NEW ORLEANS - A man was annoying Judge Ronnie Bodenheimer, getting in the way of a little business deal.  "Aggravate the little [expletive] as much as you can," the judge told a flunky.

It didn't work.  Something harsher was needed.  Judge Bodenheimer, tough-guy dispenser of justice in the white-flight suburbs, pronounced the pipsqueak's downfall:  "You know, this boy, you know, the sad part, he ain't got a shot, he ain't got a chance."  And then the judge signed off on a plan, beautifully simple, that inscribes a new chapter in the annals of Louisiana sleaze, according to a federal indictment:  plant illegal drugs in the man's pickup truck, then have him arrested.

"You know, he ain't gonna know what's hit him," chuckled Bodenheimer, a son of the rough-edged 9th Ward of New Orleans, according to transcripts of an FBI wiretap of his phone.

It is a fresh season for scandal in American's regional corruption capital (there were more public corruption indictments and convictions in Louisiana in 2000 than in any other state, according to the FBI), and this year's harvest is shaping up to be ample.  At city hall, the New Orleans police, in a strange role reversal, were rounding up municipal employees last month on suspicions of bribery - a refreshing change for citizens used to seeing police officers themselves led away in handcuffs.  The new mayor, Ray Nagin, wants the police to interview the old mayor, Marc Morial, about what he knew, and when.

And just across the Mississippi River in suburban Jefferson Parish, federal agents have been listening in on the conversations of local judges, even planting video cameras in their chambers.  They are apparently hoping to find evidence of unsavory relations between a local bail bond king and judges, several former district attorneys, a New Orleans city councilman and others, judging from a subpoena sent recently to the bondsman, Louis Marcotte III.  But along the way, the agents caught a glimpse of the hidden life of one of the area's best-known magistrates, and it led straight to his indictment July 17 on drug conspiracy charges.

Nobody would have claimed the New Orleans judiciary as a bastion of propriety.  Last year one local judge bloodied another in a furious punchout at the courthouse; recently another judge was censured for hiring her mother as clerk and losing dozens of trial transcripts, leading to reversals in murder cases.

But the indictment of Bodenheimer is a shocker.  A hard-headed former prosecutor from a working-class neighborhood, he took no prisoners, married a disfigured crime victim after a courtroom triumph and enjoyed sending men to death row.

"He was a great prosecutor, and in fact he was a hero of our organization," said Sanford Krasnoff, head of a local crime-victims league.  "When Ronnie was prosecuting, he used to carry himself with an air, he was as good a prosecutor as anybody in the country."

The prosecutor-turned-district judge ruled his courtroom in the seedy cinder block suburban courthouse with an iron hand.  Last November, he handed out the longest sentence in parish history, 881 years, to an armed robber.  "He was always very harsh in sentencing, very little compassion," said Sam Dalton, a local lawyer who has known Bodenheimer for decades.  "Which, I imagine, he's gonna have second thoughts about, right about now."

At the federal courthouse in New Orleans on July 24 for his arraignment, Bodenheimer seemed to be on the wrong side of the dock.  He reminisced about bad guys he had put behind bars and smiled at ex-colleagues in the hall.  His attorney nervously shooed away reporters, but the judge arched bushy eyebrows and flashed a smile. Dressed in a well-cut tan-colored suit and shiny black wingtips, Bodenheimer pleaded not guilty in his broadly confident 9th Ward accent.

Miles away from the courtroom, the straight-arrow judge had a penchant for hanging out with characters at the edge of the law.  Beyond his old neighborhood, to the east, the city gives way to swamp and an indistinct region of marshland and marginal fishermen.  These watery precincts, a favorite fishing ground when the judge was a boy, were the backdrop for the putative drug setup that has landed him in federal court.

Years before, the judge had gone into business with a bunch of ex-cons - shrimpers and fishermen with drug, firearms and sex-offense convictions - and bought himself a small marina at New Orlean's extreme eastern edge, where land seems to give way to water.

Soon, deed fish and shrimp were stinking up the area's canals:  Judge Bodehneimer was trying to establish a commercial fishing operation, in violation of city zoning laws.  Neighbors in the area's pricey houses were furious. "He tried to use his influence to try to force something down our throats," recalled a local homeowner, Ken Cowie.  "Very domineering."

The judge told Cowie he took on his tarnished associates to "rehabilitate" them, but locals weren't convinced; one of Cowie's acquaintances, identified in the government's papers only as "CW" (for "cooperating witness", started calling the FBI.The complaints took on new gravity in May 2001, when a  15-year-old boy, Eli Roach, hired for the shrimping season, was electrocuted after touching a conveyor belt at the judge's marina.  The conveyor belt had not been inspected, nor did it have the necessary permits, according to the attorney for the homeowners.  "Our little guy, he was coming up to be a good fisherman," his father, Billy Ray, remembered sadly last month.

"CW" kept complaining, and the FBI taped some loose, expletive-filled conversations in which the judge made it clear he was determined to strike back at him.  The FBI heard a Bodenheimer associate assert:  "I say somebody ought to kick the [expletive] out of him."  To which the judge replied:  "Yeah, I want him hurt worse than that."

In April, with an associate named Curley Chewning, the judge allegedly hatched a scheme to plant OxyContin, the powerful prescription painkiller widely and illegally trafficked for its narcotic properties, in the man's truck.  But the FBI was watching.  Questioned by the FBI early in June, the judge said he had told Chewning not to plant the drug "unless it's righteous" - unless, in other words, the man was already a drug user.

On July 17, Chewning pleaded guilty to a federal drug conspiracy charge; Bodenheimer is scheduled for trial in the fall.

"What's scary about this guy is that the type of thinking that he exercised in what he's accused of doesn't descend on a person overnight," said Dalton, the lawyer who knows him well.  "That agenda was on his mind as a lawyer, a DA and a judge.  He has always thought of himself as the ultimate decision-maker as to what's right and wrong.  His personal agenda is imposed on the law."