Day: October 22, 2015

Tonight’s recessed Bay St Louis City Council meeting should be a good one

But first I have two things related to Tuesday’s meeting, which was a barn burner all on its own:

Bay St. Louis council, mayor exchange threats in Tuesday meeting ~ Wes Muller

Falgout moved to have City Attorney Donald Rafferty file a writ of mandamus to force the administration to comply with the council’s invoice ordinance. A writ of mandamus is an order from a court that a government official fulfill his or her duties.

Rafferty responded the city attorney may not take the side of the mayor or the council.

Laughter erupted among those in attendance.

And I uploaded a 2 hour clip of the meeting from Slabbed’s Periscope coverage of the meeting. (The sound is uneven but that is the nature of the beast)

10-22-15 Agenda - Recessed meeting

Stay tuned.

An early Easter Egg for Charlene…..

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Hurricane Warning Flags

Slabbed is not quite ready to declare and hoist the Hurricane Warning flags but there has been a discernible increase in chatter related to the MDOC scandal that began on a low level in June after former MDOC Commish Chris Epps’ sentencing was delayed indefinitely steadily increasing since.  I’ve mentioned this once before though I’m not predicting anything but the MDOC scandal has the potential to greatly exceed Operation Pretense in its scope and breadth. On a timeline the Epps sentencing postponement happened in June and by that time, I had received a tip that the FBI was significantly ramping up its manpower resources in Jackson. By mid-August indictments related to MDOC were unsealed against Irb Benjamin and Sam Waggoner. Here is the salient verbiage from the US Attorney Press Release that is generating some of the chatter:

Waggoner was charged by Criminal Information with one count of bribery related to his payments of bribes and kickbacks to Epps from sometime in 2012 until at least August 26, 2014. According to the Criminal Information, Waggoner was a consultant for Global Tel-Link (GTL), which provided telephone services at MDOC facilities. The Criminal Information cites two specific instances in 2014 where Waggoner paid Epps kickbacks from money Waggoner received from GTL as a consultant.

The use of local CONsultants (aka Buffers) by the business community as a conduit for bribery schemes to get government business is nothing new folks. And when you couple the doings in Jackson with Sean Anthony’s sentence being delayed twice in successive months (September delay link – October delay link) with Anthony’s sentencing essentially postponed indefinitely one is very safe in assuming there is much more to come as rumors continue to swirl surrounding Anthony’s former company and a former state wide public official.

I guess all this is long winded way of saying the Feds are not done poking around in local doings including the construction of the recently named Jackson County Jail which according to water cooler talk in the investigative community has the FBI looking closely at an elected official along with one of the jail’s contractors.

None of this will completely unfold by the end of the year but the my crystal ball tells me the odds are very good we will see additional news hit the cycle on at least one of the three items mentioned above before year end.