Ex-Congressman William Jefferson Gets 13 Years
November 13th, 2009, 6:12 PM EST
LINK

Former Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson was sentenced to 13 years in prison for using his office to solicit bribes.

Jefferson, 62, was convicted of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and unlawfully seeking millions more, mainly by promoting business deals in Africa. Prosecutors claimed he was involved in 11 separate bribery schemes from August 2000 to August 2005 and that he and his family stood to gain more than half a billion dollars.

The Louisiana Democrat…was videotaped in July 2005 accepting $100,000 in a leather briefcase at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia, and putting it in his car. About $90,000 in the marked bills were later recovered from Pillsbury pie crusts and Boca meatless burger patty boxes in the freezer of his Washington residence.

William Jefferson verdict: Guilty on 11 of 16 counts
By Tim Morris, The Times-Picayune
August 05, 2009, 4:28PM
LINK

ALEXANDRIA, VA. - Former Democratic Congressman William Jefferson was found guilty of 11 of 16
corruption charges today by a federal jury.

The jury of eight women and four men returned a guilty verdict following five days of deliberation.

The 16 counts and the verdicts; the case history

In the 16-count indictment, Jefferson was charged with soliciting bribes and other crimes for a series of schemes in which he helped American businesses broker deals in West African in exchange for payments or financial considerations to companies controlled by members of his family, including his brother Mose, his wife, Andrea, their five daughters and a son-in-law.

Jefferson, 62, who represented the New Orleans-based 2nd Congressional District for nine terms, will now face sentencing by Judge T.S. Ellis III, who earlier meted out stiff sentences for lesser figures in the case. According to the U.S. attorney's office, Jefferson faced 235 years in prison if convicted on all counts, and will still face substantial prison time.

Prosecutors asked that Jefferson be held as a flight risk, but the judge allowed him to remain free pending his sentencing scheduled for Oct. 30. A forfeiture hearing will be held Thursday to decide what assets Jefferson will have to surrender.

Click to read a PDF of the charges and verdicts in former Congressman William Jefferson's trial.

The verdict comes four years after the Aug. 3, 2005 raids of Jefferson's homes in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., in which the FBI found $90,000 in cash hidden in the freezer of his D.C. home, money the government said Jefferson was going to deliver as a bribe to Atiku Abubakar, then vice president of Nigeria, to gain his help with a telecommunications deal in Nigeria being pursued by Lori Mody, a Northern Virginia businesswoman.

The money was the lion's share of $100,000 in FBI cash that the congressman was videotaped receiving packed in a briefcase days earlier in a suburban Virginia parking lot from Mody, who, beginning in March of 2005, had become a cooperating witness for the FBI, secretly taping her conversations with Jefferson.

The jury did not find him guilty on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which was the count linked to the money in the freezer.

While Mody did not testify at the trial, the jury heard segments of her taped conversations with Jefferson along with more than six weeks of testimony from government witnesses, including iGate Inc. CEO Vernon Jackson and Mody financial adviser Brett Pfeffer, both of whom are serving time after pleading guilty to their involvement in the bribe schemes, and hoped to see their sentences reduced in exchange for their testimony against Jefferson.

Jefferson did not testify in his own defense and his formal defense lasted only about two hours. In his closing argument, lead defense attorney Robert Trout presented his client as a man whose dealings had placed him in an ethical "gray" area, but who had not broken the law.

Trout's argument was that Jefferson's help on these business deals in Africa were beyond the purview of his "official acts" as a member of Congress, and thus did not violate bribery statutes which prohibit receiving things of value in exchange for official acts.

Trout argued that most of the key witness, including Jackson and Pfeffer, and a number of others who testified to avoid prosecution for their own involvement in the various schemes, were telling stories the government wanted to hear to save their own skins.

Of the government case, Trout said, "It boggles the mind how they constructed their way around the facts to make something that was not a crime seem like a crime. That's power."

The prosecution team scoffed at the notion that Jefferson had anyone to blame but himself, portraying Jefferson as a relentless shakedown artist.

"He never let an opportunity to demand a bribe payment pass him by," said assistant U.S. Attorney Rebeca Bellows in her closing argument.

The jury was comprised of six white women, two white men, two black women and two black men.

Jefferson, the first African-American congressman from Louisiana since Reconstruction, was defeated in a storm-delayed general election in December by Anh "Joseph' Cao, a little-known Republican attorney who benefited from a very low turnout.

Former Rep. William Jefferson sentenced to 13 years in prison
By Dave Cook, The Christian Science Monitor, 11.13.09
LINK

A federal judge sentenced former Rep. William Jefferson, (D) of Louisiana, to 13 years in prison for his conviction on corruption charges that famously included hiding cash in his home freezer.

Prosecutors had asked for a term of 27 to 33 years under federal sentencing guidelines. The request was significantly longer than for other congressmen in recent scandals. Defense lawyers had sought a term of less than 10 years. The 13 year sentence, which Jefferson’s lawyers have 10 days to appeal, is believed to be the longest ever given to a former member of Congress.

Jefferson, who represented part of New Orleans, was convicted in August on 11 of 16 federal charges of bribery, fraud, money laundering, and racketeering. He was also the first sitting member of Congress to be charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Jefferson tried to bribe the then-vice president of Nigeria. Some $90,000 of that bribe was found in Jefferson’s freezer when federal agents raided his home.

A judge’s tough words

In imposing the sentence Friday afternoon in a courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia, Judge T.S. Ellis III said Jefferson’s conduct was “a cancer on the body politic.”

On the advice of his attorney, Jefferson declined the opportunity to make a statement at his sentencing, and he remained silent because he plans to appeal his conviction.

In sentencing documents, federal prosecutors accused Jefferson of a “stunning betrayal of public trust” and sought a sentence that could amount to life for the 62 year-old former member of Congress.

“The defendant betrayed the public’s trust time after time by using his congressional office as a criminal enterprise to further a pattern of racketeering acts of corruption and self-enrichment,” prosecutors wrote. They noted that Jefferson had participated in “no fewer than eleven distinct bribe schemes.”

Not a punch line

Jefferson’s attorneys argued that the government’s sentencing recommendations ignored the full picture of the accused’s life and accomplishments.

“William Jefferson is more than the punch line of a late night talk show joke or the one-dimensional character depicted in the prosecution’s arguments,” the defense memo said. They said the court should “ensure that while the sanction adequately reflects the gravity of the offense, it is not greater than necessary to serve the ends of justice.”

The defense noted that no court had ever imposed a sentence of longer than 100 months in a case involving a member of Congress. In 2006 Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R) of California was sentenced to eight years and four months for taking $2.4 million in bribes to help military contractors win government business as well as for tax evasion and fraud.

Material from wire services was used in preparing this story.

William Jefferson case judge is old school ruler of court
Posted by rkoenig July 28, 2009 02:30AM
LINK

ALEXANDRIA, VA. -- It was the last day of testimony in the government's case against former Rep. William Jefferson and prosecution and defense attorneys, out of the jury's hearing, were haggling over the relevance of a flow chart showing how some of the money allegedly exacted by the congressman's family from business deals he aided in Africa ended up paying Harvard tuition for one of Jefferson's daughters.

"Having paid some Harvard tuition, I doubt that it was worth it, " said Judge T.S. Ellis III, Harvard Law School class of 1969. He went on to suggest that colleges these days largely serve a purpose once more capably performed by the military of quarantining adolescents from the broader society, while doing little to provide the classical education that was once their charge.

"We're losing it, our culture, " Ellis, 69, fretted from the bench. "In the old days every schoolboy could translate the Aeneid, " he said, though he allowed he is not old enough to have been one of those schoolboys.

It was trademark Ellis: quirky, caustic, a bit haughty, and decidedly old school. Offering what amounted to a commercial interruption from a bygone age, a man who bristled at every turn about the slow pace of the six-week trial took 60 seconds to issue an unsolicited indictment of the modern era.

For six weeks, Thomas Selby Ellis III -- known to his friends as Tim -- has been the dominant presence in the courtroom on the ninth floor of Federal District Court where Jefferson's fate will be decided.

It will be Ellis who will deliver the jury instructions. If Jefferson is convicted, it will be Ellis who will determine his sentence and decide whether the former New Orleans congressman must await the outcome of the certain appeal as a prisoner or free on bail.

In a hearing Monday, Ellis pushed closing arguments back until Wednesday and refused a defense motion to dismiss 14 of the 16 counts of public corruption against Jefferson. He deferred a ruling on an obstruction of justice charge.

He also gave prosecutors and attorneys a draft of his proposed instructions to the jury, estimating that it will take about two hours for him to explain them to the eight women and four men who will decide the case.

Ellis, a Navy flier between his undergraduate education at Princeton University and his legal education, first at Harvard and then at Oxford University, where he received an additional diploma in law, is a commanding figure.

He is crisp, knowledgeable and demanding, well-prepared and self-assured, if occasionally cranky, short-tempered and given to the odd excursion into cultural criticism and personal anecdote. How else would those attending the Jefferson trial know that the judge finds the "clicker" he uses while watching TV frustratingly complicated.

It has been estimated, Ellis said last week, that a judge in a case like this will make more than 100,000 judgment calls.

"It's not a perfect world, " he said, acknowledging that he is bound to be wrong now and again, though it is plain from his demeanor that he thinks that is seldom the case.

Or as an anonymous poster wrote of Ellis on The Robing Room -- a Web site in which lawyers can rate and comment on the performance of federal district court judges -- "Needs to prove that he is the smartest person in the courtroom. Usually he is."

Yet Ellis also seems aware of his touch of hubris.

Last Wednesday -- the same day he offered his Harvard critique -- Ellis advised the court that he had been sent a cartoon by a member of the jury depicting a lawyer or litigant looking up "asking the judge to stop being so judgmental."

He gently asked the jury to refrain from sending any further such missives his way, while suggesting that people would be surprised to find out from "my wife how long it takes for me to make a choice at a restaurant."

Then, in answer to another jury question, Ellis identified the judge whose portrait hangs in the back of his courtroom as Oren R. Lewis, who served on the bench from 1960 until his death at 80 in 1983.

"I was not particularly fond of him, " said Ellis noting the irony that Lewis had a reputation for being an "irascible and irritable" jurist, and "now 40 years later, I find myself presiding in this courtroom, looking at his portrait, " and being critiqued by members of the bar "for the same reasons I disliked him."

In fact, Lewis, who was known as "Roarin' Oren, " had a reputation as a shoot-from-the-hip judge very unlike Ellis. But what he shared with Ellis was a sometimes anomalous collection of traits that led the president of the Arlington County Bar Association to describe Lewis, at the unveiling of his portrait, as "outspoken, courageous and intimidating yet a friendly, warm person."

Ellis can be all those things, depending on where you're sitting in the courtroom.

He has been unfailingly warm and solicitous in his dealings with the jury.

To the prosecutors he has been a demanding law school professor -- frequently correcting and rephrasing their questions, while also siding with them in his rulings far more often than with the defense, whose legal arguments, he has indicated in any number of comments out of hearing of the jury, he finds tenuous at best.

And while Jefferson has appeared unruffled throughout the trial, facing Ellis in the event of a conviction cannot be a pleasant prospect.

Ellis has already sentenced two other figures in the case, who pleaded guilty and testified as witnesses against Jefferson, to stiff prison terms.

"Public corruption is the worst kind of virulent and malignant cancer, " Ellis said in 2006 when he sentenced Vernon Jackson, the CEO of iGate Inc., to seven years, three months in prison. A few months earlier he sentenced Bret Pfeffer to eight years behind bars.

As testimony drew to a close last week, Ellis took out his impatience on the defense, even though it occupied a small fraction of the trial's time. But on at least two occasions, his anger boomeranged to their benefit. At first he sought to keep the defense from paying tapes to impeach the testimony of Noreen Griffin because he thought the "rigmarole, " of having the jurors put on their headsets would take too much time. But ultimately, in a frustrated outburst, he told defense attorney Amy Jackson to play the tapes, but be quick about it.

And then on Thursday, Ellis again ruled that most of the tapes Jefferson's attorneys wanted to play in their defense presentation were irrelevant. Robert Trout, the lead defense counsel who Ellis has treated with the deference of a peer, declared that Ellis' rulings were "eviscerating the defense." In an instant, Ellis was vehemently urging the prosecution to withdraw its objections and let the tapes be played, which is what happened.

It was a dramatic reversal from an experienced judge who did not want to lay the case open to reversal on appeal, but it was also the act of a dependably idiosyncratic jurist who explained that he needed the matter settled quickly one way or the other because his 93-year-old mother was waiting for him and he dared not be late.

Capital bureau reporter Bruce Alpert contributed to this report.
Jonathan Tilove can be reached at jtilove@timespicayune.com or 202.383.7827.

Ex-Congressman William Jefferson Gets 13 Years
November 13th, 2009, 6:12 PM EST
LINK

Former Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson was sentenced to 13 years in prison for using his office to solicit bribes.

Jefferson, 62, was convicted of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and unlawfully seeking millions more, mainly by promoting business deals in Africa. Prosecutors claimed he was involved in 11 separate bribery schemes from August 2000 to August 2005 and that he and his family stood to gain more than half a billion dollars.

The Louisiana Democrat…was videotaped in July 2005 accepting $100,000 in a leather briefcase at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia, and putting it in his car. About $90,000 in the marked bills were later recovered from Pillsbury pie crusts and Boca meatless burger patty boxes in the freezer of his Washington residence.