(Warning: Adult language)
District Attorney Jody Owens allegedly told federal agents that he mixed bribe funds with money in the safe at the District Attorney’s Office to keep it from being detected, and he also allegedly accepted bribe money at the office in the Hinds County Courthouse.
Owens has been implicated along with Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Councilman Aaron Banks, Attorney Marve Smith, and former Councilwoman Angelique Lee in a bribery scandal currently rocking the capital city.
Court documents detail Owens allegedly telling agents that he did not keep bribe money given to him at his home, because that could be directly linked to him. Instead, he said, he kept it mixed in with “dope money and drug money and more than a million dollars” at the safe at the district attorney’s office.
“Because if someone comes in my motherfucking safe it’s a million dollars in cash, it’s a million dollars. You know what, if they come to my house, it reads like this, ‘DA Owens had twenty grand in cash.’ The regular people who vote for me, who give me $10 or $100, they can’t count that much money,” he’s quoted as saying. “But guess what, in my safe at my DA office, I got a million dollars in cash, guess what, your fucking ten grand don’t matter, your fifteen grand it don’t matter, I got a million dollars there. But guess what, at my house it matters.”
That conversation allegedly came in the course of a discussion in which Owens was trying to convince agents that Lumumba had to be looped into the scheme. According to the documents, the developers asked Owens, “Why do we need (Lumumba,)” and he and Smith allegedly told them that Lumumba could make things more difficult if he weren’t a part of it.
In a discussion of payments to be made to Lee, Owens allegedly said he wanted a payment to be made to one of her debtors,
“because here’s the thing, at the end of the fucking day, my most important job is to keep everybody out of jail or prison, because I’m not fucking going.”
The DA allegedly had meetings with representatives of the government posing as developers in the back room of his business in which some of these conversations were held, including plans for a trip to Florida in which they planned to buy Lumumba’s support. Owens and Lumumba allegedly had a text conversation about it, after which Owens told the federal representatives that they would hold the “fundraiser” in Florida, and they could either have “ten guys with checks” or ten checks in one envelope. He allegedly then told one of the developers, “What we used to do, if people wanted to stay under the radar, you just give a bunch of different checks from a bunch of different companies.”
Owens allegedly promised Lumumba $50,000 on that trip, with a promise of another $50,000 in the future.
Authorities say in the court documents that Owens allegedly opened a bank account on behalf of the developers that was to be used for “at least in part, the purpose of funneling and concealing future bribe payments to public officials.”
The documents say that Owens allegedly accepted $50,000 in bribe money at the Courthouse in Hinds County and converted the money into five “campaign contribution” checks, including one from Smith and one from Owens.
An alleged conversation between Owens, Lumumba, Smith, and the Developers in a private room on a yacht in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, had Owens allegedly explaining the process of laundering the money to Lumumba.
OWENS: We want to be very mindful of out-of-state money.
LUMUMBA: Yeah.
OWENS: So what this team did was give us the money, being me, and we just filtered it through several accounts in a way we comfortable doing.
LUMUMBA: Yeah.
OWENS: So we did five $10,000 checks to make it very simple, and then when we get past the process, to our second phase, maybe in Jackson, maybe somewhere else… we’ll do something similar.”
LUMUMBA: Yeah.
OWENS: to make sure there’s no worries about you financially in this thing cause you’re as big a part of this thing as anybody.
A federal surveillance photo of District Attorney Jody Owens allegedly accepting a bag of bribe money.Also on the yacht, Owens and Lumumba allegedly arranged to have an RFQ submission deadline moved, and prosecutors say both of them understood Lumumba was paid for that act.
Federal officials say that Owens allegedly had a private discussion later with the developers and accepted an additional $50,000 in a bag for his services. He allegedly removed the cash from the bag and put it in his pockets.
The documents go on to detail various interactions and discoveries during which Owens while acting as the District Attorney of Hinds County, hid, funneled, solicited, and directed money for alleged illegal operations.
“For Owens and Lumumba to devise and intend to devise a scheme and artifice to defraud and deprive, by means of material false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises, the citizens of Jackson Mississippi, of their right to the honest services of Lumumba, the Mayor of the City of Jackson, through bribery to influence Lumumba’s official acts and to induce him to do act is in violation of his official duty, and to knowingly and intentionally transmit and cause to be transmitted by means of wire communications in interstate commerce writings, signs, signals, pictures, and sounds for the purpose of executing such a scheme of artifice,” the document reads. “For Owens and Lumumba, knowing the property involved in a financial transaction represented the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity, to knowingly conduct and attempt to conducte a financial transaction which in fact involved the proceeds of a specific unlawful activity, that is federal program bribery…”
This case continues to unfold, and based on today’s deadlines, we can’t detail all the court documents at the present time, but we will continue to bring you coverage as time allows. Follow Darkhorse Press for more.
Read the full indictment here.
