Bill Myers

Large military death tolls

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'Wild card' Cuccinelli wins attorney general's race

Virginia Sen. Ken Cuccinelli swept into the Attorney General's Office with a resounding victory over Del. Steve Shannon. With 94 percent of the precincts reporting, Cuccinelli had won 58 percent of the vote, the State Board of Elections reported. In his acceptance speech, Cuccinelli promised "to stand guard against constitutional overreach by the federal government." He referenced the current national debates over health care and so-called "card check" legislation that would make union organizing easier. "We are coming into office with a mandate from the people of Virginia," Cuccinelli told cheering supporters in Richmond. "We will be keeping a close...

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High expectations, slow start for College Park garage

A multimillion-dollar parking lot that is supposed to help rejuvenate downtown College Park has gathered about $9,000 in its first two months, officials said. The garage, across the street from City Hall, cost $9.3 million and has space for nearly 300 cars. City officials say, though, that the garage has been mostly empty since it opened in August. Authorities say they're not panicking. "It's going to take awhile," City Councilman Bob Catlin said. "It'll be fine." The city hasn't lost money on the project because local restaurants and stores are paying for the garage, instead of building their own private lots. "The parking garage was actually intended to be paid for without anybody...

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Landslide could elevate McDonnell nationally, experts say

A big win for Republican Bob McDonnell in Tuesday's Virginia gubernatorial election could revive his party and vault the former attorney general into national prominence, experts are predicting. Pundits and pollsters alike are predicting that McDonnell will win the election, but many say a big margin of victory over Democrat Creigh Deeds will not help just Republicans lower on the ballot "This will become known as the 'McDonnell model' in 2010," political scientist and "Virginia Tomorrow" Web writer Bob Holsworth said. "McDonnell has been very successful in rebranding the Republican Party. But what I think is more fascinating about it is that he's done so...

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Bike trail hits speed bumps

A proposal for a hiking and biking trail that would connect the new $4 billion National Harbor development with Fort Foote National Park has managed to upset both bikers and preservationists, who are giving the Prince George's County Council an earful. Prince George's officials have longed hoped to connect the banks of the Potomac to the Potomac Heritage Trail, which recently opened along the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, allowing commuters to bike or walk to and from the District and Virginia. But county officials bowed to pressure from landowners along the Potomac, who convinced lawmakers to rescind decades-old land easements in the county's newly revealed master plan. The easements are...

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D.C. crime lab closer to reality

The District's long-delayed $140 million crime laboratory has cleared a vital hurdle after a city appellate board turned aside a complaint by a local builder, protesting the contract to a rival. Tompkins Builders had claimed it could offer a crime lab cheaper and faster than rival Whiting-Turning Contracting Co., but D.C.'s contract appeals board ruled against it. The way is now clear for the city to break ground on its own lab. "We probably are just going to let it lie," Tompkins Vice President George Kreis told The Examiner. That doesn't mean the company is happy with the outcome. "It just doesn't seem right to award this job to an out-of-town contractor for millions of...

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MontCo tackles 'Science City' as state backs nearby bus route

Montgomery County officials are scheduled to take up the monumental "Science City" proposal on Monday, just days after both sides of the issue claimed victory in a state transportation plan calling for an express bus route alongside Interstate 270. "You get a sense of how far along they are in their thinking," said Donna Baron, president of the "Scale It Back" coalition, an organization of neighborhood groups trying to reduce the scope of the development. The planning department has approved a massive, 60,000-job biotechnology corporate and academic complex in Gaithersburg. Advocates say that development will make Montgomery County a world leader in biotech...

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Obama backing away from Deeds' campaign

President Obama appears to be backing out of Virginia less than a year after he conquered the Old Dominion in his historic election. The president is scheduled to campaign for gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds on Tuesday, but The Washington Post reported that "Democrats at the national level" are already accusing Deeds of having blown the party's chances in the Nov. 3 election. The paper quoted "senior administration officials" as saying that Deeds has ignored the White House's advice on mobilizing blacks and young professionals. One said: "Obama, [Virginia Gov. Tim] Kaine and others had drawn a road map to victory in Virginia. Deeds chose another...

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Fenty construction contracts questioned by D.C. council

Updated: 1:17 P.M. The Fenty administration has handed out construction management contracts worth tens of millions of dollars for parks and recreation projects without obtaining legislative approval, and D.C. Council members are crying foul. A partnership between Banneker Ventures LLC and Regan Associates has become the go-to manager for the Parks and Recreation Department, handling construction contracts worth some $72 million, public records show. "We are concerned that the transfer of procurement authority may circumvent District procurement laws and is significantly less transparent," members Kwame Brown, D-at large, Harry Thomas, D-Ward 5, Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3 and Marion...

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Bedroom community blues: foreclosure crisis creating suburban slums

Two years of economic collapse have pockmarked the D.C. region's affluent suburbs with blight and experts are worried that the foundering cul-de-sacs and towns are on the verge of becoming the region's next ghettoes. "What you're looking at now is a structural problem," Brookings Institute scholar Christopher Leinberger said. "We have structurally overbuilt the fringe...It ain't coming back." Consider, for instance, Prince William County's Georgetown South community. The signs there used to say, "For sale." Then they said, "foreclosed." Now they say, "For rent." ANDREW HARNIK/EXAMINER Herb Cooper-Levy runs a group home for...

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Con artists feast on suburban blight

The ghettoization of Washington's suburbs has created a special haven for that parasitic species -- the con artist. Law enforcement say they have their hands full pursuing fraudsters from Baltimore to Quantico. The highest profile scams have involved rings using so-called "straw buyers" who obtain home loans with bogus credit histories. Federal prosecutors in Maryland are wrapping up the prosecution of six friends who ran an elaborate scheme that took in some $19 million in loans. Not only would the friends obtain phony mortgages through straw buyers, but then they'd rake in hundreds of thousands in fees for fictitious renovations. Thanks to the scam, there are now 65 homes...

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Developers battle White Flint plan to require purchase of farmers' rights

Deep-pocketed developers are using the debate over White Flint's redevelopment to reopen old arguments about Montgomery County's one-of-a-kind agriculture reserve policy. Since the 1980s, county law has forbidden property owners from developing on land within the designated agriculture reserve. As compensation, the law let farmers sell their development rights — called "building lot terminations," or BLTs — to builders for projects outside the reserve. Under the plan, more than one-fourth of county's 323,000 acres have been kept lush farmland. It also has given developers the option to expand otherwise tightly zoned projects by buying farmers' rights. Now, the...

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Backroads on historic path get 'scenic' tag from feds

The Federal Highway Administration has designated 180 miles of highway between Gettysburg, Pa., and Monticello, Va., a "National Scenic Byway," a symbolic but potentially lucrative designation that could lead to millions in tourism development dollars for Maryland and Virginia. Ninety-eight other strips in the United States already have gained the "scenic byway" tag, which was created by Congress in 1991 and recognizes classic American backroads -- like Route 66 and the Las Vegas strip -- that are experiences in and of themselves. Get your kicks on... Among other National Scenic Byways » Big Sur Coast Highway, California » Marine Highway,...

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Post's Deeds endorsement energizes both sides in governor's race.

The Washington Post's enthusiastic endorsement of Democrat Creigh Deeds on Sunday was welcomed by the struggling Deeds campaign, but was also seen as an opportunity by Virginia conservatives to tie the Democrat's candidacy to a newspaper they view as liberal. "Mr. Deeds," the Post said in its endorsement, "has run an enormous and possibly fatal political risk by saying bluntly that he would support legislation to raise new taxes dedicated to transportation." That was music to the ears of many Republicans and conservatives. "It's clarifying," Republican Party of Virginia spokesman Tim Murtaugh told The Examiner. "There is no question that Creigh Deeds...

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The 3-minute interview: David Silverberg

In 2004, while the rest of the media industry was busy collapsing, David Silverberg and his friends began Homeland Security Today, a glossy magazine for those charged with our nation's defense. How's the magazine doing? Very well, I'm very pleased to say. We've been very steady, even in difficult times. We have an extremely loyal readership and the necessity for homeland security hasn't diminished, regardless of economic ups and downs. We've got a 76 percent renewal rate in our subscriptions. How did you get into this? My background was in defense journalism. I spent a number of years with a newspaper called Defense News. I was managing editor of the Hill for a couple of years. I...

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Montgomery faces long winter of big decisions

Montgomery County leaders will take up several major development projects in a just a few scant months, intensifying already vitriolic questions over the county's long-term prosperity. Between now and April, the County Council will weigh projects ranging from the White Flint redevelopment to the widening of Interstate 270 to the so-called "Science City" project in Gaithersburg West. It's the most frenetic schedule in recent memory. As developments warrant? The Montgomery County Council will face numerous development projects in the next few months: » White Flint: A proposal to redevelop the area around the White Flint Metro station by replacing strip malls and...

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Montgomery planning chief blocked probe of computer failures

A top official in a key Montgomery County development agency tried to block an internal investigation of failures in the agency's computer security system, The Examiner has learned. Montgomery County Planning Director Rollin Stanley told his staff that a review of his agency's Internet firewall failures was "a fishing expedition" and intervened to keep investigators from interviewing his staff, internal documents reviewed by The Examiner show. The agency's firewall had problems nearly 300 times -- an average of 24 times per month -- in a little more than a year between 2008 and 2009. One Friday this spring, the entire system crashed, and officials scrambled to install a new security...

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Neighbors, council pan Fenty plan for apartments at historic school

Mayor Adrian Fenty's plan to convert a historic D.C. school for freed slaves into a luxury apartment building has run into fierce opposition from neighbors in tony Foggy Bottom and D.C. Council members. In late September, Fenty awarded a contract to Equity Residential so that the Chicago-based firm could convert the Thaddeus Stevens Elementary School into an apartment building. Many neighbors in Foggy Bottom -- many of them already angry that Fenty closed Stevens -- have erupted. "We have high expectations and we want to see a signature project there," Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Rebecca Coder said. "Rental units don't cut it." Coder and her friends have...

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Montgomery plans traffic tunnel near Bethesda Naval

Montgomery County officials are seeking millions of federal funds to build a traffic tunnel under Rockville Pike near Bethesda Naval Hospital. The plans were announced this week at a meeting that included county and state officials, U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-8th District, and invited citizens from the area. The plans were obtained by the Action Committee for Transit, a nonprofit advocacy group that posted its findings on the Greater Greater Washington Web site. Under the plans, the county would use millions in federal funds to build a zigzagging tunnel beneath Rockville Pike between the Medical Center Metro station and Bethesda Naval. The area is one of the county's most clotted,...

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'Science City' will be scaled back, council president predicts

Montgomery County Council President Phil Andrews said Monday that an ambitious plan to build a 60,000-job "Science City" in Gaithersburg would be drastically cut back before legislators finish with it. "I think it will be scaled back," the Rockville/Gaithersburg Democrat said, using the language of Science City critics. "It's a major concern of mine." The Interstate 270 corridor is already among the nation's biotech breadbaskets. Developers led by Johns Hopkins University are hoping to escalate development in the area and make "Gaithersburg West" off Route 28 a world center of biochemical research. They have been encouraged in their efforts by the billions of dollars pouring from the...

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Site struggle over proposed MontCo biotech 'city'

Twenty years ago, Liz Banks turned to Johns Hopkins University to save her family's farm. Now, her family is fighting to save the farm from Johns Hopkins. Banks had retired to her ancestral Belward Farm in Montgomery County after decades as a schoolteacher. But in 1989, she was hit with a massive property tax bill. Rather than sell the land to developers -- who were offering upward of $54 million -- Banks sold it to Johns Hopkins for $5 million. On one condition: The university would only use the 108-acre, West Gaithersburg farm for a small, "Jeffersonian" campus, nephew Tim Newell said. That was then. Now, just four years after Banks died -- still raising cattle on the land...

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Transition to taxi meters triggered corruption, feds say

D.C.'s effort to change from a taxi fare system based on zone maps to a metered system was beset with corruption from its earliest days, federal court papers show. When Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., pushed through legislation requiring the District to move from its much-derided zone map system to time and distance meters, some people saw a way to corrupt the impending change to their advantage, according to court papers. A full month before the change took effect in October, 2007, cabbies and taxi industry officials were lining up to bribe their way through, around and under the new regulations, federal officials alleged in two new indictments unsealed Friday. Thirty-six cabbies were charged...

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D.C. to consider legalizing gay marriage

Councilman Catania says he'll introduce bill Tuesday D.C. Councilman David Catania promised to introduce a bill next week that will allow same-sex couples to be married legally in the nation's capital. "We've been working hard on it, just putting one foot in front of the other," Catania, I-at large, told The Examiner on Thursday. The bill already has nine co-sponsors and will be introduced Tuesday. It follows a long battle over an earlier law -- also sponsored by Catania -- that requires D.C. to recognize gay marriages performed legally in other states. Opponents of that measure lost a drive over the summer to put the question on the ballot so city voters could weigh in. The...

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Indictments, arrests in D.C. taxi-bribery scandal

Federal officials indicted some 30 taxi industry officials Friday as part of a wide-ranging corruption investigation that has already reached the office of D.C. Councilman Jim Graham, D-Ward 1. The suspects were being rounded up Friday but the indictments were still under seal, federal law enforcement sources told The Examiner. Authorities have been investigating allegations of bribe-paying by cabbies to get new D.C. taxicab licenses and are also looking at the financing behind several taxicab companies, the sources said. More than $220,000 in bribes are believed to have changed hands, the sources said. Late last month, a federal grand jury indicted Graham's chief of staff, Ted Loza,...

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The Examiner debuts new Yeas team

Washingtonians will have two new faces greeting them on the city's premier personality, power and politics page. Nikki Schwab and Tara Palmeri are taking over as The Examiner's new Yeas & Nays team. Schwab reported for the U.S. News & World Report's widely read "Washington Whispers" column and also produced that feature on U.S. News' Web site. She will join the team in two weeks. Before joining The Examiner, Palmeri had been a news assistant at CNN, where her duties included producing a daily political podcast. Her first appearance is in Tuesday's paper. Both women are graduates of American University -- Palmeri has a bachelor's degree in communications and Schwab a...

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The 3-minute interview: Greg Bibb

Bibb is the chief operating officer of the Washington Mystics, one of the most successful franchises in the WNBA. Reports have said the league is in trouble. How have you guys managed to buck the trend? I would dispute that the league is in trouble. Anyone who wants to dispute that should look at the eight-year contract we’ve signed with ESPN. I don’t think we’re going anywhere. Our attendance is 11,658 currently. That’s league-leading. We do that through promotion, theme, initiative after initiative. You name it, we do it. We’re convinced that once someone sees the product up close and personal, they’re going to be converted to fans. Do you think the...

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Lanier loses another round of 'All Hands' litigation

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier lost another round in her battle to save her controversial "All Hands on Deck" program Monday. An arbitrator denied Lanier's motion to reconsider his original ruling striking down "All Hands" and ordering the department to pay officers overtime for this year's events. Lanier has said her "All Hands" events -- which flood city streets with thousands of cops, mostly on weekends -- is vital to protecting the public. Critics, including the police union, have said it's a publicity stunt that drains stations of manpower after the events are over. Arbitrator John Truesdale has now twice sided with the union. Attorney General Peter Nickles said he'll appeal...

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D.C.'s new co-op tax: Questions, few answers

A new law that will tax the sales of apartment co-ops is supposed to take effect this week. But few -- even among city hall officials -- seem to know what the law says. Cooperative owners and real estate experts say they're not sure what will happen when the law takes effect Thursday. "There's a dearth of guidance on this," said David Horrigan, president of the District of Columbia Cooperative Housing Coalition. Owners "haven't received any instruction on how it's supposed to be collected, how it's supposed to be remitted -- none of those things." The D.C. Council passed a final version of the tax last week but hasn't handed over the new law to the city tax office,...

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Former Graham intern to appear in court on assault charge

A former intern for D.C. Councilman Jim Graham will appear in court Monday to answer charges that he opened fire on another teen shortly after a city summer jobs orientation. Devin Black, 19, is accused of assault in a June 18 shooting outside the Columbia Heights Metro station. Prosecutors allege that he and another teenager bickered on the train on their way home from a massive orientation for youths in Mayor Adrian Fenty's summer jobs program. As they got off the train, the dispute escalated and Black opened fire before fleeing, authorities say. Last-minute motions are scheduled to be argued Monday morning and jury selection could begin that afternoon. The shooting was a mild...

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Bumped off: Area motorists besieged by 'raised potholes'

The thousands of speed bumps dotting Washington area roadways may be designed to calm traffic, but they're certainly not calming nerves. "They're raised potholes, is what they are," said AAA Mid-Atlantic spokesman John Townsend. "They confound motorists, they confuse neighbors. Only an urban planner could love them." Washington area planners certainly love them: Montgomery County has nearly 1,200. D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty has installed more than 760 speed bumps since he took office in 2007. In Arlington, there's a speed bump for every 1.4 miles of road. Bumped off? Speed bumps have sprouted all over the region. » Montgomery County: 1,198 speed bumps for 2,400 miles of...

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Top Graham aide charged with taking bribes

D.C. Councilman Jim Graham's top aide pocketed cash-stuffed envelopes and other gifts in return for steering taxicab legislation through his boss's office, law enforcement officials alleged Thursday. Ted Giovanny Loza, 44, was arrested at his Columbia Heights home Thursday morning, shortly before FBI agents raided his office at the John A. Wilson Building. Loza, the Ward 1 councilman's chief of staff, tinyurl.com/loza-indictment, to which he pleaded not guilty during a late afternoon arraignment. He was released without having to post bail. Graham immediately placed him on administrative leave with pay. Loza is accused in the 10-page indictment of accepting "a stream of things of...

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D.C. Councilman Graham's chief of staff arrested on bribery charges

The top aide to Councilman Jim Graham was arrested Thursday morning, charged with pocketing bribes to help steer taxi cab legislation through his boss’ office. Ted Loza, Graham's chief of staff, was scheduled to appear in federal court hours later, charged with two counts of bribery. He was arrested early Thursday and his city hall office raided by federal agents. He is a longtime aide to Graham, D-Ward 1, who chairs the council’s transportation committee and who earlier this year introduced legislation that would have lifted a moratorium on expensive taxi cab licenses — called medallions — for “environmentally friendly” cabs. Graham fled from a...

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D.C. region incomes hold strong in recession, census data show

Maryland residents were the wealthiest in the nation last year as the Washington region saw its median incomes rise, even as the rest of the country faltered under the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Monday. The median household income in Maryland was nearly $71,000, slightly ahead of New Jersey. Virginia came in eighth, with a median income of about $61,000, and D.C. was 12th in median income, at nearly $58,000, the census reported in its annual American Community Survey. Southern Maryland and Northern Virginia communities bolstered their states' incomes, the census reported. Median incomes from Loudoun to Prince George's counties...

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D.C. fire system still has ways to go, inspector general says

More than two years after a prominent D.C. journalist was left on an upper Northwest sidewalk to die, the District's emergency rescue team remains woefully unprepared to deal with citizens' emergencies, an internal review has found. The D.C. inspector general reported in a recent audit, obtained by The Examiner, that the D.C. Fire and Emergency Management System, the city's main rescue service: » Hasn't established anything like a quality "medical assurance" program to protect the health and welfare of District citizens; » Still suffers from "excessive turnover in key management positions"; » And still doesn't have enough staffers to coordinate rescue services for the...

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D.C. emergency system still has ways to go, inspector general says

Audit findings: The D.C. inspector general found that the District’s fire and rescue officials still weren’t prepared to help the District’s citizens in an emergency. The Sept. 15 audit found that: » D.C. and fire employees still aren’t trained to deal with bloodborne pathogens and illnesses, as required by federal law. » The fire department still isn’t guarding ambulances to protect them from vandalism. » Vital D.C. fire engine companies still occasionally are flooded by standing water and sewage in their offices. » Some local fire offices aren’t even equipped with working smoke detectors. More than two years after a prominent...

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Libraries booming in the burbs

Area bookworms are turning their local libraries from stuffy nerd wastelands into local hot spots. The libraries in Montgomery, Arlington and Fairfax counties are reporting record numbers of guests and record circulation. Librarians are eager to embrace the hordes, brightening up the color of the places, offering free Wi-Fi and even relaxing their rules about monkish silence. "Libraries and bookstores are all evolving, physically," said Debbie King, branch coordinator for the Fairfax County Library. "We have meeting rooms and computers. We try to put our high-volume material -- the things people want when they walk in the door -- in a more prominent and nice display area....

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Michelle Obama-backed farmers market knots downtown traffic

A farmers market inspired and endorsed by first lady Michelle Obama snarled traffic Thursday in downtown Washington as commuters and pedestrians found themselves trying to navigate a security gantlet. FreshFarms Market had lobbied furiously to peddle its wares on Vermont Avenue between H and I streets NW, every Thursday for the next six weeks. Its organizers promised to bring locally grown food to Washingtonians in the shadow of the White House. They dropped the first lady's name in their conversations. The result: The market was opened to the public Thursday. It closed down Vermont Avenue. "It's a great day for farmers," said Mary Ellen Taylor of Virginia's Endless Summer...

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White House leans toward veteran trial lawyer as next U.S. Attorney

The White House is leaning toward veteran trial lawyer Ron Machen as it ponders its choice for D.C.'s next top prosecutor, The Examiner has learned. Passed over in the process is homegrown product Channing Philips, the interim U.S. attorney -- a D.C. native and son of a civil rights leader. Although President Obama has final say, tradition has always given sway to members of Congress in the selection of U.S. attorneys. Multiple sources speaking on condition of anonymity told The Examiner that D.C.'s nonvoting Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat, forwarded Machen's name, along with those of former federal prosecutor and current Nixon Peabody partner Anjali Chaturvedi and former...

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3-minute interview: Steven Salzberg

Salzberg, a University of Maryland scientist, is co-founder of a new online influenza journal through the Public Library of Science. Organizers hope that the Internet format will allow scientists to share information with each other — and the public — without a delay of weeks or months on the old peer review style of preparing journals. What made you decide to get involved? David Lipman in the [National Institutes of Health] should get the most credit. David and I started talking about it *** back in the spring, when the H1N1 was turning into a pandemic. The usual suspects -- experts in influenza -- were talking amongst themselves, and then there were some other scientists...

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Suburbs not immune to homeless boom

Some of D.C.'s affluent suburbs are facing homeless crises of their own. A May study by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments found that homelessness had increased dramatically in nearly every suburb between 2005 and 2009. In Loudoun County, it spiked by more than 63 percent. In Prince William, homelessness leaped by 25 percent. In Montgomery, it increased nearly 17 percent. The only jurisdictions to see a decrease since 2005 were Alexandria and Prince George's County, the council study found. D.C. remains the capital of homelessness -- more than half of the region's 12,000-plus homeless live in the District -- but the mere fact of homelessness in otherwise wealthy...

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K Street corridor: Where homeless, business meet

An army of mentally ill homeless people have set up camp along the K Street blocks that constitute Washington's premier business district, alarming tourists and worrying business owners in the area. "We're seeing a lot more people now," said Colleen McCarthy, a volunteer with Dorothy Day Catholic Worker, a nonprofit group that provides hot meals in McPherson Square every Thursday. "Many of them are the most mentally ill." Some homeless advocates say the upsurge is an unintended consequence of Mayor Adrian Fenty's ambitious reform agenda. Last year, Fenty shut down the Franklin Shelter, the only downtown homeless refuge. He also had to back away from his ambitious...

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Lawyer has license suspended after keeping settlement secret from client

A D.C. lawyer has had his license suspended after he admitted to misappropriating money from one of his clients and missing crucial court deadlines in another client's case. The D.C. Court of Appeals ordered Ronnie Thaxton's license to practice law suspended for six months and put him on probation for another three years because he bungled two different cases. According to court papers, Thaxton admitted to legal ethics investigators that he withdrew $5,000 in fees from an escrow account that was supposed to be kept for his client, Terri Roberts. Roberts, who was injured in an accident, was threatening a lawsuit against Geico. The insurance company and Thaxton agreed to settle the case...

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Coast Guard exercise on Potomac sparks panic

A Coast Guard training exercise on the Potomac River caused a panic Friday morning after CNN broadcast the details without first checking to see whether the scenario was real. The media reports that shots had been fired on the Potomac sent law enforcement and federal agencies scrambling. The Federal Aviation Administration briefly shut down flights at Reagan National Airport, the FBI sent agents to the river, as did District police. The confusion started when CNN first reported that shots had been fired by the Coast Guard at a suspect vessel between the Memorial and 14th Street bridges, not far from the Pentagon where President Barack Obama and hundreds of others were gathered to...

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Eight years after 9/11, security experts fear complacency

Eight years after Islamic death squads slammed a hijacked plane into the Pentagon, security experts are worried that government leaders and the public are losing their focus on protecting the D.C. region from disaster. "I think there is a bit of a disruption here," said Bill Pickle, former sergeant-at-arms of the Senate. "I still think that there is some complacency not just among the bureaucrats and the politicians, but I think complacency sets in the security agencies, too." Nine months into his administration, for instance, President Obama still hasn't appointed directors of the Transportation Security Administration or the Customs and Border Patrol, Pickle...

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Arbitrator tosses overboard 'All Hands on Deck'

An arbitrator has squashed D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier's "All Hands on Deck" program, ruling that the chief's effort to flood the streets with cops violated the officers' contract. John C. Truesdale ruled Thursday that Lanier's much-ballyhooed initiative "did not honor and support" the union agreement and broke "applicable laws, rules and regulations." He ordered Lanier to cancel All Hands events for the rest of the year and to pay the union overtime for the first several events from the beginning the year. It's a crushing blow to one of the centerpieces of Lanier's regime. Lanier has given All Hands credit in helping the city curb its homicides to a decade's low. It's not clear...

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Downtown market would shut down Vermont Ave. during rush hour

Organizers have been dropping first lady Michelle Obama's name in their efforts to plop a farmers market into downtown Washington that would shut down an avenue near the White House during rush hour. In late August, staff at FreshFarm Markets sent a note to the city Department of Transportation asking if they would be so kind as to shut down Vermont Avenue between H and I streets NW every Thursday from 1 to 8 p.m. from Sept. 17 until Oct. 29. In lobbying city officials, FreshFarm staff have bragged about their talks with the first lady -- a vocal supporter of open-air markets. The city's official response? Don't bet the farm on it. "At this point, we don't consider their...

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Audits blast VA for cronyism, waste in $24M bonuses

A top official in the Department of Veterans Affairs pressured a government contractor -- and later, her own underlings -- to hire a friend, used her influenced to help hire other friends and exploited "an inappropriate personal relationship" with her boss to get a cozy office in Florida and be shuttled back and forth at taxpayers' expense, a scathing internal review has found. In a separate audit, the VA's inspector general also laid bare $24 million in "questionable" bonuses to employees, including family members and friends of one employee whom auditors accused of behaving "as if she was given a blank checkbook." The audits of the department's technology section are scathing. They...

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Former nonprofit CFO facing prison in $184K embezzlement

A former top accountant at a wildlife conservation group is facing more than two years in prison after she admitted to using the group's credit card for $184,000 in makeup, casino junkets -- and a really expensive birthday cake. Wendy Mansfield was supposed to have been sentenced by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on Wednesday, but the judge postponed Mansfield's judgment day until Sept. 17. Mansfield had been the chief financial officer of the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, an international conservation group based in D.C. In February, she agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud, admitting that she helped herself to the association's credit card for more than four years, wracking...

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Montgomery College president could face vote Thursday

Montgomery College's board of trustees will meet Thursday to decide the fate of embattled college President Brian K. Johnson. Faculty and staff have revolted against Johnson, accusing him of abandoning Maryland's largest community college for lavish junkets around the world. First reported by The Washington Post on Wednesday, Johnson's enemies have stuffed a clip file of what they're calling outrageous expenses, from a $4,000-plus hotel bill in Delhi, India, to a $780 limousine ride in Boston. Since 2007, Johnson has billed the taxpayer-funded college for nearly $60,000 in expenses. The school pays him a $220,000 annual salary. Through a spokesman, Johnson declined comment Wednesday. He...

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Metro shuts National Airport station for Labor Day weekend

Thousands of holiday travelers will have to schlep their luggage onto shuttle buses this weekend or find another way to get to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport as officials close the airport's Metro station for track work on the Blue and Yellow lines. Workers at the transit agency are replacing about one-third of a mile of rail and replacing four switches between the Pentagon City and Braddock Road stations from 9:30 p.m. Friday until 5 a.m. Tuesday, Metro said. At a glance Metro repairs on the Blue and Yellow lines: » Replace 2,000 feet of rail. » Install 735 new ties. » Replace four switches. » Perform concrete and deck joint...

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Grant foul-up puts jobs of three D.C. victims' advocates at risk

Botched application may leave hundreds of families without help Hundreds of homicide victims' families face losing their advocates in the D.C. police department because of a botched grant application, The Examiner has learned. Laverne Harley, Jennifer Murphy and Dawn Christie were all paid by the D.C. police department to help relatives of the District's numerous homicide victims with needs ranging from paying their bills to understanding the legal system. Their work was supported by a grant from the Department of Justice. But officials in the Fenty administration mishandled a crucial application and the feds pulled the plug on the program. Authorities are now scrambling to find new...

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Nickles’ old firm helped Pershing Park arrestees

Peter Nickles’ former law firm represented several citizens who were illegally swept up in a mass police crackdown, and attorneys for other purported victims of the sweep are raising the question of whether the city’s attorney general is compromised by a conflict of interest. Nickles was a giant in pro bono work at Covington & Burling before joining Mayor Adrian Fenty’s cabinet. Since taking over as attorney general, he has fought tooth-and-nail against lawsuits from other ordinary citizens arrested in Pershing Park when the D.C. police cracked down on anti-World Bank protesters in 2002. In a letter sent to Nickles’ city staff and included in court filings,...

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D.C. police lieutenant gets his job back

A D.C. police lieutenant has been brought back to work after six years of conflict with a department that once fired him -- for having been previously fired by them. Tim Haselden had been arranging traffic cones at the police academy and drawing his $100,000-per year salary while he fought to be sent back on the streets. On Christmas Eve 2003, he was fired following a couple of angry confrontations with his wife. The department said he was a wife-beater. Haselden appealed and an administrative law judge held that, in fact, Haselden had tried to defuse the confrontations. He was set to come back to work when a media outlet reported that rogue cops were sneaking back onto the force...

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Nickles' old firm helped Pershing Park arrestees

Peter Nickles' former law firm represented several citizens who were illegally swept up in a mass police crackdown, and attorneys for other purported victims of the sweep are raising the question of whether the city's attorney general is compromised by a conflict of interest. Nickles was a giant in pro bono work at Covington & Burling before joining Mayor Adrian Fenty's cabinet. Since taking over as attorney general, he has fought tooth-and-nail against lawsuits from other ordinary citizens arrested in Pershing Park when the D.C. police cracked down on anti-World Bank protesters in 2002. In a letter sent to Nickles' city staff and included in court filings, lawyers for four of...

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District police lieutenant wins his job back

A D.C. police lieutenant has been brought back to work after six years of conflict with a department that once fired him — for having been previously fired by it. Tim Haselden had been arranging traffic cones at the police academy and drawing his $100,000-per-year salary while he fought to be sent back to the streets. On Christmas Eve 2003, he was fired following a couple of angry confrontations with his wife. The department said he was a wife-beater. Haselden appealed and an administrative law judge held that, in fact, Haselden had tried to defuse the confrontations. He was set to come back to work when a media outlet reported that rogue cops were sneaking back onto the force...

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Houses divided: Capitol Hill quarrel leads to years of litigation

An 8.4-inch gap between two Capitol Hill homes has led to seven years of vicious litigation, with charges and counter-charges of harassment, libel, assault, tossed wine glasses, wicked hose-downs and even maliciously potty-trained cats. "It was a neighborhood squabble," said retired Georgetown professor R. Michael "Mike" Neuman, sighing as he explained his side of the lawsuits. Court records tell a more complicated story: Neuman and his wife, Delia — library science professor — have been locked in a give-no-quarter struggle with neighbor Anne Wood since 1999. It started when the Neumans, who own a town house at 121 E. St. SE, wanted to waterproof their...

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Long Kennedy goodbye to end at Arlington

Washington's elite will bid a solemn but fairly understated goodbye to Sen. Edward Kennedy this weekend with a private burial at the Republic's most hallowed ground. The biggest farewells for the long-serving Massachusetts senator will occur in his native Boston, but then he is scheduled to be flown to the capital for a private interment at Arlington National Cemetery. Some details of Saturday's burial had yet to be decided, said Col. Daniel Baggio, chief of staff for the U.S. Army Military District of Washington at Fort McNair. If the Kennedy family chooses to have a graveside eulogy or prayer, it is members of the Army's 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, or "The Old Guard," who would...

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Cool summer chilling the killers?

Homicides are down dramatically in the District and other cities across America at the same time many parts of the nation are experiencing the coolest summer in decades. That has some experts wondering if the big chill is allowing cooler heads to prevail on city streets. "The hard science is not conclusive," said George Washington University criminologist Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor. But "it's probably true that the cooler weather is responsible for the drop in violent crime. Any beat cop will tell you that a cooler summer means safer streets." Police leaders like D.C. Chief Cathy Lanier bristle at the suggestion that cool weather is chilling the bad...

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Veteran fraud prosecutors send double-killer to prison

Two lawyers accustomed to fighting white-collar crime have helped put a double-murderer behind bars. Nathaniel Waldron was sentenced Monday to 32 years in prison for the 2006 shooting deaths of Davion "Rock" Holt, 20, and 16-year-old and Michael Lucas. The sentence was part of a plea deal with veteran public corruption prosecutors Steve Durham and Michael Atkinson. Durham started his career prosecuting violent crimes, but he hadn't been "on the line" in more than 11 years. Atkinson had never prosecuted a violent crime. "It's a whole different set of challenges," Atkinson said. "Generally, witnesses in a white-collar case fear loss of job, not loss of life. It's a pretty big...

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A Shark in Lawyer's Clothing

When Mayor Fenty gets in a jam, count on Peter Nickles to be at his side, teeth bared and ready to attack Even his friends say D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles is like a shark. "He's got to keep moving forward," said longtime friend and law partner Alan Pemberton. "He can't stop or he'll die." Long regarded as one of the city's top litigators -- in a city full of great litigators -- Nickles has been swimming in dangerous waters for the past two years. As one of Adrian Fenty's oldest friends and most trusted adviser, Nickles seems to be everywhere, all the time, defending the mayor and fighting off his own tormentors. » City lawyers stand accused of...

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Combative at work, competitive in life

If Peter Nickles seems a bit macho at work, consider what he does in his off hours. He has run at least 40 marathons from New Zealand to Dublin. He's completed an additional 20 triathlons -- including Hawaii's notorious Ironman and two Ultraman races. He swims several miles per day. He has flipped his bikes at least twice and nearly drowned several times. The price of his sporting life: back surgery, the cartilage in his knees and, more times than he likes to admit, his dignity. He's not stopping, though. "It keeps you young, it keeps you alive, it keeps you focused," he said. Nickles was a literature major before he became lawyer, but few books can be found in his sunlit office...

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Ex-councilwoman accuses Nickles of deception in hog-tying probe

A former city councilwoman who led the investigation into a police crackdown on protesters that led to hundreds of innocent bystanders being hog-tied has accused D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles of misleading a federal judge on whether the city destroyed crucial evidence. In an unsolicited letter to U.S. Judge Emmet Sullivan, former Ward 3 Democrat Kathy Patterson said she was writing "to clear up any confusion that may have been created ... by erroneous statement included" in Nickles' recent affidavit. Patterson accuses Nickles of offering incorrect versions of what happened to the police department's so-called "running resume," a log of department orders...

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The 3-Minute Interview: Tim Cole

Cole is the new manager of Creighton Farms, a gated community in Loudoun County that boasts a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course. The recession has hurt sales at Creighton Farms and many other developments, but the course has been heralded in several golf magazines. Have you shot the course yet? Oh yeah. What's your handicap? Well, I'm a high handicapper. I work too hard. I'm a 19 handicap. And how is the course? The course is absolutely fabulous. It's a very challenging course. It's impeccably maintained, well groomed, greatly designed and well deserving of the recognition it has received. What's the hardest hole? That's pretty subjective. It'll depend on who you talk...

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D.C. students trail Maryland, Va., nation in ACT results

D.C. students continue to lag their peers in Maryland and Virginia and remain mostly unprepared for college courses, figures provided by a national testing service show. D.C. students' scores on the annual ACT test have risen slowly over the last five years, but they're still well below the national average -- and the average scores of students in Maryland and Virginia, ACT officials announced Wednesday. The average composite ACT for a graduating senior in the District was 19.4, below the national average of 21.1. The average Virginian scored nearly two points higher, while the average Marylander scored almost three points higher. The grades Composite ACT test results: »...

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Federal prosecutor in Md. creates team to track down dirty money

Rod Rosenstein, Maryland's top federal prosecutor, announced Monday that he's creating a new team of number crunchers to crack down on money laundering and to track the assets of bad guys. Rosenstein has asked veteran prosecutors Stefan Cassella, Richard Kay and Christen Sproule to lead the new task force. Cassella, the new chief of the section, and Kay work out of the Baltimore office; Sproule works out of Greenbelt. The team will focus on asset forfeiture and money laundering from civil and criminal cases. Rosenstein told The Examiner that he hoped the team would help him "take the profit out of crime and to help repay the victims." The collapse of the housing market taught...

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D.C. AG on controversial police lawyer: He's 'exemplary'

Three weeks before a federal judge ordered an investigation into how police department attorneys lost crucial evidence in a civil rights lawsuit, Attorney General Peter Nickles hailed a central figure in the widening scandal as "an exemplary lawyer," a letter obtained by The Examiner shows. Terry Ryan has been general counsel of the D.C. police department for more than a decade. He's under intense scrutiny after U.S. Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered a probe into how key police department records, subject to a subpoena from 400 some people suing the city, disappeared or were destroyed after being handed over to Ryan's office. Nickles has promised the judge to get to the bottom of...

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Former postal clerk pleads to stealing $682,000 in stamps

A former post office window clerk pleaded guilty to charges that he stole nearly $700,000 in stamps so that a buddy could sell them on e-Bay. Marvin Lamont Foster, of Rosedale, Md., went into federal court in Baltimore on Thursday and admitted that he stole stamps by hundreds and thousands from June 2008 until March of this year. He then handed the stamps over to his friend, Kyle Mathias, 23, of Joppa, who sold them on the online auction house. The scheme netted some $682,000, federal prosecutors say in court papers. Foster, 54, admitted that he stole "coils" -- rolls of 100 stamps valued at $42 -- and "bricks" -- 2,000 stamps valued at $840 apiece -- and handed them...

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Longtime editor leaving Washingtonian

Washingtonian magazine's Editor Jack Limpert, a living institution at one of America's most successful city glossies, is stepping aside after 40 years, the magazine announced Thursday. Limpert is making way for Garrett Graff, a 28-year-old former blogger who has been with the magazine for one-tenth of Limpert's tenure. "I've been working hard in journalism for 50 years and I think I need some time to do some thinking and read some books," Limpert told The Examiner. The move is effective Sept. 1. Limpert will stay on as "editor at large" to help the younger gun make the transition. Graff said that he is well-positioned to capture the zeitgeist. "It's clear to...

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Mortgage attorney stripped of law license after $90k 'misappropriation'

A veteran mortgage and bankruptcy lawyer has been stripped of his D.C. law license after he was accused of helping himself to $90,000 in client funds. Nathan Wasser had been a licensed lawyer for more than 40 years, practicing mostly out of his Cumberland office. But in early February, he had to surrender his Maryland law license after ethics investigators accused him of having taken some $90,000 from client escrow funds and used them for undisclosed business and personal expenses. He has since been disbarred by Virginia and, last week, the D.C. Court of Appeals stripped him of his District license. The move was expected — D.C.'s ethics rules favor "reciprocal...

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Lawyers for D.C. special-needs kids bringing city back to court

Lawyers for thousands of special-needs children in the District of Columbia are taking the city back to court, alleging the Fenty administration is routinely violating their federal rights to a quality education. In a letter to D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles, the lawyers say they're going to ask U.S. Judge Paul Friedman to sanction the city for routinely violating federal deadlines on testing, treating and caring for children in the $300 million special education system. Mayor Adrian Fenty has said publicly that he would risk "everything" to fix the city's $1 billion school system. He has laid his bet on schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and her pledge to bring...

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Naval Academy officials had warned staff to look out for von Brunn

Accused Holocaust Museum gunman James von Brunn was put on a watch list after a rambling meeting with officials at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis two weeks before the fatal shooting of a museum security guard, documents obtained by The Examiner show. Von Brunn is charged with first-degree murder in the June 10 shooting death of guard Stephen Tyrone Johns. On May 29, von Brunn went to the Naval Academy in his hometown of Annapolis to complain about the academy's affirmative action policies. Cmdr. Mike Fulkerson met with von Brunn and told his superiors afterward that what he initially thought was "an amusing story" had more ominous overtones. "Turns out he was not just the...

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Navy Yard rookie cop killed in Fairfax crash

A rookie police officer with the U.S. Navy Yard was killed in a one-car accident, apparently falling asleep at the wheel after working double shifts for at least three days. Travis Harris, 27, died early Sunday morning in Fairfax County when his 2003 Ford Explorer veered off the road near the intersection of Sherwood Hall and Evening lanes in Mount Vernon and struck a tree. He had graduated from the police academy in March and was working as an officer at the Navy Yard. "He was a great, great officer," said Harris' supervisor, Lt. Bobby Eason. "He was a big guy, but he just laughed everything off." Harris had started off as a young crossing guard in Fairfax County...

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Nickles wants new shot at selling neighborhood quarantines

D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles is asking a federal appellate court for another chance to prove that his neighborhood barricades are constitutional. In an appeal filed Monday, Nickles says he wants the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to hear arguments in defense of his much-criticized neighborhood safety zones. Nickles' appeal says that the court "should hold that a properly tailored checkpoint may be reasonable, and hence Constitutional, in at least some circumstances when federal or District authorities act in response to specific, credible threats of imminent violence." Nickles and D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier erected the checkpoints last...

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After 'Nine Lives,' Barry gets a 10th tonight on national TV

"The Nine Lives of Marion Barry" » Directed by Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer » Premiering Monday on HBO at 9 p.m. » Re-running on HBO Aug. 13 at 9 a.m. and 7 p.m., Aug. 16 at 10:30 a.m., Aug. 22 at 3 p.m. and Aug. 31 at 6:10 a.m. » Also rebroadcast on HBO 2 on Aug. 12 at 8 p.m., Aug. 18 at 5 p.m., Aug. 24 at 2 a.m. and Aug. 29, 7:45 a.m. Marion Barry will get another close-up Monday evening as HBO broadcasts a documentary on D.C.'s mercurial "mayor for life." "The Nine Lives of Marion Barry" makes its prime-time debut at 9 p.m., just as the Ward 8 councilman is facing a new round of investigations into his...

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Auditor accuses Nickles of hindering probe of development agencies

D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles is being accused of obstructing a probe into hundreds of millions of public dollars' worth of development and construction projects, documents obtained by The Examiner show. City Auditor Deborah Nichols says she wants a look at the last few years of books of the Anacostia Waterfront Commission and the National Capital Revitalization Corp. but that Nickles is invoking attorney-client privilege to prevent access to important records. "It's quite clear that the [Attorney General's Office] is inexplicably attempting to subvert the auditor's authority,Ó Nichols wrote in a July 2 letter obtained by The Examiner. Nichols called the attorney...

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Judge rejects Baumann's efforts to stop investigation

Police union Chairman Kris Baumann once again has been turned aside in his efforts to stop the D.C. police department from investigating him over the leak of information related to a controversial barricade incident. Baumann says he is being illegally targeted by an internal affairs investigation into how the media obtained a recording of police conversations during a May 30 standoff with a gunman. The conversations lended credence to accusations that Mayor Adrian Fenty meddled in the standoff, and Baumann says in court documents he released the tape to expose government wrongdoing. But Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that Bauman's motion for an injunction was premature. It is the...

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Feds sue body armor company over defective vests

The Justice Department has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against a body armor manufacturer, accusing the company and its president of ignoring warnings that their vests were breaking down and endangering the lives of thousands of federal, state and local police officers. Justice Department lawyers say in court filings that First Choice Armor founder Edward Dovner knew his company's vests tended to break down in high heat and humidity but continued to sell thousands of the vests around the country. The suit, filed Monday, seeks unspecified millions in recovery under the False Claims Act. It's part of a wide-ranging Justice Department effort to crack down on body armor companies...

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Mendelson joins call for A.G.'s head

D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson Monday joined calls for D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles to resign amid allegations that city lawyers destroyed evidence in the controversial mass arrests of hundreds of people caught up in anti-globalization protests. "He shouldn't have been appointed in the first place," said Mendelson, D-at large, who chairs the council's Judiciary Committee. "It was my view then, and it continues to be my view." Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, has publicly called for Nickles, Mayor Adrian Fenty's most trusted and powerful adviser, to go. Nickles is under pressure after U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ordered an inquiry into how evidence related to...

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Man who once promised to ‘lock up’ Jesus confronts very mortal Marion Barry

Marion Barry has taken on federal and local law enforcement officials several times in his long career. He’s still undefeated. But in Bob Bennett, D.C.’s “mayor for life” meets an entirely different adversary. After all, not many prosecutors can claim to have jailed Jesus. In his 2008 memoir, Bennett details his time as a junior prosecutor. One afternoon in 1967, a haggard woman “came to the office and complained that there was a serious problem in her neighborhood and that no one would help her or even talk to her about it.” “Mr. Bennett,” the woman said, “I am a God-fearing woman but I must tell you that Jesus has been causing a...

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A Brawler in the Courtroom

As a law student, Bob Bennett took a job at a moving company to help pay the bills. His older co-workers, full of resentment at the college boy in their midst, picked on him relentlessly. One day he had enough and, as he recalled in his 2008 book, “In The Ring,” “foolishly stood up to” Joe, the biggest of the bunch, “a real animal.” When Joe “charged like a raging bull,” Bennett said he grabbed a two-by-four board and smacked Joe across the face with it. Joe “fell to the ground, blood pouring from his nose and mouth,” Bennett recounted. “He gave me a toothless smile and said, ‘Kid, you’re OK.’...

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Federal judge wants probe of missing police records

A federal judge has called for an investigation into the D.C. police department after officials there destroyed key evidence related to a controversial mass arrest of anti-globalization protesters in 2002. Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said Wednesday he wanted to get to the bottom of the disappearance of police records of the orders and movements of police officers in a massive crackdown of protesters rallying against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Hundreds of innocent bystanders in Pershing Park were swept up by the police dragnet. Some 400 people have filed a class-action civil rights lawsuit. Police Chief Cathy Lanier, then a deputy, ordered those arrested to be "hog...

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Barry aide to meet with investigators; FBI reached out to whistle-blower

Investigators will sit down with a key aide to ex-D.C. Mayor Marion Barry as they try to ferret out whether he broke the law when he lavished a contract on a girlfriend and public grants to a series of questionable nonprofit groups, The Examiner has learned. Brenda Richardson was the driving force behind several nonprofit groups in Barry’s poverty-stricken Ward 8, sources said. She’s scheduled to meet with staff from the inspector general’s office this week, said a source familiar with the ongoing investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity. Richardson formerly worked for Barry and the nonprofit groups she ran shared the same addresses as Barry’s...

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People v. Barry? Ex-mayor’s long battles with law enforcement

Marion Barry has been tracked by law enforcement for decades. But for just as long, he has slipped from the grasp of federal prosecutors. He is most famous, or infamous, for his 1990 arrest at the Vista International Hotel, when he was captured on videotape with an ex-girlfriend and charged with smoking crack. Barry was indicted on 14 counts of wrongdoing, including perjury, but he and his lawyers were able to spin the arrest as a case of the white establishment striking back at a black champion of the poor and oppressed. He was convicted of misdemeanor possession charges — and capitalizing on the unpopularity of the Vista raid, soon recaptured the mayor’s seat. The Vista...

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Federal prosecutors, FBI start probe into Barry’s contracting

Federal prosecutors and FBI agents have opened a wide-ranging investigation into whether former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry broke federal laws by lavishing contracts on a girlfriend and on a host of questionable nonprofit groups, The Examiner has learned. Barry, 73, was arrested by U.S. Park Police earlier this month on stalking charges after a confrontation with estranged girlfriend Donna Watts-Brighthaupt. It later emerged that Barry had given Watts-Brighthaupt a $5,000-per-month city contract shortly after they began dating. The Watts-Brighthaupt scandal led to further revelations that Barry had steered even more taxpayer dollars into dubious nonprofit groups operating in his stricken...

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Boilermaker's widow gets new shot at asbestos suit

The widow of a retired D.C. maintenance man will get a new chance to claim that she is owed compensation as a result of her husband's death after the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that a lower judge improperly tossed her asbestos suit. Plummer Debnam died of lung cancer and asbestos exposure in early 2004, after filing a lawsuit against several manufacturers, including Crane Co. He argued that the Stamford, Conn.-based engineering firm was at least partially liable for his asbestos-related illness because it took over the company that had originally manufactured the boilers on which he had spent his career working. After Debnam's death, his wife, Mildred, continued the litigation. Judge...

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Cheh calls for moratorium on earmarks

Examiner Exclusive D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh said her colleagues should go on an anti-pork diet, calling publicly Thursday for a moratorium on city earmarks. "We will be looking at them very, very closely. And they may not survive," Cheh told The Washington Examiner in a phone interview. "Certainly I think they should end until we're satisfied that there will be no misallocation." The council will meet Friday for the first time since one of their number, Ward 8 Democrat Marion Barry, was accused of steering lucrative public funds to a woman with whom he was romantically involved. Every council member has tagged taxpayers' dollars for favored charities and...

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Watergate Hotel draws no bids at auction

Singing the Blues Bad news for D.C. hotels is bad news for D.C.'s economy: » About 28,000 employees work in city hotels. » Second largest employer, behind government » Nearly $5.5 billion in revenue Source: Hotel Association of Washington, D.C. No bidders stepped in to buy the iconic Watergate Hotel at auction Tuesday, leaving a New York mortgage company holding on to one of D.C.'s biggest white elephants. About 10 bidders paid $1 million each for the opportunity to bid on the Watergate, which has sat empty since 2007, but none was willing to go above lender PB Capital Corp.'s $25 million opening bid. The hotel is part of the legendary complex on...

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Justice's training grounds heading to South Carolina

The Justice Department is moving 250 jobs in its main legal training center from Washington to South Carolina, officials announced. The department has signed a 20-year lease with the University of South Carolina in Columbia and will move staff from current headquarters in D.C. farther south, Deputy Attorney General David Ogden announced. The government needs some four years to renovate the newly leased space. The deal, announced Monday, expands Justice's $20 million National Advocacy Center, main training ground for the government's lawyers. Employees won't be forced to make the move, spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said. "No one is losing their jobs," she told The Examiner....

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Officer in SWAT standoff dispute asks for transfer

The D.C. police lieutenant at the center of a controversy over whether Mayor Adrian Fenty meddled in a tense standoff with a wounded gunman has asked to be relieved of his command, The Examiner has learned. “… I have encountered some issues with team moral [sic] which have influenced my abilities to effectively lead,” Lt. Scott Dignan wrote in a memo to Police Chief Cathy Lanier. “At this point and with the recent false allegations, with regret I feel I am no longer in a capacity to lead this team of officers.” Dignan was a leader in the department’s Emergency Response Team, D.C.’s version of a SWAT team. He was the point man in a May 30...

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Appeals court disallows D.C. police checkpoints

A U.S. appeals court has slapped the District of Columbia with a restraining order forbidding Mayor Adrian Fenty and Police Chief Cathy Lanier from erecting any more police barricades to prevent violence. Last summer after a spate of shootings in the Trinidad neighborhood, Fenty and Lanier tried to quarantine the neighborhood. They threw up checkpoints to stop motorists, check IDs, and turn back anyone without "legitimate business" in Trinidad. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Friday that the quarantine violated the Constitution. "The harm to the rights of appellants is apparent," Chief Judge David B. Sentelle wrote for the panel, referring to...

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Fenty team posts new rules for private clinics, schools

The Fenty administration is issuing sweeping new rules governing the pricey private clinics and schools where thousands of mentally ill or disabled D.C. children have been sent for decades. Proposed new special ed regulations » Require schools and clinics to be certified every three years » Require staff at clinics and schools to be certified by state and federal officials » Give the city the right to surprise inspections » Forbid restraints and solitary confinement unless it’s an emergency » Forbid schools and clinics from hiring or partnering with lawyers who have represented parents in special ed litigation The new rules, posted on the city’s...

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Big business law firm hit with malpractice suit

A Catholic broadcasting company has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against one of D.C.’s biggest business law firms, alleging that its lawyers botched a television licensing deal, costing the company untold millions. The North American Catholic Educational Programming Foundation Inc. says that Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice and its former partner, Howard J. Barr, blew the deadline for filing an appeal with the Federal Communications Commission, which “injured” the foundation “and caused it to suffer millions of dollars in damages.” The federal lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in D.C., also claims unspecified “other errors” by Barr...

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Washington Post sells access, White House denies involvement

The Washington Post has long prided itself on its access to the capital's elite. Now, it appears, the paper is willing to sell that access. In a flier circulated to Beltway lobbyists, the Post touted a "salon" program which gives "exclusive access" to "Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds" for between $25,000 and $250,000. (View an image of the flier.) White House officials said privately Thursday that the administration had no idea that the Post was peddling access to its officials. The first event, entitled "Health-Care Reform: Better or Worse for Americans" is scheduled for...

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NTSB: Part replaced before Metro crash failed

A part of the track circuit that lost contact with a Metro train moments before it slammed into an idling train last week had been replaced five days earlier and "periodically lost its ability to detect trains" after the repair, federal investigators said Wednesday. Records reviewed by the National Transportation Safety Board revealed that Metro engineers replaced part of the track circuit June 17, five days before the crash between the Takoma and Fort Totten stations that killed nine and injured more than 70 riders. It was the worst accident in Metrorail's 33-year history. The circuit, which helps keep track of trains on the rail system, is emerging as the most likely culprit...

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Fenty interfered in standoff with gunman, records show

An investigation of the District’s top police union official grew out of a dispute in which police officers who coaxed a gunman out of a barricaded home accused Mayor Adrian Fenty and Police Chief Cathy Lanier of improperly meddling in the negotiations, according to police records. Union Chairman Kris Baumann filed a federal lawsuit this week, accusing Lanier of illegally targeting him in an investigation of rank-and-file complaints stemming from a May 30 standoff with Terrence Moore. The internal investigation commenced after The Examiner made inquiries into whether members of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Emergency Response Team were ordered to lob tear gas into the...

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Mother, daughter, file $100M suit in fatal Metro crash

Two women who claimed to have been injured in the deadly June 22 Metro crash filed a $100 million lawsuit against the transit agency Monday, alleging that rail officials ignored a deteriorating system. Ivey Epps and her mother, Bernea Bell, say they were on the Red Line train 112 when it rammed into a waiting train June 22. They claim to have suffered "severe and painful injuries" and are blaming Metro officials for not inspecting the system's brakes and not replacing the 1000 Series car that crumpled upon impact, killing nine and injuring up to 80 others. The suit was brought by Florida attorney Willie Gary, whom the Wall Street Journal once dubbed "flamboyant" for...

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Fenty administration routinely destroyed government e-mails

The Fenty administration routinely destroyed official e-mails, throwing thousands of public records into the electronic garbage pile even as the city council was drafting legislation that would have prevented it, a top city official has admitted under oath. In late 2007, Mayor Adrian Fenty tried to give himself the authority to destroy electronic records every eight weeks. After hearing months of outrage from government watchdog groups and facing emergency legislation that would have forbidden the practice, Fenty announced that he was withdrawing the proposal early last year. But the administration was destroying the records every two months until at least May 2008, Office of the Chief...

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Court puts pot conviction on hold for hearing on police bias

A man convicted of stashing marijuana in his jacket will get a new chance to interrogate one of the officers who arrested him after the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the officer might have been trying to curry favor with prosecutors to ward off a brutality investigation. Ricardo Cunningham was arrested in 2005 and later convicted of felony possession of marijuana. He served 60 days in jail. At trial, though, prosecutors admitted that they were investigating Officer Kevin Whaley for excessive force in another case. Cunningham wanted to cross-examine Whaley about the investigation. He wanted to suggest that Whaley was biased by the investigation and had a reason to curry favor with...

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Commuters frustrated over ‘chaotic’ aftermath of fatal crash

This week’s deadly Metro crash wreaked havoc with rush hour commutes, leaving travelers stuck on buses and trains for hours at a time while dealing with a tangle of contradictory instructions on how best to reach their destinations. Part of the Red Line remained blocked through Wednesday, two days after two densely packed commuter trains collided, killing nine and injuring at least 70. Commuters were forced to take shuttles around the Takoma station. It wasn’t going well for many. “It was just chaotic,” said Amanda Nicholas, 23, of Oxon Hill. After taking the Green Line from home to Fort Totten, Nicholas said, she sat and waited on a bus. Then she was ordered off...

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Metro crash victim: Mandy Doolittle, 59

Mandy Doolittle, 59, was on her way home from her job at the American Nurses’ Association in Silver Spring when the crash occurred. “She was a bright spot in everybody’s day,” her boss, Jeanne Floyd, told The Examiner. “She was just attuned to everyone around her. Her day was, ‘What can I do for you?’” Doolittle was originally from Texas and loved traveling out West. She and Floyd, another Westerner, called each other, “cowgirl.” Doolittle and her partner were planning on a trip next month, Floyd recalled. Jada Leng, another coworker of Doolittle’s, had been on an earlier train back to the District and saw the...

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$207 million drug charges dropped by feds

One of the most ballyhooed cases in drug enforcement history fizzled Monday when prosecutors announced they were backing away from charges against a man arrested in suburban Maryland they once claimed was one of the world’s leading drug dealers. Zhenli Ye Gon was arrested at a Chinese restaurant in Wheaton in July 2007 after disappearing from Mexico. Authorities recovered some $207 million in crisp $100 bills from his home in Mexico City and accused him of being a key supplier of the raw materials for a methamphetamine cartel. In U.S. court and in its papers, though, authorities said that one of their witnesses had recanted and another had refused to testify. “The...

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Who watches the watchers?

The D.C. police department has never been subject to an independent audit. Now its executives are scrambling to account for missing money from fines that was supposed to help victims of serious crimes in the District. The District’s finances are reviewed annually in the legally mandated Comprehensive Annual Financial Review. That’s the same audit that missed the $48 million property tax scam organized by Harriette Walters, a multimillion-dollar bid-rigging scandal in the technology office, and millions in fraud and waste in the city’s public schools. Some are wondering whether there ought to be forensic audits for individual agencies. Forensic audits are focused on...

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Thousands in fines go missing in D.C.

D.C. police officials can’t account for thousands of dollars in cash or receipts from nearly 200 misdemeanor cases that were supposed to help support the city’s victims compensation fund, The Examiner has learned. City officials have opened an internal investigation to determine what happened to the money, Attorney General Peter Nickles confirmed. “At a minimum, it certainly raises questions about their bookkeeping and accounting practices,” said Councilwoman Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3. “And we’ve got to get to the bottom of it.” People who are arrested for minor crimes, like drinking in public or having expired license plates, can pay small fines and...

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Accused Holocaust museum gunman to appear in federal court

Accused Holocaust museum gunman James von Brunn is scheduled to appear in federal court Monday on charges of first-degree murder in the shooting death of guard Stephen Johns. Von Brunn has been hospitalized since a brief but furious gun battle at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 10. He was scheduled to be in court last week, but a judge ruled he was not healthy enough to do so. Federal officials said his condition has approved marginally, and the judge may rule differently today. Prosecutors say von Brunn walked up to the museum and, as Johns held the door, pulled an antique rifle from under his trench coat and shot Johns in the chest. Johns’ colleagues opened...

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Voting nonprofit sues former worker

Project Vote, the nonprofit group that helped sweep then-Sen. Barack Obama into the White House, has filed a federal lawsuit against a former employee who has accused the group of illegally colluding with Obama’s campaign for its get-out-the-vote drive.

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Training backlog taking D.C. police off the streets

Nearly one out of every five D.C. police officers hasn’t been through legally mandated training in basic lifesaving skills, The Examiner has learned. City law requires every officer to attend three days of training in cardiopulmonary resuscitation and basic first aid every calendar year, but about 680 officers still haven’t been trained from 2008, internal documents obtained by The Examiner show. That’s about 17 percent of the force. Inspector Victor Brito, who heads the D.C. police academy, acknowledged “A little bit more than 600 officers ... haven’t completed training. “We’ve had for many years [where] there have been training delays,”...

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Exclusive: Museum guard 'held door' for killer

Holocaust Museum security guard Stephen Johns held the door open for his alleged killer. Johns, 39, died Wednesday after being shot in the chest at the entrance to the Holocaust Museum. Authorities are preparing charges against an 89-year-old self-admitted white supremacist, James von Brunn. Von Brunn was himself wounded in a brief but furious gun battle with Johns’ colleagues. The gunfight was captured on the museum’s security cameras, a federal law enforcement source said. The source, who viewed the tapes, spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. The source said the tapes show Johns holding the door open as von Brunn enters. Von Brunn then...

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Guard killed at Holocaust Museum; accused gunman in critical condition

A man who authorities said had ties to hate groups walked into the Holocaust Museum Wednesday afternoon and opened fire with a .22 caliber rifle, killing a security guard before he was shot by two other guards. Stephen Tyrone Johns, 39, who worked at the museum for six years, died after being taken to George Washington University Hospital. Another security guard was mildly injured by flying glass. Police sources identified the attacker as James W. von Brunn, 88, from Maryland. He has ties to white supremacist groups and was on a U.S. Secret Service watch list, sources said. He was in critical condition last night at George Washington hospital. Police said they found a notebook in von...

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D.C. would have fared poorly in personal freedoms study, advocates say

The District of Columbia wasn’t included in the study of personal freedoms by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. That’s a good thing for D.C. leaders, human rights advocates and libertarians say. “If the District had been included in this study, we probably would have ranked 85th out of 51,” said Kris Baumann, chairman of the D.C. police union. “Just look at the Byzantine level of regulation and laws that govern every aspect of the District’s life.” In the last two years, Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration has handed out automatic rifles to police officers, sanctioned warrantless door-to-door searches, tried to give...

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No. 2 internal affairs cop shifted to 3rd District after overtime flap

A top official in the D.C. police department’s internal affairs division has been transferred, barely two months after his agency was accused of turning a blind eye to corruption in the city’s court overtime program. Inspector Jacob Kishter was transferred into the police’s 3rd District last week from internal affairs, where he was the second-highest ranking officer, the department announced on a neighborhood Web site. Kishter replaces former Inspector Edward Delgado, who ran afoul of city Attorney General Peter Nickles last year when he urged neighbors in the gentrifying Columbia Heights neighborhood to lobby Nickles for a tougher stance on juvenile crime. Delgado was...

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Teen's escape raises questions about new youth jail

A teenager was able to scramble away from a brand-new $45 million juvenile detention home in part because authorities didn’t believe any child was capable of climbing the fence. The escape, coming the day after the facility officially opened, has raised questions among D.C. Council members about the management of D.C.’s youth offender program. The boy, whose name The Examiner is withholding, climbed a few feet up a pole near the sliding gate at the New Beginnings Center in unincorporated Laurel, scrambled onto a nearby roof and then jumped to the ground and freedom, according to Councilman Tommy Wells. “I think they did not believe a kid could shimmy up there,”...

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Juvenile facility flooded days before opening

Barely two days before officials cut the ribbon on the District’s $45 million New Beginnings juvenile hall, the campus was flooded by last week’s rainstorms, The Examiner has learned. City officials blamed clogged drains for the deluge at the new juvenile hall and promised that the problem would be remedied. Pictures obtained by The Examiner show the campus was under several inches of brackish water, which flooded staff cars in a nearby lot. “I don’t know how they’re going to fix it,” said Tasha Williams, chairwoman of the corrections officers union at New Beginnings. “I’m not sure it’s going to be resolvable.” At least three...

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Act proves lucrative to trial lawyers

The False Claims Act has been very good to some trial lawyers. Firms such as D.C.’s Phillips & Cohen have won billions since the mid-1980s by bringing whistle-blower suits against government contractors. “A lot more has been saved in deterrence,” Phillips & Cohen lawyer Peter Chatfield said. Some law firms have carved out niches by bringing False Claims Act cases in single government agencies. Take Ashcraft & Gerel, a D.C. personal injury firm that has cornered the market on fraud litigation stemming from General Services Administration contracts. In March, the firm obtained a record $128 million settlement from Network Appliance Inc. John Boese, a...

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Blowing whistle pays off big for fortunate few

For the fortunate few, exposing corruption can be their winning lottery ticket. Since 1986, more than $20 billion has been paid out in fraud lawsuits brought by whistleblowers. It has made some midlevel bureaucrats very rich. “I admit it: The money also did help,” said John Schilling, an accountant cum government witness who helped expose massive Medicare fraud by the hospital chain Columbia HCA. Schilling and another whistleblower shared a $100 million reward for their efforts. “I can also be proud to my own family — my own kids — and show that I didn’t succumb to peer pressure,” he said. “I did the right thing.” On Friday,...

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Pizza parlors targeted in crime crackdown

D.C. Councilman Jim Graham says he has found the culprit behind D.C.’s persistent crime problems: pizza. The former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren says pizza parlors in the hip Adams Morgan neighborhood are becoming breeding grounds for mischief because they stay open too late. He’s drafting legislation that will crack down on the walk-off eateries. “Behaving the way they do in terms of music, in terms of letting people hang out and also in terms of tolerating a certain level of violence,” the Ward 1 Democrat listed among his concerns to WJLA-TV in an interview. Adams Morgan, which Graham represents, is one of D.C.’s few night spots, but...

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Hardships plague area jails

The capital region’s jails have been marred by trouble for years. Both the Justice Department and the Prince George’s County state’s attorney continue to investigate the case of prisoner Ronnie White, found dead in his cell after being charged with killing a Prince George’s County cop. The county medical examiner has determined that White was strangled and his death was a homicide. In the last month, at least two Prince George’s Correctional officers have been put on leave — one a supervisor who was suspended amid allegations that she had a sexual relationship with one of her wards, another a guard accused of forging a boss’ signature so he...

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Cops decry parking tickets during court visits

The D.C. police department’s crackdown on parking scofflaws in Judiciary Square has uncovered an unlikely culprit: D.C. police officers. “My God, it’s crazy,” said Detective Mary Bonaccorsy, who says she’s getting about $80 in parking tickets per week. “We’re fighting a no-win battle.” The evidence is anecdotal — D.C. police spokeswoman Gwendolyn Crump didn’t respond to requests for statistical information — but several cops interviewed by The Examiner say that they’re getting tagged by their fellow officers as they try to get work done in headquarters, appear before grand juries or testify in court. “I just...

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D.C. lawyer disbarred after admitting to dodging taxes

A criminal defense lawyer has been stripped of his law license for two years after he pleaded guilty to dodging his taxes. Navron Ponds was disbarred Thursday in a terse, one-page order by the D.C. Court of Appeals. He had already been disbarred in Maryland. Thursday’s order winds up nearly a decade of litigation surrounding Ponds, who went from criminal defense lawyer to criminal defendant after the U.S. Attorney’s Office charged him with ducking his taxes in 1988, 1990 to 1994, and again from 1996 to 1999. The case began after Ponds was accused of taking a luxury automobile from a drug dealer and helping his client hide the vehicle from the government. After an 11-day...

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Examiner takes home honor for D.C local news coverage

The Washington Examiner has been given top journalism honors by a coalition of local good government advocates. The Federation of Citizens Associations of the District of Columbia feted The Examiner on Tuesday night at its 99th anniversary gala at Fort McNair. The Examiner was given the group’s Fourth Estate award for its commitment to covering — and uncovering — local news in the nation’s capital. “During the current demise of media giants and the diminishing coverage of local news, The Washington Examiner newspaper has chosen a path less traveled in serving the reading public,” the group said in its citation. “The Washington Examiner has...

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Effort to stop police barricades back in court

Police Chief Cathy Lanier’s plan to quarantine violent neighborhoods will have another day in court Friday as a civil liberties group tries to keep the District from throwing up any more barricades. A three-judge panel will hear the appeal from Partnership for Civil Justice, a nonprofit group that sued the city after Lanier sealed off the violent Trinidad neighborhood last summer. The 15-year-old civil rights group tried to obtain a preliminary injunction while it litigates a class-action civil rights suit against the city. Its efforts were turned aside by a lower court judge late last year. The partnership has appealed, and on Friday, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals...

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D.C. attorney general bars officials' testimony in firetruck probe

D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles will refuse to let city officials testify before a council panel investigating the widening scandal surrounding the donation of city rescue vehicles to a Caribbean beach town. Council members Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, and Phil Mendelson, D-at large, have subpoenaed contracting official Robin Booth and Deputy Fire Chief Ronald Gill in hopes of finding out how the city came to donate a used firetruck and an ambulance to the city of Sosua, Dominican Republic. In a letter to the officials sent late Tuesday, Nickles said he wouldn’t make Booth or Gill available unless Cheh and Mendelson secure private lawyers for the pair. “There are bar ethics...

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Report: Child welfare agency still inadequate

D.C. officials have stabilized the city’s child welfare bureaucracy from last year’s collapse, but thousands of children are still languishing in a backward system, federal court monitors have concluded. In January 2008, the public learned that welfare bureaucrats had ignored desperate calls to help Banita Jacks’ four daughters, whose bodies were later found on the floor of their ramshackle squatters’ home in Southeast. After that, the backlog of abuse and neglect cases swelled to more than 1,800. The backlog has now closed to about 30, federally appointed monitors at the Center for the Study of Social Policy have written in a new report. But the system...

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Key councilman takes D.C. attorney general to task

D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles’ crusade against special education lawyers and his hardball negotiations with the city’s unions are drawing fire from the chairman of the D.C. Council’s judiciary committee. In a recent letter to Nickles, Phil Mendelson, D-at large, says Nickles is “embarrassing” the city by bringing lawsuits against special-ed lawyers and by not paying the city’s dues in arbitration cases with the city’s employees unions. Mendelson says the attorney general is trying to intimidate victims of city incompetence by driving up their court costs. “Public sector stands on the dual pillars of finding justice and serving...

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CDC: Schools can reopen despite flu

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after weeks of hysterical coverage on the swine flu, on Tuesday encouraged schools and businesses to reopen after deciding that the virus isn’t as dangerous as once thought. Back to school Schools reopening in the area: » Rockville High School » Vansville Elementary (Beltsville) » University Park Elementary (Hyattsville) » Montpelier Elementary (Laurel) Still closed: » Our Lady of Victory (D.C.) About 500 schools had been shuttered around the country, four of them in Washington’s Maryland suburbs and one in the District. “The overall conclusion, having studied very carefully...

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Zoo shuts panda exhibit down during pregnancy watch

National Zoo officials have shut down their panda exhibit, hoping that their star, Mei Xiang, is in a family way. Zoo officials told The Examiner on Monday that Mei Xiang, a 10-year-old giant panda, has been “denning,” pulling bamboo to the quiet nooks of her cage, eating less and cradling food and other objects. “For us, it’s part of the waiting game,” primates and pandas curator Lisa Stevens said. Evolution has conspired against pandas and makes conception a touch-and-go matter. “It’s difficult because female pandas only ovulate once a year,” she said. Male pandas are, um, hard to motivate, too: The zoo attempted artificial...

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‘Automated’ radar racked up $74M in police OT

The D.C. police department has spent nearly $74 million in overtime payments to have officers sit in cars monitoring the city’s “automated” photo radar guns, records show. The money spent represents almost four-fifths of the revenues earned from the tickets the radar guns are issuing, records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show. Washington is one of several cities to use photo radar. The cameras are hooked up to radar guns, which are placed in squad cars. Whenever a car exceeds the speed limit, the radar gun is supposed to activate the camera. Photos are then taken, license plates are analyzed and tickets mailed to the car owners’ homes. The...

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On the brink? Not just yet

The swine flu might be spreading around the world quickly, and CNN has been running screen captions like “DEADLY FLU” and “ON THE BRINK OF PANDEMIC.” But doctors say that doesn’t mean the end is near just yet. “Natural selection is on our side,” said University of Maryland scientist Steven Salzberg. “It may mutate into something that’s not so infectious and go away on its own.” Salzberg said Thursday that a virus has a better evolutionary advantage when it doesn’t lay waste to its hosts. “The most effective way to be a virus is to have its victims walking around, spreading it,” he said. In fact, pandemics...

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Swine flu hits World Bank, White House

The swine flu came to Washington’s corridors of power, with new cases reported Thursday at the World Bank and White House. Probable cases of the illness were detected for the first time in Virginia, and the number of Maryland residents believed to have the flu virus rose to eight, including a probable case in Montgomery County. Federal and state officials have identified more than 130 cases in 17 states. On Thursday, the White House confirmed that a member of President Barack Obama’s government entourage on the recent trip to Mexico came down with flulike symptoms and that he passed them on to his family in Anne Arundel County — three of whom tested...

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Study gave addicts morphine, then cut them off to see effects

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs spent at least $7.8 million in a secretive experiment to determine whether drug addicts become hyperactive when they suddenly lose access to morphine, documents obtained by The Examiner show. The VA recruited 69 heroin addicts and began giving them regular doses of morphine. The scientists then cut off the morphine doses at intervals to see what would happen, internal reports show. The decade-old study, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, offers the fullest picture yet of widespread government trials that gave hard-core drugs to addicts. Patients in the 1994-95 study suffered 787 “adverse events” from constipation to heart...

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Government injecting veterans with cocaine for drug addiction research

Drug-addicted veterans are being injected with cocaine by researchers at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in taxpayer-funded studies, The Examiner has learned. The study subjects are being given the injections as part of a search for medicines that researchers hope will block cocaine absorption in the body, said Timothy O’Leary, the VA’s acting director of research and development. All the subjects were recruited because they were addicted to cocaine, O’Leary said. About 40 volunteers — most of them veterans — are being given injections at VA labs in Kansas City and San Antonio, he added. Hundreds of veterans have apparently been used as human...

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D.C. lawyer suspended as ethics probe is pending

The D.C. Court of Appeals suspended a lawyer as the District’s legal ethics board investigates charges that she tried to inflate her winnings from a lawsuit. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals ordered Terri Lea to be suspended Thursday for at least 30 days and ordered her to cooperate with an ongoing ethics investigation, alleging that she tried to increase a lawsuit award from $13,500 to $50,000. The discipline stems from a 1999 lawsuit in which Lea was a plaintiff against a real estate company. After winning the case, she and her lawyer claimed that she was entitled to $50,000 and that her demand for $13,500 was “a typo.” The judge in her lawsuit was...

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Mother, daughter accused of stealing from program that help D.C.’s blind

A mother and daughter have been charged with stealing more than $280,000 that was supposed to be used to help some of the District’s blind residents get a chance to earn a living. Barbara Stevenson-Jones, 70, and her daughter, Pamela R. Stevenson, 51, owned Wellness, a city contractor given hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to recruit, train and support blind people who had obtained food vending licenses. Prosecutors charged in an indictment unsealed Friday that the pair instead diverted money into their own accounts and used it on themselves. The money included funds given to them by the blind vendors that was supposed to be used to repair and maintain equipment,...

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Mother, daughter stole from program that help D.C.’s blind

A mother and daughter were indicted Friday on charges that they stole more than $100,000 that was supposed to be used to help some of the District’s blind residents get a chance to earn a living. Barbara Stevenson-Jones and her daughter, Pamela R. Stevenson owned Wellness, a city contractor given hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to recruit, train and support blind people who had obtained food vending machine licenses. Prosecutors allege in an indictment unsealed Friday that the pair instead diverted money into their own accounts and used it on...

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Troubled Freddie Mac expected to announce ‘terrible’ earnings

Freddie Mac’s top financial officer apparently committed suicide just weeks before the mortgage company was scheduled to release its latest financial statement. David Kellermann reportedly was found hanging in the basement of his Vienna home early Wednesday. The company, formally named the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., is scheduled to release its first-quarter results May 14. “Their earnings are going to be terrible,” Morningstar analyst Matthew Warren said. Like its bigger sister company, Fannie Mae — or the Federal National Mortgage Association — Freddie was founded to insure long-term, cheap home mortgages. The McLean company currently backs about...

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Recent suicides linked to financial woes

Adolf Merckle — German billionaire jumped in front of a train in January after losing hundreds of millions in the markets. Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet — French nobleman and financier slashed his wrists two days before Christmas 2008. Steven L. Good — Chicago real estate executive shot himself in the head in January after publicly worrying about the collapsing market. Dr. Daniel Z. Lieberman, a George Washington University professor of psychiatry, said suicides can be triggered by reports of related suicides. “Whenever somebody commits suicide, it increases the risks for anybody who will be exposed to it,” he said. Lieberman said there was no...

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Freddie Mac CFO found dead in apparent suicide

The acting chief financial officer for Freddie Mac was found dead in his Vienna home early Tuesday in an apparent suicide, according to Fairfax County police. David Kellermann, 41, had served as the top financial officer for the government-run mortgage insurer since the government take over in September. Police said there were no signs of foul play. The McLean-based Federal Home Mortgage Corp. has lost billions. It received nearly $60 billion in government bailout funds. Susan Unger, who lives across the street from the Kellermanns in the tree-lined Hunter Mills Estate, was awakened about 4:30 a.m. by a fire truck, an ambulance and five police cars outside her home. "I would...

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Freddie Mac CFO found dead in apparent suicide

The acting chief financial officer for Freddie Mac was found dead in his Vienna home early Tuesday in an apparent suicide, according to Fairfax County police. David Kellermann, 41, had served as the top financial officer for the government-run mortgage insurer since the government take over in September. Police said there were no signs of foul play. The McLean-based Federal Home Mortgage Corp. has lost billions. It received nearly $60 billion in government bailout funds. Susan Unger, who lives across the street from the Kellermanns in the tree-lined Hunter Mills Estate, was awakened about 4:30 a.m. by a fire truck, an ambulance and five police cars outside her home. "I would...

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Both sides still claim gains from landmark gun case

The Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller was the biggest victory for gun rights advocates in the modern era. Last year, the court ruled for the first time in history that Americans have an inalienable right to own firearms — and to use them to protect themselves. So why don’t firearms advocates feel better? “I’m guessing that a lot of the increase [in gun sales] is due to hysteria promoted by gun-rights groups and the gun industry,” Johns Hopkins sociologist Daniel Webster told The Examiner in an e-mail. “It’s not a very rational argument. ... The Heller decision clearly indicates that you can’t institute broad-scale gun...

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Gun sales jump in D.C. area

Gun sales are skyrocketing in the capital region. Fears that a changing political climate will lead to gun control and a Supreme Court decision striking down D.C.’s firearm laws are combining to create a run on local weapons sales, experts said. “Business is great,” said Bill Kelley, own of The Gun Center of Frederick. “The gun industry, like everything else, was going into a recession. All of the sudden, after November, the entire country decided they had to have [guns] and have them now.” In Virginia, the state police had 60 percent more requests for firearms background checks in November compared with the year before, records obtained by The Examiner...

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Live digital TV to debut on area cell phones, laptops

Washington will be the nation’s first television market to test free digital television broadcasts to cellular phones, laptops and car entertainment systems, broadcast officials announced Monday. Hold the phone? D.C.-area stations testing the new technology (and their corporate parents): » WPXW, Channel 66 (Ion) » WRC, Channel 4 (NBC) » WETA, Channel 26 (PBS) » WUSA, Channel 9 (Gannett) » WTTG, Channel 5 (Fox) Many cell phone companies already offer paid subscription services, giving customers access to their favorite television shows — but not live broadcasts. But Monday’s announcement, made at a national broadcasters convention in Las...

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Murder convictions overturned for 3 gang members

Three gang members who were found guilty in the beating death of a theology student had their first-degree murder convictions overturned because the judge gave improper instructions to the jury. Warren Helm died in the street outside the Diversite night club in Northwest, an innocent victim of a vicious gang fight that had started inside the club. After Helm jumped out of his friend’s car to help a homeless man being beaten and kicked by the gang members, the gang members turned on him. He was chased down, stabbed and slashed repeatedly, and beaten. Five men, all members of the Mara R street gang, were convicted of first-degree murder in Helm’s death in 1999. But a...

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Ex-official defends federal program to give crack, other drugs to addicts

As questions mount over the federal government’s approval and production of cocaine and other hard-core drugs for testing on addicts, a former top Washington official defended the research as necessary for the greater good. “It’s an important ethical issue and I’m glad you raise it, but holy cow, there’s so much more important stuff to focus on,” Bertha K. Madras said in a phone interview from her Harvard office Friday. “Twenty-three percent of people who show up in health care settings are in need of an [anti-drug] intervention. We need a strategic plan for that.” Madras was President George W. Bush’s deputy director for demand...

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DC city workers blocked from Washington Examiner's Web site

D.C. workers trying to log on to The Examiner's Web site for local news Friday morning got a note from the city technology office saying that "Access to this web page has been restricted." Access to Web sites of rival news organizations, including the Washington Post, was free and clear. The D.C. technology office is in turmoil with the arrests of three former employees all charged with bribery in a phony invoice/timesheet scandal. The Examiner was the first to report that accused ringleader Yusuf Acar talked about how open corruption was in the technology office. Told about the restricted site, Fenty spokeswoman Mafara Hobson logged onto her computer to confirm she didn't...

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Federal programs gave addicts street drugs

The federal government is giving crack and powder cocaine, morphine, and other hard-core drugs to taxpayer-funded researchers for testing on addicts, The Examiner has learned. For decades, the government has authorized, funded and lobbied for studies in which otherwise illegal drugs were given to addicts in cities such as Washington, Bethesda, Baltimore, New York, Minneapolis and San Antonio. The studies continue today and have an array of aims, from documenting the ways cocaine warps the brain to the intensity of pain from morphine withdrawal. Government records obtained by The Examiner show that the researchers gave test subjects: - Morphine at the Veterans Administration in...

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Subjects’ choice: Cocaine or cash

Dr. Herbert Kleber used to help the government fight drug abuse. Now he’s using the government to give drugs to addicts. Government Drug Experiments - Federal programs gave addicts street drugs - Subjects’ choice: Cocaine or cash - Clinical notes: Doctors describe drug experiments A former top anti-drug official during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, Kleber is now at New York’s Columbia University and is one of the nation’s leaders in cocaine research. His late wife, Marian Fischman, was the...

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D.C. tech office scandal widens with new arrest

Federal authorities have brought new charges in the widening D.C. technology office scandal, accusing another city employee of bilking taxpayers through phony invoices and time sheets. Farrukh Awan was arrested Thursday on allegations that he asked government contractor Sushil Bansal for cash so he would approve workers at Bansal’s company for employment with the technology office. Awan is also charged with hiding his role in a company called Network Osiris, which billed taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars for city contracts. Awan joins his former boss, Yusuf Acar, and Bansal behind bars in the scandal. Awan was fired Wednesday along with 22 other contract and full-time...

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Former top Bush aide sentenced to 30 months for embezzlement

A former top aide to then-President George W. Bush was sentenced to nearly 30 months in prison Wednesday after he admitted to embezzling hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars while leading a pro-Cuban-democracy group. Felipe Sixto will also serve three years of probation and pay $10,000 in fines. He resigned as the White House’s special assistant for intergovernmental affairs last year after the Center for a Free Cuba accused him of stealing about $579,000 in government grants on puffed-up purchase orders. Sixto accepted a government plea deal late last year. The investigation began shortly after Sixto left his job as chief of staff at the not-for-profit center in January...

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D.C. police commander warns officers about overtime abuse

A police commander in D.C.’s most violent district is warning his officers not to make arrests late in their shifts because he’s worried about overtime abuse, The Examiner has learned. “[Y]ou should not be attempting to make late arrest solely to make overtime,” 7th District Cmdr. Joel Maupin writes in an e-mail, addressed to subordinate officers and obtained by The Examiner. More than half of the city’s 24 homicides this year have occurred in Maupin’s district east of the Anacostia River, D.C. police statistics show. Homicides have leapt 86 percent in “7D” since last year, statistics show. For decades, the district has led the city in...

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Fenty gives police power to deputize citizens

D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty has given Police Chief Cathy Lanier sweeping new authority to appoint ordinary citizens as “volunteer” police officers, The Examiner has learned. Under an order signed by Fenty, Lanier and “her subordinate officials” are allowed to appoint “special privates” during an “emergency.” The unpaid citizen-cops “shall possess all the powers and privileges and perform all the duties of the privates of the standing police force of the District,” the order states. The mayor signed the order Jan. 16, and it took effect immediately. It wasn’t posted on the city’s Web site until earlier this month. D.C....

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Alleged mastermind in scandal to stay in lockup

The accused mastermind of a multimillion-dollar D.C. embezzlement scandal will remain locked up while he awaits trial. Yusuf Acar was ordered held without bond Tuesday on conspiracy charges. He and former co-worker Sushil Bansal are charged with filing phony invoices and time sheets with the city’s technology office and splitting the proceeds among several unindicted co-conspirators. Bansal remains free pending trial, but U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola said he was shocked by an FBI tape of Acar bragging about how he would flee to his native Turkey if the scandal was ever uncovered. The scandal has buffeted Acar’s former boss, Vivek Kundra, now the nation’s first...

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3 Minute Interview-Cozier

Nicole Cozier works for the Washington Area Women’s Foundation, which gives out about $1 million in grants each year to area nonprofit groups that help women and girls. The foundation recently announced 10 $10,000 awards to small focus groups on women’s health. The public is asked to vote online (at thewomensfoundation.org) for their favorite of the grantees; the winner will get an additional $5,000. How are women’s groups handling the bad economy? I think different groups are feeling it in different ways. Certainly, there’s an increased demand in services. Folks are starting to feel it, but there’s probably going to be more of an impact as we move along....

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Obama tech aide on leave after subordinate charged with fraud

President Barack Obama’s chief technology officer is on leave from the White House after FBI agents Thursday raided the District office that he previously led. Vivek Kundra was the head of the D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Officer until earlier this month, when he was tapped by Obama for a similar role in the administration. Kundra’s former office was raided by federal law enforcement officers and D.C. police as part of a major fraud investigation Thursday morning. A top aide to Kundra, Yusuf Acar, was charged with bilking taxpayers out of millions of dollars through a scam involving phony work orders and bogus employees. Acar, 40, was arrested in an early morning...

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D.C. auditor sentenced for seeking bribe for tax fraud

A former auditor in the troubled D.C. tax office is off to prison after he admitted to shaking down a local business to reduce its sales tax bill. El-Hadj Drame was sentenced Wednesday to four months behind bars, plus four months of home detention and two years of probation. He admitted that he accepted $6,000 in cash from an undercover FBI agent in exchange for reducing the tax bill of a D.C. business. Drame, 36, of Silver Spring, was assigned to audit the business and told the company that he could reduce its bill for cash. The company’s owner called in the feds. The business was not identified in court papers. The FBI taped the money exchange, and Drame was arrested Nov. 14,...

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Fraud trial for retired naval officer set to begin

Opening statements are scheduled to begin Tuesday in the case of a retired Navy commander who is accused of faking an injury in the Sept. 11, attacks on the Pentagon in order to take in more than $300,000 from the federal victims’ compensation fund. Charles Coughlin was given a Purple Heart and a Meritorious Service Medal after he claimed that he was hit by falling debris as he raced back into the Pentagon to help his stricken comrades. He claimed that the neck and back injuries he suffered for his heroism “changed substantially” his life and left him unable to clean his own home or run marathons. It was all a lie, federal prosecutors have alleged. In fact, Coughlin...

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Ways to guard against fraud

Identity theft is rampant, but that doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. “We don’t have to hide from it,” said Tempe, Ariz.-based security consultant Todd Davis, “unless you’re literally going to go live in a cave and kill your food.” Experts interviewed by The Examiner say that consumers can stick up for themselves with a few steps, ranging from the high tech to the low: Credit “freezes”: The three big credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — allow consumers to freeze their credit. It prevents any new accounts from being opened on your credit line. “It’s the most effective way to lock down your...

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Identity theft swells in District, nation as economy plummets

Identity theft is soaring in the region and in the nation, leaving thousands of people to contend with the nightmare of stolen money, ruined credit and scrambled records, a new federal report has found. Experts blame the souring economy for the spike. They say identity theft is relatively easy for criminals to commit, but it leaves victims with months’ and sometimes years’ worth of headaches. You don’t have to look far to find a victim. “They hacked into my bank account and took about $200, $300,” said Hilda Cain, who sells legal ads for The Examiner. “It wasn’t a lot, but it was all I had to live on at the time.” Cain’s account...

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Space tourist’s lawsuit moves forward

A Virginia judge has given the go-ahead to a $21 million lawsuit filed by a high-flying Japanese businessman who claims a local company unfairly clipped his wings and kept him from traveling in space. Daisuke Enomoto says Vienna, Va.-based Space Adventures took his millions and promised him a trip to outer space — compliments of the Russian space agency — without ever having permission from Russian officials to do so. His suit was approved by U.S. District Judge James C. Cacheris, who turned aside Space Adventures’ motion to dismiss in a memorandum opinion published late Friday. Enomoto, an Internet mogul, had hoped to become the world’s fourth space tourist and...

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Putting hands in pockets isn’t grounds for arrest, judges rule

A former Metrobus driver put her hands in her pockets — and it landed her in jail. Ava Howard had been convicted of “assaulting, resisting or interfering with a police office” after Metro Police Officer Rashad Watson ordered her to keep her hands out of her pockets while he tried to referee a dispute between Howard and another woman in late 2007 at the Minnesota Avenue Metro station. Howard testified that she turned her pockets inside out just to show there was nothing inside them and then put her hands back inside to warm them. The confrontation between Howard and Watson escalated, and Howard ended up in handcuffs. In court documents, Watson said Howard swore and...

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Fiery federal prosecutor back on center stage with Levy case

The Chandra Levy case puts federal prosecutor Amanda Haines back in the public spotlight. Haines was one of the lead investigators who on Tuesday sought an arrest warrant for illegal immigrant Ingmar Guandique. Haines and others say in court papers that Guandique admitted to cell mates in numerous conversations, and to a girlfriend in a letter, that he raped and killed Levy in 2001. He’ll now be brought back to D.C. from California, where he has been in a federal prison for two unrelated attacks on women in Rock Creek Park. In 2007, Haines helped resurrect the dormant Levy investigation. She has incredible drive, her boss, Glenn Kirschner, told The Examiner. “She is really...

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Chandra Levy suspect’s own words are key

Eight years after Chandra Levy’s disappearance, prosecutors are hoping that an illegal immigrant’s own words will haunt him. Authorities are relying on jail house informants and a letter Ingmar Guandique allegedly wrote, bragging about killing Levy. It’s a risky strategy, some defense lawyers say. “Those are not always very strong cases,” said Bill Moffitt, former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “Those kinds of cases have severe deficiencies because those witnesses are being given something.” Former prosecutor and Senate adviser Andy Fois agreed with Moffitt, but said that juries can still be swayed by...

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Prosecutors: Suspect’s own words are key

Eight years after Chandra Levy’s disappearance, prosecutors are hoping that an illegal immigrant’s own words will haunt him. Authorities are relying on jailhouse informants and a letter Ingmar Guandique allegedly wrote, bragging about killing Levy. It’s a risky strategy, some defense lawyers say. “Those are not always very strong cases,” said Bill Moffitt, former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “Those kinds of cases have severe deficiencies because those witnesses are being given something.” Former prosecutor and Senate adviser Andy Fois agreed with Moffitt, but said that juries could still be swayed by...

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Early suspect now charged with murder in Levy slaying

Nearly eight years after the disappearance of Congressional intern Chandra Levy dominated national headlines, D.C. authorities charged with murder an illegal immigrant who had been questioned in the early stages of the investigation. Ingmar Guandique, 27, who is serving time in a California prison for attacking two other women in Rock Creek Park not far from where Levy's body was found, is expected to be returned to D.C. within the next 45 to 60 days, authorities said. He will then be arraigned on charges of first degree murder in the 24-year-old’s death. If convicted, he faces a sentence of between 30 and 60 years in prison. The long-dormant case took a turn a few weeks ago...

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U.S. widened anti-terror focus after Sept. 11

The United States has broadened its anti-terror focus beyond Muslim groups since Sept. 11, 2001, most experts agree. Now, overseas groups from Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Mumbai, India, are getting attention from Washington’s counterterrorism forces. “I think the Bush administration very quickly after 9/11 adopted the policy ... that there’s no such thing as a good terrorist,” said Daniel Marcus, former general counsel to the 9/11 Commission and a law professor at George Washington University. Groups such as the Tamil Tigers might not be immediate threats to the United States. Then again, neither were Islamic warlords in Afghanistan 20 years ago. There are...

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Experts: D.C. ‘fertile ground’ for financing of terrorism

Dr. Nagaratnam Ranjithan has spent decades building a thriving medical practice in Maryland as a kidney specialist. Federal authorities say he has also helped finance Asian death squads. Two weeks ago, the U.S. Treasury Department froze the assets of Ranjithan’s Tamil Foundation, alleging that the money he has raised for Sri Lanka has actually gone to help the Tamil Tigers, a group that the State Department says is a terrorist organization. The Tigers have been blamed for thousands of civilian deaths. Ranjithan says his group is suffering from guilt by association. “Even the federal government hasn’t accused me of directly supporting the Tigers,” Ranjithan said...

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Nickles takes on top firm in special-ed suits

D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles has taken his special education reform crusade directly to the law firm that has turned a quiet practice area into a multimillion-dollar litigation industry. Nickles is now suing Brown & Associates, the giant of special-ed litigation in the District. Using federal laws that allow parents to recoup legal fees in special-ed cases, the firm has billed D.C. taxpayers at least $15 million since 2001, according to city records. In his lawsuit, Nickles claims that Brown & Associates lawyers are wasting the city’s time and the taxpayers’ money. It cites a single case brought by two firm lawyers on behalf of “A.C.,” a mentally...

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Three-minute interview: Cate Magennis Wyatt

In 2005, Cate Magennis Wyatt incorporated the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership, a nonprofit group that links local community heritage groups from Gettysburg through Northern Virginia. The partnership works to raise awareness about the rich history of the corridor. In January, the partnership handed out scholarships to several Loudoun County teachers for advanced history training. Why did you incorporate the partnership? What was abundantly clear was that each community took pride in the cultural heritage and history of their own backyard. We had an opportunity to truly create a national treasure. What makes it possible to discuss this is that the entire strip is basically...

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Lanier doles out medals for concierge, tour guide work

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier has bestowed medals on 18 D.C. police officers or staff who checked coats, acted as concierges and escorted out-of-town dignitaries for a national police conference. The Major Cities Chiefs and Sheriffs conference was held at the JW Marriott hotel last month. Dozens of D.C. police officers and staff were ordered to work the event on assignments from “gift bags” and “concierge desk” to “companion tours.” According to the police department’s newsletter, nine of the officers or staff have been given commendations. Nine others have been given achievement medals. “Their dedication and teamwork ensured all of the...

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Advocacy groups vocal over Fenty’s Dubai trip

Government reform and Israeli rights advocates lined up Tuesday to ask D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty what he was thinking when he accepted a junket from the government of the United Arab Emirates. “It raises at least the appearance of corruption, of conflict of interest,” said Gary Imhoff, co-founder of D.C. Watch, a nonprofit local government reform group. “If the mayor were to accept a physical gift of several thousand dollars from a foreign country, he wouldn’t keep it.” The mayor and his family spent last week in Dubai as guests of the United Arab Emirates. The trip wasn’t announced and was not on his public schedule. The mayor’s ticket and...

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3-Minute Interview: Tripp Jones

Tripp Jones is the archivist of The Church of the Epiphany, one of D.C.’s oldest and most prestigious Episcopal churches. The downtown Washington church was founded in 1847 and has been the spiritual home of dozens of major figures in American history, from Confederate President Jefferson Davis to newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer. How did you become the archivist? I certainly have a great interest in history, and the preceding one was getting elderly and couldn’t do it. He stood up one morning and announced that he was quitting and he was looking for volunteers. I said, “Here I am, Lord, let’s do it.” What does your job entail? Heinz 57. Right now,...

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Figures hazy on unsolved slayings

The District has about 3,400 unsolved homicides on its books. The unsolved slayings date back to 1968. It’s difficult, though, to get more specific than that. D.C. police officials say they have solved nearly three-quarters of last year’s homicides. But that figure includes long-open cases that were closed in 2008. “It’s the same as when someone is assaulted in one year, but they expire later,” police spokeswoman Traci Hughes said Monday. “That’s part of the next year’s homicide rate.” The D.C. police department also often closes cases “administratively.” That is, a case is consider solved even though no one has been...

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News in Levy case affects survivors of victims in less-publicized killings

The news that local authorities may have solved the Chandra Levy killing triggered complex emotions among survivors of some of the hundreds of other homicide victims in the city that received much less public — or police — attention. “It is a source of pain for a lot of victims,” said Jeff Dion of the National Center for Victims of Crime, a Washington-based nonprofit group that advocates for victims’ rights. “There’s a real frustration among victims if they feel that their case isn’t given the respect or importance that it deserved.” A top law enforcement source told The Examiner on Monday that authorities were still weeks away from...

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D.C. education officials looking to start residency checks early

D.C. education authorities are cracking down on residency fraud in the schools by trying to start conducting their investigations one month earlier. Schools are slated to check students’ addresses in May and will hand over their information in the fall. If State Superintendent Deborah Gist has her way, though, schools will open their investigations April 1. “Moving up the date would give the schools more time between when they start collecting documentation for their students and when the annual enrollment audit is conducted in the fall,” wrote Gist’s spokeswoman, Nicole Shaffer, in an e-mail to The Examiner. “This would provide the schools more time to...

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D.C. judge issues stricter rules for special-education lawyers

D.C.’s chief judge has issued strict new rules governing the conduct of lawyers who handle cases involving special-needs kids in the city’s schools. Under Chief Judge Lee Satterfield’s regulations, lawyers will have to complete at least 16 hours of specialized training, prove that they’re in good standing with the D.C. Bar, submit to continuing education seminars and follow a rigid code of conduct on topics ranging from case management to ensuring that the children’s parents, not the lawyers, make decisions affecting a child’s education. The rules are the first of their kind in the District governing special-education lawyers, who have turned what in...

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Nickles demands D.C. Council rewrite law on prisoner release

Tired of paying out tens of millions of dollars in civil rights litigation, D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles is demanding the D.C. Council rework a law that keeps the jail from releasing its prisoners in the middle of the night. D.C. passed a law in 2003 forbidding the jail from releasing inmates after 10 p.m. and before 7 a.m. after neighbors in the gentrifying Hill East community voiced anxieties about having ex-prisoners roaming their streets in the middle of the night. Nickles told The Examiner that the law has cost the city millions in civil rights lawsuits. When a judge orders an inmate freed, the paperwork takes a while to catch up. Under current law, inmates spend another night...

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Fenty withdraws contract with embattled Fla. brain injury clinic

Mayor Adrian Fenty has withdrawn a proposed $2.3 million contract with a Florida brain injury clinic that’s been the subject of hundreds of abuse and neglect complaints and was once accused of treating its D.C. patients “like garbage.” Fenty’s attorney general, Peter Nickles, told The Examiner on Tuesday that the city wanted to “tailor” short-term, individual contracts for each of the 19 District residents in the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation. All city residents will be out of the clinic by September, Nickles said. The new proposal is a victory for Council Chairman Vince Gray, who balked at giving a full-year contract to the Florida...

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D.C. attorney general sues lawyer over ‘frivolous’ special-ed suits

D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles has filed a federal lawsuit accusing a fellow lawyer of filing “frivolous” claims in order to exploit the city’s troubled special education system. Nickles’ alleges that Hyattsville-based Chike Ijeabuonwu continued to press the city in a due process lawsuit even after school officials had given his client, “K.J.,” everything he had asked for. Federal law requires local schools to provide services to help children overcome disabilities with minimal disruption to their education. But the District routinely has violated that law, and tens of millions of public dollars have gone to private attorneys who have sued the...

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Gray aims to end city contract with Florida brain rehab center

D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray is trying to stop the District from renewing a multimillion-dollar contract with a Florida brain injury clinic that has been the focus of hundreds of abuse and neglect allegations. Dozens of District residents have been sent to the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation for years for treatment of their injuries. Nineteen currently live there. The Wauchula, Fla.-based clinic has been the subject of abuse and neglect complaints for years, including a report from a congressionally appointed D.C. monitor that accused clinic officials of treating its D.C. wards “like garbage.” That hasn’t stopped the Fenty administration from...

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Councilman urges panel to ‘rethink’ D.C.’s real estate appeals board

D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson wants to scrap the city’s real estate appeals board in the wake of an ex-board member’s accusations that the reigning chairwoman has “politicized” the body. “Frankly, I think we need to rethink the board,” Mendelson, D-at large, told The Examiner. “The board has been struggling for years and it’s obviously gotten worse.” Mendelson said it’s time to bring in real estate professionals to hear property appeals. His comments were in reaction to a letter of resignation from real estate board member Lawrence Smith that was circulated among council members. In it, Smith blasted Mayor Adrian...

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3 Minute Interview-Berk

\Sally Berk, 63, is a longtime preservationist in the District. She has spent most of her life trying to save the capital’s architectural gems from the wrecking ball. She recently gave a presentation to the Federal City Council, titled “A Tour of My Losses.” Afterwards, she spoke with The Examiner. How did you get into preservation? When I was in architecture school, what interested me the most was not designing new buildings, but architectural history. I was most enamored of old buildings. What do you like about it? I love courtroom drama. I love writing testimony, waiting to see what the decision will be. What’s your best moment? One project was saving the...

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Legal mistake costs Metro worker benefits

An injured Metro worker will lose his full disability payments because a city hearing board misread the law, the D.C. Court of Appeals has ruled. Keith Boyd injured his left knee while working as a landscaper for the transit agency in 2002. As he recovered from his first surgery, Metro agreed to pay him his full, but temporary disability benefits and medical expenses. He was given “a schedule award” — in essence, a workers’ comp boost based on the loss of a limb — in 2004. He underwent another round of surgery and was given another round of full, but temporary disability compensation. He and Metro agreed that the accident left him partially disabled but he...

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Fenty, council fight on over subpoena power

Mayor Adrian Fenty has rescinded an order giving broad subpoena power to his police chief, instead giving the authority to his attorney general. Fenty signed an executive order in November giving police Chief Cathy Lanier authority to subpoena records and witnesses “in any municipal matter,” but the city council balked. After Phil Mendelson, D-At Large, passed emergency legislation ordering the mayor to suspend the order, the mayor scrapped it. He shortly issued a new directive, giving subpoena power to his attorney general, Peter Nickles. In the new version, Nickles’ deputies have to review requests for subpoenas before signing off on them. At an oft-contentious...

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Killings spiked in SE D.C. during inauguration week

As tens of thousands partied at inaugural balls across Washington on the night of Jan. 20, Terrance Johnson was shot dead for his shoes. The 26-year-old died in a parking lot near his apartment in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. His home, the Meadowbrook Apartments, a high-rise building in the 3500 block of Sixth Street SE, typically has off-duty police officers patrolling the grounds. “The night of the homicide we had no off-duty officers working due to the inauguration,” property manager Cynthia Bertolotti told police Assistant Chief Diane Groomes in a Feb. 2 e-mail obtained by The Examiner. Every police officer in the city was ordered to work 12-hour shifts...

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Six area nonprofits get $50,000 grants

Six D.C.-area nonprofit groups are getting an infusion of cash to help poor kids receive early education and care, thanks to the Washington Area Women’s Foundation. The foundation announced six grants, totaling $300,000, to D.C. Appleseed, CentroNia of Maryland, Empower D.C., Fairfax Futures, Hopkins House and Voices for Virginia’s Children. The money is designed to help give poor families a break with childcare and early education. “Investments such as these are a win-win for the community,” Craig Pascal, a PNC Bank vice president and member of the grant collaborative, said Tuesday. Child care experts say infants and toddlers are most receptive to early...

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D.C. real estate board member quits, blasts Fenty appointee

A member of D.C.’s powerful real estate board has resigned in protest, claiming the board is becoming too politicized. In a letter addressed to Mayor Adrian Fenty and Council Chairman Vincent Gray, Lawrence Smith said he could no longer serve on the board because Fenty’s appointee, Towanda Paul-Bryant, “seems bent on precipitating its destruction.” About one-quarter of the city’s total tax base comes from real estate taxes, and the Board of Real Property Assessments and Appeals is responsible for handling appeals on about $5 billion worth of property every year. Smith, a transactions lawyer who has served on the board for six years, said Paul-Bryant...

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Public defender stayed silent after client escaped

A public defender kept quiet after his client, an alleged gunman in a near-fatal shooting, slipped from his custody and fled to avoid trial, The Examiner has learned. Public Defender Chris Roberts agreed to take custody of his client, William Brice, so that Brice could attend the funeral of his father on April 18. Roberts promised Superior Court Judge Robert Richter that Roberts would call “the minute there was any trouble,” according to a transcript obtained by The Examiner. Brice was being jailed without bond. But once at the funeral, he slipped away. Brice has stayed on the run, and last week the U.S. Marshals Service put him on their most-wanted list. Authorities...

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Daschle's timeline

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., withdrew from consideration as President Obama’s health and human services secretary Tuesday. It was a quick reversal of fortune for one of Obama’s top allies: » Nov. 22, 2008: Obama nominates Daschle; he’s just the third nominee named and many view it as a sign that Obama wants to take a serious run at health care reform. » Jan. 2, 2009: Daschle files “amended” taxes for three years that he used a Cadillac and a chauffeur provided by a wealthy Democratic donor. He pays more than $140,000. » Jan. 4: Daschle tells the Obama team about the back taxes. » Jan. 30: With word of...

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D.C. juvenile arrests soar, data show

D.C.’s juvenile arrests have skyrocketed in the last year, The Examiner has learned. There were about 3,500 kids arrested in 2007. In 2008, nearly 4,500 kids were arrested, for crimes ranging from public urination (two cases) to felony murder (three cases), statistics kept by the city show. Children under 18 have to be tried as children for most crimes. They’re then handed over to the city’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. Department Director Vincent Schiraldi has come under heavy fire for his emphasis on social work over punishment for kids who’ve run afoul of the law. Dozens of children have absconded from Schiraldi’s custody, city records...

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Daschle’s rise to power in D.C.

Tom Daschle came to Washington four decades ago as a lowly Senate aide, but today reigns as one of the city’s most powerful figures. A former aide to South Dakota Sen. James Abourezk, Daschle won election, after a recount, to the House of Representatives in 1978 by 110 votes. He emerged from obscurity in that race after running a poorly funded, door-to-door campaign that barely warranted a footnote in national coverage of the election. The Washington Post incorrectly reported that he had been declared the loser. Daschle came to Washington as a champion of South Dakota farmers. One of his earliest speeches was given in support of “gasohol” research, and he became one of...

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Finance chief scraps $120M tax computer system

D.C. Chief Financial Office Natwar Gandhi is scrapping his beleaguered $120 million automated tax system more than a year after a blistering audit blamed the computer system for costing District taxpayers millions and leaving them vulnerable to fraud, The Examiner has learned. The finance office had relied on Accenture LLP to build and run its automated tax system for more than a decade. In a memo dated last week, Councilman Jack Evans, D-Ward 2, introduced emergency legislation to replace Accenture with Pembroke, Mass.-based Revenue Solutions Inc. “I am moving this proposed contract on behalf of the chief financial officer,” Evans wrote. The contract will pay Revenue...

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Ex-Interior official pleads guilty to bribery scheme

A former Interior Department official is facing up to 18 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to taking a $15,000 in bribes to help his friends win government contracts in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Edgar Johnson, 59, was the director of the Technical Assistance Division of the Office of Insular Affairs, giving him broad authority over the money flowing into U.S. possessions and territories. Prosecutors alleged, and Johnson admitted in court Friday, that he took cash to introduce his old fraternity brother and other friends to top officials in the U.S. Virgin Islands. His fraternity brother was running an insurance company and wanted to pitch his business to Virgin Islands...

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Four men plead not guilty on cocaine charges

Four men have pleaded innocent to charges that they ran a drug ring that moved cocaine by the pound in Montgomery County. Elias Flores, Samuel Chavez Lopez, Carlos Gonzalez and Eduardo Reyes-Sotero formally entered their not guilty plea in federal court earlier this month. They’re charged with felony possession charges in a case that stemmed from an ordinary traffic stop. According to court papers, Reyes-Sotero was pulled over on Interstate 270 while driving a Dodge Dakota with expired Maryland plates. A search of the truck uncovered a parcel of more than 10 pounds of cocaine. Authorities then obtained a search warrant for a car owned by Reyes-Sotero’s friend Flores. A few...

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Fishermen charged with illegally harvesting endangered bass

Five commercial fishermen, a fish wholesaler and his son have been charged with illegally harvesting hundreds of thousands of pounds of the endangered striped bass from the Chesapeake Bay and Potomac River. Fishermen Thomas Crowder, John Dean, Charles Quade, Thomas Hallock and Keith Collins, and wholesalers Robert Moore Sr. and Robert Moore Jr., have been charged by information with poaching and fabricating fishing records. It’s an indication that the men have reached a plea agreement, because a defendant can only be charged by information if he waives his right to appear before a grand jury. They follow into court two other fishermen, father and son Joseph Peter Nelson Sr. and Jr....

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Party time!

Washington area readies for Sunday’s annual gridiron get-together When the Kansas City Chiefs met the Green Bay Packers for the first-ever “Super Bowl,” the event was a flop. It remains the only Super Bowl not to have sold out and local newspapers in Los Angeles complained about the “outrageous” $12 ticket price. Forty-two Roman numerals later, the Super Bowl is a secular holiday. Experts expect the game to generate $10 billion in gambling revenues — legal or otherwise. In Washington, it’s one of the biggest partying days on the calendar. Bars, restaurants and clubs are dusting off their big-screen TVs and cleaning the lines to their...

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Dozens of local police officers assigned to concierge duties

Local police departments assigned dozens of their officers and staff to work as concierges, drivers and security for a national law enforcement conference this week in the District. Officers from D.C., along with Fairfax, Prince George’s and Montgomery counties were assigned to work the Major Cities Chiefs and Sheriffs conference at the JW Marriott Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Most of the officers came from the District. D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier wrote in a command memo obtained by The Examiner that she wanted “to ensure a safe and productive legislative conference.” The D.C. officers’ and staffers’ assignments were “concierge desk,”...

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DMV order lets judges keep home-state licenses

The D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles has issued an emergency order exempting federal judges and their spouses from a rule that requires drivers to surrender their home state licenses when they register their cars in the District. The order, which is scheduled to take effect next month, gives the exemption to “members of the judicial branch of the federal government” and is signed by DMV Director Lucinda M. Babers. “This emergency action is based on the immediate need to permit members of the federal judiciary who hold non-District driver’s licenses at the time they register a motor vehicle in the District to be able to continue to operate motor vehicles in...

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Detroit hires ex-D.C. official to fix public schools’ deficit

Former D.C. school board president and city Administrator Robert Bobb is taking over finances for the troubled Detroit public schools. He’ll be the new emergency finance chief for Detroit’s school system, Bobb told The Examiner on Monday. Bobb will continue living in the District, to which he moved in 1999 when he became city administrator. “It’s a year-one, very aggressive appointment, but my home is in the District,” Bobb said. In 2006, Bobb won the election to become the last president of an independent D.C. school board. He brought in the accounting firm of Alvarez & Marsal to give the school system its first-ever forensic audit. But he lost a turf...

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St. Elizabeths pays over $6.3M in overtime while facing probe, suit

St. Elizabeths, the District’s mental hospital, racked up more than $6.3 million in overtime bills as the hospital was fending off a federal fraud investigation and a civil suit claiming that its low staffing was endangering its patients, The Examiner has learned. St. E’s staff averaged at least 52,700 overtime hours for fiscal 2006, 2007 and 2008, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show. The actual figures are likely much higher because the city only made results for the top 50 overtime earners available. Federal authorities alleged that hospital authorities routinely defrauded the government out of Medicare reimbursements. Last year, St. E’s...

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More than a thousand women were forced into sex slavery, Justice Department reports

More than 1,000 mostly young women in the United States were forced into sexual slavery last year, an alarming new Justice Department report has found. The Bureau of Justice Statistics analyzed thousands of cases of alleged human trafficking. It found that the sex trade accounted for more than three out of every four human trafficking cases tracked by the Justice Department. Anytime anyone is forced into prostitution, they are considered “trafficked,” according to the Justice Department. Children 17 or under who are in prostitution are considered trafficked whether they were coerced or not. According to the report, about a quarter of the nation’s sex slaves were under...

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Police union seeks extra money due to conflict over scheduling

The District might have to dish out hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra police pay for the inauguration because of a dispute over the work schedules of hundreds of officers. The city’s contract with the officers’ union requires the bosses to give two weeks’ notice before changing an officer’s schedule. A new schedule was posted for the nearly 300 officers in the 5th District on Jan. 8, 10 days before the schedule took effect. The union has filed a grievance and is demanding time-and-a-half for each officer’s regular work shift from Saturday through Wednesday. “The department is not permitted to change tours of duties outside of the processes in...

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Freezing temperatures greet inauguration crowd

Mother Nature tried unsuccessfully to dampen inaugural spirits Tuesday, with temperatures plunging to below freezing as hundreds of thousands flocked to the National Mall. Temperature hit about 22 degrees around 9:30 a.m. and the National Weather Service predicted a high of 32 degrees for the day, with a low reaching down to 17 degrees. Forecasts included the chance of snow flurries. People were lining up in the bitter cold at entrances to the National Mall as early as 3 a.m., which resulted in a few cases of hypothermia. "We have had a handful of cases down on the mall, but nothing real serious," Alan Etter, spokesman for the D.C. Fire Department. The average temperature for...

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Fenty to persist with plans for public-private library

Mayor Adrian Fenty is refusing to budge and says he will push forward a multimillion-dollar library and housing complex in Tenleytown. Fenty wants to build a new library branch across from the Tenleytown Metro station and allow a developer to build a high-rise apartment building atop the new library. He has encountered fierce resistance from the D.C. Public Library board and D.C. Council members Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, and Kwame Brown, D-at large, who say the project will line a private developer’s pocket at public expense and slash into needed “green space” at the adjacent Janney Elementary School. Cheh, Brown and the library board have called for the library to be built...

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Obamas observe King’s birthday by volunteering

President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, joined hundreds of ordinary Washingtonians — and a few trucked-in celebrities — in a day of service Monday. The Obamas started their Martin Luther King Jr. holiday at Walter Reed Army Hospital, where they visited sick and wounded members of the armed forces. They were joined by King’s son, Martin III. The next stop for the soon-to-be first couple was the Sasha Bruce House, an emergency shelter for homeless kids. Obama, a former community organizer, stripped off his jacket and helped volunteers paint a wall at the shelter. “We can’t allow any idle hands,” Obama said. “Everybody has to be...

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Chicago-like freezing weather expected to hit Tuesday

Whatever other changes he’s bringing to D.C., Barack Obama is bringing Chicago-style weather with him. The National Weather Service is predicting freezing or near-freezing weather throughout the inaugural, and there is a possibility of snow. AccuWeather.com is predicting that today’s slightly higher temperatures will dip this afternoon amid a blast of wind and snow, with accumulations of up to an inch. Temperatures are to be bitterly low overnight, with howling winds. There will be little relief Tuesday morning. Forecasters predict that amid partly cloudy skies, temperatures will struggle to get to 32 degrees, but gusts of wind will leave inauguration celebrants feeling much...

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Mendelson seeks Rhee’s plans on firing ‘underperforming’ teachers

D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson says he’s worried that schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is trying to get rid of veteran educators and is asking Rhee to detail her plan to weed out “underperforming” teachers. “While we share the goal of ensuring that all DCPS students get the highest level of classroom instruction,” Mendelson wrote in a Jan. 8 letter, “I am troubled by reports that the 90-day plan may be disproportionately administered to senior teachers.” Rhee hasn’t explained her proposal yet, but says she wants to put failing teachers in a 90-day mentoring program. Those who don’t improve would be fired or reassigned. The teachers...

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Bitter cold predicted for Inauguration Day

Weather forecasters are predicting bitter cold and winds for the area through early next week and the possibility of a snowfall over the weekend that could dampen the spirits of millions flocking to the capital for President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration. Accuweather.com on Thursday released a forecast that had D.C.’s high temperature at 20 degrees today — the lowest in more than a decade. The weather is expected to be about 10 degrees colder than average through the inauguration with biting winds making it feel even colder. Accuweather experts are also monitoring a snowstorm that could dump on the capital late Sunday and into early Monday. The District’s...

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D.C. to probe whether hospitals failed to report medical errors

The District government will investigate city hospitals and clinics to determine whether they are withholding reports of medical errors that killed, injured or sickened patients, a top city official testified Wednesday. “Unless we improve the reporting technology ... the process will not serve to improve either the analysis or the feedback to the reporting health care facility,” Department of Health executive Feseha Woldu told a D.C. Council hearing called to examine “adverse events” in hospitals and clinics. An Examiner story Tuesday said there were 529 reported incidents in D.C. in the 12 months ending in June 2008. The human toll: at least 14 people dead and...

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Migrant who bought fake D.C. driver’s license gets probation

A 42-year-old hotel cook who was one of hundreds of immigrants who paid bribes to get fraudulently issued D.C. driver’s licenses was sentenced to one year of probation Tuesday. Antonio Contreras, originally of El Salvador, and hundreds of other immigrants paid $1,000 to $1,800 to buy their licenses from convicted former D.C. motor vehicles clerk Patricia Gonzalez. Contreras has already pleaded guilty to bribery charges and assisted in the investigation that put Gonzalez and two of her friends behind bars. But the search continues for others like him. Many of the bribers, who came from all over the D.C. region, gave fake addresses for their bogus licenses, and now authorities...

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529 medical errors reported during 12-month period in D.C.

D.C. doctors sliced open the wrong breast on a cancer patient, operated on the wrong part of a patient’s spine, sewed up patients with needles and sponges still inside and tried to revive a stricken patient with a broken ventilator, a new city report has found. There were at least 529 “adverse events” in District hospitals and clinics in the 12 months between July 2007 and June 2008, the city Department of Health’s annual report has found. At least 14 of these errors cost a patient his or her life, the report found. More than 1 million people are killed or injured by medical errors in the United States every year. In 2006, D.C.’s council required the...

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With inauguration one week away, early arrivals begin to pack D.C.

Donna Robinson is on her way to Washington from Anniston, Ala., with 15 friends and relatives packed into a rented recreational vehicle, fulfilling a promise she made to herself during the presidential campaign. “I said, ‘If Barack wins, we’re going to Washington,’ ” she told The Examiner in a phone interview. “I want [my] boys to learn. Look how Barack walks. Look at the way he speaks. Look at the way he carries himself. He doesn’t let his pants droop.” Robinson, 43, will be among millions coming to the nation’s capital to see the first African-American take the oath of office as president of the United States. New York college...

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Buzz for Obama echoes around globe

D.C. is not the only major city in a frenzy for Barack Obama. In London, an Internet site dedicated to Obama fans has sprung up. Tickets to the inaugural are being offered for up to 2,000 pounds apiece. There’s messages and chat rooms in Bangalore, India and Singapore. On Craigslist in Johannesburg, Obama “framed art collections” are for sale at up to $20,000 each. Student Mbhekwa Dlamini, 29, a native of Swaziland, is making his first trip to D.C. He’s studying in Atlanta for two years but won a scholarship to study the presidency just in time for the inauguration. “It shows you that in this world, things do not remain the same,” Dlamini said of...

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UDC offering to take over Southeastern U., source says

The University of the District of Columbia has made a takeover offer for D.C.’s Southeastern University, The Examiner has learned. UDC’s new president, Allen Sessoms, and its board chair, Jim Dyke, met with Southeastern’s board chair, J.R. Clark, about a month ago and offered to absorb Southeastern, a source with intimate knowledge of the talks told The Examiner. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks. Sessoms has said publicly that he wants to create a community college program in the District. Southeastern offers a two-year associate’s degree but is losing money; the school announced last year that it was interested in...

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D.C. judges deny a new trial for convicted rapist

A convicted rapist won’t get a new trial even though his judge gave incorrect jury instructions because he didn’t raise the issue when it mattered, the D.C. Court of Appeals has ruled. Raymond Mozee tried to argue at his trial that his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend had consensual sex with him in the summer of 2000 and that he only struck her after she flew into a jealous rage because another girl called. Trial judge Shellie Bowers told jurors, however, that they shouldn’t “get into this business of consent” until they decided that prosecutors had otherwise proven their case. Mozee argued that this was plain wrong, that the law says a jury can weigh affirmative...

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3 Minute Interview-Fleshner

Bob Fleshner, 53, is a former health care executive who became a personal trainer and founder of the American Odyssey Relay, a 200-mile race from Gettysburg, Pa., to West Potomac Park. A portion of the proceeds will go to the Wellness Community, a Washington-area charity that helps cancer patients and their families. Why did you start it? I ran in three of these relays with my relay team and never had so much fun. It was a complete blast. How long did it take you to get this organized? It takes a while to get all the permitting and stuff in place. But we spaced it out by about 18 months because we wanted to make sure we did it really right. When does it kick off officially? April 24....

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Lanier bringing back All Hands on Deck for ’09

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier will expand her much-publicized All Hands on Deck program, flooding the city’s streets with extra officers and cadets at least eight times in the coming year. In a memo Tuesday to her staff obtained by The Examiner, Lanier said she was bringing All Hands back because of “last year’s successes.” “The purpose of the ... initiative is to have positive interactions with citizens, address community concerns, provide a physical presence in neighborhoods throughout the city, arrest offenders of the law, and to reduce crime and the fear of crime,” Lanier wrote in the memo. It’s the third year that Lanier will flood the...

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Study names Brookings Institution industry’s most influential think tank

The Brookings Institution has been named America’s most influential think tank in the first-ever comprehensive study of the industry. The University of Pennsylvania’s James McGann analyzed about 5,500 think tanks around the world. He sent out surveys to thousands of scholars and experts and asked them to evaluate think tanks based on their ability to shape or drive public policy questions in their home countries and regions. The United States, home to more than one-third of the globe’s think tanks, got its own category for top tanks. Brookings was listed first, followed by New York’s Council on Foreign Relations, D.C.’s Carnegie Endowment for International...

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Tax scam launderer gets nearly 7 years

The self-confessed money launderer of the worst public corruption scandal in the District’s history was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison. Former Bank of America manager Walter Jones will spend the next 78 months in a federal penitentiary. He was sentenced in a Greenbelt courtroom Monday, months after he admitted that he helped former D.C. tax officer Harriette Walters launder $18 million in bogus property tax refunds. Jones, of Essex, Md., was a key figure in the decades-old conspiracy. For four years between 2002 and 2006, Jones agreed to run six-figure checks through his bank and to help keep regulators from asking questions. After Jones was fired by Bank of America for...

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D.C. councilwoman pushes to allow interns to sue

D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh is sponsoring legislation that will allow interns to sue for harassment or discrimination. “Washington, D.C. is the best internship city in the country,” Cheh said in a news release. “It boggles the mind that interns have been denied these basic legal protections.” The bill, to be introduced at today’s council session, closes what Cheh is calling “a loophole” in D.C. law that says only paid employees can sue if they suffer discrimination or sexual harassment. The loophole was exposed in November, when a federal judge tossed out a suit filed by college student Jamie Evans. Evans alleged she had been groped and...

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Mendelson seeks halt to controversial order signed by Fenty

D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson is trying to stop Police Chief Cathy Lanier from issuing subpoenas under a controversial order signed by the mayor that became public last month. In his first official act of the new year, Mendelson, D-at large and chairman of the city’s judiciary committee, has introduced emergency legislation that would suspend Mayor Adrian Fenty’s program until the council can weigh the issue. “This new authority is broad,” Mendelson said in a memo to council Chairman Vincent Gray. The council needs “a chance to look at the issue.” The Examiner reported last month that Fenty had given the police department the right to issue subpoenas...

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Hoping for a better year in 2009

The Chinese supposedly have a curse: May you live in interesting times. By that measure, 2008 might have been one of the most accursed years in memory. Americans discovered that their once-dominant economy was based on the Wall Street equivalent of magic beans; they endured the longest and most expensive presidential race in history; they saw again that their political capitals were sometimes run like Mel Brooks’ governor’s mansion in “Blazing Saddles” — where the most important motivation was “to protect our phony baloney jobs here, gentlemen!” It wasn’t all bleak times, though. Barack Obama became the first African-American in history to...

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Judge: Ex-corrections officer can’t get job back

A federal appeals court has ruled that a former juvenile corrections officer for the District who was fired after three kids escaped her custody can’t have her job back because she didn’t follow the rules for appealing her firing. Sallie Johnson was fired from Oak Hill Youth Center after three juvenile offenders snuck away in November 2001. A city judge, however, ruled that she should get a second chance because of her 13 years of service. She sued to get her job back, claiming that the city was ignoring her union contract requiring it to arbitrate her case. But in a decision dated last week, U.S. Appeals Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson ruled that Johnson’s suit was...

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Comments invited on 26 vying for D.C. Superior Court spot

More than two dozen lawyers are being considered to become D.C.’s next Superior Court judge. The list includes at least 10 who already are serving as administrative or warrant judges in the city. At least eight others work for the government. At least five are in private practice, two are law professors and one works for a charity. They’re all vying to replace Linda D. Turner, who is stepping down. Unlike most major cities, D.C. doesn’t choose its own judges. The finalists are selected by the Judicial Nomination Commission, headed by federal Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, and their names are forwarded onto the president. They have to be confirmed by the Senate. Sullivan and...

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Economic downturn ensnares area think tanks

The reeling national economy is taking a heavy toll on the Washington area’s 340 think tanks. The Council of Foundations estimates that endowments, the key funding source for think tanks, lost more than $200 billion in assets in the last few months of 2008. “The [think tank] funding streams are very dependent on foundations in particular,” said R. Kent Weaver, a Georgetown professor and Brookings Institution scholar who studies think tanks. “It’s a big hit.” Think tanks employ thousands of people and generate tens of millions for the local economy. The grand old names — such as the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute —...

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Charitable endowments shrink as economy falters

Think tanks might be in trouble, but it’s only one index of a larger crisis in the nonprofit world, experts say. The average endowment has lost between 30 and 35 percent of its funds because of the poor economy, according to estimates by The Council on Foundations. This is happening just as the same poor economic conditions cause donors to cut back on charitable giving. For example, the collapse of mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae has deprived anti-homeless charities of $47 million in foundation grants, said Steve Gunderson, the council’s president and chief executive officer. “That’s a real challenge in this area.” Donors are also becoming more...

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Former Va. prof disbarred over bad business dealings

A soured romance and a soured business deal have left a former Virginia professor stripped of his law license and accused of “blatant dishonesty” and criminal conduct. The D.C. Court of Appeals has ordered Bruce Pelkey disbarred after years of litigation involving his ex-girlfriend and a group of companies the two ran in the mid-1990s. Pelkey got Linda Cavalli to contribute about $32,000 of her own money to international companies, according to court papers. After they broke up and the couple entered extensive litigation, Pelkey denied that he’d been in business or romantically involved with her, court papers state. He then filed numerous appeals and lawsuits. A...

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Study: Female partners in D.C. law firms take more part-time hours than male counterparts

Female partners in D.C. law firms are taking part-time hours at nearly three times the rate that men are, a new study has found. There are nearly 6,000 partners in 131 big law firm offices in Washington, the nation’s second-largest law market. Less than 5 percent of the partners are part-timers, but women make up nearly three-quarters of the part-time ranks, according to a new study published by the National Association for Law Placement, a D.C.-based nonprofit group that examines hiring trends in the legal profession. D.C.’s part-time figures are slightly below the national average, NALP found, but they are still higher than those of New York — the nation’s...

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Conviction upheld in Blackmond murder case

The D.C. Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld the conviction of a woman in the beating death of her 23-month-old goddaughter despite accusations that a key prosecution witness offered bogus evidence. Angela O’Brien argued that she should get a new trial in part because prosecutors relied on the testimony of Saami Shaibani, a self-described expert on “injury mechanism analysis” who falsely claimed to be a member of Temple University’s physics department. Shaibani’s testimony has been tossed out of court in North Carolina, and Wisconsin prosecutors are investigating Shaibani for perjury in a murder case that was overturned. But a three-judge panel of the D.C....

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Ruling keeps some bars from staying open later

Bars in the District that made previous agreements with their neighborhoods will have to close at their regular time despite a City Council law allowing pubs and clubs to stay open extra late for next month’s inaugural, Attorney General Peter Nickles has decided. Nickles’ ruling affects at least 300 bars, restaurants and clubs in the city. The owners of the bars struck deals with their neighborhoods, promising to limit their hours or to close at the time alcohol sales must cease — 2 a.m. Sunday through Thursday, 3 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays. The deals were made before the City Council voted to extend the city’s bar hours until 4 a.m. for the week of President-elect...

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Cops to close embattled station

Violent crimes are rising in D.C.’s 6th District, but the police department is shutting down a key outpost there. The district’s substation on Pennsylvania Avenue is scheduled to be shut down at the end of next year, police officials announced Monday after weeks of swirling rumors. Sixth District Cmdr. Robert Contee broke the news in a hearing before the D.C. City Council’s Judiciary and Public Safety Committee. He said that the lease for the outpost had become too expensive and that the substation “does not add patrol presence to the community.” “We understand the concern that the closure of the substation may result in a loss of police presence in...

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Md. man pleads guilty to seeking millions in phony tax rebates

A Maryland man is facing 20 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to trying to bilk the federal government out of more than $4 million in fuel tax rebates. June Leftwich, also known as “Yahaya Allah,” admitted that he and his friends filed 154 tax returns between 2005 and 2008. They were filed on behalf of companies that Leftwich, 34, and his friends owned or claimed to own and asked the government for millions in fuel tax refunds. The returns were filed under his name and his alias, his friends’ names, and dozens of towing, trucking, retail and charter bus companies. It’s not clear whether those companies actually existed or whether Leftwich invented them...

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D.C. looks for funds to pay police overtime during inaugural week

District police officers and firemen will be wracking up thousands of hours of overtime during the upcoming inauguration week and city officials are scrambling to find a way to pay for it. Under executive orders signed by Chief Cathy Lanier earlier this month, all 4,000 D.C. police officers will work 12-hour shifts on six days during the week surrounding President-elect Barack Obama’s swearing in. Firefighters and paramedics will have their regularly scheduled days off revoked, spokesman Alan Etter told The Examiner. Under their union contract, police officers and firefighters must be paid time-and-a-half for overtime. But they’ll also be working weekends and the inaugural is...

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Nickles defends subpoena power for police

D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles on Thursday tried to tamp down the controversy over the police department’s newly granted subpoena power. He was less than successful. “To me, it’s no big deal,” Nickles said, referring to a mayoral order giving Police Chief Cathy Lanier and her officers the power to issue subpoenas in “any municipal matter.” “We’ve got to close down those murder cases,” Nickles said. Nickles’ comments fly in the face of an agreement made between the city and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, according to sources familiar with those discussions. Prosecutors agreed not to challenge the policy, sources said, as...

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Cheh questions subpoena power Fenty gave to police chief

A key D.C. councilwoman expressed concern Wednesday about a new executive order from Mayor Adrian Fenty that appears to grant Police Chief Cathy Lanier broad authority to issue subpoenas. The order, signed quietly by Fenty last month and posted on the city’s Web site last week, gives the chief the power to probe “any municipal matter” and allows Lanier to delegate her subpoena power “to her subordinates.” Councilwoman Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, a constitutional law professor and former prosecutor, wrote a letter Wednesday to Fenty, asking him to explain the order. “I have grave concerns over the prospect that this authority may serve as an attempt to make an...

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District homicide count rises to 183, surpassing last year’s

The District’s homicide count eclipsed last year’s toll of 181 Tuesday, marking the first time since the early 1990s that the number of killings in the city rose for two straight years. Early Tuesday, police found the bullet-riddled body of 35-year-old Durval Martins lying in the street on the 1600 block of 11th Street Northwest. That homicide, along with the death of a child last week that police reclassified as a homicide Tuesday, raised the 2008 total to 183. The city hasn’t had back-to-back increases since 1989 to 1991, when D.C. was “Murder Capital” of the nation. Since 1991, when homicides peaked at 479, killings have trended down. In 2006, they...

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Report urges independent, anti-corruption post

The District needs an anti-corruption top cop to prevent runaway fraud, a scathing recap of the city’s worst ever public corruption scandal has recommended. Disparate agencies caught glimpses of what would eventually emerge as a $48 million rip-off in the city’s tax office, but none of them was working together, auditors at WilmerHale reported in their long-awaited report on the Harriette Walters tax scam. Among the 123-page report’s recommendations was the creation of an independent oversight committee. “The [committee] should ensure that the three audit agencies address fraud risk on a District-wide level,” the auditors wrote in Monday’s report,...

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Siemens to plead guilty, pay $800M fine

International engineering giant Siemens AG will plead guilty today to U.S. charges it handed out more than $1 billion in bribes to foreign officials around the world — including to members of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government — in an effort to land lucrative contracts. Authorities have been in negotiations with the Munich-based conglomerate, which has offices in the United States, for more than a year. Under an agreement reached with prosecutors, Siemens will pay $800 million to settle the bribery charges, a law enforcement source said. Under the deal, first reported by Bloomberg news service, the company will hand over $450 million in fines and another $350 million...

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3 Minute Interview-Grant

Annette Gantt is the new president and chief executive of the Earth Conservation Corps. The corps, founded in 1989, is a nonprofit group that trains troubled youth in environmental recovery for the Anacostia River and their neighborhoods. The group has recently been given a $25,000 grant for environmental leadership by Ronald McDonald House Charities to celebrate World for Children’s Day. How important is the grant? It’s very important because we can extend more of the services to young people who live in the area. Where do the kids come from? They come from Wards 6, 7 and 8. How do you find them? Sometimes they’re referred to us — schools, other...

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Real estate scheme adds 17 years to career con man's time in prison

A longtime con man will serve 17 years in federal prison in a real estate scheme — once he gets out of state prison for running yet another scheme. Robert Miller has amassed a remarkable criminal resume: He has been arrested 57 times and convicted 17 times, on charges from impersonating a lawyer to operating a boat while intoxicated. The 54-year-old has spent nearly 5,000 days in jail. On Wednesday, federal Judge Richard Leon sentenced the smooth-talking Miller to prison for a real estate swindle in the Washington area that took in almost $500,000 from its victims. Prosecutors had sought 130 years in jail, citing Miller’s long career as a con man. “Like the calculation...

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Ex-Library of Congress worker charged with using records for shopping spree

A former Library of Congress personnel executive and his cousin have been charged with using information from employee records to finance a personal shopping binge, authorities announced Wednesday. William Sinclair and Labiska Gibbs are facing up to 20 years and 37 years in prison, respectively, on charges that they accessed library personnel files and applied for lines of credit. Gibbs, 35, was indicted Tuesday. Sinclair, 27, was charged by information — an indication that he has worked out a deal with prosecutors. Court papers also state that Sinclair is talking with prosecutors. According to court documents, Sinclair was one of the few library employees who had access to the...

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Extra police for Fenty’s bike rides costing D.C. taxpayers

D.C. taxpayers have paid for many man-hours for an extra police escort to accompany Mayor Fenty on his bike rides, according to records obtained by The Examiner. Between January 2007 and June 2008, District police officers were paid for at least 178 man-hours to follow Adrian Fenty on his bike rides, departmental records show. The records are incomplete — some of the data is illegible and at least two months of data are missing — so it is likely that the total hours are much more. Time sheets obtain by The Examiner show that dozens of officers were paid for a full day for following the mayor’s two-hour rides. The protection is in addition to the full-time officers who...

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Scandal brings Rezko back into public spotlight

The arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has dragged presidential friend Antoin “Tony” Rezko back into the public spotlight. Rezko, a convicted fixer for Blagojevich, entered the national political spotlight last year when it emerged that he had helped broker a sweetheart real estate deal for Barack Obama’s stately home on Chicago’s South Side. Rezko’s name is prominent in charging documents filed in the Blagojevich case Monday. Relying on the public record from his trial and statements Rezko made in a furious attempt to shave his upcoming sentence, prosecutors describe Rezko as Blagojevich’s key crony, shaking down high-dollar donors and making...

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Ex-agent admits hacking into FBI to help actress

A former FBI agent pleaded guilty Monday to charges that he hacked into his agency’s computer to help his girlfriend, actress Linda Fiorentino, obtain key information on the federal case against a Hollywood private investigator. Mark Rossini walked into D.C. federal court Monday and admitted that he’d acted as a mole for Fiorentino, who was a friend of Anthony Pellicano. Rossini said in court documents that he had hacked into bureau computers five times in the first half of 2007. A law enforcement source told The Examiner that among the documents Rossini accessed was a confidential FBI memo on the Pellicano case. The document became a surprise in the already bizarre case that...

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Couple sentenced to prison for aiding tax scam

A disgraced former Internal Revenue Service manager and his estranged wife were sent to prison Monday for their part in the largest taxpayer rip-off in District history. Robert Steven was sentenced to 46 months in prison and his wife, Patricia, was given 70 months in prison for helping their friend, self-confessed tax scam mastermind Harriette Walters, pilfer more than $48 million through a series of phony property tax refunds. The Stevens — Robert, 55, and Patricia, 73 — also were ordered to pay back more than $8.8 million by federal Judge Alexander Williams in his courtroom in Maryland. The couple were key players in the tax scandal. The Stevens were decades-long friends...

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Group sues feds to release info on phone use in traffic deaths

A consumer group founded by Ralph Nader is suing the federal government to force officials to release a study on whether cell phone use was causing traffic deaths. In a lawsuit filed last week in D.C. federal court, the Center for Auto Safety is accusing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of illegally withholding data on the number of traffic deaths linked to cell phone use. The agency conducted a worldwide review of driver distraction in 2003 and found that cell phones were a factor in at least 955 road deaths the previous year. The report has never been made public. After some of the information from the study was leaked earlier this year, the center filed a Freedom of...

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Ex-FEMA official gets five years for stealing from disaster victims

A former emergency management official will spend the next five years in prison after he pleaded guilty to swiping the personal information of hundreds of disaster victims to go on a six-figure shopping spree. Robert Davis got 64 months in prison and was ordered to pay nearly $50,000 in restitution Friday. Davis pleaded guilty to wire fraud earlier this year, admitting that he took Social Security numbers and other personal details from the files of more than 200 people who had filed for disaster relief with FEMA between 2003 and 2007. He used the information to open lines of credit with the Home Shopping Network, Ginny’s Inc., Shop NBC and QVC. He treated himself to jewelry, vacuum...

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E-mails show infighting over police barricades

When violent crime spiked in the dangerous 7th Police District this summer, D.C. officials tried to increase police presence. But authorities quickly discovered that every available officer had been sent to man Chief Cathy Lanier’s neighborhood barricades on the other side of the city, e-mails obtained by The Examiner show. “I wanted to hold pst over in 7d and now finding out not one pst was deployed???” Assistant Chief Diane Groomes wrote to a district commander on June 12, adding that four people had just been shot. “PST” stands for “patrol support team.” District Cmdr. Willie Dandridge replied a few moments later. He said another assistant...

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3 Minute Interview-Callaghan

St. John’s College High School junior Christine Callaghan had watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on television for years. But now she has appeared in the parade for the second year in a row. The 16-year-old from Annandale was asked to join the parade’s prestigious “All-American Band” as a clarinetist. How long have you playing the clarinet? Since fourth grade. Do you enjoy it? It’s my passion. Classical or jazz? Classical. I do play tenor sax in a jazz ensemble at school, but my main focus is classical. Who’s your favorite composer? John Williams. I love all his music he’s done for the movies. It really gives you a sense of the...

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Judge reinstates D.C. police lieutenant

A D.C. police lieutenant is back on the job after an administrative law judge reinstated him and slammed law enforcement authorities for firing the officer — because he had been fired. Tim Haselden was forced to turn in his badge and gun and was facing termination after Attorney General Peter Nickles decided that previous wife-beating accusations against Haselden — true or not — had damaged the 18-year veteran’s credibility. While fighting his firing, Haselden, 41, spent his days at the police academy, rearranging traffic cones for the police motorcycle course. He continued to draw his $100,000 annual salary. In a decision dated just before Thanksgiving, city...

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Paramedics criticize plan to consolidate fire, EMS

Mayor Adrian Fenty is facing a fight on his plan to consolidate the D.C. fire department and ambulance service, a plan critics say is a back-door attempt to bust a troublesome union. Fenty has introduced legislation that he says will close the wage and pension gap between firefighters and paramedics. But the bill would require paramedics to train as firefighters, too. The paramedics union is crying foul. “If passed, it will result in busting the union,” union leader Ken Lyons told The Examiner. “There’s no doubt.” The fire and emergency management system has promised the public that every new employee will be trained as both firefighter and paramedic. About...

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Budget ‘screwup’ leaves vendors unpaid and city facing contempt

D.C. school officials have mishandled their budget, leaving dozens of vendors unpaid and putting the District at risk of being found in contempt of federal court. City and school officials told The Examiner that the fiscal 2009 budget wasn’t properly “loaded,” meaning the correct amounts of money weren’t placed in the proper accounts. As a result, payments to numerous private companies and schools that provide services to special education students weren’t made for more than a month. This week, city officials scrambled to make good on hundreds of thousands of dollars in past due bills. The District is under a federal consent decree stemming from a...

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Ex-Interior exec pleads guilty to credit-card misuse

A former executive for the Department of the Interior is facing 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges that he used his government-issued credit card to go on a shopping spree. Jamoya Mobutu was an anti-discrimination officer for the agency. He pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to using his government credit card to buy nearly $5,000 worth of computers, briefcases and cameras. A law enforcement official told The Examiner that Mobutu also was encouraging his underlings to use their government credit cards for similar purposes when he was arrested. Mobutu was arrested in late June. He pleaded guilty to theft charges, which carry a maximum of 10 years in prison. He also...

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Accountant gets 2-plus years in prison for phony tax returns

A Virginia accountant will spend the next two-plus years in prison after he was convicted of filing bogus tax returns for his business. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema sentenced Henry Omozee to 27 months in prison and one year of probation, and ordered him to pay more than $82,000 in retribution for defrauding the government through a series of phony tax returns. An Alexandria jury in August convicted Omozee of three counts of filing false tax returns. Omozee was a certified public accountant with offices in Alexandria and Woodbridge. He popped up on federal radar screens when, as he filed returns under his brother’s name, agents noticed that he had an unusually high number...

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Counseling work for troubled children may have lead to couple’s death in D.C.

A distinguished D.C. psychiatrist and his wife are dead and police are worried that the doctor’s commitment to troubled kids may have cost the couple their lives. The bodies of Michael Spevak and his wife, Ginny, were found in their home in upper Northwest late Saturday, police said. Their car was discovered burning on a side street across town a few hours later. Investigators are working from the theory the couple was killed by one of the youngsters Michael Spevak frequently counseled, an official with intimate knowledge of the unfolding case told The Examiner. Police were trying to keep a lid on the investigation, refusing to say how the Spevaks were killed or describe the state...

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D.C. owes feds tens of millions for Medicare mismanagement

The District will have to give tens of millions of dollars, and possibly hundreds of millions, back to the federal government after an audit discovered widespread mismanagement in the city’s Medicaid program. Officials in the school system and the child welfare agency routinely approved payments without checking invoices and disbursed taxpayer dollars without proper documents, Mayor Adrian Fenty said Friday. The mayor and his aides refused to say how much money was at stake, but said that the mismanagement occurred between at least 2003 and 2006. “I can’t really give you the numbers. They’re all over the lot,” Attorney General Peter Nickles told The Examiner....

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3 Minute Interview — Andrea Powell

Andrea Powell is the executive director and co-founder of FAIR Fund, an anti-human trafficking group in Washington that helps rescue children from international flesh peddlers. The privately funded group was founded in 2003. With an annual budget of about $250,000 and a staff of six, FAIR Fund fans out all over the capital region, racing to help rescued girls and trying to keep local children from having to be rescued. Why do we need an anti-trafficking group in D.C.? The District of Columbia is listed as one of the top 10 places for trafficking in the United States. International trafficking is a major problem here. We’ve seen several major cases in the region. There are up to 25...

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Federal workers await word on day off

Hundreds of thousands of federal employees around the Washington area are waiting for President George Bush to decide whether to give them off the day after Christmas. The calendar has conspired against federal workers this season — the days after Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day are all Fridays. That means employees are facing the prospect of self-restraint at the holiday table or using a vacation day to recover from their feasting. “They’re regularly scheduled workdays,” Office of Personal Management spokesman Peter Graves told The Examiner. “We need an executive order.” Well, Mr. President? “I don’t know if we’re...

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Experts say Fenty baby’s crib could be hazardous to health

A published profile with photographs of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s family nursery adorned with toys and pillows has worried child safety experts, who say the arrangement could be dangerous for a baby. “A crib that’s safe for a baby to sleep is empty except for a firm mattress,” said Laura Reno, an executive with Baltimore-based First Candle, a nonprofit group that helps spread the word about infant deaths. “Any time you put any of that fluffy stuff in there, it can get in the way of the oxygen they need.” Reno and others are stirred up over photos of Michelle Cross Fenty that ran in the Washington Post’s Home Section last week. The pictures show a crib...

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D.C. toddler beaten to death; man arrested

Detectives on Wednesday afternoon arrested a man in connection with the beating death of a toddler, D.C. police said. Twenty-one-month-old Ronjai Butler, of the 1200 block of North Capitol Street NW, was taken to Howard University on Sunday and was pronounced dead. Police on Wednesday night had not released the identity of the suspect, but a department spokesman said the man lived in the same residence as Ronjai. Ronjai’s family was known to child welfare bureaucrats. His half-sister was the subject of a neglect complaint that was later closed, Councilman Tommy Wells, D-Ward 6, told The Examiner. Anyone with information about the incident is asked to call police at 202-727-9099.

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Metro mechanic fired for telling dirty jokes

A veteran Metro mechanic has been fired, and three top executives suspended, after the mechanic told a dirty joke to a crowd at a departmental awards ceremony, The Examiner has learned. Gene Garritt volunteered to emcee a banquet in Prince George’s County for elevator and escalator apprentices Sept. 17. Taking the microphone, he told dirty jokes. The humor was lost on someone in his audience, who reported Garritt to Metro authorities. After a three-month investigation, Metro officials fired him, agency spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein confirmed to The Examiner on Monday. “It was determined that the remarks made by the employee on Sept. 17 were so egregious that he was...

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Fenty shutters used car dealers

Mayor Adrian Fenty’s crackdown on used car dealerships continued Monday, with the mayor announcing that he had ordered 23 more lots shuttered in Northeast Washington. Fenty says he wants to close 100 dealerships for a variety of offenses, ranging from environmental violations to building code problems. The Fenty regime zeroed in last year on the dealers, most of them along Bladensburg Avenue. Squads of inspectors have fanned out through Northeast, rifling papers, reviewing licenses and checking equipment. Fifty-one businesses have been closed, 68 vehicles towed off lots and $22,500 in fines issued, according to the city. But the sweeps have caused problems of their own. The...

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Jury convicts ex-D.C. city clerk on bribery charges

A federal jury on Friday convicted a former D.C. clerk of shaking down city business owners to clear up fines and licenses. Jurors deliberated less than two hours before finding Ikela Dean guilty of two counts of bribery. She was convicted of taking cash in exchange for erasing “late fees” levied against downtown hotels for their elevator inspections. She was arrested in September 2007 after a yearlong investigation and indicted on 14 counts of bribery, but U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton threw out 12 of the counts on Thursday, ruling that prosecutors hadn’t proved their case. Dean was fired from the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, and officials are...

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Examiner editorial cartoonist wins prominent national award

Nate Beeler, The Examiner’s editorial cartoonist, has joined the elite of his profession with an award from the National Press Foundation. Beeler was given the 2009 Clifford K. & James T. Berryman Award for Editorial Cartoons, it was announced today. Past winners include Steve Breen, Ann Telnaes, Signe Wilkinson, Stuart Carlson, Jim Morin and David Horsey -- all Pulitzer Prize winners. “Not only is Nate a fine draftsman and a natural wit, he’s also a first-rate journalist,” said Stephen G. Smith, executive editor of The Washington Examiner. “He has a sharp eye for incompetence and hypocrisy in government, and his cartoons draw attention to these failings...

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Federal contractor convicted of lying about conducting background checks

A former federal contractor is facing five years in prison after a D.C. jury convicted him Wednesday lying about doing background checks on Pentagon and federal workers seeking top-secret clearance. George Abraham was convicted on six counts of lying to investigators. He was supposed to have interviewed associates of seven key government employees who were seeking top-secret clearance in sensitive positions in the Pentagon and Treasury Department. Instead, he didn’t conduct the interviews, or he cut them short and then lied to authorities about it, prosecutors charged. All of the employees were given clearance. “This case is important because of the implications for national...

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Assistant police chief named to head academy

D.C. police Assistant Chief Winston Robinson has been on the job for nearly 40 years. His behavior has caused him trouble for nearly as long. Now his boss, Chief Cathy Lanier, wants him to train D.C.’s finest. In a memo Friday obtained by The Examiner, she appointed Robinson as top officer for the department’s academy. In 1985, Robinson tried to flee D.C. police after a car crash. Officers at the scene said Robinson struggled with them and then gave a false name. In 2004, the police union accused Robinson of falsifying crime figures in the dangerous 7th District. An inspector general’s report on the allegations said there had been unintentional errors and blamed the...

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Father’s rage toward alleged abuser to be considered

A convicted murderer will get a new trial because jurors were not allowed to consider whether he was driven to his homicidal rage by the suspicion his daughter had been molested. Maurice Lee was convicted of second-degree murder in the July 24, 2002 stabbing death of Melvin Hairston. But a three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals has tossed Lee’s conviction because, the judges said, the jurors were given the wrong instructions. Numerous witnesses — including Lee’s 11-year-old son — testified that they saw Lee kill Hairston. But Lee stabbed Hairston after Lee’s daughter accused Hairston of sexually abusing her. Jurors should have been given a chance to...

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D.C. college students waiting on overdue tuition grants

Thousands of D.C. college students have had their semester thrown into turmoil because city officials stalled on getting the paperwork done for federally funded grants, The Examiner has learned. The District of Columbia’s Leveraging Educational Assistance Partnership is a $4 million matching grants program that’s designed to help D.C. high school grads afford pricey out-of-state tuition around the country. More than 2,500 students who’ve been awarded the grants are still waiting for their money. “There was a delay this fall in dispersing payments,” state superintendent’s office spokeswoman Nicole Shaffer told The Examiner in an e-mail exchange....

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Gray seeks to revive city’s rainy day fund

D.C. Council Chairman Vince Gray is behind a council attempt to resurrect the city’s defunct rainy day fund, The Examiner has learned. Under legislation still being drafted, Gray would require the administration to set aside $50 million in this fiscal year’s budget – just in case. D.C. is facing a $131 million budget gap for fiscal 2009 but Gray has told colleagues he’s worried things might get worse. The council will hold hearings Monday on Mayor Adrian Fenty’s budget. The money would come by slashing cash from Fenty’s proposed new expenditures. The measure apparently has broad support from the council. “We feel we have to be prepared,”...

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Contractor failed to perform key background checks, prosecutors say

Numerous federal employees may have been given key government positions without background checks, and prosecutors are blaming a contractor they say scammed the government by pocketing a fee without doing the work. George Abraham is charged with lying to federal authorities when he claimed that he checked on numerous federal employees in various agencies. He’s on trial in federal court this week. The case could have significant implications for national security, prosecutors said in court. Abraham was paid by two different government contractors to conduct background interviews on candidates who were slated to get top-secret security clearance in the military and investigative...

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D.C. police lieutenant fights for his career

A veteran D.C. police lieutenant is fighting for his career after his bosses, having lost a court battle to fire him, are trying to re-fire him — because the court battle damaged his credibility. The department fired Tim Haselden in 2005 after police were called to two off-duty confrontations between him and his wife. He was never charged with wrongdoing, but internal D.C. investigators alleged that he was drunk and had attacked his wife. An administrative hearing judge disagreed, ruling that Haselden had been sober and had tried to defuse the confrontations. The judge ordered Haselden, an 18-year veteran, put back on the job earlier this year. But after published reports claimed...

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Tax scam mastermind’s brother gets 4 years in prison for role

The younger brother of self-confessed D.C. tax scam mastermind Harriette Walters is off to prison, having pleaded guilty to helping his big sister siphon off millions in the city’s largest-ever public corruption scandal. U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams Jr. sentenced Richard Walters to more than four years behind bars and three years of probation for his role in the $48 million, decades-long scam. Under a deal reached in the summer, Richard Walters, 49, agreed to plead guilty and to testify against Harriette Walters, a former D.C. tax office bureaucrat who bilked the public out of millions through hundreds of phony property tax refunds. Shortly after Richard Walters’...

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Foggy Bottom residents angry at transfer of popular cop

Neighbors in Foggy Bottom are outraged that they’re losing a popular police lieutenant who they say is being punished for his good deeds. Lt. Phil Lanciano has been a fixture in the upscale neighborhood for years but he was recently — and suddenly — transferred to the ultraviolent 6th District, east of the Anacostia River. It’s a move that’s outraged neighbors, who say that police Chief Cathy Lanier and Mayor Adrian Fenty are asset-stripping their neighborhood. “Another Fenty hatchet job,” resident Marilyn Rubin told The Examiner. “The neighborhood is shocked and outraged.” Lanier announced the transfer in an internal memo that went...

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D.C. deputy police chief demoted

A former top aide to D.C. Chief of Police Cathy Lanier has been demoted for the second time in his career. Josh Ederheimer had risen to become deputy chief under Lanier, but an order obtained by The Examiner shows he has been reduced in rank to captain at the end of October and moved out of his key position. Lanier brought Ederheimer back to the department from the Police Executive Research Forum, a D.C. think tank that hired him after he was demoted from commander by Lanier’s predecessor, Charles Ramsey. Ederheimer was instrumental in helping the department get out from under onerous Justice Department monitoring of police violence. His steady demeanor and rigid professionalism...

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Officials at D.C. agencies routinely overspend by millions, review finds

District of Columbia officials routinely violated city spending laws, burning through tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and raising disturbing questions about whether the public’s purse is being carefully watched. The D.C. Anti-Deficiency Act sets strict limits on agency spending. City officials racked up more than 400 violations of the law between fiscal 2005 and 2007, internal reports obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show. Agencies exceeded their budgets by at least $1 million nearly 100 times in fiscal 2006 and 2007, the reports of the Anti-Deficiency Act board show. The worst offenders were the Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Administration,...

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D.C. court backs police barricades

Mayor Adrian Fenty’s controversial neighborhood barricades cleared a major hurdle Thursday when a federal judge ruled that the public has “an overwhelming need” to be protected from violence. “Suffice it to say that the public’s interest in deterring violent crime of this type through a checkpoint program this carefully crafted is overwhelming,” U.S. District Judge Richard Leon wrote, in denying a legal petition that sought to prevent the city from using the checkpoints until a lawsuit challenging their constitutionality could be heard. “Simply put, to take this arrow out of [D.C. police’s] quiver on such a weak showing as to its...

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3 Minute Interview - Heidi M. Pasichow

Heidi M. Pasichow, 54, will be formally sworn in this afternoon as the newest associate judge in D.C. Superior Court. A longtime area resident, she earned her bachelor’s degree from George Washington University and her law degree at American University. She’ll serve a 15-year term after two decades as a D.C. prosecutor. Are you having a good time? I am having a good time. It is a real welcome challenge. What was it like to put on the robes the first time and walk into your courtroom, having everybody stand? I felt, and I continue to feel, honored and humbled by the experience. I’ve wanted to do this for a while. I was really hoping that the moment would come that I...

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Former government contractor faces prison time for role in kickback scheme

A former government contractor faces prison this week after admitting he concealed income from a kickback scheme that cheated taxpayers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Charles Anthony “Tony” Wehausen was indicted last year on charges that he and several of his friends doctored work orders and invoices on machinery contracts for a U.S. Health and Human Services building on Independence Avenue and a Social Security Administration building on C Street Southwest. The subcontractors who were paid under the phony invoices then shipped money back to Wehausen, according to court documents. The scheme netted nearly $375,000 from the U.S. General Services Administration between...

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Nearly a dozen area cops enter online ‘Finest Ms. Officer’ contest

Photos of at least 10 local police officers in various states of undress popped up on a radio station’s Web site, where visitors are being urged to vote for the area’s “Finest Ms. Officer.” The contest is sponsored by hip-hop and R&B station WKYS-FM. It was inspired by rap star Lil Wayne’s runaway hit, “Mrs. Officer,” wherein the crooner declares his lust for a female cop. “We decided to pay tribute to female officers all across our area,” WKYS program director Al Payne told The Examiner. The contestants apparently didn’t violate any department rules, local police officials told The Examiner. This was in part because, in the...

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Lanier boots 2nd District commander after less than a year

Months after denying reports of a shake-up in a Northwest police district, Chief Cathy Lanier has replaced the commander with her agency’s former internal affairs leader. Mark Carter had served as commander of the 2nd District for less than a year. He’ll be replaced by Inspector Matthew Klein, who was demoted from the head of internal affairs this summer. “I’m acting commander as of Sunday,” Klein told The Examiner. He declined further comment. The Examiner reported in July that Carter was on his way out. He had struggled in his relations with neighbors and anti-crime activists, who said he was aloof and often detached from day-to-day life in the wealthy...

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D.C. forced to pay back $11M in federal education grants

D.C.’s failing school system has handed back more than $11 million to the federal government after an internal investigation determined that officials had illegally overdrawn their federal accounts, The Examiner has learned. The money, coming from 24 separate grants and including interest, was wired back to the U.S. Department of Education last week, finance office e-mails obtained by The Examiner show. The millions represent dollars that were spent beyond grant limits set by the federal government. The overdrafts weren’t discovered until this summer, shortly after State Superintendent Deborah Gist took over the grants office from the public schools and began checking accounts,...

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‘Ringer’ of a lawyer wins millions

Con artists hoping to hustle a fast buck from the federal government quickly learn that Paul Mussenden is a marathoner. Mussenden is an assistant U.S. attorney who concentrates on civil litigation. In three months this summer, he and his team helped taxpayers recoup nearly $16 million in fraud settlements. Nearly $11 million came from D.C. in a settlement over St. Elizabeths Hospital, which is set to be taken over by the feds under the deal Mussenden worked out. The 39-year-old has accomplished all of this without raising his voice, friends and colleagues say. “He just works his tail off,” said Rudy Contreras, chief of the U.S. attorney’s civil division. “He...

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Auditor: Tax office failed to do backgrounds checks

D.C.’s finance office did not check the backgrounds of job applicants who later stole from taxpayers, a new report by the D.C. auditor has concluded. Finance officials under city Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi failed to screen applicants and never checked employees’ backgrounds after they were hired, Deborah Nichols wrote in a report dated Friday. Without “pre-employment background checks, an employee with significant financial problems may be placed in a position of trust where temptation is rigorously tested, the internal control environment is weak and internal controls are nonexistent, inadequate, or function poorly,” Nichols wrote. Friday’s...

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Man’s squalid death spurs vow for agency reform

The squalid end of an elderly, mentally retarded man has forced the Fenty administration into another round of promised reforms of city services. But the administration has refused to bow to public calls for an outside investigation of the man’s awful last days. The 65-year-old, identified only as “Mr. Johnson” in a watchdog agency’s report, slipped into a diabetic coma in a cockroach-and-feces infested apartment in D.C. on Feb. 23. He died, congressionally mandated monitor University Legal Services claimed in its report released last week, because city officials used bureaucratic rules to refuse to admit him into a group home for people with his...

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Sources: D.C. finance workers given ultimatum

At least a dozen D.C. finance office workers have been given an ultimatum — resign or be fired — because their names appeared on checks written by the woman who masterminded the $48 million theft from the office, The Examiner has learned. The employees received money between 2002 and 2007 from Harriette Walters, 51, who is sitting in a federal jail awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to leading the city’s largest public corruption scam, sources said. The city employees’ names were handed over to the finance office by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, according to sources. Their names all appeared on checks written by Walters in those five years, the sources...

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Study: Minority female lawyers hit glass ceiling

Although more than 20 percent of Washington-area law partners are female, only 2 percent of partners are black, Hispanic or Asian women, a new study of law firm hiring practices has found. Minority women continue to struggle to make it to the elite ranks of the legal profession not just in Washington, but nationwide, the National Association for Law Placement found in its annual survey. NALP is a D.C.-based nonprofit group that studies hiring trends in the legal profession. It has been studying the status of minority women in law firms for 16 years. Their percentages have risen slightly, but very slowly, NALP reports. D.C.’s figure is better than the national average —...

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Alexander will break tied Nickles confirmation vote

Yvette Alexander, a once-obscure city bureaucrat and now freshman D.C. councilwoman, represents a key vote over whether to confirm Mayor Adrian Fenty’s controversial attorney general nominee. Alexander, D-Ward 7, is apparently the only undecided vote on the five-member Public Safety and Judiciary Committee on whether Peter Nickles should be the city’s full-time attorney general. The other four members have split. “Everybody wants to talk to me,” she said, sighing before a sometimes contentious public hearing over Nickles on Friday. “I guess I’m the one who gets to decide.” It is a critical vote in Alexander’s young political career. Nickles...

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Police biggest target in Fenty’s $30M budget cuts

Mayor Adrian Fenty on Thursday dropped the ax on dozens of key District of Columbia agencies, including the police department, promising that he would rescue the city from its $131 million budget crisis without disrupting services. In a hastily called news conference one day before the D.C. Council meets to discuss ways to save money, Fenty said his administration would trim more than $30 million by shaving from the budgets of dozens of city agencies, including the police and fire departments, the finance office and the departments of parks and health. The ax falls hardest on the cops, who are losing nearly $4 million under Fenty’s plan. “We want to make sure we live within...

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Amid budget storm, no more “rainy day” fund

The District’s $131-million fiscal wound is partially self-inflicted, after the city eliminated a once-mandatory rainy day fund. In his Thursday proposal to trim the city’s budget, Mayor Adrian Fenty acknowledged that D.C. no longer was setting aside money in a so-called operating cash reserve. For years, Congress required the District to set aside tens of millions in case of economic crisis. The mandate was lifted for this fiscal year and the fund merged into the city’s lawsuit judgments and settlements fund and no new funds were added, Fenty’s budget proposal states. Asked about the rainy day fund at Thursday’s news conference, city administrator Dan...

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Everything you wanted to know about Peter Nickels

Everything you wanted to know about Peter Nickles (but were afraid to ask): * Met his wife, Maria, at lasagna dinner at Harvard. On first date, took her to his criminal law class. * Father, Greek immigrant John Nickles (nee Nikolaides), wanted him to be a doctor. “They had Cadillacs and dressed well,” Peter Nickles recalled. But premed studies “interfered with baseball practice.” * Baseball? Really? “I was a catcher. I was a pitcher, too, but I hit a lot of people. I had a very strong arm but I was a little wild.” * One of his first cases at Covington & Burling involved litigation over land taken by Fidel Castro after the Cuban revolution. *...

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Fenty’s lightning-rod attorney general nominee tackles tasks head-on

Peter Nickles says he has mellowed with age. Critics say they would hate to have met him in his caustic days. Nickles, 70, will face the public this week, asking to be confirmed as the District of Columbia’s attorney general. More than anyone else in the administration, Nickles has shouldered the responsibility for carrying out what he thinks of as Fenty’s revolution. The Nickles-Fenty partnership was formed before Fenty was born. Nickles befriended Fenty’s parents while vacationing in Maine and has been an unofficial member of the family ever since. He was one of the first people Fenty turned to after winning his historic election in 2006. First, Nickles was a Fenty...

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Convicted career con man facing 130 years buys a little more time

The resume Robert Miller has offered to the public shows that he is a lawyer, a banker and a real estate tycoon. The 54-year-old’s real resume, prosecutors allege, is that of a career con man. He has been arrested 57 times and has been convicted 17 times, on charges ranging from impersonating a lawyer to operating a boat while intoxicated. He has spent nearly 5,000 days in jail. Law enforcement sources grumbled privately Thursday that the smooth-talking Miller might have pulled another fast one. Facing 130 years in prison for bilking hundreds of Baltimore- and Washington-area residents out of nearly $500,000 in a real-estate scam, Miller filed a last-minute, hand-written,...

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City Council calls for outside review of D.C. voting system

District officials should bring in a team of outside experts to conduct “a forensic” review of the city’s antiquated computerized voting system, a D.C. Council report stated Wednesday. “At this stage in the investigation, it is clear that a substantial number of problems exist and that the election process in the District is in need of comprehensive reform,” Councilwoman Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, wrote in her report on the ongoing investigation of the Sept. 9 primary chaos. “In the committee’s opinion, the mistakes of the September primary election brought to the fore larger, systemic deficiencies in the operation of the District’s...

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Walters to meet auditors, tell how she took $50 miliion

Harriette Walters, the self-confessed mastermind of D.C.’s largest-ever public corruption scandal, will meet with private auditors next week to help explain how she and a few friends managed to bilk the public out of nearly $50 million, The Examiner has learned. Walters, 51, has already pleaded guilty to organizing her friends and family in a conspiracy that took tens of millions of dollars through decades’ worth of phony property tax returns. She’ll sit down with lawyers and accountants from WilmerHale, the law firm that has agreed to investigate the scandal for the city council, sources familiar with the investigation told The Examiner. Details of the meeting are still...

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Man sentenced for making teen girl a slave in Germantown

A Nigerian man was sentenced to more than eight years in prison Tuesday on charges that he smuggled a teen into the country so that he and his wife could use the girl as their slave. George Udeozor, 52, had fled to his native Nigeria after police raided his Germantown home in 2001, authorities said. He and his wife, Adaobi Stella Udeozor, a Montgomery County physician, were accused of smuggling the girl in from their native country by using their daughter’s passport in 1996. They told the girl that they planned to adopt her. Instead, they held her as a slave, prosecutors charged. She was ordered to cook and clean and to baby-sit for the Udeozors’ six children. The girl also...

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D.C.’s indigent lack lawyers in civil court, study says

Despite millions pouring in from public and private donations and a city chock-full of lawyers, the District’s poor typically don’t have legal representation when they go into civil court, a new study has found. “Low-income residents face tremendous obstacles in the civil legal system,” D.C.’s publicly appointed Access to Justice Commission reported. “The consequences of unaddressed civil legal problems can be devastating and spill over into other aspects of life.” The commission’s findings, titled “Justice for All?” will be released today. It serves as a kind of report card for how D.C. — with more than 80,000 licensed...

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Computer troubles add to special ed problems

A multimillion-dollar computer system brought in to help save D.C.’s failing special education program doesn’t work with existing school software, and city officials are scrambling to account for thousands of vital records ahead of a crucial audit, The Examiner has learned. Earlier this year, the District signed a $4.2 million contract with the Public Consulting Group for help in organizing thousands of chaotically stored special education files and tracking federal deadlines for updating those files. But e-mails obtained by The Examiner show that the group’s computer tracking system isn’t compatible with the system’s enrollment database. This means officials...

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D.C. officials ‘ineffectively managed’ Eastern Market, audit finds

D.C. officials have “ineffectively managed” the city’s historic Eastern Market, exposing the public’s money to “a total lack of financial and management accountability,” a new audit has found. City council auditor Deborah Nichols reviewed five years of deals at the market and found that city authorities and executives at Eastern Market Ventures, the private nonprofit company asked to run the grand old farm stand, routinely broke rules and laws on contracting and financial management. Conditions may have worsened after the August, 2007 fire that decimated the market, Nichols found. Mayor Adrian Fenty promised to get the market rebuilt better than ever...

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D.C. residents still in shock treatment center

Seven months after D.C. officials promised to have gotten the District’s disabled and mentally ill citizens out of a Massachusetts shock-therapy clinic, three of them still are confined in the school, The Examiner has learned. The Judge Rotenberg Center is one of the only clinics in the country authorized to use electroshock and other “aversive” therapies on its wards. D.C. officials said they were horrified to discover that that the city was paying to house at least 10 mentally ill or disabled children and adults at Rotenberg. Peter Nickles, the city’s interim attorney general, promised to have every D.C. resident out of Rotenberg by March. Yet the clinic...

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Auditor rips ex-head of D.C. property tax board

The chairman of the District’s property tax appeals board led without competence, ignored regulations and accepted ethically questionable campaign donations from people whose appeals were before him, a city auditor charged in a blunt public rebuke. D.C. Auditor Deborah Nichols blasted Paul Strauss, a real estate lawyer whose term as head of the Board of Real Property Assessments and Appeals ended last month, for providing “dubious levels of service to residents and businesses.” His failed leadership, Nichols concluded in an audit released Thursday, jeopardized the integrity of the board “and diminish[ed] public trust and confidence” in the board’s...

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Audit blasts D.C. officials’ conduct on funds for teacher training

D.C. school and financial officials broke conflict-of-interest, procurement and federal spending rules to steer $6.2 million to a teachers’ training program, a new city audit has found. The Teachers’ Institute was founded by former Horace Mann Elementary principal Sheila Ford just as she was retiring. It was designed to support D.C.’s beleaguered educators with intense, on-the-job training. But a review by the D.C. inspector general found that Ford inappropriately pitched her services to D.C. officials while still an active employee. Other school officials ignored procurement laws by handing over millions of dollars without a contract before the institute had begun work....

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Call from wife led authorities to crime scene

After Victor Papagno Jr. was arrested on a domestic violence charge in August 2007, his wife, Andrea, told his bosses at the Naval Research Laboratory that she wanted his work stuff out of the house, federal sources said. Navy officials didn’t know what she was talking about. When they showed up at the Papagno’s Calvert County home, authorities found a crime scene: 19,709 pieces of stolen computer equipment from the Navy lab – hard drives, CDs, zip drives, floppy disks – worth up to $1.6 million, according to court documents and Navy officials. Papagno, 40, the computer administrator for the Navy research lab, had accumulated so much hardware that some of the...

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City Paper’s parent files for bankruptcy

The parent company of D.C.’s City Paper filed for bankruptcy Monday, casting a pall over the alternative weekly’s staff and its future. Creative Loafing Inc. is seeking Chapter 11 protection so that it can keep its lenders from carving the company up. “This is something of a shocker,” City Paper Editor Erik Wemple told The Examiner. “But if they can use the reorganization laws under Chapter 11 to give us some breathing room, that’d be great.” Executives stressed the positives Monday, saying that bankruptcy was the best choice for the company. “The company owed more money than it can pay back right now,” Chief Executive Officer Ben...

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Extra money couldn’t prevent D.C.’s vote-counting trouble

Months before phantom ballots wrought havoc with the District’s primary elections, the Fenty administration was warned that the city’s election agency was critically low on funds to handle the polling, The Examiner has learned. Documents and e-mails obtained by The Examiner also show that the Board of Election and Ethics spent six figures beyond its more than $6 million annual budget even though official requests for it had been denied. The board still is trying to account for its handling of the Sept. 9 primary debacle, in which an election machine counted thousands of votes that hadn’t been cast. Officials are worried that the city will be overwhelmed by the expected...

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Mendelson: What’s the holdup on District’s DNA lab?

The Fenty administration is wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars per month and jeopardizing public safety by dragging its feet on building a DNA laboratory, a key D.C. councilman will charge today. Phil Mendelson, one of team Fenty’s most outspoken critics, is scheduled to open hearings today into progress on building the city’s crime lab, a massive public project that has dragged on for years. “It’s not just bricks for bureaucrats,” Mendelson, D-at large, told The Examiner ahead of today’s hearing. “This is about public safety.” D.C. has set aside tens of millions of federal and local dollars to build itself what officials are...

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Rhee stays close to home for special ed chief

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has turned to a long-time loyalist to help her rescue the city’s failing $300 million special education system. Richard Nyankori has been appointed deputy chancellor for special education, Rhee spokeswoman Dena Iverson told The Examiner. He replaces Phyllis Harris, whom Rhee appointed as her $200,000-per year special ed “czar” and who is now on medical leave as she receives treatment for cancer, Iverson said in an e-mail exchange. Nyankori, a former administrator in the Baltimore public schools, is Rhee’s third special ed chieftain in the past 15 months. Rhee demoted then-director Marla Oakes to make room from Harris, whom she...

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3 Minute Interview-Ruttenberg

Daniel Ruttenberg is a partner at the Vienna law firm of Smolen, Plevy. He’s also a vice president of Devotion to Children (devotiontochildren.org), a nonprofit group founded in 1994. Its mission is to help poor families obtain child care and early education. How did you get involved? The co-founder, Rosemary Lauer, told me she really wanted me to come. She told me it would be once a quarter. I’d just have to come to a meeting and give advice. Now I’m vice president, and it’s at least twice a month. What appealed to you about the work? It was a mission I could really get behind. The mission of the charity is to provide child care to these families that otherwise...

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Firing of D.C. rent control boss is hot topic

Landlords and tenants will face off today as the D.C. Council convenes hearings on whether Mayor Adrian Fenty yielded to business interests when he fired the city’s top rent official. Grayce Wiggins was dropped as the city’s rent administrator last month. The Fenty administration has cited its executive privilege — and employee privacy rules — in refusing to discuss the dismissal. Tenants and renters advocates say Wiggins was let go because she sided with the little guys against big developers. The city’s rent administrator has broad authority over thousands of rent-controlled apartments. D.C. law sets strict rules for raising rents in rent-controlled...

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Blue crab disaster declaration will bring federal aid

The federal government is bailing out hard-pressed watermen with a disaster declaration for the region’s collapsing blue crab industry. Maryland lawmakers led by Sen. Barbara Mikulski had sought the declaration by the Commerce Department since May, after Virginia posted a record-low harvest for the delectable crustaceans and Maryland had its lowest catch since 1945. Watermen have chafed under restrictions that cut the numbers of female crabs harvested and also shortened the season. The declaration makes watermen eligible for federal funding to help ease the pressure. Mikulski spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz told The Associated Press that lawmakers must still line up funding —...

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Hundreds of hydrants need repairs or replacement

Hundreds of D.C. fire hydrants remain out of order more than a year after faulty hydrants contributed to a blaze that gutted one of the city’s grand old libraries, The Examiner has learned. At least 208 fire hydrants have quit altogether, D.C. Water and Sewer Authority spokeswoman Pamela Mooring confirmed in an e-mail to The Examiner on Tuesday. Hundreds more are ringed with “maintenance” tags, meaning they need fundamental repairs. The city water agency has spent at least $25 million since 2006 to replace or repair nearly 40 percent of D.C.’s fire hydrants. The problem was highlighted last year by a fire at the Georgetown Neighborhood Library. Firefighters were...

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Tracking bracelet leads to shooting suspect

A court-monitoring ankle bracelet has led authorities to charge a Northwest teenager in the near-fatal shooting of a retired D.C. police officer, The Examiner has learned. Lenny Webb, 18, of the 1300 block of Taylor Street Northwest, is charged as an accessory to the early Tuesday robbery and shooting of John Timbers. Timbers, who had recently retired from a long career in the third police district, was enjoying a cigarette in front of his home on the 5900 block of 13th Street Northwest when he was approached by two young men. One of the youths held up a handgun and said, “You know what time it is, don’t you?” a police source told The Examiner. Timbers reached for his...

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School officials revise grievance process on special ed

Stung by a series of reversals in the troubled special education system, school officials are revising the standards and rules for the officials who hear grievances of special ed parents, internal documents show. Under new rules proposed by State Superintendent Deborah Gist, special ed hearing officers will have to have at least five years of legal experience and can’t work for any school while they perform their duties, according to a memo obtained by The Examiner. Gist is proposing to relax rules, however, that require officers to be members of the D.C. Bar. Instead, they can be members of other state bars who have applied to the D.C. Bar. Hearing officers have broad authority...

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