Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2007-11-19 08:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

Put away your carefully honed curses for Tommy Bromwell, the disgraced former state senator now heading for prison. He knows, he knows. Put away your slings and arrows over the crimes committed by Bromwell and his wife, Mary Patricia, who stares at her own time behind bars. She knows, too.

There is no curse you can hurl at them that they haven’t already hurled at themselves. Tommy Bromwell should have been in Annapolis last week, working out the details on budgets and slots. He knows how to do these things, and once did them with insight and street smarts.

Instead, he stood there in his public humiliation before federal Judge J. Frederick Motz and about a hundred of the Bromwells’ friends and family members as Motz pronounced, in barely audible terms, that Bromwell would face the next seven years removed from the rest of the world.

Mary Patricia Bromwell should be getting her children ready for school today. They have an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old still at home. But where’s home now that they’ve lost everything for the crimes they committed? Mrs. Bromwell now prepares for a year in prison. At the sentencing Friday, Judge Motz wondered aloud whether there weren’t some “other family members who might help” with the kids while the Bromwells go away.

When Mrs. Bromwell heard those words, she buried her face in her arms until her composure returned.

Yes, yes, they have it coming. Nobody, not even the Bromwells, disputes this, so save your curses and your piety about the public confidence in politics taking another shot to the head.

The Bromwells know.

They are grown-ups, and their embarrassment has played out in front of everybody for the past several years now, and their pain is just beginning. Their children are taunted in school. Their former neighbors now gossip behind their backs, and their former constituents now feel betrayed.

They know.

If you think they don’t, you should have been there Friday in the moments before Motz muttered his fully justified sentences.

Her voice hoarse and trembling, Mary Patricia Bromwell talked about “the irreparable hurt to those who love me, and those I love. I’ve watched them suffer through no fault of their own. I acknowledge every day, I’ve caused their … lasting and profound pain.

“How,” she asked, “do you accept a job and money for doing nearly nothing?”

Now she was coming to the heart of the government’s case: The publicly funded contracts her husband helped steer to a Baltimore-based construction company, and the thousands of dollars in building materials the Bromwells received for their Parkville home, and the $200,000 in salary Mrs. Bromwell received for a no-show job.

She’d figured she would do “whatever work was assigned.” But there was no work, and when she figured this out, “I should have walked away. … But I was selfish, and lazy, and stupid.” She said she grew up in a military family. She was always told “your name is all you really have in life. And I’ve disgraced my name, and my family. … There is no hell deep enough for me.”

Judge Motz was clearly moved. He’d come out prepared to nail both of the Bromwells pretty hard, but he was beginning to waver. Then Tommy Bromwell stood up and took all the blame.

He said he’d done something “terribly wrong.” He meant the money under the table, but he also meant something else: He dragged his wife into this mess and “kept her in.” He made her vulnerable. When she asked why she wasn’t doing any work, “I’m the one,” her husband said, “who kept telling her, ‘It’s gonna get busy.’

“My wife’s involvement is on my shoulders,” he said. “I will never be able to forgive myself for what I’ve done to my wife and family and friends.”

So save your wrath today. The Bromwells are already down for the count. They know they screwed up and know they will pay the price for it, even though Judge Motz acknowledged he was handing out “a lesser sentence than I had intended.”

He was ready to throw the book at them. He was ready to match his sentencing with his anger over the Bromwells’ “undermining of public confidence.”

But he contained his sense of vengeance, as we all can contain ours.

Put away your curse words and your indignation. The Bromwells beat you to it. They awaken each morning and look in the mirror, and there isn’t a curse in the whole world they haven’t hurled at themselves.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com