The New Orleans mayor, LaToya Cantrell, was indicted on Friday on federal corruption charges after spending roughly three years under investigation.
The indictment against Cantrell came after the September 2024 indictment of local businessman Randy Farrell, who was charged with exchanging gifts with the mayor so that she would allegedly fire a municipal employee who was investigating Farrell’s building inspection company.
Among the alleged gifts were tickets to a January 2019 New Orleans Saints football game, which was being played with an appearance at the Super Bowl on the line, a cellphone and lunch at an upscale Ruth’s Chris Steak House in the city.
Cantrell had also drawn scrutiny for an alleged affair with a now retired New Orleans police officer who had served as her bodyguard. The bodyguard, Jeffrey Vappie, allegedly claimed he was at work while he was actually engaging in “a personal and romantic relationship” with the mayor.
Vappie was charged as a co-defendant in Friday’s indictment against Cantrell, full details of which were not immediately available, as Guardian reporting partner WWL Louisiana reported. He had previously been charged with wire fraud and lying to FBI agents in July 2024, shortly after he retired from New Orleans’ police force.
The allegations called to mind the 2018 scandal that cost the Nashville mayor, Megan Barry, her job and centered on an affair with her bodyguard, Robert Forrest. Prosecutors who had obtained the 2024 charges against Vappie have alleged he researched that case online two years earlier.
Both Vappie and Farrell have pleaded not guilty to the charges previously filed against them.
While the Donald Trump-led US justice department obtained the indictment against Cantrell about seven months into the Republican’s second presidency, the federal investigation into the mayor began while Joe Biden – her fellow Democrat – was in his second full year in the Oval Office.
Cantrell’s lawyer, Eddie Castaing, confirmed to the Associated Press on Friday that an indictment was returned against his client. He also said her name was read aloud by a federal magistrate judge as a defendant.
Cantrell, a native of Compton, California, had been a New Orleans city council member before winning election as its mayor in November 2017. She thus became New Orleans’s first female mayor and was re-elected four years later.
Her second term – which saw the unexpected death of her husband in August 2023 – is due to end in January 2026. Cantrell was term-limited from seeking another stint as mayor, and several candidates have signed up to run to replace her in a primary election set for October.
Cantrell on Friday became the first New Orleans mayor charged with federal crimes while still in office. The federal investigation into her began with 2022 subpoenas issued with respect to an image consultant that she employed.
Only one other person who has served as New Orleans mayor has been indicted by the US government on federal corruption charges during the city’s 307-year history: Ray Nagin.
Nagin was New Orleans’s mayor when the failure of federal levees there during Hurricane Katrina on 29 August 2005 destroyed the city and caused about 1,400 deaths. He was convicted in 2014 on charges of bribery, honest services wire fraud, money laundering, filing false tax returns and conspiracy, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
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