Crimes and Misdemeanors

A sultry voice beckoned over the phone with a "Come on over, honey; Rasheeda is back in town. Let's party" routine. How could Washington mayor Marion Barry have known that his ex-girlfriend, a beautiful former model, was now working for the FBI and that he was going to get busted instead of laid?

Could he even have guessed that the United States Government had gone to the trouble of flying Rasheeda Moore cross-country from Burbank, California--just for this date? Well, it had; and even as the mayor, as alleged, clumsily attempted the resumption of an off-again, on-again decade-long sexual liaison, kindly G men were baby-sitting Moore's three children, proving that the FBI is a full-service agency. This from a bleeding-heart conservative Government that wails about the drug problem but can't find significant money for drug-treatment programs, not to mention basic child care for ghetto kids.

Arriving at the posh Vista hotel room, the mayor evidently took it in stride that, her sexy invitation notwithstanding, Rasheeda Moore had a girlfriend who kept coming and going during the fateful 45 minutes of his visit. Perhaps the FBI, in setting this up, had assumed that Barry, the sophisticated mayor of a sophisticated town, would find nothing odd in the suggestion of an early-evening threesome. With an undercover FBI agent, yet.

Barry, the subject of years of investigations of alleged drug use, is either sublimely dumb or naïve about the workings of American justice. Friends close to him said that alcohol had so besotted his brain that he may not have been able to render an objective appraisal of his circumstance. Indeed, the ladies did ply His Honor with three glasses of cognac. The mayor then allegedly made what the FBI, which was filming a potential porn movie of the entire episode, would later call a sexual advance toward Moore. According to The Washington Post, Barry "touched her on the leg, kissed her on the cheek and tried to kiss her on the lips, said knowledgeable sources."

Imagine. When that went nowhere, he allegedly asked for drugs instead. The lady FBI agent obligingly produced some crack that the mayor allegedly smoked in a pipe supplied by the Government. The claim is that he took three puffs, set the pipe down, put on his coat and was preparing to leave when the FBI burst in and put him in handcuffs.

Had the FBI agent informed Barry that no drugs were available, then no charges could have been brought. There would have been no forced urine testing and no chemical analysis of a strand of the mayor's hair that the Government claims revealed telltale evidence of marijuana use at some time in the past. Had the FBI agent produced marijuana or peyote, the entire sorry episode would have lacked the sensationalist ring of a crack bust. So it's understandable that Government-issue crack was the abused substance of choice.

Admittedly, none of this was good form for a mayor who was preaching to kids regularly about the evils of drug taking. Had he been an advocate of drug legalization, a sensible position, then he would at least not have been guilty of hypocrisy. As it is, if the charges are true, he's a major asshole who abused his position as a much-needed role model for ghetto youth. Barry is a veteran of the civil rights movement, and if he couldn't get his act together, the ethical course was to resign quietly and pursue his pleasures in private. There is a sacred trust of office that ought not to be trifled with. Harrumph and all that.

But what about the ethics of the Feds who tripped him up by hounding an old girlfriend with troubles enough of her own? Let's review just how, and why, the sultry Moore happened to be in the Vista hotel that night. Just weeks before, Moore was driving in North Hollywood, California, late on New Year's Day, headlights off, when a local cop pulled her over and booked her on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol. A computer check revealed that Moore was wanted by the FBI on a material-witness warrant; she had disappeared after testifying before a grand jury investigating drug use by Barry. Moore, who'd been implicated by convicted drug dealer Charles Lewis, had said that she knew Barry only casually and that she herself did not use drugs. Now FBI agents escorted her to Washington, threatening long jail time and separation from her three children. She collapsed and turned in her former friend. What is the moral lesson here--that parenting is a right earned only by the act of personal betrayal?

Just what are the priorities of this nation's crime fighters, who will expend so much effort and so many man-hours going after Barry on a misdemeanor offense while more serious felonies abound? "I find it absolutely amazing," said Robert Luskin, the former Justice Department lawyer instrumental in writing the department's undercover-investigation guidelines. "I'm not aware of any undercover operation of this magnitude carried out with the goal of obtaining a misdemeanor charge."

The Feds had been after Barry on one trail or another since his first term as mayor in the late Seventies--not because he was deemed a drug kingpin but because they wanted a way to get the mayor out of office. The chief prosecutor admitted as much when he implied that if Barry would step down as mayor, he might get off with a slap on the wrist. For eight years, according to The Washington Post, "agents sorted through the mayor's American Expressbills, staked out his house, examined his signature on city contracts, analyzed his bank accounts, checked his tax returns, verified his campaign contributions, even subpoenaed two pairs of shoes he denied receiving from a city contractor." And they got nothing on Barry, who, given that degree of scrutiny, must be far cleaner than most men of influence, including junk-bond salesmen and savings-and-loan executives.

In the end, a true zealot appeared to superintend this witch-hunt. It took the appointment of Reagan Administration White House deputy counsel Jay B. Stephens as the U.S. Attorney in Washington to nail Barry. Described by The Wall Street Journal as "a rising G.O.P. star," Stephens brought the puritanical fanaticism of the drug war to the Barry hunt. He termed the mayor's arrest a "catharsis" that "would start to change the public psyche." He called drug use by a city official "a corruption of the public's confidence in political institutions," thundering further that "it is important that the city have the type of moral leadership that can heal the wounds of drugs, violence and public corruption." All that from three alleged tokes on a Government-supplied pipe.

Outbursts of that sort moved conservative New York (continued on page 144)Crimes and Misdemeanores(continued from page 55) Times columnist William Safire to call Stephens a "publicity-grubbing U.S. Attorney [who] goes on television to characterize the charge as 'corruption,' as if it were a Federal offense to be a poor role model." Safire added that Attorney General Dick Thornburgh had allowed this "trap" in which "the Federal Government, for the first time, has used the expectation of sexual intercourse to lure a target into committing an illegal act in front of television cameras."

The prosecutor's defense is to wave the Holy Grail of the war on drugs, in which matters are perceived so desperate as to justify any means of fighting it. Some war on drugs. To get Barry, the prosecutor made a deal with Charles Lewis, the drug dealer, who had been nabbed by the FBI in a sting operation. That bust was set up to get something new on Lewis in order to turn him into a witness against Barry. Lewis the pusher, who copped a plea and got 15 months for distributing, was considered less important than Barry the customer, who was threatened with 20 years and $1,250,000 in fines for what started as a smoking rap. The whole thing stinks of a vendetta.

Barry may have a problem with drug addiction and, if so, needs help, but couldn't the Feds have come to his assistance in a kindlier way? No, because the fit of puritanical rage that has come to dominate the Government's approach to the drug problem defines drug use as a criminal rather than a health problem. "Narcotics abuse is not a victimless crime," thundered prosecutor Stephens, as if to explain the costly undercover campaign to capture the mayor in the act.

Clearly, uncontrollable addiction of any sort victimizes the addict, but why the national preoccupation with only certain drugs? Barry admits addiction to alcohol and the prescription drugs Valium and Xanax. Was he not a victim then, as are tens of millions of other abusers, of legal drugs? The Government, by its mind-numbing crusade against certain forms of self-abuse, has apparently exonerated all others.

The Barry case illustrates more than anything else that the antidrug crusade has simply gotten out of hand. If excessive police power is to be used to clean up Government, which scares me, then why clean only one dirty nook?

Which is the point made by NAACP executive director Benjamin L. Hooks. Charging the Feds with "selective enforcement of the law," he noted wryly that "the search had finally paid off. We spent all of these years trying to find him with a grain of cocaine, and by God, we did it, didn't we? ... We haven't found all the people who've stolen all the money from the savings-and-loan associations and are driving Rolls-Royces and Jaguars, so obviously, many of us in the black community will have some peculiar feelings as we go further."

I don't know if black Democratic politicians are hounded unfairly by white Republican prosecutors, as Hooks implies, though that is not the wildest of suppositions. But one can't ignore Hooks's questioning of Government indifference to the savings-and-loan scandal, with losses of 19.2 billion dollars last year alone, when the Feds have ample time and money to pursue Mayor Barry in such a detailed and leisurely manner. Perhaps the FBI should recruit a seductress to entrap bank officials as effectively as it did the hapless Barry.

No matter what transpires in the trial of Washington mayor Marion Barry, it's clear that the FBI should be found guilty. So maybe Barry is a pompous hypocrite--aren't they all? Politicians, that is. Who was he hurting other than himself if he did use drugs? Until the FBI and drug agents sandbagged the man, Barry was a popular mayor of one of the toughest cities you can run. Maybe he blew it and therefore deserves no pity. But what the FBI did smacks of secret-police goonsmanship of the kind J. Edgar Hoover used to encourage. And that is a far more troubling problem than Mayor Barry's libido.

"Barry was threatened with 20 years and $1,250,000 in fines. The whole thing stinks of a vendetta."