New Orleans Lawyer Pleads Guilty to Embezzling $30,000,000 from Former Firm

This case has been bouncing around the local federal court recently, and the local news just announced this morning that Jamie Perdigao has probably struck a plea deal to charges of defrauding his former law firm, Adams and Reese, and their clients of thirty million dollars. Luckily, he’s not one of our alum, and I won’t mention what law school he went to, but I’m sure he got a great education and only missed that one day’s class in professional responsibility where they discussed the illegality of submitting phony invoices to your clients and pocketing the remitted fees.

Funny - if you look him up on Westlaw’s Legal Directory (database ID: WLD), it says “Current Firm Information Unknown” but still gives his e-mail address at arlaw.com and what is, presumably, his old phone number there.

The more colorful aspects of this story are the civil suit and counter-claims Perdigao filed; the details sound like a Grisham novel. He tried to get the local U.S. Attorney’s office to recuse itself, because he said they were unwilling to persue some of the leads he gave them which, he claimed, would have lead to overturning former Governor Edwards’ multiple convictions for fraud and other misdeeds.

He also filed suit against Adams and Reese, alleging that they were involved with Worldcom’s financial shenanigans and other sundry shady activity. Neither of these suits or claims got very far.

Thirty million dollars. That’s not like petty cash from the cigar box under the cashier counter. What kind of person does this sort of thing and thinks they can get away with it?

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Habitat for Humanity and the Corporate Conscience of American Companies

Saturday morning I went along with my wife and a group of her students to work at one of the many Habitat for Humanity houses still going up here in New Orleans. Then Sunday morning I woke up and immediately called my mother to thank her profusely for the effort she and my late father took to instill in me and my brother the importance of education. I only spent four hours helping to lay tarpaper on a roof, but since that involved what was essentially a half day of deep-knee bends and multiple trips up a sixteen-foot ladder carrying heavy rolls of tarpaper, Sunday morning my legs and lower back felt like knots of twisted steel. I’ve never been happier to be a law librarian and not a manual laborer.

But working on the Habitat homes is a worthwhile endeavor. They’ve been active all over the world since their founding in 1976, but since Katrina, they’ve been responsible for hundreds, maybe now over a thousand, homes here in New Orleans. We only pitch in every couple of months, but even over three years after the hurricane, there is still a non-stop stream of volunteers coming to town to help out for a day or two or a few weeks during the summer.

Besides my wife’s students, many of the other volunteers Saturday were employees of the GAP from all over the U.S. and Canada. I believe they mentioned that both GAP and Banana Republic employees (both chains are apparently part of the same corporate hegemony, along with Old Navy and maybe other stores - what the hell is Piperlime?)

have been coming to New Orleans recently to work with Habitat, and that the GAP has both donated money and underwritten, at least in part, I believe, their employees’ trips to New Orleans. Yeah, GAP! In appreciation, I promise from here on out to only buy my underwear from you. Yes, GAP brand men’s briefs are the most comfortable, stylish, and durable underwear I have ever had the pleasure of wearing.

And, from the Times-Picayune today we learn that for the first time in its corporate history, Starbucks is holding its annual sales meeting outside of the northwest and while they are here, two thousand or so of the employees attending will be helping out with various volunteer efforts in the city. The story mentioned that they needed something like forty-five buses just to get all their people out to the different places in town where their volunteering. Go Starbucks! Their Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccino® is detectably delicious (and is basically, come on, a coffee milkshake, right?). I don’t indulge regularly; in fact, I only have them once a year, and that’s because CALI editor extraordinaire Deb Quentel has started giving us CALI authors a giftcard as a reward for working the CALI booth at the AALL annual meetings. I usually gain about two pounds in the weeks after the meeting while I reap my Frappuccino® rewards.

If I hype up any more corporations and join Google AdSense, will ads for those companies start appearing here in the margins? I do have a lot of space in the layout that is going to waste and I need to bling it up.


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Towards the Licensing of Clowns

On that trip to Texas I mentioned in a few earlier posts, I picked up this business card at the counter of the little diner where we had breakfast every morning:



The first thing that bugs me is the name of the national association that Piccolo above belongs to: "Clowns of America International". Huh? Is it an international association of clowns from America? Or an American association of clowns with international aspirations?

Writing and blogging about scary clowns, fear of clowns, etc., has almost become a cliche, so forget about all that - the people who work as clowns have their own professional associations with bylaws, professional ethics, and annual conventions! I'm torn between the surprise of learning this and the realization that I shouldn't be surprised at all by this enlightening fact.

And - LOOK - its the Clowns of America International Code of Ethics! Called "The Eight Clown Commandments", most of them are a middlin' paragraph in length and not of a concise, "Though shalt not use sub-standard cream pies" commandment style like other, more well-known sets of commandments. Part of the second one is a bit puzzling:

I will provide my own costume.

As opposed to, what? Stealing someone else's costume? Performing naked? Along those lines, parts of commandments 1 and 3 are:

1) I will keep my acts, performance and behavior in good taste while I am in costume and makeup. ...

3) I will neither drink alcoholic beverages nor smoke while in makeup or clown costume.

Reminds me of the idea I had to be a rude, slovenly, drinking and smoking clown for Mardi Gras. Of course, the better sense of my better half prevailed, although the idea would be great. My initial inspiration for that idea is the old Evil Clown comics that National Lampoon published back in the late 80s and early 90s (at least that's when I subscribed and read them). The creator, Nick Bakay, has some stories at his web page, but they're scaled-down images and kind of hard to read. I wish he could get an anthology of all the Evil Clown comics published.

So Piccolo is also a member of the Texas Clown Association. I haven't perused this and other clown association web pages, but I would bet that somewhere some of them talk about the importance of only hiring a clown subscribing to the clown Code of Ethics and that some have even proposed, if not the licensing, then at least the certification of clowns. How many annual credits of CCE - Clown Continuing Education - should a professional clown have to keep its certification current? And do they have cautionary tales of parents who hired an uncertified clown and the tragedy that ensued when little Johnny say Bucky the Clown taking a smoke break out behind the garage during his birthday party? The horror!

Well, to wind this back to some semi-professional point; AALL has proposed the licensing of law librarians in the past. (Yes, yes - I'll dig up the references later - not that anyone is reading this....) Living in the one state that licenses florists (to protect consumers against the dangers of sub-par birthday bouquets) Louisiana and florists are a perfect example of how licensing often serve primarily as a barrier to entry into a given market.

Similarly, with law librarians, if we were required to be licensed in all 50 states, then what? Would we be paid more? If licensing attempted to manipulate the market to raise librarian salaries - by making librarians a more scarce commodity by making it harder for people to become librarians by forcing us to become licensed - we all wouldn't get a raise, but when a firm, school, or court needed more labor in the library, we would see more secretaries, paralegals and student workers filing looseleafs, re-shelving books, and conducting research. Would we then try to pass statutes against the un-authorized practice of librarianship so that only we - the actual, certified/licensed librarians could perform these and other tasks intrinsic to the operation of a library? Then, how would you define those tasks? Would you make it so that NOBODY but librarians can re-shelve the books? Even the patron who pulls the book off the shelve for two seconds to glance at the back cover? What if one patron asks another patron where the U.S. Reports are? Unauthorized practice of librarianship! Licensing isn't needed for clowns, florists, or librarians.


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Bluebook Follies

One of our students was working on a paper that has been submitted to our maritime law journal. Half of those articles, including this one, seem to deal with the “Jones Act”. That’s the common name for the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 which, as I understand it, is basically workers compensation for maritime workers. The main provision of the Jones Act used to be 46 U.S.C. §688 and practitioners who work in this area and professors who teach this subject refer to “section 688” by rote.

And so this student was checking all the citations for the article and was looking up 46 USC §688 and couldn’t find it. That’s because, as of October 2006, the Jones Act was amended and re-codified as part of the entire revision of Title 46. What used to be §688 is now found in §§ 30104 and 30105 of Title 46. But because the United States Code itself is only re-published every six years and the feds are still in the process of issuing the 2006 edition, this re-codification is not in the U.S.C. but can be found in the U.S.C.A and U.S.C.S. (the two commercial and non-official editions of the code).

The student was very conscientious and wanted to find out the best way to indicate that the law had been re-codified, so that all the old-timers who see this article and don’t see their familiar “46 U.S.C. §688” will understand that this provision is now in two new sections. But the Bluebook isn’t clear on this, and as I told the student, its not really a question of citation format, but one of style. The Bluebook doesn’t require authors to note when a law has been re-codified, it just requires them to cite the current law. So because it would really be only a courtesy to readers to note this, I told the student that perhaps a parenthetical statement noting this fact would be appropriate. (And, since the author of this article has passed away since he drafted it, the journal staff has a bit more leeway in adding things like this than they normally do.)

And, like I often do when helping students with citation quandries such as this, I suggested we look and see how other law reviews have treated this situation. For example:

“...the Jones Act [46 U.S.C. §30104, (formerly §688(a))]...”

David W. Robertson, The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Sct's Provisions on Jurisdiction, Remedies, and Choice of Law: Correcting the Fifth Circuit's Mistakes, 38 J. Mar. L. & Com. 487 n 161 (2007)

But for every good application of citation rules to an unclear situation like this, there are citations like this:

“...[t]he Jones Act also allows injured sailors and the next of kin of deceased sailors to obtain damages from their employers for the negligence of the shipowner, the captain, or fellow members of the crew. See 46 U.S.C. § 30104 (2000)...”

Bin Wang, All Bark and No Bite: A Modern Evidentiary Argument for the Retirement of the Age-Old Pennsylvania Rule, 49 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 2309, 2329, n. 121 (2008)

No, no, NO! Bad law student, bad, bad law student! ... What happened here is that the student editor probably saw that the current Jones Act has indeed been re-codified at §30104 of Title 46 of the United States Code. But that codification has only been published in the U.S.C.A. and the U.S.C.S. and NOT in the U.S.C. The purpose of citing all this stuff in such detail is, in part, to guide the reader to where the resource the author is citing can be found. And readers are going to be perplexed when they go to the 2000 edition of Title 46 of the U.S.C. and DON'T FIND a section 40103.

The Bluebook does NOT require citation to the U.S.C. in all instances. Rule 12.2.1 says “If possible, cite statutes currently in force to the current official code or its supplement” ... “[o]therwise cite a current unofficial code”. So in this instance citing to the U.S.C.A. would have been entirely appropriate as its impossible to cite the statute currently in force - the revised and re-codified Jones Act - to the official code because it is not IN the official code. So, instead, they got the cite from U.S.C.A., lopped off the “A”, and created an incorrect citation.

And not to pick on the William and Mary Law Review - this sort of thing happens all the time in most law reviews. Someone probably erroneously told the staff that they had to cite to the U.S.C., which at one time, I believe, was a strict requirement of the Bluebook.

God, is there anything less worthwhile to get all worked up about these days???


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Texas Religious Supplies

Another photo from our Texas trip:



We kept passing this place and could never figure this out. Was it a joke? Were they just a VERY THOROUGH religious supply store? Or are the fireproof shirts and caps a side business and separate from the religious supplies?
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