WITNESS: SENIORS WERE DEALING

A Wilmington man, who saw a fortune built on making bagels lost to
cocaine, told a jury in a Boston courtroom Monday that seemingly
wholesome grandparents Andrew and Winifred Schlehuber were secretly
kingpins of a Boston-based cocaine cottage industry. Mark Smith,
founder of the Newton-based Finagle-a-Bagel chain, claimed that he
was the Schlehuber's former top customer: a bagel tycoon who says
they helped him blow his fortune up his nose. The Schlehubers, both
69 and looking like a perfect Norman Rockwell pair, are on trial for
allegedly running a high-volume mom and pop drug mart from their
former home on LaGrange Street in West Roxbury.

The Schlehubers have denied the charges.

Smith testified yesterday he agreed to housesit for the vacationing
Schlehubers for a week in March 2000, in exchange for a 50 percent
discount off his $200-a-day coke habit. Smith's drug habit was
already draining his wealth when, to make matters worse, the cops
showed up while he was there. Smith said he tried to block the cops
that night, but yesterday he willingly took jurors on a sordid verbal
tour of the Schlehuber homestead. Smith described how they stashed
rocks of coke in paper cups in their bedroom dresser drawer, while
hiding still more drugs in a diaper bag in the woods, "for fear of
the house being broken into." Andrew Schlehuber, a white-haired
father of seven, "had problems in the past with other people watching
his business while he was gone," Smith testified. That's why he
volunteered to housesit. "I was more than happy to help," said Smith.

The obliging Smith said he was painting the Schlehubers' house in
between scooping coke off a plate with a six of clubs for their
regular customers, like a chimney sweep and a well-heeled Boston bar
owner, when the cops came knocking on March 31, 2000. Smith told
jurors he was welcomed into the Schlehubers' inner circle after
selling Finagle-a-Bagel for more than a half-million dollars in 1998.
In addition to paying off his debt to the couple, he said he treated
them to a trip to St. Martin. Andrew Schlehuber "let me cuff (buy on
credit) a lot of cocaine and I owed him $23,000," Smith said. "When I
paid him off, I thought it was only fair to give him a bit more." In
addition to a spiral notebook from CVS with specific instructions on
what their drug clientele normally bought and how much they paid,
Smith said the Schlehubers left a bucket of water in their upstairs
bedroom in which he would toss the drugs in the event of a raid. But
after the cops showed up that night in March 2000, Smith never made
it upstairs. He told them he was unauthorized to let them in and
tried to block the door with his body. They pushed him in, threw him
up against a wall and arrested him, he said.

The Schlehubers had supporters in court yesterday, including several
of their grown children. The Rev. Shaun Harrison of Boston's Youth in
Crisis Ministries told the Herald he doesn't buy Smith's story.
Andrew Schlehuber, Harrison said, "is a blessed man," who for the
past five years has opened his heart and wallet to the city's troubled youth.

"I'm a good judge of character," Harrison said. "I don't believe
what's going on here. I think he's being railroaded."