Homicide, Revisited: Two Men Want Detectives Made Famous by David Simon to Pay After Flawed Murder Convictions Put Them in Prison for Decades

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Dec. 10, 2013

James Owens is angry.

“I get pissed off every time I think about this,” the 53-year-old from Southeast Baltimore declares, sitting at a conference table in his lawyer’s office. “I don’t trust the cops,” he says, his glasses only slightly shielding the fury in his eyes, a thin mustache punctuating his vehemence. “Never have, after this happened, and I never will. I hate them.”

Looking at Owens, hearing his Baltimore accent stridently utter those words, it’s clear he’s simply telling it like it is. Twenty years in prison before being cleared of a murder conviction will make a man mad.

But Wendell Griffin, a 62-year-old also at the lawyer’s office meeting, is not the least bit angry. His bald pate rests smoothly above his kind face and soft eyes, a wispy gray beard on his chin. Griffin appears to be a gentle soul, and it seems perfectly natural for him to wax calmly and philosophically about his experience: “If the good Lord does things in such a way that I don’t even understand it,” he says, “then I just keep my faith and I move forward.”

The only hint at any bitterness at all comes in the very precise way Griffin describes how much time he served in prison before his murder conviction unraveled. Rather than say “more than 30 years,” it’s always “30 years, 10 months, and 23 days.

Both men, who’ve never met before, have taken the elevator 20 floors up a downtown Baltimore office building on the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving to share their stories with a reporter. They come from worlds apart-Owens, a white man, comes from a section of the city that may as well be part of nearby Dundalk, while Griffin, who’s black, hails from West Baltimore-but what they share puts them in rare company: They both succeeded in showing they were unlawfully convicted of murder.

Along with a handful of others in the modern annals of Maryland murder – including Kirk Bloodsworth, the first American exonerated from death row thanks to DNA testing, and Michael Austin, who served 27 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit – their experiences show how tragically flawed the justice system can be.

The only available surrogate for mending the damage done in such circumstances is money. The State of Maryland, for instance, gave Bloodsworth $300,000 after Gov. William Donald Schaefer pardoned him in 1993. Austin, who was pardoned by Gov. Robert Ehrlich in 2003, was awarded $1.7 million from the state for his wrongful imprisonment.

Owens and Griffin, though, have gotten neither gubernatorial pardons nor compensation from the state. So both have sued, claiming that the same findings that freed them in criminal court-that the state committed Brady violations, so named after the 1963 Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, which established defendants’ right to obtain state’s evidence that may help prove their innocence or be used to impeach state witnesses-should count in civil proceedings that seek to mitigate the damage they suffered from decades in prison.

While the lawsuits Owens and Griffin have brought are notable for the intrinsic value of the lessons they hold for proper police and prosecutorial work, they also jump for attention because of who got sued. Among the defendants in their cases are some of Baltimore’s most famous cops: detectives profiled in David Simon’s 1991 book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which chronicled the Baltimore Police Department homicide division’s work solving murders in 1988.

Owens and Griffin say they’ve never read Homicide, but while they were in prison, it catapulted quickly to the pinnacles of the true-crime genre and, starting in 1993, to the airwaves, in a television-series adaptation by NBC called Homicide: Life on the Street. The success of both meant that some real-life detectives became big names far beyond the Baltimore criminal justice circles to which most celebrated local officers’ fame is confined.

Owens’ lawsuit takes aim at Jay Landsman, Thomas Pellegrini, and Gary Dunnigan, three of the detectives whose work was described in Homicide. Two of them inspired characters in the television show: Landsman was the basis for Det. John Munch, played by Richard Belzer, while Pellegrini inspired Det. Tim Bayliss, portrayed by Kyle Secor.

Also named as a defendant is former Assistant State’s Attorney Marvin Sam Brave, who Owens claims conspired with the detectives, at times, to coerce state witnesses to lie and withhold Brady material.

Griffin’s case, meanwhile, targets Jerry Landsman – Jay Landsman’s brother, who was not in the book – and two detectives who were featured in Homicide, Donald Kincaid and Edward Brown. In the television show, Kincaid became Det. Beau Felton, played by Daniel Baldwin. Griffin claims the three committed Brady violations by withholding from the prosecutor-and, by extension, from him-numerous witness statements that contradicted testimony that led to his conviction at trial.

Attempts to reach the defendants in both cases were unsuccessful, and their lawyer, Daniel Beck of the Baltimore City Law Department, did not respond to a request for comment. But Simon, reached by email, wrote: “If they withheld Brady material, that’s dead wrong. If evidence now clears men who were innocent and were imprisoned, that is tragic and grievous. And if the real killers went undiscovered, then the injustice is compounded.”

Still, based on the time he spent with them in 1988, Simon writes that “I had an overall sense that it was hard enough for Baltimore detectives to obtain guilty verdicts on cases in which evidence was substantive or even, at times, definitive.” He calls the detectives whose work he watched that year “professional,” and characterizes the “oversight of their cases” by the state’s attorney’s office as “conscientious and appropriately cautious.”

But “if the allegations hold” in the cases brought by Owens and Griffin, he adds, they “do not reflect that dynamic,” and “I’ll certainly be interested to follow the civil cases and see both the allegations of the plaintiffs and the counter arguments of the defendants fully explored.”

The first chapter of Homicide opens with Jay Landsman and Pellegrini cracking wise about a small bullet hole in a dead man’s head.

“Here’s your problem,” says Landsman, having turned the man’s head to reveal the wound. “He’s got a slow leak.”

“You can fix those,” Pellegrini responds.

“Sure you can,” Landsman says. “They got these home repair kits now. . . . Just like with tires. Comes with a patch and everything else you need. Now a bigger wound, like from a .38, you’re gonna have to get a new head. This one you could fix.”

This kind of gallows humor is an engaging aspect of Homicide, but it is not what set the book apart from the pack. That was accomplished by its nuanced descriptions of the detectives themselves and the way they worked, revealing them to be more complex than the stereotypical gumshoe who relies on keen intuition, incisive intellect, and by-the-books protocol to take killers off the streets. While the crime-solving dynamics described in Homicide include those noble elements, it also portrayed the detectives as flawed, sometimes willing to play dirty, since cutting corners or deploying deceptive tactics-always with an eye on maintaining plausible deniability-can help keep the guilty from escaping charges and boost the division’s clearance rate with arrests for open murders.

In Homicide, Simon writes that “with rare exception, a confession is compelled, provoked and manipulated from a suspect by a detective who has been trained in a genuinely deceitful art.” A detective “follows the requirements of the law to the letter-or close enough so as not to jeopardize his case. Just as carefully, he ignores the law’s spirit and intent.” And all of this lying and mind-twisting is “street legal. Reasonable deception the courts call it. After all, what could be more reasonable than deceiving someone who has taken a human life and is now lying about it?”

And so, the detectives solved cases, taking them from red to black on the big board in the office. Even without Homicide, though, the Baltimore murder cops of the 1980s were legendary. They linked killings to perpetrators at a prodigious clip, despite a street culture in which fewer and fewer people were willing to help cops catch criminals. Their average annual homicide clearance rate-the percentage of murders closed by arrests-was 76 percent that decade. That was more than the 72-percent national average at the time, and much better than now. In 2012, the clearance rate was 47 percent, far below the national rate of 62.5 percent.

But thanks to Homicide, what it took for detectives to keep up the clearance rate is well-examined – and now, with the convictions of Owens and Griffin exposed as bogus, the risks inherent in the detectives’ sometimes fast-and-loose methods have become manifest. Though rarely realized, they are large.

The best outcome is that evidentiary and investigative problems in a murder probe come to light after suspects are arrested but before they are indicted. As Simon wrote this summer in his blog, the Audacity of Despair, 22 of Baltimore’s 234 homicides in 1988-nearly 10 percent of them-“were cleared by the police department through arrest, but then later dropped by the state’s attorney’s office prior to indictment.”

Much worse is when the bad outcomes come to light years down the road, with reversals of illegally obtained murder convictions, meaning that either an innocent’s liberty is wrongfully taken while the murderer remains free, or the murderer, with the remaining evidence too slim for prosecutors to retry the case, walks out of prison early with a clean slate. When such reversals happen, they shake confidence in the system and raise suspicions that even worse outcomes are lurking out there somewhere-innocent people rotting in prison, unable to prove how their cases were fixed, while the true murderers get away with it.

Thus, the banter between Landsman and Pellegrini on Homicide‘s opening page provides a metaphor: a bad murder conviction can lose air over time, but there’s no easy home-repair kit to fix that flat. So right now in federal court, Owens and Griffin, who blew holes in their murder cases big enough to set them free after decades in prison, want to make Homicide detectives pay. Whether they’re successful remains to be seen, but the process they’ve set in motion assures that the detectives’ risky pursuit of justice airs lessons for cops, prosecutors, defense attorneys, defendants, and the public at large-since, though the chances are slim, anyone can end up on the wrong end of a wrongful prosecution.

“What has been happening to me, it’s sad,” Griffin says during the lawyer’s office meeting. For a man who was in prison for three decades of a life sentence until last year, when a judge signaled the Brady violations in his murder conviction would lead her to grant him a new trial, that’s an understatement.

Griffin likens the cops who pinned him for the 1981 murder of James William “Lucky” Wise, who died of two shots from a hunting rifle in Cherry Hill, to bullies.

“Seem like the bully kind of get his way for a little while,” he says. “And after a while, somebody, he comes through a brick wall and check the bully. And that’s what we’re doing right now,” referring to his federal civil rights lawsuit, which his attorney Charles Curlett filed on his behalf in November. “We’re checking the bully.”

In 2011, Griffin had sought DNA evidence to test, which he hoped would exonerate him, but none was available. Instead, his legal pursuit-spearheaded by the same veteran attorney at the Maryland Public Defender’s Office, Stephen Mercer, who did the work to win Owens’ motion for a new trial-turned up numerous witness statements in the homicide file of his case that should have been provided to his defense at trial, since Griffin could have used them to undermine the state’s theory of the case.

“The internal police records produced for the first time in 2011,” Griffin’s lawsuit states, “reveal that shortly after Mr. Wise was murdered on April 22, 1981, the police showed photo-arrays containing Mr. Griffin’s picture to two key witnesses,” and both “failed to identify Mr. Griffin.”

One of them, Annie Wyche, had told police she would recognize the shooter, since she’d come within 10 feet of him, and she provided a description of him, including the fact that he was carrying a gun that looked like a shotgun pointed down along his leg. But when presented a photo array, she pointed to a photo a Griffin and said, “it looks just like him, but it’s not him.” In a second photo array, with a more recent photo of Griffin, she still did not pick him out.

Wyche did not testify at the trial, but the other key witness that failed to pick Griffin out of a photo array-Mark Williams-did.

Williams had “stumbled upon the crime scene immediately after the shooting and saw a person from 10 feet away dragging the body of Mr. Wise,” the lawsuit states. The trial transcript has Williams telling the jury that “I saw a guy dragging another guy,” and was told to “go the opposite way” because “I didn’t want to see what was over there.” So Williams ran to a friend’s house and made sure the police were called. Asked whether he could see the man’s face who was dragging the body, Williams said, “not really. But I saw a shadow. I could describe the things which he was wearing”-“black-framed glasses with clear lenses” and “a black jacket and a pair of blue jeans.”

Griffin’s trial attorney, Rolf Quisgard, did not cross-examine Williams. But surely, if he’d known Williams could not pick Griffin out of a photo array shortly after the murder, he would have.

Griffin’s lawsuit asserts that the detectives suppressed the Wyche and Williams statements excluding Griffin as the shooter “precisely because” they “directly contradicted the police theory” that Griffin murdered Wise. What’s more, in a search warrant affidavit supporting the arrest of Griffin and the search of his home, Kincaid used Wyche’s physical description of Griffin-without mentioning that she’d twice failed to pick him out of a photo array.

The detectives on the case, the lawsuit continues, also suppressed other witness statements indicating that someone else may have murdered Wise and that conflicted with another key element of the state’s theory of the case-that Griffin was observed before and after Wise’s killing with a gun.

Faced with all of this, Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Gail Raisin in May 2012, “having indicated to the parties that she was prepared to order a new trial” in Griffin’s case, the lawsuit explains, “granted an unopposed motion by the defense to modify Mr. Griffin’s sentence to time served. After more than 30 years, Mr. Griffin was freed from custody.”

Unlike Owens, though, Griffin’s murder conviction is still on the books. That’s because he decided to take a plea deal rather than wait for a new trial and sit in prison for another year or more before prosecutors dropped the case against him.

“Mr. Mercer had told me,” Griffin recalls, “‘Wendell, the judge going to grant you a new trial, but it’s going to be 18 months, as opposed to you getting out right now. It’s your choice. What do you want to do?’ And I think I’ve been out 18 months today.” He points out that, when he got out, he immediately realized that “I need to make myself marketable, and I need to get it pretty fast, before age is going to catch up with me and I ain’t going to be able to do too much.” So he got his commercial driver’s license, worked as a cross-country truck driver, and now drives a delivery van for a local construction company-all things he couldn’t have done if he’d waited in prison for a new trial.

While Griffin’s federal civil rights suit is newly filed, so the defendants have yet to respond, his attorney, Curlett, anticipates an atypical issue will be raised in the case: Since Griffin’s conviction formally stands, did he receive what’s called a “favorable termination,” allowing him to sue for damages?

“Wendell’s situation is unusual,” Curlett says, so “I fully expect that that is one of the issues that we’ll confront immediately.” Another attorney at the meeting, Laura Abelson, adds that calling Wendell’s outcome “anything other than an actual exoneration would be patently unfair.”

Despite the injustice he’s suffered, Griffin’s faith in the criminal justice system remains intact. “We have a good system,” he says, adding that “it leads up to a certain point where we can actually prosecute somebody for a wrong that they did.” But “in my case, in his case,” he says, nodding towards Owens, “it wasn’t done. They didn’t follow the process, the procedures. They violated those. And when you violate that, you destroy people’s lives.”

In 2011, as Griffin was just learning about all the undisclosed witness statements in his case, Owens filed a federal civil rights lawsuit claiming that the detectives and the prosecutor on his case coerced witnesses to perjure themselves at his trial, thereby knowingly putting on false testimony, and committed a host of Brady violations. In 2012, Owens’ case was dismissed.

U.S. District Judge George Russell, ruling from the bench at the conclusion of a motions hearing, said that Owens filed the suit too late, that he cannot sue the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office, that the detectives did not have a Brady obligation at the time Owens was investigated and prosecuted, and that the facts Owens alleges don’t amount to civil rights violations. Now the case is on appeal, set for oral arguments in January before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, with Curlett, Abelson, and another Baltimore attorney, Joshua Treem, forming the appellate team.

While the outcome of Owens’ lawsuit can’t be predicted, the facts of his flawed conviction are well-established.

Though no scientific evidence linked Owens to Colleen Williar’s brutal murder, in which she was beaten, stabbed, and strangled, a jury convicted him after trial testimony included a jailhouse snitch, Larry Oliver, who said Owens had discussed the crime with him, and the confession of James Thompson, who implicated Owens and was also found guilty of the crime in a separate, subsequent trial. Owens received life with no chance of parole-the first person to receive such a sentence under a then-new Maryland law.

In October 2008, after DNA testing of evidence cleared him, Owens was exonerated and freed. The DNA evidence also excluded Thompson, who was granted a new trial but was freed in July 2010 after receiving time served upon pleading no contest in the case.

What also came to light, as Owens’ appellate brief states, is that “the police and [Assistant State’s Attorney] Brave had withheld exculpatory evidence that showed definitively that” Thompson and Oliver “lied on the stand-repeatedly-during Mr. Owens’ trial, and the police and Mr. Brave had not only allowed this perjured testimony, but manufactured and induced it.”

Thompson, the brief continues, had told Landsman, Pellegrini, and Dunnigan “no fewer than seven different and materially conflicting versions of the events that supposedly surrounded Ms. Williar’s death.” Finally, mid-trial, “when Mr. Brave realized he was losing his case,” Brave told the detectives to try again with Thompson, and he finally gave them a version that “matched the physical evidence at the scene.” Yet, “none of these conflicted statements were disclosed” to Owens, so he could not “effectively cross examine” Thompson and show the jury how his story had changed again and again.

Oliver, meanwhile, testified after Brave had communicated with him over and over again about being rewarded in his own criminal matter in return for implicating Owens-yet at trial, Brave “knowingly elicited false testimony” from Oliver that “he had received nothing in return for his testimony,” the brief explains, telling the jury he did so only because “it was the right thing to do.” The defense knew nothing about the numerous interactions between Brave and Oliver about possible leniency because Brave did not disclose them, as required, and thus Owens’ trial counsel could not use them to discredit Oliver before the jury.

Beck, the defendants’ attorney, in his appellate brief argues that Landsman, Pellegrini, and Dunnigan acted at the time without any sufficient court decision that would put them “on notice that they were violating Mr. Owens’ constitutional rights by failing to disclose allegedly exculptatory/impeachment evidence to him,” saying “such a duty, at best, was with Mr. Brave.” He adds that Owens “has failed to identify other instances of similar misconduct” that would form “a plausible factual basis of a widespread practice of the particular unconstitutional method at issue.”

Legal wrangling aside, Owens wants his case to come back from Richmond and get a full airing in a Baltimore courtroom. “I’m not doing no settlement,” he says, “I want everything I’m after.” It’s the same absolutist gusto he demonstrated when prosecutors dangled a plea before him after he won his motion for a new trial. “I wasn’t pleading guilty to nothing,” he recalls, adding, “I told Mercer, when I went in and got that new trial, I said, ‘Look, we’re going all the way with this. I’m not going in there to plead guilty to anything.”

In a larger sense, though, whether or not Owens and Griffin are awarded millions of dollars by civil juries is beside the point. Money talks, of course, persuading police departments and prosecutors offices to train and oversee their staffs to avoid law-breaking when making cases. But so does public discussion of these issues-and lawsuits such as the ones brought by Owens and Griffin prompt that.

“Both of the cases demonstrate the extreme negative consequences of cutting corners and not following the rules,” explains Abelson. “I think Wendell has a good point, that we do have a good system. But the system requires that the parties in the system buy into it. And if you can’t trust that the system is really working, then you have innocent people who are convicted and spend large portions of their lives behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit. And these cases demonstrate how that happens.”

Clarification: Neither of the murders for which James Owens and Wendell Griffin were wrongfully convicted occurred in 1988, and thus neither were mentioned, much less covered, in Homicide.

Claws Out: Competition at Southwest Baltimore’s “Crab Corner” is good for crab lovers

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, May 16, 2012

This looks to be a banner year for crab lovers. According to the Chesapeake Bay Program, Maryland’s and Virginia’s annual winter-dredge survey results, released in April, showed a two-thirds increase in the Bay’s crab population over last year, when about 67 million pounds of crabs were harvested. If this year’s harvest increases by the same ratio, it could outstrip even 2010’s blockbuster harvest of 92 million pounds.

Regardless of the harvest, though, an intense and longstanding crab-selling rivalry in Southwest Baltimore tends to benefit buyers. It’s known as “Crab Corner,” where three crab houses—Bay Island Seafood Carry Out (1903 W. Pratt St., [410] 566-0200), Sea Pride Crab House (201 S. Monroe St., [410] 624-3222), and Always Cooking Best Crabs (225 N. Monroe St., [410] 233-5804)—compete near the intersection of West Pratt and South Monroe streets, infusing the surroundings with the mouth-watering scent of steamed crabs.

According to Gary Moree, co-owner of Bay Island, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year and sold 31,000 bushels of crabs in 2010, landing it the No. 2 slot on the Baltimore Business Journal’s list of the largest crab houses in the Baltimore area, Crab Corner’s patrons are mostly from the surrounding neighborhoods, and the prices are as low as they go.

“We sell extra-large males for $60 or $65 [a dozen] right now,” Moree said during a recent visit, “but at places out in the suburbs and on the waterfront, they’ll go for more like $90. We can only charge so much, because our customers can’t spend that much.”

The cut-throat competition for this thin-walleted clientele is evident in the crab houses’ marketing strategies. Bay Island’s motto, “Can’t Be Beat,” is printed on its plastic carryout bags, which also feature its mascot, a fierce-looking crab wearing boxing gloves. At Best Crabs, a hand-painted sign out front reads, “Bigger Better Over Here,” and one inside claims that “nothing will make ‘their’ crabs taste better.”

This smack-talking tone, appropriately enough, is reminiscent of a mind-set known as “the crab mentality,” inspired by the behavior live crabs display when put en masse into pots. As individual crabs try to escape, others grab at them and pull them back, ensuring that all share in their collective fate. In the case of the crabs, that fate is the steamer; in the case of the Crab Corner carryouts, it is relatively low prices for crabs—a plus for customers, who rave about all three places in online reviews.

“I’ve had a lot of crab claiming to be Maryland crab, but I have yet to have crab like this!” writes one Bay Island reviewer, adding that the “seasoning is amazing! Perfectly blended, perfectly spicy!” Another says “this place is really a locals’ joint due to the somewhat sketchy location, but the service is friendly and generous and the crabs are a decent size and good eating.”

Best Crabs gets concise, thumbs-up treatment: “Crabs are steamed hot and are very good!!!” writes one, while another adds, “Good crabs, cheap,” and yet another confirms the boast in the name: “The crabs there are the best.”

Sea Pride’s secret spice earns its special treatment, including the ringing endorsement of a long-traveling customer from Virginia, who says, “any time we have a crab feast we drive to Baltimore” to get them, and that “no others compare to Sea Pride,” where “the spice they use is not Old Bay, they won’t give you the recipe, but it really makes these crabs.” Another reviewer jokes that “here you can kill two birds with one stone” because you “can buy crabs and crack on the same block,” but contends that Sea Pride’s crabs “are so far above good that you will find yourself here the next day.”

On a recent visit to Crab Corner, City Paper went to each crab house and asked for the same thing: “a dozen of your largest males.” This uniform request resulted in three vastly different orders, though all of them were generous in terms of crab counts, which far exceeded a dozen. Sea Pride quickly handed over a $30 bag of reheated crabs. Bay Island charged $40 for a bag, also reheated. At Best Crabs, a bag of freshly steamed crabs cost $60, plus a long wait while they cooked. The more money spent, the heavier the bag.

All who shared in eating them agreed on how to rank the quality. The best, most meaty, and largest were the pricey, freshly steamed ones from Best Crabs. Next up was Sea Pride’s, which were perfectly good for being reheated, followed by Bay Island’s, which were soggy and nothing to brag about.

The experience at Bay Island suggests that patrons interested in the biggest possible crabs should press about their availability, because Moree, after learning that City Paper was there doing an article, said he had some huge ones for $65 a dozen. The request for the largest available males, though, had already been taken, and yielded the lackluster $40 bag.

A famous aficionado of Crab Corner culture, former Sun scribe and The Wire producer David Simon, says in a recent e-mail from New Orleans that he misses Sea Pride, which is his favorite. Simon worked there for a few days in the 1990s because Gary McCullough, the late protagonist of The Corner, in which Simon explored the tragic hopelessness of the drug war, was an employee. (McCullough, an addict, died before the book was published.)

Simon recalls that “after working a day in a Southwest Baltimore crab house, you go home and have crab dreams at night.” One day, he continues, a bushel of live crabs broke open, and watching them “race sideways around Monroe Street, trying to escape in every direction, is genuinely funny to me for some reason. I haven’t had Sea Pride crabs for a couple years now. Their spice is one of the best in the city. This is making me homesick.”

Rest assured, Simon: When you get home, Crab Corner will be there, smelling of crabs and showing off that crab mentality that, thankfully, means good, cheap crabs for the masses.

Old and In the Game: “Wire”-inspiring gangsters face new prison time

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Dec. 19, 2012

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When they went to prison in separate early 1990s drug cases in Baltimore, Savino Braxton and Walter Lee “Stinkum” Powell had been convicted as bit players in larger schemes. Such was the case, too, when their identities were used—though not their real stories—to create characters in HBO’s The Wire: Savino Bratton (pictured, from Season 5) and Anton “Stinkum” Artis, two of the five prominent enforcers in Avon Barksdale’s crew.

Today, 55-year-old Braxton and 60-year-old Powell are again in drug trouble, and their federal cases reveal how the gangster lifestyle can keep an obdurate hold on those whose only game in life has been “the game”—and they underscore the serial prison terms that lifestyle can exact on players.

But first, an acknowledgement about the use of real people’s names from Wire co-creator David Simon: “We mangled up real Baltimore surnames and real Baltimore given names and real Baltimore street names” to create Wire characters, he says in an email.

“Why?” Simon continues. “To give reality a chance to exist on its own, while at the same time creating a collective sense of the real Baltimore that we were depicting. Having all the correct surnames and street names floating about—but in the wrong order, and clearly disconnected from the correct narrative street history of Baltimore—tethered us loosely to the real, but at the same time allowed the actual survivors of that history some fair and legitimate distance.”

“We also,” Simon adds, “thought it would make people who knew the game from either side—street or stationhouse—smile a bit. An inside joke for those with ears to listen.”

Thus, “Savino Bratton,” the Wire character, has a story that does not jibe with that of real-life Savino Braxton. Simon, as a Baltimore Sun reporter covering the 1990 heroin conspiracy of Linwood Rudolph “Rudi” Williams, described Braxton as “a sizable westside dealer in his own right who sold narcotics to the Williams group.” Bratton, meanwhile, is an enforcer for Avon Barksdale’s crew who drives snitching strip-club frontman Wendell “Orlando” Blocker and undercover detective Shakima “Kima” Greggs to a shooting ambush that leaves Orlando dead and Greggs critically wounded.

The Wire’s “Stinkum,” also a key Barksdale enforcer, ends up as gangster-robbing Omar Little’s second revenge victim. His role in the narrative seems much larger than that of real-life Walter Lee Powell, who served as an errand-runner and bill-collector for his real-life bosses, Baltimore drug dealers Walter Louis Ingram and Patricia Carmichael.

Braxton’s initial undoing began in 1990, when phone-tapping cops heard him say “I got to see you” over the phone to Rudi Williams, then one of Baltimore’s biggest law-enforcement targets in the narcotics trade. They proceeded to build sufficient evidence to raid Braxton’s home, where they found a little over 27 grams of heroin and other drug-dealing evidence.

Three years after Braxton’s 2006 release from prison, he was on law-enforcers’ radar again, thanks to a cooperator’s tip, and a raid on his Frankford apartment turned up 35 grams of heroin in his car; and in his apartment, another kilogram, more than $4,000 cash, and a variety of drug-dealing appurtenances, prompting new charges (“The Wire Meets Baltimore Reality, Redux,” Mobtown Beat, Sept. 10, 2009).

Braxton is fighting the charges—though he took a break from doing so in early 2010, when he left the Volunteers of America facility on East Monument Street, where he’d been ordered to reside on a pre-trial release, to go to a medical appointment, and failed to return. For more than two years he was a fugitive, a status that ended ignobly on Aug. 17, at BWI Airport, when he tried to board a flight with a fake driver’s license and was caught.

Since then, Braxton has filed with the court a series of legal motions, handwritten in floral script, including one asking that his appointed attorney, Archangelo Tuminelli, be replaced—a request that was denied during a Dec. 12 motions hearing before U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett, who cleared the courtroom to resolve the attorney-client dispute. The case, which is scheduled for trial in February, is being prosecuted by assistant U.S. attorney John Purcell, who is seeking an enhanced penalty of a mandatory minimum prison term of 20 years based on Braxton’s prior federal conviction, though Bennett signaled during last week’s hearing that Purcell may want to back off that hard-edged stance.

Braxton told Bennet during the hearing that he’s anxious to obtain video evidence from a Kentucky Fried Chicken video camera near the location of his arrest that would show officers lied in sworn documents presented as evidence against him. Bennett reminded Braxton, though, that “you prejudiced yourself by absconding” for more than two years and that “the cameras may or may not be there” anymore.

Unlike Braxton’s case, the current one against “Stinkum” Powell is already over; Powell pleaded guilty and on Nov. 30 received a 121-month sentence. Its details, which overlap with other FBI heroin cases populated by the likes of big-name federal defendants such as Steven Blackwell, Christian Gettis, and Roy Lee Clay Jr., stretch from Baltimore to Philadelphia, New York, Miami, and Africa. Powell ran some of his illicit business out of Quantico Carwash on Reisterstown Road, according to court documents, and some of his dealings were intercepted over a phone issued by his employer, the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, a nonprofit based in Windsor Mill.

Meanwhile, one of Powell’s former bosses from back in the day—Walter Louis Ingram, now 61, whose earlier criminal career Simon wrote about extensively for The Sun—is also facing federal charges filed in 2010 (“Old Folks’ Boogie,” Mobtown Beat, July 22, 2010). He’s accused in a heroin conspiracy involving eight others, and all but Ingram and one other defendant have pleaded guilty—despite jailhouse attempts to dissuade them from doing so by using improperly obtained evidence in the case (“In the Wrong Hands,” Mobtown Beat, March 2, 2011). The lead conspirator, Kevin Hently, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, so Ingram, if convicted, can expect the same or more, given his long list of priors.

The Wire Meets Baltimore Reality, Redux

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Sept. 10, 2009

250px-Savino_Bratton_(Season_5)

Fans of The Wire know Savino Bratton as the character played by Christopher Clanton, the Baltimore actor who was stabbed last year at an Overlea party. Clanton’s character in Season One was a dreadlocked soldier in the Barksdale organization who helped set up the shooting of Detective Kima Greggs and stripclub manager Orlando Blocker. In Season Five, after doing time in prison, Savino Bratton (pictured) returns as a soldier for the Stanfield organization.

But what fans of The Wire might not know is that Savino Braxton—whose name is one letter removed from that of The Wire character—is a real-life Baltimore heroin dealer. In 1990, Savino Braxton was convicted as part of a massive heroin conspiracy headed by Linwood Rudolph Williams, and earned his release in 2008. His freedom was recently cut short, though, when on Sept. 2 he was arrested again on new federal heroin charges.

The Wire producer David Simon, asked in an e-mail whether the fictional Savino Bratton’s name is based on the real-life Savino Braxton, says only this: “The Wire is a fictional story. I have no comment otherwise.”

So what was Braxton up to on Sept. 2 that landed him with new federal charges? According to the complaint [see below], agents got a search warrant for Braxton’s apartment at 5312 Goodnow Road in Frankford. While preparing for the raid, they watched Braxton leave his residence, get in a purple Honda Accord, and drive off. They arrested him a short time later and found 35 grams of heroin in the car’s center console. The agents then returned to Braxton’s apartment to find another kilogram of heroin, a variety of drug-dealing paraphernalia (cutting agents, gel caps, a scale, etc.), and lots of cash “bundled in thousand dollar stacks.”

Mobtown Confidential: Thirty Years After His Mysterious Disappearance, Gentleman Racketeer and Block Kingpin Julius “The Lord” Salsbury Still Haunts Baltimore

By Van Smith

Published in Baltimore magazine, April 2000

“Little Melvin” Williams is shouting through a thick sheet of Plexiglas at the Prince George’s County Detention Center. The burly owner of the recently defunct Scrapp Bail Bonds is awaiting sentencing on a federal conviction for possessing a handgun while on parole for earlier federal crimes related to his career as a major heroin trafficker. Williams has spent 22 of his 58 years in jail; he claims, among other things, to be an accomplished chess player, a martial arts expert, and a speaker of five languages. What he isn’t, he says, is a snitch.

“Mr. Levinson has made a devastating mistake!” he exclaims. “I’m known as ‘Iron Jaws’!”

The source of Little Melvin’s indignation is Liberty Heights, filmmaker Barry Levinson’s latest nostalgic ode to Baltimore. In the film, released last fall, an amiable, soft-spoken racketeer named Nate Kurtzman (Joe Mantegna) juggles his family life, his illegal gambling operation, and his burlesque business on the Block in the 1950s. His downfall comes via a gambling payoff owed to a villainous dope peddler named Little Melvin (Orlando Jones), who first kidnaps Kurtzman’s son and then rats on a bookie. Kurtzman is targeted for prosecution by the Feds and arrested on Rosh Hashanah at a Cadillac dealership. “You know,” Nate says to his lawyer, “over the years in my business, you watch enough shows, you learn. A good performer knows when to get off the stage.” Nate quits the game and gets eight-to-10 years in the Big House.

The movie is fiction, of course, but the real-life Little Melvin knows that the shuckin’, jivin’, bug-eyed bungler in the movie is supposed to be him. And anyone who remembers the Baltimore of a few generations ago can tell that the doomed gentleman racketeer is drawn from the man Williams says once “called me his godson” – Julius “The Lord” Salsbury.

Salsbury, like Levinson’s Kurtzman, was a Block kingpin who was hunted down by the Feds. Unlike his fictional alter ego, though, Salsbury was never caught. After appealing a gambling conviction, he jumped bail and fled the country in 1970, eluding capture ever since. Legend has it that he went to Israel to enjoy the protections afforded Jewish-American criminals under the 1965 U.S.-Israeli extradition treaty. The grapevine says Salsbury died a few years ago, probably in 1995; if he were still alive, he would be 84 years old.

But the Lord never really left town; in his long absence, Salsbury’s legend took on a life of its own. Novelists and filmmakers have mined his tale for material; journalists have told and retold what is known of his tenure as Lord of the Block and entertained speculative reports of Salsbury sightings. In the process, Julius Salsbury became Mobtown’s outlaw hero.

The Salsbury myth holds the Lord up as the benevolent peacekeeping patriarch of the Block-based numbers rackets, an honorable man in a rogue industry that – like the East Baltimore Street nightclub district itself during its fondly remembered heyday – was tinged with menace but basically harmless. The nostalgia-driven take on Salsbury and the Block during its salad days remains common among Baltimoreans. History – at least the popular version of it – has been good to the Lord.

Little Melvin Williams knows all about that, because right now it is being less kind to him: When he’s sentenced in March, Williams will get almost 22 years without parole. He’s locked up, probably for the rest of his life, and cast as the villain in the latest retelling of his fugitive godfather’s story. And the Lord, as always, has escaped without a scratch.

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1915, Julius Salsbury was 12 years old when his parents, Isadore and Sarah, moved the family up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore and opened a lunch counter on Pratt Street downtown. At 16, Julius dropped out of Edgar Allan Poe school on West Fayette to start earning a living full-time. His first vocation – cab driver – began by the time he was 18. By 21, he already lived on the Block and was getting initiated in the rackets.

Salsbury’s education as a gambler was interrupted by World War II. His draft number was picked soon after Pearl Harbor, and he served as a military policeman in Europe. But before the war ended, he accompanied a prisoner back stateside and went AWOL. Salsbury was caught and did six months of hard labor. When he returned to Baltimore in 1945, he was a 29-year-old veteran with a dishonorable discharge and nothing much to do.

In short order, Salsbury was back in the bookmaking business. In between day jobs lending his father a hand re-treading tires, bottling soda, and running a bar, he began to build up a gambling network. He eloped to Miami with Susan Clara Wellman, a young waitress who had moved to Baltimore from Pennsylvania, because his parents didn’t approve of him marrying a gentile. And he took his lumps in the profession – a bookmaking conviction in 1948 was followed by another in 1950. But the battle scars from his run-ins with the law readied him for bigger and better things.

By the early 1950s, the lowdown on the Block was attracting out-of-town press. In Washington Confidential, the bestselling pulp expose from 1951, Baltimore’s red-light strip was described as “one of the most vicious and lawless areas in the world” by muckraking authors Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer. “At this writing,” they concluded, “any and all forms of vice are tolerated and protected. There is a price for everything and it’s not much.”

That same year, the U.S. Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime sent its investigators to root out the Baltimore underworld. Long-established racketeers cooled their heels to avoid trouble from the out-of-town heat. And into the vacuum rose the Lord.

The nickname came serendipitously. At a wrestling match at Carlin Park one night, a grappler called “Lord Salsbury” entered the ring; Julius Salsbury and his cohort, who were there to watch the fights, adopted the moniker on the spot.

It fit like a glove. Salsbury’s demeanor was soft-spoken, aristocratic, and confident – a good match with his distinctive, sharp-featured countenance.

His gambling organization, however, suffered its early setbacks. In 1952, Anne Arundel County police raided his Glen Burnie bunker in a case that Salsbury took to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost; he got six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. In 1954, he was nabbed for keeping a disorderly house and putting on an indecent show at Kay’s Cabaret, the Block bar he managed at the time. And in 1955, the Feds fined him $2,000 for failing to buy a required $50 gambling stamp.

But once Salsbury gained title to the Oasis Nite Club in 1956, he troubles with the law eased. Located at East Baltimore and Frederick streets, the club provided Salsbury with a way to wash his gambling proceeds. It also served as a home base from which to run a burgeoning empire. He bought a nice house in Cheswolde in Northwest Baltimore for his wife and three daughters. A fancy car and yacht rounded out the life of the late-1950s racketeer.

As a gambling kingpin and a Block bigwig, Salsbury was well-connected not only in the criminal world, but also with politicians and lawmen. The Lord operated in a carefully guarded region of society where criminal, political, and law-enforcement interests interweave – an area where corruption and cover-up put down deep and hidden roots.

People who worked for Salsbury remember politicians partying with Oasis girls on Salsbury’s boat. He was close friends with Baltimore political boss Jack Pollack. Pollack’s son, Morton, a lawyer and erstwhile Block habitué, says that “a lot of politicians, judges, and commissioners would go down to the Oasis at night.”

Retired Baltimore police lieutenant George Andrew, who headed the vice squad on the Block during the 1960s, suspected that Salsbury had high-up friends in the police department. “He really had somebody tied up,” Andrew recalls. “He knew somebody, but I don’t know who. But if I went on the Block, nobody would be there when I hit it. I wish I’d known – I’d have sent somebody to jail.”

Even Salsbury’s staunchest detractors admit that the man was a civilized racketeer. He shunned violence as an inducement for debt repayment; rather, he punished debtors by not allowing them to bet again until the account was settled. He was known as a generous philanthropist. And he didn’t hold grudges. When a drugstore owner on the Block was compelled to testify against Salsbury, the Lord stayed friendly with him and continued to eat at his lunch counter throughout the trial, just as he had done regularly for years.

But the image of the Lord as charitable rogue was marred by the reality of life on the Block during his ostensibly nonviolent rule: Murder, strong-arming, kidnapping, and intimidation were regular tactics of the Baltimore underworld in that era. In 1961, a troubling crime spree spurred a grand-jury probe of Block rackets, and the probe in turn set in motion the forces that would eventually bring down the Lord.

The trouble started in October of 1960, when Block restaurant manager Frank Corbi was shot at outside his house. The following May, his nephew Ed was ambushed by three masked gunmen; his bodyguard, Earl Fifer, was abducted and held for six days. In June, a Miami Club waitress was found murdered in a stream near Bowley’s Lane after being questioned by police investigating rackets on the Block; a car salesman named Edward Castranda was shot dead as he sat in his car outside the Dixie Diner in July. The three men arrested – brothers Orlando and Angelo Perrera and Benjamin “Hittie” Wildstein – were all major players on the Block and, as Morton Pollack recalls today, friends of Salsbury.

By September, eight Block club owners – including Salsbury – were indicted for various offenses involving the operation of their establishments. A fearful suspect in a numbers-writing case told the judge, “I can’t help you catch the big wheels. These syndicate people would do away with you.” Maryland’s U.S. Attorney, Joseph Tydings, announced that gambling profits were so great that racketeers nationwide spent an estimated $4 billion annually to bribe law-enforcement officers and sports figures. “Organized rackets are disciplined and able to rid themselves of people they no longer want in very efficient ways,” Tydings said.

In November 1961, Salsbury’s case came up for trial: He was charged in city court for pandering and maintaining a disorderly house. The judge and a state witness both reported receiving threats and received police protection. The witness, an Oasis dancer, testified that Salsbury once beat her up when she asked for a loan and that she and her children were told their lives wouldn’t be worth a “plugged nickel” if she took the stand. Still other witnesses were roughed up, left town, or changed their testimony. During a trial recess, a state’s witness in the custody of police was taken out drinking at the Oasis. Three police officers who patrolled the Block testified at trial that they’d never seen any problems at Salsbury’s club. Ultimately, after a retrial, Salsbury won acquittal. The Lord had slipped off the hook again.

In June 1962, the U.S. Senate had taken testimony about organized crime based on the Block as part of its investigation into corruption in the showgirls’ union. Salsbury – already fingered by the U.S. Attorney General as one of the nation’s top racketeers – was called to testify before the Senate committee, but under questioning asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Based on the information about the Block gathered during the hearings, Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota dubbed Baltimore one of the nation’s “great metropolitan fleshpots” and said its citizens have “the kind of city they want … the kind of city they deserve.”

After Salsbury’s photo was on the front page of the newspapers during the 1962 Senate hearings, he was fixed in the public imagination – and in the sights of federal law-enforcement – as an organized criminal of national proportions. From that point on, his fortunes started to change. The year 1963 brought Salsbury a federal conviction for tax evasion, for which he served eight months in federal prison. In 1965, $745,000 in tax liens were filed against him by the IRS. And from 1963 to 1965, the FBI bugged the Oasis (illegally, it was later revealed) and picked up all sorts of nefarious activities: graft among city police and vice detectives and bribes to IRS agents, according to Paul Kramer, who as an assistant U.S. attorney later prosecuted Salsbury.

“There were people coming in and out of his office and getting picked up on the wiretap – payoffs taking place in his office, exchanges of information, and the women back there with them,” Kramer recalls today as he sits in his memento-crammed office. He now runs a criminal-defense practice. “It did show the corruption that was associated with this kind of behavior. I assume it’s probably worse today, with all the narcotics money involved, than we had with gambling.”

Kramer was in zealous pursuit of Salsbury for much of the 1960s. As one of Salsbury’s defense attorneys, Arnold Weiner – himself a former federal prosecutor – recalls, Kramer “was Captain Ahab and Julius was his white whale.”

Success didn’t come easily. After a 1968 raid on the Oasis, Kramer charged Salsbury with failing to purchase a required $50 wagering-tax stamp; hours later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law on which the case was based. Kramer came back at him in 1969 with a new harpoon – the Travel Act, which prohibits interstate transport of ill-gotten gains. That one connected: Salsbury was convicted and slapped with a 15-year sentence.

“For a guy who got convicted as a nonviolent gambler,” Kramer asserts, “the judge really threw the book at him.” The main rationale for the severity of the sentence Salsbury received, Kramer explains, was the public corruption bred by the Lord’s activities. “What made it was the amount of corruption that was associated with him: law-enforcement corruption, whether it’s the liquor board or federal agents or police officers. He even asked me if I could be corrupted, which I took as flattery.”

Salsbury appealed the conviction and – despite strident warnings by Kramer that the Lord would slip away – was allowed to remain free on bail pending the outcome. Days before the appellate court upheld the conviction, Salsbury fled. Given the high level of corruption surrounding the Lord, suspicions abounded that he had some high-powered help in making his escape.

“Where was the leak in the U.S. Court of Appeals when the decision came down?” asks E. Thomas Maxwell, a former assistant state’s attorney in Baltimore who prosecuted Salsbury in 1961. His raised eyebrows concerning the circumstances of Salsbury’s disappearance are common among afficionados of the Lord. Maxwell speculates that, if Salsbury had not fled and instead been imprisoned, information the racketeer had about public corruption could have erupted in scandal.

Kramer, however, says the question of whether someone leaked word of the appellate court’s decision in order to give Salsbury the opportunity to run is settled. “A lot of people thought that,” Kramer recalls. “There was an investigation and we determined that we do not believe that there is any evidence showing that there was any kind of leak out of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.” Instead, Kramer believes Salsbury “was just playing the odds” on when and how the appeal would come down and fled town just in time.

The Lord took with him everything he knew about criminally culpable public officials, and in his wake he left a red-faced federal law-enforcement community. “The government was just embarrassed for many, many years” after the escape, says Maxwell. George Beall, who was U.S. Attorney for Maryland when Salsbury escaped, agrees. “It was an embarrassment to the FBI, to the government, that he was gone,” he explains. “They turned themselves inside out to try to solve the mystery.”

According to Kramer, Salsbury left his Horizon House apartment on Calvert Street and “went directly to Canada. We later determined that there was a safe deposit box in Canada. We finally got the search warrant for it and found it empty. The best we could determine was that he took a gambling junket to England, probably under an assumed name, and later we could prove he was in South Africa. Money was being funneled [to Salsbury] through Germany, we believe, from businesses being sold in Maryland.”

Besides the government, the other big loser when Salsbury fled was his friend and gambling colleague, the bail bondsman Robert “Fifi” London, who had posted a total of $80,000 bail that had to be forfeited, according to Morton Pollack. “I know for a fact that he was paid back” on Salsbury’s behalf by a third party, Pollack says. Fifi London died in the 1970s after a lengthy prison term for tax evasion, but his bailbonds firm lives on. In fact, Melvin Williams’ Scrapp Bail Bonds was (until it tanked due to Williams’ recent legal troubles) a subagency of London Bonding Agency.

Homicide author David Simon investigated the Salsbury case as a Sun reporter in the 1980s and early 1990s and concluded that the Lord ended up in Israel, living in a townhouse in Tel Aviv. Melvin Williams is full of insinuations that he had been in communication with Salsbury since his flight, has information about the Lord’s whereabouts over the years, and knows the truth about the man’s mysterious fugitive years. But, like any good gambler, Little Melvin plays that card close to his vest.

Back in 1969, as the net closed in around Salsbury, Fred Motz served as co-counsel to lead prosecutor Kramer. Now the chief judge of the U.S. District Court of Maryland, Motz was one of the men who helped hunt Salsbury down, and he understands well why the Lord still haunts the Block. “As you get older, you can romanticize,” he says. “It is an overstatement to say that the Salsbury people were sort of like Damon Runyon characters. [But] there’s a certain poignancy to the fact that that is now gone.”

Never mind that the real-life Salsbury helped cement Mobtown’s still-thriving reputation as a hopelessly corrupt and dangerous town. Forget that, during his reign, the Block was wracked with shocking violence, and the widespread public corruption Salsbury instigated to protect his rackets undermined the public trust in honest government. From the perspective of modern Baltimore, the Salsbury era still inspires a certain nostalgia for the days of honorable outlaws and crime that seemed at least to be organized. Maybe, Motz guesses, it’s only because corruption and violence grew so much worse after he left.

“[Salsbury] was really in quite strong control of the Block, and … after he was taken out, rough people came in and there were a lot more murders,” Motz says. “Nobody’s saying that crime is appropriate, but you are going to have crime. There’s almost a sense of longing for [Salsbury’s brand of crime], as opposed to what you see out on the streets today. I think that’s one of the appeals of the Salsbury story. It is something from a different era. And one senses that things are different now than they were then.”