Former New Orleans Mayor Nagin sentenced to 10 years in federal prison
Hurricane Katrina Fallout - Convicted of Bribery and Wire Fraud
Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin leaves federal court after his conviction in New Orleans. Nagin's steep descent from the days when he was seen as a fresh-faced reformer continues this week when he is sentenced in federal court on 20 criminal charges counts including bribery, money laundering and fraud
NEW ORLEANS - Former Mayor Ray Nagin was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison by U.S. District Judge Ginger Berrigan on Wednesday, completing a startling fall from grace that began with his meteoric ascent to the city’s highest office a dozen years ago and ended with his conviction in February on 20 counts of bribery and wire fraud.
Along the way, of course, he steered the New Orleans’ uncertain course after the disastrous levee breaches in the wake Hurricane Katrina resulted in the flooding of more than 80 percent of the city. While the crucible of the storm’s aftermath would test any politician, Nagin’s laissez-faire leadership style came under heavy fire, and he left office in May 2010 with abysmally low approval ratings.
Nagin is the first New Orleans mayor to face time in prison for corruption. He is now required to relinquish his freedom on Sept. 8, where he will begin a very different life behind bars.
“Corruption breeds public cynicism, nowhere more than New Orleans, where the perception of the city as a hub of corruption persists,” Berrigan said. She added: “The seriousness of Mr. Nagin’s offenses can hardly be overstated.”
The sentence Nagin received is slightly more lenient than the punishments handed down to other crooked local politicians, such as disgraced former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, who is serving a 13-year term, and former Gretna City Councilman Jonathan Bolar, who is early into his 17-year term.
Nagin, sporting a mostly gray beard and a brightly colored tie, made a very brief speech before the judge imposed sentence. His voice cracking slightly, he thanked Berrigan and her staff for their “professionalism and kindness.”
As is her habit, Berrigan entered the courtroom about 10 minutes before the proceedings began, clad in a bright aqua blazer rather than a judge’s black robe, and shook hands with many of those in the courtroom, including all of Nagin’s relatives. She reappeared in her robe minutes later.
Nagin told the judge, “As far as my role in this, I stand by the memos and testimonies” that are part of the court record in the case. “I trust that God is going to work all of this out,” he added.
His sentence was roughly half the minimum recommended by federal probation officers, who in a pre-sentence report said that federal guidelines dictated a sentence of 20 years in prison or more.
Berrigan performed her own analysis of the sentencing guidelines and came up with a slightly lesser range of 15 1/2 to 19 1/2 years. But she told the court she planned to be more lenient based on several factors, including the mayor’s age and the remote possibility that he will ever be able to violate the public trust again.
In recalculating the guidelines, Berrigan told the court the evidence did not show Nagin was the leader of conspirators connected to the case.
Instead, she said those accused of paying off Nagin were “eager and willing to pay bribes to get extremely lucrative contracts with the city of new Orleans.”
She noted that at least two of the co-conspirators, former chief technology officer Greg Meffert and businessman Frank Fradella, had both approached Nagin with graft in mind, rather than the other way around. She added that “Mr. Nagin claimed a much smaller share of the profits of this conspiracy than any of the other members,” several of whom made millions.
A leadership role in a conspiracy could have added years to Nagin’s sentence.
Berrigan did add “points” to Nagin’s offense level, which dictates the ultimate sentence, due to his obstruction of justice. She noted that he lied to the FBI in an initial interview, provided a redacted public calendar to the media, and tried to hide evidence from the state Ethics Board, which was investigating him. She said he also lied repeatedly on the witness stand.
While unsparing in her criticism of the former mayor, Berrigan said she thought the sentencing range dictated by the guidelines was unduly harsh, and said it is a judge’s job to weigh the guidelines against the interest of justice.
“I must make an independent assessment of the case, no matter how highly publicized and divisive the case might be,” she said.
At 58, she said, Nagin is older than most of the defendants the guidelines aim to deter from future criminal activity. And she said his “reputation and credibility have been almost irreparably harmed,” making it very unlikely he’ll ever regain a position of public trust.
Berrigan also said she doesn’t believe Nagin’s crimes were completely motivated by selfishness. She said they were in part the result of a “deeply misguided desire to provide for those closest to him.” Without praising his tenure as mayor, Berrigan said that Nagin often “displayed a commitment to helping the citizens” of New Orleans.
Berrigan recommended Nagin serve his sentence at the federal prison in Oakdale, La., to make it easier for his family, now residing in Frisco, Texas, to visit him. The ultimate decision of where he’ll serve his sentence is up to the federal Bureau of Prisons, though judges’ recommendations are often taken into account.
Prosecutors lodged an immediate objection to the sentence Berrigan imposed. In brief remarks outside the courthouse, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matt Coman said the decision on whether to appeal the sentence will be up to the U.S. Solicitor General.
While federal sentencing guidelines are considered advisory rather than mandatory, judges have limited discretion in departing from them. They must give their reasons for doing so, and appeals courts sometimes strike down sentences that are well outside the recommended range. Berrigan gave Nagin a sentence that was 36 percent shorter than the minimum called for by the guidelines as she calculated them.
Federal prisoners by law must serve at least 85 percent of their sentences before they can be released, meaning Nagin could get out of prison sometime in 2022, when he’ll be 66.
Berrigan also ordered Nagin to pay and additional $84,264 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service, based on his conviction on multiple counts of filing false tax returns.
The judge had already ordered Nagin to forfeit $501,201 to the federal government, which is the amount of “ill-gotten gains” he was found to have received in the bribery scheme. He will be required to pay the restitution at a rate of $500 per month, whereas the government has the right to seize and sell his assets to settle the forfeiture. However, the recent bankruptcy filing by Nagin’s wife, Seletha, may delay exactly when the government can collect.
Nagin’s improbable political career began in late 2001, when he joined a crowded field of candidates vying to replace then-Mayor Marc Morial. A political neophyte who was serving as general manager of the local Cox Communications cable-television monopoly, he galvanized New Orleanians with promises to rid City Hall of cronyism and bring modern business principles to government.
But chinks in his reformist armor appeared early, notably when he backed out of a pledge to outsource the awarding of no-bid contracts to panels of experts in various fields before the election was even over. He then launched a highly visible corruption crackdown a few months after taking office, with the illegal sale of taxi permits serving as the jumping-off point. Dozens of taxi drivers and a handful of bureaucrats and inspectors were arrested, some while television cameras were rolling, and he promised it was just the start.
The campaign fizzled, however, with just a couple of prosecutions and many cases falling apart for lack of evidence. The bigger fish he had promised to fry never materialized.
Still, Nagin set a different tone for City Hall than his predecessor, and early on, he showed little favoritism to supporters and sought to end or renegotiate some of the sweetheart deals handed out by Morial.
The Nagin administration’s first real patronage scandal involved the Mayor’s Office of Technology, a unit Nagin had created upon arriving at City Hall. To lead the department, he hired Meffert, who had launched a successful tech startup. Meffert essentially outsourced the work of the office to a group of friends and former employees led by Mark St. Pierre, who was paid under a large no-bid contract.
Among the jobs Meffert gave to that group: the creation of a citywide network of crime cameras, touted as a 21st-century solution to the city’s intractable and skyrocketing murder rate. The program was an unmitigated disaster that cost millions of dollars but resulted in little if any evidence used in criminal prosecutions.
A lawsuit filed by a jilted vendor in the crime-camera program began to unravel the mess. Meffert, it turned out, was getting money and the use of a credit card from St. Pierre, and both were indicted in late 2009, just a few months before Nagin exited City Hall.
By then it emerged that Nagin, too, had been the beneficiary of gifts and goodies provided by St. Pierre, including cell phone service for his two sons and a family trip to Maui taken not long after Nagin signed an executive order decreeing that technology contracts did not have to be bid competitively.
During his second term, Nagin struggled to make difficult decisions — waffling for months, for instance, on the fundamental question of whether all of the city’s neighborhoods should be repopulated. Having helped set that divisive debate into motion, he then delivered a controversial address on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in 2006, in which he decreed that New Orleans would be “chocolate at the end of the day” and implied that white New Orleanians were wishing it otherwise.
After his 2006 re-election, a contest that was much more racially divisive than his first win, Nagin often seemed disengaged, and sometimes bitter. As his federal trial revealed, he was also struggling with his personal finances at the time — in particular, with the fortunes of Stone Age LLC, the granite company he had founded just before the storm with his two sons, Jeremy and Jarin.
While Katrina theoretically presented a bonanza for a granite countertop company, the company never really took off, and Nagin resorted to questionable and sometimes corrupt practices to prop it up. News reports in 2008 revealed he had landed Stone Age a potentially lucrative installation deal with Home Depot even as the retailer was negotiating for tax breaks with the city, and was seeking to avoid signing a contract requiring the company to employ neighboring residents of its planned Central City store at certain hourly wages.
By the time Nagin left office in 2010, the sour stench of corruption hung over his administration, with scandals rocking the Sewerage & Water Board; New Orleans Affordable Homeownership, a city-backed nonprofit Nagin had charged with remediating post-Katrina blight; and the Mayor’s Office of Technology.
The Home Depot deal would form part of the indictment that federal prosecutors unfurled in January 2013. But there was a good deal more, much of it involving Stone Age. Nagin was also accused of shaking down general contractor Frank Fradella and engineering consultant Rodney Williams in exchange for his help securing city work for their firms. The bribes they paid — in the form of cash and two truckloads of free granite — went to Stone Age.
Fradella, Williams and Meffert were among the star witnesses in the government’s case against Nagin. Nagin and his lawyer, Robert Jenkins, sought to portray them as self-interested criminals looking to reduce their own exposure by bolstering the state’s case, but their stories were remarkably consistent, as were those of Home Depot officials who spoke of their discomfort with Nagin’s repeated advances.
While Fradella and Meffert had their own crimes to answer for outside of their dealings with Nagin — Fradella has admitted overseeing a stock-price manipulation scheme — Williams was accused of no crime save for bribing Nagin.
A jury had little trouble coming to a verdict, convicting the former mayor on 20 of 21 charges after deliberating for just over six hours. After the verdict, the normally voluble Nagin had little to say: “I maintain my innocence,” he said then.
Nagin was even more quiet when he left the courthouse Wednesday morning, saying nothing as he stepped into a waiting SUV on Poydras Street.
Current Mayor Mitch Landrieu also was restrained, saying simply: “Today marks the end of a sad chapter for our city. The people of New Orleans are turning the page and moving forward.”