Mayor Vincent Gray’s administration is off to a rocky start. Some of the problems the mayor inherited, such as the $2,500 in unpaid parking tickets racked up by agency heads during the administration of his predecessor, Adrian Fenty. But an alarming number of problems are the mayor’s own doing. In particular, the emerging scandal surrounding his hiring — and subsequent firing — of former mayoral candidate Sulaimon Brown from a six-figure job at the city’s Health Care Finance Department and the resignation of department Chief of Staff Talib Karim raise serious questions about the caliber of Gray’s appointments. Both men had previously been under protective orders — Brown for allegedly stalking a 13-year-old year girl and Karim for a domestic complaint — and never should have made it to the interview stage. Brown now claims that Howard Brooks, a paid member of Gray’s transition team, passed him envelopes stuffed with thousands of dollars in cash from Gray campaign chairwoman Lorraine Green to keep up his attacks on Fenty during last year’s campaign, and that Gray himself promised Brown a job in his administration if he did so. As The Examiner’s Freeman Klopott reported, Brooks happens to be the brother-in-law of Gray crony P. Leonard Manning, who catapulted from a $38 million contract to run the D.C. Lottery that Gray helped extend a year while serving as chairman of the D.C. Council to a coveted seat on the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board, where fellow District member H. R. Crawford recently referred to him as an “expert” on airport security. The mayor has denied any quid pro quo arrangements involving Brown and has asked for an investigation. But revelations that Gray also hired the children of his top aides to high-level positions in city government leads to the inescapable conclusion that the “missteps” the mayor himself acknowledges are systemic. Gray has had a long career in D.C., and of all people should know that years of cronyism and nepotism in previous administrations eventually forced the city to submit to the hated Control Board. And sweetheart deals with his frat brothers tarnished the reputation of Fenty, the first mayor brave enough to tackle the same rot in the city’s public school system. Gray can run a spoils system or a professional government operation, but he cannot do both.
