Word: booker
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Last summer Booker erected a tent outside one of the most violent housing projects in Newark and fasted for 10 days to get more police protection for the place. It worked; Mayor Sharpe James and the police brass were shamed into paying attention. Conrad Lindsey, 25, still lives at the complex and says Booker "changed a lot of moods in this community...
...Booker's first stop this summer is a battered street corner near Newark's Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Last Thursday the councilman went door to door, listening to people's concerns: one woman shows him her broken, housing-authority refrigerator; another takes him to a stripped-bare playground where the dirt reeks of urine...
...features a view of New York's World Trade Center, as well as an open-air drug market--the motor home looks like a carnival curiosity. Women walking with their children look quizzically at the vehicle and ask if there's a book giveaway. They have trouble believing that Booker is a city councilman. "Does he know what neighborhood he's in?" asks Maryann DiCostonzi, 39, who grew up here...
...disbelief runs all the way up to city hall, where Booker is widely suspected of having his eye on the mayor's office. When Booker got elected, Mayor James told the local paper he worried about people "who try to create an empire and run for higher office." The day Booker moved into the motor home, a four-page anonymous screed was sent to hundreds of city leaders, stating that "Booker himself hates Newark...He is a mere publicity-stunt hound dog who is against everything and for nothing." Over the past three years, Booker's opponents have anonymously accused...
...easy to see why some people would find Booker's record hard to believe: he played tight end for Stanford's football team. At Oxford, he was elected president of the Jewish L'Chaim society--even though he's a Baptist. He's a vegetarian, and says he has never drunk alcohol. And did we mention he once talked a suicidal fellow student out of jumping...