A genius with whom I work raised the question: Is Marco Riz the new Willie Horton?

It goes to the ugly, seedy heart of the matter. It is not to compare the crimes of which Riz is accused to those of Horton, who took advantage of a misguided social experiment to add to his list of victims.

It is to raise the possibility that Riz is being used to arouse the same ignorant, fearful, hateful reaction as Horton, who did so much to derail a presidential campaign 20 years ago.

Some history is in order here. On Oct. 26, 1974, Horton and two accomplices robbed a gas station attendant in Lawrence, Mass., stabbed him 19 times and left him in a trash can to die. Horton was sentenced to life in prison for murder. But on June 6, 1986, he was released on a weekend furlough. He fled to Maryland where 10 months later he twice raped a woman after pistol whipping and knifing her fiancé. After his capture and trial, he was sentenced to two life terms plus 85 years.

But Horton took on a new notoriety thanks to a brilliantly twisted political operative named Lee Atwater. Since Horton’s furlough was granted while Michael Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts and since Dukakis was the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988, Horton was made the terrifying symbol of what would be let loose on America should Dukakis be elected.

“By the time this election is over, Willie Horton will be a household name,” said Atwater, who was George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager in 1988.

Willie Horton is credited with helping to strip the large lead Dukakis had over Bush in the polls. He inspired campaign commercials, one showing a revolving door in and out of prison. But he was more. He was the way to plant the seed of racial fear, the way to imply things that could not be said openly.

Atwater died of a brain tumor when he was just 40, and he repented in his final months. He apologized to Dukakis in an extremely candid Life magazine piece. He referred to two campaign boasts that he would “strip the bark” off Dukakis and “make Willie Horton his running mate.”

“I am sorry for both statements — the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not.”

It is impossible to tell if lessons were learned from Atwater’s contrition, but if you jump ahead 20 years and land in Rhode Island, you’d have serious doubts.

For it is Rhode Island where Marco Riz came as an illegal immigrant from Guatemala and where he now stands accused of kidnapping a woman and raping her in Roger Williams Park. But he has become, as Willie Horton became, much more than just a man accused of a hideous crime. He has become a gift to those who would portray illegal immigration as an assault on the American way of life. He has become the made-to-order means of injecting fear and suspicion into the debate over what should be done about those who are here without proper papers.

Riz is representative of nothing but Third World poverty and the criminal charges against him. But his name keeps coming up in a thinly veiled attempt to make him the poster boy of illegal immigration. There is nothing direct, but the not-so-subtle subtext is tough to miss: This is what you get when you let them in. It happens in some political corridors and in some segments of talk radio, which have become the broadcast equivalent of an acid bath.

Someday, perhaps, we will have a Lee Atwater act of contrition here, an admission of blatantly appealing to the low end of human possibility. But don’t look for it anytime soon.

bkerr@projo.com