When the police went to arrest Harris, he was wearing the same sweatshirt he’d had on in the surveillance video. The authorities later determined that the person Garrison had thought he was texting, Kim, was in fact a New Orleans East woman named Jovanna Gardner. Harris and Gardner shared a child—and both were clients of Motta’s in accident cases. Under questioning, Gardner insisted that she hadn’t known she was setting Garrison up to be murdered. Her understanding had been that “the lawyers”—Motta and Alfortish—wanted to pay Garrison to stop coöperating with the authorities, but they were worried that he might not agree to meet for that purpose, and so Harris had instructed her to pose as a potential love interest. According to Gardner, “the lawyers” supplied Harris with the address where Garrison could be found. Later that night, she said, Harris had confessed to her that Garrison was dead, saying, “I killed him.”
After Garrison first taught Harris how to be a slammer, around 2016, the two had worked together productively for a time. But they fell out over money, and at one point Garrison told Motta that Harris was not to be trusted. On May 7, 2024, Harris and Gardner were charged with conspiracy to murder, along with wire fraud. Gardner pleaded guilty and began coöperating, telling police that, even though Harris was the father of her child, he had threatened to kill her if she told anyone about his role in the murder.
In a surprising development in early 2025, Harris also entered a guilty plea—and clarified to the F.B.I. that he had not personally carried out the murder. Instead, he implicated a man named Leon (Chunky) Parker, who was in a romantic relationship with Harris’s mother. On September 16, 2020, Harris had sent Parker a photo of a 9-millimetre he wanted to buy at a gun outlet in Metairie. “Man, that thing nice,” Parker texted back. “Almost look like mines.”
Harris did not end up buying the firearm, but, six days later, a gun of the same calibre was used to kill Garrison. Harris told authorities that, after the shooting, he and Parker had dumped the murder weapon in a canal.
According to Harris, when Alfortish and Motta became aware that Garrison was coöperating with authorities, they called him a “rat”—and intimated that it might be better if he were dead. Alfortish “wanted him gone,” Harris said. As for Motta, she told Harris that “she could not believe Garrison had done this to them after everything they’d done for him.”
Alfortish asked Harris if he knew anyone who could help solve the problem of Garrison. Harris organized a meeting at his auto-body shop with Chunky Parker. As a government filing later summarized, “During the meeting, Alfortish offered to pay Parker to murder Garrison.”
When authorities searched Harris’s auto-body shop, they discovered a blank retainer form for Motta, along with a contract in which Motta agreed to represent a cousin of Harris’s who was in a crash in November, 2023. A more cautious lawyer than Motta might have reacted to recent events—being referenced in a federal indictment, the murder of a former confidant—by backing away, at least temporarily, from truck-accident cases. Jason Baer, the lawyer who’d shared several cases with Motta, began the process of withdrawing as co-counsel at the first sign of a federal investigation. He later explained, “I was, like, ‘Man, I’m just a litigator. This is way past my pay grade.’ ” But Motta, with a brazenness that had become her signature, kept taking on new clients. “I already had to settle another case because of all this bullshit,” she complained to Baer impatiently. As Alfortish once observed, “My fiancée . . . loves to win.”
