Jury selection for ex-Fall River Mayor Jasiel Correia, accused of fraud and extortion, set to start April 20
Updated Mar 15, 2021;
Posted Mar 15, 2021
Jasiel Correia tells reporters after his second arraignment in Boston federal court on additional charges that he will fight the allegations.
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While cannabis users across the country gather on April 20, a Boston federal judge will start jury selection for the trial against ex-Mayor Jasiel Correia, who is accused of taking bribes from marijuana vendors while in office.
The former mayor’s corruption and fraud trial was pushed back to May 4 after being postponed multiple times during the coronavirus pandemic. Then it was moved up to 9 a.m. on April 20, according to court records. That date is widely known as a holiday in cannabis culture.
Correia is facing 24 counts of alleged political corruption, bribery, extortion and defrauding investors.
While in office, Correia was indicted and arrested twice, first in October 2018 connected to his now defunct phone app company, SnoOwl; and then again in September 2019 for allegedly extorting $600,000 in bribes from marijuana vendors looking to do business in the city.
While Correia was able to stave off a recall campaign after his first indictment, where voters recalled and then re-elected the city’s youngest mayor, his political career ended after the second indictment, when current Mayor Paul Coogan easily defeated him in the November 2019 citywide election.
FALL RIVER Mayor Paul Coogan will deliver his State of the City address on Tuesday, but unlike charter-mandated annual events in the past, he’ll only have a live audience of City Council and School Committee members in City Council chambers.
“We’ll talk about COVID obviously, but we’re going to concentrate on what’s going on in the positive, despite COVID,” said Coogan on Friday. “We’ll talk about what our goals are going forward.”
Tuesday will be the first live City Council meeting in months with previous meetings being held remotely on Zoom.
The public is not allowed to attend and Coogan said he’s not invited his staff or any department heads.
More Political Drama in Fall River [OPINION]
The never-ending cycle of political drama continues unabated in Fall River. In this edition of As the River Turns, the foil is embattled School Superintendent Matt Malone, who ran the education department under former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.
Superintendent Malone is refusing to resign even though the Fall River City Council, which is powerless in all of this, voted on Tuesday to pass a resolution of no confidence in Malone and asked him to resign immediately. Eight councilors voted in favor and one voted present because his wife works for the Fall River School Department.
FALL RIVER In the wake of the City Council taking a vote of no confidence in Matt Malone, the school superintendent reiterated that he has no plans of resigning.
At its meeting Tuesday, the City Council voted no confidence in Malone following allegations of harassing staff, and called for him to resign immediately.
City Councilor Shawn Cadime, who has been an aggressive critic of Malone since details leaked of a $25,000 school committee investigation into the allegations came to light, went so far as to compare the Malone issue with the past controversy over former Mayor Jasiel Correia II’s federal criminal case of government corruption.