Monica Yant Kinney: Greene says he's sorry? Really?

Last weekend, I bet my husband that Philadelphia Housing Authority czar Carl Greene would resign by Friday. Stories of his personal financial failings, I predicted, signaled the beginning of his end.

My timing is off - as of this moment, Greene remains on vacation from his $306,370 job at the state-chartered, federally funded public housing agency - but at least I'm out only $10. PHA employees were relieved of far more, if tales of weekly payroll deductions to fund boss worship are true.

I don't know about you, but I'd love to attend the next PHA bowling bash. And I'm dying to see the oil portrait of Greene he received as a "gift" from adoring staff. What's he wearing? How is he posed? Is Carl-on-canvas high art or a glorified velvet Elvis?

In an interview Friday with my colleague Jennifer Lin, Greene expressed "personal humiliation and embarrassment" over his lapses, which include a $52,000 IRS lien, failure to pay the mortgage on his $615,000 townhouse, and sexual-harassment charges.

Lest anyone doubt his sincerity, he offered "my most humble apologies to the world." Argentina and Albania, take note.

A tale of two Carls

The rap on Greene was, and is, that he's an effective egomaniac. A vicious visionary, a determined developer, a brutal boss.

Even the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development weighed in on the debate, in a 2002 audit dubbing Greene a "demanding supervisor" who drove "a number of executive personnel" to quit.

Politicians and advocates learned to accommodate the two Carls because he controlled zillions in federal money and the fate of the city's most vulnerable residents. Greene usually had poor people's well-being at heart but his own sainthood firmly on his brain.

In 2002, the housing chief reluctantly granted me an interview amid my probing into why McDowell, paid a $93,000 salary, continued to live in a $531-a-month PHA rowhouse.