Lavish Spending, Little Reward

Prioleau himself raised another red flag when he told city and school officials in a 2001 e-mail that he was using money from an unrelated federal grant to help fund the McKinley project. He expected to "recover those funds," he told them, when city money became available.

Then-City Administrator John A. Koskinen thanked Prioleau for the "positive report" and said he would help him get paid. Within months, the school system paid his for-profit company about $50,000.

Koskinen said he did not recall Prioleau's claim that he was using federal money for the city project. "It would have been clear you can't do that," Koskinen said. U.S. Department of Education officials said that shifting federal funds to other purposes is not allowed and that they have referred the matter to the agency's inspector general.

After he ran up more than $300,000 in bills, Prioleau got a signed agreement from the city and the schools, putting him in charge of much of the McKinley campus efforts. Cafritz said he was hired despite her warnings to Chief Technology Officer Suzanne J. Peck. "I said, 'You have got to listen to me on this: You need to be careful about your relationship with him, and you have got to protect the city,' " Cafritz said.

Little to Show

What Prioleau accomplished remains a mystery. He told the city's housing agency that his training center served about 6,800 people from 1998 through 2002.

Victor Selman, chief operating officer for the housing agency, said he believes the District got its "money's worth" but said there is no way to verify Prioleau's figures.

The Department of Employment Services, which paid Prioleau $3.1 million to train disadvantaged youths, said his nonprofit organization found entry-level jobs and other placements for 136 youths between 2000 and 2004.

After visiting the Southwest center in 2002, a city official wrote that "only 4 participants were engaged in activities." In March 2004, a city monitor visiting the Adams Morgan location reported that he found three people in class. Two, he noted, left after a break.

Robert Sweeney, whom Prioleau hired in 2002 to teach high school equivalency classes, said he did not think DC Link and Learn was prepared for the task. In hindsight, Sweeney said, "No one when I was there, including myself, really knew what we were doing."

Some students said the program helped them find jobs. But Carlette Fletcher, who attended GED training at the Southwest site, said her class was frustratingly uneven. "It was one teacher one day telling us one thing, then another teacher another day telling us another," she said. For that and other reasons, she quit.

Last November, the Employment Services agency warned Prioleau that he was close to losing his training grant, after an agency investigation that determined that nonprofit payroll taxes were delinquent, that audits were overdue and that Prioleau had billed the grant for inappropriate expenditures.

In December, Prioleau pulled out of the grant. In January, he closed the Adams Morgan training center and, in March, the city's housing agency repossessed the two vehicles, after questions by The Post.

Employment Services officials defended their monitoring of his grant and said they acted when they found problems. And Housing Director JaLal Greene, who was not at the agency at the time, said controls are much tighter now.

"Every once in a while, you get someone who is very familiar with the rules and can play at the edges of what is allowed and is not allowed," Greene said. Prioleau, he said, "knows how to play this game."

Across town, a renovated McKinley High opened, but the technology campus never moved beyond the drawings Prioleau commissioned. The city's Office of Planning told the mayor's office in a memo that development proposals from Prioleau's "team" had multiple "deficiencies." Donations for the campus had to be returned.

Prioleau said in an interview that he fulfilled his obligation by delivering plans and marketing materials but that the project disintegrated because of fighting between school board officials and the mayor's office. "We put the blood, sweat and tears in there. And it wasn't about the money," he said. "For me, it was a passion. It was bringing back my history."

But Peck, the city's chief technology officer, said she had a "dawning awareness" that critics had been right -- Prioleau could not deliver.

When Prioleau attempted to bill the District again in 2002, Peck said she saved taxpayers any further expense and told him no.

"I called him in and said, 'The party is over.' "

Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.