Aaron Broussard, ex-wife, lawyer indicted on payroll fraud charges

A federal grand jury today indicted former Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard on charges of manipulating the parish payroll to boost his ex-wife's salary. Also charged were Karen Parker, who divorced Broussard in October 2009, and former Parish Attorney Tom Wilkinson as part of a sweeping, two-year investigation of the parish government under Broussard's watch.

The indictments come nine months after the trio received letters from prosecutors suggesting they could be charged with crimes. Broussard had resigned in January 2010, Parker was fired a month later and Wilkinson quit a month after that.

The charges are wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and to steal money from an agency receiving federal money. (See PDF of the 25-page indictment.)

Once the grand jury indicted the defendants, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Klebba presented the charges to Magistrate Judge Louis Moore. Moore issued summonses to the three defendants to surrender to federal authorities. An arraignment usually comes 10 days to two weeks later, he said.

Broussard attorney Robert Jenkins and Wilkinson attorney Ralph Whalen did not immediately return calls for comment. Parker's attorney, David Courcelle, would not discuss the case, saying he had not yet read the indictment.

The defendants are the first parish employees ensnared in the Justice Department's exhaustive look into the Broussard administration. The investigation began in the fall of 2009 after The Times-Picayune disclosed that Broussard's top administrator, Tim Whitmer, owned a private insurance agency earning commissions off policies at the publicly owned West Jefferson Medical Center. His firm, Lagniappe Industries, also was selling policies to parish contractors.

The investigation metastasized from there. Broussard admitted to doing $5,000 of legal work for Lagniappe, and Wilkinson said he had bought insurance policies through the firm.

Tim Russert was interviewing him on Meet the Press.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Broussard

The most famous of Broussard’s post Katrina interviews was one on the television program Meet the Press. In the course of that interview, he was critical of the disaster-response effort. He finished with a tearful account of the death by drowning of his emergency services manager’s mother.[2] Broussard’s account of that incident was subsequently shown to be inaccurate, in that the long sequence of telephone calls to the mother that he described as having taken place in the aftermath of the hurricane could not have happened, since she apparently drowned before the dates in question. In an appearance on Meet the Press three weeks later, Broussard was questioned about his account. He said that the story had been relayed to him by his staff, and that he had chosen not to ask his emergency manager for the exact circumstances of her death.

Broussard and his employees were directly involved in the initial disaster-recovery efforts that followed Hurricane Katrina. On September 4, 2005 he was interviewed on NBC’s Meet the Press, still inside his parish. Broussard called the response to Katrina “One of the Worst Abandonments of Americans on American Soil Ever” and went on to say that FEMA had not only failed to meet his parish’s need but actively withheld aid and cut his lines of communication:

Three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago. FEMA, we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. When we got there with our trucks, FEMA says don’t give you the fuel. Yesterday — yesterday — FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards and said no one is getting near these lines…

after this, Broussard began to break out in tears.

He said:

The guy who runs this building I’m in, Emergency Management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home, and every day she called him and said, ‘Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, Momma, somebody’s coming to get you. Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday’ — and she drowned on Friday night. She drowned on Friday night. Nobody’s coming to get us, nobody’s coming to get us. The secretary has promised, everybody’s promised. They’ve had press conferences — I’m sick of the press conferences. For God’s sake, shut up and send us somebody!

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