Friday afternoon news dump

Stacey Jackson was sentenced to 5 years in prison today.

Jackson's sentence is the longest of any of the a half-dozen people charged in connection with extensive fraud at NOAH that began shortly after Katrina.

The small anti-blight group become a quasi-city department when former Mayor Ray Nagin made it the main conduit for federal grant dollars that were to be used to board up or gut out Katrina-damaged houses owned by poor and elderly New Orleanians. All six pleaded guilty to charges, including Jackson's cousin and a former business partner.

In a series of payouts that began just months after the storm, prosecutors said Jackson steered hundreds of thousands of dollars to contractors who overbilled for rehab work -- or did no work at all -- in exchange for a share of the ill-gotten money.

Jackson's last kickback came in 2008, as reporting by blogger Karen Gadbois and TV reporter Lee Zurick, now with WVUE Fox 8, revealed NOAH contractors were being paid for work that had not been done, as well as for work at properties Jackson owned.

People don't talk so much about this scandal now. But it was a turning point for the Nagin administration.  It was the first time the local media started to take allegations of corruption against him seriously.  Also Karen Gadbois went on from there to do some things.

There is a third phase to the "South Market District" development and it is getting a handsome tax break.

The Beacon building is the planned $39.6 million third phase of the development, set to be at the corner of Girod Street and O'Keefe Avenue with 20,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor and 126 apartments.

The Domain Companies' plans for the whole $250 million project call for shops, restaurants, a hotel, 700 apartments and parking. 

The Industrial Development Board voted Tuesday (Oct. 14) to give Domain a break on property taxes over the next decade for The Beacon. The board already approved reduced taxes for the first two phases under construction, known as The Paramount and The Park

The "payment in lieu of taxes" agreement for The Beacon sets a base tax price at $22,239 for 2015 and 2016 during construction.

From 2017 through 2026, the property taxes will incrementally increase from $119,641 to $358,922. The payments begin at 25 percent of the full tax bill and increases every year. By 2027, the owners would owe full full amount, estimated at more than $478,500.

In other words, at a time when rents and real estate prices are out of control, and an insane 37% percent of New Orleans renters considered by the Census Bureau to have "severe housing cost burdens" the city is granting huge, decade long subsidies to encourage more luxury housing development. One of the many ways that gentrification is a conscious policy choice, y'all.

Patrick Juneau appears to have put a great deal of effort into investigating and intimidating poor lil' ol' Dambala here.

NEW ORLEANS – A New Orleans-based blogger who published a chain of leaked emails related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement was subjected to an intense investigation to determine how he might have received the documents, according to a report authored by IBM.

The personal background and work of investigative journalist Jason Brad Berry, who operates the website American Zombie, was the subject of a March 26 report compiled by IBM’s CyberSecurity and Privacy Division at the behest of Claims Administrator Patrick Juneau, a Lafayette lawyer who oversees the Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement. Berry drew Juneau’s attention when he published a series of emails indicating that powerful lawyers associated with the case had selected more than 400 of their largest claims to be paid ahead of other claimants.

Do they do this to all the reporters? Or do they only go after the little guys with no legal departments?

Not that it matters.  Jason has been generally ahead of most media on this story. Not that it hasn't been covered. Only that it has been covered infrequently and, according to Jason, inadequately.

In the course of writing about the issues at the DHECC, I've come to the conclusion that mainstream media resources in this City and even national ones simply don't want to address the totality of this story.  Instead, they are satisfied with simply making a cursory glance and only choosing one side, BP, or the other, Pat Juneau, the PSC and the claimant attorneys.

The problem is, this story isn't a dichotomy.  There is a third party, the most important party, the people of the Gulf Coast who have been devastated by the BP oil spill and will continue to suffer for decades.  The reality is both BP and the "good ol' boys" running the show aren't nearly as divided with each other as the two entities are against the people to whom they are supposed be providing relief.  That complexity seems to be too difficult for MSM outlets like 60 Minutes, The New York Times, The LA Times, WWL-TV and a host of others to wrap their heads around.

This doesn't actually count as a "news dump" item since it's meant for next week's paper but here are Gambit's election endorsements anyway. 

Some of it is incredibly stupid. They endorse Steve Scalise because he knows how to do "bipartisanship" or something.  Scalise also knows how to raise as shit-ton of campaign money, btw.

They also endorse Mary Landrieu for mostly the same apolitical patrician reasons the T-P cited today. But they also throw in a little pepper here.

Landrieu’s Republican opposition has mounted a campaign based on fear, exaggeration (if not outright falsehoods) and anger — most of it funded by out-of-state special interests that do not have Louisiana’s interests at heart.

Finally, Ok Awesome points out that, despite having the luxury of the bye week to work with, several Saints bloggers have failed to turn in their papers on time.  That includes me, I guess.  I do have something I'll try to finish up tonight or tomorrow.

In the meantime, the closest thing to a "news dump" here is the Saints injury report.  There we find Jimmy Graham... surprisingly.. perhaps not credibly.. listed as "questionable" instead of "out." Also Keenan Lewis has some kind of toe problem but is "probable." Mark Ingram is gonna play which should strengthen the one phase of the game the Saints don't need much help with right now. Erik Lorig appears set to emerge from the fog of myth that has enshrouded him since training camp.  And then, there is this bit about Pierre Thomas.

Thomas said Friday that he was "sick as a dog" but would definitely play.

What is the NFL's ebola protocol?

"Suspicions grew"

Stacey Jackson pleaded guilty Wednesday to accepting kickbacks from contractors her non-profit hired to do remediation work that was never actually performed on flood damaged homes after Katrina.

Jackson, 47, was the focus of prosecutors' five-year investigation of the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership program, the troubled non-profit that she ran as its executive director. She eventually became another black eye for Nagin, whom a jury convicted of 20 corruption charges in February. He is scheduled to be sentenced July 9.

NOAH wasn't only "another black eye for Nagin" amid the various instances of corruption for which he was prosecuted. (Nagin wasn't charged with anything relating to NOAH anyway.)  It was the moment at which the local press.. and possibly federal investigators.. started to take these kinds of allegations against the Nagin administration seriously.

It's remarkably difficult to put yourself back in that time even now but back in 2007-2008 the conventional wisdom communicated through the daily news about Nagin was still wrapped up in his image as an innovative, reforming, businessman... an image the Times-Picayune had invested much in crafting and selling to voters in 2002.

Ray Nagin was a largely unknown businessman who was polling at 2 percent in his campaign for mayor before The Times-Picayune editorial board, of which I was and am a member, endorsed his candidacy. The endorsement, which was printed earlier than usual, helped give the erstwhile long shot some legitimacy.

The already revised history tells us the turning point came when Nagin delivered his stupid (but also overblown and misunderstood)  "Chocolate City" speech on MLK Day in 2006.   And it's true that this was a political turning point for Nagin.  It signaled a new and more populist reelection strategy as Nagin surely knew many of his moneyed, white backers "some people Uptown" were about to abandon him. But the press was considerably slower to turn on him.

And by "turn on him" I mean give credence to the mounting evidence that the phony they created out of whole cloth was... well.. a phony.

But, as the story says here, "suspicions grew."

Federal agents stormed NOAH's offices in August 2008 as suspicions grew that little to no work had been done at hundreds of properties assigned to the agency. What followed led to guilty pleas from four contractors, including Jackson's cousin, Richard Hall. Hall stood accused of stealing $117,000 from NOAH while performing few of the house repairs he was hired to do. He admitted his guilt in 2012, but he did not admit kicking cash back to Jackson.

How and when did the suspicions grow?  Not relevant to the story, apparently.  But for fun,  let's check the other paper to see if they know.

Jackson’s crimes were committed while she was serving as director of New Orleans Affordable Homeownership, a city-supported nonprofit program that Nagin made the centerpiece of an anti-blight campaign.

The agency hired private companies to gut and board up some of the tens of thousands of properties damaged in Katrina and its aftermath. Media reports at the time revealed that many of the properties the city had paid to remediate in fact got little or no attention and remained in shockingly bad condition.

Rather than acknowledging the problems in the city-administered grant program, Nagin reacted angrily toward the news media as critical stories unspooled, a move that did lasting damage to his relationship with the public. His image was tarnished further by the fact that his brother-in-law, Cedric Smith, was a leading contractor for NOAH, although Smith never was charged with any wrongdoing.

"Media reports at the time" likely refers to the WWLTV's investigation of NOAH.  Lee Zurik in particular seemed to get under the Mayor's skin. It was to WWL cameras that Nagin made his famous "cold cocking" threat.  Zurik deserves the credit he's received for picking up and running with this story. It's the story that made his reputation as an investigative journalist; one he still trades on today.

But Zurik didn't "break" the NOAH story.  Then-amateur investigator Karen Gadbois did. The WWLTV series became a collaboration between Zurik and Karen and a few researchers working with her Nagin would later deride as "council sponsored college students turned spies." (scroll down to page 7 of this PDF)



Karen would go on to jump into professionalism herself and found The Lens which still sort of does some spying despite appearing to be out of money lately. (Must have lost that council sponsorship. You can help with that.)

It's a shame, though, that the critical role she and her associated "dangerous people of the internet," as Advocate publisher John Georges calls them, played in the unraveling of the Ray Nagin myth seems to have been written out of the official history.

Update: Turns out NOLA Defender credited Karen Gadbois. Good on them. 

Compelling circumstances

Yesterday the media company known clumsily as NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune, having been denied a request for appeal, complied with a judge's order to turn over account information about two frequent commenters on its website.

“Nola.com/The Times-Picayune is committed to the idea that the constitutional rights of Internet users, including the First Amendment right to speak anonymously, should be carefully safeguarded, and that the identity of those who choose to speak anonymously should be revealed only in the most compelling of circumstances,” Lori Mince, the paper’s attorney, said in a prepared statement.

The T-P's position in this matter is laudable in principle. Although it has been pointed out elsewhere that they've been less than consistent on this point.  Right now, it seems, they're committed to objecting to having to rat out their... users? sources? content providers?.. whatever you call a newspaper commenter... to a judge. But they're being forced to do that anyway under "compelling circumstances."

In this case the compelling circumstance is that lawyers representing Stacey Jackson think that one or both of these commenters might have been a federal prosecutor publicly disparaging Ms. Jackson while they were in the process of bringing charges against her.

Many will recall Jackson was head of  the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership agency. 

The NOAH program erupted into scandal in the summer of 2008, when information emerged that many of the homes the quasi-city agency had paid to gut or board up had in fact received no attention. The scandal galvanized citizens frustrated with the city's halting recovery.

Much of their ire was aimed at Nagin, who had championed the NOAH program as a way of propping up overwhelmed nonprofits that had been providing gutting services. Nagin initially reacted defensively, holding a memorable news conference in which he blasted the reporting of Lee Zurik, then with WWL-TV and now with WVUE-TV, and accused him of impeding the city's recovery.

But the real center of the scandal was Stacey Jackson, who was NOAH's executive director and had close ties to several of the program's favored contractors.

Whether or not it ends up becoming the means by which more prosecutorial misconduct is exposed, the NOAH scandal is already a memorable event in the city's political history. Not only was it a major turning point in Nagin's relationship with the media but it also helped launch Karen Gadbois's career in investigative journalism and thus is a major reason we have The Lens today. 

Fewer will recall that Jackson was also part owner of a men's designer underwear shop called "The Him Store" but somehow that fact has become less significant with the passage of time.

Anyway, as we were saying, according to Jackson's lawyers, there is compelling reason to believe that forcing the T-P to turn over information about these anonymous commenters will lead to their being positively identified as federal prosecutors.

Whether they will ever be unmasked, however, is not clear, despite Thursday’s developments.

Keith Marszalek, Nola.com’s director of digital operations, did not respond to an emailed question Thursday about what information the website keeps on its commenters. And whether the identities of “aircheck” and “jammer1954” are even knowable may depend on how hard the two have tried to cover their tracks, experts say.

Or not.  But hey let's err on the side of suppressing free speech and a free press anyway just in case.

On the list that counts

Stacey Jackson indicted. Probably just under the statute of limitations wire, although maybe not.

The NOAH episode erupted in the summer of 2008, at a time of mounting public frustration with Nagin’s leadership of the city’s recovery. For many, the scandal epitomized Nagin’s fecklessness – the city was mired in blight, and a key city program aimed at ameliorating the problem appeared to be, at least, in part a sham.

The story was uncovered by blogger Karen Gadbois and television reporter Lee Zurik, who discovered that NOAH was paying contractors to gut and board blighted houses, but that in many cases the work wasn’t being done.

Nagin angrily denounced the reporting, referring disparagingly to “amateur investigators,” but federal authorities soon opened a probe and began carting documents out of NOAH’s offices. The agency, technically a nonprofit funded by City Hall, was essentially mothballed weeks later.

Those were fun times. 

Popcorn

5 charged with theft in NOAH house-gutting scandal

It also emerged that a number of the contractors working in the program had close business or personal ties to Stacey Jackson, executive director of NOAH at the time. NOAH, which is now defunct, was a quasi-city agency.

Regarding Jackson's business ties to NOAH contractors, I think the specialty underwear store was my favorite.


Getting to watch the indictments come in now is far more entertaining than seeing the whole series of events that led to them fictionalized for the benefit of snooty HBO audiences across America. Hell, knowing what we know about the way "Hollywood South" works, maybe we'll live long enough to see Treme producers indicted too.

That "other angle" we've been hearing about

T-P's Gordon Russell let's us in on it.

Stacey Jackson, the embattled former director of a city-financed program aimed at easing blight, bought four blighted properties herself through another city program two years ago but has done little or nothing to get them back into commerce.

Just last month, a company controlled by Jackson and her sister sold one of the four properties, an empty double lot at 1925-31 Sixth St., to a charity group that has been praised by City Hall and others for building new homes for first-time buyers in Central City.

The charity, Jericho Road Episcopal Housing Initiative, paid Jackson's company $20,000 for the land, three times what Jackson paid for it in 2006. As it happens, Jericho Road had been trying to get control of the land back then, but lost out to Jackson.

In fact, Jericho Road thought it had the property in 2006, having been awarded it by City Hall under a program designed to give nonprofit groups land adjudicated to the city because of unpaid taxes. But as the Jericho Road was trying to clear title to the Sixth Street property, the group learned the land was unavailable because Jackson had already staked a claim on it with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, according to Brad Powers, Jericho Road's executive director.

This is... very bad. What we're seeing now is that this is about more than just a good idea like the NOAH remediation program being wasted by incompetence and petty thievery. This is a tangible manifestation of the long held fear that this entire recovery effort would be an exercise in Disaster Capitalism; An insulting shell game where the mechanisms designed to bring relief to the abused become investment opportunities for the well- connected. Throughout these post-flood years Mayor Nagin has spoken to us of "economic buffets" and "exploding pies". I think we're starting to get a glimpse inside of some of the chaffing dishes.