Fred Heebe, the landfill giant whose indictment on federal corruption charges is imminent,' filed a defamation suit this week against Assistant U.S. Attorney Sal Perricone, claiming that the federal prosecutor hid behind a screen name to attack Heebe on Nola.com.
Fred Heebe, the River Birch landfill giant whose indictment on federal corruption charges is imminent' and whose kickbacks to Lafayette's Henry Mouton landed Mouton in hot water with the feds, filed a defamation suit this week against Assistant U.S. Attorney Sal Perricone, claiming that the federal prosecutor hid behind a screen name to attack Heebe on Nola.com.
According to The Times-Picayune's website (Nola.com), Heebe hired James Fitzgerald, the former FBI linguist credited with the arrest and prosecution of the Unabomber, to review 595 comments from the screen name "Henry L Mencken1951" posted on Nola.com articles.
The T-P also notes that prosecutor Perricone, one of the key prosecutors in the River Birch investigation, was born in 1951:
The comments were compared to legal filings made by federal prosecutors in their sweeping probe of the River Birch landfill, which is co-owned by Heebe and his father-in-law. The profiler found striking similarities in the language, the suit says.
The petition notes that "Mencken" uses obscure words, such as "dubiety" and "redoubt," that also appear in federal filings in the River Birch case. Many of "Mencken's" comments involve the U.S. attorney's office. His "interest in and level of knowledge about an ongoing (federal) investigation of River Birch are striking and beyond what could be expected of even the most diligent Times-Picayune reader," the petition says.
Read more here.