The mayor who promised Jackson, Mississippi, the most radical city on the planet took $50,000 in bribes disguised as campaign contributions. He pleaded guilty on Monday. He walked out of the federal courthouse in silence with his wife on his arm.
Five checks. The money was delivered at what was presented as a campaign event in Fort Lauderdale, after a private-jet flight in April 2024. After they cleared, the mayor called the city’s director of development to move the meeting at which the hotel project was to be discussed. That is the receipt. It is also, more or less verbatim, the textbook.
Let me name the class. The class is not “radicals” and it is not “Black officials” and it is not “Mississippi mayors” and it is not “progressives.” The class is the public official who has access to a discretionary favor, a donor class that knows how to launder a bribe as a campaign contribution, and a self-flattering brand to keep the base from asking questions. The class is the old American arrangement, dressed in the freshest language the officeholder can find. The “most radical city on the planet” is a marketing line. What it sells is the same product every municipal marketing line has sold since Tammany. The product is the favor-for-the-check, with the brand of the month stamped on the front.
He won with 93 percent of the vote in 2017. He was the youngest mayor in the city’s history. He promised a transformation. He presided over a 2022 water crisis in which more than 150,000 Jackson residents — largely Black and lower-income — went months without reliable water pressure, while he fought the state and federal officials who tried to help. I will not dwell on the water. I will note that a man who could not deliver water to his own constituents found time, in April 2024, to fly to Fort Lauderdale to collect five checks from a fake development company.
His lawyers were busy by Tuesday morning. In the federal courtroom, Jaribu Hill of the National Conference of Black Lawyers told supporters: “What’s been tarnished, if anything, is the ongoing facade of justice.” To the press, NCBL co-chair Mawuli Davis said the guilty plea should not affect the “larger national discussion about equal administration of justice.”
Don’t change the subject, dear. The mayor had just pleaded guilty, under oath, to conspiracy to commit bribery, wire fraud, and money laundering. The defense of the plea is that the plea is a smaller scandal than the system that produced it. That defense works in a faculty lounge. It does not work on a docket.
I have watched this movie for a long time. I have watched it since Spiro Agnew resigned the vice presidency in 1973 and pleaded no contest to a single count of tax evasion. I have watched it with William Jefferson, the Louisiana congressman whose $90,000 in marked bills was found by the FBI in his freezer — yes, the freezer — wrapped in foil. I have watched it with Rod Blagojevich, the impeached Illinois governor who tried to sell a United States Senate seat. I have watched it with Jesse Jackson Jr., who used campaign money for a fur coat, a Michael Jackson fedora, and a Rolex, among other things a campaign was not in the business of buying. I have watched it with the congressmen and the governors and the quiet county judges in quiet counties. The class is bipartisan the way the tide is bipartisan. The brand varies. The favor-for-the-check does not.
And I have watched this part, too — the part that comes after the plea, when the lawyers arrive to say the system is the real crook and the man is the real victim. I have watched it with the law firm that wrote the brief, the trade association that issued the statement, the lobby shop that filed the talking points. The system produces the apologist the way the river produces the foam.
Two of the mayor’s former colleagues have already pleaded guilty and resigned. The Hinds County district attorney entered his plea a week earlier. A city council member resigned her seat in August of 2024. A second council member entered the same plea alongside the mayor on Monday. The pattern inside the pattern is a city-hall bribery ring that ended in a courtroom, and a defendant class that has not, in any of the statements I have read, addressed the residents of Jackson who were told in 2022 to boil their water.
The mayor took five checks. The checks were disguised as campaign contributions. The money was delivered at a campaign event in Fort Lauderdale, after a private jet flight. The mayor made a phone call to the city development director the same week. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery, wire fraud, and money laundering, which is the legal way of saying he took money in exchange for the use of his office. He is out until sentencing in October and faces up to five years and a $250,000 fine. He walked out of the courthouse without a word to the people he was elected to serve.
A kid in Hinds County who shoplifts $50 of merchandise tonight will be arraigned tomorrow, and the docket will move. The mayor of the capital of Mississippi took $50,000 in bribes and walked out on his wife’s arm. The docket moved for him, too — at a different speed, in a different court, with a different standard. The “facade of justice” the lawyers complained about is the one that already gives the powerful their own floor.
I have watched this movie since 1973. Same script. New cast. Same five checks.