Aug 15 - Welp New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell indicted

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A federal grand jury returned a criminal indictment Friday of New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, capping a years-long corruption investigation that had overshadowed the mayor's second term.

The grand jury handed up charges against the sitting mayor at the Hale Boggs federal building in downtown New Orleans shortly before 1 p.m. Addressing Magistrate Judge Eva J. Dossier, a member of the grand jury identified Cantrell as a defendant against freshly filed charges but did not list the counts she faces or describe the allegations they stemmed from. A copy of the indictment was not immediately available.

Jeffrey Vappie, the mayor's former New Orleans Police Department bodyguard charged last summer with wire fraud and false statement counts, also faces fresh charges under Friday's indictment.

The criminal charges — an apparent result of the wide-ranging probe into Cantrell's spending, political activities and other alleged acts — mark a stunning low point for the Democratic mayor, a former neighborhood organizer who rose eight years ago from a seat on the City Council to New Orleans' top office. Her ascent shocked the city's political class and epitomized changes that swept New Orleans politics following Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell reacts as Samyra sings the national anthem at the Sugar Bowl NCAA college football game in New Orleans on Thursday, January 2, 2025.(Staff photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune)
STAFF PHOTO BY BRETT DUKE

The charges will pose th0rny questions about what comes next for the city's leadership in the waning months of Cantrell's tenure as mayor. Set to leave office due to term limits in January of 2026, she was already embattled by low approval ratings, legal troubles, a lack of political allies and a series of scandals.

Cantrell's attorney, Eddie Castaing, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the indictment. The mayor's press office could not immediately be reached for comment on the indictment. Attorneys for Vappie could not immediately be reached.

Before Friday, political and legal observers had begun to think Cantrell might escape charges as the investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office faced a snarl of challenges, including changes within President Donald Trump's Justice Department, obstacles in corralling witnesses and the small sums involved in a previous bribery indictment that featured Cantrell.

She becomes the second mayor in New Orleans history and its first sitting mayor to face criminal charges. Former Mayor Ray Nagin was found guilty at trial on corruption counts in 2014 after leaving office.

The charges against Cantrell stemmed from a probe begun under former President Joe Biden's administration. The grand jury delivered them amid widespread upheaval within federal law enforcement as Trump overhauls the Justice Department and FBI, focusing agents anew on immigration, violent crime and investigating Trump's enemies.

The Justice Department's Washington-based civil rights, environmental crimes and public corruption offices — areas where veteran prosecutors say New Orleans' U.S. Attorney's Office has long excelled — have been gutted.
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Ray Nagin, former Mayor of New Orleans, walks into the Federal Courthouse on Poydras Street in New Orleans to be arraigned on federal corruption charges on February 20, 2013.
STAFF PHOTO BY DAVID GRUNFELD

Political veterans and legal observers alike view an indictment of Cantrell, known as a bold politician who rarely displays weakness lest it becomes fodder for her opponents, as unlikely to prompt her to resign.

She has rarely bowed to critics, from holding out on reimbursing taxpayers for seat upgrades on overseas flights to fighting city lawmakers on project funding and, more recently, on a deal to withhold settlement money from the Orleans Parish School Board.

Amid the federal investigation, Cantrell has fought prosecutors' scrutiny by arguing that her race draws criticism that White politicians escape.

Being subject to federal investigation “seems to be kind of prevalent relative to Black leadership," she said at a news conference in 2023. "I am not exempt from that.”

Assistant United States attorneys Jordan Ginsberg and Nick Moses presented Friday's indictment before the magistrate judge.
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Assistant United States Attorney Jordan Ginsberg (left) walks with Assistant United States Attorney Nicholas Moses (right) from the Hale Boggs Federal Building in New Orleans, Friday, Aug. 1, 2025. (Photo by Sophia Germer, The Times-Picayune)
STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER
Earlier indictments

The scope of the investigation into Cantrell came into sharper focus through a pair of indictments filed in New Orleans' federal court last year.

Prosecutors indirectly accused Cantrell in September of accepting bribes from a private electrical inspector, Randy Farrell, in exchange for firing a high-ranking city official five years earlier. Those claims formed part of a series of allegations involving New Orleans' Department of Safety and Permits and Farrell's alleged efforts to cover up a years-long fraud scheme.

Prosecutors identified the mayor in that indictment as "Public Official 1." Her second-in-command, Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño, was also described as indirectly accepting gifts from Farrell. Montaño, who announced this week he will leave city government several months before the end of Cantrell's second term, has not been charged.
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New Orleans Mayor, LaToya Cantrell, addresses the public through the media about the impending winter storm during a press conference at city hall in New Orleans, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (Staff Photo by David Grunfeld, The Times-Picayune)
STAFF PHOTO BY DAVID GRUNFELD

Cantrell had also been implicated in an earlier corruption indictment of her former New Orleans Police Department bodyguard, whom federal prosecutors accused last summer of fabricating timesheets and lying to FBI agents in efforts to conceal an alleged romantic relationship between himself and Cantrell. The officer, Jeffrey Vappie, and Cantrell have both denied having an affair.

Once a fiery public orator whose roots as an organizer lent her an aura of accessibility to voters, Cantrell transformed amid the federal investigation after hiring a crisis communications specialist, Terry Davis, who served as a mouthpiece for Nagin, to lead City Hall's press office. She canceled events, avoided communicating with reporters and delivered more clipped remarks in curated appearances.

The mayor had become somewhat more accessible in recent months, conducting interviews alongside city and state officials about New Orleans' response to violent crime, security preparations for the Super Bowl and the aftermath of the truck-ramming attack that killed 14 people on Bourbon Street on New Year's Day.

This summer she has repeatedly slammed critics of her administration during public appearances, including at a conference of U.S. mayors in June and on a panel at the Essence Festival of Culture in July.
Years-long probe

Investigators had been scrutinizing Cantrell for upwards of two years, but beyond allegations leveled in the indictments of Farrell and Vappie last year, precisely what they were examining wasn't always clear. In late 2022, prosecutors issued subpoenas to two high-end clothing boutiques where a fashion consultant for Cantrell, Tanya Haynes, made numerous purchases. The consultant said Cantrell had paid for whatever clothes she kept.

The FBI also sought information on dealings between Cantrell’s campaign donors and her administration, sources have said.

Last July came the indictment of Vappie, which described Vappie and Cantrell allegedly discussing how they should delete messages about his allegedly fraudulent time sheets. A grand jury charged Farrell two months later, accusing him of using fraudulent permits to illegally inspect homes and bribing Cantrell and other officials with football tickets and other gifts in a bid to avoid scrutiny.

Both men have pleaded not guilty. Farrell's trial is set for October and Vappie's for January.

The indictments of people in her orbit, and now of Cantrell herself, followed a series of controversies that set her second term off to a rocky start: her handling of Hurricane Ida, overseas travel on taxpayers' dime and alleged relationship with Vappie.
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Randy Farrell, center, the New Orleans electrician accused of bribing Mayor LaToya Cantrell and her chief administrative officer in efforts to cover up a sweeping fraud scheme, leaves the Hale Boggs Federal Building in New Orleans with his attorney, Richard T. Simmons, Jr., right, on Wednesday, October 16, 2024. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
STAFF PHOTO BY CHRIS GRANGER

Her administration also confronted challenges partly outside her control, and her allies have argued that she faces unfair criticism.

The ongoing economic fallout and mass death of the COVID-19 pandemic, a spike in violent crime that tracked national trends and infrastructure troubles that have plagued New Orleans for decades have all harmed constituent morale in the Crescent City, polling shows.

Cantrell won praise from fellow Democrats for her handling of COVID-19, which gave her a national platform as a blue mayor in a deep-red region resistant to masks, lockdowns and distancing — measures Cantrell embraced.

But COVID also marked a sharp turn in her administration's fortunes: Cadres of senior staff and advisors left her side after the pandemic's first year, which coincided with the end of the mayor's first term. Polling shows constituent opinion of her performance cratered around that time, too, as voters started to view her administration's handling of crime and infrastructure in the fallout of Hurricane Ida, in August of 2021, as inept.

Cantrell faced more personal, private struggles as public criticism mounted during her second term.
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New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell seen with her New Orleans Police Department bodyguard, Jeffrey Vappie, as she celebrates her reelection Saturday, Nov. 13, 2021, at the Zony Mash Beer Project in New Orleans.
STAFF PHOTO BY SCOTT THRELKELD

Her husband, longtime New Orleans lawyer and public defender Jason Cantrell, died suddenly in 2023. The Cantrells had publicly struggled with their finances, with the federal government securing a lien on their house in 2020 over unpaid taxes, and a roofing company doing the same in 2023 over alleged nonpayment for a new roof. In October, Cantrell spoke publicly for the first time about having been s3xually assaulted as a child and surviving the trauma.

With the filing of Friday's indictment, Cantrell becomes the third Democratic mayor of a major U.S. city to face criminal charges in the past year.

In September, federal prosecutors charged New York City Mayor Eric Adams with accepting illegal campaign contributions and overseas trips from Turkish officials and businesspeople seeking to curry favor with his office. Prosecutors in Jackson, Mississippi indicted Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba two months later on conspiracy and bribery charges along with the local district attorney and a Jackson City Council member.

Earlier this year, officials in Trump's Justice Department took the extraordinary step of ordering federal prosecutors in New York to drop their case against Adams, arguing that the charges risked impeding his city from helping Trump enforce his sweeping immigration crackdown.

That move plunged the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York into turmoil as several prosecutors who worked on the Adams probe resigned in protest.


aipac not playing

-2   

New Orleans have been voting democrat mayors in the last 100 years and most of them are shady and have been under federal investigation for stealing city funds and giving their friends city contracts for money on the side. Nobody should be surprised by this.

+2   

+1   

Where is Derrick Groves, I'm trying to get paid

+3   

Even still shes eligible to run for president

+26   

+2   

outside of stealing city funds you described trumps presidency

+12   

It's never safe holding public office as a negro

+3   

Will find a way to blame someone black or a democrat to defend his massa

+4   

She had it coming unfortunately. Spending the government funding that was supposed to upgrade and maintenance City Hall to get Beyonce tickets and a few other events, flying first class traveling to the islands twice a year, renting out a 2k+ apartment in the CBD area creeping with one of the top deputies while he's married, etc.


Too much corruption going in in the city so dosent matter if you're a rebloodican or a democrip, every politician have that 'I gotta get me' mindset screwing over the people and the city


Remember the Hard Rock Cafe collapse that killed 6 people and the families and victims involved didn’t get a dollar? The person who was in charge of the faulty design just got approved to redesign the government building right up the street from the original disaster on Common and O'Keefe as the new Hard Rock Cafe when dude should've been in jail anywhere else. The corruption is way deeper than Cantrell, there's a lot of con artists transferring from New York and Miami that I know of making plays scamming

+10   

here go the list of charges

+1   

we keep electin our folks who happen 2 be democrats n it's like damn near the same pattern of incompetence n corruption over n over again

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Trump doesn’t get 90% of the black vote. She is a black Democrat that does and she been fu#king over her own people. Should black people be surprised what Trump does or what our own does to us ?

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I’m not finding anything when it’s brought to my front door. I didn’t tell the Feds to indict her. She been fu#king over our communities for years in New Orleans. She rather party at the Zulu hall, hire her friends and give them city contracts than to take care of the water pumps and potholes in the city.

+1   

Former Baltimore and Detroit Mayors reading the indictment like

+1   

They had a few indicted back to back

+1   

Greed. All that effort to get elected to public office and then they wild out.

+4   

She was terrible, but she knew this was coming and kept doing her thing so I sort of respect it.

+3   

She don’t do sh1t but party and leave town. Them dudes escaped the jail and she took off the next day to nice France

+3   

I realized not to long ago that having TRELL in your name means you get into trouble lol what is is with that sh1t


lol guilty of it too. Trellie comes from my name Artrell


Kantrell



Matrel


Lontrell





Crazy sh1t lol

+1   

A white sheriff from Georgia s3xually assualted judge Hatchett at a police convention in Cobb County, GA. And was allowed to serve as sheriff until his sentencing, and there were ZERO threads about it on here.

I wonder why?



What was his sentence for said s3xual assualt you say? 1 year probation and community service, and does not have to register as a s3x offender.

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LATRELL SPREEWELL

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Another one?

Black female politicians been on a roll lately

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