The NBC station here brought viewers a rich moment Thursday, proving again why local TV news is one of our century’s most entertaining, if journalistically and ethically lax, creations.
Jim Vance, a well-known anchor once addicted to cocaine, asked prominent boxing manager Rock Newman whether addiction has again afflicted Newman’s chum, Mayor Marion Barry, who did jail time after his a fondness for crack cocaine was captured on FBI videotape.
Newman neatly sidestepped the question. But Vance already suspected the answer. He may know human frailty and Barry, all too well.
The question was relevant because the capital’s continuing descent into a debt- and crime-
ridden abyss last week took what in a normal metropolis would be considered a stunning turn.
But here it was merely the latest indignity for a place in need of a massive 12-step program from, if it exists, Annihilation Anonymous, a group tailored to self-destructing cities.
The mayor’s office announced that the boss and ex-felon was splitting town to seek “spiritual and physical renewal.”
Barry (and entourage) tried first at a Maryland retreat. When the media horde grew too large, Barry & Co. headed to St. Louis and what is described as an ecumenical religious conference center without telephones.
Is Barry back to his old ways of drugs, booze and womanizing? Few Vegas bookies or longtime residents would bet against it.
His chum, the fight manager, suggested it might be best for Barry to resign. It was a declaration even the skittish Washington Post, whose politically correct delicacy over the years probably has contributed to the mess passing for local government, was actually moved to report on its front page.
“Marion has often stopped working his plan,” Newman told Vance, employing the lingo of self-help to suggest that Barry’s back in trouble.
Barry’s temporary flight couldn’t come at a more inauspicious time.
The city is in dire financial straits. Crime is up. Garbage goes uncollected. Potholes aren’t filled. Schools are being closed. Traffic and street lights are dysfunctional, if working at all.
Congress, which controls the purse strings, detests Barry and deserves substantial blame for the city’s decline, has forced creation of a financial oversight board. The board has shackled Barry and dramatically curtailed his power over jobs and contracts.
“The situation now is dramatically worse than it’s ever been. The city is in a kind of breakdown that even hardened Washingtonians are shocked to discover,” said journalist Harry Jaffe, co-author of “Dream City,” a critically praised book on the city.
Jaffe, who suspects that Barry has suffered a drug-related relapse, contends the control board threw Barry for a loop by attacking his “addiction to power.”
“Congress and the board have taken away the goodies of contracts and jobs. Barry can no longer enjoy that rush of public adulation. He’s suffering withdrawal from that narcotic.”
“The terrible irony,” says Jaffe, “is that this is a beautiful city. We are in bloom now. Dogwoods, azaleas. But it’s rotten at its core. If you can’t even educate your children here, what can you do?”
Jaffe cites three elements as critical for outsiders wondering about the mess. They are deep malaise, fraud and abuse in the public service sector (“there is no proper work ethic here”); Barry’s repeated “charade of telling everybody things will be OK”; and the withholding of hundreds of millions of dollars by Congress.
It explains why it is difficult to argue against the notion that Barry’s departure at some point soon is necessary.
For sure, many members of Congress are hypocrites in not actually living in the city but then destabilizing it financially. Even a Barry moral transformation certified by the College of Cardinals wouldn’t suffice.
But enough of Barry. If you want to know what’s going on in the capital, listen to Pat Lally.
Lally, 33, was born and raised here and loves the place. Having previously worked for a New Jersey congressman, he’s now Washington lobbyist for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
And not only does he know Washington cold, and New York quite well, he also has a grip on Chicago, where most of his family lives on the South Side, around 103rd Street and Pulaski Road.
Lally and his wife live on Capitol Hill in a lovely, antique-filled home on a block of two-story rowhouses a very short walk from Congress. You might assume that the homes there would go for anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million.
Unfortunately, crime is on the rise big-time in Washington, unlike in virtually every major American city.
Several burglaries at neighbors’ homes were especially galling. In one instance, checks were stolen and nearly $20,000 in bum checks passed, with thieves caught writing bad checks by security cameras in Virginia and Maryland.
But the cops said they weren’t interested in following up, though the acts were related to a crime in their jurisdiction.
Further, one thief apparently called the victimized family with a ransom demand. That family has the “*-69” function on its phone and thereby knew the ransom seeker’s number. From the number, they figured out his address and gave it to the cops. It took two months for the cops to follow up at the suspect’s home.
Lally then did some investigating and passed along the results to the financial control board in a harsh letter.
In his 4-by-14 block neighborhood, crime is up 40 percent from last year. The reported crime in the year’s first four months include 116 burglaries, 91 robberies, 42 assault, 140 thefts from cars and 64 stolen cars.
Remember, this is a stone’s throw from where your elected representatives do the nation’s business.
The police district that oversees his neighborhood had 50 detectives 20 years ago. Now it has seven. Those seven deal with an average of 50 reported crimes a day.
Whereas there were once four captains to handle the district’s daily management, there’s now just one.
“Anyone familiar with result-oriented management would be shocked at such an unrealistic workload,” he wrote the board.
Along the way, Lally discovered instances of the district’s forgetting to log a burglar’s fingerprints.
Moreover, cops no longer dust for prints in car theft cases, give increasingly low priority to property crimes and have closed the department’s pawn division, “responsible for combing brokers’ reports to locate unique stolen items.”
There’s more. But to Lally, working for a tough-minded boss who has brought positive change to New York, it all amounts to a failure in management. And it’s exacerbated by Barry.
“The presence of this mayor in this city is the single most damaging element of the municipal government,” New York’s lobbyist says. “He is unconcerned with the major responsibility of a mayorship, administering city government.”
As for Giuliani and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, “we all know they hire and fire with an ultimately political goal. They in many cases hire politically, but they still hire and appoint with good management in mind. You can do both.”
“But good management and effective city administration is not a goal of this administration. At its top level, the police force here is not managerially competent, not good crime solvers because the mayor has used it as a political tool.”
Pretty cheery, eh.
Of course, Barry, who explicitly sought and was granted redemption by a majority of voters in 1994 after a four-year absence, now may be immersed in a genuinely painful quest to save his body and his soul.
Then, again, he may simply be pulling his latest con.
