Contractor wins $20M suit against DOTD

MONROE — A former Mangham contractor won a $20 million suit he filed against the state Department of Transportation and Development over a 2007 incident he says cost him his business because he refused to pay a bribe to a state official.

Jeff Mercer said Friday he filed the suit over actions that caused his business, which employed 20 to 40 people, to be shuttered. The original suit was for $20 million, but because it has taken eight years to try, judicial interest will compound the amount by an additional several million. Mercer's attorney David Doughty, said the $20 million accounts for lost future income and is in line with the profits Mercer's company was making at the time.

"It's been a long fight, we've been trying to get them in the court for eight years," Mercer said. "We finally got justice."

Two separate suits for more than $10 million in contractual losses are ongoing in Baton Rouge, Doughty said.

On Friday night, a 12-person jury ruled unanimously in Mercer's favor. The suit was heard in 4th Judicial District Court by Judge Wilson Rambo. The suit also involved four individual defendants — Willis Jenkins, Michael Murphy, John Eason and Barry Lacy.

"It was so bad. I think that's what they (the jury) reacted to," Doughty said. " I think what this is all about is that people are tired of corruption and tired of reading of this type of thing, and I think the jury was sending a message: 'Hey, We're not going to tolerate this.'

"Here in Louisiana, we need to clean up our act. We've got a great state, but we've got things like that that are pockets of corruption that need to be weeded out."

In the suit filed in 2007, Mercer said that Willis Jenkins, a DOTD inspector on a bridge project on Louisville Avenue in Monroe, "demanded a bribe."

According to the suit, Jenkins told Mercer "if you want this job to go better, it's going to take some green." Mercer said he later demanded a generator as a bribe.

Doughty said Jenkins admitted he made the comment, but said it was a joke and the DOTD never investigated it.

In the suit, Mercer said he then reported the bribe to DOTD Engineer Marshall Hill, who removed Jenkins from the project, saying, "this is not the first time he heard about this inspector."

He also said there was collusion by DOTD officials to make his jobs costly and difficult.

"Later on, all these other defendants, they jumped on me and refused to pay me for work that I had done, all kinds of other things," Mercer said.

"As he went to other jobs, they continued to really punish him," Doughty said, "It culminated in them actually reporting him to the FBI on some false criminal charges that wound up being dropped, but they didn't check with him or his prime contractor or anybody. ... Rather than paying him, they reported him to the FBI."

After that, Doughty said, the Baton Rouge DOTD threatened him with federal prosecution when he asked for payments.

Doughty said Mercer's business qualified as a Disadvantaged Business Enterprise under the Americans With Disabilities Act because Mercer has epilepsy.

"He was crying out for help on these jobs, asking 'who protects the DBE from the DOTD?'," Doughty said. "The people who are actually supposed to guard the DBE companies are within the DOTD itself. ... He didn't get any help from them."

Instead of aid, the DOTD started investigating Mercer, Doughty said; the corruption went all the way to the top of the state agency.

Mercer's legal action says that he is owed for two projects in Monroe — $79,463 for the Louisville Avenue project and $50,567 for the Well Road project. Five other projects, including one in Morehouse Parish, make up the remaining portion of the $8,967,071 outstanding debt. All told, Mercer said more than $10 million was not paid until 2011.

In a letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration Office of Civil Rights, Mercer alleged that the DOTD had taken fraudulent, wasteful and abusive actions, committed wire fraud, abused funds, lied to the FBI, colluded, committed bribery and abused 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money.

Mercer said he wanted to thank the jury for their time. The trial, he said, took four weeks, and that kind of time away from their jobs and daily lives was "a sacrifice."

He noted that he expects a long wait before he sees the funds. He also expects the DOTD to appeal.

Follow Bonnie Bolden on Twitter @Bonnie_Bolden_.