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Posted on Friday 13 November 2009

Sentence of 13 Years for Ex-Louisiana Congressman
New York Times
By DAVID STOUT
November 13, 2009

Former Representative William J. Jefferson, a New Orleans Democrat whose political career once seemed to hold high promise, was sentenced on Friday to 13 years in prison for using his office to try to enrich himself and his relatives…
Just a criminal – no mitigating factors – simply a crook:
Jury Prepares for Jefferson Bribery Case
New York Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS
July 29, 2009

Former Representative William J. Jefferson put his office up for sale and intended to get “top dollar for it,” prosecutors said Wednesday in closing arguments at his corruption trial…

Rebeca Bellows, a federal prosecutor, told the jury on Wednesday that Mr. Jefferson “year after year, scheme after scheme, betrayed the trust of the people of New Orleans.” She noted that witnesses had testified during the trial that Mr. Jefferson regularly increased the amount of kickbacks he was demanding. He was greedy, she said…
It’s a rags to riches story. A guy who grew up picking cotton but ended up with a Harvard Law Degree and a Tax Degree from George Washington. As an eight term Congressman from New Orleans, he was stung by the F.B.I. at the end of a long career of influence peddling to African business interests. His sins were blatant, and captured on film with his bribery money famously retrieved from his home freezer. His trial defense was that he wasn’t taking bribes in his official capacity – pretty lame. And where did the money go?

… The prosecution’s case will depend heavily on hours of secretly recorded tapes of Jefferson talking to Lori Mody, a Virginia businesswoman who went to the FBI with her suspicions about what Jefferson was doing, and ended up wearing a wire.

In the transcript of a conversation taped June 17, 2005, at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, Jefferson explained to Mody how ANJ was named for his wife and children. The "A, " he explained, stood for Andrea, his wife, and daughter Akilah. The "N" was for his daughter Nailah. And the "J" was for his three eldest daughters: Jamila, Jalila and Jelani.

"Before I started paying for tuition, I wasn’t poor, " Jefferson told Mody. "But now I’m kind of poor."

"Now it’ll be flowing in, " Mody said.

Jamila Jefferson-Jones, Jalila Jefferson-Bullock and Jelani Jefferson Exum are all graduates of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where their father, who grew up in Lake Providence, one of the poorest patches in America, received his law degree. Jefferson’s fourth daughter, Nailah Jefferson, a documentary filmmaker, is a graduate of Boston University and Emerson College. His fifth daughter, Akilah Jefferson, is a graduate of Brown University and now a student at Tulane University School of Medicine…
So he became a corrupt politician to pay his daughters way through some of the best schools in the world? Rather than explaining his behavior, it just makes it all the more tragic. His daughter’s presumably earned degrees are now deeply tarnished for all time, as well as their future careers. His name is synonymous with tainted money hidden in the freezer. He’s added a notch to the argument that politicians are corrupt. And his story has a Madoff ring to it, in that the transcripts of the taped conversations make it obvious he knew exactly what he was doing, even making jokes about it along the way.

And it doesn’t help that Congressman William J. Jefferson is an African-American Democrat. We all jump on the string of corruption cases the Republicans have racked up over the last decade, but here we have to admit that he was one of our own. Just a criminal – no mitigating factors – simply a crook…

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