Doggett

Edwin F. Hale Sr., chairman and chief executive of First Mariner Bancorp and owner of the Baltimore Blast soccer team, will become chairman of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association next month. Hale, whose appointment by Mayor Martin O'Malley was announced yesterday at BACVA's annual meeting, comes as the city moves forward with a $305 million project to build a publicly financed convention headquarters hotel. City officials have argued that the 752-room Hilton, to open in 2008, is needed to boost the city's faltering convention center.

About 130 inmates at a prison in Hagerstown staged a 30-hour protest this week over living conditions, refusing to return food trays and blocking windows of their cell doors so correctional officers could not see inside, prison officials confirmed yesterday. The protest at Roxbury Correctional Institution was over restrictions on personal items prisoners are allowed to keep in their cells, according to Major Priscilla Doggett, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Division of Correction. She said the protest began at 5 a.m. Wednesday when inmates refused to return their trays after breakfast and blocked their door windows.

The problems at Maryland's troubled prisons in Jessup continued yesterday as authorities thwarted an attempted escape by an inmate serving a life sentence for attempted murder. State prison officials said the inmate scaled an interior fence at the Maryland House of Correction Annex and was trying to get past razor wire and over another fence to the outside before he was ordered down by a correctional officer patrolling the prison perimeter. "He was not being combative, he was compliant," said Maj. Priscilla Doggett, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Division of Correction.

Prison authorities are investigating whether heroin smuggled into the Roxbury Correctional Institution in Hagerstown sickened or caused strange behavior in five inmates. Three of the inmates were taken to a local hospital after they were discovered unresponsive in their cells Tuesday, according to Priscilla Doggett, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Division of Correction. She said test results have confirmed that drugs were in the system of two of the inmates. The test results of the other three inmates are pending, she said.

An inmate was stabbed at the Maryland House of Corrections Annex in Jessup yesterday, only hours after authorities lifted a lockdown that had confined 1,200 inmates to their cells for nearly a month as officials searched the facility for homemade weapons. The 40-year-old inmate was stabbed at 2:45 p.m. by another prisoner, 20, who had pried a piece of metal from a light fixture in his cell and fashioned it into a shank, said Capt. Priscilla Doggett, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Division of Correction.

An inmate was stabbed to death Tuesday at the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup, state officials said. Robert George, 29, was stabbed in the chest while returning to his cell block from lunch, said Capt. Priscilla Doggett, spokeswoman for the Division of Correction. George was serving a three-year sentence for larceny. Doggett said corrections officials have a suspect but had not filed charges early yesterday evening. A search for the weapon had begun, she said. The prison was locked down and closed to visitors yesterday, and will be again today, Doggett said.

Authorities were searching yesterday for a state prison inmate who escaped this week from a work crew in Baltimore. Corrections officials met with the inmate's wife, who received a surprise telephone call from him telling her that he had escaped from the Baltimore City Correctional Center and was coming to find her. Roderick Dunham, 30, who had served most of a five-year sentence for handgun violations, slipped away from a work crew at 2:45 p.m. Tuesday,...

In a glitzy celebration attended by hundreds and punctuated with pyrotechnics, Baltimore christened its long-awaited Inner Harbor visitor center last night. Guests watched from two boats docked nearby until the appointed moment when the drapes came down and the lights came up on the $4.5 million building, revealing its inner contents. "We want this building to be a vibrant reflection of the best Baltimore has to offer," Leslie R. Doggett, president and chief executive of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association, said in an interview this week.

Given intense competition in the meetings industry, the head of the city's convention bureau is looking to leisure travel as Baltimore's ticket to growth in the hospitality sector. Leslie R. Doggett, president and chief executive of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association, plans to focus on converting the city's many day-trippers into overnight guests. "I can assure you I will fight for our share [of conventions]," Doggett said yesterday during two town hall forums at the Pier Five Hotel, which attracted nearly 150 people.

Leslie R. Doggett plans to do something this year that the city's convention bureau has never done before. She will sit down with officials at the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts and create a "Top 10" list - a wish list of events and groups that the city would like to entertain over the next five years. "I'd like to see us come up with some signature events to really brand the city," said Doggett, who became president and chief executive of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association last summer.