Politics in New Orleans: The Nagin chronicles WHEN Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the levees and put 80% of New Orleans under water in 2005, many people saw economic opportunity in the ruins. It turns out that the city's then mayor, Ray Nagin, may have been one of them. Some months before the storm, Mr Nagin and his sons formed a granite-countertop company called Stone Age. A grand-jury indictment last week accuses the mayor of collecting cash and gifts from businesses that wanted work in the city. Quite a reversal for a man who swept into office in 2002 promising to end the patronage and cronyism that characterised the administration of his predecessor, Marc Morial - who, by contrast, has never been charged with anything. According to prosecutors, Mr Nagin persuaded an engineering firm to pay him $72,500 in exchange for a steady stream of city contracts. Another CEO paid Mr Nagin $50,000 and gave Stone Age two truckloads of free granite for a pledge of help from the mayor. A cinema owner who was deeply in arrears to the city allegedly got a break on his debt after he flew the Nagins to New York on a private jet. Stone Age got an installation contract with Home Depot after Mr Nagin helped the retailer to avoid a pledge to hire local people at above-market rates at a new store in the city. Another vendor underwrote Nagin family holidays in Hawaii and Jamaica after the mayor allowed the firm to collect millions in no-bid technology work. New Orleans, of course, is inured to corruption - though, surprisingly, Mr Nagin is the first mayor of the city to be charged with bribery. And he left office almost three years ago. Yet this is a soap opera few New Orleanians can resist. Even in a city used to colourful politicians, Mr Nagin, a Democrat, was someone people loved to argue about. He took deserved flak when the city proved so ill-prepared for Katrina, but won fans when he took to the airwaves days after the storm to upbraid President George Bush for the weak federal response. Though he is black, blacks gave him only tepid support early on in his tenure; and he then scandalised many whites with his call in 2006 for New Orleans to remain a "chocolate city." He never came up with a coherent plan for rebuilding, and seemed to lose interest in running the city after winning a second term. His popularity fell steadily, and it was then, according to prosecutors, that he started trying to feather his own nest. Through his lawyer, Mr Nagin (who now lives in Frisco, a suburb of Dallas) has denied the charges. Indeed, he seems inclined to view himself as a martyr. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," he tweeted the day the charges came down, quoting Martin Luther King. The former mayor could face two decades or more in prison if he is convicted. He is due to make his first court appearance on February 20th. The indictment means that the two most important regional politicians at the time of Katrina have now been charged with corruption. Aaron Broussard, the chief executive of Jefferson Parish - which includes most of the city's suburbs - has pleaded guilty in a fraud scheme, though he has since tried to back out of that plea, claiming that the jury pool has been poisoned by years of pseudonymous comments made by federal prosecutors under online news stories. Mr Nagin may well make similar claims; he has the same lawyer, and he was the target of one of the most livid prosecutorial posts, in 2009 when he was mayor: "For all of you who have a penchant for firearms and how they work, Ray Nagin lives on Park Island."