NEW ORLEANS (AP) – He entered New Orleans City Hall as a cool and confidant self-styled reformer, won fame there as a passionate, if profane, critic of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina and exited under suspicion.
Next stop for former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin: federal prison.
“Excuse my French – everybody in America – but I am pissed,” he shouted during a radio appearance three days after Hurricane Katrina’s levee breaches left the city awash in foul water and rotting corpses in 2005. The tirade may have endeared him to some, for a time, but Nagin turned out to be a feckless mayor and, as a federal judge saw it, something of a lightweight as a criminal.
“He started out as a rock star and he ended up as just another crass, corrupt politician,” said University of New Orleans Political Science Professor Ed Chervenak.
Nagin, a 58-year-old former cable television manager, was sentenced to 10 years in prison Wednesday for bribery, money laundering, fraud and tax violations stemming from his two terms as New Orleans’ mayor from 2002-2010. If the Federal Bureau of Prisons goes along with the recommendation of U.S. District Judge Helen Berrigan, he will do the time at a federal lockup in Oakdale, Louisiana – where former Gov. Edwin Edwards spent some of his own 10-year sentence, and where a current resident is Nagin’s fellow New Orleans Democrat, disgraced former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson.