St. Louis Riverfront Times

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  • Peter Hook No Longer with New Order — So Why Does the Band Play On?

    So, it appears that bassist Peter Hook has decided to leave New Order. (That, apparently, was news to the rest of the band.) Drummer Stephen Morris and vocalist Bernard Sumner are (ostensibly) carrying on under the New Order name.

    My question is: Why? Look, I love New Order as much as the next person. I’ve been rocking “Regret” all weekend. But I have zero — no, make that less than zero — desire to hear a New Order album without Hook’s liquid bass. I mean, does anyone?

    Since Joy Division, for pete’s sake, Hook has been the anchor of the group, the person that made New Order distinctive. Sure, Sumner’s vocals are completely distinctive too — but as Electronic proved, his voice is fluid enough to work in different contexts. In fact, if I want to listen to Sumner sing without Hook, I’d listen to Electronic. (“Getting Away With It,” yo.) But Hook’s bass — which he uses as much for melody and texture, as rhythm — made New Order great.

    I beg the band, retire the New Order name. At this point, any future albums will have an asterisk. Or the qualification: “Well, it’s post-Hook New Order.” How can they not? Countless bands insist on tarnishing their legacy by releasing sub-par albums with replacements (cough, Echo and the Bunnymen). Continue recording together, Sumner and Morris; just find another name for yourselves.

    Maybe Hook will reform Monaco, which was basically New Order lite; according to Wikipedia, its two albums should be reissued soon. And “What Do You Want From Me?” was one of the best singles of 1997.

    Whatever, here’s a video for “Regret.” Which the band is bizarrely playing on the beach. With the cast of Baywatch. (The Peach Pit must have already been booked.) David Hasselhoff swoops in at 2:30 in a most hilarious way. God, I miss the 1990s.

    — Annie Zaleski

  • It’s Spartan hotties versus Persian trannies in Zack Snyder’s far-too-faithful Frank Miller adaptation.

    Long ago there reigned a clan of Speedo-wearing militaristic psychopaths called the Spartans. They lived beneath a copper-colored sky, on a copper-colored land, amidst copper-colored fields, in copper-colored homes made from copper-colored stone. Legend has it they would outline their copper-colored pecs and abs with ash to enhance their manly buffness, and yet these were men of action and honor, not “philosophers and boy lovers” like their namby-pamby rivals the Athenians.

    Lunatic machismo was cultivated early. From the age of seven, Spartan boys were trained in the art of humorlessness, and made to beat each other into submission. Little is known of the Spartan women, but scholars assume they were fierce.

    Spartans were men of few words. They spoke in a language composed almost entirely of monosyllabic stupidities. In that strange time, among those strange people, a voice rang out perpetually from the heavens. No one knows who spoke it, but historians agree that this holy text was silly and repetitive and devoted by and large to what they now term “the totally butch awesomeness” of Spartan deed. History remembers their ethos: “Only the hard and strong may call himself Spartan. Only the hard. The strong.” It remembers their war cry: “For honor’s sake, for duty’s sake, for glory’s sake, we march. We march.” And the immortal words of their fateful end: “We are undone! Undone, I tell you!”

    Such magnificent verbiage was memorialized by Frank Miller, and incorporated into the text of 300, his graphic novel retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, in which the titular quantity of Spartan studs fended off a billion gazillion Persian invaders. Marshalling the full resources of high-end computer imaging and the full capacities of hardcore fanboy nerditude, writer-director Zack Snyder (he of the unexpectedly decent Dawn of the Dead remake) has now brought Miller’s book to “life.”

    Slathering pancake makeup on its actors then pasting them into digital backgrounds, 300 takes the synthetic blockbuster one step closer to total animation; its bland, weightless monochromatics make Sin City look like the grungiest neo-realism. It’s a ponderous, plodding, visually dull picture, but the blame shouldn’t be put on Snyder’s skills per se, and have nothing to do with his ambition to blur the distinction between CGI and photography. Frankly, it’s the slavish, frame-by-frame devotion to Miller’s source material that’s the problem. That explains both the risible screenplay and why the movie, for all its liberation from the real world, never takes full-winged flight into its own peculiar universe. Bogged down by respect for Miller’s medium — he’s almost as faithful to 300 as Gus Van Sant was to Psycho — Snyder seems to have forgotten that where comic-book panels indicate movement, movies can actually move.

    The exception to the rule of inertia comes fitfully in certain action scenes, of which there are enough to satisfy the action-buff bloodlust the film seeks to aggravate and sate. Here and there, Snyder makes good use of the lesson of The Matrix, slowing the slices, dices and decapitations to a digitally-calibrated crawl the better to relish all 360 degrees of their stupendous ass-kickery. Tolerate the lobotomized dialogue and some half-assed political intrigues and you’ll find a good ten minutes of 300 worth posting on YouTube. You can never go wrong with rampaging battle elephants. Throw in a war-rhino, some silver-masked ninja magicians, and an eight-foot-tall god-king who looks like RuPaul beyond the Thunderdome (Rodrigo Santoro as Xerxes) and 300 is not without its treats.

    Delicacies of dismemberment aside, 300 is notable for its outrageous sexual confusion. Here stands the Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and his 299 buddies in nothing but leather man-panties and oiled torsos, clutching a variety of phalluses they seek to thrust in the bodies of their foes by trapping them in a small, rectum-like mountain passage called the “gates of hell(o!)” Yonder rises the Persian menace, led by the slinky, mascara’d Xerxes. When he’s not flaring his nostrils at Leonidas and demanding he kneel down before his, uh, majesty, this flamboyantly pierced crypto-transsexual lounges on chinchilla throw pillows amidst a rump-shaking orgy of disfigured lesbians.

    On first glance, the terms couldn’t be clearer: macho white guys vs. effeminate Orientals. Yet aside from the fact that Spartans come across as pinched, pinheaded gym bunnies, it’s their flesh the movie worships. Not since Beau Travail has a phalanx of meatheads received such insistent ogling. As for the threat to peace, freedom and democracy, that filthy Persian orgy looks way more fun than sitting around watching Spartans mope while their angry children slap each other around. At once homophobic and homoerotic, 300 is finally, and hilariously, just hysterical.

  • Monster Next Door?

    With a six-foot-four-inch frame straining under roughly 300 pounds, much of it earned during nearly a quarter-century’s labor at a pizza shop, it’s hard to imagine that Michael J. Devlin did not stand out. Then again, people who knew the bookish loner say that although he kept to himself, he lived in plain view — not like a man with secrets.

    To the contrary, Devlin was a fixture behind the counter at the Imo’s pizzeria on South Kirkwood Road, chatting up regulars while he took their orders. Be it sports, religion, politics or current events, Devlin seemed like he could talk about anything — and, according to those who knew him, he often did.

    “He was very articulate when it came to news. There wasn’t a subject he wouldn’t chime in on. He was very intelligent,” says Mike Prosperi, the Imo’s owner who employed Devlin for roughly 25 years — right up until his arrest on kidnapping charges on Friday, January 12. “I was just talking to a regular [customer], and he says, ‘You know, last week we were talking something about religion.’”

    Devlin, who worked as the shop’s day manager and also worked nights answering phones at Bopp Chapel, was known to personally carry out orders to waiting customers. He’d shake customers’ hands and crack jokes. Although he smoked menthol cigarettes and didn’t play sports, he’d occasionally tell co-workers that he’d spent his day off painting rooms at his mother’s house, or that he’d gone out Rollerblading.

    “He was the same throughout his whole life. He was always kind of a heavier, dorky-type guy. He was never one of the ‘cool kids,’ and he took a good amount of abuse just because of his physical proportions, but he’d hang out. He just kind of lived his life,” says Thom Williams, who grew up across the street from Devlin and worked with him at Imo’s during the 1980s and ’90s. “He played video games, he was an avid card player — we’d play poker at his house all the time, but mainly it was employees from Imo’s.”

    Then sometime in 2002, Devlin was diagnosed with Type II diabetes. That was when he quit smoking and gave up inline skating. He also became more withdrawn at work.

    “He used to Rollerblade, but then he got diabetes and he couldn’t afford another problem with his feet, so he stopped,” says Prosperi, adding that Devlin had to have a toe amputated around the time of his diagnosis.

    “He was a complete dick,” says Dan Schwabe, who used hang out at the Imo’s in middle school before getting a job at the pizzeria in 1995.

    “All the other guys who worked there were cool with us except for Devo,” says Schwabe, referring to Devlin by his nickname. “Me and a couple of my friends just steered clear of him.”

    Owner Prosperi says Devlin did not drink or take drugs. After the diabetes diagnosis, his only vice was Mountain Dew, which he drank in prodigious quantities.

    “He drank Mountain Dew like it was water. He had the tap, so could take it straight from the [soda] fountain,” says Prosperi, adding, “It’s not like he was in a corner holed up or anything. He seemed normal, just like the rest of the guys.”

    So normal, in fact, that after thirteen-year-old William “Ben” Ownby disappeared near his family’s home in Beaufort, co-workers joked behind the counter that the aging white Nissan pickup authorities were looking for fit the description of Devlin’s own rusted-out jalopy.

    “Oh yeah, people joked about it,” recalls Prosperi, noting that Devlin had no criminal record. “But nobody really thought it was him. He never had any problems with anyone.”

    The joke didn’t last long.

    On Monday — the day Ben Ownby was abducted after stepping off a school bus in rural Franklin County — Prosperi sent Devlin home early after the pizzeria manager complained he felt ill.

    “I could see that he was feeling sick. So I said, ‘Mike, why don’t you get everything set up, and as soon as the lunch rush is done go on home.’ He left here about 12:50,” Prosperi says.

    Devlin missed work on Tuesday but arrived on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday for his regular 10-a.m.-to-5-p.m. shift.

    Prosperi says Devlin seemed normal after he returned from his sick days, taking his co-workers’ ribbing with what appeared to be good cheer and bantering with regulars — until Friday morning, when Devlin arrived at work complaining that two Kirkwood police officers had been snooping around his apartment building on South Holmes Avenue, just north of Interstate 44.

    Meanwhile law enforcement officials were about to comb through Devlin’s two-bedroom unit, where they would find not only Ben Ownby, but also fifteen-year-old Shawn Hornbeck, who’d been missing for more than four years: the “Missouri Miracle.”

    Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation took Devlin into custody after questioning him in the Imo’s parking lot about Ben Ownby’s disappearance.

    Now accused of kidnapping both Shawn and Ben, it appears that Devlin — who co-workers describe as “normal” and “nice” — was in fact harboring a secret so sinister that its very improbability appears to have been its best defense against detection.

    “It’s so surreal; when you start looking at it, I guess he does fit a lot of the stereotypes that you think about when you hear about people who do this kind of thing, but it never occurred to me or anyone who knew him,” says Devlin’s former workmate Thom Williams, who now lives in Baltimore. “He was just a dorky, chubby guy who worked at a pizza place his whole life.”

    Chances are that if you were a visitor to Washington County on the morning of Monday, October 7, 2002, you had come to help search for eleven-year-old Shawn Hornbeck.

    Last seen riding a lime-green mountain bike at around 4:30 p.m. the previous day, Shawn had been wearing an orange T-shirt that bore the logo of his Little League team, the Astros. He lived with his parents, Pam and Craig Akers, in Richwoods, a former mining community of modest homes that sits deep in a heavily wooded notch of rural land about 60 miles southwest of St. Louis.

    The hilly terrain makes for rough going, and people worried that the boy may have fallen into one of the area’s many sinkholes or abandoned mine shafts. But that didn’t stop more than 200 would-be rescuers from setting out on foot, horseback, car and ATV in search of the 90-pound boy. Hoping to find at least a clue — a piece of clothing, perhaps, or Shawn’s bicycle — the crew searched well into the night.

    But their efforts were fruitless. Shawn had vanished, and what began as a search-and-rescue mission morphed into a criminal investigation.

    Perched between two sets of railroad tracks, the apartment complex on South Holmes Avenue in Kirkwood is a far cry from the leafy neighborhoods that characterize the rest of the affluent west-county suburb.

    Neighbors say that units rent for roughly $475 a month in the cluster of red-brick apartment buildings. Set in rows perpendicular to South Holmes Avenue, the buildings face one another, sharing a small patch of grass that serves as a courtyard. Children’s bikes litter many of the complex’s walkways. Dying house plants sit neglected near the pitted parking lot, and the communal Dumpster overflows with household trash. Many of the units have screen doors with broken handles, and the residents keep their white Levolor-style blinds drawn.

    “It’s a little lower-income than the rest of Kirkwood. It’s a transient complex; people are moving in and out,” says Mike Bales, a detective with the Kirkwood Police Department. “We may go down there once or twice a month.”

    One resident, though, was no transient. A member of the Webster Groves High School graduating class of 1984, Michael Devlin had lived in Apartment D on the ground floor since roughly 2002.

    But unlike the amiable pizza guy who was ready to chime in on any old conversation, Devlin’s neighbors knew him as an aloof loner who ignored his neighbors — so long as they gave him a wide berth.

    “He was the only neighbor we didn’t have contact with,” says Yinara Emanuel, who lives across the grass courtyard from Devlin’s unit. “He looked like a strange guy. He wouldn’t look at you when he went from his apartment to his car.”

    Like many of Devlin’s neighbors, Emanuel and her family have lived at the South Holmes complex for less than a year. Still, they say they had plenty of time to see Devlin’s churlish side.

    “We warned our children not to play in front of his door because he was so rude,” says Krista Jones, who also lives across from Devlin’s apartment. “He jumped all over one of our kids for running into his door with a bike. He said, ‘Don’t play around the door.’ They never played over there again.”

    But that wasn’t the only problem neighbors had with Devlin. According to an account published in this week’s Newsweek, neighbor Laura Aguilar said that before Shawn began living with Devlin, she happened to peer into Devlin’s bathroom window. There she saw what appeared to be sex toys.

    Other neighbors say Devlin was a stickler for the rules, and if someone happened to park in his assigned parking spot, he was apt to fly into a rage.

    “One night he was out there honking in the parking lot at like two o’clock in the morning because somebody was in his space,” Jones says. “My husband almost beat him up. He was so mad at him, he told him he was going to kick his ass. [Devlin] took off and left.”

    Recalling a separate incident that occurred roughly three months ago, Yinara Emanuel’s brother Mario (who lives in a separate apartment) says Devlin became irate when he arrived at the parking lot one evening and found that someone had taken his parking space.

    Mario Emanuel says Devlin called the police to settle the matter.

    “When the police came, they talked to Devlin and the son — who turned out not to be the son,” says Emanuel, referring to the boy he now knows is Shawn Hornbeck. “They talked to the police. If the cops would have investigated across the board, they would have had him.”

    Kirkwood police officer Tom Ballman confirms that Devlin had summoned the police to the apartment complex.

    The parking-spot incident wasn’t the first contact between Kirkwood police officers and Shawn Hornbeck. On August 15, 2003, Shawn contacted the department to report that his bike had been stolen. Introducing himself as “Shawn Devlin,” the boy apparently gave officers no indication that he was in fact Shawn Hornbeck and had been abducted ten months earlier.

    Shawn encountered police once again on September 29 of last year. This time a Glendale officer stopped the boy as he rode his bike just before midnight. According to the police report, Shawn again gave his name as “Shawn Devlin.”

    To the officers who encountered him and the neighbors who saw him daily, Shawn was merely the sullen son of a single dad. Shawn’s friend Tony Douglas told Newsweek that Shawn had told him that his mother had died in a drunk-driving accident. Tony added that his friend began spending holidays with the Douglas family, explaining that he did not like his father’s (Devlin’s) family.

    “Shawn never smiled,” says neighbor Krista Jones. “When I’d walk by, he’d be in there playing Nintendo or whatever. He seemed normal, but when I’d smile just to be friendly, he’d just get a mean look on his face. He kind of kept to himself, like he didn’t want anyone to talk to him. It makes me think that the guy [Michael Devlin] brainwashed him.”

    Speaking for the first time publicly on The Oprah Winfrey Show last week, Shawn told the talk-show host that he spent most of his days in captivity sleeping, watching television and playing video games. He said that when people asked if he was in school, he told them he was home-schooled.

    “We just made a story and kept the story the same,” he told Winfrey. “It was always ‘home-schooled.’”

    “You were home-schooled?” Winfrey asked.

    “No,” replied Shawn. “That was the story.”

    Shawn’s grandmother, Anna Quinn of St. Louis, later told the Associated Press that Shawn told his family his captor would at times wake him every 45 minutes.

    “Think to yourself when you don’t get enough sleep,” Quinn said. “He had to do something to get his cooperation.”

    During a segment of her show when she spoke with Shawn’s parents, Craig and Pam Akers, without their son present, Winfrey said: “OK, I’m going to ‘go there’ and ask you what do you think happened: Do you think that he was sexually abused?”

    Seated on a couch across from Winfrey, the Akerses both nodded yes.

    “Do you think that he was tortured?” Winfrey continued.

    “That I do not know yet,” Pam Akers replied.

    “There is more than one kind of torture. There’s mental torture, there’s physical torture,” Craig Akers put in. “I have no doubt that mentally he’s not the same boy he was.”

    Still, by all accounts, Shawn was afforded certain freedoms during his four years of alleged captivity. He was permitted to ride his bicycle around the neighborhood. Neighbors report that they saw him driving Devlin’s truck on occasion. He had access to a cell phone, television, video games and the Internet.

    He went so far as to post a message on the Web site his parents created to help find him. “How long are you going to look for your son?” he posted, signing his name “Shawn Devlin.”

    Neighbors say Shawn had a friend who slept over occasionally. In recent months they’d seen him holding hands with a girlfriend — a freshman at Visitation Academy, a Catholic high school for girls in west St. Louis County. On December 6, Shawn is said to have accompanied her to a school dance. (School officials say they’re uncertain whether Shawn attended the dance.)

    Still, Shawn told Winfrey he “prayed that one day my parents would find me and I’d be united.”

    Winfrey told viewers during the show that Shawn had told her off-camera that he had been too “terrified” to attempt an escape.

    “There has to be something held over his head,” Craig Akers told Winfrey. “There’s no way in the world that if he was able to do whatever he wanted to do, and could’ve walked away at any moment — there’s no doubt in my mind that he would have [come home].”

    Experts have cited the so-called Stockholm Syndrome, in which a captive comes to identify with his captor, and hypothesized that Shawn was paralyzed by fear.

    Washington County Sheriff Kevin Schroeder puts it in plainer terms:

    “This is something that is so bizarre that the normal individual cannot grasp what this then-eleven-year-old boy went through,” Schroeder says. “There is no way that anybody can project onto Shawn what he should have, could have or would have done. Nobody knows. Nobody was in that situation.”

    Shawn Hornbeck’s strange behavior might have continued for years had not Ben Ownby disappeared on January 8. Returning home from school, Ben got off a school bus and ran down the gravel road toward his house, about 500 feet away.

    It was the last anyone would see of Ben for nearly a week.

    Investigators learned that Ben was a Boy Scout, a straight-A student and a member of his school’s Science Olympiad. Though he played plenty of video games, he didn’t seem to have been in contact with strangers on the Internet. Nor did he appear to be a runaway. Investigators quickly eliminated domestic tribulations as a potential avenue of inquiry, and as the first waves of conflicting leads poured in, authorities struggled to develop a coherent focus.

    All that changed when fifteen-year-old Mitchell Hults stepped forward with a detailed description of a truck. Mitchell had stepped off the school bus soon after Ben. The high school freshman told investigators that as he got into the Chevy pickup he’d parked near the bus stop that morning, he spotted an aging white Nissan pickup with a camper shell in the middle of the road, as if it were turning around. But as Mitchell approached, the truck aborted the maneuver and headed down the street, he said. Mitchell told investigators that as he pulled into his family’s driveway, he saw the truck reverse direction and speed away.

    Even as volunteers continued to post fliers and set out on foot, ATV and horseback in search of Ben, Mitchell’s tip became investigators’ main focus.

    Says Franklin County Sheriff Gary Toelke: “Basically, that’s all we had.”

    During media interviews that week, Sheriff Toelke drove home the importance of the white pickup.

    It paid off. On the evening of Friday, January 12, 60 miles away, Kirkwood police officers Gary Wagster and Chris Nelson arrived at Devlin’s apartment complex on an unrelated matter. As the officers were leaving, they spotted a white pickup.

    “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Wagster would later say he asked Nelson.

    There it was: A dirty white Nissan truck with a camper shell and plenty of rust.

    A neighbor approached the two officers and said he’d been suspicious about the truck’s owner, a burly man who lived in Apartment D. Minutes later the burnt-umber door to D opened, and Michael Devlin appeared.

    The officers immediately recognized the bearded man with wire-rimmed glasses as the laid-back day manager at the Kirkwood Imo’s Pizza, 500 feet south of the city’s police headquarters. They intercepted him on his way to the Dumpster.

    “They started a conversation with him. That’s when they started seeing some red flags — his body language, his attitude shifted,” says Kirkwood detective Mike Bales. “It was enough to make them think that something wasn’t right.”

    More specifically, Wagster and Nelson say Devlin was friendly at first but became defensive, clenching his fists and averting his eyes, when they asked him about Ownby’s disappearance.

    “He got all squirrely on me,” Wagster said during the Oprah broadcast. “I was like, something ain’t right.”

    Added Nelson: “For a guy that’s laid back, he got real defensive, started clenching his fists and darting his eyes — evasive. When I was asking him questions, it’s like, I’ve never seen this guy before.”

    Devlin refused to admit the officers into his apartment that night. But through the window Wagster and Nelson spied a teenage boy at a table playing video games.

    The boy had shock of dark hair and did not otherwise fit the description of thirteen-year-old Ben.

    Stymied at Devlin’s front door, the officers called in to Kirkwood police headquarters. Officials there contacted authorities in Franklin County.

    “This all happened within 35 to 40 minutes,” Detective Bales recounts. “A short time later, officers from the highway patrol and FBI arrived on the scene.”

    Bales says that when state and federal agents arrived that evening, Devlin denied them access to the apartment.

    The authorities countered with an all-night stakeout.

    As Devlin left for work the next morning, law enforcement agents followed him.

    The authorities say Devlin was cooperative when they questioned him in the Imo’s parking lot. In a statement of probable cause filed in Franklin County court, law enforcement officials say Devlin confessed to them that he had kidnapped Ben Ownby.

    When investigators later searched Devlin’s apartment, they found Ben — and, to their astonishment, Shawn Hornbeck.

    Sheriff Toelke says Shawn immediately identified himself to officers as the boy who’d been missing for four-and-a-half years.

    According to FBI agent Roland Corvington, Ben Ownby had one question for the law enforcement agents: “Are you going to take me home?”

    Michael J. Devlin is being held in the Franklin County Jail in lieu of a $1 million cash bond. He was charged late last week with two separate counts of kidnapping, one in Franklin County, the other in Washington County. In the latter case, authorities allege that he used a gun to abduct Shawn and have also entered a charge of one count of armed criminal action. Washington County has set Devlin’s bond at $3 million.

    The cases are being litigated separately. Authorities from both jurisdictions say more charges are possible, and federal authorities and St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch say they are looking into pressing charges against Devlin.

    Officials from rural Lincoln County now say that Devlin is their most “viable” lead in the case of Charles Arlin Henderson, who disappeared in 1991 while riding his bike near his home in Moscow Mills. He was eleven years old at the time.

    “There are some similarities between the circumstances of Arlin Henderson’s disappearance and Ben and Shawn,” says Lieutenant Rick Harrell of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department. “Arlin was riding his bike in a rural area just like Shawn was, the time of day [late afternoon], the boys’ ages, and also as far as the distance from Devlin’s home — it’s similar.”

    Adds Franklin County Sheriff Toelke: “It’s unlikely for people to wake up and become kidnappers or sexual offenders. There’s always the possibility that there may be other kids involved, and we’re looking at that.”

    The renewed interest in Arlin’s disappearance is welcomed by his mother, Debra Henderson-Griffith. She says Lincoln County authorities told her they were going to interview Devlin after investigators from other jurisdictions had interrogated him.

    “I’ve had so little hope for so long, but now these young boys are back — it’s really given me hope,” says Henderson-Griffith, whose son disappeared while she was cooking dinner. Then again, she adds, “I’m never really going to give up hope until someone brings me a body.”

    At an arraignment in Franklin County last week, Devlin showed little emotion as he pleaded not guilty to one count of kidnapping in the Ownby case.

    His attorneys, Michael Kielty and Ethan Corlija, declined to comment on their client’s purported confession. The attorneys also declined to comment on Shawn’s parents’ charge that they believed their son was sexually abused.

    “The only thing I have is an allegation,” Kielty says. “I think it would make it next to impossible to have a fair jury in this county.”

    Judge David Tobben set Devlin’s preliminary hearing for March 15. He is expected to be arraigned later this week in Washington County on charges of kidnapping and armed criminal action. Kielty says his client plans to plead not guilty.

    A single kidnapping conviction could carry a sentence of life in prison.

    “We’re going to take the first crack at him,” says Franklin County Prosecuting Attorney Robert Parks. “It’s my hope that this guy never sees the outside of a jail cell in his natural life.”

    Contact the author [email protected]

  • Twist of Fate

    Balls the Size of Cantaloupes


    The summer of 1999 was a tough one for St. Louis Blues enforcer Tony Twist. As popular with the howling Keil Center crowds as he was feared by opposing players, Twist asked Blues management for a bump in salary, from $725,000 to nearly a million. Not only was the raise request summarily rejected, but general manager Larry Pleau let Twist go.

    The crowd-pleasing hockey player — known as “the Twister” for his hell-on-ice exploits — was 31 at the time and in the prime of his career. He’d spent six years with the club. But Pleau decided Twist was expendable and brought in a younger, more affordable mauler named Reed Low. “I was upset about it,” Twist says of his release. “I was kind of depressed. I thought I had something to add to St. Louis. I still thought I was a marketable product, that there wasn’t a better person for the job.”

    Later on that same August day, Twist walked out of his Creve Coeur home, mounted his self-built chopper and, hoping to clear his head, motored west on Olive Boulevard toward St. Charles county. While riding, he spoke for a time on his cell phone with April Nickles, the bar manager at the now-shuttered Soulard pub Mike & Min’s.

    Then, without warning, a car pulled out of a parking lot directly in front of him. “I flipped in the air, traveled about 50 feet and landed on my feet like Fred Flintstone,” Twist recalls. “When I landed, I ripped through my boots, my pelvis broke, and I was completely naked. My pants, my belt, and everything else was gone.”

    The bike smashed into the side door of the car. Its wheels were still turning when an ambulance arrived minutes later to rush Twist to the emergency room at St. John’s Mercy Medical Center. Massive internal bleeding forced doctors to wait days before operating on his pelvis.

    Remembers Twist: “The doctor[s] told me that they couldn’t put the blood in as quick as it was leaving, so if my blood count didn’t improve they’d have to operate, and there was a very good chance I wouldn’t make it.”

    He spent a week in the hospital, monitored around the clock, until his condition stabilized.

    “My dick was this wide,” gestures Twist. “But it was only this tall, because it had a tube coming out of it. I had every nurse on the floor coming in to check on my catheter. And I know they were laughing, because my balls had bounced off the gas tank. They were the size of cantaloupes, resting on top of my legs. I couldn’t let them fall because of the weight. It hurt.”

    Twist left the hospital and spent the next month tethered to a wheelchair before returning for reconstructive surgery on his left knee. The painful realization dawned on him: He’d never play professional hockey again. “I was pretty damn sad,” he says. “You never want to give up the game.”

    “It was very scary,” says Jocelyn Twist, to whom Tony was married for nine years. “He’d been a big, strong, capable guy his whole life, and now he could hardly walk. When they told him his knee was destroyed and his career was over, it broke my heart — even though I knew what I knew at the time.”

    What Jocelyn knew was that her husband was having an affair. While in intensive care, she checked Twist’s cell phone’s voicemail, expecting to hear from his parents, who were en route from Kamloops, British Columbia.

    Instead, she heard another’s woman’s voice. It was April Nickles, the woman who, three years later, would become April Twist.

    The Twists today reside on the outskirts of Defiance with Tony and Jocelyn’s two teenage children. Their custom-designed home overlooks a vast swath of wilderness. Financially well-off, they own four bars in suburban St. Louis. When he’s not managing his saloons, Twist spends his days coaching his son’s hockey team, hosting benefits for the physically disabled and co-hosting the cable TV shows Chalk Talk and Gateway Restaurant Guide. Every summer he plays in Jerry Bruckheimer’s celebrity hockey tournament in Las Vegas.

    It seems that Twist has carved out a fresh new beginning for himself, as if a Zamboni had come along and smoothed away the rough ice of his past. But Twist’s run-ins in the rink have been replaced by anguished fights with his ex-wife, legal wrangling with a bar patron and three individuals who filed — and subsequently dropped — restraining orders against him.

    Twist’s most public spat, though, involves Todd McFarlane, the comic-book artist who Twist sued in 1997 for misappropriation of his name. Though awarded a total of $39.5 million by two separate juries, Twist has yet to see a dime, and the case remains unresolved.

    “It’s exactly like what I did on the ice — a war, a battle,” Twist says. He’s referring to the McFarlane case, but he could be describing numerous aspects of his post-hockey life. “It hasn’t been a drain on me. If it’s an emotional drain to go to battle, don’t do it, because you’re probably not cut out for the job.”

    Blow Up Some Llamas


    A first encounter with Tony Twist can be intimidating — at least, perhaps, for those who still remember his savagery in the hockey arena. Aware of the nervous awe he stirs, he’ll quickly lighten the mood with a roguish comment.

    “I don’t want any dick-sucking in this interview,” he says. “Go ahead and write it the way it is. I really don’t care. I got nothing to hide. Well, I have a few things.”

    It is Friday before the Memorial Day holiday, and Twist and his fourteen-year-old son, Christian, are sealing the cut concrete that surrounds the family pool. As Twist applies solvent with an industrial sprayer, Christian spreads it with a roller. Both working shirtless, Christian lovingly refers to Dad as a “cracka,” while Tony, with equal endearment, calls his son a “rat-fucker.”

    The 38-year-old Twist is tan, unshaven and, at 280 pounds, 20 pounds over his playing weight. His radiant smile is framed by scars on either side of his upper lip. As muscular as ever, he wears a sweat-soaked Bud bandana and gray shorts, which barely hide dozens of bruises, inflicted upon him by Christian’s hockey team on a recent trip to Chicago. To create a “team-bonding experience,” Twist permitted them to shoot a thousand paintballs at him, using only a hockey glove to protect the family jewels.

    A handlebar-mustachioed man who identifies himself as “Buster Hymen” is also by the pool, shooting the breeze with Twist. Surveying the landscape beyond the property, Twist notes the fenced-in patch of grass where llamas from a neighbor’s farm graze.

    “You ever seen llamas mate?” Twist asks. “It’s disgusting. It’s incredible. They stick the female out there and they gang-bang her. I’m serious. I got up one morning and she’s trying to run, and she’s getting hit by every damn one.”

    “Let’s blow up some llamas,” suggests Hymen.

    “We can. We have the technology,” jokes Twist.

    Located off a gravel road in the Defiance hills, the Twists’ modern ranch-style house sits on five-and-a-half acres of land, with vistas of oak, hickory and evergreen trees as far as the eye can see. The family designed and built the house themselves, hauling in, says Twist, more than two million pounds of rock for the landscaping. The property is under constant construction. Next on the agenda is a controlled burn of the backyard grass to promote the growth of native wildflowers.

    The home’s main floor features a baby grand piano, a four-post bed with Roman pillars and a Kiel-style urinal in the bathroom. A full-size weight room and pool table are located downstairs and, in the garage, Twist parks his motorcycles and Kawasaki dirt bikes.

    Twist says it’s obvious why this pad is superior to the family’s previous home in Holly Hills. “Would you rather live in the city, or would you rather overlook a valley with a bunch of trees, with no neighbors, where you can shoot your guns and beat your wife? I’m kidding.”

    In addition to the bruises and scars, Twist’s body is decorated with tattoos. There’s a white wolf, a Siberian tiger and a Native American tramp stamp, the same one he got for Don Schunk a few years back. Schunk, who recently sold his Bridgeton car dealerships, met Twist in the mid-’90s when his daughter and Christian played hockey together. A friendship — and a veritable apprenticeship — would emerge.

    “I spent hundreds of hours sitting down at his car dealership,” Twist says. “That guy is one of the most intelligent businessmen I’ve ever met.”

    “I come from a service-oriented background,” says Schunk. “The environment he came from, it was kind of like, shoot first, and ask questions later. I would say I stirred a side of him that hadn’t been stirred. He realized that if he was going to be in the business sector he was going to have to listen to other people involved — whether he agreed with what they said or not — and make sure that all parties were served in a fair way.”

    After his hockey career ended, Twist used his new-found business acumen to establish a mini-saloon empire. Not long after April opened the Havana Cigar Room in 2001, the couple debuted Twister’s Iron Bar Saloon in Imperial, which Twist calls “a real testosterone fix,” and Twister’s Merchant Street Grill in Ste. Genevieve, which he describes as “softer, more local.”

    The Twists’ business partner, Doug Walker, manages the Imperial and Ste. Genevieve joints, permitting Tony and April to focus on their latest undertaking: Twister’s Pub and Grill, located at the intersection of Highway 94 and Wolfrum Road in Weldon Spring. The grill specializes in 16-ounce rib-eye steaks and pound-and-a-half pork steaks, grilled on a giant Southern Pride smoker.

    Twist says his transition from hockey tough to saloon proprietor has been a cakewalk. “I always knew I’d be successful doing something [after I retired]. I just didn’t know what that something was.”

    Says April Twist: “The challenge for him is not being out on the ice and hearing people chant, ‘Twister.’ Because he was an amazing athlete, and whenever you have however many thousands of people chanting your name, anyone would miss that.”

    “I Wanted to Kill ‘Em”


    The legendary Wayne Gretzky amassed 2,857 points in his storied 20-year career. Tony Twist racked up about one one-hundredth as many, but he does best The Great One on one score: He spent twice as much time in the penalty box — and in a career half as long. Those statistics are just fine with Twist. As an NHL enforcer, the job wasn’t to score, but to ensure by force and the threat of force that the other team didn’t rough up his team’s star players.

    “If you want to make sure your best player plays great every night, how do you make sure he’s not hurt?” Twist posits. “You stick me on the ice and make sure that, if you fuck with him, I take your best player out. I took it very serious, and I became the best at what I did.”

    In a 1998 profile of Twist that appeared in Sports Illustrated, Austin Murphy wrote: “Although the nicest thing one can say about Twist’s stick-handling is that he does not break the puck, it would be inaccurate to describe him as unskilled. It takes a special talent to stand on skates and beat someone senseless, and no one does it better than the St. Louis Blues left wing.”

    On eBay, one can still find tapes of Twist wailing on opposing skaters. Watch these snuff-style greatest-hits clips — many of which feature spirited French-Canadian play-calling — and you’ll see a style evolution. Twist loses his mullet for a goatee, and trades his light-blue Quebec Nordiques jersey for the ‘Notes’ bright yellows and blues.

    But his jackhammer of a right hand remains constant. Centrifugal force spinning the opponents like figure skaters, Twist tears off his jersey so his opponent has nothing to hold onto, grabs the other guy and smashes away. In 1995 Twist fractured Buffalo Sabres’ enforcer Rob Ray’s orbital bone.

    “We didn’t hold any punches back,” Twist says. “I wanted to kill ’em. We had dinner the night before, but I still wanted to kill them. You got 20,000 people watching, another half-million watching on TV, and you have a job to do. This ain’t the WWF here, boy.”

    Twist was drafted by the Blues in 1988. After serving a year with the squad’s top farm team, the Peoria Rivermen, he made a name for himself at training camp by baiting established ruffian Todd Ewen. When Ewen refused to fight him, Twist flapped his arms like a chicken.

    “The night previous, at the hotel,” recalls Twist, “Coach Brian Sutter told us, ‘You’re here to do a job, boys. If you’re here to score goals — then score goals. If you’re here to play goal — play goal. If you’re here to fight, you damn well better fight.’”

    Briefly demoted back to Peoria in 1990, Twist knocked Milwaukee Admirals goalie Steve McKichan unconscious with a rough check. McKichan suffered a neck injury that shortened his career.

    “He went up to play the puck, and I hit him with a body check chest-to-chest,” remembers Twist. “I didn’t hit him from behind or with a high stick. It was payback from his interceding in a fight the period before, when he smoked me in the head and cut me open. I went and visited him in the hospital in Peoria. I said, ‘I’m sorry, man, I didn’t mean to hurt you like that.’ He goes, ‘I knew it was coming.’”

    McKichan took Twist to court anyway, winning a jury award of $175,000 for compensatory damages from the Blues in 1996. An Illinois state appeals court overturned the decision in 1998, however, citing hockey’s “violent nature.”

    The incident, though, was cited by the Blues organization as justification to trade Twist to the Quebec Nordiques, as part of a four-man deal for Darin Kimble. In Quebec, Twist became known as a prize ice-fighter. After resigning from the Blues as a free agent before the 1994-’95 season, his star reached its zenith. In the mid- to late ’90s, the Blues were one of the NHL’s elite teams, and Twist’s brutal poundings became staples of highlight reels. At the Kiel Center, Twist’s jerseys were almost as popular as star player Brett Hull’s.

    “St. Louis is a blue-collar town, and they like somebody who goes to work every day and puts in a night’s work,” offers Twist as explanation for his popularity. “They enjoy the fighting. I didn’t cheat anybody. They knew what I was going to do.

    “People say, ‘Did you like playing hockey?’ What an asinine question that is. You get to take a charter flight to a great city — all the National Hockey League cities are great cities, except for Hartford, which was terrible — and then they pay you to eat the best food at the best restaurants. You stay at the best hotels, and you play the fastest and, in my mind, one of the best games to ever be invented. The first and fifteenth of every month, they give you a paycheck. You think to yourself, ‘Could this get any better?’”

    220 Pounds of Mountain


    Tony Twist may have learned his killer instincts from his grandmother, Ethel Twist, honored at the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame in Vancouver. Or maybe he learned from his grandfather, Harry Twist, the former welterweight champion of Western Canada.

    Harry Twist turned pro as an eighteen-year-old shortly after moving from England to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. He quit the sport altogether about five years later, after killing a man in the ring on two separate occasions.

    “In those days, they didn’t have the proper matting under the ring,” says Stan Twist, Tony’s father and Harry’s son, who chose a career in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “One guy, he hit the mat too hard, and another guy [fell] out of the ring and hit his head on a theatrical prop, for God’s sake.”

    Tony Twist was born in Saskatoon and spent most of his childhood in Prince George, British Columbia. “It was simple living, I can tell you that,” he says. “We had hockey night at someone’s house every day of the week. All the dads would try to outdo themselves, of course. Tie the lights up, and the next thing you know one of them is shoveling a friggin’ penalty box out of a snow bank. We’d have the national anthem before every game.”

    Twist says he fought regularly as a young student. “If you didn’t fight when you were in Catholic school, you weren’t doing well.” He says he was no bully, however, but an athlete and a standout student. His father notes that his son one year won a junior hockey team scholastic achievement award.

    “I say this about Twister a lot: He’s the type of guy that’s smart enough to run a bank, but lot of times I think he’d rather rob it,” says Kelly Chase, Twist’s former teammate both on the Blues and on their Saskatoon junior-league team.

    Chase calls Twist a “rugged” and “hard-to-handle” young man, prone to missing curfews. One time, when Twist was eighteen, he waited in the garage of Jocelyn’s ex-boyfriend, a man Twist believed was harassing her.

    “The guy popped the garage door open, closed it, got out of his car, and then, ‘Uh-oh,’” remembers Chase. “Two-hundred and twenty pounds of mountain standing there. [Twist] didn’t beat him up. He just grabbed hold of him and scared the shit out of him, and that’s where it ended.”

    The NHL allowed Twist to harness his aggression constructively. But almost immediately after his hockey career ended, he started whaling on civilians — according to his accusers, anyway.

    In December 1999 Soulard residents Christopher O’Neal and his girlfriend, Christina Beffa, each filed orders of protection against Twist. He “struck me in the face [and] threatened my life” during a Christmas day incident, claimed Beffa, according to court records. O’Neal said Twist “[p]hysically attacked me on four separate occasions in one night [….] He knows where I live and said he would find me and kill me.”

    “It was a very aggressive verbal altercation, but there were no punches, no anything,” counters Twist. “Why would you threaten to kill someone? If you’re going to kill somebody, you don’t threaten them.”

    O’Neal and Beffa dropped the charges in January 2000.

    In 2003 Imperial’s Vincent Ventimiglia accused Twist of beating him up at the Havana Cigar Room in Arnold. According to court records, Ventimiglia fingered Twist for “knocking me down,” “mauling me” and “pulling my shirt over my head and punching like he does in the hockey ring.” After the city of Arnold threw out his criminal case, Ventimiglia sought $1.5 million from Arnold and Twist in a civil case, which was also dismissed.

    Twist denies punching Ventimiglia in the face and says the incident occurred after Ventimiglia called April and her mother “cunts.”

    “If I would have beaten him like I did in hockey, he would have marks on his face and would have never gotten up.”

    In February former Twister’s Bar and Grill manager Steven Blakeney also sought an order of protection against Twist, claiming Twist threatened to kill him after he quit the saloon in January. Twist refuses to discuss the incident. April says her husband never threatened Blakeney and, further, that Blakeney was fired for inappropriate contact with female waitresses.

    None of the three people who filed orders of protection against Twist could be reached for comment for this story. Blakeney, however, denied April’s allegations to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. In March he dropped his order of protection request without explanation.

    Twist laughs at the idea that an anger-management class might do him some good. “Just because you’re accused of something,” he says, “doesn’t mean you did it. If there was any merit to any of it, I would have been punished.”

    “He’s a big, intimidating guy, and I think when he growls a little bit, people get scared,” speculates Kelly Chase. “Plus, he’s not the type of guy to massage the situation. Maybe he doesn’t always handle things in the right way, but a lot of times people overreact. Smart people don’t go and get in his face for no reason, unless they’re looking for trouble.”

    Exurban Chic


    With its steel tread-plate walls, tables made out of giant Red Bull cans, and signed Goodfellas, Sopranos and Casino posters, Twister’s Bar and Grill is designed very much in its namesake’s image and tries, with mixed success, to appeal both to a beer-chugging college crowd and the fine-diners from distant St. Louis suburbs.

    Besides the giant slabs of smoked meats, chef Jimmy Bommarito’s menu includes calamari “steak” — pieces cut into strips rather than rings — and deep-fried artichoke hearts, both appetizers big enough to serve as main courses.

    On a recent Wednesday evening, Twist’s trademark tornado logo and a Z107-7 [107.7 FM] van greet visitors to the St. Charles County strip-mall location. By 10 p.m. the grill has stopped serving food and the speakers blast ridiculously loud Top 40. With hordes of young women blitzed on free booze, Ladies Night’s popularity is rivaled only by “NASCAR Sundays,” when racing action dominates the joint’s ten screens and patrons who purchase a 120-ounce “vessel” of beer get a free pizza.

    The eatery-cum-nightclub is sandwiched between a Mexican restaurant called Tequila and the future home of the Monkey Bar & Restaurant, a “dance club/martini bar/restaurant/sports bar.” Its proprietors include Chris Brockmeyer, who also co-owns the Vault, a Central West End nightclub that gained notoriety last year when it hosted a “Girls Gone Wild” party.

    In February Twist tried to sink the Monkey Bar, arguing before Weldon Spring’s board of aldermen that its owners would bring a lecherous element to the mall. The board thought otherwise and the club is scheduled to open later this year. Somewhat surprisingly, Brockmeyer holds no ill will. “Tony’s been very helpful,” he says.

    On the dance floor at Twister’s, frat guys in ball caps pursue blondes in tube tops and denim capris, while the green-eyed, full-figured April Twist does the books in the back office. “Since my [waitresses] dress promiscuous, I also do the same, because I couldn’t ask them to dress one way, and me to dress any different,” she says. A calm but firm manager, dressed tonight in an aqua micro skirt and black heels, she works Tuesdays at the Havana Cigar Room but otherwise spends the most of her waking hours at Twister’s Bar & Grill, bartending, waitressing — even scrubbing toilets.

    “Most bars that open up have many investors, and if they lose it’s not that big of a deal,” she says. “So that’s why Tony and I work so hard to make this successful, because if we lose, we lose huge. Half of what Tony had was taken from him by his ex-wife. We’re trying to rebuild what he lost, which was a lot.”

    Like April, Jocelyn is blond and striking. She works as an account manager with a local public-relations firm, currently promoting a new, Chesterfield-based junior hockey team called the St. Louis Bandits, which is owned in part by Kelly Chase and Brett Hull.

    Jocelyn says that being married to a professional athlete was difficult and, like many athletes’ wives, she often worried about being cheated on. She sometimes resented being stuck at home with the kids while Twist lived it up on the road. Still, she describes her ex-husband as a romantic partner and a good father and says their marriage, by and large, was a happy one.

    “I just think we just got married way too young,” says the 41-year-old Jocelyn Twist. “Tony was a father of two by the time he was 22 years old. I never thought the marriage was bad, but its dissolution was probably best for everyone, except the kids.”

    Without offering specifics, Twist counters that their union was miserable for much of its nine years. He claims his ex-wife has not been a responsible parent since the divorce. “We don’t get along,” he says. “She’s not good people. She’s fucking up with my children. She never sees the kids.”

    “I see them as often as I can,” responds Jocelyn. “Being in PR, I work a lot at night, and he moved them out to Defiance.”

    The kids live with April and Tony, Jocelyn says, in part because she is a Canadian citizen, here on a short-term visa. If she can’t get it renewed, she may have to return to Canada in a year.

    Twist became a U.S. citizen after marrying April, whom he met a few months before his motorcycle accident. At the time, she was a 22-year-old manager at Mike & Min’s and didn’t care a lick about sports. She didn’t even recognize the Blues enforcer when he came in. Whatever the case, they clicked.

    “He just caught my eye and I caught his eye,” she remembers. “It was really bizarre, sort of like a fairy tale, because most pro athletes don’t leave their wives for a bartender.”

    Jocelyn doesn’t blame April for breaking up her marriage: “If it wasn’t April, it would have been someone else. We were growing apart.”

    The Twistelli Tempest


    Had Tony Twist and Todd McFarlane gotten to know each under different circumstances, they might have become fast friends. They’re both former professional athletes who once called Kamloops home. McFarlane played center field there, for the Seattle Mariners’ farm club, in the early ’80s.

    An über-sports fan famous for paying $3 million for Mark McGwire’s 70th home-run ball, McFarlane amassed a fortune creating comic books and action figures (including ones for Napoleon Dynamite and members of the rock group KISS). A hotshot illustrator at Marvel Comics for eight years, McFarlane left in 1992 to start his own company, Image Comics. McFarlane’s departure was widely publicized and caused quite a stir in the comic-book industry. McFarlane took with him a handful of other talented Marvel illustrators, and the company lost $137.6 million in market value overnight.

    The trouble started in 1993, when McFarlane wrote the character of Antonio Twistelli into Spawn, once the number-one selling comic book in the nation. The character’s nickname was Tony Twist. McFarlane, a self-avowed “arrogant psycho,” later admitted Twistelli was named after the real Twist. A minor player in the series, Twistelli was depicted as an obese mob boss, a brutal and arrogant figure who orders the torture and death of the comics’ main protagonist, a former CIA assassin named Al Simmons.

    Twist says he first became aware of the Twistelli character after receiving a tearful call from his mother. “She was really upset, crying, asking me why I was a part of it. I said, ‘Mom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’”

    McFarlane named a number of his Spawn characters after NHL players, including Twist’s all-star Quebec Nordiques teammate, Joe Sakic. (Al Simmons played second base for the Kamploops ball club.) Only Twist pursued legal action, though, suing McFarlane in 1997 for misappropriation of his name and defamation of character. The latter charge was soon dropped. He also sued HBO — which had televised an animated version of Spawn that featured the Twistelli character — and the two parties settled out of court in 2001 for an undisclosed amount.

    At the first McFarlane-Twist trial in 2000, Twist’s lawyers argued that McFarlane used Twist’s “persona” without permission, and that the Twistelli character caused him to lose endorsements, as well as public-speaking and broadcasting gigs.

    McFarlane’s lawyers argued that the character was insignificant and that Twist himself was not famous enough to suffer financially from the comics. The Twist team benefited from the vice president of a nutrition-supplement company in Colorado, who testified that the firm reneged on a deal to make Twist their pitch man after learning about the way his namesake character was portrayed.

    The jury awarded Twist $24.5 million dollars, the sum of the past, present and future damages they believed had been inflicted. When the trial ended, a jubilant Twist signed autographs for the jurors.

    The Missouri Supreme Court, however, determined that the jury had been given incorrect instructions and ordered a new trial, where Twist would prevail in 2004, receiving a judgment of $15 million.

    The 2004 decision was upheld by the court of appeals this year. McFarlane’s defense team has since petitioned the Missouri Supreme Court to review the case. If it won’t, they vow to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    “This thing is like the Energizer bunny,” says Twist. “It keeps going and going and going.”

    Twist’s Clayton attorney, Robert Blitz, is confident that the court will reject McFarlane’s petition, and says the next six months could well bring final judgment — $15 million, plus 9 percent interest accrued since the second jury returned the verdict in 2004. Jocelyn would be entitled to half of the award.

    Blitz gives Twist much of the credit for the legal victory.

    “Tony is obviously an imposing figure, but he’s a very gregarious guy, and he’s one of the most naturally bright people you’ll meet,” says Blitz. “And because of that combination, he made a wonderful witness in this case. I would think the jurors were immediately attracted to Tony. He understood the material, understood the case. No lawyer came close to even laying a glove on him.”

    In 2005 Todd McFarlane Productions, the comic-book arm of McFarlane Companies, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Efforts to reach McFarlane at his office in Phoenix were unsuccessful.

    Though Twist says the suit has “always been about principle” and not money, many Spawn fans and armchair legal critics were astonished to learn that a player who garnered modest-paying endorsements in his playing days actually won $15 million.

    “Twist should be honored that anyone chose to loosely name a character after a nothing hockey player like himself,” wrote one furious blogger. “And, secondly, even if he was defamed, is this 2nd-rate goon’s character worth $15-mil?”

    McFarlane’s lawyer, Michael Kahn, says the case has “triggered a surprising amount of First Amendment alarms from legal experts around the country.”

    “That’s the ‘Chicken Little’ defense,” replies Blitz, adding that “right of publicity” — the ability to market one’s own name and image — is at issue in the case, not the First Amendment.

    Should the big check finally arrive, Twist has no plans to retire. “The devil finds work for idle hands, and I don’t need the idle.”

    Lover-Boy Tony


    On a recent evening, Tony Twist decides to take in some Soulard action. And that can spell trouble. Whenever he’s out on the town, men try to fight him and women try to sleep with him. Says April Twist: “Some drunk punk comes up to him and says, ‘Oh, I’ll take your bar, Twister, hit me.’ I’m like, ‘Tony, remember where we’re at.’ And Tony just looks at them and laughs.”

    As to the women vying for Twist’s attention, she adds, “

  • Win Lose Die

    [This is the beginning of a two-part story. To read Part 2, click here.]

    Jennifer Anderson had only recently landed a gig at the Golden Eagle Saloon in Belleville when her boyfriend broke her heart and moved to Florida. But it didn’t take long for the strong-willed young bartender with the wide-set brown eyes to catch the attention of 61-year-old Thomas Venezia, a down-on-his-luck ex-con who was lending a hand at the neighborhood tavern.

    The past seven years had not been kind to Venezia. The man federal prosecutors claimed once helmed a $48 million gambling empire now lived in a dilapidated house at 311 Mascoutah Avenue, next door to the Golden Eagle.

    His pauper status must have grated on Venezia, who in the mid-1990s boasted a weekly income of $16,000 and a payroll that included politicians, chiefs of police and a small army of strippers, bouncers, route men and tavern owners — spokes in the wheel of his criminal enterprise. In the words of one Washington Park police officer, “Venezia did run the city of Washington Park.”

    Or he did until 1995, when federal prosecutors unveiled a ten-count racketeering indictment that eventually ensnared the Venezia family, area businessmen and Washington Park Mayor Sylvester Jackson. The imbroglio also spawned the federal conspiracy trial of Venezia’s attorney, Amiel Cueto, which reverberated 850 miles away in the nation’s capital when prosecutors named Jerry Costello, a Democratic Congressman from Belleville, an “un-indicted co-conspirator.”

    Tried, convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, Venezia served seven years and returned to Belleville in 2002 a changed man. The mogul who’d once spent his mornings gliding from tavern to tavern in the air-conditioned comfort of a Lexus sedan now drove a car on loan from his friend Robert Staack, who ran the Golden Eagle. Gone was the midnight glamour of Cheeks, Main Street and Club Exposed, the topless nightclubs the feds seized from Venezia. In their place were a diagnosis of throat cancer, a “consulting” gig with his buddy Staack and a monthly income of $387.

    But there was one thing the government couldn’t take away from Tom Venezia: his charm. It was Venezia’s fabled charisma that wowed the power brokers of southern Illinois, and it was that same magnetism that wooed Jennifer Anderson, a 2002 grad of Belleville East high school who was now dabbling in the area’s seamy underworld.

    Born the third child of four to a working-class family, Anderson was athletic and outgoing, with a soft spot for life’s underdogs. She had straight brown hair, an enigmatic smile and a well-toned physique. She also had a wild side. The girl who’d been nicknamed “Froggy” by her fast-pitch softball team in junior high (for her prowess at catching flies) was a knockout at 21 and quickly became a favorite at the Golden Eagle. Within months of signing on in late 2004, she was living next door with Tom Venezia and managing the bar, which one co-worker describes as “the Coyote Ugly of Belleville.”

    The wiry-haired Venezia, on the other hand, had never cut the figure of the stereotypical mob don. At the height of his power he’d favored tailored suits, driven luxury cars and was never without a fat roll of cash. But he stood five-foot-seven. A thick bush of a mustache punctuated his elongated face, and watery brown eyes were framed in oversize glasses.

    “He could somehow make her feel important. He knew what carrots to put in front of her,” says Jennifer’s father, Michael Anderson, who still puzzles over his daughter’s attraction to a man 40 years her senior. He adds that Jennifer told him and his wife, Cynthia, that Venezia had promised to give her the Golden Eagle. “She had us snowed.”

    But the Andersons could hardly have imagined how their daughter’s relationship with Tom Venezia would end. A few hours after midnight on the morning of July 19, police say, Venezia shot Anderson and then turned the gun on himself.

    Jennifer Anderson was shot execution-style, with a single .38 caliber bullet to the base of her skull. Venezia’s death was more gruesome: He was discovered seated in a bedroom recliner, dead from one pointblank shot to the temple, the bullet lodged in a nearby door.

    Toxicology reports would reveal traces of alcohol in Anderson’s system, while Venezia had been legally drunk. Police promptly ruled the deaths a murder-suicide and closed the case. Statistically, Anderson became Belleville’s seventh murder in a year during which residents have seen their small town morph into a mini-murderopolis — as of this writing, twelve violent deaths and counting.

    But despite the official version of events, three months after the killings the Andersons remain unconvinced. They want to know why Venezia was living in a house that, according to Belleville records, did not have a current occupancy permit. They want to know how a convicted felon came by a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson handgun. And they want to know more about what happened in the wee hours of July 19: How could Venezia, his 61-year-old body withered by cancer to about 100 pounds, have wrestled their athletic, vibrant daughter to the ground and shot her?

    “Do I believe that Tom could have shot Jennifer? Yes. Everything points to a desperate man losing everything he had, and why not take the coward’s way out?” Michael Anderson reasons. “At the same time, when you look at the property records and talk to the people involved, there is a whole lot of mystery.

    “There’s definitely been a murder. But who shot Jennifer and who shot Tom remains to be seen.”

    When the criminal history of late-twentieth-century southern Illinois is written, Thomas Venezia will tower over the region’s motley collection of grifters and petty thieves. A St. Louis boy with an eighth-grade education, Venezia crossed the river in the late 1980s and bought a Washington Park strip club, the first of his three topless bars. He soon beefed up his portfolio, purchasing two vending companies to form Ace Music/B&H Vending, the economic engine that would deliver his fortune.

    A supplier of coin-operated pool tables and cigarette machines, B&H also dealt in bar-top video-poker and -slot machines. But these weren’t factory-fresh machines. Venezia took games like Magical Tonic, Robo Pit Pong and Cherry Master 91 that were manufactured to be operated “For Amusement Only” and rigged them to tally accumulated “credits” so winning customers could be reimbursed in cash from a till maintained by the barkeep. While they were at it, B&H workers also modified the machines to accept dollar bills — a lucrative innovation.

    Venezia ran a full-service shop. Naturally, B&H supplied and repaired the machines free of charge. If a tavern’s till ran dry, a call to B&H was all it took for a “route man” to arrive with a fresh monetary infusion. Gambling profits were split 50-50 between B&H and the tavern owner, whereupon all receipts were destroyed.

    To insulate his business, Venezia placed family members in key positions. His wife, Sandra Nations Venezia, ran the “money room,” a vaultlike chamber where gambling proceeds were commingled with the company’s legitimate earnings. A son, Milan Venezia, worked as a route man before taking over management of his father’s strip clubs.

    But as Venezia’s empire expanded, he needed more protection from nosy law-enforcement agencies. To this end, he enlisted the aid of Amiel Cueto — pronounced kwee-toe — a powerful Belleville attorney who Venezia once boasted “owned” fifteen of the seventeen judges in St. Clair County.

    “I was told that if anybody was arrested that [B&H Vending] would make immediate bail for the people that were arrested. After they were released…the owner of the tavern…would be charged [with] a misdemeanor, fined $1,000 and [B&H] would take care of the fine, the bail — everything,” Belleville tavern owner Dennis Dehn would testify during Venezia’s 1995 racketeering trial. “[T]he machines — or machines that were confiscated — new ones would be back in the next day.”

    Venezia rounded out his operation by recruiting Sylvester Jackson.

    A low-level Democratic operative, Jackson was elected mayor of Washington Park in 1989, the year Venezia bought B&H Vending. Jackson would later testify that his first business meeting with his future boss took place at a Washington Park topless club. “He wanted to expand the vending business, the gambling,” Jackson, who turned state’s witness, told jurors at Venezia’s trial.

    Venezia proposed that the mayor come to work for B&H Vending. To Jackson, whose mayoral duties earned him the princely sum of $400 a month, the arrangement sounded attractive, but he expressed concern that being on Venezia’s payroll might compromise his official duties.

    “Tom at that time said he was going to check it out for me,” Jackson testified. “A few days later Tom got back with me and told me he talked to Ame [Amiel Cueto, Venezia’s attorney] and Ame said it wouldn’t be a conflict.”

    (Cueto says Jackson perjured himself during Venezia’s trial. Jackson could not be reached to comment for this story.)

    His conscience clear, Jackson assumed duties as a “trouble shooter” for B&H, and Venezia put him on the payroll at $500 per month. In addition, Jackson told jurors, each week the boss would slip him an envelope containing $500 cash.

    Jackson, who is African American, told jurors that Venezia wanted him to get B&H machines installed at “black stops.” The aspiring racketeer also counted on the mayor to keep local police at bay.

    Conveniently, the latter role was a logical extension of Jackson’s mayoral duties. “[T]he topless business in Washington Park was one of our main resources,” he would testify. “We didn’t want the police department [coming] into the topless-club business where the vending machines was at, because I didn’t feel it was right for police officers to be around that type of atmosphere.”

    As Jackson’s relationship with Venezia deepened, the under-the-table envelope got fatter. By 1994 the mayor was collecting $2,000 a week in cash. His portrait hung in B&H’s Belleville lobby. Venezia also loaned him $25,000 to remodel a lounge Jackson’s brother owned. The loan, like all the others Venezia made to local tavern owners, was repaid over time via a deduction from the tavern’s share of the gambling loot.

    There were favors on Jackson’s end, too. “When Tom and I got a little bit more acquainted, and I understood a little bit more about the business…[I made] Sandy Nations [a] deputy marshal of the Village of Washington Park,” Jackson told jurors. “A few months later…[Venezia] come up with a list of other guys…that he wanted commissions for.”

    Though Sandra Nations, Milan Venezia and several other Venezia employees had no law-enforcement training, their badges entitled them to carry firearms and insulated them from police scrutiny.

    At Venezia’s request, Jackson also appointed a private investigator named Robert Romanik police chief of Washington Park.

    Venezia would later describe his relationship with Jackson as “a marriage made in heaven.”

    Conceded Jackson: “Going to work for B&H Vending meant I couldn’t really perform my duties when it came to enforcing the law on certain things. I closed my eyes.”

    Soon after taking office in 1989, Sylvester Jackson met with George Sirtak, a local businessman in need of a liquor license. Sirtak aimed to open Club Hollywood — which would be the fourth strip club in Washington Park (population 5,000).

    Sirtak would later testify that their first meeting went well; Jackson said acquiring a liquor license would be a snap. But plans hit a snag when the St. Clair County Zoning Commission told Sirtak he’d need a special zoning permit to serve alcohol.

    When Sirtak and the mayor next met, Jackson assured him zoning was a non-issue. “[He said] they had decided to get their own proceeding to zone for Washington Park,” Sirtak told jurors during Venezia’s trial. “[He told me] to go back up to St. Clair County and get a permit for a restaurant. By the time I was done with the building…the zoning would be there from Washington Park.”

    Sirtak had no reason to distrust the pro-business mayor. Tom Venezia, whom Sirtak knew as the owner of the Main Street strip club, had a good relationship with Jackson. And why not? The clubs brought in revenue for the city. So Sirtak broke ground on his new club and obtained a restaurant permit, taking out a $280,000 loan and emptying his savings account.

    “When things were getting close to completion, I made a call to Mayor Jackson,” Sirtak testified. “I had asked him if the zoning problem was taken care of. He said: ‘Don’t worry about that. Come get your [liquor] license and open up.’”

    The club opened in November 1989 — only to be shuttered three and a half weeks later by the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department for operating without a proper zoning permit.

    Jackson had failed to deliver on his promise.

    For the next two months, the club remained closed while Sirtak scrambled for a permit. Jackson and Tom Venezia counseled patience. But bills were coming due, and Sirtak was growing increasingly anxious.

    Sirtak told Venezia and Jackson he wanted to reopen as a topless venue that served only soda. But they counseled against the idea, warning that the club “would bring the state down on us.”

    Sirtak did it anyway. “[The] night that I opened, the chief of police, Bob Romanik, came in and took the license with him and closed the club down,” Sirtak testified. “[Jackson] stated that at that point in time it would be impossible for me to ever acquire a liquor license in Washington Park, that I was not the right guy.”

    In a subsequent meeting with Jackson and Venezia, the mayor suggested Sirtak consider selling the club — to Venezia.

    “I mentioned $350,000,” Sirtak recounted in court. “[Venezia] laughed, shook my hand and said: ‘Good luck: You don’t even have a liquor license.’”

    Two months later, facing mounting debt and zero income, Sirtak called Venezia.

    “He asked me how much I had in the property,” Sirtak told jurors. “He said, ‘I would be interested in giving you $300,000.’ I said that would be fine.”

    Venezia bought Club Hollywood, renamed it Cheeks and opened with all permits in place.

    A year after George Sirtak was relieved of Club Hollywood, East St. Louis found itself surrendering its city hall.

    A man named Walter DeBow, who’d been severely beaten while spending a night in jail on traffic violations, had sued the city. But when the wheelchair-bound and brain-damaged plaintiff won a $3.4 million judgment, the debt-ridden municipality couldn’t come up with the cash. In lieu of payment, a federal judge awarded DeBow the deed to the East St. Louis City Hall and 220 acres of riverfront property.

    Within weeks of acquiring the deeds, DeBow sold the properties to a secret land trust.

    Enter Tom Venezia, Amiel Cueto and their joint enterprise, the Illinois Port and Harbor Authority, which aimed to return city hall to its rightful owner — in exchange for exclusive riverfront development rights.

    “The land trust had agreed to sell Illinois Port and Harbor the deed and title to the East St. Louis City Hall, plus 220 acres of city-owned land…for $1.2 million,” Venezia told jurors when he was briefly transferred from prison to testify for the prosecution at Cueto’s 1997 conspiracy trial. “In turn, Illinois Port and Harbor was to give all that up to the City of East St. Louis for exclusive development rights [of the riverfront].”

    The deal met with stiff public opposition and was soon tabled. But the effort taught Venezia that his gambling proceeds could be leveraged into a legitimate business. From 1992 to 1995 he was involved in several property deals with Cueto and another investor, Richard Bechtoldt.

    In one such deal, the trio formed a company called DeKalb Crab Orchard, which aimed to develop casinos on Native American land. The investors formed yet another company, ILLART (ILL for Illinois; ART for Amiel, Richard and Tom), whose purpose was to acquire an interest in the DeKalb deal and similar arrangements statewide. According to Venezia’s subsequent testimony, Cueto maintained 50 percent of ILLART, while Venezia and Bechtoldt each owned 25 percent.

    “[Cueto] would retain 50 percent,” Venezia testified. “In the event that [U.S. Representative] Jerry [Costello] didn’t run for [re-election, he’d] have Jerry Costello as a partner.”

    Meanwhile, the investors continued to eye the East St. Louis riverfront. Property records indicate that in 1994 they took out a $600,000 loan to purchase 32 acres of riverfront property via a company called En Futuro.

    “The division was going to be 50 percent [for] Amiel Cueto, 25 percent for…Richard Bechtoldt and 25 percent for my nominee,” Venezia testified. Asked by prosecutors why Cueto was to get 50 percent, Venezia stated, “It had something to do with [U.S. Representative] Jerry Costello, that he would be his partner if he didn’t stay in Congress, or something to that effect.”

    When he took the stand in Cueto’s trial, Bechtoldt backed up Venezia’s version: “I was told that Jerry Costello was a silent partner.” When the U.S. Attorney asked Bechtoldt whether he’d been told of Costello’s involvement by Amiel Cueto, Bechtoldt replied: “Yes.”

    Congressman Costello has consistently denied any involvement in any land deals with Venezia.

    “Costello didn’t know anything about that,” seconds Cueto, a childhood friend of the congressman, once known for his sizable contributions to the Democratic Party. “None of it ever made a nickel. There was never really so much as a spade of earth turned on anything. None of these projects were advanced past the planning stages. There was a lot of paperwork done and documents signed, but it turned out to be nothing, and I don’t think it ever had a chance to be anything but nothing.”

    Though he kept a low profile before settling in Belleville, Thomas Venezia’s name had percolated into public consciousness in 1962. It was in December of that year that Venezia, then age nineteen, shot and killed an ex-convict named Elmer Dowell with a .38 caliber pistol.

    According to an article published in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the circuit attorney ruled that the killing, which took place at a midtown tavern owned by Venezia’s father, was committed in self-defense.

    Two years later St. Louis police again booked Venezia on a murder charge — this time for the New Year’s Eve slaying of John Johnson, who was shot in the head at the Pink Elephant Lounge on the 3800 block of Olive Street and then dragged outside. Venezia denied any knowledge of the slaying; the charges were subsequently dropped.

    Suicide, too, played a role in Venezia’s life: He told several associates that his father had killed himself.

    Still, those who knew the racketeer after his release from prison find it hard to imagine that Venezia could have shot Jennifer Anderson, only to turn the gun on himself.

    “I am 100 percent convinced that he did not kill her and then kill himself,” says a bartender who worked with Venezia and Anderson at the Golden Eagle. “He was too proud; he would not have took her with him.”

    The bartender, who declined to be identified in this story for fear of reprisal, stresses Venezia’s reputation as a stand-up guy: “One night [my sister and I] were drunk, so we called a cab and left her car at the bar. Well, she come back the next day to get it and someone had slashed both her driver’s-side tires. You know what Tom did? He called a tow truck and had them come get her car and then had tires put on her car. He didn’t want anything for it. It was just his way of helping his girls out.”

    By “girls” the bartender means the women who worked with Venezia at the Golden Eagle, a neighborhood bar whose most noteworthy features were its exposed brick, small patio and hot young barmaids.

    But the Golden Eagle’s tidy appearance belied the wild nights Venezia hosted there.

    “Weekend nights were unreal. If you were drunk and dancing on top of the bar, that was fine,” says Pat Williams, who worked with Venezia for a month in early 2005. “I wouldn’t say that he would encourage the girls to dance on the bar, but if you were up there he’d be right out there along with the rest of the crowd, rooting you on. You definitely would not be disciplined for it. If a customer bought you a shot, you were expected to take it.”

    For the girls behind the bar, Williams says, Venezia expected a dress code worthy of his glory days: “Very short shorts with the ass cheeks hanging out, low-cut tops and high heels.” Another bartender who quit after a few days at the Golden Eagle calls the bar “sleazy.”

    The Golden Eagle was certainly a step down from the flesh factories Venezia had once called his own. But seven years in prison had diminished the man. And when Jennifer Anderson entered his life, she must have reminded the fallen racketeer of the life he’d once led. Anderson was mildly dyslexic and kept copious diaries to articulate her thoughts. She also carried a pocket dictionary she’d refer to when words escaped her. Family members and friends say she had a penchant for collecting orphaned animals. But it was her party-girl streak that endeared her to men — and ignited jealousy in their girlfriends.

    “Girls [would] come into the bar with their boyfriends, and as bartenders we’ve got to sell our liquor,” says a co-worker who asked not to be identified in this story. “It’s not that we’d do anything to their boyfriends, but their boyfriends would look at us and they’d get pissed off. [Some of the girls] thought she was a whore. One night we were at a party after work, and they all tried to gang up on her. But Jennifer was never a whore or a skank. They were jealous: The girls didn’t like her because she was pretty.”

    But Venezia did like her. Though she had no experience running a tavern, within months of signing on she was managing the Golden Eagle and living next door with the former mob boss. But she kept quiet about the relationship, and to this day friends and family are uncertain whether they were romantically involved. Occasionally she’d leave a party to help Venezia with something; she ferried him to his chemotherapy sessions and drove him around. But friends say she rarely talked about him. Her parents say that before she died she’d begun dating someone new. In the weeks before his death, neighbors report having seen Venezia out walking, riding his bike and even jogging. After the killings Milan Venezia told reporters his father’s cancer was in remission.

    Anderson’s parents say she never told them she was living with Venezia.

    “I was very concerned but constantly lied to by her,” maintains Michael Anderson, Jennifer’s father. “She’d tell me that she’d just leave the car [at the bar] and sleep at a friend’s house.”

    When the Golden Eagle was shut down in the spring of this year for serving underage drinkers, Anderson got a job stripping at the Penthouse Club in Sauget, where she worked under the stage name “Raven.” By all accounts she wasn’t happy with the job.

    “She wasn’t liking all of the clientele,” says longtime friend and onetime boyfriend Jared Sileven. “She was going to quit stripping and go back to the bar business.”

    The Andersons, who live only a few blocks away from the tavern on Mascoutah, say they hadn’t known about the strip-joint job. “We didn’t know she was stripping until the day she was found,” says Michael Anderson, who works as a home rehabber.

    Still, the Andersons suspected that their daughter, whom they describe as fearless, trusting and loyal, was mired in a bad situation. “From the moment she took a job at the Golden Eagle there was a decline,” Michael Anderson says. “When it comes to these people [like Venezia], anybody’s daughter is in trouble. This innocent little kid became a party animal.”

    Part 2: Thomas Venezia takes a new wife, as his east-side empire crumbles.

  • Dead on Arrival

    For more than sixteen months, Chesterfield police struggled to unravel the mystery surrounding the arsenic-poisoning death of John Mullen, a well-liked physicist and retired research scientist at the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation.

    The case now appears to have ended as bizarrely as it began on the sultry morning of June 29, 2004.

    It was on that morning that Mullen, after returning to his bluff-top home in Chesterfield following his daily workout, reached into the fridge for a bottle of his favorite mineral-water drink. Little did he know, police confirmed Tuesday, that his long-time girlfriend, Tamara Rallo, had deposited a lethal dose of arsenic that would kill him before nightfall. It took city and county medical examiners five months to finally determine Mullen died from arsenic poisoning. In modern times, a homicide committed with arsenic is extremely rare.

    With police breathing down her neck after months of investigative work and an arrest imminent, the 52-year-old Rallo apparently killed herself over the weekend. Her body was found Saturday by family members inside her south St. Louis home. The method of the possible suicide is under investigation, says Chesterfield Police Captain Ed Nestor, adding that no signs of bullet or stab wounds were found on the corpse.

    The thin, blond-haired Rallo, owner-operator of Metro Pawn at 8286 St. Charles Rock Road, was to have been charged Tuesday by St. Louis County prosecutors with second-degree murder. Captain Nestor says Rallo was unaware of her impending arrest.

    Two weeks after the murder, Rallo left a disquieting voicemail message with Michael Hill, one of Mullen’s two sons. Hill recounted the message to the Riverfront Times earlier this year: “‘Don’t be surprised if you find my body floating in your dad’s swimming pool.’”

    Mullen met Rallo about ten years ago at a Chesterfield bar and dated her off and on ever since, says Hill, who took the name of his mother’s second husband after her divorce from Mullen decades ago.

    The relationship, says Captain Nestor, was steadily eroding, with Rallo wanting to get married and Mullen refusing.

    Another possible motive, suggests Nestor, was that Mullen provided Rallo the funds to bankroll her pawnshop throughout the years. “But he said he was going to cut her off,” Nestor recalls from one of statements Rallo gave police.

    “When we interviewed her, she was very talkative. We thought she was very clever and cunning, but she wasn’t at all defensive,” the police captain adds.

    During the initial investigation, Michael Hill says, police told him that Rallo’s daughter furnished detectives with a book she found tucked under her mother’s mattress, detailing various ways one might kill someone with poison.

    Nestor says Rallo placed arsenic in two bottles of Mullen’s mineral drink, both of which she put in his refrigerator. A third bottle, which Rallo claimed she had drunk from, was found in her car the day of the murder. Rallo maintained it was the same drink as the other two left for Mullen. But a critical toxicology report completed this summer found no traces of arsenic in that third bottle.

    Nestor says the reason for not filing first-degree murder charges was because a jury might question whether Rallo wanted to kill Mullen or just make him extremely ill.

  • The True Story of the St. Louis House That Inspired The Exorcist

    For the residents of this tidy, tree-lined Bel-Nor neighborhood, the haunting story that surrounds the home at 8435 Roanoke Drive may be their worst-kept secret.

    “Oh yeah, that’s the house,” confirms neighbor Cris Coy when asked if he’s aware of the occult history of the two-story brick colonial next door.

    “That’s what they say,” acknowledges Jean Kustura, a 72-year-old widow who for twenty years has kept watch over the north St. Louis County neighborhood from her bungalow on the other side of the infamous house. “But all of that happened back in the 1940s. I’m told the victim is still alive. He won’t talk about it.”

    Other neighbors, including the couple across the street and several families living on adjacent blocks, are also quick to share the mysterious story of the house. Indeed, it seems the only people who aren’t eager to recount the sordid tale are the home’s current owner, Gary Stafford, and the real-estate agent trying to sell the house.

    “I don’t want to talk about it,” bristles realtor Patrick McLaughlin before quickly hanging up the phone. “It’s not going to help me sell the home.”

    Stafford, a real-estate investor who has never lived in the three-bedroom house, says he became aware of the “rumors” only after he purchased it out of bankruptcy this summer. The last person to occupy the residence, a man named Elvis Fantroy, left the building in June and hasn’t been heard from since.

    “I don’t think publicizing it is a good thing,” says Stafford, who’s asking $169,900 for the sturdy 63-year-old domicile that has been on the market more than two months. “It’s certainly not something we’d need to disclose to the future buyer — that, some 50 years ago, a boy who stayed in the house may or may not have been possessed.”

    “Besides,” adds Stafford, attempting to further distance his investment from the events purported to have occurred there, “the exorcism didn’t happen there. It happened at [Saint Louis University].”

    But the fact remains that the real-life story behind author William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel The Exorcist had its origins in St. Louis.

    Legend tells of an ill thirteen-year-old boy who, in the late winter of 1949, traveled to St. Louis from suburban Washington, D.C. Convinced the child was possessed by the Devil, Jesuit priests from Saint Louis University performed a grueling month-long exorcism on the boy, at last freeing the teen from Satan’s grasp in the psych ward at Alexian Brothers Hospital.

    Whether the child was actually possessed is still a matter of debate, but the fact that priests did perform the archaic ritual of the exorcism is not.

    Blatty used a diary kept by one of the exorcists as the basis of his 1971 book, which rode atop best-seller lists for 54 weeks. When Blatty’s seminal shocker hit theaters two years later, filmgoers across the nation threw up in the aisles and ran screaming from movie houses. There were also reports of people conducting their own gothic exorcisms, killing several “possessed” victims in the process.

    Reacting to the hysteria, several priests with intimate knowledge of the St. Louis exorcism came forward to angrily deny some of the more outrageous claims made in the movie, such as the possessed child masturbating with a bloody crucifix and spewing pea-soup-like vomit.

    But the priests did not deny that the exorcism took place in St. Louis. Follow-up news articles, some based on excerpts from the diary Blatty used to pen his book, placed the exorcism at the rectory of St. Francis Xavier College Church on the Saint Louis University campus and in the Alexian Brothers Hospital.

    But missing from almost all accounts is mention of the St. Louis residence where the boy stayed prior to being moved to the rectory and, finally, the hospital.

    But that house was almost certainly the property Stafford recently purchased at 8435 Roanoke Drive. With both the church rectory and the Alexian Brothers Hospital having been razed decades ago, the home remains the last surviving landmark associated with the ghastly story.

    It is within that nondescript brick home that some of the most spellbinding tales of the exorcism occurred.

  • Ozark Orgy

    Warmed by sun, boat exhaust and vast amounts of human urine, the iridescent green water of Party Cove sloshes about at a tepid 85 degrees. Twenty feet below the surface a new biosphere unfolds. Here, the lake sits cool and undisturbed, with silt and sediment lending the water the look and feel of chocolate milk.

    Swimming through these murky depths, diver Tim McNitt spreads his thick arms wide, allowing his hands to rake across the muddy lakebed. Like a foraging catfish, McNitt blindly feels his way through the muck, seeking sunken riches among the discarded beer bottles, plastic Mardi Gras beads and sundry crap blanketing the floor of the cove.

    In this slow, deliberate fashion, McNitt estimates he’s discovered $700,000 worth of jewelry and other valuables in the twenty years he’s been plunging into the gloomy hollows of Lake of the Ozarks. Among the jackpots struck in Party Cove, McNitt’s found Rolex watches, gold chains, diamond bracelets, rolls of cash and scores of designer sunglasses. Most of the loot he sells on eBay or hawks directly through his business, Atlantis Dive & Dock Salvage.

    As for the less-marketable finds — the one-hitters, the syringes, the pistols, the unopened liquor bottles — McNitt discards all but the dildos.

    “They’re great for practical jokes,” exclaims the 42-year-old McNitt, who says he sanitizes the sex toys in his home dishwasher. “I leave them on doorways or tie them to people’s bumpers. It’s a hoot.”

    Yet for all the untapped spoils lurking on the floor of Party Cove, located a mile south of the Grand Glaize Bridge, McNitt warns that his is not an occupation for the weak or timid. He routinely goes deeper than 100 feet in his treasure-hunting pursuits, and as he sees it, his barrel-chested physique is perfect for the job. At just five-foot-six, he’s small enough to keep his limbs from getting tangled in dive cords, yet powerful enough (he claims to bench-press 315 pounds) to bring to the surface damn near anything he finds on the lake bottom.

    Most important, McNitt has the proper disposition for the task.

    “You have to be half-rat to do this,” he cracks, preparing for a dive earlier this month.

    Among his Party Cove war stories, McNitt tells of drunken hellions bombarding him with M-80 fireworks. He recalls run-ins with angry fish, water snakes and saber-toothed muskrats. He describes in detail how Vaseline protects the skin from corrosive solvents polluting the lake. He bemoans the ear and throat infections he invariably picks up during his frequent scavenger dips.

    “I don’t know how many times I’ve been down there and come across a used condom,” McNitt says before disappearing into the water. “The things people do in this lake: It’s disgusting.”

    Health hazards be damned, this Labor Day weekend tens of thousands of Midwesterners will descend upon the Lake of the Ozarks for one last salacious salute to summer. Of those vacationers, the Missouri Water Patrol anticipates between 8,000 and 10,000 will enter the lake’s notorious Party Cove, an audacious free-for-all that’s earned the reputation as a backwater Sodom and Gomorrah. There, under the late-summer sun, partygoers will burn their plump flesh the color of ballpark franks, expose themselves for cheap plastic beads and engage in provocative sex acts with perfect strangers.

    To McNitt’s good fortune, an untold number of thrill-seekers will drop valuables into the drink. At least two people, according to Missouri Water Patrol statistics, will be carted off to the hospital for excessive drinking. Dozens more will be arrested on charges of boating-while-intoxicated (BWI). Chances are better than average that someone will die, with a drug- or alcohol-related drowning occurring in the mile-long Party Cove roughly every three to four years.

    All of this serves to fuel the inlet’s notoriety, which after some twenty years in existence as a party spot may now be reaching its zenith. In May, Men’s Fitness magazine named Party Cove the No. 1 summer party destination in North America — ahead of Las Vegas, Cabo Wabo and South Beach — describing it as a “Greek kegger meets a Roman orgy.”

    A simple Google search on the term “Party Cove” reveals several X-rated Web sites chock-full of photos and videos of bare-breasted women, sunburned genitalia and lots and lots of public sex. A half-dozen other sites carry discussion boards devoted to Party Cove’s orgiastic escapades, and at least two competing firms now offer knockoff Girls Gone Wild videos filmed in the infamous inlet.

    In recent months, the cove has been featured on the Playboy Channel and the television show A Current Affair. Just last month none other than the New York Times ran a front-page story in its July 22 travel section, dubbing the cove “the oldest established floating bacchanal in the country.”

    It’s a reputation confirmed by the Reverend John Mark Hott. For several years the Lake of the Ozarks-based evangelical minister was a fixture in Party Cove, preaching fiery sermons from aboard his 78-foot-long houseboat.

    “We had to learn to preach clothes back onto people,” says a dead-serious Hott, whose off-shore ministry ended in 2003 when his insurer dropped coverage of his floating church. “Whenever someone exposed their genitalia to us, my response was always the same: ‘God has seen everything you got. We don’t need to see it, too!’”

    “We’ve had families go in there, and they were just appalled,” echoes Sergeant Ralph Bledsoe, information officer for the Missouri Water Patrol. “They call wanting us to do something about the drinking and the nudity, but there are no laws against getting drunk — as long as you’re not driving. As for the nudity, well, Missouri state law defines nudity as exposed genitalia. Our officers will arrest them if they’re bottomless, but topless? We can’t do a thing.”

    So widespread is the unruly behavior at the cove that Bledsoe says his agency lets the party go on unabated for the most part, responding only in cases of emergency.

    “We’ve had officers go back in there, and people have thrown beer bottles at them!” says Bledsoe. “It’s not safe.”

    It’s not quite 1 p.m. on a recent Saturday, and already the bacchanal inside Party Cove is in full force. On the bow of a houseboat, a 250-pound woman shakes her tremendous derriere to the Boston classic “More Than a Feeling.” Behind her a stick-figure of a man with the blackened smile of a meth addict thrusts his pelvis into her tremendous rolls of flesh.

    Hundreds of boats — from $1,500 pontoon junkers to million-dollar yachts — float side-by-side, forming three zigzagging barges that stretch nearly the entire length of the cove. In total, some 800 boats and personal watercraft (JetSkis, WaveRunners and the like) will enter the cove this afternoon. On holiday weekends that number can more than double.

    Navigating his way through the cove’s notorious “gauntlet” — a narrow stretch of water through which all passersby are subject to catcalls and water-gun spray — a three-foot-tall midget on a WaveRunner proves an elusive target to the frat boys shooting water cannons at him. When the little person fails to give into women’s screams that he show his penis, the crowd switches its attention to the next vessel floating through the gauntlet: a pontoon boat full of Hell’s Angels.

    Two of the gang members — a character resembling Telly Savalas and his burly friend — take objection to the squirt-gun assault and stand up to shout obscenities at their attackers.

    “Do that again, you little fucker!” the Kojak look-alike yells to one of the frat boys. “You’re fucking dead!”

    Soon another stream of water — this one coming from behind — pelts the biker, leaving a wet ribbon running down the back of his leather vest and onto his jeans. When he turns to confront this new gunman, more drunks open fire, shooting him now from all sides. As he disappears out into the cove, all the soggy biker can do is crack a smile and address his attackers with a one-finger salute.

    Off to the side, a foursome of women in their 30s are reliving their halcyon high school days, shaking their mom-hips and pumping their fists to the sound of Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf.”

    Songs in Party Cove never grow old. Quiet Riot fades into C&C Music Factory. Def Leppard melds into Garth Brooks. The B-52’s give way to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Then, rising above the din, there’s the ever-present sound of Jimmy Buffet, whose “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw” may as well serve as the siren song of Party Cove.

    Legend has it Party Cove is frequented by celebrities and athletes — the likes of Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, John Cusack, Mel Gibson, Cedric the Entertainer and Marshall Faulk. In reality, the cove belongs solely to the redneck, albeit an offshoot of the species wealthy enough to afford vacation homes and luxury boats. As one Web site puts it: “Party Cove is to rednecks what Mecca is to Muslims.”

    While their hillbilly predecessors were content to entertain themselves in the Skee-Ball arcades, salt-water-taffy shops and bumper-car rinks that early on earned the lake the nickname “Lake of the Go Karts,” this new breed of hoosier arrived in the early 1980s with money to burn. Sioux City car dealers, south St. Louis contractors and Omaha insurance brokers built million-dollar lakefront homes and thought nothing of dropping $500,000 on ocean-worthy speedboats.

    In need of a place to show off their vessels, the rednecks congregated in the lake’s “Millionaire Cove,” so named for the mansions lining its shore. When property owners protested the cocaine- and alcohol-fueled benders taking place outside their homes, the party moved to another cove before earning the ire of homeowners there as well.

    For the past ten years Party Cove has tethered its tawdry tit city in Anderson Hollow Cove, alongside Lake of the Ozarks State Park. (To find Party Cove, just follow the armada of boats streaming past the Grand Glaize Bridge on any weekend afternoon.) That the weekly revelry takes place on the doorstep of one of the state’s largest nature preserves is a paradox that does not escape Sue Holst, deputy director of Missouri State Parks.

    “Party Cove is one of the more frustrating management issues we face,” says Holst, who claims the cove’s litter and boat traffic have gravely impaired the park’s shoreline. “But our control stops at the shoreline. Unless we get the cooperation of boaters to move it someplace else, there’s little we can do.”

    Back on the water, Tyler, a student at the University of Illinois, doesn’t seem too concerned with the state park as his friends lift his legs high over his head and place a beer tap securely in his mouth. His keg stand completed, Tyler lets out a boisterous holler and jumps on the back of the boat, offering Mardi Gras beads to the first woman who’ll show him her breasts.

    His girlfriend is the first to respond, flashing her perky gumdrops toward Tyler and a raft of men canoeing their way through the gauntlet. The men carry with them a homemade beer bong fashioned out of a metal funnel, on which they’ve scribbled the words: “Bitch Bang.” When they see the girlfriend’s boobies, they pound the metal funnel and bray like donkeys.

    Minutes later a minor fracas breaks out when three middle-aged men on a cruiser vie for use of the boat’s lone binoculars. A hundred yards away — atop a Scarab speedboat — a pair of naked strippers dance about, rubbing each other’s augmented breasts and clean-shaven clam shells.

    Passing off the binoculars to his friends, one of the sunburned men on the cruiser remarks knowingly: “Welcome to the redneck Riviera. You gotta love it!”

    At the Bridgeview Marina at Osage Beach, the scene is decidedly less bawdy — even if the conversation is not. Seated inside his air-conditioned station house, Greg Newell, owner of the marina, wraps up a story about the time he saw a crew filming a porn flick in Party Cove.

    “That was the first time I saw fisting,” he offers nonchalantly.

    As proprietor of one of the last outposts before entering the Party Cove, Newell has heard plenty of wild tales of the hell-raising. His stories quickly gets others talking, including Sergeant Nick Humphrey of the Missouri Water Patrol, who’s stopped by the marina for a caffeinated energy drink and a break from the brutal August sun.

    In his ten years with the Water Patrol, Humphrey has earned the de facto title Czar of Party Cove. Between 2000 and 2002, he led the nation in the number of BWIs handed out, averaging about 70 a year, with the majority of the arrests coming in or around the cove.

    But it’s not the stories of the routine drunks that Humphrey spills forth today. It’s the lascivious, twisted stuff of Party Cove legend.

    Humphrey tells of the time he entered Party Cove in search of a drunk who’d reportedly fallen from a boat: “We’re bringing up this blue-lipped corpse, and the people in the nearby boats aren’t missing a beat,” he recalls. “When they see the body, they toast it with a few cheers and keep on drinking.”

    Then there’s the story of the guy who called Water Patrol claiming his wife of just a few months had been sexually assaulted in Party Cove. When Humphrey went to investigate, he says he found the men accused of the assault idly drinking beer and acting as though nothing had happened. When questioned, they freely admitted to having sex with the newlywed but added a few details that the husband had left out of his initial complaint. The wife consented to the orgy, and they had the film to prove it.

    “I took the film to Wal-Mart,” recalls Humphrey. “They were right. That woman was not getting raped. That I know.”

    Not to be outdone, Newell one-ups Humphrey with his story of a gay houseboat.

    “There was a guy getting a blowjob on the lower deck, and another guy on the top deck was pissing on his head,” claims Newell. “The guy getting sucked off just stands there pretending he’s washing his hair!”

    “Gross!” cries Diana Jacobson, a 23-year-old Water Patrol trainee. She grimaces at Newell’s story as though she herself were being doused by the golden shower.

    If Lake of the Ozarks ever aired a Baywatch series, Jacobson would no doubt fill the lead role. A corn-fed beauty from northern Illinois, Jacobson wears her blond hair pulled back tight in a ponytail. Hypnotic green eyes lie hidden behind her stylish black shades. Her golden-brown arms reveal an athletic, taut frame.

    By joining Water Patrol, Jacobson has defied the family trade of firefighting in favor of police work. Still, she remains daddy’s little girl, as is evident by the bulky bulletproof vest protruding under her shirt.

    “I promised my dad I’d wear it,” she says. “It’s not so much the bullets he’s concerned about. We stop a lot of fishermen. They all carry knives.”

    After hearing Newell and Humphrey’s stories, Jacobson agrees it would be best if her father goes on thinking that anglers pose her biggest risk. Dad doesn’t need to hear about the legions of dirty old drunks who routinely beg and plead that Jacobson give them a thorough “cuff and stuff.”

    “They’re always yelling out: ‘Arrest me! Arrest me!’” says Jacobson, blushing. “I was busting one guy for a BWI, and he asked if I wanted to party on his boat later that night. I was like, ‘No way!’”

    Just a month into her gig patrolling Party Cove, Jacobson has seen so much debauchery that she’s already immune to much of the flesh circus unfolding around her, offering blind indifference to the exposed breasts and free-swinging genitals.

    “You don’t want to pay attention to those parts,” she says. “You look past them.”

    Within minutes of pulling out of Newell’s marina, she and Humphrey are waved over by a boat, on which sits a woman in her 50s wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and cutoff jeans. Jacobson doesn’t so much as bat an eye at the scene, even when she’s tying up to the boat and a wave nearly sends her flying face-first into the woman’s weathered bosom.

    The couple on the boat, George and Marj Long of central Illinois, want to know why Humphrey and Jacobson didn’t pull over a cruiser that recently sent waves crashing through a no-wake zone.

    Humphrey explains that he did not see the cruiser, then offers the woeful story he tells everyone who complains of Water Patrol’s inability to police the lake.

    “We have over 1,100 miles of shoreline to patrol,” he says. “That’s more shoreline than the entire coast of California.”

    When Union Electric (now Ameren UE) dammed the Osage River in 1931 to create the Lake of the Ozarks, the thought was that the reservoir — once the world’s largest man-made lake — would serve as a rustic sportsmen’s paradise catering to hunters and fishermen. Seventy years later, the outdoorsmen who first flocked to the lake have been replaced by fun-loving hedonists.

    As many as 30,000 leisure craft now take to the lake on summer weekends, making the job of policing the area nearly impossible for the chronically understaffed Water Patrol. With just thirteen officers — and rarely more than half of them on the water at any given time — vast regions of the lake are left with little or no police service.

    As if on cue, Humphrey receives a radio call for a boat that’s broken down on the Little Niangua branch of the lake, some 27 miles away from Party Cove. He and Jacobson were to spend the late afternoon patrolling the cove; now, as the closest Water Patrol unit to the distressed boat, they have no choice but to respond to the emergency call. With Jacobson at the wheel, the two water cops take off across the lake’s choppy surface, leaving Party Cove without its sober chaperones.

    Back inside the cove, the sun hangs low in the western sky, and the heathen hijinks are slowly winding down.

    After six hours of drinking in the hot sun, the University of Illinois students lie about their boat, woozy and sunburned. On an adjacent boat, a bachelor party props up one of its passed-out participants and decorates the fallen warrior with sunglasses, a pen-drawn mustache and an empty beer can, à la Weekend at Bernie’s.

    A woman named Malinda from Kansas City swims about the last remaining boats, asking for cigarettes. Drunk on Jell-O shots and rum runners (a Party Cove favorite consisting of white and dark rum, pineapple juice and bitters), she throws a temper tantrum when she fails to find her minty cancer-stick of choice.

    “Goddamn it, I want me some Camel Men-thawl Lights!” she barks. “Why don’t you have some Camel Men-thawl Lights!?”

    Across the cove a crowd investigates an accident in which a rented ski boat collided with a cruiser. In Missouri, boaters born before 1984 are not required to have a license — or, for that matter, any experience piloting a boat. When coupled with the excessive drinking and boat traffic in Party Cove, the unskilled boaters make this a particularly treacherous place.

    In 2003 the Columbia Daily Tribune named the Lake of the Ozarks one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the nation. The article cited statistics that placed the lake behind only the Atlantic Ocean and the Colorado River in the number of boating accidents, with 725 wrecks occurring between 1997 and 2001. Of the 293 boating accidents reported last year in Missouri, nearly half came in the Lake of the Ozarks.

    But for now the few remaining partygoers need not concern themselves with boating safety. As the revelers depart Party Cove on this Saturday evening, Sergeant Humphrey has yet to return from the call that ferried him to the opposite end of the lake. Typically he’d be stationed at the mouth of the cove right now, trying his best to determine the slightly buzzed from the egregious drunks.

    “The challenge is knowing that nearly everyone out there has been drinking,” Humphrey says. “More often than not, when we pull someone over for suspicion of drunk driving, they’re more than double the legal limit.”

    At ten o’clock Monday morning, diver Tim McNitt and his protégé, Wes Coursey, pilot their pontoon boat to the east shore of Party Cove, which is now remarkably peaceful. Fishermen cast their lines in the middle of the bay. A great blue heron, with its tremendous six-foot wingspan, skims across the surface of the lake.

    The only visible reminders that a party ever occurred here is the litter hugging the shoreline, and two rented houseboats on which a dozen college students are slowly waking from their hangovers.

    McNitt was out diving in the cove the night before, but having found nothing more valuable than a pink strap-on, he’s at it again. After a half-hour submerged on the bottom, he climbs aboard the boat and empties a mesh bag onto the table.

    Among the goodies he’s uncovered are hundreds of Mardi Gras beads, a disposable camera, a half-dozen pairs of sunglasses, a bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade and a pair of ripped bikini bottoms advertising a nonexistent Web site, www.eatme-inc.com.

    Having quickly tossed overboard the worthless camera and moldy bottle of booze, McNitt and Coursey find solace in identifying two pairs of sunglasses as Serengetis and Oakleys, both of which retail well north of $100. McNitt sells the sunglasses for between $50 and $100 a pop, meaning today’s dive netted anywhere from $50 to $200. Not a great day, but not a bad one either.

    Buoying McNitt’s spirit is the knowledge that in Party Cove buried treasure is a renewable resource, and Labor Day promises a bountiful harvest.

    “Sometimes when you hit a good pocket of stuff down there, it’s like going to the grocery store,” he muses. “Other times, you’re not so lucky.”

  • I Punched Saddam in the Mouth

    I Punched Saddam in the Mouth

    In a south-city Saint Louis Bread Co., a young auto mechanic named Samir puts down his coffee long enough to carefully eye the other patrons. Assured no one is paying him any mind, he lowers his voice to a guttural whisper, fidgets with the zipper on his black tracksuit and rubs his grease-stained fingers along a finely manicured goatee. Then, in a syncopated rhythm of street slang and accented English, he transports himself back in time to a bitter-cold December night in Iraq.

    It had to have been the most sublime moment of his life. Samir tells how he arrived in Tikrit as an Arabic interpreter for United States Special Forces in late 2003, how he peered into a hidden bunker and heard a voice begging for mercy, how he reached into the darkness and pulled out Saddam Hussein.

    “I was so angry,” says Samir, who immigrated to St. Louis eleven years ago after fleeing Iraq. “I began cussing at him, calling him a motherfucker, a son-of-a-bitch — you name it. I told him I was Shiite from the south and was part of the revolution against him in 1991. I said he murdered my uncles and cousins. He imprisoned my father.

    “All these years of anger, I couldn’t stop. I tried to say the worst things I could. I told him if he were a real man he would have killed himself. I asked him: ‘Why are you living in that dirty little hole, you bastard? You are a rat. Your father is a rat.’”

    In Arabic, Saddam told Samir to shut up. And when Saddam called him a traitor, an enraged Samir silenced his prisoner with a flurry of quick jabs to the face.

    “I punched Saddam in the mouth.”

    Samir’s extravagant story is difficult to believe — until he pulls out his laptop computer and rifles through the dozens of photographs he shot that night. There’s the photo of Samir posed next to the bodyguard who will ultimately lead U.S. forces to Saddam. There’s the photo of Samir standing behind the stack of $12 million in U.S. currency seized near Saddam’s hideout. And there’s the most riveting image of all: Samir kneeling behind the bruised and bloodied dictator just minutes after his inglorious capture.

    “I would die for this picture,” Samir says. “Without this photo, no one would believe me.”

    It’s largely because of the photos that Samir insists his last name not be used for this article. He’s afraid that extremists loyal to Saddam, or opposed to the U.S. invasion, will retaliate against him or members of his family who continue to live in Iraq.

    But more than that, Samir’s anonymity as a 34-year-old civilian contractor free from military censor enables him to openly discuss the spellbinding saga. His version is far more real-to-life than the “official” Pentagon account.

    The high drama began to unfold around noon on Saturday, December 13, 2003, when Special Forces delivered one of Saddam’s bodyguards to a U.S.-controlled palace outside Tikrit.

    Intelligence officials had long viewed the bodyguard as a crucial linchpin in finding the tyrant. In a room deep within the palace, the officials and Samir went to work interrogating Saddam’s protector.

    “At first he lied to us; he said he didn’t know anything,” recalls Samir, who questioned the bodyguard in a plush recliner called the “Baath Chair” — nicknamed for its role in interrogating members of Saddam’s Baath Party.

    “We made threats to him. Routine stuff, saying we would beat him. Finally, after a couple of hours, he said he knew. Saddam was on a farm.”

    Army soldiers had searched the small farm outside Tikrit twice before and failed to find any evidence of Saddam being there. Compelled to follow up on the tip, Samir, the bodyguard and several intelligence officers piled into a van and headed out for the hunt.

    “He told us that the farmers on the land were serving as lookouts, so we didn’t want to get too close,” Samir says.

    From a distance, the bodyguard-turned-informant pointed out the two-room farmhouse. He said Saddam was living in it and told of an underground bunker where the dictator might hide.

    The reconnaissance complete, the group returned to the palace. By nightfall a brigade of some 600 soldiers from the U.S. Army’s Fourth Infantry Division was in place, along with an armada of eight support helicopters flown in from Baghdad. The raid was imminent.

    At 6:30 p.m. the brigade pulled out of the palace with Samir and the bodyguard riding in the lead Humvee. To keep warm, Samir wore a black stocking cap decorated with a St. Louis Rams insignia. So as not to draw attention, none of the vehicles in the convoy turned on its headlights. But even with the aid of night-vision goggles, it was tough going.

    “It was so hard to see, and the bodyguard kept pointing us down the wrong dirt roads,” Samir recalls. “I was yelling at him and slapping him. I don’t think he was trying to get us lost, but we were getting frustrated.”

    When they arrived at the farm, soldiers quickly detained two of the three farmers who had served as lookouts for Saddam; the third one was never found.

    Back at the farmhouse, Special Forces couldn’t find Saddam or the hidden bunker.

    “The farmers wouldn’t tell us anything,” says Samir. “We were beating the shit out of them, but they weren’t talking.”

    Desperate, they pulled the bodyguard from the Humvee and demanded that he tell them the location of the bunker.

    Samir thought the bodyguard was again trying to deceive them when he told the soldiers they were actually standing on top of Saddam’s secret bunker.

    “I gave him a few slaps on the face and said, ‘What do you mean I’m standing on it?’ We couldn’t see anything. All there was was dirt and leaves. But we got some shovels off the trucks and started digging. Immediately we hit something.”

    Samir says a soldier fired several blank rounds into the bunker’s exposed opening, and a man’s voice cried out from the spider hole, pleading for his life.

    “He said, ‘Don’t shoot. Don’t kill me,’” recounts Samir.

    Peering into the hole, Samir could make out only part of the man. In Arabic, Samir told the fugitive that if he wanted to live, he needed to get out now. When Samir asked to see the man’s hands, he showed his right hand, and then his left, but he wouldn’t show both at the same time.

    “No, I want to see both your hands,” Samir yelled.

    Keeping an eye on the man’s hands, Samir plunged into the hole and grabbed the prisoner. Samir says he knew right away that it was the deposed dictator.

    “He smelled bad, like a homeless person, and had the long beard and hair, but I knew it was Saddam. I told everyone, ‘It’s Saddam. It’s Saddam!’”

    Unconvinced, Special Forces had Samir ask the captive his identity. When the man answered that his name was Saddam, Samir says he shook him by his hair and dirt-matted beard.

    “I said, ‘Yeah, Saddam what? Saddam what?’ Finally he said, ‘Hussein.’”

    Upon hearing that, Samir unleashed years of pent-up rage.

    “I told him that I was going to fuck him up the ass. That we were all going to fuck him up the ass. I told him he was a criminal and a murderer. I hit him and spit in his face. I stepped my foot on his head and his back. He wasn’t crying, but I think he was shocked. No one had ever treated him this way.”

    The beating over, Samir tossed his digital camera to a nearby soldier, who quickly snapped a shot of Samir kneeling over the fallen despot.

    Later, when the world’s most wanted man was whisked onto an awaiting helicopter, Samir remembers Saddam muttering to himself in English, asking the same question again and again: “America, why? America, why?”

    An hour later, as Saddam sat in the Baath Chair for his initial interrogation, Samir joined an adrenaline-fueled celebration taking place in a makeshift palace bar. Samir and his photos became the center of attention. Several members of Special Forces abandoned their Heinekens long enough to download the photos onto their laptops.

    It was a hell of a party, Samir recalls, but amid the back slaps, toasts and laughter, he felt a nervous twinge in his gut. During the capture Samir’s commanding officer scolded him for taking the photo of Saddam, and now he panicked that the attention surrounding the picture could raise further ire.

    Before going to bed that night, Samir downloaded the photos onto his laptop, replaced the camera’s memory card with a new one and hid the chip containing the images deep within his luggage.

    Samir was a twenty-year-old college student living in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah when he joined a civilian uprising against Saddam. It was 1991, and U.S. and coalition fighters had just declared a ceasefire after liberating Kuwait.

    Encouraged by the Republican Guard’s swift defeat, Samir grabbed the family AK-47 and joined thousands of southern Shiites organizing a massive rebellion. In hindsight, Samir says, the revolution was doomed from the start.

    The ceasefire allowed Saddam to regroup and launch a counterattack against his own people. It soon became clear that the United States never planned to assist the Shiites with any tactical support. The failure of the U.S. government to provide military assistance during the uprising still strikes a sour chord with Samir and countless other Shiites.

    “We were defenseless,” fumes Samir. “Saddam began a retaliation campaign with tanks and helicopters. Our guns were useless.”

    Samir lost a cousin in the fighting. In other anti-Saddam strongholds, such as the southern city of Basra, Saddam’s forces slaughtered thousands. Republican Guard tanks were reported to be painted with the message “After today, no more Shiites.”

    “I knew I had to leave,” reflects Samir. “Everyone in my village knew I was part of the uprising. It was only a matter of time before [Saddam’s forces] would kill me.”

    Three weeks after taking up arms, Samir told his parents he was going to flee the country. Reluctantly they agreed.

    For 500 dinar (about $3.50 at the time) a smuggler hid Samir in the back of a van and drove him within twenty miles of U.S. military fortifications along the Iraqi-Saudi Arabian border. Samir would walk the rest of the journey, crossing desert and barren farmland before surrendering himself to a U.S. soldier.

    A few days later, he boarded a military cargo plane for the remote desert camp of Rafha in north-central Saudi Arabia. Samir spent the next three and a half years in the sprawling tent city, which, in the year following the war, swelled to a population of more than 33,000 Iraqi refugees.

    Samir describes his time at Rafha as intolerably boring and uncomfortable. Temperatures in the desert routinely rose to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and blinding sandstorms blanketed everything in mounds of dirt and grime.

    During his second year at the camp, Samir began receiving letters from his cousin Zeiad al-Hachami, one of the first Iraqi refugees to win asylum in the United States. Zeiad’s letters from his new home in St. Louis convinced Samir that he wanted to resettle in America.

    “It sounded so good,” says Samir, whose fascination with America was forged as a child, when he watched the cowboy westerns of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.

    A few years later, when Samir was granted asylum, he told immigration officials he wanted to live in St. Louis. His first impression of the Gateway City might be well suited for the city’s visitor-guide propaganda.

    “I thought it was Heaven,” says Samir. “Everything was so green and clean. Coming from the middle of the desert, it was a big deal. It was beautiful.”

    Samir didn’t sleep a wink the night he unearthed Saddam. Long after the party, he lay in bed replaying the unforgettable mission over and over in his mind. He pulled his laptop to the corner of the bed and once again viewed the image of him posed behind the handcuffed despot. At 6 a.m. he placed a call to St. Louis.

    Mohammad Al-Baaj took the call in his south St. Louis home. Mohammed and Samir’s fathers are best friends in Iraq, and their children have known each other all their lives.

    “He told me to turn on CNN,” recounts Mohammad, a brawny and jovial man. Weeks after casting his ballot in the January Iraqi national election, Mohammad still wears the purple dye on his index finger that marks him as a voter.

    “He said he did something amazing but couldn’t tell me. I didn’t know what to think. I watched CNN from nine o’clock till four in the morning — nothing. Finally I’m going to bed around four a.m., and they say that Saddam Hussein had been captured.

    “A few hours later, Samir called me back. I said, ‘You my man! Tonight I’m going to throw a party for you even if you can’t be here. I’m going to throw a party.’”

    There were no parties for Samir when he first arrived in America in the spring of 1994. He landed in St. Louis with just six dollars in his pocket, and he could barely speak English. Since then he’s gained a vast network of Iraqi and American friends, and parlayed his love of automobiles toward making a comfortable living.

    “He is a darn good mechanic,” enthuses Nadir Malik, general manager of the airport shuttle service TransExpress, who hired Samir as a driver in 2001, only to learn later on that he was also talented under the hood. “Samir could dissect a military tank and put it back together in the same day. He’s that good.”

    While working for TransExpress in the first few months of 2003, Samir again became swept up in efforts to topple Saddam’s regime. At the time, President George W. Bush delivered an ultimatum threatening war if the Iraqi government did not allow United Nations weapons inspectors access to the country.

    It took but a few hours for Samir to ace a screening exam qualifying him as an Arabic/English interpreter for the U.S. military. Days later he received his first assignment: He was to report immediately to Kuwait.

    On May 2, 2003, Bush landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln — its tower adorned with a huge sign that read “Mission Accomplished” — to announce an end to combat operations in Iraq.

    Arriving in Kuwait, Samir worried he’d missed all the action and was told there would be little use for him now. Demanding to be reassigned, he was dispatched to Tallil Airbase in Iraq and given the job of interviewing civilians and interrogating prisoners.

    After his plane touched down in the dead of night in the second week of May 2003, Samir learned that the airbase was just outside his hometown of Nasiriyah.

    “The first thing I told my boss was that I was from Nasiriyah and hadn’t been back since 1991,” says Samir. “She freaked out. She could not believe it. She said, ‘Tomorrow we will take you to find your family.’”

    The next morning Samir hopped on a Humvee for the half-hour drive to his parents’ home. The entire neighborhood, some 700 residents, poured into the streets to greet him.

    “It was an awesome feeling,” he says. “I felt like I was coming with the U.S. forces to free my family. It was the best feeling of my life.”

    Samir saw his parents often over the course of his six-month deployment in Nasiriyah, many times bringing with him soldiers from the airbase to share in meals and family celebrations. When his contract lapsed in October 2003, Samir returned to the States and immediately signed up for a second tour.

    Within a few weeks he was again in Iraq, but this time, instead of being stationed in the relatively docile south, Samir was assigned to the northern city of Tikrit, where elite U.S. forces were engaged in a massive manhunt to find Saddam Hussein.

    Ten days after Saddam’s capture, an Army officer burst into Samir’s room, demanding his photos.

    “He said officials at the Pentagon saw the photo with Saddam on the Internet and were pissed,” recalls Samir.

    It was months before the scandal of Abu Ghraib would break, but in hindsight Samir believes the military was doing some pre-emptive damage control. The picture of Samir gloating over Saddam could be seen as degrading, perhaps incriminating. A close inspection of the photo reveals blood on Saddam’s lips where Samir’s fists landed their mark.

    “I begged him not to take the photos. I made a huge scene,” recounts Samir. “But he took my laptop and erased everything. Even things that were in the trash can.”

    In reality, Samir’s protests were merely illusory, for he had hidden away scores of copies of the photos, even going so far as to pass some along to fellow interpreters for safekeeping.

    Today, military officials maintain they know of Samir’s pictures but are unaware of any efforts to destroy the images.

    “That may have happened to a certain extent on a local level, but it wasn’t an objective here at Central Command,” says Captain Alison Salerno, a public-affairs officer with the military’s Tampa-based Central Command. “In a lot of situations the military frowns on so-called souvenir photos, and in this case the interpreter should’ve been instructed that private photos of a detainee that show their faces are not appropriate.”

    For his part, Samir is unapologetic.

    “What were they going to do? Fire me? Send me home? Fine.”

    Samir remains adamant that he never released the pictures onto the Internet and speculates the leak might have come from Special Forces.

    Within days of finding its way online, Samir’s photo with Saddam was splashed across newspapers and televisions around the world. In Iraq, the news that the man who captured Saddam was an Iraqi made Samir’s face — if not his name — a well-known image.

    For months after returning to St. Louis, Samir kept a low profile. Few people outside the city’s Iraqi community (estimated to be some 3,000 people) knew the identity of the man in the photo.

    “I was scared to talk about it outside of my friends,” says Samir. “I didn’t know what might happen. In general, lots of people say they were happy about the capture of Saddam, but I know there are a lot of people out there who don’t agree. They support Saddam or don’t think the United States should be there.”

    It was only last summer — after a friend with connections to the Missouri Republican Party arranged a meeting between Samir and President George W. Bush — that Samir’s story became public.

    The meeting, held prior to Bush’s campaign stop at the St. Charles Family Arena last July, lasted just a few minutes. Samir relayed to the president his story of capturing Saddam and presented him a gift of Iraqi beads signifying good luck. Bush told Samir he was immensely proud.

    Samir’s boss at the time, Nadir Malik, says Samir was back at work replacing a transmission just hours after meeting the president.

    “It was unbelievable in a sense,” recalls Malik. “I said, ‘You just met the leader of the free world, and now you’re covered in grease working on an engine?’ But that’s very much like Samir, he’s pretty laid back.”

    Later, CNN and other outlets would grab the story. In January, a film crew from the cable network trailed Samir, Mohammad Al-Baaj and two other St. Louis residents of Iraqi descent as they drove Samir’s green BMW 740 to Nashville to register to vote in the nation’s first democratic elections in more than 50 years.

    Followed to the polling station by the television cameras, Samir soon found himself surrounded by a crowd of Iraqi nationals.

    “At first there were a dozen, then fifty,” Samir says with a grin. “Soon there were probably a hundred people. It was amazing.”

    CNN led the story with the following teaser: “It’s a world-famous photograph showing a man in military camouflage holding Saddam Hussein down on the ground. What you may not know is that the man actually lives in the St. Louis area. He was working with the U.S. military as a interpreter when American forces discovered Saddam’s secret hiding place. Well, he ended being the first person to grab Saddam as he crawled out of his spider hole.”

    After learning that Samir wore a St. Louis Rams cap during Saddam’s capture, the football team last season comped him several pairs of front-row tickets at the Edward Jones Dome.

    More recently he was honored by the arena football franchise, River City Rage, which invited him to speak at a press conference last month announcing the team’s new season and new ownership group.

    Orchestrating the event was Ed Watkins, a slender man outfitted in a dark suit coat and a pair of wrinkled khakis. Watkins owned the franchise for the previous two seasons when it played under the pious moniker the Believers, and he was not about to hand off the team without a bit of last-minute pageantry.

    “One of the great things about this country is our ability to express our opinion,” Watkins told the two-dozen or so folks who crammed their way into a hotel conference room to witness the meeting. “That said, I’m doggone happy to present to you a man who’s a hero in Iraq and here.”

    Samir strode confidently to the podium, dapperly attired in the English-cut suit and red-and-white tie he wears only for such events as this. He proceeded to recite a G-rated version of what is by now a well-rehearsed story and concluded his speech by expressing heartfelt regret that he would be unable to attend the team’s home opener. Samir had been scheduled to be the special guest during a halftime performance titled “Honor America.”

    With misty brown eyes, he told the crowd: “I won’t be here, but my heart will be.”

    Samir’s friends say that away from the media spotlight, he’s changed little since the night of December 13, 2003. He still wears his everyday uniform, a black tracksuit and Air Jordan sneakers, and works out daily at Bally’s in Clayton. And he’s more than willing to provide free auto service to friends.

    Samir is quick to anger when people dismiss the necessity of the U.S. invasion of Iraq — or, even worse, when they question the validity of Saddam’s capture.

    Such was the case early last month when United Press International ran a story debunking the public version of Saddam’s capture. Based on an interview a former U.S. Marine gave to a Saudi newspaper, the article, which received scant attention, said Saddam was apprehended a day earlier than the official reported date of Saturday, December 13, and surrendered only after an intense firefight.

    The ex-Marine, Nadim Abou Rabeh, of Lebanese descent, also said Saddam was not taken from the clutches of the spider hole but found in a modest home in a small village. Nadim claimed, too, that a military production team later fabricated the film of Saddam removed from the hole.

    “People will believe what they want to believe,” scoffs Samir, who heard the story but paid it no mind. “I was there. I know what happened.”

    Samir says that the night he took down Saddam has led him to pursue a higher purpose in life. He recently turned down a friend’s offer of $60,000 a year to run his auto shop.

    “I want to do something bigger than my old job,” he says. “My life has changed big time because of Saddam and because of the war. I want to continue to be part of this.”

    Late last month Samir returned to Iraq for the third time since the fall of Saddam’s regime. This time he’s working not as a interpreter but as a political and cultural consultant in the U.S. government’s rebuilding efforts. The job can earn Samir in excess of $100,000 a year, though he says he’d do it for half as much.

    As to the risks of arbitrary suicide bombings, Samir says he’d rather die in Iraq than here in a car accident or from a heart attack.

    “Everyone dies one day,” he muses. “Dying with honor is better than dying with nothing. At least you’re going to be remembered.”

    Such bravado hardly surprises Mohammad Al-Baaj, who says his friend has never been lacking in confidence.

    “He told me that maybe now he’ll capture Osama Bin Laden,” cracks Mohammad. “I’m just jealous that I wasn’t there when he captured Saddam — to smack him around and say bad things to him. Can you imagine? I guarantee you Saddam will never forget that experience. He’ll never forget Samir.”

  • The Resurrection of Carl Officer

    Carl Officer is seated at the reception desk in the foyer of his family’s Missouri Avenue funeral parlor, answering phones. The 52-year-old mayor of East St. Louis, who typically favors dark tailored suits, is uncharacteristically casual today in a mustard-green turtleneck sweater and olive slacks.

    “It’s election day,” Officer rationalizes. “I never know when I’m gonna have to wrassle.”

    The mayor rises, strolls to his office and commences slurping on a Styrofoam cup of soup. Always svelte, Officer looks even skinnier than usual on this late-February afternoon, perhaps because he’s given up meat for Lent. Not that the mayor, an ordained minister, thinks the Eye in the Sky is keeping score.

    “I don’t think God gives a crap whether or not I eat a cheeseburger,” he deadpans as he welcomes a stocky woman in her mid-sixties into his office.

    As it turns out, this woman is enrolled in a program called Fore Thought, which allows an individual to start planning and paying for her funeral long before the day of reckoning. She is here to establish a financing plan to pay for the basics: flower arrangements, steel-blue casket, plot of land, et cetera. The woman, who subsists on a fixed income in a housing project in the East St. Louis suburb of Venice, winces when it comes time to talk about a down payment.

    Not to worry, Officer interjects. He proposes an arrangement, based on his firsthand appreciation of her proficiency with all foods soul: He’ll take care of the down payment, he says, “as long as you keep feeding me for the next sixteen years.”

    The deal sealed, Officer beckons a mortuary employee to fire up his jet-black 1974 Stutz Blackhawk so he can drive the client home. (At one time Carl’s late father, Marion — his predecessor as funeral director and the founder of Officer Mortuary — owned more than 80 cars, many of which he kept stashed in Arizona to guard against rust.) After depositing his client in Venice, Officer speeds to city hall, parks in his reserved stall and ascends to his third-floor office, where his four-year-old daughter, Carli, is camped out with a blanket and pillow on the floor near Officer’s desk, eating popcorn and watching Nickelodeon in the dark under the supervision of the mayor’s lone full-time aide, Girt Clemons.

    “Daddy, you’ve been a bad boy,” she says. She allows herself to be scooped up in her grinning father’s arms and toted through city hall’s front double doors, repeating the phrase over and over, as four-year-olds are wont to do. Placing her in the back seat of the Stutz and plopping himself in the cockpit, Officer turns the key in the ignition.

    The engine fails to respond. The Stutz is dead.

    But then, Carl Officer is plenty comfortable with death. The possessor of a degree in mortuary and funeral services from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, he’s comfortable looking a living, breathing woman in the eye and telling her precisely how she’s going to be remembered after her ability to witness such a ceremony in the flesh is rendered moot by her Savior. And he’s comfortable plotting the resuscitation of East St. Louis, a decrepit urban relic of Industrial Age politics, even though some claim Officer himself had a heavy hand in squeezing the last drop of life out of the city during his first go-round as mayor in the 1980s.

    It could be said that Carl Officer began and ended his tumultuous twelve-year reign as mayor of East St. Louis chest-deep in trash. When he took office at the age of 27 in 1979 with the full backing of East St. Louis’ influential Democratic Party machine, he hopped in the back of a garbage truck to personally haul litter amid a refuse-collectors’ strike.

    “He’s a go-getter, he’s young, he’s trusted,” recalls Andrew Theising, a Southern Illinois University Edwardsville political science professor and author of Made in USA: East St. Louis. “It really did look like a new day was dawning.”

    The college-educated, affluent heir to a revered East St. Louis family of morticians, Officer, then the nation’s youngest mayor, was unlike any politician the town had ever seen, seemingly free of the shackles of political-capital deficits and personal financial need that had hamstrung past leaders.

    “A new day really did dawn for a while,” says Debra Moore, director of SIUE’s Institute for Urban Research and an East St. Louis native. “He was not only the mayor, he was the hope for the city. Carl came to the position well-educated and having a financial capacity that did not dictate a need. So he came from a perspective that he could make a difference and really turn the city around.”

    By all accounts, Officer spent his first term doing just that, aided by federal and state grants and a large staff over which he had direct supervision. But in time the task proved daunting. Officer had inherited a city that had lost nearly two-thirds of its commercial base and nearly half its population in the 1960s and ’70s, with a citizenry ground down by Depression-era unemployment levels that led to high rates of crime and poverty.

    “East St. Louis was collapsing,” says Norman Ross, head of the local Chamber of Commerce. “Regardless of who the mayor was, you were gonna have the same problems.”

    Others, however, maintain that it wasn’t the city that stymied the mayor, but Officer who tripped up the city.

    “I think he lost sight of what his purpose was: to rebuild the city,” says East St. Louis City Council member Eddie Jackson, a onetime Officer ally who’s now an arch nemesis. “He was horrible administratively. He spent over $80,000 on limousines. And he didn’t get along with any elected officials. Anywhere.”

    Adds fellow city councilman Charlie Powell, who does double duty as chair of the city’s Central Democratic Committee: “At the end of Carl Officer’s twelfth year, we were $150 million in debt, couldn’t pay police officers and couldn’t pick up the trash.”

    He’s right: When Carl Officer was defeated in the 1991 Democratic primary, East St. Louis was in such dire financial straits that there was no garbage truck for the soon-to-be-ex-mayor to hop onto, no cans for him to sling over his shoulder from city block to city block. Moreover, the Illinois legislature had taken the unprecedented step of creating a special panel to oversee the city’s suspect financial dealings. In the space of twelve years, Officer had gone from favorite son to prodigal son, his reputation sullied by allegations of egotism, recklessness, womanizing, selfishness, immaturity, corruption, megalomania, senseless grandeur and race baiting.

    Knocked out of the fast lane and the public eye, on the cusp of his 40th birthday Carl Officer saw in himself a maturity deficiency. So the lifelong bachelor spent the next decade-plus finding a wife, finding Jesus and finding a way to expand his family’s flourishing funeral business. For the first time in his professional life, he was a civilian — and making an earnest go of it with his political future seemingly dashed.

    But never underestimate the restorative talents of an embalming-school graduate. Them boys are trained to make a corpse look as though it could jump right out of the coffin and walk again, if the Lord would just grant permission.

    I remember my first visit to East St. Louis two and a half years ago like it was yesterday. I was new to the area and looking for a roller rink located on a dead-end road near Officer Mortuary. Unacquainted with the city’s grid system, I came at the rink from the wrong side and ended up in an industrial area bordered by a chain-link fence. I’d just pulled into a parking lot to reverse course when another motorist motioned to me from the cab of his imposing truck. We both rolled down our windows.

    “Do you know where you are?” asked the driver, a Caucasian who appeared to be in his early thirties. “You’re in East St. Louis, boy. You’d better get the fuck up out of here.”

    Properly redirected to Missouri Avenue, I could see what he meant, in a way. West-side legend paints a portrait of an East St. Louis rife with machine-gun-toting gang bangers and a drug dealer on every corner, the sort of place where the mere sight of a honky at a stoplight equals a carjacking. Such characters exist in East St. Louis, of course, but in no greater concentration than in any other downtrodden urban area. What was striking about that first visit to East St. Louis wasn’t any palpable menace, but rather a pervasive sense of desolation, as if the municipal lords had thrown in the towel on this city a quarter-century ago, hightailing it without even troubling to stitch up its wounded shell. I wanted to get the fuck up out of East St. Louis not because I was scared, but because it was so depressing.

    Not surprising, then, that the city suffers from a dearth of capable young adult residents. Men and women who saw the city brought to its knees as youths during Carl Officer’s first reign want little to do with their hometown today.

    “There’s a youth outage, quite frankly,” says recently appointed city manager Alvin Parks Jr., a 1979 Lincoln High grad who went on to earn degrees at Morehouse College in Atlanta and Washington University in St. Louis. (Lincoln High has since been turned into a middle school, leaving the city with just one public secondary school, East St. Louis Senior High.) “People from the ’70s and ’80s have chosen not to come back. I lived through the wheels coming off. People would just run, knowing police cars couldn’t go more than 35 miles per hour. We had trash literally blocking the streets. Sanford & Son was junk. This was vermin. This was trash.”

    While the 1990s saw a return of garbage collection and operable police cruisers to the streets of East St. Louis, the hopelessness remains.

    “There are limited opportunities inside the city limits,” explains Chris Hudlin, an insurance broker headquartered in the flagging wasteland that passes for downtown East St. Louis. “You get your degree and then a headhunter calls and says, ‘Come to New York, come to Atlanta.’ So of course you leave.”

    Some have chosen to stay. Take, for instance, Patricia Gibson, an east-side native who in 1994 expanded her small nursing home on State Street to a million-dollar facility next door. Like Parks, Gibson went away to school — she holds a master’s in public health and nursing administration from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill — yet she never wavered in her intent to return home.

    “African Americans, in general, don’t have the ability to say where our roots are,” Gibson says. “I can’t say anything about the tribe I come from, but this is home. East St. Louis is rich in culture and location. It’s almost as if it’s a silver teapot with tarnish on it. You just need to wipe it off.

    “Most people either love East St. Louis or hate it,” Gibson concludes. “I love it.”

    Her affinity is tested often, however, especially as it pertains to tax-increment financing (TIF) funds Gibson and several fellow entrepreneurs claim are being unfairly diverted to outside interests.

    “We were approved three times during the [Mayor Debra] Powell administration,” says Cedric Taylor, who owns Javon’s Fine Dining downtown and Club Casino on the south side and has yet to see a dollar of TIF money. Taylor says that when it comes to TIF funds, small businesses like his and Gibson’s are passed up in favor of big developers, who hog the whole pie. “It seems like the only TIF money they release is to the Casino Queen and Foot Locker,” he alleges, citing two recent beneficiaries, both of which have ties to out-of-town developer Jim Koman.

    “The city’s supposed to help local businesses, but TIF dollars go to those who can give the biggest campaign donations,” seconds Wade Wicks, a Republican precinct committeeman and Officer supporter who owns a Mobil station at Collinsville Avenue and State Street. “Outsiders come in and raid dollars. Small businessmen don’t have a voice.”

    It was this breed of pent-up street-level frustration that created the perfect scenario for Carl Officer to strike a populist, anti-establishment tone in his successful run for mayor in 2003, a campaign that saw him nudge out machine-backed candidate Eddie Jackson by 233 votes after finishing a distant second in the primary. (East St. Louis employs a nonpartisan runoff system, in which the top two mayoral candidates advance to the general election.)

    “It had nothing to do with Carl whatsoever,” scoffs Charlie Powell, leader of East St. Louis’ legendary Democratic machine. “If you’re an Officer in East St. Louis, you’re just like a Kennedy. He’s royalty. And he’s a schmoozer.”

    But this time Officer arrived at city hall to find a mayor’s office that had been stripped of virtually all the authority it wielded during his first go-round. Where once he was surrounded by nineteen staffers and possessed the power to hire and fire at will, nowadays Officer is designated a lone paid civil servant and must rely on volunteers to answer his phone and man the reception area — duties he occasionally undertakes himself if nobody’s available. The city manager — a position that was created in the wake of Officer’s first tenure — does all the hiring and supervises all city services. These days the office of mayor is considered a part-time job (though interestingly, Officer’s annual salary is $50,000 — $20,000 more than he earned as a full-time mayor in the 1980s).

    Beyond the role of symbolic public figurehead, the extent of the mayor’s reach is a single vote on the East St. Louis City Council. And considering that Officer spent a great deal of his campaign trashing the council’s power brokers — one of whom was his opponent in the general election — he now finds himself completely shut out of Powell and Jackson’s inner circle and on the losing end of virtually every three-to-two council vote.

    “Carl has to get permission to call a cab,” quips SIUE’s Moore. “And the council won’t give him that permission today.”

    After a year and a half of cranky public gamesmanship, matters came to a brisk boil at the December 30 city council meeting at which Alvin Parks was confirmed as city manager. After interim city manager Bob Storman announced his retirement amid published allegations that he’d exposed himself to a female staff member, Jackson, Powell and council ally Eddie Russell tapped Parks for the $81,000-per-year post without consulting Officer or Karen Cason, the mayor’s lone council collaborator.

    “I find it personally insulting that you guys would have met and chosen a city manager without offering me, Ms. Cason and the taxpayers a minimum of input,” Officer sneered. “I think this government’s being run in a cesspool of back-room bullshit.”

    The mayor then fixed his gaze on Parks. “Don’t get sucked into this crap. They will chew you up and spit you out after the April elections,” Officer said, referring to the fact that both Powell and Jackson are up for election. “Alvin, I implore you: Don’t do this to yourself.”

    (Counters Parks, who attends the same church as Officer and is a long-time family friend: “If you’re calling it a cesspool, why do you want to be a part of it? If it’s good enough for you, then why not me?”)

    As the meeting drew to a close, it became evident that Officer’s venom was not directed at Parks but at the kingmakers who’d anointed the city manager-to-be.

    “If you think I’ve been a thorn in your side up until now,” the mayor addressed Powell, Jackson and Russell, “I’m gonna be on you like white on rice, like stink on shit. Whatever I can do to get rid of the three of y’all, I’m gonna do it. Every single breath of my day is gonna be concentrated on getting rid of the three of you from public service.”

    As the events of the next two months unfolded, Officer would discover that his frustration was shared by two powerful cohorts: the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    Five dollars and a sandwich is the going rate for vote buying in East St. Louis — or so it has been alleged by many people, for many years. Political corruption is one of the worst-kept secrets in a city rivaled only by Chicago for its purported capacity to cast votes for dead folks or to make a ballot box disappear.

    “East St. Louis has had a negative image since the cowboy days,” says nursing-home operator Pat Gibson. “Nothing shocks me anymore.”

    But even in a town inured to having its elected officials paraded in shackles before federal grand juries, the indictments of January 21 packed an unprecedented wallop.

    On that Friday, the FBI apprehended four government employees, including two key department heads, on charges ranging from perjury to conspiracy to kill a federal witness. One of the department heads, police chief Ronald Matthews, resigned shortly after his arraignment. Matthews and his secretary, Janerra Carson-Slaughter, were each charged with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice for their alleged roles in helping a member of Matthews’ auxiliary force, a convenience-store owner and ex-con named Ayoub “Dave” Qattoum, illegally obtain a firearm. Qattoum faces the same charges, plus a count of unlawful possession of a firearm. An additional charge of perjury was leveled against Matthews for allegedly providing false testimony to a federal grand jury.

    “He’s pled not-guilty to all counts and intends to defend himself,” says Matthews’ lawyer, Stephen Welby, whose client’s trial date is May 10.

    On March 15 Carson-Slaughter and Qattoum entered guilty pleas to the conspiracy and firearms charges leveled against them; in exchange, the government dropped the outstanding charges. Sentencing is scheduled for June 13.

    “Obviously, we want to bring all the favorable information available to the court’s attention in support of Ms. Carson-Slaughter,” reports Carson-Slaughter’s lawyer, Scott Rosenblum.

    Qattoum’s lawyer, Jim Stern, declined to comment on his client’s case.

    Meanwhile, the revelation that East St. Louis’ auxiliary police force included a convicted felon led to the subsequent dismissal of 22 of the unit’s 58 officers, after background checks revealed that they too carried substantial rap sheets.

    As serious as those charges are, they pale in comparison to the plight of Kelvin Ellis, the city’s director of regulatory affairs. A precinct committeeman and integral cog in the Powell-Jackson political machine, Ellis ascended to his post despite having served 21 months of hard time on a federal extortion charge in 1990, when he was employed as the city’s personnel director during the first Officer administration. This time around Ellis is charged with three counts of income-tax evasion and four counts of obstruction of justice — one of which involves tape-recorded conversations during which Ellis allegedly contracted for the murder of a government informant. (For highlights from the tape transcripts, see “Problem’s Over” in the January 26 Riverfront Times.)

    That allegation, in turn, sheds new light on rampant but unfounded rumors that Ellis put out a similar hit on former city manager Harvey Henderson, who died in 2002 after mysteriously falling from an overpass. (Illinois State Police classified Henderson’s death as accidental.)

    Ellis, who is being held in prison without bail, was snared via wiretapped conversations with Deputy Police Chief Rudy McIntosh, who’d offered his services to the FBI as an informant. A little more than a week later, McIntosh, a former undercover narcotics officer who is currently a precinct committeeman and a candidate for East St. Louis township supervisor, was put on paid administrative leave pending a state police investigation into whether he shot and killed Floyd Reese in 1979. (McIntosh, a nineteen-year-old civilian at the time, confirms he was at the scene of Reese’s murder but denies having played a role in the unsolved crime, which occurred during an altercation involving a dice game.) The East St. Louis Police Department’s internal-affairs unit is also looking into whether McIntosh and three of his fellow officers joined the force without having earned either a high school diploma or GED — a benchmark requirement. McIntosh says he earned the equivalency degree after being expelled from high school.

    Also revealed at Ellis’ January 29 detention hearing were allegations that the defendant had been operating a prostitution ring from his office in city hall.

    “In all my years of public service, I could never have imagined these allegations against a municipal employee,” Officer says of the charges faced by his former director of personnel. “This is a small southern Illinois community. There’s no oil here. Yet these boys play politics at a level found nowhere outside of Chicago or New Orleans.

    “We have a considerable amount of convicted felons running city departments,” notes the mayor. “That should have said something to somebody.”

    The day Ellis was indicted, Officer held a press conference at city hall to discuss the allegations. Flanked by two of his former taxpayer-funded police bodyguards, Lester “Boom” Anderson and Delbert Marion — a pair of Marine Corps veterans who are opposing Jackson and Powell in the April 5 city council elections (the top two win) — Officer said he felt the indictments were “just the tip of the iceberg.”

    Officer makes no bones about his opinion that the FBI’s tentacles will inevitably reach Powell and Jackson, both of whom testified before a federal grand jury looking into voter-fraud allegations stemming from Democrat Mark Kern’s narrow victory over Republican Steve Reeb in the hotly contested race last November to replace long-time St. Clair County supervisor John Baricevic.

    A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office confirms that Powell and Jackson testified before the grand jury but declines to speculate on the outcome of the investigation, which is ongoing.

    Reeb says a large sum of cash funneled from the St. Clair County Democratic Party to the East St. Louis Central Democratic Committee in the week leading up to election day was used to buy the votes of East St. Louisans, 82 percent of whom favored Kern. (Reeb carried the rest of the county.)

    Jackson, who holds the title of first vice chair of the Central Democratic Committee, will not comment on anything related to the grand jury’s proceedings.

    Committee chairman Powell says the influx of money was spent to pay for doorbelling and other legitimate get-out-the-vote efforts. “There’s quite a bit of money spent in East St. Louis because it’s staunch Democratic and poor,” he explains. “People know that on election day they can get hired by committeemen. This is jackpot day, and they know the committeeman has the money. It’s really just a hustle: The money is spent to attract and turn out the vote. I provide lunch at my polling place, because you want them to come.”

    Testimony at Ellis’ detention hearing painted a less-innocent picture. There Assistant U.S. Attorney Hal Goldsmith alleged that Ellis had ordered one of his employees to pay voters “who voted the way he wished” in the November 2 elections.

    In most cities, such a string of events would be a black eye. Not so in East St. Louis.

    “To be perfectly honest, I think everyone in East St. Louis is elated that the FBI is here,” says Pat Gibson. “The fight that Carl has down there is a fight against evil. The devil has always been in East St. Louis. To kill that devil, you have to stand up to him.”

    Adds SIUE’s Professor Theising: “Right now Charlie Powell is facing a significant investigation. The future of East St. Louis’ power structure hinges on the outcome.”

    But, cautions Theising, “The larger issue is: Where do you stop enforcing the law? Selective enforcement has been a reality in politics forever. What if you took the same magnifying glass and used it in Chicago? You’d see the same activity with much bigger names attached.”

    Former city manager and ex-deputy mayor (under Officer) Lamar Gentry cites East St. Louis’ chronic bureaucratic ineptitude as the chief reason the feds have singled out the city.

    “There’s corruption in every city,” asserts Gentry, who now works for a real estate agency on the southern edge of town. “But if you take care of business, people turn their heads. And the perception here is that they haven’t done anything in years.”

    When people speak of the change that’s occurred in Carl Officer since he left office in 1991, they inevitably circle back to Lisa, his wife of seven years, and Carli, his four-year-old daughter.

    At city hall, Officer’s lone legislative aide is a woman. Most of the volunteers who answer his phone are women. His press liaison is a woman. The matronly acquaintances who pray with him at his mortuary every couple of weeks since his beloved mother’s death last April are women. And the neighbors who paddled his misbehaving ass every afternoon back when Carl was a student at Crispus Attucks Elementary School were women.

    “I got a beating from every lady in every one of these houses,” Officer reminisces, pointing to a row of homes near the center of town, across the street from the grade school. “I wasn’t bad, I was mischievous. After they’d beat me, they’d give me a tea cake or something.”

    Strong women have helped focus Carl Officer’s priorities and have made him a more patient man. They’ve helped him to fully embody his late father’s management credo: “You catch more flies with honey than you do with shit.” But while the women give him respite from bare-knuckle political scraps with the likes of Charlie Powell and Eddie Jackson, there are still days when he feels as though he’s the only man left stranded on Venus.

    “Thank God they keep making Grey Goose and Finlandia,” he jokes, referring to his favorite brands of vodka.

    Dressed smartly in a dark tailored suit, Officer is seated in the basement of a small Baptist church in Brooklyn, where services are being held for a young serviceman. As the speakers crackle above him, Officer takes issue with the volume of the preaching. “The worst thing that ever happened to black churches was giving them microphones,” he contends.

    Just as confidently, Officer predicts that the festivities are winding down. How he can make this determination without being able to see the pulpit is anyone’s guess, but for a man who officiates a dozen such services every week, it must be second nature. Once upstairs, Officer gracefully ushers weeping old women to the casket, where they pay their last respects.

    After ensuring that the coffin is snugly ensconced into his mortuary’s white hearse, Officer distributes orange pennants emblazoned with the word “Funeral” to motorists who will be following his white Cadillac down Route 3, across the Jefferson Barracks Bridge and on to the military cemetery for an early-afternoon burial. As he leads the procession, Officer takes a long drag off a Salem and peers at a tacky spackling of cartoon dog stickers on his vehicle’s right-rear window. This is where his daughter sits, and his daughter likes to talk to the cartoon dogs. And so the stickers stay.

    “They give a certain ambiance to this Cadillac,” observes Officer, whose family’s commitment to death’s silver lining has spawned East St. Louis’ version of the Kennedy dynasty.

    “His family’s done so much for so many, and Carl continues that tradition,” says SIUE’s Debra Moore. “A lot of people have enjoyed very respectable funerals at no cost, and people remember that. People could never thank them enough.”

    Seconds St. Clair County Circuit Judge John Baricevic: “Carl’s mother and father and sister and brother have been great leaders to the community. They are very good people, not just from a business standpoint, but religious and social. They help folks.”

    That Baricevic omits Carl from his roll call of esteemed Officers is no accident. If he were to be presented with the choice of having a deaf-mute two-year-old run the city of East St. Louis or having Carl Officer run the city, Baricevic would tap the silent toddler, reasoning that he couldn’t possibly fuck things up as spectacularly as the judge believes Officer did in the ’80s.

    “When I was state’s attorney from 1979 to 1990, in almost every instance East St. Louis’ problems had to do with Carl,” Baricevic says. “Carl was interested in Carl, not his city. The city of East St. Louis got a criminal conviction [for failing to repair its sewer system] when Carl was mayor. Police would go on the street without gas, without their radios. Cops would literally have to take a quarter with them to make a phone call.

    “There was a public housing project with a leaking sewer,” Baricevic recounts. “Carl just made excuses: It was the white man trying to bring burdens on him. When in reality it was an African-American system putting African-American children in danger. One time in 1981, there were twenty inches of snow and the county offered to help with snowplows. Carl’s response was: ‘Don’t come into my city, or I’ll confiscate your trucks and you’ll never get them back.’ In every one of these instances, his response was: ‘It’s the white man trying to take over East St. Louis.’ As far as I’m concerned, he’s never done a thing for the city. A lot of us would have said he’d have run for statewide office one day. Not anymore.”

    Still, Baricevic didn’t get serious about holding Officer’s feet to the fire until late 1989, when he successfully convicted the city of failing to clean up the aforementioned sewage spill. That resulted in Officer getting thrown in the slammer for contempt of court. During his couple of hours behind bars, the mayor penned a letter in which he likened his incarceration to Martin Luther King’s arrest, 26 years earlier to the day, in Birmingham, Alabama.

    Similar histrionics marked Officer’s entire third term. Furious at the machine’s decision to back another candidate in the 1987 mayoral election (which Officer won narrowly amid great controversy and allegations of corruption), he referred to the East St. Louis Democratic Party as the “Nazi Afrika Corps,” the St. Clair County Democratic Party as the “Nazi Democratic Party,” the Southwestern Illinois Development Authority as the “Ku Klux Klan Development Authority” and city council chairman Oliver Hendricks as “Rommel the Desert Rat.” And when Officer was invited to accompany a group of U.S. mayors on an economic-goodwill excursion to Zaire, he publicly expressed concern that he would be transfused with “monkey blood,” whereupon he was dropped from the delegation.

    These outrageous utterances might have been viewed as eccentric chinks in a small-town mayor’s armor, had they not landed on the likes of 60 Minutes and Donahue and on the pages of the New York Times.

    “As local issues begin stirring and a new day doesn’t appear to be dawning, you have Carl at the center of media attention — and a lot of that attention is negative,” says SIUE’s Theising. “You’d see the audience clapping on Donahue, but it proved to be very destructive to him in the big pictu

  • Dead Reckoning

    You don’t see too many arsenic-poisoning homicides these days, so it came as an unsettling surprise when a St. Louis county toxicologist determined in mid-December that John Mullen had been served up a killing dose inside his swank, bluff-top home in Chesterfield. Even more surprising was how long it took to officially conclude the death was a homicide: nearly five and a half months.

    “I have no idea why it took so long,” says St. Louis county medical examiner Mary Case. “To determine whether something tests negative takes two to three weeks, and if it’s positive it usually takes four weeks.”

    Michael Graham, chief medical examiner for the city of St. Louis, is inclined to agree. “These laboratory tests [to detect arsenic] are relatively complicated, but this did take a rather long time,” concedes Graham, who performed the autopsy on Mullen.

    The 67-year-old Mullen was a well-liked physicist and research scientist at the old McDonnell Aircraft Corporation (now the Boeing Company). He retired in 1999 but remained active as a Boeing consultant. An avid pilot, Mullen co-owned Creve Coeur Airport for nearly twenty years. The father of two grown sons, he’d divorced long ago but had a girlfriend whose daughter was staying at his home at the time of his death.

    “He was a really nice guy, a wonderful person, and this was quite a shock,” recalls John Cournoyer, one of Mullen’s partners at the airport. “There was nothing to indicate there were any problems [at home].”

    “This whole thing is bizarre,” agrees Al Stix, another airport partner. “I’m still flabbergasted. You just want to know who did it.” Stix adds that Mullen was always “very careful about his health,” not wanting to lose his pilot’s license for medical reasons. “John worked twenty hours a day. He was the most industrious guy I’ve ever known. He was a very happy, ‘up’ sort of person.”

    On the morning of June 29, 2004, Mullen called 911 and said he was feeling very sick. A Chesterfield police officer was dispatched to his home, which overlooks Gumbo Cemetery near the intersection of Long and Wild Horse Creek roads. Paramedics whisked Mullen to St. John’s Mercy Medical Center, where investigators were able to interview him. He died later that day.

    Police immediately ruled out the possibility of suicide. At a mid-December news conference, Captain Ed Nestor of the Chesterfield Police Department revealed the toxicology findings and declared the case a homicide. Police, he said, looked into Mullen’s life-insurance policy and beneficiaries.

    Nestor also took the time to single out the work of the officer who had responded to Mullen’s 911 call. The officer, Nestor noted, had sensed something about the victim’s symptoms that led him to believe the man had been poisoned. (The symptoms of arsenic poisoning include excessive saliva, difficulty swallowing and gastric hemorrhage. As the poison’s effects progress, the victim may experience a seizure that usually results in death.) The officer “gathered evidence” at the scene that “turned out to be very helpful. The case certainly would have gone a different way if he had not done it.”

    Aside from those revelations, however, Nestor was vague — so vague, in fact, that he declined to name the evidence-gathering cop.

    A month later the Chesterfield police captain is still playing it close to the vest. Nestor declines to identify the heroic officer or to comment on any aspect of the case for this story. “I’m a media-friendly guy,” he says. “But getting a successful prosecution is what I’m trying to do.”

    Christopher Long, the St. Louis county forensic toxicologist who performed the tests in the Mullen case, defends the delay in ruling Mullen’s death a homicide. “Arsenic cases are different,” he maintains. “Sometimes things just take longer.”

    Long would know: He played a key role in the successful prosecution of a 1995 attempted-murder case involving arsenic. The case, which gained national attention, involved a St. Louis man named Jim Boley who set about to systematically poison his ex-wife, Donna, after secretly upping her life insurance to $600,000. Boley’s modus operandi was to put rat poison into the salt shaker his ex used each day and to dose her milk. Long’s tests on Donna Boley’s hair showed she’d been slowly poisoned over the course of three months or longer. The wife survived; Boley is serving a life sentence.

    Long speculates that the massive levels of arsenic found in Mullen’s body might have come from an easily obtained, garden-variety ant poison. The toxicologist says his tests showed that Mullen’s death was caused by a single massive dose of the substance.

    How might Mullen have been poisoned with arsenic? “I can’t say why at this point, because that could compromise the police investigation,” says chief medical examiner Graham. He will say, however, that in more than 90 percent of all arsenic-related murders, the substance is ingested orally.

    Neither the city of St. Louis nor the county keeps records on how often arsenic has been used as a murder weapon. “I’ve been here since 1981, and I can’t think of one,” says Graham. In Missouri, according to the Centers for Disease Control, there have been ten murders by poison since 1978. But the federal agency does not track the type of poison used.

    Arsenic has been the object of macabre fascination for centuries. Some believe Napoleon Bonaparte’s death in 1821 can be traced to arsenic, because small amounts of the substance were found in his hair. (The French ruler’s residence was decorated with wallpaper containing Paris green, an arsenic-laced compound used in fabrics that was not recognized as a health hazard until the end of the nineteenth century.) And arsenic was the homicidal poison of choice for murder-mystery writers of yesteryear. In 1944 Cary Grant starred in Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace, the classic comedic tale of two sweet old ladies whose hobby is killing lonely old men and burying them in their cellar.

    But murder by arsenic, which seemed almost fashionable in the early nineteenth century, became far less popular when, in the 1830s, British chemist James Marsh developed a sure-fire method for detecting the substance.

    “One thing about arsenic,” notes Michael Graham. “Once it gets in the body, it stays there forever.”

  • Taking It to the MAC

    Men’s clubs were de rigueur when the Missouri Athletic Club (MAC) opened its doors in downtown St. Louis back in 1903. A cross between a gym and a watering hole, clubs like the MAC allowed the city’s elite to mix business with leisure over a stogie or squash match — in a gilded setting away from the public’s prying eye.

    In those days, a MAC membership represented somewhat of a coup. There was a waiting list. Applications were reviewed by a membership committee that dismissed the undesirables and weeded out anyone their fellow clubgoers didn’t like. The MAC was a whites-only club for nearly half a century and didn’t admit a woman until 1989. (Men persisted in swimming nude in the lap pool and retained sole privileges to the other athletic facilities until the early 1990s.) Today it’s much easier to join; pretty much all one needs is two sponsors, a clean police record and the initiation fee, which ranges from $600 to $2,000. Memberships cost an additional $1,100 to $3,000-plus.

    In search of a revenue infusion in 1992, the club recruited a new general manager, Larry Thompson, former head of the Milwaukee Athletic Club and a lifelong hospitality hand. Thompson worked hard to boost female involvement. Last year, the Club Managers Association of America named Thompson Club Manager of the Year. A meet-and-greet sort who clearly prefers pressing the flesh to holing up in his mezzanine office, Thompson is modest in citing the MAC’s gains. He won’t share specifics about membership growth, but he is emphatic about one point: “There are probably hundreds of people who pass this club every day in their automobiles and on foot who say, ‘What goes on in there? Probably the same old things.’ It’s not true.”

    He’s referring to frat-boy traditions of old, like one that used to take place the night of board member elections: Candidates would man makeshift booths in the lobby to hustle votes. A dinner followed — then strippers. One year, about two decades ago, a board member got upset and called the police, according to a former board member who declined to be named in this story. That was the end of the adult entertainment, the ex-board member says.

    Thompson wants to make it clear that the elitist playboy antics that once held sway are a thing of the past. “This is a good place to work,” he says, wagging a finger. “And I say that not as the general manager. I say that as an employee.”

    One former staffer, however, disagrees. Ex-MAC waiter Tracy Gilliland has filed a lawsuit in state court in St. Louis claiming he was the victim of gender- and race-based discrimination while working at the club. Specifically, Gilliland alleges that a male supervisor sexually harassed and assaulted him, and that higher-ups passed him over for promotion because he’s white.

    Gilliland says he took a job at the MAC in 1999 after being sold on the place by the wife of a staffer. The divorced father of two was waiting tables at another downtown restaurant but was seduced by the MAC’s proximity to his home, not to mention the club’s comprehensive healthcare plan, a boon in the food-service business. “It seemed like a step up,” he says today.

    Gilliland says he started as a bartender at the MAC, then became a waiter. He was paid about $2 an hour plus a guaranteed 15 percent gratuity on each table during regular meal services, he says. Parties or weddings netted about $9 an hour. His aim was to work his way up to the role of trainer, a maître d’ of sorts who can take home three times what servers get.

    The MAC’s ten-story edifice at 405 Washington Avenue houses two restaurants and numerous banquet rooms. Gilliland worked predominantly on the first floor, where he says he served “local business walk-ins — lawyers, judges, bankers.” He longed for shifts at the fourth-floor restaurant, where “the older crowd” settled in for homemade beef-barley-mushroom soup and fried sole sandwiches; a regular clientele and bigger tables upstairs promised higher earnings.

    According to Gilliland’s suit, filed in late 2003, “The fourth-floor restaurant is better known to respondent MAC’s employees as the ‘Blackberry Inn’ because only African-American employees are permitted to hold positions there.” Gilliland further claims that in December of 2001 he was passed over for a promotion to trainer in favor of a “less-qualified” African-American female with only four weeks’ experience at the club, even though supervisors had previously told him he was “next in line” for a trainer position.

    Gilliland, who is gay, alleges that the MAC’s management failed to respond to his complaints that a married male supervisor, Vince Millen, was sexually harassing him. From the time he began work at the MAC, the suit claims, Millen would grab and pinch his nipples and press into his buttocks and simulate anal sex.

    “I’m not a touchy-feely person,” says Gilliland, now 40.

    Soon after being turned down for the promotion, Gilliland filed a complaint with the city’s Civil Rights Enforcement Agency. Nine months later, on November 13, 2002, he amended the claim to include an allegation of sexual harassment at the hands of a supervisor. The lawsuit describes the incident in detail: In early August of 2002, the suit alleges, Miller pinned him against a computer desk from behind, thrust his groin into Gilliland’s backside and “[said] he should not be such a ‘hard ass’ and to just drop his complaint of discrimination.”

    That same day, Gilliland says, he told club management he intended to quit.

    Gilliland says his experience at the MAC was psychologically devastating and drove him to see a psychiatrist for the first time in his life. “I didn’t get out of bed. I didn’t care if I brushed my teeth.” Gilliland says he was unable to work for a year afterward. His partner of eight years took care of the bills, including Gilliland’s child-support payments.

    In August 2003 the Missouri Commission on Human Rights responded to Gilliland’s civil-rights complaint against the athletic club, giving him the go-ahead to sue. (State law requires that before filing a discrimination lawsuit against one’s employer in Missouri, a citizen must lodge a complaint with a local civil-rights agency. If the agency fails to rule on the case within six months, the petitioner is notified he has the right to sue.) Employment lawyer Kurt Cummiskey filed Gilliland’s lawsuit in November of that year, and it has been making its way through the requisite red tape ever since. Cummiskey says he plans to request a jury trial at the next hearing, scheduled for January 24. “That’s the only way we can correct the things that happened to Tracy,” asserts the attorney.

    Vince Millen declined to comment for this story on the advice of the athletic club’s attorneys. MAC attorney Matthew Robinson declined to comment. MAC officials have consistently and categorically denied Gilliland’s allegations. “The charges are unfounded, end of story,” says general manager Larry Thompson.

    Gender-law experts say Gilliland faces an uphill battle.

    “Many courts treat male-on-male harassment cases as ‘sexual harassment lite,’” says Nancy Levit, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of The Gender Line: Men, Women and the Law. Levit says courts often rule in favor of defendants because “they think of male-on-male cases as just teasing, roughhousing and horseplay.”

    Pauline Kim, a law professor at Washington University, calls sexual harassment “a mess.” Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars discrimination on the basis of sex, and court decisions handed down in the 1980s used the act to include sexually tinged harassment between males and females, Kim says. In 1998, in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door to same-sex harassment complaints. In that case, a roustabout on an oil rig claimed he was subjected to humiliating, sex-related taunting by two male supervisors and a male co-worker and threatened with rape. In a unanimous opinion, the justices held that a victim of same-sex sexual harassment would have to prove one of three conditions: that the aggressor was sexually motivated, that he hates his own gender or that he treats members of the opposite sex differently from those of his own.

    “What gets lost in that [Supreme Court opinion] is a focus on whether the behavior of the harasser is appropriate and should be tolerated,” says Kim. “The courts are asked to answer whether the harassment took place in the context of sex, not in the context of intolerable behavior.”

    Kim and others say they’d be hard-pressed to cite same-sex discrimination precedents set by Missouri courts. In two recent cases at the federal level, the defendants prevailed. In the most recent suit, resolved in 2003 two days after Gilliland sued the MAC, a construction worker at St. John’s Regional Health Center failed to prove that his supervisor’s grabbing, grinding and lewd comments constituted harassment.

    “We thought the facts would be shocking to a judge or jury,” recalls Jeff Merrell, the construction worker’s attorney. In the wake of the verdict, Merrell says, he believes that finding facts sufficient to prove same-sex sexual harassment is “like finding a needle in a haystack.”

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