The St. Louis city building inspector linked to two different contractors working for programs he supervised has resigned. Adebanjo “Banjo” Popoola resigned this afternoon, says City Hall spokesman Conner Kerrigan.
Last week, SLM broke the story of Popoola’s close ties with two companies that the city collectively paid $2.3 million. On Wednesday, after hearing our questions about those ties, the city moved swiftly to open an investigation into Popoola.
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Popoola was one of two building inspectors supervising two programs to fix up derelict properties using American Rescue Plan Act dollars: The Building Stabilization Program and the Privately-owned Property Stabilization Program.
Farst Construction, which lists Popoola’s ex-wife’s address as its primary place of business, billed the city for $1 million of work in the programs. (Joy Popoola said she had no idea why the business was registered to her address and knew nothing about it other than the mail that arrived there.) The other $1.3 million went to Premier Finish Contractors, whose organizer and registered agent is Popoola’s current wife, Tanya Garrett, with whom he shares a home in Wildwood.
Now SLM can report that a third company benefiting from the programs appears to have ties to Popoola. Maxify Contractors brought in about $277,000 from the city programs, city records show. State records list Godfrey Ekwenugo as Maxify’s registered agent; Ekwenugo was also the registered agent for Premier Finish when Garrett first organized it (Garrett made herself the agent in 2023). The exact connection between Popoola and Garrett and Ekwenugo is unclear. While Popoola initially claimed to have no connection to Farst, he’s no longer returning our calls, and neither Garrett nor Ekwenugo responded to requests for comment.
Kerrigan says that the city paused the programs that Popoola worked with at the end of October, for reasons unrelated to him. He writes, “[For] all awarded contracts that had not yet been issued, building permits were canceled (18 in total), and staff began (1) reviewing all prior contracts for compliance and (2) redeveloping the process for scopes of work and contractor procurement to provide more clarity to both contractors and property owners.”
Popoola drew complaints from some property owners targeted by the programs he worked on in recent years, which include a roster of high-profile names in North City (former aldermen Jeffrey Boyd and Brandon Bosley among them). But Popoola was perceived as a friendly presence in the Building Division and well-liked at the Cultural Resources Office, as he was frequently called to testify in front of the city’s Board of Historic Preservation about the integrity (or lack thereof) of buildings that developers want to knock down. He said at a Preservation Board meeting last year that he had been working for the city for 15 or 20 years.
In his brief phone call with SLM earlier this week, Popoola expressed optimism about development in the city, saying: “If you’re into construction, you can join the city, because we’re trying to revitalize the city. We’re looking for contractors. We got a lot of contractors in the city, but we still need more.”
