Greco's out in front but out of touch

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By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 26, 2001

Dick Greco and I were talking face to face. If he had been any closer, he would have been behind me.

This is typical of the mayor of Tampa, part of his ballyhooed M.O. His posture transmits the signal that you are just so interesting and that he would if he could eat you up.

But if you enjoy the psychological protection of your personal space or the subject matter displeases the mayor, his behavior has a rattling effect.

You feel yourself the target of a campaign to dominate. Greco wants you to yield.

Unhappily for Greco, he cannot get the FBI and FDLE to step aside from their pursuit of how his housing aide, Steve LaBrake, got a contractor who works for the city to build him and his city employee of a girlfriend a house on what looks like the cheap.

So the mayor turned on reporters in his latest defense of LaBrake and LaBrake's girlfriend, Lynne McCarter.

"These are two human beings," Greco said. "But for the grace of God, it could be one of you. How would you like it if it had been you?"

Blaming the press is an old tack, but Greco took it to new lows.

I have never known Greco to be a churchgoer. Maybe he's changed, for this thrice-married man who has not lost his eye for the ladies directed me to the Bible, and the seventh chapter of the Book of Matthew. "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

In other words, LaBrake was a brother. I was a bum.

I was disrespecting the rules. The way Greco knows them, a public official can have a messy private life, and it's his business -- even if it poses a huge conflict with public business.

Greco will be 68 on Sept. 14. He complained after last week's news conference that he was feeling old, but nobody should think this means he is slowing down. It means that he doesn't understand just how much the rules have changed since he was mayor the last time, 30 years ago.

We don't wink and look away the way we used to.

A man who makes a mess of his personal life on the public's time is treated differently from a man who does so while on a private payroll.

And even on the private payroll, a man who has an affair with a subordinate had better be at least smart enough to have her report to another boss.

Our tolerance for a dodge posing as an answer is low. Our tolerance is so low that some unlucky people are hanged in the press, before the jury reads a verdict.

Greco complained correctly about the unfairness of this.

But when a man complains like this and relies on no rules but his loosey-goosey own -- well, you have to smile.

It was unfair, the mayor said, to pick on LaBrake and his poor pregnant girlfriend. It was unfair to look closely at the house deal, or even ponder that the house was built by a city contractor vulnerable to pressure by LaBrake. Greco had seen the paperwork. Wasn't that enough?

Somebody needs to tell him he is not LaBrake.

It was impossible not to hear Greco's defense of the man and think of the mayor's sore tooth, nursed in private, that he is constantly under suspicion by somebody with subpoena power, because his name ends with a vowel, because he doesn't turn his back on his friends, no matter the trouble they get in.

Greco denied it, but it was impossible not to sense that he knew what LaBrake was suffering. People were saying terrible things about him and he would never have a chance to clear his name of the absurdities uttered against it.

There but for the grace of God go you, Dick Greco said.

Go I, the mayor meant.

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