In the back rooms of D.C.’s city hall, you might hear people talk about the Green Team.
The Green Team has a footprint in the nation’s capital, but we’re not talking about carbon. The team’s color doesn’t relate to its environmental purity. Matter of fact, I can’t figure out where it got the name. I suspect it refers to money, as in greenbacks.
Team members are: Sinclair Skinner, Omar Karim, Warren Williams and Keith Lomax. The foursome shares two things: proximity to Mayor Adrian Fenty; and a boost in their fortunes since Fenty took office.
What of it? Why can’t people in business do well when their friend wins an office? Is this not the American way, as down home as “mother and apple pie?”
As their attorney, A. Scott Bolden, has told me and the scads of reporters who have inquired about his clients’ recent success: “Does being a friend of the mayor disqualify someone from doing business with the city?”
No, but it does invite questions and articles and investigations.
The city council has held at least eight hearings to investigate $82 million worth of construction contracts that went to Karim’s company, Banneker Ventures, and through it to Skinner. Having come up with little more than contracts being properly wired through city agencies, the council has hired attorney Robert Trout as a special counsel to dig deeper into the deals.
This, I fear, is a fool’s errand.
Council members hope Trout will find criminal wrongdoing. Surely there must be some old-fashioned graft in these deals. Someone on the business side must have paid cash to someone on the government side to get a contract. Gotta be some kickbacks or bribes. Right? Wrong.
I’m afraid what we have here is old-fashioned patronage and cronyism. When I asked a council member what he made of the deals, he said: “It’s like Chicago around here.”
And Philly, and Boston, and Detroit and New York. Fenty often says he wants to be a “big city mayor.” Cronyism comes with the turf.
I’m not saying it’s pretty or justified when a contract gives Fenty’s friends an inordinate fee for managing contracts. I sense greed. I would agree with developers who say the playing field is no longer level. R. Donahue Peebles, a developer who got his start as a Marion Barry crony, has been spilling to anyone with a pen and pad about the way the Green Team members have tried to get into deals without investing a penny.
But no one — not me or teams of journalists or peeved council members — has come up with anything that smacks of criminal acts.
What would be criminal is if the contracts were awarded and the work was not done. Or the work was shoddy. Or the contracts were grossly inflated.
That would take us back to the Marion Barry days — and color me red.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected].
