NEW ORLEANS — The former head of a nonprofit created by Mayor LaToya Cantrell to pay for city welfare programs is now backing off his claims that illegitimate board members mismanaged public and private funds at the nonprofit, Forward Together New Orleans, after a judge ordered him Thursday to stop acting as if he still runs FTNO.
Although not a final judgment in the case, Orleans Parish Civil District Judge Nykesha Ervin-Knott was definitive in ruling that the board members who fired FTNO Executive Director Shaun Randolph in August were still on the board and had fired him properly, contrary to Randolph’s claims.
Randolph has created a separate Forward Together New Orleans website, changed FTNO’s corporate documents at the Secretary of State’s office and allegedly tried to seize control of the nonprofit’s bank account after he was fired. Ervin-Knott shot that down Thursday.
“I find you were in fact terminated on Aug. 17, therefore you do not have a right to claim you are still executive director,” Ervin-Knott said from the bench. “That website you put up, I’m going to order that you take that website down. I order that you no longer contact individuals purporting to be executive director.”
She also ordered Randolph to stop trying to access FTNO’s bank account at Liberty Bank, which contains about $1.5 million, including more than $1 million in city money. Liberty Bank froze that account in September after the New Orleans Inspector General issued a subpoena for financial records as a part of an investigation requested by the City Council.
But FTNO said Randolph tried to collect his payroll check and tried to convince Liberty Bank he still controlled the funds as recently as Oct. 1.
Meanwhile, the Cantrell administration is asking FTNO to return the city money the mayor sent under agreements she and Randolph signed in April to pay for the city’s job-training and gun-violence prevention programs.
Randolph said Thursday he doesn’t know if he will continue to fight. Allen Miller, a lawyer for FTNO, said that if Randolph doesn’t answer the lawsuit in the next 21 days, FTNO will seek a default final judgment from Ervin-Knott to provide to Liberty Bank, so the bank will release the money in the account to the board members so they can return it to the city and private donors. He said at that point, FTNO plans to dissolve for good.
“The sad fact is that money is used to pay normal, everyday citizens in these programs and those people are not getting paid now,” Miller said in court.
According to documents filed in court, Randolph hired a New York attorney for $650 an hour in February, and the board chair, Kathleen Kennedy, didn’t learn about it until July. But Randolph said the attorney, Rudyard Ceres, did not represent him personally, so he went to court Thursday without a lawyer.
Appearing chastened in an interview after the hearing, Randolph said he didn’t know what he was doing and failed to object several times when he wish he had.
“I lost in court. I deserve to lose in court. Does that mean I'm a liar? Does that mean I did anything wrong, was a crook? No, I don't believe so,” Randolph said.
But he declined to answer questions about allegations reported by WWL-TV that he had tried similar attempts to seize the accounts of another charity in Florida after he was fired there in April. The station also reported he received an $80,000 salary to work full-time for FTNO while simultaneously running at least two other charities around the country.
And Randolph tried to back off the most serious claims he had made in emails to the Inspector General and City Council, alleging mismanagement of FTNO funds by the board members who hired and then fired him, Kennedy and board treasurer Eric Griggs.
“I've never said that they mismanaged funds. I said I'm aware of mismanagement of funds, not at FTNO,” he claimed Thursday, even though that’s contradicted by several public emails, including one he sent to City Council members in August stating, “City funds that were in the custody of Forward Together New Orleans have been stolen by individuals who are no longer affiliated with the organization,” referring to Kennedy, Griggs and former board member Silas Lee, who has consistently said he stepped down from the board in July.
Confronted about his earlier allegations against the board, Randolph now says he misunderstood what was happening when he tried to pay FTNO bills in September, a month after his firing, and received a message through an online banking system stating “payment failed.”
“I informed stakeholders, ‘I believe the account’s been drained.’ I didn't find out till later that (‘payment failed’) was popping up because of the frozen account,” he said in Thursday’s interview.
He still tried to argue after court that Kennedy and Griggs were properly replaced on the FTNO board in July. Asked why he didn’t press that argument in court, he said, “Because I suck at being a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer. I didn't know when to say, when to step in, what to do.”
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