O’Henry’s was a bar in midtown Baltimore with a charming façade that bravely peeked out on North Charles Street, the literal heart of the city. It was easy to assume it was a simple Irish pub but, in fact, the owner was an older Jewish man named Henry Segal. He gave his place its jaunty Irish moniker believing that the neighborhood’s drinkers would prefer to tip their glasses in a place more evocative of a cozy Dublin pub than, say, a Russian shtetl. The name was a small deception but a deception all the same.
One of the crowd who became a recognizable regular was a cheerful guy in a sport coat and tie named Harry Meyerhoff. By the late 1970s Harry was slightly past midlife and transitioning physically and emotionally. A great athlete in his youth, he had thickened out only a little bit with the years. He’d lost most of his hair, and the scraps that were left over were mostly colorless. But with Harry’s undeniable advancement of age came something else. He cultivated an impressive gray beard that didn’t merely grow but seemed to flow from him in waves, enhancing his Semitic features and adding an air of Old Testament wisdom to his already formidable visage.
Just a few years earlier Harry had awakened to the idea that he was unhappy and restless. He’d been married to his wife, Marilyn, for a long time, and it was a generally happy marriage. The only tension between them that their children could easily see was when they prepared to go out. Marilyn took an inordinate amount of time to get ready, changing makeup or outfits multiple times. Harry liked to be prompt, so Marilyn’s delays annoyed him and sometimes provoked uncharacteristic bickering. But that was minor stuff, and Harry eventually learned how to play the piano to peacefully occupy his time while he waited for his wife.
All told, Harry was married to Marilyn for about twenty-five years. The first twenty-two had been mostly happy, but the last three had not. Suddenly they were not getting along so well. At about the same time, Harry and his brother, who had always been close, were also struggling. The two situations were not unrelated.
Like many middle-aged men, Harry took steps to stave off decline or depression or death anxiety, and he detached from his wife and his work. Harry vowed to enjoy his life with more fervor than he ever had before. And O’Henry’s was one of the places he found his escape. He felt comfortable at O’Henry’s. It was his favorite bar, a place to have a few laughs and a few drinks and unwind from his stresses and anxieties. But most of all it was the place where he could see a single beautiful face that he greatly admired. It belonged to a struggling but attractive young waitress and bartender named Teresa Riberdy Murdick.
Harry and Teresa enjoyed each other’s company, but they came from entirely different worlds. Harry was Jewish; Teresa, Roman Catholic. He was rich; she was a student and a low-income worker. He had been raised in Baltimore, the son of a wealthy and successful land developer; she was born at home in a small town called Half Moon, New York. Teresa was the youngest of seven children. Her father, a dairy farmer, assisted in her delivery.
Harry was at a place in his life where he was putting the past behind him; Teresa was still struggling to ensure her future. He had graduated college at the dawn of the 1950s, and after an abbreviated but brilliant career he was on the cusp of retiring. Teresa was still at Antioch College, studying psychology and working on her feet.
The only thing Teresa really knew about Harry, other than his name, was that he was a good bit older than she was. When they met, he was forty-four, and she was only twenty-five. But with his bald head and long gray beard he presented as much older.
It wasn’t hard to see why he was attracted to her. She was an ingenue with long blond hair, a flawless face, and the trim and alluring body of a woman who was still a half-decade away from her thirtieth birthday. Despite her youth, she was intelligent, a passionate conversationalist, and a woman with strongly held opinions. She also had a social conscience; through the years Teresa had marched for a variety of causes that she felt would make the country better and more fair.
At first, Teresa merely found Harry charming. He was a nice guy with a ready smile and a few self-deprecating jokes. He had a sense of humor about his baldness, and he could even poke fun of his own heritage. He joked about being cheap, though she found that he was in fact generous and tipped well.
One thing that they did not have in common was their marital statuses. Teresa was free of her husband, a man she found abusive, while Harry was still married and living with his wife, a piece of information he did not readily disclose to his new girlfriend. Harry eventually admitted to Teresa that he was married, and she continued their romance anyway with her eyes wide open.
It didn’t take Harry long after meeting Teresa to leave Marilyn. It was almost immediate. There was a great deal of risk for Harry in his behavior, with its implicit dishonesty and betrayal. Of all the things he stood to lose, at the top of the list was the affection of his adult children. They might have felt righteous rage on behalf of their jilted mother.
Instead the affair and dissolution of the traditional family structure actually brought the children closer to their dad. He was visibly happier, less tense, and more approachable. He moved from the suburban Baltimore home he’d shared with Marilyn and bought a palatial old farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, 340 acres and a river view, called Hawksworth. That would be his home with his new wife, Teresa.
Hawksworth was a kind of Eden for the Meyerhoff offspring. It brought so much pleasure to the kids that one of them wondered aloud, a little resentfully, why their dad had never purchased a place like that when they were younger.
The relaxed atmosphere on the new farm was a perfect reflection of the new man. To the outside world he might still be a fearsome figure with the power to literally change the landscape, but to his family he was a different guy. He was in love. He was mellow. He smiled a lot. Most of all he spent more time with his kids and got to know them better than he ever had before.
The Meyerhoff children didn’t mourn the end of their parents’ marriage as much as they felt a sense of pleasure and relief that they were finally getting to spend time with their father. All the years they were growing up they had been starved for his presence, attention, and affection.
While Harry’s business might have been somewhat behind him, there was one arena in which he continued to stoke his competitive fires, and that was horse racing. He and his brother, Robert, had been co-owners of their own stable since the early 1960s. But much like Harry had ended his marriage to Marilyn and ceased his active business partnership with Robert, he had also ended the brothers’ horse racing arrangement.
Both brothers continued racing, and at extraordinarily high levels, but they did so apart. Robert worked with “Dicky” Small, an excellent trainer, and owned Fitzhugh Farm in Harford County, Maryland. His stable included Broad Brush, a horse that had earned more than $3 million, and Concern, a winner of the Breeders’ Cup Classic.
After deposing Robert, Harry made Teresa and his son, Tom, his new racing partners. The idea was to make a more cohesive family unit. One of the first tests for Harry’s new team was in Lexington, Kentucky, where the Meyerhoffs and trainer Buddy Delp were all due to attend the Keeneland Fall Yearling Sale to choose colts for their new stable.
Some of the best one-year-old thoroughbreds in the world were for sale at Keeneland. Buddy’s influence at the auction, interestingly considering his vast knowledge, was relatively small. Harry, an expert businessman but a racing outsider, was the one who scoured the catalog looking for the right bloodlines and who determined which colts deserved his money and how much of it.
Buddy basically came along to have a look at the horseflesh in person that Meyerhoff had picked out in print. He wasn’t a veterinarian, but he judged the soundness of Harry’s choices. In fact, Buddy was so inconsequential to the process that he’d actually missed his flight to Kentucky and had to meet the Meyerhoffs there the next morning. Harry wasn’t exercised about it since he felt perfectly capable of buying thoroughbreds without his trainer’s assistance.
That year, 1977, there were more than 1,500 yearlings in the fall catalog. The Meyerhoffs and Buddy examined more than two hundred of them. But Harry had come all the way there with just one colt on his mind, a charcoal gray identified in the catalog as “Hip No. 532.” He gave himself a budget of $60,000 to acquire Hip No. 532, but he wanted the horse so badly that he secretly vowed that if push came to shove, he would pay even more to get him. But it never came to that.
Harry valued the steel gray far more than any other potential suitor at the auction. When the gavel banged, he found himself with the horse he wanted at a price he had never expected. He paid “only” $37,000 for Hip No. 532, the most he surrendered for the six horses that he bought that weekend, but not by very much. Half of his new purchases were $30,000 or more. Persian Emperor, the most expensive horse at the auction, sold for $200,000.
Meyerhoff’s enthusiasm for his new gray horse was mostly a matter of bloodlines. The horse was the son of Bold Bidder and the grandson of Bold Ruler, one of the twentieth century’s most productive sires. As Buddy Delp noted, the Meyerhoffs had a long-standing interest in “Bold Ruler blood.” So did many other owners. The only reason the charcoal gray did not garner more interest or sell for more was because his mother, Spectacular, had a less compelling lineage. She had but one notable horse in her family tree, and the best days for that one stretched back to the Jazz Age.
Harry not only picked out the new colt, but he named it too. Being an avid card player, he initially came up with “Seven No Trump.” It was a bridge term called out by a player who believed he possessed an unbeatable hand. But the Jockey Club refused to approve it since the name was already associated with another horse. Meyerhoff went back to the drawing board and cleverly combined the names of the colt’s parents—the mare, Spectacular, and the sire, Bold Bidder. He officially named his new horse Spectacular Bid.
To anyone who knew Harry Meyerhoff it was no surprise that he was the driving force in finding and choosing a great horse or that he was clever enough to provide it with an unforgettable and marketable moniker or that his managerial skills ensured that it would receive the best care and training. Harry was successful at virtually everything he did.
Understanding Meyerhoff meant also understanding his family and city. Harry had been born into wealth, but his hard work, bright mind, and sharp focus assured that he would have his own string of successes and build his own fortune. He grew up on Ocala Avenue in the heart of the city’s northwest side. He studied at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (or “Poly,” as it was known locally), a public high school with a special emphasis on engineering. (Poly was a prestigious early example of a “magnet” school with a big reputation, though one of the teachers at rival City College liked to point out, “They say they are training engineers over there [at Poly], but most of them end up reading meters for the Gas and Electric Company.”) After high school Harry followed in his brother Robert’s footsteps and moved on to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he attended the elite eastern university Lehigh.
If Ronnie Franklin’s Dundalk provided the industrial revolution its brawn, Lehigh provided its brains. Among Lehigh’s many virtues was that it was welcoming to Jewish students like Harry in an era when many top universities, including Johns Hopkins back home in Baltimore, limited the number of Jews they admitted with anti-Semitic quotas.
Lehigh opened its doors for Harry and others like him and in fact harbored a thriving Jewish community. Harry was only one of several high-achieving Lehigh students from Baltimore’s Jewish community. His classmates included Morton Lapidus, a future soft-drink industry titan; Morton Cohen, whose parents, ironically, owned Pimlico Race Track, and Joseph R. L. Sterne, who would be the Baltimore Sun’s editorial page editor for forty years. Lehigh’s Jewish students were a close-knit group, and many of them, including Harry, belonged to the same fraternity, Pi Lambda Phi. The group was housed off campus on the town’s north side.
Harry the college student was a handsome young fellow with a lanky, muscular frame and a tousle of wavy and unruly dark hair. He was a magnificent athlete, a prolific scorer in lacrosse who once netted seven goals in a single game against archrival Lafayette. In 1948 he was named to the All-American team.
But one of Meyerhoff’s fraternity brothers, Theodore Madfis, remembered him less than fondly. “You knew he had money,” Madfis said. “He made a lot of noise when he spoke. But I don’t think anyone was really close to him in the fraternity house. He wasn’t someone I wanted to spend time with.”
Madfis found Harry to be the least impressive of the Baltimore crowd. “There were several who were much more interesting, more impressive [than Harry]. . . . People liked them better. People didn’t take to Harry.” The Pi Lambda Phi fraternity brothers “dated the girls from Cedar Crest College, Allentown, Bethlehem,” he said. “But I never saw [Meyerhoff] with a date,” he said.
When Harry graduated from Lehigh in 1950, he returned home to Maryland to partner with his father and brother in a new real estate development company they called “Jack Meyerhoff and Sons.” Family venture or not, it was an exciting business opportunity. In the euphoria following World War II the United States was enjoying a population explosion and a burgeoning economy. Meanwhile, the nation was in the throes of a serious housing shortage. In 1944, with World War II still raging and many potential home buyers away fighting, home starts in the United States had dipped down to only 114,000. Even before the war most builders were small-time operators who put up less than five houses per year.
At the dawn of the Eisenhower age, however, farmland just outside the major cities was inexpensive and ripe for acquisition. To the uneducated eye those acres were still seen as remote and irrelevant. But forward thinkers like the Meyerhoffs saw opportunity. They knew that automobile improvements and a growing network of paved highways were making the suburbs more accessible and valuable than ever before.
Bedroom communities also offered a solution to a growing problem that then vexed many white Americans. Integration of both neighborhoods and schools was coming to the cities, where Black and white people lived. The suburbs were a place for whites to run away, a place where there were fewer Blacks with whom to integrate. The affluence it took to make that move, they thought, would assure that Blacks would not arrive on their doorsteps again for decades to come.
In 1950, just as Harry returned to Baltimore from Lehigh, U.S. home starts exploded to 1.7 million. William Levitt, a revolutionary developer in the greater New York City area, learned to meet that demand in innovative ways. He applied the principals of a well-functioning automobile assembly plant to home building. He broke down the process into twenty-seven component parts. With his greater efficiencies, houses were begun and delivered in a fraction of the time it had taken previous builders. And he sold them at a far more attractive price.
Despite his breakthroughs Levitt didn’t have anything on the Meyerhoffs, who, as a family, had already been building suburban homes and commercial properties for decades.
The Meyerhoff business legend is a classic American story of one family rising from the lowest depths to achieve great wealth. As East European Jews, the Meyerhoffs could not have started life in Baltimore from a more disadvantageous position. The East European Jewish refugees who migrated to America were considered by the majority culture to be lacking in education, social graces, and even hygiene.
In the early twentieth century H. L. Mencken, then still a young reporter, went into one of the city’s Jewish ghettos and saw Russian and Polish Jews right off the boat working in and around one of the sweatshops. He recorded his revulsion, especially of the small Jewish children: “I . . . was appalled by what I saw,” he recalled. “No one seemed to mind that dirty urchins played in the garbage, constructing a chain of potato peelings.” Mencken’s well-respected biographer, Marian Elizabeth Rodgers, wrote that “the sight convinced [Mencken] that the bulk of Russian Jews lived in filth.”
Mencken’s family, of German extraction, had only been in the United States a few decades longer than the Meyerhoffs, but it was a more precise fit for mainstream American mores. The Menckens owned a cigar factory in Baltimore, two prestigious homes, and a stake in the Washington baseball club.
Like many Americans of that era, Mencken was an unabashed anti-Semite. He was not in favor of the mass extermination of European Jews, but his plan for saving them from the atrocities of the Holocaust demonstrated the wide difference that he and others saw in Jews from Western and Eastern Europe. Those from the western part of the continent were considered better, of a higher class, than those from the eastern part. Mencken advocated absorbing German Jews into the United States but felt that East Europeans were not ready for life in an advanced society and should be removed to the Soviet Union.
The Meyerhoffs had to work around such irrational biases to have any hope of success in America. And it didn’t come fast or easily. The family patriarch was a butcher with a small shop on the north side of town. It was a simple enterprise, but it gave the family enough money and standing to gain a foothold in their new country.
The true origin story of the family’s business success, however, started in the early 1920s with one of Harry’s uncles, Joseph Meyerhoff. Joseph worked all day at his father’s meat market and then spent his nights in a classroom studying law, a subject for which he had no enthusiasm. Meanwhile Joseph’s brother, Morris, started a small home-building business and asked Joseph to join him in the venture. Joseph accepted and began by handling his brother’s legal matters and working as a laborer on the construction sites.
Joseph started his own building business in 1921 but continued doing his brother’s legal work, a job that included endorsing promissory notes. Morris ran into serious financial problems in 1924 and declared bankruptcy. Joseph, because of the endorsements he had signed, was caught in the same financial web. Instead of also declaring bankruptcy, however, Joseph paid back all of the creditors. It took him ten long, painful years to pay the debts, but when all was said and done, his reputation as a man of his word was assured and his business took off in earnest.
Joseph started by building and selling the most ubiquitous thing in Baltimore: row houses. As his fortunes grew, he moved into constructing luxury homes for incredibly opulent Baltimore neighborhoods such as Guilford, Stoneleigh, Homeland, and Roland Park. These communities set the standard for gracious living and helped create the suburb phenomenon nationwide.
All in all, over the course of his long career, Joseph Meyerhoff built more than fifteen thousand homes, seventeen thousand apartments, and nineteen shopping centers. He amassed a fortune that was estimated at more than $100 million. His partner in some of these pursuits was another one of his brothers, Jacob “Jack” Meyerhoff. The brothers had joined forces to form the Property Sales Company. When they split up in 1951 and liquidated that blandly named but highly successful firm, they were both still young enough to start anew but experienced enough to achieve much more than they ever had before.
Jack headed up an important ready-mix concrete supply firm that he built into a valuable commodity before selling it. After that, of course, came his business venture with his boys. The sons’ connection to their father’s name and reputation was a significant business asset, and so was the old man’s knowledge. Jack was considered an expert in retail development, a professional who understood how to construct and operate commercial structures as well as anyone in the country. His reputation was assured with projects such as Edmondson Village Shopping Center in suburban West Baltimore. It was one of the first shopping centers in the United States oriented around the automobile.
Built promptly after World War II, Edmondson Village’s Tudor architecture affected the look of a nineteenth-century English lane. Its twenty-nine shops sold everything from auto supplies to ice cream. But instead of seamlessly meshing with the local houses and pubs, it was surrounded by a five-hundred-car parking lot. Edmondson Village was a harbinger of the motorized United States to come, a place in which consumers no longer walked to the corner store down the street but drove from their far-flung homes. For all its fanfare and fine touches, Edmondson Village was basically a strip mall, a pioneer in American blight and sprawl. Similar projects would mar American suburbs for the next fifty years.
Jack’s expertise in this area led him to form yet another business, this time with a then little-known mortgage banker. Their new venture, the Community Research and Development Company, was specifically formed to build and operate shopping centers. Jack was named chairman of the board while his partner, James W. Rouse, became president.
This business eventually gained public acclaim under its new name, the Rouse Company. The firm gained national prominence for reviving downtown shopping corridors in America’s great but crumbling cities, including Faneuil Hall in Boston, South Street Sea Port in New York, Underground in Atlanta, and the Riverwalk Center in New Orleans. The most famous of these projects was Baltimore’s Harborplace.
All of these ventures were hailed for their courage and innovation. James Rouse and Jack Meyerhoff invested heavily in downtowns when others were fleeing them. They made their shopping centers attractions and entertainment centers by filling them with quirkier retailers and restauranteurs.
Harborplace was an especially significant case in point. Baltimore had been hit by many sad reversals after World War II, including steadily declining job opportunities, the sale or relocation of headquartered banks and businesses, the flight of the white middle-class tax base, and the rise of heroin in the city’s ever-expanding Black ghettos. The riots after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 rapidly accelerated the decline and highlighted the inequities and violent tensions between white and Black Americans.
With all of these negative trends, retail shopping in Baltimore proper had all but vanished. The city’s traditional retail corridor was Howard Street, a main downtown artery where large department stores competed with each other from huge, architecturally beautiful structures. It was Baltimore’s version of New York’s Fifth Avenue. But the great structures that had housed those once grand stores were abandoned and shuttered with no new tenants to ever arrive. And the marvelous architecture sat fallow and rotting.
Harborplace not only brought shopping back to downtown Baltimore, but it also showcased the natural beauty of a once glorious waterway that had long been ceded to commerce. Out went the rotting old piers and warehouses, and in came two new, gleaming “galleries” of restaurants and shopping.
But the Rouse Company’s most startling project and significant achievement was not reviving old cities but inventing a new one. The company bought twelve thousand rural acres between Baltimore and Washington and then planned and built the city of Columbia, Maryland. More than just a spectacularly audacious development project, it was also touted as a bold social experiment. Columbia’s founders claimed to harmonize architecture with nature, retail with residential, and culture with culture.
In Columbia, a synonym for America, everything that Jack Meyerhoff knew about developing land supposedly coalesced and meshed with James Rouse’s humanistic views. Black, white, and brown people were to live side by side. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worshipped at the same “interfaith centers.” Wealthy homeowners and aspiring apartment dwellers bridged the social-class gap and coexisted seamlessly.
But some questioned if Columbia was really a city at all or just a well-branded suburb. Its center of commerce wasn’t a collection of “downtown” buildings and skyscrapers but a shopping mall also owned by the Rouse Company. Ultimately Columbia included many of the hallmarks of a city, including a concert venue, a hospital, and a community college. A downtown lake offered fishing and “natural” beauty, though it was as faux as the town itself, made not by God but by human hands.
Columbia’s aesthetic was highly controlled. Its design standards mandated inconspicuous commercial signage. Green spaces and wooded areas were zoned into existence to preserve a sense of organic beauty. But all of this merely hid the true nature of the project. Columbia wasn’t as green as the developers pretended; it was all about the combustible engine. The town looked like the nucleus of an atom with an endless network of high-speed beltways, highways, and interstates encircling it, cutting through it, and zipping around it.
There were other deceptions as well.
Diversity was supposed to be prized in Columbia, yet it was a flavorless town, a beige and bland place that reeked of homogenization and conformity. Worse: it accelerated the exodus of middle-class white families from urban environments in nearby Washington and Baltimore that were legitimately diverse. Columbia helped erode and collapse the tax bases in those cities and further encouraged the so-called white flight that expanded inner-city poverty and the ghettoization of American Blacks.
One prominent Baltimore politician admitted to his son that Baltimore had lost the war to retain white residents a long time ago. “There’s nothing left to do now,” he told the boy, “but build a fence around the place to keep the jigs in.”
Despite all the pieties about “green space” and “organic architecture,” Columbia was built on a wide swath of former farmland, woodlands, and open space that the developers had largely bulldozed, ploughed under, paved over, and tamed. No one, however, could take away from the significant business achievement. Jack Meyerhoff and his partners at the Rouse Company walked away with incredible riches and something more valuable than money. They had created a hard-to-refute image of themselves as altruistic intellectuals and social reformers. It was a conflation once known in a more literate era as Babbitry.
Harry and Robert were less audacious in their business pursuits than their father had been in his, but they were highly successful too. Without attempting to reinvent anything, they built houses and garden apartment communities all around the Baltimore beltway. Like their father and their uncles, they were brothers pooling their talents and efforts to generate wealth and prestige for the family name.
A big part of the Meyerhoff mystique was grounded in philanthropy. The family gave away its money and valuables almost as prolifically as it earned them. Joseph Meyerhoff singlehandedly saved the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and then gave it $10 million to fund a first-class music venue. It was christened, not unreasonably, the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.
As a Jew who had personally fled persecution and poverty in Europe, Joseph was particularly interested in supporting self-determination for his people. He estimated that he had written about $5 million in checks for a variety of projects in Israel, including funding five different libraries, a college, and various pavilions.
Robert and Harry Meyerhoff continued the family’s philanthropic tradition. Harry threw his support behind Center Stage, an important Baltimore group dedicated to producing excellent theater. Robert and his wife, Jane, cultivated a modern art collection that included works by canonic masters such as Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollack, Roy Lichenstein, Robert Rauchenberg, and Frank Stella (among others). After spending years collecting, they donated their masterpieces to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC—a gift that was worth about $300 million. It was a highly significant donation. “[This gift] doesn’t fit into [our collection],” the modern art curator said. “It defines it.”
The Meyerhoffs embodied a muscular Americanism. They had come to the United States with nothing but a legacy of ethnic prejudice aimed against them, and yet through hard work and education they rose to high levels of wealth, respect, and power.
But the Meyerhoffs also had another quality; a thinly veiled greed. Patriarch Joseph, a slender, bald man who favored a pencil-thin mustache and fine tailoring, amassed powerful friends like so many dollar bills. But he paid a steep price to fit in.
Much like his colleagues in the development industry, Joseph built neighborhoods that utilized protective covenants that kept Blacks and, incredibly, Jews out of his homes. That prohibition was especially astonishing since it meant that even he and his family could not live in the neighborhoods that he had built. “It is a plain and proven fact,” he said, falsely, “that it is not within my power . . . to alter what has always been a deep-rooted pattern of housing in the Baltimore area.” It was his cluttered way of saying that he hadn’t invented racism and there was nothing he could do about it.
Joseph’s position was shockingly mercenary and out of touch. Already wealthy, he could have manfully absorbed the repercussions of doing “the right thing” like few others could. But the sad fact was he simply wasn’t interested in being a leader for any cause that might limit his business interests.
This mercenary attitude rubbed off on Joseph’s nephew Harry Meyerhoff. Harry also engaged in questionable activities to enhance his success and wealth.
By the 1960s Maryland had a well-earned reputation as one of the most politically corrupt states in the United States. Much of that misconduct revolved around real estate development. There were two obvious reasons for this. First, there was a lot of money to be made in real estate, and second, making that money relied on the good will of politicians and political bureaucrats.
One powerful man all too eager to take advantage of this situation was Spiro T. Agnew, the son of a Greek immigrant restaurant owner. Agnew was a tall, dark-haired man with a fleshy nose and a studied, meticulous appearance. He idolized his father but ran from his roots and went by the Anglicized nickname “Ted” rather than the Mediterranean “Spiro.”
Ted began as a small-time lawyer with an interest in politics who rose through the ranks with astonishing speed. He went from the Baltimore County Executive Office to vice president of the United States in only about six years.
Agnew spoke a great deal about law and order during his tenure in government, but he was secretly a highly persistent criminal. He was accused of a multitude of crimes, including being offered bribes without reporting them, engaging in inappropriate business deals, using inside information for land purchases near planned public improvements, and taking substantial cash payments in exchange for favors, such as the granting of public roads contracts.
In short, Agnew set up a business in which his favors were for sale. When he became vice president, he relocated that lucrative enterprise to Washington.
Projects that were awarded as a result of secret payments to Agnew included the Chesapeake Bay Bridge project, the Harbor Tunnel in Baltimore, a large bond for a tunnel and bridge, and the master plan for a federal building. His corruption always seemed to be connected to real estate development.
Agnew’s misbehavior led to a great deal of scrutiny on Maryland politicians by law enforcement and the press. That was especially true for Agnew’s successors in the Baltimore County Executive’s Office and the Maryland governor’s mansion.
In 1968, when Agnew resigned the governorship to accept the vice presidency, another young lawyer, Marvin Mandel, succeeded him. Mandel was considered an adept, even talented, public servant who was hailed for ushering in many state improvements. But he was also caught taking cash for political favors just like Agnew.
Mandel’s political rise was aided by a childhood friend named Irvin Kovens. They had grown up together in the same northwest Baltimore neighborhood. Mandel became governor, but his power paled in comparison to that of Kovens, who was ostensibly a discount furniture storeowner in a low-income African American neighborhood of Baltimore.
In fact, Kovens was an old-fashioned political boss who could raise incredible sums of money for any candidate he favored by prying open a rusty old locked file box in his office that contained the names and numbers of thousands of people who owed him favors. He could make a king simply by picking up his phone. He operated in the shadows, but many argued that his actions were for the betterment of the city and state. Kovens not only backed Mandel in Annapolis, but he also put William Donald Schaefer in City Hall as surely as if he had lifted him up and tucked him into the mayor’s big chair himself. Schaefer and Mandel were respected nationally and considered among the best in the country at their respective jobs.
So Maryland’s boss system was considered flawed but effective. And indeed, it worked well enough until a woman younger and blonder than Mandel’s wife undid everything. The governor’s long, torturous personal and professional unraveling began, as it did for many middle-aged men, with an adulterous affair. It ended, however, like that of a doomed jockey—on the low turf of a racecourse. Mandel’s case highlighted for everyone the unholy intersection of high-stakes politics, horse racing, and real estate development that drove the state.
One of the worst-kept secrets in Maryland was the fact that Mandel was stepping out on his wife, Barbra (called “Bootsie” by everyone who knew her). Bootsie was from Mandel’s world. She had grown up with him in Baltimore’s Jewish community. Mandel’s mistress, Jeanne Blackistone Dorsey, was almost twenty years younger and two inches taller than he was. She had the fresh face of a debutante and the pedigree of a thoroughbred. Her familial roots went all the way back to the very founding of the Maryland colony.
One night, on his way back from trysting with Jeanne in southern Maryland, Mandel was involved in a fatal accident. The driver of the other vehicle was killed. Mandel survived, but he was bloodied.
Suddenly a harsh spotlight shone down on the governor.
The Washington Post, smelling the corpuscles, sent one of its rising star reporters, Richard Cohen, to the governor’s mansion. The editors wanted this young man to ask the governor a terribly uncomfortable question: Had the governor been visiting his mistress?
Incredibly, Mandel agreed to see Cohen. Upon arriving at the mansion, the reporter was ushered into the great man’s bedroom, where he lay in his pajamas, with the bloody gashes of his trauma still unhealed and fully visible like scarlet letters.
The governor’s press secretary, sensing the young reporter’s discomfort, enhanced it by goading him forward. “Go ahead,” the aide meanly said. “Ask him.”
Cohen swallowed hard and then choked out his cringe-worthy question. He point blank asked the most powerful man in the state if he had been visiting his mistress before the wreck.
The governor heavily sighed at the intrusive question he was surely anticipating. He glared at Cohen and then responded with one simple word.
“No,” the governor said.
“Now get out!” the press secretary bellowed. And out young Cohen went.
But Bootsie was made of far stronger stuff than that. She made it clear she wasn’t going anywhere. She refused to grant Mandel a divorce or even vacate the governor’s mansion unless and until he met a list of her demands.
She wanted money, of course, and a lot of it. The problem was that the governor didn’t have much. Though he lived in a mansion and traveled by limousine and yacht, Mandel made a working man’s salary of only about $25,000 per year.
One thing was clear: it wouldn’t be easy to give Bootsie the boot. It meant not only coming up with the huge amount she wanted but also paying astronomical legal fees. The governor had no choice but to turn to his friends for help. And he got it. They gave him enough money to deal with his divorce and a few extras like some snazzy suits and a little cash.
All that was well and good except that his friends, led by Kovens, quickly asked for a favor in return. They demanded that Mandel veto a bill that added racing dates to a dilapidated old junker of a race track called Marlboro. Their goal was to make the value of the track plummet in order to scuttle a deal that someone else had made to purchase it. After the veto Mandel’s friends, shielding their identities, swooped in and bought Marlboro at an artificially depressed price. After the deal was finalized, Mandel did indeed sign a bill increasing Marlboro’s racing dates, and the property’s value skyrocketed again. The governor’s buddies had made a pretty good bet. They flipped the track and walked away with a handsome profit.
Thanks to this scheme a few esteemed people, including Mandel and Kovens, went to jail. Years later the verdict was overturned, but Mandel’s political career, once so justifiably bright and promising, was irretrievably lost.
Back in Baltimore County a similar scandal found Robert and Harry Meyerhoff. Their man in power was Dale Anderson, a former developer out of their own ranks and now the Baltimore County executive.
In 1974 a federal jury convicted Anderson on thirty-four counts of conspiracy, extortion, and tax evasion. It seemed that Anderson had been charging his old developer buddies a “fee” in order to “expedite” their permit requests. This was accomplished through a system of color-coded index cards. Yellow file cards and folders were assigned to applicants who were put on a fast track.
It is not surprising that major builders were among Anderson’s biggest financial backers. And for good reason. Speedy permits were more than a mere convenience; they were a highly valuable business commodity. They allowed builders to plan their projects around labor deadlines and seasonal shifts in the weather, and they also provided substantial savings on project-related interest payments.
Much of the evidence for the color-codes had been destroyed before journalists could investigate. But one yellow file remained. It approved all the permits for a Baltimore-area garden apartment complex and did it in just eight days. For a company less privileged the process would have taken six to eight weeks. That lone yellow file belonged to the Robert and Harry Meyerhoff Building Company.
The man who expedited the paperwork was George J. Mueller. Mueller had only recently become a bureaucrat. Before that he had been an employee at Dale Anderson’s development company. Mueller followed his boss into government and did quite well, doubling his initial county salary and getting reimbursed for expenses at a rate double that of anyone else working at the county.
As the investigations intensified, Mueller abruptly left his job serving the citizens and went to back to what he knew; he found work in real estate development at none other than the Robert and Harry Meyerhoff Building Company.
Dale Anderson left his job too, but in his case it was to go to jail. The Meyerhoffs, on the other hand, skated away with very little or no damage done to themselves or their business. After all, the next day a brand new newspaper rolled off the presses, and the reporters and the public were on to new things.
No ink could smear or stain the Meyerhoff name. It was as sparkling clean and as solid as it ever had been. Harry went on to his affair with Teresa and then his happy life with her on Hawksworth Farm. But even on the Eastern Shore he wasn’t exactly what he seemed. Without work to occupy him, he became an all-day drinker, starting early in the morning with beer and then, later in the day, switching to vodka. He supplemented his drinking by liberally smoking pot. After years in a jacket and tie and as one of the most respected businessmen in the state, he was, in fact, unconventional.
There was a valuable lesson to be learned in all that for anyone who was paying attention, and almost no one was. There can be quite a wide gulf between a man and the public’s perception of him.
In some cases, a great reputation, or even respectability, can be nothing more than a beard.