NEW ORLEANS — When Mayor LaToya Cantrell won her first primary mayoral election, hospitality businessman and former boxer Fouad Zeton wrapped a championship boxing belt around her on stage, grabbed the microphone out of Cantrell’s hand and declared her “Our new champion for the city of New Orleans.”
Zeton is a former professional boxer who says he was a sparring partner of legendary fighter Evander Holyfield. He is known around town as a prolific political campaign donor who is boisterous about the influence he wields as a result. His support and friendship with Cantrell landed him that spot at the podium in 2018.
Cantrell’s campaign finance reports reveal $3,500 in donations from Magnolia Mansion one of Zeton’s companies.
That same year, Zeton’s son Fouad, Jr., was shot and killed by a friend at a French Quarter bar at the age of 30. Zeton, Jr., was gunned down at Attiki Bar and Grill, a restaurant and bar where he formerly worked. At the time of his son’s death, Zeton told reporters Mayor LaToya Cantrell was one of the first to check on him after word of the killing spread.
Zeton has owned several businesses tied to the hospitality industry over the years, including a restaurant named Ali Baba and the Magnolia Mansion boutique hotel and event venue in the Garden District.
The Mansion was raided by FBI agents three years ago with agents spotted taking large packages out at that time. Last year in April, Zeton pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in federal court for claiming to his homeowner’s insurance company that several of his paintings had been stolen. Prosecutors say a New Orleans Police Officer helped Zeton try to commit the fraud by filing a false report in exchange for a cut of the proceeds.
Two months prior to his guilty plea, Zeton sold the Magnolia Mansion to Eric George for $4.2 million.
Zeton’s business holdings listed with the Louisiana Secretary of State reveal tight ties with several influential lawyers and businessmen in New Orleans. Those ties include Randy Farrell, the owner of the largest private building inspection company in South Louisiana.
In 2021, WWL-TV reported that Farrell’s company, IECI, was performing more building inspections in New Orleans than the city’s own inspectors. The city work was worth millions of dollars to Farrell.
When a member of the New Orleans Safety and Permits office began looking into questionable practices by IECI, Farrell and some of his inspectors, sources say Farrell moved to get Cantrell to fire the investigator. In August of 2019, Cantrell did just that, firing Jennifer Cecil, Deputy Director of the Safety and Permits office, ending her work to expose Farrell for allegedly falsifying city electrical permits and inspecting his own work.
Part of the federal probe into Cantrel centers around whether Zeton used Farrell’s money to buy Cantrell high-dollar gifts, including a top-of-the-line iPhone and tickets to the 2019 NFC Championship.
Despite that connection, the nature of Fouad’s business relationship with Farrell isn’t yet clear. Orleans Parish Assessor records reveal Zeton bought a Lakewood home in 2017, but then turned ownership over to a corporation he owned with Farrell two years later. He put the house back in his own name in 2020.
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