Free Republic

NEW ORLEANS -- John Wesley Colvin Jr., a former state legislator from Alabama, deserves 60 years in state prison for ripping off six New Orleans families in a post-Katrina modular home scam, an Orleans Parish judge ruled today. Colvin, 63, had already pleaded guilty to six counts of theft over $500 for bilking about $240,000 from people desperate to return home after the Katrina disaster flooded their neighborhoods in 2005. His victims, including two elderly people who asked their children to testify for them, filled one half of the courtroom today. "I'm still not in my home," Annette Rainey testified....

Three Hurricane Katrina evacuees who bought houses here with the help of Oprah Winfrey appeared in court today on charges they cheated the Federal Emergency Management Agency by lying to continue to obtain rental assistance for storm victims after they moved into the furnished homes.

HOUSTON — Four Hurricane Katrina evacuees are charged with wrongfully obtaining federal rental assistance after buying new homes financed by Oprah Winfrey's "Oprah's Angel Network." The U.S. attorney's office in Houston says Darlene McGruder Poole, 30, of Houston, and her sister, Lashona McGruder Victor, 37, of La Place, La., are charged with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud. Kiesha Murphy, 34, of Houston, and Angela Payne, aka Angela McKinnies, 38, of Houston, are charged separately with making false statements to FEMA and theft of government property. Murphy declined to comment when reached by telephone Wednesday. Calls to Poole and...

NDIANAPOLIS, IA—Jimmy Alexander, 38, Indianapolis, Indiana, was sentenced to 57 months in prison today by U.S. District Chief Judge David F. Hamilton following his guilty plea to conspiracy to steal public money, announced Timothy M. Morrison, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana. This case was the result of an 18-month investigation by the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General and Federal Bureau of Investigation. In sentencing Alexander, Chief Judge Hamilton indicated that stealing from the victims of Hurricane Katrina is about as low as you can go. The Chief Judge also commented that Alexander’s criminal...

BATON ROUGE, LA—United States Attorney David R. Dugas announced that two more Louisiana residents pled guilty in federal court yesterday to fraud charges related to hurricane disaster relief programs. CHERYL M. TAYLOR, age 48, of Greensburg, Louisiana, pled guilty yesterday to a bill of information charging her with forgery against the United States, in violation of 18 United States Code, Section 495. According to the stipulated factual basis in the plea agreement, TAYLOR altered the face of a U.S. Treasury check that had been made out to her for disaster relief benefits in the amount of $1,425 so that it...

We are told by Henry Lemoine, who represents Mayor Hebron, this FBI raid is about employee overtime hours during hurricane crisis time.

Federal prosecutors have charged the former pastor of a church damaged by Hurricane Katrina with diverting thousands of dollars in private donations and public flood relief money to his private bank account. The U.S. attorney’s office said it filed a bill of information charging Noah A. Thomas Jr., former pastor of Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, with a single count of mail fraud. He led the church until October 2006, authorities said. Thomas was unavailable for comment. Prosecutors said the church applied for a donation from the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, a private philanthropy headed by the two ex-presidents. The church also...

BATON ROUGE, La. — Republican Bobby Jindal, the nation's first Indian-American governor, was sworn in Monday in Louisiana and moved quickly to make good on a campaign promise to clean up the corrupt image of this hurricane-battered state. "We have the opportunity - born of tragedy but embraced still the same - to make right decades of failure in government," Jindal said in his inaugural speech, referring to hurricanes Katrina and Rita of 2005. Jindal, a former congressman, became Louisiana's first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction. He took the oath from the state Supreme Court's chief justice, Pascal Calogero. Jindal's wife...

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration now acknowledges it is trying to recover nearly $500 million from people who improperly received federal aid money intended to help victims of two deadly hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, along the Gulf Coast two years ago. It said the amount may increase further. "This is a moving target and not finite," said James McIntyre, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The government's newest estimate of improper aid represents $494 million FEMA paid to 134,000 people who were ineligible for the aid they received. More than half the money went to people who couldn't...

A grand jury in North Mississippi has indicted Richard "Dickie" Scruggs, his son, Zach Scruggs, Scruggs Law Firm attorney Sidney A. Backstrom, attorney Timothy Balducci and former State Auditor Steve Patterson for conspiring to bribe a state court judge in North Mississippi over a case that involved funds from a settlement with State Farm insurance companies. The indictment, filed late Thursday, said Scruggs attempted to influence Lackey in the case by offering him $40,000 for an order that would resolve the lawsuit Jones vs. Scruggs in favor of Dickie Scruggs and the Scruggs Law Firm. Dickie Scruggs also is accused...

(Dickie) Scruggs arrested on bribery charges

"Federal agents investigating widespread fraud after the Gulf Coast hurricanes in 2005 are sifting through more than 11,000 potential cases, a backlog that could take years to resolve," reports USA Today. "Authorities have fielded so many reports of people cheating aid programs, swindling contracts and scamming charities after the hurricanes that Homeland Security inspectors, who typically police disaster aid scams, have been 'swamped,' says David Dugas, the U.S. attorney in Baton Rouge." In "Federal Aid to the States: Historical Cause of Government Growth and Bureaucracy," Chris Edwards, Cato's director of tax policy studies, writes: "The theory behind aid to the...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., Aug. 29 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Fifteen individuals have been indicted by a federal grand jury in Alabama on allegations of fraud and theft resulting from claims filed with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), U.S. Attorney Alice H. Martin, Special Agent in Charge J. Christopher Murphy and Assistant Special Agent in Charge Roy Sexton, both of the U.S. Secret Service, announced today. The indictments filed allege fraud and theft of federal disaster relief funds from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita which devastated parts of the south in 2005. "The defendants are charged today with consciously setting out to steal...

WASHINGTON - The Homeland Security Department wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars last year on iPods, dog booties, beer-making equipment and designer jackets, congressional investigators have concluded. More than 100 laptop computers and a dozen boats also bought by Homeland Security employees are missing, the investigators found. Poor training, lax oversight and rampant confusion over what employees are allowed to buy with government-issued purchase cards left Homeland Security "vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse," according to a draft report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative and auditing arm. The report was to be released Wednesday by a Senate panel...

Among the many superlatives associated with Hurricane Katrina can now be added this one: it produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2 billion. There is the hotel owner from Sugar Land, Tex., who has been charged with submitting $232,000 worth of bills for phantom victims. There are the 1,100 prison inmates across the Gulf Coast who apparently collected more than $10 million in rental and disaster-relief assistance. There are the bureaucrats who ordered nearly half a billion dollars worth of mobile homes that are still...

After Katrina, the most destructive hurricane and natural disaster to ever hit the United States, was over, the nation's media, along with many politicians attacked FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency www.fema.gov/). Many cited gross incompetence, while they hung the organization's director, Mike Brown, from pillar to post. Also, the Katrina disaster was a great opportunity for some to deny responsibility--while blaming others for the suffering which ensued in the aftermath of the storm. Brown lost his job at FEMA and the Bush administration was said to be racially insensitive because many of the victims in New Orleans were people of...

Less than a year ago, the images of Hurricane Katrina victims were riveted into the nation's collective memory: Homeowners perched on roofs amid rising water. Families pushed their belongings in trash cans down swamped streets. Children and the elderly camped out amid the squalor at New Orleans' convention center. If anyone needed a lift, it was folks on the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast. So, who among them wouldn't have enjoyed an all-inclusive, one-week Caribbean vacation in the Dominican Republic? What about scoring New Orleans Saints season tickets? Or a little stress-relief with a "Girls Gone Wild" video or a sex toy?...

MOVE OVER, RECKLESS CONSUMERS. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has outdone your irresponsible spending by racking up a debit card bill so outrageous it could have been created using Mad Libs. Sex-change operations, vacations to the Dominican Republic and wild nights at strip clubs were all bought on the government's dime by both con artists and legitimate victims of Hurricane Katrina. But try to keep that knee from jerking — although FEMA's oversight was lacking, wasted money is an inevitable byproduct of providing rapid emergency assistance. The tawdry expenses are listed in a report released Wednesday by the Government Accountability...

by Mark Finkelstein June 17, 2006 What do you call someone who rips off the American taxpayer by spending Katrina relief funds on champagne, 'Girls Gone Wild' videos or gambling sprees? Why, a 'victim', of course. At least, you do if you're the editorial writer of the Los Angeles Times. The sub-headline in the editorial in today's LA Times reads like a parody of liberal paternalism: "It's Wrong to Blame Victims for Spending Irresponsibly." No, that's not a misprint. While acknowledging that the 16% of improper expenditures 'is indeed high', the Times doesn't want us to get all worked up...

WASHINGTON - Houston divorce lawyer Mark Lipkin says he can't recall anyone paying for his services with a FEMA debit card, but congressional investigators say one of his clients did just that. The $1,000 payment was just one example cited in an audit that concluded that up to $1.4 billion — perhaps as much as 16 percent of the billions of dollars in assistance expended after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — was spent for bogus reasons. TheFederal Emergency Management Agency also was hoodwinked to pay for season football tickets, a tropical vacation and a sex change operation, the audit found....