U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen went to church last Sunday. Let’s leave aside whether he brings a spiritual side to his job of prosecuting criminals, but Machen likes to visit churches. He chose Matthews Memorial Baptist in Anacostia last weekend. “These are my constituents,” he tells me. “They see me in church on Sunday, it makes them more comfortable to see me in court, to serve on juries, to work with us.”
As a preacher, Machen was no match for Pastor C. Matthew Hudson, who belts it out and brings down the house every Sunday. But Machen’s sermon on trusting the authorities and coming together as a community to quell violence might be helping cops and prosecutors get bad guys off the street.
“Seeing me there speaks volumes,” he says.
The political classes and media hordes want one thing from Machen: closure on the investigations into three D.C. political leaders. For months, Machen’s prosecutors have been probing Mayor Vincent Gray’s election campaign, city council Chairman Kwame Brown’s 2008 campaign and Ward 5 council member Harry Thomas Jr.’s nonprofit for alleged criminal wrongdoing.
But the residents of the nation’s capital want more from the city’s top law enforcement official: safer streets, criminals locked up, consequences for bad behavior. From what I can tell, Machen has been accomplishing those tasks very well since taking over the job in February 2010.
In the past year, Machen’s prosecutors got convictions and serious sentences for 23 killers. Among them was Seneca Benjamin, who got 105 years for a shooting rampage that killed his uncle’s fiancee and wounded three others. There were Shanika and Leon Robinson, who murdered Pizza Mart owner Shahabuddin Rana and set him aflame in a burglary. She got 54 years; he was sentenced to 75 and a half.
October was a good month for Machen. On the 27th, six men pleaded guilty to conspiring to set up a methamphetamine ring in the District. Crystal meth has devastated small towns across the country. Highly addictive, the concentrated form of speed has caused parents to abandon their children, small-town sheriffs to become drug dealers, schools to care for students whose parents became addicts.
As destructive as crack was on D.C. in the 1980s and 1990s, crystal meth could have been worse. The defendants had worked with a Mexican drug cartel to set up shop in Georgia and North Carolina. They were on the verge of establishing a network here when the feds, working with local cops in D.C. and down south, busted up the ring.
Those of us who’ve covered cops in the District for a few decades have always heard complaints of cases dropped by the U.S. attorney, about thugs busted Friday night and back out on Saturday, about drugs being sold in open-air markets.
Don’t hear those complaints much these days. Props to the police, federal investigators and Machen, who gets around town to community meetings and school events three to four nights a week.
And church on Sunday.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
