Bondsman

The knock came shortly after 7 a.m. As the door was answered, five agents, pistols and batons in hand, entered the tiny brick rowhouse in Northeast Baltimore, plowed up the stairs to a bedroom and nabbed their man.Anthony William Burnes stumbled out of bed and pulled on jeans and a sweat shirt. Still groggy, he was handcuffed and driven away as relatives peered out a window.Because the armed men were bounty hunters, they needed no search warrant to enter Burnes' house. There was no need to read him his rights.

Now, the racing gets serious.Blushing K.D., who has dominated this year's 3-year-old filly crop, returns to the track today as a heavy favorite in the Grade II, $200,000 Black-Eyed Susan Stakes at Pimlico.The daughter of 1989 Pimlico Special winner Blushing John will take on six rivals over 1 1/8 miles in an event that looks much softer for her than the Kentucky Oaks on Derby Day.Blushing K.D. won the Oaks -- her seventh victory in eight lifetime starts -- by 2 1/4 lengths and pushed her earnings to $713,040, sixth highest in the country.

A Westminster woman was arrested yesterday on charges of stealing $2,500 by writing a bad check to a bail bondsman, court records show.Terry R. Morgan, 25, is accused of passing the check to a bondsman for Mr. Bail Network on Nov. 27, police said. She was trying to bail a friend out of jail, police said.Court records show Morgan faces assault charges stemming from an alleged unrelated violation of a court order Oct. 29.Morgan was being held yesterday on $500 bail at Carroll County Detention Center.

A 73-year-old Columbia bail bondsman who was thinking about retiring died of a heart attack Monday while in Baltimore to bail out a client.Louis Leon Myles, believed to have been the first bondsman based in Howard County, was losing interest in the job he started in 1987, but kept at it anyway, said his wife, Minnie Myles."

In a case that could affect the ability of defendants to make bail at the crowded Baltimore City Detention Center, a Baltimore bail bondsman has asked the state Court of Appeals to decide whether he can allow clients to pay their premiums in interest-free installments.The request is the latest salvo in a three-year legal fight between Steven E. Engelman, a city bondsman who operates Professional Bail Bonds Inc., and the state Insurance Administration, which is trying to require bondsmen to spell out their systems of collecting payments.

Howard Duncan is no mere company man -- unless he owns the company. "I can't work for anyone," he says.The independent 55-year-old Columbia man has operated a car-dealing business. He's worked as a mortician. He's run a snack bar at the Howard County Circuit Courthouse in Ellicott City. Now he's a bail bondsman.Coming from a family of entrepreneurs, the North Carolina native says an adventure for him is starting a business from the ground up. "I think he typifies the American small-business man," said Joel Abramson, a Columbia lawyer who represents the Duncan family.

A Baltimore man charged in a June burglary at a Columbia business escaped from the Howard County Circuit Courthouse yesterday minutes after a bondsman turned him in on a warrant.Sheriff's deputies, police officers, park rangers, search dogs and two police helicopters spent yesterday afternoon searching a wooded area north of the Ellicott City courthouse for Richard Allen Shrout.By late yesterday, Mr. Shrout had not yet been apprehended, VTC even though authorities had set up roving patrols and closed off the area between the courthouse and Patapsco Valley State Park for about three hours.

Three Nigerians were extradited to Maryland yesterday to face numerous charges linked to drug dealing and violence in Baltimore, federal authorities said.Authorities identified two of the suspects as Henry and Roseline Solomon, a husband and wife. The couple was linked by these authorities to a drug gang responsible for the slayings of a city bail bondsman and his 3-year-old son.The third suspect, Emenka John Okpala, 42, is the reputed head of the Okpala Organization, a group that allegedly laundered money and smuggled raw Southeast Asian heroin to Baltimore, the authorities said.

Carroll H. Hynson Sr., a prominent Anne Arundel County businessman and developer and the county's first black bail bondsman, died Sunday of pneumonia at Anne Arundel General Hospital. He was 95."He was a real distinguished gentleman who was 95 years young," said state Comptroller Louis L. Goldstein. "I've known him since 1939 when I came to Annapolis as the youngest member of the House of Delegates. He was certainly the backbone of Annapolis and I was proud to call him my friend."Mayor Alfred A. Hopkins of Annapolis praised Mr. Hynson's "ability to succeed, to overcome in a time when it was difficult being black.

Authorities publicly aired for the first time yesterday allegations that a West Baltimore drug dealer ordered the fatal shooting of bail bondsman Angelo Garrison Sr. -- a shooting that also killed Mr. Garrison's 3-year-old son.During a sentencing hearing in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, prosecutors alleged that convicted heroin dealer James "Ricky" Rogers ordered Mr. Garrison killed because he was afraid the bondsman would offer testimony that could...

The first day of school is a little more than a week away for 11-year-old Molik Hylton, and he readily admits he has no desire to reopen the books. He will, however, be prepared to do so with a new notebook, a fresh haircut and one final day of fun, courtesy of a block party Saturday in his Northwest Baltimore neighborhood. "I don't want to go," said Molik, who will be a fifth-grader at Arlington Elementary/Middle School. "But this helps a little bit." The eight-hour party in the 4000 block of W. Belvedere Ave. was sponsored by eight local businesses that provided food, haircuts and school supplies to about 100 kids in attendance.

People charged with crimes generally can get out of jail by paying a bondsman 10 percent of the bail set by the courts. But many in Maryland are walking free by paying much less - in some cases as little as 1 percent - to bondsmen willing to offer a discount. These cut-rate bails are a common practice, leading to thousands of people accused of serious offenses going free on far less bail than some judges and the public realize. State regulators and city prosecutors say they are troubled, but bondsmen argue that such price reductions are necessary to remain competitive in a cutthroat industry.

So, O.J. Simpson, whose career as a professional defendant is going just gangbusters, was back in the spotlight (e.g., courtroom) in Las Vegas yesterday because he made a phone call that prosecutors said violated terms of his release on bail regarding that sports memorabilia fracas at the Palace Station. Simpson had tried to send an angry message through the bail bondsman at the You Ring We Spring agency to a co-defendant, a move that angered the judge who originally released him on bail.

LOS ANGELES -- Habitual sex offender Ross Wollschlager has bounced from one Ventura County, Calif., hotel to another in the weeks since his release from a state mental hospital, getting ejected each time the owner learned of his identity. Publicity about his release has made it impossible for the 44-year-old convicted rapist to find a rural landlord willing to give him a place to live. After seven evictions, Liberty Healthcare Corp., a San Diego company hired by the state of California to help Wollschlager get resettled, gave him a tent and he began living in the Ventura River bottom.

Clarence "Shad" Brown Sr., a former bail bondsman, travel agent and fixture in the long-faded nightlife of Pennsylvania Avenue, died of an infection June 30 at Genesis Eldercare in Randallstown. He was 92. Born in Blackstone, Va., he moved to Baltimore with his parents and two brothers at a young age. He graduated from Frederick Douglass High School. He married Helen Francis in 1935, and the young family lived in the 300 block of Presstman St. for decades. Mr. Brown operated an after-hours club in the basement of his West Baltimore home that attracted many top entertainers when they were in town, said his son, Clarence Brown Jr. of Lochearn.

A 34-year-old bail bondsman and grocery store security guard was charged in Anne Arundel County with impersonating an officer after an investigation that began when he allegedly used emergency lights to pull over another vehicle that contained two real policemen. Karl Glenn Salenieks of the 1900 block of Cavalier Circle in Crofton also was charged with illegal possession of firearms by a convicted felon after police reportedly uncovered an arsenal of weapons -- including semiautomatic guns -- in his home.

The conflict between a woman's inner good girl and inner bad girl is a great movie subject. Unfortunately, it remains untapped in Domino, the "inspired-by-fact" story of a ferocious female bounty hunter who in the end displays a heart of tarnished gold. Domino (Keira Knightley), the daughter of a British movie star, Laurence Harvey (Room at the Top, The Manchurian Candidate), and a London model (played by Jacqueline Bisset), chucks pampering and privilege to grab fugitives and bail-jumpers off the mean streets and out of the crummy motels and trailer parks of the American West.

Maryland's intermediate appellate court issued a strongly worded rebuke yesterday to a bail bondsman who challenged a Montgomery County court's authority to forfeit a bond months after a defendant failed to appear for a sentencing. The fact that bondsman Nickolas Pantazes lost $10,000 as a result is only "peripheral" to the concept of bail bonds, which are, essentially, a contract between the state and defendants to ensure a court appearance, retired Court of Special Appeals Judge Charles E. Moylan Jr. wrote for the three-judge panel deciding the case.

In Baltimore City Woman pleads not guilty in son's scalding death A 23-year-old woman pleaded not guilty in Baltimore Circuit Court on Friday to charges of first-degree murder in the scalding death of her 5-year-old son. Sheila Avery of the 600 block of N. Monroe St. is accused of putting her son, Travon Morris, into a bathtub filled with hot water Jan. 5. Travon suffered first- and second-degree burns over 50 percent of his body and died Feb. 15...

The West Baltimore mother accused of child abuse for allegedly leaving her children alone for days in an unheated home was bailed out of jail yesterday by her attorney and a bail bondsman. Tiffany Simmons, 23, of the 900 block of N. Gilmor St. was released about 5:30 p.m. after her attorney, Warren Brown, and bail bondsman Cody Smith put up money to bail her out. She had been jailed since Tuesday on $50,000 bond. Simmons was planning last night to stay with an aunt and then enroll in a city service program where she would get help finding a new home, Brown said.