Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens filed hundreds of pages of documents in federal court Monday containing salacious quotes from undercover agents, an interview with a now-convicted felon, a transcript of a federal grand jury interview and a photograph of an undercover FBI agent smiling at an open fridge full of alcoholic drinks. 

The federal government swiftly filed an emergency request for the judge in Owens’ federal bribery case to permanently seal the motion and the attached exhibits, claiming it violated a protective order in the case and could “influence the jury pool.” 

Owens is charged with eight criminal counts, including conspiracy, bribery, racketeering, wire fraud, money laundering and making false statements. He has pleaded not guilty, and his 68-page motion points to his likely defense — entrapment. 

“In its unrestrained zeal to ‘get something’ on Owens, the Government made material misrepresentations in the indictment; concealed evidence; lied to the Grand Jury; induced Owens after he rejected criminal overtures and exhibited reluctance; strategically used alcohol to target Owens, who is a diagnosed alcoholic, to break down his resistance, overcome his reluctance, and elicit incriminating statements,” the motion reads.

READ MORE: Yacht, strip club, bags of cash: The traveling FBI sting that set the stage for bribery charges against Jackson officials

Former Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and former Jackson City Councilman Aaron Banks have also pleaded not guilty, and a trial is scheduled for July. 

The FBI sting began in 2023, when agents came to Jackson impersonating wealthy, out-of-state developers seeking to invest in downtown. 

In the course of their operation, Owens allegedly helped the developers bribe Lumumba by translating the agents’ cash into checks from multiple supposed campaign donors, and forking over the funds while on a yacht in south Florida. According to documents obtained by Mississippi Today, the fictitious developer group had invited Lumumba to Fort Lauderdale, just outside Miami, under the guise of a fundraising event, including a sunset cruise.

Lumumba then allegedly called his planning and development director in exchange for the money and asked him to move up a deadline in a bid for proposals, theoretically giving Owens’ new developer friends an advantage. Photos of Lumumba talking on the phone and Owens handling cash appear inside the indictment.

The federal government also accused Owens of bribing Banks with $10,000 for his future vote on the project.

The federal indictment is chock full of quotes from Owens, taken from hours of tape the undercover agents recorded during their conversations with the district attorney. Owens’ brow-raising remarks – which he described as “cherry-picked” and “drunken, locker room banter” – extend to topics far beyond the alleged bribery scheme. 

“We can take dope boy money,” Owens is quoted in the indictment as saying, “… but I need to clean it and spread it.”

The indictment alleges Owens told the agents he was mixing their cash with “dope money and drug money and more than a million dollars” and storing it at the district attorney’s office. 

But the indictment does not include charges related to these comments. This is another thing Owens’ motion challenges. 

“The Government intentionally used a ‘speaking indictment’ to foment public anger and acrimony toward Owens resulting in widespread conclusions of guilt with no regard for due process,” the motion reads.

Owens’ motion includes similarly detailed descriptions of the FBI’s attempts to learn about his activities, despite the government’s claims in grand jury testimony that Owens “inserted” himself into its investigation. 

Months before the real estate developers came to town, the motion claims, the FBI had set its sights on broaching Owens’ network by turning a law enforcement officer and former candidate for Hinds County Sheriff, Torrence Mayfield, who was also working as the district attorney’s bodyguard. 

With the help of a jailhouse informant and a convicted felon who runs a Jackson nightclub, Owens’ motion claims the feds indicted Mayfield on federal firearm charges in 2022 after he bought a rifle for the nightclub owner. In 2025, Mayfield pleaded guilty to one charge of making false statements to a gun dealer. 

Owens’ motion says the feds sat on the indictment until they got to town. Then, Owens claims they used it to pressure Mayfield, arranging a SWAT team to arrest the unsuspecting man in April 2023 as he was “leaving a health club wearing a plastic suit to help him lose weight.” 

For more than three hours, the motion says agents interviewed Mayfield as he “sat handcuffed in the backseat sweating profusely in his plastic suit.” He told them about his suspicions of corruption in city government and local law enforcement. 

“And you got to understand, we have heard all those things from the County, the City, like everything,” one of the agents told him. “We just are now hearing a position where you could get something.” 

The motion repeatedly cites this interaction, claiming it shows the government wanted to “get something” on Owens. The motion also alleges the federal government concealed this transcript from the defense. 

“To coerce Mayfield, the FBI agents repeatedly reminded him that prison was in his immediate future unless he could ‘come up with something,’” the motion reads.

Owens’ motion lingers on a paragraph from the indictment in which the government asserts the undercover agent initially made contact with the district attorney after casually happening on his lounge, Downtown Cigar Company. 

The government claimed a lobbyist the agent was meeting with while in town recommended the establishment. The inclusion of that detail puzzled some onlookers when the indictment was unsealed in November 2024.

And Owens alleged in his motion that it was a misrepresentation by the government. Instead, his lawyers assert that the informant knew what he was doing when he stepped into Owens’ establishment.

The motion claims the FBI began investigating Owens long before the cigar shop scene. Specifically, it pointed to a September 2022 email in which a local FBI agent discussed Owens’ businesses and wrote, “Also, we are getting Jody added as a subject to one of our investigations but that hasn’t happened yet.” 

But when a U.S. Department of Justice lawyer asked FBI special agent Lawrence Correll during an October 2024 federal grand jury proceeding whether Owens had been a target of the FBI “as somebody that had been previously mentioned as somebody who was taking bribes” at the launch of the investigation, Correll said Owens was not, according to the transcript reviewed by Mississippi Today. 

Correll answered affirmatively when the attorney asked whether the initial FBI agent had “just happened to kind of run into Owens.”

“And is it accurate to say that Owens kind of then inserted himself into this bribery scheme?” the attorney asked, and Correll responded, “That’s correct.”

The filing includes several images of Owens with a beverage in his hand, including one in which he appears slumped over, holding his head in his hand, and two with his face on the table. 

The undercover sting carried out in Jackson from 2022 to 2024 resembled FBI operations that ensnared public officials in other cities. The agents treated a councilman from Cincinnati to the same treatment, a yacht ride and an outing to a Miami cabaret club, according to news reports.