NYC Expat Goes to Baltimore, Gets Drunk, Talks Trash, Gets in Trouble

Demon rum made Paul T. Graziano do it.

Graziano, New York's former housing authority manager, has a headbanging hangover, not so much from the booze he consumed during a late December pub crawl but from the potty-mouthed words he spouted while under its numbing influence. Graziano's blunder was that he uttered the F-word in polite company.

The F-word that rolled off Graziano's well-lubricated tongue was "fag." And the trouble was, Graziano thundered the accusatory noun at two heterosexual men socializing at a local bar, quaffing beer and for all the world minding their own business when Graziano's alcohol level disengaged his brain from his mouth.

So Baltimore's new housing commissioner has developed a double dose of toil and trouble. For openers, he was put on 30-day paid medical leave and tucked away at some booze farm to undergo counseling and dry out, or so the official word was. Gay and lesbian rights activists are making the appropriate ouster noises as a way of leveraging more access to the mayor. The Baltimore Sun, editorial defender of bien pensant liberalism at any cost, has gently demanded his resignation, and even ran a full page of pro and con letters. To all of Baltimore's tv-watchers, Graziano feels terrible about his wayward behavior, and emoted so at a news conference. But the city's mayor says he stays, and that's that, calling Graziano's use of alcohol a "mitigating factor."

Graziano moved to Baltimore last October, golden resume in hand and fully vetted, as is required in politics these days, to assume command of the city's embattled housing authority at the beckoning of the city's young and energetic new mayor, Martin O'Malley. So far, so good.

But at the height of the season that has come to be known as Festivus?on Dec. 28 to be precise?Graziano found himself in the tank sleeping off a 90-proof headache. The next day? Temporary amnesia. Blackout. Mea culpa.

Graziano began the evening with dinner at one of Baltimore's glitziest dining rooms, at the waterfront's Harbor Court Hotel, with the city's deputy mayor for inter-governmental relations (that is, he's a lobbyist). Before the night was over, he had been all over the city and had had two barroom exchanges, insult-and-run incidents with male customers.

From the Harbor Court, Graziano's next stop was the Brewer's Art, a midtown pub where, it was discovered from a televised news conference the next day, he'd also used the word "fag" twice, and apparently, stimulated by alcohol, threatened to use his fists on two unsuspecting patrons. His speech was described as "extremely slurred," according to published accounts. Graziano slouched away after the bartender cut off his flow.

Graziano next appeared near midnight at Bertha's, located several miles away from Brewer's Art, in Fells Point, a gentrified waterfront warren of restaurants and bars made famous by the tv series Homicide, where boomers and beemers compete for space with winos and the homeless. At Bertha's, over a pint of pub ale, Graziano the Good once again morphed into an apparent homophobe and alcohol-induced tough guy.

"This place is full of fags," Graziano boomed to two indifferent men claiming squatters' rights at the bar.

The bartender ordered him to leave, but also called the police. When two policemen arrived and instructed him to leave, Graziano said, "I don't have to go anywhere."

When a third policeman appeared, Graziano said: "Oh, now it's going to take three of you to get me out of here. Why don't we stop right now. I'll call Commissioner Norris." Meaning former New York deputy police commissioner Edward T. Norris, who is Baltimore's new police commissioner.

Norris was never called, and Graziano was consigned for the night to the drunk tank.

The very next day, Graziano, Mayor O'Malley at his side, was profusely and profoundly apologetic. He claimed he had no recollection of the homophobic misadventure, that he had blacked out. And?to the surprise of many in and out of Baltimore who knew him?he acknowledged that he had a drinking problem.

"I can't even begin to describe how much I apologize and how bad and how sick I feel about this whole thing," Graziano said at the news conference. "And I spend virtually every waking moment since then reflecting on this, and this is not me."

By all accounts, Graziano received high marks for his performance as housing authority manager in New York. The New York agency was considered by HUD as one of the best of its kind in the nation. He also garnered respect when he manned posts in Boston and Manchester, NH, where he was known as a mild-mannered workaholic with no apparent dark side.

His gilt-edged resume was noticed in Baltimore by Robert Embry, head of the Abell Foundation and O'Malley's transition committee chief on housing. Embry once held the housing authority job himself before moving onward and upward to become an assistant secretary of HUD in the Carter administration. Graziano did not make the first-round cut because of local political elbowing, but he was everyone's second choice. And when Number One crashed and burned after a few months, Graziano was resuscitated to assume the vacancy.

"Graziano's a solid professional," Embry said. "I'm surprised that he even applied for the job in Baltimore, given his background and professional credentials. I checked him out with people in the field for whom I have high regard, and they had nothing but good things to say about Paul. He got high grades all around."

Embry is equally confident about Graziano's character.

"I checked out his personal characteristics," Embry said, "things such as infidelities and alcohol-related problems, and there were no indications at all that he had any problems."

Embry added: "I don't think he has a drinking problem. He may have had too much to drink that night, but that's another matter altogether."

Graziano's colleagues and peers across the country not only express high regard for the luckless Baltimore housing commissioner, but also proclaim shock over the incidents that occurred.

Kevin T. Kearne, an openly gay New York housing official whom Graziano had named a top deputy during his New York days, defended Graziano as "very professional and very respectful" and as someone "who treated everybody the same," according to published reports.

A 1976 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Graziano, 47, assumed his senior New York post in 1993, after serving three years as the executive director of the Manchester, NH, Housing and Redevelopment Authority, also highly rated by HUD under his leadership. He worked for 13 years in Boston-area housing programs before going to Manchester.

"New York doesn't put up with shoddy people," a senior HUD official was quoted anonymously as saying. "The [New York] housing authority was one of the best-run in the country."

And now O'Malley is hoping Graziano, once rehabilitated and repatriated, can work the same magic in Baltimore's beleaguered housing department. The department O'Malley inherited from his predecessor, 12-year mayor Kurt Schmoke, was rife with scandal. Its then-director, Daniel P. Henson III, had awarded nearly $26 million in HUD funds to no-bid contractors, many of them friends and relatives, including people with close ties to Schmoke. Although Schmoke and Henson were not personally implicated, the non-bid work led to federal convictions of 13 contractors.

When HUD demanded repayment of $750,000 in misspent money, Henson said Baltimore didn't owe Washington "diddly." And when HUD's inspector general announced an investigation into Baltimore's free-spending habits with federal money, Schmoke and Henson (both black in a city that's 65 percent black) screamed "racism." The probe was quietly dropped.

To Graziano, Baltimore must appear not only a city dishabille but also a monumental challenge. There are anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 boarded-up houses, depending upon which pencilneck is doing the counting. The city is scooting around Congress by using dynamite instead of legislation to redistribute the poor, imploding high-rise housing projects and passing out Section 8 vouchers to the displaced as entry tickets to the swards of suburbia.

And under the Clinton Administration's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, Baltimore reaped hundreds of millions in federal dollars that'll probably shrink dramatically?if not disappear entirely?under the new Republican administration. Graziano also has to figure out how to make up $100 million in appropriated spending that Henson overcommitted before leaving the office to the next victim.

So with Graziano freshly detoxed and soon back on the job, O'Malley and Baltimore have one last faint glimmer of hope: Give up the stuff, Paul.