Councilmember Jim Graham has generally kept quiet on the taxicab bribery case that has so far snared his right-hand-man Ted Loza. But at a recent Kalorama Citizens Association meeting, Graham apparently couldn't help himself. According to sources in attendance, he blasted federal law enforcement for busting Loza.

Recalls one source who was there: “[Graham] basically said Ted was entrapped by the FBI. The gentleman Kamus…He said he and Ted were very, very good friends. I thought it was a very bizarre thing to say."

Says another: “He talked a little bit about the investigation. He went back and forth from sort of defending Ted and throwing Ted under the bus a little bit. He talked about how Kamus was a really good friend of the office and a good personal friend of Ted’s.…That’s when he came up with the FBI entrapment….It’s a close friend of Teddy’s who got caught up in the investigation.” [See pictures of Loza and Kamus].

And finally, here's one more source from the KCA meeting: "I heard him talk about the taxicab investigation and how tragic everything was....It gets you paranoid. You don’t be expecting to be talking to someone and thinking you are talking to the FBI."

Pretty deep insights from the Grahamstander.

When we asked the councilmember to confirm or deny his comments, a staffer offered up a very unique retort.

Brian DeBose, Graham's new spokesperson, replied via e-mail: "It was an off-the-record meeting. That means you want him to verify something. He wants to know what you want him to verify before he talks to you." (This item initially misspelled DeBose's last name)

I replied that there's no such thing as an off-the-record public meeting. DeBose replied: "Incidentally, I know a community meeting is by definition not off the record. However, Dennis James assured the Councilmember it would be."

Denis James did not return calls seeking comment.

Bryan Weaver, an ANC Commissioner in Adams Morgan, says the meeting was not advertised as off-the-record. “I don’t know how you can have public meeting be off the record," he says. "It’s impossible. They had probably a 100 signs up in the community featuring Jim Graham as the speaker…It was the only thing on the poster.”

Eventually, Graham agreed to be interviewed. Yesterday, I was told that he would be calling. He never did. This afternoon I got another, final response from DeBose: "The councilmember was unavailable for comment by press time."

*photo by Darrow Montgomery.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT---"Jack Evans Says He Still Supports Peter Nickles," "Councilmember Alexander Raises Concerns Over AG Nickles."

Morning all. Last night may have been National Night Out but for Mayor Fenty, it's Greek Week. WaPo breaks the stunning news that the District government actually paid the $37,000 tab for his Kappa Alpha Psi's welcoming party. The bash was held on Monday night and featured an open bar, crab cakes, red velvet cupcakes, and jazz bands tooting on two floors. The Post makes no mention of beer bongs and togas. The Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development had put out the dough via a grant. AG Peter Nickles apparently has forced Fenty and Co. to reimburse the city for the shindig. But Nickles swears Fenty knew nothing about the city's involvement. Key graphs:

"Attorney General Peter J. Nickles said he looked into the matter Tuesday morning at the request of the mayor. 'I concluded immediately that this was not proper,' said Nickles, who said the society reimbursed the money that morning.

Although the mayor attended the affair and was on stage as fraternity members thanked him for paying for the event, 'he didn't put two and two together that this was money that had come from the city,' Nickles said."

SEX ED NEWS: The District plans to expand its STD testing program into all public high schools. WaPo has the full story on this progressive move. There are plenty of reasons to do this. Key graphs: "The program conducted last year at eight high schools found that 13 percent of about 3,000 students tested positive for an STD, mostly gonorrhea or chlamydia, according to the D.C. Department of Health. The expansion places D.C. public schools in the vanguard of a growing number of urban school districts that test adolescents for STDs. About 12,000 students attend public high schools in the District." The news came within hours of DC Appleseed releasing its report card on how the District is dealing with the HIV/AIDS crisis (for public education, the District received a C+). WaPo covers the DC Appleseed's findings noting the overall positive scores: "But the report took Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) to task for failing to give the disease more visibility. 'While Mayor Fenty and his administration deserve recognition for the continued support of . . . numerous HAA initiatives, his public appearances and statements about the epidemic have fallen short of his enthusiasm for action inside the government,' it said."

THE NEW YORK TIMES IS ON OUR SIDE: The paper's editorial board comes down hard against Congress and its attempts to meddle in our needle exchange program. The editorial dubbed the meddling an "outrage."

NATIONAL NIGHT OUT: As we mentioned above, National Night Out happened. This meant another All-Hands-On-Deck effort from the D.C. Police Department. Police visibility was high! But News Channel 8 reports that the District still endured at least one violent incident. Three people were injured during a shooting in Southeast shortly after 10 p.m. News Channel 8 reports: "Fire officials say two 38-year-old women and a 17-year-old boy have each been shot in the leg."

AFTER THE JUMP: A power outage, more Metro news, Harry Jaffe pens a quick profile of the judge in the Pershing Park case, and much, much more.

Fox5 covers a power outage that left one Northeast neighborhood without electricity for most of yesterday. Three utility poles had crashed to the ground. Key graph: "The downed lines were a health hazard for some. One 7 month old who suffers from a heart condition was taken from his apartment complex, which had no electricity for hours."

METRO: Yesterday, Metro General Manager John B. Catoe Jr. begged a Senate subcommittee for more money. WaPo reports: "Metro, the only major transit agency without a source of dedicated funding, says it needs more than $7 billion for capital projects over the next 10 years to offer safe and reliable service." Catoe stated that without additional funding, safety as well as service would decline. Bonus graph: "Catoe used a question from Menendez about what lessons he has learned from the crash to sharpen his request for more money. He noted that the oldest Series 1000 train cars are less crashworthy than the newer cars, which he said "did not cause the accident but had an impact on the amount of damage that can be done." All six of the cars on the train that struck the one ahead of it were from the old series."

FBI RAID: Yesterday, the feds raided a health clinic in SE as well as a medical supply company. The agents are looking into allegations of medicaid fraud. WUSA9 reported that a number of patients had to be turned away while the agents did their work.

STaTter 911 raises some good points over the on-going issues with the hydrants:

"Councilmember Jim Graham announced Friday he will hold a hearing on September 16 to determine what went wrong at the fire last Wednesday night at the Chain Bridge Road mansion of former DC Board of Education president Peggy Cooper Cafritz. The Ward 1 councilmember is trying to determine why it took the DC Fire & EMS Department almost two hours to establish a reliable water supply to combat the fire.

Mayor Adrian Fenty has asked the fire chief and the DC Water & Sewer Authority (WASA) for reports this week on what happened and how to correct the issues.

If this sounds familiar, it should. In late 2007, Councilmember Graham held a series of hearings looking at the serious water supply issues that became apparent during a four-alarm fire that destroyed an apartment building in Adams Morgan on October 1 of that year. The Fenty administration also ordered an investigative report into the problems that occurred during that fire.

So what happened to the report?"

YOU DON'T MESS WITH U.S. DISTRICT COURT JUDGE EMMET SULLIVAN: That's the gist of Harry Jaffe's new column in the Examiner. Judge Sullivan is presiding over the controversial Pershing Park case and has called on the D.C. Council to investigate possible wrongdoing in which evidence has either been lost or destroyed or messed with. Key graph: "Three different presidents put Sullivan into three different judgeships: Ronald Reagan appointed him to Superior Court; George Bush (41) moved him up to the federal court of appeals; Bill Clinton nominated him to the federal district court in 1994. From the streets of his home town to the federal bench, friends and lawyers have learned one thing: 'Don't cross the dude.'"

FENTY'S SCHEDULE:

10:00 a.m.
Remarks Savoy Playground Installation Kick-off
Location: Savoy Elementary School
2400 Shannon Place, SE

3:45 pm Remarks
Appleseed HIV/AIDS Report Card Announcement
Location: J’s Barber Shop 3845 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE

First, this just came in from one of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Yahoo groups: Beware of the telephone shysters posing as sales reps for the FBI. No, silly! Not the real Federal Bureau of Investigation. This one's an alleged alarm company peddling “free” security systems. The pitch starts off saying "you live in a high crime statistics area" and offers a free home alarm system in exchange for letting the company put an FBI sign on your lawn. It’s the latest twist in alarm system scams.

AFTER THE JUMP: More on D.C. confidence schemes and Obama's plans to take down abusive consumer lenders.

For weeks, reports of shady looking traveling salesmen have been burning up neighborhood listservs.  More than a few residents reported unnerving visits from alleged alarm company reps going door to door. These guys demand to be let inside homes to see if the systems needed upgrading. Needless to say not too many street-smart District residents have fallen for this one (um, or perhaps we've only heard from the folks who told the grifters to clear off.)

Well, anyway, those ruses are in no way unique. It turns out the country is awash confidence schemes. The Federal Trade Commission says thousands of people have been swindled out of millions of dollars since the economic downturn began. 

Today, the agency announced a crackdown on scammers who have hoodwinked consumers with get-rich-quick plans, imaginary government grants, and fraudulent debt-reduction opportunities, among other things.

The enforcement crackdown involves dozens of cases brought by the FTC, the Department of Justice and law enforcers here in the District and at least 13 states. At today’s press conference, officials even trotted out “a Washington, D.C. job seeker who was conned by a company that made false promises of maintenance and janitorial work.”

I missed the webcast, so I have no more details on our very own District victim. But it sounds like he or she may have been duped by Wagner Ramos Borges, one of several alleged criminal masterminds picked up in the nationwide sweep, officially dubbed: “Operation Short Change.”

Ramos Borges allegedly advertised janitorial jobs in area newspapers and online sites. But once applicants responded, he would trick them into paying $98 apiece for bogus “certified registration number” cards. Those cards were supposed to land them jobs with one of the front companies he operated. But the jobs didn’t exist, officials say.

…

As for the perfectly legal scams run by banks, the Obama Administration is taking them on too. The Department of the Treasury forwarded a proposal to Congress yesterday that would establish a new agency to oversee home mortgages and other consumer lending. Click here for the press release discussing the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The administration says the new outfit would shield consumers from lending abuses like those that led to the financial sector’s current travails.

According to today’s Washington Post, the banking industry is in revolt over the plan, saying it would allow the government to meddle too much into its business; but lawmakers may have a hard time voting against it without looking like corporate sellouts.

Despite U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s willingness to talk about race in America and his pledge to end racial profiling, his Department of Justice hasn’t done much to dismantle Bush-era guidelines on national security; Those guidelines not only promote racial profiling by the Federal Bureau of Investigation but create justification for state and local law enforcement agents to do it too, the ACLU charges.

"Racial profiling remains a widespread and pervasive problem throughout the U.S., impacting the lives of millions of people in the African American, Asian, Latino, South Asian, Arab and Muslim communities," Chandra Bhatnagar, staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program and the main author of the report said in a press release. "The U.S. government must take urgent, direct action to rid the nation of the scourge of racial and ethnic profiling and bring this country into conformity with both the Constitution and international human rights obligations."

The ACLU made the charges in a report to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. To read the press release or the entire report, click here.

Wearing a fake beard while robbing the same bank twice: priceless.

Image courtesy of BuyCostumes.com