…but I wanna add somethin’ to MacAoidh’s lil’ thing earlier about Daniel Edwards and his fun-raiser he threw over there in July with the DOTD secretary an’ the nice fella from CPRA.

Because my uncle T-Leaf read it an’ give me a call. An’ he said “Dat guy from da Hayride almos’ got it right about dat pay-for-play, excep’ he’s missin’ a lil’ bit.

“What he’s missin’, an’ I know it because I know some-a John Bel’s people and they talk too much, is the plan behind dat fun-raiser was to haul in $750,000.

“Now, Daniel Edwards don’t need no $750,000. He probably don’t need more than $250,000 to get re-elected in a lil’ place like Tangipahoa, specially when nobody’s gonna run aginst him.

“So what they gonna do with that money they raised is, Daniel’s gonna take like a half-million of it and make him up a Super PAC for to get his brother re-elected.”

We don’t have any kinda way to find out whether they made that $750,000 at Middendorf’s – at $2500 a head they’d have needed 300 people there, which is a lot but it’s not not doable – because Daniel Edwards isn’t gonna file his annual off-year campaign finance report until February. See, once you get elected you only have to file once a year until you come up for re-election, then you have to put out a lot more regular reports.

So John Bel goes in in January and he buffaloes all these people to give his brother money if they wanna do a contract with DOTD or CPRA, an’ since most of ’em are in Baton Rouge or Houma or Lake Charles or Shreveport or whatever, they figure who cares who the sheriff of Tangipahoa is and it’s not the same thing as givin’ campaign contributions to JBE since most of ’em are Republicans.

But what they don’t know is that, yeah, they’re actually givin’ two-thirds of that money to JBE via a super PAC they had no idea they were gonna end up contributing to, and they also don’t know the check they’re writing is to a guy that five months later is gonna end up with his laptop in an evidence bag.

T-Leaf also told me what I gotta do is Google Jeffrey Sallet, the dude who’s the FBI agent in charge of the NOLA office now, who’s the head honcho behind yesterday’s raid they had over in Hammond.

So I did, and I found the press release the FBI put out when got his job in da Big Easy. Said this…

From 1998 to 2005, Mr. Sallet was the case agent on the investigation of Joseph Massino, the Bonanno La Cosa Nostra family boss. This investigation led to the indictment and conviction of Massino and more than 100 organized crime figures, as well as the successful resolution of more than 30 cold case murders. For his efforts on this investigation, Mr. Sallet received the Executive Office for United States Attorneys Director’s Award in 2005.

Which is a thing. I also found a thing from here at the Hayride back in May, where Sallet said local corruption in his office’s territory is “profound.”

And another thing I found was from October, and it was just a lil’ story WWL-TV had…

Federal authorities arrested 45 suspected human traffickers in Louisiana during a recent crackdown, the FBI said.

Dubbed Operation X, the crackdown reached international levels, netting suspects in multiple countries, including Cambodia, Canada, Thailand and the Philippines.

“Amongst those arrested (in Louisiana), were six pimps, and law enforcement also recovered three juvenile victims that were used for prostitution,” said Jeffrey Sallet, special agent in charge of the FBI New Orleans Field Office.

Officials said the operations focused on locations such as hotels and truck stops.

So this cat Sallet is runnin’ a big operation tryin’ to do somethin’ about sex trafficking, an’ the FBI is in Tangipahoa bustin’ up the sheriff’s department. And here there’s this rumor that’s been goin’ around forever about how they got lots of places up an’ down I-55 in Tangi where the truckers go an’ get a lil’ relaxation…

I should stop.

But lemme say this – because MacAoidh had a real interestin’ point and then he said he had a theory behind it, and I know what his theory is, I think. He said the DEA agent who got busted because he was rippin’ off drugs from the evidence room and sellin’ ’em on the street, and he was signin’ up Tangi sheriff deputies to go with him on that. And he wondered how come Scott knew he could recruit so many crooked cops for his scheme over in Tangipahoa.

Imma guess the theory has somethin’ to do with there bein’ no better place you can move dope than at a whorehouse. Especially if you have the cops on the payroll to keep everything quiet.