If you didn’t know that Washington, D.C., has an official “key to the city” — the ceremonial icon that mayors typically bestow on visiting dignitaries and homegrown honorees — you’re by no means alone. And that, for the moment at least, suits City Hall just fine. Soon after he moved into One Judiciary Square two years ago, Mayor Anthony
MY FATHER STARTED THE BUSINESS IN 1936, when we moved back to Washington from Wilmington, Delaware. My mother was from Wilmington, and my dad was in the jewelry business there. He opened a little shop at Tenth and D Streets. It was probably twelve feet wide and maybe twenty-five feet long — a tiny little place. Then he met a gentleman who was interested in buying a gift shop
And Now, For Our Next Witness. When the Justice Department needed to show in U.S. District Court in 1976 that Metro subway tunnels would not threaten the foundation of the new Continental Trailways building at 12th Street and New York Avenue, N.W., it turned to Robert L. Redell. Redell, a construction engineering expert with degrees from Michigan State and
Throughout its checkered history, the nation’s capital has held special allure for the most sophisticated species of the American criminal class: the con artist. Nowhere else, save perhaps for Wall Street, has the confidence game been more comfortably practiced and its practitioners more handsomely rewarded. Disciples of Phineas Barnum, knights of the golden fleece, con artists have swindled their way through society soirées on Embassy Row and wheedled their way into
Several hours before sunrise on Friday, November 5, 1999, Mark Johnson entered Federal Building 3 in Suitland, Maryland, and went inside the ground-floor offices of the U.S. Census Monitoring Board. The previous evening, a subordinate had called Johnson, one of the board’s two executive directors, with the news that five badge-bearing federal agents had shown up at the office just before closing time and
Tony Coelho, the chairman of Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign, did not report a now-controversial $300,000 personal loan on a federal financial disclosure report that he signed on June 11, 1998, the Center for Public Integrity has learned. The Center obtained the financial disclosure form as part of its investigation into Coelho’s activities as the U.S. commissioner general
On May 11, praising “his leadership skills and strategic vision,” Vice President Al Gore named Tony Coelho general chairman of Gore 2000, his presidential campaign organization. “Tony has been a great leader in every endeavor he has undertaken — government, business, and as an advocate for the disabled,” Gore said in the news release announcing the appointment. The release
Though its last rites were pronounced by a final bang of the auctioneer’s hammer on August 27, 1994, Dominique’s restaurant died with a whimper. Out, in the satisfied hands of auction-goers, went the autographed photographs of presidents, celebrities, and other famous folk, from Teddy Kennedy and Ronald Reagan to Warren Beatty and Frank Sinatra. Out, from the 30-foot-high Garden
AS AUCTIONEER BILL STAHL brought down the gavel for the 432nd time on Saturday, January 29, virtually everyone in the Manhattan salesroom of Sotheby’s knew that they had witnessed history in the making. Sotheby’s sale of paintings, folk art, and other objects from the collection of Bertram K. and Nina Fletcher Little was a jaw-dropper, bringing in nearly $7.4 million — more than double the high estimate of $3.6 million and more than double the previous record for a collection of Americana.
Happy Days Are Here Again — Or Are They?
When it rains, it pours, the saying goes, and lately upbeat economic news has been falling on President Clinton like cats and dogs. Consider, for example, the evidence of economic turnaround that came on just a single day — Friday, December 3. For starters, the U.S. Labor Department reported that the nation’s unemployment rate plummeted four-tenths of a point in November to 6.4 percent, the biggest one-month improvement
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