Let's hear it for Jefferson family values

Congressman "Dollar" Bill Jefferson, D-New Orleans, must be one proud patriarch.

To judge from the federal indictments that continue to rain down, his kinfolk were filled with a desire to be just like him.

They could not, of course, hope to emulate the scale of his alleged scams and shakedowns, which, as befits a politician in such exalted office, played out across two continents.

But there were no flies on the local team either, according to the feds. While Dollar Bill awaits trial in Northern Virginia, the New Orleans feds have indicted Dollar Bill's sister, New Orleans Assessor Betty Jefferson, his brother Mose and his niece Angela Coleman.

Year in, year out, those three pocketed huge amounts of public money supposedly appropriated to help the needy, according to the indictment. No doubt they now yearn for the days when Dollar Bill's old sidekick Eddie Jordan was U.S. attorney.

When President Bush appointed Jim Letten to replace Jordan, the family might have been wise to draw in its horns or at least to make some show of charitable endeavor. But its organizations just kept raking in the dough without so much as putting out a sign or publishing a phone number. The city's myriad dispossessed can have had no idea all that money was sloshing around for their supposed benefit.

Stealing public money, it turns out, is pretty straightforward, provided you have friends and relatives in Baton Rouge and Washington. And you certainly have them if your patriarch is Dollar Bill, who was a state senator until his election to Congress 18 years ago.

Jefferson family organizations were major beneficiaries of slush funds in the gift of individual state legislators, who included Dollar Bill's protégée Renee Gill Pratt and his daughter Jalila. Between them they steered some $5 million to organizations controlled by Aunt Betty, Uncle Mose and Cousin Angela.

The purported New Orleans charities also proved quite adept at extracting money from the feds, and, although nobody knows what if any influences were brought to bear, it is a fair bet that Dollar Bill did not object.

If securing grants was more or less a breeze, stealing the money required no great ingenuity either. According to the feds, the family members would establish bank accounts with themselves as the only authorized signatories and divert the proceeds to their own accounts while submitting fraudulent reports to the state and federal governments.

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