Sometime in the 1980s, Marion Barry, the married mayor of Washington, DC, and a man who enjoyed a party, found himself alone with a woman at a friend’s house after a long, celebratory night.
At the time, Barry, a casual drinker whose drinking grew less casual throughout his mayoralty, had never tried cocaine. But after the woman came out of the bathroom for the third time that night, she said to Barry, “That’s some good s—. You want some? This makes my p—- hot.”
Like Hillary Clinton, Barry, 78, has a political memoir out this week. For pure entertainment value, his is better. Call it “Really Hard Choices.”
“At first I hesitated,” he writes. “I had never done anything like that before. But this woman’s comment excited me. So I was curious. If cocaine made this woman feel that hot, I wondered how it would make me feel.”
After a bit of faltering — he exhaled instead of inhaling on his first attempt, blowing cocaine around the room — he snorted a few lines and had his answer.
“That was my first time ever trying cocaine, and I felt like I had ejaculated,” he writes. “The cocaine was a powerful stimulant that went straight to my penis. What happened next? I had sex with her.”
Your move, Rob Ford.
By 1990, Barry would be captured on surveillance video smoking crack with a woman in a DC hotel room. He wound up serving six months in prison for drug possession, but was regarded as a returning hero by many in Washington afterward, and was elected mayor again in 1994.
The Incredible Story of Marion Barry Jr. by Marion Barry Jr.
Barry believes that even though he was caught red-handed, he’s the real victim.
He claims the city had awarded just 3 percent of its contracts to black-owned businesses before his tenure. Barry says he increased that to 47 percent of the city’s $2 billion budget. Powerful interests wanted revenge.
“White folks may let you in their country clubs to play golf, invite you out to dinner, take you out to play tennis, but when it comes to dividing up the money, that’s a whole ’nother story,” he writes. “They didn’t want me creating all of these opportunities for black folks. So when the FBI set me up at the Vista [Hotel], they were really trying to kill me. If they killed me, they wouldn’t have to worry about me anymore.”
True or not, when Barry is not discussing his drugs or his genitals, the book reads like he’s setting up a presidential run. The self-aggrandizing tone — this is less a memoir than a self-hagiography — bathes us in Marion Barry’s supposed greatness, with the former mayor proclaiming his vast importance at every turn. To hear Barry tell it, one gets the feeling that were it not for him, the city of Washington would be a “Grapes of Wrath” dustheap with no jobs, schools or infrastructure.
After heavy involvement with the civil rights movement of the 1960s — Barry worked with Martin Luther King Jr., and helped create the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an organization dedicated to fighting segregation and discrimination — Barry became involved in Washington, DC, politics. He rose quickly up the city’s political ladder in the ’70s, from his election as president of the school board in 1971 to a city council seat in 1974.
In 1977, a Muslim group took hostages in the DC council building, and Barry was shot in the melee, the bullet landing just inches from his heart. While the shooting was an accident and Barry escaped real peril, the groundswell of support that followed built momentum for a mayoral run. Barry was elected mayor in 1978, noting that, “Washington, DC, had never seen my style of politics.”
Barry writes that during his time as mayor, “There were always rumors about me womanizing and drinking,” explaining that “that was one of the downsides of being a popular mayor.”
But throughout the book, Barry attempts to have it both ways. He repeatedly claims that the rumors and actions against him were a conspiracy meant to keep black people down, while also admitting that the rumors were largely true.
Nowhere was Barry’s self-delusional hubris more in evidence than at the Vista Hotel on Jan. 18, 1990, in an incident that he describes as “the war to reclaim Washington for white people.”
In 1987, during his third term as mayor, Barry met a woman named Rasheeda Moore, a teacher and former model in her 30s. Originally meeting to discuss education, the two developed a close friendship that evolved into a romance.
In Barry’s telling, Moore was addicted to cocaine, and he, an occasional user, was hoping to quit. As such, the relationship left him conflicted. Things came to a head in June 1989 after an ugly incident at an AIDS fundraiser where Barry caught Moore smoking crack in an executive suite at the Grand Hyatt Hotel.
Barry took her pipe, wrapped it in a towel and began smashing it to bits, causing Moore to grab his arm, begging him not to destroy the pipe. Barry searched her purse and found five crack rocks and tried to flush them down the toilet despite Moore’s violent opposition.
“Rasheeda started to wrestle me to get her drugs back,” he writes, quoting Moore as screaming, “Give me my s—, man! Give it back to me!”
“It was like Diana Ross in ‘Lady Sings The Blues,’ ” he writes. “I wasn’t a violent person. I had never hit a woman in my life, but I had to smack Rasheeda upside her head and push her down to get her off me. I told her, ‘Rasheeda, you gots to go now!’ ”
Moore ran into the hallway, “yelling up and down the halls, ‘Marion Barry! Marion Barry! Marion Barry!’
“I ran out there,” he writes, “and grabbed her back inside the room. ‘Bitch! Are you crazy?’ ”
Barry avoided contact with Moore for months after, despite her constant calls and attempts to apologize.
That December, Moore was arrested in California for a traffic violation, and it was soon discovered that “she had a bench warrant for not attending a grand-jury hearing back in DC.”
It was this, Barry writes, that gave his enemies what they needed to put him away.
“FBI agents told [Moore] they would put her in jail if she didn’t cooperate in a case they were trying to build against me.”
The FBI, Barry writes, flew Moore back to DC, “put her up at the Vista Hotel, placed cameras in the room, supplied the drugs and told her what to say. They even babysat her kids.”
Moore called Barry’s office, leaving several unanswered messages until finally leaving one saying it was “a matter of life and death.” Barry, who hadn’t spoken to her in months, returned the call, and Moore persuaded him that she absolutely had to meet him to talk in person.
Barry arrived at the Vista with his security detail, determined, he claims, to have Moore meet him in the lobby. But Moore blasted through his impenetrable defenses by telling him on the hotel phone, “I just ordered a bowl of soup, but once I finish that, we can come back downstairs. Now come on up.”
Defeated by the brilliant soup ruse, Barry went to her room, telling his security detail to wait downstairs.
Barry insists his intentions were pure, but the mere sight of Hennessy in her room lulled him closer to a drunken binge.
He never even noticed that throughout his time in her room, no soup ever arrived.
Barry poured himself a drink, removed his coat and sat next to Moore on the bed. Immediately, his caution evaporated.
“I started thinking sexually while sipping my drink,” he writes. “But every time I reached to caress her breasts, she pulled away from me. Then she said, ‘Let’s do something.’ That was Rasheeda’s code word for drug talk.”
Barry tried to convince her that his drug days were behind him, but apparently he needed more convincing.
They had no drugs, so Moore said she’d call a friend, and this friend miraculously appeared just moments later, the oddness of which didn’t occur to Barry at the time.
While his city, the city he claims to have had such a significant role in building, was being decimated by the crack epidemic, Barry was now holding a crack pipe and, after some weak initial protests, was ready to dive in.
“I knew how addictive it was, and I had heard nothing but terrible stories about it,” he writes. “It was a hard street drug that thousands of people were strung out over. I had no interest in the drugs, but I figured Rasheeda would have some good sex with me if I agreed to do it with her.”
He asked Moore to smoke first to show him how, but she refused, insisting he do it instead. Barry, his thoughts clouded by lust, took the pipe into the bathroom to practice in front of a mirror. When he came back out, Moore put the drugs in the pipe, and Barry took what he claims was his first-ever hit of crack.
He barely had time to inhale before the FBI came rushing in.
Barry was tried on 11 counts of cocaine possession — there were supposedly other instances the FBI had tracked — and three counts of perjury. The jury, broken down largely along racial lines, hung on all charges except one misdemeanor count of drug possession, which earned Barry six months in prison. Despite his admission of doing the drugs, Barry refers to himself as “a political prisoner.”
Upon his release, Barry was treated like a conquering hero by parts of DC, with 400 to 500 people showing up to watch him emerge from prison.
He returned to politics soon after, writing that he was “too knowledgeable and cared too much about the citizens of Washington not to run again for mayor.”
The Democrat was elected again in 1994, under the slogan, “He may not be perfect, but he’s perfect for DC.” He served one term before deciding not to run again; he was elected to the city council in 2004.
His troubles — all a conspiracy, to be sure — have continued. In 2009, Barry, already on probation for failing to pay taxes, was arrested for stalking political consultant/ex-girlfriend Donna Watts-Brighthaupt. The following year, he was censured by the DC City Council, by a 12-0 vote, for allegedly awarding Watts-Brighthaupt a $15,000 city contract and then taking some of the money as a kickback.
Barry still sits on the council.
Toward the end of the book, Barry writes that he didn’t want to tell his story “while the wounds were still fresh,” and wanted to wait until he was “confident and comfortable enough to say it all.”
After reading “Mayor for Life,” it’s hard to believe he was ever anything but.