Archive for August 15th, 2025

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#150 in a series)

Friday, August 15th, 2025

150 of these, and we have a good one for number 150.

LaToya Cantrell, the mayor of New Orleans, has been indicted on Federal charges.

The indictment accuses Cantrell of a slate of crimes including wire fraud, conspiracy to obstruct justice, false statements, obstruction of justice and lying to a federal grand jury.

Also indicted: Jeffrey Vappie, who was a former New Orleans Police Department officer, the mayor’s bodyguard, and apparently her boyfriend. He had previously been indicted in 2024, but the grand jury issued a “superseding indictment” against him.

Here’s a list of the allegations against them:

Count 1: Conspiracy
Counts 2-13: Wire Fraud
Count 14: Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice
Count 15: False Statements
Count 16: Obstruction of Justice
Count 17 and 18: False Declaration Before Grand Jury

More from WWL TV:

The indictment alleges that Latoya Cantrell, the Mayor of New Orleans, and Jeffrey Paul Vappie, a member of her Executive Protection Unit (EPU), developed a personal relationship in October 2021. To conceal their relationship and maximize their time together, they allegedly created a scheme to defraud the City of New Orleans by engaging in personal activities while Vappie was on duty and being paid for providing protection.
As part of the scheme, it is alleged that Cantrell had Vappie accompany her on at least 14 out-of-state trips, falsely claiming she needed protection for safety concerns. These trips reportedly cost the City of New Orleans over $70,000, not including Cantrell’s own travel expenses. The indictment also claims that Vappie and Cantrell used a city-owned apartment in the Pontalba Building for personal use, with Vappie frequently spending time there while on duty.
The document states that Cantrell and Vappie took several actions to impede inquiries and a federal grand jury investigation into their relationship and scheme. These actions included:

Using an encrypted messaging platform
Deleting electronic evidence
Making false statements to federal law enforcement agents and a federal grand jury
Lying to colleagues and making false public statements

More:

The indictment caps a federal investigation of Cantrell, first reported by WWL Louisiana in 2022. A grand jury started hearing the evidence from federal prosecutors in February 2024 and returned an indictment last September against building inspector Randy Farrell, charging him with conspiring to bribe Cantrell with about $9,000 in gifts in 2019, including NFC Championship Game tickets, a lunch at Ruth’s Chris steakhouse and a cell phone, in exchange for causing the firing of a city official who had been investigating Farrell for alleged fraud.

The WWL story also includes the full indictment.

As noted in the press coverage, Ms. Cantrell is actually the first sitting mayor of New Orleans to be indicted. Ray Nagin was indicted, convicted, and did time, but that was after he left office.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Noted.

Friday, August 15th, 2025

A while back, I wrote, in the context of the Connor Stalions “sign stealing” scandal:

Realistically, if this is substantiated, I suspect major loss of scholarships, a ban on post-season play, and possibly for Harbaugh to get a “show-cause penalty“.

The NCAA has handed down their penalty. No post-season ban, and no wins erased, but Michigan is getting hit with fines “that could eclipse $30 million”.

The NCAA also imposed an additional game suspension for coach Sherrone Moore, which will be served for the first game of the 2026 season. Moore is expected to serve a two-game suspension in the upcoming season, which ESPN reported in May that the university proposed to self-impose. He also received a two-year show-cause penalty.

…

The NCAA committee also levied an eight-year show-cause penalty for former Michigan staffer Connor Stalions and a 10-year show-cause for ex-coach Jim Harbaugh, who is now in the NFL. Those essentially act as barriers to schools hiring them in the future. Harbaugh’s new 10-year show-cause penalty will not begin until after he serves a current four-year show-cause from a previous NCAA case.

…

The size of the fine is expected to be considerable, although a finite amount will not be immediately available. It includes a $50,000 initial levy, 10% of the football budget, 10% of the cost of football scholarships for the 2025 season, and the loss of all postseason competition revenue sharing for the 2025 and 2026 seasons. That sum could easily eclipse $30 million.
Though there are variables on how much teams get from football postseason revenue, sources expect that number alone based on past Big Ten income and projections to be more than $20 million. Some of that will depend on the performance of both Michigan and the Big Ten. The football budget in 2024 was more than $70 million, which means the amount is likely to be at least $7 million for that part of the fine, depending on updated budgets.

Also, Denard Robinson, who is a former assistant coach, got a three year “show cause” for what are apparently unrelated recruiting violations.

Michigan and its coaches and staffers were charged with six Level 1 violations in the sign-stealing case, which are the most serious. The decision to fine the school heavily but not issue a penalty such as a postseason ban indicates a shift in NCAA enforcement rulings away from postseason prohibitions.

Posted in Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 15, 2025.

Friday, August 15th, 2025

Gerry Spence, legendary lawyer and author. He was 96.

Among the people he defended or represented: Karen Silkwood.

She had died in 1974 in a car crash on her way to talk to a reporter about flaws in safety practices in the production of plutonium at a Kerr-McGee plant in Oklahoma, where she had worked and become contaminated. Representing her family in their suit claiming negligence, Mr. Spence won $10.5 million in damages. (The case was later settled for $1.38 million — about $6.6 million today.)

Randy Weaver.

While rejecting Mr. Weaver’s racist beliefs, Mr. Spence argued that his client had acted in self-defense and raised doubts about whose bullet had killed the agent. The jury acquitted Mr. Weaver of all major charges but convicted him of failing to appear at a 1991 weapons trial. He was sentenced to time served; Mr. Spence did not appeal.

Imelda Marcos.

The 1990 New York racketeering trial of Mrs. Marcos made headlines for months. Prosecutors produced thousands of pages of bank records, telexes, receipts, memos, contracts and reports, calling them a trail of thievery. But Mr. Spence broke through with simplicity, calling his client “a lonely widow” and “a small, fragile woman” whose only crime was being “a world-class shopper.” She was found innocent.

…

Mr. Spence often boasted that he had never lost a criminal case with a jury trial, as either a defense lawyer or a prosecutor, and that he had not lost a civil case since 1969. That was not actually true, but it was not far off. He was known to lose now and then, and several of his notable civil verdicts were overturned on appeal.
But in the tradition of Perry Mason, he seemed unbeatable — not only to courtroom foes but also to lawyers who attended his seminars, and to Americans who read his best-selling books and tuned in to his television programs and network commentaries, most notably on the O.J. Simpson murder case.

I remember seeing a “60 Minutes” profile of him some years back. I can’t find that now, but there’s a two-part interview with him on the ‘Tube.

Masaoki Sen. He was 102.

Mr. Sen was best known for serving as the 15th-generation grand master of the Urasenke, one of the three main schools of Japan’s tea ceremony. After inheriting the role from his father in 1964, he used it as a platform to promote peace, often while speaking of his own experiences during the war.
Traveling the world to engage in a sort of tea-ceremony diplomacy, Mr. Sen used the ancient art, whose roots lie in Zen Buddhism, to call for an end to all wars. He was known for the phrase “peacefulness through a bowl of tea.”

He was also a former kamikaze pilot.

After leaving Doshisha University in 1943 he was drafted to the Imperial Navy, where he trained to be a pilot. When his unit was asked to form a “special attack” squadron to carry out suicide missions, Mr. Sen was one of the volunteers.
“I thought I was ready to die,” Mr. Sen said in a 2021 interview with a Japanese newspaper. “But I was just a greenhorn of 20 or 21 years of age. I didn’t know what death meant.”
While many young men in his unit flew off to ram their aircraft into Allied ships, Mr. Sen was never sent. Historians say the Japanese military often spared the oldest sons, especially from historically significant households.
After the war, Mr. Sen asked a former commander why he was never sent. The older man answered: “Just think of it as fate.”
Unlike many war veterans, Mr. Sen spoke openly of his experiences and sorrow for comrades who never returned. He also made no effort to disguise his anger toward his nation’s leaders who sent them on one-way missions.
“We were told to die because others would fill our ranks,” he said in another interview. “But who wants to die?”

Posted in Books, History, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Reminder.

Friday, August 15th, 2025

The Catholic Church has more compassion for people who have died by suicide than science fiction fandom.

Posted in Religion | Comments Closed