Crooked New Orleans Cops Under Investigation for Theft and Extortion

Asset forfeiture, when done by the book, is essentially a "license to steal." Cops conducting or serving a drug-related raid or warrant often don't just confiscate drugs; they also seize cash, computers, cars, and recreational electronics. While there's no apparent justification for confiscating these items, the law allows it and police department higher-ups encourage it, so cops do it. The only thing required of the officers who walk away with your stuff is that they document what they've taken.

When cops fail to document their haul, it's theft-theft. This appears to be the case in New Orleans, where NOPD officers serving a search warrant at the art studio of a suspected drug dealer walked out with two personal safes and a ton of other loot that likely wasn't on the warrant, and that the officers then failed to document. The Times-Picayune reports:

Ashley Boudreaux, the caretaker at ArtEgg studios, said she was there when police arrived. Stefen Daigle had signed a "consent to search" form allowing police to search his unit.

Later, while outside smoking a cigarette, she watched the officers carry boxes of evidence out of the building, including two safes. At one point, one of the safes toppled off a handcart used to wheel it out, she recalled.

When Boudreaux went to check on the studio after police left, she found that a door between Daigle's unit and the neighboring unit had been forcibly opened. The baseboard that covered the locked door between the two units was removed, and scratches on the frame seemed to indicate it had been pried open, Boudreaux said.

The two units -- Nos. 215 and 216 -- were both leased by Scott Bean, a friend of Daigle's who has since died. Kitchens on Monday said most of the materials that police seized were taken from No. 215, which Boudreaux said was mainly used by Bean.

Boudreaux said she had been in that unit a few days before the police raid. The door appeared to still be closed and locked at that point.

In the police report about the raid, NOPD Detective Ray Veit wrote that he and three other officers went into No. 216 with Daigle, where they saw a partition and an open door that led to another room. The report describes officers seizing a substance they believed to be crystal methamphetamine, along with other containers. Veit and another officer then went into the other room and seized other drugs, along with digital scales and a black suitcase containing a food "sealer" from an open closet, the report stated.

Officers also reported seizing "three glass smoking devices," but photographs takens by Boudreaux show that police left behind what appeared to be at least a couple homemade pipes.

There is no mention of any safes in the report.

The theft of the safes from the ArtEgg Complex by New Orleans' finest is not the most troubling thing about NoLa PD's case against 24-year-old artist Stefen Daigle. That would be the video evidence of extortion, which led Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro to drop charges against Daigle late last month:

[Daigle's attorney] Roger Kitchens said arresting officers extorted money from his client. He showed prosecutors a video that captured his client, Stefen Daigle, going into a French Quarter apartment with two law enforcement officers. When the officers return, one is holding a bag.

Kitchens says the bag contains $3,500 that was in Daigle's French Quarter apartment, money the officers forced him to turn over. The video -- obtained by WDSU-TV and first reported Friday -- does not show what is in the sack.

However, Kitchens says the video undercuts sworn testimony given last month by Detective Ray Veit, who Kitchens said was waiting in a New Orleans Police Department squad car outside Daigle's apartment while other officers went upstairs.

The three officers initially arrested Daigle outside his art space at the ArtEgg studios in Mid-City. But according to Kitchens, they then drove him to his apartment on St. Peter Street in the Quarter.

Veit testified "that they never went anywhere with my client," Kitchens said. "There is video of the cops leaving the apartment with a bag. Inside the bag, was the $3,500, my client will tell you. That money was never put into evidence. He dug himself into a hole as deep as the Grand Canyon.

"He was asked, 'Was there any other evidence, anything else?' He said no."

After the officers came back downstairs, they booked Daigle with distribution of methamphetamine and took him to lockup, Kitchens said.

WDSU reported that a "consent to search" form that authorities filed before entering Daigle's art studio listed the St. Peter Street apartment. But it was scratched out later, and Veit "testified it was a mistake, that they never went there," Kitchens said.

More on the ArtEgg/Daigle story, which has sparked a wide-ranging internal investigation, from Times-Picayune reporter Laura Maggi.