Mayor of D.C. Arrested on Drug Charges

District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry, who has been dogged by accusations of drug use for the past five years, was arrested Thursday night by FBI agents and local police on charges of purchasing crack cocaine from undercover operatives.

Jay P. Stephens, U.S. attorney for Washington, and Thomas E. DuHadway, special agent in charge of the FBI’s office here, said Barry was arrested shortly after 8 p.m. at the Vista International Hotel in downtown Washington in connection with “an ongoing public corruption probe.”

Sources close to the case said Barry was filmed as he made the purchase of the illicit drug. He was being held temporarily at FBI headquarters in Washington and was expected to be arraigned before a U.S. magistrate today.

The protracted controversy swirling around Barry was intensified last fall when Charles Lewis, a former District of Columbia employee and friend of the mayor, told a federal judge that he had supplied cocaine to Barry in the past.

Barry denied the accusation, contending that Lewis was concocting the charges in an effort to lessen his own problems with prosecutors. Lewis, whose late-night meetings with Barry at a Washington hotel drew attention when police investigators were suddenly called off the case, was subsequently convicted of selling drugs in the Virgin Islands.

Barry’s arrest, coming only three days before he was to announce his candidacy for a fourth term, follows a five-year investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office and is certain to heighten the turmoil surrounding the city’s second black mayor.

The son of a Mississippi sharecropper and a national leader in the 1960s civil rights movement, the 53-year-old mayor has accused his detractors of conducting a racially motivated vendetta intended to drive him from office.

The issue is particularly sensitive because many in Washington’s black community believe there is a blueprint known as “the plan” drawn up by white business and community leaders to recapture political control of the city, which was granted home rule by Congress in 1973.

There has been persistent speculation that the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a long-time associate of Barry who recently moved to the district, will enter the mayoral race.

Jackson, reached by the Washington Post Thursday night in Chicago, said: “I’m too stunned to talk right now.”

Some district officials reacted with shock and sadness at the mayor’s arrest. “It’s just sort of shattering,” said D.C. Council Member H. R. Crawford, a political supporter of the mayor. “I’m just devastated.”

Council Member John Wilson, who has known Barry for 30 years and is running this year for council chairman, said: “I’m just numb right now.”

Details of the undercover operation were not immediately available. But a government source discounted initial reports that Barry was not a target of the public corruption probe. He declined to say whether there were other targets.

Barry was elected mayor in 1978 and returned to office in 1982 and 1986.

During his first term, Barry drew high marks for sponsoring a downtown revitalization effort and drew significant support from the local business community as he restored the city’s financial credibility, built roads and improved services.

But Barry soon ran into difficulties, with his former wife and several key aides convicted of corruption charges involving city finances. Barry blamed his troubles on what he denounced as an overzealous investigation launched in 1984 by then-U.S. Atty. Joseph E. diGenova.

Under diGenvoa’s successor, Stephens, the long-running investigation began to focus on allegations of cocaine use by the mayor.