FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 5, 2025

District Attorney Announces Historic Indictment Under New Criminal Blight Law

NEW ORLEANS – Monday, July 28, 2025, Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams announced a landmark indictment of Edward Neal Morris, III, marking the first use of Louisiana’s newly updated criminal blighting statute and a historic racketeering prosecution in Orleans Parish. A grand jury returned the indictment on July 16, 2025, following a presentation by Assistant District Attorney Daniel Shanks, Director of Strategic Initiatives.

Morris, a longtime property owner and manager, is charged with one count of racketeering and four counts of criminal blighting of property. The charges stem from Morris’s role as the owner and controlling member of multiple real estate entities, including Lincoln Grove 1, LLC and Lincoln Grove 2, LLC, which together held dozens of severely deteriorated properties across New Orleans. Those properties were the subject of a litany of code violations including: unsafe structural conditions, rodent infestation and other sanitation failures, unsecured access points, and severe exterior decay.

“This is what justice looks like at the intersection of public safety, public health, and community dignity,” said District Attorney Jason Williams. “For decades, public safety agencies, city departments, and neighborhood residents have struggled with the toxic impact of blighted and abandoned properties. These aren’t just decaying buildings; they’re health hazards, crime magnets, and destabilizers of neighborhoods.”

“There haven’t always been adequate legal tools to hold bad actors accountable,” DA Williams continued. “But that changed when Representative Mandie Landry and Chief of Screening Andre Gaudin, from my office, partnered to pass updates to the state’s criminal blight law. This indictment represents the first time those new tools are being used in a courtroom to protect our communities from people who profit by ignoring them.”

Systemic Neglect Meets Accountability: DA’s Office Targets Blight Profiteering in Landmark Indictment

Dir. Shanks reflected after the indictments were returned, stating,

“These charges reflect a sustained pattern of unlawful behavior by Morris, who, through a patchwork of business identities, allowed properties across our city to deteriorate into hazardous conditions. The egregious level of systemic neglect undermined public health and safety and destabilized neighborhoods.”

The indictment follows extensive collaboration between Code Enforcement, prosecutors, and community partners. Investigators drew on inspection records, crime mapping, property filings, and the work of Holly Friedman, a former OSINT Project Manager for the District Attorney’s Office, to trace Morris’s use of shell companies and layered ownership structures to avoid accountability.

“Profiting from neglect will no longer be tolerated in Orleans Parish,” said DA Williams. “Our neighborhoods and families deserve better—and now, we have the tools to fight back.”

“Morris had a continuous negative impact on the community for years,” said Shanks. “Just between August 2023 and July 2025, Morris’s properties were cited for 44 separate code violations. Just this May, one property became an active crime scene when an escaped inmate from the Orleans Justice Center was found hiding in a home on Second Street.”

Indictment Breakdown

  • Count 1: Racketeering – operating an enterprise through a pattern of criminal blight.
  • Counts 2–5: Criminal Blighting of Property – knowingly or negligently allowing hazardous conditions to persist at specific addresses, including:

This prosecution represents a major milestone in the city’s broader efforts to tackle longstanding quality-of-life crime and to hold negligent property owners criminally accountable for their impact on public safety. Officials emphasized that this indictment is an outgrowth of data-driven prosecution and cross-agency collaboration, including efforts through the District Attorney’s Neighborhood-Oriented Data and Intelligence-Driven Community Engagement (NODICE) initiative.

Turning Neglect into a Crime: How Pattern Recognition and Policy Reform Empowered a New RICO Strategy

“About three years ago, we began to rethink how we organized our screening division at the District Attorney’s Office. That shift allowed us to recognize patterns of crime rooted in systemic neglect and gave rise to the NODICE initiative—our data-informed community engagement strategy. During that time, I learned Representative Mandy Landry was working to strengthen our state’s criminal blight statute. I made one simple request: add it to the Louisiana racketeering statute.

Racketeering laws are meant to target criminal enterprises, and what we were seeing was exactly that, neglect as a business model. When someone uses shell corporations to ignore code enforcement and profit from decay, they aren’t just breaking the law; they’re endangering public health and destabilizing entire neighborhoods. Adding criminal blight to the RICO statute gave us the ability to tell that story and hold those actors accountable. This law empowers us to restore dignity, safety, and justice to the people of New Orleans.” – Chief of Screening Andre Gaudin

Strengthening Enforcement: Holding Negligent Property Owners Criminally Accountable to Protect Community Well-Being

“Blight is one of the greatest quality of life issues that we have here in the city of New Orleans. And unless we start doing things differently, nothing’s going to change. That’s why I’m so appreciative of the team that worked to strengthen our enforcement tools, particularly the collaboration between Andre Gaudin and Representative Mandy Landry to enhance the criminal blight statute in 2023.

For too long, powerful property owners have hidden behind LLCs and ignored code enforcement fines and civil court actions. But with these changes, we can now pursue criminal accountability. This isn’t just about abandoned buildings, it’s about the health, safety, and dignity of our communities.” – Council President Helena Moreno

Collaborative Reform in Action: How City and State Leaders United to Strengthen Blight Laws and Protect Housing Rights
“Housing is a human right, and we all agree with it. But some people who own housing in this city clearly don’t. In early 2023, one of our old friends from the city came to me with this little kernel of an idea, and I said, let’s do it. We talked to staff, more staff, my committee members, and then the District Attorney came up, Councilmember Green came up, and we just kept making it better.

One night, I got a call from some guy named Andre Gaudin. I didn’t know who he was, and he said, ‘I have this idea to make this for RICO.’ And I thought that was great. The District Attorneys Association was stunned into silence that they hadn’t thought of it before. So we got both bills through unanimously. And this really shows how city and state officials can work together, and the positive outcomes we can get when we do.” – Rep. Mandie Landry

A Team Effort Beyond Government: Empowering Communities and Faith Leaders to Tackle Dangerous Blight

“I want to thank you and your team, you’ve always been a good partner. Daniel and my team talk probably every day to tackle some of these issues that affect our communities. And when we say this affects our community, we’re talking about houses that are inhabited, many times, and in danger of falling on a neighboring home.

But I’m going to take the DA’s analogy and say this, it is like a football team, but we can’t do it just among us officials. The football team comprises not just us, but our faith partners, our citizens who report the blighted housing, and people who are living in horrific conditions. This is an amazing tool, and I have a list of names and addresses where we can employ it.” – Councilmember Lesli Harris
The case will proceed in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court.

In attendance at today’s announcement were:

  • Anthony Davis, Director of Code Enforcement
  • Holly Friedman, Former OSINT Project Manager, DA’s Office
  • Dr. C.S. Gordon, New Zion Baptist Church
  • Joe Givens, Communities of Hope
  • Pastor Nicholas Derouen, Stronger Hope Baptist Church
  • Pastor John Gerhart, Urban Impact Ministries
  • Deacon Nakia Hooks, Stronger Hope Baptist Church
Contact: OPDA Communications

Tel: 504.822.2414

Email: communications@orleansda.com