A Massachusetts mayor who was first elected at the spry age of 23 has been arrested and charged with defrauding investors in his tech startup SnoOwl and then filing false tax returns to cover it up.
Federal investigators say Fall River Mayor Jasiel Correia pocketed hundreds of thousands dollars from financiers that were intended for the development of a promising new app. He used the funds to gamble, buy luxury cars, and pay down his student loans.
"His actions were underhanded, shameless and greedy," said FBI agent Hank Shaw, as quoted by U.S. News & World Report. "Mr. Correia blurred the lines between public business and private duties, using investor funds as his own personal ATM, systemically looting almost a quarter-million dollars."
Correia has pleaded not guilty to the charges and has refused to resign.
"I look forward to my day in court to share my side of the story and to clear my name," he said in a written statement.
A petition to have him recalled is now in circulation. The state’s governor and lieutenant governor have both called on him to step down.
Correia’s fall from grace reads like a Shakespearian tragedy.
Correia once seemed to embody everything that Fall River felt it was losing. It is a city that ranks regularly on lists of the most dangerous places in the area to live, where the young people grow up and leave, where the windows of the old mill buildings that once powered the city’s economy break and stay broken.
And Correia was young, energetic, relentless. He’d been a teenage activist named Fall River’s Youth of the Year in 2009 and a college intern for Senator John F. Kerry. In 2014, the local Chamber of Commerce gave him an “Entrepreneur of the Year” award. He spoke passionately of the need to bring businesses and youth to the city, and he’d started a “business incubator” called 1ZERO4 Business Academy in a mill building on Anawan Street, filling it with SnoOwl, other people’s startups, a pool table, and a baby grand piano.
He joined the City Council in 2013 and was elected mayor two years later, becoming the youngest person to ever hold the job in Fall River — or any city of its size. He won re-election by a comfortable margin in November, with many considering him a rising political star.
Sooner or later, all stars explode.