NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Trial is scheduled to start Monday for a former Army Corps of Engineers consultant and a subcontractor charged with conspiring to bribe another consultant for confidential information about a Hurricane Katrina levee project.

Kern Carver Bernard Wilson, 58, of Apollo Beach, Fla., was a corps consultant who tried to help Durwanda Elizabeth Morgan Heinrich, 46, of Metairie, La., find work as a dirt, sand and gravel subcontractor after the August 2005 hurricane, federal prosecutors said.

Wilson and Heinrich allegedly offered to pay another corps consultant, Raul Miranda, for access to information about bids for a $16 million contract to rebuild a levee southwest of New Orleans.

Hoping to secure a subcontract for the project, Heinrich showed the confidential information to one of the bidders, but the contractor reported her overture to authorities rather than use it to improve his bid, according to prosecutors.

“Thus, the conspiracy was uncovered before any money could change hands,” lawyers for the Justice Department wrote in a pretrial memo.

Miranda, 51, of Spring, Texas, pleaded guilty to a bribery charge in September 2007 and is awaiting sentencing.

Heinrich allegedly promised to give Wilson and Miranda nearly $300,000 each, or 25 cents for every cubic yard of material used to reconstruct and enlarge the Lake Cataouatche levees, which protect New Orleans suburbs and small towns west of the Mississippi River.

Federal investigators confronted Heinrich in October 2006 when she met in Houma, La., with Mike Mayeux, the contractor who cooperated with authorities and let them tape two of his conversations with Heinrich.

Heinrich’s lawyers claim the agents coerced her into making statements that jurors shouldn’t be allowed to hear, but their motion to suppress the statements was denied last week by U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans.

In court papers, prosecutors argue that money doesn’t have to change hands for a bribery scheme to be a crime.

“If the bribery scheme was doomed to fail from the beginning, it was simply bad planning and execution on the part of the defendants; it is not an excuse to the crimes charged,” prosecutors wrote.

Congress has earmarked billions of dollars to repair and fortify New Orleans area levees that failed during Katrina and its aftermath, flooding 80 percent of the city. The Justice Department’s investigation of Heinrich and Wilson was its first criminal case stemming from post-Katrina levee work.