The emotional core of the government’s case against Mayor Sheila Dixon has nothing to do with affairs of the heart. It’s intended to sound more like an affair of the heartless.
So forget, for the moment, the mayor’s one-time romantic relationship with her former boyfriend and current co-indictee, Ronald Lipscomb. Look past whatever fur coats she might have gotten, or city contracts that he might have gotten. Bribery is not mentioned in these charges.
But gift cards are. If allegations about these gift cards are true, then never mind a court of law somewhere down the road. This will come down to an immediate court of public opinion.
Wrapped inside those indictments handed up Friday afternoon we find 20 gift cards given to Dixon, in the days before Christmas of 2005, by a couple of real estate developers. The indictment makes it sound like a good-faith gesture by the developers. It’s Christmas, so let’s be nice to the poor. Dixon was then city council president. She was to distribute the gift cards to needy families.
Instead, the indictment claims, she used all but one of the 20 Best Buy gift cards for herself. She bought a digital camcorder. She bought a PlayStation 2. She bought other electronics. This is what the indictment tells us. A year later, we’re told, she used Old Navy, Best Buy and other gift cards intended for the poor and the needy for an Xbox 360, a PlayStation Portable, clothes and other items for her own use.
When investigators showed up at the mayor’s house last summer, they found some of the cards were still there.
“Petty, petty, petty stuff,” one man close to the investigation was saying Friday afternoon.
“What do you mean, ‘petty?'” he was asked. “You mean, too small to prosecute?”
“No,” he snapped. “Too petty a gesture for anybody who has a heart.”
Among the charges against her: two counts of felony theft over $500 – and two counts of theft under $500. Maybe the mayor can explain this, and maybe not. There’s an old, unwritten rule among prosecutors that you do not topple a king (or queen) for a misdemeanor.
But there’s a flip side to this: As mayor, Dixon is the great mother figure of the city. The thought that she would take money intended for the poor is a horrible one – and it’s one that her attorney, Arnold Weiner, attempted to shoot down at a news conference just a couple of hours after the indictments were issued.
“These charges never should have been brought,” Weiner said. The mayor sat next to him. “We expect they will disappear as this case makes its way through the court.”
He called the charges “ludicrous.” He invoked the specter of Republican federal prosecutors here spending years looking to bag high-ranking Democratic officials, implying this case was an outgrowth, and called it the state prosecutor’s “personal obsession” to nab Dixon.
He belittled the claims about the gift cards. Sometime, he said, the state prosecutor referred to them as “theft from Lipscomb,” and at other times as “gifts. He can’t make up his mind. He should know what he wants to say. É Thefts from Lipscomb. Gimme a break.”
Weiner went on for about half an hour. He had a roomful of reporters there, and TV cameras, and sometimes he seemed to be making a case for a jury. And maybe he was: That jury of public opinion, of some who will automatically pronounce her guilty – and those who will say she should step down while fighting to clear her name.
Dixon made it clear she has no intention to step down. She is innocent until proven guilty. But she is also torn between defending herself in court and trying to run a city with breaking points everywhere.
Just last week, we had the police commissioner, Frederick Bealefeld, holding a news conference designed to steady everyone’s nerves. Through much of 2008, Bealefeld looked like the best thing to happen to the police department in years. Homicides were down considerably.
But not in recent weeks. In November, 30 killings. In December, 21 killings. In the first seven days of 2009, another 11 killings.
Bealefeld is a solid cop, but he is only a police officer, not the top official of the city. That’s Dixon. She has entire neighborhoods where people routinely self-destruct: through violence, and drugs, and families coming undone. In the coming weeks, she’ll add Annapolis to her work as she tries to bring state money to Baltimore.
“A spectacular mayor,” Weiner called Dixon.
He said she looked out for “vulnerable citizens, the poor. É”
Well, that gets us back to those gift cards, doesn’t it? Who’s got it right, the prosecutor or the defendant? It’s not affairs of the heart. Is it an affair of the heartless?
