By Jeffrey Anderson
I’m not gonna lie: 2020 and 2021 felt like one long year, broken up by bursts of hope shortly followed by surges of Covid–and dread. With each new variant, it has become clear that life as we once knew it will never be quite the same again.
Yet the District of Columbia and its people live on, as does District Dig. So starting this (semi)annual retrospective column at the end of this past year seems appropriate, particularly given the impact of The Dig’s work in late 2021.
Across multiple mayoral administrations, working in both the public and private sectors–seemingly always to have one foot in each–Neil Albert has been a fixture of D.C. business and politics for at least the last decade.
That is, until a pair of stories in The Dig that detailed his improper use of authority forced him to resign as Chairman of the Board of Commissioners of the D.C. Housing Authority and be placed on indefinite leave from his job as President and CEO of the Downtown D.C. Business Improvement District, pending an internal review of contracts he approved for his girlfriend, and, presumably, the outcome of various inspector general and federal grand jury probes.
Albert is known to some of his friends as “The Great Gazoo,” that tiny, Martian-green, bubble-headed space alien who is exiled to the prehistoric world of “The Flintstones.” In cartoon-land, Gazoo regards Fred Flinstone and Barney Rubble as a pair of caveman “dumb dumbs” whom he attempts to help in their ill-fated endeavors, only to guide them into more trouble–trouble he himself avoids because other adult earthlings cannot see him.
Similarly, his imaginative friends have joked, Albert is a Guyana-born immigrant from New York City who with an air of superiority has over time cultivated a reputation as the smartest guy in the room–but one who often is at the center of problems or controversy while nowhere to be found when the shit hits the fan.
That changed in 2021, and unlike the saga of former Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, whose misdeeds The Dig exposed for more than a year before the Washington Post got involved, Albert’s demise was dizzying in its swiftness, leaving those same friends and observers to marvel at the poor judgment he showed in purchasing homes with a love interest whose federally funded city contracts he was approving.
Time will tell if any of our local “dumb dumbs” follow him down.
Witnessing the fall of such notable scoundrels is a spectator sport in politics and government, but at the end of the day, it is the institutional rot and decay they both embody and enable that count. On this front, The Dig was active, at times vigilant.
Let’s have a look:
While technically published on December 30, 2020, very much of a 2021 story was Mayor Muriel Bowser’s nomination of Monica Ray, executive director of Congress Heights Community Training and Development Corp. (“CHCTDC”) to the Board of Directors of the Green Finance Authority (“Green Board”), based on her bona fides in affordable housing and community development.
Yet as The Dig and others have repeatedly demonstrated, Ray’s minority business contracting practices have been suspect for years. Her special sauce? Relentless campaigning for Bowser and her mentor, former mayor Adrian Fenty; volunteering on campaigns for former D.C. Council member from Ward 8, LaRuby May, another Bowser crony whom she served as treasurer; and, along with various corporate entities and longtime associate, real estate manager, community developer and Ward 8 fixture Phinis Jones, contributing close to $100,000 to political campaigns–much of it to Bowser, friends of Bowser, or candidates backed by Bowser.
Not surprisingly, Ray, for all of her largesse, has been rewarded handsomely, with millions of dollars in city contracts, purchase orders and grants across the bureaucratic spectrum.
Close readers of The Dig also may recall this expose from 2020, in which Ray (with an assist from Anthony Hood, longtime Chairman of the D.C. Zoning Commission, and Polly Donaldson, former director of the Department of Housing and Community development) emerged as a shadowy land banker for local developer Geoffrey Griffis, whose attempt to evade tenant purchasing rights of blighted apartments in Congress Heights resulted in displacement of elderly residents, receivership and a lawsuit that forced him to enter in settlement talks with the tenants.
Following inquiries by The Dig, Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh was reminded that she had asked the Office of the Attorney General to investigate Ray in 2019, when an RFP for a food services contract at homeless shelters run by an outfit with ties to Ray’s business incubator at 3215 Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in Southeast had led to an award to a vendor that had been charging substantially more for meals than its competitor.
Cheh promptly pulled Ray’s nomination, and Bowser was forced to go looking for another crony to serve on the Green Board.
In addition to some outside projects, The Dig seeded the fields for more investigative work in 2022, with more reporting on the affordable housing crisis being driven by the Housing Authority; and the filing of Freedom of Information Act requests that hopefully will shed further light on the Albert debacle, the District’s sketchy foray into sports betting, and the reasons why the D.C. Police were on virtual standby when the Trump rioters invaded the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to thwart democracy and overturn the 2020 Presidential Election.
Persuaded that D.C. officials take FOIA requests more seriously when they know a requestor is prepared to seek legal recourse, The Dig has filed a lawsuit to enforce FOIA compliance in at least one of these pending records requests, with more legal action to come.
The coming year is big for D.C., with federal probes looming over the Housing Authority, Bowser seeking a third term, Council Chairman Phil Mendelson facing a spirited challenge, and an election in Ward 5, where The Dig recently mediated a candidate forum, and where a change of representation could solidify the Council as a body not entirely beholden to business interests.
And to close with the horror that we witnessed in the beginning of the year, on a personal note, I would like to remind readers that January 6 was not just an assault on democracy and the U.S. Capitol; it was an invasion of our hometown, a Capital City that is embodied physically in the Capitol, and symbolically in our lives, with its views majestic on the horizon, and its image pasted for decades on everything from police cars to license plates, taxi cabs to Nationals baseball caps and company logos, and even album covers by the likes of Parliament and D.C.’s own Bad Brains.
Here’s to accountability for those responsible for that fateful day.
*This post has been updated to include previously omitted references.
