[StBernard] HANO employee booked in St. Bernard Parish Section 8 theft case

[Westley Annis]

An employee of the Housing Authority of New Orleans
<http://topics.nola.com/tag/hano/index.html>  allegedly helped his friend,
St. Bernard Parish employee Preston Carmon, steal $47,000 from St. Bernard's
<http://topics.nola.com/tag/st.-bernard/index.html> Section 8 housing
program through false rental-assistance claims.

HANO spokesman David Jackson confirmed that Gregory Kennedy, 34, who was
booked for felony theft on Thursday along with Carmon, was an employee of
HANO.

So far investigators from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development have determined that Kennedy "definitely wasn't in control of
any funding" at HANO, said Robert Anderson, special agent in charge of the
HUD inspector general's office for the New Orleans division.

Jackson also said that while the agency's new compliance officer is looking
at everything Kennedy touched, "currently, there is nothing to suggest that
Kennedy committed fraud (at HANO) while he was a housing authority
employee."

On Thursday, Kennedy was suspended without pay and his access to any HANO
systems was terminated, Jackson said, noting that Kennedy was hired in
September as an inspector for the agency's Section 8 program. Before that,
Jackson said, Kennedy had worked as an inspector for Mir Fox Rodriguez, the
Houston contractor that ran HANO's voucher program.

Mir Fox Rodriguez took over HANO's voucher program in 2009 after the
department's director, Dwayne Muhammad, was discovered using a Section 8
voucher to rent an apartment along with his girlfriend, who also worked at
Mir Fox. Despite his annual salary of $114,000, the two were living in a
house in Gentilly where the rent was covered by a voucher, issued in
Muhammad's mother's name.

Muhammad was succeeded by his deputy, Naomi Roberts, who was fired in
December amid claims that she and her husband's organization, the Coalition
for a Better Community, rented property to a program tenant despite employee
guidelines barring participation in the program as a landlord.

Some HANO sources had reported in the past that HANO administrators had made
it difficult for employees to give information to HUD investigators.

But Anderson said that his office has been working closely with the team led
by turnaround specialist David Gilmore and that investigators are currently
trying to determine whether Kennedy "was complicit in anything within HANO."

The Section 8 program, operated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development, helps low-income families pay rent by making monthly payments
to private landlords.

For 13 months starting in January 2010, Carmon falsely listed Kennedy as the
landlord at fictitious addresses in order to have government checks made out
to Kennedy, said James Pohlmann, St. Bernard's chief deputy sheriff. 

The two men split the money received from HUD, Pohlmann said.

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Well thank goodness he didn't commit any fraud with HANO so all they did was
suspend them.  DOH!  What about the sec. 8 fraud with SBP?  


If this weren't so pathetic it would almost be laughable.

JY