Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Kwame Brown could not utter the phrase, as Marion Barry did, when he was taken down for smoking crack cocaine in the Vista Hotel, back in 1990. The immortal line — “Bitch Set Me Up” — was emblazoned on T-shirts and embodied the rallying cry for those who thought the former mayor was taken down deliberately, perhaps illegally.
Barry truly was set up by the D.C. cops and the FBI in a classic sting operation. Those of us who covered the city back then know that Barry did not want to go to the hotel on Thomas Circle that January night. At first, he resisted the siren call of Rasheeda Moore, his paramour at the time. He made excuses. She lured him to the room. Was Barry entrapped? Not quite. Set up? Absolutely.
Why? The assorted lawmen and women set up in the adjoining hotel room watching cameras trained on Barry as the crack pipe touched his lips played on Barry’s human frailties, of which he had quite a few. It was not the crack he was after. They knew he might give in to the temptation of having sex. They were right.
Temptation is the direct line from Marion Barry’s fall to Kwame Brown’s demise. Brown succumbed to the temptation to own a flashy power boat. Of course the boat didn’t seduce Brown in the way that Barry’s lover beckoned him. But temptation is temptation — universal, Biblical, Shakespearian.
Brown fell prey to another weakness that afflicts people in power. He believed he was untouchable, above the law, “bulletproof,” as he named his boat. He became arrogant. Combine the temptation and the arrogance and you get a city council chairman who would falsify bank documents to get a loan for the boat and use the fax machine in his office to send in the application. You get bank fraud, the federal charge that Brown pleaded guilty to last week.
Likewise, the human frailties that brought Harry Thomas Jr. low were a combination of temptation and arrogance. He craved an expensive car and motorcycle and trips to swank golf resorts. He stole from a city fund for children to get them and figured he wouldn’t get caught. Like Brown, he’s out of office and headed to jail.
Which brings me to recommend a simple rule for anyone who aspires to serve on the D.C. Council. If you want to get rich and live an extravagant lifestyle, don’t go into public service. If you come to public service having made or inherited millions — Mitt Romney, Ted Kennedy and a dozen U.S. senators come to mind — fine.
A seat on the city council is a well-paid gig. Both Brown and Thomas were pulling down $125,000, give or take, when they gave into the temptation for more stuff. It’s a part-time gig, too. Not too shabby.
There’s one more human frailty that could play into the current round of federal investigations. If the feds can prove that Mayor Vince Gray violated the law in his 2010 mayoral campaign, we can ascribe it to fear — the fear of losing.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
