Dwaine Caraway loves giving reporters tours of District 4, the southern Dallas sprawl in which he was born and raised and never left.

Over the years, I've read — even assigned and edited — countless travelogues penned by journalists amazed at how the former City Council member knows the location of every sketchy halfway house, slumlord-owned shopping center and drug-dealing corner store from Cedar Crest to Loop 12 to Interstate 45. He's south Oak Cliff's Vasco da Gama of vice.

I finally got my own tour Monday, along with my City Hall bunkmate Tristan Hallman. Went in thinking this was going to be a straight-up interview, though I've known Caraway long enough to know better.

I had a few questions about how a vote for Caraway in the May 6 City Council election is supposed to be a step forward when it feels like a leap backward, since he was term-limited out two years ago. I also wanted to know whether this was just a fallback gig for Caraway after he'd been so profoundly trounced in the county commissioner's race last year by a man whose fate is currently in the hands of a federal jury.

But instead, we drove. The tour works like this: Caraway pulls you into whatever he's driving that day — could be his BMW or, in our case Monday, a pickup with a warning light that keeps ding-ding-dinging throughout the drive — and whips out his collection of cellphones, each of which doesn't seem to stop ringing.

Then, he lets loose with the gems. Here, straight from the notebook, is one selected at random from our drive, when we pulled up to a barren corner that he said is usually swarming with prostitutes.

Caraway on the campaign trail Monday, showing reporters the Wal-Mart built during his first go-round at the City Hall horseshoe.

"It's too early for the prostitutes, but they'll be out," Caraway said, sounding disappointed that he didn't get to show his guests all the sights and sounds of District 4. "Probably had a good Easter weekend."

If Caraway had been on the sports radio station The Ticket, where he has been a frequent guest ever since he explained in February 2011 that he gave convicted dog torturer Michael Vick a key to the city "for the children," it might have been turned into a drop, a sound bite played over and over. That's why people who don't follow local politics know and love the guy: He's such a character, he's damned near caricature at this late date.

He'll insist otherwise, of course, pointing to the developments that sprung up in his district during his first go-round. "It's not about a sideshow," he said.

But come on, this is a guy who brought props to City Hall — fake trees and a barbed wire fence — when he tried to persuade his colleague to turn his plastic-bag fee into an outright ban. Who tried to get cops to lay off his dad's favorite South Dallas poker house.

Who went to court to bury police records related to a domestic dust-up involving his wife, some aprons and a kitchen knife, then blamed the whole sordid incident on a Cowboys game and two guys allegedly named Arthur and Archie ... who, naturally, turned out to be real. Who seriously suggested turning Main Street into a canal. Who rumbled with John Wiley Price at a gospel radio station over long-simmering allegations that Price slept with his first wife.

On Monday, I asked Caraway about the $439.40 "bereavement" expenditure on his latest campaign finance report. He said it was for flowers for his campaign treasurer, who died in February.

Caraway's what you get when you remake The Wire as an episode of Parks and Recreation.

The May 6 election is filled with more than our usual share of intriguing races. East Dallas and downtown's Philip Kingston, who's as blunt as a kick in the shorts, is squaring off not just against Matt Wood, but the attack PAC from which Wood keeps having to distance himself.

Over in West Dallas, it's Monica Alonzo versus everyone — including Kingston, who thinks she has done nothing to stop gentrification and cement plants from chasing out residents. And in the north, real estate blogger Candy Evans is hoping to oust Lee Kleinman, her down-the-street neighbor.

But only one person running in next month's Dallas City Council elections used to be mayor. And sure, it wasn't a long run — four months, give or take. Still, Caraway's photo is up on the mayors' wall at City Hall; and somehow, his mayoral biography survives on the city's unnavigable website. Says he provided "a stable and seamless transition" between Tom Leppert, who descended into a pipe dream to run for Senate, and Mike Rawlings, the pizza man who became public servant.

Not sure how stable it was. God knows it was fun.

Caraway points out the anti-Caraway sign posted in his district, near Big T Plaza.

But District 4 doesn't need fun. Like every southern Dallas district, and a couple in the north, it's a giant code violation overstuffed with businesses where bad people do bad things in broad daylight.

Caraway drove us past a gas station where drug dealers were peddling their wares at 11 in the morning. He grumbled about trash strewn along every major corridor and the rotting church across from Elisha M. Pease Elementary. He said he couldn't understand how one stretch of Cedar Crest filled with barren, decaying storefronts hadn't become like Bishop Arts.

The longer we drove, the angrier he became with the sad state of things. Caraway, now 64, fancies himself the Sheriff of District 4, its rule-maker and law-keeper. But things here didn't just fall apart after he left office less than two years ago.

Caraway brought fake plastic trees and plastic bags to Dallas City Hall in June 2015 in an attempt to persuade his colleagues to turn his bag fee into an outright ban. It didn't work. (File Photo/Staff)

I wondered aloud if maybe it was time for new blood — not him, not his successor Carolyn King Arnold, but someone else. He waved me off, insisting that, yeah, this time he would groom "young and qualified individuals to learn and take my place."

But, he said, John Wiley Price, state Rep. Helen Giddings, U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson and state Sen. Royce West keep getting elected "over and over and over," so why not him? Why not a council member born in this very neighborhood?

And, because Caraway's life is a sitcom, at that very moment, a guy in a black pickup pulled up next to us at a stoplight. Caraway said hi to him, because he waves and honks at everyone. The guy looked at the campaign signs sticking out of the flatbed and asked him, "You running again?" Of course, Caraway answered.

"Ain't no more fights at the radio station?" the man asked, grinning. Then he drove off. Could have sworn I heard the laugh track in the distance.