The Shy Pornographer: Show World’s Owner May Be Times Square’s Last Man Standing

By Van Smith

Published in New York Press, Apr. 7, 1999

Richard Basciano, a 73-year-old Times Square real estate investor, is said to be a personable, intelligent, gracious and charitable gentleman, but he can’t seem to shake his sinister reputation. That’s because he’s also a wealthy pornographer whose longtime business partner, Robert DiBernardo, was a Gambino captain who was whacked by Sammy “The Bull” Graviano on John Gotti’s orders in 1986. With friends like that, it’s hard to be seen as Mr. Clean.

But “Mr Clean” is exactly how some people in law enforcement and other regulators describe Basciano, who owns Show World, Times Square’s sex-selling centerpiece. A veteran FBI agent who claims to have thoroughly scrutinized Basciano says the man is definitely not Mob connected, and that the Basciano surname – which has popped up attached to five other men in New York Mafia circles for the last two generations – is a red herring in reference to Richard Basciano, who comes from Baltimore.

The agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, believes Basciano’s great success in real estate – in which he built up his Times Square holdings and has been collecting condemnation fees from the state as the area’s redevelopment advances – is due to a combination of luck and uncanny instinct, not to any nebulous underworld connections. Rather, Basciano’s rise since the early 1970s was aided by Samuel Rappaport, a controversial Philadelphia land speculator. Rapport, DiBernardo and Basciano held pornography interests together in Philly; Rapport, who was originally from New York, purchased the Show World property in the mid-1970s and then “flipped it within a year to Basciano,” says another government official, who has followed Basciano’s career for the last 20 years. Rappaport named Basciano one of the two executors of his estate when he died in 1994.

As Basciano’s unbroken asent in the heat-drawing New York pornography industry has endured for almost three decades, his partners and competitors have fallen prey to criminal prosecution. A government anti-smut campaign snared Basciano partners DiBernardo and Theodore Rothstein. Another big Times Square peepster, Martin Hodas, and other less prominent sex salesmen – including Show World employee Clemente D’Alessio – also have been nabbed by the law.

Only Basciano has remained upright and unsullied. This situation, in conjunction with the fact that Basciano’s daughter worked for FBI headquarters until her early retirement in 1981, prompts a question: Did Basciano ever cooperate with the government’s push against porn and organized crime?

Basciano’s lawyer, First Amendment attorney Herald Price Fahringer, bristles at the suggestion that his client was a rat. “Richard Basciano has never cooperated with any law-enforcement agency whatsoever,” he states emphatically. He says his client’s record is easily explained: “The reason he’s still standing is that he’s always stayed well on this side of the law.”

Fahringer points out that when Mayor Rudoph Guiliani instituted new zoning laws as a way to shut down city sex shops, Basciano “immediately complied.” While leading the fight against the new regulations in court, Basciano is also making plans to end adult entertainment at Show World and turn it into a virtual-reality arcade. “We want to become completely, totally non-adult,” Fahringer proclaims.

Top-notch fellow, mobster-associating pornographer, scrupulously law-abiding citizen: This guy Basciano is a bundle of contradictions. Because he’s an intensely private individual who hasn’t spoken to the press since 1982 (when he made the still-remembered statement that pornography is “a deterrent to rape”), trying to pry loose some truth about Basciano and learn how such oxymoronic descriptions apply to him are difficult tasks. By sifting through the records and accounts of his life, and by speaking with those who know him – and are also willing to talk – it is still possible to sketch a portrait of Basciano. Whether the picture that emerges is of a scoundrel or a saint, or of something in between, depends on your perspective. But Basciano’s life has been nothing short of epic.

Richard Carmello Basciano was born July 16, 1925, in Baltimore, the son of Nicholas Joseph Basciano and Margaret Ranzino, the sister of a boxer known as “the original Baltimore Dundee.” Richard’s father was a boxer, too. According to a Veterans Boxing Association tribute to Nicholas Basciano, in 1920 he moved from Philadelphia, where he had “mastered bare knuckle fighting on the rough and tumble streets of South Philly,” to join his brother-in-law in a tailor-shop business in Baltimore’s Little Italy. He came to be known in the fight world as Nick “Double KO” Bass for a memorable fight in DC when he knocked out two opponents in a row. He won the Middleweight Championship of the South in 1930.

Later in life, Richard’s father was active in the International Ladies Garment Union and worked as a bouncer for clubs in Baltimore’s red-light district, The Block. In 1976 Nick Bass was named to the Maryland Boxing Hall of Fame, and annual awards are still conferred in his name by Ring 101, Maryland’s boxing association, thanks in part to Richard Basciano’s financial support.

The chairman of the board of Ring 101, Ray Leonard, explains that “Richard has contributed a lot of money, he gives about $1000 every year [to Ring 101] and he set up a fund in his father’s name. There’s a showcase [of boxing memorabilia] that he set up there” at Martin’s West, a large Baltimore catering hall that often hosts boxing, political fundraisers and gala social events. “If anybody’s having some hard times, he just slips you the money, does it out of his pocket. He does it for guys who are down on their luck.”

Leonard says Richard Basciano “was the businessman of the family, a very nice man, very distinguished.” Asked if Richard ever boxed in Baltimore, Leonard says he “more or less fooled around, sparring in the ring. He never fought competitively, I don’t think, but he stayed in very good shape.”

Richard Basciano’s nephew – also named Nicholas Joseph Basciano, after Richard’s father – is a defense contractor in Anne Arundel County, MD. He remembers in his childhood thinking his uncle was “the strongest man I’d ever seen.” Recalling what he knows about his uncle’s life in Baltimore, he says Richard never went to high school; economic hardship pushed Richard and his brother, John, into the workforce as early as possible. They hawked copies of the Baltimore Sun from street corners together, Nicholas remembers, and Richard later worked in the paper’s distribution department until the late 1950s or early 1960s.

After leaving the Sun, Richard Basciano ran a newspaper and magazine distribution company. He also got into commercial real estate and the restaurant business. As his nephew explains, “his first entree into business was he bought some buildings and started a restaurant, Ricardo’s,” in the Baltimore suburbs. “He was flinging pizzas” even as he was the boss and building owner, Nicholas recalls.

During this period, Richard ran afoul of the law for the first and only time in his life. In 1966, when he was 41 years old, Basciano was indicted for mail fraud in U.S. district court in Baltimore for participating in a scheme involving the sale, at half price, of thousands of food coupons to grocery store owners, who would redeem them for their full cash value from the manufacturers even though the coupons hadn’t been used to purchase merchandise. In 1968, Basciano pleaded nolo contendere to the charges and received a $750 fine and three years’ probation, according to court records. He was released from probation early, September 1969, the records show.

“He brings that up often,” Basciano’s nephew says of the coupon-fraud conviction. “Talk about the blood pressure going up – he just hates that! He always wishes he fought that, because he didn’t do anything wrong. He didn’t have any money, couldn’t fight it.” Getting caught in the scheme was due “either to ignorance or an anomaly in his character,” Nicholas Basciano asserts.

After the fraud bust, Basciano ended his entrepreneurial foray in his hometown. According to his nephew, Basciano may have been inspired by the success of Baltimore’s Block, which was booming in the 1960s and early 1970s, in deciding to go to Philadelphia and enter the pornography business. Sometime during this transition, Nicholas says, Richard “ended up giving that whole block [he owned, where his restaurant was located] to charity.”

In Philadelphia, Basciano met Sam Rappaport. “He was building his business in Philly, and he rented some property from Sam,” Nicholas recalls, and they struck up a close relationship. “I think Sam just felt sorry for him,” Richard’s nephew says. Perhaps their common background in the criminal justice system – Rappaport, too, was convicted of mail fraud by the feds, but he actually served some time – contributed to their sense of fraternity.

Also during the early 1970s, Basciano and Rappaport joined forces with Robert DiBernardo in pornography enterprises in Philadelphia and New York. How and where they met and why they chose to join together in business are questions that no one contacted for this article had answers to. Since Rappaport and DiBernardo are dead, and Basciano isn’t talking, this key piece of information about Richard Basciano remains a secret.

From what is known about DiBernardo, who was often called “Debe,” he wasn’t exactly a savory character. He reportedly came from the Sam DeCavalcante family in New Jersey and handled the Gambino’s substantial pornography interests. A partner with Theodore Rothstein and Nathan Grama (both Basciano business partners as well) in the porn distributors Astro News and Star Distributors, DiBernardo also had ties to mobster-pornographer Michael Zaffarano, who had a heart attack and died in 1980 when he heard he was being indicted on obscenity charges in the same early 1980s antiporn campaign – MIPORN – that tripped up both DiBernardo and Rothstein. Zaffarano was the landlord for Basciano’s first New York peepshow outlet, 1605 Book Center at 1605 Broadway, which was licensed for peeps in 1972, according to a New York Times account.

Al Goldstein has used Astro and Star for the entire 31-year history of his magazine Screw. “The people who distribute Screw,” Goldstein explains, “are like Damon Runyon characters … Do I know they are Mafia? No. I read The New York Times and I was talked to by the FBI, but how would I know? Was there ever a threat from these people to carry me? No. But is it coincidental that no one else has ever come to me in 30 years to distribute Screw? There must be arrangements. You have a cut. Things are carved out.”

Still, Goldstein has a warm spot in his heart for DeBe. “I loved DeBe, because he was classy,” he says. “DeBe dressed well. He had a style about him. And then when he was going to John Gotti’s club all the time, it was even more exciting.”

But it wasn’t just DiBernardo’s wardrobe and personality that makes Goldstein speak well of the dead mobster. “The one time in my life there was a contract on me, DeBe rescinded it,” Goldstein recalls. “It had to do with a girl I was dating who was the ex-wife of a hitman. And I didn’t realize – I met her through a dating service. Basically, the guy was a typical Italian; he lived with a blonde bimbo in a high-rent building, but he didn’t want anyone to date his ex-wife. And I called DeBe when I heard about it and I said, ‘DeBe, there are reasons to kill me, but this isn’t one of them.’ And DeBe had to sit down with Gotti and it was rescinded.”

Goldstein’s edgy stories about DeBe stand in stark contrast to his recollections of DeBe’s longtime business partner, Richard Basciano. “All I could tell you about him is when I ran for sheriff [of Broward County, Fla., which Goldstein has done twice, unsuccessfully], he was very generous. He gave me a very nice contribution, $1000.” Other than that, Goldstein says he once put the hard sell on Basciano to take ads out in Screw for Show World. “I yelled at him – well, you don’t yell at these guys too loudly. I said, how come you don’t advertise in Screw … I was very frustrated. Nobody at Times Square spends a penny with me. Why do they hate me? Because I have a big mouth. I’m nasty and no one owns me.”

In answer to the question of whether Basciano is associated with the mob, Goldstein demurs. “What can I tell you? Is he Mafia? Well, of course, I’ve read that he is, but when I’ve met him, he didn’t have a sign saying, ‘Hi, I’m Mafia.'”

Richard’s nephew Nicholas was shocked when told of his uncle’s ties to DiBernardo. “I never knew that!” he exclaims, and explains that Richard “doesn’t need” to be tied in with organized crime since “he knows, because of the nature of his business, he’s being looked at with a microscope” by law enforcement. Nicholas Basciano admits, though, to having a certain jocular wariness of Richard’s potential for menace; he says jokingly that he hopes he doesn’t end up in the East River for talking to a reporter and that “I know if he wanted to he could probably have some legs broken, but I don’t think he does that.”

There’s a difference of opinion among law enforcement people regarding the question of Basciano’s possible Mafia ties. While a veteran FBI agent who took a long close look at Basciano earlier in his career says there is nothing to suggest that Basciano is a mobster, another FBI agent familiar with Basciano concludes “he’s obviously in with the family, I’d say.” And another government official who’s scrutinized Basciano over the years says, “It’s the first time I’ve heard it that he’s not mobbed up. You don’t do business like that if you’re not mobbed up.” Regarding Basciano’s specific Mafia origins, this official reports that “everybody always says he’s from the Bruno family in Philly, but that’s just speculation.”

No one in law enforcement contacted for this article had any information linking Richard Basciano to the several Mafia-related New Yorkers also named Basciano. Gennaro Basciano and Jerry Basciano were casualties of the Gallo-Colombo mob wars of the 1970s. Gennaro’s son, Dino Basciano, an extremely large, red-haired, tattooed gangster, was accused in the 1990s of a murder conspiracy, of providing guns to infighting Colombo gang members and of cocaine trafficking; he turned informant. Vincent Basciano was implicated, then acquitted of involvement in the Blue Thunder heroin ring in the early 1990s, and is a reputed Mafia associate who turned up recently in John Gotti Jr.’s Mafia roster. Ferdinand Basciano in 1980 was arrested for auto-insurance fraud with the son of convicted mobster John Masiello.

Richard Basciano, though, has no known connection to any of these New York underworld figures.

Herald Fahringer, Basciano’s attorney, says categorically that “the allegations of organized crime, that’s never been true of Richard Basciano. He has never in any way been connected with organized crime.” Fahringer does not see Basciano’s long association with DiBernardo as a mob connection.

Fahringer has been a staunch ally of Basciano for years. And his advocacy is more than your typical lawyer-client relationship. In 1978 Fahringer gave Basciano a sentimental holiday gift. He explained the gift in a letter.

“Dear Richie: I wanted to give you something very special for Christmas that would have meaning and would convey my very deep affection for you. I chose this medal of St. Joan of Arc … St. Joan has been an emblem of courage and faith. I cannot think of any other characteristic that fits you better. You deserve to wear this medal more than anyone else I know, and I hope it brings you good fortune.”

Whether due to this good-luck charm or not, Basciano has indeed enjoyed good fortune. After he left Baltimore to set up porn operations in Philadelphia and New York, and joined forces with Rappaport and DiBernardo – which didn’t happen until he was well into his 40s, had a federal conviction under his belt and had failed in more mainstream business enterprises – the gods of free enterprise finally shined on him.

Starting with his initial foothold in the New York porn industry – the peep show licensed in his name in 1972 at 1605 Broadway, where the Crowne Plaza Hotel now sits – Basciano by the late 1970s was seen as the main competitor of Martin Hodas, “King of the Peeps.” Public records show he was owner or part-owner of at least eight Times Square buildings hosting porn businesses. Basciano’s Show World emporium – the largest of these – quickly became famous for its live sex shows and performances by giants of the adult biz.

During this heyday of Show World, Basciano’s nephew recalls, he brought a famous name up from Baltimore. “He knew the owner of the 2 O’Clock Club,” the famous Blaze Starr, the queen of Baltimore’s Block. “He had her come up to New York just as a special event, I think she was a little worse for wear by then.” (A phone message left for Starr at her home in Maryland was not returned by press time.)

Basciano quickly started cashing in on his real estate holdings. In the 1970s, according to a government official, Basciano had a stake in three porn businesses across from the Citicorp headquarters building on E. 53rd St. The porn shops so annoyed the Citicorp CEO that the bank eventually acquired the properties for a reported $4 million, providing a tidy profit for Basciano.

A pattern suggestive of Basciano’s real estate strategy was thereby started: Buy up properties with porn businesses, run them well and profitably until prevailing, buttoned-down interests in midtown Manhattan seek to improve the neighborhood, then sell high – or wait for state condemnation and initiate protracted, court-adjudicated negotiations to obtain the highest price possible as compensation. In this way, Basciano since the mid-1980s has netted millions.

The strategy is pure Rappaport, who did a similar thing on a much larger scale in Philadelphia – and to much more public outrage, since Rappaport was infamous for letting his Center City properties slide into disrepair. “Basciano probably learned it at Rappaport’s knee, or at his side,” says a government official.

Today, according to Fahringer, “all Richard has left is Show World; he’s sold off or leased out” all the other properties in his empire. Still, he awaits condemnation payments from the state for three properties that have been incorporated in the massive retail-and-entertainment overhaul of 42nd St. between 7th and 8th Aves.

According to Maura Gallucci, a spokeswoman for the quasi-public Empire State Development Corp., negotiated payments for three former Basciano properties, now slated for development by Forest City Ratner and Tishman Construction, are pending from the state. The combined assessment for the properties, which were condemned in 1994 and 1995, is $5.2 million. This is on top of the $8.4 million in condemnation fees he received in 1996 for 210 W. 42nd St., the former site of Video World Center. And the future looks bright. Says one government official, “He stands to make a lot of money from Show World, eventually.”

While Richard Basciano has accumulated much wealth from his real estate dealings, he’s reportedly maintained for much of his life a certain salt-of-the-Earth humility, the result of a low-key nature. Not one for a lot of flash, Basciano has kept his ranch home in suburban Baltimore, a property currently assessed at $158,000. He also has a small condominium in Ft. Lauderdale. His only bow to conspicuous luxury seems to have been a home he built on property he acquired in a suburban neighborhood outside Baltimore in 1993. Now assessed at nearly $1 million, it sits on an acre and a quarter and features tennis courts. “This thing is way out of line for the neighborhood it’s in,” Basciano’s nephew says of the property. “But he wanted to be close to his daughters,” who already lived in the solidly middle-class community.

Many of those interviewed for this article said Basciano seems almost completely uninterested in his porn operations. His were commercial enterprises selling a simple, profitable commodity, they say, and Basciano had no particular affection for the product.

Alex Michelini, a former Daily News reporter now based in Arizona and the last newsman to talk to Basciano, for a 1982 article about a church protest against Show Worlds, says, “His love was boxing. His main claim was that he was trying to develop young boxers, keeping his practice ring in Show World open for disadvantaged teens. He sounded to me like he had absolutely no interest in the other thing. One thing’s for sure, he knew how to stay straight and narrow, at least for the record.”

“He is not a connoisseur of pornography,” says Nicholas Basciano. “It is something his interest in is zero. And he’s very much against any of that stuff getting to minors and the major media.”

Nicholas says his uncle’s poor reputation deriving from his status as a pornographer is completely unfair. “Because of the nature of his business, he’s gotten bad press.” Referring to a public outcry that resulted from a Wall Street Journal report that Show World was the beneficiary of a Small Business Administration loan in the late 1970s, Nicholas says, “He made improvements to his business, and the press jumped all over him. In my opinion, that’s bullshit. He’s never done an illegal thing in his life. His is a closely monitored business. Apparently, pornography is okay on tv, but if you have it closed off and closely monitored, as in Richard’s places, it’s bad.”

Nicholas has deep admiration for his uncle. “What he is is a natural born leader. He’s very intelligent and has a business sense about him – he works 18 hours a day. He’s charitable, anonymously so, and he’s not ostentatious, not a showboat. Even though he has no formal education, he’s got an incredible amount of common sense and he’s a very fair individual.

“I’ve never really heard anybody say anything bad about him,” Nicholas says. “He knows a lot of powerful people in New York, people who respect him, but they would be ashamed to admit it because of his association with pornography.

“I’m not putting the man on a pedestal,” Nicholas Basciano concludes. “I just think he’s getting a bum rap.”

But while he considers his uncle’s poor reputation unfair, Nicholas seems to understand that that’s life for a pornographer. And perhaps it’s a small price to pay for the riches the sex biz has brought to Richard Basciano.

Rendering Unto Oprah: How Dead Pets, Bad Brains, and Free Speech Landed Me in Amarillo

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Mar. 11, 1998

Bored and listless in the morning heat of Labor Day 1994, I jumped on an opportunity to catch a Hagerstown Suns minor-league baseball game with a friend. Oddly enough, this spur-of-the-moment foray into Western Maryland marked the beginning of a saga that eventually led me, 3 1/2 years later, to Amarillo, Texas, where I testified last month in the U.S. District Court case of Texas Beef Group vs. Oprah Winfrey.

Sitting next to us that Labor Day afternoon in Hagerstown’s Municipal Stadium were two guys who said they were truck drivers for the local rendering plant, where, they explained, ingredients for dry pet food are made partly from dead pets they pick up from the local chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).

We were at once aghast, amused, and skeptical. “No, really, it’s true,” they said blandly, sensing our doubts. “We pick up dead pets from the SPCA and take them to the plant. The plant cooks up the carcasses and other things to make stuff that goes into pet food. Honest.”

I was deeply affected by this information. During the drive back to Baltimore I couldn’t stop talking about the horrid, poetic perversion of it all. “It’s soylent green for pets,” I exclaimed. Remorsefully I recalled that as a kid I was known to eat dry dog food–strictly on an experimental basis, of course. If I had known I might have been eating refried Rover, I’d have tamed my curiosity.

Over the ensuing months I started to gather what little documentation I could find about rendering. I learned it is a necessary and little-known industry that cooks and processes huge quantities of waste fats and proteins–mostly animal tissues and used restaurant grease. From the fat, renderers make yellow grease and tallow; from the protein comes meat-and-bone meal, which is used primarily in dry animal feed.

I visited Earl Watson, then the director of the Baltimore City Animal Shelter, and discovered that the city pays Valley Proteins, a rendering company with a plant in Curtis Bay, to cart off its euthanized pets and road kill. Then I spoke with Valley Proteins plant manager Neil Gagnon in the first of several conversations about rendering that eventually led to an August 1995 guided tour of the plant with City Paper photographer Michelle Gienow. She and I also spent a day following Valley Proteins truck driver Milt McCroy from the animal shelter to Parks Sausage to Ruppersberger Meats on Pennsylvania Avenue.

These experiences became the backbone of a September 1995 City Paper cover story titled, “Meltdown: What Happens to Dead Animals at Baltimore’s Only Rendering Plant.” Among other things, the story established that dead pets and road kill are part of the raw-materials mix at Valley Proteins’ Curtis Bay plant for meat-and-bone meal, some of which is sold to pet-food manufacturers.

I’ve had little peace on the rendering front since.

First, there were the horrified readers. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wrote in, concerned that sodium pentobarbital–the poison used to euthanize unwanted pets at the animal shelter–is getting into pet food. A fan of Gienow’s work was upset that the paper ran her photos of barrels full of dead pets waiting to be rendered. A critic even argued that I shouldn’t have written about pets going into pet food because Valley Proteins President J.J. Smith, interviewed for the article, said he doesn’t like to talk about it. One woman called me in tears, fearful that her dead pooch had ended up in dog food.

The initial aftermath was followed by a steady flow of interest from faraway places. Canadian journalists started contacting me after Anne Martin, a pet-food activist from Nova Scotia, used an excerpt of my article in her book Food Pets Die For. Local television news shows in Texas, Connecticut, and Kansas used the CP piece and Gienow’s photos to do their own stories. 20/20, the ABC newsmagazine, chewed up hours of my time trying to arrange a lengthy exposé of the pets-in-pet-food phenomenon, then quietly abandoned the effort.

Amid all of this, in March 1996, another wrinkle was added to what I knew about the rendering biz. The British government announced 10 people had died from new-variant Cruetzfeld-Jacobs disease (nvCJD), a human form of mad-cow disease. I soon learned that I had missed a very important point about rendering in “Meltdown”: infected meat-and-bone meal caused the spread of mad-cow disease in Great Britain. And now the disease appeared to be crossing the species line into humans. Suddenly rendering seemed to be an inadvertently insidious industry tied to a mysterious medical threat, not a sensible and profitable recycling measure, as I had previously reported. (In July of last year I made up for this oversight with another article, “Bad Brains: Maryland’s Role in the Mystery of Cannibal Brains, Mad Cows, and an Emerging Food Scare.”)

Enter Oprah. On the April 16, 1996, broadcast of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the Humane Society’s Howard Lyman, a former rancher turned food-safety advocate, declared that U.S. rendering practices are just like Britain’s, so one mad cow unwittingly rendered into feed for other cattle could cause an outbreak here just as it did there. Voluntary precautions the U.S. rendering industry had taken to prevent an outbreak in this country weren’t working, he said. And he pointed out that pets and road kill enter the cattle-feed mix. Winfrey swore off hamburgers after Lyman said a U.S. mad-cow epidemic would “make AIDS look like the common cold.”

Texas cattlemen were outraged. Four of them, led by Paul Engler of Cactus Feeders, sued under an untested law, the Texas False Disparagement of Perishable Food Products Act of 1995, that makes it easier for perishable-food producers to win libel suits over statements that criticize their products. (During the trial the judge dismissed that basis for the suit, leaving Engler to pursue the suit as a case of common-law business disparagement, which is very hard to prove.) Labeling Lyman’s statements “exaggerations, untruths, and innuendo,” Engler claimed to have lost $6.7 million as a result of lagging sales after Winfrey’s show aired.

Late last winter, I got a call from Leslie Ashby, one of Oprah’s lawyers. She said she had a copy of “Meltdown,” which seemed to corroborate some of Lyman’s statements about rendering. She flew up to Baltimore to meet with me and Michelle Gienow and obtain the negatives of Michelle’s numerous, gory photographs. She asked us if we would be willing to testify about what we saw of the rendering industry. “Sure,” we said.

Having been unsuccessfully sued for defamation myself, I felt it was important for my information and Michelle’s photos to be available to a jury–especially since the case involved a law that places new restrictions on speech. Besides, based on what I knew about rendering, Lyman’s statements appeared substantially accurate, if scant in some important details.

So I flew down to Amarillo to testify on Feb. 18 as the opening witness in Oprah Winfrey’s defense. Michelle unfortunately couldn’t make it, but her photographs were the main exhibit–about 50 of them, displayed one at a time on a big screen with my play-by-play commentary corroborating statements Lyman made on the show.

Cross-examining me, the cattlemen’s lawyers asked questions about Dykes to Watch Out For, a comic City Paper runs, perhaps believing the jury would think poorly of a journalist who works for a newspaper that carries a lesbian comic strip. Then they trotted out a copy of a satirical, self-deprecating sketch I wrote about myself that is tucked away somewhere on CP‘s Web site (“no respectable, buttoned-down company” would hire me “to do anything of significance,” it says). The jury thought it was funny.

But never did the attorneys try to discredit “Meltdown” or “Bad Brains.” In fact, Engler came up to me after my testimony, shook my hand, and said he thought I did a fine job on the stand and that my articles were topnotch. This from a guy whose lawsuit I’d just punched several holes in (and who went on to lose; the jury returned a verdict in Winfrey’s favor on Feb. 26).

Never say they aren’t good sports down in Texas.

Moving on Down: One Month in the Lives of a Homeless Couple Just Trying To Get By

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Apr. 12, 2006

“Hello! Anybody home!” A second passes. No answer, but a flutter or two of the hanging blankets. “It’s the newspaper,” in a loud clear voice. “Was hoping to talk to you, but don’t want to just barge in.” More fluttering, and a man’s voice goes, “Yeah.” A woman’s goes, “Just a minute.” The blankets are the type used by moving companies to protect valuables. Rocks secure the tops of the blankets to the large metal beams of the overpass. The fast-moving cars and trucks above can’t be seen, but they’re heard—a constant, arhythmic racket, echoing off the cold, hard surfaces below. Together, the blankets square off room enough for a bed and some crouch space.

The blankets part and a man and a woman walk out into the early March chill. The man is much older than the woman, who looks barely out of her teens. He has a blackened right eye and a scrape on his forehead above it, both resulting, he says, from the lack of lighting under the overpass. She gave him the black eye with her elbow, a middle-of-the-night mistake in bed, and the low-hanging beams got his forehead. His gray fleece hooded jacket, black nylon pants, and lightweight hiking boots give him the appearance of being ready for action. But his thinning, graying hair, his missing teeth, his careful gait, and his dark brown eyes give away the hard miles he’s traveled to middle age. His name is Leonard, and this is his second foray into Baltimore homelessness.

“Eleven years ago, being here, things were a lot more accessible as far as outreach goes,” he says. “People seemed to be a lot more friendlier. But now it’s like people look [at us] as if we are nothing.”

Leonard talks pretty much nonstop for about five or six minutes. He explains what’s wrong with the homeless scene in Baltimore, and how it’s gotten worse since he last was here from New Hampshire more than a decade ago. He says a lot of homeless people choose to stay that way, working the system for years, but not him and his young wife. They’re willing to work hard to better themselves. A lot of circumstances have conspired to keep him out of work, but something’s bound to come up. It has to, since his wife is pregnant. She’s not showing, but she’s about four months along. She finally speaks.

“Actually,” she says, “I want to become a massage therapist.” That’s her area of expertise, based on what she’s been told by people whose backs she’s rubbed. Leonard nods. “I’ve massaged his back a lot and I actually make him fall asleep,” she says. “I can actually make him feel better.” She has bright blue eyes and long brown hair that falls down around her wide face from under a black winter hat. She’s wearing a green-and-white fleece pullover with a Nordic pattern and blue jeans. Her boots match Leonard’s. She introduces herself as Donna.

Donna says she’s “not totally through a GED class,” with a meek hint of pride, but “it’s going to take a while” to be job-ready in the massage industry. “And I just don’t have all the ability right now to be able to get to something like that while being on the streets.” She’ll need a manicure before she does.

It’s hard to say at first whether Leonard and Donna stand out in the homeless population, which is estimated at anywhere between 3,000 and 30,000 in Baltimore, depending on which of the various loose estimates you choose to believe. Lack of income and affordable housing are the root causes of homelessness, and health problems—whether physical or mental—exacerbate it. Their stories fall right in with that sad model, though they’re married and pregnant, which puts them in a particular subset of the indigent; most are single adults. That, though, is not what makes them remarkable.

What sets Leonard and Donna apart is that they shared their stories in a series of conversations spread out over a month full of surprises in their lives—many of them bad, but one good. And along the way, they revealed the details and causes of their problems and how they deal with them, or don’t face them at all, and what that could mean for their future.

Leonard and Donna call their place under the overpass “the spot,” and when they’re not there they worry about it. Somebody might be messing with it or stealing their stuff. When they’re at the spot, sometimes they sleep, sometimes they just hang out, but even there they feel the anxiety that somebody will show up to mess with them. Leonard and Donna say they were attacked in the middle of the night in mid-March and that they’ve chased off threatening intruders at other times.

At regular intervals, they make the rounds of the local homeless-service providers to get food, showers, mail, and changes of clothes. They go to the main public library on Cathedral Street to check their e-mail accounts. They scrounge up money wherever and however they can. Sometimes, they say, people just give it to them without being asked, and they really appreciate that. Sometimes people seem to get angry at them for no particular reason, just for being there, out on the streets. That, they don’t like at all.

They say they arrived in Baltimore from their native New Hampshire last Nov. 9 with several duffel bags packed with their belongings. Leonard, who turned 42 in March, says he’d toughed it out on the streets of Baltimore before, maybe 11, maybe 15 years ago—he’s not precise on the date. Donna will be 23 this August. She first laid eyes on Baltimore from the window of an arriving bus.

They left their part-time jobs working a daily newspaper delivery route on foot, abandoned the food stamps they’d been getting, and took the Greyhound south, away from a bad scene back home. They were homeless in New Hampshire. Winter was coming. Hard rains and record-setting floods struck the region. Now they’re living outdoors in Baltimore, one of the poorest, most violent cities in America.

They tied the knot last September in a discount ceremony in New Hampshire. (“You’re supposed to pay, like, $60 for the justice of the peace,” Leonard boasts. “We got it for, like, 30. It was pretty cool.”) They both have hepatitis, they say. They drink and smoke tobacco, but are adamant that they don’t do drugs. Leonard says he tried cocaine and pot each exactly once, long ago and at different times, and Donna proclaims proudly that she quit marijuana at his request after they met last August. They give polite cold shoulders to people who do drugs. They attend church at a local mission and profess a deep religious reverence. Once they get comfortable talking, they cuss like soldiers.

The first time Leonard used a profanity when talking to a reporter he was going through the story of getting attacked. A guy had shown up in the middle of the night March 12, saying that Leonard and Donna had taken his belongings from where he had them stored under the overpass.

“I said, ‘No, we didn’t take your eff-ing shit. OK?’” Leonard has had a chance to nurse his resentment, though his wounds—a bruised head, cheek, and throat, and cuts on his arms—have begun to heal, and he’s had a little bit of vodka to drink. “He turns around,” Leonard continues, “grabs [a] stick, and just—five times over my head.” Then, he says, he was punched in the face five times, choked almost unconscious, and cut in the arm by a vodka bottle that broke on a metal street-sign post Leonard was using to defend himself. He describes himself screaming in his underwear as he chased the attacker across a nearby street, cars filled with witnesses driving by, but no one stopped or called 911.

The stick was one of the many pieces of bamboo lying around the spot. They’d scavenged them out of an alley and brought them back, thinking they could find some use for them. But they hadn’t expected one of them to be cracked over Leonard’s head, or pushed into Donna’s pregnant stomach, which she says the attacker also punched. “He goes, ‘I don’t care if you’re pregnant, I’ll make you lose the kid,’” she says. “I’m still surprised he didn’t.”

Just over a week later, Leonard picks at his breakfast at a Charles Street eatery. (Over the course of a month, City Paper bought Leonard and Donna a few inexpensive meals, and gave them some small currency, a pair of two-for-one drugstore reading glasses, and an alarm clock.) Instead of eating, Leonard cracks open the nut of why they moved here. “I was living in an apartment up there,” he says of New Hampshire. “After we got married, she moved in with me, and then things went downhill. I lost my job at the restaurant. And then city welfare paid my rent for a little while. They stopped. So we had no choice [but eviction]. And she wanted to get away from all the turmoil.”

So it was back to Baltimore for Leonard, a place he thought he knew.

“Compared to up north, this here is big-time,” Leonard reflects. “Because up there it’s, like, laid back. Little bit of crime but nothing to speak of. Down here it’s a whole different situation.” The city is proving a change not only from bucolic New Hampshire but also from the way Leonard remembers it. The Greyhound station has moved since he was here, and their bus dropped them off in a part of town nowhere near the areas with which Leonard was familiar. Services for homeless people seemed more accessible then, he says, and people’s attitudes kinder.

“Maybe I didn’t plan as well as I thought,” he says. “But, you know, you make decisions every day and make the best of it.”

Making the best of Baltimore has been painful. In addition to the bamboo attack, Leonard says he was tossed, with bound wrists and ankles, into a paddy wagon and taking him to a local hospital, where he ended up in the psych ward with a blood-alcohol level of 0.15. He has no hospital paperwork on that, though; there were no charges, and with only a vague description of where and when, there’s no police report.

“To a lot of people, when you report things, you wonder whether it is true or not,” Leonard observes one morning at the spot, having given some thought about the fact that their experiences are going to be the subject of a lengthy article. “But when you come with the homeless, there’s sometimes a lot that you might not want to take for granted, because a lot of things are true. And this right here, what we’re going through, is very true.”

When Donna gives birth, Leonard will become a father for the third time. He says his sons, aged 22 and 5, are back north with their respective mothers. The oldest is a part-time security guard, and Leonard wasn’t around as he grew up. He pines over the 5-year-old, but hasn’t been in touch with the child since leaving New Hampshire. Still, Leonard is rosy about his role in the boy’s future—especially if he wins the $10 million Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes he’s entered online.

“That’s a once in a lifetime dream right there,” Leonard enthuses. “That’d be cool. If I could put maybe $50,000, or even a million in there, you know, for his trust fund? The rest we could use to get a place, get our necessities.”

But Leonard isn’t sitting back waiting for pie in the sky. He’s willing to work hard for money, he says. When he talks about his work history, he describes prep-cooking and dishwashing at restaurants, working at pizza parlors, and a stint as a cab driver. He decries the difficulty of finding a job without a good education, which he lacks. He’s looked at the classifieds in Baltimore but acknowledges that he hasn’t really followed through on anything he thinks he could get.

Sitting in the small park just west of the Washington Monument, Leonard has a smoke and talks about his family. The stately mansions lining the park make for a picture about as pretty as his mood is dismal. He’s been morose all morning. On the walk from the restaurant, he complained of his various aches and pains, mentioned that maybe he should get his head examined, because he hasn’t felt the same since the attack. He muses about how he hasn’t treated his body well, how it is deteriorating, and how he’s paying the price for all his hard drinking. In the middle of this funk, he launches into his family history.

“I was the outcast of a small family,” he says quietly, intently. His mother died of bone cancer 15 years ago, and she was “a very pleasant woman, quiet, until you got her mad.” His father was a lout who beat them. He tells the story of the one time when his dad punched his mom and she actually fought back, bouncing a frying pan off his head. Leonard says he was next in line after his mom in the melee that followed. “I’m fucking small, I can’t do shit anyway,” he says. “I walk around the table, he starts chasing me with the goddamn knife. I’m like, whoa!

“Of course, being that age, how far can you run?” he laughs, with a shrug.

“He was a total abuser,” Leonard seethes, takes a drag, and coughs. “He’s the one that messed my life. He used to beat me up when I was 4, 5 years old. He’d be drunk off his ass, ram my head into the wall and shit. Oh, man, he tormented me hard. Looking at me, it’s like, why me? He never liked me, never liked me.

“My mom drank a lot, yeah, she did. And she used to get drunk, too, but she tried her best to put up with his shit. She used to have bruises all over her body. He used to cut her lip wide open, cut her head wide open and stuff. He was ruthless.”

Leonard sometimes refers to “stepbrothers,” who got some of the rough treatment he got, including being thrown down the stairs. But he stresses that they never got it as bad as he and his mom did.

Leonard brightens up when he speaks about his grandmother. “She was like a mom to me,” he remembers fondly. He recalls how she took custody of him when he was still a child, taking him out of his troubled home. She passed away late last August, of cancer and emphysema. She’d always been the only one to help him out in a jam. Not anymore.

Over the weeks of conversations—many at the spot, others while walking somewhere or waiting in line for services—Donna has generally deferred to Leonard’s steady, staccato, sometimes slurred banter. She signals her agreement with the things he says by nodding, saying “yeah,” or telling a short, affirming anecdote that shores up whatever his point is at the time. Up until now, in the restaurant for breakfast, Leonard has been the chief press secretary for the couple. With a pair of haphazard new haircuts has come a new attitude. After she finishes eating, she refills her soda. Then Donna’s reticence suddenly falls away as she talks about her dad’s ex-girlfriend.

She says her father died in February 2005, leaving behind a 49-year-old girlfriend living on Social Security who smokes and has such serious emphysema that she’s tethered to an oxygen tank most of the time. “I hate to say it,” Donna declares with a resigned expression of resentment. “But now her and my brother are going out—living together. And, you know, her yelling, bitching, screaming, everything at me. Her even hitting me and stuff, pulling my hair, choking me. And she had the balls enough to be doing stuff with my brother while my dad was still alive!” Her brother, she adds, recently turned 21.

Her father’s girlfriend, Donna goes on, forced her to leave high school in 10th grade to do factory work, and generally has been a roadblock to her progress most every step of the way. While Donna says it’s the girlfriend’s fault that her schooling was cut short, she admits her grades were falling off.

Later, while walking up Park Avenue on the first day of spring, Donna talks about how her mother left the nest when she and her brother were children and gave up custody to her father.

“My mother went to court and she goes, ‘You can have them, I don’t want them. They’re a burden on me,’” Donna recounts bitterly. She pauses to light one of the half-smoked cigarette butts they collect and store in a Ziploc bag, then resumes, spitting out the story a mile a minute: “Last I heard, she moved to Alabama somewhere, and she didn’t even tell us—her ex-boyfriend’s the one who told us. Yeah, she’s my mom because I was born, but beyond that, I ain’t got no love for her.”

Leonard and Donna are inseparable. They hold hands while walking. When they’re sitting, he wraps an arm around her shoulders. When standing, hers goes around his waist. By all appearances, they’re soul mates. Before him, though, Donna says her boyfriends had failed her miserably. “This one particular one was an asshole,” she declares, then changes her mind. “You know? Actually all of my exes were.”

While living on her own away from her family, Donna has generally stayed at New Hampshire shelters, doing community service to keep her space. But that didn’t always go well. At one, she was kicked out after being accused of stealing $10, she says. She contends that the evidence was flimsy—the culprit was known to have used the money to buy Mountain Dew, she says, and she’s strictly a Pepsi drinker. She crashed at a series of friends’ apartments, and at times went home to be with her sick father. Eventually, she phoned her accuser, who helped manage the shelter. She says he acknowledged her innocence, because the real thief was later caught. But he never apologized, and she sees that as a powerful lesson about the arbitrary and capricious ways of so-called justice.

Attempts to locate and contact Leonard and Donna’s family members failed, but other bits and pieces of information proved more accessible. Trying to track down any traces of Leonard’s past sojourn in Maryland led to records indicating that he was arrested in Worcester County on the Eastern Shore on May 28, 1992, as a fugitive from New Hampshire justice. Court papers show he pled guilty the next day, waived extradition, and on June 4 of that year was handed over to New Hampshire authorities.

The press coverage in his hometown paper at the time reported that Leonard had been picked up at the Cruising Café, a restaurant in Ocean City, and that he’d been wanted since 1990, when he failed to show up for a court appearance to enter a possible 10-year plea deal on charges that, on four occasions in 1988, he’d raped a child under the age of 4.

In 1992, after Leonard was tracked down and returned to New Hampshire to face the charges, the prosecutor declined to bring them because the alleged victim and her family had stopped cooperating. Instead, Leonard served one year in prison, and two on parole, for jumping bail. The accusation that he was a sex offender went away. No one can say that Leonard is a convicted child rapist.

When asked about this ordeal, Leonard speaks calmly and matter of factly as he denies the charges at length. “That was all my ex-girlfriend’s doing,” he says, asserting that he’s made Donna aware of this chapter in his past, and how it ended. The bruises on the child, he says, were not from him.

The detective on the New Hampshire case, James McLaughlin, a man with vast experience and broad respect in his field of sex-offender investigations, returns a phone message and immediately asks how Leonard’s doing, healthwise, and whether he’s in any kind of trouble. There is genuine concern in his voice.

“I remember him as a guy who had a really horrendous childhood,” McLaughlin says. “He was a parents-had-tied-him-up-in-a-basement kind of kid.”

After being told that Leonard is homeless with some hard miles on him but is otherwise fine, the detective contends that Leonard made a memorable videotaped confession before the ill-fated plea deal on the rape case. A short but shocking segment of the tape, the detective says, is used to train investigators, showing them an example of “distorted thinking” they may encounter when interviewing suspects.

Any lack of justice arising from the failed prosecution of Leonard “was rectified with him going to jail on the bail-jumping,” McLaughlin says. And, just to make sure, he checks to make sure there are no open warrants out on Leonard. There aren’t.

Leonard denies he confessed, and says he went on the lam to Maryland back then because he was scared of going to jail for something he didn’t do.

A record of the confession McLaughlin alleges Leonard made could not be made available by press time. A New Hampshire woman who said she is the alleged victim’s mother declined during a brief telephone conversation April 9 to say whether her daughter knows Leonard. “If she does,” the woman said curtly, “she’s not going to want to talk to you about it.”

The bottom line on all this, Leonard stresses, is that he’s “always been good with kids”—adding that that’s an important quality, since “I got one coming now.”

Regardless of Leonard’s guilt or innocence—a matter already settled as far as the courts are concerned—he says he needs treatment for his childhood trauma. “All the turmoil I went through when I was that age I’ve carried up with me all these years,” he says. “It’s been like a bad scar of the mind, because when my temper goes off, it’s not just the temper of normally being mad. It’s just . . . I have flashbacks. I relive everything all over again. That’s what makes me 10 times worse. It’s not my fault. It’s just something that . . . I’ve dealt with some of it, but there’s a lot more I have to deal with.”

To illustrate, he tells a story, something that happened at the spot one night: “There was somebody under there, and actually I chased them off. I ripped my shirt right off, took my fucking stick right out there, said, ‘I’ll take your fucking head right off.’ And his other buddy started coming in, and I was like, ‘You don’t want to be doing that.’ Why? I swear, I hit him right in the fucking head with it. Got him on the ground, I started pushing his fucking head right in the ground. [Donna] had to pull me off him, too, ’cause I would’ve killed him. I just went off. I was actually starting to see a sense of red in my eyes. I was like, oh, no, no, we’re not going there. No, we can’t go there. If I’d’ve gone there, man, that guy’d’ve been dead. I’d have killed him. That, and something else, too.

“I know that in time, here, I’m going to have to deal with this, ’cause I’m going to need to get that out of my mind,” Leonard continues. “I can’t get it out of my mind, no, but at least learn to deal with it better. Because I do have a very, very vicious temper. And this one here [Donna], that’s why she’s unique, because nobody else has been able to deal with my temper the way she has been able to deal with it.

“She’s helped me out a lot. But I’ve also had to bring myself up a lot. And it hasn’t been easy. Still bringing myself up.”

Donna silently listens and nods throughout the soliloquy, nursing her cigarette. Now she says calmly and quietly, “Yep. We help each other now.”

Donna looks away, silent, when it is suggested that she needs to see a doctor about her pregnancy. Leonard says they have visited Health Care for the Homeless, which does what it’s name says it does at 111 Park Ave., but Leonard and Donna are both pessimistic about approaching Baltimore’s social-services network. They talk about how they can’t find the help they need regularly—for her pregnancy, their hepatitis, his back pain, food stamps. That is part of what makes Baltimore seem so much different, and more difficult, to Leonard than it was previously.

The first social-services stumbling block for Leonard and Donna is their lack of identification. They don’t have state-issued IDs from New Hampshire or Maryland, or copies of their birth certificates and marriage license, all of which are useful in accessing proper social services. Getting these papers costs money, which they don’t have, except for the few dollars they occasionally come by. The only identification they have are MTA passes, library cards, and mail. That’s not going to cut it at a bank, where they hope to open accounts and save money, or at a leasing office, where they might want to put down some of that money on an apartment deposit.

There are public beds for homeless people in Baltimore, and Leonard and Donna could probably sleep in them, depending on how full the shelters get at night. But only a few, hard-to-find shelters here accommodate married people, so they’d have to split up at night, and they just won’t have that.

“Separated is not exactly the answer,” Leonard explains, as the two of them sit on their mattress-and-box spring set, which is set up on pallets inside their blanketed cubicle. A small door set up on a rickety chair serves as a table; a scavenged smoker-grill provides heat, but it makes a lot of smoke and they don’t use it much. There’s a single candle for light, sprouting out of plastic water bottle set inside an old coffee can. Their food, they’ve learned, is best stored up on the ledges of the overpass beam, to make it harder for the rats to get to it. “We’re a common bond and we should stay that way,” he adds.

“Especially with me being pregnant,” Donna chimes in. “That ain’t going to fly.”

Again, Leonard returns to his belief that life on the street in Baltimore has gotten harder. “You can’t get the necessities of health assistance that you used to be able to get,” he says. “They do need a lot of improvements. They ought to have more places around here to go eat that’s accessible, more bus-line accessibility. Shelters are overfilling. [The city Department of Social Services] ought to have more fundamental access to programs that help people that are on the streets to get off easier.”

To some extent, Health Care for the Homeless CEO Jeff Singer agrees with Leonard. Singer’s worked for the nonprofit since 1985 and now leads the organization; he’s sat on or chaired committees, task forces, and advisory boards on the homeless in Baltimore and statewide for decades. And despite a lot of ongoing lip service and growing funds to treat the symptoms of homelessness—temporary quarters, emergency food, limited access to health care—Singer says he’s seen nothing but a steady progression of policies that exacerbate poverty and the lack of affordable housing. Those two factors are the root causes of homelessness, he says, and they’ve gotten nothing but worse since 1980.

Indeed, Singer says he traces the tipping point back to President Jimmy Carter’s third budget in 1979, which put more money into foreign policy than domestic matters for the first time since World War II. Under subsequent presidents, up to and including George W. Bush, the federal government has made U.S. poverty less of a priority. At the same time, the gap between rich and poor in the United States has widened inexorably, median incomes have declined steadily, and there has been less and less investment in affordable housing. For example, Singer says, the tearing down of Baltimore’s high-rise projects in the 1990s resulted in 3,000 fewer units of affordable public housing in the city.

Federal policy-makers set the agenda on the homeless front, Singer explains, because nearly all the money for local homeless-services programs—as well as much of the money to fight poverty and provide affordable housing opportunities—comes from federal coffers. The city’s homeless budget has grown expansively over the last 20 years, from less than $500,000 in 1986 to an expected $27 million this year, but nearly all of that money is federal, with a small chunk coming from the state. But the funds go to stopgap measures, last-ditch efforts to help people already mired in trouble. The key, Singer says, is to set policy that will prevent people from landing on the streets, and that’s simply not happening.

Part of Leonard and Donna’s troubles accessing care, they believe, is how the system categorizes them when they approach it—married, with no documented disabilities, no drug addiction, no HIV. The system, it seems, is largely geared to help single disabled adults suffering from addictions and HIV/AIDS. But there’s a lot they don’t know about available services. By the end of March, while walking to the library and talking about the safety net again, Leonard is even willing to acknowledge, “There’s still a lot out there that we aren’t aware of.”

Singer is confident that Health Care for the Homeless can do something for Leonard and Donna. Speaking in his office on March 31, Singer acknowledges that married couples like Leonard and Donna have a harder time getting services. The system has shifted over the past two decades, he explains, from focusing on families to focusing primarily on the most populous segment of the homeless community—single adults. Nonetheless, Singer says, “we will get her pre-natal care, and we will assign a case manager to her who will help her find a place to live.” Donna’s marital status is a complication—most public-housing opportunities for indigents are for singles—but, Singer notes, “we work with couples all the time.”

“Homelessness is worse today than it has ever been,” Singer says. “The funding, if you factor in inflation, it’s a little bit more. But the context in which that funding is delivered has gotten worse and worse and worse, in terms of what they call the social safety net, or the support for public housing.” There are ever more people becoming homeless, he explains, as poverty grows and the number of cheap housing units, both public and private, declines. “But for any individual that we can get our hooks on, we’re here to help them. So if [they’re] willing, there’s a lot we could do.”

As for helping Leonard come to grips with the deep-seated legacy of childhood trauma, Singer says, “we have a whole mental health team that would be willing to work with him.”

Leonard and Donna may be down on their luck, but they’re newlyweds in love, and fundamentally optimistic about their situation. And they recently found solid reason to be so: jobs, working together downtown, handing out free copies of the new daily newspaper in town, the Baltimore Examiner. It first hit the streets April 5, and Leonard and Donna were there, she in a company-issued cap and he in a company-issued vest, polite and beaming with confidence as papers flew out of their hands into the hands of rush-hour pedestrians. They’re looking at $1,600 per month between the two of them, before taxes: $10 an hour, four hours a day, five days a week. The fact that they have jobs might actually make it even harder to access some homeless services, but with money coming in that seems like less of a worry.

“Now we’re in business!” Donna exclaims. By banking half their paychecks, they figure they’ll be out from under the overpass and into their own apartment in two months. “That’d be nice,” remarks Leonard, back at the spot. “We’d be back on our feet, get a TV, get all of our necessities for the apartment, be able to escape here and be able to have our own privacy, and lock our door.”

If they can just keep it together until then, there’s a chance they’ll be housed when the baby comes. They haven’t spelled out plans for what happens if they can’t keep it together until then, other than that they’ll survive, as they have before. Their feeling is that it will all work out once they get some money and into housing, that their troubles are temporary. But their stories, both separately in the past, and together since they fell in love late last summer, are filled with unexpected twists and turns and complicating factors. Stability and predictability have been scarce for them.

Before dawn on April 10, Leonard and Donna are starting their fourth day of handing out Examiners. They’ll get their first paycheck later in the week, they say, and they look forward to being in a newspaper themselves. Their story, Leonard believes, is compelling enough for a whole book. “Maybe something like, Living Life as It Is,” he suggests as a title. “Yeah, that would be kinda cool.”

Odd Man Out: Meet Spear Lancaster–Maryland’s Libertarian Candidate for Governor

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Oct. 23, 2002

For many months now, since long before the September primary elections, Maryland voters have been sizing up two candidates for governor: Republican Robert Ehrlich and Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Few voters, though, are even aware that a third candidate’s name and party affiliation will be printed on November’s ballot: Spear Lancaster of the Libertarian Party. He was not included in the only televised gubernatorial debate; pollsters ignored him until mid-October, when they found he attracted 1 percent of voters; and a near absence of news coverage has relegated him to electoral obscurity.

Lancaster, though, harbors no resentment over the blackout. “I understand it,” he explains genially at a recent gathering of a couple dozen of the party faithful at Mike’s Crab House in Riva, near Annapolis. “I knew that coming out of the gate. From a pure business standpoint, I see why the media isn’t going to cover the guy who isn’t spending $15 million to get a $200,000 job.”

As of the last set of state campaign-finance reports filed in late August, Lancaster’s campaign had spent only $37,000–nearly two-thirds of it on a drive to gather the 27,000 valid signatures needed to meet the state’s stringent ballot-access requirements. “We just about ran through our money” to get on the ballot, he says, stretching the resources of his “hand-to-mouth organization” in the process. Still, Lancaster puts a positive spin on the effort: “A real camaraderie has been established,” he explains, which will help as the party grows in the future. And besides, he made history.

The last third-party candidate for Maryland’s governorship, Robert Woods Merkle of George Wallace’s segregationist American Party, ran in 1970 and received nearly 20,000 votes. His candidacy was so distasteful to the state’s political establishment that new laws were passed to make it harder for such candidates to make the ballot. The restrictions, though eased since, are still considered among the toughest in the nation. Third-party candidates in Maryland, once their party has gained state recognition by gathering 10,000 signatures of registered voters, must also collect the John Hancocks of at least 1 percent of the voters where they hope to run. According to Richard Winger, a Libertarian and publisher of the Ballot Access News newsletter, which covers such laws across the nation, two-thirds of states have less restrictive ballot-access laws than Maryland’s.

Today, about 6,300 Marylanders are registered as Libertarians–more than the three other state-recognized third parties (Green, Constitution, and Reform) combined–and 170 are dues-paying members. And Lancaster expects to attract many more voters to the Libertarian fold in the coming years, not just in Maryland but nationwide.

“We’ve become the center party,” he contends. “Believe it or not, we’ve become more of the old pragmatic, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done party than the two major parties. And I think this is why we are going to start getting a lot of our pull, especially among young people. The young people, they are not about to go into the real radical right, and they are not too keen on going real radical left. I think they see our program as being pretty realistic and pretty functional.”

Lancaster’s claim that his party is a get-it-done outfit is belied by a glaring fact–the Libertarian Party has precious little experience in governance. Only one Libertarian currently holds elective office in Maryland–Joseph Harrington, a longtime city council member in Brunswick, a town of 5,000 in Frederick County. Three others hold appointed positions on various local boards and commissions. Nationwide, Libertarians have been elected state representatives and small-town mayors, but higher offices have been elusive. What they do best, so far, is sell their ideas by running for office. And for Lancaster–who at 69 is retired from a long career in sales–selling ideas is second nature. All he needs is an audience, be it of one or a thousand, and he’s more than happy to explain the party line.

Over chili and beer at Fuddrucker’s in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, Spear Lancaster and his running mate, Lorenzo Gaztanaga, hold forth about libertarianism. The party’s bottom line, they explain, is right there in the Declaration of Independence: equal rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and self-determination over governance. And these rights, Lancaster explains, must be protected for every individual. “That’s the key,” he explains. “You can’t protect selectively. You have to protect everybody–all the time, every time, no exceptions. The weak, the people you even detest, the people whose lifestyle you wouldn’t engage in for a million bucks–you have to protect their rights. This is the thing that the Founding Fathers signed onto. It is not what either of the major parties sign onto today. They have selective rights.”

Picking up on Lancaster’s train of thought, Gaztanaga declares, “They selectively apply which rights are important to them, and then they try to promote bills and laws and regulations selectively based on those rights they like.

“A real government would actually make it its business to apply equality under the law, number one, and number two, to protect individuals from the abuses of other individuals,” Gaztanaga says. “That’s the true role of government, that’s what it is supposed to do–and can do very well, if it sticks to it. The problem with government today is that it steps into arenas that it is not equipped for and becomes intrusive, restricting freedom and reducing personal responsibility.”

Libertarians, Lancaster explains, take the best ideas of both major parties and combine them under the overarching rubric of liberty.

“Most Republicans,” he says, “agree with us on the importance of maintaining free markets, but they just don’t think people’s personal rights are all that important. The Democrats, just the opposite. They are all for personal rights, but they don’t think people should have as much liberty in economic areas. We want economic liberty and personal liberty, both, and the responsibilities that go with them.”

The libertarian philosophy of individual liberty and personal responsibility, Gaztanaga explains, leads many people to think that libertarianism “means you can do whatever you want to do. And I stop them right there and say, yeah, as long as you are not hurting anybody else. You have to have ethics. If you hurt anybody else, the game’s up.” An axiom of this moral guidepost, Lancaster continues, is never to initiate violence in any form.

Maryland’s Libertarian Party was formed in 1972, shortly after the national party’s founding in 1971, says longtime party member Dean Ahmad, an astronomer and expert on Islam from the Washington suburbs. In 1980 the party first achieved official recognition by the state, and “a Libertarian presidential candidate has been on the Maryland ballot in every election since,” Ahmad explains. Due to Maryland’s restrictive ballot-access laws, the party has often resorted to the courts–with mixed success–in order to win places on ballots. Other than Brunswick City Councilman Harrington, only one other Libertarian has ever won elective office in Maryland: Steve Ziegler, who earned a seat on the Charles County school board in 1996 and served one four-year term, Ahmad recalls.

Applying libertarianism to some of the big issues of the current campaign season leads to some interesting platform planks. Income tax? Get rid of it. The war on drugs? It’s a failure, so end prohibition and stop unfairly criminalizing a large segment of society. Social Security? Privatize it. Homosexuality? Keep the government out of people’s sex lives. Abortion? It’s up to the individual. Guns? Citizens have a right to keep and bear arms.

“When we get into the gun issue,” Lancaster says of his stump speech, “I ask everybody in the audience, do you have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? ‘Yeah,’ they say. Then I say, ‘Well, then you have the right to defend them any way you can.'”

On taxes, Lancaster believes a national sales tax should replace income tax–the more you spend, the more taxes you pay, and no income tax would mean no Internal Revenue Service and no cumbersome tax law full of loopholes for the rich. On illegal drugs, Lancaster believes drug criminalization is what makes them so profitable and so prone to violence; legalize drugs, he says, and “you take the money out of it. If you don’t take the money out of it, you’re not going to have a choice to stop” the violence.

If he should win the governorship, Lancaster says he’ll immediately convene a panel of experts from nationally recognized think tanks, who would form an “efficiency committee” to assess and make recommendations for reducing “the size and redundancy” of state government. In working to get his bureaucracy-shrinking agenda through the Democrat-and-Republican-dominated legislature, Lancaster says he would use the governor’s considerable budgetary powers to persuade oppositionist legislators to back policy measures he supports.

Lancaster sees many, many faults with the way government approaches problems today, but he remains optimistic because he believes politics is opening up to new ideas.

“We need choices, and I’m working with the Greens, the Reforms, and anybody else to make sure that happens here in Maryland,” he says. “The major parties seem to think the public is too dumb, that we just have to walk them through it. But you need choices. And the way they do it here in Maryland, getting permission to get on the ballot once you’ve jumped through all these hoops, we don’t have many. I am free when I don’t have to get anybody’s permission.”

Spear Lancaster’s life story helps explain his do-it-yourself attitude. The grandson of a Maryland state senator, he was born on a small tobacco farm during the Great Depression in Leonardtown, St. Mary’s County; attended a one-room schoolhouse in Rock Point; and survived a typhoid epidemic that struck his community when he was 6 years old. After high school in La Plata, he attended the University of Maryland, started a small construction business with some colleagues, and met and married his wife, Doris (who’s affectionately known as “Dee”). He then embarked on a career in sales, working from 1961 to 1993 for Rubbermaid Corp. Since 1966, he and Doris have lived in Crownsville, near Annapolis, where they raised two sons in a house he built himself. In 1990 he started his own company, 4 Seasons Flooring, which he ran until 2000. All the while, he’s been a voracious reader, soaking up ideas–particularly on politics.

For most of his life, Lancaster was a Democrat–“a Harry Truman Democrat,” he likes to say–and even dabbled in far-left thought. “I stayed a Democrat so long because of the women’s-rights and civil-rights movements, and the fact that they claimed to be helping the poor people,” he says. “And for a while, I think they did.”

Eventually, in the late 1980s, he grew disillusioned with the failure of Democratic policies and switched to the Republican Party. This was a temporary home. In the mid-1990s he found the Libertarian Party and studied its ideas. “I said to Dee, ‘You know, I’ve been a libertarian all my life,'” he recalls. He officially joined the Libertarian Party in 1996 and has actively participated in the party organization ever since.

Libertarians, he explains, are “very tolerant” of diverse ideas and lifestyles–a quality he cherishes, since “I’ve always been suspicious of sanctimonious, self-righteous people.” As a man who likes his fun, he says, “I actually like to think of myself as a Jeffersonian-Jackson libertarian.” Thomas Jefferson, as the author of the Declaration of Independence, is a libertarian icon, but Andrew Jackson’s appeal to Lancaster lies in his wild ways. For instance, Lancaster says that, if elected, he plans to rent out the Governor’s Mansion on the weekends for parties and weddings: “Dee says, ‘Well, you can’t mess the place up.’ I say, ‘The hell I can’t. Hell, old Jackson had the crowd come in the White House. They stood on the furniture and drank whiskey and had a good time.”

Like Lancaster, Gaztanaga is also a self-made man. Born in Havana in 1949, he arrived in Miami as a 12-year-old, and by the time he was 14 he was sweeping floors and working as a gofer for the Jesuit Seminary Guild in Baltimore. Public schools in Cuba were followed by parochial schools in the States. He graduated from Cardinal Gibbons High School and has studied history and psychology at various Baltimore-area colleges. He and his wife of 27 years, Susan Gaztanaga, spent five years teaching English and Spanish in Haiti until 1984, and are very active in their church, Cliftmont Wesleyan Church in Belair-Edison. He’s had many jobs over the years and is currently a security officer at a building near Baltimore/Washington International Airport.

Also like Lancaster, Gaztanaga came to libertarianism from the left-wing side of the political spectrum–drawing from his family’s tradition in Cuba of being social democrats. When he first registered in Maryland, he was Democrat, then became an independent, and finally spent a few years as a Republican before joining the Libertarian fold in 1992, quickly rising through the ranks to become state chair later that year. In 1995, he tried to get on the ballot for the Baltimore City Council’s Third District race but fell short of the signature requirement–at that time, he needed signatures from 3 percent of the district’s voters. In 1999, he successfully made it onto the ballot and garnered 9 percent of the vote (almost 1,500 votes).

“I’m an idealistic pragmatist,” Gaztanaga proclaims. “I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but I’m very strong in my ideals. I understand that I cannot have it now, and that I have to find ways to get there, that I have to always try to persuade people and be willing to be proven wrong when I’m wrong.

“I’d like to serve in office one day. I really would. And it might happen. And then I can really see if all the stuff I’ve been talking about is really good or not.”

And at that, Gaztanaga puts forth a hearty laugh.

The Libertarian Party in Maryland is a big tent, which welcomes both youthful leftists who question authority and aging conservatives disillusioned with the Republican Party. While politically minded people in the midst of their careers who are interested in working within mainstream thought tend toward the major parties, pre- and post-career folks seem more willing to entertain third-party politics and ideas.

“Yep, yep,” confirms Lancaster when presented with these thoughts. “Absolutely right.”

Colin Boxall, a 30-year-old Curtis Bay resident who works as a systems administrator for the Associated Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore, became a Libertarian after voting as a Republican in the 1992 presidential election. Dissatisfied with the major parties, he “went shopping” for alternatives by doing research at the local public library until he “found the one that more or less matched my political ideas.”

In libertarianism, Boxall found comfort in an ideology that has as its “fundamental idea that people have a right to run their own lives,” a tenet that he says is “not well-expressed or defended by the major parties.” Still, Boxall notes, “there are certainly things I disagree with–some of their economic ideals. There is too much trust in laissez-faire capitalism–some libertarians just don’t understand how ruthless corporations, particularly large corporations, can be.”

After growing up in Catonsville, Boxall got married and moved first to Brooklyn, then to nearby Curtis Bay. “We were looking to move to the city, because we have an alternative lifestyle [an unorthodox marriage, the particulars of which he prefers to keep private],” he explains. “We are not members of the ‘Big Three’ religions, and we did not want to live where these things would be held against us. In Brooklyn and Curtis Bay, there are enough problems that, if you’re not causing problems, people will let you live your own life.”

Boxall’s excitement about Lancaster’s candidacy is palpable. “Spear is a particularly good candidate for the Libertarian Party to put forward. The fact that he was a Democrat for most of his life means that he has values that Maryland Democrats can identify with,” he says. “And he sells the concept of libertarianism very well.” Having a former Republican as a candidate, he says, would “frighten off” the 18- to 25-year-old demographic–a group that Boxall wants “to pull into the party because it has the energy necessary to push a third party forward.”

Ruth Andrasco, a 65-year-old medical receptionist from Bowie, was registered as an independent voter until finding the Libertarian Party several years ago.

“I’m very tired of the one-party system in this state,” she explains. “I don’t feel I belong. And things are not being fixed, but more and more money is being spent to fix them.”

In the early 1990s, when Newt Gingrich was on the rise in Washington, she thought there was hope, “but then he pooped out. And the Republican Party didn’t do what they said they would do. They act like Democrats, supporting farm subsidies and steel tariffs.” She wants “less government, less taxes,” and believes the government should sell off its land to pay down its debt.

Lancaster’s candidacy is “a long shot, but it gives me hope,” Andrasco admits. “He’s a very smart man, and very optimistic.”

She first met him when Gaztanaga was running for Baltimore City Council in 1999, and “he was very friendly and made me feel at home in the party, because it is mostly men. I’m very glad that we have someone like him to fill the candidacy. But it is very hard for him to get publicity. All we basically want is for people to know that there is an option, that you don’t have to vote for the major-party candidates if you don’t like them.”

Rock guitarist Chris Couture, 33, gave $100 to the Lancaster campaign, making him one of the Baltimore area’s biggest contributors. He has since moved away and now lives in New Hampshire, but Couture spent seven years living in Mount Vernon, Reservoir Hill, and Charles Village while performing in bands that played such venues as the 8 x 10 Club, Fletcher’s, and the Hard Rock Café. He got involved with the Libertarian Party of Maryland in the mid-1990s and strongly supported Gaztanaga’s 1999 City Council bid.

Before hooking up with the Libertarians, Couture says he “usually voted Democratic,” but came to believe the major parties were “actually two sides of the same coin” and wanted an alternative. The Libertarian Party, he says, “as a whole mimics my ideals–it is the best party to represent people who have an individualistic ideal. Libertarians respect people.”

Bill Buzzell of Dundalk joined the Libertarian Party in the early 1980s, after retiring from the Air Force. Previously, the 62-year-old Buzzell had been a Republican. Then his sister-in-law introduced him to the writings of Ayn Rand, whose views served as his “entrance point into libertarianism.” The problem with Republicans, he says, is that “they don’t vote the way they talk–as strict constitutionalists.”

In 1994, he worked on Ehrlich’s successful bid for Congress but quickly grew disheartened with him. “Once in office, he seemed to work at getting the government larger and more intrusive, so I never worked on another” Ehrlich campaign, he says.

Buzzell is excited about the Lancaster’s candidacy but is concerned that “we can’t get the word out.” He believes Lancaster can appeal to “both sides of the spectrum,” politically, and take advantage of what Buzzell views as the electorate’s innate libertarianism. “About a quarter of people are libertarian,” he says, “but they don’t know it.”

One of Lancaster’s biggest beefs with the prevailing body politic is what he likes to call its tendency to create “unintended consequences.”

“Politicians talk about doing stuff–they don’t have a clue about what the hell they’re doing,” he says. “They pass laws without any idea what it will cost or who it will cost. They create unrealistic expectations, and the quickest way to fail is to have unrealistic expectations. The politicians want to promise you miracles and talk wonders. And they’ve got to know that they are talking gibberish.”

Lancaster, though, is not prone to such “hogwash,” he says. He doesn’t expect to win the upcoming election and he isn’t holding out libertarianism as the answer to all the world’s problems. He just wants a diversity of views to inform the political debate–be it his, those of other libertarians who don’t share his opinions, or those of other third parties who similarly are shunned by the system. Infusing new voices into politics, Lancaster believes, will help reinvigorate the public’s interest in politics in an era of manifest apathy.

“A third of the voting-age public doesn’t register, and more than half of those who do don’t vote–and that’s in a good year,” he says. He is also quick to point out that more and more Maryland voters opt not to register with the major parties–from 7.8 percent in 1984, to 9.5 percent in 1994, to 13.7 percent in 2001–which indicates to him growing disillusionment with politics as usual. Thus, Lancaster offers himself as an alternative–the first one Maryland voters have been offered in a governor’s race in 32 years. Come election day, we’ll see if anybody’s buying it.

Grave Accusations: Dead Prosecutor Luna Dubbed Bondsman Tillman Jr. a “Violent Drug Dealer”

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Apr. 23, 2008

In May 2002, federal prosecutor Jonathan Paul Luna stood up in a Baltimore courtroom and called bail-bondsman Milton Tillman Jr. a “violent drug dealer,” even though Tillman Jr. hadn’t–and still hasn’t–been convicted of violent, drug-related crimes. Luna was not yet famous; that would come after his violent death in a rural Pennsylvania stream, in December 2003. But Tillman Jr. was and is famous, at least locally, a fact that was part of Luna’s point: In gangland Baltimore, he argued, Tillman Jr.’s role as the patriarch of a drug-dealing family strikes fear in the hearts of other gangsters.

The case at hand was against Eric Lamont Bennett’s drug organization, which had operated in the late 1990s in Baltimore and Westminster, and the crimes Luna was prosecuting included the East Baltimore shooting, in 2000, of Tillman Jr.’s son, Milton Tillman III, nicknamed “Mo.” The violence erupted over a drug deal gone bad, and though Mo survived, two other men were murdered before the night was out.

By May 2002, Luna had won convictions against men held responsible for these and other crimes, including Bennett, Solomon Jones, and Tavon Bradley. The three have since won appeals and Jones and Bradley been reconvicted and resentenced. Bennett was scheduled to be resentenced on April 18, but the hearing was postponed and has not yet been rescheduled.

The three convicts had been part of a team of drug dealers who had sold Mo and two other buyers a bag of baking soda for $3,000 on Jan. 18, 2000. Before Mo and his friends could learn they’d been burned, Bennett’s gang went gunning for them. Luna asserted that, having robbed Tillman Jr.’s son, they figured they were as good as dead unless they struck first.

Luna based his comments on the trial testimony of Damien Simmons, the man who shot Mo three times in the back and became a cooperating witness against Bennett and the others, and on a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration memo. That document, dated March 2000, called Tillman Jr. the head of a crime family with a 20-year history in the East Baltimore heroin trade and warned that the then-imprisoned Tillman Jr. appeared to be conspiring to hit back at Bennett and his crew.

The portrait of Tillman Jr. painted by Luna at Bennett’s first sentencing hearing complicates Tillman Jr.’s public persona, which has been forged by years of press coverage. News consumers would think Tillman Jr. is simply a politically connected bail-bondsman, real-estate investor, and nightclub impresario with convictions in the 1990s for attempted bribery and tax evasion. Luna’s statements about Tillman Jr., which have not been disclosed in news reports until now, get at the Tillman family’s street-level reputation as a force to be reckoned with in Baltimore’s drug-fueled shadow economy.

Luna’s focus on Tillman Jr. does not discount the alleged criminal career of at least one other family member: Stanford Stansbury. After Tillman III was shot in 2000 and thought he might die from his injuries, court records show, he told detectives that his cousin Stanford Stansbury would know the last name of “Ericky,” the man Tillman III believed to be responsible for the shooting. Last March, Stansbury and two other men, Harry Burton and Allen Gill, were federally indicted for running a murderous, decade-long drug conspiracy based at the Latrobe Homes housing project in East Baltimore. Today, Stansbury has secured a guilty-plea agreement in which he is a cooperating witness against Burton and Gill, whom prosecutors are seeking to give the death penalty in a trial scheduled for June.

Stansbury’s lawyer, Stuart O. Simms, a former Baltimore City state’s attorney and former secretary of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, did not return a call for comment. Simms, as city state’s attorney in the 1980s, oversaw probes into Tillman Jr.’s suspected criminal activities. In 2006, New Trend Development, Tillman Jr.’s main real-estate company, contributed money to Simms’ failed run for Maryland attorney general.

The Tillman family’s business dealings drew public attention during a trial last year in which a jury determined that Tillman Jr., his son, and the other defendant, Bernard Dixon, did not intend to post multiple bails on properties in order to spring high-bail defendants out of lockup, as state criminal charges had contended. Since March, City Paper has published five articles in which Tillman Jr. was part of the story. Two were about a fugitive drug trafficker (“Flight Connections,” Mobtown Beat, March 12; “One Angry Man,” Mobtown Beat, March 26); one was about a felonious, bounty-hunting minister (“Preacher, Teacher, Forger, Spy,” Feature, April 16); another covered the Baltimore City Board of Liquor License Commissioners’ scant control over criminals influencing the city’s bar business (“Creative Licensing,” Mobtown Beat, April 9); and one second-guessed the deaconlike image of a former heroin trafficker (“Redemption Song and Dance,” Mobtown Beat, March 19).

Tillman Jr.’s success in bail bonds and real estate appears to have soared since his release from prison in 2000. His Four Aces Bail Bonds has rapidly put a large dent in the dominance of the Baltimore City bail-bonds market traditionally enjoyed by Fred W. Frank Bail Bonds. “There is no question he has affected our business,” company President Barry Udoff confirms. New Trend Development, related businesses, and Tillman Jr. associates have acquired nearly $10 million in Baltimore-area real-estate holdings since 2000, according to property records. Meanwhile, Tillman Jr.’s political clout has also grown, as measured by the thousands of dollars in donations from Four Aces and New Trend to local politicians since his release from prison.

Luna’s career was cut short by his death in Pennsylvania in early December 2003. His body was found before dawn, drowned in a stream in Lancaster County, midway between Philadelphia and Harrisburg along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He’d been stabbed dozens of times, though not deeply, and his car sat idling close by. He had last been seen late the night before at his downtown Baltimore office. The local authorities deemed it a homicide, while the FBI leaked information to the press suggesting it was suicide, but the case remains unsolved. A book has been written about it, The Midnight Ride of Jonathan Luna (“Plot Device,” Books, Feb. 23, 2005), and U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, continues to press for progress in getting it solved.

The Bennett prosecution was but a piece of Luna’s caseload against violent drug dealers, and it was over a year and a half before Luna died. There is nothing to suggest that the mysteries surrounding Luna’s death are in any way tied to Tillman Jr. or members of his family.

Luna’s insights into the Tillmans in the Bennett case gives the public an evidentiary record that the family was in the drug game. “Let me speak very frankly,” Luna said, according to the court transcript. “It is not news to most people in this courtroom that Mr. Tillman is the son of one of the most notorious drug dealers in Baltimore City history. That is a fact.” Luna also said that “there is no question that Mr. Tillman’s father is a reputed drug dealer, a violent type of guy.”

Underscoring Luna’s contention was a March 2000 DEA memo stating that the agency’s “investigation into the Tillman family has revealed that the family has been active for the past 20 years in the Baltimore, East-side based, heroin traffic. Milton Tillman, Jr., the patriarch, is currently in the last six months of a Federal prison sentence in Butner, North Carolina for tax evasion. Phone conversations made by Tillman, Jr., from . . . Butner to his son and associates indicate that a retaliatory strike against the Bennett organization is imminent.”

The Bennett trial testimony of Damien Simmons, the man who shot Tillman III, also supported Luna’s statements that Tillman Jr. was known as a feared, high-level player in the drug game. The trial transcript shows that Simmons answered “Yes,” when asked if Bennett told him to shoot Tillman III and his associates because of whom Tillman III’s father is. Simmons pleaded guilty to his part in the Bennett organization’s crimes and is scheduled for release from federal prison in 2017.

“Jon Luna wasn’t just relying on the DEA memo when he said these things about Tillman Jr.,” recalls defense attorney Harvey Greenberg, who represented Jones in the Bennett case. “He also had Simmons’ testimony. Luna was trying to be frank about the background of the shooting and what prompted it. He was being open and honest, and telling what he knew to be true with evidence to back it up.”

Tillman Jr. did not respond to detailed messages left at his office and with his attorney, Greg Dorsey. U.S. Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Marcia Murphy says her agency would not comment about Luna’s statements regarding Tillman Jr., and also would not respond to questions involving the Bennett or Stansbury cases, because “we don’t discuss our charging decisions or prosecution strategy.”

Some of the politicians who have received campaign support from Tillman Jr.’s companies, however, did respond to City Paper‘s inquiries. “I did?!” Baltimore County Circuit Court Associate Judge Mickey Norman exclaims, when told his judicial campaign committee in 2005 got money from one of Tillman Jr.’s companies. “I honestly don’t know about that,” Norman says, explaining that judges’ campaigns are set up so the judges themselves are insulated from the fundraising process and have little, if any, knowledge of who’s supporting their candidacies.

“Did I?” Baltimore City Deputy Mayor and former state delegate Salima Siler Marriott asks when told about Tillman Jr.’s donation to her campaign. She says she doesn’t know the man, either by name or personally. Messages left with nine other politicians–eight of them Democrats, including Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith; House of Delegates Majority Whip Talmadge Branch (45th District); Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot; former Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich; and Sen. Nathaniel McFadden (45th District), the chairman of the Baltimore City state Senate delegation–were not returned by press time.

Greenberg, however, is intrigued by City Paper‘s inquiries, suggesting that what Luna had to say about Tillman Jr. is already widely recognized among lawyers, law enforcers, and others familiar with the local crime scene. “Do you find Luna’s comments remarkable?” he asks. “Because I don’t.”

Additional reporting by Jeffrey Anderson And Chris Landers

Shut Your Pie Hole: Mouthy Judge Faces Rare Suspension

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Sept. 12, 2007

Baltimore County District Court Judge Bruce Lamdin is known for telling it like it is (“Bench Talk,” Mobtown Beat, April 18), but the rhetorical boundaries he crossed on the bench may end up unseating him for a spell. On Aug. 28, 10 members of the Maryland Commission on Judicial Disabilities (CJD), which is responsible for holding judges accountable for their conduct, unanimously ruled that Lamdin’s pattern of making inappropriate comments from the bench were “actionable conduct” for a judge. The CJD’s order recommended to the Maryland Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, that Lamdin be suspended for 30 work days without pay and that his courtroom behavior be monitored regularly by CJD staff.

If the Court of Appeals accepts the commission’s recommendation, Lamdin, who was appointed in 2002 by then-Gov. Parris Glendening, will become the first Maryland judge to be suspended without pay as a result of the 41-year-old commission’s work since 1996. That’s the year the CJD was reconstituted after public outcry over its toothless leniency in disciplining judges who made outrageous comments about crimes against women. Since then, its public cases normally have resulted in reprimands. In some instances, judges have resigned rather than face the commission’s charges in public hearings.

Lamdin’s case looked like it was headed to a reprimand, too, but was ratcheted up to a recommendation for suspension after the June 18 hearing on the matter before the commission. The CJD’s counsel, Peter Keith, and Lamdin’s attorney, Alvin Franklin, had mutually agreed to a public reprimand, the written decision explains, but the commission felt that wasn’t sufficient. “The imposition of a public reprimand,” the commissioners wrote, “is not commensurate with the serious pattern of misconduct in office committed by Judge Lamdin and does not not reassure the public that Judge Lamdin will be deterred from making similar comments in the future.”

Now that the CJD has sent it recommendation to the Court of Appeals, Lamdin’s legal options are spelled out in the Maryland Rules of Procedure. He has 30 days from the date he received the commission’s order to file “exceptions” to it with the high court, and, if he does so, the commissioners have another 15 days to respond to them. Then a hearing is scheduled, after which the Court of Appeals may do one of three things: impose sanctions (either those recommended by the CJD, or any others permitted by law), dismiss the case, or send it back for more proceedings. If Lamdin chooses not to file exceptions, then the Court of Appeals may reach its decision without a hearing.

Lamdin stipulated to the commissioners that his courtroom speech in 14 cases before him violated the state’s Canons of Judicial Conduct, and the commissioners found his comments to be “undignified, discourteous, and disparaging.” His offensive speech included comments about children, the Baltimore City judiciary, the Maryland correctional system, the state of Pennsylvania, the Baltimore County Circuit Court and its judges, and drug treatment. “Do you think I just came in on the watermelon truck today?” he asked one defendant. To another, he declared that “if there is a pile of shit there you’ll step in it,” according to the CJD’s findings of fact in the case.

Lamdin failed to impress the commissioners during the June 18 hearing, according to the written order. “During his sworn testimony at the Hearing,” the order reads, “Judge Lamdin admitted that his stipulated comments were ‘wrong,’ but never indicated any appreciation of exactly what was ‘wrong’ about those comments. … Judge Lamdin expressed no remorse for his comments; instead, he attempted to justify his comments through explanations and excuses. In response to questions from members of the Commission, Judge Lamdin was generally defensive, sometimes evasive, and, on at least one occasion, arrogant and hostile.”

The hearing was lively, if transcripts set down in the order are any indication. Lamdin grew combative with commissioner Paul Shelton, for example, who had asked Lamdin whether he would still tell “a person that appeared before you that the Circuit Court judges are spending the afternoon drinking cocktails?” Though Lamdin was stipulating that his from-the-bench comments broke rules of judicial behavior, he sometimes tried to defend them. For instance, when he had asked a lawyer whether his client’s head was “out of where he had it inserted earlier today,” Lamdin told the commissioners, “I think the comment fit the situation quite frankly at the time.”

Lamdin told the commissioners that, in some instances when his speech turned offensive, he was attempting humor. Such was the case, he explained, when he had described himself to a defendant as “a merciless SOB” – a comment he told the commissioners had been taken “out of context” in CJD’s charges. Another attempt at humor, which he admitted was “a mistake,” was when he said this in open court: “I get in trouble because I told some lady we confiscate cell phones and we put the cell phones in plastic bags and send them down to Annapolis. I suggested maybe we ought to do the same thing with children except poke holes in the bag.” In regard to this, the commissioners wrote that Lamdin “never expressed remorse, nor did he acknowledge that his disparaging comments about children in [that instance] might lead the public to believe that he was biased or prejudiced against children.”

The general excuse Lamdin offered regarding his offensive speech was that he was trying to communicate to defendants in “terms [they] could understand.” When the commissioner’s chairman, Court of Special Appeals Judge Patrick L. Woodward, asked what Lamdin was doing now that was different from before the charges arose, Lamdin said he was taking defendants back to his chambers to talk because “I can find out where their true desire is and whether they really want treatment or help, of if they’re a lost cause. And if they’re a lost cause there’s not much time to be wasted on talking to them.” The commissioners wrote about this answer: “Did he intend to continue using profanity, vulgarity, and name-calling, only now ‘back in chambers,’ or did he simply want a setting more conducive to finding out whether he could help a particular defendant? The commission truly hopes that it is the latter. Nevertheless, Judge Lamdin’s answer is disturbing to the Commission.”

Reached by phone at his court office in Towson on Sept. 7, Lamdin was characteristically feisty: “Why would you think I would want to talk to you?” he asked. When told a reporter must attempt to contact the subject of a story, he added, “I have nothing to say.” Asked whether he intended to file exceptions to the CJD’s order, Lamdin referred questions to his attorney, Alvin Frederick. As of press time, Frederick had not returned messages. Keith and staff at the CJD declined to comment on the case.

The CJD’s business is done largely in private, and only enters the public domain when the matter rises to a level of severity that calls for a hearing by the commission. Approximately 53 cases taken by the commission since 1996 resulted in measures that fell short of the public-hearing threshold, such as warning letters, private reprimands, or probationary terms. Eleven cases involved public outcomes – a dismissal, nine reprimands, ad a recommendation for removal from the bench.

Nationwide in 2006, only 18 judges were suspended without pay, according to Cynthia Gray, who tracks such things as director of the Center for Judicial Ethics of the American Judicature Society.

Lamdin has backers, including attorney David Irwin, who says he wrote a character letter to the commission to defend the judge. Irwin has in the past served as co-counsel with Lamdin before Lamdin became a judge. “I’ve just known and admired Judge Lamdin for a long time, and I hope it’s not over for him,” Irwin says, adding that “he’s a really good judge, and it saddens me” to hear of the recommended suspension.

Boat People: Cheek to Jowl With the Maritime Set in the Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Nov. 12, 1997

These days it is easy to forget that Baltimore is a port city. Merchant seamen don’t stumble around drunk on the Block anymore; now conventioneers do. The Inner Harbor, once abuzz with the boat-based trade of food, lumber, and coal, is now home to malls, parking garages, museums, hotels, and half-empty office buildings. Baltimore still is a player in the modern shipping industry, with its massive freighters, cranes, and dry docks, but none of that can be seen from the city proper except on a clear day from, say, the pagoda in Patterson Park or the top of the Washington Monument. With the exception of a few remnant working vessels, the Fells Point-Canton waterfront – one of the birthplaces of America’s maritime heritage – now berths only a large fleet of small pleasure boats.

But each year in mid-October Baltimore’s maritime heyday is nostalgically revived. Scores of two-masted sailboats come to town to engage not in trade but in another, more leisurely kind of competitive enterprise: a race. Some are made of wood, some of steel, some even of fiberglass and epoxy, and most are less than 20 years old. Many hail from the north – New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maine, Novia Scotia – and stop for the event on their way south to more tropical climes for wintertime charters. Their captains all hope to claim honors in the Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race from Baltimore to Norfolk, Va.

For days leading up to the event, schooner captains, professional crews, and paying passengers mix with Baltimore’s native nautical subculture at the Whistling Oyster in Fells Point, a bar that also serves as the headquarters for the Fells Point Yacht Cub, which organizes schooner-race activities in Baltimore. The race participants get serious for the 145-mile race to Norfolk, where partying resumes with a playful vengeance at a pig-and-oyster roast and an awards ceremony.

This annual orgy of schooner fare nets several thousand dollars to benefit the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and spawns a handful of race stories and a shared sense of Chesapeake Bay maritime heritage among the competitors. It started with a challenge in 1988 at the launch of the Pride of Baltimore II, when Lane Briggs of Norfolk, the builder and captain of a unique schooner-rigged tugboat called the Norfolk Rebel, challenged the Pride II to a race down the bay, with the loser to buy the winner enough beer to satisfy the winning crew. In 1990 the competition was made official by the formation of a race committee and has continued each year since, attracting as many as 35 entrants. Twenty-four boats – from the 44-foot Green Dragon out of Massachusetts to Baltimore’s own 171-foot Pride II – participated in this year’s race, according to Briggs, president of the Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race organization.

The race, though young, reflects a very old rivalry between Baltimore and Norfolk, port cities with a history of commercial competition dating to the 18th century. It also revives a tradition of schooner racing on the bay, an activity that at one time captured the imagination – and gaming instincts – of Baltimore’s populace. In 1884, for instance, bookies in Mobtown’s bars were reported to have held $60,000 in bets on the outcome of a race between two famous Baltimore schooners – the William M. Himes and the Judy – from Baltimore to Beaufort, N. C. After the Judy won by 10 minutes, both boats loaded their holds with watermelons for the return trip north.

Schooner racing today, however, doesn’t involve working boats. Rather than making runs for pineapples from the West Indies or shipping coal to New England, modern schooners are mostly chartered for pleasure, a use that, when it began in the 1930s, earned them the derisive label “dude cruisers.” Those that aren’t charter boats are either private yachts, educational vessels, or goodwill ambassadors, such as the Pride II. Together the schooners form the basis of an Atlantic Coast nautical society, a web of boat people familiar with each other – and with each other’s boats – and bonded by a taste for maritime history. When they congregate for the race, you can taste the salt in the air.

The schooner race is known by crew and passengers as a chance to party, but winning it has become a coveted honor among East Coast schooner captains. The competitive spirit runs thick. Heading out of the Baltimore harbor at the helm of the Liberty Clipper on Oct. 16, race day, Jason Kurtz is asked if he thinks his boat will win. “We’re going to try,” Kurtz says. “And we’re going to have fun doing it.” Then he pauses, looks around at the other schooners heading toward the starting line just south of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and adds, “Don’t let anyone fool you. Everybody is in this race to win. The bragging rights are huge if you win this race.”

Kurtz, at 26, is young for a schooner captain. As a child he sailed with his family on the Great Lakes, then went to Hamilton College in upstate New York. In college he spent a semester at sea aboard an educational vessel out of Woods Hole, Mass. After graduating from college he dabbled in sales before joining a schooner crew in Key West. That was three years ago. Earlier this year he was hired as Liberty Clipper‘s captain.

Kurtz is one of many schooner sailors to make a career of working the big boats up and down the Atlantic seaboard. In addition to the Chesapeake fleet of dude cruisers (the Clipper City and the Schooner Nighthawk of Baltimore, neither of which raced this year) and vessels funded by foundations (the Pride II and the Lady Maryland), a variety of schooners operate along the coast, many in New England. Most of these boats provide full-time jobs for crews of 10 or more. The schooner race gives these sailors an opportunity to look at other boats for possible employment, to catch up with friends, and to upgrade their sailing licenses by taking a test administered in Baltimore by the Coast Guard.

Before the race Kurtz tosses a penny over his left shoulder and into the drink, then scratches the mast, both maritime superstitions believed to bring luck and wind. The schooner’s owner, Greg Muzzy, also throws a penny “to appease Neptune,” he says. Then the strains of Jimmy Buffet’s “Follow in My Wake” are piped over the schooner’s on-deck stereo speakers. Kurtz is overcome with good-spirited cockiness. “This is the song we’re going to play for the rest of the schooner fleet,” he crows, and starts singing along.

Muzzy came to schooner ownership after a career as an accountant and small-business consultant, and a lifetime of fascination with schooners. In the 1980s he took an educational schooner trip to learn celestial navigation; shortly afterward he took the plunge and bought the Liberty, a small schooner he still owns. Its success as a dude cruiser led him to purchase another – the Mystic Clipper – and rename it the Liberty Clipper.

Built in 1983, the Liberty Clipper is a 125-foot steel-hulled schooner designed in the style of the Baltimore clippers, the fast-sailing, “sharp-built” vessels that made Baltimore internationally famous during the first half of the 19th century. For her first six years she was owned and operated as a dude cruiser on the Chesapeake by Quentin Snediker, a towering figure in schooner circles. Today Muzzy sails her out of Baltimore in the summer and Key West in the winter.

Snediker played a key role in reviving pubic interest in the bay’s maritime heritage. The 1992 picture book Chesapeake Bay Schooners, coauthored by Snediker and Ann Jensen, chronicles the rich territory of bay-schooner culture in great detail, down to vessel lists and architectural drawings. He recently moved from Annapolis to Mystic, Conn., to help coordinate construction of a replica of the Amistad, a Baltimore-built clipper that achieved fame in 1839 when 53 West Africans mutinied and took control of the ship after being sold as slaves in Cuba. They were captured off of Long Island by the U.S. Navy and stood trial for murder and piracy; they were acquitted, amid great fanfare. The case became a rallying cry for the abolitionist movement in the United States, and its story is the basis of an upcoming Steven Spielberg movie.

The race starts at 2:10 P.M., just outside of Annapolis. The Liberty Clipper crosses the starting line ahead of the Pride II, the boat to beat in the AA Class of larger vessels which also includes the 104-foot Lady Maryland of Baltimore, the 115-foot A.J. Meerwald of New Jersey, the 88-foot Ocean Star of Maine, and the 135-foot American Rover of Norfolk. “Take a picture of me with the Pride behind us,” Kurtz pleads as several cameras work to record the scene – which, with nothing in sight but big sails on two-masted boats, would be a familiar one to a bay waterman 100 years ago.

After the race begins, most of the AA Class schooners head toward the Eastern Shore, then tack over to sail west, zigzagging back and forth down the bay. The idea is to stay as much as possible out of the incoming tidal current, which is strongest in the deepest parts of the bay, by sticking close to shore, where a land breeze is also likely to add velocity. The increased sailing distance this strategy involves can be offset with higher boat speed.

Using her tremendous amount of sail, the Pride II banks on this strategy and pulls ahead of the pack. To fly that much sail, Liberty Clipper crew member Ron Peifer says, “you gotta work harder than a cat trying to bury a turd in a concrete floor.”

But Muzzy and Kurtz of the Liberty Clipper take a different approach. They point their boat straight down the middle of the bay, running her before the north wind. Kurtz orders the crew to set the schooner’s two largest sails – the mainsail and the foresail, on the mainmast and the foremast – “wing and wing” on opposite sides of the boat. To do this, the foresail is held in place by a “preventer,” a heavy block-and-tackle rig attached to the boom that keeps the sail from swinging unexpectedly and dangerously across the deck. The schooner barrels along, pushing through the brine before the strong breeze, going a steady seven or eight knots – 10 or 12 miles per hour.

Several hours into the race the Lady Maryland pulls up from behind to come broadside to the Liberty Clipper. A smaller, slower schooner with a sizable time advantage over the Liberty Clipper under the race’s complicated handicapping formula, the Lady Maryland is one of the last vessels Muzzy and Kurtz expect to see up close this long after the start. But there she is.

Just as the Lady Maryland pulls up, Kurtz, noting the wind has suddenly shifted slightly to the east, orders the preventer removed and the foresail jibed to starboard – that is, moved to the right side of the boat to take advantage of the wind change. Meanwhile the passengers of both schooners stand on deck, staring silently at each other from a distance of about 25 yards. The silence quickly grows somewhat absurd – after all here we are, two groups of people on two large schooners in the middle of the bay and within easy shouting distance of each other. Somebody must have something to say.

A Lady Maryland passenger breaks the ice: “Pardon me,” he says in faux British accent. “Do you have any Grey Poupon?”

No one on the Liberty Clipper has time to laugh. At that very instant the foresail jibes prematurely, wrenching the preventer from crew member Brooke Pastore’s hands. The heavy wooden block with a meat hook on the end swings out of control above the deck and strikes Muzzy hard on the head, opening a two-inch gash in his scalp and cutting his ear.

The vibe on the Liberty Clipper turns quickly from carefree and confident to chaotic as the crew frantically runs for ice and towels to stem Muzzy’s bleeding and clean the blood off the decks. But within moments the schooner’s speed increases dramatically and the Lady Maryland shrinks behind us, not to be seen again until both schooners are docked safely in Norfolk the next day.

I write of Muzzy in my notebook, “He’s bloody and beaten, and I doubt I’ll see him again on this race. Too bad, because I liked his attitude.” An hour later, after another, different kind of mishap – the schooner’s sewer system backed up, making it necessary to “clean the shit out of the shower,” as one crew member put it – I add another comment to my notes, “I guess the Lady Maryland put the bad juju on us.”

I was wrong about Muzzy. By dinnertime he is propped up in a captain’s chair in the Liberty Clipper‘s main cabin, fielding comic banter about his misfortune. His head is wrapped in a bandage and a bag of ice balances atop his pate. Two or three bandages patch up his injured ear. “You look like that guy from A Christmas Carol,” says one crew member, alluding to Marley, the ghost who haunts Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ classic holiday tale. “You look like that self-portrait of van Gogh,” another chimes in.

Muzzy is philosophical about the accident. “It was the shock of looking up and seeing the Lady Maryland right there. I was thinking, What the hell is that boat doing next to us?” But he doesn’t blame the “bad juju” on the Lady Maryland. Rather, he jokingly blames it on Kurtz’s superstitious act of scratching the mast before the race began, a sailing ritual that is believed to bring wind. “That’s what you get for scratching the mast,” Muzzy says.

He might have said, “That’s what you get for letting the press come aboard.” The last time that happened was during an excursion in Boston Harbor. Muzzy fell overboard, and a Boston Globe photographer captured him on film as he flailed around in the dirty water.

Muzzy’s clock-cleaning by the Liberty Clipper‘s preventer is one of many mechanical hazards of sailing schooners. The Liberty Clipper, for instance, uses 4,300 square feet of sail, manipulated with heavy, complicated, and archaic rigging, to harness the power of the wind and propel the 145-ton vessel through unpredictable waters – a venture that is bound to lead to the occasional casualty. As would be expected, the Chesapeake Bay schooner’s 200-year history is filled with morbid tales of the tough life on the sea.

Historically, though, the hazards of schooners have more to do with economics than mechanics. The Sarah, launched on the Wicomico River in 1731, was the first schooner built on the Chesapeake Bay, according to Snediker’s book. By that time the bay’s growing class of merchant planters was realizing ever higher returns from producing and shipping tobacco, beef, pork, grain, and other perishable goods to markets on and well beyond the bay. Piracy or seizure by warring nations was a constant threat, labor conditions for crews could be unbearable, and an infamous human commodity – slaves – were transported to the bay in inhuman conditions in schooner holds.

By the end of the 18th century schooner-based trade was a booming local industry, fueling Baltimore’s remarkably speedy growth. As Snediker points out in his book, between 1776 and 1783 the population of Fells Point – the city’s main shipbuilding center – jumped from 821 to 1,522, with the slave population rising from 65 to 276. By 1820 Fells Point shipbuilders could produce a schooner to order in six weeks, with much of the craftsmanship handled by slaves.

Many of the schooners built on the bay in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were fast-sailing vessels with sleek lines – Baltimore clippers, as they came to be known. Based on the design of Virginia pilot boats – small schooners used to speedily transport pilots, who would board incoming ships and guide them to port – the Baltimore clippers quickly became internationally renowned. They were widely used as privateers – armed vessels hired by merchants or governments to fend off pirates or enemy craft. And they were used by pirates themselves, who could more easily overtake “prize” vessels in a speedy clipper. The opium trade from the Far East relied on the clipper’s stealthy, swift qualities, and later, after the importation of slaves was banned in 1807, Baltimore clippers were used in the illegal “black ivory” slave trade.

Naval architect and historian Howard Chappelle summed up the Baltimore clipper with a well-crafted sentence Snediker uses in his book: “Sired by war, mothered by privateering and piracy, and nursed by cruelty, nevertheless, the Baltimore clipper will always remain the type representative of the highest development of small sailing craft, as built by American builders.”

Once the illegal slave trade was brought to a halt in the 1850s, Baltimore clippers faded from the bay’s schooner scene. Only a few remained by 1860. A variety of other schooner types – such as the bug-eye, the pungy (of which the Lady Maryland is an authentic replica), the clump schooner, and the skipjack – came to the fore, many of them used in the then-booming oyster industry.

Dredging for oysters brought its own hazards. Cruel oyster captains were known for running their crews ragged, then “paying them off with the boom” – an “accident” that swept unwanted crew members overboard to unrecorded deaths. Also, oyster clans fought each other for territory and fought the “oyster police,” a state-sanctioned navy that tried to keep a lid on the rampant ruthlessness in the hugely profitable industry.

As if ruthless captains weren’t enough, schooner folks were faced with dangers in port, too. The Baltimore waterfront after dark was an ominous place where bad luck and trouble lurked around every corner. Schooner crews leaving their boats at night were sure to stick together, walk in the middle of the street, and carry brass knuckles in their pockets.

By the 1920s and 1930s, with the oyster industry in decline, working schooners were also on the outs. A few lasted into the 1940s, when a few enterprising individuals came up with a new use for them: dude cruising. In 1944 Herman Knust came across an old schooner – the Levin J. Marvel – in Curtis Bay, bought and refurbished her for $18,000, and started Chesapeake Vacation Cruises, taking vacationers out for a thrill on the Chesapeake. Three years later he invested in Edwin and Maud – a schooner launched in 1900 that still dude cruises today under the name Victory Chimes.

Todays schooner culture is underwritten mostly by charters, foundation grants, and public funding – a necessity, since the big old boats, which are expensive to maintain, cannot be put to economical use hauling freight anymore. Schooner sailing still has its dangers – Muzzy’s mishap is a good example, as is the lost of four lives when the Pride of Baltimore went down in a freak squall near Puerto Rico in 1986 – but its days of piracy, drug running, and oyster wars are long over.

The strong breeze holds steady all night, then picks up steam after changing to the southeast in the wee hours of the morning. Around 2 A.M. one of the Liberty Clipper‘s jibs – the sails that fly ahead of the foremast – rips, making a sound, Brooke Pastore recalls, like “a screaming woman” as the force of the wind shreds the sail. In rough seas and darkness, the crew wrestles the ruined sail to the deck.

As we approach the finish line, the spans of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel between the Eastern Shore’s Cape Charles and tidewater Virginia’s Cape Henry are outlined by lights. The full moon peeks occasionally through the clouds as we cruise along at nine knots or more. There we are in the middle of the broadest reaches of the bay, and twice a haunting sound, very much like that of a dog baying, is heard behind us.

We cross the finish line right around 5:50 A.M., the fourth boat to cross after the Pride II and two Class I boats, Imagine …! and Woodwind. “Fourth to scratch, not to shabby,” Kurtz says after the crew does a countdown over the finish line. He figures the Liberty Clipper lost to the Lady Maryland by about 12 minutes on corrected time (which takes into account each boat’s handicap), but his calculations show her beating the Pride II by about a half-hour. The most important thing – short of winning, of course – is to beat the Pride II.

The crew takes down all the sails but the main and the fore, and the Liberty Clipper heads up the James River toward Norfolk. Huge aircraft carriers and other monstrous naval craft are docked along the shores. Container ships also line the passage to downtown Norfolk. The Nauticus – a massive nautical museum designed to resemble a battleship – comes into view, and the Liberty Clipper prepares to take a berth behind the Pride II at a pier in front of the edifice.

After the docking, Jan Miles, the Pride II captain, drops by and says his “preliminary calculations” also indicate the Liberty Clipper beat the Pride II. The Liberty Clipper‘s crew is reserved, preferring to wait for the official results before claiming victory of the famous Pride II. Muzzy, who went to the hospital shortly after docking, returns with two large stitches in his scalp. He’s in good spirits. “All’s well that ends well,” crew member Nate Kirmess says. “And it’ll be worth it if we won.”

Dutch Schulz, a Pride II mate who once captained the Liberty Clipper, stops by to greet Muzzy, his old boss. “I’ll settle for first over the line,” Schulz says. Schulz describes the Pride II‘s trip as “a sleigh ride,” adding that the captain “was so excited” to cross the finish line before Imagine …! and Woodwind, two boats with modern hulls designed for racing – a feature some say should disqualify them as schooners. Schulz declares he’s “ready for a three-day, knockdown, drag-out, nice-to-meet-ya” – in other words, to resume partying.

Due to the strong, steady wind, the race ended for many schooners much sooner than expected – in about half of the time of last year’s race. Antsy crews are thirsty for beer, so after dark a keg is obtained an tape underneath the shelter of a pagoda near the Nautilus. It is pouring rain.

Jan Miles and Chris Rowsom, the Lady Maryland captain, chat about schooner racing. Miles says, “Our industry doesn’t know shit about racing, so hotshots like us” can tear up in a race. It appears that Lady Maryland came in first in Class AA, and Rowsom says he loves winning. His only regret is that the schooner wasn’t crewed by its regular users – schoolchildren participating in the bay-based educational programs of the Living Classroom Foundation, which owns the Lady Maryland. Instead the boat was crewed by members of the local chapter of the Corinthians, an international sailing club.

On Saturday midmorning the Lady Maryland goes upriver a short ways to pump out its sewage. As it passes the Liberty Clipper, the crew’s competitive edge comes to the fore. “That bucket was our competition?” Kirmmse snaps. Another sailer claims, “They stole our strategy.” Another attributes Lady Maryland‘s finish to “a freak of wind.”

By late afternoon on Saturday, the schooner crowd is partying hard, eating roasted pig and oysters under a tent in the rain. A band plays sea chanteys. There are few surprises in the official results: Imagine …! is best overall, Pride II wins first over the finish line, and Lady Maryland wins first on corrected time among Class II schooners, beating out the Liberty Clipper and Pride II, in that order. For his efforts at the Liberty Clipper‘s helm, Kurtz collects a compass – and the ever-precious bragging rights for beating Pride II.

Those gathered for the Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race love the boats, the history, the sense of participating in cultural preservation that comes with keeping a centuries-old sailing tradition alive. But as Frank Turney, a crew member on the Yankee out of Cape May, N.J. – the boat that took the honors of coming in dead last in the race – says, the event is really about having a good time.

“That’s the only reason I come on these things,” he says with a wry smile as he sips his beer. “They throw good parties.”

Train Wreck: One Man’s Dreams of a Local Freight Line Run Smack Into Reality

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Oct. 10, 2007

If the law goes his way, a man who calls himself James Riffin says he’ll run freight on railroad tracks between a property he owns in Cockeysville and the nationwide rail network that converges on Baltimore, and at all possible points in between, using a section of light-rail tracks to do it. He’ll do this even though the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA), which has about a billion dollars invested in the light-rail system, and Norfolk Southern, which holds the freight-carrying rights along the line, oppose him. That’s because, if it all goes Riffin’s way, he says that light-rail right of way will be his.

To get to the point where Riffin can make such an outrageous claim, he has boned up on railroad law and used it–with some success, so far–to tangle with transportation giants like the MTA and Norfolk Southern before the federal Surface Transportation Board (STB), which regulates railroads. Since he first began his campaign to start freight-rail service to his Cockeysville property in 2003, James Riffin has become a name a number of state and local officials and several important lawyers know very well, even if they can’t talk about him because he is, was, or could be in litigation with them. MTA spokesman Richard Solli confirms the magnitude of the legal problems Riffin has caused the agency, agreeing that the right of way’s status is “an open question until the board decides.”

If Riffin is going to run freight cars along what used to be the Northern Central Railroad’s right of way in Cockeysville, he faces more than legal challenges. The tracks are largely impassable and, in many areas, nonexistent, so essentially they would have to be completely replaced; pieces of the right of way have been rented out to become parking lots or sold off in real-estate deals. But railroad right of ways, and the laws that regulate them, are long-established and complex things. If the Surface Transportation Board found in Riffin’s favor, it could compel the state and Norfolk Southern to accommodate his claims and his fledgling freight line. The right-of-way property would need to be sorted out and reclaimed. A small railroad bridge would have to be replaced and a new crossing at York Road would have to be installed, disrupting traffic. And if, as Riffin says he wants to do, he interchanges with CSX’s tracks coming out of the Howard Street tunnel in Baltimore, it could theoretically jeopardize the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, which is situated along an old CSX spur. At the very least, Riffin will need to have a large railroad bridge constructed across the Jones Falls. Who’s going to spend all this money? Riffin says he’s willing to bear some reasonable costs, but the MTA damaged the tracks, he argues, so it should repair them.

Lawyers have written in many motions over the past several years that Riffin is abusing the process, that he’s insinuating himself into railroad matters by making unfounded claims to railroad rights, that he’s given to making misleading statements, that he’s a sham. But Riffin doesn’t seem to mind. He just keeps plugging along, preparing for the day when he’ll be driving the locomotive of his own active freight-rail operation, accessing the national rail system via the light-rail tracks that ordinarily ferry passengers between the heart of Baltimore and its northern suburbs. He’s never been entirely sure his dreams would come true, but today it seems more likely than ever before.

Riffin has been behaving as much like a railroad as he can, in the meantime, and that has gotten him into some hot water over his insistence that, like any railroad, he doesn’t have to comply with local and state laws, only federal ones. State authorities didn’t like it, for instance, when in 2004 he started moving large quantities of earth in the Beaver Dam Run flood plain, where his property lies, in order to grade to a higher elevation for the railroad tracks he wants to install. In case the STB and the courts back him, he wants to be ready to start operating.

Riffin continues to pursue this grandiose–some would say impossible–plan because “I have a personal bias against losing railroad right of ways,” he explains. “And I want freight service returned to my property in Cockeysville.”

Meeting with Riffin is difficult to arrange. He’s busy, ever on the move in his worse-for-wear Honda minivan, and often out of cell-phone range. When reached and asked about a convenient time to get together, he says he’s rarely sure what each day will hold, that he has legal research and reading to do, evidence to gather, support from shippers to solicit, and about 8.5 miles of railroad track in Western Maryland that he bought from CSX in August 2006 to tend to, and the best thing is to call him between 8:30 and 9 in the morning on any given day and see whether he has any free time before or after his mid-day meal, which is the only one he eats each day. He’s a one-man operation, and that’s an especially demanding task when the state of Maryland and Baltimore County are both out to shut him down.

Besides, Riffin doesn’t want press. “I’ve actively made attempts to keep this out of the media,” he says, though he doesn’t explain how. When first contacted on Sept. 11 by phone for this article, Riffin immediately asks, “How did you find out about me?” Once it is explained that the discovery was complete happenstance, made while looking for something else entirely in the federal courts, he acquiesces, indicating that, well, if the press is interested, there’s nothing anybody can do about it because it’s all a matter of public record anyway. And he did, as he says, “hit the jackpot” by getting as far as he has unnoticed. But he acknowledges he would prefer it if the matter stays within the tight circle of involved parties: the STB, the MTA, Norfolk Southern, CNJ Rail Corp. of New Jersey (which may want to operate Riffin’s railroad, if it ever gets rolling), and Riffin himself.

His opponents are loath to comment on him, since there is so much active litigation and the likelihood of more. Paul Mayhew, a Baltimore County government attorney who’s been contending for years with Riffin’s federal pre-emption argument, was nice enough to send up the municipal chain of command a list of City Paper‘s questions, but comes back with: “We feel it is best simply to decline comment.” His statement echoes those of other lawyers and spokespeople.

Riffin guesses that his opponents would say this about him, if they felt free to: “Some people would say `eccentric,’ some people would say `kook,’ and some people would say, `Christ, I’d like to see that guy dead.’ If I was in Jersey, I’d be wearing concrete boots at the bottom of some river.”

There are ways short of murder to bring Riffin’s plans to a halt. He could be slapped with liens on his Cockeysville property over outstanding fines and penalties for developing in the flood plain, which he admits he did. He could be forced, at great expense, to move the massive pieces of railroading equipment and machinery from his property, which he’s been ordered to do repeatedly and hasn’t, risking arrest. He could run out of money. But none of that has happened yet.

While Riffin is still very much a Don Quixote with his railroading campaign, his impressive stake in the matter of the light-rail right of way gives him the potential to become David facing Goliath. “It’s about to get real dicey,” he says darkly during one of several hours of phone interviews. When his late-afternoon schedule on Sept. 26 allows for a field trip to point out the route he’d like to use to link with the light rail, Riffin declines to be photographed, saying he doesn’t want to be recognized by Gov. Martin O’Malley. That’s how he sees the magnitude of the forces he’s up against. (Later he agrees to let City Paper publish a photograph in which he walked into the frame while it was being taken, once he’s assured that he’s unrecognizable.)

His black slacks and tucked-in button-down shirt bring the word “professorial” to mind. Work boots suggest an academic area requiring time in the field. His half-glasses are cocked a little on his nose, and his dark hair shows less gray than one would expect for someone in his 60s. He speaks rapidly, imparting with exacting recall his detailed knowledge of railroad case law and the technical aspects of moving freight. Pointing to a section of Cockeysville track overgrown with trees, or where a railroad bridge has been removed, he recites precisely why that’s wrong under STB rules and what it would take to fix it and about how much it would cost. He’s compact, energetic, fast-thinking, and, as if in front of a classroom, he’ll call on you: “Remember what I told you about whether you become a common carrier if you buy a line of railroad?” The man’s in full command of the subject matter, and many others besides, and he likes to test attentive students to make sure they’re still following.

Towson University confirms that James Riffin was an assistant professor of business administration in what is now the College of Business and Economics from August 1978 to June 1981. There were other teaching gigs, too, Riffin recalls, while he was studying graduate law and industrial relations at University of Pennsylvania, continuing an academic career that began during the Vietnam War at the University of California, Berkeley. Later, he made some money developing the Timonium Road property now owned by the Maryland Athletic Club, and he describes crafting money-saving deals to reduce corporate lighting costs. Only after he acquired the Cockeysville tract in 2003, he says, did he start to look closely at the possibilities of railroads.

“Until I came along,” Riffin observes smugly, “no one paid any attention. And then I said, `I’d like some freight-rail service in Cockeysville.'”

Then, in a sense, Riffin became a railroad. A little over a year ago, he bought some track in Allegany County along George’s Creek south of Frostburg on down to Westernport, about 8.5 miles in all, on a right of way anywhere from 30 to 100 feet wide–44 acres of dirt, rocks, and rail. The George’s Creek Subdivision, it’s called in the STB records; after CSX sold it to Riffin, the STB classified him as a Class III railroad, commonly known as a short line.

“Someone suggested I buy it,” Riffin explains about the track purchase. “And I did, pretty much sight unseen. And then I went about finding out what it was I bought. It has the potential to have a lot of freight traffic, but there’s also a lot of politics.”

Riffin has run into a lot of that in his short railroading career, as the records of his legal maneuverings make clear. “Maryland does not like railroads” is the lesson he says he’s learned from his dealings so far, adding that “it’s a philosophical thing, and I can’t do much about that. They keep putting everything on trucks, and the roads are overwhelmed.” Road salt for Allegany and Garrett counties is trucked in, he explains, but he could ship it along George’s Creek by rail for less, and adds that the truckers have the shipping contract for a power plant that is connected by Riffin’s railroad to a mine whose coal the plant burns. “I can do it for less,” he boasts. “And I’m not unionized.”

Riffin may be on to something. An October Fortune magazine article, “Cash in on the Rebuilding Boom,” touts four publicly traded companies poised to take advantage of the coming billions that will be spent by state and local governments to upgrade aging infrastructure, including Greenbrier, whose rail cars fitted to carry the containers used on ships and trucks are a hot product. The story quotes an investment manager for a firm that owns a big chunk of Greenbrier stock saying that rail “has an advantage over trucking because it uses less gas to transport freight.” In its October issue, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance puts a freight railroad and a freight rail-car manufacturer on its list of investments for an article titled “25 Ways to Invest in a Cleaner World.”

Not that freight rail isn’t already ascendant. Demand for it has been increasing for a generation now. But with energy costs increasing quickly, demand is expected to grow even faster. The U.S. Department of Transportation recently predicted an 88 percent rise in freight-rail tonnage by 2035. When the American Association of Railroads saw that, it commissioned a study, released in September, to determine what it would cost to meet the expected jump in demand. The figure: $148 billion, in 2007 dollars, so the actual cost will likely be much higher. Most of that goes to keeping the big railroads–the Class I’s, under STB’s system–up to snuff, but $13 billion would need to be spent to keep the regional rails and short lines in good working order.

In Maryland, preparations for the spending spree are underway. On Sept. 22, the Associated Press reported that the state Department of Transportation and CSX Corp. have started to look for ways to accommodate double-stacked freight trains through Baltimore, since they can’t fit through the 112-year-old Howard Street tunnel. Building an alternate route and finding another use for the tunnel will surely add substantially to big-ticket rail spending in the region, as will Norfolk Southern’s recently announced plan to double-track its system through Maryland and other Eastern states. And Gov. O’Malley’s plans for expanding the MTA’s MARC passenger train system to the tune of nearly $4 billion over the next three decades were just announced in late September. The rail giants, be they governments or corporations, have started to reach for their wallets.

Riffin’s stranded and inoperable one-man railroad operation barely has a wallet to reach for, and whatever’s in it could take a big hit at any time. But he thinks he has a chance to turn into an active and going concern, and to gain a legitimate seat at the transportation table.

Right now, Riffin owns his Western Maryland track and he says he has 12 rail cars, nine of them stuck in York, Pa., two at CSX’s Bayview Yard in East Baltimore, and one at his Cockeysville property, where a whole lot of heavy railroading equipment and track-building materials are also stored. Give him a week, he says, and he could lease a locomotive, start moving freight, and become a player, however small, in the rail game. But until he’s cleared to move freight along the light-rail right of way, he’s in limbo, on his own, and Big Railroad and Big Government seem out to squash his plans despite all the talk of investment in railroads.

Riffin says that Maryland doesn’t like railroads, but maybe Maryland just doesn’t like his railroad or, more simply, perhaps it doesn’t like Riffin.

On April 14, 2003, according to the deed recorded in Baltimore County, Riffin acquired 10919 York Road in Cockeysville–a two-acre former distillery warehouse site east of York Road and on the north side of Beaver Dam Run, which flows into Loch Raven Reservoir. Along the opposite side of the stream is the old Northern Central Railroad bed, which is owned by the state. Three weeks later Riffin incorporated NCRR LLC, a Maryland business formed with the purpose of being a railroad. (He has formed, and let lapse, several other railroad companies since.) Two months after that, on July 7, 2003, Riffin made his first filing with the Surface Transportation Board, trying to gain the right to run a railroad on the Northern Central right of way (including the stretch occupied by the NCRR Heritage Trail, a popular recreational destination), though he withdrew the filing a week later. He also wrote a letter to STB Secretary Vernon Williams, explaining how he had “a desire to be under the jurisdiction of the Surface Transportation Board” and how his railroading plans actually are realistic.

“I would utilize used ties and used rails,” he wrote, “which I may retrieve from other abandoned lines. I have a complete set of specialized railroad-building equipment (tampers, track liners, ballast equalizers, spike pullers and inserters, etc.) and a large quantity of heavy construction equipment (dozers, loaders, dump trucks, cranes, etc.). I have the ability, financial resources, time and requisite passion to reinstitute this service. (I personally know how to operate all of the equipment I own.) A number of individuals have indicated they would love to help me reinstitute this service, on a volunteer basis. This is a do-able project, so long as I do not get too enmeshed in bureaucratic procedures.”

Riffin then proceeded to get enmeshed in the bureaucracy that enforces state and county laws meant to protect human health and the environment.

In addition to the crackdown on the work he did in the flood plain next to the watershed buffer for Loch Raven Reservoir, local and state authorities also cited him for improper storage of many tons of railroad-related inventory at his Cockeysville site, and for the empty, unpermitted fuel tank (to store fuel for his locomotive, when and if he gets one) at a property Riffin owns on Greenspring Drive in Timonium. The fines, penalties, orders, and injunctions have been mounting as Riffin repeatedly tells skeptical judges that he is a federally pre-empted railroad under STB’s sole jurisdiction, so local and state authority be damned. So far, he’s lost every time, most recently on Oct. 4, when a federal judge threw out his latest complaint and declared Riffin a “frivolous” litigant who must, from now on, seek the court’s permission before filing another federal preemption claim.

He also had an interesting encounter with the city of Baltimore when, on Sept. 10, 2004, a Department of Public Works inspector caught him laying asphalt without permits on city-owned watershed property behind his Cockeysville warehouse. Riffin told the city he’d done the work “inadvertently” and promised to restore the site to its prior condition. On the same day, Riffin pulled out a sheet of Northern Central Railroad letterhead and typed out a letter to DPW director George Winfield, informing him that he’d like to “construct a railroad right-of-way across a portion of Baltimore City’s watershed property.” It took almost three weeks for Winfield to send out a letter denying the proposal.

Baltimore County Councilman T. Bryan McIntire recalls that, a few years ago, Riffin approached him about plans to turn the distillery warehouse into a railroad-themed restaurant with a dinner train leaving from a second-floor railroad queue. That was part of his hope to link with York, Pa., along the old Northern Central right of way and, while he was at it, he said he wanted to arrange to move Blue Mount Quarry’s stone by rail south to Cockeysville–something he still talks about. The idea caught some attention, including an October 2004 Baltimore Smart CEO article that concluded, “It doesn’t look like Riffin’s dream of being a railroad tycoon has much chance to succeed.”

Riffin ran into obstacles at every turn, but he kept making more proposals and filing more notices with the STB. Sometimes they’d be denied, sometimes he’d withdraw them, but in going through the paces, he kept open his lines of communication with the board as he learned its ways.

On Dec. 22, 2006, the MTA asked the STB to rule that federal approval wasn’t needed for the MTA’s 1990 purchase of 14.2 miles of right of way from Conrail to build the light rail north of North Avenue in Baltimore. In the same filing, the MTA also asked the board to confirm that freight rights and obligations that would have placed the MTA under the board’s authority were not transferred to MTA when the 1990 sale took place. Ordinarily, such a deal would entail that the purchaser maintain the right of way for “common carriers”–that is, the MTA would have had to keep all the track intact and ready for use in the event that Norfolk Southern wanted to use the line.

The reason the MTA was asking for clarification about the matter in 2006, 17 years after it bought the right of way, is that in 2005 Norfolk Southern applied to officially “abandon” the section of its track used by the light-rail line. A railroad officially abandoning a track involves attesting that it no longer uses it, and would therefore like the STB to relieve the railroad of its track maintenance responsibilities, which is a requirement of railroad law. The MTA had been maintaining the track, and Norfolk Southern had been running freight on it between midnight and 5 a.m., when the light rail doesn’t run. When the MTA shut down that light rail line to install a second track in 2004, Norfolk Southern stopped running freight on it and soon started abandonment proceedings to completely dissolve its responsibility for the line.

In response, Riffin filed an offer with the STB to take over Norfolk Southern’s freight-carrying rights. This bought him some time to dig into the board’s records and uncover the MTA’s failure to clarify with the board that it had no need to worry about maintaining the tracks for “common carriers” in 1990.

Riffin pointed this out to the STB, and Norfolk Southern’s request for abandonment was denied in 2006 because, thanks to Riffin, the right of way’s ownership had been called into question and needed to be properly established. When the MTA filed its petition to clear it all up, Riffin protested, and the federal board will issue a ruling on the matter when it is good and ready. The validity of the 1990 right-of-way transaction and all that hinges on it appear to be hanging in the balance, as is the question of whether the MTA has an obligation to maintain the entire right of way–not just the parts it uses–for freight traffic.

“Because of the uncertainty created by the issues raised related to MTA’s acquisition, use and ownership of this line,” wrote Charles Spitulnik, the MTA’s outside counsel on the case, in an Aug. 21 letter to the STB, “MTA is prevented from using and improving this asset for its intended passenger transit purposes and from making changes that will further enhance the safety of operations on this line.”

When asked about this letter, Spitulnik apologetically says he is “not authorized to talk to you because the matter is in litigation.” MTA spokesman Richard Solli agrees that the board’s answers to the MTA’s questions about the 1990 right-of-way purchase should have been sought 17 years ago, rather than today, but “everybody back then thought that everything they were doing was being done properly, and until we’re told differently, we think the actions we’ve taken since 1990 were appropriate. We’re just asking [the STB] to move things along so all the parties can go ahead and do the things that all the parties need to do. As for how the STB decides, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

If the board rules that the MTA’s 1990 purchase did not fall under STB authority, and that the MTA was not responsible under federal law for maintaining the line for freight use, then Riffin’s enterprise will remain trapped piecemeal on the unconnected properties he owns. But if the board rules that the MTA’s purchase did fall under its authority, then the fact that the MTA appears to have dismantled and sold off portions of a disused section of the right of way known as the Cockeysville Industrial Track, Riffin argues, could make the MTA responsible for repairing that damage, to the tune of millions of dollars. Riffin has letters from shippers along the right of way supporting the prospect of renewed freight service, including Packard Fence Co., SealMaster Paving Products, and Buschemi Stone Masonry. If the Cockeysville Industrial Track reopens, then Riffin’s property, which is across York Road from it, will be that much closer to getting rail access.

If the current light-rail right of way ends up back in Norfolk Southern’s hands, then Norfolk Southern will likely apply again to abandon freight service on the line, giving Riffin another chance to offer to provide the freight service instead. If Riffin’s offer is accepted by the federal board, then the MTA would have to negotiate light-rail rights with Riffin, who says his first order of business would be restoring freight service to Cockeysville.

After Riffin purchased the George’s Creek line and found the MTA’s weak spot with the light rail right-of-way issue, things kicked into high gear. He sought STB approval to obtain short-line rights on old railroad beds in Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and Maine. On Jan. 12, the world learned for the first time that he intended to operate a railroad on 2.2 miles of the old abandoned Maryland and Pennsylvania (aka Ma & Pa) right of way that runs through city-owned property along Falls Road that is currently occupied by the Baltimore Streetcar Museum and a newly-constructed bike trail. CSX, the MTA, the museum, and the city of Baltimore opposed Riffin with strongly worded pleadings. The museum’s interpretation of Riffin’s proposal was that it would supplant the museum’s operations and shut down the bike trail.

Museum board member Christopher McNally, who is also serving as its counsel in this as-yet-undecided matter, in his filing told the federal board that Riffin’s railroad plan “would likely obliterate [the museum]’s entire operation in the Jones Falls Valley.” McNally declines to be quoted for this article, except to say this of Riffin: “We will fight him to the legal bitter end in terms of any effort to build a railroad in the Jones Falls Valley.”

Riffin’s STB filings often jangle the nerves of opposing parties, but in the Ma & Pa case, he says he has no actual use for the ripped-up and paved-over line, and no intention of disrupting the Baltimore Streetcar Museum operation or the bike trail whatsoever. All he wants, he says–and he says this is “on hold until I figure out what’s going to happen with the Cockeysville line”–is to build a $20 million railroad bridge over Falls Road from the light-rail right of way to the CSX tracks, and to do so, he has to cross the Ma & Pa right of way. Hence the STB filing that caused McNally and everyone else involved such grief.

But, Riffin adds, McNally’s filing was helpful. In the event that Riffin wants access to the line in the future, he says he needs to show it was used to move freight after its official 1958 abandonment. McNally’s STB filings state that the Baltimore Streetcar Museum was the last to get rail service on the line when it “received railroad ties delivered on flatcars in the 1970s.”

Riffin was tickled with that. But he filed something recently in an STB case involving light-rail plans in Norfolk, Va., that tickled him even more because of the response it prompted from Norfolk Southern. Riffin says the company’s lawyer on the case, James Paschall, wrote an “unflattering biography” of Riffin in a Sept. 6 filing that sought to sanction him and bar him from appearing in any future STB matters involving Norfolk Southern.

“It was a personal attack, really,” Riffin says. “I wanted to push his sensitive button, and I did, and I guess I hit it pretty hard.” The lawyerless novice gets one over on Big Railroad’s experienced counsel here and there, and Riffin delights in it, and in the reaction. “Sometimes I have fun playing with people’s minds,” he says.

Paschall wrote in his 42-page filing: “In an astonishing, but perhaps not surprising, display of misinterpretation, misrepresentation and illogic, Riffin has filed a frivolous Comment and sham Notice” in the city of Norfolk’s light-rail matter, and thereby “again abuses the Board’s processes and harasses parties who appear before the Board for legitimate purposes.” Paschall proceeded to recite Riffin’s entire history of participating in STB matters, casting it all in the worst light possible.

On Oct. 1, Riffin filed his reply to Paschall. The conclusion of the 18-page document read, in part: “For the foregoing reasons, Riffin would ask that the Board deny NS’ Motion for Sanctions, and Riffin would further ask that the Board admonish Mr. Paschall for his unprofessional behavior in this proceeding. . . . Perhaps next time, Mr. Paschall will consider walking down the smooth path, rather than the thorny path.”

Riffin’s enemies have said many negative things about his railroading aspirations, but he has at least one friend: Eric Strohmeyer, vice president and chief operating officer of CNJ Rail Corp. of New Jersey. Strohmeyer calls Riffin “a very nice guy, and an extremely smart guy. He’s arguing the case extremely well. It’s an amazing transformation from having an interest in railroads to being a full-fledged railroader.”

“Our interest,” Strohmeyer continues, “is we have rail properties up in New Jersey, and we control some New Jersey track, and we got involved with James Riffin when Norfolk Southern had tried to abandon the Baltimore light-rail line to Cockeysville. Our firm would be an independent, third party to operate the line, should it be returned to freight service under Riffin.

“We estimate we could move 3,600 car-loads of freight per year over the [Cockeysville Industrial Track], and that would take 12,000 truckloads per year off the Baltimore Beltway,” Strohmeyer adds. “Right now, there are ethanol trucks rolling through Baltimore streets. If we moved 150 to 200 rail cars of ethanol per year instead, that would be 600 to 800 fewer truckloads, and it would take an explosive substance off the public streets. And remember, railroads pay for their own track maintenance, but trucks rely on publicly maintained roadways.”

Strohmeyer begins to talk about how Riffin’s case fits in with the larger transportation-planning picture. He points out that “as cities grow, we can’t build brand-new railroads for freight, we’ve got to share these corridors. The MTA does not believe they have to co-exist with freight, but there needs to be smart transportation planning, and excluding freight is shortsighted transportation policy.

“What Riffin’s started is a major battle, and right now it’s just Riffin and the state,” he says. “But if the STB’s decision runs afoul of the law, all hell will break loose because the MTA has unlawfully ended freight service on the Cockeysville line even though shippers along the line want service, and the MTA knows it. This is going to go to the courts unless everybody agrees to agree. The MTA is playing Russian roulette with the taxpayers of the state of Maryland.

“They can scream `Jim Riffin’s a kook’ until they’re blue in the face,” Strohmeyer concludes. “But the law’s on his side.”

The law hasn’t always been on Riffin’s side. Even before he started to build his railroad without permits, a bungee-jumping proposal for his Timonium site was shot down by the Maryland Court of Special Appeals in 2001. “Riffin wants to hoist jumpers 100 feet into the air, hook them up to two or three bungee cords and allow them to jump off a platform,” The Sun reported, adding that “an air mattress would be placed below to cushion the fall in case of accidents.” He tried appealing that decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Long before, in the early 1990s, there was another instance in which he lost a court ruling. It was a writ of habeas corpus Riffin filed in Montgomery County, and it arose from his detention awaiting trial on six counts of theft conspiracy and related charges the county filed against him in 1990. Ultimately, the prosecutor declined to pursue the case any further, and the records have been destroyed, leaving behind only what is available on the court web site. The records available on the web site indicate James Dennis Riffin had two aliases: “Bob Cohen” and “James Griffin.” James Dennis Riffin, the records note, was born on Aug. 21, 1943, that at the time the charges were filed he lived on Gateview Road in Cockeysville, and that he pleaded “not guilty and not criminally responsible by reason of insanity” to the charges on Dec. 10, 1990. On Jan. 25, 1991, bond was set: “no amount with special condition of mental health counseling,” the records specify.

When asked about all this in an Oct. 1 phone interview, Riffin’s amazing recall abilities vanish. “Nope, I don’t remember any of this,” he says, “so I can’t say whether it happened or not. But if it’s down in the public record, it probably did. At least I didn’t get found guilty of anything. My memory has failed. It was too long ago. My mother had Alzheimer’s, and it starts to happen when you get old. Some things I remember, but other things, 10 minutes later, I can’t.”

More recently, in May 2005, Riffin was arrested as “James Dennis Griffin” at his Greenspring Drive property by Baltimore County police, who delivered him to York County, Pa., where he faced 13 counts of identity theft-related charges. “I do remember that one,” Riffin says. “The state totally withdrew everything, and they didn’t even show up for court when they did [it].” When asked to explain what the charges were all about, Riffin says, “I don’t know, I’d have to go look.”

According to a May 17, 2005, article in the York Dispatch, a man who had used the name James Riffin “appeared before the York County Commissioners in April 2004 to outline a plan to return rail service along the York County Heritage Rail Trail,” and the charges were filed after the Pennsylvania state police said he had “used the birth certificate of a dead child to obtain credit cards, a Social Security number and a Pennsylvania driver’s license.” The case, the article continued, is “also being investigated by police in Norwich, Conn. State police and Norwich police said they’re still trying to unravel how a James Dennis Griffin, 62, obtained a birth certificate from Connecticut in the name of Charles Moran of Norwich.”

“People on occasion put a `G’ in front of my name,” Riffin says. “And I just sort of ignore it, say, `Call me what you want.'” But, “no,” he says, he’s not James Griffin. And, “no, not offhand,” Riffin says, does he remember a traffic stop on Aug. 10, at York Road and Wight Avenue in Cockeysville, in which a “James Dennis Griffin,” also born in August 1943, was ticketed for driving on a suspended license and whose address is listed in the traffic records of the case as an apartment in Falls Church, Va. That James Dennis Griffin, the records say, is scheduled to appear for a trial on the charges in Towson District Court on Nov. 21.

“So there is a James D. Griffin,” he says when asked about the traffic stop. “I had a recollection that someone started to borrow my identity, but I never found out any details about it. Nobody ever told me. That was a long time ago. But as far as I know, there’s nothing wrong with my driver’s license.” Does it say he’s from Falls Church? “Nope.” Is his middle name Dennis? “Nope, I don’t have a middle name.”

Riffin, in a voice-mail message left shortly after that conversation, related that “your questions this afternoon got my brain thinking.” He proceeded to call into question the certainty of anyone’s identity.

“You got a birth certificate, it’s got your name on it,” he said. “How do you prove that’s yours? Because your birth certificate probably doesn’t have a fingerprint or a footprint on it, so how do you prove you’re a citizen? I don’t think you can. If you can’t prove you’re a citizen, you can get deported. Think about it.”

He added that he’d experienced an Alzheimer’s moment that very day–he walked out to his car, but when he got there he couldn’t remember what for, and it took him 20 minutes to sort it all out. “That’s what happens when you get Alzheimer’s,” he said.

As far as City Paper could determine by combing through the voluminous records of Riffin’s legal battles, none of Riffin’s opponents has presented to the STB or a court any questions about Riffin’s identity. It’s not clear that any of them know there is any basis in the public record for raising such a question. But if such questions are ever raised, they could be used to suggest to the STB, or to the courts, that Riffin has presented false or misleading information in his filings, and that would be a legal no-no. It has the potential to undermine his campaign to become an up-and-running freight railroad with rights to use track in Cockeysville, Western Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Maine–or anywhere at all.

Riffin seems unconcerned. “Someday you can show me how to look all those things up,” he says, marveling how “a person can turn up things you never knew about yourself.” He’s too busy to worry. He has filings to make, research to do, a track to maintain in Western Maryland, a railroad to build and operate someday soon, and one meal to eat each day. He’s still a guy in Cockeysville who calls himself James Riffin and he still has a stake in the pending STB case over who controls the light-rail right of way and he still owns an actual length of railroad line, and if that ever changes, he can just forget the whole thing ever happened.

Postscript: Moments before this story went to press on Oct. 9, the Surface Transportation Board released a decision on the Maryland Transit Administration’s petition regarding its light-rail line. The STB ruled in the MTA’s favor. Riffin could not be reached for comment in time, but he has indicated in interviews that he might appeal such a decision.