A Louisiana state court has sentenced Danette Colbert, 49, to 60 years and Rickey White, 35, to 45 years in prison for their roles in a criminal racketeering operation that killed Adan Manzano, a 27-year-old reporter for Telemundo Kansas City who had traveled to the New Orleans area to cover the 2025 Super Bowl. Judge Nancy Miller issued the sentences Monday in Jefferson Parish, days after a jury convicted both defendants. Manzano was found dead in his hotel room in Kenner, Louisiana — the suburb housing New Orleans' international airport — days before the Kansas City Chiefs lost Super Bowl LIX to the Philadelphia Eagles on 9 February 2025. The Jefferson Parish coroner determined he died from positional asphyxiation, with an autopsy finding Xanax and alcohol in his system. Prosecutors described a criminal enterprise dating back to 2012 in which Colbert, White, and co-defendant Christian Anderson — who testified against them — lured unsuspecting tourists in the French Quarter with the promise of sex before drugging and robbing them. Manzano was one victim among many over more than a decade of operation. Colbert received 50 years for racketeering and a consecutive 10 years for negligent homicide; White received 45 years for racketeering alone. The sentencing hearing carried extraordinary personal weight. Manzano's father, appearing via videoconference, called it "a sad day for me and my family" and asked the court to "lock up the people that destroyed my life." His mother described the defendants as "beings of darkness" and said she would never overcome the loss. A cousin, Carlos Castillo, told the defendants: "Every time the cell opens and you cannot see the light, you think of my cousin." The tragedy's dimensions extend beyond the courtroom. Manzano's wife, Ashleigh Boyd, was killed in a car crash in Topeka, Kansas, in April 2024 — months before his own death. Todd W. Armstrong was found guilty of vehicular homicide in that case on 21 September, just four days after the jury verdict in Manzano's case in Louisiana. The couple's daughter Eleanor, now three, is being raised by her maternal grandparents. Colbert had already received a 25-year sentence months after Manzano's death for violating probation on a prior theft and fraud conviction as a habitual offender. Judge Miller told her Monday that her "behavior in this matter is quite alarming" and that her "consistent pattern in criminal history" showed she had "been doing this for quite some time. It's finally caught up to you with the death of one of your victims." The case lays bare a specific failure mode in urban tourism economies: visitor populations create a permanent pool of vulnerable, disoriented, cash-carrying targets, and enforcement only arrives when a victim dies publicly enough to generate political pressure. Thirteen years of operation before a fatal outcome triggered prosecution is not a success story for the justice system — it's a measure of how long predatory extraction from transient populations can persist unchecked.
