[StBernard] Oil cleanup security details in St. Bernard Parish overseen by company with ties to sheriff

Westley Annis Westley at da-parish.com
Fri Oct 15 08:04:40 EDT 2010


For nearly five months this summer, a company owned by St. Bernard Parish
Sheriff <http://www.sbso.org/> Jack Stephens' cousin and business partner
oversaw
private security work done by off-duty Sheriff's Office deputies totaling
nearly $900,000.



St. Bernard Parish deputies have provided security for every bit of BP's oil
spill <http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/> cleanup operations in the
parish

but details about the off-duty work run by Tony Fernandez Jr.'s company --
how many hours deputies worked, who was working them and


when -- are unknown to the public.

<http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nola.com%2Fnews%2Fgul
f-oil-spill%2Findex.ssf%2F2010%2F10%2Fst_bernard_parishoff-duty_depu.html%23
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0Parish%20overseen%20by%20company%20with%20ties%20to%20sheriff%20%7C%20NOLA.
com&src=sp>

That's because the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Office keeps no internal
documentation about the private details its deputies work, choosing instead
to outsource the jobs as separate private contracts between the deputies and
the businesses for which they are working. It's a practice that has been
phased out by every other law enforcement agency in the region, in an
attempt to increase transparency and prevent potential abuse by deputies who
still represent law enforcement even while they are not on department time.

In the case of the BP spill, the private details during the summer were not
arranged by the Sheriff's Office. Instead, Parish Oilfield Services LLC, a
company owned by Fernandez, collected money from BP and distributed it to
the deputies working the off-duty shifts.

Fernandez is also a partner with Stephens in Amigo Enterprises Inc., which
this summer rented marina space in Hopedale to BP for $1.1 million per
month, the oil company said. Amigo leases the land for about $2,000 per
month from a local nonprofit group, the Arlene and Joseph Meraux Charitable
Foundation, whose president says Amigo has not been paying a stipulated 10
percent of its gross income to the charity, as outlined in a lease
agreement.

Until last month, the private security for the BP spill in St. Bernard
Parish was run from Fernandez's company. Since then, the details have been
managed by Professional Network Consulting Services, a firm brought in by BP
to manage the security.

Neither Fernandez nor Stephens could be reached for comment after numerous
phone calls.

Doing the math

BP confirmed the $900,000 figure in early September after St. Bernard Parish
President Craig Taffaro called media attention to a standoff between BP and
several contractors, including Amigo Enterprises, over the marina lease
payments that threatened to shut down parish oil-fighting efforts.

BP would not say whether any administrative fees to Fernandez's company were
included as part of the payments. BP paid $45 per hour for the security
details, a 50 percent increase from the Sheriff's Office's typical $30 per
hour rate.

At $45 an hour, that would mean deputies logged more than 20,000 hours
during the summer. That would equate to nearly 2,500 eight-hour shifts over
120 days, meaning 20 deputies working full-day detail shifts every day of
the summer.

The Sheriff's Office employs about 300 people.

Anthony Radosti, vice president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission
<http://www.metropolitancrimecommission.org/> , who has followed abuses of
off-duty police work in New Orleans for decades, said the detail
arrangements brokered through a private company are "truly unacceptable,
because the public has no way of knowing the true value of the contract."

"What you can't determine is how much is being paid to the LLC, and how much
actually filters down to the officers," Radosti said. "If it's not
transparent and the public doesn't have the ability or the right to ask that
question, then it's truly lacking credibility, and it's not in the best
interest of the people of St. Bernard."

The Times-Picayune filed a public records request with the St. Bernard
Sheriff's Office, seeking the records of the private security details. But a
lawyer for the Sheriff's Office said the department keeps no internal
documentation monitoring the off-duty work.

"The Sheriff's Office has no involvement in these contractual relationships
between off-duty deputies and companies who contract with them for their
services," Sal Gutierrez, a lawyer for the Sheriff's Office, wrote in an
e-mail response to the records request. "Therefore, no public records are
kept by the St. Bernard Sheriff's Office of these off-duty details."

'A timeless problem'

The policy raises a number of questions about liability for the department.
Deputies working private details are sworn law enforcement agents who use
taxpayer-financed vehicles and other equipment. Often the rates paid for
private details can far exceed the amount a deputy might make on a normal
shift for the Sheriff's Office, and involve less demanding work.

St. Bernard Chief Deputy James Pohlmann said that although there is no
central oversight of security details, senior deputies in the department are
given the task of overseeing how the details are set up.

"We pay attention to things and make sure there's a higher ranking guy who
would supervise a large detail," Pohlmann said. He added that the policy has
always been the same in St. Bernard, dating back before Stephens, the
current sheriff, took office in 1984.

"There's never been a problem anywhere," he said. "Remember, everybody works
for a supervisor, and everybody has accountability to a supervisor."

Pohlmann said he did not know details about how the off-duty work was
arranged for the BP spill, such as how much Fernandez's company made or how
the details were organized by higher-ranking deputies in the department.

Other sheriff's offices and police departments in the area maintain records
about off-duty work. The changes have come after a history of abuse,
particularly in the New Orleans Police Department, where private details
became a lucrative business opportunities for a select few high-ranking
"brokers" of the off-duty work.

"It's a timeless problem," Radosti said. "One of the things a local law
enforcement agency has to do is keep track of paid details, simply because
you have deputies out there negotiating contracts and deals, being paid a
salary from a business. The deputy is getting the full benefits. The
department knows nothing about it, and the department gets 100 percent of
the liability in case something goes wrong."

Others document private detail work


At the Jefferson and St. Tammany Parish sheriff's offices, and the Kenner
Police Department, there are separate detail offices tasked with fielding
requests for private details and assigning those duties to deputies.

Every request must go through the detail office, where there is
documentation and written authorization from the department. The Jefferson
Parish Sheriff's Office also takes $2 per hour of the $30 per hour rate, to
cover any liability and the use of Sheriff's Office equipment.

In St. John and St. Charles parishes, written authorization from the sheriff
is required for every outside job done by deputies, and all requests must go
through the department hierarchy before assignments are made.

The New Orleans Police Department has a lengthy list of requirements for
paid details, and the department requires a detail log book that is
maintained by each district commander, specifying all officers working
off-duty jobs and how many hours they are working.

The NOPD requirements came after a particularly dark period for the
department and its management of off-duty officers in the mid-1990s. Officer
Antoinette Frank was sentenced to death for her role in the murder of
another officer and two restaurant employees at an eastern New Orleans
restaurant where she worked details. And NOPD Deputy Chief Antoine Saacks
was dismissed after a number of allegations involving a private security
enterprise he ran on the side.

****************************************************************************
*******

There's a file photo of Jack with the nola article:

http://media.nola.com/politics/photo/8278594-large.jpg

I was surprised by how much Jack resembles Tony Soprano:

http://tinyurl.com/2dxvw8j










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