Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day January 19th, 1990, at the end of a joint sting operation by FBI agents and

District of Columbia Police, D.C. Mayor, Marion Berry, is arrested and charged with drug possession for the use of crack cocaine.

He was arrested in a room at the Vista International Hotel in downtown DC, caught smoking crack on camera with a woman named Rashida Moore who had cut a deal with law

enforcement to set up Barry in exchange for a reduced sentence for an earlier drug conviction.

It will not surprise you that the sitting mayor of the nation's

capital city being caught on camera using crack was a major, major scandal, but it wasn't perhaps

that big of a surprise maybe to the people who knew Barry's story.

He'd been plagued by trouble with drugs and infidelity and corruption for years and years

and years and so I guess we could say this felt more like an exclamation point on a sentence that was already

being written and very familiar to a lot of DC residents.

And at the same time, people loved Mary and Barry.

This is the paradox of Marion Barry. He was DC's own. He was only the second

mayor of the city had ever had under home rule. He basically made government in his

image for bad and for many, good to people on the outside though he was a

punchline and the continued popularity of him was a total mystery so this is a

really great chance to talk about Marion Berry,

DC, dig into trying to understand

of his incredible position in the history of that city.

I will say I moved to DC a few years after this

and it's hard to overstate how pervasive the

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