Over a seven-month period last year, attorney Tanzanika Ruffin solicited the staggering sum from the family of client Kai Hansen through wire transfers and Venmo payments, a grand jury indictment alleges. She wrote official-sounding emails claiming portions of the money would resolve Hansen’s charges, according to the indictment and state court records. She said payments would also cover medical treatment for a New Orleans Police Department officer whom Hansen was accused of assaulting in March outside of a Bourbon Street cigar bar.
Ruffin on Friday referred a request for comment to her attorney, Kerry Cuccia. Cuccia declined to comment, saying he had not yet reviewed the indictment. Cuccia has previously said his client repaid the family, save for some attorney’s fees.
The allegations surrounding Ruffin, who runs a firm specializing in criminal defense and announced a run for an Orleans Parish judgeship last November, have roiled the city’s legal circles for months.
Hefty fees
Hansen was let out of jail on an $8,000 bond; yet Ruffin billed the family $66,000 for what she described as bond-related costs, according to the DA’s office’s December filing.
Later, she said Hansen could pay a “settlement” for a lighter sentence, tying sums to each charge he faced: $25,000 for each of two counts of resisting a police officer by force; $5,000 for simple assault on a police officer and so on, emails included in state court filings show. One charge Ruffin listed, “2nd degree aggravated battery on a police officer,” does not exist under Louisiana law. For that count, she billed the family $15,000, the records show.
The family provided records to the DA’s office showing $250,000 in wire transfers and Venmo payments they sent Ruffin.
A spokesperson for Williams’ office did not immediately respond late Friday to a request for comment on the indictment.
Federal investigators were revealed to be scrutinizing the case in January of this year. Hansen gave documents and recordings of the family’s interactions with Ruffin to FBI agents, according to a January court filing by a new attorney the family hired, Graham Bosworth.
The criminal court judge overseeing Hansen’s case, Robin Pittman, recused herself in what legal analysts described to WVUE-TV as a sign she may have been called as a witness in the federal probe. The TV station first reported the allegations against Ruffin last year.
Ruffin returned money, attorney said
Cuccia told WVUE on Jan. 16 that Ruffin had “almost immediately returned the money that she clearly was not entitled to keep.” Ruffin kept attorney’s fees of just over $33,000, Cuccia told the station. Ruffin’s federal indictment orders her to surrender to the government any property purchased with the money.
Since they surfaced, the allegations have already had repercussions for Ruffin. She represented one of the 10 New Orleans jail escapees who broke out last May, who have all since returned to jail. In December, the escapee was assigned a new attorney as the DA’s office detailed the allegations in state court filings.
A judge in 2015 declared a mistrial after Ruffin, who was representing second-degree murder defendant Leroy Price, disclosed that she also represented a business owned by someone married to a police detective who led the murder investigation. Price had said the connection made him uncomfortable with his representation.
Prosecutors, though, pushed to salvage the trial after learning that the detective’s wife had dissolved her stake in the company years earlier.
In 2011, when she was a prosecutor for the District Attorney’s Office, Ruffin was disciplined by the Louisiana Supreme Court for threatening to prosecute a person who wrote a bad check to a friend of hers, records show. She lost her job with the DA’s office after she “self-reported” the episode.
Ruffin acknowledged the incident in a blurb posted to a legal website, calling it a formative part of her legal career.
U.S. Attorney David Courcelle of the Eastern District of Louisiana, a career defense attorney sworn in as the 13-parish district’s top federal prosecutor in December, presented the indictment in magistrate court alongside Assistant U.S. Attorney Maria Carboni.
“The fact that Mr. Courcelle appears to have handled and presented this indictment personally is significant,” said Michael Magner, a veteran white-collar defense attorney and former federal prosecutor. Doing so, Magner added, “reflects his intentions to pursue worthwhile cases aggressively and help restore the office’s storied reputation for prosecuting corruption and major fraud cases.“
Staff writer John Simerman contributed to this report.
