… blueberries, red onions, turmeric, paprika, red cabbage, coffee, spinach, and beets.

Hysteria: In Maryland and Across the Country, the Federal Designer-Drug Crackdown Takes Prisoners, Cash, and a Legal Backlash

MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. Spice is originally sold as an incense, but has now swept the military community with controversy as a legal designer drug. However, Marine Corps Order 5355.1, issued Jan. 27, directly prohibits the use, distribution, sale and possession of it and others like it. (Courtesy photo)

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Oct. 13, 2013

Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

Dev Bahadur Hamal worked behind the counter of the Tobacco Stop in Bel Air, one of those ubiquitous shops that sell legal smokables and accessories for illegal ones, like bongs, hookahs, rolling papers, pot grinders, and glass pipes.

On Sept. 22, 2011, a customer stepped up to the counter and asked whether the Tobacco Stop sold “Hysteria.” Hamal nodded and sold him a 1-gram packet of the stuff, labeled “potpourri” that is “not for human consumption,” for $21.20. The customer held his hand to his mouth while pinching together his thumb and index finger, and asked if “you smoke this stuff.” Hamal said, “Yes.” Pointing out that his pipe wasn’t working properly, the customer asked for rolling papers, and Hamal said the stuff was “very strong,” urging caution if smoking it that way.

Hamal’s helpfulness has been memorialized in numerous federal court documents in the years since, causing no end of trouble.

The customer, it turned out, was an undercover officer working for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Hysteria, subsequent testing confirmed, was a kind of illegal designer drug popularly known as “K2” or “Spice,” said to mimic the effects of pot. Hamal had unwittingly spawned a cross-country probe into an alleged illegal Spice supply line to Maryland from California.

Spice contains what the law calls “analogue” compounds that are “substantially similar” to controlled dangerous substances and which are barred from making, distributing, or possessing “for human consumption” – which is why the Hysteria packaging, in an effort to sidestep this provision, dubbed it “not for human consumption.”

The federal statute outlawing such analogues, the Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement Act of 1986 (AEA), is designed to give law enforcers flexibility in quickly swatting down the availability of substances that crop up in the marketplace after being chemically tweaked to differ slightly from already-banned ones. Until the DEA temporarily bans them by listing them under the AEA, or until they can be shown to be analogues of substances already so banned, people buy them as legal highs-and the manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers make legal money.

The list of chemicals banned under the AEA has itself been tweaked repeatedly over the past two years, amid mounting public concern over designer-drug users being poisoned by Spice and another family of analogues, called “bath salts,” said to ape the effects of illegal stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine.

Since 2011, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report, the DEA has used its AEA powers to ban 11 synthetic designer drugs. Congress, meanwhile, passed legislation signed in 2012 that added some of the same drugs and others-a total of 26-to the nation’s main anti-narcotics law, the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

The dizzying pace of analogue bans is understandable, since the dangers of these little-understood chemicals have become alarmingly apparent. Widely publicized tragedies have mounted among users, who, while under their influence, have committed suicide, died of overdoses, and inflicted senseless violence on others.

Also understandable, given these horror stories, is the tremendous amount of resources the federal government has thrown at deterring those in the analogue trade.

The probe spawned by Hamal’s helpfulness at the Tobacco Stop was, on July 26, 2012, revealed to be part of something much bigger. That’s when the DEA unveiled “Operation Log Jam,” the first nationwide effort to crack down on analogues. Nearly 100 communities around the country were impacted, resulting in nearly 100 arrests and the seizure of more than $36 million and 5 million packets of designer drugs, along with chemicals to produce nearly 14 million more. Among those targeted was the Tobacco Stop’s California supplier, whose bank accounts were emptied of $2.2 million-about 6 percent of Operation Log Jam’s total cash take.

After Operation Log Jam, a second DEA push was announced in June: “Project Synergy,” said to have yielded about 230 arrests in nearly 50 cities and five countries, with more than $51 million and thousands of kilograms of designer drugs seized.

The crackdown has put people and businesses, some perhaps unknowingly, on the wrong side of what critics call a highly confusing law and has created a new and growing class of drug defendants – or sometimes plaintiffs, when people whose assets were seized seek their return. Some of them, including the Tobacco Stop’s California supplier, are fighting back, trying to convince judges that the law is unfair and prone to arbitrary enforcement because it is hopelessly hard to understand.

That’s predictable – it’s what attorneys do. But the designer-drug game is different than the traditional law-enforcement dramas that play out on the streets every day. When it comes to heroin and cocaine, everyone knows what the rules are: Dope and coke are illegal, case closed, so court arguments tend to be over evidence and how it was obtained.

But the rules of the designer-drug game changed rapidly in the last two years, and those who possessed or distributed chemicals might not have had a clue about their chemical structures or effects on humans. Those fighting back are attacking the rules themselves.

Now, though, after the headlines about the arrests, seizures, and successful prosecutions resulting from Operation Log Jam and Project Synergy, one thing should be abundantly clear: It’s a risky proposition to sell anything exotic that’s construed as a legal high.

Nine months after Hamal’s Hysteria sale to the undercover officer and nearly 2,700 miles away, on June 12, 2012, Ratchanee McAuley was at M&C Wholesale. The business occupied three suites in a one-story, block-long commercial building in Laguna Niguel, Calif., in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. Around noon, the 40-year-old from Arizona and four others unloaded a Rapid Express truck delivering packages to M&C. Then McAuley took her small white dog for a walk.

As the day wore on, pallets of white canvas bags about the size of sandbags were moved around M&C’s suites, and more deliveries arrived, including boxes filled with black foil packaging. The business made and received lots of deliveries – its FedEx bill for a four-month period that year was over $100,000. Just after 6 p.m., McAuley put her dog in a silver Land Rover, drove to a house in nearby San Juan Capistrano, checked the mail, and walked toward the front door.

These glimpses of McAuley and M&C come courtesy of David Metzler, a Howard County cop assigned as a task-force officer to DEA’s Tactical Diversion Squad 59. He went to Laguna Niguel and observed them himself, then meticulously described what he saw in numerous sworn court documents. He also swore out the details of Hamal’s Hysteria sale-and much more, involving others at M&C and at another Baltimore smoke shop, the Dragon’s Den on Fleet Street in Fells Point.

At the Dragon’s Den in the fall and winter of 2011, Carlo D’Addario of Timonium had sold bath salts to people from Virginia, and federal authorities there indicted him for it in early 2012. D’Addario’s co-defendant, Holly Renae Sprouse of Craigsville, Va., near Shenandoah National Park, helped build evidence against him, and both would later plead guilty and receive relatively short sentences-a year in prison for D’Addario, and 20 months for Sprouse.

Shortly after D’Addario’s indictment, under the supervision of Metzler’s crew, orders for Spice were placed from the Dragon’s Den to M&C, where the Tobacco Stop had gotten its Hysteria.

By June 2012, after serving search warrants for email accounts and making the controlled buys orchestrated at the Dragon’s Den, Metzler’s team had good reason to suspect M&C supplied Spice products, branded with names such as “Hysteria,” “Brain Freeze,” “Dr. Feelgood,” and “Black Sabbath,” to the Tobacco Stop, the Dragon’s Den, and other such shops in Indiana, Kentucky, and New York.

On July 25, 2012, M&C Wholesale was raided and its bank accounts emptied. The next day, the DEA announced Operation Log Jam, explaining in its press release that the AEA “allows these drugs to be treated as controlled substances if they are proven to be chemically and/or pharmacologically similar to a Schedule I or Schedule II controlled substance,” including anything from pot and heroin to prescription painkillers and methadone.

The raid on M&C turned up several thousand pounds of suspected Spice, several kilograms of suspected analogue chemicals used in making Spice, and several thousand packets of Hysteria, Brain Freeze, and other brands of Spice.

Metzler had good cause to suspect they’d find such a haul. On July 17, about a week before the raid, he’d spoken with a courier who’d made deliveries at M&C and described seeing “8-10 individuals seated around a table handling piles of a green herb-like substance”-“no other sort of activity seemed to be ongoing.”

These observations, Metzler wrote in court records, “are entirely consistent [with] M&C Wholesale being exclusively devoted to the manufacture and distribution of analogue substances.”

No federal criminal charges have yet been filed publicly against anyone involved with M&C’s operation. Nor have charges been filed against Hamal or the Tobacco Stop’s owner, Kyu Tae Yi.

Others have not been so fortunate.

In September, federal prosecutors in Maryland moved to keep $105,574 seized from Bruce Lloyd Bradburn and his business, the Dundalk smoke shop Up in Flamez, in part because “large quantities of synthetic marijuana” were found in the store and in Bradburn’s nearby home. As a result of the probe, Bradburn is currently scheduled for a December trial on narcotics and gun charges in Baltimore County Circuit Court.

Earlier, in August, federal prosecutors filed suit to keep $259,988.61 seized in a synthetic-drug investigation of three Puff & Stuff smoke shops in the Cumberland area of Western Maryland. Puff & Stuff’s owners, Traci Lynn and Charles Casey, have filed claims in the matter, asserting “a legitimate and lawful interest” in the cash, which they say they “earned, saved, and acquired through lawful employment and enterprises.” But the probe prompted drug-conspiracy indictments against the Caseys in Allegany Circuit Court, and both are scheduled for separate trials later this year.

Also this year, three men – Nathaniel Petit, Andrew Burger, and Joshua Sylvia – were charged and pleaded guilty in a conspiracy to distribute methylone shipped here from China. Methylone is used to make bath salts, and though banned temporarily under the DEA in 2011, it was only in April of this year that methylone was listed as a drug banned by the CSA. Shortly thereafter, Petit, Burger, and Sylvia were charged in Maryland federal court, though they were caught in June 2012 and initially charged in state court. They are scheduled to be sentenced later this year.

These new Maryland cases show how effectively synthetic-drug laws can be enforced to punish accused Maryland criminals and to try to take their ill-gotten gains. Sprouse’s lawyer, Fred Heblich, a veteran federal public defender in Virginia and a lecturer at the University of Virginia School of Law, says criminal cases involving analogues are hard for defendants to beat.

“The way that the statute is written is very broad,” Heblich says, “so that the legal definition of an analogue is not specifically the same as the scientific definition.” This means cases are “easy to prosecute because the courts don’t require scientific accuracy.” So, in a typical case in which a prosecutor is trying to prove a chemical is an analogue of a banned substance, the prosecutor simply calls to the stand a “DEA chemist who testifies they’re similar,” Heblich explains, “and then brings in a user, who says it’s similar – ‘I’ve used that stuff and it’s a lot like meth.'”

Heblich says Spice cases are “a little different animal than the bath salts-like pot and meth are different.” Law enforcers might find “Spice is less worthwhile to pursue because it doesn’t have the cachet of bath salts – there are no stories of people eating people on Spice,” Heblich says, referring to a story last year in Miami that went viral with the false information that a man who attacked another man by chewing his face was on bath salts. And bath salts, more than Spice, pose a greater law-enforcement problem, he adds, because “there are hundreds of them, and you could create thousands of analogues of this stuff.”

In bringing analogue cases to criminal court, though, the defendant is at a distinct disadvantage, Heblich says, because “the judges let the government put in whatever evidence they want, and the jury is going to convict.”

When asked about probes that have resulted not in criminal charges but in asset-forfeiture cases, Heblich says law enforcers “will go after you if you have money – that’s all they care about now.”

Analogue cases that go after alleged manufacturers’ assets have shown some potential to reveal the AEA’s frailties – such as the forfeiture case against M&C, filed in November 2012, which seeks to keep the $2.2 million seized from the company’s bank accounts, along with 34 money orders and 102 checks made out to the company. Like other Operation Log Jam forfeiture cases elsewhere, this one has not been easily concluded.

This summer, after Maryland Assistant U.S. Attorney Evan Shea filed an amended complaint in the case with U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander, M&C’s attorneys, Randall Skeen and William Feldman, moved to dismiss it. They argued that the government failed to establish a fundamental common-law principle: mens rea, which is Latin for “guilty mind.” No evidence, they claimed, had been produced to show that M&C and its operators “actually knew that the substances at issue were unlawful.”

The reason the government hadn’t shown this, the lawyers continued, is that the AEA is so “unconstitutionally vague” that “a person of ordinary intelligence would have no way to reasonably learn that these substances are unlawful and thus have an opportunity to conform their conduct to the requirements of law.”

Shea swatted down these arguments in a brief filed in August, citing abundant precedent that the AEA-even when applied to recently banned substances and their analogues-consistently has been ruled not unconstitutionally vague.

Then M&C attorneys’ reply cut to the core of the matter: money. Any proceeds derived from M&C’s sale of Spice before March 1, 2011, the date the compounds involved were temporarily banned by the DEA, should not be forfeitable, they argued, nor should any proceeds that haven’t been shown to be connected to sales of banned substances. This, they claim, comes to $1,829,784.50 plus interest “based upon the government’s improper seizure.”

While M&C’s motion to dismiss the Maryland forfeiture is awaiting a ruling by Hollander – and while a related suit M&C filed in Utah, where some of its money was seized, has been put on hold pending Hollander’s decision – in Florida, a whale of an Operation Log Jam forfeiture fight is underway.

In Operation Log Jam’s Tampa-area takedown, over $18 million, a handful of homes, and a brand-new Infiniti belonging to Timothy Hummel and his family were seized. Hummel, his family, and his colleagues in an alleged Spice-manufacturing operation have not been charged criminally, and they want their property back – but the government has moved to keep it. In working to have the case thrown out of court, Hummel’s lawyers, James Felman and Katherine Yanes, have tossed around some weighty rhetoric and strong claims.

Calling the Hummel forfeiture and Operation Log Jam “the latest installment of the modern American assault on the bedrock principle of mens rea” and “the first instance in the history of the Republic in which the government has sought to seize assets – and potentially imprison its citizens – based on conduct that it literally would not have been possible for the citizenry to know was unlawful,” the lawyers argued that, in Hummel’s case, the government is doing this based on “a single man-a chemist employed by the DEA named Terrance Boos.”

Boos, according to court records, testified in February at another federal proceeding in Wisconsin, offering his scientific opinion that two compounds-XLR11 and UR-144-are banned analogues under the AEA’s standards, and that he was not aware of anyone at DEA who disagreed with that conclusion.

But Hummel later obtained government documents showing that wasn’t the case-that, in fact, as Hummel’s lawyers put it, “an entire Section of the DEA disagreed not only with Dr. Boos’ conclusion that UR-144 is an unlawful analogue, but also with his authority to reach such a conclusion on behalf of the agency.”

Thus, Hummel has unearthed dissent within DEA over whether certain substances do, in fact, meet the AEA’s “substantially similar” standard.

The Wisconsin case Boos testified in was heard by veteran U.S. District Judge Rudolph Randa, a Vietnam War veteran who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush and served until 2009 as the chief judge of the state’s eastern district. It involved $100,000 worth of “herbal incense” that was seized in September 2012 from The Smoke Shop in Delavan, Wis., by law enforcers who wanted to test it for illegal analogues. When they wouldn’t give it back, the owner sued for its return.

After late-winter hearings and briefings, Randa noted that “the overwhelming weight of opinion in the scientific community” is that the substances found in the incense, UR-144 and XLR-11, “are not substantially similar to the chemical structure” of an already-banned substance, JWH-018, and therefore could not be ruled analogues.

On May 16, though, in the midst of the litigation, DEA put UR-144 and XLR-11 on the list of temporarily banned analogues.

Less than a week later, on May 21, Randa concluded in an order that, given DEA’s new ban, he had no choice but to dismiss the Smoke Shop’s suit. In doing so, though, he leveled some blunt criticism of the way this complicated law is being enforced.

“Under this scenario,” Randa wrote, “it seems unfair for a federal agency to seize the property of a small business owner and then keep it until it is declared illegal.”

There you have it: a federal judge saying what defense attorneys have been arguing, so far without success – that law enforcers’ approach to leveraging the AEA’s significant powers in expanding the menu of banned analogues, in one instance at least, “seems unfair.”

MDPV

Attorneys attacking the AEA often turn to a memorable critique penned in 2008, well before the recent spate of analogue bans: the act’s definition of an analogue is an “unholy union of legalese and chemistry jargon [that] is probably enough to bewilder even the most studious individuals,” Gregory Kau concluded in “Flashback to the Federal Analog Act of 1986: Mixing Rules and Standards in the Cauldron,” an article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

Still, arguing that the AEA is so vague that people can’t reasonably be expected to know whether or not they are breaking it has not been received well by courts. Over and over again, the argument has been rejected.

A high-profile Operation Log Jam defendant in Arizona, Michael “Rocky” Lane, for instance, got nowhere in pre-trial motions on this question and ended up convicted by a jury this summer. Afterwards, in September, his attorney asked for a new trial-again, in part, based on claims the AEA is unconstitutionally vague. As the prosecutor’s response makes clear, the argument is not likely to win-but the attorney, Bruce Feder, scored rhetorical points in trying.

In addition to quoting Kau’s “unholy union” commentary, Feder reached back in time to invoke the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in a 1931 opinion. “Although it is not likely that a criminal will carefully consider the text of the law before he murders or steals,” Holmes wrote, “it is reasonable that a fair warning should be given to the world in language that the common world will understand, of what the law intends to do if a certain line is passed. To make the warning fair, so far as possible the line should be clear.”

Sometimes, the line may not be sufficiently clear even to the law enforcers themselves. In one 2011 case in Maryland, for instance, a designer-drug prosecution was abandoned until a judge officially dismissed the charges – and the defendant proceeded to successfully sue for the return of property seized in the probe. This rare instance, perhaps, is more telling of the vagaries of the designer-drug crackdown than any protests of those targeted.

The man’s name is Mohd Abujamous, and his saga began on May 3, 2011, when a suspicious box containing five packages of an off-white powder arrived from China at a Howard County UPS store. Investigators, thanks to information from the people who arranged to have the package picked up, quickly got a search warrant to raid a warehouse in New Market, near Frederick. They found it operated “as a manufacturer, packager, and distributor of various designer drug products including bath salts and Spice,” according to court documents, and determined Abujamous ran it.

The warehouse was filled with incriminating evidence, including barrels and boxes of chemicals used in Spice and barrels of powder, an envelope in one of them labeled MDPV, which is used to make bath salts, along with lots of substance-filled packets labeled “not for human consumption.”

On May 27, 2011, Abujamous was charged with manufacturing and possessing with intent to distribute chemicals used in Spice, JWH-018, and JWH-073, which the DEA had temporarily banned under the AEA on March 1, 2011. The case languished for months, and Abujamous’ attorney, Richard Karceski, asked for it to be dismissed, pointing out that the “Government has done nothing, to include refusing to respond to defense counsel’s calls and e-mails.”

In November 2011, Abujamous instead was indicted for a different crime-introducing misbranded drugs into commerce-and shortly thereafter the Spice charges were dismissed by the prosecutor, Philip Jackson. The misbranding indictment was based on the “not for human consumption” Spice labeling and the fact that the bath salts packages did not say they contained MDPV.

Nearly a year passed after the indictment without any activity by the government. So in October 2012, Karceski moved to dismiss the indictment, pointing out that Abujamous’ right to a speedy trial was being violated. Jackson never responded, so, in late November, U.S. District Judge Catherine Blake ordered the indictment dismissed.

Abujamous was off the hook, after about 18 months of prosecutorial silence and inactivity. But his property taken during the raid-about $36,000 of industrial equipment, including a truck, cement mixers, and some packaging machines-was being kept by the government, and he wanted it back. Not getting any response to his requests, he ended up suing-and winning.

Judge Blake ordered the government to return Abujamous’ seized equipment in June. In doing so, she also denied attempts by Assistant U.S. Attorney Stefan Cassella, an expert on asset-forfeiture law, to have the case dismissed or put on hold – which, in the latter instance, was filed under seal, so Cassella’s arguments remained shrouded from public view.

Neither Karceski nor the U.S. Attorneys’ Office will provide insights as to what went on with this case. However, an August 2011 letter from Karceski to Jackson, included in case documents, sheds some light on the circumstances.

“My client has always said that he was never in violation of any federal law regarding the compounds with which he is charged,” Karceski wrote. “I request that you provide me with a detailed chemical analysis conducted by the forensic division of the DEA. A fair evaluation will show that the banned chemicals were not contained in the product seized, nor were they seized in bulk from my client.”

Apparently, there was some confusion over the law.

The Accidental Warrior

Baltimorean Matthew VanDyke Didn’t Plan to Be a Motorcycling, Freedom-Fighting, Filmmaking Activist (and Prisoner) in the Arab World, It Just Kinda Happened

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, July 10, 2013

All Matthew VanDyke set out to do, he says, was to be like Alby Mangels, the Australian famous in the 1970s and 1980s for making films of his own world-traveling adventures. But after what happened as VanDyke pursued this rather singular dream-including fighting against Moammar Gaddafi’s regime in the 2011 Libyan civil war and spending nearly six months in solitary confinement as a prisoner of war there-he’s instead been compared to author Ernest Hemingway and revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

This transformation from would-be entertainer to real-life freedom fighter has prompted VanDyke to think big: Asked about these comparisons to such cultural titans, he says, “Hopefully I can live up to those expectations.”

At 34, VanDyke likely has plenty of years left to try-assuming he continues to survive the risks he takes. Most recently, while in Syria last year filming his award-winning short documentary, Not Anymore: A Story of Revolution, meant to spur popular support for the revolution there, president Bashar al-Assad’s regime broadcast VanDyke’s image on television while labeling him a “terrorist.”

“It became quite dangerous for me after that,” says VanDyke. “The guys that caught me would probably torture me, because they’d be really angry-and understandably so. . . They’d make a fortune selling me to the regime.”

When Hemingway was VanDyke’s age, his books were being burned in Berlin as the Nazis were coming to power; Guevara had helped overthrow the Cuban government and replace it with socialism. VanDyke’s start – three years of filming his motorcycling adventures around the Arab world, his remarkable experiences during the eight-month Libyan war, and the production of Not Anymore – could lead him any number of ways. Whether he achieves the prominence of Hemingway, with fortunes made from reality-based literature, or of Guevara, with the blood-splattered creation of a political icon, or goes in some other direction, depends both on how VanDyke proceeds and how the world receives the roles he plays. In the meantime, he’s out to convince the world to liberate downtrodden people in conflict zones.

In explaining himself while on the lecture circuit, VanDyke often quotes a controversial figure in U.S. history: William Alexander Morgan, an American anti-communist who was stripped of his U.S. citizenship for fighting with Guevara and Fidel Castro, who had not yet revealed his socialist leanings, to overthrow Cuba’s Battista regime, and who was later executed when Castro’s government suspected him of plotting with counter-revolutionaries.

“I am here,” Morgan wrote from Cuba in a 1958 statement, “because I believe that the most important thing for free men to do is to protect the freedom of others. I am here because I believe that free men should take up arms and stand together and fight and destroy the groups and forces that want to take the rights of people away.”

VanDyke is determined to follow Morgan’s example, though Morgan’s fate is something he’d obviously like to avoid. Whether VanDyke uses guns or cameras, he says, depends on the circumstances. Right now, in helping the Syrian revolution, he says, “I believe that the camera is more powerful than the gun, because the camera is going to get them more guns. The role I would play as a fighter, it’s just not time right now.” VanDyke says he’s “not eager to run off to war,” especially since he grew more religious while imprisoned and now has “a bit of an issue with fighting in wars, as a Christian.” Nonetheless, he adds, “Ill do it in a second if that’s the best way to make a contribution.”

Tall and slender, VanDyke cuts a dashing figure. Photos of him with his motorcycle in the deserts of the Arab world or wielding an AK-47 and wearing military garb or an Afghan pakol cap make him look like a latter-day Lawrence of Arabia. It’s quite a transformation from his upbringing as an only child in Baltimore, where the Mensa member gained an education from Calvert School and Gilman School, which he dropped out of in 11th grade, opting for a GED and community college courses before entering University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).

VanDyke says he loved Calvert, the expensive private lower- and middle school in North Baltimore’s Tuscany-Canterbury neighborhood. “I owe everything to Calvert,” he says. “That place taught me everything I know.”

Coming from Randall Street in South Baltimore, which was still a working-class neighborhood when he was growing up there, he had a decidedly different background than the upper-class kids for which Calvert is mostly known. He says his mother, Sharon VanDyke, an elementary school principal, and his father, Edgar VanDyke, a waterman and seafood broker, were divorced when he was 3, and he was the fifth generation of his family to live in their house, where he was raised by his mother and grandparents.

“I had bright people around me in my really formative years,” VanDyke says. “It makes all the difference in the world.”

Gilman was another matter, though. “I hated Gilman,” VanDyke says, explaining that as a skateboarder who listened to hip-hop, “I just didn’t fit in. I had a bit of a problem with authority-which now I’ve turned into a career. Like, that whole dress code thing, I used to mock it by basically wearing a tuxedo, a bow tie, just to be a smartass about it. I was getting in fights and arguments and things like that. And I didn’t know how to keep my mouth shut. I had ADD [attention deficit disorder], so I would say things without thinking and strategically planning.” He also says he’s been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, an anxiety-producing condition that was aggravated by his imprisonment.

VanDyke excelled at UMBC, graduating in 2002 with a 4.0 grade-point average and winning the political science department’s “outstanding scholar/leader award,” he says. His interest in the Arab world blossomed at UMBC, where late Middle East expert Louis Cantori was on the political science faculty. “I started to take his courses,” VanDyke says, “and that’s how I got into the Middle East,” saying he “identified it as a likely area where there was going to be change and potential and action.”

After UMBC, VanDyke entered Georgetown University’s prestigous Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., where he says he was a bit of an oddity. “There were people who were in the military, in the CIA, working for the State Department,” he explains, “and there I was, riding my skateboard to class.” VanDyke, too, wanted to work for the CIA, explaining that he “was mesmerized by the Hollywood aspect of it, my fictitious image of what the CIA does. Now I know it’s more like a mixture of James Bond and the U.S. Post Office, as one of my friends who works in U.S. intelligence has told me.”

While in the process of applying for a summer internship at the CIA, VanDyke’s problems with authority came to the fore. “I went to my first CIA interview, and that day, after the interview, I went to my first Iraq War protest,” he recalls. “I didn’t really see a conflict at the time. I nailed the interview and I got pretty far through the process.” But his polygraph test kept getting delayed as his anti-war activism grew, and ultimately, he decided against reapplying. “With a concentration in Middle East security studies, they were going to put me on the Iraq War,” he explains, “and I didn’t want to work on a war I didn’t believe in.”

After graduating from Georgetown in 2004, “I felt like my life was really wrecked,” VanDyke recalls. “I had put so much time and effort and money into the education, and I had wanted to work for the CIA, to start out as an analyst and then transition into the operations side. But my worldview changed with the Iraq War.”

VanDyke says he thought the Iraq War “was a disaster for U.S. foreign policy”-and he “knew it would be, because I could put myself in the shoes of Iraqis, that when they see soldiers from another country walking around in their country and setting up checkpoints, they’re not going to be happy about it, no matter what we did in removing the regime. I wanted Saddam [Hussein] removed, but I wanted it to be actually just like what ended up being done in Libya-air power and support [of] the local population. I wanted people to do it themselves.”

At Georgetown, VanDyke says he’d been “advocating for the Libya model, it just wasn’t called the Libya model then. Let them overthrow their own government. In Iraq, we basically overthrew regime and then handed it to them. They didn’t spill the blood getting rid of it-so then they started spilling their blood trying to get rid of us. Anybody should’ve been able to understand that.”

After misgivings about the Iraq War essentially tanked his chosen career path, VanDyke cast about for something to do with his life. “I went and I tried to start a business with my cousin, totally unrelated, and that didn’t work,” he recalls. “And I went down to the beach and painted boats at a boatyard, doing roofing, trying to figure out what to do next.”

That’s when he remembered Alby Mangels.

“I had seen Alby Mangels’ shows on the Travel Channel [in 1996] and never forgot it,” VanDyke recalls, “and I realized that’s what I want to do. I always wanted to do documentary filmmaking, but I thought it would be, like, my retirement career after the CIA. But in 2004, 2005, I realized, ‘Why don’t I make adventure films?'”

VanDyke at that time had recently started driving a motorcycle, “so I thought, Well, why don’t I drive a motorcycle across the Arab world?It’s the region I studied, it’s where the action is. I’ll do an Alby Mangels film, but I’ll upgrade it for the 21st century, take it to a whole other level, learn about the region I’d been studying-because I’d never actually been to the Middle East, even though I was a Middle East expert.”

It was the revelation that would spark the chain of events that transformed VanDyke from a run-of-the-mill, over-educated beach bum to a remarkable and controversial freedom fighter.

The first stop on VanDyke’s three-year trek was Madrid, Spain, followed by Morocco, Mauritania, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, filming along the way. He sometimes worked as an embedded journalist in Iraq and Afghanistan but says he produced very little published copy-an article for The Baltimore Examiner about Iraqi perceptions of the U.S., and pieces for a Kurdish paper in Iraq about an Islamic faith healer, Kurdish agriculture policy, and his motorcycling experiences in Kurdistan. He’d return periodically to the States, spending time in Baltimore, Delaware, New York, and Pennsylvania, but once he got to Iraq, his filmmaking vision started to come into focus.

“I never thought I could go to Iraq on a motorcycle,” VanDyke recalls. “When I found out I could, I did. Then, once I was there, I wanted more, wanted to push things higher and higher. That’s why I kept trying to drive to Baghdad and kept getting detained and arrested. I met this guy Dan Britt, a photographer, kind of a rebel, who’d been kicked out of the embed program, and I knew he was the only guy crazy enough to go with me Afghanistan. So I decided Dan and I would do a film called War Zone Bikers where we’d hit two war zones in one film.”

The film has never been made, and today, VanDyke says he’s not ready to do it any time soon, even though he says a producer and director would like to do the project as a reality-TV show. After having served in Libya and now supporting the Syrian revolution, he explains, “I didn’t want to do something that was the slightest bit jackass-y at a serious time, when I’m doing serious work.” Later, he says, he still might do War Zone Bikers “if the show could be done in a way that’s still respectful of my serious work.”

While still in Madrid, before spending three years collecting hundreds of hours of footage in nearly a dozen Middle Eastern countries, VanDyke met someone who’s been an important supporter of his life’s work since: Lauren Fischer. They met in early 2006, while VanDyke was waiting for his 1981 Yamaha XS650 motorcycle-a dud of a bike, which died without leaving Spain-to come through customs. He noticed Fischer, an American from the suburbs of Philadelphia, in the lounge of the hostel where he was staying because she was wearing a Georgetown sweatshirt. Turns out, even though they’d never before met, they’d been at the school at the same time, she as an undergraduate. Fischer was in Madrid teaching English while waiting to get into graduate school in the States.

“We started talking,” Fischer recalls, “and he hadn’t really seen much of Madrid, and I said, ‘Well, I’ll show you the city.’ We spent the next day together-and then spent most of the next six months together. He stayed with me, but it was only supposed to be a couple of weeks while he was waiting to get his motorcycle, but he didn’t leave.”

Today, more than six years later, they’re still together. While Fischer went on to get her master’s in teaching at Columbia University in New York (she now teaches second grade at a Baltimore City Public Schools elementary school), VanDyke bounced back to Baltimore, Pennsylvania, or the Delaware beaches in between his motorcycling forays across the Middle East.

“He would be gone for maybe three months, and then back here for a month,” Fischer recalls, “then gone for six months, back for three months. We did talk but not every day. It was hard, especially with the time difference. And then his equipment would go bad or something would break, and I had to get a replacement part and ship it to some strange location where he was.”

Over time, Fischer grew accustomed to expecting the unexpected when VanDyke touched base from the other side of the world. “I was going to a show on Broadway,” she recalls, for example, “and he called to ask if I could talk to my dad about his legal rights because he’d been detained or had his motorcycle taken away, leaving him stranded. There was definitely a lot of anxiety, but I eventually got used to it. I built up a tolerance, a level of comfort with the uncomfortable.”

VanDyke’s mother, Sharon, says “I thought it was great” when her son set off for his ambitious trek. “We are a motorcycle family, even though we don’t look like one-when I was in college I had a motorcycle, his dad had a motorcycle, my grandfather had a motorcycle. I supported him any way I could to prepare for that journey. I’d raised him to get out there and do something, and he had all this book knowledge about the Middle East but he wanted to go experience it.”

The big trip began inauspiciously, with the old Yamaha dying in Spain and being replaced with a brand-new Kawasaki KLR 650, and it only got worse in Morocco, where he had to fend off drug dealers who “asked me how many kilos I want of marijuana, and I didn’t even smoke marijuana.” After just a few days, he broke his collarbone in a motorcycle crash, prompting another return home to recuperate.

When he returned to Morocco, VanDyke says he was “terrified” and “afraid to leave my hotel room”-his state of mind was so bad that “my girlfriend said, ‘Why are you such a coward?’ At that point, I was looking for any reason to come home.”

Rather than bail, though, VanDyke “went down to Mauritania and did kind of a desert safari with two Spaniards, two Israelis, a Japanese guy, a rabbit, and a dog. My motorcycle broke down in the desert, and I had it brought out in a truck with a goat.” When he returned with his motorcycle repaired, he met Nouri Fonas, who VanDyke describes as a Libyan “hippy” who’d “been traveling all over the world for like 10 years with his cousin.”

Four years later, during the Libyan war, “Nouri was the driver of the Jeep, and I was the gunner,” VanDyke explains. VanDyke’s bonds and loyalty to Fonas and the other Libyans he met in Mauritania and, later, during his first visit to Libya in 2008, are the reasons he went there in 2011 to help defeat the regime of longtime Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi.

“It was personal,” VanDyke explains. “I ended up having to cancel conference calls I’d set up with an HBO producer and another Academy Award-winning producer about War Zone Bikers because my friends in Libya started telling me about what was happening there, and I bailed on everything. And I’d written a book that I’d had an agent for, about my travels, but they had been telling me for a few days what was happing on Gmail Chat and Facebook, and then I suddenly made the decision that I’m going. And I booked the flight.”

Late at night on March 6, 2011, about three weeks after Libyan unrest had started with protests in Benghazi, VanDyke arrived there from Cairo, Egypt. When he first saw Fonas, he recalls, “Nouri’s like in military clothes and totally serious. He had cut his hair down, you know, he used to have kind of a ‘fro, a little bit. And it was like a totally transformed Nouri, from Nouri the hippy to Nouri the warrior. That’s when I knew that I could serve in the revolution, for sure.”

VanDyke immediately joined them in preparations for fighting. “From that very first day,” he recalls, “we went and started fixing up [Fonas’] friend Ali’s truck that had been damaged in the Rajma weapons depot explosion. I have video of this too-this truck is so beat up. I took the camera with me because I had been filming my life for years in the region.” They got a DShK .50-caliber heavy machine gun, popularly called a “dushka,” to mount on the truck and some mortar tubes, for which VanDyke sought advice from a family friend on how to use.

Then, on March 13-a week after his arrival-VanDyke was captured. He was in Brega “to figure out where to set all this stuff up, familiarizing ourselves with the town, looking for good defensive positions,” and “some guy’s serving us coffee on the tray, and I took his picture, showed him the picture-and that’s the last thing I remember. They knocked me out with a severe strike, and I wake up in prison with the sound of a man being tortured.”

VanDyke says he was interrogated only once, shortly after he regained consciousness, and he doesn’t know where he was. “They played video off my camera,” he recalls, “of me saying to Nouri, ‘You remind me every day why we fight’ after we said something about Gaddafi. I was thinking, oh, shit,” because he was sure his friends would soon be arrested and imprisoned too.

The interrogators “accused me of being CIA or Mossad,” the Israeli spy agency, and “I said, ‘Oh, that’s ridiculous.’ I told them I’d been in Libya before, and they said, ‘Oh, why were you in Libya?’ And I said, ‘I was driving a motorcycle from Mauritania to Afghanistan to make a movie, to film it.’ And they were like, ‘You are in the CIA.’ That fit their Hollywood image of what the CIA does.”

First, VanDyke was in Maktab al-Nasser prison in Tripoli, “in a 7-by-4-foot cell for 80 days,” he recalls “and then I was moved to Abu Salim prison for the next 85 days. I heard men being tortured in the prison or violently interrogated.” Both prisons are notorious-especially Abu Salim, a reputation that would later serve him well, after his escape.

In the meantime, though, VanDyke was missing. No one knew where he was, and efforts to locate him by Human Rights Watch were fruitless. “When he was captured,” his mother says, “I never once thought that he had been killed.” VanDyke, though, was sure he would be.

“I knew I was finished,” he recalls. “I was a terrorist by the definition of the regime, and guys caught doing exactly what I was doing, if they were caught in Iraq or Afghanistan, they’d be in Guantanamo. I felt like I had left my mother alone since my grandparents had died, and I knew she’d never stop fighting to get me released, but I don’t want to become, like, the cause of her life. I want her to enjoy her retirement. I thought I’d never see my girlfriend again, and I thought maybe someday I’d get out in like 20, 30 years and meet the children that should’ve been my children. It was quite a depressing time. I figured that the regime had sent assassins to Nouri’s house and killed him for this, for me, and for what’s on the video. It was my fault. I worried about the guys I was captured with, if they were being tortured, if they were imprisoned, if they would ever get out.”

The guilt and remorse ate at VanDyke as he had “nothing to do but stare at a wall for like six months. All this stuff with people thinking I was a journalist-the regime released journalists, they were given like a little trial, charged with not having a visa, and sent home. The regime made me disappear. They made me vanish. They put me in isolated parts of the prison. The guards didn’t even know I was an American. They didn’t know who I was. The world thought I was dead.”

And then, on Aug. 24, 2011, the Abu Salim guards abandoned the prison, and someone broke the lock on VanDyke’s cell. He walked out into Tripoli with other escaping prisoners, was given some money by the imam at a local mosque, and eventually, after a couple of days staying with well-wishers, ended up with a room at the five-star Corinthia Hotel Tripoli.

VanDyke, after reuniting with Fonas, promptly rejoined the war effort and fought for two months until Gaddafi was killed and the rebels’ victory was assured. During this time, he recalls, he made ample use of informal weapons training he’d received while embedded with the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he seriously engaged in the front-line fighting.

Media interest simmered while VanDyke had been missing, then came to a boil after his escape and return to the front. Richard Engel, NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, returned with VanDyke to Abu Silam and found the cell where he’d been kept in solitary confinement, and posed for photos reenacting his time there. There was also coverage from CNN, the Washington Post, and the Global Post, a Boston-based international news website.

“The press was good at covering this story when I was missing,” VanDyke recalls, “so I reluctantly did interviews.” He says he was “excited” about Engel’s interest, and their visit to the prison turned up “a piece of the lock of my cell,” which, after finding the other piece on another return visit, he now keeps as a souvenir.

VanDyke says he also became friends with the Global Post’s James Foley, who he escorted to the front lines, along with other journalists, so they could report on the war.

“It was really dangerous for journalists to jump into vehicles of rebels, because rebels don’t think generally two steps ahead,” VanDyke points out, “but Nouri and I were very careful, especially when we had people with us, to like ask what’s ahead, what’s around the next corner, always cautious and alert. So we were one of the more safe transportation for journalists in between the fighting to get them up there.”

But his decision to resume fighting disappointed Human Rights Watch, whose emergencies director, Peter Bouckaert, was quoted in the press as saying: “We all worked hard to try and locate him and get him home safe for all those months, and it is a bit tragic to now see him try and join the fight as a rebel.”

Bouckaert “was very angry when I didn’t come home,” VanDyke recalls, and “he later wrote that it felt like I had spat at his face and the faces of the other people who had advocated for me while I was missing. But none of these guys got me out of prison. Rebels got me out of prison. I got myself out of prison. My mother raised me so that when you take on a commitment, you finish it, and it hadn’t been finished yet. There actually happens to be video of the time I told Nouri, ‘I’m not leaving until Libya is free, no matter how long it takes.’ And I wasn’t going to go back on that. So I stayed, and it ticked off some people whose business it really wasn’t.

“After prison,” VanDyke continues, “Nouri’s like, ‘Hey, we’re going back to the front line.’ His father’s like, ‘OK, good luck.’ It’s not weird to them that somebody would come and help their friend to overthrow the regime. To them, that’s not a strange thing. I don’t know why it’s so strange to Americans.”

When the Libyan war ended, VanDyke returned to Baltimore, and the controversy over his service continued. The Committee to Protect Journalists, which had worked on his case while he was missing, wrote that VanDyke misled people about his intentions in going to Libya and that “pretending to be a journalist in a war zone is not a casual deception,” but “a reckless and irresponsible act that greatly increases the risk for reporters covering conflict.”

The criticism became quite pitched in the case of conservative commentator Debbie Schlussel, who wrote a column shortly after VanDyke’s return from Libya entitled “Dumbass: 32-year-old ‘American’ Fights for Libyan Rebel Muslims,” calling him a “jerk” and a “loser.”

The source of the confusion is unclear, as VanDyke says that when he was missing, “journalists, they’re like, ‘What was he doing?’ Well, they hear that I was touring the Arab world, shooting video, working on this book about my travels, and they’re like, ‘Oh, he’s writing, he’s a journalist.’ And they started using the label. It’s not a label that my family uses, it’s a label that journalists used. Not like there’s anything wrong with being a journalist, but I don’t want people confusing what I do with journalism. And then I take heat for it even though I’m the one who’s most vocal about not being a journalist.”

So when VanDyke set out to do his Syria film, he made it very clear he was going as an activist filmmaker, not a journalist. And Not Anymore comes across as masterfully designed propaganda with compelling footage of the very dangerous conditions in war-torn Aleppo. VanDyke says the 15-minute documentary is “like a symphony of crescendos, diminuendos, peaks, and valleys” that both “entertain the viewers and then slap them in the face with emotion.” It’s gone over well on the film-festival circuit, winning the audience-favorite award for documentary shorts at the Palm Springs International Shortfest, the country’s largest short-film festival, and in January, CNN aired clips from Not Anymore during a five-minute interview of VanDyke by Victor Blackwell.

But Not Anymore was expensive to make-$15,000 of his own money to produce it, plus more money spent to get it shown at festivals and mail DVDs around to influential people-and so far VanDyke is at a loss over how it will produce any revenue. At times, he claims, he’s foregone revenue-generating opportunities in order to avoid conflicts that could prompt criticism.

For instance, VanDyke says, given that he “had really good access” with the revolutionary Free Syria Army while shooting Not Anymore, he could have made “thousands of dollars selling photos and video to the press.” He didn’t, though, because “the commitment I made publicly” at the outset was “to stick to [being an] activist filmmaker and not do anything else,” such as engage in journalism-a label that, despite his strenuous protests, has continued to stick to him. If his work in Syria had even a hint of journalism mixed in with it, he says he’d be constrained by the rules of the media game in conflict zones, which dictate he neither pick sides nor bear arms-both of which he felt compelled to do in Syria.

Though VanDyke’s website (matthewvandyke.com) describes him as working as a “journalist, war correspondent, political columnist, [and] talk radio show host” over the years, he emphasizes that “I’ve never been paid for one article or one photograph or one piece of video in my life.” He adds that “I accept the label of former journalist because people tell me I am, but it’s flimsy. It’s not like I ever made a living-I actually just spent money doing it.”

How he’ll dig himself out of his financial straits remains an elusive quest, though he’s working on getting grant funding for setting up a nonprofit women’s center in Syria.

“It will be a place to train women activists, train women journalists, and give them a safe place to stay and work,” VanDyke explains. “A lot of their families won’t let them work in the revolution because if they sleep in a building with men, they get a reputation. So some women who want to work in the revolution can’t. Women’s role in the revolution has been diminished because of these cultural things, so I want to give them a building that they can have, that they can work in. I can bring in people from the outside for workshops and they can work there without these reputation problems.”

Fischer is especially excited about VanDyke’s prospects with the Syrian women’s center. “It would really help the people of Syria,” she says. But Fischer is not so excited about what she calls VanDyke’s so-far unrealized “earning potential.” “Ideally,” she says, “he’ll bring some money back as soon as possible.” Perhaps VanDyke’s long-envisioned movie and book will start to bring in a return on his life’s investments. He predicts both will be out next year.

Sharon VanDyke, meanwhile, has room to be proud of her son without getting overly anxious about his money problems. His work now, she says, “is very different from when he was going to make motorcycle documentaries that he was going to sell for entertainment. Now it’s about the rights of people and the oppression of people and the murdering of thousands of people by these governments.” If he needs to get somewhere in a conflict zone to help out, she adds, “I’ll take him to the airport. I raised him to do what he has a passion for, and that’s what’s happened.”

The City Paper site under Baltimore Sun stewardship is getting … interesting.

Jewelry Dealer Boasted of Drug-Dealer Ties

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, June 4, 2014

Today, Eugene Petasky is a humbled man, serving a 41-month prison sentence at West Virginia’s Morgantown Federal Correctional Institution after pleading guilty in U.S. District Court in Baltimore last fall to laundering drug money through his jewelry business, Metro Brokers, for nearly a quarter of a century. But on Nov. 8, 2006, when still a free man, Petasky spoke with apparent pride of his drug-world connections, sharing the details with an undercover cooperator in a sting operation that resulted in his indictment weeks later.

The account of Petasky’s litany of drug-world ties is contained in documents included in a civil forfeiture case, entered into the federal court record on April 7, in which the government is seeking to keep two firearms and ammunition seized from Metro Brokers during a November 2006 raid. To back up its forfeiture pleading, the government included a search-warrant affidavit written by Sharnell N. Thomas, a special agent with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation Division. The affidavit includes a paragraph describing Petasky’s conversation with the cooperator.

“Petasky discussed being associated with several drug traffickers,” Thomas wrote, including “Darryl Henderson, also known as ‘Bam,’ [who] would kill anyone that hurt Petasky.”

Thomas wrote that Petasky stated that he “paid Bam’s legal fees” and that “Bam was an associate of Greg Parker, a well known drug trafficker” in Baltimore. According to the affadavit, he also discussed another “well known” Baltimore drug dealer named “Ya Ya Brockington” and recalled selling “a large chain with a pool table encrusted with diamonds and rubies” to “an individual named ‘Wimpy,'” and “discussed the possibility that Wimpy was killed by another well known drug trafficker . . . Rudy Williams.”

While Thomas’ affidavit describes several of the drug-world figures cited by Petasky as “well known,” only one—Rudy Williams —may qualify as truly famous. The savage criminal career of Linwood “Rudy” Williams was the subject of a lengthy 1992 article in the Baltimore Sun by David Simon, who compared Williams to William Shakespeare’s dramatic and bloody portrayal of King Richard III. Simon’s piece includes an account of “Curtis ‘Wimpy’ Manns, who took Williams into his own drug organization, then ended his career as a corpse in Baltimore County, with partner and friend Williams as the prime suspect.”

In all likelihood, the “Wimpy” Petaski referred to was Manns. Williams, meanwhile, is serving his life sentence at the high-security United State Penitentiary—Canaan, near Scranton, Pa. Details of the other drug dealers Petasky mentioned—Darryl Henderson, Greg Parker, and Ya Ya Brockington—remain inscrutable as of press time.

Given the number of years that have passed since Williams and Manns were on the scene, Petasky’s 2006 boasts may have been more reminiscent of times past than of his contemporary stature on Baltimore’s mean streets. But that a man with Petasky’s trappings—records show he was a donor to Maryland politicians, drove luxury vehicles, had a diversified investment portfolio, and owned a nice home on Woodvalley Drive near Stevenson in Baltimore County—would claim such ties, even in vaunted rhetoric, speaks volumes of the drug culture’s reach into respectable circles.

Petasky’s past—he was previously convicted by a jury in 1990 in connection with a similar money-laundering scheme involving Metro Brokers and an attorney, Neil Steinhorn, who was also convicted—meant that he was prohibited from possessing firearms or ammunition. As part of Petasky’s plea deal, though, prosecutors dismissed the firearms charges, along with numerous other counts of financial crimes. He pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy count of money laundering, and agreed to forfeit $336,000 to the government as ill-gotten gains. Petasky is scheduled to be released from prison on Jan. 1, 2013.

Legendary gangster-cum-author Linwood ‘Rudy’ Williams is ready to talk after nearly a quarter-century in prison

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Jan. 20, 2015

The rumor mill, said 60-year-old Linwood Rudolph Williams, has it that “I killed like 200 people with my wife” over the years. The imprisoned-for-life Baltimore gangster denies it, of course, as he does the six murders that David Simon suggested he was responsible for in a 1992 Baltimore Sun article that compared “Rudy” to King Richard III of England, whose two-year reign in the 1400s was a bloodbath. Williams has to deny it, of course; there’s no statute of limitations on murder. But dwelling on the suspiciously violent deaths that litter his life’s path serves a purpose: It perpetuates his legend, which, in turn, helps sell the first of what promises to be his many gangster-fiction books to be published: “Power Moves,” which hit the streets in 2012.

The book is a name-dropping crime epic of Baltimore, starring protagonist Michael Jones, a straight-A high school student who reluctantly enters the game, only to take it over. Williams says he has seven or eight more novels in the Michael Jones series yet to be published, and this first one was picked up by Gangster Chronicles, a publishing house that aims to dissuade readers from entering a life of crime by printing what comes out of the minds of those who did, and came to regret it. Count Williams among the regretful.

Simon’s King Richard III piece was published shortly after Williams, who in the 1980s had beaten numerous serious charges arising from Baltimore police investigations—including one that was prosecuted personally by then-State’s Attorney Stuart Simms—was finally brought down by an intensive federal investigation. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole for sitting atop a violent drug-dealing and money-laundering conspiracy whose supply lines spanned Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe. Despite the rap and the rumors, even though Williams was convicted of manslaughter as a youngster, he has never suffered the ignominy of a murder conviction.

“I love David Simon,” says Williams, who’s approaching his 25-year mark in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In “The Wire,” Simon confirms, a story about Williams was the inspiration for the plotline in which Marlo Stanfield, having been caught stealing a lollipop at a store, has the security guard who confronted him about it assassinated. The King Richard III piece includes a brief description of what Williams may have done: “a security guard at a North Avenue grocery was murdered after he had quarreled with Linwood William’s wife.”

“I liked that piece,” says Williams. “But it wasn’t about reality. It was like theatrical, a lot of rumor and stuff.” Rumors abound, Williams says, including one that “I lost my mind” and another that “I got killed a couple years ago myself.”

Williams’ legendary status was further cemented by what his federal judge, the late Frank Kaufman, had to say about him from the bench. “The pity of it all,” Kaufman said, is that Williams “has tremendous ability. He has tremendous brain power, organizational ability, and he has charisma. But he has used it, unfortunately, all in the wrong way.”

During the trial, according to Simon’s reportage, Williams repeatedly mouthed off at Kaufman, saying “fuck you again, judge.” In Williams’ final courtroom speech, he called Kaufman “your lordship of this great star chamber of injustice,” and told him that “by no stretch of anyone’s imagination did I receive a fair trial, nor an honest or decent one. Because God has given me the sense, dignity, and courage to decline the government’s perverted plea bargain of 35 years and the strength to stand up to this persecution, your end has been from the very beginning to put me in prison for life.”

Williams still maintains he was railroaded, though he now says he “sold out” by becoming a drug dealer and can’t quibble with Kaufman’s contention that he misused his talents. In a series of three- to 15-minute recent phone interviews with City Paper, he tries to explain himself.

in a 1992 Baltimore Sun article, David Simon compared “Rudy” to King Richard III of England, whose two-year reign in the 1400s was a bloodbath.

City Paper: If you were 10 years old and could start again, what would you do?

Linwood Rudolph Williams: I would go to Harvard, shake a lot of hands, rub elbows, and be the first black president.

CP: What neighborhood did you grow up in?

LRW: Early on, East Baltimore, and then, about 13 years old, my family moved to West Baltimore. But I went away when I was 13, right after the riots in ’68, for truancy. I wouldn’t go to school, so they sent me up to Boys Village, and it’s a pecking order according to your crime. They go around and ask you, “Whatchu in for?” “Oh, I stole a car” or “I broke into a house.” When they got to me, I had to lie. I couldn’t tell them I was in there for hooking school.

CP: So what did you say?

LRW: I told them I robbed somebody. But when they sent me in there, the die was cast. They should have had a better way, because it was like crime school. So now, when I come home, I’m stealing cars and robbing and all. So that way when I go back next time I don’t have to lie. Do you remember in King Richard III, the judge was talking about how I had all this talent and organizational ability and leadership. I mean, where was you at when I was 13? They said I could have been a CEO and all that. So I look at that kind of cynical. You’re hypocritical, you didn’t care back then.

CP: That King Richard III piece also put all sorts of bodies on you.

LRW: Yeah, accusations and all. They accused me of everything. Every unsolved murder I used to get accused of. Their excuse for not being able to solve the cases was like, “Well, Rudy did it.” So they blamed me for everything. People still dying out there, probably more so.

CP: Then Simon put in “The Wire” that scene with the security guard that was inspired by a guy getting into an argument with your wife, and you had the guy killed.

LRW: No, no. I didn’t do that. I ain’t never did that. But, it’s funny, they don’t know how many lives I’ve saved. I saved a lot of lives.

CP: How did you save lives?

LRW: Squashing beefs. People have disagreements and they can’t settle it and they get the guns out. Somebody have to talk to them, somebody with respect can do it. The police can’t do that. They’re not going to listen to the police. The police can only, after they’re dead, try to find who did it. Yeah, I settled a lot of beefs, because of the respect thing.

CP: That reminds of when [former mayor] Tommy D’Alesandro asked Little Melvin [Williams, another legendary Baltimore gangster] to help with the riots in ’68, right?

LRW: Yeah, yeah. You got two mayors. You got the official mayor and the unofficial mayor. You always did have that, you know, with the Italian gangs, the Jewish gangs, Irish—they was the first gang, and they became the police.

CP: What about your mom and dad?

LRW: My father passed when I was home in ’87, my mom’s still living. She worked at the city jail for years, a correctional officer over there, retired from there, well respected. She got her house, nice cars, all that. She did wonderful. My father, he worked on soda trucks, manual labor, things like that. They was together for mostly all my childhood years. We was a good family, in the way poor people was back in the day. We wasn’t really dirt poor, I never lived in the projects, but we was close. There was eight of us children, eventually, so you know that’s fun right there. You don’t need a Playstation with that. When I came home from Boys Village, they was divorced, my father was gone. You know, big family, he couldn’t take care, he couldn’t be the man he wanted to be. We was real tight when he passed, though.

CP: What happened when the federal case came down on you?

LPW: They thought that they’d grab us and put us in a jar like you do bees when you’re a kid, shake it up. So what they did, they grabbed a bunch of people, people they see me talking to, and they didn’t get anything. But they the feds, right, the feds can’t look bad, nobody can beat the feds. They got the biggest ego in the world. They’re going to spend $10 million investigating you, so they’re going to make it stick. They intimidate lawyers and they don’t even fight. The judge got in on it too, because they tried to run over us and I wasn’t going to let them run over me. The judge was a bully.

CP: They tried to put bodies on you, too, right?

LPW: That’s what it was all about anyway, really. The city, [former Baltimore police detective and “The Wire” co-creator Ed] Burns and them, they was doggin’ me for years. They didn’t have the resources or the manpower to exclusively go at me, so they went over to the feds and made out like I was a big crack dealer, which I wasn’t. The feds had a priority on cocaine and crack, so they was like, “Alright, we’ll make him look like a crack dealer, under the policy, so we go after him.” They wanted me so bad, you could’ve killed people and they’d have made a deal with you and let you go. For real, man. They went over to city jail to the guy that, back in a murder trial, he was a juror and hung a jury. They held him, they couldn’t do anything with him, and they let him go. Then he was over [at] the jail for killing his girlfriend and they told him, “Look man, we’ll make this go away if you tell us that Rudy bribed you back in the day when you was on the jury.” You know what the dude told them? “You got to kill me before I tell you some bullshit like that.” They gave him 18 years.

CP: So you weren’t overseeing any crack sales, you were strictly heroin?

LPW: Yeah. A dude told me in ’80s, he was a significant drug dealer, semiretired, he was like, “Look, I got to tell you about something, it’s big in New York, it hasn’t hit Baltimore yet. We can take it down.” He told me how it was, and morally it ain’t sound. I was like, “No, if it do that type of thing to people, no, I don’t want it.”

CP: So crack seemed to take such a toll on people in the streets, but heroin was less of a problem.

LPW: No, it wasn’t that. With the heroin, they’re already addicts anyway, you know? What he was talking about was making new addicts. You got to draw a line somewhere.

CP: Did you encounter any police corruption?

LPW: When I was out there, no, not really. They’ll try to get you the right way, and they might be frustrated, but they didn’t cheat too much. The one time they pulled me over in ’87, they found a machine gun, a bulletproof vest, and they say they found a gram of heroin. I don’t know where that come from. I had maybe $1,300 on me, and they counted it like three or four times, before they were going to give it back to me. The last time they counted it, it was, “He don’t get that back, we found heroin.” That was fishy. I don’t know where that come from.

CP: Right. But generally, it sounds like they played fair with you. You dealt with Ed Burns on your big case?

LPW: Yeah, Ed Burns and them. They cheat, man, they cheat a little bit. Especially when they went over to the feds. The feds are dirty. They aren’t going to let anybody out-lie to them, out-law them, none of that. They’re the biggest outlaws, the biggest gang out there. They’re going to get the judge, they use intimidation, whatever they got to do. They do it smooth though.

CP: During the trial you were quite a spectacle.

LPW: Outspoken, yeah. Because the judge was up there cheating and lying, telling them I was scum. It was all a show. I’m fighting for my life, man, I’m a fighter. You can’t intimidate me. You got to kick my ass. So he was trying to intimidate me, old man, sitting up there. A robe don’t make a man, it’s balls that make a man. And they was cheating—they had nothing on me. They’d been making the case up all along.

CP: What was your bail-bond business?

LPW: L&L up on Whitelock Street. Lisa and Linwood. I mean, we was like the biggest other than Arthur London and Fred Frank. As far as the black bail bondsmen, we were the biggest overnight, when we opened up. We wrote $10 million worth of bails in two years, and we profited $470,000. They had to concede that when we went to court. I knew everybody from jail, the streets, so we got all the major dudes. That was their way of cutting it to me. If they didn’t know me, they get out on bail, they get a chance to talk to me, do business with me. They had to have a reason. Other than that, you know, you couldn’t come up to me in the street and just start a conversation unless you knew me.

CP: The guy who has Bare Feet Shoes, he was in your case?

LPW: Meir Duke and his brother, yeah, they was friends of mine. One time, I had one of the stores, but it didn’t last long because I didn’t have the time, so I took a cash-out. But they used to do little favors. They had a clothes store, and a dude needs a job to get out of jail or something like that and I’ll ask them to give this guy a job. Things like that, man. I had a lot of friends with businesses.

CP: So he ended up doing pretty well. He got convicted, but he didn’t really do much time, and he had [former State’s Attorney] Gregg Bernstein as his post-conviction attorney.

LPW: Yeah, they gave him his money back and everything. He cooperated with the government, you know. He made a deal with them.

CP: And then your wife Lisa was acquitted.

LPW: All charges. She didn’t do anything. They were just holding her hostage. They was like, we grab him, he going to get sentimental and all that. But I don’t do that. You got to kick my ass, I don’t cop out. I come up under George Jackson. When I was young I didn’t care about going to jail. We fought, we was fighters. We don’t do shit ass-backwards.

CP: You mentioned George Jackson. In Baltimore, you’ve heard about what’s going on with the Black Guerrilla Family [BGF].

LPW: Yeah, I’ve heard about it. There’s a lot of them in here, too.

CP: There’s this political, ideological component of it, from George Jackson, but now it’s just a gang doing gang stuff, it’s not the dignity that George Jackson had envisioned.

LPW: All the gangs do that. The Crips and the Bloods, they started out as political, protect the neighborhoods and all that. Then the criminal element takes over. It’s the same thing with the Italians and the Jewish ones. It’s opportunism. Even in here, I know a lot of them and they are not serious. It’s something to do. It’s the leaders that they follow. If the leader’s not serious, then they not serious. They become opportunists and parasites. The people they claim they are going to protect, well, they’re preying on them.

CP: So you’re saying it’s no different than the Italian mafia or the Jewish mafia?

LPW: Yeah, it’s the same. They used to prey on their own. The bootleggers sell that rot-gut, take rubbing alcohol when they couldn’t get their rum from out of Canada. And you know Joseph Kennedy was a bootlegger and all, they made their fortune and got out, became part of the establishment, a political dynasty. They’re all a bunch of crooks, though, how they started out.

CP: How was George Jackson important to you?

LPW: When I was young, he was the single most influential person in my life. He inspired me to read. I was a reader, but I was reading junk before. His books were like the Holy Quran to me, I knew them backwards and forwards. I still do. I’m probably the only person who understands his theory on fascism, which was unique. He was way ahead of his time, a genius. I read it again a few years back and was still blown away by his fire, the brainpower he had. A lot of kids out there reading about George Jackson, talking about George Jackson, BGF, they don’t have a clue. They don’t know the lessons, they’re not really serious. It’s a fraternity club, and they just want to belong. People don’t want to be alone, they join it just to belong to something.

CP: Did you ever join the BGF?

LPW: No. I considered myself a Black Panther. I was a revolutionary. But it was over with by the time I found out about what was really going on. The whole time I was doing that state bit for 11 years [for manslaughter], by the time I got close to the door, I was pissed off. I went home and sold out, basically, a fraud. Because I was conscious, I knew what I was doing. I was young and angry, and when you’re young and angry you make bad mistakes. That’s why it’s not good to get angry, I learned, no matter what.

CP: So do you regret becoming a heroin dealer?

LPW: Yeah, I sold out, man. A lot of dudes get in there thinking it’s something exciting, but I was pissed off, man. I came out to get the American Dream, to get the things I wanted in life whatever way. I worked when I came home. I worked at Burger King, I worked at a construction company, delivered pizzas and all that. But you can’t get the American Dream doing that.

CP: I invoked your name in articles a few times over the years. There was this one case involving Eugene Petasky, who got caught twice for laundering money through his jewelry store, Metro Brokers, and he bragged about knowing you to the undercover.

LPW: Oh, you talking about Gene. Yeah, how’s he doing? I hear he got himself in some trouble by, you know, name-dropping and all.

CP: So it wasn’t just bullshit, he actually knew you?

LPW: Yeah, we go way back. I been knowing him for years, but I didn’t know he was just talking reckless like that, about stuff that he don’t know what he’s talking about. That’s how people get in trouble and all that. I’ve been knowing Gene for years, all those guys down at Metro, Bernard Hill [a clothing store]. They’re kind of like family. They all spread the money around, you know. Me and him were pretty cool. But you got these gangster groupies, they like to know everything. I wouldn’t expect him to be going around talking about stuff like that. I know what lawyers were smoking dope at the parties, who was screwing whose wife, stealing money and whatever, but I don’t talk about other people like that.

CP: In Baltimore, there’s no awareness that there is any organized crime. In your day, people could point to you for a minute, or to Robert Dowdy for a minute, or, earlier, Peanut King or Melvin Williams for a minute. There are these passing gangsters, but no sense of continuity or organization.

LPW: It’s true. With gangs, it’s more like peer pressure and clubs and all that, they don’t have no financial goals, they just hang out. You see one, you see 50 of them, they move together. With organized crime, they are more like businessmen. They self-sustain. The little boys in the gangs, you got to hold their hands.

CP: Used to be there was Julius Salsbury, there was Little Willie Adams [both of whom controlled aspects of the city’s rackets in the past], but that seems to have passed.

LPW: Everything gets watered down in time. I think the TV has a lot of influence. You watching what’s on TV, you can understand pretty much why people are the way they are. This hip-hop reality-TV stuff—everybody is just silly.

CP: Did you know any politicians in your day in Baltimore?

LPW: Yeah, I knew [former mayor Clarence] “Du” Burns. We used to have lunch down at the Palmer House. I campaigned a little for Kurt Schmoke, Nathaniel Oaks [a state delegate]. I used to donate money to Nathaniel Oaks.

CP: You would have lunch with “Du” Burns when he was mayor?

LPW: Yeah, “Du” Burns, he was my man. But no, after he was retired. I tried to get him to run again, but he wouldn’t run. He was like, “Youngblood, I’ve been in politics for 50 years, I’m tired now.”

CP: You helped political campaigns?

LPW: Yeah, we helped campaign for Kurt Schmoke. Then I was friends with the East Baltimore Murphy family, they ran a political machine in East Baltimore. They the ones that renovated my house for me on Linden Avenue. Security, it had cameras. It had everything: Jacuzzi and chandeliers, carpet, marble, brass. It was nice and comfortable. Down at the Sheraton downtown, we gave a party and all the politicians and judges came out. There was a picture in my house, when they raided my house, but that one disappeared, the picture of the party we gave for politicians down there. I was at the funeral for Henry Parks [the founder of Parks Sausage]. It was crowded, but I got into the chapel, got to see the royal family, Willie Adams and that circle. And I was at Willie Adams’ birthday party up in Martin’s West. The lieutenant governor and all were there, and Stuart Simms. That was right after that big case of mine against Stuart Simms, the only case he took as state’s attorney.

CP: And you beat it.

LPW: Yeah, I beat it. They underestimated me. They was Rhodes scholars. I’m thorough when it comes to my homework. I don’t let nobody know more than me about it. They look at you a certain way, but they don’t know who you really are. So I know more about them than they know about me. I got to know my town. I could talk about Mencken, whatever, Julius the Lord, the numbers runner. You got to know your history. So I knew a lot of them guys.

CP: The flavor has definitely changed. At some point it seems like the city just exploded with violence.

LPW: It’s the economy. To understand anything, it’s the economy. We’re social creatures. We need each other and all that. The one’s that made it, they turned their backs on us. The hip-hop movement came directly after the Black Power movement and the civil-rights struggle. The ones that made it got through the door. Jesse Jackson and a lot of them, they sold out. So the kids had to raise themselves, and that’s what they came up with. They don’t care.

CP: How did you come to start writing?

LPW: I kept a diary in prison, and during my trial and everything, and did it for years. I stopped doing it after a while, but I still got it. And then I expanded from there, and let people see my stuff, writing short stories, and then short stories became novels. I handwrite everything.

CP: When did come up with the Michael Jones character and what was the inspiration?

LPW: It evolved on me. It started out like it was a short story, and then it just kept on spreading. Michael Jones is like a composite of a lot of people, and he’s like my alter ego. I want to be like him. He’s a smart character, he reads a lot, he studies, even though he’s a criminal. He seems like he’s a drug dealer, but he’s really not a drug dealer. He’s a little businessman.

CP: Right, it just happens to be drugs.

LPW: Yeah. So when the young dudes out there dealing drugs read it, it’s like they don’t have no exit plan, they’re not going anywhere. They read it, you know, at least they be smarter, they read books. And ultimately, they get out from in there, because it’s a dead end.

CP: Seems like that message never takes hold. There’s no chance of long-term success, yet people keep doing it.

LPW: I think it’s because it’s a struggle to survive, that’s the only outlet that they have. It’s the only way for a young black dude to have a chance at the American Dream, not just working at McDonald’s, coming home, and popping some popcorn in the microwave and sit there and watch other people enjoy life, live vicariously. People, especially at a young age, they want to live their life. The American Dream, they over-sold it. Nobody wants a white picket fence and a two-car garage anymore, they want the mansion, they want the Mercedes-Benz. If society don’t create no outlet for that, they going to keep doing it, no matter what. We had “New Jack City,” we had “Scarface,” we had “The King of New York,” we had all these movies showing a dead-end thing, right, where you’re going to end up dead or in jail, but it doesn’t stop them.

CP: In the book, I noticed you used a lot of names and places that are real.

LPW: Because it’s a way of recognizing people, and then there’s people who know that their name is in there, they’re going to talk about it, telling other people. It’s like a promotion thing, too. They got to run out and get it. People live off gossip, you know.

CP: You’re 60 now.

LPW: Yeah, I’m 60 years young. I’m about 155. I play a lot of basketball. I surprise them, I beat all the young kids.

CP: You stayed in shape.

LPW: Depends on what you eat. I try to eat out of the dining room. Some of that stuff’s not bad, the rice and beans, potatoes and all that, it’s not bad.

CP: And you spend a lot of time in the library.

LPW: Yeah, I be in library. I jog, I listen to my MP3, I got like 2,000 songs on there. That’s the key to it, Van, you got to stay busy. If you’re busy, working and all that, then you don’t really know where you are. It don’t matter where you are, because you are into your work.

CP: What music are you listening to?

LPW: I got everything. I got rappers, I got R&B, I got pop. I got Rod Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, I got “Rapture,” Blondie, Herbie Hancock, Average White Band. I like to mix it up. You listen to everybody’s music, you see America through everybody’s eyes, you know. It’s more enriching.

CP: What do you know about prison life, after all those years?

LPW: It’s a university, man, you know. I don’t waste no time. I learn everything I can, like a sponge. I don’t care what it is—quantum physics, relativity, religion and everything, economics, history—I love it.

CP: You got to negotiate the powers that be.

LPW: Yeah, it’s saturated with gangs. When I first come in, it was just individuals, but now you got these gangs and they got their own little rules they play by. They’re not the old-school rules anymore, it’s little kiddie rules. There’s no trust. They stab you in the back, they think small. The goals, it’s not to be successful or the money, but it’s just to be known. We’re living in the age of celebrities. But they’re all like sons to me, man, like one big family, so they listen and respect.

A Dog In the Fight: Baltimore’s Enforcement of Animal-Cruelty Laws is Getting Some Bite

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Feb. 17, 2015

Photo: aspca.org

Last March, the door of a vacant house at 6203 York Road in Baltimore was forced open by police to reveal a scene of prolonged horror. The broad contours of what happened were pieced together by authorities after someone reported that a live animal was trapped inside the house in Cedarcroft, a nice neighborhood on the city’s northern boundary.

Baltimore City animal enforcement officer (AEO) Megan Zeiler looked through a window in the house and saw a dead dog. She called the police for help, and when they entered, they found the home “covered in animal waste,” while the “extremely emaciated” dead dog’s “face appeared to have been eaten by another animal,” court records explain. While Zeiler examined the dog, named Rudy, a “live emaciated cat” named Lola “came down the steps” of the house, “covered in dried blood, presumably from consuming dead animal.” Zeiler “found a dead cat” on the third floor that “also appeared to have been eaten.”

Zeiler talked with a neighbor, who explained he had not seen the home’s owner since January. Thus, it appeared that Rudy, Lola, and the other cat had been locked in the house, left to their own devices, for about two months. Only Lola made it out alive, apparently by eating the others. The dead cat’s cause of death is “unknown because most of the body was missing,” court records state, while Rudy “suffered terribly with evidence of severe neglect and lack of veterinary care,” along with “extended malnutrition/starvation.”

After a bit of detective work, someone was held to account: the vacant home’s owner, 33-year-old Patrick Kenji Ito. Charged on July 17 with 31 counts of various forms of animal cruelty, he was arrested a week later and released pending trial on his own recognizance. At his Oct. 7 court appearance, prosecutors declined to press all charges but one count of aggravated animal cruelty. Ito pleaded not guilty and was given two years of supervised probation before judgment and ordered to pay $264 in restitution to the nonprofit Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter (BARCS), where Lola was treated.

Ito, the chef and co-owner of Hampden’s McCabe’s Restaurant, has not yet paid restitution to BARCS. (BARCS has filed a court lien against him for the amount owed, which they do whenever defendants fail to pay the ordered restitution).

In a Facebook message responding to City Paper’s inquiries, Ito explains that the York Road house had gone into foreclosure and he had moved out, and “there clearly had been quite a few people in and out of the property” after that, and then “out of nowhere I got arrested for animal cruelty charges.” The dead dog, he claims, “was not my dog” though the authorities “thought it was. I just took the offer of probation so there was no possibility of me doing jail time for these ridiculous charges.” He adds that “this has been quite an ordeal and I just really don’t want to be pictured as this animal killer after all this.” In a follow-up phone conversation, Ito adds that “my dog Rudy is still alive.”

The case against Ito is one of 28 criminal matters City Paper reviewed in order to get a grasp of how people in Baltimore are getting caught and penalized for abusing animals. Detailed in sworn statements contained in the court files, they run the gamut from a man who left a dog locked in a hot car, to a woman who threw a kitten against a wall, to dogfighting.

The 28 cases show that animal abuse is a big tent of bad conduct by all sorts of regular citizens, not just violent drug dealers driven by greed and bloodlust to hold high-dollar dogfighting events, as in a massive dogfighting indictment filed in December. They also show that law enforcers are going after all manner of animal abuse, and taking the crimes seriously.

As recently as April 2013, the city’s animal-abuse enforcement effort was lambasted in a report of the Mayor’s Anti-Animal Abuse Advisory Commission (MAAAC), which City Hall tried to suppress. The report found “many law enforcement officials in Baltimore continue to treat animal abuse as a minor property crime,” yet predicted that “2013 promises to be a better year.”

If 2013 brought improvements on the abuse-fighting front, 2014 appears to have brought even more. City Paper asked to interview police and prosecutors about their efforts to combat animal abuse, and Tammy Brown, spokeswoman for the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office, said only “we work very closely with Animal Control to investigate and prosecute animal cruelty cases when they are merited,” though her office did provide defendants’ names and court-case numbers for some of its 2014 prosecutions.

A request to interview Sharon Miller, director of Baltimore City’s Office of Animal Control, about her encounters with animal abuse in the field, and how enforcement has changed or improved over time, was met with a prepared statement.

Each year, Animal Control’s statement says, it receives “approximately 5,000 calls [that] are classified as Animal In Danger,” such as “dogs inhumanely chained in rear yard, injured animals, animals that appear malnourished, etc.” The “office responds and investigates each call” and also “works closely with” police and prosecutors “in investigating suspected cases of neglect and abuse,” a “collaborative relationship” that “has led to an aggressive investigative approach which has resulted in an increase in felony arrests and prosecutions.” That last point is backed up by the number of animal-abuse arrests processed at Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center (BCBIC), which went from 17 in 2013 to 24 in 2014.

BARCS’ Executive Director Jennifer Brause says “animal abuse is taken more seriously now,” with “more enforcement, deeper investigations, and more prosecutions, and it makes you feel good because something is being done about it.” Greater enforcement spawns more citizen reports of abuse, she adds, because “now they know something is going to be done about it.”

Not among those 2014 arrests, though, were the 22 people indicted for a massive dogfighting conspiracy in December 2014—a case that is perhaps the best gauge of how seriously Baltimore law enforcers now take animal abuse.

Hundreds of dogs and huge hauls of dogfighting paraphernalia, along with guns, drugs, and cash, have been recovered as a result of the dogfighting investigation. The case is overseen not by line prosecutors, but by the elite Major Investigations Unit (MIU) of the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office, an outfit best known for prosecuting gangs and handling complex wiretap investigations.

As then-State’s Attorney Gregg Bernstein pointed out when he announced the indictment, “there is a strong connection between those individuals who would subject animals to horrific treatment and abuse and those engaged in the drug trade and acts of violence.” The indictment, he continued, “hopefully will protect innocent and vulnerable animals from further abuse and reduce violent criminal activity.”

The cases City Paper reviewed also show this connection, but not always. Ito, for instance, has not otherwise faced criminal charges in Maryland, and neither have many of the other defendants. The 28 cases, though, have at least one thing in common: victims. All told, 74 dogs and five cats suffered, whether or not the perpetrator suffered consequences.

Those defendants deemed guilty, says retired city animal-abuse investigator Eric Banks, “should be kept from ever owning another animal, another pet,” he says, adding, “if you’ll abuse a dog, a pet, you’ll abuse a child. It’s the same mindset.” While the law doesn’t allow this, the effort to seek justice on abused pets’ behalf shows the city does indeed have a dog in the anti-abuse fight, and it has some teeth.

Tavon Sol was 8 years old in 1999 when since-retired Baltimore Sun features writer Carl Schoettler profiled him and his father, Tyrone Sol, in a boxing story. Tavon, “looking like a chunky spaceman in his protective headgear and midriff guard, whacks away at his dad with more enthusiasm than skill,” Schoettler wrote. “But he’s learning.”

The son apparently learned more than boxing from his dad. Fast-forward to 2011, when both were charged for guns and drugs. Eventually, prosecutors declined to pursue most of the charges, but Tavon Sol pleaded guilty to drug possession and was put on six months of probation, while 56-year-old Tyrone Sol, an already-convicted drug dealer and burglar, pleaded guilty to animal cruelty and was given a two-month sentence in October 2013.

A month after his father was sentenced, Tavon Sol rolled up to his home at 545 N. Fulton Ave. to find the police raiding the place. After advising him of his rights, the officers took his statement: “he had three guns and marijuana in his basement bedroom” and “all the pit bulls at the location was [sic] owned by him,” whether “dead or alive.”

In the house, in addition to guns, drugs, cash, and “various dog fighting paraphernalia,” were seven pit bulls in the basement, three pit bulls “chained to the rear fence line outside,” and a “deceased pit bull in a cage on the rear deck outside the kitchen door.”

Come Jan. 19, the only remaining charges remaining against Sol involved the guns and drugs, as prosecutors dropped the 12 animal-cruelty and dogfighting-related charges against him. Those, it turns out, were rolled into the MIU’s dogfighting-conspiracy case.

The indictment describes in greater detail the fruits of the November 2013 raid on Sol’s house: In addition to the 11 dogs, there were “materials, devices, and instruments used to facilitate the breeding, training, and fighting of dogs (e.g., a treadmill, conditioning harnesses, breaking sticks, wound treatment, dietary supplements, etc.),” and “one of the pitbull puppies was deceased due to starvation.”

Thus, Sol is no longer on the hook for just the animal-abuse crimes apparent in the November 2013 raid on his house, but of the crimes of the whole 22-member conspiracy, which is alleged to have spanned from April 2013 to when it was indicted in December. The grand jury claims he’s part of what the indictment calls “a closely-knit clandestine community” that used “disturbing conditioning methods designed to make dogs more aggressive, vicious, and lethal.” This was done to “increase the chances of prevailing in dogfights—and to maximize the corresponding profits from gambling on matches,” where “the total purse” can be “$100,000 and higher, with individual cash bets of $25,000,” or “even greater at larger events.”

Of the 22 defendants, eight have prior convictions for violence, five for handguns, two for sex offenses, and one for murder. Earlier in 2014, some of Sol’s co-defendants, including the father-and-son team of William Murray Jr. and William Murray III and Tyrone Wolfe, already had already appeared in court documents for suspicions of dogfighting, as had a man, William Paige, who’s mentioned though not charged in the MIU indictment.

As Baltimore Police Department (BPD) officers were preparing to raid Murray III’s home at 2801 Oswego Ave. in Park Heights in April 2014, the 27-year-old emerged from the house, got into a white Ford Crown Victoria, and drove off. The officers stopped and arrested him for not having a valid driver’s license. Thus, Murray III wasn’t present for the raid on his house, but his girlfriend, Victoria Burnham, and an infant were.

The raid turned up drugs, a gun, and “5 pit bull type dogs within cages” in the basement. One of the dogs “was severely injured” and the other four “were injured with scarring and swelling,” while one was wearing a “weighted collar.” Among the wide array of dogfighting paraphernalia found were a “weight pulling harness,” a “weight pulling sled,” a “scale used for weigh in for dog fight,” and “conditioning videos.”

The police then went to the Murrays’ used-car dealership, around the corner at 4026 Reisterstown Road, where 48-year-old Murray Jr. was there to let them in. More dogfighting paraphernalia was recovered, including veterinary-care medicine, dietary supplements, and “various animal fighting documents.”

Burnham and Murray III were arrested and charged for drug- and dogfighting-related offenses, and Murray Jr., who was entrusted with the infant, was not arrested. The case against Burnham dwindled to a minor pot charge. Murray III’s case continued until Jan. 15, when prosecutors declined to pursue the charges, which by then had been rolled into MIU’s dogfighting indictment.

Then, on Jan. 12, Murray Jr. and his wife, Barbara Murray, were also indicted in Baltimore County in a separate dogfighting conspiracy, which also includes animal-cruelty counts for failing to provide “proper drink” to several horses. Murray Jr., who owns the Southwest Baltimore arabber stables on Carlton Street that were raided on Jan. 13 over concerns about the care provided to the horses there, also faces numerous firearms-related counts in the Baltimore County conspiracy, including for possessing guns when he’s prohibited from doing so given his prior felony record.

Wolfe, meanwhile, made a blip on the anti-dogfighting enforcers’ radar on June 18, 2014, when animal-control director Miller and BPD officers came to his house at 3922 W. Garrison Ave. with a warrant to check on “the health and welfare and licensing” of animals there. Once inside, they found 41-year-old Wolfe, Ebony Goins, and three children.

“We smoke weed, and that’s it,” Wolfe told the officers, adding “there is an old gun in the basement.” Also in the basement, Miller observed, were “a make shift box with carpet on the floor which had blood stains,” while three pit bulls were in the backyard, one of which had “bite wounds/scarring” and another had “a long split of the tongue.” A “weight pulling harness” and a “treadmill” were also found, “an indication of conditioning a dog for a fight.”

The charges against Wolfe, who was previously convicted of assault with intent to murder and handgun violations, remain pending in Baltimore City Circuit Court.

Paige can count himself lucky not to be charged in MIU’s case, since his name appears in the indictment, along with the circumstances found at the 58-year-old’s house in January 2014. That’s when, similar to what happened to Wolfe, Baltimore authorities came knocking at his Sandtown-Winchester house at 1118 N. Carrollton Ave. with a warrant to check on the welfare of animals there.

In addition to guns and drugs, six pit bulls were found in the backyard, “housed in 50 gallon plastic drum barrels” and “chained with heavy chains” in frigid, 14-degree weather. Several bore scars “on the face, chest, and legs,” suggesting they “have been fought.” In October 2014, the Sandtown-Winchester resident was sentenced to three years in prison for having fight-trained dogs and five years for being a felon in possession of a firearm, in light of his 1985 attempted-murder conviction. Thus, Paige’s penalties had already been meted out before the indictment came down.

While the dogfighting scene appears to be populated with nefarious characters with shady backgrounds and criminal proclivities, numerous people with clean or nearly pristine criminal backgrounds have been snared for animal abuse in Baltimore. At times, their culpability was established after they engaged Baltimore’s animal-welfare apparatus upon their pet’s sickness or death.

Take 47-year-old Northeast Baltimore resident Tonya McCoy. In January 2014, she surrendered the body of her dead brown-and-white pit bull to BARCS. An employee there was “concerned about the condition” of the dog, and so contacted an AEO, who inspected the dog and found it “emaciated and dehydrated.”

When interviewed, McCoy explained that the dog “became sick two weeks ago,” and took it to the vet, but “the line was too long and the dog died before making it to the shelter, about 30-40 minutes earlier.” But the dog “was cold to the touch,” its left side “had begun to flatten” as if it “had been on its side for an extended period, . . . yellow liquid was draining from the dog’s nose and mouth,” and its body temperature “did not register on the thermometer.”

A necropsy concluded the dog “suffered from serious neglect” and “lack of proper nutrition” for “weeks/months.” It had an inflamed abdominal wall, a “very painful condition” that would have rendered it “visibly sick and in pain.” McCoy was found guilty of one count of animal cruelty, for which she received one year of unsupervised probation before judgment.

Andrea Eaton, a 48-year-old Northeast Baltimore resident, adopted a dog named Sput Lee from BARCS in January 2013, but it was in poor condition when her brother brought the dog back to BARCS in February 2014. Eaton admitted she “never found out why the dog was losing weight and did nothing more until the time of surrender” by her brother. Under BARCS care, the dog regained weight, adding 13 pounds in six days. Eaton was given 18 months of supervised probation and ordered to pay $496.55 in restitution to BARCS, which she has not yet paid.

The case of 33-year-old Torrelee Lane, who called the Maryland Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MDSPCA) in June 2014 to say “her dog had been hit by a car about two months ago” and was “chewing at the foot,” shows the lengths to which animal-welfare investigators sometimes have to go.

After prompting from MDSPCA, Lane arrived there hours later with the dog, identified as “T.K.,” whose foot was wrapped up with a towel, electrical tape, and a plastic bag. Amputation was required, because T.K.’s “entire foot and part of the bone was missing,” and that the dog had “severed” bones.

Lane had mentioned she had other dogs, so an extensive probe ensued, overcoming Lane’s efforts to thwart it. Ultimately, authorities came to her home with a warrant and found three pit bulls, including a “thin and unresponsive” puppy that had parvovirus, a highly contagious and life-threatening disease. All three were euthanized. Lane was put on one year of supervised probation, and had to pay $57.50 in court costs.

In other cases, people called authorities to have their unwanted, sick dogs picked up, and AEOs responded to discover neglected animals. One of them, 40-year-old Ellwood Park resident Gregory Williams, told an AEO his Rottweiler, who was “extremely emaciated,” had “eaten a rat” and “had been in the same condition for about a month.” Turned out, the dog had a condition requiring a special diet, and gained seven pounds with proper care. Williams got one year of supervised probation for animal cruelty and was ordered to pay $294 in restitution to BARCS, which he has yet to pay.

Another man, 44-year-old West Baltimore resident Louis Raymond Jefferson, called to have Animal Control pick up his Rottweiler, Bo, and the responding AEOs found “a very thin” dog “lying on a urine soaked sheet” in 28-degree weather. Jefferson said Bo “had been sick for about a month” without “any veterinary care.” BARCS found Bo to be “in horrible condition, emaciated, dirty, unable to walk, with pressure sores, and extremely swollen/enlarged joints,” and after the dog was euthanized, it was determined that Bo was “an old dog with numerous problems such as failing organs and parasitism.” Jefferson got six months of unsupervised probation.

One of the dogs seized in the December bust of a Baltimore-based dogfighting ring (WBAL)

Calls from tipsters spawned many of the 2014 animal-abuse cases City Paper reviewed, and responding AEOs turned up some heart-breaking cases of abuse.

A tip about two underweight dogs “left out in the cold” brought AEOs to 934 N. Rosedale St. in West Baltimore in January 2014. They found a pit bull on a short chain lying on a blanket outside of an “igloo dog house” in 4-degree weather, and a white dog “dead on arrival and frozen to the bottom of the doghouse.” A 48-year-old woman, Bridget Jones, “came to the door” and claimed ownership of the dogs. She got a 90-day sentence (with 86 days suspended) and probation for one year, and was ordered to pay $150 in restitution to BARCS, which she hasn’t yet paid. Since the animal-cruelty charges were filed, Jones has been found guilty of theft and, in yet another case, charged with first-degree assault and use of deadly weapon with intent to injure.

In February 2014, BPD officers and AEOs went to 2818 Ellicott Drive in West Baltimore, responding to “an anonymous call that a dog had been abandoned in the rear yard,” which is exactly what they found. Neighbors confirmed that it had been “left outside, tied to a pole in the cold” for “over a month,” and the police noted it “had severe scars on his legs and nose.”a year of supervised probation and ordered to pay $500 in restitution to BARCS, which she has not yet paid.

“The owner of the home,” 50-year-old Carolyn Simmons, walked up to the scene, bearing “the strong pungent odor of marijuana on her person.” When told of her impending arrest on animal-cruelty charges and the apparent smell of pot, Simmons announced, “I got some bud in my bra underneath my breast on the left side.” Simmons was given a year of supervised probation and ordered to pay $500 in restitution to BARCS, which she has not yet paid.

In July 2014, AEOs and BPD officers were directed to an apartment in the 3800 block of Rogers Avenue by a tip about a “deceased dog,” and came upon a disturbing scene. In the garage was a live dog that was “being stung by bees which were on a hive near the dog,” which was “tied to a crate without water or food.” Also in the garage was a dead pit bull “still tied to a electric [sic] outlet on the wall” and “already in an accelerated state of decay.” Charges were brought against a man named Maurice White, but prosecutors dropped the case on Jan. 13.

In November 2014, someone called in a complaint for “four dogs being kept in a 4×6 area in the rear of” 4451 Eldone Road, and AEOs arrived to find three dogs “confined in a fenced in area on the patio.” Dante Blake was there, and the 42-year-old explained that the two female dogs “were kept in crates to keep them from fighting” and that they’d fought two weeks earlier, adding that “he felt he could properly treat the injuries” himself “because of his career in the medical field.” All three were “visibly malnourished,” and one of them had “many wounds on her face,” another “had open wounds on her front legs and swollen muzzle,” and the third had “scarring on his legs and a wound on his chin.” Blake got one year of supervised probation and was ordered to pay $57.50 in court costs.

Two cases involving cats resulted from tips—including one that “a cat had been thrown against a wall and was possibly dead” in the Curtis Bay home of 38-year-old Elizabeth Gauthier. When an AEO arrived on July 8, 2014, Gauthier explained her kitten died when it “stopped breathing,” and that “her boyfriend had buried it somewhere outside,” though she didn’t know where. Animal Control director Miller got on the phone with Gauthier, who then admitted she had thrown “the kitten against the wall because the kitten scratched her,” and its body was in a plastic bag in the basement. A necropsy determined a concussion and brain trauma caused the kitten’s death. Gauthier got three years of supervised probation, and was ordered to pay $165 in court costs.

Similarly, in June 2014 someone reported that “a cat had been thrown from a window” at 4322 Reisterstown Road in Park Heights. Responding AEOs met with Philip Hanna, who explained that he’d heard his brother, 50-year-old Steven Hanna, earlier that day exclaim, “throw that mother fucker out the window.” A witness, Montre Jordan, confirmed what had happened and said the cat “almost died,” though it was found on the deck below “in shock but not significantly injured.” Steven Hanna got a 90-day suspended sentence and six months of probation.

A tipster’s call to police—and steps taken prior to their arrival—may have saved a dog’s life on June 30, 2014. Baltimore real-estate investor Thomas Karle Jr. called in the situation: a dog locked “inside a black GMC Denali with the windows up for over three hours” across from Baltimore City Hall. While waiting for the police to arrive, Karle and others noticed the dog “was in serious distress and on the verge of passing out,” so Karle “forcibly pulled the window of the car down and extracted the dog,” who “could barely move and was heavily panting,” so Karle and others “washed him down in water and gave him water to drink.”

When the police arrived, “the dog seemed to be in stable condition,” but “there was no sign of water or food” in the Denali. Its owner, 22-year-old Danael Tesfaye, “then came out to see what was going on,” and said “he did not know you couldn’t leave a dog in the car and admitted he owned the dog for two days.”

The dog went to BARCS, and Tesfaye, who has no prior criminal record, was arrested on four counts of cruelty. He was freed the same day on $50,000 bail. In September, he received six months of unsupervised probation and a $250 fine, and had to pay $57.50 in courts costs. When he failed to pay the fine, a warrant was issued and he was again arrested on Dec. 8, then released on his own recognizance.

Perhaps the most compelling animal-abuse case City Paper reviewed was one involving a 13-year-old boy who arrived on July 18 at BPD’s Southwest District station and announced that his mom and stepdad were trying to kill his pit bull. It joins together themes that the MAAAC report pointed out: the correlation of animal abuse with other kinds of violence and abuse.

The boy explained that he’d had an argument with his mother, 34-year-old Lynette Reed, who’d ordered his stepfather, 28-year-old Kevin Harris, to “take that bitch in the woods and kill it,” after which the boy had watched Harris walking his pit bull toward the woods along the 2700 block of Frederick Avenue, announcing that “I’m going to hang him from a tree and kill him!”

The police looked for the dog, but couldn’t find it, so they went to the boy’s home and encountered a “very hostile” Reed, who said of her son: “Get that bitch away from my house! That bitch isn’t coming inside my house! He’s not going to be shit just like his daddy wasn’t shit!”

When officers advised Reed that the youngster could not legally be refused access to the home, Reed threatened him. “If he comes back in here,” she said, “I’m locking him in the basement! He’s not getting any food or water unless I want him to have it. And when I’m ready for him to have something, he’ll only get bread and water. And he’s not getting a bed, he’ll sleep on the basement floor! I’ll show him what it feels like to be on lock down!”

The police tried to explain to Reed the procedures for handling her desire to no longer have her son live in her house, and she yelled back at them: “If you don’t take him, I got something for that! I’m unplugging his box!” Reed proceeded to unplug her son’s home-detention monitor, “in an attempt to violate his probation and get him arrested.”

The boy then asked his mother, “What did you do with my dog?” She yelled back, “I took the bitch in the woods and left him there!” and “I told you if you didn’t get it out of my house, I was gonna kill him!” The police, “not feeling comfortable leaving” the boy with her, sought “proper placement” for him. They then received a citizen’s call that a pit bull was tied to a tree nearby. Upon arriving, they found it “out in the sun” and “tied to a tree using a rope, a cord, and a metal chain” with “no food or water.”

Reed, who like Harris has prior convictions for assault and theft, was arrested on five cruelty counts, but in August prosecutors declined to pursue the charges. A warrant was issued for Harris, who was arrested on Feb. 9 and held without bail pending trial, scheduled for March 10.

Another harrowing domestic scene played out in April, prompting animal-abuse charges, when 32-year-old Andrea Ashe called the police to say she believed her estranged boyfriend, Darryle Langley, had “broken into their home” in Northeast Baltimore and “was still inside.” He “had access to a firearm,” she explained, adding that she was “unsure if he had one with him.” She had “separated from Langley due to being afraid of him,” but “he still had some property inside of the residence.”

When the police entered the house, they found no one there except for “a dark grey Pit Bull standing at the bottom of the steps” in the basement “with its “tail between its legs.” When they approached, the dog “ran to the far corner of the basement, as if to be afraid.” Urine and feces were “scattered around the basement floor,” and there was a “dog crate that appeared rusty with jagged edges” and empty bowls for food and water.

The police tried to talk to Ashe about the dog, but she “seemed to be uninterested” and “would not answer” any questions. So they spoke directly: “Ma’am, that dog in your basement needs your immediate attention. You need to give him food, water, and take him with you when you leave.” Ashe “did not respond,” but “merely walked inside” the house.

Two days later, an officer returned, knocked on the screen door, and “heard the Pit Bull come up the steps from the basement and begin to scratch at the door with its paw while it wimpered [sic].” The officer entered, “believing the dog was in great pain and suffering.” Everything in the basement was it had been during the previous visit, and the dog was in bad shape. The officer “could see its rib cage” and it had “little to no energy,” so Animal Control “responded and took custody” of it.

Ashe and Langley both were charged with animal cruelty, but prosecutors declined to pursue their cases. About 10 days after Langley was arrested on the charges, he was accused of second-degree assault in the city, and later pleaded guilty, receiving a three-year suspended sentence with 18 months of probation.

About a week after the assault charges were filed, Frederick County law enforcers accused Langley of heroin distribution, and after pleading guilty he received a 20-year suspended sentence with two years of probation. That case violated his supervised release on a federal felon-in-possession-of-a-firearm conviction, so he was sent back to federal prison for seven months, and is scheduled for release in July

While routine animal-abuse cases involving neglected or abused dogs and cats, however disturbing, rarely make headlines, dogfighting, the rock star of animal-abuse crimes, is all but assured media coverage. Aside from MIU’s big case announced in December, consider the case against Johnnie Taylor of Howard Park.

It started in April 2012 as a routine drug probe prompted by suspicions that Taylor’s house “was being used to sell marijuana.” After watching apparent drug transactions, the police arrested two men, including Taylor, who told police that he lived alone at the house, but “he had several dogs inside his house and he was aspiring” to be a pet-shop owner.

As the police later arrived at Taylor’s house to raid it, his girlfriend, Tara Davis, “was standing outside” and told the officers of the dogs. “All but one” of them “were confined to a crate,” she said, and the “loose dog” was a “king corso” named “Midnight,” an “extremely aggressive” dog that “was a direct danger to anyone entering the dwelling.” So the police had Davis “enter the dwelling first,” put Midnight on a leash, and “take the dog directly to her vehicle.” They then went inside.

What they found was a bunch of pot, bullets, and “eight pit-bull dogs scattered throughout the house contained in separate cages,” living in a manner “unsuitable for any living creature.” The dogs were “kept in small cages” and were “standing in their own fecal” matter and “did not have any food or water.” Five of them “were kept in the unlit basement,” and two of them “had clear signs they had been bitten on the face and legs.” Also found was dog-training equipment, dietary supplements, and veterinary supplies, along with “a manual titled ‘Conditioning a Dog for a Fight.’”

The case prompted much media coverage, and Taylor took to YouTube after his arrest to try the case in the court of public opinion. “A lot of people probably seen me recently in the news for this dogfight ring,” he declares on the 11-minute video, “so I figure I get my own camera crew out here and tell the city and the world what’s really going on with Johnnie Taylor.

“Well, let me start off by saying I’ve never fought dogs ever in my life,” he says. “Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve always rescued animals,” and “my house is like an animal sanctuary.” He claims “people know I’m trying to open up a pet store, so why would the police say that I’m fighting dogs” when “all my dogs were healthy and friendly?” He asks viewers, “have you ever heard of a friendly fighting dog?”

Taylor will soon get a chance to defend himself in court, because a pretrial dispute was recently returned from the appellate courts in the prosecution’s favor, and a trial is scheduled to begin on Feb. 23.

In 2014, though, one dogfighting case went unnoticed. It demonstrates how this form of abuse can be a spectator sport on the open streets of Baltimore.

On the afternoon of April 13, the police went to an alley near Homewood Avenue and East 20th Street, just north of Green Mount Cemetery, “for a dog fight in progress,” and when they arrived, they heard “citizens start to yell, ‘Yo the police are coming.’” There were “approximately 20 citizens in the alley, who were spectating this event, but they began to scatter” when the police showed up.

Two men, 36-year-old Edward Dancy and 44-year-old George Jordan Jr., were separating the fighting dogs, a “brown and white pit bull terrier” and a “white bull terrier,” who were “still growling, barking, and displaying their teeth toward each other.”

Dancy, ignoring officers’ calls for him to stop, pulled the pit bull down the street, but was soon detained and hesitantly did as told, to secure the dog by chaining it to a fence. Jordan did the same, chaining the bull terrier to a light pole.

“We wasn’t fighting the dogs, his dog jumped the fence,” Dancy said initially, but then changed his story, claiming “that’s not really what happened officer. We were walking the dogs” and they got too “close to each other and started fighting.”

Both dogs had injuries, but the bull terrier’s were worse: “punctures and lacerations” to the “face, ears, front legs, rear right leg, and neck.” The pit bull had “bite wounds” on its “face, nose, and front leg.” A responding AEO declared that the scene appeared to be more than what Dancy described, since their injuries “are consistent with that of dog fighting.” The police concluded that the two men “were intentionally and maliciously fighting these dogs” with “blatant disregard for public safety” and “the lives of these animals.”

Dancy and Jordan both were charged with animal cruelty and dogfighting. Jordan, who has a 2005 drug-dealing conviction, pleaded guilty and received an 18-month suspended sentence and one year of unsupervised probation. Prosecutors declined to pursue the charges against Dancy, who has faced numerous minor charges over the years, but has never been convicted.

Banks, the retired city investigator who would like to see convicted abusers banned from owning pets, holds dogfighters in particular disdain. “People that fight dogs are displaying antisocial behavior, and they’re dangerous,” he says, adding that “they should be publicized on a website, like the sex-offender registry.”

The zeal is borne of what Banks saw during his days in the anti-abuse business. Now a security professional who has provided services to celebrities in town to film movies, Banks, a fit man with a yen for gold chains, doesn’t come across as prone to emotional displays.

Yet, when his memory is jogged about what he saw in Baltimore’s basements and backyards, his emotions run high.

Banks recalls entering the basement of house where “there was a dogfighting ring, broken down, and a bloody carpet, and they had vitamins and steroids and treadmills. They were breeding dogs for fighting.”

What really got to Banks, though, was “a bait dog in a cage, and this dog was tore up. Part of his jaw was missing, his tail was gone, his ear was bitten off. He’d fought before, his time was over, and they just used him as a bait dog,” to get fighting dogs riled up.

“The thing about it was,” Banks continues, “this was the friendliest dog you’d ever want to be around. But he was so ugly, so abused. I cried.”

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