It Couldn't Happen Here - Part II

November 16, 2014
0045
Interview with Sheriff Mike Lewis
Wicomico County Sheriff Mike Lewis emerged from an interrogation observation room moments ago. He was able to give us these words, which gave us surprising information about the incidents leading to last night's arrests: “We were the original point of contact for complaints having to do with this case, and the first agency to be called with a complaint. This goes back about fourteen months. We got reports of the blimp being seen at all hours of the day and night, and sometimes strangely close to areas where fires had just been reported. We asked the fire department about it, and they verified that they had been doing a lot more mutual aid and training calls than ever before as a part of the grant acceptance requirements. They said that it was sometimes the case that flight hours or weather would keep them overnight in isolated places on the Shore. We later checked the county's 911 logs, and they all seemed to be on the up and up, accurate to a T with what fire officials said. We ceased investigation at that point and treated all blimp sightings as routine. State and Salisbury City Police were doing the same thing. We might never have considered to do anything more with the complaints than reassure the citizens that all was well if it hadn't been for a call from the regional DEA office. Mantenga su escroto, literally, “hold your scrotum,” was a phrase that was being newly used among Hispanic gangs on the East Coast as some sort of drug dealer code phrase. The DEA scratched their heads over this for quite some time, until one sharp agent remembered seeing a Salisbury News item a few years back about the Salisbury Fire Department accepting a blimp from the federal government, the ASCROTM-4F, which was later named The Barrie T. That was when they called me as the head of the Tri-County Drug Task Force. Task Force confidential informants verified the Spanish “hold your scrotum” phrase as locally and regionally used to indicate that limited patience would be necessary to wait for the next big drug delivery from out of state. It was then, too, that we connected the phrase to the acronym to the conflicting reports of The Barrie T's movements. It all clicked. We were able to obtain a federal warrant to place a dedicated signal GPS unit on The Barrie T as she was moored at the airport. With DEA taking the lead, and with the help of the National Security Agency, we were able to get real-time satellite film of The Barrie T when she was in transit. Whenever she moved, we had pictures. This went on for the better part of eleven months. The NSA shot over a thousand hours of useful frames, edited them for time and put them in a chronological series that showed The Barrie T flying into places she shouldn't have been, picking up and delivering suspicious cargo she shouldn't have touched. After the first two months of surveillance, there was enough to take to a Maryland court to get a warrant for video and sound recording gear to be quietly and inconspicuously installed in the blimp's gondola, and for wiretaps on the 911 dispatchers' lines. With a month's worth of surveillance video and audio from inside The Barrie T and uncompromised recordings from 911 Central, we were ready to spring the trap. Eleven months of work has led us to this day. We might not get the big boys, but we're going to deal a blow to the middlemen that will be felt for quite a while. And we're going to blow the lid off the scandal that's been silently building over the past five years, the misuse of the ASCROTM.”

A Little ASCROTM History
As many of Salisbury News' readers may have little knowledge or memory of the craft of which Sheriff Lewis spoke, we'll provide a bit of background:
The Barrie T , Salisbury City Fire Department's firefighting blimp, formerly known by its acronym ASCROTM-4F, or simply ASCROTM, was accepted by the city in fall 2009 as a part of a Homeland Security grant program. It was intended to increase the SFD's capabilities and range in fighting marsh fires on and adjacent to the land mass of the Eastern Shore. Grant requirements dictated that the area that the craft and its crews would cover would be from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to Cape Charles, Virginia, a distance of over 170 miles, representing a huge increase in mutual aid response area, which historically had been, with very few exceptions, no more than forty miles from Salisbury. The acceptance of the blimp, which was unsuccessfully contested by Councilwomen Deborah Campbell and Terry Cohen and a scant few taxpayers, changed many things, including the annual expenditures for marsh fire mutual aid calls. This was a constant irritant to the two councilwomen over ensuing years, an ever present reminder that the fiscal responsibility platforms they represented were rendered nearly moot by a perennial 3 to 2 “spend it or lose it” motivated vote in council.
After three and a half years of service, a record of maintenance and operating fees published by the city listed the craft as, for the third year running, the singlemost expensive item of equipment ever owned by the city, bar none. Operating costs were estimated to be as high as $6,600 per hour of the airborne time recorded in official flight records in FY 2011, which, remarkably, is recorded as 1,874 hours, in stark contrast to Assistant Chief Rick Hoppes' prediction that "... based on the use of another fire craft we continually pull out of the water for repairs and draining, we expect that the ASCROTM-4F will run us about $7000 a year in maintenance and everything else."
The hourly cost exceeded even that of the Barrie Parsons Tilghman Wastewater Treatment Plant, whose hourly rate at the time, after years of innumerable unsatisfactory design changes, had topped $5,000.
When questioned about the seemingly excessive cost and why much of it was not borne by other jurisdictions, as 98.3% of flights were logged to rural areas outside Salisbury and Wicomico County, Salisbury Mayor Shanie Shields, replied: “This saves lives. What money cost can you put on a human life?”
Salisbury City Council President Louise Smith said, “You must live, as I do, a life of courtesy and politeness. When all else fails, courtesy will see us through.”
Majority leader and Council Vice President Muir Boda, fresh from his appointment to council after the settlement surrounding Shields' mayoral and council seat win, a result of a newly appreciated oversight by the Wicomico Board of Elections, said last week from his new home on Jersey Road, “We have much bigger things to look at right now, including getting through the 2013 audit. We can't be sidetracked by the rhetoric of the minority.”
Salisbury City Council minority leader Deborah Campbell said, “It's about time we got to knowing where our money is going. After spending over $27 million on this foolishness in about three years, we need to be assured that the next steps we take will be to find out where the money's gone, why so much of it has been spent, and why we have the only marsh fire suppression unit on the entire Eastern Shore. It seems to me that the Homeland Security Administration, and maybe some others, have played the City of Salisbury and its taxpayers for suckers with a piece of equipment no one else wanted or could use. With the results of some of the Freedom of Information Act Request responses I've received, I intend to introduce this as a council work session item at our next meeting, so that we can all read from the same pages, which I hope won't be delivered from the Shields administration ten minutes before the meeting starts.”
Junior minority leader Terry Cohen, a Democratic shoe-in to run for the upcoming Maryland State Senate seat, said, “I hope that the taxpayers of Salisbury have seen the light, and will now overwhelmingly support a thorough housecleaning of its administration, something that seems to have unconscionably and even astoundingly slipped through the cracks for the last two decades.”
City officials were unable to justify expenditures early on, but as the mutual aid system cost share administrators became better at tracking and billing for ASCROTM's forays into the counties of the northern and southern Eastern Shore, expenditures seemed more balanced with reimbursements, but always with substantial payments pending. But this was seen as an easily-to-be-expected lag in payments from state comptrollers. Little did they know an ever increasing number of those reimbursements for mis-documented flights were actually coming from coffers other than those of the states and counties of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. Some were coming as electronic transfers from offshore accounts in the Caribbean, cloaked in a complex web of internet proxies and computer code, followed by counterfeited paper verification and identification. Early on, some payments were in cash, presented as “donations” charitably and anonymously made for counties who were the alleged recipients of mutual aid calls made by The Barrie T. But in the spring of 2012, the bulk of payments listed in city ledgers as reimbursements for marsh fire mutual aid calls were received from a newly formed 501(c)(3) corporation known to the public only as The Marsh Queen. It was this entity, which turned out to be the philanthropic arm of the Mid Atlantic Drug Cartel, that sponsored dozens of high-profile fund and awareness raisers across the Shore, aiming its message of marshland preservation to the upper middle and upper classes, while producing internet, television and radio advertising to reach the rest of the population. To this end, the organization's video production studios even produced a live cable TV hunting and fishing show featuring a different NASCAR driver every week as a guest hunter or fisherman, and sometimes both. Many may recall the July, 2012 episode of “Where Your Mouth Is - Hunting and Fishing And Having A High Old Time On The Big Sandbar”, as four professional drivers converged on Salisbury to fish the freshly cleaned and recertified Wicomico River. Sadly, as readers may remember, premier driver Darryl Waltrip was the victim of salmonella and acute mercury poisoning from handling and eating a tainted but record-setting 19 1/2 inch, 8 lb. 6 oz. smallmouth bass caught on a red Rebel Floating Frog in six feet of water with four pound test in light weeds and heavy submerged branches on the North Prong, near the site of the failed contaminated land “giveaway” of 2009, which has,since the fishing mishap, been found to be a fresh underground source of mercury in addition to previously discovered petroleum and chemical seepage. In the wake of the incident, the site was archaeologically source-linked to a tanning concern operating in the late 1500s and a small but prolific felt and hat factory of the early to late 1700s, a factory owned, perhaps ironically, by the Parsons family. Since the 2012 event, this and two other adjacent North Prong properties have been the site of massive excavation and remediation, currently to the tune of over $58 million. Following Waltrip's untimely death, “Where Your Mouth Is” ratings soared and several spin-off series emerged, including a wildly popular VIVA! Network derivative entitled, “Mantenga Su Escroto,” roughly based on the classic U.S. shows “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “Jackass”, but with much more bass fishing, décolletage and, regrettably, graffiti. Tourists are often seen at the Darryl Waltrip Monument, located at the head of the North Prong on Isabella Street, where city-owned waterfront property meets that of the Salisbury Monument Company, the last business now occupying the North Prong after the April 2012 relocation of the Perdue Farms grain handling facility.
Once that it seemed that reimbursements for the ASCROTM's mutual aid were consistently being made, and that the city's ASCROTM-related finances appeared to be in balance, public controversy regarding the craft seemed to wither, save for an occasional Salisbury Times Grapevine post asking why the blimp was in the air so often and why its young volunteer crews came home so tired and quiet at night. Comments to those posts were generally dismissive in their tone, citing countless hours of marsh fire control by seasoned volunteers and those under their able mentorship who could have been spending their hours elsewhere, instead choosing public service.
Views from Salisbury's political camps, though, seemed unaffected. Said Councilwoman Campbell, “Something's not right here. If this blimp were a fish, it would be stinking to high heaven by now, and people would smell it all over town. You can stack hundred dollar bills as high as you like over a stinking fish, and you know what you'll get? A stinking fish covered with money and funny looks from bank tellers when you make a deposit. But, eventually, it seems, almost everybody gets used to the smell, one way or another. Almost everybody, that is.”
Council Vice President Boda said, “Like I said before, this is an insignificant issue when compared to others, and doesn't deserve any more of our attention. The money is coming in to justify the ASCROTM, and it has proved its worth on more than one occasion. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the ASCROTM soon proved its value in ways other than firefighting.”
Council President Louise Smith, looking well rested from her vacation at an undisclosed destination, said, “Pour the mixture into a greased pieplate. Cover the edges with tinfoil and bake at 350 until a toothpick comes out clean. I like it when the sun makes the colors on the straightened windowfishings look just so.”
Shanie Shields, although not asked to make a comment, did, saying,”What part of firefightering do you not understand? I trust my department heads when they tell me what's good for them. And that's why I'm the mayor and somebody else isn't. ”

In early 2013, almost prophetically, the Salisbury Fire Department was lauded by the DEA for providing streaming surveillance video, incident to an ASCROTM night training exercise, of a large drug drop off Assateague Island. This event led to the arrest and conviction of nine mid-Shore individuals who were identified as members of an established drug ring now known to have been in direct competition with the Mid Atlantic Cartel. Following this and the subsequent flurry of positive local, regional and national public relations coverage, The Barrie T's activities went virtually without public scrutiny. This affirmation even put to rest the animosity many taxpayers felt after the successful 2011 class action lawsuit launched against the city by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, The Cannon Group, Walt Disney Studios, Turner Broadcasting, the Estate of Michael Jackson and thirty-one other film production companies and stakeholders, who charged that the City of Salisbury had, without authorization or recompense, publicly presented over 120 copyrighted films to an appreciative supine audience between October 2009 and November 2011 as part of the city's popular ASCROTM Over The Park film series. The end of this extensive legal battle, it can be remembered, was nearly immediately followed by the resignations of long-time City Attorney Paul Wilber and Assistant City Administrator Lore' Chambers. Chambers, after appearing in a series of direct-to-DVD feature films, is now reported to be preparing for the lead role in an MGM remake of Funny Girl, also featuring veteran actors Michael Clarke Duncan and Ving Rhames, due to begin filming next month. Wilber's exact whereabouts are unknown, but certain city sources believe that a series of unmarked postcards to the mayor's office from tropical destinations might be clues to his currently most recent location. The December 2012 settlement for an undisclosed amount of cash and other considerations was followed in May 2013 by a thirty percent property tax increase, similar to the increase in sewer and water fees levied each year after the 2011 WWTP disaster, when grounds, overburdened by an accumulation of methane in a long-undetected and ever-growing subterranean cesspool beneath the facility, erupted in a huge explosion, causing the buildings and acres of holding ponds to slide into the Wicomico River. Remarkably, no workers were injured, and their water rescue was accomplished by passing kayakers. This rendered the then ongoing WWTP lawsuit moot, as, in the words of an O'Brien & Gere attorney, “You can't have a case without evidence, and in this case, there is neither. Poof!”

Update
0155
It now comes to light that the pilot of the ship, Griffin Delacort Watson, Jr., is only fifteen years of age and one of a dozen or more Salisbury Fire Department cadets and probational volunteer firefighters who were allegedly pressed into service as flight officers, stewards and ground personnel as part of the flight program's rigorous and extensive orientation process. He has been released to the immediate supervision of parents.

0156

New allegations, stemming from Salisbury News' revelations one minute ago, are surfacing, calling for SFD officials to explain the SFD cadet program regulations and practices. The highest of those officials are currently unavailable for comment.

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