It's Chinatown

Fred Heebe runs and owns all of it. Ray Nagin gets a day out of jail to go testify and all but, you can kind of see where things are headed.

In a sense, the bare-knuckled lawsuit brought by trash conglomerate Waste Management represents the closest thing to a public airing of the corruption claims against Heebe and Jim Ward, his father-in-law, that New Orleanians are ever likely to see.

That’s because the criminal case the federal government was building against the two men cratered amid evidence, unearthed by Heebe’s legal team, of major misconduct by top officials in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

And the case is resurfacing at precisely the same moment that the leader of Heebe’s legal team, defense lawyer Kyle Schonekas, is expected to be nominated by President Donald Trump to run the office whose leadership he toppled five years ago.

In another odd convergence, the jurist presiding over Waste Management’s civil racketeering case, U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt, is the same judge that eagerly embraced the evidence of prosecutorial misconduct that Heebe brought forth in 2012, and embarked on his own crusade to measure its extent.

By the time the case gets to the courtroom, in late August, it's possible that Engelhardt, the chief judge in the district court, will have moved on as well: He is said to be a leading contender for an open seat on the New Orleans-based U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeal. Such a nomination would also come from Trump, with input from Louisiana's senators.

Yeah so congrats to everybody on their promotions.