Judgment Day: Dan McIntosh’s pot-conspiracy co-defendants to be sentenced in the coming days

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Nov. 14, 2012

Image-1-5

Now that a federal trial jury has found former Sonar co-owner Daniel McIntosh and Keegan Leahy guilty of some of the counts against them (Mobtown Beat, Nov. 7) in the massive, 16-defendant indictment alleging a cross-country, decade-long pot-dealing conspiracy (“Risky Business,” Feature, Aug. 15), the rest of the defendants who answered the charges with guilty pleas will soon meet their fates.

Four – Matt Nicka (pictured above), Gretchen Peterson, David D’Amico (pictured below), and Jeffrey Putney – remain fugitives and, thus, will suffer the peculiar penalty of being on the run. But the 10 who pleaded guilty before trial are scheduled to receive their sentences in the coming weeks and months.

What follows describes the facts each admits is true, the counts to which they pleaded guilty, and the dates and times of their scheduled sentencing hearings, if available. All of the hearings will take place before U.S. District Judge Roger Titus in Courtroom 2C of the U.S. District Courthouse in Greenbelt, Md., located at 6500 Cherrywood Lane.

Joseph Spain

Alias: “Goose”

Scheduled sentencing: TBD

Guilty count: Conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 100 kilograms or more of marijuana.

Admitted facts under plea agreement: From about March 2008 until about March 2009, Spain served the conspiracy as a truck driver, bringing seven loads of weed to Maryland from California. He did so at the behest of Sharpeta and “solicited his brother Jeffrey Spain to assist with some of the trips.” The first trip was a 50-pound “test load” of pot, and the remaining six “ranged from 100 to 300 pounds.”

Amount of weed attributed to Spain: at least 400 kilograms, but less than 700 kilograms.

Sean Costello

Alias: “Chong”

Scheduled sentencing: TBD

Guilty counts: Conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 100 kilograms or more of marijuana, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Admitted facts under plea agreement: There were two time frames for Costello’s involvement in the conspiracy: from about January 2003 until August 2006, and from the spring of 2008 to June 2009. During his first stint, Costello was busted while bringing about 30 pounds of pot on a train from Baltimore to Florida for D’Amico. During his second stint, Costello worked with D’Amico and Leahy, a pilot, to set up a business that owned and operated a small jet for transporting pot and money back and forth across the country and also helped the conspiracy launder money.

Amount of weed attributed to Costello: at least 400 kilograms.

Pot proceeds received by Costello: at least $50,000.

Michael Phillips

Scheduled sentencing: Jan. 15, 8:30 A.M.

Guilty count: Conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 100 kilograms or more of marijuana.

Admitted facts under plea agreement: Phillips was “a mid-level dealer and distributor” who, between 2008 and July 2009, obtained pot from co-conspirators and distributed it in Pennsylvania. He arranged for deliveries via Peterson and traveled to Baltimore to pick them up from Andrew Sharpeta and others. On April 20, 2011, when he was arrested, Phillips acknowledged his role in the scheme.

Amount of weed attributed to Phillips: more than 100 kilograms, but less than 400 kilograms.

Andrew Sharpeta

Aliases: “Ken Thomas,” “Bird”

Scheduled sentencing: Nov. 19, 9 A.M.

Guilty counts: Conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 1,000 kilograms or more of marijuana, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Admitted facts under plea agreement: Sharpeta was “directly involved with all aspects of the marijuana conspiracy” from about June 2008 to about June 2009, “including collecting monies, arranging for the transportation and storage of marijuana by airplane and tractor trailer, receiving orders for marijuana, transporting bulk currency to marijuana suppliers, and delivering large quantities of marijuana to mid-level dealers in and around Baltimore.” He also laundered money by participating in transactions “designed to conceal the nature, location, source, ownership and control” of the pot-dealing proceeds, including “transporting bulk currency across state lines, renting a warehouse under an alias for the receipt, division, and distribution of marijuana, and purchasing a van for the storage and transport of large quantities of marijuana.”

Amount of weed attributed to Sharpeta: more than 1,000 kilograms, but less than 3,000 kilograms.

Pot proceeds received by Sharpeta: about $250,000.

Ian Travis Minshall

Scheduled sentencing: Nov. 19, 12 P.M.

Guilty count: Conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 100 kilograms or more of marijuana.

Admitted facts under plea agreement: Minshall was a “mid-level dealer and distributor” for the conspiracy who “maintained” a property – 3835 Falls Road, owned by a company tied to co-conspirator Jeremiah Landsman – “for the purpose of storing and distributing marijuana.” In March 2009, Baltimore County police raided the place and seized 32 pounds of pot, nearly $16,000 in cash, digital scales, and two cell phones, all of which Minshall admits was part of the conspiracy.

Adam Constantinides

Aliases: “Matthew Thomas Anderson,” “Mike,” “Bossman,” “Ted,” and “A.D.D.”

Scheduled sentencing: Nov. 19, 3 P.M.

Guilty counts: Conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 100 kilograms or more of marijuana, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Admitted facts under plea agreement: A “mid-level dealer and distributor” for the conspiracy, Constantinides from 2002 until March 2009 handled “substantial quantities” of pot in Maryland: from 10 to 35 pounds every two weeks “when marijuana was in season,” and “up to 50 pounds on at least one occasion,” paying between $2,600 and $4,000 per pound. In addition, from 2006 until March 2009, Constantinides helped the conspiracy manage its money, using proceeds to rent vehicles and lease space to transport and store marijuana.

Amount of weed attributed to Constantinides: at least 700 kilograms.

Pot proceeds received by Constantinides: at least $50,000.

Anthony Marcantoni

Alias: “Mr. Purple”

Scheduled sentencing: Dec. 10, 3 P.M.

Guilty count: Conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 100 kilograms or more of marijuana.

Admitted facts under plea agreement: From 2008 through January 2011, Marcantoni “regularly obtained large shipments of marijuana” – from 50 to 250 pounds, as often as twice per month – “and also arranged for other individuals to receive large shipments on his behalf.” He received deliveries “at various locations in Baltimore,” including “the parking lot outside of the Whole Foods in the Mount Washington neighborhood.” He paid his pot suppliers “more than ten times,” giving them “more than $100,000” on “multiple occasions.” Marcantoni’s main supplier awarded his “performance selling marijuana” with “a Rolex watch.”

Amount of weed attributed to Marcantoni: more than 700 kilograms, but less than 1,000 kilograms.

Daniel Fountain

Alias: Danny Boy

Scheduled sentencing: Dec. 18, 2 P.M.

Guilty counts: Conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 100 kilograms or more of marijuana, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Admitted facts under plea agreement: Fountain, “a mid-level dealer and distributor” for the conspiracy, rented a Landsman-owned house on Hickory Avenue in Hampden and subleased it to D’Amico. When the house was raided in March 2009, law enforcers found much evidence to advance their probe, including more than 100 pounds of pot, $20,000 in cash, 31 cell phones, and records about the small jet that Costello, D’Amico, and Leahy were purchasing to help transport weed and cash. From 2003 until August 2009, Fountain helped the conspiracy manage its money by handling rental payments for property used to stash pot and proceeds, using “at least one art gallery that he owned to conceal and launder proceeds,” and attempting to purchase the Hickory Avenue property from Landsman.

Like Landsman, Fountain also lied to the federal grand jury investigating the conspiracy. At his August 2009 appearance before the jury, for which he was subpoenaed, Fountain made “several false statements,” including “lying about D’Amico’s identity, how D’Amico came to rent” the Hickory Avenue property, and “his contact with D’Amico” while D’Amico lived there. Fountain “also presented a false and fraudulent lease agreement to the grand jury.”

Finally, Fountain went on the lam “for over a year” after the case was first indicted in December 2010, “living under an alias. While fleeing from the U.S. Marshal’s Service, at times Fountain abandoned property, used eight different cell phones, and obtained a government-issued identification in the name of his false identity.”

Ryan Forman

Scheduled sentencing: Dec. 19, 11:30 A.M.

Guilty counts: Conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 100 kilograms or more of marijuana, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Admitted facts under plea agreement: From 2006 until March 2009, Forman “assisted the conspiracy by locating and introducing large-scale local distributors to receive and distribute marijuana in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.” He also assisted with the rental and purchase of aircraft the conspiracy used to move pot and cash back and forth across the country, and came to Maryland at least twice “to deliver multiple Rolex watches to Nicka,” who “gave them to his co-conspirators as Christmas bonuses.” Forman also helped manage the conspiracy’s pot proceeds, depositing about $430,000 in cash into bank accounts and transferring proceeds to other accounts so it could be used to rent or purchase aircraft. In all, the money-laundering transactions involving Forman amounted to “more than $400,000 but not more than $1,000,000 in proceeds of the marijuana conspiracy.”

Amount of weed attributed to Forman: over 400 kilograms, but less than 700 kilograms.

Jeremiah Landsman

Alias: Jeremy Landsman

Scheduled sentencing: Jan. 7, 2 P.M.

Guilty counts: Conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 100 kilograms or more of marijuana, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Admitted facts under plea agreement: Landsman, a Baltimore developer who operates a host of companies related to his JBL Real Estate, headquartered in Fells Point, “personally distributed at least 100 kilograms of marijuana, brokered other conspirators’ purchases of marijuana, and maintained several properties used for marijuana storage and distribution.”

Between about June 2003 and August 2009, Landsman helped the conspiracy launder money by participating in “several financial transactions involving at least $400,000 but less than $1,000,000 in proceeds of the marijuana conspiracy.” Among the methods he used was to facilitate the “lease, purchase, and/or sale of property to, for, and between members of the conspiracy” in order to conceal “the nature, location, source, ownership, and control of drug proceeds, disguising the source of those funds and promoting the aims of the conspiracy” via properties owned by Landsman under seven limited-liability companies: JBL 2, JBL Aqua, JBL Keswick, JBL Services, 3520-22 Hickory, Weldon Chapel Properties, and McCabe-Falls.

Landsman also lied to the federal grand jury investigating the conspiracy when he was subpoenaed to testify in October 2009, making “several false statements,” including “lying about D’Amico’s identity, his contact with D’Amico” while D’Amico lived at a Hampden property at 3522 Hickory Ave. that was owned by a Landsman-related company, and “his knowledge of and involvement with” Nicka. Landsman “further lied about his knowledge of and involvement in” the marijuana conspiracy, “as well as his knowledge of and involvement [with] several members” of the conspiracy.

Former Sonar and Talking Head co-owner Dan McIntosh got the best pot-conspiracy sentence he could: a decade in prison.

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Mar. 26, 2014

When law enforcers first picked up Daniel Gerard McIntosh in 2011 on charges that he was involved in a massive cross-country, decade-long pot-trafficking and money-laundering conspiracy, he failed to recognize how much trouble he was facing, according to the lead prosecutor in the federal case against him and 15 others, Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Johnston. McIntosh, Johnston said in court on March 20, told his arresting officers: “Listen, I don’t believe for one minute my government’s going to sentence me to life in prison for selling marijuana.”

It turns out McIntosh, a co-owner of the now-defunct downtown Baltimore nightclubs Sonar and Talking Head, as well as McCabe’s in Hampden, was right.

At McIntosh’s sentencing hearing at the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Md., U.S. District Judge Roger Titus ended up giving him the statutorily mandated 10-year minimum sentence, followed by eight years of supervised release. Prosecutors had sought 20 years – a term Titus called “way in excess” of what McIntosh’s conduct deserved.

But until Titus pronounced McIntosh’s sentence just after 2 p.m., after about four hours of proceedings, the threat of being in prison until his 70th birthday approached, or even dying there, theoretically hung over the 38-year-old’s head.

Under the federal sentencing guidelines, tabulated as a result of rulings Titus made during the hearing about McIntosh’s criminal history and the amounts of pot ascribed to him as part of the conspiracy, as well as his role in the enterprise, McIntosh should be getting 30 years to life in prison. As Titus remarked after he’d determined the categories into which McIntosh falls, the guidelines’ calculation “produces a big number,” whereupon McIntosh’s court-appointed attorney, Carmen Hernandez, exclaimed “Outrageous!”

In the end, though, Titus called the 30-to-life recommendation “greatly in excess” of what McIntosh deserved and indicated that even the mandatory 10-year sentence was too harsh, saying a “10-year sentence for what this man has been involved in is a very stiff sentence.”

While McIntosh was convicted of conspiring to traffic in 100 kilograms or more of marijuana, participating in a money-laundering conspiracy, and interstate travel in aid of the conspiracy, the jury at his six-week trial in the fall of 2012 acquitted him of participating at a higher, 1,000-kilogram-or-more level, laundering money through Sonar, and maintaining Sonar and a house in Medfield as drug-involved premises.

In an apparent attempt to take the edge off the sentence, Titus promised to make recommendations to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons that “could reduce time” for McIntosh, saying there is “something salvageable about this defendant” and that “I have hope for you,” predicting he could “emerge from this a better man. It’s up to you.”

McIntosh has been incarcerated since his conviction in late 2012, so his release date should come in 2022 – or earlier, should he qualify for the limited early-release options afforded by the federal prison system.

During the hearing, Hernandez made impassioned factual arguments gleaned from evidence in the case, determining that the amount of pot McIntosh actually had been responsible for was 136 to 318 kilograms rather than the 2,066 kilograms Johnston had estimated to the court. Hernandez also tried mightily to persuade Titus that several of McIntosh’s prior convictions should not be counted in calculating whether he should be dubbed a career criminal, triggering the 10-year mandatory minimum, and that McIntosh was a “worker” in the conspiracy, not a “manager or supervisor,” as Johnston asserted.

Ultimately, Titus held McIntosh responsible for 954 kilograms of weed-the amount he’d determined after a hearing last year that resulted in a $6.3 million preliminary forfeiture order against McIntosh, which became permanent with his sentencing. Titus also agreed with Johnston that McIntosh was a manager or supervisor and dubbed him a career offender.

While Titus did not include in his calculations McIntosh’s 2004 Baltimore County pot-related conviction, ruling it was part of the conspiracy charged in the current case, he counted four others: a 2004 Baltimore City valium-possession conviction and three pot-related convictions in York County, Pa., arising from conduct committed over a one-month period in 1998 that had resulted in a two-year prison sentence.

The top three members charged in the conspiracy have not yet appeared to face the charges. Matt Nicka and Gretchen Peterson were arrested last summer in Canada, and David D’Amico, according to a press release from the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s office, is awaiting extradition from Colombia. A fourth, Jeffrey Putney, presumably remains a fugitive. Johnston told Titus during McIntosh’s hearing that some of those still awaiting their fate in the case will appear before him “in the hopefully not too distant future.”

When McIntosh entered the courtroom at the beginning of the day’s proceedings, his most obvious health problem – degenerative arthritis – was manifest: He limped in, aided by a cane. He also suffers from Lyme disease, Hernandez said during the hearing. When McIntosh made his statement to Titus, given while seated rather than standing, as is customary, due to his infirmity, he opened with a reference to the loquaciousness which earned him the nickname “Talking Dan.”

“First of all,” said McIntosh, still bearing his trademark mustache and soul patch, “I’d like to apologize because it is going to be difficult for me to speak, which is new to me.” He proceeded to sketch out a difficult childhood when he “felt abandoned by my father,” which “made me callous and mean.” This upbringing prompted him to seek solace in intoxicants at an early age, starting with beer and cigarettes at 11 years old, progressing by the time he was 17 to “crack, heroin, everything,” he explained, since he found that, through drugs, “I could alter how bad I felt.” He had “no reason to trust anyone” and “wound up in jail,” an “absolute hell” that he “came out [of] knowing that I had to do something better.” Though “I knew that I couldn’t fix everything,” he “had to take steps,” and he now wishes “that I had made them faster.”

“I got off [hard] drugs but I was still miserable,” McIntosh continued. “Music literally saved my life,” he explained, crediting Bob Dylan and other titans of the modern music pantheon as “my teachers,” helping him to “figure out a new way of thinking” and to “find a way of not being so abrasive.” McIntosh “obviously still was involved in marijuana,” he explained, and those “were not good choices,” but at the time, he thought “I could not inflict pain on people” by being so involved-“I have a different view of it now,” he said.

Eventually, as the years passed, “music and art gave me a place to be helpful.” He found that “I could be somebody, for the first time in my life, that I could be proud of”-though “not without mistakes.” He learned that “my most important job was actually my children,” and “the fact that this is happening is almost unimaginable.”

He tearfully told Titus that “when you love your children as much as I love mine, sir, two days away from them . . . 10 years, 20 years . . . I don’t know how my mind can even comprehend that.” Confirming the words Johnston attributed to him when he was first arrested, McIntosh told Titus that “I had no sense that I would ever get into this kind of trouble” and that “I was so stupid for not understanding the possibility of 20, 30, life.”

McIntosh also broke down in tears as numerous people testified on his behalf, pleading for the judge’s mercy. The principal of the Medfield school attended by McIntosh’s children called him a “decent and generous man” as he described the toll McIntosh’s post-trial incarceration since late 2012 had taken on their school performance. A businessman who coordinates volunteers for local shelters, who spoke of McIntosh “perpetually volunteering,” called him “contrite” and “a good guy.”

Roman Kuebler, McIntosh’s former partner in Talking Head and the frontman of the Oranges Band, credited McIntosh for having “really validated all of the things I’ve been doing in my life with art and music.” McIntosh’s stepfather called him a “difficult teenager” who “turned himself around” to become “an excellent father.” His wife, Danielle McIntosh, implored for leniency, saying “I really need my partner back,” as “I don’t have any help” raising their children.

John Bourgeois, a prominent Baltimore criminal-defense attorney, spoke highly of McIntosh at the hearing, describing him to Titus as “forthright and candid”-and called the guideline sentence of 30 years to life “horrific, out of all proportion in a civilized society.”

The 10-year mandatory minimum, Bourgeois added, “is a massive sentence.”

In an email to City Paper after the hearing, Bourgeois opined that “the government took an especially harsh approach to Dan because he insisted upon standing on his Constitutional rights by putting the government to its proof” and that “the sentence vindicates Dan’s decision to go to trial” because “my understanding is that Judge Titus sentenced Dan to substantially less time than the government offered in plea negotiations.”

Titus explained that part of his job at sentencing is to “avoid disparities” in penalties given the various co-defendants in a case, while assuring that a message of deterrence is delivered-and Hernandez tried to assist by pointing out the fates of others caught up in the investigation that snared McIntosh. One in particular she singled out: Jacob Jeremiah Harryman, a real-estate developer who was one of the first people arrested among many, though he was not charged in the federal case.

Hernandez told the court that Harryman was videotaped by detectives saying he got “a million dollars a month” at the height of his pot-dealing, yet today he is “out on the street.” Harryman “was not a nice man,” Hernandez said, yet “he got to keep most of that money” and “was way over Mr. McIntosh in terms of profit and drug-dealing,” asking “is that the message” of deterrence that should be sent?

Harryman, reached by phone, said he had “no comment” about Hernandez’s characterizations. Court records show he currently has an electrical-contracting company that recently settled a lawsuit over unpaid wages to nine workers-though a tenth one continues to press the matter.

During the hearing, Titus went down the list of McIntosh’s co-defendants who have already been sentenced-all but one of whom accepted responsibility and pleaded guilty rather than go trial. Andrew Sharpeta, Titus said, got 63 months in prison after cooperating and testifying at trial. Sean Costello got 57 months, and Daniel Fountain got 96 months. Ian Travis Minshall, who got 48 months, was “comically stupid,” Titus said, for continuing his pot-dealing career after using it to pay his way through West Virginia University. Michael Phillips got 70 months, and Ryan Foreman got two years. Jeremiah “Jeremy” Landsman, a Baltimore developer who procured properties useful for the conspirators’ drug-dealing operations and helped launder money, got 57 months. Adam Constantinides cooperated and got 70 months. Joseph Spain, who had “very grave health problems,” Titus explained, got a one-day sentence, deemed already served. Titus called Keegan Leahy, who got 36 months after being convicted of some charges at trial with McIntosh, a “foolish man” who piloted airplanes in support of the conspiracy.

Of those convicted, Titus had the most damning words for Anthony Marcantoni, a previously convicted pot dealer who did five years in federal prison and came out to open Ground Control Academy martial-arts studio in Owings Mills-while also immediately resuming work as a pot dealer. Marcantoni “did not please me at all,” Titus said, calling him an “absolutely incorrigible person” who benefited from a “very generous plea agreement” obtained through “skilled negotiations,” resulting in “the highest sentence in this case so far,” 121 months-a month more than McIntosh.

Hernandez sought to minimize McIntosh’s role compared to these others, saying he did not, as others did, use fake identification; go on the lam; have attorneys’ fees paid by Nicka; or perjure himself to the grand jury investigating the matter, as did Landsman and Fountain (who also ran from the charges until being caught and brought back from California). Hernandez argued that “perjury before a grand jury is more damning to our system of justice than marijuana.”

McIntosh realized “so little enrichment” from his involvement in the conspiracy, Hernandez continued, that “it just boggles the mind that he is the person the government paints.” She added that Sharpeta, Minshall, and Landsman were “people who were integrally involved” and that “this conspiracy could not have run without them,” but McIntosh “had stopped” his involvement “more than two years” before the indictment came down in late 2010.

Johnston, though, while asserting “this is a sad day for all of us” and that she has “deep sympathy” for McIntosh’s wife and children, urged a long sentence for McIntosh. “He got a second chance” after his Pennsylvania convictions landed him in prison for two years, she said, but “he ignored that.” McIntosh’s crimes caused harm, Johnston said, because “we don’t know how many kids” ended up smoking the pot he dealt, causing them to miss school and waste opportunities for advancement, “so there is still an impact on the community.” And while the other conspirators “accepted responsibility,” McIntosh “has not done that,” which is “the first step” to rehabilitation. Given “the harm he has done” due to “his own selfish acts,” she urged a 20-year sentence, “well below the guideline range” of 30 years to life.

After the hearing, while chatting with well-wishers and McIntosh’s family and friends in the courthouse parking lot, Hernandez was almost embarrassed to be celebrating the outcome. “It’s a warped system,” she said, “that, for a non-violent marijuana offender, I’m celebrating that he got 10 years.”

Risky Business: Potrepreneurs’ High-Flying Operation Faces a Pricey Reckoning

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Aug. 15, 2012

Image-1-5

The Lancair IV-P airplane is a sleek four-seater, capable of flying 330 miles per hour and more than 1,500 miles on a tank of gas. The one that was seized in June 2009 from Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport, near Denver, had been purchased the previous summer for $450,000. The buyer, a Delaware company called Air Sky Holdings LLC, still owed the seller about $64,000. But the Lancair was not repossessed due to outstanding debt. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration took it.

What led law enforcers to that Lancair was a game-changing series of events for a sprawling, sophisticated outfit of Baltimore-based potrepreneurs whose illicit, high-volume business had been a veritable license to print money. Its seizure didn’t immediately end the flow of eye-popping amounts of premium weed they’d been moving, but it was a red flag, putting key players on notice that the gig was nosediving into a forest of cops, lawyers, and judges.

And nosedive it did, ultimately resulting in at least three federal cases and possibly dozens of state-level ones, all in Maryland. The central federal case accuses 16 people, indicted in Dec. 2010, of participating in a Baltimore-based conspiracy that used not only airplanes, but trains, trucks, warehouses and other real estate, and legitimate businesses—including Baltimore’s now-shuttered Sonar nightclub (“Future of Sonar in Doubt” May 4)—to perpetuate its sophisticated efforts to satisfy the seemingly bottomless market for weed (“Smoked Out,” Mobtown Beat, Feb. 29).

The $30-million, decade-long operation, evidence in the case shows, got its pot from Canada and California, then distributed it not only in the Free State but also in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Kansas, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, and Georgia (“The Smoke Thickens,” Mobtown Beat, March 21). Four of the defendants are fugitives, and all but four of the remaining 12 have pleaded guilty. The final four, if they don’t plead guilty soon, are scheduled for a month-long trial starting in September.

When law enforcers discovered the plane’s connection to the alleged pot conspiracy, one of the first pieces of the house of cards to fall was an actual house in Woodberry Woods, also called Green Acres, near Television Hill, which the conspirators quickly abandoned.

That house, at 4210 Clarkdale Rd., sits amid thick forest cover at the end of a dead-end street. It had been purchased in Aug. 2007 for $367,000 by Clarkdale Properties LLC, a company formed the same day the deed transferred. The LLC was formed by Anthony Thacker, an alias for Matthew Nicka (pictured), according to a federal forfeiture lawsuit that put the property in government hands.

Nicka allegedly used the house for nearly two years to receive, repackage, and distribute large volumes of weed, and to count lots and lots of money, according to the forfeiture case. “The money was counted approximately three to four times a week,” according to court documents, “and bundled into $50,000 increments and then placed in Tyvex [sic] envelopes in $300,000 increments.”

“Nicka abandoned the Property and left Baltimore” shortly after a house in Hampden was raided, court documents say—the same raid that drew a bead on the Lancair. He remains a federal fugitive.

Other than the alleged Nicka conspiracy, a related federal case against two others implicated in the operation—Kevin Brandes and Michael Borakove—has already wrapped up with guilty pleas. Brandes is serving a four-year prison term, and Borakove got 18 months. According to their plea agreements, they dealt many thousands of pounds of pot from Canada and California between 2002 and 2010, at prices between $2,200 and $5,000 per pound. Taking the least amount they dealt—8,000 pounds—at the lowest price, that translates to at least $17,600,000 in transactions.

One of Brandes and Borakove’s suppliers during the earlier part of their conspiracy was Jeremiah “Jeremy” Landsman, according to court records. A Baltimore real-estate developer whose JBL Real Estate owns, via one of its many LLCs, the Hickory Avenue house where the Lancair documents were found, Landsman’s companies own or co-own numerous Baltimore-area properties. Several of them also figure in the alleged Nicka conspiracy, including properties leased by Sonar and McCabe’s Restaurant in Hampden, both of which were or are operated by another Nicka co-defendant, Dan McIntosh. Landsman pleaded guilty to his role in June and is scheduled to be sentenced in November.

In his plea, Landsman admits to using properties owned by seven of his companies to help facilitate the massive pot conspiracy. By City Paper’s count, those companies own 46 properties in the Baltimore area—24 in Hampden, 14 in Fells Point, one in West Baltimore near the Gwynns Falls, five in Mayfield, and two in Towson—though his plea does not specify which ones were used to aid the conspiracy. Under his plea agreement, the only properties he will turn over to the government are seven garages behind Keswick Road in Hampden. In addition, he agrees to hand over $200,000 to the government—but he’s escaped obstruction-of-justice charges for lying before the federal grand jury investigating the conspiracy.

Another Baltimore developer, Jacob Harryman, was one of the biggest customers of Brandes and Borakove, according to their pleas. Harryman, while not indicted in federal court, figures prominently in the evidence of both cases. In addition, as a result of a wiretap on Harryman’s phone, in Nov. 2010 at least 21 people were arrested on pot-related charges amid a series of police raids around the Baltimore region.

The third and earliest case related to the sprawling federal investigation appears to have been against Charles Koplow, whose name appears in charging documents in the Nicka case. Koplow was charged in Nov. 2009, the same month he pleaded guilty to conspiring to deal 100 kilograms or more of pot between Oct. 2007 and May 2008. In his guilty plea, he admits to running a threatening operation involving guns, an assault, and a robbery. This past May he was sentenced to two years in prison.

Of the 16 defendants in the Nicka case, four remain at large: David D’Amico, Jeffrey Putney, Gretchen Peterson, and Nicka himself. Only four of the remaining 12 – Keegan Leahy, McIntosh, Anthony Marcantoni, and Ryan Forman – have not pleaded guilty. They are running out of time to do so, since the month-long trial-and the defendants surely are hoping this isn’t a bad omen-begins on Sept. 11.

From small things, big things can happen and such is the case with the Lancair.

On March 11, 2009, a police investigation out of Montgomery County, Md., brought a drug-sniffing dog to storage unit 8-14 at S&E Mini Storage on Wilkens Avenue, next to St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore. The dog smelled drugs, and a week later, on March 18, a surveillance team watching the storage unit hit pay dirt.

The team saw one of the subjects of the probe, Adam Constantinides, enter the unit around 11 A.M. with some empty cardboard boxes. When he left, he carried three full cardboard boxes, which he put in his 2001 Ford truck. The team followed Constantinides to Bond and Aliceanna streets in Fells Point, where he handed the boxes to Jeffrey Putney, who put the boxes in his Toyota 4-Runner. He drove to the rear of 3522 Hickory Avenue, in Hampden, and took the boxes inside.

While they were being followed, Constantinides and Putney pulled U-turns and drove across parking lots and down dead-end streets. Their tactics didn’t work. Moments after Putney left the Hickory Avenue house and drove away, he was pulled over. He had $2,000 cash on him and another $5,000 was in the truck.

When investigators searched the storage unit, they found more than 30 pounds of pot. What was inside of 3522 Hickory Ave., though, suggested something huge-and explains why Nicka fled Baltimore.

In addition to nearly 100 pounds of pot, the house contained about 30 cell phones, four money-counters, two scales, $20,000 in cash, money wrappers, and drug tally sheets detailing more than $1.5 million in transactions. Also found: documents about the purchase and maintenance of a Lancair aircraft, tail number N516DB, and near them, paperwork reflecting prices and amounts of drugs, including the names of customers and suppliers.

Air Sky Holdings, the airplane’s owner, is incorporated in Delaware, a state where corporate charter laws can make it difficult to ascertain companies’ true owners. But documents in the Hickory Avenue house allowed investigators to pierce the veil: three men – David D’Amico of Baltimore and Massachusetts; Keegan Leahy, a licensed pilot from Chicago who has a Canadian passport; and Sean Costello of Hawaii-controlled Air Sky.

Five days after the Hickory Avenue raid, D’Amico, Leahy, and Costello had met in San Francisco to put in place financial maneuvers intended to conceal their connection to the aircraft and their drug-derived cash, according to court documents. On April 1, 2009, about two weeks after the raid, D’Amico left the United States for Caracas, Venezuela, and he remains a fugitive.

The Lancair was at the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport undergoing repairs when law enforcers showed up to take it. Why was it there? Just like the far-flung pot conspiracy that helped its owners acquire it, it crashed.

The Nicka indictment seeks to take $30 million in allegedly illicit proceeds from the defendants, but a little math would indicate that’s a very conservative estimate of how much the operation may have yielded.

According to evidence in the case, Marcantoni, who owns martial-arts studio Ground Control Academy in Owings Mills-there are others in Canton and Columbia-was distributing 500 to 750 pounds of pot each month. If true, that translates to 6,000 to 9,000 pounds annually. The operation dealt in high-grade weed from California and Canada, which can sell on the street for about $3,000 a pound-up to $5,000 or more for super-premium bud. That means Marcantoni alone could have been grossing $18 million to $27 million or more each year.

Marcantoni has already done a five-year stint in federal prison for pot dealing, identity fraud, lying to law enforcers, and money-laundering, after a 2004 jury trial was cut short with his guilty plea, two and a half weeks after it began. The case arose after police in Houston, Texas, found him with nearly 150 pounds of pot and $28,000 in cash. His current indictment charges him with the same conduct-large-scale weed dealing-while he was on supervised release for his prior federal conviction. He’s facing up to life in prison if convicted in the Nicka case.

Marcantoni’s predicament actually may be better than his brother’s in one sense: at least he gets to answer to the accusations. His brother, Rafael “Rocky” Marcantoni IV, just has to grin and bear being described in court documents as a participant in his brother’s bulk pot dealing, without the benefit of a judge or jury to weigh the evidence.

The allegations came from a cooperating witness, dubbed CW1, and were included in a July 2011 search warrant for two locations connected to Anthony Marcantoni. CW1 is described as one of Anthony Marcantoni’s pot suppliers.

“CW1 explained that [Anthony] Marcantoni knew Jujitsu and owned a gym called Ground Control” in Canton, the warrant states, adding that “Marcantoni and his brother … ‘Rocky,’ worked together and were receiving marijuana from Matthew Nicka and Kevin Brandes. CW1 recalled delivering 50-100 pounds of marijuana to Marcantoni and/or ‘Rocky,’ whom investigators have identified as Rafael Marcantoni IV, on eighteen (18) to twenty (20) occasions between September 2008 and March 2009,” for a total of 1,000 to 2,000 pounds. “Marcantoni and/or his brother paid $3,000 to $3,500 a pound,” and CW1 “recalled receiving as much as $100,000 in cash on a few occasions.” If true, that translates to between $3 million and $7 million in weed, and it means the flow stopped when the Hickory Avenue house was raided.

City Paper‘s attempts to reach Rafael Marcantoni through a variety of channels-lawyers, Ground Control Academy, friends and associates-were fruitless. One man, though, said he’d try to get word to Rocky: John Rallo, a professional fighter who is the primary owner of the Ground Control Academy gym in Canton.

Rallo calls Anthony Marcantoni “a very nice guy” and “a friend,” and says “I don’t want to believe” the accusations against him, which he characterizes as “movie stuff.” He points out that each of Ground Control’s three locations is a separate business entity the three men co-own: Rallo has the one in Canton, which is the original one; Anthony Marcantoni has the Owings Mills location; and Rafael Marcantoni’s is in Columbia. He says he was subpoenaed to testify before the federal grand jury investigating the case, so he’s not free to speak about the details. He calls CW1’s claims “bullshit.”

Rallo confirms something that has come up in court proceedings in the case: that Ground Control had drawn law enforcers as customers, but they’ve taken their business elsewhere since Anthony’s troubles began. “We used to do a lot of law-enforcement guys,” says Rallo, estimating that they lost 40 or 50 customers in total in the indictment’s aftermath. Rallo adds that he believes the government’s case against Marcantoni lacks hard evidence.

The Nicka indictment alleges that Anthony Marcantoni “used Ground Control to facilitate the drug business, including as a location to receive and deliver large quantities of marijuana and bulk currency payments.” But one of his attorneys, Howard Cardin, stressed “the weakness of the government’s case” at a February hearing. Cardin added that the government’s witnesses are “looking for a benefit from the government,” and that they’ve presented “conflicting stories” about Marcantoni’s alleged pot dealing.

Cardin said “no money, no marijuana, no owe sheets, no payment records, no evidence whatsoever linking Mr. Marcantoni to this conspiracy” were found during three raids, according to the court transcript. “Mr. Marcantoni runs a business, pays taxes, and there is no evidence of suspicious activity within his accounts,” Cardin continued.

There are, however, wiretaps of Jacob Harryman’s phone, intercepted by Baltimore County police in the fall of 2010. Transcriptions of the phone calls have Harryman, who has not been charged publicly (although he has lost assets to the federal government in civil court), talking about his dealings with Marcantoni – though not always in the friendliest terms. Until, that is, Harryman needs him.

“I just gave him $140,000 in the last two weeks and he can suck a fucking dick,” Jacob Harryman says on Oct. 4, 2010. He’s telling Jordan Barraco, who has since pleaded guilty in state court to pot-conspiracy charges, about having paid down his weed debt to Marcantoni, who he calls “the Italian” and “Boss Man.”

Three days later, Harryman is at the Sudsville Laundry in Reisterstown, talking to Barraco again, saying he’d just been with “Boss Man.” The cops on Harryman’s trail watch him leave the laundromat. They notice Marcantoni in the parking lot, seemingly counting money for nearly an hour in his red Chevy truck.

A couple of weeks later, on Oct. 25, Barraco complains to Harryman that the pot market is “flooded again,” hurting sales. “That’s from the Italian,” Harryman says, “because he just told me, he . . . got rid of four hundred last month or so. I’m sure it’s flooded.”

In the early afternoon on Nov. 13, Harryman talks on the phone with Mitchell Kalavan, who would soon be charged in Baltimore County in a high-volume pot case that is scheduled for trial this fall. Harryman says he’s going to meet “the Italian.” The surveillance team watches Harryman enter Captain Harvey’s Restaurant in Owings Mills, then leave a half-hour later with Marcantoni. By mid-afternoon, Harryman’s telling Kalavan that “the Italian would not serve him until he gets his outstanding balances paid down.”

“His shit is garbage anyway,” Harryman complains. A couple days later, though, Harryman’s take on Marcantoni turns rosy.

On Nov. 16, the police raided 925 Binney St. in Canton, finding 30 pounds of pot and two guns, for which Andrew Sunell is arrested, charged, and later convicted, receiving a five-year sentence despite the efforts of his attorney, Stephen Tully. The property is described as one of Harryman’s “stash houses where large amount of high-grade marijuana is stored.”

Marcantoni, according to court documents, was instrumental in mounting Sunell’s defense and helping Harryman manage the damage his arrest posed to their pot-dealing operation.

The day after the Binney Street raid, Harryman and Kalavan talk repeatedly about how to deal with Sunell’s arrest. Harryman says he “can always go back to the Italian and beg.” Later, Harryman says Marcantoni’s advice is for Kalavan, who had made large pot deliveries to the Binney Street house and may have been noticed by police, to get rid of his truck, find a new place to live, and establish a new “stash spot” for the pot. Harryman adds that Marcantoni “will not directly deal” with them anymore, “until they know the depth of the police investigation regarding Sunell.” Marcantoni, Harryman says, paid Sunell’s lawyer $7,500 and Harryman kicked in $2,000.

“When times are tough,” Harryman concludes, Marcantoni “really does have my back.”

(In addition to Sunell, Tully has been the go-to attorney for numerous individuals in the alleged Nicka conspiracy, including Putney, Constantinides, McIntosh, Ian Travis Minshall, and Daniel Fountain in state-level cases leading up to the federal indictment. Tully says he can’t comment on the alleged payments by Marcantoni and Harryman for representing Sunell because of attorney-client privilege. As for the others, he says he was notified by prosecutors shortly after their state-level arrests that he was conflicted out of representing them further.)

In short, the Sunell situation is the least of Marcantoni’s concerns. His life, as well as those of dozens of people targeted in the Nicka investigation, is upended by indictments, forfeitures of valuable property, and the need to hire expensive attorneys and make bail. Business reputations are tainted. Children and other family members have to be told something about what’s happening with their father, brother, or son. And then there’s the nagging, unverifiable concern about who’s going to turn state’s evidence-and where else the investigation may turn.

As assistant U.S. attorney Stacy Belf said at a February court hearing, “the case is still under investigation and we keep finding more evidence every day.”

Just who is cooperating is hard to say, but there are cooperators. They’ve already appeared as CW1 and the like, in affidavits filed in the case. And court records show their numbers are growing, even if their names aren’t yet disclosed – as are the numbers of potential targets in the ongoing investigation.

According to court documents, prosecutors have been using a book of photographs of persons of interest in the case to show potential cooperators. When they first made the book on Aug. 12, 2009, it contained nine photographs. As of April 20, there were 118. That’s a lot of people with cause to be nervous.

Late to the Party: David D’Amico Extradited From Colombia To Answer 2010 Federal Pot-Trafficking And Money-Laundering Indictment In Maryland

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Sept. 9, 2014

David D’Amico turned 50 a week before his Aug. 28 appearance in Maryland U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, where he consented to pre-trial detention in a massive 2010 pot-trafficking and money-laundering case in which most of his 15 co-defendants—including Daniel McIntosh, co-owner of defunct Baltimore nightclub Sonar—are serving prison sentences. He looked a shadow of his formerly beefy, smiling self, as seen in the “Most Wanted” photo of him distributed by the U.S. Marshals Service in early 2013 (pictured), when he was a fugitive. Now, having been extradited from Colombia, D’Amico looks gaunt and tired—every day of his age, and then some. Five years on the run seems to have depleted him.

D’Amico’s name is peppered throughout the voluminous transcripts of the seven-week trial in the case, which ended on Nov. 1, 2012, when McIntosh and Canadian pilot Keegan Leahy were convicted of several charges—though acquitted of the most serious ones—that they have since appealed. D’Amico was described as a top player in the decade-long, cross-country, $30-million scheme, the man who oversaw its day-to-day operations in three arenas—transportation, wholesale distribution, and finance and real estate—and harbored ambitions of taking the reins from the conspiracy’s overall leader, Matt Nicka, who now, along with his wife, Gretchen Peterson, is in the hands of Canadian authorities as the U.S. seeks their return to face the charges.

With D’Amico’s extradition from Colombia and appearance in Maryland federal court, a jury may yet get to weigh the evidence against him. Neither D’Amico’s court-appointed attorneys—Richard Finci and Jennifer Mayer—nor assistant U.S. attorney Deborah Johnston would comment on the case, but existing court records bring the story of D’Amico’s alleged dealings into tight focus.

The D’Amico narrative that played out before the McIntosh/Leahy jury started in early 2000s, when co-defendant Sean Costello—an energy consultant from Hawaii at the time of his 2012 guilty plea in the case—was D’Amico’s roommate from 2003 to 2005. Costello recalled for the jury that D’Amico was a concert promoter and day-trader in stocks who sold concessions at large events like the Ultra Music Festival in Miami. In 2003, after “a Phish concert in Miami” where “we did our normal orange juice plus alcohol sales,” Costello said, he, D’Amico, and Nicka “started distributing weed” at a rate of “50 to 100 pounds per month,” with Costello helping move it from Baltimore to Atlanta and Miami, and “money back the other direction.”

At this stage, Costello continued, Nicka would call “breakfast” meetings in “downtown Baltimore” between “most of the people in the conspiracy”—anywhere from six to 10 people, including D’Amico—where they “just caught up with each other personally.” While they ate and socialized, Nicka would “talk with people individually and pull them outside” to discuss “how many pounds of weed they needed or wanted” and “how much money they owed Matt for said weed.”

The last such meeting Costello attended was in June 2005, he testified, because “I was arrested either that day or the day after” by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration while “on a train from Baltimore to Miami” with “24 pounds of marijuana” that belonged to D’Amico and Nicka. D’Amico paid for Costello’s attorney and offered him “50 grand” if “I kept my mouth shut,” Costello recalled. He did, in a sense—Costello admitted he actually told agents a mixture of truth and lies about the pot’s provenance, saying he’d gotten it from a “an over-weight white male of Russian decent” at the train station, and that he was being paid $2,000 by a someone he only knew as “Man”—and served six months’ incarceration in Florida for the crime.

In early 2007, after Costello’s release, D’Amico dropped in on him in Orlando, Florida, and “was trying to convince me to get back into selling and distributing weed,” Costello testified. D’Amico drove him to meet with Nicka in Jensen Beach, Florida, and “I think Matt assumed that I was going to get back into helping them sell and distribute weed, which I didn’t want to do at the time,” Costello continued.

A little over a year later, in May 2008, though, Costello helped the conspiracy by introducing D’Amico to a pilot—Leahy—to fly pot and money back and forth across the country. “Back in 2004, 2005,” he explained, “we had always been looking for a pilot so that we could fly instead of drive, because there’s quite a bit of money that was seized by the government during that time for traffic stops” and “you can’t get pulled over by the cops in the air.”

Costello had gotten to know Leahy after they’d first met in 2006, when they explored developing a solar energy plant in south Florida. Leahy “fit the personality type of the people that we work with,” Costello explained, adding that he “seemed cool” and that he “was the only pilot I knew.” So “I asked him if he wanted to fly for a friend of mine,” Costello continued, but “I wasn’t going to tell him that it was distributing thousands of pounds of weed.”

Shortly after Costello introduced D’Amico to Leahy, the three set out to buy an airplane, a Lancair IV-P, and title it in the name of a company they formed, Air Sky Holdings. Before it ever made a trip for the conspiracy, though, Leahy damaged it so badly in a crash that it was never used. So Leahy instead piloted a leased Cessna 400, the fastest single-engine production aircraft on the market, and by all appearances he was simply D’Amico’s personal pilot—though Costello pointed out that, given the strong and distinctive odor that loads of pot give off, it would be hard not to suspect what was inside of the bags with which D’Amico travelled. When the bags were filled with cash, Costello testified that they held up to “$500,000 at a time.”

Costello eventually wanted out of the arrangement, he testified, and in February 2009 met D’Amico in Boston “to get rid of my responsibility with Air Sky Holdings” and “dump everything on to Dave hopefully.” It didn’t work, though, and in early March, 2009, Costello met D’Amico in Baltimore at D’Amico’s rented house on Hickory Avenue in Hampden—a house owned by a company controlled by co-defendant Jeremiah “Jeremy” Landsman, a Baltimore real-estate developer who is currently in prison after pleading guilty in the case—and watched as a load of pot was shipped into and out of the house. Then, Costello continued, he, D’Amico, Leahy, and another person went to “some state airport . . . near Baltimore” and tried, unsuccessfully due to the snowy weather, to fly out with a duffel bag full of money. The inside of the plane, Costello said, “smelled like weed.”

A few weeks later, D’Amico summoned Costello and Leahy to San Francisco. “He seemed very agitated,” Costello recalled. It turned out that the Hickory Avenue house had been raided by police, who had found nearly 100 pounds of pot, about 30 cell phones, money counters, scales, $20,000 in cash, and documentation of more than $1.5 million in drug transactions, including the names of customers and suppliers. Also in the house were documents about the Lancair, connecting it to D’Amico, Costello, and Leahy. Just prior to the raid, another co-conspirator—Jeffrey Putney, who is now the sole remaining fugitive in the case—had been arrested immediately after coming out of the house, because the cops who had been tailing him saw him drop off boxes of suspected pot there.

The three met in a hotel lobby in San Francisco, where D’Amico said “that somebody had gotten arrested that knew a lot of information” and “it would be smart to leave” the country and get rid of their cellphones. Leahy “got upset and walked away,” Costello continued, and D’Amico explained “how he was going to get me a quarter million dollars” to “finance leaving the country.”

The next day, on the recommendation of a weed supplier for D’Amico and Nicka—a person Costello only knew as “Bear”—D’Amico and Costello sought advice from a legal titan: J. Tony Serra, a legendary civil-rights and criminal-defense attorney who was portrayed by James Woods in the 1989 movie “True Believer.”

“We talked at length” with Serra “about how or if we should sell the aircraft,” Costello recalled, and “about minimum maximum penalties and what we could be charged with.” They were also “asked the scope and depth of the case, how many people, how much money, how much weed,” Costello continued. Serra’s fee would be $100,000 and, Costello continued, “Dave voluntarily . . . put money on Tony’s safe on the way out the door,” about $10,000 or $20,000. While Costello said Serra “looked like he smoked weed,” he did not think he was part of the D’Amico/Nicka conspiracy.

Also that March, D’Amico first gave Costello a sense of the breadth and depth of the conspiracy: that it involved sending “150 to 250 pounds east . . . every two to three weeks,” Costello recalled, and that it involved “40 to 50” people.

At some point after the Hickory raid, Costello recalled waiting at a mall in Berkeley for D’Amico and Bear to “come back from somewhere further north,” where they had gone so that D’Amico could “pick up his balance of all the money that was owed to him.” After they returned, they transferred the money to Costello’s rented car and, after Costello dropped D’Amico at a hotel, “I drove away” with the money, Costello recalled, since “I assumed that it was the money that Dave had promised me the day before” and “I wanted to be done with the relationships with Dave.”

In the ensuing months, after the government seized the Lancair and started court proceedings to keep it as a criminally derived asset, Costello filed a claim for it, saying it was obtained lawfully. D’Amico—who had fled the U.S. for Caracas, Venezuela in early April—put the kibosh on that move, Costello recalled, by telling him “in no uncertain terms that he would come and kill me if I did not give up the aircraft, verbatim.” D’Amico “just seemed very, very upset,” Costello explained, “because I took off with money that he was supposed to give me of his own accord and I just took it.” So, he continued, “I released all interest in the Lancair aircraft on behalf of Air Sky Holdings.”

Costello also told the jury that he still feared D’Amico: “He could come to my house and hurt me and come to my house and shoot me,” Costello said. “I’ve always been concerned about that. And I’m still concerned about that to this day, in fact.”

But D’Amico may have been too busy enjoying life in Colombia to bother trying to harm Costello. An expatriate American who co-owns a hotel in Colombia where D’Amico stayed in 2010 and 2011 provides a glimpse of D’Amico’s life on the lam. City Paper confirmed the identity of the hotelier, who provided evidence to back up stories of D’Amico’s time there, but the hotelier asked not to be named in this article “because of the cloud that Dave brought” to the hotel.

D’Amico “looked like the typical gringo businessman who comes to Colombia looking for business opportunities along with some fun and excitement,” the hotelier recalls in a series of emails, but “the reality soon became evident—Dave had come to party.”

He was “certainly a very colorful character, and sometimes wild,” the hotelier observes, adding that “I learned this within a few days of his arrival, when a worker at the property led me to Dave’s suite one morning to show me that he was passed out on the floor of his room, surrounded by garbage. Once awakened, Dave told me that he occasionally enjoyed sleeping on the floor—and he said it with a serious face.” On another occasion, the hotelier recalls, “while trying to leave the hotel very late at night when the outer gate was locked,” D’Amico “tried to destroy the lock and the gate’s hinges so he could get out of the building, instead of waiting for the night clerk to return and open the door for him to leave the building.”

D’Amico “spent nearly a year here,” the hotelier continued. “I tried to get rid of him, but couldn’t. The property damage and neighborhood shame were costly,” since D’Amico was “doing whatever he wanted.” D’Amico disappeared from the hotel after a fire “started in the (locked) apartment where Dave had been living.”

The hotelier first learned about D’Amico’s indictment in Maryland after he’d disappeared. “Frankly, if I had known he was on the run at the time he was destroying my property,” the hotelier explains, “I would have turned him in to the authorities to stop the losses.”

After years as a fugitive, D’Amico now will see if he’s able to stop the loss of liberty the government wants him to suffer. He’s the most high-ranking member of the conspiracy to be brought to court so far, and those convicted for playing lower-level roles—including McIntosh, who is serving a mandatory-minimum 10-year sentence, meted out earlier this year—are currently paying the price. Despite his good times at the hotel in Colombia, D’Amico, too, based on his physical appearance recently in court, has already started to pay the price.

The Smoke Thickens: $30 million Baltimore-based pot-conspiracy case part of broader investigation

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Mar. 21, 2012

The $30 million cross-country pot conspiracy first alleged by a Maryland federal grand jury in December 2010, involving 32-year-old Baltimore real estate developer Jeremiah Brandon Landsman and 15 others (“Smoked Out,” Mobtown Beat, Feb. 29), is connected to numerous other Maryland criminal cases, court records show. Central figures in the investigation, which involve the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Baltimore County Police Department (BCPD), are another Baltimore developer, 33-year-old Jacob Jeremiah Harryman, and 34-year-old Andrew Jin Park of Pikesville, who pleaded guilty in the mid-2000s to drug and assault charges in Baltimore City and Baltimore County.

Landsman, whose holdings include storage facilities and properties that house popular Baltimore nightlife destinations, had a role in at least one other recent federal case. The defendants—30-year-old Kevin Brandes of Owings Mills and California, and one of his distributors, 31-year-old Michael Borakove of Locust Point—recently pleaded guilty, admitting that they were involved in moving thousands of pounds of pot shipped to Maryland from California and Canada over the better part of the last decade—a scenario much like the one in Landsman’s pending case.

According to their guilty pleas, Landsman supplied pot to Brandes and Borakove in the early 2000s, and Harryman was one of Brandes’ “biggest customers.” The DEA “developed several cooperators” who purchased “approximately 8,000 pounds of marijuana in the course of the conspiracy” from 2002 to 2010, court documents say.

Initially, the pot in the Brandes/Borakove conspiracy was brought to Maryland from Canada by couriers, who would deliver it to Brandes at the Renaissance Hotel near Harborplace in downtown Baltimore. Later, the pot traveled to Maryland from California in a recreational vehicle, and then, after Brandes moved to California in 2009, he started shipping it by mail. “Brandes was not the ultimate source of supply,” court documents state, “but was always purchasing it from someone else.”

Brandes’ attorney, Kobie Flowers, declined to comment, and Borakove’s attorney, Andrew White, did not respond to an e-mail requesting comment. Landsman’s attorney, Barry Pollack, also declined to comment, as did the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Neither Harryman nor Park is currently facing criminal charges—at least not publicly; if they’ve been charged under seal, there’s no way to confirm it. But in recent years both have lost assets to the federal government in civil court cases, known as forfeiture proceedings, that describe them as large-scale pot dealers. Attempts to reach Harryman and Park for comment, including through lawyers who represented them in the past, were unsuccessful.

Events in November 2010—just prior to the Landsman indictment—were watershed moments in the probe. That’s when conversations between Harryman and Park were intercepted by BCPD investigators, according to a warrant that resulted in more than $125,000 being seized from Harryman’s investment accounts as ill-gotten gains. Law enforcers quickly learned that Park was one of Harryman’s main marijuana suppliers, that Harryman and Park were expecting a large shipment of pot from California that they intended to split for distribution, and that the shipment was being driven across the country by 45-year-old Robert Alan Tryson of Sykesville, court records show.

When Tryson drove into Western Maryland, he was pulled over for speeding and arrested when 90 pounds of pot were found in his car. Tryson, who had no criminal record and worked as director of credit operations for Polk Audio in Baltimore, told investigators he’d been transporting pot for Park for about a year, and would bring Park’s shipments to 33-year-old Jamel Maurice Reid at his Northway Apartments residence in Tuscany-Canterbury. Reid, court records show, has a history of arrests for illegal drugs and firearms and a 2000 drug-dealing conviction.

On Nov. 30, 2010, Reid’s apartment was raided—as were numerous other locations in the Baltimore area. City Paper has not been able to confirm the entire number of places raided and people arrested as a result of the Harryman-Park investigation. At least nine locations were raided, though, and in addition to arresting at least 21 people, the police seized large quantities of marijuana; smaller amounts of cocaine and prescription drugs; guns and ammunition; hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash; numerous cell phones, computers, and documents; and jewelry and other valuables, including vehicles. Forfeiture proceedings then were filed against real estate holdings and money seized from homes, bank accounts, and investment funds.

At least three people caught up in the Harryman-Park investigation faced federal charges: Brandes, Borakove, and 31-year-old Anthony Marcantoni, a co-defendant in Landsman’s case. Marcantoni’s most recent federal charges came when he was on supervised release after serving a prison sentence for prior federal pot-and-fraud convictions, and he is facing a possible life sentence in his current case. Marcantoni allegedly used his Owings Mills business, a martial-arts studio called Ground Control, to aid the conspiracy.

Prior to the November 2010 raids, forfeiture proceedings in federal court have stripped Harryman and Park of assets tied to large-scale pot dealing. In 2005, two properties Park owned in Roland Park and Lutherville were raided, resulting in the seizure of about 110 pounds of pot, almost $19,000 in cash, and paperwork indicating about $500,000 in drug debt owed to Park. Prosecutors settled the case, and Park got to keep the Roland Park home and money that had been seized from his bank accounts, but lost the Lutherville property and the cash found at his home.

In 2008, the federal government sought to keep $12,796 seized by Carroll County police from a house Harryman owned in Pikesville after they raided the place, along with another Harryman-owned house in Westminster. At the Westminster raid, a 243-plant pot-growing operation was in place, and one of the two men there told the raid team, “This is a lot bigger than it seems,” according to court records. Prosecutors settled the forfeiture, allowing Harryman to keep $8,000 of the seized cash.

Most recently, on March 9, federal prosecutors filed a forfeiture action to take four of Harryman’s Baltimore-area rental properties, which are held by two companies Harryman co-owns with another man, 45-year-old Mark Anthony Jones, a military veteran who lives in Owings Mills. The affidavit supporting the forfeiture, written by IRS Special Agent Matthew Hooker, explains that the two companies, First Chesapeake Investment Properties LLC and FCIP II LLC, “purchased 15 real properties between May 2007 and June 2010 for a combined cost of $622,700.”

In interviews with investigators, Harryman’s co-conspirators “stated that, along with distributing marijuana received from Harryman, they also worked for him doing construction and maintenance” on the properties, according to the forfeiture affidavit, and that he paid them in cash. The forfeiture case also seeks to allow the government to take $71,057 in cash and a Breitling Super Avenger wristwatch taken from Harryman’s residence when BCPD and IRS agents raided it in November 2010.

Jones, Harryman’s partner in First Chesapeake and FCIP II, has a luxury-transportation company, How We Roll Inc., that he says provides tour-bus services for high-profile entertainers. He was caught up in the Harryman pot probe—his condominium was one of the locations raided in November 2010—but the charges against him did not result in convictions. In a March 14 phone conversation with City Paper, Jones claims law enforcers “know I’m not part of the conspiracy.”

The raid on Jones’ condo was based on the cops’ faulty interpretation of wiretapped phone conversations he’d had with Harryman, Jones says. “They had wiretaps on Harryman’s phones,” he explains, “and because of a conversation I had with him possibly being encoded, they went on that [as a basis for the warrant]. Look, I’m from New York City, the Bronx, and I don’t talk straight English. I wasn’t talking about drugs or anything else. I mean, I can fight, I can talk shit, I have sex with many women—does that make me a bad person? I could have been talking about anything.”

Jones recently filed suit against BCPD for the return of property seized from him, including $237,000 in cash, six handguns, a cache of loaded magazines and ammunition for those guns, and a bullet-proof vest. Of the federal government’s recent move to take real-property Jones co-owns with Harryman—as well as BCPD’s response to his lawsuit, which states that the $237,000 is in the DEA’s hands “to pursue forfeiture in the federal court system—Jones says, “Oh well.”

As for the nearly quarter-million dollars in cash at his home, Jones says that’s how he gets paid in legitimate business. “I work hard for my money,” he explains. “I travel with high-profile entertainers, and I get paid in cash a lot, and I don’t put all of it in the bank. I mean, it’s not unusual for the people I hang with to have $20,000, $30,000 in cash, and that’s how they pay me. I went to Europe twice with L’il Wayne—that’s the kind of people I’m talking about.” The guns, he says, were lawfully owned: “I have all of them registered, I bought them at gun shops.” He adds, “I’m not guilty of nothing.”

Smoked Out: Baltimore developer revealed as co-defendant in cross-country pot conspiracy

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Feb. 29, 2012

When Jeremy Landsman was robbed at gunpoint at a Greektown poker game in 2006, along with 20 other people, he said he hadn’t been playing poker. “I’m in real estate,” he said, explaining the $900 the robbers took from his wallet, which the cops quickly got back for him (“Luck of the Draw,” Mobtown Beat, June 7, 2006), “so I always carry a lot of cash.”

That was 2006, when people in real estate were expected to have fat wallets—but as the real estate market crashed and the Great Recession ensued, Landsman, who’ll turn 32 in March, continued to expand his portfolio. His indeterminately large family of LLCs, many if not most of which have “JBL” in their names, manages and lists for sale others’ properties, and owns or co-owns commercial, storage, and residential properties of its own. The most recent indicator of its near-decade of success was Landsman’s planning-committee role in the International Conference of Shopping Centers (ICSC) conference at the National Harbor on Feb. 21 and 22, with The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol as the keynote speaker.

But even as the ICSC conference was winding down, Landsman’s star was darkening. Since December 2010, he’d secretly been a defendant in a partially sealed marijuana-conspiracy indictment in which the federal government seeks to allow the federal government to take ownership of $30 million worth of allegedly ill-gotten gains. On Feb. 22, this fact was revealed in the court docket, and the next day City Paper obtained a copy of the fully unsealed indictment.

The conspiracy case had been populated by nine named and six unnamed co-defendants accused of moving pot grown in Canada and Northern California to warehouses in Maryland, where it was divvied up for sale in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Kansas, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, and elsewhere. The scheme the indictment describes was vast and enduring: From at least 2001 until June 2009, the conspirators moved pot and cash using “aircraft, tractor trailers, commercial carrier, trains and other vehicles, including at least one vehicle containing a trap device to secrete items for transport.”

Landsman “distributed marijuana, brokered other conspirators’ purchases of marijuana and maintained several properties used for marijuana distribution,” the indictment alleges.

In addition to seeking forfeiture of $30 million in assets, the indictment aims for the government to keep more than $70,000 in cash seized by law enforcers in 2009 and 2010 and to gain forfeiture of real estate in Sonoma County, Calif., and two properties in Baltimore, including garages behind Keswick Avenue in Hampden owned by JBL Keswick LLC, one of Landsman’s many real estate companies.

“I have no comment,” Landsman, whose legal name is Jeremiah Brandon Landsman, told City Paper over the phone on Feb. 23, before abruptly hanging up.

Barry Pollack, an attorney who says he represents Landsman, sent an e-mailed comment on Feb. 24, stating, “Jeremy Landsman has operated a successful real estate business in Baltimore for nearly a decade. He takes this matter very seriously and has asked me to represent him. We will not comment further until the case has been resolved.”

Early last year, JBL partnered with David Berg, of the Berg Corporation demolition firm, in purchasing the downtown property that houses Sonar, a sizable nightclub across from the Hollywood Diner near City Hall. The purchase occurred after the indictment was handed down but before Sonar’s main owner, Daniel McIntosh, was revealed as a co-defendant in the case (The News Hole, July 8, 2011 ). McIntosh also co-owns McCabe’s Restaurant, a popular eatery on Falls Road in Hampden; JBL is McIntosh’s landlord there too.

The indictment describes McIntosh as a large-scale pot distributor who allegedly “picked up,” “delivered,” and “unloaded large shipments” once they arrived in Maryland. McIntosh and another defendant—Anthony Marcantoni, an alleged large-scale distributor on supervised release for a prior federal pot felony—are the only two whose businesses are named in the indictment. While Marcantoni’s business, a martial-arts studio in Owings Mills called Ground Control, is described in the indictment as having been used in the scheme, McIntosh’s are not.

Marcantoni is facing a possible life sentence if convicted, and is being detained pending trial. His lawyer, Steven Levin, has been fighting—so far unsuccessfully, but with an appeal pending—to have him released to await trial. “Mr. Marcantoni maintains his innocence,” Levin says, “and is looking forward to regaining his freedom pending trial.”

At one of Marcantoni’s detention hearings in the case, Maryland State Police Sgt. Lee Link, who worked out at Ground Control, testified as a character witness, calling Marcantoni “a friend” and “confidant” who “has a good heart” but has “made bad decisions in the past,” according to the hearing transcript. The prosecutor contended that Marcantoni “was facilitating his drug activity . . . right under the noses of law enforcement who use that gym.” Link, reached by phone recently at the MSP’s Glen Burnie Barracks, said “I no longer go to that gym” since Marcantoni’s legal troubles “came to light.”

The case has been marked by intrigue from the start, given that so many names had remained blacked out in court documents. As several of the defendants appeared in court last spring and summer, their identities—Andrew Sharpeta, Keegan Leahy, Sean Costello, Ian Travis Minshall, Michael Phillips, Adam Constantinides, and Joseph Spain, in addition to McIntosh and Marcantoni—were revealed, but little else was, other than the general accusations against them.

When Landsman and the five other sealed defendants—Matt Nicka, David D’Amico, Gretchen Peterson, Jeffrey Putney, and Daniel Fountain—were revealed, more came into focus. State court and real estate records show Landsman’s ties to Nicka, who allegedly “supervised and directed” the scheme’s activities, “recruited conspirators,” and “obtained large quantities of marijuana in exchange for bulk currency payments,” according to the indictment; Putney, who allegedly handled logistics by picking up, delivering, and unloading shipments as he “accessed residences and storage units where marijuana was kept”; and two alleged mid-level dealers, Fountain and Minshall.

In 2009, Minshall was arrested when police executed a search warrant at a JBL-owned property at 3835 Falls Road, next to McCabe’s. The raid turned up approximately 32 pounds of high-grade pot that sells for $5,000 per pound, for a street value of $160,000, along with nearly $17,000 in cash, a money counter, a digital scale, and a heat sealer. Two weeks later, Putney was arrested for large-scale pot possession (prosecutors later declined to proceed with the charges), and the case record gives two addresses for him: one in Santa Cruz, Calif., and the other at a JBL-owned property, 3522 Hickory Ave., in Hampden.

In 2008, a JBL company acquired a home at 1207 Weldon Ave., in Medfield from Anthony Thacker—one of the many aliases the indictment ascribes to Nicka, the conspiracy’s alleged supervisor—for free, and then sold it in 2009 for $226,500. The property is two doors down from the house posted as bail for McIntosh’s release pending trial.

Fountain was picked up by the U.S. Marshal’s service in California in late January on the pot-conspiracy charges, and was described in court papers as a fugitive. In 2007, he incorporated DB5K Gallery, an art gallery in Fells Point, using as a contact address a property near the Baltimore Beltway that is co-owned by Landsman. Fountain and Landsman have shared that address—7203 N. Charles St.—in court records, and Fountain has also used in court records another address at a JBL development on Portugal Street in Fells Point.

On its web site, JBL (jbl-realestate.com) describes 10 of its projects. McCabe’s and Portugal Street are two of them. The others are a Fells Point tavern; a salon on the Avenue in Hampden; a shopping center in Lauraville/Mayfield; storage garages in Highlandtown; the LaTerra building in Hampden, which also has storage garages for rent; the Pinkney Manor apartments in Northwest Baltimore; a retail office building in Arbutus that it converted to mixed use with residences; and the Bell Foundry, a Greenmount West building populated by artists and students. JBL’s real-estate agents, including Landsman, currently list 34 office, retail, restaurant, bar, land, or mixed use properties for sale in Baltimore and surrounding areas, including seven in Washington, D.C. (Disclosure: JBL hosted a City Paper photography exhibit at a property it co-owns at 231-235 Holliday St., near Sonar, in June 2011.)

The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to say anything about the case, citing its policy against commenting on pending matters. The trial is scheduled to start on Sept. 11 and last for eight weeks.

Luck of the Draw: Police Bust Gunmen Robbing Greektown Poker Game

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, June 7, 2006

IN A 15-MINUTE PERIOD AROUND 11 P.M. on Thursday, May 25, Baltimore City racked up 21 victims of violent crime in Greektown: 18 armed robberies and three attempted armed robberies. The incident is a blow to the victims and to Mayor Martin O’Malley’s attempts to reduce violent crime in the city—a central theme of his campaign for governor. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the two suspects were caught while robbing $23,827 from a high-stakes poker game, an illegal activity that O’Malley made light of last fall, after police raided two poker games that netted charges against nearly 100 players.

Last Nov. 17, O’Malley discussed the poker raids on WBAL Radio, relating cheekily how he had asked police commanders, “‘How many people do we have assigned to the poker task force? Do you think we could reassign them to the violent-crime and drug task force?’” He continued, “It seems like we’ve become obsessed with poker games. I think there are more deadly challenges facing our city and our citizens.”

As of press time, the police department had not responded to City Paper’s request for information and comment about the Greektown poker robbery. When mayoral spokeswoman Raquel Guillory was asked if the mayor’s thoughts about poker enforcement had changed after the robbery, she had only this to say: “We have a vice squad who, along with other crimes, track these as well. These particular types of games pose a risk to the players because there is usually a large amount of money and the police don’t know about them. But these are illegal.”

One of the victims, criminal defense attorney Stephen L. Prevas (a brother of Baltimore Circuit Court Judge John N. Prevas), rues that the poker-game heist chalked up a host of offenses on the city’s violent-crime tables. “One event that takes 10, 15 minutes,” he points out in a telephone interview after the robbery, “and it skews the statistics.”

Another victim, Jason Thomas Lantz, was pistol-whipped during the incident, according to a police report contained in the court records. “It opened up a nice gash on the guy’s head,” Prevas recalls. “It was ugly, but everybody remained rather calm.”

The timing of the robbery, Prevas adds, was perfect. “Of any time to strike,” he says, “that particular time on a Thursday night was good, to maximize the benefits” of a robbery, because more than the usual amounts of cash were on hand.

Prevas, who represented two dealers charged with gambling in one of last November’s poker raids, would like to see poker legalized and regulated in Maryland. However, “when it is done in this fashion”—illegally, with lots of money on the table—he opines, “the biggest negative is that someone will get robbed. Any time you put a bunch of people with a lot of money in their pockets in one place, it is going to put a gleam in someone’s eye. I may start going to Atlantic City again—it keeps you honest.” Or, he adds, “I may just stay in games that are in someone’s home where I’m familiar with people.” At any rate, Prevas says, “as I understand it, the game will not reopen at that particular place.”

Prevas, who has been a member of the Maryland Bar since 1973, had $1,700 taken from him during the robbery and says that money is now in police hands. He contends that, while a poker game was in progress at the time, he wasn’t playing. “You can infer what you want,” he asserts when asked why he had so much money while watching a poker game. “But in the scheme of things, it’s not that big of a bankroll. I am used to having cash on my person.”

Another victim, real-estate investor Jeremiah B. Landsman, says he had $900 in his wallet when it was taken from him by the robbers. “I got most of it back,” he says, after the police busted the perpetrators. He, too, contends that he wasn’t playing poker. “Everybody knows gambling is illegal,” he states in a phone interview. “And I don’t want to do anything illegal.” As for the amount of money he possessed at the time, he explains that “I’m in real estate, so I always carry a lot of cash.”

While police found $23,827 in the robbers’ bag once they were detained, court records indicate that only $15,429 was attributed to the 18 individuals who were robbed. The court records don’t explain the discrepancy, but the remainder may have belonged to the game’s organizers. “I have nothing to say about the house money,” Landsman says when asked about the differing sums.

The arrested suspects are 31-year-old Todd Mikal of Glen Burnie and 27-year-old Ronnie Lee Jones of Parkville. Mikal is charged with 131 counts, including possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, although a search of court records shows that this is the first time he’s been charged with a crime in Maryland. Jones was charged with 127 counts in connection with the poker robbery. Court records reveal that, since 1997, Jones has faced 17 charges for crimes including auto theft, illegal firearms, assault, robbery, theft, and juror intimidation. He was never convicted, though in 1999 he received two years of supervised probation before judgment for assault.

According to the police report, the crime was interrupted after one of the victims, Wayne Byers Long Jr., flagged down a passing patrol car and stated that a robbery was in progress at 4600 Eastern Ave. Long’s Parkville address is an apartment a few blocks away from Ronnie Jones’ home. Attempts to reach Long, in order to ask him if he knows the suspect, were unsuccessful.

The robbers, Prevas recalls, entered the back room of the premises through a side door.

“They came in behind a guy who’d been playing in the game fairly regularly,” he says. “[Someone] saw him through the peephole [in the door] and let him in.” One of the robbers “was doing all the talking, and was very loud and intimidating, and the other was the bag man,” who put the cash and wallets into a sack.

Once Long had hailed the police, “in seconds there were bunches of police there,” Prevas continues. “The friendly perps were just finishing up their business, saying ‘Good night and thank you, gentlemen,’ or something to that effect, when three cops appeared at the landing with their guns drawn. One guy gave it up immediately, and the other guy took off out the door,” Prevas recalls. The police quickly chased him down.

“It was a sense of vindication that they actually got caught,” Prevas says.

State records show the owner of 4600 Eastern Ave. to be Pete Koroneos, whose other interests over the years include a strip club and a restaurant on the Block, a Fells Point bar, and the Broadway Diner, located just east of Greektown on Eastern Avenue. A sign for the diner graces the side of the nondescript building that hosted the ill-fated poker game, and is the only identifying mark on the newly painted building other than the street number affixed to the mailbox on the front door. Attempts to reach Koroneos at his Otterbein condominium, in order to ask him about the poker game held in his Greektown property, were unsuccessful.

Landsman and Prevas indicate that the property has long been a home for poker—though Landsman insists that it was “only for fun, only for chips, not money.”

“It’s a men’s club,” he continues, “where we would eat, drink, watch games. It was a really nice group of people and a really good time. I would go once a week. It was a great place to network with other professionals from Baltimore.”

Another victim, Gilbert Roden, is more direct. “It was a bunch of guys that get together and play poker,” he says over the phone.

The list of 21 robbery victims includes 11 people whose names also appear on the membership lists of two other poker clubs: the Owls Nest, which was raided by police last fall, and a related entity called the Orioles Nest (“Fouled Nests,” Nov. 23, 2005). Two of the Greektown victims had been arrested for gambling at the Owls Nest raid, and their charges were later dropped.

None of the poker-playing victims of the Greektown robbery has been charged with a crime—in contrast to the gambling charges that resulted from last November’s raids of the Owls Nest and another game at the Aces High Club on Harford Road. Without police comment, City Paper has not been able to determine whether the decision not to charge the gamblers resulted from O’Malley’s public statements that enforcing the law against poker games squanders police resources.

Landsman, however, says he believes “the police handled [the Greektown poker robbery] perfectly. It was a bad situation with the best possible outcome.” Nonetheless, he states, “obviously, these games draw crime. It’s unfortunate.”

Union Busted: Ex-cons, and some current ones, find a home in troubled Local 333 of the International Longshoremen’s Association

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Nov. 24, 2010

Ask Michael Thames if he’s a member of the Local 333 of the International Longshoremen’s Association, and the 42-year-old quickly pulls his Port of Baltimore photo-identification card out of his pants pocket. He’s been working for nine years on crews that load and unload ships calling on Baltimore, he says, and his brother and two uncles do too, as did his father until retiring recently. All, he says, are members of Local 333.

Thames is holding his Baltimore Orioles cap and sunglasses in his hand, sporting a black faux-leather jacket with lots of zippered pockets. A grill of gold caps his front teeth, flashing as he speaks. He has close-cropped hair and a slight mustache.

Yes, Thames says, he’s aware there’s a Local 333 election coming up on Dec. 3, and that Riker “Rocky” McKenzie is running for Local 333’s president.

McKenzie has already been president of the union once, having won the position in January 2009. But he was replaced in August by an acting president after the ILA’s national leaders in New York determined that a heroin-dealing conviction from the 1970s rendered him ineligible for the position, since felons are barred from serving as union officers. The day after the decision, McKenzie appealed. While he did not contest the conviction during a June hearing on the matter, in his appeal he contended he received probation before judgment in the heroin case rather than a guilty finding. Pending the outcome of his appeal, he’s allowed to be nominated as the local’s president. He has only one opponent: longtime Local 333 member John Blom.

And yes, Thames says, he knows McKenzie’s bid for president included a Nov. 15 fundraiser at the Eldorado, a strip club in East Baltimore co-owned by Kenneth Antonio “Kenny Bird” Jackson, an iconic Baltimore underworld figure—and a fellow member of Local 333.

Jackson hasn’t been part of an active prosecution since a generation ago (“The High Life,” Mobtown Beat, Jan. 3, 1996), but his criminal history includes several notable convictions—manslaughter, narcotics, and gun possession—and he beat two murder raps, one in 1974 and the other in 1991. In between, he was twice pulled over in his car on the New Jersey Turnpike with large sums of cash during the late 1980s. The first time it was $91,000; the next it was nearly $700,000.

Over time, Jackson’s life quieted on the law-enforcement front. In a 2009 interview about a film he produced, The Baltimore Chronicles: Legends of the Unwired (“Last Word,” Feature, Apr. 29, 2009), Jackson told City Paper he’d undergone “a transition from one lifestyle to another,” shelving his gangster ways and retreating peacefully to the simple life of running a family-owned strip club.

But Jackson is still a lightning rod for criminal and political intrigue. In the mid-2000s, a federal prosecution of a politically connected violent drug gang, the Rice Organization (“Wired,” Mobtown Beat, March 2, 2005), targeted a man who helped run the criminal enterprise while also operating a restaurant in a Jackson-owned building on Howard Street’s Antique Row. And Jackson’s mother—who co-owns the Eldorado with him—still co-owns a downtown Baltimore condominium (The News Hole, Feb. 22) with Jackson’s former criminal-defense attorney, Robert Simels of New York (“Team Player,” Mobtown Beat, Sept. 24, 2008), who’s now serving a 14-year prison sentence for witness intimidation.

It’s hard to imagine a man of Jackson’s stature doing wage-paying labor as a stevedore. And, in fact, he may not have, according to multiple Local 333 members who spoke on the condition that their names not be used, for fear of retribution. Instead, they say it’s common knowledge on the docks that another man, Anthony James Carroll, worked in Jackson’s place—a not uncommon practice known as “covering” (“Clocked,” Mobtown Beat, Oct. 6). To shore up this contention, they share details about a woman who almost married Carroll, thinking he was Jackson, until the ruse came tumbling down after Carroll’s arrest when driving a stolen car in 2007.

“I don’t know,” Thames says when asked about Carroll standing in as Jackson at the port. “I just know [Carroll] worked down there [as a stevedore] before.”

Jackson did not respond to a detailed e-mail and could not be reached by phone. Attempts to reach Carroll, who court records indicate is now in South Carolina, were unsuccessful. The phone number he gave officials when he signed probation papers in October for a recent theft conviction is no longer active.

Thames is also aware that Local 333 member Milton Tillman Jr.—a politically influential bail-bondsman and real estate investor with two prior federal convictions for attempted bribery and tax evasion—was indicted by a federal grand jury early this year. Some of the charges against Tillman involve covering, alleging he was paid port wages for shifts he did not work. Tillman’s reputation as a drug-world figure was exploited in a federal courtroom in 2002, when since-deceased Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Luna, while prosecuting a case involving the 2000 shooting of Tillman’s son, called him “one of the most notorious drug dealers in Baltimore City history” (“Grave Accusations,” Mobtown Beat, April 23, 2008).

Tillman and Jackson are arguably two of the most enduring names in the modern annals of Baltimore crime. And both are members of Local 333.

In addition to McKenzie, Jackson, and Tillman, Thames says he knows about the federal fraud convictions in September of three port timekeepers for covering. The case against the timekeepers, who are members of Local 953 and track dockworkers’ hours on behalf of employers, grew out of the federal investigation into Tillman’s conduct on the waterfront (“Collateral Catch,” Mobtown Beat, March 31).

Asked about the investigations and the upcoming elections, Thames says, “I don’t really have no recommendations. As far as Rocky and all them, all I know is what you know.”

The conversation with Thames occurred on Nov. 12 in a hallway outside a courtroom at the U.S. District Court in Baltimore. Thames, whose street name is “Gotti,” had just pleaded not guilty to an indictment accusing him of being a cocaine dealer. According to the charging papers, on Sept. 1 law enforcers descended on Thames’ Essex residence armed with a search warrant. The search turned up about five ounces of cocaine, about $5,000, two digital scales, and two blocks of mannite, often used as a cutting agent for illegal drugs.

Thames’ circumstances—along with convicted criminals Tillman and Jackson being Local 333 members and union president McKenzie’s hazy criminal charge—beg questions. Does Local 333 draw people with criminal pasts or presents? And if so, why? Thames answers as best he can, saying, “I don’t know.” Attempts at follow-up interviews were unsuccessful.

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice in New York filed a civil racketeering lawsuit against the national ILA. The government calls its target “the Waterfront Enterprise,” and says it is comprised of ILA leaders and members and associates of the Genovese and Gambino organized-crime families. Among the dozens of named defendants in the case are two Baltimoreans: Richard Hughes, the ILA’s president, who is the longtime business agent for Local 953 in Baltimore; and Horace Alston, a Local 333 member who serves as an ILA vice president in New York.

The purpose of the litigation, the federal attorneys wrote in a 2008 motion, is “to eradicate the pervasive and long-enduring Waterfront racketeering that has deprived” the ILA’s “honest membership,” the “innocent beneficiaries” of its pension and welfare funds, and businesses that use ILA labor “of rights and property for decades.”

Last week, the ILA’s problems in New York and New Jersey were put under a spotlight by the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, the watchdog agency that polices port labor practices there. According to news reports, testimony revealed that an ILA shop steward makes $400,000 a year logging 168 hours of work each week, an ILA timekeeper earned about $462,000 in 2009 by getting paid for 25-hour workdays, and a cargo checker with mob ties had a no-show job. The hearings seek to reveal how irrational labor practices drive up port costs and create conditions ripe for organized crime to have a say over how billions of dollars worth of cargo is moved through New York Harbor each year.

The words “Baltimore,” “Maryland,” or “Local 333” do not appear in the federal case, which focuses on conduct alleged—or in many cases proven—to have occurred in New York, New Jersey, and Florida. Nonetheless, the ongoing, slow-moving litigation casts a pall over the ILA as a whole, lending credence to the possibility that something about its institutional culture attracts, or perhaps even welcomes, criminal elements.

People like to say that Baltimore doesn’t have organized crime; instead, it has disorganized crime. There aren’t any Gambinos or Genoveses to infiltrate the ILA here in Mobtown, calling the shots about how cargo gets moved. Instead, there are run-of-the-mill, disorganized criminals. An analysis of the Local 333 membership roster bears this out.

Local 333 isn’t packed with people who have bribery, extortion, racketeering, kickback, and public corruption backgrounds. Instead, the records of many Local 333 members reflect the core criminality of Baltimore: drugs, violence, and property crime. At least a fifth of its membership consists of serious felons.

City Paper used online court records to determine that out of the 918 distinct port identification numbers issued to ILA members through Local 333, according to its roster in mid-October, 272 of them are held by presumably honest workers who have never been charged with a crime in Maryland in their adult lives. Thus, at least 29 percent of the membership is untainted by any criminal accusations at all, based on available information.

The number of completely upstanding members is likely greater, because, in the case of another 267 members, City Paperwas unable to ascertain whether or not they’ve ever had criminal charges filed against them in Maryland: Either their names were too common to match up with available information in the court records, or someone with charges or convictions on the record shared their name, but available information was insufficient to reach any definite conclusions. Of these 267, it is unknown if they’ve ever been charged with a crime, charged but not convicted, or found guilty. This group comprises another 29 percent of Local 333’s membership.

That leaves at least 379 members, or 41 percent of the membership, who are confirmed to have been accused of criminal wrongdoing in Free State courts at some point in their adult lives—though this number, too, is likely to be higher, given the 30 percent of members with undetermined backgrounds.

Of these 379 members, 219—almost a quarter of the union membership—have been convicted. By removing from the list of convicts those who were ruled guilty only of relatively minor charges—things like traffic offenses, cable-television fraud, open container, disorderly conduct, housing violations, leaving the scene of an accident, etc.—the list is whittled down to 194 members with serious criminal backgrounds, more than one-fifth of Local 333’s roster.

So far this year, 21 members of Local 333 have been convicted of serious crimes. All but one of them have prior convictions. Their 2010 convictions include: armed robbery, possession with intent to distribute drugs, drug dealing, attempted drug dealing, drug possession (five counts), firearms (three counts), sex offense, escape, theft (two counts), and assault (three counts).

One member, who was convicted this year of escape and drug possession, already had 10 convictions dating back to the mid-’90s for such crimes as drug dealing, battery, firearms, robbery, and car theft. Another, who was convicted this year of theft, also has an open drug-possession charge and has been convicted previously of drug-dealing crimes in 2004, 1997, and 1996. On average, before getting convicted this year, this group’s number of prior guilty findings is three, and three of this year’s convicts were first found guilty of a serious crime in 1993.

In 2009, 19 members were convicted of serious crimes. Six of them were subsequently convicted of other crimes in 2010, or currently face open charges. Their 2009 convictions include: assault (three counts, including one for assaulting a correctional officer), theft (four counts), possession with intent to distribute drugs (two counts), drug dealing, drug possession (five counts), driving while intoxicated (two counts), and escape (two counts). All but two of them have prior convictions on their records and, on average, this group, like 2010’s, had three prior convictions. The member convicted of assaulting a prison guard has drug-dealing and firearms convictions going back to 1995, while another, convicted of three counts of theft in 2009, has drug dealing and assault convictions going back to 1996, and faces new drug-possession charges this year.

Thus, the group of Local 333 members convicted recently of serious crimes consists almost entirely of repeat offenders, and several have records that make them appear to be career criminals. Being a Local 333 member, with access to good wages working as a stevedore, does not seem to have solved the recidivism problem for them.

It is possible that many of those with serious convictions in their past have put their criminal behavior behind them, with the aid of their well-paying jobs at the port. Of the 98 members of Local 333 who had serious criminal convictions in 1995 or before, 40 have never been convicted of a crime again (though one of them was recently arrested for drug possession, which triggered an outstanding drug-dealing warrant from 22 years ago). That’s a powerful statement about the rehabilitative effects of a good job. Among the remaining old-school felons, the picture is rather dismal.

These 58 aging criminals, on average, have been convicted three additional times since 1995. Eleven of them have five or more new convictions since then, including for: theft (13 counts), drug possession (21 counts), possession with intent to distribute drugs (six counts), drug dealing (three counts), assault (10 counts), robbery (two counts), firearms (two counts), deadly weapon with intent to injure, conspiracy (two counts), violating protective orders (four counts), and 16 probation violations. The other 47 members, who have one to four convictions since 1995, display a similar laundry list of bad or dangerous conduct: assault (11 counts), firearms (three counts), drug dealing (seven counts), possession with intent to distribute drugs (14 counts), drug possession (20 counts), and theft (nine counts)

In addition to the 58 members who appear to be career criminals and the 38 members convicted of crimes since 2009, nearly all with prior convictions, there are 23 members of the local who currently face open charges and are awaiting trial. They are accused of such crimes as arson threat, false imprisonment, attempted kidnapping, assault (seven counts), sex offense, felon in possession of a firearm, possession with intent to distribute drugs (two counts), drug possession (nine counts), selling counterfeit goods, burglary (three counts), driving while intoxicated (two counts), and violating a protective order.

While Local 333 has more than its fair share of felons, new, old, or soon-to-be-again, it also boasts a high number of productive members of society who either have never demonstrated a criminal disposition, or shed their criminal lifestyles long ago. Whether or not these good people make up the union’s majority is hard to say, but they might. And the upcoming elections offer them the chance to control the local’s destiny.

When visited at his fundraiser at Kenneth Jackson’s Eldorado strip club on Nov. 15, Riker “Rocky” McKenzie declined to discuss his candidacy for president—or anything at all, for that matter. He refused to answer questions and said he was not interested in receiving a follow-up call to try to change his mind about being interviewed.

McKenzie’s opponent, John Blom, wasn’t eager to talk either when reached by phone a few days later. He was unhappy because a rumor had been making the rounds that he’d sicced City Paper on McKenzie, which was not the case. But Blom agreed to answer questions, though he was far from pleased with the prospect that his union would be portrayed as a den of thieves, drug dealers, and other ne’er-do-wells.

The union’s problems, Blom says, are not due to criminal elements in its midst, but instead to “disarray” and “infighting” that are detracting from its ability to defend workers from employers’ never-ending quests for labor-contract concessions.

“I was originally planning on retiring this year,” says Blom, who has been a member of Local 333 since 1977, “but I don’t want to leave with it in such a mess as it is in right now.” He says “there’s an incredible amount of infighting involving Mr. McKenzie,” and it’s gotten so bad that “people won’t work together. It’s pretty brutal, to the point of being, as far as I’m concerned, pretty dysfunctional.” He explains that “the infighting is making us ineffective when the companies are trying to wrest concessions from the workers,” but is circumspect when it comes to the details of what’s prompting dissension in the ranks.

“It’s all kinds of stuff,” he says, “kind of in-the-family stuff, so I don’t want to go into it. But it needs to stop in order for us to be an effective organization. I’m going to take a crack at making things better. I believe I can be a unifying force. I think I’m pretty well perceived as being a fair person.”

As for the contention, based on the roster analysis, that the local appears to have been infiltrated by active criminals, Blom believes the data City Paper turned up “pretty much matches up with the population of Baltimore City. Statistically, I don’t think that’s unusual,” he says of the high proportion of ex-cons, recent convicts, and recently accused people among Local 333’s membership. “We incarcerate people at a far greater rate than any other country in the world,” he points out.

Blom, who is one of the local’s many members without a trace of criminal blemish in his background, concedes that the local may have attracted some who want to be members just so “they can tell a judge, ‘Yeah, I work there, and I’ve worked there for five years,’ even though maybe they haven’t worked a shift in five years.”

Kenneth Jackson and Milton Tillman Jr., who both have legitimate business incomes, presumably don’t have to worry about explaining where their money comes from. Asked what advantage a union stevedoring job—especially one that they may not work—provides Jackson and Tillman, Blom says, “I don’t have a clue. That’s beyond my payscale.”

Blom adds, “I don’t even know who the Jackson guy is. ” Of Tillman, he says, “I recognized by sight the guy who said he was Tillman” while working at the docks, “and all of the sudden, he disappeared.”

Meanwhile, Blom is banking on winning the Dec. 3 election for Local 333 president so he can work to make the union’s problems disappear too.

Hot Grease

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Nov. 6, 2013

On normal shifts working the mean streets of Baltimore’s northwest police district, officer Maunda Williams catches people engaged in typical Mobtown crimes, like shooting people. But just after midnight on Oct. 18, 2012, Williams’ shift started with something oddly amiss, right before his crime-keen eyes. It was going down right next door to the police station, at the Roost, the beautifully retro drive-in eatery that is far-famed for its deep-fried fare, especially its delectable lake trout.

Long lines of fried-food connoisseurs regularly form at the Roost, so its fryers work overtime, needing fresh oil on a regular basis-and producing huge volumes of used oil that restaurants like the Roost sell to companies that recycle it into animal feed or biofuels. That night, Williams had reason to suspect the Roost’s prodigious quantities of old fryer fat were about to go somewhere they shouldn’t, which would rob revenue from both the Roost and its used-oil recycler.

Williams, after returning to his personal vehicle to retrieve some items he needed for his shift, “observed a white Freightliner truck with a green tank on the back” as it entered the Roost’s property, he wrote in court records. Williams “began to observe the actions of the truck driver in the rear of the restaurant” as the man “extended a long blue hose” from “a vacuum pumper type of tank on the rear of his truck” to two 300-gallon tanks “that are kept in the rear of the location to store the used cooking oil of the Roost.”

Williams knew a thing or two about the used fryer-fat market-more than, say, a casual fan of The Simpsons, which in 1998 ran an episode, “Lard of the Dance,” in which Homer and Bart try haplessly to enter the grease-theft racket.

“This used oil is very valuable,” Williams wrote, “and is often specifically targeted by thieves who have the proper trucks and pumper equipment needed to syphon this used oil,” which is “then sold to recycling companies and is worth approximately $3.00 per gallon.”

The two tanks, Williams pointed out, bore signs announcing them as “the property of Valley Proteins, Inc.,” yet “this truck did not bear any markings or company information,” which “struck me as odd,” since “I have seen these types of vacuum trucks in the past and have always observed the recycling company information to be clearly displayed.”

Williams “decided to approach and investigate further.” After returning to his patrol car and driving next door to the Roost, he “asked the driver/operator if he was authorized to collect this used oil,” the court records state. When confronted, the driver, Anthony Lamont Fitzgerald, explained that “he was a subcontractor for Valley Proteins” and, as proof, showed Williams a black binder that “contained detailed listings of restaurant used oil collection locations from across” Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia.

Williams was not impressed. He called Valley Proteins, using the phone number displayed on the Roost’s tanks, and reached Marcus Singletary, described in the court records as “the transport manager who is in charge of the used oil collections for this region.” Singletary explained that “his company does not employ any subcontractors and no one other than his employed drivers are authorized to collect used oil from their storage tanks.”

Since Fitzgerald isn’t a Valley Proteins employee, Singletary confirmed what Williams suspected: “If he’s taking oil from our tanks,” Singletary said, “then he’s stealing from my company.”

Busted-and not for the first time, nor the last. This was the second of three grease-theft cases brought against Fitzgerald since 2011. He got suspended prison sentences and probation for the first two, and is currently facing fresh charges in Baltimore County.

Fitzgerald should count his lucky stars that it was the lightly punitive local authorities that brought the boom down on him. It could be much, much worse. As accused grease thieves in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island have learned over the past year, more potent law enforcers are on the case: the serious hardasses working for the U.S. Department of Justice.

Though used cooking oil is often stored outside, next to restaurants’ garbage Dumpsters, it is not waste. It is “yellow gold,” as Homer calls it. Thanks to the efforts of Valley Proteins and other well-heeled interests that lawfully collect used cooking oil for processing and resale, pilfering it is now being prosecuted at the federal level-and if convicted, those charged so far are facing as much as 15 years in federal prison and a $500,000 fine.

“Grease thieves are huge,” says Neil Gagnon, Valley Proteins’ district manager, whose bailiwick includes its Baltimore plant in Curtis Bay. Formed in 1949 and headquartered in Winchester, Va., the company is one of the bigger players in the rendering industry, an ancient trade that cooks, cleans, and separates the leftovers of food production to make raw materials for a myriad of products, from biofuels and animal feed to paint and cosmetics.

Back in 1995, Gagnon took City Paper on a tour of Valley Proteins’ Baltimore plant, one of 15 the company operates in states from New York to Florida. Located in Curtis Bay on the banks of Cabin Branch, the plant’s grinders, cookers, and centrifuges process millions of pounds of offal and restaurant grease each year, separating the liquid fats from the solid proteins. The fats are rendered into high-end tallows and lesser-valued “yellow grease,” while the proteins become meat-and-bone meal, the core ingredient of animal feed.

Restaurants used to pay renderers to haul away their used oil. That changed in the mid-2000s-Gagnon pegs it to about 2005 or 2006-as rising fuel prices prompted increasing demand for biofuels that can be used in petroleum diesel vehicles. As a result, restaurants’ waste oil has become a hot commodity, so renderers and biofuel producers pay restaurants about $1 per gallon for it-sometimes up to $2 per gallon-and then turn a tidy profit by processing and reselling it at higher margins.

At Baltimore Biodiesel Cooperative, which has fueling stations at the Mill Valley General Store in Remington and at Merriweather Post Pavilion, members can purchase biodiesel currently for $3.75 to $4.50 per gallon, according to its website. Yellow grease, meanwhile, has been going for between $2 and $3 per gallon, according to market surveys. So every gallon of grease stolen is one less gallon that renderers and biofuel producers can buy, taking a bite out of their profits.

“It’s such an issue that we have a full-time lawyer on it, to help deal with the millions of pounds that grease thieves steal from us on a weekly basis,” Gagnon explains, adding that the Baltimore/Washington, D.C./Philadelphia area “is the hardest hit for our company,” though “it’s a nationwide issue.”

That lawyer, Charles Gittins, says that “across our company, we estimate that we lost over $5 million last year to grease theft. It’s serious money.”

Gittins says “my job is basically to try to educate law enforcement” about grease theft, “track the problem,” and “hire investigators to identify the loci of big theft.” He was hired by Valley Proteins in May 2012 after leaving a long and notable career as a military-justice defense attorney for those accused in some of the most notable military scandals in memory, from the Navy’s Tailhook sex scandal to the torture of Abu Ghraib prisoners and the Haditha massacre of unarmed civilians in Iraq. So Gittins is no stranger to taking on big adversaries.

In joining Valley Proteins’ team, Gittins signed on with an outfit with some serious industry clout. The company’s president, Gerald F. Smith Jr., chairs the National Renderers Association (NRA), the industry’s alliance of 51 companies that operate more than 205 rendering plants in North America, according to its website. The NRA has been taking grease theft very seriously, including the creation of a Grease Theft Task Force that Gittins has joined.

Earlier this year, the NRA published a “Restaurant Grease Theft Backgrounder,” which puts some numbers on the industry-wide scope of the problem. From 2005 to 2012, the number of grease-theft incidents reported increased 150 percent to nearly 6,000, while the number of criminal charges filed jumped from 12 in 2005 to 188 in 2012. An industry survey found that the volume of grease stolen annually stands at about 8 percent of the total collected-an amount valued at nearly $40 million in lost revenue. The tanks and stout locks that are meant to prevent theft often get damaged during the crimes, adding an additional loss of around $3.26 million per year.

Given those eye-popping loss numbers, it’s no wonder the NRA and Valley Proteins took the offensive. A key moment occurred in November 2012, when the NRA hired the Freeh Group, a consulting firm headed by former FBI director Louis Freeh, to meet with senior DOJ and FBI officials in Washington. As Gittins explained it in an article in the October issue of NRA’s magazine, Render, the purpose was “to educate them on the magnitude of the grease theft problem in the rendering industry and the collateral criminal activity that accompanies the individual thefts, including interstate transport of stolen grease, money laundering, and tax evasion.”

Based on what’s been happening since, hiring the Freeh Group appears to have been a smart move. Grease thieves have definitely been feeling the pain from the feds.

“Actually, I don’t do the biodiesel,” says Richard Arturo Figueroa of Hunt Valley. He’s talking on his cellphone while driving, and there’s a lot of loud noise in the background, like what a big truck might make, but he understands he’s talking to a City Paper reporter. “I just collect the waste vegetable oil, that’s all we do. We pick it up from restaurants and have a facility where we process it.”

Is that the place in Middle River? “Not anymore, that’s somebody else.” Then, only about a minute into the conversation, he explains that he’s approaching a toll booth and really should get off the phone, and maybe call back in an hour.

Figueroa seems not to know that he and his business-Rafxcel Services-are in the middle of a federal grease-theft investigation in Maryland that has resulted in charges and a guilty plea from Ahmad Qaabid Abdul-Rahim, the 37-year-old owner of a College Park grease-collection company called Waste Not Inc. If Figueroa does know he’s squarely in the middle of this ongoing probe, he’s being mighty coy about it.

According to Rahim’s plea agreement, Waste Not in 2011 had 650 legitimate contracts to collect waste vegetable oil (WVO) from restaurants, but Rahim also stole grease-and “would take both his legitimate WVO and the stolen WVO to R.F.’s collection facility” at 1701 Leland Ave. in Middle River. Once at the facility, the WVO “would be sold to a fuel company located in Pennsylvania, among others,” the plea agreement states, and “the Pennsylvania fuel company would send trucks to” the Middle River warehouse, “load the WVO, and transport it back to the fuel company’s location in Pennsylvania.”

Money from the sales went into bank accounts held by Figueroa’s company, Rafxcel Services-and generated a ton of revenue: $1,575,982 between Jan. 18, 2012 and Sept. 20, 2012, according to Rahim’s plea agreement, which says that Waste Not’s take from this arrangement was $361,356 for 180,678 gallons of WVO-an even $2 per gallon.

But here’s the rub: Rahim sold the stolen WVO at a marked-down price of $1.05 per gallon, according to the plea agreement, which means his legitimate WVO-86,500 gallons of it-sold for $3.03 per gallon.

Thus, Rafxcel Services paid about two-thirds less for stolen grease than for legitimate grease.

This is why Gittins says he wishes law enforcers would crack down on grease buyers who are only too happy to accept low prices with a wink and a nod, and thus enable the thieves to convert their quarry to cash.

“The thieves are selling it well under market,” Gittins says, “so the buyers should be on notice.”

Steve Blankenship, the logistics manager in the Washington, D.C. region for Greenlight Biofuels-which, like Valley Proteins, has been working hard to get grease thieves caught and prosecuted-adds that “that’s the problem, the buyers aren’t really interested in what the source is. And the problem is not going to solve itself without some sort of regulation of the buyers, to make sure it’s coming from legitimate sources.”

Rafxcel Services was not alone at the Middle River warehouse. Also there was a company called Green Initiative Global (GIG), a Delaware concern that advertises in Manhattan as a used-restaurant-oil collector. GIG’s resident agent in Maryland, Anthony Jean Claude, registered in February with the U.S. Department of Transportation as a carrier of “WVO Waste Vegetable Oil” out of the same Leland Avenue address as Rafxcel Services’ Middle River warehouse.

Claude has another Maryland company, MDGB (short for Maryland Green BioFuel), based out of an Arbutus address it shares with a company called Parking Management Enforcement, which does business as PME Towing-an outfit also mentioned in Rahim’s plea agreement. Corporate records show Rahim and Claude formed Parking Management Enforcement in 2006.

After several years operating PME as a towing business, in May 2010 “A.C. suggested that he and Rahim could make money stealing WVO from restaurants in Maryland and Virginia and selling it to out-of-state oil companies,” Rahim’s plea agreement states. So the two did just that, “using Rahim’s flatbed tow truck from PME towing.” From May to October 2010, the plea agreement states, they “simply stole the WVO using the flatbed truck and a tank and mechanical pump.”

After Rahim started Waste Not, he obtained a proper vacuum-pumper truck, got legitimate grease-collection contracts, and hired a driver, referred to in the plea agreement as “J.L.,” who suggested they use the truck not only to service the contracts but also to steal WVO from other locations. From October 2011 until September 2012, J.L. would take the truck to Northern Virginia “to collect stolen WVO,” the plea agreement states, and deliver it to the Middle River facility, where “A.C. used this warehouse to collect the stolen WVO, process it, and store it” until arranging for “the refined WVO to be sold to a fuel company located in Pennsylvania, among others.”

Attempts to reach Claude at numerous phone numbers in the Baltimore area, Washington, D.C., and Florida-where in 2009 and 2010 he was a director of a now-defunct Miami company called MD Biodiesel Corporation-were fruitless.

GIG and Rafxcel in July were sued by a Hawkins Point company, BakerCorp, which leases heavy-duty tanks, pumps, and filtration systems. BakerCorp’s lawyer, Mark Lynch, says the company “leased grease collection tanks to Rafxcel,” and successfully sued for their return. Lynch says grease collection is a “popular use” of BakerCorp’s leased tanks, stressing that “BakerCorp had absolutely no idea that the tanks were going to be used potentially for any illegal purpose.”

It takes a lot of money to lease a grease-collection tank from BakerCorp, according to Blankenship. “They’re not cheap,” he says, adding that “if you have the means to lease one, you’re in it big-time.”

Figueroa and Claude have not been charged publicly with any crime related to the Rahim investigation-though Rahim was charged on Aug. 27 with interstate transportation of stolen goods in Maryland U.S. District Court and entered his guilty plea on Sept. 23. He’s scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 3.

A call back to Figueroa at the appointed time, an hour after he talked on his phone while driving, went to voicemail. He never returned the call. A quick Google search turns up the likely location of the new facility he referred to in the earlier call: Rafxcel Services is now at 8213 Rosebank Ave. in Dundalk, on the banks of Back River.

On Aug. 15, a little less than two weeks before Rahim’s grease-theft charges were filed in Maryland, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia issued a press release: “Philadelphia Man Charged with Stealing Cooking Oil.”

That’s a quaint headline in the realm of federal law-enforcement press releases, which usually announce milestones in efforts to take down more sinister-sounding criminals like drug kingpins, child pornographers, or big-time financial fraudsters.

But the recent federal grease-theft crackdown has meant more such publicity coming out of law enforcers’ PR teams. The Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office press release announcing Rahim’s case was titled “Owner of Waste Collection Business Pleads Guilty to Transporting Stolen Waste Vegetable Oil.” An even wordier one was issued by the Rhode Island U.S. Attorney’s Office last December: “Three Indicted in Alleged Theft of Used Cooking Oil From Hundreds of Massachusetts and Rhode Island Restaurants.”

The fact that these press releases are being written at all, though, is evidence of progress for Valley Proteins, Greenlight Biofuels, and other big players in the kitchen-grease collection business. It means their concerns are prompting tangible action at the highest levels of national law enforcement, and the resulting publicity is spreading the word about the grease-theft phenomenon.

The Rhode Island case is replete with an inside snitch, thousands of gallons of allegedly stolen oil transported in approximately 50,000-pound loads, an attempt to camouflage the alleged theft operation by outfitting a pickup truck with a camper cap and a quiet pump, and a mobster-probing FBI agent interviewing grease buyers.

Three men were indicted: brothers Andrew and Bruce Jeremiah-the owners and operators of three companies, Jeremiah Motors Corp., Removal Services, and Green Energy, who both have prior drug-conspiracy convictions-and one of their truck drivers, Anthony Simone Sr., also a drug convict, who cooperated with the FBI in the final stages of the investigation and pleaded guilty in the resulting indictment. The Jeremiah brothers’ trial is scheduled to begin on Nov. 5, and if convicted, they face possible 15-year prison sentences and $500,000 fines.

The case records allege that starting in January 2012, a New Hampshire trucking company, Abenaqui Carriers, delivered 806,740 pounds-almost 110,000 gallons-of used cooking oil from the Jeremiahs’ operation to a New Hampshire biodiesel producer, AMENICO, which is short for American Energy Independence Company. Between Jan. 31, 2011 and Nov. 5, 2012, the court records show, AMENICO paid the Jeremiahs’ business Removal Services $429,268.07 for deliveries of used cooking oil.

As part of the ongoing Jeremiah investigation, FBI agent Jeffrey Cady-a veteran of taking down New England mobsters-in May interviewed two companies that buy unrefined used restaurant oil to establish the going price per gallon, according to court records. Mopac, a rendering company in Souderton, Pa., was willing to pay approximately $1.75 per gallon, and EnviroTek USA, a biodiesel producer in Tewksbury, Mass., would pay $2 gallon if “there was a large volume of oil being sold.”

The Jeremiah case also has an interesting tidbit about tactics in the grease-theft world intended to lessen the attention unmarked pumper trucks attract. Andrew Jeremiah allegedly wanted the collection operation to be more “mysterious” so they could “rob things . . . right in the [expletive] daytime,” court records state. To that end, he allegedly took “several steps towards camouflaging his Dodge pickup truck,” including “attempting to outfit it with a low profile oil tank, a quiet pump with a custom muffler, and a camper cap” without windows.

The Philadelphia case is against Bernard Corbin, whose indictment remained under seal from February until shortly before he was detained in August. His trial date, initially scheduled for October, was recently reset to start in January. He’s accused of setting up a company called Simply Green that “hired employees to travel around the Philadelphia area and steal used cooking oil from storage containers used by restaurants and then bring the cooking oil back to the Simply Green facility,” according to the indictment.

Corbin is also accused of supplying his employees with “bolt cutters to cut open the locks which restaurants used to secure” the waste-oil containers, and “vans containing holding tanks and pumping systems to pump the stolen oil” out of the containers.

The Corbin indictment also describes the fate of Simply Green’s allegedly stolen oil, illustrating the multi-tiered, multi-player, integrated nature of the grease-theft economy. Corbin allegedly “sold the cooking oil to K.D., a cooking oil merchant,” who sold it to “J.K., a broker located in New Jersey,” who sold it to “a New York company named ‘B Green Group,'” who “hired a Minnesota trucking company to drive to Pennsylvania to pick up the stolen oil. After further processing, the oil was shipped around the United States.”

If the feds’ cases against Corbin and the Jeremiah brothers proves the scenarios they’ve alleged, and if the Rahim probe expands from its already admitted complexity, there are many, many players in the grease-theft world who may find themselves in the authorities’ crosshairs.

After all, each of these probes in ongoing, and the available evidence suggests they could travel far and wide.

Valley Proteins’ Gittins knows all about Anthony Fitzgerald, the guy Baltimore police officer Maunda Williams busted at the Roost last fall.

“He came out of our Baltimore plant,” Gittins explains, claiming that “two of our former employees have been out there stealing. We call them ‘the Two Anthonys.'”

The other, Anthony Barner, has not been charged criminally-though Valley Proteins sued him in September 2011, several months after he resigned as one of the company’s truck drivers who picked up used restaurant grease.

“He kept his uniforms, the keys to the locks at the restaurants, [and] the manifest” that listed Valley Proteins grease-collection customers, says Gittins, echoing what the lawsuit claims.

On June 6, 2011, according to the lawsuit, Barner was stopped and ticketed by Rockville police “after he caused a grease spill from a green vacuum truck he was driving on Rockville Pike”-and when this happened, he “was wearing a Valley [Proteins] uniform” and had a Valley Proteins “service manifest” listing the company’s “restaurant customers on Rockville Pike.”

Then, the lawsuit continues, on Aug. 31, 2011, also while wearing a Valley Proteins uniform, Barner went to America’s Best Wings in Randallstown-whose owner confronted him, prompting Barner to leave.

The lawsuit, which was settled after three lawyers for Valley Proteins spent more than a year litigating the case (including relentless efforts to serve Barner), concludes that he “has taken or attempted to take grease” from Valley Proteins customers “while misrepresenting himself” as an employee.

While trying to serve him, the lawyers discovered that in August 2011, Barner started a company in White Marsh called Planet Fuel Recovery-another feel-good corporate name along the lines of others in the picture of the grease-theft probes, like Simply Green, Waste Not, Green Initiative Global, and Green Energy.

Gittins says Valley Proteins got its property back and the lawsuit was dismissed.

Meanwhile, Greenlight Biofuels’ Blankenship says his efforts to make grease thieves feel the pain have started to bear fruit too. The thefts are “so easy to do,” he explains, but by “educating law enforcement on the problem, saying, ‘This is a problem, we need some help,’ it’s starting to get on their radar.”

Blankenship’s optimism is tempered by the scale of the problem, though. “We filed 647 police reports about grease thefts last year,” he explains, “and we’ve filed about 350 so far this year. But I believe theft is not down. It’s unbelievable the number of people out there doing this. The thieves are just getting smarter.”

A short, link-littered history of City Paper’s Black Guerrilla Family coverage

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper in April, 2013

The Black Guerrilla Family (BGF), though long known to be active in Maryland’s prisons and Baltimore’s streets, has suddenly become hot news, with the April 23 announcement of a federal indictment against 25 alleged members, including 13 Maryland correctional officers (COs). But the BGF had already burnished its image in the public’s mind in April 2009, when federal prosecutors announced two indictments against alleged BGF members, including correctional officers.

City Paper jumped on the story, covering the press conference announcing the indictments and the BGF’s ties to a Baltimore bar called Club 410. From that point on, the stories kept rolling – starting with the unnerving news that the BGF had offered $10,000 to anyone who killed people involved in helping to build the case. A series of profiles, dubbed “Family Portraits,” was assembled, spotlighting co-defendants Nelson Arthur Robinson, Rainbow Lee Williams, Randolph Edison, Eric Marcell Brown, Deitra Davenport, Calvin Renard Robinson, and The Black Book (pictured), the BGF’s 122-page self-improvement guide that was subtitled “Empowering Black Families and Communities.” A lengthy feature provided a birds-eye view of the case.

By the fall of 2009, the first guilty pleas were entered, including by two COs, and a few defendants were sentenced, including Marlow Bates, the son of a famous Baltimore gangster. Meanwhile, City Paper discovered an inmate’s federal lawsuit that had unearthed a trove of evidence that Maryland’s prison administrators had turned a blind eye to the long-known problem of gang-tied COs, including the lawsuit’s defendant, Antonia Allison, who the inmate accused of facilitating his brutal beating by a group of gang-members. (Allison is now one of the 13 recently-indicted COs.)

Driving home that the issue was an ongoing problem, a state criminal case was brought against another CO, Lynae Chapman, accused of delivering a cellphone to her unborn child’s father, a BGF member who was in a Baltimore jail awaiting trial on murder charges. Chapman’s case was intriguing, in part because she initially was denied the opportunity to enter a guilty plea. Then, in March 2010, another CO was charged for bringing pot and cellphones into the Baltimore City Detention Center.

Almost exactly a year after the 2009 BGF indictments, prosecutors took another whack at the gang, and this time the focus was on its infiltration of an anti-gang non-profit group. One of the more fascinating defendants was Kimberly McIntosh, a health-care worker with no criminal record who was accused of being at the “epicenter” of the gang’s street-level operations.

Shortly after the 2010 indictment was filed, City Paper ran a lengthy feature examining the issue of corrupt COs, and how the Maryland General Assembly had just passed reforms that would make it harder to discipline them. After the article ran, concerns were elevated as another CO, Alicia Simmons, was charged in the federal BGF probe, when the 2009 and 2010 indictments were rolled into one, big racketeering case, and another inmate gained traction with another federal lawsuit alleging a gang-tied CO facilitated his prison beating.

Finally, in 2012, after covering the courthouse fates of some of the BGF defendants here and there, City Paper ran a lengthy feature about the BGF probe’s impact – which, given recent developments, would seem to have been lacking. Maybe this next round, as it unfolds, will have more lasting repercussions.