Multiple members of the family of U.S. Representative William Jefferson have been named in a federal indictment for allegedly skimming over $600,000 intended for three charities supposedly created to aid New Orleans Central City youths. Jefferson’s older sister, New Orleans 4th District Assessor Betty Jefferson, brother Mose Jefferson and Angela Coleman, Betty Jefferson’s daughter, were all charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud, program fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft.
According to the Times Picayune, the trio founded non-profits, requested federal funding, then pocked the money. The requests for the ear-marked funds came through then-state Rep. Renee Gill Pratt, a protege of the congressman, and her successor, Jalila Jefferson-Bullock, the congressman’s daughter. Other family members, listed in the indictment as “Family Member 1” through “Family Member 9,” are unnamed.
Congressman Jefferson is currently awaiting trial on 16 counts of public corruption following the discovery of $90,000 in alleged payoffs, in his freezer. Mose Jefferson is also facing trial on charges that he bribed the former president of the Orleans Parish School Board. To read the entire story in the TP, click here .
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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