Former Kenner Code Enforcement Director James Mohamad pleaded guilty to permitting fraud and filing false tax returns in federal court Tuesday.
Mohamad admitted paying $93,000 in bribes for HVAC permits and then underreporting his income by as much as $4 million over three years.
As part of the plea deal, Mohamad pleaded guilty to the two charges and the other two were dropped. He faces up to eight years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
Sentencing is set for July.
Sources had previously told WWL-TV that Mohamad made money from his air-conditioning business, J&J Sales, as well as from rental properties he owned and from inspections he conducted for IECI & Associates, the private firm handling most of the third-party inspections on behalf of local governments.
Mohamad’s work for IECI during those years is well-established in the public record. WWL-TV first exposed questions about Mohamad’s inspection reports in an investigative series called “Hidden Dangers.”
The city of New Orleans banned Mohamad from doing inspections in 2019 after the head of the city’s Safety & Permits Department at the time, Zach Smith, discovered Mohamad had used duplicate photographs on inspection reports he filed for multiple property inspections.
A WWL-TV analysis of New Orleans inspection records in 2019 found Mohamad submitted more than 1,700 inspections that year before getting banned.
IECI owner Randy Farrell defended Mohamad’s inspection work for the city of New Orleans at the time, saying the duplicate photos had been submitted in error.
But this October, Farrell pleaded guilty to his own federal tax fraud charges, admitting he concealed income from multiple businesses, including more than $358,000 in personal income he collected from IECI by cashing about four dozen checks recorded for false business purposes.