Businessman may have used his influence to get Mayor Cantrell to fire city employee
Sources tell us federal investigators are closing in on Mayor LaToya Cantrell, and they are specifically interested in why she fired a certain city employee in 2019.
A former city permitting official who was investigating alleged misconduct was fired just days after the targets of her probe complained about her directly to Mayor LaToya Cantrell, according to city records and secret recordings of those meetings obtained by WWL Louisiana.
Sources say a grand jury subpoenaed those records late last year as a part of a sweeping federal investigation into the mayor.
The permitting official who investigated alleged self-dealing in the city’s Safety and Permits Department was Jennifer Cecil, who was deputy director of the department and head of the OneStop permitting and licensing program until she was fired in August 2019.
“As a federal prosecutor, you would want to get all the communication surrounding that decision, including Ms. Cecil's communications with anybody explaining why she believed she was fired,” said former Assistant U.S. Attorney Matt Chester, part of the team that prosecuted former Mayor Ray Nagin.
City employee sends emails to investigator
In June of 2018, Cecil sent emails to an investigator for the Inspector General’s Office with evidence that the owner of a private safety inspection firm was using that company to buy electrical work permits under a licensed electrician’s name, then signing off that the work was safe.
The emails include images of dozens of checks signed by Randy Farrell, a former city inspector whose private inspection firm, IECI, inspects the majority of the private building and electrical construction and repair work permitted by the city.
Records show a single electrician working by himself had received more than 2,700 permits from the city over three and a half years, from 2016 through the first eight months of 2019. Farrell had approved the final inspection on almost 2,400 of those jobs, or 86% of them, records show.
The records also show IECI had paid for more than 400 electrical work permits for that single electrician in the first half of 2019 alone, then approved the final inspection of the work, certifying it was safe.
“Seeing checks with the third-party company’s name (IECI) made me concerned, because we should not have anyone inspecting their own work,” Cecil wrote to IG investigator Kristen Morales on June 18, 2019. “It would be a major safety concern if someone from IECI were also performing the work.”
“When IECI made checks payable to the City of New Orleans on behalf of various subcontractors, seeking electrical or building permits, such payments were perfectly proper, but sometimes misunderstood,” Farrell’s criminal defense attorney, Rick Simmons, told WWL.
By law, Farrell and IECI’s other inspectors can’t get jobs as contractors in the city -- to make sure they aren’t inspecting their own handiwork. They aren’t even allowed to hold licenses to do construction or repair work in the city if they are licensed to inspect the work of others.
It’s like a school making sure a student doesn’t grade his own test.
But that’s exactly what former IECI inspector James Mohamad was convicted of doing as he bribed city official Brian Medus to approve Mohamad’s HVAC jobs under the names of other, properly licensed contractors.
Former Safety and Permits Director Jared Munster said he had asked Cecil years earlier to look into allegations that IECI inspectors, including Mohamad and the owner, Farrell, were engaged in that kind of self-dealing.
“She was the one who was in the system actually observing the irregularities that then led to the reports being generated, forwarded to the OIG,” Munster said.
He said Cecil continued her work when the Cantrell administration replaced him as director in 2018.
City emails show Cecil was closing in on Farrell, Mohamad and other IECI inspectors in the summer of 2019 when Cantrell suddenly requested lunch meetings with the entire Safety and Permits staff. Larry Chan, the chief building official and one of Cecil’s targets inside City Hall, immediately forwarded the staff-only invitation to Farrell, city emails show.
In a secret recording of the meeting held Aug. 19, 2019, Chan complains to Cantrell that Cecil was “charging me with things” and creating a “hostile work environment.” Cantrell responds by praising Chan for his courage and asking, “Do you believe that we have what we need internally to fill leadership gaps should they become open? So, like running OneStop, that sort of thing?”
A couple of hours after the meeting, Cecil, who wasn’t in attendance, texted Morales, the IG investigator: “Larry had his meeting today… Apparently, the theme was my incompetence…And my false accusations…F--- me…He’s gonna win.”
City employee fired
Three days later, Cecil was fired.
“I’ve just been fired,” she texted Morales. “Because of Larry.”
Chan didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Cantrell’s defense attorney, Eddie Castaing, also declined to comment.
WWL asked the mayor in December if she had Cecil fired at Farrell’s request to make his life easier.
“No, I don’t do favors,” she said. “I’ve never had any conversations with anyone, Randy Farrell or anyone else, relative to who I need to put in place in leadership to make it easy for anybody.”
Not only did the recording from August 2019 appear to contradict that, but WWL received public records last week that show Farrell, himself, also talked to Cantrell about Cecil before she was fired.
In September 2023, Farrell emailed current Safety and Permits Director Tammie Jackson: “I had asked Mrs. Lotoya (sic) Cantrel (sic) to Look into Jennifer Cecil's Toxic environment at Safety and Permits and she chose to remove her.”
“While Mr. Farrell did complain about the environment at the Safety and Permits section, there were many complaints from other sources which caused scrutiny of the department,” said Simmons, Farrell’s defense attorney.
Chester, the former federal prosecutor, said the U.S. Attorney’s Office is going to need more than Farrell and his allies influencing Cecil’s firing to establish any criminal wrongdoing.
“You're talking about the ‘quo’ in the ‘quid pro quo,’” he said. “You'd want to see, is there anything of value given by Mr. Farrell or anybody associated with Mr. Farrell to the mayor or anybody at City Hall that helped undertake these efforts” to fire Cecil.
Shortly after Cecil’s firing, Chan was suspended, according to a letter from Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño, as “the result of an ongoing federal investigation into the illegal issuance of city permits.”
Chan then went to work for Farrell at IECI. Chan also holds the necessary electrician’s license for Randy Farrell’s electrical company, Global Technical Solutions, to operate as a contractor in the state of Louisiana.
In 2021, Chan and Farrell were arrested in Jefferson Parish, charged with contractor fraud and falsifying inspections.
Farrell pled guilty to federal tax fraud in December 2021, admitting, among other financial crimes, he concealed a quarter million dollars in income he got from IECI. He was sentenced to probation and has paid back more than $1 million to the federal government, Simmons said.
Farrell has never been charged with any fraud or corruption involving IECI’s work in the city of New Orleans.
Last September, Jackson revoked Farrell’s third-party inspection license, citing the tax fraud conviction and the fraud charges in Jefferson Parish. She also noted the evidence uncovered four years earlier by Cecil: “It has been recently brought to my attention that IECI, under your direction, has paid for numerous permits which were inspected by IECI inspectors. This practice constitutes numerous violations of the Code of the City of New Orleans.”
The next day, Farrell shot back an email claiming the charges against him in Jefferson Parish are “dummied up” and “Politically Motivated.” Then, he likened himself to Cantrell and the federal investigation into her.
“Look at what false charges are doing (to) your boss the Mayor and you are playing into the same politically motivated game being played by the same people who want her out.”
He concluded with this: “Open your eyes, you're being used like a puppet. Talk to the Mayor if you don't believe me.”
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