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Our state of affairs: Honesty is news
© St. Petersburg Times Talk about your parallel lives. On the same day two Tampa sixth-graders were lauded by the Hillsborough County School Board for turning in $4,000 they'd found on the street, Steve LaBrake was back at City Hall looking for new ways to make money. Oscar Carter and Jarvarious Jones have been the toast of Tampa Bay ever since they found the bundle of cash at their school bus stop last week and turned it in. The two 13-year-olds could teach LaBrake a lesson in ethics. But the man wouldn't understand. "Why am I the only one singled out that can't do business with the city or can't have a private life?" LaBrake whined Tuesday to a Times reporter. "What have I done wrong?" Where do we start? With the romance with the subordinate he kept promoting? Or the house he had built on the cheap by a builder who did business with the city? Or the favors he got from a non-profit agency he worked with when he was the Greco administration's real estate chief? Or what he's up to now? Tuesday, LaBrake introduced a developer to city officials. The developer wants to build on a piece of land that, as the city's real estate chief, LaBrake knew well. He was in charge when that non-profit group that did him favors, the Tampa-Hillsborough Action Plan, bought the land in Ybor City with city-backed loans. He was in charge when a developer sought tax breaks to build on it. The city is looking for a new developer for the property. LaBrake is playing the middleman. He's acting as a real estate broker. If his client gets the right to build on the land, LaBrake stands to make thousands in commissions. Bingo. Once again, LaBrake is using the knowledge and contacts born of his city position to benefit himself. Once again, he sees nothing wrong. It makes you wonder what LaBrake would have done if he'd found that $4,000. Would he have had the clear sense of right and wrong of a 13-year-old boy at a bus stop? The boys who found that money didn't get their sense of principle out of the air. They learned it at the kitchen table. Said Jarvarious Jones' mother, Jacqueline: "If he had brought the money home, it still would have been turned in, because I would have called the police." LaBrake operated in a much different environment, in which the rules were, and are, determined solely by convenience. No matter what LaBrake did, Mayor Dick Greco has been his enabler, even granting him three months of paid leave last year when his salary and other benefits ran out. Tuesday, when LaBrake showed up in City Hall, Greco shrugged. Whatever he thought, ethics didn't enter the picture. The best the mayor could come up with was this lame remark: "You can't say he can't come into a city building." This is the state of our lives: What LaBrake does, what Greco says, surprises nobody. What two 13-year-olds do when they find $4,000 in cash astounds everybody. We don't expect honesty. We expect con artistry. So when two kids out of the blue do what's right rather than what would benefit them we shower them with money, shopping trips, game tickets, proclamations. We give these things not just to reward the boys, but to thank them for the gift they gave us -- a reprieve from our usual cynicism about how our world works. -- You can reach Mary Jo Melone at mjmelone@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3402.
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Times columns today Mary Jo Melone Tampa Uncuffed Gary Shelton From the Times Metro desk |
