NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has been indicted on 21 federal corruption charges including wire fraud, bribery and money laundering.
The charges are the outgrowth of a City Hall corruption investigation that already has resulted in guilty pleas by two former city officials and two businessmen.
The counts include wire fraud, bribery, money laundering, filing false tax returns and conspiracy.
Nagin, a former cable television executive, was a political novice before being elected to his first term as mayor in 2002, buoyed by strong support from white voters. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 elevated Nagin to the national stage, where he gained a reputation for colorful and sometimes cringe-inducing rhetoric.
During a radio interview broadcast in the storm's early aftermath, he angrily pleaded with federal officials to "get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans."
In January 2006, he apologized for a Martin Luther King Day speech in which he predicted New Orleans would be a "chocolate city" and asserted that "God was mad at America."
USA TODAY
This is what I hate. Black men who succumb to the value system they grew up with.