Barry Wanted Sex for City Contract, Ex-Model Claims

The key witness in the drug and perjury trial of Washington Mayor Marion Barry testified Tuesday that Barry refused to renew a city contract with her two years ago because she refused to perform a sexual act with him.

But under hostile questioning from Barry’s attorney, former model Rasheeda Moore acknowledged that she also dropped out of the contract because her addiction to cocaine had become so severe that she “couldn’t perform” adequately.

Moore, who lured Barry into a Washington hotel room where he was videotaped while allegedly smoking crack cocaine, also testified that she, her three children and her fiance are receiving $1,700 a month under the federal witness protection program.

She said that the FBI, which induced her to cooperate in the Jan. 18 sting operation against Barry, had paid all of her bills from January through May, when the federal protection program went into effect.

In response to government questioning, Moore said that she decided to enter the program because she had received an anonymous death threat and because the FBI had received information about a $100,000 contract on her life.

Moore, who once graced the cover of Essense magazine but was receiving welfare and living in a homeless shelter in California last summer, is the most critical witness in the government’s case against Washington’s three-term mayor.

Barry is charged with 10 counts of drug possession, one charge of conspiracy to obtain drugs and three counts of lying to a grand jury. He faces as much as 26 years in prison and $1.85 million in fines if convicted on all counts.

Moore’s testimony produced repeated clashes between Assistant U.S. Atty. Judith E. Retchin and defense counsel R. Kenneth Mundy, who tried to portray her as a desperate, jobless drug addict willing to do anything the FBI asked.

Moore testified that her contract to administer a city youth program called Project Me first won Barry’s approval in the summer of 1986, when he and Moore became lovers and began using cocaine together.

She said that the program, for which she received $180,000 in 1986 and 1987, was terminated in the summer of 1988 after she had ended her sexual relationship with Barry.

Moore testified that she and another woman met with the mayor in a downtown hotel to discuss the program’s future. Upon being left alone briefly with Barry, Moore testified, the mayor made a “sexual request,” which she refused.

Moore said that Barry then told her: “You turn your back on me, you turn your back on the program. You refuse me, you refuse the ongoing of the program.”

Defense attorney Mundy, who questioned whether the program was legitimate and hinted that Moore might have been overpaid for her services, said that her comments at the trial conflicted with her testimony before a federal grand jury in January.

“Didn’t you tell the grand jury you could not do the program because you were strung out on drugs?” Mundy demanded.

Moore denied that she had ever described herself as being “strung out,” but she said that she had owned up to “such an addiction to cocaine” that she “could not perform” well enough to run the program.

But Retchin, the government attorney, responded by having Moore provide a more extensive account of her grand jury testimony, including a more graphic description of the demand allegedly made by Barry in 1988.

At the meeting at the hotel, Moore testified: “I asked him if I could get the program going. He asked me to have oral sex with him, and when I refused, he refused the program.”

In a related action Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson defended his decision to bar from the trial two controversial Barry allies: Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and excommunicated Roman Catholic priest George A. Stallings Jr.

“District courts possess considerable discretion to exclude specific spectators in order to ensure that jurors and witnesses are free of distraction, disruption and intimidation,” Jackson wrote in papers filed with the U.S. District Court of Appeals.

The Justice Department supported the judge in a separate filing.