Author Description

In 2002, I left a $300,000-a-year job with the Fortune 10 computer company that had bought the startup I had founded a half dozen years earlier to take a top posting in New Orleans's City Hall. I had no great political ambitions, but I was also an action junkie who couldn't resist taking dynamite to my life for the right opportunity. I figured I'd have a few years of new adventures, write my little piece of history, and make my way back to the safe and profitable confines of the private sector. I hadn't counted on Hurricane Katrina and the worst urban disaster in U.S. history nor the day the U.S. Attorney showed up at my door accusing me of crimes in office. There was no one closer than me to the city's mayor, Ray Nagin, my close friend and also business partner in ventures the two of us had set up a few months after I started the city, though out of view from our now highly public profiles. The decision to eventually turn state's evidence against my friend and a global celebrity after Katrina was made easier once I watched him throw me betray me in such spectacular fashion. I'd be sentenced to 2 1⁄2 years in prison. The judge would hit Ray with 10 years.LANDFALL is the story of my time in City Hall and offers a glimpse behind the scenes of real politics at work. I came into government as an idealist wanting to break a system that meant awarding contracts to selected supporters and cozy partners but ended up making sure contracts went to our selected supporters and cozy partners. The same traits that won me praise in the press and inside City Hall as a doer and a fixer - a tendency to cut corners, an ends-justify-the-means attitude - were the same ones that would get me in trouble. Throw Katrina in there and it was an amazing time: trapped with the mayor and only a few other staffers in flooded New Orleans. People saw me as a hero in a post-Katrina New Orleans for circumventing FEMA and other federal bureaucrats to rebuild our city. In retrospect, I was also drinkin