Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once joshed on the square, “I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.”  I share the gist of those feelings when it comes to District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty, but what I’d really, really, really like to be is his fraternity brother.

When I read yesterday in an NBC Washington story that the District of Columbia had agreed to settle out with Omar Karim for $550,000, I thought, “Holy moly, not only is this dude not going to jail for opening a brand-new bag of buddy corruption, he’s getting paid for doing nothing.”

 Karim, you’ll remember (or maybe you won’t) is one of a gaggle of fortunate fraternity brothers Mayor Fenty acquired as he was matriculating (yes, matriculating, and in public) at Howard University.  Actually, they were extremely fortunate because after they supported Fenty in his run for mayor in 2006, he introduced them to the deep green waters that flow through the District’s leaky bidding process, where they’ve been drinking their fill ever since.

 Fenty ran as a fresh-faced reformer and took his landslide victory over Linda Cropp in the Democratic Primary as a mandate.  Since he took office in 2002, Fenty’s been doing what he pleases, vacationing with his family in Dubai at the expense of the United Arab Emirates, skipping DC saint Abe Pollin’s funeral to soak up the Thanksgiving sun in South Beach, fibbing about his involvement in a traffic accident, and jumping the Que at Lafayette Elementary to get his kids into one of the few public schools in the District that isn’t crumbling into the ground.

 /A note:  if Marion Barry or Tony Williams had pulled such a stunt when they were in office, the lions and lionesses of the Lafayette PTA would have given the kids Metro cards and dumped them at the Friendship Heights Metro.  But I digress./

Early in the Fenty Administration, Mr. Karim and Sinclair Skinner, another Fenty brother in the Alpha Kappa Psi fraternity, set up shop in and around City Hall.  Mr. Skinner formed two new companies, Liberty Engineering and Design and Liberty Law Group.  Mr. Karim’s firm, Banneker Ventures, quickly scored a huge deal with the city to tear down a couple of awful housing projects and replace them with a mixed-use development called Northwest One.  He stuck to his Kappa Psi vows by sub-contracting some of the work to brother Skinner.  The Northwest contract was followed by a pair of agreements with the city to manage the rebuilding a school and a recreation center. Total at that point: $1.8 million. Then came a $2.3 million agreement to oversee construction of recreation centers and ball fields across the city.

When it got out that that more than $80 million worth of city contracts had been awarded to friends and fraternity brothers of Mayor Fenty, the city council launched an investigation (not exactly timely, but what the hey).  Karim’s response to the Washington City Paper’s Loose Lips columnist, Mike Dubois was, “God wants us to live well.”  When a lawyer for Omar and Sinclair was asked about the propriety of it all, he told Washingtonian Magazine, “If your friends are qualified and they share your view of the city, why should they not get contracts?  That’s not unheard of in DC.”

Turns out that under oath before the City Council in April, Mr. Skinner admitted that he was not certified to perform $900,000 worth of work that Mr. Karim’s firm had subcontracted to him.  After the Council terminated the original contract awarded to Mr. Karim because it violated a law requiring Council approval of deals over $1 million, Mr. Karim sued.  Yesterday, he won a settlement of $550,000 for doing nothing, except, of course successfully to trading on his relationship with Mayor-for-hype Fenty.

How did all this happen, and will it make a difference come election time this Fall?  It happened because  the District of Columbia government is a crazy quilt of responsibilities and authorities. And I doubt it will make a difference in the election, because DC voters have such bad powers of deduction. (When Mayor Barry said, “Mitch set me up,” I wanted to believe him. But who was Mitch?)

Try putting this on a post-it on your refrigerator door.  “Who’s Adrian?  Who had the city install a $75,000 water warmer in the public pool where he trained for the triatholon he just won?  Whose fraternity brother got caught circulating a flyer with a cartoon depicting white council member (and Fenty opponent) Jim Graham as a plantation boss overseeing a black man being lynched?  Who tried to keep all the freebie Washington Nationals baseball tickets for himself? (Yikes, who wanted them?)  Who used city police to create traffic jams by blocking off streets for his bike rides?  Who fired the DC Housing Authority Board Chair who tried to blow the whistle on Mr. Karim and Mr. Skinner?  Indeed, who hired Michelle Rhee?”

A hint: it wasn’t Mitch who set us up.  It was Adrian.