Or should we say “Family Affair?” I’m amazed they haven’t been able to shut down U.S. Attorney Letten’s efforts. For once, our side is getting justice.

Getting put up at the expense of the taxpayers yet again… the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Here.

Court documents say the scheme worked like this: Family members set up nonprofit agencies that allegedly had a public purpose, ranging from Orleans Metropolitan Housing, which ostensibly helped the poor repair their homes, to Central City Adult Education, which was supposed to help the illiterate learn to read. The charities were mostly domiciled in Central City, though a Times-Picayune story in 2006 noted that several of them lacked a physical location and were not listed in phone directories.

The nonprofit groups received several million dollars in government grants, all steered to them by family members and allies who held political offices. Among those who secured grants for the family charities: William Jefferson, who landed a $99,350 federal earmark; Jefferson-Bullock, who steered at least $100,000 to one of the groups; and Gill Pratt, who funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in state taxpayer money to several of the groups.

The indictments charge that nearly all of the money allotted to the charities instead went to the various family members, who often accessed the cash by making out checks to bogus payees and then depositing the proceeds into their own bank accounts. In the summary of the case, which she signed, Betty Jefferson admitted that she also deposited checks from a 4th District assessor account into her own bank account.

To make the charities look more legitimate, the court document signed by Jefferson says, family members listed phony employees on records sent to the state. In fact, those employees — most of whom were real people known to the Jeffersons — did not do work for the charities or earn salaries, the document says. For instance, Larry Bryant was listed as a full-time counselor for one of the nonprofit groups at a salary of $18,000; in fact, he worked full-time at the 4th District assessor’s office.

They got hundreds of thousands of dollars from the state to set up foundations to do things like distributing pencils and school supplies to disadvantaged kids.

Things like that, that are totally unauditable.

So the scammers set up your foundation in an office, paid for with state funds. The office, of course, is owned by one of the clan. The state’s paying $2,000/month rent for an office whose assessed value is $10,000.

Of course, it helps if your sister is the tax assessor.

Pigs at the trough. I agree, the black community should be totally outraged, but they’re not. The attitude of many is that they had crooked white politicians for years, now it’s the crooked black politicians’ turn.

But I have heard even some very conservative New Orleanians saying that Landrieu will be an improvement over Nagin.

But I am not so sure, it always struck me that the Landrieu’s were among the most corrupt pols in La.

BTW How have you been feeling since the Saints won the Superbowl? I spent the night here in Houston with twelve other Louisiana ex-pats, we couldn’t believe that it had ever happened.