This Blog from "The New Republic" makes "moose-meat" out of Charlie.
WHAT A RELIEF THIS GUY NO LONGER CARRIES A BADGE: Today is the publication day for Charles Moose's as-told-to insta-book about the Washington sniper shootings. The more we learn about Moose, the happier I am that he no longer runs the police department of Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live.
First, Moose is already yakking it up like mad about the snipers--"Dateline NBC" last night--in the rush to market his book. But the accused haven't been tried yet. Either Moose will only say things so vague as to be meaningless, or he'll make specific comments on the case, potentially prejudicing jurors and raising the terrifying prospect he could slip something that allows the guilty to get off. What does he care about most, justice or money?
Wait, we already know--money. In an August story that received surprisingly little attention, The Washington Post revealed last December, just after Moose became a celebrity, he essentially blackmailed Marriott, which has a division headquarters in Montgomery County, into giving him around $200,000. (The Post story built on an initial report on the mainly conservative web site WorldNetDaily.com.) After the sniper attacks ended, Moose and his wife took a well-earned vacation at Marriott's Ihilani resort in Hawaii. While Moose was wandering the grounds, a security guard asked to see his room key as proof he was a registered guest. Moose claims this was racism, that he was suspected because he is African American. But the Ihilani's claim to fame is a spectacular private beach, pictured here. Security personnel at this hotel routinely ask to see room keys, to keep the un-registered out of the facility. If security wasn't keeping the riffraff off the private beach, the resort would not have been worth what Moose was paying to stay there.
Shortly after returning from Hawaii, the Post asserted, Moose wrote a letter to Marriott threatening to generate bad publicity for the company unless it gave him $200,000. This was done while Moose was still police chief of the county; Moose was threatening to harm a company he had the power to harass in many ways. That's blackmail. If Moose really was the victim of racism, he should use his First Amendment rights to say so. But justice wasn't on his mind, money was. To prevent bad press, Marriott settled for an amount believed to be slightly less than $200,000, and the company signed a confidentiality agreement, forbidding it from talking about the incident or accusing Moose of being an extortionist. Moose, in turn, is currently trying to block Montgomery County from revealing the payment on his final county-required financial disclosure form.
It turns out that when Moose was police chief of Portland, Oregon, his wife Sandy Herman Moose, who worked for the police department, accused another department employee of sexual harassment. Maybe this really happened, though it seems hard to believe anyone in a police department would be so incredibly stupid as to mess with the chief's wife. The Mooses received an undisclosed amount of money, in return for not making public accusations against Portland. Word is the city government of Portland was very happy in 1999 when Moose announced he was leaving for the Maryland job. Probably Portland never told Montgomery County recruiters what Moose was really like, hoping the county would take a problem off the city's hands.
Racism persists in the United States; you couldn't be a black man working as a cop without encountering some ugly sentiment. But being asked to show your room key as you relax at a luxury resort--that's the new Edmund Pettus Bridge?
And why, with Charles Moose enough of a story for the cable news universe to broadcast hundreds of hours of his face, has his sideline as an extortionist not been widely reported? Even the Post buried its own story in the Metro section, rather than on the front page. Imagine the media flap there would have been if, say, Los Angeles police chief William Bratton, who's white, was writing to Hollywood companies threatening to create bad publicity for them unless he was given secret payments.
From here it looks like Moose is benefiting from reverse racism, rather than suffering from the standard kind: Because he's black, he's being held to a lower standard. I think I'll write a letter to the national media, threatening to accuse them of reverse racism unless they give me $200,000.
tnr.com |
