Blogs: The News Hole

Jose J. Morales, the collapse contractor, thief, arsonist and drug dealer whose curiously consequence-less criminal career was featured in City Paper in 2008, and who later turned in his lawyer, Stanley Needleman, on tax charges, pleaded guilty to new federal drug charges today. “I am writing to inform you that I would like to...
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Last summer’s prostitution raid on the York Spa at 2023 York Road in Timonium got scant media attention—it appears only Patch covered it. But thanks to a recent federal-court filing, the public can now know more about it—including the fact that, after being drawn to York Spa thanks to advertisements in City Paper, two...
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A federal grand jury indicted mortgage broker Joshua S. Goldberg today, alleging he helped steal $2.5 million from various lenders through a mortgage fraud scheme in Baltimore. City Paper first outlined the scheme in this 2008 story. As the financial crisis worsened Goldberg and his husband, Bayardo Alvarez, continued to get big mortgages and...
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Ryan Lohr, a correctional officer at Roxbury Correctional Institution (RCI) in Hagerstown, was charged Jan. 18 in Maryland U.S. District Court with a single count of conspiracy to obstruct justice and destroy evidence, according to court documents. Lohr, 26*, is accused of participating in a cover-up of an inmate beating that occurred at RCI...
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It’s not often that the worlds of bail bonds and tech startups overlap, but they do in the Nochumowitz family, founders of Big Boyz Bail Bonds, of the ubiquitous pens, who have branched out as of late with a startup called BetaPunch. And the Nochumowitzes have brought their unique brand of asshole behavior to...
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One of the more intriguing defendants in the 16-member federal pot-conspiracy case involving the shuttered Sonar nightclub in downtown Baltimore (“Risky Business,” Feature, Aug. 15, 2012) has been 32-year-old Jeremiah “Jeremy” Brandon Landsman, the Baltimore real-estate developer whose JBL Real Estate, based in Fells Point, is tied to several properties that figured in the...
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Last week Rep. Pat McDonough proposed doing for Maryland what something like 30 other states have already done: make secret the state’s list of who is permitted to carry a concealed handgun. I was vacationing in my home state of Connecticut at the time, so I missed all the hubbub about the proposal and...
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Republican Delegate Pat McDonough held a press conference today to announce plans to introduce three gun-related bills in the Maryland state legislature. The first of these, called the “Gun-Owner Privacy Act,” is intended, according to the delegate’s press release, “to prohibit newspapers and other publications from printing personal or private information about firearm owners.”...
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Anthony Marcantoni, one of the founders of Ground Control jujitsu studio who had his own location in Owings Mills, was handed a 121-month prison sentence yesterday after pleading guilty for his part in the cross-country pot conspiracy involving former Sonar nightclub co-owner Daniel McIntosh and 14 others (“Risky Business,” Feature, Aug. 15). Marcantoni, 32,...
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As City Paper reported in 2004, when Maryland debt-collections lawyer Michael Peroutka was the Constitution Party’s presidential candidate, the guy’s an extreme paleo-conservative with ties to the Texas militia movement and a fellow-traveler with supporters of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Today, the Human Rights Campaign went further, calling Peroutka an “active...
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Tyrone Johniken, the only defendant to go to trial in a four-member racketeering drug-conspiracy case involving the 2010 murder of Club Pussy Cat dancer Cherrie Gammon (“Laid Bare,” Mobtown Beat, Oct. 3), was found guilty of all charges by a federal trial jury on Nov. 21, after a 10-day trial. At his scheduled Mar....
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Salvatore Petti, a 76-year-old Ellicott City resident who has been at the center of a still-simmering dispute involving the bocce courts in Baltimore’s Little Italy neighborhood (“Bocce Brawl,” Feature, June 22, 2011), has been charged in U.S. District Court with fraud for allegedly diverting funds from a Social Security Administration employees’ association. According to...
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