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Goodbye Cerasoli and the Need for Real Public Corruption Investigations

By Ethan Brown

Last week, New Orleans lost its first Inspector General, Robert Cerasoli.

New Orleans is in dire need of government transparency and accountability so Cerasoli's loss is being mourned across the city.

Though the IG's office will continue without Cerasoli, his departure has got me thinking about public corruption, particularly the kinds of public corruption cases brought by the beloved U.S. Attorney down here, Jim Letten. [More...]

One of Letten's most high-profile cases involved bringing federal felony charges involving bribery of a public official against onetime City Council President Oliver Thomas.

According to the indictment, Thomas accepted $15,000 in bribes from New Orleans businessman Stanford Barré who was looking to have Thomas "to assist him in maintaining a parking contract...with the French Market Corporation (FMC), City of New Orleans."

During the late summer of 2007, Thomas pled guilty to the charges against him and he's now doing time in federal prison and is scheduled to be released in 2010.

This sort of corruption is par for the course in New Orleans and, I'm sure, many, many cities across the country. And I think Letten is right when he argues that corruption of all kinds--no matter how seemingly petty--not only erodes faith in government, but also drives away business and has contributed to the population declines in New Orleans and Louisiana more generally.

But when I read about these sorts of indictments--or Letten indicting individuals in FEMA fraud cases--I wonder where the investigations into bigger and much more corrosive public corruption are.

Here in New Orleans last summer, revelations surfaced that a city run agency called the New Orleans Affordable Home Ownership Program that was supposed to gut and remediate Katrina damaged homes did not actually do much of the work it had claimed to have done.

The stakes in this case were very high: NOAH had a $3.5 million budget and it claimed to have remediated more than 1,000 homes. NOAH was shuttered after the allegations surfaced, a federal grand jury was convened and then... nothing.

Thinking about the lack of progress in the NOAH case I couldn't help but be reminded of a piece by Scott Horton in Harper's last year on the Jack Abramoff case:

In 2005, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, two of the most astute observers on the Washington scene, called the game for Abramoff and his crew. They had developed the biggest political scam operation in America’s history...So now that we’re some five years into the Abramoff investigation, what has happened, exactly? It mysteriously dead-ended. Most of the major branches of the investigation went absolutely nowhere. And it seems that the Justice Department just couldn’t come up with the resources to explore most the leads that turned up.

So: I wonder if public corruption cases brought by the Holder-led DOJ will have more substance and greater reach--and much, much less driven by politics? Any DOJ watchers out there have any thoughts on this?

Full post as published by TalkLeft on February 02, 2009 (boomark / email).