Almost Missed It!

What with the Christmas and New Year holidays, our newspaper reading was largely limited to the slow-cooker recipe section. (And that's turning out just fine, thank you for asking.) As a consequence, we missed the fact that former District of Columbia Mayor-For-Life Marion Barry (currently a member of the City Council) was robbed at gunpoint on New Year's Day. The Washington Post reports:

Barry, 69, was held up in his kitchen about 9:30 p.m. Monday by two assailants who minutes earlier had helped him carry groceries from his car to his third-floor apartment in Southeast Washington. They pointed a gun at Barry's face and stole his wallet, which contained more than $200, his driver's license and two credit cards, police said.

What's really quite bizarre is this:

"There is a sort of an unwritten code in Washington, among the underworld and the hustlers and these other guys, that I am their friend," Barry said at an afternoon news conference in which he described the robbery in detail. "I don't advocate what they do. I advocate conditions to change what they do. I was a little hurt that this betrayal did happen."

Do tell.

Those damned gun-toting hoodlums just have no respect anymore. In times past, they'd have moved on to some more deserving victim. (A less deserving victim?)