'Cory realized that he had erred,' Price added to the Star-Ledger. Rather, he was a 'composite' of various people Booker knew in Newark. In August of that year, National Review spoke to Clement Price, a history professor and friend of Booker who claimed the then-Senate candidate admitted to him in 2008 that T-Bone was not real. That's because no one had ever heard of a drug dealer in Newark who went by that name. The validity of Booker's T-Bone story was questioned in 2013, when he ran for Senate. 'That rift between me and T-Bone was inches, we sat there, but I felt so alienated that there was a gulf as wide as the Grand Canyon between us, and I could not reach out to save this young man, and we drove back to Brick Towers, and I've never seen him again since that day,' Booker said, according to National Review.

Booker told The New School in 2007 that his friendship with T-Bone eventually ended after the drug dealer said there were warrants out for his arrest. In fact, Booker has admitted to talking about T-Bone a 'million' times, the Star-Ledger reported in 2013. 'I later got to know this guy and his name was T-Bone and I'm a vegetarian so that was a particularly vicious threat.' 'I said hello to this guy and I'll never forget he leaped off the steps where he was standing and looked at me and threatened my life,' Booker said during a speech at The New School in New York in 2007, not long after he was elected mayor of Newark, according to the New Jersey Star-Ledger. T-Bone then became a regular in Booker's anecdotes. 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.''

'I walked up to this charismatic black guy my age called T-Bone, who was one of the drug lords. (Booker is a Stanford graduate.) 'I still remember my first month on the street,' Booker said, referring to the time in 1995 when he moved to a dangerous neighborhood in Newark.

Various critics have questioned whether T-Bone is actually a real person, and Booker has never really provided a definitive response.īooker was talking about T-Bone at least as far back as 2000, when he gave an interview to Stanford Magazine. Take, for instance, his many references to 'T-Bone,' a drug dealer who Booker claimed to have been friends with. Plus, he's already called for weed legalization nationwide.īut Booker's chances will no doubt be hurt by his penchant for grandstanding and embellishing the truth for rhetorical purposes. As Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted this morning, Booker's strengths include his strong support for criminal justice reform. Cory Booker's (D–N.J.) announcement today that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic nomination for president prompted various political analysts to publish pieces pondering what his chances are.

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