Tag: Barber and Mann

Rooked: FBI probing Livingston Parish CIAP Land Purchase

Since RFP did the work digging up the old links on Slabbed, a comment bump is in order as the FBI is now poking around a subject Slabbed first reported on a bit more than 2 years ago:

More Mississippi Mud? Louisiana Mud too? Flipping swamplands and CIAP funds? FBI has been asking questions? Say it ain’t so. Oh, and that name seems strangely familiar.

Land deal appraised by tax assessor Barber probed

“Federal authorities have been looking into Madison County Tax Assessor Gerald Barber and his role in a Louisiana land deal that scored almost $3 million in profits for private citizens and a conservation group.

The lynchpin for the deal may have been an apparent inflated appraisal done by Barber’s firm, Barber & Mann Inc., that the U.S. inspector general called “noncompliant” and unreasonably priced in an audit.

See also:

DMR Scandal day 53: The bucks are beginning to stop.

Rooked: Elizabeth Rooks Barber of Barber and Mann exports the DMR friends and family program…

Rooked: Elizabeth Rooks Barber of Barber and Mann exports the DMR friends and family program…

To my many peeps in the Louisiana chapter of the Slabbed Nation allow me to welcome ya’ll aboard the great CIAP land swindle program.

Livingston Parish owns 2,300 acres in Lake Maurepas

By my calculation it looks as if the taxpayers paid over $1,000/acre for swampland and lake bottoms. The seller was a Mississippi based LLC , now dissolved, owned my Jackson area residents Marion C Davis and Diane Wilks but a nonprofit was apparently used as a financial intermediary. Our readers may recall the Land Trust for the Mississippi Coastal Plain was used as an intermediary to buy disgraced DMR Director Bill Walker’s son’s property with CIAP funding.

Problem with a Barber and Mann appraisal? Not a problem as Rooks-Barber hubby Gerald Barber is on the Mississippi Appraisal Board. Nice move to have the package all wrapped up in advance huh.