an yanked the grant. No grant, no radios, no bulletproof communications system. A year or so later, Katrina hits, thousands die, and communications failures were one of the biggest complaints after the storm. Out of everything the Nagin administration has done, from NOAH, to Tracie Washington, to Veronica White, to Chocolate City, nothing compares to the Interoperability Grant. That fuckup probably cost hundreds of lives. Someone deserves to get lethal injection for it, unfortunately it looks like Jim Letten is looking primarily into more recent activities. Too bad. I'd love to see Meffert indicted with a thousand cases of negligent manslaughter (Mass Murder?).

Reversal of something or other. Tracing Tracie Washington's history in Dallas. I'd heard some of this, too. I was also reading around the archives of the the archives of the Austin American Statesman and Austin Business Journal. I got beat to the punch on posting. The only other things that I'll add is Tracie Washington allegedly called one of the attorneys suing Cap Metro a son of a bitch in front of a huge number of media people (TV, paper, radio, etc.). That was the final straw that got her fired. Also, the parking lot that drew all the attention was owned by the Praise Tabernacle Church. Tracie Washington allegedly had some sort of connection to the minister. Wasn't really made clear in the articles I read, but they alluded to a connection. The point of the story is Tracie Washington has a very dirty history, but then, we already had indications.

Checkered Past Comes Full Circle. Eli exposes Warren Riley's past. Wow, you talk about some bombshells. Warren Riley was once suspended for hiding a domestic violence call from a cops wife days before the other cop kills the wife and dumps her body in the swamp. I'd always heard that Warren Riley knew where the bodies were hidden because of his days with IA, but never any details. Warren Riley/Eddie Compass/Ray Nagin have supervised the demise of what was once a model police force and its replacement with it's national-nightmare predecessor. The thing is, the people that should be the most afraid of this is the cops themselves. I'm betting it's 6 months until you get another Antoinette Franks (cop that kills another cop).

I'll end with a quote from when Pennington lost after losing to Nagin in 2002:

"Pennington professed to have information abut Nagin that ‘sickened him to the core’, without specifying its nature."

Mayor's Office of Technology

Mayor's Office of Technology
Originally uploaded by Noladishu

Getting confused about the whole crime camera shenanigans? Need a diagram to keep things straight?

I'm working on it. Here's a sample of what I've got started. If anyone is curious for more, let me know.

Jim Letten's true nature to be revealed?

WARNING- LONG, MEANDERING POST AHEAD:

After a lot of wondering about what Letten is really up to, it appears that something big is finally in motion.

Jim Letten is the Federal Prosecutor for the Eastern District of Louisiana. He was Eddie Jordan's chief assistant and did most of the heavy lifting in the Edwin Edwards case.

After Jordan left to become Orleans DA, Letten was appointed by Bush. After taking down most of the Morial administration and nailing Oliver Thomas, Jim Letten has been extraordinarily quiet. Very little visible action was taken after the NOAH story broke. The only brief interruption was when the crime camera report from the OIG office came out.

Supposedly, Cerasoli had been sitting on the report for months, at the behest of Jim Letten, who didn't want to endanger ongoing investigations. Cerasoli had to leave for health reasons and had the report released shortly after he left for Boston, straining the relationship between the OIG and Jim Letten's office.

Now, there's a lot of speculation out there about why Letten's office has been so quiet for so long. The dark side of the speculation says he's a Rovian attack dog (along the lines of the Donald Siegelman case)), bent on taking down only Democrats. As evidence, they cite the Canal Street Madam case early in his career. Letten took down a major brothel that served many of New Orleans' movers and shakers. Allegedly, Letten shut the investigation down early because too many Republicans including a few national Republicans, were in the Madam's little black book. There's also a flagrant violation of the Travel Act that has yet to see the inside of a courtroom.

Furthermore, remember that Nagin's most loyal backers are Republicans (the "Couhig Conservatives") and Greg Meffert, Nagin's Pampy Barre, is a behind the scenes player with the local Republicans (Intelliport, a Meffert company, put together Joe Cao's new website).

Recently, Nagin's been acting like he know's he's untouchable, either because he has friends in high (Federal) places or because he knows that any indictment of him could tear this city to pieces. Take a look at Jeffery's character portrait of Nagin. Lots of interesting points. Nagin plays the fool, but the joke's on us. Some of Nagin's theatrics below:



He makes the reporters act like total fools (and the reporters are dumb enough not to even realize it).

So, could the much beloved "Dragon-Slayer" really be in on a bigger corruption racket?

There could be a lot of innocent explanations for the delays. First off, corruption cases are VERY hard to put together for one big reason (amongst many others): politicians tend to hire very good defense attorneys. Cases have to be airtight. If you're outside looking in, it can be very hard to put all the pieces into place in a way that will stand up in court, especially if you don't have a snitch (or does Letten have a snitch in Nagin's administration?). Also, the Federal Prosecutor is required to have a certain percentage of his prosecutors on violent crime cases (generally putting local thugs who work through the revolving door local justice system into the federal system on gun charges).

There's no definite evidence to say that Letten is either assisting the corrupt (knowingly or unknowingly) or is just trying to put together a case in tough circumstances.* Whether or not Meffert goes down, or if it's just smaller players, could finally settle the matter, though.

It's getting exciting. I don't know what I'm looking forward to more: the ending of Battlestar Galctica, or what Letten's next moves are.

_______________
*For the record, I think it's the latter. Full disclosure, my dad used to work for a friend of Letten's and used to go to lunch with his boss and Letten. He's always spoken highly of Letten.

UPDATE- Detailed analysis of the legal implications for some of the lawyers involved. A whole lot of lawyers (Tracie Washington, Penya Moses-Fields) probably deserve to be disbarred.

If you really want to get down to business, look at the offsite backups. That will tell you instantly what's going on. Any monkey business with those tapes and you have a serious federal offense.

For real tinfoil-hat territory, Ciber, a Meffert company, was a security contractor for Premier Election Solutions [Diebold]. Nagin, whose reelection depended on higher than expected turnout at satellite voting stations in Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, etc. might have gotten an extra boost from Ciber/Diebold audited machines at those polling stations...

Debris

I've got a bunch of random stuff that I wanted to post, but didn't want to dedicate a post:

Added a few bloggers to the list. Sophmom has been commenting here for a while, but I hadn't added her to the blogroll. Sorry about that. Mosquito Coast is a recent discovery. No, it's just me spoke at Rising Tide. I also found m.d. filter because of Rising Tide.

Speaking of blogs, someone likes my site's name.

Dirty Coast store now open at 5704 Magazine!

Broken: the Army Corps of Engineers. In Mother Jones...

Recovery by the Numbers (Times-Pic). Not that bad, actually. It is starting to look like the sun is finally starting to shine through the clouds.

Chertoff might take Gonzales' place I hope this report turns out to be wrong, because Chertoff was worse than the Horse's Ass ("Heck of a job" Brownie).

Communism in the NFL... Deadspin's season preview of the Patriots. Worth a read purely for the writing.

Wired article about how inter-operable communications saved lives in Minnesota... and cost lives in New York and New Orleans. Greg Meffert has blood on his hands.

Extremely insightful article about the economy by Brian at Got Law? Been meaning to link to this for a while. What he writes about will become more and more important over the next 10 years, IMHO.