POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Marion Barry: The Politics of Race. Jonathan I. Z. Agronsky. British American Publishing, $21.95. While this book is not a clunker (and it easily could have been,...
...Jon Cohen Opening Arguments...
...Cocaine dealer Lydia Pearson handed Barry cocaine and a job application at the same instant...
...Restaurateur Hassan Mohammadi and attorney 'Lloyd Moore, both of whom owned businesses that received city contracts, supplied Barry with cocaine...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Marion Barry: The Politics of Race...
...Some highlights: >Hazel "Rasheeda" Moore, the paramour used to lure Barry into the Vista sting, submitted a proposal for a $47,000 city contract months late yet had it approved within days...
...Tell me what made Barry run...
...Though I think the sting stank and the trial was a morality play—two points I wish Agronsky had unambiguously weighed in on—I am glad that Barry is no longer my mayor...
...Barry once threatened to cut funding of the contract unless Moore gave him a blow job...
...When it comes to Barry the man, Agronsky—like the rest of us—is at a loss to explain fully the power, the charisma, the fundamental detachment...
...Nevertheless, he does accumulate a remarkable catalog of Barry's callousness toward the public he was elected to serve...
...Viking, $22.95 I opened this book...
...Toss in the earlier legal wrangles involving Barry's ex-wife Mary Treadwell and former deputy mayors Alphonse Hill and Ivanhoe Donaldson —all of whom were sentenced to prison for their abuse of the public trust—and a few exhalations of crack seem like nothing...
...Yet when it came down to it, crack—not corruption or incompetence—was what it took to bring down the mayor...
...A straightforward telling of his actions, which this book provides, certifies that by the end of his reign, Barry's role as mayor—once to protect the poor and disenfranchised of this city—had radically narrowed...
...Jeffrey Toobin...
...While this book is not a clunker (and it easily could have been, considering how quickly it was written), it succeeds only in the modest goal of recounting Barry's rise and fall—a swell, if overly familiar, story...
...Protecting himself and his friends had become a full-time job...
...Now tell me something I don't know...
...The shy son of a Mississippi maid abandons his chemistry career to join the civil rights movement, perfects the mau-mauing of whites, exchanges his dashiki for a pin-striped suit, and then scratches backs (and stabs them) to become one of America's most powerful mayors...
Vol. 23 • July 1991 • No. 7
