Episode 69: Indicted in New Orleans – The LaToya Cantrell Case

Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the Overruled podcast, brought to you by the Scott Vicknair Law Firm. I am your co-host, David Vicknair, along with my good friend, co-host, and law partner, Brad Scott. Brad, good afternoon. Good afternoon, David, how are you? Are you ready to talk about Mayor Cantrell? Oof, we’re going to rip the Band-Aid off this one, aren’t we? Let’s do it. It’s a big news item. Eleven federal indictment charges issued against LaToya Cantrell. Just for those who maybe are out of state and don’t know who LaToya Cantrell is, who’s LaToya Cantrell, David? LaToya’s been the mayor of the city since, I believe, 2016. She was elected, or 2017 she was elected. She’s in her last term this year, so she’s been a re-elected.

She had one initial four-year term, was re-elected to a second four-year term. A lot of controversy surrounding her tenure, especially in the second term. There was a recall effort, effort to recall her, which failed on technicalities, on technicalities. Some votes just a bunch of recall ballots just accidentally like 80, whatever thousand, I forgot, we did an episode on it, were illegally turned in even though they were all signed in, they were left in a box. It was a lot of random accidental things like that happened in the recall effort. A lot of controversy over her continued travel, flying first class, trying to get the city to pay for her first class travel, said she didn’t feel safe in coach. I don’t blame her. And she’s been a lot of fights with the city council over the years and there’ve been rumors of her, rumors of her getting indicted related to her bodyguard or her public, one of the police officers assigned to protect her. I think the cred-du-vo, infamously named Jeffrey Vappy, the bodyguard, after the Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner movie. But in any event, she has had, been rumored to have an intimate relationship with him. He was indicted separately, was it four or five months ago, Jeffrey Vappy was indicted by the US Attorney’s office for mail fraud and wire fraud and conspiracy, I believe, to commit wire fraud, related to submitting timesheets and overtime sheets for fraudulent timesheets.

Public work, which there was evidence that he was not working either at the Pontabla, which is an apartment in the French Quarter by the St. Louis Cathedral, spending time with the mayor, not on the clock, but still submitting timesheets and getting paid for it with public money, that’s a big no-no. So he was separately under federal indictment, but he has been re-indicted by the grand jury this past Friday, along with Mayor Cantrell. And so that’s the quick, I guess, two-minute background. That’s the background. So now the city of New Orleans is now facing its first sitting mayor to be federally indicted on fraud charges. And it’s, you know, the first time I heard this, and it’s like, goddamn, is politics, you know, politics as usual, same old crap in the city of New Orleans.

So it’s another major black eye for the city in our long-standing, you know, issues with corruption and that kind of stuff. So, so tell us about the charges. What, what exactly has she been charged with? Let’s kind of get that out of the way, and she’s facing up to 20 years in prison potentially if all counts stick. Give us a little bit of the background of the charges, then we can kind of get into why this keeps happening to us, it seems. Yes, her 11 charges, which the grand jury indicted, are on six counts of wire fraud. So, indictment related to her use of a wire to commit fraud, to communicate the fraud. One count on conspiracy, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, also indicted on conspiracy to obstruct justice. The main thrust of the claim or the case that the US Attorney’s office and the grand jury has indicted her on, appears to surround approximately $70,000 worth of money that the indictment alleges she was using to spend on travel aside from her necessary work travel, to spend personal time with Jeffrey Vappy, her, police protector, bodyguard, whatever you may call him. And why do you think they’re going after her for $70,000? It doesn’t seem like a whole lot. I mean, any dollar of public funds used improperly is bad, but she seems to have poked a lot of people in the eye, don’t you think?

Yeah, I read a lot of the reaction from some of the, for those who don’t know, like white-collar defense lawyers, would be like lawyers who specialize in non-violent federal charges. And there’s a wide array of opinions on both sides of the spectrum. Shocker, a bunch of lawyers, we all have opinions. Some view this as, as petty. You know, $70,000 being like a zip on the size of New Orleans. They’re going to spend more than that prosecuting her. A hundred percent on the budget. And I find it very interesting because a lot of the investigation that, or at least what was rumored, because a lot, obviously the grand jury is like very confidential, and you cannot find information about who’s on the grand jury, like you can’t find out what happens in the grand jury. Not to get political, but like everything going on with Jeffrey Epstein, that’s been a big thing that the president, President Trump has demanded that, you know, we need the Jeffrey Epstein grand jury files and evidence and all the things. Not to be political on that sense. But that’s probably never going to happen. Because a part of our process, yes. Because a part of our process, the grand jury is incredibly confidential so that those people who, in many cases, they serve on a grand jury up to six months. And the judge can extend a grand jury service to like up to 18 months.

So these are like, you, you know, your wife, who’s a teacher, or, a doctor, or whatever it is. Like, it’s a family member, like taking out of their job, and they have to serve on that grand jury and hear different cases. Every Friday or so, I think the Eastern District does it, maybe other every other Friday, and they hear evidence and then after they’ve seen enough evidence and heard enough testimony, they bring it to a vote and the grand jury votes to indict or not. There’s like this old legal joke that like it’s easier, like it’s easy to like a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich, is that the joke? Yes. A baloney sandwich is so easy to get an indictment from the grand jury because, you know, the US attorney really gets to put their whole case on. It’s a one-sided case. Correct. There’s no like real defense at that stage. But, they have been presenting evidence to this grand jury for a while. At least since they indicted Jeffrey Vappy and the separate unrelated case. This is not something that happened overnight. Correct. And I think I do think the indictment, my personal perspective on it is like the indictment is so narrowly tailored and like it didn’t include other things that were rumored to have been in the investigation. For example, there’s a city contractor, Jeffrey Forell, I think his name was.

I forgot the guy’s name. And there was all these allegations and, you know, if the paper got it, like it was coming from somewhere, it was like leaks from the US Attorney’s office or whatever, people on the inside who knew where the US attorneys go have drinks at and find out after they’ve had, you know, what they’re investigating, what’s the scope of the investigation. There were all these rumors that they were investigating him, allegedly using Saints tickets and things like that to bribe the mayor to like relax city permitting standards and things like that. None of that made its way into the indictment. This one. This one. Lot of discussion over allegations that have been out there that she had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, illegally, or in violation of campaign finance laws to do makeup and wardrobe that was not like in the narrow definition of how campaign funds can be used. And subpoenas being issued to all those vendors, right? Like that’s a good way to indicate and at least have an idea of like, where is the US attorney’s office investigation going, where are they issuing subpoenas?

And that like, you can see where the subpoenas are going. And that didn’t make it in this indictment. No allegations related to that. And so what they’ve really kind of narrowly tailored it to is everything related to her and Jeffrey Vappy and the alleged misuse of public funds for the travel. And I think, no different than like what me and you talk about all the time, right? The US Attorney’s office has like, you were telling me before we got on the show, 90 plus percent conviction rate. It’s like almost 98%. Yes. I think I want to say 98, but it’s, it’s north of 90%. So if they take a case and they’re going to push it forward, they want to win it. They think they can win it. And they were embarrassed publicly by our friend Jason Williams. Yes. A case they never should have brought in my opinion. It was a terrible case, that tax case against Jason, was a political vendetta, I feel very strongly about that, irrespective of what you think about Jason as a DA. And they lost and they had egg on their face. And they looked like idiots and they didn’t, they could not have proved that case. But if you’re going to indict a sitting mayor, you better have the goods to prove it. And so I think they brought the charges they knew they could prove. And I hate to say it, but I think a lot of this is her. I hate. I don’t hate to say it, I’ll just say what I think. A lot of this was her own doing. You know, allegedly, she deleted thousands of WhatsApp messages, thinking like that the US Attorney’s office and the federal government wouldn’t get a subpoena.

Yeah, they don’t have the power to see deletion history. Yeah, they don’t have the power to see deletion history and get a subpoena out to that company and know like. They tried to cover it up. And then try to cover it up. And we will never know, right? What she allegedly, I think she testified to the grand jury, but the allegations are that she obstructed justice by trying to delete files from the WhatsApp messaging and then lied under oath to the grand jury. We know. And that’s one of the charges in this indictment. It is. Yeah. And they have a lot of the messages in this indictment where her and Jeffrey Vappy, not only publicly denied having any level of intimate relationship, but I believe in some under oath statements, denied it, which is alleged. They didn’t go as far like to try to indict her on perjury, but they’re using that as like the overall scheme to obstruct justice and cover up the misuse of public funds. And like we always look about, a lot of times the cover-up is always worse than the actual crime when you try to cover things up. So they’re going to hang her on some of this stuff. It seems. You know, I don’t think they’d be moving forward with unless they thought they really had a great case. And like we said, the conviction rate is so damn high with these things. Obviously, she’s not going to have a trial date before she comes out of office. This is something that’s going to be in the news probably a lot next year. Next spring time, we’ll likely hear a lot more from this stuff.

But, you know, it kind of begs the question, why does this stuff keep happening in New Orleans? We’ve had a long history of this stuff. We had Ray Nagin as a mayor also who also got indicted and did jail time. But even, I mean, the, the ridiculousness of this is we have an election coming up and one of the people running for the mayor’s office is of course, Oliver Thomas, who had his own problems with being indicted in federal charges. And here we are again, potentially considering somebody for a public office in New Orleans, who has a history of being, you know, criminal activity potentially. So why is it that we keep getting these people in these positions in the city of New Orleans, to keep having these black eyes? And one of the stats I saw was, you know, a refresher for me when LaToya ran for re-election, only 20% of the registered voters even showed up to vote her back into office. So is there some level of voter apathy out there and us just expecting less, and we just keep getting less? What keeps causing this? What do you think? I don’t know. I mean, back when she ran for office, there was like some belief that she, you know, there was a belief that she was like a reformer and not susceptible to corruption. Which I think everybody was just coming off of the Ray Nagin thing, which was like an open and shut case for the US Attorney’s office.

Like they had all the goods that he had like really committed public bribery and accepted money in exchange for everything that he was indicted and convicted of. But, I think with this particular case, you know, there was a lot of questions I saw, on, one of the news casts covering this whenever the indictment was issued. And really like asking some of the federal prosecutor, former federal prosecutors who were on air, like, did LaToya’s conduct lead to the US Attorney’s office pushing this indictment? And by that, I mean, it’s like she doubled down at every stage. She did. And it was like, she got caught using first class travel and instead of lying and coach, like, why not just apologize and say, you know what? This is my responsibility to refund the city and do it. She caused a fight with the city council and she publicly, like declared that she needed to be in first class. Which if she wanted to fly first class is her choice. She can pay for the upgrade. Just and there’s like all these city rules that allow for her to do that. And then it became a fight for her to finally refund that. And then it was like the same thing with all these conventions that she was going to, which clearly had no connectivity whatsoever to her role as the mayor and she just kept doing it. And she’s still doing it. She just went, I saw that she went to some clean energy summit in like Bangladesh. Like what does that have to do with the city of New Orleans and her last three months of being the mayor here? And so, I just think with her, it was like all those things. There was the neighbor who took the photo of her, and instead of like just letting it go that the neighbor took a photo of her and Jeffrey Vappy sitting on the balcony, heaven, wine together.

She sued her. She goes after her. And then she loses the lawsuit down here in Civil District Court and the judge awards the neighbor attorney fees against LaToya. And instead of like taking the L, she appeals to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, loses the appeal and then vows she’s going to take it to the Supreme Court, who’s never going to grant that writ. I’m going to go out on a limb and say they’re probably not going to grant that writ. They doubt it. And so they have discretionary power over civil writs like that. So it was like everything was like that with her. And it was like she kept poking the US Attorney’s office, who she probably already knew from her lawyers, because she had hired a defense lawyer a year or two ago. She knew they were investigating her, they were subpoenaing people and it was actually that video camera that the French Market Corporation owns down there by the St. Louis Cathedral, which is like, that’s what did her in. Would did her in? Because Lee Zirik got wind of this, he issued a subpoena for that video and then all of a sudden he’s got this video showing Jeffrey Vappy going into the Pontabla, and then he’s got the timesheets, which he issues a foa request to the city for. And he’s charging the city for the time that he’s in the Pontabla with the mayor. And the Pontabla is now the great example. It’s a city-owned apartment. And everybody’s like, hey, you shouldn’t be living in the Pontabla, that’s kind of potentially an illegal use of the Pontabla, that’s on shorter territory. She just kept living at the Pontabla.

And so it’s like everything she kept poking and poking and poking, and I’m like, you just begging the Feds to charge you. And I think that her own, I do think her own refusal to just self-correct, even though it shouldn’t practically play into the law, it does sometimes. And in this particular case, I think it played a big role in motivating the US Attorney’s office to pursue an indictment against her. Because I don’t think the stuff they were really trying to get her for turned up much. I think they were really trying to get her on bribery with the contractor. I think they were really trying to get into like, was she illegally using campaign funds for her wardrobe and all those things and they didn’t put any of that in this indictment. Which means they didn’t come up with anything they felt they could win on. And so ultimately, what ended up in the indictment. They still want her. And these are the things they think they can get her on. They know they can get her. Just like we go back to who was the mob guy. Remember? Yes. Was it Capone? They couldn’t get him on anything but mail fraud. Mail fraud. Tax fraud. They caught him on a tax violation. They didn’t get him on any of the murders, any of the. Of course, LaToya didn’t murder anybody or anything like that, but they didn’t get Al Capone on any of the real stuff.

They still got him. They the suspected that he was involved in and they couldn’t prove it. But they got him on some innocuous like. So it’s kind of begs the question, because we’ve had this systemic issue with corruption, what, you know, time after time. So, and like you mentioned, when she came in after Ray Nagin, people were looking for somebody to come in and be a reformer. The question is, do these people come in with these ill intents when they’re coming into office, or do we have a system that kind of fosters and festers these problems and the way the system is like built in our city. Because I mean, you look at the amount of money that goes through the mayor’s office and they might have contracts they get to allocate, you know, you’re putting a lot of power in that seat, in that mayor’s seat, which inherently is going to put them potentially in, you know, situations where they may have to, you know, make some moral decisions. And money a lot of times pushes them in certain directions. And then you see something like, you know, the office of an Inspector General, that was created after Katrina, to kind of root out corruption and things like that. Well, during, you know, the Cantrell administration’s, during their administration, that budget got slashed.

Yeah. So, you know, the safeguards that we’ve tried to put in place are now not there anymore. So it’s almost it kind of begs the question, do we need to change the system and things that we have in place to kind of stop this stuff from continuing to happen? You know, stopping us from having a black eye in the nation. And, you know, one of the, you know, we have a population that’s declining. We don’t have businesses growing and moving here. We got the opposite, people are leaving here, businesses are leaving as well. So if we want to do something for our kids, we really got to start investing time. Like I said, one in five people showed up to the vote in that re-election. So until the voters stop papping at, stop having apathy towards the situation, I don’t think we’re going to see much difference. You know, it kind of starts with us and demanding more from our politicians, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think for, it’s a fair point, but I think for her, and in this particular situation, like we all have egos. This was a clear mismanagement of her ego. Like she has, she has the city attorney. The city attorney has a whole city attorney’s office for those who don’t know.

And so there’s a primary city attorney and other attorneys who work for the city, and they’re there to serve the mayor, and the mayor’s office, and the city. And I think they can give her legal opinions. Her advisors can use the city attorney’s office, they can collaborate with the city council. And it really just kind of came, became this thing that she developed like this monolithic mindset where it was like, she was going to find the legal opinion, she wanted to do what she wanted, and she wouldn’t even like, it became so acerbic that she wasn’t, I don’t think she’s even been talking to the city council. They’re always like fighting and the city council is fighting to strip more authority from the mayor’s office. It becomes like a monarchy basically. And became, it became this constant battle, and I think staying away from the politics of why that all happened, because I have no idea. I think it did contribute to her indictment, because I think that it was like double down, double down, double down, double down, and the US like the US Attorney’s office has like, look, they’re like looking to put a skin on the wall. And the mayor of New Orleans is like a big skin on the wall for them. Right down the street from the, what is it, five hundred quarters they’re at.

And she kept begging them and up until, I really think like six or seven months ago, she kind of went silent right before Jeffrey Vappy was indicted. And that at least became clear to me that it was like an external signal that maybe she’s listening to her lawyer now. And trying to be silent. But I think she’d be a. She stopped digging the hole. She stopped digging the hole. What’s the first rule of holes? Stop digging. And I just, I think she’s probably going to be, you know, one of the legal commenters I saw talking about it. And I kind of like generally inclined to agree, she’s going to be, got to have been a really difficult client for her Peter Castan and so forth. As far as like listening to the advice, he can’t talk about the advice he’s given her, but I can’t imagine she’s very good. I can only imagine the conversations that they’ve had and a refusal to probably do the, you know, not every client wants to listen to the things that we tell them or suggest. And I think that her ego has kind of goaded the US attorney’s office in this indictment. And I, I’m not like trying to de-minimize the miss potential misuse of $70,000.

But in the grand scheme of things, this is it’s not usually something they would go after. No. And I think that, you know, this would be more of an inspector general type investigation, like, hey, you’re bringing family members along on this travel, like, you need to pay us back. You owe us this much back. No different than they handled the first class travel. Like, hey, you charged us all to the city. But and she did pat the payback. She did. She ultimately did I think did pay all that back. And so this would typically be like an inspector general, regulatory oversight kind of thing. Oversight type of thing. Say you owe us this money back. But I ultimately, but I think what tipped it over the edge from my perspective, was the cover-up. Like you said, the cover-ups always worse than the crime. If she had come clean with them, if she had not lied to the grand jury, allegedly lied to the grand jury, we don’t know. Yes. Well, let’s make sure we, we have no inside information on this. What they alleged is she deleted all these messages and that she lied to the grand jury, which amounted to obstruction of justice. And so I doubt with any of that, without any of that, they would have brought an indictment against her and Vappy saying that she aided and abetted him in the in the payroll fraud.

They probably would have just indicted him for payroll fraud. Yeah. And clearly they indicted Vappy at the beginning, not only because he probably committed payroll fraud. I mean, you look at the evidence, he leaves, Zirk’s got the invoices right here, when he built for time. Lee built that case. Yeah. And then the video of him, him not working, like that’s a pretty hard case for him to win, Vappy. But I think besides that being payroll fraud, you know how the Feds work, they indict the lower level person that they can get. And they wait for him to flip, or him or her to flip and get them everything they want against somebody higher. Which will be interesting to see if he toes the line or what happens with him. Apparently, he hasn’t, I mean, my guess is he hasn’t flipped yet because if he had flipped and given them something bigger, there would be more breadth to this indictment and more charges they would have brought, rather than what they actually have in this indictment, which is basically that she aided and abetted and embedded him in the in the payroll fraud. Yeah. And it’s a pity back on the Vappy indictment, 100%. And that she then deleted things and lied and tried to obstruct justice in the investigation of the Vappy indictment. And so it doesn’t appear to me, even though I’m not like a white collar defense lawyer, it doesn’t appear to me, everything I’ve read, looked at, and researched to discuss this, that he’s flipped on her yet. We’ll see. The time will tell. I don’t know. I mean, it’s going to be interesting. I just, they clearly don’t have her on corruption and they, for and like the contractor that they were going down that route, and they clearly don’t have her on the other stuff they were investigating. Now, whether or not they get her, I don’t know.

You know how the Feds are. I mean, they’ll wait, they’ll run this indictment as long as they need and indict other people as they learn along the way to get them to flip and build up their case. Case builds over time. But it doesn’t always work. I know. But I think this is kind of the first punch. I think there’s a lot more to come, possibly. I mean, you take the case against Jason, they tried to get people to, they pressured people to say things that did not happen. Yeah. Okay. I know that. I know they tried to pressure witnesses to say things that were not true to indict, and convict Jason. And they didn’t have the evidence to prove the case that he knowingly committed tax fraud, the bookkeeper had been convicted and admitted and pled and cut a deal. But, and so, I’m assuming that they will try to build a similar case here against her, which is get other people, potentially lesser involved people, and indict them to get them to get immunity and then testify. Yeah. And see what happens. So it’s going to be interesting. It’s, yeah, it’s see how it shakes out. And New Orleans is not alone.

I mean, there’s many major cities, Detroit, DC, Baltimore, San Diego. They’ve all had problems with mayors getting indicted. Most of the time this happens after they’re out of office, though. So this is, this is interesting twist here is that she is still in office while she’s facing a federal indictment. So we have a sitting mayor who’s got to finish out her term under, you know, what’s going on now in federal court down the street. So, we’ll see how it plays out, but it’s definitely a news story we’ll keep up with. She is back at work this week, I read that. So she’s still working. The, the other the closest corollary I could find, Brad, is there was a mayor, I believe it was in Nashville, Tennessee. A mayor, similar situation, she was caught in a personal relationship with another public official. I don’t think she was ever indicted. Because she ultimately resigned and didn’t run for re-election and kind of like, I think that the federal, there was no real investigation or indictment in that situation because she had resigned. But, it is going to be interesting to see where the, where the indictment and the charges go. And I expect her to come out fighting. That’s been her kind of her MO since the beginning. So it’ll be fun to watch. How long do you think the case will take before it gets to trial? That’s a good. That’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t keep up with those federal trials enough to know how quickly they can move them, but, you know, anything in federal court usually moves pretty fast.

I do think they wouldn’t have brought, like, I hate people.

I have already had some people asking me, like, do you think she’s going to be convicted? Like, whatever. 90 plus percent chance that she will. 90 plus percent chance. It’s so early, but like, I do think they tailored this so narrowly that they’re going to get her because they’ve got they’ve got Vapi. They’ve got him on the on the on the on payroll fraud, on, you know, public payroll fraud. They’ve got the bills and they have evidence that he wasn’t working at that time and then they’ve got all the messages. I think they’re going to I think if they lose on all the other counts against her, they’re going to get her on obstruction. Yes. And because they’re going to be able to prove that she covered, deleted things and probably lied under oath. And that’s, that’s enough in itself. Enough to get her own, like one charge or two charges and we’ll see what the sentencing is on that. Hopefully, you know, you never want somebody to go to prison for a long period of time, especially when they’re like a non-violent white collar offender and she’s got a daughter. And so I, the human side of me is like, I don’t want her to go to prison forever. And I don’t think they really got her on what a lot of the things they thought they were going to get her on. So it’s going to be interesting to watch, but it’s not really a good look for us as a city, is it? It’s another black eye.

Yeah. So, anyhoo, interesting topic, interesting story to follow. I’m sure we’ll do a follow-up episode discussing the legal aspects of it as the case progresses, but we’re in the early stages. We’re like three days past an indictment and it’s national. I mean, I’m seeing things show up on social media now that, you know, they’re making fun of this situation. Yeah. Not good. But we do have a mayor election coming up. So hopefully everybody pays attention to that election and really gets engaged and asks questions and learns about each of the candidates and that we get a really good, new mayor in place for them. Absolutely incredible American city. So. Thank you all. Thanks Brad. Great topic. We’ll be back to talk more about this as the latoya cantrell indictment and case progresses. And thank you to our listeners for watching and listening along. This has been another episode of the Overruled podcast brought to you by the Scott Vicknair Law firm. This is David Vicknair, my law partner and co-host Brad Scott signing off. See you next time. Take care. Information is for illustrative purposes only and does not constitute tax, investment, or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified investment, legal, or tax professional before taking any action.