Mob Rules: Ex-Gangster Charlie Wilhelm is Making a Different Kind of Book These Days, and it’s Opening Up a Lot of the City’s Secrets

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Oct. 6, 2004

Mobtown is not, by reputation, a mob town. Baltimore’s nickname derives from its citizens’ proclivity to riot, not from its role as a home to organized crime—a role that until very recently has been little recognized, much less resisted. Sure, there was Julius “The Lord” Salsbury, who hobnobbed with city pols and lawmen as he ruled Baltimore’s rackets in the 1950s and ’60s, until he skipped bail and fled the country in 1970, never to be heard from again. (Barry Levinson’s Liberty Heights in 1999 retold the Salsbury story). And sure, there’s a 16-month-old outfit in the Baltimore City Police Department called the Organized Crime Division, but it claims to target low-level drug dealers, not racketeers involved in loansharking, narcotics-running, gambling, arson, and murder. Poker-machine guys and titty-bar owners with ties to police and politicians, rogues who maybe bring some coke in from Ocean City or Miami or New York every now and then—they’re not The Sopranos. They’re more like Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

But with the release this week of Wised Up (Pinnacle Press), by gangster-turned-informant Charlie Wilhelm and ex-Sun reporter Joan Jacobson, Mobtown’s long-held denial of its own entrenched organized-crime problem may start to dissolve. Recognition and frank discussion of a problem, as everyone knows, are the first steps on the road to recovery. And Wised Up—Wilhelm’s story, fully corroborated and retold by Jacobson, almost entirely in Wilhelm’s voice, as if he were regaling the reader over rounds of beer at Showalter’s Saloon in Hampden—promises to let that process begin.

The recovery process for Wilhelm—a longtime loan shark, bookmaker, arsonist, drug dealer, and extortionist—started when he hit bottom in the summer of 1995. The police staged an early-morning raid on his house on Keswick Road in Hampden, and Wilhelm’s gut wrenched as he saw his youngest son, a 7-year-old, scared and crying while the house was searched. Wilhelm wasn’t arrested, though, and a few days later his partner in crime, Billy Isaacs, with whom Wilhelm had run for nearly 20 years, appeared at his front door, fresh out of prison after a federal stint for witness tampering. Wilhelm knew Isaacs had gotten away with a murder in 1978. He also knew Isaacs wanted him to kill two men who Isaacs believed were stealing from their operation. Wilhelm, who had never killed, didn’t want to do the job, and was quickly getting sick of the gangster life. Within a week, Wilhelm went to Washington to tell an FBI agent—a childhood acquaintance of his, Wilhelm’s brother’s best friend—that he wanted to turn informant. He brought no lawyer, sought no deal for the crimes he’d committed, and had no pending charges hanging over him. It was the only way Wilhelm saw to get out.

And it worked. Ultimately, Wilhelm’s dicey errands as an undercover informant led to the arrest of 23 people, including Isaacs, who went to prison for the 1978 murder. Wilhelm supported his family on government funds—$2,500 per month, for a total of $140,000—until he could land a legitimate job as a Baltimore-area carpenter, a career he still has. He never entered the federal witness-protection program, instead leaving town in 1996 to live quietly in Alabama, until homesickness drew him and his family back in 1998. Meanwhile, Wilhelm kept a journal to help beat back chronic anxiety, and eventually was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, from which he still suffers. But the journal became the basis for a four-part series by Jacobson in The Sun, published in November 2001, as well as for Wised Up.

“It’s the only thing I ever did right in my life,” Wilhelm said recently during a sit-down at City Paper’s offices, with Jacobson in tow. “Why should I be the one persecuted for doing something right? Even though all that stuff I did before was wrong—if they told me I had to do 30 years, I’m perfectly happy with that. But why should I have to run? You know what I mean? Why can’t the guys that I dealt with be on the run? Why can’t regular people, hard-working people say, ‘Hey, those guys don’t run. He’s right, he did the right thing, let them run off,’ and get them to run away?”

That, in a nutshell, is the central message from Wised Up: Baltimore has to recognize that organized-crime henchmen live and do their dirty work in its neighborhoods, and it needs to reject them, just like Wilhelm rejected his earlier life. “The general public has to make these guys the criminals—the bad cops, the bad politicians, the wise guys,” Wilhelm says excitedly. “Make them be the wrong guys. The public has to say, ‘That’s not right, what you’re doing.’ Like Billy [Isaacs]. Billy goes into Hampden, everybody looks up to him. He’s a murderer! Why don’t you have a problem with that? Why can’t people’s opinions change? That’s the problem. Billy will come out of jail, and everybody will think he’s a hero. That has to change.”

A crucial turning point in Wised Up comes in that pivotal 1995 encounter, when Isaacs ordered Wilhelm to murder the two men, and he balked. Wilhelm figured it would only be a matter of time before a contract would be out on him, too. But what’s most interesting, in terms of the larger lesson of Wised Up about the presence of organized-crime figures in city life, is the identity of one of the men Isaacs wanted killed: a fellow named in the book as Ronnie Jones, whom Wilhelm and Jacobson do not describe further.

City Paper, during the mid- to late 1990s, published numerous stories involving Ronald David Jones, an ex-city cop with a history of involvement in vending machines, bars, real estate, and strip clubs. The paper’s interest in Jones was due to his political ties to then-City Councilman, now Mayor Martin O’Malley. Those ties apparently ended not long after O’Malley was elected mayor in the fall of 1999, according to Jones and others interviewed during the intervening years. But during O’Malley’s formative years as a Baltimore politician, Jones was one of his earliest and most generous financial backers. Jones made donations through his wife, ex-wife, and businesses to O’Malley’s campaigns, and the sum reported in campaign-finance records approaches $10,000. (O’Malley isn’t the only political pony Jones has backed. State Sen. George Della, outgoing City Councilwoman Lois Garey, former City Council President Lawrence Bell, and former state Senators Tommy Bromwell and Vernon Boozer all have campaign ties to Jones, and the full list is likely longer.)

During the decade that Jones was betting on O’Malley and others, he was also involved with Joe’s Tavern, an infamous Dundalk Avenue bar that looms large in Wised Up as Wilhelm and Isaacs’ base of operations. Joe’s took its name from its earlier owner, the late state senator, Joseph Staszak, who died in a mysterious boating accident in 1979 on Old Road Bay near Sparrows Point, three months after pleading guilty to federal charges of mail fraud and filing false tax returns. In 1990, Isaacs and Wilhelm were taking over Joe’s, and Jones was at the table with them from the start—though, in a series of Oct. 1 telephone conversations with City Paper, Jones discounted his involvement with the bar, and the Isaacs-Wilhelm crew, and questioned the truth of the claims Wilhelm makes in Wised Up.

Jones says that “because I lent [Isaacs] money at one point, [Wilhelm] said I had something to do with [Joe’s], but I was never a partner, nothing like that. I lent him 7 or 8 thousand dollars for setting up Joe’s, and that was it.” As for whether there was a contract that Isaacs put on his life, Jones says, “It was bullshit. If Billy had killed all the people he said he wanted killed, you’d have to put [all the names] in a phone book.”

Also, he says, Wilhelm wanted out of the gangster life not because of his unwillingness to do the killings Isaacs ordered but because he had “no money. [Wilhelm and another Isaacs associate] put their own hits in—they were robbing the book and blowing [the money] all over town.” In other words, Jones contends that Wilhelm was stealing from his and Isaacs’ own bookmaking operation, and spending so much money that he was running out of juice, so he ran to the feds in order to make government cash as an informant. “The guy wrote a book,” Jones concludes. “To me, it’s fiction.”

“I robbed all the bookmakers—that’s the way it was,” Wilhelm explains in a follow-up interview, while at his carpentry job. “In July of 1995 [when Wilhelm offered himself as a federal informant], I still had $60,000. I did it for money? Who would put their whole family what I had to put them through for $2,500 a month? That little piece of shit.”

When told of Jones’ contention that Jones had virtually nothing to do with Joe’s Tavern, Wilhelm went ballistic: “He’s an absolute liar—I’ve got the paper on that!” And then he left his job site to retrieve a document, which he shortly delivered to City Paper. It was a handwritten promissory note (apparently in Jones’ hand) for $71,000, with a promise to spend $15,000 more on equipment, lent to Joe’s Tavern by Jones, who signed the document along with Isaacs associate Richard A. Payne (the other man Isaacs later ordered Wilhelm to murder) on behalf of Joe’s. Wilhelm signed the note as witness to the December 1990 transaction, which also secured a 50-50 split between Joe’s Tavern and Ron Jones for all the tavern’s vending-machine business for 10 years. Wilhelm says the document was drawn up and signed at the offices of Baltimore criminal-defense attorney Michael Marr.

“I don’t recall anything like that,” Jones responds, adding, “I never got a dime out of” Joe’s vending-machine revenues. Then he remarked about the promissory note, “Goddamn, I gotta get a hold of that—I could collect on it. If you find anybody else who owes me money, call me.” In a phone message left at City Paper later the same day, he said that his wife at the time, Lois Arreguin, was on the Maryland State Lottery license for Joe’s Tavern for one year in 1990.

The absolute truth of the matter is hard to ascertain, despite the documentation. It’s still possible that the money was never loaned, and that Jones never shared the vending-machine take at Joe’s. But Jones freely admits to a long-term relationship with O’Malley. “I’ve known Martin for 14 years, going back to when he ran against [former state Sen. John] Pica” in 1990. Jones recalls being introduced to O’Malley through John Hubble, a real-estate investor who later, in 2001, served for three months as real-estate officer for Baltimore City government. “Once [O’Malley] became mayor, he got a different life,” Jones says. “I don’t want to be in that circle. If you need the mayor, you’re in trouble.”

In response to questions about the mayor’s relationship with Jones, O’Malley spokesman Steve Kearney would only say that “the mayor’s office has nothing to say other than there have been over 10,000 donors to the mayor’s campaigns over the years.” With Wised Up hitting bookstores on Oct. 9 and also available online (www. wisedupthebook.com), though, one of the mayor’s longtime—though erstwhile—political benefactors is now fingered in print as having been in business with organized-crime figures. Journalists, voters, and other political observers are sure to notice, and it’s safe to predict that a discussion about organized-crime ties to Baltimore politics will enter the civic debate.

Despite Wised Up’s remarkable disclosures and descriptions of mob life in Baltimore, it remains at its core a story about a man who made a change. “I really wrote the book because I thought it was a great story about how [Wilhelm] changed his life,” Jacobson says. “And I understood that there needed to be chapters about loansharking and bookmaking, and it was fascinating, but I really see this as a book about a guy who really turned his life around. And that’s what I think is the most interesting part about this book. That’s what really kept moving me along. I’d never written a book before, and it’s a big, long process. And that’s what kept me going—it’s a great story. It’s a story of hope.”

Stung By Honey: Viryta Is Hard To Know, Easy To Like

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Sept. 21, 2005

I was force-fed a little Latin as a tyke, so when I see a word like “viryta” I’m reminded of “veritas,” Latin for “truth.” And as someone who’s known to be, on occasion, a bit of a tippler, when I see “viryta” on a liquor label, I think, “in vino veritas”—in wine is truth. But when it comes to viryta, a sweet and potent honey liqueur popular at the city’s Lithuanian gathering places, the truth is hard to come by.

My first encounter with viryta was in early 1996, when a series of snow and ice storms incapacitated the city. My piss-yellow Dodge Diplomat was encased in the tundralike mixture, and the city’s snow-removal effort had seemingly lost my address, so I was walking to work. As I passed Hollins Market trudging east one of those mornings, a familiar face poked out of an open window on the second floor above the Corner Coffee House. It was a young fellow from the neighborhood, of proud Lithuanian stock, and he was beckoning me upstairs for a taste of ethnic pride.

“Hey, Van!” he shouted out. “Come on up! My grandmother’s cooking up a batch of vitatis.” That’s what I thought he said—“vitatis”—and that was how I referred to his grandma’s potion until just recently, when I finally was schooled about viryta within the bounds beyond which outsiders aren’t welcome to venture.

At first, I balked at my friend’s kind invitation, claiming to be duty-bound to my waiting desk at the paper, but he cajoled me until I relented, propelled as much by curiosity as his browbeating. At the very least, I wanted to see what had made this normally reticent gent so upbeat and red in the face this early in the morning.

Upstairs, in the family kitchen, his nana, robed in a flower-printed housedress, was using a long wooden spoon to stir something in a large pot on the stove. Empty jars and bottles of honey and grain alcohol were scattered on the counter, along with various spices and some dried grassy-looking vegetation. Everyone there—three generations, maybe a half-dozen people total—was ebullient, excited about the snow, and happily expectant about the product of the old lady’s labor, which they’d already tasted prematurely.

“It’s just about ready,” my friend said, “but we couldn’t wait.” The simmering batch of viryta scented the room like a Christmas candle, and the grandmother shooshed sniffing faces away from the lip of the pot. Then the ladle came out, and the teacups, and I had my first taste of viryta—and my only taste of it hot. When I finally did make it to the office, no work got done.

Since then, I’ve taken many opportunities to introduce people to viryta, and to enjoy it, cold or at room temperature, with wizened aficionados. Mum’s, a bar in South Baltimore, has it, drawn from a bottle labeled “Evil.” At the Harbor Way Inn in Ridgely’s Delight, they try to keep viryta in stock, but the supply-and-demand chart is a little out of whack. The Lithuanian Hall in the Hollins Market neighborhood is, of course, a hotbed for viryta tasting, but its management tends to have a Soviet bloc-type attitude when it comes to answering questions about the shots that have made Baltimore’s Lithuanians quasi-famous. And J-Ray’s Tavern at the corner of Carey and Herkimer streets—a watering hole frequented by city cops—has it, too. There, the stuff’s reputedly mixed using whiskey—and cheap whiskey, at that. To each his own.

For those intimidated by such hostelries, I suggest awaiting the annual Lithuanian Festival, held mid-May at the Catonsville Armory. Next year’s will be the 34th festival, and each year plenty of viryta washes desra (Lithuanian sausage) and koputsai (sauerkraut) down many gullets.

Though I can’t claim to be a wizened aficionado myself, I thought, with nearly a decade as a viryta taster under my belt, that I’d imbibed some knowledge about the stuff. At the very least, I believed the label that dubbed it “Lithuanian Nectar of the Gods.” But then photographer John Ellsberry, a man with a drop or two of Lithuanian blood in his veins, returned from a trip to Lithuania a few falls ago with the news that no one he spoke to there had ever heard of viryta. Turns out, it’s strictly a Baltimore thing, hon. Well, maybe Chicago, too. Both cities have a strong Lithuanian presence.

“It was the Lithuanian community in the United States that discovered viryta, using their own ingenuity,” explains Vytautas “Vito” Makauskas, the 78-year-old erstwhile proprietor of the Harbor Way, who in 2003 gave the bar—which his mother had given to him in 1952—to his 32-year-old daughter, Anna “Spooky” Makauskas. “So it is not Lithuanian—though the botanicals in it come from Lithuania.”

These rare “botanicals,” found only in certain swampy areas of Lithuania, are the secret ingredients in viryta, the identities of which, Makauskas explains, cannot be shared with outsiders, “on pain of death. I would no longer be welcome in the Lithuanian community if I told you.” And these leaves of grass are not cheap. A bundle, about eight inches long and the diameter of a beer can, costs on the order of $90 and is shipped here by suppliers in the mother country. He declines to provide a list of other ingredients, but recipes available online list cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ginger, cardamom, and caraway, among other spices. The honey used in the best viryta, Makauskas says, is from the linden tree.

Given the ingredients, no wonder viryta is supposed to be good for you. “It’s quite effective on coughs and colds,” Makauskas deadpans. “I strained my back once, and drank some viryta, and that cleared it right up,” Spooky Makauskas adds, apparently neglecting to give the grain alcohol (or vodka, or whiskey, or whatever liquor the maker uses) any credit for sparing her some pain.

Vito Makauskas dates the invention of viryta to, oh, sometime around 1913. “Everybody was experimenting,” he says. “It started out like a hot toddy, and at picnic time everybody brings their own. And then they found somebody who made the best. I got the original recipe of it, but it’s a pinch of this, a pinch of that. How much is a pinch? But my mother made her own in a big kettle, and would always keep a bottle around.” And where did Makauskas’ mother make viryta? “Washington Boulevard,” he says, “just around the corner from here.”

Makauskas may have been born in Lithuania, but he’s very much of his neighborhood. His path to becoming the Harbor Way’s patriarch was via war-torn Poland and Germany, as a boy, and it involved a lot of walking and border-crossing red tape. But here he sits, in his daughter’s tavern that was his for decades and, before that, his mother’s, and cheerily points out three bullet gouges on the bar’s coral-colored linoleum surface and a stuccoed-over bullet hole from his own .45 next to the front door. These scars are from a shootout in 1972, he recalls, when armed invaders stormed the place, then quickly turned and ran off at the sight and explosive sound of an itchy-trigger-fingered Makauskas in a cloud of gun smoke. His stories are hard-earned but happily shared—and often shed light on the shaky ground on which the truth sits.

Like this one: “Two drunks are sitting on a bench,” he gleams as he starts in on a favorite joke. They’re beholding a glowing orb, hovering in the sky. “One says it’s the moon rising. The other says it’s the sun setting. And they can’t agree. So a third drunk comes along, and they ask him, is that the moon rising or the sun setting? And the third drunk says, ‘I don’t know. I’m not from this neighborhood.’” This sends me and my friends into fits of laughter. I know, you had to be there. It was all in the delivery. But the point’s well taken. What is truth, when it all depends on how you look at it?

So, many thanks to Makauskas for dispensing some semblance of truth about viryta, including the meaning of the name. It has nothing to do with truth—except, perhaps, as a truth serum, in which case it doesn’t work on local Lithuanians, because they generally declined to give me many sought-after truths about it. The Lithuanian word means “cooked” or “stewed,” appropriately enough, given its effect on people who drink too much of it. And given my introduction to viryta—being stirred on a stove by an old Lithuanian lady—the literal name fits like a glove.

Still, one source of viryta lore eluded me. The reputed local master of viryta-making, who lives near the Lithuanian Hall, was suspicious of a reporter’s requests for an interview. She, along with the hall’s leadership, distrusts my motives for wanting to introduce the spirit to the general public. Makauskas says she once was approached by a large liquor company who wanted to purchase her recipe for a goodly sum, but she declined in a huff. For fear of alienating myself from all the Lithuanians in town, I’ll decline to give her name, even if I could spell it. After all, I still want my viryta, even if I still don’t know all that much about it. I suppose that’s as it should be.

D. Day: The Bengies Drive-In Theatre Turns 50

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, May 31, 2006

The original 1956 marquee at the Bengies Drive-In Theatre, which is named after its Middle River neighborhood, had a misplaced apostrophe in the name—“Bengie’s.” Proprietor D. Edward Vogel says there is a “very controversial” story behind the stray punctuation mark. He lights a cigarette in the bright May sun, stands on the asphalt before a newly repainted replica of the bygone sign affixed to the drive-in’s concessions building, and starts to tell it: “My natural father was A. Fred Serrao. You need to know this. He Americanized his Italian name. His father never forgave him.”

Hours pass. The apostrophe story still isn’t finished. By the time the punch line is delivered, the sun is sinking below the top of the Bengies’ 6,240-square-foot movie screen, the biggest on the East Coast, and Vogel (who goes by D.) has nearly emptied his pack of smokes. As it turns out, the apostrophe and the size of the screen are related—an epic story that takes an epoch for fast-talking D. to tell.

“You asked me about the Bengies,” Vogel explains. “The Bengies is my favorite subject, and I answered your question.” (While many patrons refer to the theater as “Bengies,” as if it belonged to a guy named Bengie, à la the original marquee, Vogel always includes the definite article—“the Bengies.”)

It’s easy to forgive Vogel’s multi-stranded yarn. First off, on June 6 the Bengies will turn 50 years old, a proper occasion for a full oral history of the place given by the guy who owns the business, books the slate of current-release movies that screen each weekend night, runs the projector, and handles the PA announcements. Secondly, after years of uncertainty over the theater’s fate, Vogel is about to own the land his business sits on, so—for the first time in decades—he believes the end of the Bengies is not near. Finally, Vogel was raised to talk endlessly, so he can hardly help it if his stories get away from him.

D. Vogel was born in Pennsylvania, the son of Serrao, a movie-theater developer who died when Vogel was 3. His mother, Aileen, then married an acquaintance of Serrao’s, Jack Vogel of Ohio, an architect-engineer who designed and helped build movie theaters, including more than 300 drive-ins. Thus, Jack Vogel (known in the business as the Frank Lloyd Wright of drive-ins, but known to D. as Dad) was often on the road checking in on his far-flung projects. Young D.—the youngest of the six Serrao children Jack Vogel adopted—was his father’s co-pilot on many such trips, assigned by his mother an important task: to talk nonstop in order to keep his dad alert at the wheel.

By the time Vogel was honing his storytelling skills in his dad’s car, the Bengies was already up and running. Jack Vogel was in business with his brothers, Hank and Paul, and they came to Maryland to build theaters for Durkee Enterprises—the company that gave Baltimore many theaters, of which only the Senator survives. Then, in 1954, they designed and built the erstwhile Edmondson Drive-In on Route 40 West in Catonsville for developer George Brehm. Two years later, after Hank Vogel found the Bengies property, the brothers bought it and built their own drive-in.

“Hank is the one that I really got close to,” D. Vogel says. Paul Vogel was an Army colonel, and the military was his life’s focus, though he had a stake in the business. Hank Vogel’s role was to build the drive-ins that Jack Vogel designed. “Once the Bengies was built, Uncle Hank chose to stay here,” Vogel continues. “And I started to work for him in the summers,” in the mid-1970s, staying in a rented apartment in a house right behind the Bengies’ screen. When Hank died in 1978, “we were all devastated,” Vogel remembers, but the Bengies never skipped a beat.

Vogel took a break from college after Hank died, to run the Bengies and two indoor Vogel-owned theaters nearby. But he soon grew resentful about his lack of a say in how the family business was run by Jack Vogel, who was in Ohio. So D. Vogel quit and resumed college while his older brother Fred took over the Bengies, which after a few years was leased to R/C Theatres. “The Bengies had left the Vogels’ hands,” Vogel says sadly. “And I refused to set foot in there.” The bitterness ran deep, and Vogel virtually stopped talking with his brother and father. In the meantime, he worked at the city’s old movie theaters—the Towne, Mayfair, New, and Hippodrome—and sold cars for Smith Motors.

Eventually, Vogel ran into the Bengies’ concessions manager around town, and she asked him to visit the eastern Baltimore County drive-in. “I did not like what I saw,” he says. “The place looked like a dump—sound poles were missing, the grass was knee-high.” The concessions manager asked Vogel to lease it. After much family debate and in-fighting, Vogel fulfilled her request in 1988 with a year-to-year lease.

He immediately set about trying to buy the land from his family. The heartache and haggling over this issue almost buried the Bengies in the late 1990s. But just before Vogel’s dad died in the fall of 2004, the last issue holding up the property sale—changing the zoning from residential to commercial—was approved, with a covenant restricting the land’s use to entertainment purposes. Today, D. awaits the final settlement papers to sign.

So why the apostrophe on the original marquee? That, after all, is how Vogel started this story. “Because Dad thought it was cute!” he exclaims.

Jack Vogel ordered it built that way—with his brothers’ blessings, though they hadn’t noticed the apostrophe in the marquee drawings. The sign arrived for installation just as the brothers were in the middle of a dispute over the size of the screen, causing the argument to escalate. Jack had designed the screen large; Hank wanted it that big, but Paul thought it was too expensive. “Everything’s big around here,” Hank argued. Just then, as D. Vogel recounts, a very large horse fly landed on Paul’s arm, so big that Paul didn’t know what it was. After Hank whacked it with a spade, smashing it into a gooey mess on Paul’s arm, he sealed the deal: “See,” he repeated, “everything’s big around here.”

“At that moment, it was all settled,” Vogel says. “There was an apostrophe on the marquee, and there would be a big screen. And that screen is one of the reasons I’m just hellbent the Bengies is going to stay here. No, the Bengies wasn’t the nicest theater the Vogels ever built, most certainly. But the screen is exactly right.” And today the marquee, which was replaced in 1973 without the apostrophe, is too.

Star Power: Frank M. Conaway Jr. Won an Election, Baggage and All

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Oct. 25, 2006

State delegate candidate Frank Melvin Conaway Jr., who with 5,889 votes was the top vote-getter in the 40th District Democratic primary in September, doesn’t want this story published. His father, Baltimore City Clerk of the Circuit Court Frank M. Conaway Sr., doesn’t either. In separate interviews, both used the same, emphatic words: “You don’t have to write the story.”

The story, though, may be of interest for 40th District voters, who on Nov. 7 will decide which three of the four candidates will go to Annapolis to represent approximately 110,000 city residents living from Pimlico and Rosemont to Woodberry and Mount Vernon. Simply put, Conaway Jr. isn’t a delegate yet, but he likely will be soon–despite having a decidedly thin résumé and embarrassing problems: a drug convict chairs his campaign committee, and his wife swore in 2003 that Conaway Jr. is mentally ill and abusive, prompting Baltimore County courts to step in for her protection.

Conaway Jr.’s campaign-finance committee is chaired by Adonis Sanchez Johnson, 26, who in 2003 was convicted for possessing six quarter-sized chunks of crack cocaine with a street value of several hundred dollars. He received an 18-month suspended sentence and 18 months of supervised probation. At his sentencing, court records show, Johnson was an unemployed community-college student who previously worked construction.

Conaway Jr.’s longtime wife, Latesa Elaine Thomas, 44, has had a Baltimore County domestic-violence protective order against her husband for more than three years. The order, dated Aug. 25, 2003, states that Conaway Jr. “threatened to kill” Thomas, placing her “in fear of imminent serious bodily harm,” and that “one year ago [he] pushed her face through back door window.” Thomas also convinced the court that Conaway Jr., 43, was a threat to himself and others as a diagnosed sufferer of bipolar disorder who had stopped taking his prescribed medications, so the court ordered police escorts to deliver Conaway Jr. to two emergency hospital evaluations in the summer of 2003. Thomas is in the process of divorcing Conaway Jr.

“We knew this day would come,” Conaway Jr. says. It’s an unseasonably warm early-October afternoon, and he’s standing at the foot of the Battle Monument, in the middle of Calvert Street between the two circuit courthouses. “Somebody’s going to ask that question,” he remarks, “and it’s none of your business.” At the time, City Paper did not know what had happened to prompt the protection order.

Conaway Jr. dismisses the drug conviction of his committee chairman by asking, “Can’t a guy get a second chance?” He remarks that “in order to be one of the people, you have to help the people. I gave a person a chance.”

Conaway Sr., when asked about Johnson’s criminal record and committee chairmanship, says simply that “it is what it is.” Attempts to reach Johnson were unsuccessful.

Bringing up Conaway Jr.’s own court record prompts the candidate to assume a don’t-go-there attitude. “My children’s mother is a decent woman,” he says. “That’s all you need to know. People understand that things happen between man and woman and the rearing of children.”

Conaway Sr., interviewed later over the phone after his son’s domestic violence record had been examined, says, “I don’t know about [Conaway Jr.’s] diagnosed disorder.” He adds that he doesn’t “get into [his children’s] marital affairs” and therefore was unaware of the domestic-violence issues. He cautions that his son once took his wife to court, too, so “you should take what she says with a grain of salt.”

In addition to the injuries described in the protective order, Thomas, in her sworn statement in the case, mentioned a “tooth chip” and “bruises all over the body.” She wrote that Conaway Jr. was “having a bi-polar accident. He has not taken his medicine for several months.” She asked the court to help, writing that she and the three children she’s had with Conaway Jr. are “living in fear” because “he is bi-polar and I can’t deal or control his behavior,” which she described as “unstable,” “talking threats, keeping son in garage in fear. My entire family is afraid. He is in a manic state and is unreasonable.”

Bipolar disorder, which is also known as manic-depressive illness, is described by the National Institute of Mental Health as “a brain disorder that causes unusual shifts in a person’s mood, energy, and ability to function” that “can result in damaged relationships, poor job or school performance, and even suicide.” It estimates that 2.6 percent of the U.S. adult population suffers from the biochemical illness. In September, the Harvard Medical School published a NIMH-funded study that found that the economic impact of bipolar disorder is measurable: “each U.S. worker with bipolar disorder averaged 65.5 lost workdays in a year.” But it is treatable with medication–as long as sufferers stay on their medication.

Keeping on the medication, Thomas swore to the court, was what Conaway Jr. failed to do. The result was abuse allegations severe enough for the court to order him to stay away from his wife, children, and in-laws, and their respective homes, schools, and workplaces, or be charged with a misdemeanor crime that could bring jail time.

In the ongoing divorce case, Thomas no longer alleges abuse by her husband, and asks for divorce on the grounds that they’ve been separated since July 2003. Conaway Jr., though, brought up the issue of violence himself, writing in his response to her divorce filing that Thomas “failed to list when she was charged with domestic violence.” That occurred in 1993, when Conaway Jr. swore out a complaint against her for assault, but prosecutors dropped the charge.

Conaway Sr., when informed of his daughter-in-law’s sworn statements, says quietly, “I don’t believe these things. I don’t think he would lay a hand on her. And I know him.”

Thomas initially said she would meet with a reporter for this article but then stopped returning phone calls. “I’m just an ordinary woman looking out for my children,” she said during a brief phone conversation.

Conaway Jr. is a mail clerk in the Baltimore City Municipal Post Office, a job he says he’s had for about three years. For about six or seven years before that, he says he worked for his father’s travel agency. Back in the 1980s for three or four years, he says he had an insurance broker’s license while working for Conaway Sr.’s now-defunct insurance business. In the meantime, Conaway Jr. says he received an education–three years at Howard University, one year at Morgan State University, then three years at Sojourner-Douglass College, graduating in 1999 with a degree in business administration. He also wrote books, and started a replica kit-car business called “F” Dreams Inc. The business fell victim, he says, to the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994. His book Baptist Gnostic Christian Eubonic Kundalinion Spiritual Ki Do Hermeneutic Metaphysics, which combines biblical theology and martial arts, was published in 2001, and was followed by the ’04 release of his The 20 Pennies a Day Diet Plan. Both are available online.

Conaway Jr.’s political committee, which was formed in May, raised and spent exactly nothing to get him elected in the primary. Yet at the polls he bettered all others–one well-liked, well-funded incumbent (freshman legislator Marshall Goodwin) and a number of other challengers with serious jobs and respectable campaign kitties. How? Conaway Jr. explains it this way.

“I have been in this community all my life,” he asserts. “I was raised up to have respect for everyone, to greet people every day–police officers, teachers, businesspeople–so every day I say good morning to people. I speak to people in the supermarkets, gas stations, whatever. That’s how I know people. That’s how I pulled it off, because I’m one of the people.

“I covered the whole district,” he continues, defensive at the suggestion that he was a no-show candidate, often missing at primary-season events. “I went door to door, I gave out toys, I gave out whistles, I gave out brooms, I spoke at forums. I tried to tell the truth. I tried to give a different answer than just rhetoric. I separated myself from the pack, because most of the people I was running against, they sound the same. You know, they sound good, but there are no answers [when they speak]. I spoke my mind.”

Conaway Sr. fills in the rest. “Everybody that gets elected gets elected by name recognition–everybody,” he proclaims, explaining that voters tend not to vote for people whose names they don’t know. “If you don’t have it, you have to buy it, and it just so happened that [Conaway Jr.] didn’t have to buy name recognition because his name was well-known.”

The Conaway name has graced Baltimore ballots since the 1970s, when Conaway Sr. was himself elected a state delegate. He rose to chair the Legislative Black Caucus before his star arched into a scandalous investigation of his insurance business. By 1982, he’d vacated his seat in Annapolis and declared bankruptcy. The same year, his wife, Mary Conaway, was elected the city’s register of wills, a position she’s held ever since–though she’s made stabs for other offices, including for Congress and mayor. Since Conaway Sr. gained the clerkship of the city Circuit Court in 1998, he’s run for mayor, too. Conaway Jr.’s sister Belinda Conaway is the 7th District’s city councilwoman, and just ran and lost for state Senate in the 40th District. Conaway Jr. himself tried for a City Council seat in 1999. That’s a lot of Conaways on a lot of ballots over a long period of time.

In order to keep the family legacy going, Conaway Sr. started Three Bears Slate, the campaign committee that raises and spends money on any and all of the family’s races for public office–including Conaway Jr.’s primary victory. Formed in July 2005, it had raised nearly $60,000 and spent nearly $50,000 as of late August.

“All of those votes for four people with so little money,” Conaway Sr. says, admiring the electoral efficiency of the family machine. “It’s not for power,” he insists–though he allows that another organization he formed this year with a bevy of local political and business leaders, Metro Political Organization, is “about power–what else would it be?” But when it comes to the family slate and public service, “I’m in it to help people,” he says.

In this case, Conaway Sr.’s help came in the form of Conaway Jr. The son, since he hasn’t followed former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Doug Duncan’s recent example of withdrawing after confessing to a mental-health problem, is on the November ballot along with fellow Democrats Barbara Robinson and Shawn Tarrant. Green Party candidate Jan Danforth is on the list, too. While Danforth’s vote-drawing potential is as yet untested, she has made a name for herself by fighting vocally in recent years against Loyola College’s decision to develop forestland in Woodberry and serving on the boards of the Greater Homewood Community Development Corp. and Jones Falls Watershed Association. If Danforth, 56, comes in fourth, Conaway Jr. will be elected, making his father proud.

“He’s not going to do anything bad,” Conaway Sr. predicts of his son’s likely future in the state legislature. “He’s fine. He’s going to be a star.”

Working Overtime: Drug Conspirator Eric Clash Says Cooperating Rehabilitated Him

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Apr. 1, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, July 1, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Dec. 23, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last Dirty Picture Show: The Heyday of the Apex Theatre Has Come and Gone. Can It Rise Again?

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Jan. 27, 2010

Tuesdays are Retro Night at Baltimore’s 580-seat Apex Theatre, meaning old VHS porn tapes are projected on the big screen instead of the usual DVDs. On a recent Tuesday, the onscreen action featured a mustachioed guy with a champion mullet going down on a big-breasted blonde. It’s a long, quiet scene, with no musical accompaniment, so in the cavernous silence it’s hard to miss the sounds in the seats: a zipper zips down front, and in the back, someone’s moving rhythmically. The two other patrons of tonight’s show would seem to be enjoying their solitary, if somewhat public, recreation.

A sign in the foyer baldly declares no sex acts performed in this building, but someone has scratched out the no. After all, pulling the juice in the dark is pretty much what X-rated movie theaters are all about.

Behind the Plexiglas at the Apex’s entrance, DVDs, snacks, and sodas are for sale. The cashier estimates that, on average, five customers an hour pay $10 to pass through the theater’s turnstile. Asked when to visit should one be looking for a crowd, he thinks for a second, takes a sip from his paper cup, and says: “About 1965.”

It’s a funny answer. But for the Apex’s owners, it points to an obvious problem: In today’s smut economy, they may as well be wearing powdered wigs and writing with quills. Porn consumers for decades now have been easily getting off in the privacy of their own homes, thanks to the boom of home-video technology in the 1980s and, more recently, the ubiquity of cheap, or even free, porn on the internet.

Today, according to cinematreasures.org, an ever-growing online catalog of more than 27,400 movie theaters around the globe, the international inventory of adult cinemas is down to 105, with 31 in the United States. They still hang on in big cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and in less bustling locales, such as Bay City, Mich., Youngstown and Toledo, Ohio, Clarksville, Ind., and East St. Louis, Ill. But they are steadily on the wane. Since the Earle Theatre on Belair Road closed in 2006, the Apex–located on Broadway in Upper Fells Point–is Baltimore’s only remaining adult theater.

Apex owner Isa Mufareh (whose business partner is his son, Maurice) acknowledges that the business model is anachronistic, but says the theater still makes money. “With home entertainment, it’s available everywhere,” he says of adult films. “But keep in mind,” he continues, “there are always some lonely people in this world. Our patrons, many are older people who don’t have that [technology] at home, and they don’t want to be at home alone. They want to mingle with other people who are in the situation they are in. There will always be people like that–we need more of them.” As for profits, Isa Mufareh says the business is “sustaining. We’re not getting rich out of it, just breaking even.”

The routine at the Apex is quite simple. The theater, other than the VCR tapes shown on Tuesdays, screens DVDs. “We buy them by the hundreds,” Mufareh explains. “We just take them out of the box and, well, just show them one after the other. On Thursdays, it’s the gay movies. We get about 100 people coming in on Fridays and Saturdays, half of that in the middle of the week.” As for costs, he says, “normally, there are one or two people working,” manning the cash register, operating the projector, and ensuring that patrons are behaving. Other than that, there are rent, insurance, and utility bills to pay.

Inside, the Apex retains its allure as a historic, single-screen theater. Four fleur-de-lis shaped sconces on the walls shed red light upward, and though a bit rag-tag in places–the ceiling is showing its age, and the bathroom has some plumbing issues–its homely grandeur is generally well-preserved. Upstairs, the projection room serves now as storage (the DVD projector used today is housed behind the last row of seats), but still boasts two vintage Motiograph projectors and some 35mm prints of old porn films, such as Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones III, Education of the Baroness, and Freedom to Love. The marquee, according to erstwhile Senator Theatre proprietor Tom Kiefaber, is “the second best marquee in Baltimore [after the Senator’s] in terms of its look, its maintenance, proper spacing, and matched letters.”

Isa and Maurice Mufareh, along with a third partner–Khalid Darraj, Isa’s nephew, whose one-third share in the business, Isa explains, was purchased by Maurice two years ago–have been running the Apex since 2003. Back when it was first converted from a bowling alley in 1942, it screened major Hollywood releases, but it has been an adult theater exclusively since the mid-1960s. With a market that consists largely of older, technologically unconnected people, the Apex is up against the law of attrition: Such patrons die off, and it’s not clear who, if anyone, will replace them. So the question becomes, how much longer can the Apex survive screening porn?

It’s a question that Khalid, Maurice, and Isa, incorporated as KMI Entertainment, tried to resolve several years ago by attempting to turn the Apex into a strip club. After the city liquor board consented to the change, in 2004 the Mufarehs and Darraj applied for a building permit for $250,000 in planned renovations, but zoning officials balked. In court documents, their lawyer, Fred Lauer, argued that “the Apex is used as an adult entertainment business and would continue such use, the only difference being that the adult entertainment would now be live.” The zoning board didn’t buy it, so in 2005 KMI Entertainment appealed to Baltimore City Circuit Court, where judge Evelyn Cannon didn’t buy it either. Live adult entertainment “is not similar in nature” to adult movies, she wrote in her 2006 opinion.

“The neighborhood made a fuss about it and filled up the courtroom,” Isa Mufareh recalls. “We said the law would let us do it, but [zoning officials and the judge] interpreted it differently–they wanted to interpret differently–so we didn’t get it. You can’t fight City Hall–if they don’t want it, then they don’t want it, and that’s that.”

Neither did the Apex’s neighbors. In letters to the zoning board, and in testimony before the board at the June 2005 hearing on the matter, several officials of neighborhood groups stridently opposed KMI Entertainment’s plans, essentially saying they preferred an existing X-rated movie theater to the possibility of a strip club instead–all the while attacking the theater, nonetheless.

“The Apex Pornographic Theater,” offered one letter-writer, “is a stark reminder of the troubled past of the surrounding area. It is time that this business stops being a hindrance, a moral drain and impediment to continued improvements” in the neighborhood. “I would like to see it resurrected as another general movie theater, not an adult theater,” wrote another.

In testimony at the hearing, neighborhood leaders observed that the Apex appeared to be struggling. “I don’t see people coming in, I don’t see people coming out,” said Edward Marcinko, president of the Upper Fells Point Improvement Association, concluding that “they’re not making any money. That’s why they want to bring in a nude adult entertainment complex.” Isa Mufareh, answering boardmembers’ questions, confirmed his dilemma: “No one wants to run a business that is not successful,” he explained, adding that “whatever we do within the law, we hope that we’ll make a profit out of it.”

“Those movie theaters are dying,” Isa Mufareh says today of X-rated cinemas, “but live entertainment is not dying.” Recalling KMI Entertainment’s efforts to bring Apex’s neighbors on board with their strip-club plans, he says: “We tried. We met with them, but everything was against us.”

It seems everything was, in fact, against them. The meeting Khalid, Maurice, and Isa had with community leaders, in a failed effort to appease them, occurred on Jan. 14, 2005. But first thing in the morning the day before, KMI Entertainment’s owners awoke to other, more serious troubles: Internal Revenue Service agents with warrants knocking on the doors to their homes, looking to turn up evidence of suspected tax evasion in connection with KMI Enterprises, a company owned by the three men that operated the strip club Christina’s Female Revue on North Point Boulevard in Baltimore County. The resulting searches turned up evidence that KMI Enterprises’ owners also were underreporting their income from KMI Entertainment, doing business as the Apex Theatre.

“I can’t talk about it,” Isa Mufareh says today of the criminal case that resulted–though he contends that “that subject has nothing to do with the Apex Theater.” It is relevant, though. Mufareh and his partners were convicted of underreporting the theater’s income, indicating that the Apex–despite its appearance of barely scraping by–makes enough money screening porn to merit hiding some of its revenues, however ill-advised the tactic turned out to be.

All three owners of KMI Entertainment and KMI Enterprises were charged with tax evasion and pleaded guilty in December 2008. The warrant described the IRS’ undercover operation targeting KMI Enterprises, doing business as Christina’s, and their owners, who had advertised the club for sale. The investigation began in August 2004, just as KMI Entertainment was applying to renovate the Apex Theatre. An agent posing as a prospective buyer called the real-estate agent representing Christina’s, and then, in September, met with Isa Mufareh, who told the agent that “the business was making a profit, but not on paper,” according to the warrant.

Meetings and conversations about the prospective sale continued into December 2004, with Isa Mufareh and Darraj increasingly disclosing the ways in which Christina’s operated under two sets of books, and how they and Maurice siphoned off unreported cash from the business, including through revenues from illegal gambling on video-poker machines. But the owners were cagey about sharing their records of the unreported income. “Isa Mufareh,” the warrant states, “stated that the law can get you for anything, such as money laundering. ‘We have to be careful with who we are dealing with.’ Khalid then stated ‘I do not want to end up someone’s girlfriend in jail.'”

When agents raided their homes on Jan. 13, 2005, the records showing that the Apex Theatre kept two sets of books were recovered from Maurice Mufareh’s house. The plea agreements in the case explain that the three owners each held a one-third share of the Apex, and that each “did in fact receive a one-third share of the earnings of Apex. Comparison between the second set of books recovered for Apex with the tax returns filed in 2003 for KMI Entertainment revealed that the conspirators had engaged in a similar pattern of underreporting the revenues of the theater” as they had with Christina’s. The amount of Apex’s underreporting came to $26,643, according to the plea agreement, compared to almost $300,000 for Christina’s.

As Isa Mufareh sat in a federal courtroom in downtown Baltimore in February 2009, preparing to be sentenced, he appeared comfortable with his fate, laughing and smiling with his attorney, Larry Nathans. Once the hearing got underway, a reason for this became clear: The prosecutor, Michael Hanlon, praised the defendants for taking “a very dignified approach” to the case, saying they were “on the right track from the go,” and recommended that U.S. District Court judge Catherine Blake hand down a lenient sentence.

When Isa Mufareh rose to address the judge, he was profoundly apologetic, acknowledging that “Four years ago, I made a mistake.” He described a long life of hard work and service, and said with sadness that “Two months from today, I will be celebrating my 40th wedding anniversary, perhaps alone.” Blake, after saying “Mr. Mufareh is, I’m sure, punishing himself with regret,” agreed with Hanlon’s recommendation of five months’ imprisonment followed by three years of supervised release, including five months of home detention, and, of course, restitution in the amount of $19,771. The other two defendants received the same sentences, though their restitution amounts were greater: $31,779 for Darraj and $20,667 for Maurice Mufareh.

In 2006, KMI Enterprises and its liquor license for Christina’s was transferred to Marc’s Vision, LLC, and Marcello Burdusi, state records show. KMI Entertainment survives to keep showing porn at the Apex Theater, with Isa and Maurice Mufareh as the remaining partners.

“We were thinking about it recently,” Isa Mufareh says, when asked by a reporter whether he’d ever considered showing something other than X-rated flicks at the Apex, “but couldn’t come to any conclusions.” When the possibility is raised of showing Spanish-language films, given the high density of Latinos living in the theater’s immediate vicinity, he says, “You are right, there are thousands. When I go to the theater, they are always asking me if I have any work for them. It could be done.”

Tom Kiefaber, who owned and ran the Senator Theatre as a first-run movie house for major Hollywood releases from the early 1990s until last year, agrees. In fact, he says he’d raised the possibility before with the Apex’s landlord, Mark Wagonheim, who is a beneficiary of the family trust that owns the Apex property. Wagonheim, who did not return a message asking to discuss his family’s history in the film-exhibition business in Baltimore, is the son of Howard “Boots” Wagonheim, Kiefaber explains, who helped chart Baltimore’s film-exhibition history as vice president of Schwaber Theatres.

“That’s what’s needed there,” Kiefaber says of the idea of screening Spanish-language films at the Apex. “That’s what its ideal cinema use would be, because of the population base. If you look at other cities where this is done, the audience can be very loyal and enthusiastic, so much so that it almost becomes a throwback to the heyday of the motion-picture business. There are enough people within walking distance to really make that location one which serves the community. It would be the ideal evolutionary move that not only would be more profitable, but would allow the landlord to improve this historic structure and provide a heightened sense of community. It would be win-win all around.”

Jessica Contreras, the mayor’s office liaison to the Hispanic and Latino community, also agrees. “It would be a great opportunity not only for the community, so they have someplace to go with their families, but also beneficial to the business owner–it would open the door for him to grow his business,” she says, pointing out that, while “no one really knows” the size the Spanish-speaking community in Baltimore, “most people would put it at between 30,000 and 35,000. How great would it be if the community does respond? It’s a very good business opportunity. There’s definitely a market for it.”

Kiefaber cautions that he prefers to be “reticent about telling someone else how to run their business, because I’ve heard enough of that myself over the years,” but he can’t contain his fervor when it comes to this subject. The Apex “is crying out for” Spanish-language film programming, he says, “and has been for years.”

Given the Wagonheims’ long history in Baltimore, Kiefaber adds, a successful shift to Latino films at the Apex would, in a certain sense, be a repeat performance. “What Boots did at the old Parkway Theatre and the Playhouse, it changed our culture in Baltimore, bringing in the Euro films, the art movies. It fostered a salon atmosphere, where people talked about films, engendering a community with common interests in, say, seeing and discussing [Ingmar] Bergman films. The Wagonheims utilized their theaters in Baltimore to change the film-viewing culture here, and I think they probably have an opportunity again with the Apex, don’t they? Sure got my vote.”

Isa Mufareh’s eyes, magnified by thick glasses, look friendly in his round face, and, for being in his mid-60s, he’s quite well-preserved. A short, unassuming man, one would never guess by the look of him that he’s an X-rated movie purveyor who used to be in the strip-club business. And it’s clear, as he gives a tour of his theater, that he’s not out to hurt anyone, only to make money.

“You should never run out of thoughts about improving things,” he says, reflecting on the option of screening Spanish-language movies. “I don’t want to upset the neighborhood. If anything comes up, it is not going to be derogative to the neighbors.”

Friends of Milton Tillman Jr.: Raided Businessman’s Political Beneficiaries Discuss Donations

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Aug. 27, 2008

“I know of him, but I don’t know him,” Keiffer Mitchell Jr., former Baltimore city councilman and 2007 mayoral candidate, says when asked about Milton Tillman Jr., the Baltimore bondsman and real-estate investor whose business interests were targeted in Aug. 18 federal law-enforcement raids at seven Baltimore locations. Mitchell’s 2007 campaign last August received a total of $1,000 from Tillman Jr.’s companies–$500 each from 4 Aces Bail Bonds and New Trend Development. Mitchell acknowledges that his family–a political dynasty that includes civil-rights pioneers and U.S. congressmen–goes way back with Tillman Jr. While he doesn’t know him, he says he’s “appreciative of his campaign contribution.”

Mitchell is nonplussed with the idea that it might look bad politically to have received political donations from a man with two federal convictions in his background, and who now, along with his son Milton Tillman III, is being targeted again. “There were members of my family who were convicted and sent to jail,” Mitchell points out during the Aug. 21 phone interview, referring to Clarence Mitchell III and Michael Mitchell, both former elected officials who fell from grace in the 1980s. “Do I kick them out?” he asks, adding that his ex-con cousins “worked on my campaign.”

Altogether, 13 Maryland politicians gathered $8,250 from three Tillman companies since 2001. Most politicians contacted about the donations they received from Tillman enterprises are not as candid as Mitchell. Many of them–state Del. Talmadge Branch (D-45st District), state Sen. Nathaniel McFadden (D-45th District), former Baltimore City Council President Lawrence Bell (D), and former Baltimore City State’s Attorney Stuart Simms (D), who ran for Maryland attorney general in 2006–did not respond to inquiries at all.

Henry Fawell, spokesman for former Gov. Robert Ehrlich (R), writes in an e-mail that “we’ll decline to comment.” Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith couldn’t respond due to illness. A returned phone call from Baltimore City Councilwoman Belinda Conaway (D-7th District) was missed. Baltimore County Circuit Court Associate Judge Mickey Norman spoke to City Paper in April (“Grave Accusations,” Mobtown Beat, April 23), explaining that judicial campaigns are set up to buffer the candidate from knowledge of donors, so he was not aware of the donation from Tillman Jr. State Comptroller Peter Franchot’s campaign spokesman, Tim Daly, says the campaign will be returning Tillman’s money. “We just felt it was the right thing to do,” Daly says.

Two of Tillman Jr.’s beneficiaries–state Sen. Catherine Pugh (D-40th District) and former state Del. Salima Siler Marriott, who is now a Baltimore City deputy mayor–claim never before to have heard the Milton Tillman name. “Nope,” Pugh says repeatedly when asked if she knew him, his name, or anything about him, insisting that “I’ve never heard of him.” Marriott did not return messages for this article, but in April she told City Paper she, too, had never heard of Tillman (“Grave Accusations”).

One recipient of Tillman campaign money is Baltimore City Councilman Bernard “Jack” Young (D-12th District), who is not shy about knowing Tillman Jr. “We grew up in the same community, East Baltimore,” Young explains. “He’s a nice guy.” Asked about indications that Tillman Jr. is tied to the drug trade, Young says, “I’ve heard about the drug allegations before. Any response I make, the government can come after me. So I have no comment.”

Additional reporting by Jeffrey Anderson

Milton’s Till: Donations From Tillman Family Companies to Political Figures

Aug. 23, 2006: $1,000 from Xpress Bail Bonds, to Lawrence Bell (D), former Baltimore City Council President, 1999 candidate for Baltimore Mayor

June 16, 2006: $1,200 from 4 Aces Bail Bonds, to Talmadge Branch, D-45th District, House of Delegates, Majority Whip

Nov. 6, 2007: $100 from 4 Aces Bail Bonds, to Belinda Conaway, D-7th District, Baltimore City Council

Aug. 26, 2002: $500 from 4 Aces Bail Bonds, to Robert Ehrlich (R), former Maryland Governor

Jan. 8, 2008: $1,000 from 4 Aces Bail Bonds, to Peter Franchot (D), Maryland Comptroller

July 29, 2006: $500 from 4 Aces Bail Bonds, to Salima Siler Marriott (D), Baltimore Deputy Mayor, former 40th District Delegate

Jan. 4, 2008: $500 from 4 Aces Bail Bonds, to Nathaniel McFadden, D-45th District, Maryland Senate

Aug. 23, 2007: $1,000 from 4 Aces Bail Bonds ($500) and New Trend Development ($500), to Keiffer Mitchell Jr. (D), former Baltimore City Councilman, 2007 candidate for Baltimore Mayor

March 1, 2005: $500 from 4 Aces Bail Bonds, to Mickey Norman, Baltimore County Circuit Court Associate Judge

Aug. 22, 2003: $250 from 4 Aces Bail Bonds, to Catherine Pugh, D-40th District, Maryland Senate

May 4, 2006: $500 from New Trend Development, to Stuart Simms (D), former Baltimore State’s Attorney, 2006 candidate Maryland Attorney General

July 27, 2004: $1,000 from New Trend Development, to Jim Smith (D), Baltimore County Executive

Sept. 6, 2001: $200 from 4 Aces Bail Bonds, to Bernard “Jack” Young, D-12th District, Baltimore City Council

Wired: Alleged Drug-World Figures Tied to Local Politics

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Mar. 2, 2005

Anthony B. Leonard’s Downtown Southern Blues restaurant on North Howard Street’s Antique Row had a meteoric run starting in 2002, drawing a clientele of local notables, including many in politics. But today, the Howard Street location is closed, and Leonard and his restaurant businesses (Leonard’s Southern Blues carry-out in Randallstown remains open) are allegedly part of a violent drug conspiracy called the Rice Organization, which prosecutors say operated in Baltimore for the past decade. The federal trial in the case is scheduled for next January.

Shades of politics color the background of the Rice Organization case, but they are not spelled out in the 41-page indictment, which was made public on Feb. 2. In fact, very little detail is revealed in that document, other than names and some addresses associated with those charged. From campaign-finance and other public records, though, it’s clear that Leonard, Downtown Southern Blues, and at least two other Rice Organization defendants played the political game, and, in Leonard’s case, entered it on the heels of an earlier chapter in Baltimore’s history of overlapping political and drug-world cultures.

That earlier chapter centered on Leonard’s Howard Street landlord, K.A.J. Enterprises, Kenneth Antonio Jackson’s family company. Jackson is an ex-con strip-club owner whose drug-world past has made his political activities controversial. This time, though, the political dealings of Leonard and others allegedly involved in the Rice Organization occurred while prosecutors say they were running drugs.

The indictment claims that 35-year-old Leonard and his 12 co-defendants, including brothers Howard and Raeshio Rice, ages 38 and 32, raked in $27 million as they distributed more than 3,000 pounds of cocaine and heroin to Baltimore’s streets since 1995. Other co-conspirators include 30-year-old George Butler, a character from the now-infamous Stop Fucking Snitching DVD, which warns viewers against cooperating with law enforcement, and Chet Pajardo, 36, co-owner with movie actress Jada Pinkett Smith of an East Baltimore corner-store property (“Star Crossed,” Mobtown Beat, Feb. 16). The federal government seeks forfeiture of defendants’ assets, including vehicles, the Pajardo-Pinkett property, other real estate, and whatever is left of Leonard’s two restaurant businesses.

The Rice Organization allegations make the political ties of Leonard, Downtown Southern Blues, Pajardo, and 26-year-old co-defendant Eric Clash symbols of how the drug economy is embedded in modern civic life. When Downtown Southern Blues sought a liquor license in 2002, then-state Sen. Clarence Mitchell IV (D-44th District) and former state senator Larry Young (D-44th District) were copied on administrative correspondence. Shortly after the restaurant opened that year, political business came its way. The financial details show only that political money changed hands in ’02 and ’03 involving businesses and people who only recently were accused of being part of the Rice Organization. There is nothing to suggest that any of the parties to the transactions have any other links to the drug world. Here the are details:

> In ’02 Antonio Hayes, the legislative-affairs director for City Council President Sheila Dixon (D), ran and lost in the race for the 40th District Democratic State Central Committee seat; he spent $1,200 on a June 2002 fund raiser at Downtown Southern Blues.

> Democrats for Ehrlich, a campaign committee supporting then-Republican Congressman Robert Ehrlich’s successful 2002 bid for governor, spent $4,000 at Downtown Southern Blues in November of that year for a post-victory reception in honor of Ehrlich’s running mate, Michael Steele.

> In 2002, Leonard and the restaurant made donations to the campaign committees of Mitchell ($250) and Rodney Orange Sr. ($200), the former head of the NAACP’s Baltimore chapter. Mitchell and Orange were running primary campaigns for senator and delegate, respectively, for the West Baltimore’s 44th District. Orange’s campaign also received $80 from Eric Clash. Mitchell and Orange both lost.

> In 2003, the campaign of City Comptroller Joan Pratt, who was running uncontested in the city’s Democratic primary, spent $2,200 on catering from Downtown Southern Blues. Pratt’s campaign also received $200 from Pajardo. The committee of then-City Councilwoman Catherine Pugh (D), who was mounting an unsuccessful campaign to unseat council President Sheila Dixon (D), spent $600 on a party for Larry Young at Downtown Southern Blues.

> Also in 2003, Pajardo donated $100 to the campaign of Democrat Charese Williams, who challenged incumbent City Councilwoman Stephanie Rawlings Blake (D-6th District) and lost in the September 2003 primary.

In a Feb. 28 phone call with City Paper, Rodney Orange Sr. said Leonard and Clash are related to him—they are both second cousins, he explained—so he is not surprised that they donated to his campaign in 2002. At the time of the donations, he continued, “there was no knowledge on my part of any activity on their part that was illegal.” Hayes said he’d booked his fundraiser with Downtown Southern Blues’ predecessor, Britton’s, and he went ahead with the scheduled event anyway. “Fortunately,” he added, “he didn’t contribute to my campaign.”

The other politicians or campaigns whose ties are disclosed above could not be reached for comment by press time.

By 2002, when Leonard leased the space for Downtown Southern Blues from K.A.J. Enterprises, the property’s ties to 47-year-old Kenny “Bird” Jackson were already well known. From 2001 until Leonard took over, the location was used by another Jackson-related company, Universal LLC, to house Britton’s, a restaurant where politicians spent nearly $1,500 in ’01 and ’02 combined, according to state campaign-finance reports. The manager of Britton’s, James Britton, owns Class Act Catering, which has gotten $120,000 worth of business from Maryland political committees since 1999. Britton, like Jackson, earned a drug-related criminal record when he was younger: He pled guilty in 1983 to pot and handgun charges in Baltimore city.

Jackson’s days in the drug business in the 1980s were summed up by The Wire producer David Simon, a former newspaper reporter, in a 1987 Sun series about a famous Baltimore drug trafficker, “Little” Melvin Williams.

“Wholesale exchanges of narcotics were carefully controlled, according to detectives,” Simon wrote, “with Williams represented by tested lieutenants such as Glen Hawkins or Kenny ‘Bird’ Jackson—men identified in court papers as Williams’ most trusted surrogates, men who allegedly had the authority and knowledge to carry large amounts of cash and make purchases without being cheated. The loyalty of such lieutenants was unquestioned.”

Jackson’s convictions in 1978 (manslaughter), 1979 (resisting arrest), and 1984 (a gun charge) were accompanied by dozens of other criminal charges in numerous jurisdictions that didn’t stick. In 1992, Jackson faced bribery charges in New Jersey, but pleaded down to one count of giving false information to a state trooper who had stopped him with nearly $700,000 in cash in his car. Meanwhile, Jackson sought to establish himself as a legitimate manager of his family’s strip club, the Eldorado Lounge, and as an accepted figure in the city’s political circles. In 1995, Jackson was a major backer of a short-lived political-action committee called A Piece of J.U.I.C.E., which was run by one of Orange’s sons. A Piece of J.U.I.C.E., which sought to give political voice to inner-city residents, made a total of $8,000 in contributions to city candidates in 1995, including Pratt, Dixon, Orange, and then-Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke (D).

Later, after the 1999 city elections, as the city’s plans for redeveloping the west side of downtown forced the Eldorado to move, Jackson’s contributions to politicians again became a public issue. Dixon got $2,500 and Mayor Martin O’Malley (D), ducking controversy, returned $2,000 he’d received from Jackson’s mother, Rosalie Jackson. In 1999, Jackson had former governor Marvin Mandel represent him in a paternity case, a measure of Jackson’s access to politically connected help. Meanwhile, donations from Jackson and those tied to him continued at the federal level. In 1999, Rosalie Jackson gave $1,000 to then-Vice President Al Gore’s committee in the 2000 Democratic presidential primary. More recently, in 2003, Kenneth Jackson gave $500 to the National Republican Congressional Committee. And in 2004 Universal LLC, which operated Britton’s, donated $250 to Lt. Gov. Steele’s campaign.

Leonard, in his 2002 city liquor-license application to fill the vacancy left by the closing of Britton’s, wrote that he had been self-employed since 1999, and had previously worked from ’95 to ’99 at the Starlite Lounge, a West Baltimore bar. The sources of funds for starting Downtown Southern Blues were disclosed as proceeds from the Southern Blues carry-out in Randallstown and from Raphael Barber Shop, also in Randallstown Plaza. The purchase price for the restaurant was $350,000, with $3,394-per-month payments to K.A.J. Enterprises. Under Leonard’s proprietorship, violence struck at Downtown Southern Blues in October 2003, when an argument that started in the restaurant spilled outside, resulting in four men shot and another stabbed. Today, a new restaurant called Gambrino’s of Spain is preparing to open up there, with owners who moved here recently from Elizabeth, N.J., and a letter in the files on the property kept by the Baltimore Board of Liquor License Commissioners indicates that K.A.J. Enterprises is considering selling building.