CHARMED LIFE LOSES ITS LUCK IN COURT

Drug Conviction Undoes Dangerfield's Lifestyle

He cast himself as an up-from-the-hood gangster gone legit in real estate.
He had style, a sense of elegance, a quick wit and ready smile that won the
instant attention of some very pretty women. He drove a royal blue Rolls.

At nightclubs from Columbia to Manhattan, George A. Dangerfield Jr. was a
walking blizzard of cash, bestowing trays of drinks and sizzling skillets of
filet mignon on his adoring entourage.

Not yet 30, he already had it all.

"I'm the K.O.B., can't nobody mess with me," he decreed to friends. "When
things get rough, I can't be touched. I'm the King of Baltimore!"

He had reason to believe his own rap -- until last week.

Stripped of his gold watch and alligator briefcase by a federal court jury,
which found him guilty Wednesday of masterminding a conspiracy that dumped
pounds of cocaine onto the streets of Baltimore, Dangerfield now sits behind
concrete and barbed wire.

Denied bail until his sentencing hearing in September, he will have three
months in the Baltimore City Detention Center to polish the story of his
life that he will tell to U.S. District Judge Andre M. Davis.

The outcome will be a penalty ranging from 10 years to eternity.

Much of the story is already beyond Dangerfield's control, an unchangeable
criminal past writ large across hundreds of pages of court records that
portray him as a coldly calculating scofflaw slumlord with a prior
drug-dealing conviction in 1995.

But the saga of his rise and fall is also a morality tale for the times.

In the wastes of America's most drug addicted city -- the national
bellwether for heroin- and cocaine-related emergency room admissions --
Dangerfield drove a desperate road to success that destroyed far more lives
than his own.

Over the past five years, he has ambled through the court system in
chalk-striped suits and two-tone cranberry-on-white shoes, drawing on a
seemingly bottomless supply of ready cash to employ enough lawyers
to staff a small downtown firm.

With city police, prosecutors and judges taxed to distraction by abacklog of
80 new drug defendants a week, even so flamboyant a character went largely
unnoticed.

Dangerfield fended off child support suits by the mothers of his four
children. He beat seven drug charges that might have sent a lesser being to
prison for decades. He demanded full-blown trials for such minor infractions
as speeding on his motorcycle.

"Not discreet"

When he won -- and he usually did -- the president of Estate Management Inc.
sent roses or sympathy cards to prosecutors.

On his way out of the courtroom, he seldom failed to flash them that winning
smile -- a gleaming white show of teeth that could shift from impish to
insolent in the course of a sentence.

"He is not particularly discreet," said a frustrated Denise M. Duval, the
city's chief housing prosecutor, after an unsuccessful court bout with
Dangerfield in February. "Most defendants at least make a show of remorse.
Mr. Dangerfield laughs at you."

It was a risky attitude for a man in his 20s who owned more than 125 slum
rental houses through a web of 22 corporations -- all managed from a pair of
restored rowhouses trimmed in gold paint and black awnings on a boarded
block of North Avenue.

Parked out front was his fleet of Lincoln Town Cars, a white Humvee and one
of the few Rolls-Royce touring sedans in the city.

In the patois of the street, the man known as "G" appeared to be "all that,"
a "player," a living legend in the making in an East Baltimore community
racked by murder, drugs, poverty and 3,000 abandoned houses -- a community
starved for heroes.

"We see a young guy like this out here who seems to be a success story, and
it's a rare moment of inspiration," said Michael Seipp, who heads a $35
million urban renewal campaign that sought to acquire his houses, after
Dangerfield first came to public attention in February.

"Whatever hope there is gets attached to him pretty fast," Seipp added at
the time.

But for his dismal surroundings, the athletically built Dangerfield might
easily have been mistaken for an Oriole or a Raven, with a premium cigar
nested in his mouth and a golf bag on his shoulder. Dressed for a night of
"profiling" at the Silver Shadow club in Columbia, he found the backdrop
more to his liking.

Mingling with young black suburban professionals from Baltimore and
Washington, Dangerfield was in his element, the embodiment of the bootstraps
entrepreneur, a lady's man with a string of pretty things on his arm --
including a bank teller, a minister's daughter and, for a time, a promising
young Baltimore Police officer.

"Once she found out who he really was, she dumped him," said the officer's
mother. "It was awful for her. Like a lot of people, she believed in him.
She believed he was who he said he was. And she's been regretting it ever
since. Personally, I could wring his neck."

Said the officer: "It was beyond embarrassing. I was sick to my stomach for
a week when I found out the truth" two years ago.

Police commanders ultimately decided that the relationship amounted to
nothing more than an ill-advised romance. But they transferred her out of
East Baltimore as a precaution.

The reason? The ax was about to fall.

After years of roving the east side with impunity -- paying thugs to bash
troublesome tenants, leasing abandoned houses dusted with lead paint to
families with children and withholding thousands of dollars in city taxes --
Dangerfield had finally come to the attention of someone with the time,
talent and technology to stop him.

The beginning of the end

It was Thanksgiving 1997.

Sgt. Rick Barbato of the Baltimore County Police Department had been leading
a squad of young, streetwise undercover cops working to break up a ring of
white kids in the suburbs who had been hustling bags of cocaine and pot
around the Baltimore Beltway.

They tapped their phones, listened to thousands of hours of conversations
and collected dozens of names, including George Albert Dangerfield Jr., a
29-year-old known commodity. They had busted him once in 1994, after he
palmed off three ounces of cocaine to a couple of would-be customers outside
a Rosedale diner.

The cops used that information to persuade a judge to let them tap
Dangerfield's phones, too.

The plot thickened when the officers executed a search warrant at another
suspect's home and found a box of deeds that showed Dangerfield was cutting
his alleged drug partners in on his real estate action.

He spun off one house on Broadway to his 25-year-old nephew and three more
to a 26-year-old from East Baltimore named Marion Shawn Anderson, who
already owned a property management company, a townhouse in Timonium and a
grocery store at the corner of North and Longwood in West Baltimore, deed
records show.

Between them, five members of Dangerfield's immediate circle owned 16
houses, three real estate corporations, a clothes store, a shoe store and a
music production company that provided most of the cellular phones for their
operation, state records show.

None of the crew was older than 29. And they were looking for new ways to
diversify.

Paul E. Blinken, a long-time Park Heights businessman and owner of
Cinderella Shoes, was approached by one of Dangerfield's associates and
asked if he had ever considered selling out.

"He was a nice kid, always a gentleman," Blinken said in an interview. "He
owned a car wash and a barber shop, and was looking to get into some other
line. We went around the question for a couple weeks, but nothing ever came
of it.

"I saw him later, and he told me he'd gotten into some kind of legal trouble."

Serious legal trouble.

By last summer, the indictments started to come down. And one by one, the
defendants began to plead guilty in federal court, including Anderson, who
will be sentenced in October. As for Dangerfield's nephew, Karriem Michael
Jackson -- president of KAJA Enterprises -- he was indicted in March.

An unexpected jury

So far, Dangerfield is the only one who has chosen to tempt fate, tearing up
a five-year plea agreement and opting for a trial. What he hadn't figured on
was the jury he confronted last Wednesday in U.S. District Court.

Accustomed to the state court system -- where majority-black juries drawn
from a majority African-American city are not unusual, and where defense
lawyers sometimes win acquittals by appealing to deep-seated suspicions
about police -- Dangerfield was way outside his arena in federal court.
Here, the jury is drawn from the entire state of Maryland, home to four
major U.S. military bases, the National Security Agency, the Social Security
Administration, the National Archives, the National Agricultural Research
Center, the Goddard Space Center and thousands of retired federal employees.

Not only are juries mostly white, but they are also famously conservative
and intolerant of drug dealers. Dangerfield was shocked to find himself
confronted by nine white faces and three scowling black mothers.

"There's not a single black male on the jury!" he sputtered during a break
in the trial. "What kind of s- - - is that?"

Even worse for the defendant, the case against him -- which included a
half-pound of cocaine seized from his silver Audi on the Baltimore Beltway
last April -- was, in the words of one assisting investigator, "a slam dunk
from the minute they pulled over his car."

"That ain't no half-pound!" Dangerfield angrily insisted outside the
courtroom. "You ever seen a half-pound of coke? I'm telling you that ain't
no half-pound. Never was. Never will be."

As his plight became apparent, his mood swung from pious to profane.

"I have no fear," he said. "I'm blessed. The Lord is with me."

A moment later: "Did you see what they did to my f- - - car? Did you see
those pictures they showed the jury? They tore it up, ripped out the seats,
tore out the trunk liner. The s- - - was sitting right there on the
passenger side in plain sight. Why'd they have to total the interior?"

From beginning to end, the trial took eight hours over two days, including
97 minutes of jury deliberation.

Guilty as charged.

The trappings are gone

All that remains now of his props is the black tattoo that snakes downs his
right arm, a Roman script headline that reads: "East side."

The tailored wardrobe and studied pose he borrowed from Al Pacino in his
role as the drug lord "Scarface" -- Dangerfield's favorite movie -- lay
hollow in the property room of the Baltimore City Detention Center.

"That's style, flash, pizazz!" Pacino is told in the film by a friend. "A
little coke money doesn't hurt nobody."

Gone, too, are the cocky strut and lyrical defiance of gunned-down rap poet
Tupac Shakur, the inspiration for Dangerfield's planned hip-hop recording
company and his self-bestowed title of "K.O.B.."

"Can you picture my prophecy?" Shakur once thundered from the speakers of
Dangerfield's white Humvee as he tooled down North Avenue with a 9 mm Glock
in the glove box and a pretty lady in the passenger seat beside him. "Stress
in the city. The cops is hot for me. I'm headed for danger, don't trust
strangers."

The song's title was "Me Against The World," and Dangerfield had made it his
personal anthem, the soundtrack for his imagined script of a young gangster
who rises above his meager station to become the mayor of Baltimore.

For that was his ultimate goal -- to be the next Kurt Schmoke, a successful,
respected black man, without all the fuss of going to college and scaling
the ladder of social achievement.

"Win, lose or draw," he said a week before his trial. "I'm not going to let
this stop my crusade. You can write this down, and never forget it. Someday,
I'm gonna be running this town. You think Schmoke knows anything about the
street? That's the whole damn problem with this city. Ain't none of them
come up from the street."

At least one man begs to differ.

Dangerfield's archnemesis -- the city's bulldog housing commissioner, Daniel
P. Henson III -- grew up in Poe Homes and carved a path from the ghetto to
wealth and power the hard way. College. Low-paid apprentice jobs in
government agencies. And, finally, admission to the boardrooms of the city's
banks and development firms.

"I have two brothers who succumbed to that kind of crap," Henson said
Friday, "and they were a lot smarter than me. But I still somehow figured
out a way to make it out alive. So I don't have much sympathy for anybody
who tries that line.

"It's a sorry excuse."

A middle-class childhood

In the end, the truth is that Dangerfield was not of the street at all.

It was a pose -- an act poorly planned, indeed, not planned at all.

That much becomes apparent upon meeting his family.

His mother is a retired account supervisor for the state. His father is a
disabled U.S. postal worker.

Growing up in a strictly disciplined two-parent household on Cliftwood
Avenue, steeped in the Methodist faith -- not to mention church choir,
summer camp, the Boy Scouts and the Police Athletic League -- Dangerfield
was the beloved baby of the family's five children.

Doted upon, showered with the board games and model cars he loved, he was
taught hard work, enterprise and belief in Almighty God.

"`Keep them busy,' that was always my philosophy," his mother, Elizabeth,
said last week. "I used to think maybe I was too strict."

Her son earned enough selling frozen Kool-Aid cups at age 12 to buy himself
a motor scooter. At 16, he strapped buckets and mops to it and opened a
janitorial business. At 20, he had dropped out of Lake Clifton Eastern High
School and bought his first rowhouse at a city tax sale.

Suddenly, it seemed, the world was flocking to his door.

"All the old, white landlords were looking to sell out," explained his
niece, Angie Jackson, 30. "Tell you the truth, they were afraid to even be
out here anymore, with all the guns and drugs and everything going to hell.
That's how this all got started."

As word spread of Dangerfield's arrival in the market, the fax machine at
Estate Management whirled with offers from sellers.

One by one, then in batches of two and three, then a dozen, Dangerfield
bought up rental properties on installment loans called "purchase money"
agreements, pledging himself to pay off the owners as he went, records show.

Problem was, most of the houses were a wreck, and his portfolio grew too
fast to keep pace with his repairs and monthly payments and annual taxes.

"Where you gonna get the money?" Jackson asked. "No banks are gonna make a
loan to a young black man out here. The city doesn't give a damn. If you're
gonna succeed, you have to help yourself -- and George succeeded."

"Amen," said his mother.

Thus did Dangerfield become the "King of Baltimore," a man with a record
that those close to him find hard to reconcile with the man they knew.

His travails they now blame on a host of real and imagined enemies: racism,
the police, the courts, the press, the banks, the old-line landlords who
milked the worth from East Baltimore for 50 years and left them with the
crumbled shells.

"It's not fair and it's not right," Jackson said last week, standing on the
threadbare carpet of Estate Management and looking out the window across
North Avenue. "George should not have to pay for the sins of the whole city."