Mayfield, Markham Raise Unanswered Questions

The plea deal the NOJO leaders agreed to last July ends the story with more than a few loose ends.

On Tuesday, we learned that Irvin Mayfield and Ronald Markham pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud, which comes with the potential of five years in prison. There have always been parts to their story that haven’t made sense to me, and this latest chapter adds another. The prosecutor dropped 23 charges and accepted the plea deal for conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud. That’s a lot of dropping.

I wrote about the story in 2018 and at the time wondered how Mayfield and Markham managed to move all this money around someone like Ron Forman, head of the non-profit Audubon Nature Institute and member of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra board. You’d think someone with Forman’s experience in the non-profit arena would watch large sums of money enter the NOJO coffers and wonder about them, particularly when his son was on the Library Board where much of that money started. Similarly, you’d think Library board members would have been skeptical of Mayfield and Markham’s desire to revise the board’s bylaws to make it easier for them to act with more autonomy. You’d think the library board would have been exceedingly reluctant to have money moving from its accounts to those of the NOJO since Mayfield and Markham’s leadership roles there created at least a very strong appearance of self-dealing and potential impropriety. 

I wrote at the time, “Recapping the [Mayfield] story without other business people in it reinforces the narrative that one sly, ambitious musician climbed the political ladder to enrich himself, but fell because of his overreach and greed. There’s likely truth in that construction of the story, but it’s too simple.” If nothing else, the story calls into question the business acumen of many of the city’s business leaders. As Martin Morse Wooster wrote for Philanthropy Daily, “The lesson to be learned from this debacle is that nonprofits have to have a strong board that can stand up to nonprofit presidents that make bad decisions…. Strong nonprofits have strong boards, and weak nonprofits have weak ones.”

Maybe prosecutors were feeling generous and didn’t want go for every charge that they could, but I also wonder if those charges weren’t as iron-clad as we’re made to believe, or if pursuing them would have revealed that Mayfield and Markham weren’t quite the criminal masterminds the existing narrative suggests. What kind of crime lord spends $402 on snacks and drinks from the minibar in his New York City hotel room? 

Others who have dealt with Mayfield may have had different experiences than I have, but although I’ve never seen him effectively disguise his hustle. When he wants something from you, you know it. He knew what kind of coverage he wanted from me and worked to get it—not crassly, but not subtly either. Sometimes the hustle felt almost compulsive. I interviewed him in 2015 for The New Orleans Advocate to promote an upcoming NOJO show, and even though the odds were that the piece was going to serve his purposes, he told me about the then-upcoming NOJO book and box set, telling me how great it would be if I contributed an essay to the book. I said that sounded good but wasn’t surprised when the moment the words came out of his mouth was the last I heard from him on the project.

I assume that Mayfield had more charm than I ever saw because a lot of smart, talented, successful people bought in to him. Musicians and NOJO staffers bought in. It’s possible that Mayfield was more cautious and nuanced with bigger fish because they had more to offer, but since people like Forman and Entergy’s Dan Packer are used to people wanting something from them—usually money—it’s hard to believe that they didn’t see through Mayfield’s hustle. 

It probably helped that Mayfield believed the core of his rap—the transformative power of jazz—and that he could sell it. In 2009, he told writer John Swenson, “Yes, we need clean streets, but use the culture as an economic engine that drives that.” Unfortunately, it sounds like he also believed in the transformational power of living large, and that doesn’t happen on a trumpet player’s salary.