Moving on up seems the Jeffersons (close knit bunch) will all get to spend some time in the joint together.
Congressman ?Dollar? Bill Jefferson, D-New Orleans, must be one proud patriarch.
To judge from the federal indictments that continue to rain down, his kinfolk were filled with a desire to be just like him.
They could not, of course, hope to emulate the scale of his alleged scams and shakedowns, which, as befits a politician in such exalted office, played out across two continents.
But there were no flies on the local team either, according to the feds. While Dollar Bill awaits trial in Northern Virginia, the New Orleans feds have indicted Dollar Bill?s sister, New Orleans Assessor Betty Jefferson, his brother Mose and his niece Angela Coleman.
Year in, year out, those three pocketed huge amounts of public money supposedly appropriated to help the needy, according to the indictment. No doubt they now yearn for the days when Dollar Bill?s old sidekick Eddie Jordan was U.S. attorney.
When President Bush appointed Jim Letten to replace Jordan, the family might have been wise to draw in its horns or at least to make some show of charitable endeavor. But its organizations just kept raking in the dough without so much as putting out a sign or publishing a phone number. The city?s myriad dispossessed can have had no idea all that money was sloshing around for their supposed benefit.
Stealing public money, it turns out, is pretty straightforward, provided you have friends and relatives in Baton Rouge and Washington. And you certainly have them if your patriarch is Dollar Bill, who was a state senator until his election to Congress 18 years ago.
There are so many examples of embezzlement under cover of good works that the indictment runs to 46 pages. The Jefferson family established the supposed non-profits that are the focus of the indictment in the early 1990s, and must have developed a sense of invulnerability, although this does not appear to have been a sophisticated conspiracy. The thefts were so brazen that they were bound to come to light once the feds moved in.
Daveb