Has Nagin been bush-whacked by the Southern Mob?
A jury convicted former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin Wednesday on 20 of 21 federal corruption counts, including bribery, marking a stunning fall for the feisty official who gained a national profile following Hurricane Katrina.
The 57-year-old Democrat, who led his city through the aftermath of the 2005 storm, was found guilty of charges that he accepted bribes, free trips and other gratuities from contractors in exchange for helping them secure millions of dollars in city work while he was in office.
He will remain free on bond while he awaits sentencing. Each of the charges carries a sentence from three to 20 years, but how long he would serve was unclear and will depend on a pre-sentence investigation and various sentencing guidelines. No sentencing date was set.
Nagin sat quietly at the defense table after the verdict was read and his wife, Seletha, was being consoled in the front row. Before the verdict, he said outside the New Orleans courtroom: "I've been at peace with this for a long time. I'm good."
Nagin, who left office in 2010 after eight years, was indicted in January 2013 on charges he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and truckloads of free granite for his family business in exchange for promoting the interests of local businessman Frank Fradella.
He also was charged with accepting thousands of dollars in in payoffs from another businessman, Rodney Williams, for his help in securing city contracts.
Nagin is best remembered for his impassioned pleas for help after levees broke during Hurricane Katrina, flooding much of New Orleans and plunging the city into chaos.
Nagin testified that key witnesses lied and prosecutors misinterpreted evidence including emails, checks and pages from his appointment calendar linking him to businessmen who said they bribed him.
The defense repeatedly said prosecutors overstated Nagin's authority to approve contracts. His lawyer said there is no proof money and material given to the granite business owned by Nagin and his sons was tied to city business.
The charges against Nagin included one overarching conspiracy count along with six counts of bribery, nine counts of wire fraud, one count of money laundering conspiracy and four counts of filing false tax returns. He was acquitted of one of the bribery counts.
Each charges carries a sentence from 3 to 20 years, but how long he would serve was unclear and will depend on a pre-sentence investigation and various sentencing guidelines. No sentencing date was set.
Prosecutors say he took hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of bribes including money, free travel and granite for Stone Age LLC, a family granite business.
They allege the corruption spanned the time before and after Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005.
The charges resulted from a City Hall corruption investigation that had resulted in several convictions or guilty pleas by former Nagin associates by the time trial started on Jan. 27.
Fradella and Williams, both awaiting sentencing for their roles in separate bribery schemes alleged in the case, each testified that they bribed Nagin.
Nagin's former technology chief, Greg Meffert, who also is awaiting sentencing after a plea deal, told jurors he helped another businessman, Mark St. Pierre, bribe Nagin with lavish vacation trips. St. Pierre did not testify. He was convicted in the case in 2011.
Nagin said he did not to know his vacation trips to Jamaica and Hawaii were paid for by St. Pierre. He also said he wasn't told that a family trip to New York was paid for by a movie theater owner who, prosecutors said, received help with a city tax issue after Katrina wiped out the theater.
Comment: Charging and convicting a politician in the USA with taking bribes is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. A man in his position would be
expected to accept bribes; failure to do so would have raised suspicion and flagged him for extra scrutiny. If anyone wants to do well for his community in the US, he
must play the game. In fact, in today's America, for someone to be charged with taking bribes, it probably means they were diverting money in order to be able to do good with it.
So the question is; why Nagin? Could it be because he interfered with certain developers' plans for post-Katrina N.O.? Could it be because he was actually a rare case of a
good politician that he has been sent down for more than most murderers get in the U.S.? Somebody clearly wanted to eliminate this man from the game.
Curiously, the evidence used against Nagin is 'secret' and
won't be made public.... 'just temporarily', they say, but everyone will have forgotten about it once he begins rotting in prison.
From his
Wiki page we learn that:
Shortly after Katrina devastated New Orleans, some started making bold public demands for socially reengineering New Orleans during its recovery. There were repeated calls for moratoriums on rebuilding certain neighborhoods with developers eager for cheap land. Two weeks after Katrina struck, Nagin took a weekend trip to Dallas to reunite with his family. While there, he was asked to meet with leading New Orleans businessmen to discuss the city's future. Nagin made it clear at the meeting that everyone had a right to return home, a claim contradicted by some businesspersons in attendance. He also asserts his plans were to rebuild a bigger and better New Orleans where diversity, equity, and fairness ruled. Nagin traveled the country presiding over 170 town hall-style meetings to inform displaced New Orleanians of the status of the city's recovery.
...and those "some businesspersons" are no doubt among those implicated in the deliberate sabotaging of the city's flood defenses during Hurricane Katrina, along with the deliberately delayed federal response and the barbaric handling of refugees in the city and across the country.
Despite all that, Nagin still managed to turn the city around for one of the fastest ever urban recoveries from a major disaster.
It seems to us that they put a decent man away because he wasn't a psychopath like them.
See also:
It was the levees, not the hurricane, that flooded New Orleans
Comment: Charging and convicting a politician in the USA with taking bribes is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. A man in his position would be expected to accept bribes; failure to do so would have raised suspicion and flagged him for extra scrutiny. If anyone wants to do well for his community in the US, he must play the game. In fact, in today's America, for someone to be charged with taking bribes, it probably means they were diverting money in order to be able to do good with it.
So the question is; why Nagin? Could it be because he interfered with certain developers' plans for post-Katrina N.O.? Could it be because he was actually a rare case of a good politician that he has been sent down for more than most murderers get in the U.S.? Somebody clearly wanted to eliminate this man from the game.
Curiously, the evidence used against Nagin is 'secret' and won't be made public.... 'just temporarily', they say, but everyone will have forgotten about it once he begins rotting in prison.
From his Wiki page we learn that: ...and those "some businesspersons" are no doubt among those implicated in the deliberate sabotaging of the city's flood defenses during Hurricane Katrina, along with the deliberately delayed federal response and the barbaric handling of refugees in the city and across the country.
Despite all that, Nagin still managed to turn the city around for one of the fastest ever urban recoveries from a major disaster.
It seems to us that they put a decent man away because he wasn't a psychopath like them.
See also:
It was the levees, not the hurricane, that flooded New Orleans