Archival Revival: Efforts to salvage the Baltimore City Archives get a boost

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, July 3, 2013

Screen Shot 2019-03-31 at 4.35.34 PM — Robert Schoeberlein, left, and Gerald Roberts with a vintage map of Baltimore.

The Baltimore City Archives (BCA), the repository of city records going back centuries to the local government’s earliest days, is abuzz with the work of about a dozen employees scanning historic documents, cataloging records, and otherwise tending to collections. Yet only one—records administrator Gerald Roberts—is on the city payroll. And while computers sit on tables all over the facility, located just east of Greenmount Avenue off 27th Street, Roberts says the city owns only one of them—and none of the six scanners used to digitize the BCA’s holdings.

Though the city rents the office-and-warehouse space that houses the archives and pays all utilities and other incidental costs, such as cleaning crews, Roberts explains, the Maryland State Archives (MSA)—a state agency headed by Edward Papenfuse, who is set to retire this fall after nearly two generations at the helm of the state’s repository of similar materials—covers the salaries of all other workers and, with the exception of that one computer, owns all the digitization and computer technology at BCA that modern archives management requires.

The resource-sharing arrangement began in 2009, according to city records, when MSA received permission to store some of its Baltimore-related records at the BCA in return for providing the BCA with technological services. The agreement was expanded in 2010, when, in return for $90,000—the equivalent of the salary and benefits of a BCA position that had recently become vacant—the MSA agreed to provide day-to-day management and staffing for the BCA.

On June 26, the Baltimore Board of Estimates approved a new agreement, which, according to city documents, “will consolidate the two previous agreements and extend their terms” for five years, until 2018.

It wasn’t always like this. Until it moved to its current location in 2008, Roberts explains, BCA was located at 2165 Druid Park Drive. There, Roberts says, “there was mold and mildew, due to the nature of the building,” and, according to Robert Schoeberlein, the MSA’s director of special collections, who now helps Roberts run the BCA’s day-to-day operations, there was “plastic over the tops of the stacks because of the roof leaks.”

More colorful descriptions of BCA’s prior facility were published in this spring’s issue of Baltimore Gaslight, the newsletter of the Baltimore City Historical Society. Matthew Crenson, an emeritus Johns Hopkins University professor who’s working on a comprehensive history of Baltimore City’s government, described it as a “dank, leaky, vermin-infested warehouse,” while Garrett Power, an emeritus University of Maryland law professor, wrote that the BCA had fallen into “disuse, disorganization, and decay” as records “had been placed in a leaking, decrepit warehouse that posed a clear and present danger to both the papers themselves and the intrepid researchers who used them.”

On a recent visit to the new location, Seattle University professor Emily Lieb was at BCA, going through housing data for a book she’s writing about the impact of a 1970s-era Baltimore City housing program on the Rosemont neighborhood in West Baltimore. She used to put in long hours at BCA’s Druid Park Drive warehouse, and, while she misses it in some respects, she appreciates the importance of the BCA’s revitalization and modernization at its current location.

“What was really wonderful about working over” at Druid Park Drive, Lieb says, was that “essentially they were open stacks, so I could just poke around and see what I find and just stumble across stuff,” which is “not something I would be able to do in a place managed like every other archive is managed, and like this is now managed. I realize it was not the best way to run an archive for preservation purposes,” she adds, “but, for me, I got a lot done. I was thinking just this morning, What kinds of things am I missing now because I don’t know that they exist and I don’t know to ask for them?”

Lieb says the Druid Park Drive location would get “very, very hot” and “very cold,” and, since she has “an irrational phobia of large insects, I was always a little worried I’d run into them there. But here, they definitely don’t have giant bugs.” She also appreciates that she no longer works alone: “I don’t think I ever saw another person” at Druid Park Drive other than Roberts, she says, “and here, I’ve seen all kinds of people really making use of the stuff, which is great—that’s what it’s for. It’s great that it’s more accessible and that people feel comfortable using it.”

As Roberts and Schoeberlein give a tour of the office and warehouse, they describe some of BCA’s holdings. Behind the office, in the warehouse stacks, Schoeberlein pulls out what he describes as “records that detail the payments and the outreach to widows and children” of Civil War soldiers in Maryland, and part of a “survey of buildings in the 1930s, early 1940s, that were in the path of possible slum clearance, and a lot were pulled down.” He describes a collection of “studio portraits of Baltimore firefighters with their uniforms on” just after the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, and “a series in the 1890s of Russian-Jewish street peddler applications with some demographic information about them.”

Most recently acquired, Roberts says, are “maps laying out where all the storm drains and sanitary systems are under the streets,” as well as “engineers’ field books for sewer connections to houses sometime in the early 1900s” and, Schoeberlein adds, “an aerial survey of Baltimore City from 1927.” Soon, says Roberts, “we’ll be taking in 65 pallets of 40 boxes on each pallet of Law Department files” that date as far back as the 1890s.

“In the past,” Schoeberlein explains, “a city agency might request to have files returned, and it’s troubling because the idea of getting them back or keeping track of them while they’re gone—well, files might not be returned.” Now, says Roberts, “we pull it, scan it, and send it to them as a PDF, and the actual file will never leave here.”

To Roberts, “the situation today—it can’t be improved,” he says. “The tools are here to lay our hand on anything we have, almost immediately. When we were on Druid Park Drive, we didn’t have the computer programs or the computers, so every search we made was on paper and pencil, and then we’d go out and look for it. Now, it’s all right there on the computer, no matter what you want.”

Here’s Mud On Your Robes: The Nose is aware of a long history of racially troublesome neighbors here in the Mobtown region

Published by City Paper, Sept. 11, 2013

The lyrics of Brad Paisley’s country-Western song, “Mud on the Tires,” strike a chord with the Nose: we’re as partial as the next desk-bound yahoo to getting out to the middle of nowhere and spreading a blanket as the sun sets, listening to crickets and watching the stars blink on. And so, apparently, is Team Hell, a Baltimore-based off-road truck-racing outfit that fields its vehicle—a 1966 El Camino body affixed to a 1977 Chevy Blazer frame—at events in the area. Its YouTube video of the near-monster truck’s reconstruction is set to Paisley’s number-one Billboard hit from 2003.

Here’s the rub, though: Team Hell’s driver/owner is Richard Preston, the self-described imperial wizard of the Confederate White Knights, a Rosedale-based Ku Klux Klan group that’s emerged recently to hold protests at Antietam National Battlefield and Gettysburg National Military Park, with some members wearing Klan robes.

No wonder, then, that online photos of Team Hell’s El Camino feature it festooned with a Confederate flag.

The Nose has, over the years, made efforts to keep tabs on Maryland’s “active hate groups,” so dubbed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). As of Sept. 6, the SPLC listed 17 of them in the Free State—but the Confederate White Knights isn’t one of them. Preston’s creation, then, has either been flying under the radar—until suddenly making national news with its protest plans—or is a newly minted Klan group. Either way, the group’s website touts its motto—“Save the land, Join the Klan!”—has photos of a cross burning, and implores members to “always do your duty for the preservation of the white race.”

The Nose is broadly tolerant of our neighbors, no matter how much they may appall us. Team Hell, after all, is not the Confederate White Knights—even if they do share a leader—and is known for its efforts to support cleaning up the degraded water in Bear Creek and other Chesapeake Bay tributaries in our area.

But lest, dear reader, you find this an outlier—that Baltimore, or Maryland for that matter, a state built on tolerance and, in these times, held up as a bastion of political liberalism—be reminded: we have a history of hate too, so don’t be surprised.

Remember: Last year the Human Rights Campaign dubbed Pasadena debt-collections attorney Michael Peroutka, a former Constitution Party presidential candidate and an influential supporter of ultra-conservatives such as Maryland State Del. Donald Dwyer, “an active white supremacist and secessionist sympathizer.”

Remember: In 2009, white supremacist Calvin Lockner and two others savagely beat up an elderly African-American fisherman at Fort Armistead Park, just for kicks.

Remember:In 2009, Annapolitan James von Brunn, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier, opened fire at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., killing security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns.

Remember: In 2003, Highlandtown resident Lovell Wheeler, reportedly a white supremacist and member of the National Alliance hate group, was arrested when police with a search warrant found an arsenal of guns, ammunition, gunpowder, and gun-making machinery in his house.

Remember: In 1991, Hampden’s Robert Poole Middle School was beset with white-supremacist threats thanks to skinhead parents.

Remember:In 1990, a white-supremacist skinhead group was granted a permit to march through Hampden.

Remember: In 1989, five Ku Klux Klan activists were convicted of assault or weapons charges in Baltimore’s federal court.

Remember: In 1988, two Hampden men were convicted of throwing bricks and stones through the windows of a black family, the Boyce-Beys, who’d moved into the neighborhood.

Remember: In 1964, segregationist George Wallace nearly won the Democratic presidential primary in Maryland.

All of which is to say the Nose is aware of a long history of racially troublesome neighbors here in the Mobtown region. Just like the Confederate White Knights, they’re entitled to their views—just not to commit crimes while trying to force them on others. So have a nice protest, Preston, and enjoy getting mud on your tires—just don’t get any on the rest of us.

Arrested Development: Police lied for Baltimore raid warrant to arrest innocent man, lawsuit claims

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Nov. 13, 2013

Close to midnight on Jan. 16, a SWAT team used a battering ram to break down the front door of 4823 Aberdeen Avenue, a rowhouse near Herring Run in Frankford. Inside, they found their man: 19-year-old Kyle Brandon Wills, a suspect in two armed robberies in Howard and Baltimore counties. After two days in jail, Wills made bail in Howard County, but was immediately arrested by Baltimore County police and spent another day locked up there.

Turns out, though, it was the wrong man. What’s more, in order to convince a judge to sign the raid warrant leading to Wills’ arrest, the detectives on the case—Mark Claypoole of Baltimore County and Wade Zufall of Howard County—falsely claimed Wills had recently been arrested with the other suspect in the armed robberies, according to a lawsuit filed Nov. 6 in Baltimore City Circuit Court.

After prosecutors in Howard and Baltimore counties learned of “the terrible mistake that had been made,” the lawsuit explains, the charges against Wills were dropped and another man—Wills’ cousin, Stanley Berry—was charged instead. But the damage wrought by the raid and Wills’ detentions, all based on the detectives’ allegedly false claim, had already been wrought: three days in jail, two strip searches, a required medical intravenous injection, emotional trauma, still-ongoing monthly payments to pay back the bail money, and an arrest record for serious charges in two jurisdictions.

As a result, Wills, his mother, Vickie Wills, and brother Calvin Clifton—the three people present when the SWAT team came through their door—are suing Claypoole, Zufall, and their police forces for false arrest, assault, battery, false imprisonment, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, seeking $75,000 in compensation and another $75,000 in penalties. Their attorney, Charles Curlett says Wills, a 2012 Patterson High School graduate, is employed at University of Maryland Hospital, helping prepare operating rooms for surgery.

“I don’t see how this could be an honest mistake,” says Curlett, adding that the detectives’ allegedly false claim that Wills had been arrested was the “lynchpin of probable cause” in the affidavit that supported the raid. “I think it is a very strong case.”

Howard County prosecutors declined to pursue the charges against Wills on Feb. 13, and two days later his Baltimore County charges were dismissed. The cases against Berry and Michael Elliott Dickey—the man who was originally charged with Wills—remain intact, though. Both pleaded guilty in their Howard County cases, receiving 10-year sentences with five years suspended, and both are scheduled for trial in their Baltimore County cases.

Howard County initially was proud of the detective work in the case, issuing a press release on Jan. 24 announcing the charges against Dickey and Wills—and repeating the detectives’ false assertion that Wills had previously been arrested with Dickey.

“Wills is a known associate of Dickey’s,” the press release states, “who was recently arrested with Dickey for an unrelated incident in another jurisdiction. Surveillance video in both cases show Dickey and Wills together, each wearing the same clothing in both incidents.”

The details of how Claypoole and Zufall pursued the case are spelled out in the lawsuit. The two-county probe was spawned after two men robbed an Exxon gas station in Columbia by throwing hot coffee on the clerk’s face and then taking cash out of the register while brandishing guns. That was on Jan. 5—three days after the exact same tactics were used by two men in an armed robbery of a Quick Mart in Cockeysville.

Dickey’s fingerprints were found on the coffee cup at the Exxon, and it was soon discovered that he’d been arrested the day after the Quick Mart robbery for petty theft at a Walmart store—and at that time had been accompanied by a man who had not been arrested, but who identified himself as “Kyle Wills.” So Claypoole showed the Wal-Mart security officer Wills’ driver’s license photograph, and the security officer confirmed it was the same man who’d been with Dickey during the theft.

At that point, Claypoole and Zufall wanted to raid Wills’ home and arrest him—“but they had a problem,” the lawsuit explains. In order to get a warrant, they “needed to establish a likelihood that Dickey’s friend from Wal-Mart was also Dickey’s accomplice in the coffee robberies,” yet “nothing had been done to reliably confirm that person’s identity.” The security officer’s confirmation was not sufficient—but an arrest would be, since “his identity would have been established through fingerprinting, and they would have been able to rely on the arrest to tie that person to Dickey,” the lawsuit explains.

Absent an actual arrest, Claypoole and Zufall allegedly made one up. “Rather than admit what they did not know,” the lawsuit states, “they misled the court” with the following information that was stated in the raid-warrant affidavit: “Arrested along with Dickey during the Theft at Wal-Mart was the following individual: KYLE BRANDON WILLS BM 507 150 DOB = 9/18/1993.”

“When I saw the affidavit” for the raid warrant and saw the assertion that Wills had been arrested, Curlett recalls, he looked for it on the online court records and couldn’t find it. “‘Where is it?’” he says he asked himself. “‘Why isn’t it here? It is there for the other guy.’”

Not only was Wills not arrested at the Walmart, he wasn’t even there. But, according to the lawsuit, his cousin Berry—a man who was wanted on several open warrants—was, and told the security guard that he was Wills, who has no prior criminal record.

Based on the detectives’ “perjured testimony,” the lawsuit continues, a no-knock warrant was issued for the Wills home and a SWAT team “broke through the door of the suspect’s Baltimore City home and restrained his family at gunpoint and in handcuffs while they searched the house.”

Given that anyone, including a judge who’s considering signing a warrant, can check online to see if someone’s been charged with a crime, it seems a risky proposition for detectives to lie about such a thing. Curlett speculates that such “hubris may be borne of the unlikelihood that anybody’s going to challenge” the information. “So many cases plead out,” he continues, “the risk of airing dirty laundry like this is slim.”

With the Wills’ lawsuit, though, Claypoole and Zufall have run headlong into that risk.

Party Crasher: Clean-water group’s failed legal effort to help oversee Baltimore’s sewage-repair plan exposes lax enforcement

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Oct. 30, 2013

After years of watching state and federal regulators fail to enforce violations of Baltimore City’s 11-year-old agreement to fix its leaking sewer system, Blue Water Baltimore (BWB) this summer “went forward and took action,” says the clean-water group’s executive director, Halle Van der Gaag. But BWB’s bold step—litigating to become an intervening party in the 2002 lawsuit that crafted the “consent decree” that dictates how the city is to spend nearly $1 billion to overhaul its sewers—failed on Oct. 1.

That’s when U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz denied BWB’s motion to intervene, leaving intact the existing roster of parties: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE), the plaintiffs who alleged the city was committing chronic violations of the federal Clean Water Act, and the defendant, Baltimore City, which avoided massive fines and legal costs by accepting the terms of the consent decree—but, as a result, had to send water and wastewater fees on users soaring in order to fund the required upgrades.

The system, though, remains rife with leaks and overflows—a point that BWB drove home in its legal filings, which also exposed seemingly lax enforcement by EPA and MDE for apparent violations of the consent decree.

In one instance, Baltimore City estimated that a sewage overflow on Herring Run last fall amounted to 8,100 gallons—versus the 800,000- to 1,000,000-gallon estimate calculated by BWB volunteer Thayer Young, an environmental engineer who lives nearby the spill and is an expert in tracking sewage contamination. What’s more, the city’s official report of the leak attributed it to wet weather from Superstorm Sandy, but Young observed the leak already occurring before the storm hit Baltimore.

“I believe that the City of Baltimore highly underestimated the flow rate and total sewage overflow volume” of this “sewage overflow incident,” Young concluded in an affidavit attached to BWB’s recent court filings. “Furthermore,” he added,” although Super Storm Sandy clearly exacerbated” the incident, “the overflow actually began at least 12 hours before the storm showed an impact” on the Herring Run’s water levels.

The discrepancy in the estimated amounts of leaked sewage is important not only because of public-health and environmental concerns arising from such a massive release into a Baltimore stream, but because the City of Baltimore, under the consent decree, is required to pay fines based on the amount of sewage it estimates was released. In this case, the city’s estimate was two orders of magnitude lower than Young’s, which was based on meticulous observations and technically proficient calculations based on video recordings and engineering concepts.

Yet, according to David Flores, BWB’s longtime water-quality manager who was recently appointed as Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper—a BWB program that seeks to apply the law to attain cleaner water—“there hasn’t been any enforcement” by MDE or EPA over this incident.

In its legal filings, BWB’s attorneys wrote that the city’s estimate of the amount leaked during the incident is tantamount “to the flow rate from a standard drinking water fountain”—which photos of the leaking sewer give lie to—and that the city “has not provided any correction of its inaccurate volume estimates or any explanation as to how those estimates could be so far off the mark.”

When CP asked the two agencies and the city’s Department of Public Works (DPW) about this, EPA and DPW each provided a copy of an 80-page document prepared in May in response to BWB’s numerous concerns about ongoing sewer-related problems under the consent decree. On page nine, the document explains what was done: Last November, an inspection revealed “roots and debris” had clogged the sewer line, so it was cleaned and the manhole was rebuilt.

“It is believed that all of the problems causing previous overflows at this location have been resolved,” the document concludes—without addressing at all the seriously low-balled estimate of the size of the overflow.

“EPA understands that sewage discharges in Baltimore are a serious problem and we have been working with the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore to curtail them,” EPA spokesperson David Sternberg writes in an email to City Paper, adding that “sanitary sewer overflows are being addressed within the context of the 2002 federal consent decree.”

But BWB’s court filings detailed numerous instances of apparent consent-decree violations by the city that appear not to have prompted any regulatory response by EPA or MDE. They included continuous leaks from a sewage structure and large periodic sewage overflows along the Jones Falls near the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, a stretch of the river where a heavily used pedestrian and bike path is located; evidence of unreported overflows from the Jones Falls Pumping Station in Hampden; a June 2012 week-long sewage discharge into the harbor, of unknown origin; repeated sewage overflows on South Clinton Street in Canton; and failures to adequately clean up or warn the public of sewage contamination after overflows occur.

The 80-page document that EPA and DPW provided to City Paper addresses most of the issues BWB raised—but it does not indicate that any penalties or other enforcement action was taken by federal and state regulators as a result. It merely explains the problems and how they are being addressed.

After helping to document all of these problems, Flores has been disappointed by the official response. “We documented all the violations that we observed,” he says, and put them “in a written report to EPA and MDE, and rather than investigate and enforce them, they requested a response from Baltimore City, which was inadequate.”

Van der Gaag says she’s “disappointed” and “frustrated” that Motz denied BWB’s attempt to intervene in the consent decree, because having a citizen group at the table would help “ensure accountability” in the sewer-upgrade process. So far, she points out, “hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent with very little outcome that the water quality is getting better.”

Cat Crusader: “Mike the cat guy” has made befriending felines his mission

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Aug. 29, 2012

Ewan Meiklejohn frequents the Park Heights corridor, favoring the alleys and back streets. “Gran-be-bes! Gran-be-bes!” he calls out loudly as he approaches his spots, the same places he goes nearly every day as he plies his trade. In short order, desperate souls emerge from abandoned houses, stepping into debris-covered lots, eager to see him coming.

The call-and-response is not unlike what plays out over much of this stretch of drug war-torn Baltimore, where corner boys sling heroin and cocaine, calling out the brand names of the day’s mind-altering products, doing their parts in an enormous underground economy.

But Meiklejohn, who goes by the nickname “Mike,” is not selling heroin or cocaine. He’s giving away food and water. His customers aren’t junkies; they are cats and kittens. Thus, many who are aware of his mission in life simply know him as “Mike the cat guy.”

Meiklejohn makes 27 to 30 stops nearly every day, he says, setting out about 25 pounds of cat food and 15 to 20 gallons of water in various containers around the trash-strewn properties the cats have colonized. On a typical day, he starts at eight in the morning and gets home around 2 P.M., he says. After happily taking City Paper’s offer to drive him on his route on a recent morning, the whole outing took about three hours.

He’s been doing this since he came to Baltimore, in 1997, in between working odd jobs as a shop clerk, laundromat attendant, and cleaner for a variety of Park Heights businesses, in addition to doing laundry for a network of nearby clients. His cat-feeding capabilities have been greatly aided in the past year, though, since a community of animal lovers stepped up to help him out.

“I’m in all these alleys all the time,” Meiklejohn says. “When I came to America and I saw these dogs and cats that were being abused,” he continues, “I said to myself, ‘Wow, this is my time to shine.’ Maybe I can put a damper on it and a little bit of awareness. I started feeding them, taking them to the vet, and getting them well, finding homes for them. Sometimes I trap them, get them neutered, release them again.”

Growing up in Jamaica, Meiklejohn recalls a rough stretch he survived during adolescence. Though he says he grew up “privileged” before then, in the home of his adoptive parents, whom he describes as “jet-setters,” Meiklejohn spent three years on his own between the ages of 14 and 17.

“I lived in the streets, eating out of garbage cans, sleeping in abandoned buildings, being raped, beaten up, stabbed up,” Meiklejohn remembers, tears welling in his eyes. “So I grew up with this kind of abuse, sleeping in back alleys. I wasn’t able to go to school, I never slept in a bed. I would roam around, find a big trash can close to a restaurant, search for food, and then I would go and eat berries and grapes and sugar cane and bananas on properties where I didn’t belong.”

Reflecting on this part of his life, Meiklejohn draws an analogy between himself and the animals he cares for. “I was an abandoned cat, abandoned dog,” he says, “so there is no one better than myself to understand their plight. I lived it too. I’m [60] years old, not as young as I used to be, and I have aches and pains, but when I think about the animals, pain doesn’t come anywhere close to me. When they see me coming, they come out and it brings a joy over me. I’ve found my niche in life, my purpose, and I want to do it for as long as I can.”

Last summer, Meiklejohn was uprooted from his prior home base in the Park Heights corridor, after his abode and belongings were torn up by police conducting a drug raid. He says he neither does nor sells drugs, but that, thanks to his efforts to stop the drug activity in the house where he lived, he ended up as collateral damage.

He soon found new digs near the Mondawmin Mall and tapped into an animal-lover network that now supports his endeavors by helping with expenses and transportation. His two Facebook pages have fans such as Feline Rescue Association and volunteers and staffers at other animal-rescue organizations such as BARCS Animal Shelter. A recent post says, “Mike is in need of cat food! If anyone can help him out, please do!”

A recent tag-along with Meiklejohn on his cat-feeding routine shows he’s a fixture on his route. Along the way, friendly folks with garden hoses let him refill his water bucket. He greets an apparent drug dealer as “soldier,” and a postman is happy to see Meiklejohn, cracking jokes about his cat-tending ways. He tries hard to keep his stops low-key (he asked that no specific locations be disclosed in this article) for fear that someone might come to abuse the cats.

Over the years, Meiklejohn has met with some resistance—he recalls a woman chasing him with a baton, screaming for him to stop feeding the cats, and a man who showed him his gun, saying Meiklejohn was trespassing on his property—but such antics don’t stop him. “You can kill me,” Meiklejohn says, “but I’m not going to stop.” He feels empowered now, thanks to all the help from the larger Baltimore-area community of animal lovers who know and support him.

“I’ve tapped into a network now, bless their souls,” Meiklejohn says. “Things are on a roll now. They’re helping with food. Sometimes the cats have to go to the doctor, they help me with that, too, with eyedrops, antibiotics, and formula, and with TNR [trap, neuter, return]. All the people online, they’re involved with me now, so I’ve found some help. It makes a big difference.”

Best Intentions: The list of Baltimore’s drug-dealing gang-interventionists grows

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Aug. 8, 2012

Back in 2007, Brian Morris, then Baltimore City’s public schools board president, was impressed by Kevin Foreman. At the board’s Aug. 28, 2007, meeting, Foreman declared that he’d “left the private industry to come back and work . . . to service these children, these gangs, this issue with education, the drop-out rate and what have you” via a group Foreman had started with a former Baltimore City policeman, Trevor Britt. Morris responded, “We do need to find a way to plug you in.”

Earlier that year, Foreman and Britt were listed in incorporation papers as the two directors of Continuous Growth Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit that set out to provide “education, counseling, and mental health services to at-risk and/or disadvantaged youths,” ages 12 to 21. Britt also formed Continuous Growth, LLC, a business that provides “education and reclamation for high school dropouts in addition to counseling services,” according to its incorporation papers.

Four years later, in July 2011, Continuous Growth, LLC was indeed “plugged in” to the school system, having clinched a three-year contract for conflict resolution and extended learning services for city students. But Foreman was in big trouble: On June 16, he had been caught in a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sting operation, while trying to close a 10-kilogram cocaine transaction with someone he thought was directly linked to a Mexican drug cartel.

The investigation into Foreman’s drug-dealing activities began in January 2011, according to court records. That’s when one of Foreman’s co-conspirators, David Humphries, introduced him to someone Humphries thought was a Mexican drug-dealer, and Humphries had told the Mexican that Foreman was the “man with all the money.” Foreman told the Mexican that he could handle transporting shipments, as his drug organization “already had vehicles that had concealed compartments”—two of them, with a combined capacity of 30 kilograms. Foreman drove to meet the Mexican in an Audi SUV registered to Continuous Gro, LLC, at 2119 St. Paul St., two blocks south of Foreman’s apartment.

Though Foreman had told the Mexican in January that “he was currently out of cocaine and had many customers waiting,” and that he had enough money to buy 17 kilograms immediately, the deal was delayed until June 16, 2011, when Foreman and another co-conspirator, Andre Carter, went to the Fairfield Inn in White Marsh to meet the Mexican. They shelled out $150,000 for 10 kilograms of cocaine, with the remaining balance of $125,000 to be paid after the coke was sold.

The Mexican turned out to be a DEA confidential source, and Foreman and Carter were immediately arrested after the transaction took place. A search of Foreman’s Charles Village apartment turned up a .45-caliber semi-automatic handgun, 15 rounds of .45-caliber ammunition, a money counter, a digital scale, a kilogram of suspected cocaine, Foreman’s Continuous Growth business card, and a document reflecting that Britt owed money to Foreman’s landlord.

Foreman pleaded guilty, and is now serving a 10-year prison sentence, as is Carter. The two were caught as a result of a joint investigation involving the DEA, the FBI, and the Baltimore City Police Department, that also snared two other major drug-dealing operations, one of which caught former Baltimore City cop Daniel Redd, who is awaiting his sentence on a heroin-conspiracy conviction. Foreman has a prior federal conviction for wire fraud and, in 2004, was sentenced to three years of probation and nearly $40,000 in restitution.

According to David Barney, a publicist representing Continuous Growth, Foreman has a master’s degree in education “as well as years of classroom experience.” In an e-mail, Barney describes Foreman as a “dedicated and passionate professional whose genuine concern for providing support and guidance . . . made him a valuable asset to the organization.”

As for Foreman’s criminal conduct, Barney says Continuous Growth “can’t always be with our employees every minute of every day” and “cannot control what a person might do or has done outside of the organization. Just like the youth we try and reach, we know that we will not change the lives or direction of each and every youth that we look to serve. We can only do our best at providing skills and dedication needed to help bring about a change of habit and direct them in making a conscious decision to adopt new behaviors.”

After Foreman was arrested, Britt tried to convince the federal judge on the case to allow Foreman to keep working at Continuous Growth, though the motion to allow him to do so ultimately was withdrawn.

In a July 22, 2011, e-mail that was submitted as part of the court record, Britt called Foreman “an indelible part of our program,” and that, if allowed to continue working, he would “help the company conduct interviews, perform staff trainings in crisis prevention and intervention, negotiate services with schools, compose manuals concerning protocol as it pertains to services rendered, and solicit new services to principals in the Baltimore City public school system.”

Foreman joins several others in Baltimore who, in recent times, while working to help solve the problems faced by at-risk kids in Baltimore’s streets and schools, were accused and convicted of committing the same kinds of crime they ostensibly sought to prevent. Three men indicted and convicted for their parts in the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) prison gang—Rainbow Williams, Todd Duncan, and Ronald Scott—were so employed; Williams worked as a mentor for at-risk Baltimore City public school kids through a company called Partners in Progress, while Duncan and Scott were outreach workers for a West Baltimore group called Communities Organized to Improve Life. In addition, BGF leader Eric Brown incorporated Harambee Jamaa, a nonprofit that sought to promote peace and betterment in Baltimore’s poverty- and crime-stricken communities.

Heroin “Hustlin’”: Courthouse hot dog vendor sold heroin with cop

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, July 31, 2012

Shanel Stallings works hard selling hot dogs from a cart in front of Baltimore’s downtown circuit courthouses, as City Paper reported recently (‘Every Day I’m Hustlin’, July 18). But her other gig—at least between January and July last year, when she was indicted in federal court—was selling heroin.

Stallings, according to her April guilty plea, hustled between one and three kilograms of junk with four co-conspirators, including Baltimore City cop Daniel Redd, whose supplies were smuggled to the U.S. from Ghana. All five defendants have pleaded guilty, and all have been sentenced but Redd, who is scheduled to learn his fate on Sept. 6. Stallings received her sentence on July 11 and is set to start serving her 30-month prison stint on Sept. 10.

Stallings’ role in the conspiracy is detailed in FBI special agent Craig Monroney’s 51-page search warrant affidavit, used to justify searches of 11 locations last summer, including Stallings’ Cedonia home and the 2007 Cadillac Escalade she and Redd used. The document includes transcriptions of phone calls intercepted by wiretaps, which picked up Stallings and Redd discussing the hard times they’d been facing obtaining more heroin to sell and the potential need for Redd to intervene on Stalling’s behalf should she be stopped by police or be threatened with a robbery by customers looking to take her money or heroin.

Stallings’ conspiracy was unearthed as a result of a lengthy joint investigation by the FBI, DEA, and the Baltimore Police Department. The probe resulted in two other federal indictments: a cocaine case against Kevin Foreman and Andre Carter, and a heroin-and-cocaine case against Will Evans and five codefendants.

Foreman had been a Charles Village resident working as a gang-interventionist for at-risk Baltimore City Public Schools students through the non-profit organization, Continuous Growth, prior to his arrest. Carter has a long history of drug arrests and convictions. In June 2011, according to court documents, the two men went to a hotel room near White Marsh Mall, believing they were buying 10 kilograms of cocaine from a representative of a “Mexican-based drug-trafficking organization,” but it turned out to be a sting operation set up by the DEA. They have pleaded guilty and been sentenced to long prison terms.

The Evans case, which, according to court documents, was centered at Club 2300, a West Baltimore bar operated by codefendant Clifford Andrews, and supplied Eastern Shore communities, is still winding its way through the court, with two defendants—including Samuel Brown, in whose name the Cadillac Escalade used by Redd and Stallings was registered—still fighting the charges.

The Stallings-Redd case also overlapped with a case in which one of Stallings’ co-defendants – a Ghanaian named Abdul Zakaria, also known as Tamim Mamah – testified as a state’s witness in the federal heroin-conspiracy trial of Moses Appram, which ended with a conviction on May 2. That case involved other Ghanaians who smuggled heroin into the United States from West Africa using couriers aboard commercial flights.

Zakaria’s sentencing hearing was held on July 17, though what happened remains a secret, as the proceeding was sealed as a result of a motion by Zakaria’s attorney, who wrote in a since-sealed letter to U.S. District Judge William Quarles that CP’s recent coverage involving Zakaria (“Straight Outta Accra,” May 23) had given rise to threats against his client.

The case against Stallings was remarkable for the presence of Redd, a heroin-dealing police officer who sold drugs while on duty and in uniform, including from the department’s Northwestern District parking lot. But Stallings, too, was not a typical drug dealer. Not only did she sell hot dogs in front of a courthouse where defendants, cooperators, and grand-jury witnesses regularly go in and out, but she also sold food at the municipal pools, according to court documents.

Stallings “prepares the tastiest food and work[s] tirelessly for patrons who attend the pools,” wrote Darryl Sutton, director of the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks Aquatic Division, in a June character letter, written on City of Baltimore letterhead and submitted as part of the court record in Stallings’ case. “She has become an essential member of our team,” Sutton continued, “as we serve more than 100,000 visitors at the pools each year.”

Another letter, written by a former employee of Stallings’ hot dog business, who was offered the job despite a lengthy criminal record, including convictions for drugs and armed robbery, was glowing in its estimation of Stallings’ character.

“I understand that she has made a grave mistake,” wrote Timothy Wrenn, “but if at all possible don’t take her from her children for too long. She is truly a great person.”

Machine Gun Mama Returns: Lightly sentenced machine-gun seller gets another 6 months in prison for again violating the terms of her release

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, May 8, 2015

Screen Shot 2019-03-31 at 3.07.00 PM — Jennifer Debois Dickerson’s Facebook photo from 2012.

“Leave the girl alone,” Richard Debois says to a reporter entering Maryland U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett’s courtroom on Apr. 16 to cover the violation-of-supervised-release hearing of Debois’ daughter, 35-year-old Jennifer Debois Dickerson, whose machine-gun case has drawn repeated City Paper coverage since August 2012. That’s when Bennett, despite Dickerson’s prodigious flurry of drug-related arrests in late 2011 and early 2012, gave her a surprisingly light sentence: time served for a conviction that carried a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. She’d sold a machine gun to an undercover federal agent.

Since then, Dickerson has already come before Bennett a second time, receiving a six-month sentence in 2013 for violating the terms of supervised release by testing positive for cocaine and morphine and failing to appear for court-ordered counseling. So this is her third trip before a judge who’s given her extraordinary opportunities to fly straight.

Dickerson, her long, straight hair flowing freely to the middle of her back, is wearing a yellow jumpsuit as she sits with her attorney, assistant public defender Susan Hensler. Bennett explains the alleged violations: In addition to testing positive for a variety of drugs, including cocaine, morphine, and marijuana, four times between Nov. 20, 2014 and March 12, 2015, she also left Maryland without permission on Dec. 31, 2014, failed to submit monthly supervision reports as required, failed to stay employed since her last job at Vagabond Sandwich Company in Bel Air, failed to notify authorities when she changed address, and failed to participate in required mental-health treatment.

Dickerson “has been a frustrating person to supervise,” assistant U.S. Attorney John Purcell tells Bennett, since she’s “not making whole-hearted efforts to essentially save her own life.” Still, Purcell explains, there is “an unusual way we are proceeding on this,” because, despite the fact that Dickerson’s “continued drug use” is clear, the government acknowledges the “uncertain nature of some of those tests.” So Dickerson is agreeing to plead guilty to only two violations: leaving the state without permission and failing to submit monthly reports.

Hensler says Dickerson is “struggling still with addiction,” since “she hasn’t been able to get her drug problem under control.” She adds that a recent “psychiatric diagnosis” is “the issue that has not been addressed,” and suggests to Bennett that treatment for the condition, which is not disclosed in open court, “may help Ms. Dickerson address this insidious addiction.”

Dickerson’s history of interaction with law enforcers, other than the machine-gun sale, depicts a working mother living in a nice Green Spring Valley home whose life spiraled out of control. The arrests started to mount in September 2011, when cops raided the home she shared with her husband and son and discovered a trove of pot, prescription pills, and cash. She pleaded guilty to pot possession in that case, but in January 2012, she sold 4 ounces of weed to an undercover cop in the Mondawmin Mall parking lot, and when she was later arrested, she was holding weed, heroin, and equipment for shooting it up. The same day, the cops raided her father’s Ellicott City home and turned up evidence of a high-volume pot-sales enterprise, along with some LSD, hashish, hash oil, and a handgun. Dickerson and Debois were both convicted of pot dealing in Howard County as a result.

“I apologize,” Dickerson says to Bennett, for “coming back here again” and causing “so much problems and worry” for those around her. She “made attempts” to get her act together, she continues, and when she served the six months at Federal Correctional Institution-Danbury (the facility where Piper Kerman was incarcerated, and subsequently wrote the book on which the Netflix series “Orange is the New Black” is based), “all I got was a drug-education class.” But, she tells Bennett she was drug-free while in prison, and that “I’ve had periods of abstinence,” but “outpatient programs” were “not good enough” to help her stay clean in the long haul.

“Do you know how many people stand here and have drug issues?” Bennett asks Dickerson, rhetorically. Saying she’s caused “great pain” to her father, mother, and son, who Bennett said was 9 years old in 2013, “who’s doing quite well without you,” Bennett declares that she is going to “have to go back to prison again” and adds that “we’re determined to use all the resources we can to get to the root of this problem.”

Explaining his philosophy of handling offenders still beholden to him, Bennett says, “I’m not of the mind … to just cut them free,” because “we don’t give up on people. I want to keep my thumb on them. That’s how I feel about it. I’m not going to throw in the towel on people.”

“I wish you the best of luck,” Bennett says to Dickerson, after pronouncing another six-month sentence followed by two more years of supervised release. “You just have to buckle down. It requires a certain amount of self-discipline.” Meanwhile, he adds, “your son is growing up,” and he’s “doing it without you.”

Machine-Gun Mama Goes Free: Despite multiple drug arrests, suburban mom gets time served for selling AK-style machine gun

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Sept. 5, 2012

Maryland U.S. District judge Richard Bennett on Aug. 27 gave a 32-year-old suburban Baltimore mother, who pleaded guilty to machine-gun possession, a chance to rehabilitate her drug-addled life without going to federal prison. Bennett sentenced Jennifer Debois Dickerson to the three months she’d already spent incarcerated on charges stemming from her sale, for $1,350, of an AK-style machine gun to an undercover agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) last November.

The maximum sentence faced by Dickerson was 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Bennett did not impose a fine, but put her on three years of probation, the first five months of which will be spent on home detention at Dickerson’s mother’s house in Bethany Beach, Del., where, the judge disclosed, he owns a second home.

The judge cited Dickerson’s drug-addiction problems and family situation in justifying the light sentence despite her two prior pot convictions. Though evidence in the case shows she sold a machine gun, Bennett stated that Dickerson “is not a machine-gun dealer,” adding that “the simple fact of the matter” is that she was “dragged into this by a husband that subsequently left her and her child.”

“I have looked very carefully at this case,” Bennett said to Dickerson, noting that he has a “second home within walking distance of your mother’s place” in Bethany Beach. “I was there just yesterday,” Bennett added, pointing out the irony of Dickerson’s “pain and heartache” amidst the resort community’s beachside beauty.

City Paper left a message at Bennett’s chambers, asking for comment, but did not hear back from him.

Similar machine-gun cases in Maryland federal court have had notably different outcomes. In 2010, Ernest Johnson was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to possessing the same kind of machine gun Dickerson sold. Johnson did not sell the gun, but his prior convictions lengthened his sentence.

A decade ago, Bennett himself sentenced Edgardo Nieves, Jr., to 21 months in prison for possessing a broken machine gun that he had stored in a guest house on his parent’s farm. Nieves, whose conviction was overturned on appeal, appears not to have had a prior criminal record and, like Johnson, he did not sell the machine gun—in fact, Nieves told agents where it was.

During Dickerson’s sentencing hearing, Bennett twice asked Dickerson’s retained defense attorney, Lawrence Rosenberg, and assistant U.S. attorney John Purcell, who prosecuted the case, if they’d like to seal the proceeding to shield it from public scrutiny. Each time, they declined.

Before telling Dickerson “it is ironic that you are here, but it may be a blessing,” Bennett noted that “this court sees many drug-addiction cases” in which defendants go to “prison for 15, 25, and 30 years.” Bennett added that Dickerson’s appearance before him is “perhaps the best thing that could have happened to you.”

Dickerson—who has a 9-year-old son and had, until her legal troubles mounted, a $30,000-a-year job as an office manager at her husband’s construction firm—faces an uphill battle to put her life in order. Based on court records, it appears to have fallen apart starting last September, when police executed a no-knock, predawn raid at her rented Green Spring Valley home, which she shared with her husband and son, and found pounds of marijuana, hundreds of prescription pills, about $1,300 in cash, and evidence of a cocaine party.

Dickerson and her husband, John Turner Dickerson, were arrested, as were two guests, Alan Franklin Chapman and Elizabeth Supharat McCarron. Dickerson pleaded guilty to pot possession and was sentenced to time served. Her husband received an 18-month suspended sentence and currently has an open warrant for violating probation in the case; his last known address was in Eureka, Calif., in Humboldt County. McCarron received a six-month suspended sentence and the charges against Chapman were dropped.

Chapman was present when Dickerson sold the machine gun to the undercover ATF agent, according to court records. The agent “entered a residence” in the Baltimore area “and Dickerson followed with Chapman and placed the weapon on a couch.” The agent then “asked if it was fully automatic. Chapman replied by stating, ‘I don’t know, it’s not mine,’” and Dickerson “stated, ‘It’s fully automatic.’” After counting the $1,350 the agent had handed her for the gun, Dickerson agreed to sell the agent “high grade marijuana for $4,500 per pound” and handed the agent “two loaded 50 round magazines” for the machine gun, saying, “You can’t buy the fifty ones here,” according to the records.

Dickerson’s unraveling continued in January, when she sold four ounces of weed to an undercover ATF agent for $1,300 in the parking lot of Mondawmin Mall in Baltimore City. A warrant for her arrest was issued about two weeks later, and after she was spotted leaving Brown’s Motel in Ellicott City with her husband, Dickerson was arrested. They found joints on her husband (who was charged and is currently wanted on a warrant in the case) and, on Dickerson, they found weed, heroin, a syringe, a tourniquet, and a burnt spoon.

Later that morning, police raided the home of Dickerson’s dad, at the end of Hobsons Choice Lane in the nearby Allenford development, where she had been living and where her husband’s company, JTD Building and Remodeling, was based. They found marijuana stored in labeled glass mason jars, hashish, hash oil, and LSD, along with a handgun and other evidence of a high-volume weed-selling operation. Dickerson and her father, Richard Evan Debois, were indicted in Howard County as a result. Debois was found guilty of pot-dealing at an Aug. 13 trial before a judge, and is awaiting his sentence, while Dickerson is scheduled for trial in September.

Dickerson was first charged in the machine-gun case on Feb. 16, the same day another man—Robert Taylor Holderman—was charged for selling a machine gun to an undercover ATF agent for $1,500 in the Severn area. Court records describe Holderman as Dickerson’s co-defendant, though Holderman, unlike Dickerson, has not been indicted by a grand jury. Nothing has happened in Holderman’s case since March, and he has not yet been arraigned, though he is out on conditional release while the case is pending.

During Dickerson’s sentencing in the machine-gun case, Bennett expounded in detail on U.S. Supreme Court rulings that, over the past decade, have liberated federal judges from mandatory sentences under the federal sentencing guidelines. Now they are free to depart, sometimes significantly, from the guidelines’ astringent calculus, Bennett explained, based on factors that they have great latitude in weighing.

After announcing that the guideline range for Dickerson was 21 to 27 months in prison, Bennett called a bench conference, leaving courtroom observers unable to know what was discussed. When it was over, he announced that Dickerson’s criminal history had been “overrepresented” in the prior calculation, and now her range would be “reduced considerably” to eight to 14 months in prison.

“You are here because you put yourself here,” Bennett told Dickerson, and warned her of “the cycle that is created” by addiction that “is passed to the next generation,” so if she’s not careful, “you’ll see your son up here at the age of 19 or 20 . . . I see it all the time.”

After announcing the time-served sentence, Dickerson’s mother, Cheryl Debois, wept, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “I intend to keep a thumb on this case,” Bennett said sternly to Dickerson, adding, “I’ve got loads of defendants that come before me who have children issues,” so “don’t let me down on this.”

Dickerson, reached by phone in Bethany Beach on Aug. 30, declined to comment. “I just don’t want to be in the paper,” she said, adding, “every day is a new day.”

The Rumrunner Diary: Maryland liquor stores suspected of supplying New York booze smugglers

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Sept. 26, 2012

For nearly two generations, court records show law enforcers have had evidence of large-scale illegal smuggling of Maryland-taxed booze to New York, where alcohol taxes are much higher. Only recently, though, have the revenue collectors taken to fighting it seriously, staging a raid last year on Northside Liquors in Elkton, Md., that resulted in the owner being criminally prosecuted and forfeiting to the government nearly $250,000 in seized, ill-gotten cash.

The crackdown continued this summer, according to a search-warrant affidavit filed in Maryland’s U.S. District Court on Sept. 14, before it was sealed from public scrutiny by a judge on the same day. The document reveals a series of raids on five other Maryland liquor stores, all in Cecil County, also suspected of supplying booze smugglers from New York: Happy 40 Discount Liquors in Elkton, Chesapeake Wine and Spirits in Chesapeake City, North East Liquors in North East, and Crown Liquors and Park Liquors in Perryville.

The warrant, signed July 12 by U.S. District Judge Beth P. Gesner, was written by M. Lisa Ward, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also suggests that liquor distributors, not just liquor stores, are in on the alleged smuggling scheme.

The latest round of raids were based on an investigation started last July, according to Ward’s affidavit, when law enforcers received information that liquor distributors in Maryland “have been engaged in selling liquor, knowing that it was being transferred for resale in New York, without paying New York State liquor taxes.”

Booze in Maryland is taxed at $1.50 per gallon, Ward’s affidavit explains, whereas in New York, the rate is $6.44 per gallon—plus another dollar per gallon in New York City. Thus, there is a significant margin of profit to be made in the alleged scheme—especially if, as Ward’s affidavit and other court documents claim, it has been going on for a long time, involving large volumes of alcohol.

When City Paper called James E. Smith, chairman and chief executive officer of Reliable Churchill, one of the wholesalers named in the affidavit, on Sept. 20, and started to share with him what the affidavit states, he said, “I have no comment. I don’t know anything about it,” and hung up the phone. Smith is also president of his industry’s trade group, Licensed Beverage Distributors of Maryland. Tom Cole, the New Orleans-based president of Republic National Distributing Company, the other wholesaler named in the affidavit, could not be reached for comment.

As for the law enforcers staging the investigation, ICE spokesperson Nicole Navas, in a Sept. 20 e-mail, stated “there is nothing for public release at this time,” while Marcia Murphy, spokesperson for the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office, also had no comment. Cary Ziter, spokesperson for the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, which Ward’s affidavit says is involved in the probe, writes in an e-mail that, while “our Criminal Investigation Division often is involved with local, state or federal officials around the country on investigations,” he won’t “comment on, or confirm, any particular investigation that might be in progress.”

Messages left with the targeted liquor stores and their attorneys were not returned by press time. Joseph Shapiro, spokesperson for the Maryland Comptroller’s Office, which court documents say has been aware of the alleged smuggling scheme, had no comment other than to say the agency “takes the illegal sales of alcohol very seriously” and is “very proud” of its “strong working relationships” with law-enforcement agencies.

According to sources cooperating with the probe, Ward’s affidavit explains, “it would be perfectly obvious to anyone with knowledge of the retail liquor business that it literally would take years to sell in retail the quantities of liquor that Republic or Reliable was delivering to Northside every couple of weeks.” (Emphasis in the original.)

Bank records, Ward’s affidavit explains, “show deposits from most Republic and Reliable customers around the state of Maryland to be under $3,000; exceptional are the Cecil County customers who routinely paid more than $15,000 and sometimes paid up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in each check.” The affidavit says, for example, that Chesapeake Wine and Spirits paid over $300,000 to Republic and $400,000 to Reliable in one 10-day period in late 2011.

Until the crackdown on Northside Liquors last year, law-enforcement attention to the problem had been spotty, according to court records. Though seven men from New York were charged federally, and five of them convicted, in a 2000 case involving Maryland liquor smuggled to Canada, Northside’s prior owner, Robert Pagliaro, was given wide latitude for years, despite much evidence of the store’s involvement in liquor smuggling.

In 1995, Pagliaro agreed to pay $5,000 to avoid criminal prosecution in connection with the alleged smuggling activities, according to court records. In 2004, when 160 cases of Northside-purchased booze were intercepted in a vehicle headed to New York, Pagliaro got another visit from authorities. In 2007, after Wilmington, Del., law enforcers seized a large amount of cash and liquor after a New York-bound vehicle was stopped, the driver said he’d been purchasing 100 cases of booze every three months from Northside. This time, when Pagliaro was visited by the authorities, he agreed to give up $5,000 in seized money and told agents he was selling the liquor store and moving to Italy.

Northside’s new owner, Tushar Patel, kept the scheme going, according to court records—and also kept Pagliaro’s son, Michael Pagliaro, in the corporate fold. Patel ended up pleading guilty to possession of untaxed alcohol in Cecil County Circuit Court and receiving probation before judgment. The federal government sued to keep nearly $250,000 in funds seized during the Northside raid, and Patel settled the matter by agreeing not to contest the money in return for the government returning nearly 600 cases of seized booze.

Ward’s affidavit describes “a cycle of proceeds from the New York smugglers to the Cecil County liquor stores and then to Republic and Reliable,” characterizing the conduct as breaking wire-fraud and money-laundering statutes. While her affidavit refers to several arrests of New York smugglers while on their return trips with vehicles laden with booze, it appears that none of the liquor store owners and wholesalers have been formally accused of committing any crimes.