An order by a federal judge in New Orleans that has led to the special appointment of an Atlanta federal prosecutor to investigate other federal prosecutors in New Orleans included scathing language about the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates allegations of misconduct against federal prosecutors and federal judges.

The order, handed down Nov. 26 by U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt of the Eastern District of Louisiana, chastised the division, which has taken fire before –  most notably for its botched  prosecution of former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska that led U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to dismiss the indictment against Stevens in 2009 and appoint a special prosecutor to investigate OPR lawyers.

OPR also prosecuted U.S. District Senior Judge Jack Camp of the Northern District of Georgia, who was arrested trying to buy illegal drugs while armed. Although Camp pleaded guilty to a single drug felony and two misdemeanors, at his sentencing, a visiting federal judge from Washington converted the felony plea to a misdemeanor.

Engelhardt’s recent criticism of OPR stems from an internal investigation run by OPR and the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana of unauthorized online postings by two of the New Orleans office’s federal prosecutors – First Assistant U.S. Attorney Jan Mann and Assistant U.S. Attorney Sal Perricone.

The anonymous online comments were highly critical of defendant police officers who were prosecuted in connection with a deadly shooting on a bridge in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Perricone resigned last March after admitting that he had made some of the anonymous comments. U.S. Attorney Jim Letten resigned last week after Mann admitted that she had made similar anonymous postings about the case.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney John Horn of the Northern District of Georgia was assigned by Holder last week to follow the judge’s directive to redo the investigation.

In his order, Engelhardt explained why he wanted the investigation redone by a special prosecutor. He noted that while “the usual DOJ protocol appears to require simply placing the matter in the hands of the DOJ’s OPR [Office of Professional Responsibility], such a plan at this point seems useless. First of all, having the DOJ investigate itself will likely only yield a delayed yet unconvincing result in which no confidence can rest.”

“If no wrongdoing is uncovered,” the judge wrote in his order,  “it will come as a surprise to no one given the conflict of interest existing between the investigator and the investigated.”

Engelhardt also noted that although the investigation of Perricone — who  publicly admitted writing a number of the anonymous postings — had taken eight months, “It comes as a complete surprise to everyone at DOJ and the U.S. Attorney’s office that another ‘poster’ [Mann] exists, especially one maintaining as high a position in the U.S. attorney’s office.”

“It would seem obvious,” the order stated, “that, upon news of Perricone’s activities, among the first questions to be answered were: 1) Is anyone else in the U.S. Attorney’s Office posting inappropriate and/or compromising online comments? And 2) Did anyone in the U.S. Attorney’s Office know or suspect that Perricone was posting prior to his admission in March 2012? (Even if OPR asked the first question in March, one shudders to imagine what answer was given by First AUSA Mann. Either she confessed to such activity, or falsely denied it.) Regardless, had the DOJ proactively and independently investigated and carefully analyzed the online comments in March 2012 as did the [defense] expert who uncovered Perricone and Mann, the answer to the first question would have been known months ago.”

Engelhardt’s order continued, “ It is difficult to imagine how this could possibly have been missed by OPR, and surely raises concerns about the capabilities and adequacy of DOJ’s investigatory techniques as exercised through OPR.  In any event, the Court has little confidence that OPR will fully investigate and come to conclusions with anywhere near the efficiency and certainty offered by suitable court-approved independent counsel. The Court strongly [judge’s italics] urges DOJ to do so post haste. Should DOJ determine not to proceed accordingly, the Court is left to proceed as it sees fit.”

A DOJ spokeswoman in Washington said no one was immediately available from OPR to comment.

A former member of the Gwinnett County Planning Commission pleaded guilty Monday to bribing a Gwinnett County commissioner to secure her vote for the construction of a waste transfer station in which he had a financial stake, the U.S. Attorney of the Northern District of Georgia announced Monday.

Mark Gary, 39, of Duluth pleaded guilty to giving $30,000 worth of casino chips at an out-of-state casino to John Fanning, the son of former Gwinnett County Commissioner and former Duluth Mayor Shirley Lasseter, U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates announced.

Gary is the fourth person to enter a guilty plea in connection with political corruption in Gwinnett. Federal prosecutors say he could face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine as high as $250,000.

Last month, Fanning, 34, of Dacula  and Hall County businessman Carl “Skip” Cain, 65, were sentenced in U.S. District Court in Atlanta to four years, nine months in prison for public corruption and drug trafficking offenses that included a scheme to bribe Lasseter.

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A federal grand jury in Atlanta has indicted two former officers with the Transportation Security Administration on charges of conspiring and attempting to smuggle cocaine into Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia announced today.

Henry County resident Richard C. Cook II, 27, and DeKalb County resident Timothy G. Gregory, 25, have been indicted on multiple counts of drug trafficking, said U.S. Attorney Sally Yates.  Gregory is free on $15,000 bond.

“Our nation’s well-being depends, in part, on the security of its airports,” Yates said. “The citizens of this district are entitled to law enforcement officers who obey the laws that they have sworn to enforce. The crimes with which Cook and Gregory are charged created a breach of security of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and betrayed the trust of millions of passengers who travel through this airport each year.”

Brian Lamkin, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta office, said investigations involving airport security breaches are a priority for the agency.   James Ward, special agent in charge of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, said that acts  of corruption within DHS, which oversees the TSA, “represent a threat to our nation.”

According to prosecutors and court records, beginning in January of this year, Cook and Gregory began misusing their positions as TSA officers to smuggle what they believed were illegal drugs through airport security.   To that end, Cook met with two men who were posing as drug cartel members but were actually undercover officers, federal prosecutors said.  In return for $3,500 in cash, Cook – wearing his TSA uniform – took possession of what he thought was three kilos of drugs and transported them through a security checkpoint, then delivered them to an undercover officer inside the terminal where he was paid an additional $4,000 in cash, according to federal prosecutors.

Two weeks later, Cook transported an additional three kilos of what he was told by an undercover officer was cocaine through another security checkpoint for another $7,500 in cash, prosecutors said.

Last February, Cook resigned from the TSA but allegedly recruited Gregory to assist in the drug smuggling operation and introduced him to an undercover agent masquerading as an international drug trafficker, prosecutors said.  That same month, Gregory allegedly received what he thought was 5 kilos of cocaine from the undercover officer and, in return for $5,000, transported the fake drugs through a TSA security checkpoint.

The two men could face life sentences and fines of up to $10 million if convicted, prosecutors said.

Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman is headed back to prison after a federal judge in Montgomery, Ala.,  sentenced him Friday to a 78-month prison term, the U.S. Justice Dept. announced late Friday.

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/August/12-crm-975.html

Siegelman – a Democrat who served as Alabama’s governor from 1999 to 2003  – was originally convicted in June 2006 of bribery, conspiracy, fraud and obstruction of justice charges associated with the prosecution of former HealthSouth CEO Richard M. Scrushy and began serving a federal prison term associated with those charges in June 2007, DOJ prosecutors in Washington said. But in March 2008, Siegelman was released on bond  pending his appeal.

Although Siegelman’s honest services fraud convictions were reversed, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th  Circuit upheld the five remaining counts, according to the DOJ.  The U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider the appeal.

Siegelman was convicted for his role in a scheme in which HealthSouth’s CEO paid $500,000 to Siegelman’s campaign for a state lottery fund in exchange for a seat on the state hospital regulatory board that had oversight of HealthSouth.  Scrushy had previously served on the board but was indicted along with Siegelman — shortly after Scrushy had been  acquitted of federal fraud, false corporate reporting charges  brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He later was convicted of his role in the bribery scheme and was sentenced to 82 months in federal prison.  Scrushy was released on July 25.

“Today’s sentence is another welcomed step toward closure to a dark chapter in Alabama politic,” said Louis Franklin, acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama.  “Six years after the trial jury rendered its verdict, and the appellate courts reviewed the evidence, former Governor Don Siegelman remains convicted for the serious felonious crimes he committed while serving as governor of Alabama. The verdict, the appellate review and the sentence have energized my faith in our legal system and renewed my commitment to prosecute politicians who commit bribery, honest services mail fraud, conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

A former lawyer, disbarred by the Supreme Court of Georgia in 2009,  was arrested today on charges that he stole money from clients while acting as their closing attorney in real estate transactions, according to federal prosecutors in Atlanta.

Neal Landers, 45, of Duluth, has been charged with wire fraud, money laundering, bank fraud and making false statements in connection with more than $1.5 million in funds that he is accused of siphoning from real estate transactions he handled.

“This defendant is charged with running a Ponzi scheme out of his law firm, often using the proceeds from real estate transactions for his own personal benefit rather than the business purpose for which they were intended,” said Sally Quillian Yates, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta.

According to federal prosecutors and a federal indictment, Landers – beginning in 2007 – misappropriated funds that were transferred to his escrow account for disbursement after property sales were closed.  According to the indictment, Landers should have disbursed the funds as soon as the sales were closed but, instead, disbursing the funds for weeks and sometimes months at a time. Landers then allegedly used the funds to pay parties in real estate deals that he had previously closed, according to the indictment.

The former lawyer has also been charged with  improperly transferring funds from his firm escrow account to his personal checking account to pay for a variety of personal expenses, federal prosecutors said.

Landers could face a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison and a fine as high as $1 million.

Federal judges in Atlanta have sentenced an employee with the U.S. Education Department in Atlanta and a former Navy seaman for their involvement – in unrelated cases – in the child pornography trade, federal prosecutors in Atlanta announced late today.

U.S. District Judge Thomas W. Thrash Jr. sentenced Joseph Butler, 66, of Clarkston – a career employee at the education department, to 10 years for collecting child pornography using his government computer, prosecutors said.

On Monday, U.S. District Chief Judge Julie E. Carnes sentenced former U. S. Navy seaman Spencer Duncan, 23, of Lawrenceville to six years and six months in prison.

According to U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates, Butler used his work computer at the Education Department to download child pornography from the Internet. Federal agents who searched Butler’s home as part of the child pornography investigation last year found CD-ROMs of child pornography he had downloaded while at work as well as a collection of stories he had written describing in graphic detail children having sex with adults and animals, prosecutors said.

In the other case, Duncan was caught after an undercover FBI agent downloaded sexually explicit photos of children from Duncan’s computer after he made his child pornography photo collection available on a peer-to-peer file sharing network on the Internet.

“These two cases,” Yates said, “illustrate the important point that consumers and purveyors of child pornography can be found everywhere. Both defendants had worked in service to our country and yet were collecting or distributing photographs of children being sexually abused.”

Both men will be required to register as sex offenders when they are released from federal prison.

Georgia State Attorney General Sam Olens has joined with the U.S. Justice Department and other state attorney generals across the nation in a civil complaint against the country’s five largest mortgage servicers that seeks a share of a $25 billion settlement, Olens announced Monday.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington , names as defendants Bank of America, Corp., JP Morgan Chase & Col, Wells Fargo & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Ally Financial Inc. . It alleges that the banks’ misconduct “resulted in the issuance of improper mortgages, premature and unauthorized foreclosures, violation of service members’ and other homeowners’ rights and protections, the use of false and deceptive affidavits and other documents, and the waste and abuse of taxpayer funds.”

The civil complaint is an effort by state attorneys general to secure for their states a portion of a $25 billion settlement that the banks reached with  the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last month.  The agreement ends multiple federal investigations involving allegations that the banks or their agents routinely signed foreclosure documents without knowing whether the information contained in the documents was correct.

For more information, see www.NationalForeclosureSettlement.com

The U.S. attorney in Atlanta has announced that federal prosecutors are reviewing a YouTube video of a brutal beating of a 20-year-old Atlanta man to see if prosecution of his attackers is warranted under federal hate crime statutes.

Calling the video – which went viral shortly after it was posted on YouTube Jan. 4 – “appalling  and unacceptable in our community”, Sally Quillian Yates, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said that federal prosecutors, along with the FBI and the Atlanta Police Department “are working to determine if the actions portrayed in the video violate federal law, including the hate crime statute.”

Yates said that the federal inquiry into “possible civil rights violations based on a person’s sexual orientation” is a priority of her office, as is combating violent gang activity in the long crime plagued Pittsburgh community near Turner Field where the beating took place. Yates urged anyone with information about the video and the beating it depicted to contact the FBI or Atlanta police.

Meanwhile, the beating victim has called a noon news conference today to tell his story. He was identified as a “black gay youth” in a news release issued by the H.I.P. HIV Intervention Project in Atlanta.  Calling the recording of the beating a “video of hate,” the intervention project news release stated, “We are in horror of the violent community act against an innocent young black same gender loving youth in the City of Atlanta… .”

The news conference – scheduled for noon at the city community center at the corner of Georgia Avenue and Hill Street, coincides with Tuesday’s National Black HIV/Aids Awareness Day.  National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day was founded by five national organizations more than a decade ago to encourage a national HIV testing and treatment initiative that focused on black communities.

To see video of the beating go to http://www.cbsatlanta.com/story/16690315/video-shows-gang-members-beating-gay-man.

Pictures from the 2/8/12 press conference by Brandon White, person self-identified as being the beating victim in the YouTube video, are on the Daily Report’s Facebook page.

U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson has written a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. asking him to revisit a decision by the U.S. Justice Department to close the Atlanta office of its Antitrust Division.

In a letter dated Feb. 1, Johnson, a DeKalb County Democrat, said that the DOJ’s current plan to consolidate the  Antitrust Division’s offices in other cities – including Chicago, San Francisco and Washington – “wastes money.” He suggests, instead, that Antitrust staff and cases be consolidated  in  Atlanta “if the Department intends to maintain enforcement levels and save costs through consolidation.”

Johnson said that not only would Atlanta be a less expensive venue than other cities that will maintain antitrust offices, but it is “critical” because Atlanta is an international business hub—“the Capital of the South and the gateway to the world” with an antitrust bar “well-recognized by lawyers and jurists throughout the United States and the globe.”

Johnson dismissed the DOJ’s prediction that it would save $8  million from an anticipated 50 percent attrition rate for employees at offices slated to close who decline a transfer to one of the other cities.

“In the alternative, the Department may be left shorthanded – and have to wait for the end of hiring freezes to replace departing staff with new, untrained employees” in other cities that have higher pay scales than Atlanta, Johnson wrote.

“Not only will 26 employees in the Atlanta Office alone, lose their jobs if they are not able to transfer, but the reorganization as proposed will mean that the entire southern half of the United States will have no criminal antitrust enforcers who are familiar with these geographic regions, markets, businesses, the Courts and antitrust bar,” he wrote. “The Department would likely see diminished deterrence as a result and its actions would give credence to the old adage that out of sight means out of mind.”

A PDF of Rep. Johnson’s letter is viewable here.