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If you’re looking for this summer’s hottest legal thriller, you’ve come to the right place. Fiction is fine for some, but here at the Basement we find plenty of entertainment at our local house of justice. No one but no one does scandal and corruption like the power hungry politicos of New Orleans. Just ask our local attorneys.

On the afternoon of Wednesday May 27, 2008 one mister James G. Perdigao filed civil action number 08-3570 with Eastern Louisiana U.S. District Court. Civil actions (that’s legal jargon for lawsuits to you and me) get filed every day, but all civil actions are far from equal…and this one is a whopper. Money, politics, more money, corruption, lots of money, cover ups, really really gigantic wads of cash, extortion, a staggering amount of dinero, attempted murder, and a just downright unbelievable amount of moolah, this case has more than enough to fill the pages of John Grisham’s next three novels.

I have in my hot little hands a copy of the very 73 page “brief” which outlines (with great aplomb) the various and sundry reasons why Mr. Perdigao feels that the law firm of Adams and Reese, L.L.P. owes him some of that prodigious amount of cash. According to the suit, Mr. Perdigao (who was a partner with the firm from 1993 until 2004) was privy to the inner workings of the firm’s many business ventures, both legal and not-so-much. His side of the short story goes something like this: Firm engages in copious illegal activities including bribery and extortion, Perdigao resists firm’s strong-arm tactics to involve him in various cover ups, firm engages in character assassination, Perdigao becomes official scapegoat, FBI gets involved, house of cards tumbles faster than a cheetah on speed, Perdigao files suit and names names. Big names. Names like Congressman Jefferson (you remember him from the recent frozen money scandal), former District Attorney Eddie Jordan (a cocksucker of the highest order) and former Mayor Marc Morial (of the infamous Johnson Controls scandal), as well as high-ranking businessmen like Robert J. Guidry (part owner of the Treasure Chest Casino).

The long story is, as ever, more complicated if no less Hollywoodesque. The file reads eerily like the script of a summer blockbuster, ironic in that the Louisiana Motion Picture Incentive Act is at the core of much of the debatably legal income garnered by named defendant Robert Vosbein. He and all of his partners (Charles P. Adams, B. Jeffrey Brooks, Edwin C. Laizer, Paul J. Lassalle, Thomas G. O’Brien, Mark J. Spansel, and Martin A. Stern) will have to answer charges ranging from racketeering and bribery to obstruction of justice and retaliation against a government witness in response to Perdigao’s allegations, the most notable of which include a trail of bribery leading directly from Guidry, through Congressman Jefferson to D.A. Jordan.

Following a series of hearings in July-September, 1997 in Baton Rouge dealing with [former Governor Edwin Edwards, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison on racketeering charges – what a coincidence!]…seized cash, Guidry noted to Vosbein, Wilson, and plaintiff that Ewin would not do well in Baton Rouge and that Andrew [Martin] intended to ride Edwin’s coattails because Andrew was broke. Guidry related that he could outspend all of those M*****F*****’s and that he was getting his own insurance, referring to his plan to bribe U.S. Attorney Eddie Jordan through the efforts of U.S. Rep. Bill Jefferson…. Guidry informed Vosbein, Wilson, and plaintiff that he was confident that he would be able to keep his money. Guidry proclaimed that he had an ace in the hole, and that his ace was an ace of spades, referring to his African-American co-conspirator.

Good stuff, right? For those of you following along at home, that’s on page 7. The brief goes on to describe one such bribery encounter being carried out:

In the spring of 1998, plaintiff had a meeting with Guidry at Guidry’s penthouse apartment above his offices in Harvey, Louisiana. At this meeting, as they were discussing recent events regarding the Edwards grand jury in Baton Rouge, Guidry proceeded to tell plaintiff how he was bribing U.S. Attorney Eddie Jordan through U.S. Rep. Bill Jefferson. Guidry noted that he never placed the money directly in Jefferson’s hands, but rather under the back steps while Jefferson watched inside through the window. Guidry then recounted the story of his first “drop” under the back steps of Jefferson’s house in New Orleans. When Guidry entered the backyard, he found two sets of steps. With a puzzled look, he glanced through the window for directions from Jefferson. Guidry related that both he and Jefferson “cracked up laughing” as Jefferson pointed him to behind a planter by the correct stairs.

Page 9. Hard to believe, isn’t it? But in this mass of greed and obfuscation so tremendous that it does almost seem like a joke, there are victims to consider, and I’m not talking about poor deposed lawyer Perdigao. Central to much of the financial scandal is the insurance industry, which has more than a small effect on this hurricane-ravaged region. The brief goes on to detail numerous incidents which served to defraud both the firm’s clients and – most importantly to my delicate sensibilities – thousands upon thousands of Louisiana insurance holders who will ultimately continue to pay the price for the firm’s alleged misdeeds in the form of outrageous premiums, extra fees, and/or being dropped altogether from their policies. The brief explains how the firm made a repetitive practice of recruiting former city and state government officials with the express intention of placing them on projects which they are by law barred from addressing within two years upon leaving elected or appointed office. Of particular note is the description of the firm’s employment of former Louisiana Insurance Commissioner Robert Wooley (who replaced Commissioner Jim Brown after he was convicted of lying to an FBI agent – is anyone else starting to see a pattern emerge here?)

With similar ethical constraints as [former Mayor] Morial, Teamer, and Coulon, Wooley would be prohibited from representing insurance companies before the Louisiana Department of Insurance for a period of two years after he left office. But the firm proposed to put forward a “low-key grinder” to front the insurance regulatory work for Wooley during his two-year probation. In addition, the firm proposed to use Wooley as a state legislative lobbyist for his insurance company clients. Plaintiff recommend…to obtain an ethics opinion from the Louisiana Board of Ethics on the legality of a former Insurance Commissioner engaging in legislative lobbying on behalf of insurance company clients during his two-year probation. They decided that they did not want to risk an adverse opinion and instead would try to have Wooley “fly below the radar.” They advised plaintiff that his advice was no longer needed.

It gets better. Wooley followed the firm’s advice while he was in office, which essentially suggests that he tied his financial and therefore political future in with the firm while he was supposed to be protecting Louisiana consumers from things like insurance fraud as the state’s Insurance Commissioner. Perdigao’s suit states that Commissioner Wooley “helped push through a measure that allowed insurance companies to raise rates by up to 10% without the approval of the Louisiana Insurance Rating Commission. This so-called ‘flex-band’ initiative promoted by Commissioner Wooley was a gift to insurers at the expense of Louisiana consumers.” The suit goes on to describe how Wooley’s pet project, the creation of Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, served to allow insurance companies to pass their losses on to policyholders rather than pay to insure their own losses. Insurance Companies previously made money by distributing their risk around to a much larger area and re-insuring against their own losses; they could afford to insure New Orleans area houses because they also insured inland areas at a much lower rate. Any losses they suffered were offset by the lower risk areas. The suit states “After Louisiana Citizens was created, all losses were directly passed on to policyholders as surcharges, effectively taking insurance companies off the hook.”

Of course, that only matters if you can actually get insurance in the first place. Perdigao’s suit accuses the firm of creating and profiting from a situation which allowed insurers (specifically Allstate) to unilaterally drop coverage to nearly 30,000 policyholders in 18 coastal parishes. When the Louisiana Department of Insurance threatened to sue, guess who represented Allstate.

Allstate performed drive-by inspections of roughly 40,000 homes in the New Orleans area in an inspection process that took less than one minute per home. However, many customers who received cancellations letters complained to the Louisiana Department of Insurance that their homes had already been or were in the process of being repaired and that their coverage should not have been terminated. In the Spring of 2007, the Louisiana Department of Insurance forced Allstate to scrap this drive by inspection process that resulted in several thousand homeowners getting their policies canceled. Meanwhile, Allstate reported a record of $5 billion profit for 2006…. During his two-year prohibition [against handling any insurance business involving the state after his term as Insurance Commissioner], Wooley directed an army of lawyers at the firm looking for technicalities to allow Allstate to drop long-standing customers in storm-prone areas of the state, violating both the letter and the spirit of Louisiana’s consumer protection laws.

Perdigao’s suit goes on to cite further illegalities involving other large insurers as well as the state Medicaid system (because why stop at just taking your house, when they can ruin health insurance too) before moving on to accuse the firm of obstructing justice on several occasions and then trying to have him murdered. According to the suit, Perdigao was attacked by gunfire two days after firm partner Vosbein threatened him, saying “the snitch usually ends up in the ditch.” Apparently the firm’s $16,000 per hour rates financed an education in bumper sticker mentality.

So that’s the bad news. The good news? Adams and Reese, L.L.P, has no intention of going down without a fight. With any luck we’ll all get a front row seat as these titan douchebags undertake to prove once and for all who is the douchiest douche among them (Perdigao is asking for a jury trial on all counts).

Hollywood ain’t got nothin’ on us, Louisiana.

Coming Up: Law firm Adams and Reese, L.L.P. responds to the suit.

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New Orleans residents continue to fight for fair housing after natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina and the re-election of Mayor Ray Nagin.

Those of you who have followed our series on New Orleans City Council’s wildly misguided war on homelessness will not be shocked to learn that the city’s illustrious leaders are now considering a proposal which would literally criminalize homelessness. Under the proposed measure, members of the homeless population would have a choice: go to whichever shelter the police sends you to, or go to jail. The measure would make refusal to enter a shelter an arrestable offense, provided that the shelters had space, which they don’t, so it’s all a bit premature at any rate.

Fortunately, however, recent activism on behalf of homeless residents may have made a dent in the the otherwise thick political skulls currently running New Orleans. After allowing HUD to demolish most of the city’s subsidized low-rent housing (at a tax cost of over $700 million), the city saw a spike in homeless encampments in public parks. City Council passed an ordinance outlawing camping in public parks, and an encampment grew in the Claiborne Avenue freeway area. Council members seem to be slowly coming to the realization that the act of simply shuffling ordinances is having no real effect on the homelessness situation, which was already dire due to spiking rent prices after the destruction of so much housing during hurricane Katrina.

Councilmember Stacey Head, who previously brought us such hits as What do you mean they’re not all crazy? handed the questions over to Councilmember Shelly Midura during the recent council meeting, who asked remarkably sane questions including “Who is going to want to hire someone who has a record of being homeless?” in reference to the notion of criminalizing homelessness. The Council could do better, like acknowledging that some of these potentially hardened criminals are the same people who will not consent to live in FEMA trailers on the silly little technicality that they seem to be poisonous. But the recognition that criminalizing homelessness will not solve the basic problem of a lack of affordable housing is an improvement in the Council’s process, no matter how small.

Not surprisingly, the criminalization measure was proposed by none other than our illustrious Mayor Ray Nagin, incidentally recently voted “The Basement’s First Choice For Darwin Award Recipient.”* Nagin would clearly be happier to simply continue shuffling the homelessness problem (and responsibility) from pillar to post, but council members insisted that a task force scrap the proposed criminalization measure and begin anew. Whether their brief foray into rationality will continue remains to be seen; residents recall that the council recently had the opportunity to refuse HUD’s demolitions but instead allowed the destruction of the city’s low-rent housing complexes without second thought. Residents can only hope that the council members have begun to see the larger issue underlying the rise in homelessness, and can shape a more reasonable and/or helpful policy, despite Mayor Nagin’s personal, lifelong commitment to corruption and stupidity.

*See Lazlo’s Basement message board for vote details

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The house Katrina built.

Residents of the Gulf region whose homes were destroyed by hurricanes Rita and Katrina testified in congress this week about the extent of the health issues caused and exacerbated by living in emergency FEMA trailers.

As far back as 2006, the FEMA trailers were known to excrete poisonous formaldehyde fumes, which caused severe illness among many displaced trailer residents. Yesterday, citizens who have lived in the trailers testified to the nature and severity of the health conditions they believe were a direct result of the FEMA’s decision to send the trailers to the devastated region, despite previous knowledge that the trailers posed a health threat.

FEMA has been accused of deliberately ignoring and downplaying the toxic trailers’ formaldehyde problems. In 2006, FEMA workers along the Gulf Coast alerted the agency to possible problems with air quality in the trailers. But e-mails uncovered during a congressional investigation into the trailers last summer showed that FEMA lawyers told the agency to drag its feet on air quality testing. On June 15, 2006, one FEMA lawyer advised the agency “do not initiate any testing until we give the OK. . . Once you get the results and should they indicate a problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them”. A day later, FEMA’s Office of General Council advised an agency employee not to test the trailers because doing so “would imply FEMA’s ownership of the issue”.

Late last year, FEMA and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) finally conducted formaldehyde tests of 519 trailers. In February, the CDC released preliminary tests of formaldehyde fumes in the FEMA trailers. The tests confirmed that the FEMA trailers pose a serious danger to residents still living in them. The CDC trailer tests revealed average formaldehyde levels of 77ppb (parts per billions), significantly higher than the 10 to 17 ppb concentration seen in newer homes. The CDC said at the time that it was urgent that those still living in toxic FEMA trailers be relocated as soon as possible.

A woman whose family moved into one of those trailers told a House of Representatives oversight committee that her children began having respiratory problems almost as soon as they moved into the toxic FEMA trailers. “I feel like essentially we were lab rats. We were put in this situation, we were exposed to this and seeing that this large group of scientists knew about it, it seems like they should have at least been doing studies to see what the effects were,” the woman explained. The woman told the panel that when she sought help from FEMA, none was forthcoming.

The panel also received written testimony from a toxicologists who said the CDC downplayed formaldehyde dangers posed by the toxic FEMA trailers in a report it issued a year ago. Christopher De Rosa, a top toxicologist for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), said in written testimony that his advice to warn trailer residents about the health effects of formaldehyde in the FEMA trailers was ignored. That report minimized the dangers posed by the toxic fumes, and stated that leaving windows open and air conditioning running would keep formaldehyde below “levels of concern.” “Since formaldehyde is a carcinogen, it is a matter of U.S. federal government science policy that there is no ’safe level’ of exposure,” DeRosa said.

Of the nearly 150,000 trailers FEMA delivered to families whose homes were destroyed by the hurricanes, nearly 30,000 are still in use by citizens who lack other means of housing their families. This is just one of the many ways residents feel they have been ignored and betrayed by their government, which continues to provide little more than lip service and half-measures to the economically devastated region.

As a resident of the region, I have to say that it would be a downright lie to suggest that I am not sick and fucking tired of reading and writing about the myriad of ways that this area of the country continues to get screwed. Many people who have not seen the Gulf Coast since the 2005 storm season, who have no experience with that level of destruction, simply fail to grasp the enormity of the issue at hand. Most of the country seems to believe that the emergency has passed, and that residents’ continued complaints are somehow self-indulgent rather than completely valid, if not downright understated. When residents from the Gulf Coast travel to other areas of the country, they are often met with sneers and sanctimony, ridiculous questions like “Why didn’t you just evacuate?” or “Why do you stay?”

If 30,000 families can’t find housing that doesn’t emit toxic fumes, what the hell makes anyone think that the devastation the region continues to suffer is somehow a matter of each individual resident’s personal failings or poor choices? How does a region effectively evacuate five states’ worth of people in a matter of hours? Why is rebuilding even a matter of question? The lives of over a million people, a MILLION, have been irrevocably changed by the storms and the government’s subsequent failures to provide aid or protection. They refuse even to provide funding for improvements to the New Orleans levee system for Christ’s sake!

Wake up America. This is your nation, these are your countrymen, and in this age of moral majorities and religious rights, every single one of us should be involved in the struggle to help the people of the Gulf Region - not because we are perfect, not because it is in our country’s best economic interests to have a strong society operating the nation’s third largest port, not even because it is the right thing to do, but because there but for the grace of God go every single last red, white, and blue one of us.

Because if you think it can’t happen to you, just wait. Let the government get away with this now, and see how well they provide for the rest of the nation in future years. Unless you think the United States is fated to live a perfectly charmed existence without tragedy from today until the end of time, this is your last wake-up call. This is your last, best chance to figure out what to do when the government utterly fails to represent or care for your emergency needs, and your fellow countrymen are all you have left; the same countrymen currently being poisoned to death by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. What you would want them to do for you if the situation were reversed, you must do for them - and sooner rather than later, because a very small window of opportunity is closing down on all of us.

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