The Advocate (Louisiana)
Copyright 2006 Capital City Press
FEMA isn’t talking about how or why it gave $12.5 million in post-Katrina ambulance contracts to a convicted felon with no experience and no ambulances.
This is a disturbing matter that deserves the attention of auditors, and perhaps criminal investigators as well.
The Advocate reported Sunday that the deal to provide ambulance service in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina was good for $7.5 million in profit for Chuck Henderson, a 72-year-old Texas man, and two partners with whom he is fighting over the money.
The FEMA deal apparently was cut sometime in the hours before 8 a.m. Sept. 3, five days after Katrina devastated Louisiana. During the succeeding four months, the ambulances had assignments in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, as well in Texas, which was struck by Hurricane Rita.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency deal doesn’t pass the smell test, and the Bush administration emergency agency refuses to disclose any information about it.
We see no justification for withholding from the public information about a federal agency’s multimillion-dollar deal for ambulance service.
Fortunately, some details have surfaced in a Houston courtroom, where the second of Henderson’s four wives (in five marriages) is seeking a divorce and a judge is considering whether wife No. 2 should get some of the ambulance-deal profits. She says they were never divorced, although he wed three more times; he says he got a Mexican divorce from her in 1999.
Here’s some of what is known about the ambulance deal with C. Henderson Consulting Inc., which FEMA apparently approved early on Sept. 3. At the time, Henderson had no ambulances.
Henderson said recently in divorce court that he didn’t tell FEMA he was a convicted felon because he considered it irrelevant.
In 1995, Henderson pleaded guilty in Texas to engaging in organized crime and got a suspended 10-year sentence. We know no further details.
An attorney for Henderson’s second wife said in court recently that the Department of Homeland Security is investigating Henderson for “fraud in obtaining a FEMA contract.”
After Henderson landed the FEMA contract, ambulances were leased from Goldstar, a troubled Texas company under federal investigation for possible fraud and tax evasion. Paramedics were hired to man the ambulances; some of the paramedics have said Henderson still owes them money.
More importantly, some of the paramedics have said the ambulances were poorly supplied and equipped to handle serious emergencies.
That is one of the most-disturbing allegations, especially since in some cases the ambulances were used to evacuate patients from hospitals and nursing homes.
We can’t help wondering how many other questionable deals FEMA might have made after Katrina and Rita. We also wonder how much such deals might figure in the millions the federal government wants the state to reimburse.
The federal Freedom of Information Act should enable the public to find out what our government does with our money. Congress should revisit this law and see what can be done to improve it and to broaden its application.