A Maryland man fraudulently rented out athletic fields at D.C. Public Schools—to the tune of more than $100,000—according to a recently unsealed lawsuit.
The suit alleges that Larry Washington falsely claimed that he had an agreement to rent out soccer fields at several D.C. high schools, charged the Washington International Soccer League $100 an hour to use the facilities, and then purloined the money over a four-year period.
The Washington International Soccer League initially filed the lawsuit in 2016 under seal. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine announced on Friday that his office has intervened in the suit, and is seeking damages and penalties of more than $370,000.
“The purpose of this lawsuit is to hold Mr. Washington accountable for fraudulently pocketing funds that rightly belong to DCPS,” Racine said in a release. “We are also warning others that cheating the District of Columbia will not be tolerated.”
Washington, who lives in Laurel, claimed that he had arrangements to rent out the fields at Dunbar, Mckinley, Coolidge, and Eastern high schools, charging the soccer league a total of about $120,000 from 2009 to 2013. The alleged scheme fell apart after a custodian at Eastern High School alerted the principal that WISL was using the field without a reservation. Another organization, in fact, had reserved it. The commissioner of the league asked to see the permits that Washington had obtained, but he couldn’t produce them, according to the lawsuit.
In an interview with the Washington Post, he denied the allegations and said that DCPS “certainly got their money.”
DCPS school fields—and who gets to access them—have been a source of tension in the past. In 2017, group of longtime neighborhood players were kicked off a field in Columbia Heights after an organized league rented it out for the season, before reversing course.
The use of such fields must be approved by the school’s principles and applied for through the Department of General Services.
Rachel Sadon