Dealers

Here we go again! In Peter Hermann 's article on theft of gutters ("Homeowners aggravated as thieves target copper gutters," Dec. 5), once again the scrap metal industry is blamed for the problem of stolen metal. As the owner of a scrap metal company that has been in business since 1917, I am sick and tired of my industry being unfairly blamed for metal thefts. To be clear, my business only buys metal from business, industry and government, so we have zero exposure to stolen metal.

The course is "Introduction to Casino Gambling," but upon entering the classroom, one might be tempted to place a bet at the roulette wheel, the craps table or any of the other table game layouts. As he stared at the roulette wheel, Christopher Lamb of Elkridge, a student who has taken one week of the Anne Arundel Community College course, could scarcely contain his excitement at the thought of working in a casino. "It is an amazing game, just on gambling and chance, and who knows where the ball is going to land?

The Anne Arundel County Council on Monday night soundly defeated a measure that would have exempted dealers in secondhand firearms from registering gun acquisitions with county police. Councilman Jerry Walker, a Republican from southern Anne Arundel, sponsored the legislation and was the lone supporter. Walker was seeking to amend a law passed last summer requiring retailers selling secondhand merchandise, including guns, to report information about sellers and merchandise to a computerized police database within 24 hours.

Justin Boston of Baltimore took the checkered flag Saturday to win the pole for today's Kentuckiana Ford Dealers 200 presented by Crosley Radio, an Automobile Racing Club of America race in Salem, Ind. Boston nosed out Venturini Motorsports teammate Kyle Benjamin by .004 of a second. "We've been neck and neck here," Boston, 23, said of himself and Benjamin. "He edged me out at the test, and I went and watched the video of that. After the qualifying lap he had, I didn't know if I could top that.

Joseph B. Aiello, president of J.B.A. Chevrolet on Ritchie Highway in Glen Burnie, says he never expected to be named the 1994 Time Magazine Quality Dealer.Sure, he has been among Chevrolet's top 10 dealers in the country in recent years. But the 55-year-old Severna Park resident said he was "really surprised" when he received the award at the National Automobile Dealers Association convention in San Francisco last month."I feel really honored that I was chosen to be the recipient of the award," he said yesterday.

DETROIT -- With auto sales stuck in the cellar, new-car dealers nationwide are marketing their service departments to bolster their bottom lines.The battle for the service dollar is creating some rifts within the LTC industry. For years, the corner garage was the primary supplier of car service, until dealers began to chip away at its business. That has caused some neighborhood spitting matches."Garages and dealers are competing for a smaller and smaller business base," said David Cole, director of the Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation at the University of Michigan.

Early Thursday mornings, hundreds of them from as far away as Canada and Puerto Rico descend on 41 acres in Bel Air in search of the deal.They'll inspect under hoods, scour interiors for flaws, check bodies and paint jobs for rust and previous patch jobs, and rev engines, listening for the telltale knocks and pings that the best of them can hear a block away.So like horse racing handicappers, the used car dealers stand prepared when the 800 to 1,000 automobiles approach starting gates A, B and C at the Bel Air Auto Auction.

Police promised residents yesterday that they would "make i hot" for drug dealers at Northeast Baltimore's Claremont public housing complex in the wake of Monday's fatal shooting of a 25-year-old man there.Police believe an unknown gunman shot Damon A. Toodle of the 4100 block of Coleman Ave. in the head in retaliation for the victim's having shot at him. The shooting occurred outside the 152-apartment Claremont Towers high-rise for the elderly.Police had made no arrest in the murder last night.

DEAR Baltimore drug dealers: I promise this will be the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard. Here goes: How about taking the summer off to see what it might be like around here without all the shooting and killing? Serious. How about a cease-fire? A little break could save lives, maybe even your own. I know this is crazy, the idea of drug dealers just shutting down the factory for a few months - too much money to be made, and too many customers to serve. And if you back off, even for a little while, some other guy in a long white T-shirt will take your place, and you'll have to find new work.

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. -- DaimlerChrysler AG says it will use its purchasing power to help dealers cut costs, and unveiled an advertising campaign touting its "Five Star" outlets, which meet standards the No. 3 automaker in the United States set for customer service and facilities. DaimlerChrysler plans to start in Indianapolis late this year a program that would let its dealers use the automaker's leverage in buying such things as health care, telephone and financial services and supplies.

A former Baltimore Police officer pleaded guilty Thursday to improperly accessing a law enforcement database to provide information to a drug dealer who was under federal investigation. Keith Nowlin, 39, of Laurel, pleaded guilty to one count of accessing a protected computer without authorization. In June 18, 2010, prosecutors say Nowlin, then an officer assigned to the Northeastern District, exchanged text messages with a man named Marvin Mobley, who was being monitored through a wiretap as part of a drug trafficking investigation.

A Baltimore judge sentenced Jason K. Hamel to 50 years in prison for the Federal Hill murder of an alleged drug dealer who tricked him into paying $5,000 for a T-shirt he said was a package of cocaine. The shooting happened in 800 block of Battery Avenue on June 20, 2008 when Hamel, 33, went to meet his victim Keyva Bluitt and two other men to do the supposed drug deal. Hamel picked up the package at around 9:15 p.m. and soon realized the deception, according to the Baltimore state's attorney's office.

Many were off work because of a snowstorm that never came, so they went to Hollywood Casino, tucked off Interstate 95, in search of games they thought they'd never see here: blackjack, roulette, craps and poker. For the first time Wednesday and about four months after voters approved it, Marylanders played table games without leaving the state. About 35 people were waiting when Hollywood sent out a small team of dealers to begin table play about 2 p.m., immediately after the Penn National-owned casino in Cecil County received permission from the state.

Over the last few weeks we have witnessed the rallying cry from our elected leaders, both locally and nationally, for the need for more restrictive gun control (smaller magazine clips, banning certain "assault" weapons, etc.). The liberal left seems to hold the patent on exploiting current events to further their political agenda, and they're following the playbook step by step to further erode our right to bear arms, guaranteed to us in the Second Amendment. Some of the pro-gun control letters published in The Sun question why any hunter would need a so called "assault weapon" to go hunting, or they claim that our forefathers only intended the amendment to be about muskets and single shot rifles, because that's what was around back then.

Anyone seeking to purchase a gun — even those buying weapons at a show or through a private dealer — should be required to pass a background check through a national database, according to recommendations drafted by a panel of violence reduction experts convened by the Johns Hopkins University. "It is really indefensible that we have a system where someone is able to obtain a firearm with no background check or record-keeping," said Daniel Webster, director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Grace Maynard, a retired Howard County antiques dealer, died Saturday from complications of a stroke at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Columbia. She was 91. She was born in Baltimore and raised in Windsor Hills. Her father, William Hard Maynard, who had been a Baltimore deputy state's attorney, had rewritten Maryland's penal code. Her mother, Helen Vail Maynard, was a homemaker. After graduating in 1939 from Forest Park High School and Eaton and Burnett Business College, she went to work for the Army at Fort Meade, and later held jobs at The Baltimore Sun and the Social Security Administration, when it was downtown in the Candler Building before it relocated in 1960 to Woodlawn.

Several dozen Chevron dealers in the mid-Atlantic region have organized and are considering a legal challenge to the oil company's plans to leave the market, their attorney said yesterday.Gerald M. Bowen, a lawyer in McLean, Va., said a group of Chevron dealers have retained him to protect their interests in the wake of Chevron's decision, announced in December, to turn over 63 stations to Exxon Corp. and sell or close another 30.Mr. Bowen said his "preliminary determination" was that the conduct of Exxon and Chevron was "legally insufficient" under the federal law governing an oil company's withdrawal from a market.

It's a buyer's market.So says Alan Abramson, head of Archway Ford in northwest Baltimore. Even his hotter selling models, such as the Taurus sedan and Explorer sports utility truck, are in plentiful supply, and competitive pressure has dealers around the state discounting them more than usual."

Continuing a tradition begun in 2008, members of the Bel Air New Car Dealers Association made two $5,000 donations to Harford County charitable institutions that serve members of the community in the greatest need for food and shelter. Checks were presented Tuesday to the Harford Community Action Agency in Edgewood, which manages and stocks the county's food banks, and the Faith Communities and Civic Agencies United (FCCAU) Welcome One Emergency Shelter in Belcamp. "We had two very successful parking lot sales at the Festival at Bel Air during 2012, over the Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends," Thomas D. Walls, president of the Bel Air New Car Dealers Association, wrote in a press release.

Dorsey Nicola was shaking the dice and staring down the green felt, where chips were stacked like miniature skyscrapers and multiplying. The craps table was hot last week as a half-dozen students lined the perimeter and Nicola kept throwing sixes. The winnings went ignored in this windowless room tucked into a back corner of an Anne Arundel Community College satellite campus. Students glued their attention instead to the dealer's clever tricks to coax tips from players and calculate payouts, crucial skills for someone hoping to secure a job in the state's newly expanded gambling industry.