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  • 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.”

  • Katrina Elam

    As a beautiful blond young-country charmer with a knack for soaring choruses, Katrina Elam shares superficial similarities with the soulless Faith Hill, last seen in an overapt role as a Stepford wife. But Elam’s pop-damaged peers can’t match her passionate delivery and pristine phrasing. Her debut disc showcases not only her rich, expressive voice but also her surprisingly subtle songwriting. Elam’s nuanced takes on relationship issues are a welcome change from the genre’s usual frying-pan-to-head slapstick sass, and her slow songs, delicately decorated with piano and strings, never become bloated ballads. Elam isn’t too pensive to party; she serenades the yee-haw crowd with the fiddle-fueled “I Want a Cowboy,” and she gallops through most tracks at a perky-pony pace that should keep her set list lively.

  • The Case That Haunts

    On a mild winter day in February 1983, two men rummaged through the basement of a vacant apartment building at 5635 Clemens Avenue in northwest St. Louis. Their purpose, they would later tell police, was to find a metal pipe they could use to fix their broken-down jalopy.

    After searching the main floor, the men crept downstairs into the basement. Blinded by the darkness, one of the men flicked a cigarette lighter. The horror revealed by the flame sent them running for the police.

    Facedown amid the boiler-room rubble lay the headless body of an African-American female. Naked from the waist down, she wore only a yellow V-neck sweater fitted loosely around her torso. Fingers flecked with chipped crimson-red nail polish, her hands were bound behind her back with a strand of red-and-white nylon rope. Between her shoulders, where her neck used to be, there was only a hack-sawed hole.

    When St. Louis homicide detectives Joe Burgoon and Herb Riley arrived, the building was teeming with police. Awaiting crime-scene technicians, the two veteran detectives speculated on the corpse’s identity. Maybe, they guessed, she was a prostitute or drug addict from nearby Cabanne Courts, a housing project with a murderous past. It wasn’t until technicians at last rolled the body over that they realized she was not a woman, but a pre-pubescent child. Instantly, the mood in that damp cellar turned from morbid curiosity to disgust. A child-killer.

    At the time, the FBI called it the only decapitation in the nation involving someone so young.

    As police officers searched a sixteen-block area for the girl’s head, Burgoon and Riley returned to headquarters to check missing-persons reports. Surely, they thought, the girl’s parents or relatives — someone — would call to report her missing. With any luck, they’d establish her identity that night and draw up a list of suspects.

    The body went unclaimed on a slab in the city morgue for more than a week before it was given the name Jane Doe. For nine months she lay frozen. Finally, on a glum, rainy day in December 1983, she was buried in a pauper’s grave in an historic black graveyard in north St. Louis county. At the funeral were a few homicide detectives, the chief medical examiner, and a half-dozen news reporters. Four muddy gravediggers served as pallbearers.

    As he was leaving, Herb Riley told a reporter, “I’ve been involved with her since the day she was found, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop looking for her killer.”

    The day of the grisly discovery, February 28, still casts a pall over the homicide department. For years detective Burgoon commemorated that day by sending out teletype bulletins to police departments in all 50 states. No one ever responded. After a dozen years, he was told the mass dispatches were too costly to continue. Today homicide detectives observe the occasion in hushed tones of remorse.

    Never a suspect, never an arrest, and never was the head found. Most of what is known of Jane Doe came within days of her discovery. She was likely between the ages of eight and eleven. She was big for her age, around four-foot-ten. Without the head, she measured just over four feet. She had been raped and then strangled. Based on the lack of blood at the crime scene, police believe she was dumped in the basement after her beheading. Mold growing from the wound on her neck indicated she was there for several days before the two men found her.

    Little else is known about the girl who has become the most notorious cold case in the nearly 200-year history of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. Thousands of futile police hours have been spent. The cops who first worked the investigation have retired or died of old age. A new generation of homicide detectives are still at work on the case, hoping DNA technology will spark even the slightest clue. They say they’re nowhere near giving up, but the odds are stacked against them.

    “Without your victim’s identify, you don’t know who the killer could be,” says Mary Fran Ernst, director of forensic education at Saint Louis University Medical School. “The entire world is your stage.”

    In his mind, Joe Burgoon can still see the building where they found the girl. It is three stories high, brick, with the Latin word for home, Domi, inscribed in stone above the doorway. Traces of blood streak the cellar walls where the killer dragged the body into the darkness. There’s no smell of death. The coolness of the basement preserved the body.

    Located about a mile east of the University City Loop, the neighborhood is undergoing a subtle transition, giving rise to new homes priced at $250,000 and up.

    But even the most progressive revitalization efforts can do little to mask its violent history.

    It’s in this same neighborhood that in 1972 police found a woman with her face peeled from her head. In 2001 a ten-year-old boy was mauled to death by a pack of stray dogs in nearby Ivory Perry Park. Last month police found a man with his throat slashed just some 200 yards from the building that contained Jane Doe. For all its mayhem, homicide detectives still associate the neighborhood with the beheading.

    On a recent autumn day, Burgoon pulls his wife’s white Ford Explorer up to the grassy lot where the apartment once stood. The city razed the building years ago, but in Burgoon’s mind, it’s still there, taunting him even now.

    Eight years after he left homicide, and nearly a year since retiring from the force at the age of 65, he still can’t shake the memory of Jane Doe. Not a week goes by, he says, that he doesn’t think of her.

    Described by a former colleague as “almost too nice for this dirty business,” Burgoon, with his quiet demeanor and nearly photographic memory, landed hundreds of violent criminals in prison during his 27 years on the force, earning him the nickname “Father Homicide.” Something about those flickering green eyes, the fidgety way he makes small talk, that embarrassed look on his face when he lights up a Carlton, won Burgoon the empathy of victims’ families and suspects alike. He’s the kind of guy people want to help.

    But with Jane Doe, there was never any family or suspect to coax. Burgoon couldn’t work his good-cop magic.

    Mary Case, the city’s medical examiner at the time of the murder, says the case affected Burgoon more than any other detective. During those months the girl lay in the morgue, the two were in constant contact, investigating any leads that might reveal her identity.

    “I’ll always associate him with Jane Doe,” says Case. “Whenever I see him, it’s the first thing I think of, and it’s always the first thing we’ll discuss.”

    At six-foot-two and 230 pounds, Captain Leroy Adkins casts an imposing presence. He doesn’t scare easily, but for a decade following the ghoulish crime, he was plagued by nightmares. He says he’d awaken in a cold sweat, the investigation spinning wildly in his mind.

    “I wonder: Did we miss something? Is there something we should have done but didn’t do? Something we missed at the scene? For the life of me, I can’t think of anything.”

    The first African-American head of homicide, Adkins, now 71, was a year on the job at the time of Jane Doe’s murder. Wanting to dispel the belief among many of the city’s black residents that the police department cared more about white victims than black ones, Adkins immersed himself in the case. He organized meetings in the black community, urging residents to help. He wrote letters to the St. Louis American, Ebony and Jet magazines.

    Adkins’ tired eyes reflect the frustration and resignation that come from this infuriating case. The nightmares are gone, but harrowing memories linger. Jane Doe, he says, enters his mind when he’s reading the paper, watching television, in the quiet-time moments before sleep.

    His wife, Glenda, knows the case nearly as well as her husband. For years she’s been the sounding board for her husband’s unanswered questions.

    “There’s just so much wonderment in this story,” she says. “You wonder how no one can be missing a child of that age. Where is the family? What about her schoolmates? Her friends? How could no one report her as missing?”

    Right up until his death in 1996, detective Herb Riley kept his promise to never stop his search for the killer. Given the moniker Herb “Seek and Find” Riley by local crime tabloid The Evening Whirl, the hard-nosed cop was the yin to Burgoon’s yang. Playing the part of bad cop, Riley was well known for his ruthless interrogations and his daily four-pack habit of Lucky Strikes. Of the more than 2,000 homicides he worked, Jane Doe was one of only two cases he never cracked.

    After retiring in 1986, Riley brought home boxes of his notes and kept in regular contact with Joe Burgoon and other detectives.

    “He was constantly talking about it,” recalls his son, Jeff Riley. “I remember visiting him at the hospital and asking him if he was happy with his life and what he’d done. He replied that he was, but said he wished he solved the Jane Doe case. He said when he died he would finally know who did it. He believed the afterlife would reveal all life’s mysteries.”

    Hours after finding the girl’s mutilated body, Burgoon and Riley sent out all-points bulletins nationwide. When the dispatches yielded nothing, they began checking school attendance records, looking for students no longer on the rolls. Only the St. Louis Public Schools kept computerized attendance records at the time, but even those lists gave no indication as to where a student went after leaving school.

    For the most part it was guesswork, with detectives calling as many as a half-dozen school districts before locating a child. For each child eliminated, hundreds more remained to be checked. So mind-numbingly frustrating was the task that detective Wayne Bender was hospitalized for migraines.

    Finally, some seven months after the murder, the detectives accounted for every eight- to eleven-year-old black female enrolled in St. Louis city schools and the neighboring districts of University City, Wellston, Ferguson-Florissant and Normandy.

    Who was she?

    Desperate for something, anything, police have tracked down a score of false leads over the years, some more preposterous than others.

    There was, for example, the time just months after the murder that a frantic woman appeared at police headquarters claiming to have just met the killer. He lived just a few blocks from the shuttered building. The woman said the man invited her into his apartment and showed her a human skull and a machete.

    Minutes later, Burgoon, Riley and Adkins arrived at the apartment with a search warrant and a sledgehammer. They busted down the door and recovered the skull and knife.

    “The machete was a novelty piece you could bend a million ways. It could never cut someone’s head off,” recalls Burgoon. “He got the skull from his high-school teacher in California. It was all verified. He wasn’t our guy.”

    Then there was the Charlack police officer who got a skull from a man he had questioned at a storage shed on St. Charles Rock Road. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Danny Davis of Pagedale told the cop he bought the skull for $35 in the late 1970s at a souvenir-gift shop near Northwest Plaza shopping center. Davis said he was told the skull was that of a young Indian woman who had been killed by a tomahawk. A forensic anthropologist determined it was too old to be Jane Doe’s skull.

    Other leads have been less conventional. Grasping for clues, Burgoon once sat in on a séance in a Maplewood home. Under dim candlelight the detective passed around photocopied fingerprints of Jane Doe to a table full of psychics. As the clairvoyants channeled the spirits, Burgoon sat in the corner and observed.

    “The psychics put their hands on the fingerprints and would shoot straight up in their chairs like they got a jolt or something,” remembers Burgoon. “At the end of the meeting they told me to call the Coast Guard. The head is on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico.”

    The séance wouldn’t be the last time homicide detectives looked to the paranormal for help. In 1994 Burgoon and Adkins agreed to appear on Sightings, a nationally syndicated television show on the occult and the supernatural.

    Connected by phone, the homicide detectives sat in St. Louis with notepads at the ready while a psychic in Florida entered the mind of Jane Doe. Producers filled in the backdrop with Hitchcockian theme music and shadowy, slow-motion footage of children at play. The final product was vague enough to seem eerily real, but it only harmed the investigation.

    Prior to the show’s taping, detectives mailed the psychic the bloodied sweater and the nylon rope used to bind Jane Doe’s hands. They never got them back. The evidence was lost in the mail.

    Perhaps the most far-fetched story surrounding the case came in 2002 when Sharon Nolte called detectives. A Kansas City insurance investigator, she was convinced Jane Doe was a Chippewa Indian named Shannon Johnson. Nolte said she also knew the killer, a drifter living in southern Texas.

    She worked the case independently for seven years before contacting the police, her investigation taking her to an Indian reservation in Minnesota where she collected sample DNA from a woman she believed to be related to Jane Doe. She says she even visited the killer, inviting herself into his home and collecting DNA evidence in his bathroom.

    Nolte has few positive things to say about the St. Louis police department. She claims her story fell on deaf ears — that Carroll and Burgoon never took her seriously. Of the $23,000 she says she spent on the case, $4,500 went to a private lab that tested the DNA against that of Jane Doe. The tests came back negative, but Nolte still maintains she was right.

    “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the police department. I think they stink,” she says. “I told them who she was and who killed her, and they never did anything with it. I had a bag full of the killer’s pubic hair. Do you know how difficult it is to collect a bag full of pubic hair?”

    As with all the people who have stepped forward to help police solve the case, Carroll and Burgoon say they appreciate Nolte’s efforts, but in the end her story just didn’t add up.

    “You don’t want to play anyone cheap,” says Burgoon. “In a case as tough as this one, you want to listen to what anyone has to say. What do you have to lose?”

    The most recent twist to the case came this past July, when detectives Tom Carroll and Jeff Stone flew to Texas to interview Tommy Lynn Sells. On death row for the brutal murder of a thirteen-year-old girl, Sells claims to have committed dozens of murders across the country, including five in Missouri.

    The interview was inconclusive, but Carroll doubts Sells’ involvement.

    “He’ll claim anything. Whatever case you put in front of him he’ll say, ‘It could be me.’”

    Buried within the Web site for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lies a page devoted to Jane Doe. Of the roughly 1,400 children profiled, she is the only child without a mug shot or artist’s rendering. In its place appears the bloodied yellow sweater found on her body, along with information about skin color, weight and age.

    It is on this Web site, and a handful of other databases devoted to missing children, that detective Tom Carroll continues to search for Jane Doe’s identity. Police long ago abandoned the hopes of finding her head. Even if they were to find it, it would be nothing more than a skull, perhaps providing the girl’s dental records, but little else.

    It is in the ethereal world of the Internet that Carroll digs for clues. In six years of scrolling through thousands of profiles, he’s identified a dozen missing girls who perhaps match the description of Jane Doe.

    Carroll, 40, is the latest detective to head up the case from inside a department whose interior is little changed since the days of the girl’s vicious death. Detectives are outfitted with the bare minimum: a desk, phone, filing cabinet. Fluorescent lights, a worn linoleum floor and half-finished coffee cups complete the scene. Save for the width of the cops’ neckties, it might be the stage set for the 1970s sitcom Barney Miller.

    Once Carroll comes across a possible match, he contacts the child’s parents. Each phone call is another stab in the dark.

    “It’s to the point you really are walking on eggshells when you’re calling these people,” says the soft-spoken Carroll, who works the Jane Doe murder whenever he has a free hour or two. “People will let time heal a lot of things, and do you really want to gash that back open?”

    The conversations are more or less the same. Carroll identifies himself and prefaces the discussion by saying he’s not calling to report good news. He tells them St. Louis police have a deceased black female they can’t identify. He then describes Jane Doe as best he can. Inevitably the strangers on the other end of the line begin quizzing him, wanting to know what color hair the victim had. What color were her eyes? Doesn’t he have dental records?

    After a while Carroll is forced to show his hand. He tells them the little girl’s head was never discovered. That revelation comes followed by a long pause, but most parents of missing children sympathize with the cop. After so many years, they’re looking for any answer, good or bad.

    Eleven of the twelve families have provided DNA samples, all of which have ruled out any connection with their missing child. When one couple declined to help, Carroll enlisted local police to search their trash for hair follicles, fingernail clippings or anything that might provide a DNA sample to run against Jane Doe.

    Twenty years ago DNA-typing was the fodder of fantasy novels. Today evidence as to the identity of her killer is virtually non-existent. A white substance found on her stomach was initially believed to be semen, but further tests showed it contained no DNA. A pubic hair found on her leg failed to provide enough DNA to identify a killer, but Carroll and others have a theory on the origins of the hair — it fell off one of the cops at the crime scene.

    “I’d lay money down that it came from one of us,” Carroll says.

    While DNA technology has so far failed to unravel the Jane Doe puzzle, it has helped St. Louis police crack several other cold cases. Just last month a grand jury indicted Danny Ray Kittrell in the grisly killing of a woman stabbed more than 50 times with a screwdriver in 1983. Last year police charged Vester Herrod with first-degree murder and rape in the killing of two women in the early 1990s. In both cases, DNA obtained from the suspects’ semen led to arrests.

    Owing in part to the success of those cases, the St. Louis Police Department recently received a $150,000 grant from the United States Department of Justice that will pay detectives overtime to pore over cold cases and check if DNA technology might help unlock those unsolved murders.

    The grant is unlikely to solve the case of Jane Doe.

    “Everything we could do for her has already been done,” says Mary Beth Karr, DNA technical leader for the police department.

    Working in tandem with Carroll, Karr has eliminated all but one of the potential Jane Doe matches the detective has brought her over the years. The remaining sample awaits advanced testing with the FBI, but Karr doesn’t hold out much hope.

    “I’d be shocked if it were a match.”

    Still, she remains optimistic DNA will one day unlock the case. Jane Doe’s genetic profile currently resides in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, a massive database that continually attempts to match DNA material found at crime scenes.

    Since 1994 the Missouri Department of Corrections has taken DNA samples of all felons convicted of committing a violent crime. Beginning next year, Missouri will join 33 other states in collecting DNA on all convicted felons — no matter the crime.

    Of the many theories homicide detectives kick around, the most common pins Jane Doe’s killing on a parent or close relative. If they’re serving a prison term for some other crime, police may soon know Jane Doe’s identity, and possibly that of her killer.

    Until then, the case goes on much as it has for the past two decades, with investigators chasing down any leads they can.

    Carroll’s logs show he last worked the case October 25, when he ran fingerprints of a missing Jamaican girl against those of Jane Doe. Those very same fingerprints were tested back in 1988, but he wanted to rule them out a second time. In a case as vexing as Jane Doe’s, police have checked and re-checked all their leads.

    Resting next to Jane Doe’s grave is a white teddy bear, left there two years ago by Sharon Nolte, the woman convinced that Jane Doe is a Chippewa Indian. Next to the stuffed toy, Nolte left the child an offering of food — a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Today the food is long gone.

    Jane Doe’s memorial is in stark contrast to the one left to a little girl in Kansas City. It was there, in 2001, that police stumbled across the headless body of a three- to five-year-old African-American girl. Immediately, detectives began looking for similarities between Jane Doe and the Kansas City victim but failed to find any link. Like Jane Doe, the Kansas City victim’s identity and that of her killer remain an enigma.

    Three years later, Carroll has not entirely ruled out a connection.

    “Hard to believe this could happen twice in the same state and not be related,” he says. “Maybe the culprit was in prison for fifteen to eighteen years for another crime and came back to do the same thing again.”

    This past August, Kansas City residents established a permanent memorial to the girl they’ve come to call Precious Doe. Next to the woods where police found her body, they’ve planted a pair of hawthorne trees in her memory. Two white cement benches offer visitors a chance to reflect on her death.

    Jane Doe’s grave is nearly impossible to find. Washington Park Cemetery, in which she is buried, has fallen on tough times. In 1991 the cemetery’s owner, Virginia Younger, committed suicide shortly after the state’s attorney general sued over botched burials. The allegations included reports of bones strewn about the property, bodies missing from graves and multiple caskets dumped into the same plots. In 1993 the cemetery faced further upheaval when thousands of bodies were disinterred to make way for MetroLink and to level a hill that obstructed air traffic at nearby Lambert Airport.

    Today visitors to the cemetery are greeted by a rusty iron gate and a shuttered house that once served as the graveyard chapel and museum. Blanketing the grounds, waist-high thickets of poison ivy and weeds choke the toppled tombstones of generations of black St. Louisans. The air stirs with the sound of cars barreling down Interstate 70 — the din of traffic broken only by the roar of a commercial jetliner as it makes its descent toward the airport.

    At the time of her interment, no tombstone marked Jane Doe’s grave. Months after her funeral, an Illinois high school class launched a letter-writing campaign urging city officials and the cemetery to place a marker on her grave. In response, the owner of a monument company came forward and donated a small $300 stone. The owner’s wife chose the somber inscription from a book of epitaphs. It reads: “The saddened hearts were healed knowing the pain of life is over and the beauty of the soul revealed.”

    Burgoon years ago videotaped the location of Jane Doe’s grave for police records, afraid that when he died, she would be lost forever amid the tangled shrubbery. It is here that the former detective finds himself on a recent afternoon.

    After pausing a moment to reflect on the long-ago tragedy, Burgoon is ready to head back to his car. He knows he’ll never stop thinking of the little girl who has consumed his thoughts for much of the past twenty years. In nine simple words he summarizes the thousands of hours he and other detectives have spent trying to crack the city’s most vexing murder.

    “This case, we struck out,” he says. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

  • Where the Boys Are

    Lee stares out at Washington Boulevard through the late-evening drizzle. No one’s driving by, except for the 97 bus, which rolls over a plastic soda bottle with a sudden pop! It sounds like a gunshot but Lee doesn’t flinch. He’s familiar with what real gunshots sound like.

    It’s only a few blocks away from the bustle of the Fox Theatre, but tonight the Stroll’s dead. If the johns were trolling past in their Mercedes, in their SUVs and Crown Vics, more guys would be hustling hand jobs and head and Lee likely would have scored by this hour, thanks to his young soft face and sweet-thug appeal. But tonight it’s only him and one other guy out here, pacing the sidewalk in front of the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light Center.

    Like Lee and all the other prostitutes on this street, Mike’s a black male. But he’s got the haggard looks and the jittery moves of a crackhead. Lee’s not homeless, not a crack addict. He’s 28 and lives at home with his parents, which helps explain why he wants to use an alias for this story. They would kill him if they knew he did this.

    A black SUV approaches. Lee and Mike wave but the guy rolls on.

    “Is that a Lexus?” Lee asks.

    “Nah,” Mike says. “It’s a Range Rover or something.”

    The rain comes down harder.

    Lee finds a dry doorway, lights a cigarette and misses his chance at a new-looking green pickup. Mike flags down the driver and strikes up a conversation through the rolled-down window. Less than a minute later, he’s inside.

    “I know that guy,” Lee says sourly, watching the car pull away. “He ain’t gonna get nothin’ from that guy. He tried once with me. It was like, five dollars.”

    He hikes his New York Yankees jersey up over his head to ward off the rain and crosses the street. Minutes later his perseverance pays off, in the form of a Chevy Blazer. The driver, fiftyish, looks well off, but Lee won’t ask him any personal questions as they drive around. Instead the transaction is negotiated, then quickly administered.

    “He was drivin’ with one hand and jerkin’ me with the other,” Lee recounts. “He jerked me off for $25. Done deal, you hear me? Done deal! It didn’t take nothin’ but about five minutes.”

    Cash in his pocket, he heads back to Mom and Dad’s.

    Over the Harbor Light Center’s sparsely appointed entryway, a device that looks like a ceiling fan in a science-fiction movie spins, emitting purple-blue ultraviolet light. The contraption, called a Silent Air Mover (SAM), represents the latest weapon in the war on tuberculosis. The center has about ten of these $1,500 bug lights, which purport to zap all bacteria in their path.

    “TB is an airborne thing, and this is a critical area,” explains Tim Best, a Salvation Army captain and a Harbor Light administrator. “Those in the homeless population are more susceptible to TB. They don’t get tested, so they don’t know they have it, and so when it goes active it doesn’t take much for you sleeping next to me on a mat for me to breathe it in.” On any given night, Best adds, up to 49 homeless men sleep here on three-inch-thick pads.

    Though the St. Louis Health Department boasts that the Harbor Light is the first place in the U.S. to use the technology, some say it’s a Band-Aid approach, similar to the way the city fights prostitution. Rather than work to prevent the problem before it starts, the effort simply seeks to slow its spread.

    A pudgy and genial ex-cocaine addict who was once homeless himself, Best understands the plight of the men who come in here. The Harbor Light facility at Washington Boulevard and Garrison Avenue operates drug- and alcohol-treatment programs, job-training programs and a veterans’ re-integration program, and it’s equipped with beds for men who are too sick to sleep on a mat. Though the facility was built to house 150 per night, it sometimes serves as many as 300. Some stay for one night, some stay for the better part of a year.

    The nature of the relationship between the Harbor Light and the men who walk the Stroll is a complicated one. Because they are required to be indoors and accounted for by 9 p.m., those who bunk at the facility can’t participate in the nighttime street scene, which usually heats up around midnight.

    But Lee says male prostitution and the shelter go together like condoms and lube.

    “It’s an easy target for homosexuals,” he explains. “They go by a men’s shelter. They know that most times a man in a shelter, he is down and out. So he’s an easy prey.” He motions with his hands as if giving out cash. “‘I’ll give you this, I’ll give you that.’”

    “Gerald” used to walk the Stroll. Now he stays at Harbor Light. The unemployed 33-year-old’s life story is full of ups and downs. He comes from a well-to-do family in the county. Openly gay, he took up prostitution and his family disowned him. In 2000 he began hanging around the Stroll, hooking and developing a crack habit.

    A few months ago he came to the Harbor Light for the rehab program, and now he’s trying to find a job. Today he picked up applications from Wendy’s, Rally’s and McDonald’s. But now, shortly before lights-out, he’s in the mood to reminisce about his best client.

    “He would pick me up further down Washington, in a Mercedes I think, around 1 or 2 a.m.,” Gerald recounts. “He was a banker at Bank of America or US Bank. I’d see him every week or every two weeks, he’d drop in randomly. We’d go to a hotel on Grand and he would bring food — Chinese food, Popeye’s or Lee’s chicken.

    “We’d sit down, eat and then get into the grind. He gave me $200 to get down and dirty — not intercourse but oral sex. We’d stay until we finished, four hours or five hours.

    “They’re not getting the satisfaction from their womens,” Gerald speculates about the men who visit the Stroll. “How they wanna, when they wanna.

    “Or else they’re not ready to admit they’re gay.”

    To see him in a white T-shirt that contrasts with his bloodshot eyes, it’s difficult to imagine Gerald in high heels and a dress, his fingernails and toenails painted red. But this is the way he’d dress for the Stroll. His crack addiction, he says, was a motivator to work, and the drug, in turn, helped him maintain the energy to stay out all night long. Now, between detox and job-hunting, he hasn’t been walking the Stroll.

    But he plans to go back.

    “This is me, this is my life,” he says. “I had some good experiences at it, dressing up as drag queens.”

    In 1980, plainclothes St. Louis police officer Gregory Erson was killed while working a prostitution detail. In those days the Stroll was located on Washington Avenue at the eastern edge of the Central West End, and it featured women. Erson’s death prompted a major police crackdown. A decade later, in 1992, comedian and activist Dick Gregory led a march along the Stroll with the goal of reclaiming the neighborhood from its seedier elements. “The people must get the courage to know they can do something about the prostitutes and dope dealers,” he told the Post-Dispatch. “With courage comes the power.”

    A year later 34 female prostitutes and 34 johns were arrested during a two-week crackdown on the “South-Side Stroll,” located in the area framed by South Grand Boulevard, Jefferson Avenue, Meramec Street and Gravois Avenue.

    St. Louis has had a Stroll for as long as anyone can remember, and female prostitutes continue to ply the above areas. But nowadays “the Stroll” refers to the region roughly bordered by Washington Boulevard and Locust Street on the north and south and Jefferson and Compton avenues on the east and west.

    Carter Hendricks owns a business in the neighborhood, but he’s concerned that there might be break-ins if his shop were to be identified in print. He’s been here since the late 1980s, Hendricks says, and first noticed the male prostitution trade about ten years ago.

    “The clientele has changed,” he says. “The clientele in the mid- to late ’90s was much more heavily married white businessmen from the county. You know, driving Oldsmobiles.”

    But now more of the men doing the trolling are black. Hendricks speculates that many are on the “down low” — black men who consider themselves straight but have sex with other men on the sly. Whatever the case, Hendricks says the Stroll is busier than ever: “It’s a marketplace, and sometimes the marketplace gets really organized. It’s been more of a problem again in the last few months.”

    Because the neighborhood is dominated by light industry, for a long time the night moves didn’t prompt much public outcry, according to Robert Berger, chairman of the Locust Business District. But loft renovations have begun to draw a residential contingent.

    “About six years ago we had thirteen families within our district,” Berger says. “Now I wouldn’t be surprised if we had close to a hundred. Over the past year and a half, two years, you’re seeing more and more individuals parking their cars and walking to their place of residency. At our meetings there’ll be people coming up and complaining about auto break-ins, or break-ins in their place of business, or being accosted on the street, or a woman’s purse being stolen within that area.”

    One disgruntled resident is 38-year-old advertising writer Wade Paschall, who moved into a restored loft near the Stroll three years ago. He’s now trying to mobilize his neighbors to get the area cleaned up.

    Paschall believes Harbor Light isn’t pulling its weight.

    “It’s hard to go after an organization like the Salvation Army,” he says. “It’s like: ‘Who can hate ice cream?’ On their own, all their programs are great. But when you put them all together, it’s just sort of this recipe for disaster. There is a lot of overcrowding in the facility. This is not a case of, ‘Hey, I don’t want this in my backyard.’ It’s that this isn’t working for the guys inside any more than it’s not working for me. I don’t think it’s that they have any bad intentions, it’s just that it’s gotten beyond their control.”

    Tim Best says that’s a common misperception.

    “I would absolutely dispute that it’s not working for these guys,” the Salvation Army captain counters. “Anybody who feels that way ought to come down and let me take them on a tour and show them that we’re a series of connected small groups. While I understand the view from outside — that we’re a big facility where everything is all melded in together — what we really are is a mini-continuum of care. Providing care for a guy who is just coming off the street, all the way to guys who are being restored in their work ethic, who are being restored to their family. Treatment begins when a guy comes off a mat and enters into the program.”

    “You drive by at night and see ten guys loitering in front of the building,” Paschall complains. “If they’re Harbor Light guys, then why aren’t they inside? And if they’re not Harbor Light guys, then why doesn’t the Harbor Light call the police?”

    Best says he does precisely that. “However, if they’re across the street, we’ve been told in the past that we don’t have the right to call the police for people that are not on our property. Well, we call anyway, and if they are our guys they are brought inside, and if they’re not our guys they’re asked to move along.

    “There’s a view that because there are guys hanging around in the neighborhood, we’re not being effective,” he continues. “But a lot of those guys are not our guys. We don’t like it either — it makes it difficult for us to do our jobs as well.”

    Robert Berger would just as soon see the Harbor Light pack up and leave. His business-district group has met with local aldermen and Salvation Army officials a number of times over the years, hoping to persuade them to relocate, but nothing has been worked out. Harbor Light, meanwhile, has been rebuffed by city officials in its attempt to expand eastward onto an abandoned block the Salvation Army owns east of Garrison.

    Best dreams of an insulated, aesthetically pleasing campus. “One of the things I’d love to be able to do is have a campus-style setting where we’re blocked off, so that the neighborhoods don’t get too concerned,” he says. “We’d have a lot of green space, so that when you drive down the street guys aren’t hanging out on the corner. They wouldn’t need to be if we had a city block, or two, where we had nice decorative walls and green space, picnic areas — places just for them to hang out while they’re not doing anything.”

    Until then, Berger contends, something needs to be done.

    “With more individuals moving into the area, the safety of these people lies in the hands of the Salvation Army. They’ve got to change with it. I believe they should consider moving before one of their people ends up hurting somebody. At that point in time there’s going to be a ruckus.”

    After a few weeks off, Lee’s anxious to get back to the Stroll. But before hitting the street on this summer night, he kicks back with a tallboy of Busch in a car parked in front of his parents’ house.

    When he left just now, his mom asked where he was going. “I just gotta handle some business, you hear me?” he told her, sounding like 50 Cent — affable yet vaguely menacing.

    Lee says he’s close to his mother. She was shot a few years ago in a gang-related spree that his family fears may been intended for him. While their mother was in the hospital, his sister padlocked the house and the family scattered. With nowhere to go, Lee crashed at the Harbor Light. He hated it.

    “I’d rather be on the street than staying somewhere like that,” he says. “Those guys are straight trash.”

    He says his current situation isn’t bad. He has two young daughters he sees often and hopes to get married soon to his girlfriend of a year (she’s not the girls’ mother). His parents continue to take care of his financial needs, which is more than most 28-year-olds could ask.

    “I don’t trip off money like that,” he says. “I got a nice house. I live good, I eat good. They support me as far as food, clothes, everything. Unless I’m trying to get something I don’t need to be getting.”

    What he doesn’t need to be getting is drugs. Lee’s got a pretty demanding weed habit and dabbles in coke and heroin. He took to the Stroll six months ago, after he got fired from a landscaping job. A friend from the south side told him about it. “He told me I could make some cheese by doing nothing, just by standing around,” Lee says. “Disgracing myself for a minute, but not too disgracing.”

    An aspiring rapper, Lee has laid down some of his tracks but has yet to catch a break in the music business. He says his brother recently got him a job washing dishes in Clayton, which he’ll start soon. But the Stroll is his most reliable source of income. “It’s kinda tough out here. But I don’t got nothin’ better to do, nothin’ that I’m good at,” he says. “I knew there was money in that field. I’m down there to get in where I fit in.”

    Lee spins countless tales of tragedy, including the time he and a friend were walking in this north-side neighborhood one early morning in 1993 and discovered a corpse just around the corner from his house. He interrupts his narrative to spit out the open window. A decade of friends and family getting shot has left a bad taste in his mouth.

    He says he recently tested negative for TB, HIV and other STDs. If a john on the Stroll wants more than the hand job he offers, he turns them down.

    “I don’t get down like that,” he says. “I come from a moral family. I don’t lose my morals. I don’t need no cheese like that. I’m not gonna penetrate nothin’; they can’t put their mouth on it. But you’d be surprised how many just want to jerk me.

    “You have to have boundaries, because you can hop in the car with a mothafucker who’s a straight-up serial killer, a Ted Bundy-typa shit,” he says. “I know the dangers of all that. I got in the car with mothafuckers before and they ain’t got no conversation for me. I say, ‘Hey, pull this car over and let me up outta here.’ You know a lot about someone when you get in the car with them by their conversation. If they ain’t got nothin’ to say, then there’s probably something else on their mind. You gotta read signs and you’ll be all right. Don’t look at the dollar signs. I watch enough Court TV to know that people are sick.”

    His line of work, he speculates, is even more dangerous than a female prostitute’s.

    “With all these faggots out here, I guess it’s kind of different than women prostitutes. It’s more sick-ass men out here.

    “This ain’t for everybody,” he says suddenly. “To me it’s sickness. Even though I do it. You gotta be something wrong with you if you can participate in something like that. What ordinary, normal person would participate in something like that? I might not do what some other guys do down there, but at the same time I still participate in what’s going on down there. That makes me no better than them. No matter how I make my money, it’s still foul.”

    Before he leaves for the Stroll, Lee excuses himself, walks across the front yard and relieves himself on the side of his parents’ house.

    Will Lipe, a St. Louis police officer who works out of the Ninth District, has come to a meeting of the Locust Business Association in order to bring those present up to date on what the department is doing to combat prostitution in the neighborhood.

    “Over time we have gotten buildings in the area torn down in which prostitutes would take their customers and do whatever,” Lipe says. “We do occasionally have the vice squad that goes down there and picks up male prostitutes, just like they do with female prostitutes that you see on TV. Undercover, targeting the customers or targeting the prostitutes themselves.”

    One resident has joined the business owners at the meeting and asks what to do if she sees men hustling. “If you see them and you think they’re engaged in prostitution, call 911,” Lipe advises. “We’ll dispatch a car that should — at the very least — run them out.

    “Unless they actually see them engaged in prostitution, solicitation, et cetera, they can’t really charge them with that,” Lipe goes on. “But they can arrest them for bench warrants. I would say a large percentage of them have bench warrants.”

    (A few weeks later, Lee will be arrested on the Stroll for outstanding warrants — driving without insurance or a valid license — and spend four days in jail.)

    “There is male prostitution in the area. We are aware of it,” Lipe assures the group.

    But the same cannot be said of some of his superiors.

    Harry Hegger, division commander for the Fourth, Fifth and Ninth districts, says he hasn’t heard the area around Washington and Compton referred to as “the Stroll.”

    Police chief Joseph Mokwa, however, is familiar with the situation.

    “The department is aware that there are some prostitution issues, and we’ve been aware of it for some time,” Mokwa says. “We’re trying to collaborate with the Salvation Army, and we recently had a meeting with the circuit attorney, and the public safety director for the city and neighborhood residents. As more residential development continues in this area, there’s going to be less tolerance of that kind of behavior.

    “We’re also looking at long-term solutions to try and make sure we don’t have recidivism,” Mokwa goes on. “The best solution is to modify the lifestyle of people that are engaged in prostitution, and get whatever kind of systemic problem — whether it’s alcoholism or drug problems — that’s forced them into this lifestyle. Secondarily, if that’s not productive, we’d like to have the judges prohibit the people from being in the area that they’ve been arrested in the past. Thirdly, I guess we’d have to incarcerate people if the behavior didn’t stop, and diagnose why they’re in that area in the first place.”

    Harbor Light security manager Sam Taylor pilots a Salvation Army van around the neighborhood several times every week, telling loiterers to move on. Having patrolled the Stroll for years, Taylor thinks police should focus more on the johns.

    “I’m not saying they’re not doing all they can,” Taylor says as he cruises the area late one night. “They’ve been stepping up their efforts. Maybe the officers who ride through here should spot some of these cars that come around the block five or six times, get a license plate and run ’em. Then you’ll see where most of these guys are coming from” — the implication being that johns are commuting in from the county.

    “Just in the last six months to a year we kind of hit critical mass, having enough people where we felt like we can start making a difference here,” says Wade Paschall. “We said to the police, ‘Hey, we live down here, we work down here and we want to help you guys in any way we can.’ We are just in the beginning stages of doing that, but I think you’re going to start seeing a lot of cracking down.”

    A lot of times the way you can tell that they’re here for sex work is that they may stand against the wall and may peer into cars for long periods of time. Another way to tell is if they’re walking around and they’re not walking around for any particular reason.”

    Some people have a special talent for discerning the flavors of a fine wine, others for identifying rare species of insects. Anthony Galloway can spot a male prostitute from a distance of 100 yards.

    An openly gay, 23-year-old black man, Galloway works for the St. Louis Effort For AIDS, specializing in outreach to at-risk gay men of color. On this pleasantly cool Thursday night, he’s making his rounds on the Stroll, handing out “Safer Sex Kits,” each of which contains three condoms (two regular and one flavored), a packet of lubricant and a sheet of safe-sex tips. By the time he’s done he’ll have given kits to about half the two dozen or so men he encounters. Later tonight hustling will be even more bustling.

    Galloway has been handing out the kits on the Stroll for five years. Somebody has to do it, he says, noting that Harbor Light doesn’t distribute condoms and the St. Louis Department of Health and its Metropolitan Center for HIV/AIDS Services, located nearby on Grand Boulevard, will likely move soon. HIV and AIDS, meanwhile, are on the rise in St. Louis, which also boasts the nation’s second-highest rate of gonorrhea and ranks third in chlamydia.

    Galloway, who distributes condoms in “public sex environments,” including clubs and places that sell pornographic materials, speculates that the down-low phenomenon, coupled with garden-variety Show-Me State homophobia, combine to draw johns to the Stroll. “Missouri is a highly conservative state. It’s very homophobic, which has a lot to do with the amount of down-low men,” he theorizes.

    Although some Stroll denizens wordlessly refuse Galloway’s kits, many recognize and return his greeting. Some know him by name. And in exchange for a few dollars, many are willing to talk about their lives.

    “I love women. Sex with men I really don’t like,” says a middle-aged Stroll walker who identifies himself as John Smith and goes so far as to produce his Social Security card to prove it. “I don’t like it, man, but sometimes you gotta make ends meet.”

    Smith says he’s been on the Stroll for ten years, during which time he has developed a special relationship with some of his clients.

    “Sometimes guys might just want a hug or something — it’s not always about sex. They come down here to get somebody they can be friends with. Some guys come out here because they want somebody to be with them that’s for real, that’s down to earth.

    “I like to be around them just for the company,” Smith goes on. “Someone to talk to, man. Some of ’em are really good listeners, and some of them will befriend you and help you out in any way they can. They might want you to cut their grass, they might want you to put up a computer stand or something.”

    And what of those who characterize the Stroll as a den of secret, seedy commerce?

    “It’s not secret — what’s so secret about it?” he responds. “Everybody’s business is not everybody’s business. A lot of people come down here, man. You’ve got guys that’s got wives. You’ve got guys that’s in church, that’s preachers, you’ve got schoolteachers, you’ve got people with high status, man. They want to keep it low-key. Everybody entitled to their own privacy, right?”

    Answering his own question with an affirmative nod, Smith gets back to his business.

  • The Ten Most Hated Men in Rock

    David Byrne has done it right. Destined to live high on the hog by way of Talking Heads royalties until the day he dies, the adventurous quirkmeister has been nothing but ballsy since his seminal new-wave outfit parted ways. You may not like everything he’s tried since his career apex, but complacency has, to his credit, been Byrne’s worst enemy.

    Sting, meanwhile, is another story. This turtleneck-sweatered Jaguar shill has so desecrated his Policeman legacy that we’re not entirely convinced the current soft-rock incarnation isn’t the original Sting’s evil twin. He is, without question, the most hated man in rock.

    A better question is: Who’re numbers two through ten? According to San Francisco Chronicle pop-music critic Aidin Vaziri, the runner-up is Eric Clapton, a ranking based almost exclusively on the guitar god’s synth-slop collaborations with Babyface. While we may not agree with this ranking, the criteria for what makes a rocker “hated” is more or less spot on: have talent, use it well for a substantial period of time, then intentionally squander it for commercial riches, fame and/or forced mass appeal.

    Admittedly, it is tough to find ten men who strictly adhere to such requirements, so we’ve chosen — with the help of a secret, eleven-man panel — to implement a graded system in which talented sellouts merit weightier consideration than, say, Johnny Rzeznik or Fred Durst. That said, to exclude such ass-clowns from this list outright would be doing a public disservice. So too would including Sting, as he is as consensus a top dog as doggies can top. Without further ado, let the hatred begin!



    1. Paul McCartney     Barely qualified to carry John Lennon’s roach clip while both toiled with a grotesquely overrated boy band known as the Beatles, Sir Paul’s true colors have reverberated loudly and horribly since Mark David Chapman put a tragic slug in Yoko’s hubby. “Band on the Run” could have been written by a third grader, and McCartney’s duets with alleged pedophile Michael Jackson — and the ensuing public pissing match over Wacko Jacko’s savvy purchase of the Beatles’ catalogue — cemented McCartney’s legacy of poor taste and idiocy. And wasn’t it great when Sir Paul, sharing the stage with Madonna at the close of the 1999 MTV Music Awards, thought Lauryn Hill was a man, referring to the artist of the year as “some guy named Lawrence Hill?” Nice one, asshole. Worst of all, who can forget the post-9/11 ode to freedom named, with typical genius, “Freedom”? Marrying a young, blond, one-legged starfucker twelve hours after burying your hero-philanthropist wife was a good one too, mate. Go fuck yourself, McCartney. You deserve worse than that, but such dread is unattainable on this earth. We can only hope Satan delivers the goods to Sir Paul in Hell, where knighthoods carry no currency.

    2. Carlos Santana “Or else forget about it!” We wish we could, Carlos. And that would likely be possible had you made just one album of duets with flash-in-the-pan pop stars such as Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas. But no, you followed it up with “a little bit of this” and “a little bit of that” with no-talent teen tart Michelle Branch on the dreadful Supernatural sequel, Shaman, and proceeded to ride the low-rent pop-culture train all the way to a spot on National Basketball Association playoff lead-ins with the Black Eyed Peas. Pathetic career trajectory for a man once considered to be the heir apparent to Jimi Hendrix, and Santana has no one to blame but himself. It’s not like his record label swooped in and said, “Say, Carlos, we need you to do this duet with the guy from Nickelback or else we’re going to drop your ass.” Look for him on the next Jennifer Lopez album.



    3. Jimmy Buffett     Alcohol-rehabilitation counselors, antidepressant manufacturers and shrinks should present Buffett with gold-encrusted plaques of recognition thanking the Key West ukulele hack for supplying roughly half of their paying clientele. Here’s how the vicious cycle works: 1) Begin liking Buffett during perpetually drunk collegiate undergrad years; 2) prolong perpetual drunkenness by becoming Parrothead and attending Buffett shows until the age of 40; 3) crash car drunk on drive back from Buffett show at Pensacola Fairgrounds; 4) enter court-mandated rehab program; 5) get sober; 6) recognize how bad taste in music and hollow life was during personal “Cheeseburger in Paradise” bender; 7) start seeing shrink and taking Prozac; 8) realize that entire wardrobe consists of imitation Hawaiian shirts, huarache sandals, golf visors and jams; 9) start drinking again; 10) hit the road for Chattanooga stop of Buffett’s “Four Inebriated Horsemen” tour with Alan Jackson, Clint Black and Randy Travis. Margaritaville, unfortunately, has inescapable walls made of petrified ape dung, which is an apt description of Buffett’s entire catalogue.



    4. The Adams Family (Ryan & Bryan)     You’ve been asking for this double entry, Ryan, by refusing, time and again, to cover “Summer of ’69” in concert. If you didn’t want to be confused with Bryan Adams — or, short of that, teased a little for being one consonant short of Canada’s pint-size pride — you should have changed your fucking name. Lots of rock stars do it, bro. Releasing three mediocre albums a year and mounting the likes of Winona Ryder and Parker Posey have done nothing to help R. Adams’ credibility either. Bryan, meanwhile, paved the way for mediocre soloists like Phil Collins and Patrick Swayze to cash in at the box office by contributing to Robin Hood. For this, the gravel-throated Canuck will never be forgiven, even if the aforementioned “Summer” is a true-blue gem.


    5. Elton John     Bernie Taupin’s not-so-tiny dancer was way better in the Studio 54 era, when he was as high as a Rocket Man and actually cranked out adventurous pop hits with gusto. Now sober, Sir Elton seems content to belt out cheesy power ballads for animated-feature soundtracks, host garish awards-show afterparties and retrofit “Candle in the Wind” to cash in on the It-Dead Princess of the Moment. Leavin’ Levon far behind, indeed, and much the worse for it. Heaven hope the sun goes down on this pasty, toupee-wearing key tickler ASAFP.



    6. Johnny Rzeznik     Feel free to debate whether what the Goo Goo Dolls record can even be considered rock. Also feel free to debate whether or not it’s music. Any way you slice the pie, this moronic, saccharine, neo-glam outfit is the worst band in America, with Rzeznik being the synthetic cherry filling. Quick, name one Goo Goo Dolls song! That’s okay, you’re not alone. The fact that Rzeznik ascends to this high a ranking without ever exhibiting an ounce of artistic talent is testament to how much people just want to drop-kick his pretty-boy bean through the goalposts at Fuckface Field. At least this Calvin Klein underwear-model wannabe has one thing going for him: Avril Lavigne evidently wants to ride him. And in Missouri, that’d be barely legal.



    7. G.E. Smith     We know: How can a Saturday Night Live bandleader named after a power company qualify for this list? Here’s how: Smith served as Hall & Oates’ lead guitarist from 1979 until 1985, which marked the peak of the Philly duo’s commercial viability. And — come on — was there any blond ponytail more ubiquitous than Smith’s during his ten-year SNL run? Absolutely not — homeboy played on every imaginable televised tribute concert, including Bob Dylan’s, Live Aid and Farm Aid. Indeed, where there was an Aid — and a camera — there was a blond ponytail, which Smith took great pains to flap across his face like a horse does with tail and ass. Smith was Michael Bolton before Michael Bolton was Michael Bolton. The difference is Smith didn’t even have to open his mouth to attain such reviled status; his “look at me!” facial expressions did it all.



    8. Conor Oberst & Chris Carrabba     Who wants to hear sad, sad songs about the day-to-day pathos of well-to-do suburban white kids? Well-to-do suburban white kids, that’s who. And that’s about it. “Emo,” then, is really a genre within a genre within a genre, which makes it a mystery as to why these two wimps have been garnering so much ink and critical fellatio. Every song they write is overwrought and essentially intellectually dishonest. Everybody’s got problems, to be sure, but we’d love to transplant this double entry (two whiny weenies equal one man, by our count) of pastoral crackers to the ghetto for a few decades. Then we’ll see if they continue to pump out the same prepubescent pussy bait that’s gotten them this far.



    9. Fred Durst     It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe Durst’s claim that he drilled Britney Spears six ways ’til Sunday; this rap-rock goofball is largely responsible for rock’s darkest era: the late 90’s (Kid Rock, you can take a bow too). Fortunately it looks like Durst’s career is over. Otherwise, he’d likely outstrip Rzeznik for the sixth spot and would rank number one if this poll were more concerned with sonic proficiency.



    10. Bob Weir     You can actually stop truckin’ now, Bob. The Dead’s insistence on staying on the road post-Jerry Garcia has proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the band was just a collection of semi-competent nerds with a prodigiously charismatic and talented frontman. And “Rock Star Bobby” is the worst of the bunch, a bona fide gravy trainer who would’ve probably invited frequent guest Huey Lewis to join the band as a full-time harmonica player had Garcia not understandably kept his pink Izod-wearing ass in check. Weir’s side project, Rat Dog, is basically a below-average bar band with a frontman who needs a teleprompter to remember his own lyrics. But frankly, given our unyielding love for all things Garcia, we were willing to forgive and forget until Weir & Co. jumped on a stage in a movie-studio lot to appear on Leno recently. With Garcia on the injured list (for good), Weir stepped in to sing lead vocals on “Touch of Grey.” Horribly. Why he didn’t just defecate on Jerry’s headstone instead, we’ll never know.



    Rounding out the Top Twenty:     11. Glenn Frey & Don Henley. 12. Scott Stapp. 13. Rod Stewart. 14. Phil Collins. 15. Lenny Kravitz. 16. Steve Miller. 17. John Cougar Mellencamp. 18. Michael McDonald. 19. Max Weinberg. 20. Lars Ulrich.



    Honorable Mention:     Eric Clapton, Anthony Kiedis, Kid Rock, Scott Weiland, Liam & Noel Gallagher, Zack de la Rocha, Peter Gabriel, Kenny Loggins, George Thorogood, Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bruce Springsteen, Axl Rose, James Hetfield, Ozzy Osbourne, Steve Winwood, Bruce Hornsby, Billy Joel, Dave Matthews, John Popper, Julian Casablancas, Jack White, Rob Thomas, Huey Lewis, Jackson Browne, Dave Grohl, Chris Cornell, Mark McGrath, Melissa Etheridge and the lead singer of Maroon 5 (we’re too indifferent to even bother learning his name).

    Click the links beneath the photos to print out your very own “Least Wanted” posters, then hang them around town, CORE Project-style! (Note: All posters are in PDF format and require Acrobat Reader [available
    here] to view. Posters average 500k in size.)

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