Barry Charged With Crack Cocaine Possession : Drugs: The mayor’s lawyer says he will plead not guilty. An FBI agent says blood and urine tests were positive.

A subdued but seemingly unfazed District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry was charged Friday with possessing crack cocaine, a misdemeanor offense that carries a jail sentence of up to one year.

Barry, who has repeatedly denied allegations of drug use, shrugged off questions after formal presentation of the charges before a U.S. magistrate. “I’m going to leave here and go about the business of running government,” he said.

His lawyer, Kenneth Mundy, said the 53-year-old mayor would plead not guilty and seek a jury trial. U.S. Magistrate Deborah A. Robinson allowed Barry to remain free on his own recognizance and set another court appearance for Feb. 5.

A statement issued later by the mayor’s office said Barry was turning over his day-to-day “duties and functions” to City Administrator Carol Thompson while retaining authority to sign and veto legislation and approve contracts.

“I want to assure my friends, colleagues, supporters, fellow citizens, the business community and the nation that this government will continue to operate at maximum performance,” Barry said in the statement. “I have a team of competent professionals who will continue to run the affairs of government while I devote some time to my legal case.”

An FBI surveillance team filmed Barry on Thursday night smoking crack, which he purchased from a “cooperating witness” in a downtown Washington hotel room, FBI agent Ronald D. Stern said in an affidavit.

“Mr. Barry put some of the crack cocaine in a smoking apparatus, lit the crack cocaine and smoked it,” Stern said. “Through a surveillance camera, I observed Mr. Barry take possession of the crack cocaine and inhale on the lit smoking apparatus. After observing Mr. Barry possess and use crack cocaine, I and other special agents entered the hotel room and arrested Mr. Barry.”

FBI agents and policemen took Barry into custody so that blood and urine samples could be obtained under a search warrant, and both “showed evidence of cocaine ingestion,” Stern said in the affidavit.

At the government’s request, the magistrate ordered Barry to appear at the federal courthouse every Monday to take a weekly urinalysis.

Government sources said the “cooperative witness” was a woman friend whom Barry had put up at various Washington hotels over the last year.

The woman, identified by the sources as Rasheeda Moore, decided to cooperate with the FBI after she developed “problems of her own” with a federal grand jury that has been investigating Barry and public corruption in the nation’s capital.

FBI agents baby-sat with Moore’s three children while she took part in the operation, a government source said.

Barry’s wife, Effi, entered and left the courthouse holding her husband’s arm during Friday’s arraignment, but she made no comment.

U.S. Atty. Jay B. Stephens, whose office oversees the continuing corruption probe, called Barry’s arrest “a personal tragedy for the defendant.”

“But narcotics abuse is also a tragedy for this city,” Stephens said. “Narcotics abuse is not a victimless crime.”

Stephens and other law enforcement officials defended the elaborate undercover scheme used to arrest Barry on a misdemeanor offense by noting that it was part of an ongoing public corruption probe and that additional charges are possible.

In previous grand jury testimony, Barry has denied using cocaine. Establishing that he is a user could support a perjury charge, one law enforcement source said.

Another law enforcement source said the undercover operation had been “under contemplation for a long time” by the FBI and Stephens, who weighed the potential advantages and disadvantages.

“There was strong intelligence that the mayor has a drug abuse problem,” he noted.

The U.S. attorney denied that Barry had been targeted because he is a black mayor who has alienated many white residents of Washington. “There is absolutely no basis for that allegation,” he said.

Stephens also rejected the suggestion that the sting operation was a form of entrapment. “Where there is predisposition (to violate the law), there is not entrapment,” he said.

Another source said Barry was recorded in a conversation with Moore in which he first raised the subject of crack, a highly addictive substance, and asked whether she had any for him.

The arrest occurred only three days before Barry’s scheduled announcement of his candidacy for a fourth term as mayor, an announcement that now has been postponed indefinitely.

But Stephens said the timing of the operation in relation to Barry’s campaign plans was coincidental and instead reflected the availability of the cooperating witness to participate in the action.

It was “that investigative imperative” that led to the sting operation, he said. “He (Barry) went in with his own limousine, with his own bodyguards,” Stephens said. “He came to the Vista Hotel on his own free will.”

Stephens’ predecessor as U.S. attorney, Joseph E. diGenova, considered but rejected a similar sting operation against Barry, a former law enforcement source said.

The idea was turned down because of concerns that the public could consider the tactic unfair and part of a campaign to harass Barry.

The source noted, however, that the decision was made more than a year before Charles Lewis, a former city employee and friend of Barry, told a federal judge that he had supplied the mayor with cocaine.

An hour after Barry’s court appearance, Lewis was sentenced to 15 months in prison on cocaine conspiracy charges, after prosecutors praised his cooperation. Lewis has appeared twice before the grand jury probing Barry’s alleged drug use and other corruption.

U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin told Lewis that he had been prepared to sentence him to 18 months. But Sporkin said he reduced the sentence because “the government has impressed me with the extent of your cooperation.”

Thursday’s arrest of Barry and the continuing investigation culminates a history of legal troubles that began shortly after his reelection to a second term as mayor in 1982. Barry was reelected again in 1986.

Inquiries into the financial activities of the mayor’s Administration yielded the convictions of 11 city officials, including a top Barry aide, Ivanhoe Donaldson, and a former D.C. deputy mayor, Alphonse G. Hill, for financial crimes involving the city.

Barry, a Democrat, called the federal investigations led by diGenova, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, an attempt by the Republican Administration to “lynch black people another way.”

The first allegations that Barry used cocaine surfaced in 1983 after local news reports said the mayor had taken the drug during a December, 1981, party at a Washington nightclub.

In 1984, federal prosecutors said they had obtained a taped conversation of Karen Johnson, a convicted cocaine dealer with whom Barry admitted having a “personal” relationship, acknowledging that she sold cocaine to the mayor 20 to 30 times.

But Johnson, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in connection with a major cocaine trafficking and money laundering ring, refused to tell the grand jury investigating Barry whether she used drugs or sold them to the mayor. She was jailed for 18 months.

Federal investigators revived their inquiries in December, 1988, after Barry repeatedly visited the Ramada Inn room of Lewis, the former city employee and Barry friend.

Responding to a tip that Lewis was selling drugs from the hotel room, police officers arrived to make an arrest. But police officials called off the mission after learning that Barry was in the room with Lewis.

Through it all, Barry has argued forcefully that he has been the victim of “McCarthyism” similar to the red-baiting tactics used by the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin in the 1950s.

He has blamed the media for hyping his problems and has said he is a victim of racism.

“My record is clear and clean that I have no need to engage in illegal drug use, have never done so, don’t intend to do so,” Barry said last September. “What we have is the new McCarthyism . . . . There doesn’t have to be any evidence or credible collaboration; someone just says it and it takes on a life of its own.”

Staff writers Sam Fulwood III and David Savage contributed to this story.