For two decades, Milton N. Tillman Jr. has sold himself as a successful Baltimore businessman wrongly and repeatedly targeted by the law.
"Can't get no justice in this city," he told a judge who ordered his nightclub called Odells to remain shut in October 1992.
Four months later, Tillman pleaded guilty to trying to bribe a city zoning board member with $30,000 to keep the North Avenue club open. In April 1993, he cried as a federal judge sent him away to prison for 27 months, a jail term longer than the U.S. attorney's office had sought.
He got out, only to be sent right back - sentenced in 1996 to 57 months in federal prison for failing to pay his taxes and funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars of Odells' profits into city real estate ventures that a federal appeals court decided were used to "hide his income."
Now, authorities are after Tillman again, having recently raided six buildings connected to him, including his 4 Aces bail bonds business on East Monument Street, an office at the Dundalk Marine Terminal and a building owned by Ioannis "Crazy John" Kafouros, a fugitive and convicted dealer in stolen goods last seen a decade ago on a Greek island.
It is yet another chapter in what has been a turbulent two decades for the Tillman family, who through relatives and companies have owned at least 60 Baltimore properties, including nightspots linked to violence and drugs, slum apartments in the inner city and clubs frequented by politicians.
"There's a lot about this guy that people aren't talking about," said one of his former attorneys and a friend, Edward Smith Jr. "He is known on the east side as a very generous man. This crook business, they shouldn't point fingers. They should be as good as he is as a businessman."
Smith said that Tillman "has become a target of his success. Milton has gotten involved in some things he shouldn't have. That's obvious because there are convictions out there. But this guy is not the devil."
But Anthony J. Ambridge, a former Baltimore city councilman who now works in real estate development, remembers a different Tillman. The two were at odds in the early 1990s - Tillman was trying to get an after-hours license for Odells while Ambridge was trying to push through legislation to stop him.
