Brad Cascio had never been to Mustard Seed Creamery.
That was one of the first things I learned about him when we sat down over ice cream, and admittedly, it wasn’t exactly the information I had invited him there to tell me. I had come prepared to talk about prosecution. Thirteen years of it. Cascio has spent more than a decade as an Assistant District Attorney for the 21st Judicial District, prosecuted more than 4,000 cases and now finds himself running for District Attorney. But I tend to start interviews the same way, no matter who I’m sitting across from.
“What made you want to do this?”
The answer usually tells me where the rest of the conversation is going to go. Cascio’s answer took us all the way back to when he was 19 years old and learning to become a mechanic. There was no lifelong dream of becoming an attorney. No story about always knowing he belonged in a courtroom. In fact, the first time someone seriously suggested law school, he laughed at the idea.
“You’re crazy,” he remembered telling his wife, Katie. “That’s for rich people’s kids.”
Sitting across from him now, that answer almost feels impossible to picture. But the more we talked, the more I realized he wasn’t trying to make his beginnings sound humbler than they were. He genuinely believed that. Cascio grew up in Hammond in what he describes as a working-class family. He attended Holy Ghost Catholic School, then St. Thomas Aquinas High School, before eventually finding his way from trade school to Southeastern Louisiana University. Even getting through college looked more like a work schedule than a college schedule.
“I would go to school Tuesday and Thursday, all day,” he told me. “Then I would work construction Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And then I would work in a restaurant Friday night and Saturday night.”
He shrugged as if there wasn’t anything remarkable about it.
“That was the majority of college.”
I don’t know why that answer stuck with me, but it did. Maybe because it explained so much about everything that came after. Before there was law school, there was construction. Before there were courtrooms, there were restaurant shifts. Before there were suits, there were work boots.
The more Cascio talked, the more I realized that blue-collar kid never really disappeared. He just ended up carrying that same mentality into a profession most people don’t associate with it. After graduating from Southeastern with a criminal justice degree in 2008, Cascio thought he was going to become a federal agent. Then he met Katie. The two met through a mixer between his fraternity, Sigma Tau Gamma, and her sorority, Phi Mu. As their relationship grew more serious, so did the realization that a career built around constant travel probably wasn’t the life he wanted anymore. Instead, he took a job selling paper products and supplies to bars and restaurants.
He hated it.
“I was miserable,” he said. “I was driving 3,000 miles a month in my personal truck. I just wasn’t enjoying it at all.”
Katie noticed.
“My wife knows that I’m the kind of person that wants to enjoy what he does.”
So she suggested law school. His response?
“You’re crazy.”
He laughed telling the story, but he was serious at the time. To Cascio, law school belonged to a completely different world. Going to college had already been a milestone for his family. Becoming an attorney felt like something other people did. Katie kept pushing anyway.
Eventually, he took the LSAT on a whim. He scored well enough that the crazy idea suddenly didn’t seem so crazy. He quit the sales job, went back to construction, borrowed what he describes as “a ton of money” and enrolled at LSU Law School. Like anyone borrowing that kind of money, he figured he’d better find a career that paid well.
“I thought, okay, I’m borrowing all this money, and I want to make a lot of money when I get out.”
Fair enough. So, he interned with a large law firm. It should have been exactly what he wanted.
Instead, he found himself in another job he didn’t enjoy.
“I just felt like we were churning, burning and going, but not actually doing.”
That sentence lingered with me. It wasn’t that Cascio didn’t want to work. If anything, everything he’d told me up to that point suggested the exact opposite. He just wanted the work to matter. That’s what eventually led him to the District Attorney’s Office in Amite. No appointment. No connections. No carefully planned introduction. He simply walked in and asked to speak with then-District Attorney Scott Perrilloux. They had never met. Eventually, Perrilloux came out and sat down with him. Cascio asked if he could work there part time. There wasn’t money in the budget.
“Well, that’s okay,” Cascio remembered telling him. “Don’t pay me. I just want to work here and see if I like it.”
That may have been my favorite story of the afternoon. For someone who had spent years working construction and restaurant shifts because he needed the paycheck, volunteering to work for free said everything I needed to know about how badly he wanted to find work that actually fulfilled him. He found it.
“I just fell in love with the work itself.”
As he talked about prosecution, I noticed something. He almost never talked about winning. He talked about working. Sure, he admitted criminal cases are interesting.
“Just when you think you’ve seen it all, something else…” he said, letting the sentence trail off.
I didn’t need him to finish it. After 13 years, I had a feeling there were probably hundreds of stories sitting behind that unfinished sentence. But when I asked why he’d stayed all these years, his answer wasn’t about excitement.
“Mainly, it’s the impact you can have, and the difference you can make, and the way you can help people,” he said. “I just love it.”
Today, Cascio handles felony, juvenile and Department of Children and Family Services cases for the 21st Judicial District while also serving as City Prosecutor for Denham Springs and French Settlement. Those are the résumé facts. The story he told me about becoming good at the job was much more interesting.
“When I first started, I was wearing the floor out between my office and the older guys’ and girls’ offices,” he said.
Every few files, he’d run into something he’d never seen before. So, he’d grab the file, walk down the hall and ask someone who had.
“Here’s the rap sheet. Here’s what they did. Here’s what they’re saying they did. What do you think?”
Then he’d listen. He told me prosecution isn’t just knowing the law. It’s learning judgment. Learning when to push. Learning when to listen. Learning how to weigh circumstances that don’t fit neatly inside a criminal code.
“That’s a skill that you have to hone and train years to really develop the right sense to do it.”
Now, thirteen years later, those footsteps come the other direction.
“Now, I’m the guy that they come to,” he said before laughing. “It’s hard to believe I’m the older guy there, but I am.”
I laughed too. Oddly enough, that was probably the moment the whole interview clicked for me. Not the 4,000 cases. Not the titles. The hallway. That’s how he measures experience. Not by awards or accomplishments, but by the day he realized younger prosecutors had started walking into his office asking the same questions he used to ask everyone else. When the conversation shifted to Katie, the tone changed immediately.
“I chased her for a while,” he laughed. “Because I was not a prosecutor when I was a young man. I made my fair share of bad decisions.”
Apparently, Katie remembered that version of Brad Cascio, too.
“She really wouldn’t date me. She was like, ‘You’ve got to calm down. You’re partying too much. You’re doing this, you’re doing that. I’m serious.’”
He listened.
“She really got me on track,” he said. “I owe her a lot.”
Then came one answer I wasn’t expecting.
“I get the benefit of a second chance,” Cascio told me. “If a young person really needs it, wants it and deserves it.”
For someone whose career revolves around accountability, it was interesting hearing him talk just as openly about grace. Then we got to my favorite story. The Cascios have three children: Olivia, Sam and Benny… and one Labradoodle named Mozzy.
“Like mozzarella?” I asked.
Exactly like mozzarella. The kids named him after their favorite cheese. I laughed. That one was absolutely making the article. Apparently, Katie had been asking Brad to get the kids a dog while she was pregnant with their youngest child. Then they had the baby. Most people would probably decide a newborn was enough excitement for one week. Brad Cascio showed up with a puppy.
“I was like, ‘Guess what I got,’” he laughed.
He dropped the puppy in the living room, let everyone enjoy the excitement, then went back to work. Somehow, that story felt perfectly on brand. By the time our ice cream had long since melted and our conversation at Mustard Seed was winding down, I’d almost forgotten why we’d met there in the first place. Yes, Brad Cascio is running for District Attorney. But for nearly two hours, that wasn’t really what we talked about.
We talked about construction jobs, bad career choices, a wife who believed in him before he believed in himself, the hallway he used to wear out asking older prosecutors for advice, and a Labradoodle named after mozzarella cheese. At one point, Cascio admitted something that probably summed him up better than anything else he said that afternoon.
“I don’t like politics,” he said. “I love this job though.”
By then, I believed him. Not because he told me. Because for the last two hours, he hadn’t sounded like someone trying to convince me to vote for him. He sounded like someone talking about work. The kind of work you learn by asking questions, putting in long hours and showing up day after day until one morning you realize you’re the person everyone else comes to for answers. Brad Cascio thought he was supposed to become a mechanic. He thought he was supposed to be blue collar.
After an afternoon over ice cream at Mustard Seed Creamery, I’m not entirely convinced he was wrong.
The tools just changed.
