NEW ORLEANS — Former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin is a free man after completing the terms of his supervised release nearly 10 years after being convicted of federal fraud charges as our partners at The Times-Picayune report.
Nagin, 67, celebrated his newly found freedom with a post on social media saying a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "Free at last, free at last, Thank God Almighty, we are free at last," Nagin wrote on Saturday.
In 2014 a jury agreed that he took hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for granting city work to the contractors giving him the kickbacks.
He was convicted on a list of corruption charges, which included wire fraud, bribery, and tax evasion. A judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison.
Nagin served in prison until he was released on house arrest in April 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
His early release from prison was the result of a growing concern during the pandemic which led to inmates of non-violent crimes being released due to their age and vulnerability to the COVID-19 virus.
After his release Nagin was under “community confinement” for two years after being let out of a federal facility Randilee Giamusso, a spokesperson for the prison bureau told Nola.com.
That “community confinement” ended in March 2022 which led to the next phase of his sentencing, a two-year supervised probation which then ended on Saturday, March 16, 2024.
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