5,000 job-seekers attended the
event.
This — these lines of eager job-
seekers, the newly polished résu-
més — was the reception they
were hoping for when Amazon
chose Arlington’s Crystal City for
the headquarters campus this
past winter. Similar events were
being held in Boston, Chicago,
Dallas, Nashville and Seattle,
where Amazon is based. (Compa-
ny founder and chief executive
Jeff Bezos owns The Washington
Post.)
“I’m looking for a job in user
experience or user interface or
front-end development,” said
Amalia Cowan, 27, of Rockville, a
year o ut of college and “looking to
get my f oot in the door.”
“Everyone else has tech and
human resources, and I pretty
much fit the bill on the legal side,”
said retired attorney Benny Estor-
SEE AMAZON ON B2versity. “I feel like they’re very
diverse in their hiring,” he said.
“A nd Amazon is one of the leading
companies o ut there.”
The retail giant’s first Career
Day drew a racially, ethnically and
age-diverse crowd to the Northern
Virginia neighborhood where the
company plans a second head-
quarters that should employ 400
people by year’s end and 25,000
within a decade.
Event organizers opened the
doors early and extended hours
until 8 p.m. once they gauged the
numbers. In all, Amazon saidBY PATRICIA SULLIVAN
They arrived by foot, car, Uber
and scooter. Some wore their best
interview suits, others wrinkled
T-shirts.
Many already had jobs — no
surprise in an era of historically
low unemployment and a boom-
ing national economy. But now
Amazon, the world’s l argest Inter-
net company, was beckoning. And
these folks wanted i n.
“I really want someone to give
me a chance. Everyone wants to
work here,” said Leo Versel, 26, of
Rockville, Md., one of hundreds,
maybe thousands, of people in a
line that snaked down 12th Street
South and around the corner onto
Army Navy Drive in Arlington on
Tuesday m orning.
Also h opeful was John Mackell,
26, of Bladensburg, Md., who
works in security and graduated
two years ago from To wson Uni-KLMNO
METRO
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 , 2019. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/REGIONAL EZ M2 B
JOHN KELLY’S WASHINGTONA touch of twang: The
District has always been
an incongruous hotbed for
country music. B3
MARYLANDMontgomery introduces a
sweeping racial-equity bill
that would affect all county
agencies. B5
OBITUARIESSander Vanocur, 91, a
veteran TV journalist, was
a panelist in Kennedy-
64 ° 74 ° 76 ° 70 ° Nixon debate. B6
8 a.m. Noon 4 p.m. 8 p.m.High today at
approx. 3 p.m.78
°
Precip: 5%
Wind: NE
7-14 mphBY PETER HERMANN
A man fatally shot his older
brother inside an apartment in
Southeast Washington on Mon-
day night and then opened fire
on D.C. police, authorities and a
family member said. One officer
was struck in the chest but saved
by his protective vest, according
to authorities.
Police officers fired back at the
gunman, killing him outside the
apartment complex on Savannah
Te rrace SE, near Suitland Park-
way and Alabama Avenue, police
said. The injured officer was
treated for a bruise at a hospital
and sent home, according to a
department spokesman and his
union representative.
Renee Carter identified her
55-year-old brother, Alphonzo
Carter, as the man fatally shot
inside the bathroom of their
mother’s apartment. She identi-
fied her other brother, Eric Cart-
er, 53, as the man shot and killed
by police.
A D.C. police spokesman con-
firmed the identities and said
investigators at t his p oint b elieve
SEE SHOOTING ON B3Police:
Gunman
had shot
brother
BULLETPROOF VEST
SAVED D.C. OFFICEREncounter at SE complex
left victim, shooter deadBY STEVE THOMPSON
Several D.C. Council members
are asking whether the $215 mil-
lion lottery and sports gambling
contract the council approved
this summer fulfills local busi-
ness subcontracting require-
ments. This week, they got an
answer from a high-level District
staffer: Everything’s fine.
“Yes, the contract is compliant”
with D.C. law requiring compa-
nies with large public contracts to
subcontract some of the work to
local businesses, Kristi Whitfield,
director of the department re-
sponsible for monitoring compli-
ance with the law, w rote in a letter
Monday to D.C. Council member
Elissa Silverman (I-At Large).
But an investigation by The
Washington Post last month
found that the contractor, the
Greek company Intralot, is sub-
contracting work to its own sub-
sidiary, rather than to the small
business it lists on District forms
to show compliance with the law.
The Post investigation found
that the business Intralot has
listed as its main subcontractor,
Veterans Services Corp., had no
employees and that its website
SEE CONTRACT ON B2D.C. o∞cial:
Gambling
contract is
‘compliant’
Agreement doesn’t flout
local subcontracting
provision, council is toldBY RACHEL WEINER
A Virginia judge on Tuesday
ruled that longtime prosecutor
Nicole Wittmann can run for
commonwealth’s attorney in
Loudoun County, dismissing a
challenge by voters who argued
she didn’t meet the residency
requirement.
The ruling by Judge Richard
Potter clears the way for Witt-
mann, a Republican, to appearon the ballot this fall. She will
face Democrat Buta Biberaj, a
defense attorney and substitute
judge who is one of several
candidates hoping to reform the
criminal justice system in North-
ern Virginia. A group of Demo-
cratic voters had challenged
Wittmann’s residency, noting
that her family lived in Fairfax
County through August.
“I’m very pleased; I’m not
surprised,” Wittmann, now chief
deputy in the prosecutor’s office,
said after the trial in Loudoun
circuit court. “I did everything
right. I think it’s a testament to
my devotion to Loudoun County
— I uprooted my family.”
SEE LOUDOUN ON B3From job-seekers, Amazon
gets the welcome it wanted
Thousands crowd career fair in Arlington’s Crystal City
ahead of the arrival of the retail giant’s second headquartersJudge a∞rms Loudoun
candidate’s residency
BY MICHAEL S. ROSENWALD
David M. Rubenstein, one of
Washington’s richest men, has
lately been in the business of
protecting and restoring many of
the country’s historical treasures.
He’s pumped millions of his
billions into the Lincoln Memori-
al, the U.S. Marine Corps War
Memorial and Arlington House,
which was the home of Robert E.
Lee.
Rubenstein even bought — for
$21.3 million — a copy of theMagna Carta, which is on loan to
the National Archives.
But compared to the plaudits
he’s received for those efforts,
Rubenstein says nothing comes
close to the thanks he’s received
for the more than $10 million he
has spent helping restore the
Washington Monument.
“It’s really an iconic building
and probably the most recogniz-
able building in the United
States,” Rubenstein said Tuesday
morning on the monument’s ob-
servation deck. “It’s a statement
of American strength.”
The 555-foot marble and gran-
ite landmark reopens to the pub-
lic Thursday after years of repairs
stemming from a 2011 earth-
quake. First lady Melania Trump
is expected to attend a ribbon-
cutting ceremony and visit theobservation deck.
Rubenstein, who made his for-
tune in private equity at the
Carlyle Group, initially donated
$7.5 million to repair structural
damage to the monument. After
it reopened in 2014, the aging
elevator repeatedly broke down,
often stranding visitors.
Following a second closure in
2016, Rubenstein kicked in an
additional $3 million to modern-
ize the elevator.
Visiting the monument this
week, Rubenstein recalled visit-
ing as a child while g rowing up in
a working-class neighborhood in
Baltimore, where his dad was a
mailman.
“My parents brought me over
here because the price was right,”
Rubenstein said, meaning it was,
SEE MONUMENT ON B8Capital icon is ready to shine again
JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POSTA line of people snakes around
a block in Arlington as a crowd
of thousands gathers for
Amazon Career Day, billed as
the nation’s largest job fair. The
retail giant announced this past
winter that it would build a
second headquarters there.GOP attorney cleared to
run for chief prosecutorWashington Monument
repairs are benefactor’s
pursuit of happinessCourtland
Milloy
He is away. His column will resume
when he returns.