NEW ORLEANS — Four New Orleans police officers are now under internal investigation after confidential law enforcement information was provided to Mayor LaToya Cantrell.
The probe stems from the mayor’s now-dismissed petition for a protective order against a woman who took her picture as she sat with her then-police bodyguard Jeffrey Vappie.
The mayor’s petition against Anne Breaud, a one-time neighbor of Cantrell when the mayor was staying at the city’s Upper Pontalba apartments. The mayor’s petition included Breaud’s social security number, an expunged 2016 arrest and an old driver’s license photo, all information that is off-limits to anyone outside of law enforcement.
WWL Louisiana obtained an email confirming the probe, which was outsourced to an independent law firm, Transcendent Law Group. The email was from Transcendent to Breaud’s attorney Justin Schmidt.
Schmidt said that in addition to filing public records requests to determine who provided the confidential information, he also filed complaints to the police department’s Public Integrity Bureau.
“It shows that there definitely was this link to the mayor,” Schmidt said. “And now we're just trying to figure out who all was involved, whether this was involved through a chain of command situation, or whether this was kind of a favor to somebody, a friend of a friend, or with a wink and a nod.”
The email states that the officers under investigation are Vappie, who has since retired from the NOPD, Vappie’s supervisor, Sgt. Victor Gant, Leslie Guzman, who fielded the mayor's complaint against Breaud and wrote an incident report on the matter, and a fourth officer, Ryan St. Martin.
Vappie’s retirement came on June 29 while he was already under investigation after the May 7 photos surfaced of him sitting at the Tableau restaurant with the mayor while he was on duty, photos that Breaud admitted she shot from her Pontalba balcony. He also remains under investigation stemming from a July 2022 picture of him and Cantrell sitting with glasses of wine at Doris Metropolitan, a photo the Breaud said she did not take.
The city hired Transcendent to conduct the internal investigations into Vappie after an earlier PIB probe was heavily criticized as inadequate by federal consent decree monitor as well as U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan, who is overseeing the 12-year-old consent decree.
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