The Dumb Defense

The Kansas City, Missouri, councilwoman gets out of her chair and moves to the back of the room on the 10th floor of City Hall. She raises the thermostat and returns to her seat, sniffling.

It's a Monday afternoon in mid-December. The city's rarely convened ethics commission is taking testimony about the suspicious circumstances surrounding McFadden-Weaver's purchase and loss of a house in Lee's Summit.

McFadden-Weaver is wearing a black suit and beige heels. A white-haired lawyer is at her side. The councilwoman's need for legal representation is evident: An FBI agent, seated behind McFadden-Weaver, takes notes on a legal pad when the hearing begins.

The councilwoman doesn't dispute most of the facts. On September 30, 2005, she borrowed $400,000 to buy a Lee's Summit house. McFadden-Weaver says she bought the property on behalf of a contractor, Emanuel Kind. In exchange for the use of her name and credit, she claims that Kind promised to do repair work on her residence in Kansas City. Kind was supposed to make the mortgage payments on the Lee's Summit house and then buy it from McFadden-Weaver.

The transaction bore telltale signs of mortgage fraud. McFadden-Weaver admitted as much last August, when The Kansas City Star first wrote about the purchase. Several aspects of the deal were strange. McFadden-Weaver paid more than the original list price. Also, she signed documents that indicated she would occupy the house. This was false.

McFadden-Weaver claims that she signed the papers in a rush. She says she did not intend to deceive anyone. "I think this time I've been the victim of a con," she says.

At the ethics commission hearing, the councilwoman looks the part of a beleaguered figure. During the testimony of a mortgage broker, she gratefully receives a cup of hot water and a tea bag from a supporter. Later, her aide, Reva Simmons, delivers a Pepsi and a candy bar. Her sniffles persist.

The mortgage broker, a squat man named Ricky Hamilton, explains to the commission how McFadden-Weaver qualified for such a large mortgage. Hamilton says the councilwoman's monthly income was "escalated" on the loan application. Hamilton says it's acceptable to inflate a homebuyer's earnings, as long as the increase is within reason. "You can't just pull a number out of the sky," he says.

Some answers, however, Hamilton cannot provide. He does not know why, for instance, the Lee's Summit house lost a third of its value less than a year after McFadden-Weaver bought it.

Three weeks after the hearing, on January 3, a federal grand jury returned a seven-count indictment against McFadden-Weaver, Hamilton and Kind. What the councilwoman called a con, the U.S. attorney called a conspiracy to defraud mortgage lenders. In any reading of the facts, McFadden-Weaver either willingly committed fraud or was foolish.

McFadden-Weaver, who is also a church pastor, maintains her innocence. "I'm sure that I will be vindicated, and I have told the truth," she told reporters during a press conference held at City Hall on the day she was indicted.

The councilwoman has been no stranger to controversy in her four years in office. She lost her meaningful committee assignments when she crossed Mayor Kay Barnes. She faced a recall election. She has been fined by the state ethics commission. A woman she appointed to an important advisory group was arrested in November. Her council attendance record is abysmal: She misses nearly one out of every five meetings.

McFadden-Weaver's defense in the criminal case — that she didn't know any better — sounds similar to past explanations she has given. Her ignorance would seem terminal to a career in politics, yet it's going largely unchallenged. Black leaders who have defended her in the past are keeping silent. Meanwhile, her inadequacies continue to be exposed.

The 3rd District leads the city in murders, boarded-up homes and sad corners.

Residents of the 3rd District hate the stigma, says Melba Curls, who is running for the at-large 3rd District City Council seat now held by Troy Nash.

"We work. We go to church," Curls says. "We try to make it better, just like everybody else."

Yet the poverty and violence are inescapable. At a recent Center City Neighborhood Association meeting, a resident said he found 23 bullets in the shingles of a roof that he replaced.

McFadden-Weaver, 47, was born and raised in the 3rd District. She grew up in a family blessed with performance skills. Her father, James McFadden, was a tap dancer and bandleader who performed with Count Basie and Louis Armstrong. Her brothers, Lonnie and Ronald, followed in their father's footsteps, forming the McFadden Brothers, a jazz and tap duo that performs regularly.

The family's only daughter, Saundra McFadden discovered a gift for preaching. Her talent became evident at an early age. She was ordained when she was 16 at the nondenominational St. Mary's Grand Holy Tabernacle on the East Side.

She attended Lincoln University in Jefferson City and married for the first time in 1984. (Weaver is the last name of her second husband.) She became a minister in an African Methodist Episcopal church.

Her affiliation with the church ended in a court battle. In 1998, she alleged sexual harassment by two church officials (Divine Debauchery, June 7, 2001). McFadden-Weaver initially won $6 million from a Jackson County jury, but an appeals court reversed it, and she settled out of court in 2003 for an undisclosed sum.