A yacht, a hollow book and a 'war room': How the FBI ensnared a city's leaders in a bribery investigation

JACKSON, Miss. — For out-of-state developers hoping to bring a win to Mississippi’s capital, their pitch was flat.

The city had long been searching for someone to develop part of downtown Jackson, and when two men showed up expressing their interest in late February, City Council member Virgi Lindsay agreed to meet with them at an upscale steakhouse in a nearby suburb.

But they had “no vision,” Lindsay said in an interview, and they were short on details. She could not recall whether they even offered a business card.

She left the dinner — after having paid for her own meal, a personal policy that is a holdover from her days as a newspaper reporter, she said —  not expecting to join them at a ribbon-cutting any time soon.

“I just thought I would never see them again, because I just felt like they were so poorly prepared,” Lindsay said. “I certainly did not suspect they were connected to the FBI.”

Now, Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens, who invited her to the meeting and was present, is accused in a federal indictment filed in the Southern District of Mississippi of participating in and facilitating a bribery scheme that ensnared the mayor and members of the City Council. The out-of-state “developers” were FBI agents. As part of a sting operation, they sought support from officials in Jackson, the state’s largest city, for a phony hotel deal in exchange for cash and perks like shopping sprees and personal security details.

Owens, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and City Council member Aaron Banks were indicted last month on conspiracy and bribery charges. All have pleaded not guilty. A trial is set for early January.

A City Council member, Angelique Lee, resigned in August and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery. Sherik Marve Smith — a relative of Owens who court records say conspired to give “things of value,” including cash payments and campaign donations, to elected officials in exchange for their support for the real estate project — also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery. Smith did not respond to a request for comment.

No other City Council members have been charged.

The allegations in the federal indictment paint a picture of people entrusted to public office in a city where roughly 26% of residents live in poverty being accused of receiving more than $100,000 in “bribe payments” while being whisked away to hobnob on private jets and yachts.

The bribery scandal is the latest in a series of challenges Jackson has faced in recent years. Last year residents went without garbage pickup for roughly two weeks amid a contract dispute.

That breakdown came on the heels of a water system crisis that left much of the city without access to running water for days in 2022. The problems with the water system persisted, with residents being asked to boil their water for safety amid reports of brown water, leaking sewage and low water pressure. The system is now under the control of an interim third-party manager.

“People are tired; they just want some good stuff done,” said Vernon Hartley, a City Council member for one of the city’s poorest wards.

The indictment lays out a roughly eight-month period when two FBI agents, posing as developers from Nashville, worked with Owens to secure support they would need to win a development project in the city.

The undercover FBI agents arrived in Jackson in July 2023 looking for potential real estate opportunities and were put in touch with Owens, according to the indictment.

The city had received a multimillion-dollar loan from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2008 to be used to pay for development projects in the city’s downtown, and the city struggled to find anyone to take up the project throughout the years. The city made another effort in July 2023 to find developers by issuing a public request.

Owens was campaigning for re-election when the developers flew him and others to Nashville on a private jet in October 2023 to discuss business opportunities in Jackson.

After that trip, the indictment alleges, Owens boasted to undercover agents that he and Smith had “a bag of f------ information on all the city councilmen” that allowed him to “get votes approved.”

A few weeks later, he would win re-election by a wide margin. At his victory party, he told developers that being the district attorney was a “part time job” that he used to get leverage for his full time job of real estate development, the indictment alleges.

“This is the part time job to get the conversations and the access. Access equals the other sh-t we’re trying to do,” he said, according to the indictment.

Owens, whose attorney did not respond to a request for comment, said after last week’s arraignment that “cherry-picked statements of drunken locker room banter is not a crime.”

The next day, Owens and Smith negotiated a $250,000 payout to be divided between them and an unidentified person, with Owens and Smith receiving $100,000 each for securing support for the developers’ project, according to the indictment.

In December, the developers flew Smith, Owens and an unidentified witness to Florida on a private jet for a meeting on a yacht. Owens is alleged to have accepted $125,000 in cash from one of the agents on the yacht, according to the indictment.

Owens boasted about his power to sway things, saying, “Everybody needs something. Every file comes to us. Everybody needs something fixed,” according to the indictment.

Roughly a month later, in a meeting at the DA’s office in a room he had dubbed the “war room,” Owens gave the developers a heads-up that the city of Jackson would be putting out another request to solicit developers for a downtown development project that would include a hotel near the city’s convention center, according to the indictment.

The request for proposals issued in July failed to secure any approved projects.

At that point, Owens and the developers’ alleged efforts to secure support for the proposal seemed to pick up steam, and Banks, then the City Council president, was brought into the alleged scheme, according to the indictment.

Banks is alleged to have told a developer at a meeting with Owens on Jan. 11 that “fifty grand as soon as possible would help” during a discussion about his support for their project, according to the indictment. The next month, Banks accepted $10,000 in cash from Owens, it alleges.

Reached by phone Monday, Banks, who is charged with two felony counts, said, “I have nothing to say.”

In February, Owens arranged a dinner to introduce Lumumba, the mayor, to the developers. The indictment alleges that during introductions, Owens said, “I’ve done background checks. They’re not FBI by the way,” and that he went on to explain their development interest to the mayor.

After the dinner, Owens promised the developers he would get them three more votes, in addition to securing Banks and Lumumba, according to the indictment. He went into detail about how to funnel funds through campaign finance accounts and explained how to first “clean” the money, the indictment said.

“I don’t give a sh-t where the money comes from. It can come from blood diamonds in Africa, I don’t give a f------ sh-t,” the indictment quotes Owens as saying. Owens said his job was to “get this deal done.”

“We can take dope boy money, I don’t give a sh-t. But I need to clean it and spread it,” Owens said, according to the indictment.

At least one other dinner among Owens, the developers and a council member would occur, according to court records. In late March, developers gave a bag of $3,000 in cash to Lee, then a member of the City Council, according to the indictment. The next day, she would spend more than $6,000 on luxury goods using one of the agent’s credit cards, according to the indictment.

In August, Lee pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery. She has not yet been sentenced. Lee’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment, and a call to a number listed for Lee was not returned.

Owens worked with the developers to concoct a plan by which he, Smith and Lumumba would travel to Florida for another meeting on the yacht, where Lumumba would receive $50,000, according to the indictment. They arranged for the money to be paid in five $10,000 “campaign contribution” checks in exchange for Lumumba’s moving back the deadline for the development proposals, according to the indictment. The developers agreed to pay him another $50,000 later, the indictment said.

During the trip, Lumumba was recorded calling a city employee with instructions to change the deadline for proposals, according to the indictment.

A spokesperson for Lumumba declined to comment.

The same day, according to the indictment, Owens, Lumumba and the agents went to a venue identified only as a “club” in court documents. Owens is alleged to have made $5,000 in cash available for Lumumba to spend there, while Lumumba is alleged to have instructed one of the developers “to pay cash to employees of the club for Lumumba’s benefit,” according to court papers.

In late May, the FBI searched Owens’ office at the Hinds County District Attorney’s Office under a warrant. During the raid, they found that a book titled “The Constitution of The United States” was actually a lockbox, according to the indictment. Inside, officials said, there was $20,000 in cash. Almost half of it was traced via serial numbers to funds the developers had given Owens, according to the indictment.

The indictment alleges that Owens had told developers earlier that he kept “dope money and drug money and more than a million dollars” in the office safe to avoid the risk of keeping it in his home.

Owens said in a statement that he was fully cooperating with their efforts.

At least three City Council members have confirmed to NBC News that Owens invited them to meetings with developers in January and late February.

On the day Owens and the developers first met with Banks, they had lunch with another council member, Hartley, Hartley said.

Hartley said in an interview that he declined their offer to pay for his meal at Walker’s Drive-In, a restaurant often frequented by Jackson’s business class and well-known for seafood and other Southern fare. As with Lindsay, the details of what they hoped to do in Jackson seemed scarce to him.

Hartley said Owens had said the developers had an interest in learning about his ward. The meeting itself, though, was lackluster, he said.

Ashby Foote, the council’s sole Republican, told NBC News he joined the group for lunch at the Capital Club on Feb. 29.

The restaurant’s location, the 19th floor of the downtown Capital Towers building, was a prime one. Its windows overlooked the property developers had their eye on.

Foote said that there was no formal presentation during the meal and that the businessmen talked “in generalities.”

But one thing stood out.

“They said, ‘How does Jackson work?’ I think, or something to that effect, or ‘How do things get done in Jackson?’ or something to that effect,” Foote said. “I didn’t really answer the question.”

He initially looked at the meeting as “a nothing burger.”

Normally, you might at least get a business card, Foote said. He was frustrated. He did not catch their names, but he did write down the name of their group, the Facilities Solutions Team.

“It never occurred in my wildest dreams they were undercover for the FBI,” Foote said.

Now, the City Council is grappling with the aftermath of the latest developments, alongside routine matters of governance.

“After the parade is gone,” Hartley said, “we still have to clean up the mess.”

The first council meeting since the indictments is scheduled for Tuesday.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com