NEW ORLEANS (CN) - A federal prosecutor's identity as blogger "Henry L. Mencken 1951" was confirmed by the U.S. attorney on Thursday, days after a landfill owner filed a lawsuit claiming that someone in the U.S. Attorney's Office had defamed him repeatedly using the pseudonym of the famous writer.
U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said in a Thursday afternoon press conference that the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington had been notified that one of his top prosecutors, Salvador Perricone, 60, admitted using the pseudonym to bash Frederick Heebe, among others, and to discuss open cases.
Heebe, who is part-owner of a suburban landfill and was being investigated by Perricone, is the subject of hundreds of posts by the pseudonymous Mencken.
Letten said Thursday that Perricone had been removed from any cases that were a subject of the Mencken 1951 comments.
In his complaint in Orleans Parish Court, Heebe claims he hired a former FBI agent and forensic linguist, James Fitzgerald, to analyze Mencken's comments on Nola.com, a website of the Times-Picayune.
Heebe said in his complaint that all evidence pointed to Perricone, including the prosecutor's 1951 birth date. The complaint claims that Mencken 1951 made 598 comments on the Nola.com website, many of them disparaging Heebe and his family and referring to his case.
"Starting on August 15, 2011, an anonymous person, writing under the pen name 'Henry L. Mencken1951' (Mencken) has posted a series of defamatory comments about petitioner Frederick R. Heebe and his family on the Times-Picayune website, Nola.com," the complaint states.
"Petitioner does not know Mencken's true identity with certainty and therefore cannot serve a civil complaint on him at this time. But the evidence discussed herein and more fully examined in the attached report by forensic linguist and former FBI profiler, James R. Fitzgerald ... strongly indicates that Mencken is in fact a member of the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana ('USAO'), acting outside the scope of his employment. ...
"In the course of six months, Mencken has submitted comments to Nola.com on a near-daily basis, posting some 598 comments to the site to date, the latest on March 11, 2012 at 12:41 p.m. Of the comments posted through February 7, 2012, roughly half relate in some way to active USAO investigations or past matters the office has handled. A substantial portion of these comments discusses Mr. Heebe, his family, and his company (River Birch, Inc.), River Birch CFO Dominick Fazzio (a defendant in a criminal matter being prosecuted by the USAO), the USAO's investigation of Jefferson Parish officials whom the government has sought to tie to Mr. Heebe, or other persons connected to these investigations or Mr. Fazzio's criminal case.
"In addition to containing a number of false and defamatory statements about Mr. Heebe, the Mencken posts reveal a level of knowledge about the inner workings of the USAO that is well beyond what could be expected of even the most diligent outside observer.