NEW ORLEANS — Even after pleading guilty to bribery and admitting he falsified building permits and safety inspections, a former top Kenner official remained defiant to the end, arguing his crimes weren’t serious enough to warrant prison time.
Today, a federal judge didn’t agree. Former Kenner Code Enforcement Director James Mohamad was sentenced to nearly four years in prison, 13 months after he pled guilty.
U.S. District Judge Lance Africk acknowledged a huge crowd in court to support Mohamad, many of whom came on a chartered limousine bus. Mohamad apologized for his crimes but asked for leniency, saying he wants to get back to his life dedicated to helping people.
But Africk responded by saying, "You like to help people, but you also like to help yourself." The judge said Mohamad's scheme "permeated with avarice and greed," noted that Mohamad made more than $1 million and still it wasn't enough. He also agreed with lead prosecutor Tracey Knight that Mohamad's crimes were more serious than Mohamad's defense attorneys portrayed them and posed a real danger to the public.
Africk sentenced Mohamad 46 months in prison for a count of bribery and a count of filing false tax returns, the high end of the federal sentencing guidelines for each conviction.
Mohamad admitted to bribing an inspector in New Orleans and paying licensed contractors to let him do HVAC installation jobs without a proper license, then inspecting his own construction work. He also admitted in court papers that he filed false tax returns that didn't report the income he got for those jobs.
The federal sentencing guidelines called for three to four years in prison for those crimes, but Mohamad’s attorneys argued in court filings that he should only get a year of home confinement by claiming he was simply trying to “expedite the permit process and, in effect, jumped the line.”
Federal prosecutors shot back in their own filings that Mohamad had “submitted fraudulent inspection reports .... This practice is dangerous and does not protect property owners as the system is set up to do."
In court Wednesday, Knight said Mohamad's scheme "put homeowners in danger." Africk agreed and said to Mohamad, "Your counsel says you're just jumping the line. I'm not persuaded by that argument."
Mohamad's attorney Mike Magner also argued that the false tax returns were the tax preparer's fault and emphasized that his client had already paid more than $300,000 in restitution in January to cover the tax debt. Again, that did not convince Africk to reduce Mohamad's prison time.
While dozens of Mohamad's supporters left the court in apparent shock, contractor Brian Palmisano and Mohamad's longtime former girlfriend, Christy Simon, emerged from the courthouse relieved. They said they had finally received justice years after bringing details of Mohamad's scheme to the FBI.
"And it's just been an ongoing battle since then," Palmisano said. "And now he can't do nothing. He can't harm us no more. He's a bully."
"Because I wanted out of a very toxic atmosphere and relationship with him because he's not the good person everybody thinks he is," said Simon, who said she was with Mohamad for 32 years before she came forward against him and then got arrested over a credit card dispute with him that went nowhere. "Trust me. I know."
As Mohamad and the government argued back and forth over the last several months about his appropriate sentence, a WWL-TV investigation found Mohamad was back to doing building inspections in Kenner, and a resident there filed a new criminal complaint against Mohamad less than two months ago, alleging he had falsified a plumbing inspection on a house she was planning to buy.
A Kenner Police spokesman confirmed the department referred the allegations to the Jefferson Parish District Attorney. Africk noted from the bench that Attorney Sherry Schultz, who filed the criminal complaint, had written a letter detailing her allegations. The judge said he was not taking that or our news coverage into account in setting Mohamad's sentence.
Documents show Mohamad gave final approval for work on a house Schultz had a contract to buy and caused Kenner to issue a final inspection certificate. Armed with hundreds of photographs and text messages, Schultz alleges Mohamad approved the work before it was actually finished, and now independent inspectors she hired are telling her the home has serious defects.
Mohamad’s attorney says that’s not true, that Mohamad “properly performed all required inspections” and approved the work after it was complete. An inspection code consultant in Texas who reviewed the photographs and public documents for WWL-TV said that can’t be the case.
“The inspections were not properly done and thoroughly done, if they were even done at all,” Frank Morris said.
The new allegations are similar to those made by the former head of New Orleans’ Safety and Permits Department, Zach Smith, when he banned Mohamad from performing any more inspections in New Orleans after discovering dozens of Mohamad’s inspection reports used photographs from other properties as supposed proof that aspects of the construction work were completed properly, suggesting he may not have actually showed up to review the work before approving it as safe.
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