Barry’s middle initial S originally didn’t stand for anything. In
1957, Marion took the middle name Shepilov in honor of a leader of the Soviet
Communist Party.
Barry was busted for allegedly writing bad checks in 1962.
Police officers stopped Barry for jaywalking in 1967 and asked to
see his ID. Marion shouted, “I ain’t showing a white motherf***er a goddamn
thing … . My name is nobody.” When they tried to get Barry into the police
wagon, Barry reportedly punched one of the cops in the face. When he was inside
the wagon, he kicked the vehicle’s door so hard it buckled. Barry was arrested
for jaywalking, disorderly conduct, and destroying government property. He
claimed it was all the fault of the police. Marion went to trial and was
acquitted.
Two years later, Barry confronted two police officers standing next
to a vehicle that was parked illegally. “If you write a ticket on that car, I
will kill you,” Marion reportedly threatened. The law enforcer wrote the ticket,
Barry ripped it up, and a fight ensued.
Barry was arrested, and was released on bail. He arrived at the
District Building, blamed the police for the incident, and announced, “We have
declared war on the police department and this city. The police are like mad
dogs.” As Marion’s supporters left the building, they broke glass bottles, tried
to set the American flag on fire, shouted obscenities, punched a news vendor in
the face, took flowers, and removed beer from a parked car.
During Barry’s term as mayor of the nation’s capital, newspapers
claimed that planes flew drugs from the Virgin Islands into D.C. and that some
D.C. employees snorted cocaine at their office desks.
In 1989, Marion made several visits to the Ramada Inn Central in
Washington to the suite of Charles Lewis, a district employee and a native of
the Virgin Islands. Traces of cocaine were later found in the room. At the
Ramada, a man claimed that he came to talk with Barry about a job. Marion sat on
the commode while the man spoke. Finally, the politician looked up and said,
“You know, you look a lot like Santa Claus.”
During his third term as mayor, Barry remarked that the poor of D.C.
were using the free ambulance system too often.
After a welfare mother complained to Barry about the lack of housing
for herself and her fourteen children, Marion advised her to “stop having all
those babies.”
When hecklers booed Barry at a September 1989 neighborhood festival
in Washington, he grinned and gave them the finger.
In January 1987, a blizzard hit Washington, D.C. At the time, Marion
Barry was in California watching the Washington Redskins play in the Super Bowl.
When his city was unable to clear its streets of snow, Barry said that residents
were exaggerating the situation, and delayed his return. He claimed that he had
a hernia; others insisted that he had suffered a near fatal cocaine
overdose.
When Marion saw the cover of Essence magazine in 1977, he
went gaga. He contacted the cover girl, Hazel Diane Rasheeda Moore and sought to
persuade her to fly to D.C. She said no, and instead flew to London to visit her
boyfriend. Oops! The day her plane landed in London, her beau was arrested for
allegedly smuggling $18 million worth of heroin.
Barry eventually got together with Rasheeda. Rasheeda claimed later
that she had had sexual relations with Barry over one hundred times over three
years at twenty-two different places, and had used marijuana, cocaine, crack,
and opium with the mayor. She alleged that the mayor became paranoid when high.
At one point, after smoking crack, he supposedly believed that the police were
closing in on him, so he hid his crack-crystal drugs in a vacuum cleaner bag.
When his paranoia subsided, Marion took the crystals from the bag, dusted them
off, and smoked them.
At one point, Ms. Moore claimed, Barry took a massive hit of crack.
When he exhaled his body started shaking and he almost collapsed. She grabbed
the mayor and told him to stay focused. After regaining his composure, he looked
at Moore and said, “That was a really good hit.”
When Rasheeda tried to break up with Barry, he told her “Divine
Providence” was behind their romance. He arranged for her to work on a summer
youth program that received $180,000 worth of district funding. The name of the
program? Project Me.
Allegedly, Barry threatened to cut off funding for Project Me after
Rasheeda refused to have oral sex with him.
Rasheeda agreed to cooperate with the FBI on a sting operation. In
January 1990, she invited the mayor to her room at Washington’s Vista
International Hotel. The videotape of the encounter revealed that Barry was more
interested in sexual relations than drugs. He kept grabbing Rasheeda’s breasts,
and expressed his interest in having sex with multiple partners, “twos and
threes if I can.”
Eventually Barry smoked crack on camera, and was arrested
immediately by the FBI. As they read him his rights, the mayor observed,
repeatedly, on tape, “B***h set me up.”
During Marion’s trial, one witness stated that Barry liked to smoke
cocaine-laced cigarettes that he called “M.B. specials.” Barry was convicted on
one count of drug possession.
After serving time, Marion was reelected mayor of Washington,
D.C. (by the same people who reelected obama). However, the district was in such terrible shape that Congress stripped Mayor Barry of his power and the federal government once again took over control of D.C. Mayor Barry was left to supervise only a few agencies, including the Office of Cable TV and the Department of Recreation.
