Working Overtime: Drug Conspirator Eric Clash Says Cooperating Rehabilitated Him

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Apr. 1, 2009

His well-fitted gray suit and good-natured confidence lend 30-year-old Eric Clash the look of an earnest young professional as he stands behind the defense table on March 9 in U.S. District Court Judge William Quarles’ courtroom in Baltimore. With bright eyes shining under his clean-shaven dome and a light, trimmed beard on his chin, Clash doesn’t look like what he is: a second-generation drug dealer who, after agreeing to plead guilty to charges in a massive drug conspiracy, has spent the past three years helping the government make criminal cases. He appeared before Quarles on March 9 to ask for leniency, saying he left the thug life for good when he became a cooperator.

When Clash was first charged in 2005 as a member of the violent, politically connected Rice Organization drug conspiracy, which operated in Baltimore from the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s (“Wired,” Mobtown Beat, March 2, 2005), prosecutors seized about $150,000 from his bank account and said he “occupied a high level” in the group’s hierarchy. Today, with Quarles set to sentence him, Clash is projecting the image of a changed man in grave danger, due to his cooperation with authorities.

Of the 13 Rice Organization co-defendants, Clash is one of three who remains to be sentenced. The other two are Steven Campbell and Anthony Leonard, who also have been revealed in open court to have cooperated with the government. The remaining 10 Rice Organization co-defendants–brothers Howard Rice and Raeshio Rice, Chet Pajardo, Eric Hall, Robert Lee Baker, Michael Felder, Keenan Dorsey, George Butler, Oreese Stevenson, and James Jones Jr.–are serving prison sentences, with release dates ranging from two or three years from now until 2030.

In addition to bringing a steady stream of cocaine to Baltimore, the Rice Organization was responsible for violence, including murder. Among the businesses associated with the crew was Downtown Southern Blues, a restaurant on Howard Street’s Antique Row whose landlord was Kenneth Antonio Jackson, an ex-con and strip-club owner with a long history in the drug game and local politics (“The High Life,” Mobtown Beat, Jan. 3, 1995). Several Rice Organization members gave campaign funds to local politicians, some of whom held fundraisers at Downtown Southern Blues.

One of the Rice Organization members, Pajardo, co-owned an East Baltimore corner-store property with Hollywood actress Jada Pinkett-Smith, the wife of actor Will Smith (“Star-Crossed,” Mobtown Beat, Feb. 9, 2005). Another, Butler, was featured in 2005’s infamous Stop Fucking Snitching DVD, produced in Baltimore to warn off potential cooperators. Clash, who bought and sold Baltimore real estate including a westside bar called the Red Door during his drug-dealing years, is the son of Edward Clash, who himself was convicted of drug dealing in 1994.

Four Rice Organization rivals–Willie Mitchell, Shelly Martin, Shelton Harris, and Shawn Gardner–were convicted of numerous federal organized-crime charges last fall. Among them were murder charges arising from the 2002 stabbing of three Rice Organization members, including Clash and Raeshio Rice, outside the now-defunct Hammerjack’s nightclub in downtown Baltimore, after a birthday party for Baltimore-born rap mogul Kevin Liles. In February and March, three rivals received life prison sentences while Martin received a 400-month sentence.

Both Clash’s lawyer, Robert Simels, and his prosecutor, assistant U.S. attorney Jason Weinstein, tell Quarles that Clash is over and done with his former life in the game, and that he holds promise in lawful pursuits in the future.

Weinstein says Clash is an “extremely bright man” with “impressive potential.” He says Clash’s sentence reduction will be “richly deserved,” since “‘exemplary’ is the word I’d use to describe Mr. Clash’s cooperation.” He reminds the judge that Clash had “less of a role in the conspiracy” than two other indicted Rice Organization members, Steven Campbell and Anthony Leonard, who also cooperated as part of their pending pleas.

Simels’ job is easy, given the prosecutor’s lavish praise for his client: “It is rare in my experience that I have heard an assistant [U.S. attorney] speak as glowingly as Mr. Weinstein has of Mr. Clash,” he says. And Simels, a New York attorney with a decades-long history of representing major drug figures in Maryland (“Team Player,” Mobtown Beat, Sept. 24, 2008), who himself is currently under indictment in New York for witness tampering in a Guyanese cocaine case (“Big Target,” Mobtown Beat, Feb. 12), has plenty of experience.

Simels tells the court that Clash’s cooperation has been “remarkable in terms of his assistance to this community, and the United States as a whole,” as “set forth fully” in a sealed letter to the judge. He says Clash is married now, has professional expertise in real estate and construction, is taking classes, and has “adopted his faith as his guiding light.

“He’s not going to be in trouble again in the future,” Simels says. “At some point we have to demonstrate the sacrifice that he’s made” and “make sure the reward is an appropriate sentence.” The attorney recalls that at one point putting Clash in the witness-protection program was discussed. He says that Clash’s cooperation puts him in danger, and “to incarcerate him at this stage puts a burden not only on the [U.S.] Bureau of Prisons, but also on Mr. Clash, who will be looking behind his back at all times.”

Simels suggests that Quarles impose a “non-incarceration form of sentence.”

“I am pleading for leniency to save my life,” Clash tells Quarles on his own behalf. “I have put my family in jeopardy, myself in jeopardy. . . . I am here to better myself.” Clash says he now plans to help steer people away from crime. “When I was living that lifestyle, I knew it was wrong,” he says. “Nobody forced me into the decisions I made.” He says he wants to write a book to help others, especially children, get the direction he lacked when he was younger.

Clash tells the judge that while he was cooperating with the government, he spent three months working as a mortgage broker in New York, and that he went to Detroit, where he learned about educational broadcasting while working on a documentary for a major cable channel.

Quarles tells Clash that his cooperation “goes some distance to correcting some of the damage you and your cohorts inflicted on this community [by] bringing in more than 3,000 pounds of cocaine.” Instead of the 10-year sentence the federal guidelines call for, Quarles gives Clash 48 months, with credit for 16 months already served.

After the sentencing, U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein explains that Clash received an extraordinary break. As a matter of policy, Rosenstein says, his office recommends a two-level departure for cooperators who help prosecutors in the case they are charged in, and two more levels if they help in other cases. In Clash’s case, he says, Weinstein recommended that Clash get the standard four-level departure for cooperators that helped in cases other than their own, but Quarles tacked on two more, for a total of six years shaved off the sentence.

“You really have to do a lot to get recommendations for departures of more than four levels,” Rosenstein says, but in cases of cooperators who go the extra mile, “we increasingly make exceptions to it. Ultimately, the judge decides.”

In this case, Quarles decided that Clash’s work helping prosecutors was valuable enough to schedule him for release from prison in late 2011, and, in order to enhance his safety, to have him assigned to prisons that maximize protection from the expected threats of other inmates.

It may not be all the leniency Clash was hoping for, but it’s a pretty good deal compared to the long, hard time his old Rice Organization running buddies are serving.

Small Change: The More Tom Waits Creates “Tom Waits,” the Less Fans–or Biographers–Know About Him

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, July 1, 2009

A year before Barney Hoskyns’ Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits (Broadway) hit bookstores in May, “Tom Waits True Confessions” was published online by Waits’ record label, Anti (anti.com). Posted by “Gina” and linked on Waits’ official web site (tomwaits.com), the over 3,100-word Q&A is heavy with lists of Waits’ preferences–what he finds scary, for instance, or which sounds he likes–garnished with aphorisms and one-off stories with morals, in turns humorous and poignant. It’s what one would expect from the mind of Tom Waits: cryptic amusements, absurdist entertainments, and sentimental journeys, courtesy of a wizened, irascibly likeable showman with an ever-evolving shtick borne both of hard time in a bottle and years of sober fatherhood.

While “True Confessions” fed the Tom Waits mystique, it hardly confessed a thing about Thomas Alan Waits, the person. Fans liked it, though. “He seems to see through the crap by talking a lot of crap,” one enthusiastic commenter wrote at the end of the blog, while another urged, “He should interview himself more often.” After all, who really needs to know the man behind the mask, as long as he’s entertaining?

Outside of his showman’s persona, Waits is intensely private, banking perhaps on the presumption that his fans possess a happy lack of curiosity about what fuels his greatness. Hoskyns confirmed this trait the hard way while working on Lowside. The 50-year-old British writer chose as his subject a 60-year-old with 40 years of contributions to the cultural landscape, but Waits wasn’t having it. He and his wife, long-time creative collaborator Kathleen Brennan, wouldn’t be interviewed, and they told a wide circle of trusted friends and associates not to help Hoskyns, either.

The shunning came from a man who gives good interviews–including some to Hoskyns in years past. But, as Lowside describes it, while conversing publicly Waits has “managed to shield himself behind a smokescreen of humor and verbal dexterity.” The blackballing of Hoskyns probably wasn’t personal, though, given the author’s impressive record of work as a sympathetic, thoughtful scribe with his own fan base, the result of having covered music intensely for years as a working journalist, while also writing books about, among other things, soul music, the Band, and the singer-songwriters of the ’70s era Los Angeles canyons. Lowside suggests, rather, that the shut-down was a matter of principles: Waits doesn’t want to share because his approach to show business is all about imaginariness, and a biography’s truthiness would spoil the party.

In Lowside, Hoskyns justifies his unauthorized foray into Waits’ true stories by saying of great artists that “we all want to get closer to their greatness” and, of Waits in particular, that “the tension in his music is in the space between the mask and the emotion, the frame and the picture. We enjoy the artifice but are moved by the pain and compassion that seep through the tropes of the ‘Tom Waits’ shtick.'” He wants to get answers to the question: What about Waits’ life explains the enormous empathy he evokes in his art?

Though handicapped by Waits’ decision to undermine his efforts, with LowsideHoskyns manages to part Waits’ thickly woven veil. It’s not a full unmasking, by any means–especially with respect to Waits’ family life–and it keeps the legendary stories about Waits’ long-ago partying to a minimum, but it shows much about what makes Waits Waits without ruining his mystique. Lowside examines coded autobiographical clues contained in Waits’ songs and interviews, but it turns out Waits’ path through day-to-day life hardly explains his timeless abilities as a gruff, smoky conjurer of modern Americana. Still, Hoskyns’ painstaking efforts to recreate the whats, wheres, whos, hows, and whens of Waits pay off, providing sensible explanations for Waits’ extraordinary run of high-level creative output, and giving insights into a complicated man who inspired deep respect in those who worked with him.

As the decades passed, Waits’ records and tours kept coming, along with the plays and the movie scores and the bit roles on the silver screen–even an opera. Judging by them, one might guess that Waits’ grew up the son of carnival workers, hopping trains before he could shave, and spent years drifting in and out of low-rent bar districts over several continents, relying here and there on the kindness of strangers, until he was discovered, a young man bent and broken, playing in an old-time medicine show. But his life has been nothing so impossibly authentic. A studious, compassionate observer of street life, he’s hardly set foot in it, really, except as a visitor. In essence, Waits came out of the San Diego suburbs in the 1960s and invented an act he took to Los Angeles, and he’s been shaping it ever since, even as he professes to run from its earlier incarnations.

As a hard-working young entertainer, Waits fell into highly functional alcoholism, but in his 30s he cleaned up his act and started a family. Along the way, he had some wild times and some dramatic romances, and he worked with many musicians and actors and directors, who remember him glowingly as a complete mensch, both in the studio and out. He’s got a thing about journalists–they’re like cops, and he’s feels better when they’re not around. During successive bouts of reinvention, he dropped long-time collaborators, sometimes without explanation, and they are Hoskyns’ main sources in Lowside. Their memories of working with Waits–which Lowside recounts, song by song and session by session–are among the best in their esteemed careers.

The cost of Waits oppositional strategy is that Lowside readers are saddened that their hero coldly stood in the way of Hoskyns’ well-intentioned and thoughtful project, depriving followers a full glimpse. Without Waits to explain matters, Hoskyns is left at times to chart Waits’ inconsistencies and paradoxes, some of which leave him looking mildly hypocritical; if Waits had engaged Hoskyns, he instead could have explained how and why he evolved over time. While the cloak of riddles Waits wraps himself in is entertaining, by the end of Lowside, readers are left, like Hoskyns, standing by the stage door in the rain after a show, hoping the hard-bitten idiot savant will grace them with some off-stage interaction, to give them a kernel of understanding as to where his stuff comes from.

One hopes that Waits is happy for having been left alone by Hoskyns. After all, fans–and, like Hoskyns himself, most Lowside readers will be fans–are no fun when they’re prying. If Lowside leaves Waits followers continuing to wonder what fuels his art, if not the true grit of living desperately on the lowside, then Waits’ mystique survived Lowside intact. Turns out, “Tom Waits” springs largely from a very active imagination, just as Thomas Alan Waits thinks show business should.

Meet the Neighbors: 2000: My First Mistake–Calling the Cops About the Shady Characters Next Door

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Dec. 23, 2009

At first, in early spring, the business that took over the vacant garage on the alley behind my house seemed like it’d make a good neighbor. Evidently, it required only a blow torch and an air wrench powered via an illegal hook-up off the utility pole. The place hummed: zzzztch-zzzztch, vvvvt-vvvvt, all day long and sometimes into the night. I could see into the garage from my third-floor window, and learned that it worked on cars. With its door yawning open most of the time, it seemed not to have anything to hide.

But soon a fever prompted a series of events that started to change my attitude about the garage. Two o’clock in the morning rolled around and, sleepless blob of warm pus that I was, the ongoing racket boiled me over. One guy was working–zzzztch, vvvvt–and three or four others were playing music and generally having a cussin’ good time. I marched over, ducked under the arm of a guy who tried to block me, and became the textbook definition of the crazy white guy.

They quickly talked me down. The main guy–a giant of a man–was smiling, all mellow, and holding a fat wad of high-denomination cash in his hand, doubled over a finger. “I’m in charge, and I’m telling you right now, if you got a problem, you come to me, and I’ll take care of it.” He introduced himself as Blood, and his sidekick as Red. I went home, thinking, well, that went well.

The cash struck me, though, since I never saw any paying patrons. I put my long-lens camera on a tripod and watched. They were working on nondescript, second-hand cars, installing hidden compartments with electronically activated hydraulic lifts. I started to snap pictures and write down license-plate numbers of cars that frequented the place. I didn’t know what I would do with the information, but I was the homeowner here, and the criminal-renters would have to go.

I drove home in the wee hours one night to find there was no place to park, so I took an illegal space. Blood and Red’s completed inventory had taken over the neighborhood’s once-plentiful parking. I got up to re-park before dawn, and found the inventory–maybe 30 cars in all–was gone. They were doing a brisk business.

One late night in May, the crew was hanging out in front of the garage, smoking blunts and drinking and having a rowdy good time playing craps. The garage door was open, the cars lined up behind them. I called 9-1-1 and gave the operator the address, explaining that they were smoking blunts and gambling in plain view, but the true crime was inside, where they were refitting cars with hidden compartments for delivery of drugs, cash, and probably guns. A passing cop would end up with a major case instead of minor charges. I hung up and went out to my stoop to watch the show.

About a half-hour after the call, a patrol car pulled up to the intersection of the alley, slowed down, turned around, and drove off. That was it.

The next morning, an unmarked police car arrived, and two uniformed cops with portable radios got out and fist-bumped Blood. The three chatted a bit, then the cops got back in their car and drove off.

I realized I couldn’t call the cops on the garage anymore. Though no longer naive, I was very, very scared.

Soon, I contacted the FBI. I met with two agents. I gave them photographs and described what I’d been observing. They tried to persuade me to become a cooperator, to infiltrate the garage, to exploit the friendly terms I’d established with Blood and Red. I went ballistic and profanely refused. They told me that, absent that, it’d be two or three years before they could dismantle the operation.

Meanwhile, Blood and Red menacingly invited me to their Memorial Day cook-out, saying I would be the “guest of honor.” My spacious back yard–once a happy place, with a colorful picnic table and a fire-pit over which many sumptuous meals had been prepared, and where my cats often lounged–became mysteriously and repeatedly bombarded with cinder blocks. For an entire weekend, Blood and Red tried psychological warfare on me, playing one song–“Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown, why is everybody always picking on me”–over and over and over again. Good grief.

I called a retired cop I know, who referred me to a veteran at the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force. The HIDTA guy was enthusiastic, and so was I when he said, “Based on what you’re telling me, we can go in there tomorrow.” Then he asked if I’d shared the information with anyone else. When I told him about the FBI, he said, “You told the frat boys? Well, that’ll probably shut us down.” And it did.

So I called a prosecutor I know, who referred me to a Drug Enforcement Administration guy, who told me they’d maybe get to it on a rainy day someday.

At that point, I wasn’t eating properly, I was hardly sleeping, and I was chain-smoking. I had set up a comfortable chair by the tripod on the third floor, along with an oversized ashtray, a glass, and a bottle of Pikesville rye. I was obsessed with the garage, and it wasn’t healthy.

In July, I told a friend in New York about my nightmare, and he suggested I take over his apartment in August while he and his family vacationed. I did, but on the way out of town, I called the neighborhood association president. “At the next meeting,” I begged, “pass a motion that a letter be sent to zoning enforcement about what’s going on at that garage. I don’t think it’s zoned for what’s going on there.”

When I got back in September, zoning had rousted Blood and Red. The garage was empty again, and the alley had returned to safe, familiar normalcy as a comfortable haven for hand-to-hand drug-dealing and strung-out junkies. I breathed a long sigh of relief.