Slender Glass Tube Houses 'Lover's Rose' A Central City corner store intentionally sold crack cocaine pipes over the counter, an Orleans Parish magistrate court has ruled. The slender four-inch tubes encase tiny plastic roses and are marketed as a "Lover's Rose," but law enforcement agencies across the nation have identified the gaudy knickknack as having a double life as a crack pipe. The tubes can be found near cash registers of stores in the suburbs as well as the city. The Nguyens appeared in court Wednesday and opted for trial, which they swiftly lost. [continues 259 words]
Big Dealer Freed While They Spend Lives Jailed Some mistakes, it seems, can never be forgiven. In 1975, Richard "Hoghead" Mahogany sold four packets of heroin at $15 a pop to an undercover New Orleans police officer. A jury found him guilty as charged, and a judge gave him life in prison. After years of appeals, Mahogany, 61, who said he made a $10 profit on the illegal sale, won a chance at freedom last year. Orleans Parish Criminal District Judge Ben Willard heard his case and decided that 29 years was enough, crafting a new sentence that placed Mahogany on probation and ordering his release. [continues 1964 words]
Rose Trinkets Really Drug Vessels, Police Say Drug addicts pull some colorful stunts when it comes to getting their fixes. Many a pot smoker has fashioned a pipe from a crushed soda can or an empty toilet paper roll. Desperate alcoholics have drunk nail polish remover. Credit cards make handy tools to cut ready-to-snort lines of cocaine or heroin. A light bulb can be hollowed out for smoking crystal meth. The crack cocaine user is known for fashioning a thin "pipe" from household items or even a scrap of aluminum foil. [continues 920 words]
Fraud Charges Spring From Alleged Bribery A New Orleans defense lawyer and a former drug court counselor were indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday on charges of computer fraud involving an alleged bribery scheme that offered freedom to probationers in exchange for cash. To carry out their scheme, Glenda Spears, 46, and Angela Kirkland, 45, entered false information into the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court's computer system and recommended judges release certain probationers who had paid them off, prosecutors said. [continues 646 words]
Feds Think Pair May Have Used Jail Time As Threat Federal investigators are questioning officials at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court about an alleged scheme in which a defense lawyer and a former court-employed drug counselor asked people on probation for money and offered to make it look as if they passed a urine drug test that they never took, courthouse sources said. Calvin Johnson, the chief judge at Criminal District Court and one of several judges who has a specialized drug court, said he didn't know details of the federal investigation. But he confirmed that a few weeks ago, Angie Kirkland lost her job running a drug court program in his section after law enforcement began looking into the allegations. [continues 330 words]
For years before his retirement as Orleans Parish district attorney, Harry Connick beat the drum for a Massachusetts company that uses hair samples to test people for drug use. He spoke out publicly in favor of testing students' hair and on occasion escorted its officers to meetings with officials and opinion-shapers in the media. Civil rights concerns and other issues led Orleans Parish public school officials to reject the testing regimen Connick advocated, but his efforts on behalf of Psychemedics, as the company is known, were not unavailing. [continues 1213 words]
Lionel Pooler II, known as Butch to those who cared about him, was left face down on the rotting floorboards of an abandoned house in Central City. His blood had pooled next to a crack pipe, a loaded 9 mm magazine, an empty bottle of cheap wine and a sleeping bag. He had stayed for some time in the house on Philip Street, not far from the corner of Loyola Avenue, where he was raised and his family once ran a store. [continues 569 words]
Addicts Desperate For A Fix Rub Elbows With Death Daily, Entering Dangerous Areas And Risking Dealers' Wrath Death accorded Terry Faulkner little dignity. According to police, the father of two daughters died July 21 with a bullet in the back of his head and a glass crack pipe tucked in his hand. They found him by a curb in the insular Hollygrove neighborhood of New Orleans, where he was born and raised: dead at 42. Crack cocaine played a definitive role in Faulkner's death, just as it had in his life, a life marked by arrests for possession and stints in jail and rehab. [continues 1643 words]
Latasha "Shannell" Adams crossed the line. A 25-year-old mother with a history of prostitution and crack use, Adams looted several hundred dollars' worth of crack from a dealer, police concluded. That affront was addressed with gunfire, and Adams was found dead on Aug. 27 just after 6 a.m. in the 900 block of Wagner Street. She had been shot in her back, shoulder and buttocks, and was finished off with a bullet to the head. [continues 128 words]
April Savoy Scheidel, a mother of three who grew up in Lacombe, next door to Mandeville, never made it home from the truck ride she took with two acquaintances into the city's Lower 9th Ward, just before Easter. Police said the trio was looking to buy drugs when something went wrong and a gunman opened fire on the pickup. Scheidel, who was shot in the back, died at Charity Hospital a short time later. She had cocaine in her system and had been drinking alcohol, the coroner's office said. [continues 419 words]
Ashcroft Rule Change Draws Fire Elsewhere U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has riled a host of defense lawyers and law professors across the nation with his recent memo instructing federal prosecutors to tighten the reins on plea bargaining. The policy could set off a crisis, they said, from clogging up court dockets to handcuffing prosecutors seeking to entice defendants to cooperate with the government. But in the Eastern District of Louisiana, life at the federal courthouse is not about to change, said several officials and lawyers on both sides of the bar. [continues 752 words]
No Inalienable Right to Glow Sticks, They Say Saying a federal judge overstepped his bounds by blocking the government's ban on glow sticks and pacifiers during raves at the State Palace Theater, an appeals court Friday tossed out a decision that sided with the American Civil Liberties Union. U.S. District Judge Thomas Porteous can't stop federal prosecutors from enforcing a condition of a plea bargain made in the criminal case against the rave promoters, a unanimous three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled. [continues 619 words]
Some Nearly Done With Their Sentences By the end of March, 16 inmates had been freed through the risk-review process, according to the Louisiana Department of Corrections. Two others remained in a New Orleans substance abuse rehabilitation program, waiting to join them. About 20 additional inmates found relief through programs such as work release or boot camp. Although their cases didn't go through the state Pardon Board, the inmates got the attention of the Corrections Department when they applied for risk reviews. [continues 258 words]
Group Suggests Alternative Ways To Fight Crime Amid grim stories of social injustice and the brutality of prison life, the Rev. Goat Carson chose to laugh. It's a symbol of freedom, he announced Friday night inside Treme Center, at the start of a weekend conference dedicated to ending the nation's reliance on prison cells and razor wire to stop crime. "I want to laugh in the face of this oppression," Carson shouted, rousing the crowd to join him. "We are still here, we are still here. We are the people." [continues 620 words]
New Orleans' Longtime and Controversial DA Harry Connick Says He Has No Regrets and Looks Forward to His Family Time and His Singing Career They had to block off a lane of Tulane Avenue to make room for the crowds that came to watch the inauguration of District Attorney Harry Connick on April 1, 1974. In so many ways, it was a different era. Moon Landrieu was the new mayor. Edwin Edwards was a first-term governor. Richard Nixon was months away from resigning the presidency. And Connick had narrowly drummed the flamboyant 12-year incumbent, Jim Garrison, out of the Orleans Parish district attorney's office by about 2, 200 votes. [continues 2203 words]
Candidates vying to become the next Orleans Parish district attorney slammed Harry Connick's office Tuesday night during a forum, saying it bungles violent cases. They cited a Faubourg St. John killing Friday in which two of the suspects had recently been released from jail because prosecutors failed to charge them in an earlier case. The slaying Friday morning of Christopher Briede, 32, and the subsequent finger pointing between prosecutors and police about why the suspects were on the street, dominated Tuesday's candidate forum, sponsored by the Audubon Riverside Neighborhood Association. [continues 580 words]
Wainwright Extols Value of Marijuana Gary Wainwright, the feisty criminal defense attorney running for Orleans Parish district attorney, talks bold. He routinely calls police officers "perjurers" in open court, rants that the nation's war on drugs is a racist, violent mess, and extols marijuana for purposes both medicinal and otherwise. With the city's favorite son a known fan of the same herb, Wainwright doesn't hesitate to proclaim: "Louis Armstrong would be a supporter if he were alive today." [continues 1423 words]
Most Back Leniency for Young, New Users Candidates for Orleans Parish district attorney addressed the city's illegal drug trade at a forum Wednesday night, with most saying that cases must be "prioritized" before being brought to trial, and almost every candidate promising counseling for first- and second-time nonviolent offenders. Gary Wainwright, a defense attorney whose campaign is based on decriminalizing simple drug possessions, especially first-time marijuana offenses, said addicts need treatment, not prosecution. "We need to take the sick people out of the criminal district courthouse and put persons who have harmed other persons in the crosshairs," he said. "Murderers, rapists, armed robbers and politicians will be the only persons tried at Tulane and Broad if you give me the chance." [continues 364 words]
Government's Move A Lot Like Local Effort Decrying raves as havens for illicit drugs, some U.S. senators want to expand a federal law to zero in on the all-night dance parties where, they say, Ecstasy tags along with the techno beats. Sound familiar? In New Orleans, the government's rage against raves came in the form of the U.S. attorney's office and the so-called "crack-house law," which can mean criminal charges against those whose buildings are used to cook up, shoot up or serve up drugs. [continues 1115 words]
1 Million Doses Driven to N.O., Court Files Say For almost a year, a drug dealer made regular trips from Miami to New Orleans with some 50,000 tablets of Ecstasy stored in the spare tire of his sport utility vehicle, prosecutors say. And when someone got in the way of the drug ring, suspect Jason Rodriguez and another man roughed him up, a federal grand jury charged, in a case involving the overall distribution of about 1 million tablets, the largest quantity of Ecstasy prosecutors have seen in New Orleans from one investigation. [continues 536 words]
