D.C.’s small-timers

Published March 6, 2011 5:00am ET



Mayor Vince Gray has a headache called Sulaimon Brown. Brown ran a mayoral race for the sole purpose of attacking former Mayor Adrian Fenty, and received a handful of votes on election day. He was then hired by Fenty’s victorious challenger, Vince Gray. Brown was then fired from that $110,000-a-year job because of a restraining order against him — it involved allegations that he had stalked a 13-year-old girl.

Brown is now telling The Washington Post that he originally got the job as part of a quid-pro-quo with Gray’s campaign.

Brown says he was offered a city job if Gray won in exchange for continuing campaign attacks on incumbent Mayor Adrian M. Fenty. He also alleges that two Gray campaign aides gave him a series of cash payments to help finance his mayoral campaign.

This is just one more in a series of unflattering revelation about Gray’s early hires and the pricey automobiles leased for Gray and his political ally, Council Chairman Kwame Brown. It doesn’t quite rise to the scale of the patronage armies that elected and re-elected Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (and his father) and got Rahm Emanuel his congressional seat in 2002, but it’s our version of losing faith in local government. If they’re crooks, D.C.’s politicians are small-time crooks.