Brazen betrayal

It's as if she was desperate to get caught.

The feds say she shoved the cash into her bra and her pockets at restaurants right across the street from the State House. These are restaurants with big windows, restaurants full of people who work on Beacon Hill.

They say she openly cracked knees and twisted arms after taking the bribes, barely bothering to disguise her intentions.

That Dianne Wilkerson expected to get away with all of this beggars belief and betrays a serious psychic malady.

Then again, she had survived other transgressions - thrived, even. With a magician's sleight of hand she called on the race card and it fluttered into view, diverting eyes from her campaign finance violations, her tax problems, her lies.

The state's only black senator - the one who was supposed to represent a new Boston - appears to be nothing but a throwback to the city's corrupt past.

Dejavu indeed.

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

And it is heartbreakingly sad. Because Wilkerson - as passionate and eloquent a lawmaker who has ever walked the marbled hallways of the State House - could have been so much more than this.

As a legislator, she took heroic stances. She was out there, advocating for gay rights, long before others saw the writing on the wall and joined in. When lawmakers debated banning gay marriage in 2004, she gave a speech on the floor linking the fight for gay marriage to the civil rights movement. It was brave, given the tensions in the black community over the issue, and it moved people to tears.

"I could not in good conscience ever vote to send anyone to that place from which my family fled," Wilkerson said of her childhood in Jim Crow Arkansas.

The city's African-American community loved her because she had overcome so much, a single mother of two who got through law school on welfare and went on to help desegregate public housing and led the fight against unscrupulous lenders feeding off hard-working city residents. They loved her because she was the only black senator, a symbol of how far the community had come (and a reminder of how far it still had to go). They loved her because she was willing to wield her considerable influence on behalf of them.

Over the last year, Wilkerson's devotees have defended her with every ounce of energy they could muster. When she was locked in a bitter primary battle, they knocked on doors for her and shook her red signs on corners. They decried press coverage of her continuing financial breaches as unfair, and even racist. The governor and the mayor put their considerable political capital behind her.

But while her supporters were laboring to keep the embattled incumbent in her seat, some fighting on even after she lost the primary, the senator was busy padding her underwear with hundred dollar bills.

As some residents of her district discovered long ago, Wilkerson's storied advocacy for her constituents was selective, to say the least. Some got help from her after bulking up her campaign coffers. Some got help after handing over wads of cash for spa treatments and gambling chips, according to the FBI.

And some got thrown under the bus. They have plenty of company today.

That devastating picture of Wilkerson with her hand up her sweater has done more than heap ignominy upon the senator. It has spread a cloud of suspicion across the city - from Boston City Hall to Columbus Center. And it now hangs over everybody with whom Wilkerson cast her lot. It has tainted every honest, hard-working legislator battling the belief that all politicians are corrupt.

And it has made all of the people who believed in this senator - good people who had invested her with their hopes for what women, African Americans, and the whole city could be - look like fools.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. Her e-mail address is Abraham@globe.com