OVERWORKED AND BROKE, Alan Wilson quit his solo practice for the Eastern Virginia Medical School, where he was named an assistant professor of internal medicine. He did not abandon his patients or his passions, however—in the summer of 1996, he was instrumental in bringing an experimental AIDS vaccine to Norfolk for testing. The effort earned headlines. Wilson’s work was widely recognized as heroic. He was at the forefront of the fight against the disease.
That fall, Sentara Health System, a corporation that owned the hospital with which the medical school shared a campus and with which Wilson’s work was inextricably bound, asked the doctor for evidence that he was board-certified. It was an entirely routine request, akin to being asked for ID when cashing a check. Except that in Wilson’s case, it didn’t seem routine at all.
He panicked. He took his old certificate, fudged the date on it, copied it, and sent in the copy. Unknown to him, the old document had been signed by a board official who’d since died—had been dead, in fact, for six years, which did not escape the attention of the American Board of Family Practice. The organization sued Wilson for forging his credentials, charging that by so doing he’d endangered its credibility. It sought $200,000 in damages. That, too, earned headlines.
The press attention erased any chance of doctor and board achieving a private solution to the problem. Wilson quit his post at the medical school. He continued to see patients, but his diminished practice wasn’t sufficient to maintain his flamboyant guppie lifestyle. He and Seely sold their posh downtown loft. They moved first to a more modest neighborhood across town, then retreated to Parrott, a tiny burg (population 160) in southwest Georgia, where Seely continued his design practice and Wilson commuted to Atlanta to teach.
They all but forgot the Chevy. It remained on a back lot at Bay Chevrolet in Norfolk, exposed to the elements, crumbling. And so a relationship between car and owner that in 1994 had achieved that rare fifth stage now backslid to the third and final substage of the fourth: The wagon was abandoned.
I’ve only once thrown up my hands and walked away from a car—though, as the past owner of too many pieces of junk, I might have done so as a matter of habit. The one instance involved the demonic Triumph roadster I bought in college, which for all of its good looks refused to operate as expected, especially its brakes, and nearly got me killed every time I took it out—and which thus rendered practically no service in exchange for its purchase price of $2,450, a goodly sum at the time, not to mention all the hundreds I sank into trying to fix the damn thing.
It is a dramatic moment, indeed, when a driver unscrews the license plates from a car’s bumper, gives the hood a fond farewell pat, and leaves a lifeless carcass on the side of the road—or, in the case of that Triumph, in the garage of my mother’s house just prior to my moving three thousand miles away. It’s a conscious breach of a strong emotional bond. It’s a surrender of responsibility. It feels a little like taking a pet to the vet to have it put down.
The wagon sat derelict for additional months, taking up space on the lot, until finally the dealer notified Wilson that he’d have to move it. The doctor had no use for the wagon now, and no place to keep it. But it so happened that one of the dealership’s workers knew a fellow who had a soft spot for old cars, and who might be able to solve Wilson’s dilemma. Contact was made, a deal struck. And so, for the grand price of two hundred dollars, the Chevy became the property of Jack’s Classic Pawn, a sideline interest of Jack Reed Sr., the patriarch of a family-owned plumbing supply business.
Some types of enterprise have long done well in military towns. Drive off of any big base, and you’re almost sure to encounter a clot of (a) payday lenders offering soldiers and sailors a way to cover emergency expenses between their twice-monthly paychecks, sometimes at triple-digit interest rates; (b), rent-to-own furniture showrooms, computer shops and independent car lots willing to extend credit—again, at less than competitive terms—to low-ranking service members too young, poor, or otherwise risky to qualify for a note from the bank; and (c), pawnshops, where a nineteen-year-old E-2 can get a loan against the stuff he bought from (b) to pay the fast-mounting debt he’s accrued at (a).
Jack’s Classic occupied a particularly auspicious location on a main drag halfway between the huge Norfolk Naval Station and the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, within sight of one of Arney’s go-go bars. Reed augmented the usual pawnshop fare—jewelry, stereo equipment, cameras, and the like—with a personal passion, vintage cars. He didn’t often grow attached to his inventory, as the business required that he spruce up a car and flip it without a lot of fuss. Even so, he barely had time to prepare this car for sale. No sooner had the dealership towed it to the pawnshop and Reed washed it and vacuumed its interior, than Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Jeffrey H. Simmons happened to drive past, fall in love with it even before he’d come to a stop, and agree to pay five hundred dollars for it.
The Chevy’s ninth owner had joined the navy a day after finishing high school in Buffalo, New York, and had spent his entire military career in Norfolk. Aside from a stint as a guard at the brig, he’d always pulled sea duty—on a destroyer tender, with landing craft, and now on the salvage ship Grasp, aboard which he’d recently helped raise the wreckage of TWA flight 800 from the floor of the Atlantic.
Vintage cars had always excited him. Born in May 1964, Simmons had grown up among old photographs of his father in the company of stylish, long-vanished machines, and had been heartsick over the explanations he heard as to what became of them: I cracked it up. I sold it. I traded it for something practical.
Here was an opportunity to call such a car his own, and he was not about to let it pass, even if it came at an inconvenient moment, between paychecks; he cobbled together loans from friends to meet Reed’s price. Simmons’s wife, Patricia, whom he’d met while moonlighting as a bouncer, laughed when she saw him pull up to their house in the wagon. The front seat had so decayed that he all but sat on the floor. He could barely see over the dash.
Simmons wasn’t put off by the Chevy’s decrepit condition. It represented potential to him, achievable beauty: He need only devise a plan for its restoration, stick to that plan, and in time he’d have a classic that would wow his shipmates and turn heads wherever he took it. That he had the mechanical wherewithal to complete the project was never in doubt: The Grasp had seven diesel engines bolted into its hull, four to drive the ship and three to run its salvage gear, and Simmons repaired and maintained all of them in the engine room. He knew how to turn a wrench.
He got to work. He knew he’d have to replace the right front fender, which was not only dented but ripped, its metal turned back on itself; he tracked down a supplier in Arizona that had a replacement front end, and started saving toward it. He made phone calls to local shops that redipped chrome, an expensive undertaking but necessary if he were to restore the rust-flecked bumpers to their original glory. The couple’s three children joined in when he worked on the car in the yard. The youngest, Tamara, handed him tools as he labored under the hood. His son Joshua spent hours trying to rub the cloudy trim back to a shine. The car excited the whole family.
But no one more than Simmons, who on some evenings would take a beer outside and climb into the Chevy, sit with his hands wrapped around its big, skinny steering wheel, and picture its curves rust-free and sheathed in candy-apple red paint, its seats reupholstered, the carpeting fresh. He imagined its engine smooth and powerful, its brakes reliable. The car thus returned to a fifth stage of ownership. It was in the hands of a savior.
Or so it seemed. Except that three kids and a mortgage will devour every cent of an enlisted sailor’s pay and then some. Simmons’s savings for the new body panels never grew into much. He didn’t send the bumpers off for new chrome. After a year, he had the car running but far short of roadworthy. It spent all but a few hours of that period under a tarp beside the house.
One day a paper materialized on the tarp, announcing that an inspector from the city of Norfolk had stopped by and found an unlicensed junker on the premises. Simmons had never bothered to transfer the title into his name, let alone buy plates for the Chevy; now, he learned, he had seventy-two hours to rectify this oversight or his beloved classic would be towed away and impounded. Ultimately, it might be auctioned off.
Like others on their cul-de-sac, the Simmonses were within sight of the middle-class ideal, if not actually in its embrace. They lived in a comfortable house. They had good kids who attended reasonably decent public schools. They worked. No one went hungry. But in one respect they differed from most of their neighbors: They’d received such a notice from City Hall before. A few years back, while Jeff was at sea, the city had towed away a ’63 Ford pickup that had been sitting in the yard. The episode had enraged Simmons, who saw it as a case of government thievery committed while he was serving the country. He resolved that he’d not repeat the experience.
Simmons briefly considered erecting a six-foot wooden privacy fence around the Chevy—that would stick it to the city, wouldn’t it?—but only briefly, because just then a fellow named Dave Simon, having made a wrong turn on his way to a nearby restaurant, saw the wagon and stopped to ask whether Simmons wanted to sell it. He did not, most emphatically, but he didn’t want to lose it to officialdom, either. He told Simon that yes, he might consider parting with the car, if Simon had $1,500 to spend.
Simon replied that he did not. He could afford $900.
Simmons wasn’t thrilled by the offer, but he felt cornered.
They shook on it.
HERE BEGINS SOME very strange business, that being the world of auto fanatics, of compulsive collection and mind-bending fixation on details. Here appears a species of automotive ownership far pricier and more time-consuming and more generally ruinous than we have so far encountered. Because Dave Simon wasn’t just some guy who got lost on his way to get a cheesesteak, and who happened to have nine hundred bucks in his pocket. He was a lost, hungry guy who happened to be obsessed—completely, utterly obsessed—with the exact make and vintage of car that Simmons offered. To wit: Dave Simon had owned, by his count, 284 Chevrolets of the 1957 model year.
That bears repeating: 284. Thirteen ancient Chevys had been lined up outside the family’s house at one juncture, and there were four or five as a matter of course. Dave’s wife, Dianne, called the curb bordering their lot “Battleship Row.”
Simon’s earliest memories included a ’57. He had a snapshot of himself at age five, playing with friends outside his family’s house in a Cleveland suburb, and visible in the garage behind him, rendered in grainy black-and-white, was his dad’s year-old 210 four-door sedan.
In his teens, a stormy relationship with his stepfather spurred him to move out of the house and into the back of a 1960 Ford Galaxie, then into the navy. He’d arrived in Norfolk as a seventeen-year-old radioman, his high school sweetheart in tow. In 1977, he and Dianne, the new parents of a baby girl, decided they needed to swap their Dodge muscle car for some safe, sturdy transportation. Simon chose a ’57 Chevy two-door, a black 210 with a 265 V8 under the hood.
So began the collection. He started amassing parts for the car. They filled the garage, then the house—family photos show baby Carolyn in her crib, and bumpers piled under it, chrome pieces hanging from the walls. Soon enough, he was gathering entire Chevys. He bought a four-door sedan at a police auction for $110, then a two-door sedan, then a two-door hardtop from another sailor. He traded his first ’57 for a four-door sedan that he set about restoring. Bought others, dozens of others, many wrecked or ruined, for their engines or hard-to-find components, junking or selling whatever remained.
He found one car in a farmer’s field, axle-deep in mud, open to the seasons, its insides shot. The farmer told him he could have it if he could move it, so Simon had it towed out of its hole while he steered, sitting on a milk crate so he could see over the wheel. He owned that car three times. Once home from the farm, he took its doors and fenders, sold the remainder, and a month later got a call from the buyer asking: Want it back at no charge? The man had taken the trunk lid and stripped the dash. Simon sold it a second time to a man who needed its quarter panels and rear glass, and who gave the rest—not much more than the frame and roof—back to him. He sold that again, too.
He embarked on restorations in his dirt-floored garage—on four-doors, mostly, because those were the least appealing to collectors, and thus the easiest and cheapest to find—and sold most before he’d finished. When he bought the wagon, he and Dianne were down to a permanent collection of just two Chevys, a bright red coupe and a yellow two-door sedan. But at one time or other they’d possessed all of the model year’s various incarnations—two-door hardtops, four-door hardtops, two- and four-door sedans, Bel Air convertibles, Nomad wagons, two-door wagons, four-door wagons. When their son, Christopher, was born, in November 1979, the Simons had taken him home from the hospital in a white Bel Air.
Such a fixation, though unusual, was not unique. Scattered around the country were others of similar bent. A farmer named Leroy Walker in Beulah, North Dakota, traded for a used Edsel with a bad clutch in 1961, and grew so fond of the famously unsuccessful Ford that he started buying others; soon, thirty-seven acres of his spread were covered with 266 Edsels, about a hundred of which ran, and thousands of other derelict vehicles that he parted out or sold whole to finance his Edsel habit. He parked his collection in widely spaced clusters so that if a tornado should tear through the property, it wouldn’t take out his whole crop.
Another Edsel fan, Hugh Lesley, had 160 of the cars scattered in the woods around his house in Oxford, Pennsylvania, through the eighties and nineties. New trees grew so close around some of them that the cars could be moved only with the deployment of chain saws. Other aficionados have fastened their attention on old Lincolns, Studebakers, Cadillacs. Dennis Albaugh, a billionaire pesticide manufacturer in suburban Des Moines, bought a ’57 Chevy Bel Air convertible from a golf buddy in 1998, and got the bug to keep buying; inside of fifteen years he’d built a collection of Chevy ragtops representing every year they were built between 1912 and 1975, plus a smattering of rare Chevy muscle cars—147 vehicles in all.
Bruce Weiner, a former chief of the bubble-gum brand Dubble Bubble, collected some two hundred microcars—tiny one- and two-seat BMW Isettas and Messerschmitts and the like, next to which a modern Smart car seems a limousine, but which played a big role in getting a ravaged Europe back on the road after World War II—then opened a museum in Madison, Georgia, for a few years to show them off.
So Dave Simon had company. By dint of sheer numbers, however, he was in the first rank of automotive obsessives. This, ladies and gentlemen, was a car nut.
SIMON INTENDED THE wagon as a gift. Christopher was due to graduate from high school in a year and deserved a ’57, his father reckoned, to mark the accomplishment. Could there be any better gift, any greater emblem of Dave Simon’s love and pride, than to welcome his son into his weird and passionate fraternity? Probably not. But the Fates did not smile on his generosity. As he drove the two miles home from Jeff Simmons’s house, the Chevy’s brakes went out.
Simon kept his cool. He initiated the seasoned driver’s checklist of responses to such an emergency. First he pumped the brake pedal. No luck. It slapped against the floor like a beached fish. He pumped it again. Nothing. He stomped on the parking brake. That failed, as well. Still rolling, he resorted to a drastic third countermeasure: He grabbed the shift lever on the Chevy’s steering column and slammed the transmission into park. The car slowed, shuddering as the gears ground to powder, but it didn’t stop.
His options exhausted, Simon aimed the nearly two tons of rolling steel over the curb and across his lawn and into the chain-link fence beside his house. The fence buckled, but a van parked beyond it did not. With that, his seventeen-year-old son walked outside to find that he owned a not-so-gently used classic.
Its interior was littered with boxes and papers. Its right front door was dented, and its right front fender still torn. Its tailgate was bent. Its entire body seemed twisted—when the younger Simon stood at the front bumper and looked toward the rear, the driver’s side seemed to bulge a little toward the stern, while the far side ran straight. The exhaust and rear-end bearings were shot, a consequence of motionless exposure to the weather. A creeping, milky haze fouled the curving safety glass at the wagon’s rear corners. The back bumper was dented. The front seat was worn through. The sun visors had split and their foam-rubber innards turned to saffron powder that snowed onto the dash. Reversing all this decay now rested in the hands of an eleventh grader. The car was twenty-three years older than he was.
Chris Simon was undaunted. He’d always been mechanically gifted: As a youngster, he’d ride his bike until it wore him out, then tear it down to its frame and put it back together. As he grew older, he watched for hours as his father worked in the garage. He was surrounded in every room of the house by Dave Simon’s growing collection of ’57 Chevy memorabilia. No surprise that he’d inherited a romance for the vintage. In third grade, he’d shown off toy ’57s to his classmates. Later, he’d built them of Lego blocks, from scratch—no kit, no instructions, just his exposure to the real thing as guide. One, rendered in red, was wonderfully detailed, surprisingly realistic, with a hood that opened to reveal a V8 engine fashioned from the snap-together plastic.
Now Chris finally had the genuine article, and he dove into the wagon on afternoons after school. He repaired the transmission, rebuilt the carburetor, and got the motor running as smooth and quiet as a sewing machine. He repacked the bearings, fixed the brakes, replaced much of the front suspension. He tried to beat back the worst of the rust that now devoured the body, cutting away a lesion that penetrated the right rear corner of the roof and patching the hole with fiberglass. The patch sagged before it set, creating a small concavity, but it beat having rain pour into the cargo hold.
He didn’t have time to redo it, anyway. When he pulled up the Chevy’s carpeting, he discovered that rust had obliterated large sections of the floor. It was so bad that if he drove through a puddle, water would splash into the cockpit, soaking the rear seat and doors. So bad that on the road, the wagon filled with the sound of whooshing air and the rumble of the tires. He and his friends sang the Flintstones theme when he drove the Chevy. That’s how bad it was.
Which is why he didn’t drive it much. He never took it to school, never drove it on the interstate. He braved a journey the six or seven miles across Norfolk only once. Most of his time in the ’57 was spent close to home, on brief weekend joy rides through the neighborhood.
Faced with an extra semester in high school, Chris Simon left without graduating and got a job in demolition. Like his dad, he grew his hair until it coursed past his shoulder blades. He moved out of the house and into a buddy’s condominium, taking the wagon with him. He longed to restore it, talked about how sweet it would be when he did. In those early days of his relationship with the Chevy, he talked about that a lot.
But demo work didn’t pay much. Money was too tight for the basic repairs necessary to make the car safe, let alone expensive chrome, paint, and upholstery. So months passed with the wagon parked at the curb a block from the Chesapeake Bay, salt air and weather countering whatever small progress he made on its salvation.
The months became years. He and a girlfriend got an apartment together in a complex just outside the gates of the naval base. It was a modest place with linoleum floors and hand-me-down furniture, decorated with model airplanes that Chris built and hung on thread from the ceiling, model battleships and cars on the bookcases, a rebel flag tacked to the living room wall. It little resembled the fantasy suburban home of the mid-fifties. The Chevy sat out on the street, along with a beat-to-hell Oldsmobile Cutlass that Simon used as his daily driver.
He was approaching his mid-twenties now, but in economic terms was not much better off than he’d been when he left home. The jobs he landed paid little. He didn’t have a telephone of his own: He used his girlfriend’s cell when she wasn’t at work. His budget was tested by maintenance on the Olds, which he had to keep healthy before he could consider any further investment in the wagon.
Simon did hunt down replacement floor pans—only to decide, once he had them in hand, that the installation was beyond his abilities. He couldn’t find anyone who would do the necessary welding at a decent price. So the car sat all but immobile through its forty-fourth year, its forty-fifth, and its forty-sixth.
His father got on him about it. That car’s sliding fast, he told Chris. Fix it or sell it. Put it in the hands of someone who’ll do right by it. Don’t let it fall to pieces. That, son, would be sacrilege.
A FEW MILES away, the new Tommy Arney was grappling with profound change. Three years had passed, give or take, since Krista ushered him out of the house. Now, at long last, he moved back in—believing, he says, “that if I didn’t go back home and focus, there would be no telling how my children would turn out.”
He was an attentive parent, involved in the kids’ schooling, insistent that they strive for good grades, eager to take an active hand in their projects. Still, it took him a while to find his rhythm, especially with Ryan. Arney was accustomed to getting his way, to snuffing resistance and neutralizing trouble with preemptive force. It was a leadership style uncalibrated to the quiet life, and especially the fragile sensibilities of a pubescent son. Arney offered Ryan advice. It came across as criticism: The boy’s clothes weren’t different from his own, they were wrong; the kid’s music wasn’t unfamiliar, it was crap. Arney strove to be engaged. It played as overbearing. For all his postcancer mellowing, he had strong opinions on just about everything—the right things to eat and drink, the right way to tighten a bolt, the right way to treat a car or a woman or a dog.
Ryan already had ample reason to resent him; now, as he entered his teens, he retreated into silence around the old man, escaping him further by drinking on the sly. Once, liquored up, he came close to sawing down the street sign where he’d spent so many hours waiting for Arney’s weekend visits, and where he’d been so often disappointed.
Arney’s public life was no less dramatic. Even with insurance, the expense of his cancer treatment required him to divest many of his holdings. Some of his car collection had to go, as did most of his go-go empire: By the time I met him, he owned just the original Body Shop.
As he rebuilt his financial affairs, he considered buying a vacant church near the bar and turning it into a soda-pop joint—a gentlemen’s club that served no alcohol and thus was beyond the reach of the ABC and its rules about what dancers could wear and do onstage. The Church of the Everlasting Body and Soul, he planned to call it. He’d invite his friends and the Body Shop’s best customers to “services” on Sunday afternoons, presided over by the Right Reverend Skinhead, who at Arney’s behest sent off for a mail-order ordination. The reverend, the product of a churchgoing youth, could cite Bible verses like a TV preacher; he would open the proceedings with a brief sermon, a female choir behind him on the altar—“and then the music would start,” Arney says, “and the girls would all rip off their robes and they’d be wearing pasties and [g-strings] underneath.
“We would have been protected by the federal government, because all they’d have to say is that Jesus told ’em to take their clothes off.”
Unfortunately, the church’s owner died with the sale in the works, and the deal fell apart. It wasn’t long after that, as Arney tells it, that his daughter, Ashlee, nine or ten years old, was talking with her classmates about what their parents did for work, and Ashlee announced that her dad ran the Body Shop. Ah, her teacher said, Ashlee’s father fixes cars. No, Ashlee said, my dad has girls dancing onstage. Krista Arney was not pleased when she heard this, Arney says. She told him that it was time to sell the bar. The demand had muscle: Krista still held the liquor license.
In 1995 Arney bought a restaurant in suburban Chesapeake, in a busy strip shopping center surrounded by an edge city of apartment complexes, office buildings, and a sprawling mall. Maxwell’s would become popular with lunching office workers and neighborhood regulars for the consistent quality of its short but wide-ranging menu. And the following year, in a move that broke his heart, Arney got out of the go-go business.
He tried to keep the Body Shop in the family by selling it to Slick, but the transfer was complicated by his iffy relationship with law enforcement. A former associate—a man who’d been a close friend to the old Tommy Arney, who’d worked with him for years, who’d joined him in numerous dustups, and who had amassed a lengthy criminal record before and during their friendship—found himself a defendant one time too many and facing serious prison time. In exchange for leniency he offered up his boss and compatriot: Arney, he said, was a major player in the Norfolk drug trade, and the Body Shop a marketplace for the trafficking of cocaine and a Laundromat for drug income. Bill Taliaferro says that this accusation dovetailed with a long-standing article of faith among local law enforcement officials that Arney was a drug kingpin, and that finding the evidence to prove it was only a matter of time. “They always thought Tommy was involved in drugs, and I can tell you that, to the best of my knowledge, never—never, ever, ever—was he involved,” the lawyer said. “Honest to God, I’m telling you, I don’t think there was any truth to it.”
Arney, for his part, denied the story and insists today that it was untrue; he never had his hand in the drug business, he says. Still, a subsequent investigation into the former associate’s report, along with an ABC probe into whether Arney retained a hidden interest in the Body Shop’s liquor license, hamstrung the club’s operation. “They were looking for any angle to get us,” Slick told me. When ABC agents popped her for what she described as a bookkeeping error (and which the ABC termed “filing a report . . . which was fraudulent or contained a false representation”), she locked the doors.
In the meantime, Arney moved the family into a big rented house on a cul-de-sac not far from the restaurant, and after a year there bought a three-bedroom rancher with a pool out back in a subdivision of quiet, meandering streets, carefully trimmed lawns, tasteful shrubbery. The former ward of the state, the fifth-grade dropout, the violent young man on society’s outermost margins, had achieved what looked a lot like suburban comfort and ease.
BEFORE WE BID a final farewell to the old Tommy Arney, let’s review the criminal record he amassed on the long journey to his new life—a record that, although it lists dozens of arrests, bears witness to only a fraction of the assaults, batteries, and malicious woundings he describes. Why is this? Well, for one thing, a slender few of his adversaries—or victims, if you prefer—brought charges against him. The fellow he hit with the soup can? Arney says he never had to answer for that. The melee with the marines, in which he brandished a firearm and swung a steel hook through a man’s cheek? No legal intervention there, either. Same goes for the fellow he kneecapped, the man he more or less neutered, the two he stabbed, the plank wielder, the man who didn’t pay his power bill, the scores of others he beat while performing his duties as a bouncer, and the scores more who were foolish enough to swing at him first.
The Norfolk of the seventies and eighties was inured to fistfights, Bill Taliaferro says, and its police were disinclined to bring charges themselves against someone answering a first punch, even if that answer was cataclysmic, and “especially if it happened in a bar.” That left it up to the participants to pursue charges—and Taliaferro found that many “so-called victims” could be talked out of it. “Many of them knew they were not entirely blameless, that they didn’t have entirely clean hands,” he told me.
By way of example, he cited the case of two brothers, co-owners of a used-car lot, who badmouthed Arney to a prospective customer. When she passed along their comments the following day, Arney decided he needed to set the men straight. In typical fashion, he announced his intentions on arriving, then followed through—beating both brothers so badly they were all but unrecognizable; both Arney and Taliaferro told me the men’s heads were swollen to the size of basketballs. “They showed pictures in court,” Taliaferro said. “I’d never seen anything like it.” Arney faced charges of malicious wounding, but once they were before the judge the brothers lost their will for retribution. They “just wanted to end this,” the lawyer said. “They’d been hit by a tornado, and they wanted to get away from it.”
Had he been arrested for every fight in which he’d hurt someone, Arney’s rap sheet would run into the hundreds of offenses. That’s his own assessment, and one that Taliaferro backs up: “I represented him on a lot of assaults,” the lawyer told me. “I don’t know how many times I represented him. I couldn’t count how many times.”
Arney’s actual numbers were almost modest. An official Norfolk Police Department printout of his record, prepared in May 2005, lists sixty-seven offenses for which he was arrested, and a 2012 federal accounting of his criminal past turned up another five, for a total of seventy-two.
Of these charges, thirty-five, or almost half, were dismissed by a judge or dropped by prosecutors—and of those, twenty-nine no longer appear in court files because in the summer of 2005, Taliaferro argued that their “continued existence and possible dissemination” could give people the wrong idea about his client, and he succeeded in getting them expunged from Arney’s record. Among the expunged charges were one misdemeanor assault, one felony assault, one assault on a police officer, one brandishing of a firearm, and fifteen assault-and-batteries.
Of the thirty-seven charges for which he was found guilty, many of those adjudicated in Norfolk’s General District Court—the equivalent to what some communities call the “police court”—have been purged from the files as part of the court clerk’s periodic disposal of old paperwork. The surviving documents attest that his convictions—all misdemeanors except the 1974 grocery store burglary and safe heist—included seven disorderly conducts, three assaults, nine assault-and-batteries, one charge of shooting into a vehicle, one of brandishing a firearm, and one of fornicating in public.*
And the record shows one charge of assault on a police officer—a case that spent some weeks wending its way through the court system before Arney was convicted on or about April 15, 1988, as best as I can tell, and which addressed his most storied and mythologized moment: his reputed confrontation with, and domination of, a Norfolk police dog and its handler.
This much can be said of the incident without fear of contradiction: that on the night in question, Arney was involved in an expansive fistfight outside Knickerbocker’s, a bar and restaurant catering to sailors and working-class townies; that the lawlessness was of sufficient scope and intensity that a seasoned Norfolk police veteran would recall it in a conversation with me more than a quarter century later; that among those arrested was Arney, who was subsequently charged with assault on a police officer, a misdemeanor.
That’s as far as consensus goes. Arney’s own account is that he went to Knickerbocker’s to discuss some business with a man running the place, and that at meeting’s end he emerged from a back room to find a fight erupting in the bar. Arney says he played the good citizen, stepping into the fray to break it up. He had one of the troublemakers in a full nelson and was advising the man to calm down when a squad of bouncers materialized, assumed he was the instigator, and rushed him. He defended himself.
Taliaferro verifies the story thus far. “That’s one time when he was an innocent party, I swear to God,” he told me. Arney again: The bar cleared and several dozen people spilled into the parking lot, he and the bouncers among them. He was holding his own—not winning the fight, but not losing it, either—when the police arrived in force. He heard someone yell his name, looked over his shoulder, and found a K-9 cop a few yards away, holding a German shepherd by a short lead. Stand down, the cop said, or I’ll put the dog on you.
Arney says he was busy at the time. Between swings he replied: Please don’t put that dog on me. Then don’t move, the cop said. Don’t move or I’ll put the dog on you. Look, you can arrest me, Arney says he told him. But don’t put that dog on me, or I’ll fuck up your dog. Taliaferro told me that later, in court, Arney was quoted saying “something like ‘I can tell you love that dog. But if you put that dog on me, I’ll hurt it.’ ” He added: “Those may not have been his exact words.”
The cop advanced to within a few feet of him, Arney says. The dog was going crazy, barking and growling, fur on end, spittle flying. Don’t move again, the cop said, or I’ll release the dog. And that, Arney says, was one warning too many. He was already annoyed that he was being treated as a lawbreaker, when he’d actually been attempting to do good. Fuck it, he thought, I’m going to jail anyway—and he reached over and thumped the cop on the chest. As he did, the cop let the shepherd go.
Arney whipped up his hands, caught the leaping dog by the throat, and held it off the ground as it kicked and snapped at him, squeezing the animal’s neck, biting deeply into its ear, bellowing, How do you like that, huh? The cop jacked him in the jaw, knocking his head back, so Arney swung the dog at him, landing a heavy blow that staggered the officer. The cop punched him again. Arney again swung the dog, out cold by now, harder this time, and knocked the cop off his feet. As he did, he lost his own footing on the parking lot’s loose gravel. Down he went, the dog’s inert weight on his chest. He was charged with assaulting the dog, rather than its handler; in court, Arney says, he told the judge that he didn’t realize the animal was a police officer because it wasn’t wearing a uniform or a badge.†
Taliaferro seconds many aspects of this account. “They put the dog on him, and damn if he didn’t grab it,” he said. “I asked him how he did it, and he says, ‘The secret is that you have to get their legs off the ground.’ ” Arney choked the animal until it “was about to check out,” Taliaferro said. “Finally, he dropped the dog and it ran off to [a police] van.”
He did “seem to remember,” he added, that the dog was so traumatized by its brief acquaintance with Arney that it had to be retired from service—it “had to go to a nice family.” Arney makes this claim himself, and he’s also corroborated by the late lawyer and substitute judge Peter G. Decker Jr., who became a close friend of Arney’s and whom I asked about the incident in November 2011, shortly before his death. “He was no longer a K-9 dog,” Decker said of the animal. “The police were a little upset with Tommy.”
The cops I spoke with differed with many of the story’s particulars. Betty Whittington, a secretary in the K-9 unit for decades, said through an intermediary that she recalled no such injury to a police dog. A seasoned police spokesman told me he remembered hearing the man-bites-dog tale as a young cop, but couldn’t say it wasn’t an example of the mythmaking that pervades any police department. Retired police captain Carmen Morganti, whom Arney remembers being present during his booking, and who recalls the Knickerbocker’s melee and Arney’s arrest himself, told me he believes the part about the dog was “probably bullshit.”
Arney says not only did it happen the way he describes, but for months afterward, Norfolk K-9 cops would demonstrate their lingering displeasure over the episode by parking outside the Body Shop on their breaks and staring down those who entered and left. When he confronted one of them as he sat in his SUV, his dog in the back, Arney says the cop growled: I’d like to see you try to choke this dog.
Let it out of the fucking truck, Arney says he replied. I’ll choke that motherfucker right now.