The Fall of Latoya Cantrell

It is not hard to destroy a college. The podcast Campus Files brought you stories of fraternity drug rings, stolen body parts, campus cults, and more. And now Campus Files is back for another season. There's a guy screaming into his phone. He's like, I just saw Charlie Kirk assassinated right in front of me. Every week. It's almost like a university. Listen to and follow campus files. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Like drive-through daiquiri shops and streets that flood five minutes after it rains, political corruption is a fact of life in Louisiana. The Justice Department has consistently ranked the state, and New Orleans in particular, among the nation's leaders in public corruption convictions. Residents have come to expect a certain amount of graft and backroom dealing from their lawmakers. As the old joke goes, in Louisiana, we don't tolerate corruption, we demand it.

The existence of political corruption may be bad for Louisiana taxpayers, but it offers an endless supply of rich material for the local media. And few understand this world better than Stephanie Grace. Stephanie has been covering New Orleans City politics for close to three decades. She writes a popular political column for the Times Picky Yoon and appears regularly on local TV and radio stations. She even moderates the Timothy Times.

Conducts candidate interviews, including the most recent government. Based on her resume, you might think Stephanie's from Louisiana, but she's not. She's part of what I've come to see as a small but hardcore community of expat journalists who move to Thinking they'd stay for a year or two, but then realized they'd stumbled into the best news town in America and found it impossible to leave.

I had a job in Philly at the Inquirer that was kind of ending and I was looking for something interesting to do for probably, you know, a year or two. It ended up being more than that. So New Orleans was interesting. During her career, Stephanie has covered some of New Orleans's biggest political scandals. Like the case of Bill Jefferson, the New Orleans congressman, who used his position to help U.S. companies land telecom deals in Nigeria in exchange for payoff.

When FBI agents raided his home, they found 90 grand in cash wrapped in foil in his freezer, spawning his nickname Dollar Bill. After Katrina, Stephanie covered the fall of Ray Nagan, who'd leveraged his role as New Orleans mayor to get truckloads of free granite for his family's granite countertop business, among other perks.

And was sentenced to 10 years in prison. And so, when rumors began to swirl that New Orleans's most recent mayor, Latoya Cantrell, was having an affair with her security guard, Stephanie covered that too. She continued chronicling the saga until Cantrell's federal indictment on conspiracy and wire fraud charges last summer. But the Cantrell indictment differs in important ways from those against other corrupt New Orleans officials.

Instead of recounting years of bribery and kickbacks, it tells the story of a love affair, acted out in an exclusive city-owned apartment and hotel rooms around the world. In most corruption cases, the political official is driven by money, power, or both. But in this case, are simply looking for love. I'm Jed Lipinski. This is GoneSap.

Latoya Cantrell is the first New Orleans mayor in 150 years who was not born or at least raised in Louisiana. She grew up in Compton, but she went to college at Xavier, a historically black university in New Orleans. Like Stephanie, she decided to stay. She married into a local political family and settled in Broadmoor, a racially and economically diverse neighborhood in the heart of Uptown.

And, you know, the thing to know about it is that it's what we call in New Orleans the bottom of the bowl, which means that when Katrina came, the water gathered there and there was a tremendous amount of flooding. In the months after the storm, city leaders faced the huge challenge of rebuilding. A key part of that was deciding which neighborhoods to fully rebuild and which might be converted into parks and green space.

A panel of national experts laid out a reconstruction strategy, a map of which was later published on the front page of the Times Piccayune. It would become known as the Green Dot story. because there was a big graphic and it had green dots where the idea was these are areas that were low lying. You could make them kind of retention areas. parks, green space, but then when the flooding came, you know, that's where the water would gather and you wouldn't have houses.

So what happened is people picked up the paper and saw there was a green dot on their house when they were trying to come back. The Broadmoor neighborhood was covered in green dots. For residents who just lost everything, it felt like the city had decided their homes weren't worth saving. So it really became a rallying cry in a lot of areas, but very much in Broadmoor, because it was really this defiance. It was that, you know, you can't tell us we can't come back to our neighborhood.

Latoya Cantrell has always had an interest in civic life. Her grandmother brought her to community meetings when she was little. By the time Katrina hit, she was the president of the Broadmoor Improvement Association, and she led the neighborhood's recovery effort. She helped reopen a local charter school and drove the rebuilding of the neighborhood library, which featured a coffee shop called the Green Dot Cafe.

So by doing this, Cantrell ended up interacting with People at major universities and she went to the Aspen Institute and she kind of became a public figure that way and someone who really kind of fought the system and helped her neighborhood come back. Which was a great way to kind of launch a city council campaign.

Cantrell was elected to the City Council in 2012 and re-elected two years later. On the council, she bolstered her reputation as someone who could get things done in tough situations. In 2015, she led the push to ban smoking in New Orleans bars and restaurants. She faced serious opposition from the city's powerful bar and casino lobby, but she framed the ban as a matter of public health and workers' rights.

She, you know, always had kind of a populist streak. So the idea was this was something to protect the people who work in bars and the musicians, the people who are exposed to the second hand smoke all the time. Based on her success with the city council, Cantrell entered the 2017 mayor's race. She faced a former municipal court judge who was backed by the city's political establishment. But Cantrell won with 60% of the vote, becoming the first woman ever elected mayor of New Orleans.

So this win tonight is not for me nor my family. This win tonight is for the city of New Orleans. Cantrell's victory upended some of the historic voting patterns in the city, meaning she got a lot of support from the city's white community. She was less polished and less politically connected than her opponent, but many voters saw that as an asset. What people seem to like about La Thoya was that she seemed very real.

and grounded and down to earth. And, you know, she kind of had some policy chops but also was just kind of You know, she would dance in street parades and things like that. She would drop the F bomb. People complained about that a lot. But, you know, there was a thing about her kind of a rawness that I think a lot of people liked.

As she took office in 2018, Cantrell's future as mayor seemed full of promise. The city was still clawing its way back from Katrina. Streets were full of potholes. The budget was a mess, and the crime rate, as usual, was too high. Cantrell's tough, hands-on style seemed right for the moment. But running New Orleans is not for the faint of heart. The city has a way of chewing up its leaders and has brought many seasoned politicians to their knees.

It was a fair question to ask whether Cantrell was up to the task. In her role as a political columnist, Stephanie closely covered Cantrell's first term as mayor. Overall, Stephanie says, she did a pretty good job. It was fine, it was not spectacular, she had some early wins. One of those wins had to do with the city's perennially cash-strapped sewerage and water board, the agency responsible for the city's drainage and drinking water.

For locals, it's a constant source of headaches, from street flooding to water main breaks to boil water advisories. The issue is it's an old city with old pipes. And a lot of them are broken and they leak and you end up with kind of imploded streets or you end up with boil water advisories if the water pressure goes too low.

So, you know, those were happening not totally frequently, but it's a tourist city. People would come to a friend of mine got married and there was a boiled water advisory that weekend, so all his guests couldn't use the water. I mean, you know, things like that. In her first year as mayor, Cantrell pushed through a deal to shore up the sewerage and waterboard.

It included$50 million up front and$27 million per year for repairs and street work, and was greeted with some relief by residents weary of broken pumps and collapsing streets. But the headaches continued. There were 10 boil water advisories in 2019 alone. That same year, a cloudburst flooded streets citywide. Meanwhile, the city's murder rate continued to climb.

And two years into her first term, the Hard Rock Hotel, an eighteen-story tower under construction near the French quarter, suddenly collapsed, killing three. And now to the devastating scene in New Orleans where rescue crews remove the body of a man killed when the Hard Rock Hotel collapsed. A second body is And it sat there for months and months because they had to do the investigation, so the bodies were still inside, and it's right downtown. It's right in a prominent corner on Canal Street.

And you know, there were some questions about the city permitting office and how they handled that project and other projects. On one hand, broken water mains Par for the course, something you sign up for by living in New Orleans. But on the other, they were harbingers of more. There was evidence in the house and they would not listen to it. Podcast is back. And this time the stakes are higher than ever before. The letter from the doctor said I have six months or left to live.

Security shirt must be. A dying man is serving a life sentence for a murder he says he didn't commit. Did you ever question if they got the right person? I'm scared to be sitting here in this damn chair talking about this shit. How many other cold cases were gonna come? Hey man, you need to look at my shit because I didn't do it. Everything I tell you is the truth. I'm not bullshitting one way or the other. I hope I don't bring a ton of shit down on me. I really do.

Have you ever felt like you were losing? Just a B or B plus life. It's so dangerous to live that. More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't You think it's good enough, is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast for People think okay an A plus life is not a good thing. Away. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.

It was early March when the first case of COVID was first detected in the city of New Orleans, but it is widely believed by medical experts that COVID was here and undetected before then. As we've mentioned, Latoya Cantrell's first term as mayor of New Orleans was full of ups and downs, but its defining event was the outbreak of COVID-19.

New Orleans, if you remember, was an early hot spot that when everything shut down in March, what happens before March? February. What happens in February? Mardi Gras. Which means a lot of people are in very close quarters and a lot of people come from other places. So Mardi Gras ended up being a super spreader event. Nobody knew it at the time.

Two weeks after Mardi Gras, New Orleans hospitals were seeing a surge from COVID infections. By late March, the city posted the highest per capita death rate from COVID in the U.S. As it did in other cities, the outbreak had a disproportionate impact on New Orleans's black community. Stephanie says Cantrell took it all very hard. During a press conference, she said one of the city's earliest COVID victims was a friend of hers. She made the tough call to shut the city down.

It's a tourist city. That was difficult. It's a social city. It's a gathering city. But she was pretty tough. And the numbers did come down, and she got a lot of props for overseeing the city's response. People really approved of that. That was probably her high point in terms of popularity among her constituents.

Cantrell ran for reelection in twenty twenty two and won with sixty four percent of the vote, more than she'd gotten during her first race. But this time, Stephanie says, voters seemed less enthusiastic. there wasn't a lot of opposition that formed, but by the time the election actually happened, things were starting to turn somewhat. By the time people were voting, I think, you know, you would hear people wish that that she had a real competitor.

Just months into her second term, the controversies began. In July of 2022, she flew first class to the French Riviera to sign a sister city agreement and to attend a local jazz festival. Her team defended it as tourism promotion, but the international trips continued, and she insisted on flying first class. That fall, the city attorney said she was on the hook for$30,000 in flight upgrades. Cantrell refused to pay, claiming her safety required it.

The travel was a number of issues. It was kind of this It was taken as entitlement that she deserved to have upgraded travel on the city dime while things at home were not great. She became very involved in kind of international circles on climate change, which definitely affects New Orleans and isn't a very important issue here. But, you know, it felt very opportunistic that she would go to France and then she would go back to France. I mean, kind of a number of things that

collectively created the feeling that things were just not working here. And meanwhile, off she goes again. More problems followed. The murder rate surged to number one among major U.S. cities. renewing complaints about staffing shortages at the NOPD. There were issues over short-term rentals, infrastructure, spending. By the summer of 2022, a group of residents launched a recall campaign to have her removed from office.

It was a former aide of hers who let it. There were people who were very angry and very enthusiastic about the recall and lined up around the block to, you know, sign the petition, sign the papers, to get it on the ballot. And it ended up being kind of racially divisive because you would like turn on the T V and you would see like huge lines of white people who wanted to sign this thing. It was more mixed in the black community.

So that just kind of created a racially tense situation in a city that kind of often has those.

The recall effort dominated headlines for months. It fizzled when organizers didn't get enough signatures to force a vote. But an even bigger story soon took its place, this one about Cantrell's use or misuse of a city-owned apartment. The apartment, located in a Parisian style rowhouse with cast iron balconies, overlooks Jackson Square and the heart of the French quarter. It's reserved for official functions like receptions and hosting visiting dignitaries.

I mean, you're not supposed to live there for one thing. You're not supposed to stay over if you're the mayor. And she was spending a lot of time there with. of her bodyguards, basically a New Orleans police officer named Jeffrey Vappe, violating a number of rules. One is that her protective details not supposed to go inside with her. They were not supposed to stay over.

But that's exactly what they were doing. And people quickly figured it out because, in the French quarter, security cameras are everywhere. It's a big tourist area, it's a big business area, so a lot of this was caught on tape. You know, he would go pick up her dry cleaning, things like that. And some of the T V stations started running stories about this with footage.

In response, the New Orleans City Council, where Cantrell had been an outspoken leader for years, ended the mayor's access to the apartment. They later ordered the locks changed. But Cantrell's relationship with her security guard wasn't confined to the apartment. On the pretext of official business, she and Vappy traveled the country and the world together.

Miami, San Francisco, Scotland, Argentina. He was going on trips with her, and the city was paying, and there were a lot of questions over the peril documents. He was charging for overtime when they seemed to be, you know, having a personal relationship. What made this even more awkward was that Cantrell and Vappy were both married to other people.

It was an open secret that Cantrell's marriage had been on the rocks for years. People had gotten used to seeing her out with her teenage daughter, but not her husband. In a statement, Cantrell insisted that Vappi's presence on the trips was, quote, a matter of safety, not of luxury, adding, as all women know, our health and safety are often disregarded and we are left to navigate alone.

Cantrell's husband never publicly responded to the rumors, but Vappi's wife did. Jeffrey Vappi's wife filed for a divorce and named Latoya Cantrell in the divorce paper.

The NOPD's public integrity unit opened an investigation. They pulled Vapi off the mayor's security detail, but the mayor's office pushed back. A few months later, he was reinstated. By 2024, there was a sense in New Orleans that Mayor Cantrell had basically checked out.

Local stations reported that federal agents were circling, issuing subpoenas and asking questions about her and her bodyguard. Everyone was waiting for the indictment. In July, it finally landed, but Cantrell's name wasn't on it. Officer Jeffrey Vappi, former NOPD officer Jeffrey Vappi, indicted on federal charges. We don't know what the federal charges are at this time. This happened. About twenty minutes ago at the federal courthouse. We do have numerous crews.

In July 2024, Latoya Cantrell's personal security guard, Jeffrey Vapi, was indicted by a federal grand jury. He was charged with seven counts of wire fraud and one count of lying to the FBI. Prosecutors said he filed false timesheets and got paid for hours he didn't work while assigned to Cantrell's security team. The indictment didn't mention Cantrell by name, but it referred repeatedly to a public official A. It was pretty obvious who they meant.

She was kind of an unindicted person in there, but you could tell who it was. And it certainly seemed like they were trying to get him to flip on her. He did not. Vappi pleaded not guilty. The court set his trial for that fall. For Stephanie, the indictment was remarkable for what it revealed about Cantrell, I mean public official A.

And the way she wielded power as mayor. For instance, early in her second term, the city's chief of police retired, and Cantrell appointed a woman named Michelle Woodfork to serve as interim chief. During the probe into Vappi's timesheet and conduct issues, Woodfork had publicly reprimanded him a few times. She was Jeffrey Vappi's supervisor. And

She did a report that implicated him in some wrongdoing. And she was asked not to do that, and she stood her ground. Woodfork was a veteran NOPD commander with 30 years on the force. Many saw her as a shoe-in for the permanent police chief job. But after her criticism of Vappi, Cantrell wound up choosing someone else, and she made sure Vappy was there to hear her.

When Mayor Cantrell told Michelle Woodfork that she was not going to get the job permanently, she called her into a meeting, and Geoffrey Vappi was there. So, I mean, it was kind of a dominance ritual. It was basically like you messed with my man, what seemed to be the implication, and she did not get the job. So it was really insulting to Michelle Woodfork, who seemed to be trying to, you know, follow the rules and do the right thing and hold him to account.

Due to the volume of evidence in the case, Vappi's trial was pushed back to the summer of twenty twenty five. He had not implicated Cantrell, but an indictment naming her seemed inevitable. In the meantime, Cantrell and the city suffered some painful losses. Cantrell's husband, who was rumored to have struggled with addiction issues, died of a heart attack.

Then, on New Year's Day, as the city was preparing to host the Super Bowl, a rented pickup truck bearing an ISIS flag plowed into a crowd of people on Bourbon Street. New Year's Day terror attack in New Orleans, the city holding a vigil overnight for the victims. As we learn more about the suspect behind the wheel, ABC's Christian Cordero. The FBI labeled it a full-scale terrorist attack.

That summer, the indictment everyone had been waiting for finally dropped. Cantrell was charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and making false statements. Prosecutors said she and Vappi spent more than$70,000 in city funds on trips, hotels, and perks, and then tried to cover it up. What was your reaction when the indictment came out naming the mayor? The thing that struck me immediately in reading through it was how just intensely personal it is.

You know, you got a very clear sense on a human level of what was happening reading this indictment. That they were having this relationship, they were taking trips together under the guise of official business. The big thing they did, of course, is they tried to cover their track. Once the Fed started asking questions, they did not allegedly tell the truth. And they allegedly deleted messages.

they used WhatsApp and they kind of had this idea that those messages would not be stored. Of course they were stored and the feds have them and, you know, there's kind of an eight, nine month stretch when there were fifteen thousand messages between the two of them and there You know, they're flirty, they're romantic, they are, you know, what you would expect of two people in that situation.

In one exchange, not long after the media began speculating about their relationship, Cantrell sent Vappi a text reading The times when we are truly alone traveling are what spoil me the most. In another, Vappi described a business trip they took to Washington, D.C. as another great trip, and another leg on our journey, adding that he loved her and their physical relationship, as the indictment put it. Just reading it through earlier today, it was kind of a document chronicling a love affair.

on many levels. I mean, they are clearly, judging from the correspondence that they have here, this is a couple that's clearly in love. They wanted to be together. And in some ways it's kind of tragic because they weren't really allowed to be together in this intimate way, at least during this time.

They were flirting with danger. You know, the fact that they weren't allowed to be together made it more romantic. I mean, again, there are so many different movie scripts it could be, or, you know, kind of trashy novel scripts it could be. The indictment also makes clear that the People close to Cantrell and Vappi had warned them not to break the law.

In 2022, a member of the mayor's security unit sent a group text to others on the team saying that anyone having an affair with the mayor should stop because of the detrimental consequences it could have. According to the indictment, Cantrell and Vappi later confronted the person and denied they were together. Days later, one of Cantrell's associates, who was apparently aware that she was sleeping with Vappi, told her it was a felony to have her lover's travel paid for by the city.

The associate pointed out that the mayor of Nashville had recently gone down for something similar. After admitting to an extramarital affair with her own head of security, she'd been forced to resign and gotten three years probation. Please don't let this be your path, LaToya, the associate wrote. Cantrell texted back, please don't accuse me. You know, what was so interesting was there were people trying to help her and she could not accept the help, did not see that.

She often turned on the people who were trying to warn her, who were trying to help her. And there was a how dare you criticize me, how dare you question me attitude about the whole thing. In the lead up to Cantrell's indictment, New Orleans was braced for something big. Twelve years earlier, Mayor Ray Nagan had been indicted on twenty one counts, including bribery, wire fraud, and money laundering. He was later sentenced to ten years in prison.

But Latoya Cantrell's indictment was a much different read, and according to Stephanie, it left the city divided. So it ended up being this kind of Question of is she being prosecuted for having an affair for having sex? I understand what the feds are doing in trying to draw all these elements together, but when you read this, you see a human being. You see a human being's private story. splashed out there in public, you know, almost

Maybe mocked even, you know, fifteen thousand messages. It's a lot, you know, and you could look at it and say, huh, fifteen thousand messages. But you know, are there gonna be people who are gonna say that's too much and that is personal? I don't know. I do wonder how jurors could react to that.

For people following the arc of Latoya Cantrell's career, it's been easy to get caught up in the drama of her affair with Jeffrey Vappi. But that's only part of the story. It didn't explain her growing combativeness, or what looked to many like a near-total withdrawal from the day-to-day work of governing. To columnist Stephanie Grace, there were other, less sensational research.

Reasons rooted in power and the search for her next job. I guess what I would say about the mayor's job in particular is. It's a big job. If you can master it, you know, you rule the school. But it's also there are a lot of temptations. You know, you are in charge of giving out contracts without really a lot of oversight. So that means people want to please you to get contracts. You know, it can really go to your head.

You know, and something else I'd say, and this would maybe connect it to Ray Negan, who was of course indicted and convicted after he left office. And one of the reasons a lot of people think she was kind of working this circuit, this kind of international climate change circuit. I mean, I think she enjoyed being a featured speaker at big events. I mean, a lot of people would.

But also she was kind of looking for her next career. She was looking for where she would land. And again, that's another distraction when you have a city that has a lot of needs. I want you who've been just so frustrated to just hold on. Just hold on. Because we're about to take this city in a whole new direction. So that you can always, always call New Orleans home. Days before we spoke, Stephanie had covered New Orleans's most recent mayor's race.

The winner was a young woman named Helena Moreno. A former TV reporter turned politician. Like Cantrell, Moreno had served on the city council prior to running for mayor. Unlike Cantrell, she's financially stable and well connected. She ran her campaign on restoring stability after years of turmoil at City Hall. But if Latoya Cantrell has taught us anything, it's that a candidate and a mayor can be two very different people.

If you have information, story tips, or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone Saturday. team, please email us at gone southpodcast at gmail.com. That's gone southpodcast at gmail.com. For bonus content, you can follow us on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram at GoneSouthPodcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter on Substack at Gone South with Jed Lipinski. Gone South is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created

Written and narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Leo Reese Dennis, Maddie Sprung Kaiser, and Lloyd Lockridge. Our story editor is Katie Mingle. Gone South is edited, mixed, and mastered by Chris Basil. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. Thank you for listening to Gone South. Some crimes are so shocking, they don't just make headlines.

They forever change our society. I'm Katie Ring, host of America's Most Infamous Crimes. Each week I take on one of the most notorious criminal cases. Each case unfolds across multiple episodes, released every Tuesday through Thursday. From the first sign that something was wrong to the moment the truth came out. Or didn't. Listen to and follow America's most infamous crimes on Apple.