A poor Dominican Republic town paid a close friend of Mayor Adrian Fenty a tenth of its monthly budget to have surplus D.C. emergency equipment transported there, only to learn later that the shipment was abruptly canceled, the town’s mayor said Tuesday.
Sosua leadership routed Sinclair Skinner, Fenty’s friend and confidante, $11,000 in cash early this year to finance the shipment of a firetruck and ambulance to the town on the north Dominican coast, Mayor Vladimir Cespedes said during a news conference.
But the vehicles never arrived: They were ordered returned days after the deal became public in late March. Cespedes said he has not heard from Skinner since his e-mail that the trucks were turned around.
Sosua wants either the vehicles delivered or its money back “if the problem is not solved,” Cespedes said through translator and legal counsel Jorge Espaillat. The town of 50,000 survives on a budget of only $100,000 a month, Cespedes said.
“We hope we’re going to have a good solution because we really need that equipment to save lives in our poor country,” he said.
Whether Skinner or the D.C. government would write the check is unknown. Neither would comment Tuesday.
Fenty said Tuesday, before the Cespedes press event, that the deal is off.
“What you should read between the lines is that sometimes in the realm of being a public official things can be legal, you can have a good purpose in mind, and you still shouldn’t do it,” Fenty said. “And that’s what we concluded from this one and that’s why we won’t do it again.”
The firetruck donation was first proposed in 2007 by William Walker of Faith Productions Inc., a nonprofit that occasionally sends low-income D.C. youth to the Dominican Republic for boxing tournaments. But the District offered only “scrap,” Walker has said.
Then Skinner moved in, as did David Jannarone, a top Fenty development aide.
“[Skinner] said he has a good relationship with the city and he can help bring down the firetruck and ambulance,” said Cespedes, whose visit to D.C. was organized by Dorothy Brizill of D.C. Watch.
But Cespedes denied Skinner or Jannarone were paid anything to make the deal happen. They were simply “tourists,” he said, who visited the town “three or four times” and would stop by city hall.
The vehicles were ordered returned soon after The Examiner exposed the donation. Attorney General Peter Nickles investigated and found nothing wrong. The D.C. Council and the inspector general also are investigating, and Cespedes has met with both in the last 48 hours.
