E4 VA EE THE WASHINGTON POST . SUNDAY,  JULY  17 ,  2016

BY MARK GUARINO

Irvin Mayfield made his Carne-gie Hall debut in October 2012,and it was quite a star-studdedaffair. Dignitaries spoke, guest stars such as Aaron Neville ap-peared alongside the young trum-peter, and even CNN’s SoledadO’Brien emceed. For a local boy growing up in New Orleans, the achievement was undeniable. Even local station WWOZ markedthe occasion by broadcasting the concert live for hometown listen-ers.

Yet the performance had a pricetag: more than $20,000 before travel, production and talentcosts, which could reach up to tensof thousands of dollars. The NewOrleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO), Mayfield’s nonprofit organization,rented the venue, according to Michael Tomczak, a Carnegie Hallspokesman. Mayfield threw theparty, it appears, for himself.

The lavish spending during thistime by NOJO has made the Gram-my-winning trumpeter the targetof a three-year federal probe fol-lowing media reports that showedhow he and business associateRonald Markham directed morethan $1 million from a privatefoundation tasked to aid the city’sbeleaguered public library systemto NOJO, where both men have drawn six-figure salaries. The situ-ation has enraged the city’s philan-thropic community and shrunk library donations. A financial au-dit released late last year showsthat NOJO paid Mayfield’s pro-duction company hundreds of thousands of dollars. An account-ing of where and how money was spent was practically nonexistent.

In an emailed statement to TheWashington Post, Mayor Mitch Landrieu said Mayfield owes the city an apology, calling the shifting of funds from the New Orleans Public Library Foundation to NOJO “improper and a serious breach of trust.”

“While an agreement is in placeto reimburse the Library Founda-tion in part, this scandal has sub-stantially damaged the Library Foundation’s brand, its endow-ment and its relationship with the New Orleans Public Library Sys-tem. Ultimately, kids lost out,” Lan-drieu said.

In the years after the devasta-tion wrought by Hurricane Ka-trina, Mayfield, 38, branded him-self his city’s ambassador, per-forming benefit concerts, meeting presidents George W. Bush andBarack Obama, playing presti-gious stages throughout the world,and earning a seat on the NationalCouncil on the Arts. He also soldhis name and likeness to BourbonStreet’s Royal Sonesta Hotel, which opened Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse, a namesake clubhis team started booking in 2009.

“Irvin was at the forefront oftaking our story nationally and even globally, and that mattered,”

said City Council member LaToyaCantrell. “He played a critical rolein showing that New Orleansneeded to rebound and its ownpeople were spearheading that growth. You can’t take that away.”

Mayfield’s fall from grace re-sults from the usual hubris of ce-lebrity, but in this case it was also enabled by the city’s infamous lais-sez-faire attitude. Mayfield and Markham, also childhood friends, were subject to little to no over-sight from board members of theLibrary Foundation and NOJO.Part of the reason was Mayfield’s charm and talent, but another rea-son was because many of the peo-ple tasked with policing the foun-dation had conflicting interests aswell.

“He plays their private parties,he plays their bar mitzvahs. Forthose people to go on record andadmit they were wrong meansthey would have to take a longhard look in the mirror to say, ‘Thisguy got one over on me,’ ” said a music industry executive whoasked not to be named for businessreasons. “What made them givethis guy a pass? I think they now have the self-awareness that they[messed] up big time.”

A federal probeThe scandal first erupted last

year when WWL-TV, a CBS affili-ate, revealed that Mayfield and

Markham rewrote the bylaws ofthe Library Foundation board sothey could divert funds to NOJO. Last month, WWL further re-vealed that Mayfield spent $18,000 of foundation money on afive-night trip to New York in 2012.According to a foundation audit inMay, he billed the foundation for rooms at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel,meals, liquor, limousine rides anda single breakfast costing $1,400.

“There was nothing that sug-gested [the trip] had anything to do with the Library Foundation,”said Bob Brown, president of thefoundation’s board. In May, thefoundation sent repeated letters toMayfield and his attorney de-manding immediate payment; thefirst two letters were returned un-opened, Brown said.

Mayfield and Markham steppeddown from the board, and this month, Mayfield resigned his post as NOJO’s artistic director. NOJO has not admitted wrongdoing, but in May it worked out a voluntary agreement with the foundation to return $483,000 in installments stretching into May 2021. NOJO also pledged to raise the rest of the $1.1 million through benefit con-certs. But it is questionable wheth-er Mayfield’s drawing power is strong enough to eliminate the def-icit and whether he will perform with the group at all since he cut ties with NOJO this month.

“The deal will never be paidback, because Irvin’s concert feesare not comparable to that pay-ment plan, ” said the music indus-try executive. In June, a citizensgroup, Make NOJO Pay, erected abillboard one block from NOJOheadquarters to raise publicawareness and demand full repay-ment.

“I do not believe that I haveviolated any law,” Mayfield said onhis Facebook page July 5.

He declined to be interviewedfor this story.

Sources told The Post that theU.S. attorney for New Orleanslaunched an investigation in June2013. Brown confirmed that theagency subpoenaed attorneys

working with the foundation. Ra-fael Goyeneche, a former state’s attorney for Louisiana who headsthe Metropolitan Crime Commis-sion, a nonprofit organization ex-posing white-collar crime andpublic corruption, said the casestarted when a whistleblower con-tacted the group in May 2013; hethen brought the allegations to theU.S. attorney.

“The fact that an investigationis still active three years after ourinitial referral indicates that they have found violations. There is astrong likelihood that criminalwrongdoing was found,” Goye-neche says.

New bylaws, new powersMany of the city’s philanthro-

pists described Mayfield as active-ly courting them to get on boards of some of the city’s most presti-gious institutions with the inten-tion, they said, to get them toeventually steer their money toward his personal projects, par-ticularly the New Orleans Jazz Market, a $10 million facility thatwould serve as NOJO’s headquar-ters. His biography during this period swelled with honorary uni-versity degrees, board appoint-ments and artist-in-residencehonors. By last year, Mayfield saton at least a dozen boards.

Mayfield got the library honorin 2007 through Daniel Packer,vice chairman of NOJO, who ad-vised then-mayor Ray Nagin toappoint the trumpeter chairmanof the Library Foundation’s boardof directors. Soon Mayfield not only headed the Library Founda-tion board, but also the librarysystem as well, putting him inadministrative control of the li-braries and their endowment. Heousted top librarians and even-tually the director of the LibraryFoundation. In a 2009 interviewwith Offbeat, a local music maga-zine, Mayfield shrugged off critics, saying, “I challenge people to stop questioning why I’m doing thingsand start questioning what they’redoing to improve the city.”

Under Mayfield, two-thirds of

the foundation board seats wereeliminated. There were conflicts atthe start: One of the board’s new members was Markham, also the chief executive of NOJO. Another member was Dan Forman, the sonof Ron Forman, a local power bro-ker who happens to be chairmanof NOJO’s board.

Then, in June 2012, the newboard voted to grant sweepingpowers to Mayfield, giving him theright to “sign any and all acts, agreements, contracts, and docu-ments that he deems fit and appro-priate.” At the same time, they alsorewrote the foundation’s bylaws, expanding its mission to supportnot just the public library, but also“literacy and community organi-zations.” Soon afterward, moneystarted flowing to NOJO.

In 2012 and 2013, the LibraryFoundation awarded NOJO$666,000 and $197,000, respec-tively, from its $3.5 million endow-ment. WWL reported that internalemails revealed that the founda-tion directed an additional$375,000 to NOJO in 2011 without initially disclosing it on tax forms. During this period, Mayfield andMarkham received annual salariesof between $100,000 and $200,000 each from NOJO.

In an email, Markham said thatthe foundation changed its bylaws“to broaden its scope and effective-ness.” He said NOJO intended tobuild a “storefront branch of thepublic library system” that wasmentioned in the library system’smaster plan dating back to 2008.The New Orleans Jazz Market of-fers free broadband, daytime con-certs, literacy programming and abook collection of more than 700titles — all of which have beenused by an estimated 3,000 chil-dren since April 2015, he said.

“The future plans are to im-prove the existing programmingto better serve the needs of thecommunity,” he said.

Hurricane Katrina struck a neardeath blow to the New Orleans public library system. All 12 branches experienced devastatingwater and mold damage, and only

a few were salvageable. Most staff-ers were displaced, and some hadto return making less than they had before the storm. Tania Tet-low, the foundation board presi-dent Nagin fired and replaced with Mayfield, said that after the storm, the philanthropic commu-nity rallied to rebuild and within afew years had raised more than $7 million, with an additional$3.5 million secured for the en-dowment.

“No foundation gives away ap-proximately a third of its endow-ment unless there’s a major crisis.Even if this somehow was the greatest, most important library project possible, which I can’t un-derstand how it would be, May-field had a conflict of interest,” shesaid, adding: “There’s a specialplace in hell for people who stealfrom libraries.”

‘Significant deficiencies’Althoughe Markham insists that

NOJO earmarked the foundation money for a good cause, “that does not change the fact that the money was taken from where it was sup-posed to have been spent and gone somewhere else, which makes for a classic federal prosecution case,” said Peter Henning, a former feder-al prosecutor who now teaches law at Wayne State University in De-troit.

Aiding the federal case willprobably be a state-commissionedfinancial audit of NOJO by LaPorte, a Baton Rouge account-ing firm, that shows “significant deficiencies” in NOJO’s bookkeep-ing. A copy obtained by The Postnotes that NOJO paid Mayfield’sproduction company for services totaling more than $300,000 com-bined for the fiscal years ending June 30 in 2014 and 2015 despitehaving no written agreement al-lowing the transaction. The auditalso found “several areas whereincontrols appeared to be deficient,”such as a lack of canceled invoices,proper coding of expenses anddocumentation for purchases made with a debit card.

“The business purposes of mealor travel transactions were not noted,” the audit states.

Overseeing the organizationwas the job of NOJO’s 20-memberboard, which is stacked with celeb-rities and dignitaries, including J.Kevin Poorman, a Chicago-based board member of the Barack Obama Foundation and chief ex-ecutive of a private investmentfirm founded by Commerce Secre-tary Penny Pritzker; former Re-publican Party consultant MaryMatalin; and CNN personality Soledad O’Brien.

Leslie Lenkowsky, a professor ofphilanthropic studies at Indiana University who led the Corpora-tion for National and CommunityService under presidents GeorgeW. Bush and Bill Clinton, said thatnot only should Mayfield and Markham have recused them-selves from decisions involving NOJO, but also that the NOJOboard itself had an obligation “tooversee how that money was beingused and where the money was coming from.”

“Boards have all sorts of prob-lems. But you need a board thatcan say no. If it’s a board of peoplethat are too close to the principal,or if there are too many of them, it can lead to some very bad mis-takes in their decisions,” Len-kowsky said.

Enduring damageEven if Mayfield and Markham

are never charged with wrongdo-ing, the scandal has done irrefut-able harm to the public library system. Brown, the new founda-tion chairman, said that donationshave dropped to zero and that the endowment now dangles under $2million. “We are tainted,” he said.Many philanthropists, includingCarol Billings, a former head of theLouisiana Library Association,said she and her husband have stopped their annual giving.

“I’m so furious. I’m not givingthem any more money that they can squander or use in an illegalway,” she said.

Gary Solomon, the chief execu-tive of Crescent Bank & Trust andone of the city’s biggest philan-thropists, said he is frustrated thatNOJO didn’t pay back the fullamount but instead offered to pay less than half. He blames Mayfielddirectly. “I’m so disappointed inthat it seems to me that [Mayfield]abused that role in the foundationin a way I don’t think many non-profits would allow,” he said.

But the insularity of New Or-leans society may ultimately be to blame for so many conflicting in-terests serving each other at thesame time.

Even Brown, who is policing therepayment on behalf of the Li-brary Foundation, said he has cutties with Mayfield, a longtimefriend.

“If he calls me, I will not answer;if he emails me, I will not email him back,” Brown said.

style@washpost.com

A Big Easy trumpet star’s tarnished brassIrvin Mayfield became board chairman of a foundation for New Orleans’s ravaged libraries. Then its endowment started flowing elsewhere.

RICK DIAMOND/GETTY IMAGES

“I do not believe that I have violated any law,” says Irvin Mayfield, shown performing with the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO) in 2012. He and an associate directed more than $1 million from a public library foundation to NOJO, where both men have drawn six-figure salaries.

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