Casino Crime: NOPD Seeks Ticket Thief

Casino Crime: NOPD Seeks Ticket Thief (Video)
Posted Sunday, February 3rd, 2013

It's not uncommon for people to lose all their cash in the casino, but last night's robbery victims lost more than money. The NOPD has surveillance of the crooks who stole seven NFL tickets from some unsuspecting gamblers.

At 10:57pm last night, the victim and family members were exiting Harrah’s via the Canal Street doors. The suspects spotted the group leaving and followed them to the door. A suspect, donning a navy blue Adidas jogging suit with white stripes down the sleeves and pants, a dark knit cap, and tennis shoes, reached into the victim’s back pocket and stole a white envelope containing seven NFL tickets.

After swiping the tix, the subject entered and exited through the Canal Street doors and met up with four black males and two black females. The group fled down Canal heading towards the river, making a right towards Poydras in the direction of Convention Center Boulevard.

The suspect who physically stole the tickets is in his mid 20’s, about 5 ft. 9 inches tall, weighs about 180 pounds, and has short black hair. The second suspect is in his mid 20’s to early 30’s, also about 5 ft. 9 inches, about 240-260 pounds. He was wearing a white baseball cap, flannel plaid long sleeved shirt, and blue jeans.

Suspect number three is in his mid 20’s, about 5 ft. 10 inches, and weighs between 240 and 250 pounds. He was wearing a Kankoo hat, a brown blazer, a light colored shirt, tan pants, and dress shoes. Number four is also in his mid 20’s, about 5 ft. 9 inches, also wearing a dark Kankoo hat, a dark blazer, and dark pants. Number five stands at about 5 ft. 10 inches and weighs 180-190 pounds. He was wearing a dark-colored button down shirt and dark pants.



Citizens with information that can help solve this crime or know the identity or whereabouts of these men are asked to call CRIMESTOPPERS at 822-1111 or toll-free 1-877-903-STOP (7867). Those with information can also text a crime tip to C-R-I-M-E-S (274637), Text TELLCS then your crime information. Folks could receive a cash reward of up to $2,500 for information leading to the arrest and indictment of the person(s) responsible. No one is required to give his or her name nor testify to receive the reward. Citizens can also submit an anonymous tip online to CRIMESTOPPERS at www.crimestoppersgno.org.

http://www.noladefender.com/content/casino-cri67me-no3pd-seeks-ticket-thief-video

Crime Fighter Bumps Into Retail Theft Suspect In Casino

(Photo: Mugshots from Florida police.)
Sami Elias has at least three mugshots, two pending court dates and one arrest and extradition on his record, according to Florida police. This includes two arrests inside casinos. His alleged crimes: stealing over-the-counter drugs in bulk from Florida CVS and Walgreens outlets using a so-called booster bag, which is lined with metal to thwart in-store electronics sensors. He's posted at least $17,000 in bonds in the past year.
Tough Luck: Crime Fighter Bumps Into Retail Theft Suspect In Casino
By Angelo Young
June 29, 2012
Sami Elias's luck ran out in a New Orleans casino.

Unbeknownst to the 54-year-old Kentucky resident, gambler and accused grand theft shoplifter, just a short walk away from the slot machines and poker tables of Harrah's Casino was a veritable who's who of anti-theft officials for some of the largest U.S. retail chains gathering for the annual loss-prevention convention of the National Federation (NRF).

One of those anti-theft officials was Tony Sheppard, nationwide manager for combatting organized retail crime for CVS Caremark Corporation (NYSE: CVS). Sheppard had arrived in town on June 19 and headed over to the casino on the city's famous Canal Street for a little pre-convention R&R.

As Fortuna would have it, that's where Sheppard spotted Elias.

"Confident that the suspect had active warrants, Sheppard called Brendan Dugan from Walgreens to confirm," a blog post on the National Retail Federation's website said. "Dugan, who was also in town for NRF's conference, verified that, yes, the arrest warrant for this booster was still active but they needed law enforcement to confirm."

Sheppard and Dugan reported the sighting to the Louisiana State Police, who arrested Elias on an outstanding warrant from Daytona Beach, Fla., on two counts of grand theft. Elias, who has allegedly been vexing CVS and Walgreen Company (NYSE: WAG) retail outlets in Florida, was booked in Orleans Parish at about 12:30 pm on June 19 and later extradited to Florida. He was booked Thursday night at the Volutia County Correctional Facility in Florida. A representative of the jail said Elias posted $10,000 bond and was released.

His whereabouts are unknown.

This month's casino episode isn't the serial suspect's first run-in with the law. He was arrested June 20, 2011, in Boynton Beach, Fla., after a CVS loss-prevention officer said he witnessed Elias shoveling products into a metal-lined bag designed to avoid tripping in-store electronic sensors. In his car were unopened boxes of Rogaine and other products in trash bags. He posted a $5,000 bond and was released.

And then a couple of months ago, he popped up on law enforcement radar again. On May 6, Elias was arrested by Seminole Indian Reservation Police at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Tampa, Fla., on third-degree grand theft. He posted $2,000 bond and was released. A sheriff's office representative said Friday that Elias faces a court date in that case.

The NRF estimated that the annual cost of stock shrinkage linked mostly to theft costs the retail industry at least $15 billion a year. According to the U.K.-based Centre for Retail Research's Global Theft Barometer, organized retail crime -- including serial bulk shoplifting -- costs American consumers at least $425 a year in added cost to products to make up for the losses.

The New Orleans loss prevention convention that Sheppard was attending focused on coordination among companies and local and national law enforcement to combat crimes like the ones Elias is accused of committing.

Both CVS and Walgreen declined to comment on their run-ins with Elias.

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/358065/20120629/organized-retial-theft-sami-elias-cvs-walgreen.htm

1993: A new gambling era begins in New Orleans

1993: A new gambling era begins in New Orleans
By The Times-Picayune The Times-Picayune

A new gambling era began on Nov. 8, 1993, when the Star Casino on Lake Pontchartrain opened its doors. In less than a decade, Louisiana welcomed three forms of legalized gambling: a state lottery, video poker machines, and casinos on the state’s rivers and at the foot of Canal Street.

Critics warned that gambling would nourish the state’s culture of political corruption, and they were right. But the industry became a reliable employer and helped the state diminish its dependence on oil and gas.

Louisiana’s chief cheerleader for gambling was Gov. Edwin Edwards. But most of the measures legalizing gambling passed while Buddy Roemer ran the show in Baton Rouge. The lottery, video poker and riverboat casinos were all approved on Roemer’s watch.

There were two chief reasons why the Louisiana public accepted the gambling measures: Roemer, the reformer, was expected to win re-election in 1991, so he would oversee the licensing; and Mississippi was legalizing casinos.

Edwards’ chief contribution to the gambling landscape was to authorize a single land-based casino at the site of the Rivergate, an obsolete convention center. The competitors for the right to operate the gambling hall made promises so lavish that the project went broke twice before finding its financial footing, thanks in part to a state tax break in 2001.

The timeline: May 1, 1995: Harrah’s temporary casino opens in the Municipal Auditorium. Nov. 22 1995: The casino files for bankruptcy, the temporary casino closes and work on the permanent casino stops. Oct. 28, 1999: The permanent casino opens. For the past 10 years, Harrah’s New Orleans Casino has been a dependable source of jobs and tax revenue.

Riverboat casinos never provided the economic boom for the New Orleans area that supporters had expected. The Star Casino lasted a year and a half before shutting down and eventually heading for Lake Charles. But lavish casino developments like L’Auberge du Lac lifted Lake Charles and Shreveport, which benefited from their proximity to Texas.

When he unexpectedly won the 1991 governor’s race, Edwin Edwards inherited an opportunity for political corruption that dwarfed anything he had encountered in his first three terms. He won the right to award licenses for the state’s 16 casinos. In 2000, nearly five years after he left office for the last time, a Baton Rouge jury convicted him of extorting nearly $3 million from companies that applied for the licenses, and he was sent to jail for more than eight years.

Tomorrow, 1994: New Orleans' homicide rate peaks.

Jefferson Parish Courthouse corruption investigation

FBI records shed light on Jefferson Parish Courthouse corruption investigation
By Drew Broach, The Times-Picayune

The FBI's nine-year inquiry into Jefferson Parish Courthouse corruption and the ensuing prosecutions convicted 14 people of federal crimes, imprisoned two judges and removed a third from office through impeachment. And it grew out of a simple tip that the Metropolitan Crime Commission received on June 15, 1998, according to FBI records.

On that day, a disgruntled bail bonds agent unloaded the dirt on the dominant bonding company in Gretna, Bail Bonds Unlimited, telling a crime commission investigator that owner Louis Marcotte III was paying off judges and justices of the peace, covering one's gambling debt and picking up the tab for their vacations, as well as buying food and drinks for the sheriff's deputies who worked in the parish jail. In return, says a crime commission summary of the interview, "Bail Bonds Unlimited is never turned down for any request they make of a judge."

Intrigued, the FBI soon launched what came to be a relentless investigation that employed live and electronic surveillance, an undercover agent from Brownsville, Texas, and covert trips to Biloxi, Miss., and Las Vegas.

Those are among the tidbits found in newly released FBI records of its investigation, which sent district judges Ronald Bodenheimer and Alan Green to prison, obtained guilty pleas from 12 others, including Sheriff's Office jailers, and culminated last December with the Senate kicking U.S. District Judge Thomas Porteous out of office.

The FBI began releasing the records this month in response to a four-year Freedom of Information Act effort by The Times-Picayune. The first 676 pages, although heavily redacted and often less illuminating than previously disclosed aspects of the investigation, nonetheless provide a few new details.

They suggest the FBI traces its investigation to the 1998 tip that the Metropolitan Crime Commission passed on to the bureau. With some initial spade work and the help of a cooperating witness, who secretly wired up to record conversations with others, federal agents came to hypothesize that Bail Bonds Unlimited was paying judges, lawyers and jailers in order to help it boost its business and freeze out competitors.

The cooperating witness' name is masked in the released records, but the circumstances suggest it was Martha Sassone, a state district judge who was suspicious of Bail Bonds Unlimited and Marcotte. Sassone had just lost a 1998 race for the state appeals court in Gretna to District Judge Susan Chehardy, whose 1994 wedding to lawyer Bruce Netterville included Marcotte as best man. The Times-Picayune has previously disclosed Sassone's role in the investigation.

THE FBI RECORDS
•Part 1
•Part 2
•Part 3

By Jan. 26, 1999, the special agent in charge of the New Orleans office, Charles Mathews III, had seen enough preliminary evidence to authorize a full investigation, the records show, and the inquiry received its code name: Operation Wrinkled Robe. Two years earlier, when Mathews took command of the FBI office in New Orleans, he told his public corruption supervisor, Charles McGinty, that he wanted "high impact" cases. This would be one.

It become obvious within five months that the investigators were onto something big. One analyst determined that Bail Bonds Unlimited had insurance agreements with bond agents throughout Louisiana and surmised, according to a June 22 handwritten memo, "If this isn't racketeering, I don't know what is."

The early phase seems to have centered on laying the investigation's groundwork, including its budget and accounting. Agents also began obtaining pen registers, to determine what numbers were called from certain suspect phones, and securing various approvals from headquarters. U.S. Attorney Eddie Jordan signed off on use of undercover techniques on March 1. And a conference call was held April 28 with Carolyn Dineen King of Houston, who was chief judge of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. King appointed then-Chief Judge A.J. "Buddy" McNamara of the U.S. District Court in New Orleans to handle requests for court orders during the investigation.

In July, agents set up surveillance at the Beau Rivage hotel and casino in Biloxi, having heard that one of the subjects of its investigation would be there on someone else's nickel, the FBI records say. That was during a convention of bail bond agents, where Bail Bonds Unlimited spent $541 to enter Green, Bodenheimer and Porteous in a deep-sea fishing tournament and $963 on Cirque du Soleil tickets for Green, Bodenheimer, state District Judge Kernan "Skip" Hand and Justice of the Peace Steve Mortillaro and their wives, according to company records that were introduced at Green's criminal trial. Green and Porteous skipped the fishing tournament, so Hand and Mortillaro took their places, according to Bail Bonds Unlimited records.

In a 2005 interview, Mortillaro denied receiving an invitation or ticket to the fishing tournament or the circus performance. Neither he nor Hand was charged with a crime.

It was the first of two such Wrinkled Robe surveillance efforts at Beau Rivage, the other coming in April 2001, according to the records.


View full size
The Times-PicayuneAn interactive history of Operation Wrinkled Robe.

By the fall of 1999, agents had grown interested in Porteous, a former state district judge. A newspaper clipping in the FBI file recounts Porteous' controversial court ruling in the struggle for control of a Kenner hospital, which later figured into Porteous' impeachment. Mathews asked the Justice Department's public integrity division for a background investigation of a federal district judge, and soon the FBI sent two agents to Las Vegas to investigate a "bachelor party weekend," according to the records. Two of Porteous' lawyer friends had helped pay for his son's wedding and for Porteous' hotel room in Vegas.

In 2000, the FBI began to implement an undercover operation. The bureau transferred its resident agent in Brownsville to New Orleans to assume a fake identity and infiltrate Bail Bonds Unlimited's operation. After seven months, the agent returned to Texas, "successful in acquiring detailed information concerning subjects of the investigation."

That information later went into a crucial affidavit that the FBI used to secure warrants from McNamara for wiretapping phones and secreting video cameras in the chambers of Bodenheimer and Green. Five days after losing a court challenge to use of the electronic surveillance, Bodenheimer plead guilty to three corruption charges. The recordings also played a important role in convicting Green at trial of mail fraud in 2005.

Alaska Addict embezzles to gamble in Washington state, Las Vegas and New Orleans

The indictment alleges [Maggie Ahmaogak] spent the money to gamble in Washington state, Las Vegas and New Orleans.

Former whaling commission director indicted for embezzlement, accused of gambling
MARK THIESSEN Associated Press

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The former longtime executive director of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury and accused of stealing about $475,000 from the organization.

The indictment was returned against Maggie Ahmaogak, 61, the second former whaling commission director to face federal charges.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Aunnie Steward said Ahmaogak was not in custody and a summons will be issued for her arrest.

The U.S. attorney's office listed her home in Barrow, but she has a phone listing in Anchorage. A man who answered the phone at the number confirmed it was for the former director but said she wasn't home. She didn't immediately return a message left by The Associated Press.

The commission was formed in 1976 to protect Eskimo culture and activities associated with subsistence bowhead whale hunting, according to a release from the U.S. attorney's office announcing the indictment.

The commission's current director, Johnny Aiken, told the AP by telephone from his Barrow office that the organization was aware an investigation was under way but didn't know that Ahmaogak had been indicted. He declined further comment.

Steward said it was the commission that first notified her office by letter that there were concerns funds might have been misused.

That letter came after another former whaling commission director, Teresa Judkins, was fired in 2008. Federal authorities last summer charged her with stealing more than $100,000 from the organization in a two-year span ending with her termination. She has pleaded not guilty and faces a jury trial beginning March 5 in Anchorage.

Authorities allege Ahmaogak stole $475,000 from 2004 until 2007, when she was fired. She is charged with wire fraud, theft, misapplication of funds from an organization receiving federal grant funds, and money laundering, according to the release. If convicted she could face up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count.

Authorities allege Ahmaogak wrote checks to herself from the organization's account, never repaid paycheck advances, transferred commission account money into her own account, and used the commission's credit card for personal use, according to the release.

The indictment alleges she spent the money to gamble in Washington state, Las Vegas and New Orleans. Authorities also allege she bought three snowmobiles and put a down payment on an SUV.

In the separate case, authorities allege Judkins also used commission funds to buy a snowmachine, never paid back payroll advances and used funds to pay for travel.

The whaling commission receives a majority of its funds from federal grants, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration being the biggest benefactor. From 2004 to 2007, the time Ahmaogak is accused of embezzling funds, federal authorities say the whaling commission received $2.3 million from NOAA, a division of the Department of Commerce.

"Certainly it is a cause of concern, but we can't comment on it for legal reasons," NOAA spokeswoman Julie Speegle said.

The Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation, the FBI and the Department of Commerce Office of Inspector General investigated the case.