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On August 10, Vincent Gray‘s campaign announced that they had been the victim of a crank caller. The day will probably not go down in infamy, nor will it even rank very high in our local history of dirty tricks. (This does not come close, for example, to former Maryland Gov. Bobby Haircut‘s 2006 election day scam where he got his wife to help organize hundreds of Philly’s homeless to pass out fliers in P.G. County that suggested Ehrlich was a Democrat.) Still, the crank caller allegation has legs, at least among LL readers who have been pushing for a follow-up.
The story does seem at least convoluted. At the time, the Gray campaign claimed that their numbers had been hijacked. The numbers were then used to mask the caller’s number. The crank caller then called hundreds of residents. Once the residents picked up the phone, the caller didn’t say anything. They just hung up. Who does that? No heavy breathing. No “Gray secretly funnels money to some cult” lie. Not even a rant about Gray’s stance on streetcars.
The police and Verizon both looked into the matter. Campaign spokesperson Traci Hughes e-mailed LL last week with an update: “Verizon confirmed we were spoofed. There is still no word yet on who was responsible.”
The police department was even more cryptic about its investigation into the matter.
Metropolitan Police Department spokeswoman Gwen Crump provided an update via e-mail that’s just vague enough to get LL readers really upset:
“The Metropolitan Police Department is still investigating the matter. No offense report has been prepared. As of yet, there is no evidence of a crime. The preliminary investigation has revealed that the calls do not appear to be coming from Chairman Gray’s office.”
So how is it that there’s no evidence of a crime, and yet the calls do not appear to be coming from Gray’s office? The plot thickens!