Former Wildlife and Fisheries Commission member admits to trading influence for more than $260,000 in bribes.
Former Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission member Henry Mouton pleaded guilty on yesterday (June 1) of taking more than $260,000 in bribes from the owner of a landfill company while using his position to try and keep a competing landfill from opening, according to news reports.
“He obviously is sorry that this all has happened, and it has affected him and his family,” Mouton attorney Mary Olive Pierson told the Times-Picayune. “He just made some bad decisions, and this is where we are.”
The 54-year-old Mouton faces up to five years in prison, two years of supervised relese and a fine of as much as $250,000 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to accept bribes as a public official, the newspaper reported.
Sentencing before U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman was scheduled for Jan. 25.
The plea was part of a deal reached with federal prosecutors, who agreed to dismiss seven other charges against Mouton.
Court records reveal that Mouton admitting meeting an unnamed co-conspirator in 1996 on a duck-hunting fundraiser for “a former Louisiana governor.”
This co-conspirator is alleged in the court records of offering Mouton $2,000 monthly in exchange for insider political information and access to the governor, even though Mouton was not a registered lobbyist. Mike Foster was governor at the time.
After being appointed by Foster to the Wildlife and Fisheries Commission, Mouton is accused in the records of receiving “the first of approximately 180 illegal payoffs/bribes” from the co-conspirator in mid April of that year.
Mouton admitted to lobbying U.S. senators, local officials, the U.S. attorney in western Louisiana, the Army Corps of Engineers and even the FBI to close Old Gentilly Landfill in eastern New Orleans and not to open Two Rivers Recycling Landfill in Catahoula Parish in the wake of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.
He admitted to accepting $30,000 in August 2006 in return for a public advertising campaign against the Two Rivers landfill that resulted in the denial of the required permits. Mouton also said he tried to disguise $11,000 in campaign contributions to a congressional candidate in April 2006 and later a state candidate on behalf of his unnamed co-conspirator.
