Tag: new orleans

New Evidence Emerges Against Indicted Democrat Mayor of New Orleans in Corruption Case

A superseding federal indictment has unveiled new evidence against New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, a Democrat already facing corruption allegations, and former NOPD officer Jeffrey Vappie. 

Prosecutors now claim the two engaged in a years-long fraud scheme that misused city funds to conceal their romantic relationship and bankroll luxury travel.

According to the filing, Cantrell and Vappie exchanged more than 15,000 WhatsApp messages, photos, and audio clips in just eight months. 

During that period, they coordinated at least 14 domestic and international trips, racking up more than $70,000 in travel expenses billed to the city.

Vappie allegedly claimed on-duty hours during the trips, while serving on Cantrell’s executive protection detail, even though prosecutors say much of the travel was personal.

The indictment goes further, alleging that Cantrell and Vappie used WhatsApp not just for personal communication but also to intimidate subordinates, harass a private citizen, delete records, and mislead investigators. 

Federal prosecutors say the pair attempted to obstruct justice by concealing evidence and offering false testimony to a federal grand jury.

Cantrell herself is accused of abusing her office to protect Vappie from scrutiny. 

Prosecutors allege she pressured then-Interim NOPD Superintendent Michelle Woodfork to halt an internal probe into Vappie, despite findings that raised concerns. 

Cantrell also allegedly demanded Vappie’s reassignment to her security detail, even after red flags had been raised, and concealed responsive WhatsApp records from a grand jury subpoena.

The 18-count indictment represents an escalation of a case that has dogged Cantrell for months, combining allegations of fraud, obstruction, and misuse of public funds. 

While Vappie previously entered a not-guilty plea, Cantrell has consistently denied wrongdoing and accused her critics of political motivation.

Still, the mounting evidence paints a damaging picture for the city’s top official. 

The indictment details patterns of excessive travel, manipulation of police resources, and alleged efforts to sidestep accountability. 

For residents of New Orleans, the charges revive long-standing concerns about corruption in City Hall and misuse of taxpayer money.

Cantrell, who first took office in 2018, has faced growing criticism in recent years over crime, public safety, and fiscal management.

 This latest legal development adds to those pressures, with prosecutors signaling they intend to make the mayor’s conduct central to the corruption case.

If convicted, Cantrell could face severe penalties, and the scandal could reshape the political landscape in New Orleans, where faith in city leadership has already eroded.

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Democrat Mayor Caught in Fraud—And She’s Not Alone

Corruption in Democrat-run cities is sadly familiar, but the federal indictment of New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell is historic and deeply troubling.

A grand jury has charged Cantrell with dozens of felony counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to obstruct justice, obstruction of justice, and making false statements. 

This marks the first time in New Orleans’ history that a sitting mayor has faced criminal prosecution, an unprecedented low point for a city already plagued by crime and mismanagement.

The indictment paints a picture of systematic abuse of office. At the center of the case is Cantrell’s relationship with Jeffrey Paul Vappie, a member of her executive protection unit who prosecutors say developed an “intimate and personal relationship” with her in late 2021. 

According to federal prosecutors, Cantrell and Vappie knowingly devised a scheme to defraud the city, with Vappie falsely claiming to be “on duty” while accompanying the mayor on at least 14 trips outside Louisiana, including international travel. 

These trips, totaling over $70,000 in taxpayer-funded expenses, were not legitimate city business—they were personal excursions disguised as official duties.

The indictment goes further, charging Cantrell with a dozen counts of wire fraud. Prosecutors allege she obtained money and property “by means of false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises.” 

In plain terms, Cantrell is accused of using her office to enrich herself and those close to her at the expense of the taxpayers. 

If an ordinary citizen stole $70,000 from the government, they would face years in prison. The law should not bend simply because the accused sits in city hall.

Equally alarming are the obstruction-related charges. Prosecutors allege that Cantrell conspired to obstruct justice, made false statements, and even delivered a false declaration before a grand jury. 

These are not minor lapses—they are serious felonies aimed at concealing misconduct and undermining the justice system itself. A public official who lies under oath not only betrays the people but attacks the very foundation of accountability in government.

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‘How does this happen?’ Power outages plunge major U.S. city into darkness after months of warnings

New Orleans was plunged into darkness on Sunday afternoon when the region’s grid operator cut off power to reduce usage, a “last resort” measure to prevent a large-scale blackout, according to Nola.com, a local news outlet.

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), a major electrical grid operator, directed the energy company Entergy to reduce power with only three minutes’ notice to prevent a blackout, affecting nearly 100,000 customers, according to Nola.com. Power was fully restored after several hours, though concerns about the power grid’s reliability remain as President Donald Trump’s administration, energy policy experts and multiple North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) reports have signaled that MISO is at an elevated risk for blackouts due in part to phasing out coal-fired power plants.

“The forced outages were directed by MISO as a last resort, and done in order to prevent a more extensive, prolonged power outage that could severely affect the reliability of the power grid,” Entergy said in a Sunday statement.

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New Orleans Police Secretly Used Prohibited Facial Recognition Surveillance for Years

The New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) secretly received real-time, AI-generated alerts from 200 facial recognition cameras throughout the city for two years, despite a city ordinance barring generalized surveillance of the public.

“Police increasingly use facial recognition software to identify unknown culprits from still images, usually taken by surveillance cameras at or near the scene of a crime,” an exposé by The Washington Post explains. However, “New Orleans police took this technology a step further,” automatically alerting officers with real-time updates of names and locations of possible matches of wanted suspects from a private network of cameras through a mobile app. 

“This is the facial recognition technology nightmare scenario that we have been worried about,” Nathan Freed Wessler, a deputy director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology project, told the Post. “This is the government giving itself the power to track anyone—for that matter, everyone—as we go about our lives walking around in public.” According to Wessler, New Orleans is the first known instance in which a major American city has used artificial intelligence to identify people through live footage for the purpose of making arrests.

The use of these automatic alerts may have violated a city ordinance meant to protect the public’s privacy from a generalized surveillance tool and prevent wrongful arrests due to software errors. 

Passed in 2022 in response to New Orleans’ post-pandemic crime wave, the Surveillance Technology and Data Protection Ordinance removed a previous prohibition on surveillance technology in criminal investigations to increase public safety. Mayor LaToya Cantrell said at the time that the NOPD needed “every tool available at their disposal” to keep the city’s “residents, businesses and visitors safe.” However, the ordinance stopped short of allowing the NOPD to utilize a “face surveillance system”—defined as “any computer software or application that performs face surveillance”—while limiting data collection to “only the minimum amount of personal information needed to fulfill a narrow well-defined purpose.”  

While violent crime in New Orleans has declined since 2022, so have the crime rates in most major American cities that do not use real-time facial recognition surveillance systems. 

Anne Kirkpatrick, superintendent of the NOPD since September 2023, paused the automatic alerts in April after learning about potential legal problems with using the system. Records obtained by the Post reveal that Kirkpatrick sent an email to Project NOLA, the nonprofit that provides the NOPD with facial recognition services, on April 8 stating “that the automated alerts must be turned off until she is ‘sure that the use of the app meets all the requirements of the law and policies.'” The network of cameras remains in place. 

While automatic pings of potential suspect matches to NOPD officers are paused, Kirkpatrick maintains that facial recognition technology is essential to law enforcement. On May 16, 10 inmates escaped from the New Orleans jail, prompting a manhunt (five inmates remain at large). Facial recognition is credited with the capture of two of the escaped inmates. Kirkpatrick told WVUE, the local Fox affiliate, that such a situation is “the exact reason facial recognition technology is so critical and well within our boundaries of the ordinance here.” Bryan Lagarde, Project NOLA’s executive director, confirmed that NOPD is not currently using real-time, AI-generated alerts but is still utilizing facial recognition technology and footage from 5,000 cameras across New Orleans to track and apprehend the escapees. Lagarde described to WVUE an instance in which officers narrowly missed an inmate by a matter of minutes, insinuating that automated alerts might be necessary to protect public safety, despite the cost to privacy. 

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Whistleblower: FBI’s New Orleans Boss Stayed On Vacation after New Year’s Terrorist Attack

Apparently the second-deadliest foreign-inspired terrorist attack in the U.S. since 9/11 wasn’t enough for the boss of the New Orleans FBI field office to end his vacation early.

Early on New Year’s Day, 42-year-old Army veteran Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar rammed a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans’s famed French Quarter—killing 14 people who were celebrating the New Year. Police fatally shot Jabbar in a following firefight, and authorities later determined that the incident was inspired by the foreign terrorist organization ISIS.

Despite that, New Orleans FBI Special Agent in Charge Lyonel Myrthil took several more days to return to the office, according to a whistleblower working with the office of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

“Myrthil vacationed in Europe from late December to early January, which included New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, and the Sugar Bowl and took multiple days to return to New Orleans after the terrorist attack on January 1,” Grassley said in a Tuesday letter to FBI Acting Director Brian Driscol and Acting Attorney General James McHenry.

“The FBI failed to note this in any of the joint briefings it provided to Congress and must provide more information.”

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REVEALED: Top FBI Leader in New Orleans Was on Vacation Over New Year’s Despite Known Vulnerabilities on Bourbon Street – And Left DEI Special Agent with Nose Ring in Charge

According to the Oversight Project, the top FBI leader in New Orleans was on vacation in Italy over New Year’s despite known vulnerabilities on Bourbon Street, leaving the DEI hire with a nose ring in charge.

According to the Oversight Project, top FBI brass Lyonel Myrthil was in Italy which is why they left Special Agent Alethea Duncan in charge to brief the public after the terror attack.

In a carefully worded statement, the FBI confirmed to the Oversight Project that Lyonel Myrthil was “en route to a family vacation out of the country” when the terrorist attack occurred.

FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate didn’t even know Lyonel Myrthil was out of the country. Abbate deployed a senior counterterrorism official from FBI HQ to New Orleans hours after the terror attack.

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Biden Falls Asleep During Service For New Orleans Terror Victims

Joe Biden appeared to doze off Monday during a prayer service for the victims of the New Orleans terror attack on January 1st.

Biden was seen sitting with is head down and his eyes closed before the actual prayer part of the service. His wife and everyone else looked alert and had their eyes open as a pastor spoke in honour of the 14 people who lost their lives in the horrendous attack.

Biden has already displayed contempt for the victims twice with his handlers sending out a tone deaf ‘happy new year’ tweet after the attack had happened, and by checking his watch and saying he wanted to “get this damn thing done” while holding a press conference and talking about the attack last week.

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Who in the Heck Was the Terrorist Waving to As He Placed an IED Along Bourbon Street?

Late Sunday morning, officials in New Orleans, Louisiana, held a press conference to update the public regarding the state of their investigation into the New Year’s Day terrorist attack launched by (the now-deceased) Shamsud-Din Jabbar. 

There were a number of details shared by the FBI and ATF Special Agents in Charge (SACs), not least of which was the revelation that Jabbar had traveled out of the country (to Egypt and Canada) in 2023 and had made at least two reconnaissance treks to New Orleans in the months leading up to the attack. 

On his October New Orleans visits, Jabbar used Meta smart glasses while riding a bicycle to film the French Quarter. He was also wearing the glasses at the time of the attack, but they were not activated to livestream it. 

During the press conference, FBI SAC Lyonel Myrthil referred to several clips of surveillance video that showed Jabbar in the hours leading up to the attack. 

The first three to four seconds of the clip above purports to show Jabbar looking in the mirror while wearing the Meta glasses. 

Then, there is about a minute of surveillance video of Jabbar out on the street with a wheeled cooler as he prepared to place one of the IEDs. (Per the stated timeline provided by Myrthil, this would have been sometime prior to 1:53 a.m. on January 1.) We see Jabbar, in a long tan coat, with what appears to be a phone in his right hand, holding onto the cooler handle with his left. He appears to be waiting for something (or someone?) and checking his phone. After about 40 seconds, he starts walking, towing the cooler. We then see him at what appears to be a slightly different location, next to a trashcan, cooler still in tow, phone still in hand. At the 54-second mark, he looks up and appears to be waving at someone (in the general vicinity of the surveillance camera). After that, he steps off the curb, leaving the cooler behind. 

Next, we see Jabbar walking in the street, carrying a blue bucket-style cooler in his right hand. Per the stated timeline, this would be sometime prior to 2:20 a.m. And, of course, we know by 3:15 a.m., he was back behind the wheel of the Ford F-150, barreling down Bourbon Street. 

As noted in the presser, authorities now believe that the individual(s) who moved the first cooler from the point where Jabbar left it at Bourbon and St. Peter to Bourbon and Orleans (initially thought to be accomplices of Jabbar) were simply “unknowing Bourbon Street visitors [who] grabbed the cooler’s handle and moved it.” Odd and flukey, no doubt. But considering the hour and the setting, not all that difficult to believe. 

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Was NOLA Killer Jabbar A Jason Bourne? Bourbon Street Terrorist’s Bombs Made With Extremely Rare Explosive, Officials Say

Reports of strange facts and inconsistencies continue to follow the Jan 1 ‘terror’ attacks in the United States, leading many to insinuate these attacks were ‘inside jobs’.

The terrorist who killed 14 people and hurt 35 more in New Orleans in the early hours of New Year’s Day prepositioned bombs that used an extraordinarily rare explosive compound, senior law enforcement officials have told NBC News. The two devices didn’t detonate, but authorities are scrambling to learn how Shamsud-Din Jabbar was able to incorporate a type of explosive that has never before been used in a terror attack in America or Europe.   

At around 3 am on Wednesday, Texas-born Houston resident Shamsud-Din Jabbar used a pickup truck to plow a path of carnage through a crowd of New Year’s partiers on Bourbon Street, before police killed him in a shootout. The 42-year-old US Army veteran’s plan had another dimension of death that he failed to execute: The FBI and ATF say he’d built two bombs that were rigged to be detonated with a transmitter that was found in his rented Ford F-150 truck.

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New Orleans Terrorist Home Left Unsecured Before Full Processing?? And Quran Verses Displayed in New Orleans Terrorist’s Home Revealed – “Kindergarten Koran””

Yesterday, the New York Post’s Jennie Taer posted a video of her walking through what should have been a secure crime scene, the house of New Orleans terror suspect Shamsud-Din Jabbar.  The head-scratching walk-through revealed a house reasonably intact despite an alleged search warrant being served.  Computers and electronics were visible throughout the home.  Religious texts appeared still in place as if they were left alone during the search.

It is now being reported a day later that Taer may have walked through the property without the knowledge of law enforcement.  FOX News’s Brooke Taylor is reporting on X that Harris County Sheriff’s bomb squad is en route to “collect evidence”:

Deputies just closed down the street in north Harris County where Shamsud-Din Jabbar was living. A source tells me HCSO bomb squad is on the way to collect evidence. This comes days later, when the door was left open and people were inside the home taking pictures and freely roaming around. Sources also say precursor chemicals were found inside the home when they first raided it, which are typically used for making home made explosives. The question now becomes why come back and collect evidence and not do this days ago?

The home of an alleged ISIS-supporting terrorist was left unsecured after an initial search?  During her video, Taer showed what appeared to be a staged display of the search warrant and receipt for items collected in her initial video yesterday.  As mentioned, nothing other than some preliminary bomb-making materials were reportedly taken, according to the receipt left on the kitchen island.

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