Marion Barry: I Guess You All Figured That I Couldn’t Resist That Lady

Nelson Mandela’s historic address to a joint meeting of Congress, George Bush’s retraction of his no-new-taxes pledge, the savings and loan crisis — none of these issues could hold Washington’s attention for long last week. The topic dominating front pages and TV news broadcasts, gossip on the Metro and at the State Department was a fuzzy 83-minute black-and-white videotape played at the trial of Marion Barry. It showed the three-term mayor of the nation’s capital rolling around on a bed in a downtown hotel room with a former girlfriend who had invited him there, inhaling twice from a pipe filled ; with crack cocaine and, finally, handcuffed and surrounded by police and FBI agents, muttering over and over, “Goddam, I shouldn’t have come up here . . . that bitch set me up.”

Barry, 54, is charged with eleven misdemeanor counts of possessing or conspiring to possess cocaine and three felony counts of lying to a federal grand jury in 1989 about drug use. If convicted on all charges, he could be jailed for 26 years. His lawyer, R. Kenneth Mundy, calls the federal sting operation that caught Barry smoking crack with Rasheeda Moore “entrapment pure and simple.” It was, says Mundy, a plot devised by a Republican Federal Government frustrated by the failure of a seven-year effort to chase a flamboyant — and virtually unbeatable — Democrat from office. The prosecution contends that Barry was not entrapped because his long history of drug use predisposed him to smoke crack on that fateful night last January.

In addition to viewing the tape, the 18 jurors and alternates (who include 15 women) heard sordid stories of drug use and sexual escapades from Moore and Linda Creque Maynard, a friend of Barry’s former pal convicted coke salesman Charles Lewis. Maynard described how Barry overpowered her and forced her to have intercourse with him at a Virgin Islands hotel in March 1988. Dixie Lee Hedrington, another Virgin Islands woman who claimed that she had been harassed by the mayor, testified that “he was a pig.”

Moore’s tale was even more shocking. The former model, 39, testified that over several years, beginning in 1986, she shared cocaine with Barry at least 100 times — in hotel rooms; at the residence of Bishop H.H. Brookins, a powerful leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; even at Barry’s home, where the mayor cooked up a batch of crack cocaine in the kitchen. On the first such occasion, Moore said, the couple visited an apartment where Barry pulled a stash of powder cocaine from under the corner of a rug. Once, Moore said, after she and Barry got high in her mother’s basement, the mayor went upstairs and gave advice to Moore’s mother on how to help her son with his drug addiction.

Barry, Moore testified, told her that it was “divine providence” that had brought them together. In 1987 the pair started smoking crack, which, according to Moore, made Barry “paranoid.” During one meeting at the home of a friend, the mayor asked Moore to check out an empty, dark-windowed van parked outside; on another occasion, she testified, Barry thought a blinking light on the Washington horizon was a surveillance device. She described buying coke for the mayor, once delivering $40 worth of crack to him in his District Building office and another time receiving drug money hidden in a magazine from him during a city budget hearing.

Moore said the affair ended in 1988 after Barry smacked her to the floor of a hotel room and told her, “You bring out the worst in a man.” That seems to have been what U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens was counting on when he brought Moore to Washington and set her up in a hotel room equipped with three concealed video cameras. Tape-recorded telephone conversations between her and the mayor indicate that he was initially reluctant to meet her at the hotel because “there are too many nosy Rosies around.”

But the videotape shows that once he arrived, Barry propositioned Moore to make love with him “just for old times’ sake” and tried to fondle her breast. After Moore rebuffed him, Barry at first refused to smoke crack — supplied by “Wanda,” a female FBI agent posing as a friend of Moore’s — unless Moore took some first. When she declined, the mayor walked to a dresser, picked up a crack-filled pipe and took two deep inhalations. Moments later, FBI agents and D.C. police burst into the room and arrested Barry. Said he: “I guess you all figured that I . . . couldn’t resist that lady.”

Throughout the testimony and the playing of the videotape, Barry’s wife Effi sat in the courtroom, hooking a rug and staring stone-faced at her husband’s former lover. Barry dismissed Moore’s story as “garbage, garbage.” In fact, the prosecution still has a few problems: under questioning from Mundy, Moore admitted that Barry had come to her room more interested in sex than drugs, though he changed his mind after she resisted his advances. Mundy has blasted away at her credibility and some inconsistent testimony. Still, it is Barry’s lawyers who face the most daunting task. “I’m the luckiest man in the world,” the mayor claims in the videotape. “The Lord’s on my side.” Good thing — he might need a miracle.