Edward Joseph Price III[a] (born October 1952[2]) is an American former politician in Louisiana who served as the mayor of Mandeville in St. Tammany Parish.
During his fourth term as mayor in 2008, Price became increasingly surrounded by scandals, one of them involving an early morning accident on April 22, when Price drove a city-owned luxury sport utility vehicle (SUV) into a tollbooth at the north end of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway; he admitted that he had been drinking alcohol, but the failure of the causeway police to give the mayor a field sobriety test, along with the failure of the police to issue a traffic ticket until two weeks later when the story was in the hands of news reporters, augmented the controversy.
[7] Soon after failure of the recall—and on the same day (March 6, 2009) as the inauguration of a city vehicle policy which Councilwoman Trilby Lenfant criticized as deficient in accountability—Price again began driving the city's SUV, which, according to Cindy Chang in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, On August 13, 2009, Price was indicted for perjury in a case against Gary Kopp, owner of SpeeDee Oil Change & Tune-Up Company.
[14] The next day, the newspaper—positing that the council members "were testifying before a grand jury investigating possible criminal wrongdoing by Mayor Eddie Price"—left less to read between the lines.
[18] On October 16, 2009, Price pleaded guilty to tax evasion and depriving citizens of honest services through mail fraud.
[21] On June 17, 2010, Judge Martin Feldman sentenced Price in U.S. district court in New Orleans on charges of income tax evasion as well as corruption.
[22] Two days before Price's sentence was to begin, Feldman granted a delay of the start of the prison term until September 11, 2010.