The limited seating was packed, with about 50 people squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder into four rows of seats on the sides of an aisle leading into Courtroom 12C in the federal courthouse.
Extra chairs were put alongside the aisle. Some of Aaron Zahn’s friends and family members were moved into the jury box — four months after two sets of jurors had sat in a jury box for weeks, listening to prosecutors lay out the case that this was “the largest fraud in the history of Jacksonville.”
One set of jurors acquitted Ryan Wannamacher, the former CFO of the city’s publicly owned utility.
The other set found Zahn, the former CEO of JEA, guilty of fraud and conspiracy.
More: Money & Power: Inside the campaign to privatize JEA
So this — the tension-filled scene for the sentencing — felt like the end of a saga that began more than five years earlier, with then-Mayor Lenny Curry orchestrating an overhaul of the JEA board, the rapid elevation of Zahn to CEO and the attempted sale of the city’s utility.