Jack Montoucet helped arrange emergency Ida contracts for figures in bribery probe

Days after Hurricane Ida ravaged coastal Louisiana, leaving shrimpers and fishers without power, water or ice, Jack Montoucet sprang into action to send generators and mobile water units across southern Louisiana.

Records and emails show Montoucet, the secretary of the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, had a couple of specific people in mind for the job. At his behest, the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness gave emergency contracts worth $7.6 million to Produced Water Solutions and DLS, LLC. The companies were to set up base camps, feed workers and deliver filtered water, ice and generators to devastated areas.

Produced Water Solutions’ primary owner is Leonard Franques, a Lafayette businessman and Montoucet friend who has been implicated in a growing bribery scandal. His brother, Andre Franques, is one of three registered officers for DLS, LLC.

In late March, Dusty Guidry, another Montoucet ally who served on the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Commission, pleaded guilty to taking more than $800,000 in kickbacks from vendors he dealt with. Nearly a third of that sum came from Leonard Franques, according to court documents. Guidry has also said in a signed statement that Franques had promised to steer an unspecified amount in kickbacks to Montoucet after Montoucet’s retirement, which was expected in early 2024. Montoucet wound up resigning last month, after Guidry’s conviction.

Neither Montoucet nor Franques has been charged, though the investigation is far from over. Federal investigators secured two wiretap orders in the case just 12 days before Ida struck. At least one was for Guidry’s phone, according to court documents and interviews. Over the next four months, authorities listened in on nearly 1,500 calls they have described as ‘incriminating.’

The hurricane contracts, which were not mentioned in Guidry’s plea deal, cast another shadow over Montoucet’s tenure as a member of Gov. John Bel Edwards’ cabinet. They call into question whether the millions of federal dollars poured into the emergency contracts were well spent, and whether the corruption in the LDWF goes beyond the scheme laid out in Guidry’s guilty plea.

The former chair of the Wildlife and Fisheries Commission has criticized both the way the contracts were awarded and the contractors’ performance.

The kickbacks Guidry has acknowledged receiving from Franques were in return for a state contract, awarded by Montoucet, through which Franques provided paid online courses for hunters and boaters who violated outdoors laws. Guidry also pleaded guilty to two counts in a similar scheme to profit from pretrial diversion referrals in the Lafayette-based 15th Judicial District Attorney’s office.

Putting in a word

Montoucet was instrumental in getting the Franques brothers the post-Ida contracts, records and interviews show.

But those weren’t their first disaster deals. After Hurricane Laura in 2020, Montoucet signed two small contracts on behalf of his agency with DLS, the company tied to Andre Franques. The company was paid about $47,000 to repair facilities damaged by the storm in southwest Louisiana. A few months later, in September of that year, Montoucet’s agency hired the same firm to remove hurricane debris at the LDWF’s Lake Charles office. That deal was worth $213,000.

When Ida hit a year later, the big money started flowing.

Montoucet told a GOHSEP official to hire Andre Franques’ firm to set up a base camp in Grand Isle, including sleeping quarters, laundry trailers, restrooms, a generator and a host of other services, including staff to feed 150 people a day. He later asked the agency to bump up the scope to feed 250 people a day, then 300. By the end, the costs reached $5.5 million.

“A huge thanks to you, and especially the Secretary,” Andre Franques wrote to a Wildlife and Fisheries staffer and Montoucet, in January 2022. “He was the one that made the decision to help the citizens of Grand Isle in many ways.”

Also in the days after Ida, emails show Montoucet asked GOHSEP to hire Produced Water Solutions, in which Leonard Franques has said he owns a 77% stake. The company was tasked with providing purified water and ice to seafood companies in Grand Isle, Dulac and Chauvin, for which it billed $2.1 million, records show.

Andre Franques took the lead in interfacing with Montoucet, emails show, giving him regular updates about the progress.

Andre Franques hung up when asked for comment about the contracts. Leonard Franques has not responded to messages seeking comment for several weeks. Montoucet declined to comment through his attorneys, Don Cazayoux and Lane Ewing of Baton Rouge.

‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ 

At the first Wildlife and Fisheries Commission meeting after the storm, in October 2021, the panel’s chair, Jerri Smitko, took aim at the contracts.

She said folks in her coastal area were calling and emailing her asking for help and items like generators and complaining that the contractors hired by Wildlife and Fisheries weren’t doing a good job with outreach. She also questioned how the vendors were chosen.

“It was not a transparent process and folks who needed assistance were not getting it and did not get it,” Smitko said, according to a recording of the meeting. “And I am at a loss as to what the criteria were and specifically I’m talking about people who were capable of making ice to support the commercial fisherman…were not contacted and were completely bypassed.”

Andrew Blanchard, another commission member and the owner of Pearl Inc. seafood processing, also raised concerns.

“It just seems like it was more politics involved in the process,” he said at the meeting.

Montoucet shot back that he couldn’t please everybody.

“This is a typical case of Monday morning quarterbacking,” he said. “If that’s what you’re going to do to me, maybe next time I’ll sit in my office and do nothing.”

Angling for more

Three months after Ida, Andre Franques wrote Montoucet pitching him on an even bigger and bolder proposal. He told the secretary that Produced Water Solutions could set up mobile units to provide fresh water and ice “anywhere in the state” after a disaster, and indicated he had spoken with Montoucet about it before. He said PWS had “proved itself in Chauvin, Dulac and Grand Isle.”

“GOHSEP, FEMA, and the State can partner up with PWS to help provide immediate water and also immediate ice where needed, after any disaster, anywhere, at any time,” Franques wrote. “PWS wants to be, to water and ice for the State Emergency’s, as MACRO Oil is to fuel, for the State after all disasters.”

That deal appeared to never pan out. But Montoucet also sought to get Andre Franques’ company a separate contract. He recommended Franques to another official in the governor’s office, Sam Jones, suggesting he could hire him to provide cranes to remove boats that were sunk by Ida.

Andre Franques later met with Jones and Montoucet and sent a follow-up email. In it, he suggested putting together a “big picture plan” for picking up 90-130 vessels that Jones could review and approve. After that, Franques offered to “dress it up on paper, and then resend it back to you for your final approval. Then you can present it to your subordinates in its proper channels.”

The ethics of that approach sounded problematic to Jones.

“I have to decline your offer as you can not help design a project that you will likely bid on,” Jones replied.