DREW BROACH/ Nola.com / May 6, 2024
Operation Wrinkled Robe was the FBI’s name for its nine-year investigation and prosecution of Jefferson Parish Courthouse corruption.
It produced 14 criminal convictions: of judges Ronald Bodenheimer and Alan Green of Louisiana’s 24th Judicial District Court, three executives of Bail Bonds Unlimited, five sheriff’s deputies and four other people. Three other judges lost their jobs.
Wrinkled Robe grew out of a tip that the Metropolitan Crime Commission received on June 15, 1998, from a disgruntled bail bonds agent, according to FBI records.
The tipster unloaded the dirt on Bail Bonds Unlimited, the dominant bonding company in Gretna, telling a crime commission investigator that owner Louis Marcotte III was paying off judges and justices of the peace, covering one judge’s gambling debts and picking up the tab for judges’ vacations, as well as buying food and drinks for the sheriff’s deputies who worked in the parish jail.
In return, says a crime commission summary of the interview, “Bail Bonds Unlimited is never turned down for any request they make of a judge.”
As part of its inquiry, the FBI in 2001 and 2002 tapped phones, secreted microphones and even installed hidden video cameras to record conversations in the Gretna courthouse chambers of Bodenheimer and Green or among Bail Bonds Unlimite’s executives.
Bodenheimer pleaded guilty to 2003 to conspiring to plant drugs on a critic of his Venetian Isles Marina; scheming to fix Al Copeland‘s child custody case with the hopes of gaining a lucrative seafood contract at the multimillionaire’s restaurants; and plotting to reduce and split bonds for Marcotte in exchange for dinners, trips and other things of value. His sentence: 46 months in prison.
Green was the only defendant to go to trial. A jury convicted him of mail fraud, in connection with $10,000 that prosecutors described as a bribe he received from Bail Bonds Unlimited. His sentence: 51 months in prison.
State District Judge Joan Benge was removed from office by the Louisiana Supreme Court for a ruling, in a relatively minor civil case, that the court found was based on her relationship with Bodenheimer and an attorney in the case instead of the case’s merits.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Porteous, a former judge of 24th Judicial District Court in Gretna, was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives then convicted by the Senate and disqualified from office for a “corrupt financial relationship” with a law firm and attorneys appearing in his federal court, a “long-standing pattern of corrupt conduct” with bail bondsmen, lying on his personal bankruptcy filing in 2001, and lying to the Senate during his confirmation for the federal judgeship.
State District Judge Martha Sassone, a whistleblower who helped the FBI in its investigation, was defeated for reelection in 2008 — the first time in at least 84 years that an incumbent Jefferson Parish judge ran for another term and lost.