Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 3, 1990 TAG: 9007030494
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/7 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Former model Rasheeda Moore provided "the pipe . . . the light and the know-how" for Barry to use crack, defense attorney Kenneth Mundy said Monday as he replayed the videotape of the FBI sting at the mayor's drug and perjury trial.
The tape was first played publicly last week by the prosecution. It pertains to one of the 10 misdemeanor charges accusing Barry of cocaine possession. He also is accused of conspiracy and three counts of lying to a federal grand jury about his involvement with drugs.
Barry seven times declined Moore's offer to use drugs during the sting, Mundy said as he went over the transcript of the Jan. 18 hotel room meeting between the mayor and Moore.
"You provided the encouragement by bringing the subject up ad nauseam," Mundy told Moore, a former Barry girlfriend.
Moore didn't deny Mundy's suggestion that she kept bringing up the subject of drugs. But she said Barry readily engaged in discussing drugs and initiated talk about them himself on more than one occasion in the hotel room. Any hesitance on Barry's part stemmed from his suspicions that something was amiss, she said.
On the videotape, Barry said he didn't know how the crack pipe worked and that he had never smoked crack before, Mundy pointed out.
Barry was suspicious of a "hotel room situation" and "he felt intuitively something was going on" when he walked into the hotel room, Moore said. "He was guarding his conversation."
Then "why did he go on and hit the pipe?" Mundy asked.
"Because he had a desire to," Moore replied.
The defense attorney contended that Moore misled a grand jury five days after the sting operation by telling the panel that it was Barry who "persuaded" the conversation toward drugs.
Moore has acknowledged that she violated the instructions her FBI handlers had given her not to try to persuade Barry to use drugs. She said she got "overwhelmed" and "overcarried" in attempting to carry out her duties for the FBI.
The government can overcome a defense of entrapment by showing that Barry was predisposed to commit drug offenses. Moore testified last week that she and Barry snorted cocaine powder, smoked crack and used marijuana and opium more than 100 times from 1986 to 1989. She had given that information to the FBI by the time of the Jan. 18 sting. Outside the U.S. District Court building, Barry said he has been "blessed by God" not to have suffered a relapse of substance abuse.
Barry, who was treated at two clinics following his arrest in the sting, said he has been free of any substance abuse for 163 days.
by CNB