Friday, February 21, 2014

EXTRA: He’s coming back home! But do we really want Mel to return?

It would seem that one-time Congressman Mel Reynolds is NOT some form of international pornographer.

He’s just a guy who overstayed his visa, and is about to get kicked out of the country. Zimbabwe, that is.

FOR IT SEEMS that the one-time representative from the Far South Side and surrounding suburbs who got caught using the camera on his personal phone to take pictures of women in compromising pictures is not going to face a criminal charge on that, after all.

A judge in Harare dismissed that charge of pornography possession – which is a felony in Zimbabwe.

But Reynolds did plead guilty to a charge that he was in Zimbabwe on an expired visa (he’d been there since November, theoretically so that he could make contacts to benefit U.S. corporate interests that want to do business in Africa).

So for that, a judge ordered Reynolds to be deported.

THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE reported Friday that attorneys for Reynolds say they expect him to return to the United States next week, although they’re not sure if he will wind up back in Chicago proper (he had been living in the Bronzeville neighborhood in recent years).

Although the part that most intrigued me was the claim by the hotel manager to the Tribune newspaper that they had nothing to do with Reynolds’ arrest. He had something like a $24,000 hotel bill he had run up. Who knows if they’ll ever get the money?

I still wonder if this was more about Reynolds offending some local persona, and then falling into a trap of his own making by having all those girls up to his hotel room so he could try making himself a personal film.

All of which makes this week’s Reynolds saga -- which was already so overloaded with tacky incidents -- a self-inflicted wound!

  -30-

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