Legal documents are rarely page-turners, but an indicted lawyer in New Orleans may have just put out one of the most gripping legal thrillers in years.

James Perdigao, who is battling a 59-count criminal indictment that accuses him of stealing about $30 million from his former firm, has come out swinging with a 73-page civil-racketeering complaint that carries some explosive accusations of its own.
 
He paints his former firm as something akin to John Grisham's fictional Bendini Lambert & Locke and himself as the cocky yet naive Mitch McDeere, scapegoated by a corrupt system that protects its own.
  
"The snitch usually ends up in the ditch," Perdigao contends that one partner warned him, adding that shortly after that threat, he was "attacked by gunfire at his residence."
 
While Perdigao does not go so far as to claim outright that his law firm, Adams & Reese, tried to have him killed—that might be too "Grisham" to be believed—he does make plenty of other bold accusations. The boldest: that partners at the firm turned a blind eye when one well-heeled client in a jam schemed to bribe a U.S. attorney.

It should be noted that Perdigao's story lacks corroboration for his bold claims. He will have to produce some evidence soon enough if he wants to keep a judge from tossing out the complaint.
 
Adams & Reese has called the suit "the latest episode in Perdigao's continuing fantasy of blaming the government and our firm for his wrongdoing and lashing out at those who are holding him accountable for his actions."

But this is New Orleans, where outlandish yarns of greed and corruption can have the ring of truth. Indeed, more than 170 people have been indicted for public corruption in the Big Easy over the last six years.  
    
As James Bernazzani, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s New Orleans field office, has noted on more than one occasion, corrupt public officials in Louisiana tend to take things an additional step or two. They don't just skim the cream, he likes to say. They also "steal the milk, hijack the bottles, and look for the cow."
    
Controversy has also swirled around several of the people who figure prominently in Perdigao's complaint, helping to give it stronger legs than it might otherwise have had. Federal officials have been investigating contracts awarded during the term of former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, who served of counsel with Adams & Reese for about a year after leaving office. Although Morial has never been charged with a crime, his uncle, his aunt, and a close associate have each pled guilty to various charges of city corruption. Adams & Reese has reportedly been issued two subpoenas seeking information about Morial's work at the firm.
    
The former U.S. attorney at the center of Perdigao's bribery allegation is Eddie Jordan, who last November resigned as Orleans Parish District Attorney after a federal judge ordered the district attorney's office to pay a $3.7 million judgment related to accusations that Jordan, who is black, fired dozens of white employees after being elected to office in 2003. Around the same time, Jordan admitted that he gave shelter to a man wanted in connection with both an armed robbery and a shooting of a police officer. Jordan has said he didn't know that the suspect—who was one of his girlfriend's friends—was on the lam.
    
Also an integral player in Perdigao's narrative is Representative William Jefferson, Democrat from New Orleans, who gained fame during Hurricane Katrina for commandeering a National Guard unit to ferry him to his home to retrieve personal items. Jefferson is currently facing federal corruption charges over allegations that he solicited bribes in the Congressional dining room. An F.B.I. raid of his home turned up $90,000 stashed in his freezer. Jefferson has pled not guilty.

Against this backdrop, it doesn't sound so ludicrous when Perdigao claims that he watched a client—who was a key witness in the federal bribery trial of former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards—"fill a bag with cash that had been hidden under some tiles next to the bathtub" in the man's penthouse, with plans to drop this money under some steps at Jefferson's humble abode.

Or that, rather than agreeing to call in the feds, a law partner might have encouraged Perdigao to go on the next bag drop instead, stating that he would then "have a multimillion-dollar client for life."

At least one other person besides Perdigao must sure hope it's true, with Edwards' appeal of his 2000 conviction in the riverboat-gambling extortion case generally resting on a belief that there is something shady about the deal prosecutors gave this witness.

Implicit in the bribery accusations was Perdigao's own hope that the U.S. attorney's Office of the Eastern District of Louisiana would be forced to recuse itself from trying the criminal case now staring him down.
 
But that now will not happen, with the judge in the case ruling on Friday against Perdigao's motion.

"This was a clear and unambiguous ruling, so the interruption in the criminal case is over, says U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, who in filings to the court characterized Perdigao's claims as "unsupported vitriol," "perfidy," "vacillations," "lies," and "hearsay malice" unfairly leveled against Perdigao's accusers and victims.
 
Letten notes in these filings that "in an abundance of caution" Perdigao's allegations against his office were "promptly referred" to an independent prosecutor from the Justice Department, adding with obvious annoyance that "Perdigao's mendacity with the facts is as disprovable as his mendacity with the law."
 
Unfortunately, these days the people of New Orleans may rightfully fear there is a bit of mendacity in even the truest-sounding statement, and a little truth in every lie.
 
As Brick says, responding to the heavy hang of lies that define Tennessee William's own bayou tale, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, "You said it yourself, Big Daddy, mendacity is a system we live in."