New Orleans lawyer accused of stealing from client indicted | Courts
A federal grand jury charged a New Orleans prison protection lawyer on Friday with wire fraudaccusing her of stealing $250,000 from a client’s household for a bogus settlement she claimed to have confected with the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.
Over a seven-month interval final yr, lawyer Tanzanika Ruffin requested the staggering sum from the household of client Kai Hansen by means of wire transfers and Venmo funds, a grand jury indictment allegations. She wrote official-sounding emails claiming parts of the cash would resolve Hansen’s fees, based on the indictment and state courtroom data. She stated funds would additionally cowl medical remedy for a New Orleans Police Department officer whom Hansen was accused of assaulting in March exterior a Bourbon Street cigar bar.
But “as Ruffin well knew, neither the (District Attorney’s Office) nor the officer requested any money from the client at any point,” the indictment reads.
Ruffin on Friday referred a request for remark to her lawyer, Kerry Cuccia. Cuccia declined to remark, saying he had not but reviewed the indictment. Cuccia has beforehand advised his client repaid the familysave for some lawyer’s charges.
The allegations surrounding Ruffin, who runs a agency specializing in prison protection and introduced a run for an Orleans Parish judgeship final November, they’ve roiled the town’s authorized circles for months.
The weird alleged scheme surfaced late final yr in a submitting by District Attorney Jason Williams’ workplace. Accusing her of “fraud and deception,” state prosecutors detailed how they believed Ruffin had bilked Hansen, who the DA’s workplace was prosecuting, out of tens of hundreds of {dollars} for the pretend “settlement” and different bogus charges stemming from his 2025 arrest.
Hefty charges
Hansen was let loose of jail on an $8,000 bond; but Ruffin billed the household $66,000 for what she described as bond-related prices, based on the DA’s workplace’s December submitting.
Later, she stated Hansen might pay a “settlement” for a lighter sentence, tying sums to every cost he confronted: $25,000 for every of two counts of resisting a police officer by power; $5,000 for easy assault on a police officer and so forth, emails included in state courtroom filings present. One cost Ruffin listed, “2nd degree aggravated battery on a police officer,” doesn’t exist underneath Louisiana regulation. For that depend, she billed the household $15,000, the data present.
The DA’s workplace discovered of the pretend settlement after the household employed a separate lawyer to overview what they thought could be irregularities within the settlement Ruffin claimed she had negotiated. That lawyer contacted the DA’s workplace, data present. When they discovered what Ruffin had advised the household, police and state prosecutors started investigating.
The household supplied data to the DA’s workplace exhibiting $250,000 in wire transfers and Venmo funds they despatched Ruffin.
A spokesperson for Williams’ workplace didn’t instantly reply late Friday to a request for touch upon the indictment.
Federal investigators had been revealed to be scrutinizing the case in January of this yr. Hansen gave paperwork and recordings of the household’s interactions with Ruffin to FBI brokers, based on a January courtroom submitting by a brand new lawyer the household employed, Graham Bosworth.
The prison courtroom decide overseeing Hansen’s case, Robin Pittman, recused herself in what authorized analysts described to WVUE-TV as an indication she might have been referred to as as a witness within the federal probe. The TV station first reported the allegations towards Ruffin final yr.
Ruffin returned cash, lawyer stated
Cuccia advised WVUE on Jan. 16 that Ruffin had “almost immediately returned the money that she clearly was not entitled to keep.” Ruffin saved lawyer’s charges of simply over $33,000, Cuccia advised the station. Ruffin’s federal indictment orders her to give up to the federal government any property bought with the cash.
Since they surfaced, the allegations have already had repercussions for Ruffin. She represented one of the ten New Orleans jail escapees who broke out final May, who’ve all since returned to jail. In December, the escapee was assigned a brand new lawyer because the DA’s workplace detailed the allegations in state courtroom filings.
A decide in 2015 declared mistriaAfter Ruffin, who was representing second-degree homicide defendant Leroy Price, revealed that she additionally represented a enterprise owned by somebody married to a police detective who led the homicide investigation. Price had stated the connection made him uncomfortable along with his illustration.
Prosecutors, although, pushed to salvage the trial after studying that the detective’s spouse had dissolved her stake within the firm years earlier.
In 2011, when she was a prosecutor for the District Attorney’s Office, Ruffin was disciplined by the Louisiana Supreme Court for threatening to prosecute a person who wrote a nasty test to a pal of hers, records show. She misplaced her job with the DA’s workplace after she “self-reported” the episode.
Ruffin acknowledged the incident in a blurb posted to a authorized web site, calling it a formative half of his authorized profession.
“First, let me address the obvious,” she wrote. “Yes, I was disciplined early on in my practice. But, like so many, my mistakes do not define who I am and certainly does not define who I am now.”
US Attorney David Courcelle of the Eastern District of Louisiana, a profession lawyer protection sworn in because the 13-parish district’s high federal prosecutor in Decemberoffered the indictment in Justice of the Peace courtroom alongside Assistant US Attorney Maria Carboni.
Newly appointed US attorneys who are usually not profession Justice Department prosecutors typically attempt instances personally, authorized veterans say, both to achieve a greater grasp of methods to navigate the federal system as a prosecutor or just to point out solidarity with the duties of rank-and-file prosecutors who work for them.
“The fact that Mr. Courcelle appears to have handled and presented this indictment personally is significant,” stated Michael Magner, a veteran white-collar protection lawyer and former federal prosecutor. Doing so, Magner added, “reflects his intentions to pursue worthwhile cases aggressively and help restore the office’s storied reputation for prosecuting corruption and major fraud cases.”
Staff author John Simerman contributed to this report.
