A Convicted Council Member Tells His Story — On Stage

One of the most effective ways to create a good ethics environment is by telling the full story of the bad ethics environment that preceded it. If someone or, better, a number of people, have the courage and integrity to not only admit publicly to what they and their colleagues did, but to tell it like a story, a group story, it will have a cathartic effect. It will cleanse the community and act as a point where everything is in the open and continues to be in the open. It will make it easier for people to point out unethical conduct, and harder for people to act unethically.

But it almost never happens. There are denials, there are settlements, but there are very rarely honest stories told. New people come in, but no one really knows how new they are, and especially how new their values are.

Tonight a very unusual story-telling about local government corruption will premiere. Reflections: A Man and His Time might be a terrible title, but it is a play about a New Orleans council member, Oliver Thomas, who took a bribe to help someone keep his parking lot contract with the city (he also got the parking lot owner to hire a friend, who gave the council member a percentage of his salary; for the ethics side of the matter, see my 2007 blog post on Thomas). And the council member, who went to prison for his acts, will play himself. The play is based on his prison journals.

There is one thing wrong with the play, from what I've read about it (see an article in today's New York Times and an article in Tuesday's New Orleans Times-Picayune). It's not about the city's lousy ethics environment, the web of relationships, the acceptance of and complicity with unethical and criminal conduct. It's about one man's mistake, which ruined his career and sent him to prison and, ultimately, redemption.

There are also suggestions of a white conspiracy to marginalize blacks, to undermine trust in black leaders. Thomas does not subscribe to this theory; he says that he was the sole author of his demise, but the author of the play is not so sure. He cut out some references to a conspiracy at Thomas's insistence, according to the Times article.

But was Thomas the sole author of his demise? I doubt it. It is far more likely that he did what he did because others around him were doing the same thing. He likely thought that it was acceptable behavior, part of doing business as a council member in New Orleans. He's hardly the only New Orleans official to have been caught and gone to prison.

To present the story as the the drama of one man is to miss what is essential about the story, at least from a government ethics view. Ethics environments are really what ethics programs aim to change. And ethics environments can only be changed by a number of people. Not only will a bad apple not change an ethics environment, but it is the idea of a bad apple, or one man who makes a mistake, that helps poor ethics environments continue. It is one of the myths that preserves an ugly reality.

Other such myths include:  everyone does it (and the ethnic group that ran the city before us got theirs), we deserve it for all the good we do, don't be a stool-pigeon (or a goody-goody), and real men (and now even women) take what they can.

I wish I could see the play. If there's anything valuable in the reviews, I'll do an update.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

---