Howard Dixon, a retired city police officer who gets paid $60,566 a year to hold the door for the mayor, is a more valuable public servant than might be imagined.
Valuable to the mayor he serves, anyway, in a don't ask, don't tell kinda way.
Take that day in 2004 when, state prosecutors say, Sheila Dixon handed a wad of cash - $4,000, in $100 bills - to Howard Dixon, who is paid to escort her to events and who is no relation.
Prosecutors allege that then-City Council President Dixon, just back from a Chicago shopping spree with developer-boyfriend Ron Lipscomb, asked Howard Dixon to put the cash in his bank account, and then write a check to help cover her whopping American Express bill.
"She said, 'I overspent and this bill is too high. I went shopping too much,'" Howard Dixon told the grand jury, according to testimony filed last week. "That's not unusual for her. She's a shopalcholic [sic] ... I said, 'OK, I do you a favor.' I paid the bill."
Howard Dixon was asked "if it was rather unusual for the president of the City Council to have 40 $100 bills in cash."
"Yes, it is," he replied. "It's an unusual situation."
That's a relief. For a minute, I thought we had real corruption on our hands.
Howard Dixon also was asked if he'd ever heard the term "money laundering" and if he'd committed it.
I hate to pick on prosecutors here, but that's a silly question. The guy was a cop. Of course he knows money laundering when he sees it, right?
"Well, I didn't ask her where the money come from ... " Howard Dixon replied. "I ain't want to know, absolutely didn't want to know."
Fashion forward
Turns out the future mayor and Lipscomb had a perfectly legit reason for going to New York together on Feb. 18, 2004.
I'd always suspected they were celebrating the 20-year tax break Dixon had granted him earlier that day on his $97 million Spinnaker Bay project. Or that that they were having a romantic stay at the Trump International, away from the kids and spouses.
The real reason, according to Lipscomb's grand jury testimony: Dixon was visiting prospective colleges for her daughter. And it turns out her daughter was interested in following in mom's footsteps by studying ... public policy? Politics? Guess again.
"Her daughter wanted to go to fashion school," Lipscomb said.
Designs on Subway
