This article was originally published by The New Orleans Advocate on September 29, 2019. See full article online.
A 23-year-old man lay face down in his Lakeview bedroom, out cold. Foam bubbled around his mouth. Pill bottles were scattered about.
Joey Georgusis was declared dead at the hospital that day in August 2005. His girlfriend ran down a laundry list of drugs he’d taken the previous night. Cops came and went, interviewing witnesses.
An autopsy showed the young man had taken methadone, oxycodone, cocaine and carisoprodol, at minimum. A forensic pathologist with the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office ruled it an overdose.
“Accidental – drug related,” she wrote.
But within a few months, the young man’s father, Joe Georgusis, started hearing otherwise. And for the last 14 years, Georgusis, a wealthy developer of strip malls who lives in Old Metairie, has hired ex-cops and enlisted powerful politicians in a quest to prove his son’s death was not self-inflicted. His army of investigators has helped Georgusis build an elaborate, closely held theory that apparently involves murder, coverup, corruption and conspiracy. Joey was killed, the theory goes, and law enforcement refused to follow the leads.
As a Chalmette businessman, Georgusis parlayed ties to lawmakers like state Sen. Sammy Nunez in the early 1990s to land one of the 15 coveted licenses for a riverboat casino. He partnered with Circus Circus to bring a boat to Chalmette, but the plan fell apart when he couldn’t get the St. Bernard Parish Council to waive a boarding fee.
Georgusis responded by backing a slate of candidates who ran against the group that opposed him. But the stratagem failed, and Georgusis ultimately sold his interest in the boat.
Since his son’s death, he has continued to contribute heavily to politicians, primarily law enforcement officials. His suspicions of foul play have received attention from many of those same people.
Through an intermediary, Georgusis declined to be interviewed for this story.
Georgusis scored a quiet coup in 2015, a decade after his son’s death, when then-Coroner Jeffrey Rouse — a major recipient of campaign cash from Georgusis — changed the classification of Joey’s death to “unknown.”
The revision, reported to the state, was unknown even to the staff of the Coroner’s Office until this newspaper discovered it in state records.
Rouse has hardly been the only official to give the case fresh legs. Others who have probed the case over the years include former Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand, former St. Bernard Parish Sheriff Jack Stephens, former St. Bernard Parish District Attorney Jack Rowley and current Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro.
Joe Georgusis’ crusade to prove his son was murdered and hold others accountable for it continues today. Yet another new probe is unfolding now: a federal grand jury investigation overseen by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Orleans.
So far, at least half a dozen witnesses have appeared before the grand jury, which met last week.
Though his office is handling the investigation, U.S. Attorney Peter Strasser is personally recused from the matter. Before his presidential appointment last year, Joe Georgusis was a Strasser client.
Strasser had signed on to represent Georgusis in a lawsuit against the coroner’s office that was aimed at proving his son’s death was a murder.
In 2015, Strasser — who spent decades as a fed himself before going into private practice — brought a dossier on the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, then headed by Kenneth Polite.
Strasser urged a federal investigation of the matter, according to sources familiar with the request. Polite referred it to an assistant U.S. attorney for a look. Four years later, the same prosecutor, Michael McMahon is heading the new grand jury investigation.
Legal experts contacted by this newspaper say it might have been more prudent for the Justice Department to recuse Strasser’s entire office from the grand jury probe. Strasser’s close relationship with Georgusis could leave a perception of bias, despite his recusal, they said.
“Although it was absolutely correct for him to recuse himself, a safer option may have been to have the Justice Department or another (U.S. attorney’s) office handle it,” said Laurie Levenson, an expert in legal ethics and a professor at Loyola Marymount University’s law school.
Whether a wide-ranging probe is justified is nearly impossible to say from the outside.
Some Georgusis allies — none willing to speak on the record — say inconsistencies around the son’s death point to a dark network of corruption. They predict the new investigation will expose shoddy policework, lying to cover it up, and perhaps a seamy underbelly of cooperation between law enforcement at the time and local drug dealers.
Skeptics, equally circumspect, see the latest inquiry as a doomed effort to accommodate a loving father’s search for meaning in his son’s tragic death.
Joe Georgusis issued a prepared statement outlining what he hopes to achieve.
“As Joey Georgusis’ father, I am motivated by my love for him and my desire to learn the truth about his death,” he said. “After I received troubling information about his death fourteen years ago, my sole quest has been for law enforcement to gather all physical, scientific, and other evidence which will reveal the truth.
“I believe that any father would do the same. My hope and prayer is that we are on the verge of learning the truth.”
The fatal day
The 911 call came in at 1:13 p.m. on Aug. 5, 2005, to an address in Lakeview, on West End Boulevard.
Joey Georgusis lay face down on his bed, unresponsive, his girlfriend and a roommate told police. He had no pulse. He was taken by ambulance to East Jefferson General Hospital, where an hour later doctors pronounced him dead.
The autopsy said he died from pulmonary edema, fluid in the lungs. A screen found plenty of drugs in his system, though the amounts were never tested.
As routine as the death appeared to the coroner and to New Orleans police, there were unusual aspects in its handling, oddities that bolstered a dark suspicion in the elder Georgusis.
The biggest red flag: The investigators on the scene included St. Bernard Parish sheriff’s deputies, who had no jurisdiction in Lakeview. Georgusis has sought answers in court filings over who called them there, why, and when in relation to the early afternoon 911 call and the arrival of NOPD officers. One filing indicates that Joe Georgusis suspects his son died hours before the 911 call, and others show he believes St. Bernard deputies were there as many as six hours before that call was made. How that might tie to a theory of murder is an open question.
By the evening of Joey’s death, meanwhile, St. Bernard deputies had made an arrest, based in large part on interviews they conducted at East Jefferson hospital with his then-girlfriend, Jennifer Miller, and his roommate, Jerone Carrasquillo.
The senior Georgusis and Stephens, then the St. Bernard sheriff, were extremely close friends and sometime business partners. Their relationship may account for the puzzling early involvement of St. Bernard deputies — though both declined to comment for this story.
A report on the day’s events filed by two top Stephens deputies, Major Pete Tufaro and Lt. Kelly Lauga, says only that Tufaro “was instructed to assist the New Orleans Police Department if need be.”
The report says Tufaro interviewed Carrasquillo and Miller at the hospital on the afternoon of Joey Georgusis’ death. Both said Joey had gotten his pills from a Meraux man named Lloyd Appel, a regular supplier.
Later that day, according to the report, Tufaro and three other deputies arrested Appel at his home. He’d tried to dispose of methadone and then grabbed a loaded gun under his mattress. Appel said he was trying to hurt himself, not the cops, according to the report.
St. Bernard deputies booked him with four counts of attempted murder of a police officer and a series of drug counts based on items they said they found in his house.
Tufaro appeared before the federal grand jury this week; he declined to answer questions from this newspaper. Lauga could not be reached. Carrasquillo and Miller declined to comment.
The next probe
A few years later, the charges against Appel would all go away, dropped by St. Bernard prosecutors.
Investigators were far from done trying to figure out what killed Georgusis’ son. A federal-state drug task force started tapping the phones of suspected drug dealers in St. Bernard in mid-2006 “based on information from a confidential source,” according to court documents. Thirteen alleged buyers and sellers were indicted in federal court in April 2007.
Several of those caught up in the dragnet told this newspaper that the authorities had one burning question for them: Who killed Joey?
Georgusis thought he knew. His theory: two of the dealers had smothered his drug-addled son. In fact, Carrasquillo and Miller had allegedly said so once, in 2006 statements given to an NOPD officer working for Georgusis, a later NOPD review of the case shows. The officer who took the statements in 2006, Charles Loescher, resigned from the department around that time.
But Carrasquillo later recanted that statement. According to the NOPD review, he told DA investigators that Loescher had browbeat him into the false accusation at a meeting at Georgusis’ house. Carrasquillo also said he had met with Miller to ask her to adopt the same story.
“Mr. Joe was putting so much pressure on me,” Carrasquillo said by way of explanation, adding that Loescher had been threatening to revoke his probation at the time. Loescher declined to speak to a reporter.
“He wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Carrasquillo said in his recantation. “And that’s when I had to give him this other statement about this. And I knew that’s what they kind of believed, because that’s what the private, the investigators kind of pushed…. But I, I was sleeping (when the death occurred). So, I can’t prove any of that.”
Winston Harbin, a cold-case homicide detective at NOPD who was asked by supervisors to conduct the review of the case in 2011, spotlighted Carrasquillo’s recantation in his report in order to “stress the influence of investigators as well as the father of the decedent, upon the persons interviewed.”
One of the drug dealers Georgusis believed smothered his son was Vernon Cook, who knew Joey personally. The other man Georgusis suspected was Dennis Brown, the Harbin report shows. But neither was charged in Joey’s death.
Still, Cook and his alleged supplier, Jason Broom, came in for special law enforcement attention. Both quickly pleaded guilty in federal court to selling cocaine. They were looking at sentences of five years or less.
They soon found themselves in much deeper trouble. The St. Bernard members of the DEA task force brought their federal confessions back to Chalmette. And prosecutors in St. Bernard Parish District Attorney Jack Rowley’s office quickly charged Broom and Cook with the same drug-dealing activity they had already admitted.
Broom’s lawyer cried foul over the second prosecution, saying it was an unfair effort to extract confessions or else punish the men for a homicide they couldn’t prove. The attorney, Gary Bizal, claimed Rowley’s top aide, Glenn Diaz, had told him Broom “was a big drug dealer involved in multiple homicides, including [that of] Georgusis.” Diaz warned him the DA planned to punish Broom harshly to please his friend, Bizal wrote.
He sought to recuse the DA’s office, alleging several conflicts of interest.
Rowley, who has since died, had been a partner in a handful of ventures with Georgusis, Bizal’s motion said, citing public records. And Rowley’s first assistant, Glenn Diaz, also has done multi-million dollar deals with the developer, a close friend.
In addition, Stephens, whose deputies helped make the drug case, also counted himself a close friend and business partner of Georgusis. In late 2007, a firm owned by Georgusis paid Stephens’ wife $900,000 for a home in Mandeville that she had bought for half that amount five years earlier. She bought the house back from Georgusis a little over a year later for $725,000 — booking a profit of $175,000.
Georgusis, Bizal wrote, is “a wealthy and powerful friend and business associate of Mr. Rowley and Mr. Diaz. This relationship … is the motivation for this prosecution and has eliminated any chance of Broom receiving a fair trial in St. Bernard Parish.”
State District Judge Wayne Cresap — a close ally of Stephens who would soon plead guilty in a corruption scheme — rejected Bizal’s motion. Broom pleaded guilty and Cresap sentenced him to 25 years. Under similar pressure, Cook followed suit and got 22.
Both have been released with “good time” credit. Neither agreed to be interviewed for this story.
Diaz denied he had any business relationship with Georgusis at the time of the case, and said the DA’s Office did nothing unusual.
“The feds gave them essentially a slap on the wrist,” he said. “There’s nothing improper there.”
New alliance with new DA
As the prosecution of Broom and Cook wound down, Georgusis was forging new alliances.
One was with Leon Cannizzaro, then a candidate for Orleans Parish district attorney. Georgusis, his relatives and his businesses poured more than $60,000 into Cannizzaro’s 2008 campaign, and he later helped retire the new DA’s debt.
In August 2009, months after Cannizzaro took office, one of his top investigators signed a warrant for the arrest of Carrasquillo, Joey Georgusis’ old roommate. The warrant alleged that, three years earlier, Carrasquillo had admitted to Loescher, the NOPD detective, that he had flushed marijuana and pills down the toilet on the day of Joey’s death. According to the warrant, Carrasquillo aimed “to distort the facts surrounding the death.” He was booked with injuring public records and obstruction of justice.
The district attorney investigator, Mason Spong, interviewed 17 witnesses about Joey’s death over the course of a year before charging Carrasquillo, according to Harbin’s review.
In 2012, Carrasquillo pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in a drug investigation, receiving a five-day jail sentence with credit given for the time he’d already spent in jail.
But four months later, the DA would get another crack at him. New Orleans police pulled Carrasquillo over on Airline Highway and found a spoon with heroin residue in his car. Carrasquillo handed over an empty syringe and admitted he’d been using the drug.
When the case was screened, a prosecutor in the DA’s Office recommended a misdemeanor possession charge. But Cannizzaro stepped in personally, court documents show, upping the charge against Carrasquillo to a Class 2 felony. That left Carrasquillo staring at a multiple bill and a possible 20 years to life.
Cannizzaro said in a recent interview that he doesn’t specifically remember the case, but he called such decisions “a part of my job.”
Carasquillo’s public defender, Ashleigh Georgia, filed a motion to recuse the DA, a rare gambit. Just as Bizal had argued in St. Bernard, Georgia said this DA was too close to Joe Georgusis to handle the case fairly.
The attorney wrote that Cannizzaro had told her he “would not authorize any negotiation” because he believed Carrasquillo had “lied about his knowledge” about Joey’s death. Her motion also noted Georgusis’ heavy financial support of Cannizzaro.
“In this case, Mr. Carrasquillo is being treated in a matter especially harsh in order to obtain information from him (information that does not seem to exist) in order to pursue the unrelated goals of a major campaign donor, namely, the prosecution of a homicide that officially does not exist,” she wrote.
In a reply memo, the DA’s Office said Cannizzaro had no “personal interest” in the case other than to uphold his duty to prosecute offenders.
Cannizzaro repeated the same theme in the recent interview. “I have no interest in any particular case that I’ve prosecuted, and I have no personal interest in this case other than seeing that the right thing is done,” he said.
Nothing about his relationship with Joe Georgusis warranted stepping aside, Cannizzaro said.
“I could make a decision to recuse myself on every case,” he said. “The reason I did not need to recuse myself was because there was no legal basis for recusing myself.”
The recusal motion was denied, and in June 2013, Carrasquillo pleaded guilty and received a 15-year prison term as a multiple offender.
Scott Sherman, who oversaw Carrasquillo’s recusal motion for the Orleans Public Defender’s office and now practices in California, said the drug case seemed awfully minor for Cannizzaro himself to take such a close interest.
“It’s crazy to think the elected DA for a city the size of New Orleans, with the crime problems of New Orleans, is deciding how a ‘residue’ case gets charged, and whether it’s a misdemeanor or a felony that carries life,” Sherman said. “What I can infer from that is that he had some personal interest in it. Otherwise, why?”
The relationship between Georgusis and Cannizzaro went beyond campaign checks. Early in the new DA’s tenure, they vacationed in Cozumel together with their wives, staying in Georgusis’ place there.
And in May 2011, when Georgusis sold his deceased son’s house on West End Boulevard, Cannizzaro’s wife, Norma, served as listing agent. The house sold for $170,000, according to real-estate records.
Cannizzaro acknowledged the friendship, but said it never affected his decisions around the case. He said he had “no personal interest” in the outcome of Carrasquillo’s charges.
He also said that his wife is a 40-year real-estate agent who specializes in Lakeview properties, adding that she “is not the district attorney” and “does not make decisions with regard to charging” defendants.
Working the coroner
Over a decade, one inconvenient fact proved especially nettlesome in Joe Georgusis’ quest for justice: Pathologists found no homicide to investigate.
Georgusis had been seeking to change the coroner’s finding for years. But longtime Coroner Frank Minyard, well into his 80s, stood fast.
Georgusis set out to support a new candidate for coroner. In 2010, he and his associates gave $35,000 to Minyard’s challenger, Dwight McKenna, nearly two-thirds of the money McKenna raised. But Minyard still won easily.
In early 2011, six years after his son died, Georgusis had Joey’s corpse exhumed. He hired the celebrity pathologist Cyril Wecht — who gained fame questioning the Warren Commission’s conclusions about John F. Kennedy’s assassination — to examine it.
A few months later, Georgusis filed a bold lawsuit against Minyard’s office, accusing his pathologists of botching the death determination and claiming that Wecht’s autopsy “scientifically excluded the cause of death as drug-related.”
Wecht, however, told this newspaper that he “had no basis” to rule out an overdose. But, still, Wecht said he was confounded by the pathologist’s explanation for why Joey’s larynx and hyoid bone — the Adam’s apple — were broken. And he thought the lividity and rigidity described in the autopsy were inconsistent with the position of the body described in a police account.
In the report, which he partially read to a reporter over the phone, Wecht recommended the death be “fully reinvestigated,” describing that conclusion as a “very restrained, appropriate opinion.”
Wecht said his opinion is not for sale. “I’m sure because of Mr. Georgusis’ money, he’s able to (be persistent),” he said. “Does that mean he did something bad?”
Georgusis’ suit seeks to force the Coroner’s Office to change the cause of death — perhaps to homicide, though the suit doesn’t specify. It has functioned broadly as an inquiry into Joey’s death.
Georgusis and his lawyers — Joe Ward of Covington, plus Walter Becker of the Chaffe McCall firm in New Orleans, and Strasser when he was with that firm — have taken depositions from perhaps two dozen witnesses. Some of them have recently been called before the federal grand jury.
Those depositions are not part of the public record, but some court documents cite them. Those references, along with statements made by Ward, offer a peek into Georgusis’ theory that Joey was murdered — and that Stephens, among others, knew of his death hours before the 911 call to police dispatchers.
Stephens and Georgusis, once extremely close friends and political allies, no longer speak.
Stephens also declined to be interviewed for this story.
“Mr. Georgusis was one of the best friends I ever had,” he said in a text. “Losing Joey was a tragedy that I’m sure his mom and dad will never get over. My wish for them is that they can find some peace in their lives.”
A new direction
Georgusis got behind a winner In the next election for coroner, in 2014, when he backed Jeffrey Rouse, the son of one of his lawyers and a top Minyard deputy.
Georgusis raised nearly $50,000 for Rouse, more than a quarter of the doctor’s contributions. Rouse beat McKenna by a 51-49 margin.
A year later, Rouse changed Joey Georgusis’ cause of death, a decision he says he made after reviewing the father’s investigative files, including Wecht’s autopsy. The change removed a major impediment to a potential homicide probe.
Rouse didn’t just reclassify the death as “undetermined.” He told state officials to delete the time and place of death as well. Not only how Joey died, but also when or where, had become, officially, a mystery.
There is no trace of the change in the office’s file “for reasons unknown to the current administration,” the office spokesman said recently. The office had to retrieve the amended records from the state.
Lawyers representing the Coroner’s Office said they might have moved to have Georgusis’s lawsuit dismissed had they known about the change, and they may still do so.
Rouse shocked city voters last year when he qualified for a second term, then announced shortly after the qualifying period ended that he was dropping out – essentially bequeathing the office to McKenna, his lone rival.
Rouse declined to be interviewed, providing a statement instead.
“When I was coroner, I conducted an independent inquiry into the 2005 death of Joey Georgusis Jr. and the related pre-existing lawsuit against the Coroner’s Office,” he said. “I reviewed coroner’s records, records from the family’s extensive private investigation, and spoke to the prominent forensic pathologist who had conducted a second autopsy.
“In my opinion, the death warranted further investigation, and ‘undetermined’ was its appropriate classification. I expressed my opinion to law enforcement authorities and, by the time I left office, no further information had been brought to me regarding this case.”
Yet another referral
Yet another agency that investigated Joey Georgusis’ death was the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.
In 2012, seven years after the death, one of Sheriff Newell Normand’s top deputies turned over its investigative file on the matter to the FBI and asked the bureau to take a look, according to law enforcement sources. One result: The feds questioned deputies who showed up at the Lakeview house and secured a subpoena to the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff’s Office for Stephens’ cell-phone records from the time period surrounding Joey Georgusis’ death.
That FBI inquiry doesn’t appear to have sparked much interest in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. But three years later, shortly after Rouse amended Joey’s death record, Rouse and Normand together pitched a fresh probe in a meeting with Kenneth Polite and other prosecutors.
Normand opined that Joey had been murdered, and that the feds needed to investigate more fully, according to sources familiar with the meeting. Rouse also urged a look, though he was less sanguine about the cause of the young man’s death.
At the time, Normand was being paid $3,000 a month by a Georgusis firm for what the sheriff has described as “business analytics.” The sheriff’s business relationship with Georgusis surfaced in a later federal investigation of Normand’s chief deputy. Normand’s state disclosure forms indicate those payments ran from 2014 until at least 2017.
Georgusis also contributed a total of $56,000 towards tuition payments for Normand’s daughter in 2014 and 2015, court documents show. Normand described the money as a “gift” in an interview with the FBI. The tuition and cash totaled at least $150,000.
Normand, who now hosts a talk-radio show, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.
A murky situation
Because of the many powerful people involved – and because of ongoing grand jury investigation and civil litigation still swirling around Joey Georgusis’ death – very few people with knowledge of the case have been willing to speak on the record about it.
Tim Bayard, a former NOPD vice commander who retired in 2009, acknowledged testifying in front of a grand jury a few weeks ago in the case but said he couldn’t discuss details.
He said Georgusis, an old friend from the 9th Ward, called him after his son’s death. Bayard said he could do little else but pass it on to friends, like Joe Waguespack, then head of NOPD’s homicide division.
“He was looking for help. I was a narcotics guy. I wasn’t a death investigation guy,” Bayard said. “You try to help people out (who are) going through a rough time. Your son dies unexpectedly. It’s a drug overdose. He’s looking for help.”
Waguespack, who said he had not been called by the grand jury, spoke bluntly about how he believes the case has been mishandled. Not by police, but by politicians and other powerful people who had a hard time telling Georgusis no.
“We had some of our best people look into this several times,” Waguespack said. “Every lead that came up, we followed every which way. The boy OD’d, whether it was suicide or accidental.”
The case was originally overseen by Lt. Doug Eckert, who he described as a gifted and ethical investigator. Eckert “believed this to be an overdose of illegal narcotics,” according to a police report. He recently died.
In 2011, the case was re-examined by Harbin, the cold-case investigator, who agreed with Eckert’s original conclusions.
“This detective finds nothing to indicate the death of Joseph “Joey” Georgusis is anything different than the conclusion reached by the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office,” he wrote.
Waguespack said several other veteran homicide investigators also gave the case a look.
“Everybody I considered one of the best,” Waguespack said. “We looked at it from every angle. The feds even looked at it. Everyone came to the same conclusion. It was either an accidental overdose or a suicide.
“Look, I talked to him, I feel bad for anyone who loses a kid. I told him, if there was any chance he was murdered, we’d jump on it. But everyone came to the same conclusion.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated Sept. 30 to reflect that Joe Waguespack is still employed by the NOPD.
A 23-year-old man lay face down in his Lakeview bedroom, out cold. Foam bubbled around his mouth. Pill bottles were scattered about.
Joey Georgusis was declared dead at the hospital that day in August 2005. His girlfriend ran down a laundry list of drugs he’d taken the previous night. Cops came and went, interviewing witnesses.
An autopsy showed the young man had taken methadone, oxycodone, cocaine and carisoprodol, at minimum. A forensic pathologist with the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office ruled it an overdose.
“Accidental – drug related,” she wrote.
But within a few months, the young man’s father, Joe Georgusis, started hearing otherwise. And for the last 14 years, Georgusis, a wealthy developer of strip malls who lives in Old Metairie, has hired ex-cops and enlisted powerful politicians in a quest to prove his son’s death was not self-inflicted. His army of investigators has helped Georgusis build an elaborate, closely held theory that apparently involves murder, coverup, corruption and conspiracy. Joey was killed, the theory goes, and law enforcement refused to follow the leads.
Broom’s lawyer cried foul over the second prosecution, saying it was an unfair effort to extract confessions or else punish the men for a homicide they couldn’t prove. The attorney, Gary Bizal, claimed Rowley’s top aide, Glenn Diaz, had told him Broom “was a big drug dealer involved in multiple homicides, including [that of] Georgusis.” Diaz warned him the DA planned to punish Broom harshly to please his friend, Bizal wrote.
He sought to recuse the DA’s office, alleging several conflicts of interest.
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