Booker disputes charge he fabricated tale he told often

U.S. Senate candidate Cory Booker said Friday that allegations raised in a report that he fabricated a Newark street character named "T-Bone" for dramatic effect amounted to a "fake controversy."

Booker, the Democratic mayor of Newark, has said T-Bone was a drug dealer who threatened his life when Booker moved to Newark, but later sought his help, according to the Newark Star-Ledger. Back in 2007, the Star-Ledger reported that Booker said T-Bone "is an archetype of so many people that are out there. He is 1,000 percent a real person."

The newspaper tried to find him in 2007 but failed. And on Thursday, the conservative National Review alleged that T-Bone is a figment of Booker's imagination. Clement Price, a Rutgers University historian, told National Review that Booker confessed to him in 2008 that T-Bone was a "composite" of many people he had met in Newark.

Price did not respond to requests for comment Friday.

"It was a fake controversy back in 2004, '05, '06, or '07 about an event that happened in 1995. So it was a fake controversy then and it's a fake controversy now," Booker said in response to a question Friday morning at a Labor Day ceremony in Collingswood.

"This is what we do know: I lived for about a decade in one of the most drug-infested parts of Newark, N.J. - I lived in public housing projects," he said.

"Not only were there lots of people involved in the drug trade, but I got very actively involved working with people in the drug trade, meeting people in the drug trade, in fact hiring some people in the drug trade as well as making sure we as a city were doing innovative things to help people involved in the drug trade.

"Any fair view of my last history of 15, 20 years living in some of the toughest areas with the severe narcotics trade would understand what my record is."

He declined to take follow-up questions.

Booker has conceded talking about T-Bone a "million" times, according to the Star-Ledger, though he has not mentioned him recently. Some in Newark have criticized Booker for telling the story, saying it reinforces a stereotype of the city.

"I still remember my first month on the street," Booker told Stanford's alumni magazine in 2000. "I walked up to this charismatic black guy my age called T-Bone, who was one of the drug lords. I just said, 'Yo, man, wha's up?' And he leaped in front of me, looked me right in the eye, and said, 'Who the blank do you think you are? If you ever so much as look at me again, I'm going to put a cap in your ass.' "

In February 2007, Booker told the story in a speech at the New School in Manhattan. T-Bone, he said, sobbed on his shoulder when he said there were warrants out for his arrest, according to the Star-Ledger.