investigativevoice.com

By Stephen Janis


A prostitute named Heather lingers on the 1200 block of South Carey Street in the Pigtown neighborhood of South Baltimore.

Drinking from a can of Sprite, dragging on a cigarette butt, the petite 23-year-old woman can barely stand still, her sapphire blue eyes encircled with watered-down eyeshadow. her jittery movements the result of a four-day crack-fueled binge.

But Heather’s fragile state of mind does not deter Pigtown activist and resident Sebastian Sassi from engaging her. Suspecting that she was responsible for throwing a brick through the window of a neighbor’s car the night before, Sassi, sporting a "Wacco for Flacco" T-shirt, peppers her with questions.

“Do you know who threw the brick through Laura’s window?” he asks.

“No,” she answers, adding: “People hate snitches.”

The exchange becomes heated, as Sassi continues to probe, and Heather wonders aloud why Sassi can’t mind his own business.

Finally, she lashes out.

“Why are you coming to me and asking me all this crazy s--- ?” she says.

“It really seems like you’re obsessed with it, how much you all f--- with us.”

But Sassi doesn’t back down.

“Don’t you think some of the craziness is that we would like to live in a neighborhood without prostitutes and drug dealers in it, and you guys are refusing to leave?”

“This is Baltimore City and that’s not going to happen, as much as you would like it to happen,” Heather retorts.

Indeed, prostitution and drug dealing is as much ingrained in the fabric of the community of this South Baltimore neighborhood as the blue-collar ethos and post-industrial grit that has lifetime residents living next to downtown urban homesteaders.

TOUGH TACTICS

But unlike other locales that have sought increased police intervention to combat crime, a core group of Pigtown residents has taken a well-publicized hands-on approach that has given even prostitutes like Heather pause.

Using traditional police techniques like a so-called "john sting" replete with local women posing as prostitutes and posting videos of suspected drug dealers on YouTube, Sassi, who has a legal permit to carry a gun, has made the sex tourists who ply Washington Boulevard at the very least uncomfortable.

“It’s working,” he says assuredly, as he leaves Heather standing in the rain. “I see fewer of them around.”

And though his exchange with Heather was tense, he said his beef was not with drug-addicted prostitutes, but with the johns who prey upon them.

“Do you really think that somebody wants to give you blow jobs for 20 bucks? Do you think you’re old wrinkly ass is really that attractive and she’s so desperate to suck you off she’ll do it for 20 bucks? Give me a break,” Sassi asks rhetorically.

Since Sassi moved to Pigtown in 2005, he has become known as an unofficial enforcer for the neighborhood. With newly renovated $300,000 row homes just doors down from ramshackle “adandonminiuns” as they are known, Sassi said as homeowner he has little choice but to fight.

“This is about the future of this neighborhood.”

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Wandering south of Carey Street, it is apparent that support for Sassi’s tactics depends on who you ask.

Teen drug dealers on bicycles eye him warily, darting in and out of alleys as Sassi ambles down the street.

A few blocks down, Sassi encounters Thomas Gamble, 57, a retired federal police officer who is known as the unofficial “mayor” of Pigtown.

The tall, bespectacled man said he welcomes Sassi’s help in keeping johns out of the neighborhood as he greets Sassi in an alley behind an elementary school.

“It has helped; there is no doubt about it,” Gamble says.

“We certainly see less of it around; he is certainly having an impact.”

BROTHER NOT AS PLEASED

But Gamble’s brother, a former Baltimore City firefighter, is not as pleased with Sassi’s tactics.

“Not everything that goes on in the neighborhood is Buck’s fault,” says the younger Gamble sibling, who did not wish to be identified. Chiding Sassi for calling police on a neighborhood man named Buck, who Sassi said allowed prostitutes to shoot-up in his home, the younger Gamble asserted Sassi’s focus on Buck was unwarranted.

“They took [his dog] to the pound because he bit the police,” the former firefighter says.

“I called down there and asked about the dog and they told me he was not there,” Sassi says, “which made me believe the dog has been put down.”

“Maybe I can talk to him,” the Gamble brother says, “because he believes everything that happens to him is because of you,” adding: “He’s not the problem.

"You need to get to know people in the neighborhood; not everyone is bad, but a lot of people think they're targeted because of you," the younger Gamble says.

“Do you know the Sweaty story?” Sassi asks.

Sweaty, Sassi explains, was a local drug dealer who in 2004 confessed to killing his girlfriend. But the rumor in Pigtown was that Sassi had “snitched” on Sweaty.

NOT 'ON MY ACCOUNT'

“Sweaty was arrested in 2004, and I didn’t even move here until 2005,” Sassi explains. “What I’m getting at is that there is a persistent belief that everyone that gets hooked, or goes to jail, goes there on my account,” he says, adding:

“There are people that have gone to jail with me, but not everyone goes to jail because of me,” he says.

“I don’t have that much free time.”

But the younger Gamble is not satisfied.

“Don’t just assume everyone is a prostitute, or a drug dealer; get to know the people,” Gamble chides him. “These people think you don’t even try to get to know them.”

“I understand, but I don’t think it’s fair,” Sassi says.

Later as Sassi drives his diesel-fueled Ford F-150, he admits that his efforts have put him at odds with some of his neighbors.

“I’ve been accused of everything — not liking black people, or being a vigilante,” he explains. “But we didn’t ask for this; we didn’t ask for prostitutes to come and take a s--- in our backyard."

TALKING TRASH

The back alley of Sergeant Street is laden with trash. Used diapers, rotten meat, even discarded toys sit piled in heaps that fill the alley with the stench of decay.

The weekly trash pick-up day, Wednesday, fell on Veteran’s Day, a federal holiday. City officials rescheduled trash pick-up for Saturday. But the week and a half interval between pick-ups left trash cans overflowing.

To make matters worse, the recycling pick-up truck piled the trash that had spilled over into the alley into sprawling compost behind a row of abandoned homes.

Armed with shovels, a small group of Pigtown residents dressed in sweatpants and T-shirts scoop up the trash early Saturday, placing bags of debris in the back of a pickup truck driven by Washington Village Association President Dan Cosgrove.

“We feel like we’re on a treadmill; this is like the third time in a month,” says Pigtown homeowner and school psychiatrist Brad Petrie, who along with his wife was shoveling the trash into large black trash bags.

“So you just feel like you’re Sisyphus,” he says, evoking the son of a Greek king consigned by the Greek god Thanatos to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity for Sisyphus's misdeeds on earth.

“It’s like, every Saturday, 'Do you want to hit the alley behind Sergeant?'"

'THE ALLEY WAS KNEE-DEEP'

“When we first started, the alley was knee-deep; we’ve moved over 400 tons in three years,” Cosgrove says.

“Contractors would bring it in and just dump it in the middle of the street,” he recalls. “That’s how bad it was.”

Cosgrove said the city initially did nothing to help their efforts to clean up. But after Mayor Sheila Dixon was sworn in as interim mayor in January of 2007, he says, things changed.

“They would send us a trash truck every other week.”

But now the city’s "One-Plus-One" schedule for trash and recycling pickups has dealt residents a bit of a setback. [In July, trash collections were cut back from twice per week to weekly while recycling pick-ups were increased from twice monthly to once a week.]

“The sad part is, this is somebody’s recycling,” remarks Stacey Petrie as she lifts a shovel full of debris into a trash bag.

“We live in a corrupt city where people are given sugarplum jobs,” says Sassi, obviously frustrated.

“No one is held accountable."

The worst trash usually accumulates behind abandoned homes, he says, not an insignificant hazard.

“We’ve had four vacant homes burn down in the past two months,” Cosgrove adds.

“It’s not a small thing to keep the trash off the streets.”

PROPOSITIONED MOM TURNS DECOY

Early Saturday morning, longtime Pigtown resident Carol Ott took a walk.

But shortly after setting out in the neighborhood she has called home for nearly 12 years, the short but not diminutive woman quickly had an encounter that she says is not uncommon for women who live in Pigtown.

On Bayard Street a man driving a black pickup truck pulled alongside the mother of two, and asked if she was "dating" — the euphemism for tricking.

“I said, 'If you don’t get out of here now I’m going to club you like a baby seal,'” the communications specialist recalls, standing on the sidewalk just two blocks from Washington Boulevard.

The incident was not unusual, says Ott, who recounts being propositioned en route to pick her children up from school or simply talking out the trash.

“It happens all the time.”

The unwanted attention from johns prompted Ott to join forces with Sassi, working as a so-called “model” to lure men during weekly john stings. Ott and another woman who did not want to be interviewed stand on the corner once a week waiting for prospective johns to proposition them.

When the johns take the bait, they hand them a flyer telling them to stay out of the neighborhood, while Sassi catches the offenders on video that he posts on the group’s web site, Pigtown John Watch.

The johns, Ott says, are generally men in their 40s, 50s or 60s, many of whom don’t seem to understand, or care about, the ills their appetites bring to the neighborhood.

“They're somewhat nonchalant about it,” she says. “But someone needs to tell their wives, because they’re going to bring home what they’re doing here to someone else.”

Working as a decoy, Ott says, helps discourage johns from trolling the streets and is the best way to protect the neighborhood.

“I’m not trying to change the world; I just want to make the neighborhood a little less scary.”

* * *

A few blocks down on Washington Boulevard, Sassi surveys the back of three row homes that had been set afire several weeks ago. Sassi believes the fire was started by a prostitute cooking heroin in an abandoned home.

But the fire spread, damaging the home of a 71-year-old woman who did not have insurance. Now she has been dislocated, living with relatives, Sassi says.

Charred scraps of trash fill the alley. The back of the row homes look like an open wound turned necrotic.

Sassi shakes his head at the evidence that his work is far from done.

“Anyone who thinks prostitution is a victimless crime should take a look at this,” he says.

“I bet the woman who lost her home doesn’t think so.”


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