Moon Rabbit Closes, Cop Colludes with Proud Boys, and Ranked Choice Voting

Today on CityCast DC, one of DC's top restaurants abruptly shut down Monday under strange circumstances. It turns out it's an issue that has to do with unions, money and culture. And Washington Post's food reporter Tim Carmen is going to walk us through it. Plus CityCast contributor Dan Reed and I will talk about DC's embrace of ranked choice voting and the scary specter of extremists on DC's police force. Today is Friday May 26th. I'm Michael Schafer and here is what DC is talking about. Dan Tim, good to see you guys. Hey Dan. Hey, good to see you. Hey, Mike. Hey, Tim's dog. That's Lucinda. Forgive her. She's a very hungry beagle, always hungry and is now diving for her second breakfast from her younger brother. So you wrote this week about the closing of Moon Rabbit, which is down on the wharf. It's one of the best regarded restaurants in DC. It's been named in the top 10 restaurants nationally. Can you, what happened? So it's very complicated and I will try to boil it down to its essence. That's a culinary analogy there. Right. Well, very good reduction. So on May 1st, the majority of the food service workers at the Intercontinental Washington on the wharf, they voted to have a union vote. They were going to unionize and they've been working with the local 25 here to unionize. In the three weeks from that vote, the Intercontinental had been in negotiations to part ways with its chef. Now this came as a surprise to just about every watcher in the DC food scene because he was a semi-finalist for a mid-Atlantic chef for the James Beard Award. He's restaurant was voted one of the top 10 restaurants by Food and Wine readers. His restaurant was considered one of the 10 best new restaurants by Esquire. This guy is a rising star chef. So to suddenly have the hotel want to part ways with Kevin T. and the chef was a surprise to just about everyone. This weekend, the hotel sent out a statement saying that they and Kevin had parted ways and then the day later, they said that Moon Rabbit would be closing. So they do this to fend off the union? That's what local 25 says. They have been raising a fuss about the closing of Moon Rabbit and the parting of the ways with the chef. They claim it's all about the unionization efforts. More than one source told me that what the Intercontinental did was try to drum up charges against Kevin, the chef, with the hopes that if they went public with these, he would rather take a deal and son and end of day and walk away. Because the idea was that Kevin was the attraction for a number of workers there, that there were a number of cooks in the kitchen, there were a number of prep cooks, there were even maybe some servers there that wanted to work with Kevin because he was a rising star and a talent. I think the thinking was from the union and others, especially some of Kevin's friends in the kitchen, was that if they killed, they chopped off the top of this chicken, it would die and the whole union effort would die. But I don't get it. So, Kevin's gone, if I went there and opened a restaurant or you went there and opened a restaurant, would we be somehow less likely to have our staff form a union? This is the union's thought and some of Kevin's friends. But they think that if Kevin goes away and Moon Rabbit goes away, that those large percentage of employees that wanted to start a union would also fall away. Now, that hasn't been the case from what I've heard those workers want to stay there and unionize more than ever now. They really want to basically stick it to the intercontinental. And we'll see if that happens because what the intercontinental has done now is its interim restaurant, they don't need as much staff. So they are only scheduling maybe a third to half of the staff. So that'll mean if food service workers want to stay there until the vote to unionize, they may have to wait three weeks, four weeks, longer. And I doubt many cooks and servers can wait that long for a paycheck. All right, just to be clear, the intercontinental says these two things had nothing to do with each other. Yeah, no, they say it has nothing to do with each other. Do they say why they would suddenly get rid of one of the best regarded chefs in the country? The best I've got is a statement from them to say that Moon Rabbit had run its course and has accomplished everything it wanted to do. So it was time to fight a new place. Does that pass the sniff test for you, Michael? I mean, probably we are really deep in the food analogies. No, like the aroma off that dish. It doesn't seem especially believable. But wait, this is a thing within the restaurant economy of Washington now that there has been more moves towards the organized labor and general attention towards inequities in the workplace beyond just this one restaurant. For sure, the pandemic changed. I would say the leverage that workers had. So many restaurant workers left the industry because it was unsafe and because there were no tips and say because diners still wanted to dine like it was 2019 and they still had the sort of privilege about it. So there was a sort of great awakening in the restaurant industry and workers left it in droves. So there was a real shortage of workers which continues to this day. So the industry is often now paying minimum wage or more for just about everyone. The wages have increased, but there is still a tip credit available in DC for the next four years. It's an initiative passed, as you may know, last fall called initiative 82, which over a four year period will get rid of the tipped minimum wage. But that's four years for restaurant owners to sort of phase that tipped minimum wage out. But that's still a sticking point. All of this increases payroll costs and a union, I think, for a lot of restaurant owners is a threat of even higher wages. But they're still dealing with increased wages from the pandemic, from needing to hire better workers and retain them. So their payroll costs have gone up considerably in the last two or three years. And I think some see a unionization as losing even more leverage and they will do whatever they can to prevent that. All right. So before I let you go, what happens next with Kevin? You'd written that he retains the intellectual property for the recipes. Is he going to open a new place? Do you know? Well, he's not talking right now. He's signed an NDA. So I don't know exactly what he's going to do. But the speculation is that he will relaunch Moon Rabbit somewhere else. I've got to think he's got many people lining up to invest into this next restaurant, given all the awards and recognition he's received. Tim, thank you. It's awesome to have you here. Yeah. Good to see you. Bye bye. And good to see you, Dan. Yeah, you too. All right. So in also controversial news, and maybe a lot more troubling, maybe there was an arrest last week, last Friday, a lieutenant with the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department was arrested on charges of allegedly helping the proud boys in the days before January 6. And a lot of the news, it's treated as kind of a part of the January 6 saga. And the Proud Boys saga, this happened just the same month as Enrique, Tario, the leader of the Proud Boys was convicted of seditious conspiracy. But I wrote about this in my political column this week, which I'm sure Dan reads closely. The minute it comes out of Friday morning. But I think the local piece of it, and the thing that it gets shockingly little attention as far as I'm concerned is this is yet another case of an allegation, and he has played it not guilty, an allegation of radicalism, extremist right-wing politics within the Metropolitan Police Department. You remember last year when Michael Fonoan, the police officer, who'd been a hero on January 6, he wrote a book about his experiences. And he depicted the MPD as a place where there was a set of cops who were basically in the tank for Trump and in denial about January 6, and he felt physically unsafe as a result of them. There have been a bunch of little incidents over the years, a police fist-bumping Proud Boys or an officer, a CECE, and a white supremacist t-shirt. And this is a problem across the country. I think in DC a lot of us think we're in a kind of blue bubble and oh, these things only happen elsewhere. What has really surprised me is there's never been a real study of this, and the MPD has been kind of mum about what are you doing to vet the department and so on. And this is leaving aside the fact that the DC police, as we all know now, are a part of the essential protection of national institutions here for people who just want public safety and want to department you can trust. And the possibility that this is true is a pretty toxic thing to have hanging out there. Yeah, I think it proves, or at least gives credence to some of the anxieties that people feel right. I think for especially a lot of people of color in the DC area, you might feel like the police are already organized against you and are working against you. And now here's a little piece of proof that the Metropolitan Police Department officers are working with this extremely white supremacist and racist organization. So one of the things that is also weird about it is this is all happening at a time when Congress is like throwing its weight around in law enforcement issues in the city and holding hearings and chastising the local prosecutor and so on. They didn't do any asking about, hey, is there a dangerous number of domestic radicals on the force? Do they believe that the Proud Boys are domestic radicals? Well, I don't know about that. But what's weird is so this bill we discussed last week. It's a police accountability bill that bans certain policing measures, all the stuff that sort of came in after the 2020 protests against police brutality. One of the kind of less hyped elements of this bill is that it mandates that the city's audit or do a study of white supremacist ties within the force. This measure is the one that Congress has voted to overturn, to disapprove of. This is the one Biden says he will veto the overturn, so it's going to become law and they will mandate this study. But it's just kind of incredible that in the face of this, the Congress, which in this case, this actually is their business. I mean, it's their safety that people like Michael Fennone protected has moved the other way. Yeah. There's sort of a couple of different kinds of self-interest in conflict, right? Because one is like literally, as you said, like their safety and also for members of Congress who may feel obligated to sort of deny or play down the events of January 6th, they may not feel like they can speak out about this. I will say, like, lest we feel like really superior in DC, that, you know, we're not like those guys on the hill. When I spoke with Fennone, he had a fairly uncharitable theory as to why it might be that the MPD is not taking this as seriously as he thinks, which is he thinks that the city electorate, a lot of the city politicians are so anti-cop that they can't really appreciate the difference between like a domestic radical with a badge and anyone else with a badge. And so the distinction that seems like a really big deal to me and to you is lost on some people. I don't know. I think he may be overstating it a little bit, but that, you know, because I would think it's kind of a political winner, right? In a city like DC to say like, we're going to get Nazis off the force. But he thinks maybe not. I think it's hard for folks to admit that these elements live here, right? You know, we've heard about Proud Boys protests like a drag queen story hours in the DC area over the past couple of months. I attended one of their counter protests to their protests back in February that actually got pretty violent. And at first, I thought, well, you know, these folks must have driven in from somewhere else to attend this thing. But like, no, they live in our neighborhoods. They go to our schools, they grew up here. And we don't want to necessarily confront that. Right. And the details of the indictment, Lamonde, he still is an officer. He's on suspension, but he was the head of intelligence for the Homeland Security Unit of the cops. His job was to cultivate sources. So his lawyer says he was just doing his job, developing a relationship with Tario and in order to get information. But prosecutors say, actually, look at the 500 texts. And each other was a lot of very chummy stuff. He writes them the day of Biden's victory. Boy, that's sad, sad news. What are you all planning? He at one point tells him, switched to an encrypted channel. You remember this in December of 2020, there was a kind of Proud Boys like Rampage almost in downtown where a Black Lives Matter sign was ripped off of a church and burned. Tario burned it. They were going to arrest him. And according to this indictment, this officer who is a can. He's not like some random beat cop. He was a 24 year veteran of the force who had a senior position, warns him, you will be arrested. So this is like pretty disturbing stuff. And again, his side say, look, he was doing his job, cops all the time, all over the place have to develop relationships with really unsavory characters. They have to charm them and to giving up information. And so that is, that's their side of the story. Some of the other law enforcement people I talked to said, tipping someone off about an arrest. It's harder to defend in court. Do we know what Lamont actually got out of this on his end? Is there meaningful information that MPD got from this relationship? So Tario was telling him, we're going to meet here. We're going to do this. His side will say, look, he was an intelligence guy, which is to say he wasn't in charge of making cases. He just wanted to know and anticipate things that might be public disturbances. So if the Proud Boys tell you, we're going to gather on this street and not that street, then you can assign officers accordingly. At the very least, MPD was a lot better prepared during those days of stop the steal incidents than the Capitol police were. It's not clear exactly what came from what, but the intelligence reporting is a messy business where you're testing a wide net. What are other folks saying about this outside of the DC bubble, outside of Congress? How was Lamont's case being perceived, maybe by his supporters? I think his supporters will say, this is a Biden administration, prosecutors, busting a cop for doing his job and tiring by association anyone who is discussing an incredibly wide net about domestic radicalization. It is unfair. A lot of cops have a kind of right of center political views and those views are being persecuted. That's the line from the right. And most of the national story deals with that, not with the kind of things that we as DC residents want to know in order to have confidence in our police force. More grist for the conspiracy mill. Speaking of things that lead to conspiracies, ranked choice voting, remember that? It is supposed to actually help steer electorates towards the center and make it harder for like a party to be captured by extremists and then force their extreme candidates on the general public. What is going to maybe happen locally, it is something that Dan is super interested in. Can you explain what the story is, where it's happening, why? Yeah. First up, let's explain what ranked choice voting is. In a traditional election, you vote for a person. You pick your one choice and then the person who gets the most votes, whether it's 51% of the votes or it's like 10% of the votes that a lot of different candidates, that person wins. They call this first pass the post elections. When ranked choice voting is a little different, instead of just picking one person, voters rank multiple candidates in their order of preference, like a second choice or even a third choice. They can put down one person if they want. When the votes are counted, if one person has received more than 50% of the vote, that's it. If not, then they start adding people second and then later third choices in until one person reaches 50%. The idea is, like you said, Mike, that you will get candidates who better represent what most people's views are. Instead of whoever can script together some votes when you have, for example, in Montgomery County, there was a primary in 2018 with 33 candidates. The winners got single digits. In theory, you could have a situation where there's one communist and eight capitalists of different ideologies and the communist gets in with 21% because everybody else divides up the capitalist vote and they're trying to prevent them. Exactly. The first place in the region that's going to do ranked choice voting is Arlington. It became legal in Virginia in 2020. In this spring's primary, which is June 20th, Arlington's going to try it for the first time with their county board race. There are two open seats on the county board. The way ranked choice voting will work there is voters will get to pick three people for those two seats. Instead of 50%, it's the first person who can get to 33% because there's three of them. Other places around the country that have done it include New York City and Alaska. Nevada is going to start doing it in 2026. In DC, voters could decide in next year's election whether to do ranked choice voting there in the future. I get the appeal. Particularly in DC, where even mayoral primaries, you've had people who won with a fairly small percentage of the total vote on the Democratic primary. But in New York, it wasn't exactly totally smooth sailing. It took weeks or months for election results to be known. This in turn gave rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories about them cooking the books behind closed doors and so on. Are we going to get a situation in Arlington or in DC if they do it here where you've got these weird weights and we don't know for a while who won election that we've already voted in? Even in traditional elections, it can take a few days to certify all the votes. We're already used to some amount of waiting. This system is more unfamiliar to people and it is easy to say it could be rigged or broken or something because you don't know it very well. In fact, that's one of the arguments against ranked choice voting in DC is that it will confuse voters and exclude lower income or less educated voters because they're used to picking one person now they have to pick three. It'll take a lot of explaining to people. I know Arlington County is doing a ton of explanation to help voters understand what it is. It's not just around in DC, what's happening in Maryland? In Montgomery County, they've been talking about ranked choice voting for several years. Like I mentioned in 2018, there was a county council election where 33 people ran for four open seats and at the same time, the county executive marked Elerich won with just 29% of the vote and with a 77 vote margin. When he was elected in 22, he only won by 32 votes. So this is the head of a county of more than one million people wins with just less than a third of the votes and yet he gets to take office. That's right. And this isn't necessarily why the conversation started, but it's definitely, I think, added more fuel to the fire. Like in Arlington, the state has to approve it. And so the Maryland House delegates, there was a committee that reviewed a potential ranked choice voting bill among Montgomery County. The Washington Post editorial board endorsed it, but we have yet to see if it will gain momentum. I mean, how will the read households vote if it was put to them? That's a good question. I love to engage in electoral's, and any local election, I usually have like two or three choices for what I want for an office. So it'll be fun to promise to all of the candidates who knock on my door that I get to vote for all of them. And in fact, that might encourage a little more camaraderie among candidates themselves, right? Because there was a case, I want to say in San Francisco where they have ranked choice voting where two candidates actually said vote for both of us for your first and second choice in the hopes at least one of them would get through. All right, Dan, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And I'll see you in a couple of weeks, my friend. Yes. Stick around, though, because today's tip of the day comes from guests we had earlier this week, local tour guides Rebecca Gral and Caitlin Calajera. I don't know if this is a life hack, but this is a personal DC hack for me. So I use the White House as my personal compass. I use the North Lawn, South Lawn, West Wing and East Wing. That is how I know North, Southeast West in DC. I do the exact same thing. We've never talked about this. I think that's important, you know, looking up and figuring out where you are. That's a really good tip, I think I wonder if all tour guides do this. Rebecca and Caitlin actually had lots of great tour suggestions and advice. Check out the full episode in our show notes. And that is all for today here on CityCasty. Our lead producer is Priyanka Tilve. Our producer is Julia Karen. Our newsletter writer is Kayla Cotee-Stemmerman. Our production assistant is Susanna Brown. And our hosts are Bridget Todd and me, Michael Schaeffer from Politico. Music is by Alex Roldan. If you enjoyed the show, why not? Tell a friend, rate the show, leave us a review and subscribe to our morning news letter. We'll be back Tuesday morning with more news from around the city. Bye. and I'll see you next week. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.