Riverfront Times, December 2, 2020 by Riverfront Times

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MARCH 6-12, 2019

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An Enemy’s Request

or more than a decade, the lives of Felix Key and Shelton Buchanan have been tied together. The two were once teenage rivals who fought bloody battles in south St. Louis. They’re grown men now, but in this week’s cover story, Ryan Krull explores the crime and a series of decisions that still bind their fate all these years later. It’s the kind of story that sounds like a movie plot, but it’s real. And as Ryan explains through expert reporting and sharp-eyed writing, there’s no guarantee of a happy ending. — Doyle Murphy, editor in chief

TABLE OF CONTENTS CA N ’ T

S TOP

WON ’ T

S TOP

ED ITION

Publisher Chris Keating Editor in Chief Doyle Murphy

E D I T O R I A L Digital Editor Jaime Lees Interim Managing Editor Daniel Hill Staff Writer Danny Wicentowski Contributors Cheryl Baehr, Eric Berger, Jeannette Cooperman, Thomas Crone, Mike Fitzgerald, Andy Paulissen, Justin Poole, Theo Welling, Ymani Wince Columnist Ray Hartmann Interns Steven Duong, Riley Mack, Matt Woods A R T

& P R O D U C T I O N Art Director Evan Sult Editorial Layout Haimanti Germain, Evan Sult Production Manager Haimanti Germain M U L T I M E D I A A D V E R T I S I N G Advertising Director Colin Bell Account Managers Emily Fear, Jennifer Samuel Multimedia Account Executive Chuck Healy, Jackie Mundy Digital Sales Manager Chad Beck Director of Public Relations Brittany Forrest

COVER False Witness

C I R C U L A T I O N Circulation Manager Kevin G. Powers

Will an old enemy save Felix Key from prison?

E U C L I D M E D I A G R O U P Chief Executive Officer Andrew Zelman Chief Operating Officers Chris Keating, Michael Wagner VP of Digital Services Stacy Volhein www.euclidmediagroup.com

Cover photograph by

N A T I O N A L A D V E R T I S I N G VMG Advertising 1-888-278-9866, vmgadvertising.com

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Above: courtesy family of Felix Key

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LEDE

“It is really frustrating, because all of this pain, suffering, loss and even the minimal lockdown measures that are implemented right now are all so avoidable if everyone just did the right thing — social distance, wear masks and everything like that. It’s incredibly frustrating for sure. I wish I knew the answer of how to fix people’s perspectives on this, because unfortunately, it seems like with most people, they’re not going to do anything unless they see it in person. I just hope it doesn’t get to that point. But I am very worried that after Thanksgiving we’re going to see things get quite a bit worse.” REUBEN HEMMER, HEMODIALYSIS TECHNICIAN, PHOTOGRAPHED OUTSIDE AT A ST. LOUIS DIALYSIS CLINIC ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 8

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PHOTO BY THEO WELLING

HARTMANN Cleanup in Aisle 45 Blunt, Hawley spin Trump’s messy exit for their own purposes BY RAY HARTMANN

he circus might be closed due to the pandemic, but that fellow up there walking the high wire looks strangely familiar. Why, it’s Senator Roy Blunt. What a rotten couple of months Blunt has on his hands. Blunt’s own political career seems secure enough for the moment, but he faces twin challenges that would keep up any Republican at night, even if he is sleeping on one of creepy Mike Lindell’s pillows. First and foremost, there’s the small matter of Donald Trump

potentially blowing the Senate for Republicans in Georgia with his psychotic, narcissistic raging against Republican leaders and ballot integrity there. The oneword change from “majority” to “minority” in the Senate would rock Blunt’s world far beyond the aggravation of having to order new stationery and business cards. Then there’s Blunt’s responsibility as Senate Rules Committee chairman to preside over one of the most challenging presidential inaugurations ever. His Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies is going to need to smoke some joints: Imagine trying to plan all that pomp and circumstance while navigating the dangers presented by a raging, uncaring and dangerous invisible enemy. And there’s also the pandemic to worry about. Blunt’s position is starkly different than that of lean-and-hungry Senator Josh Hawley, who likely could not care less about control

of the Senate. That’s not certain, but Hawley’s presidential brand for 2024 — all-consuming to him — is best served by positioning himself as an outside flamethrower, and minority status wouldn’t hurt the cause. His challenge is to garner nonstop right-wing media coverage as a loyal Trump lieutenant while hoping and praying that no one named Trump will matter in four years. It goes without saying that both Blunt and Hawley understand — like every one of their Senate colleagues — that Trump lost the election beyond all doubt. But Blunt apparently believes that he needs to go without saying that for fear of triggering Trump. Hawley will say anything that works as red meat, anytime, anywhere, for any reason or no reason. History won’t be kind to either of these men for having enabled Trump’s toxicity over the past four years. But fi ing history is on neither’s “things to do” list. The task at hand is ushering out the

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mad king without doing further harm to your political party if you’re Blunt and without missing a golden opportunity to inherit Trump’s mantle of grievances if you’re Hawley. What an interesting study in contrasts we get to watch in Missouri. While Hawley gets to blather incessantly into every unguarded microphone — the battier the better — Blunt has to walk that tightrope. “You know the president wasn’t defeated by huge numbers. In fact, he may not have been defeated at all,” Blunt told CNN on November 10. Blunt, who apparently hasn’t revisited that assessment since, was pushing back strongly against a virtually treasonous statement uttered just two days earlier by, well, Blunt: “It’s time for the president’s lawyers to present the facts, and then it’s time for those facts to speak for themselves,” Blunt had said on

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November 8 in an interview on ABC’s This Week. Blunt added that there are always some changes after an election, but it “seems unlikely that any changes could be big enough to make a difference.” ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos raised the uncomfortable point that Blunt once held the same job as many of the beleaguered state officeholders getting kneecapped by Trump. “You’re a former (state) secretary of state. I spoke with secretaries of state, Democrat and Republican state officials over the last several days, they said they’ve seen no widespread evidence of any kind of fraud at all,” Stephanopoulos said. “Joe Biden has won this election. Why can’t you acknowledge it?” Well, just because. “This is a close election, and we need to acknowledge that,” Blunt responded, in part, after earlier referring to the states’ official canvassing procedures. “It’s a process. There’s a process here that we need to go through. I think both Vice President Biden and resident Trump benefit from that process.” Excuse the Biden transition team if it fails to fully appreciate the benefit of the process as it takes the helm of a runaway freight train. Trump needs to benefit from the process by ta ing some meds or slipping into a straitjacket. Blunt showed political skill in delivering the benefit” line without breaking character. That was pretty good, although not as immortal as what he had told the Washington Post in August about the central issue of the campaign: “Were you better off in January of this year than you were three years ago or four years ago?” Blunt asked. “Almost every American, if they look at that question, would say we absolutely were better off.” But that was in August, and the election was in November. Why would people be wondering about how they’d felt in January? Turns out at least 80 million of them were not, especially those not buying Blunt’s implied suggestion that the nation ignore Trump’s epic failure to handle the COVID-19 pandemic. Hawley, on the other hand, has to love the tortured process to which Blunt referred. That is, at least as long as he gets to make profound proclamations such as “the media

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do not get to determine who the president is.” Aw, c’mon, Josh, how about just this once? Hawley has actually acknowledged Trump’s demise by ignoring it. In tone and substance, Hawley celebrates Trumpism on his social media, but a tweet last week inadvertently accepted the inevitability of a Biden administration by condemning any and all Cabinet picks he might make. “What a group of corporatists and war enthusiasts — and #BigTech sellouts,” Hawley whined on Twitter after listing all of the names of Biden appointees thus far. ow there’s a fine serving of raw meat made possible only by Dear Leader’s exit stage right. Normal Republicans, such that any remain, refrained from tweeting their obvious confusion: “Did someone say corporatism is bad?” But that’s the beauty of being Josh Hawley in these twisted times. This guy is such an unmitigated fraud that just about any nonsense he throws against the wall will stick. Veteran Republican strategist Stuart Stevens summed up Hawley well in reacting to the tweet with one of his own: “His political consultants told @HawleyMO that he had to be a ‘populist’ to run for president. Watching this prep school-Stanford-St Paul’s-Yale Law school hot house plant trying to sound authentic is li e watching a fish try to ride a bicycle.” Stevens has that right, but let’s not forget Hawley’s audience consists of people who can be convinced that cyclist fish are all that stand between America and the rule of Satan-worshiping pedophiles from the Deep State. At the end of the day, Hawley cares only about Hawley — sound familiar? — and that means perpetuating Trumpism without Trump. s for Blunt he’s fi ated on holding the Senate with two cartoonishly corrupt senators in Kelly oe er and avid erdue all the while placating Trump, who just called Georgia’s conservative Republican secretary of state “an enemy of the people.” And he’s got to oversee a not-too-eventful inauguration of President Joe Biden. All without losing his balance. n Ray Hartmann founded the Riverfront Times in 1977. Contact him at rhar tmann1952@gmail.com or catch him on Donnybrook at 7 p.m. on Thursdays on the Nine Network and St. Louis In the Know with Ray Hartmann from 9 to 11 p.m. Monday thru Friday on KTRS (550 AM).

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NEWS

How St. Louis Overturned an Election — and Why Trump Can’t Written by

DANNY WICENTOWSKI

hen attorney Dave Roland reads the news on ballot fraud conspiracies in the 2020 election, his mind wanders back to 2016. He thin s of a third-floor office at the St. Louis Board of Elections, and of a moment that made him one of the small number of people who have ever pulled off that toughest of all election tricks — overturning the result — which continues to elude the legal team of President Donald Trump. It was in September 2016 that Roland’s then-client, activistturned-candidate Bruce Franks, beat Peggy Hubbard in a do-over of their primary race for Missouri House District 78, a contest that ubbard had won in the first round by 90 votes. In the second round, however, Franks won. The victory didn’t just validate his insurgent campaign over a longstanding political dynasty — it did so on a rollercoaster of revelations that appeared to describe a machine of absentee voter fraud at work in St. Louis. Four years later, the ups and downs of the Franks-Hubbard drama are echoed in the legal battles waged by the Trump campaign in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The overturned 2016 St. Louis election has also entered conservative annals of proven voter fraud: It is featured in the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database and in the pages of a legal brief filed in ovember by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, in which the AG argued that Pennsylvania should throw out mail-in ballots that arrived within three days of Election Day bearing smudged or missing postmarks.

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Police deliver a box to election workers at the St. Louis Board of Elections. | DANNY WICENTOWSKI Roland is no stranger to the importance of proper envelope usage. But in an interview with the Riverfront Times, the attorney says that while he sees some merit to the tactics employed by Trump’s legal team, his own experience in disrupting St. Louis’ 2016 primary bodes poorly for their chances of pulling off a similar reversal. “The kind of concerted effort that it would ta e to intentionally flood an election with unlawful ballots, to favor one specific candidate you can do that on a small scale and be successful,” he says. “You can engineer a campaign of fraud.” But, he adds, “When you engage in fraud like this, you leave evidence.” For Roland, the funny thing about overturning the 2016 election for the 78th House District was that he didn’t need evidence of fraud to do it. That’s what happened in that third-floor office at the board of elections: It was late August 2016, and with time running out before the general election, a St. Louis judge had allowed Roland to review the records of the just-completed primary election. Roland sets the scene: On the judge’s order, he and two reporters from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch — the newspaper had similarly sued for access to the ballot records — spent three days pouring over applications for absentee ballots and the associated paper-

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Attorney Dave Roland. | SARAH FENSKE

work. As Roland tells it, he noticed that about 115 absentee ballots cast during the election were missing the mail-in envelopes. Roland remembers getting the attention of an election worker overseeing their review of records: “We were missing 100, 115 envelopes — what’s going on here?” he says. “And one of the election workers said, ‘Oh, we didn’t put those in envelopes, we just tabulated them straight away, we put them straight into the ballot box.’” The answer stunned the attorney. What the worker was suggesting was illegal. Without the envelopes, there was no way to tie the ballot to the associated envelope and absentee application materials, which, under Missouri law, must be available so that a

campaign can have the opportunity to challenge them. “I remember she said this, and I was like, ‘Holy crap!’” Roland says. “I looked at [Post-Dispatch reporter] Stephen Deere — he was sitting right next to me — and he said to me, ‘Is that the ballgame?’ And I said, ‘It may well be.’” Roland’s reaction turned out to be right. At the bottom of the ninth, he’d just discovered his home-run hitter. “I remember that exchange really distinctly,” Roland continues. “Because that was the moment when I realized that we had gone from a really, really long shot of getting the election overturned to realizing that if the judge applies the law properly, we win the contest and get the new vote.” That was exactly what happened. Days later, a St. Louis judge ruled that the number of envelopeless ballots, which exceeded the margin of victory, “cast doubt on the validity of the initial election.” On September 16, 2016, Bruce Franks faced Penny Hubbard for a second time. Just like the August 2 primary, Franks won the in-person vote on Election Day. But this time, there was no lopsided glut of absentee ballots for Hubbard. Franks won the special election in a landslide. If transplanted to the national scale, what happened to Bruce Franks in 2016 is what Trump’s legal team dreams of in 2020. Indeed, the main beats of the 2016 local election drama bear many of the marks of a 2020 Rudy Giuliani press conference, complete with allegations of absentee mailin ballots being dumped for one candidate, a conspiracy involving election workers, and calls for additional audits to reveal even more fraud behind the results. There are further similarities. Like Trump and his supporters, Roland had been raising alarm about potential absentee ballot fraud long before the 2016 election; Roland had alleged “massive, systematic violation of the state’s absentee ballot statutes” going back more than a dozen election contests involving members of the Hubbard political dynasty. Roland had started with sweeping, conspiratorial claims. Today, he concedes those claims weren’t backed by solid evidence but represented “broad sketches

Bruce Franks Jr. won the do-over 2016 primary in landslide. | STEVE TRUESDELL of the illegalities we thought were happening.” But the pattern of shady absentee ballots indeed cropped up in the 2016 primary: While Franks had won more than 50 percent of the Election Day votes, the absentee ballots added more than 300 votes to Hubbard’s total, sealing her apparent win 2,203 to 2,113. “We had a pretty clearly developed theory for how fraud was taking place in concrete settings,” Roland notes — and that theory soon translated to first-hand accounts from voters who, according to election records, had voted absentee for Penny Hubbard. Roland started hearing from district voters who insisted they had done no such thing. Just as Giuliani and the other Trump campaign surrogates have in 2020, Roland began collecting affidavits. Some voters claimed they’d been approached by Hubbard campaign workers and asked to sign their name on a document, not knowing they were applying to vote absentee or registering as “incapacitated.” Others would later detail their experiences to reporters for the Post-Dispatch, which published the results in a barnstorming investigation that corroborated some of Roland’s most explosive accusations, including reports that Rodney Hubbard Sr. was known to drop off “stacks of ballots” at the election office during previous elections. But while Trump’s legal teams have raised seemingly damning testimonies in hundreds of affidavits from voters in various states,

the accounts have failed to gain traction in court. Roland observes that among the Trump lawsuits, “there are not that any particular concrete patterns of fraud are taking place, but they’re tossing out the idea of the potential of fraud, and they’re saying, ‘That’s why we need to investigate.’” For Roland, the irony of the present fraud-focused election drama is that in 2016 he spent months gathering evidence of alleged election fraud, won a court order giving him the power to investigate, and even had a team of news reporters independently chasing the same suspicions — and yet, at the trial to determine whether the primary result would be overturned, Roland went in a completely different direction. “When it came down to brass tacks in the trial, we did not call any of the witnesses that could have testified to the chicanery in the Hubbard campaign,” he says. “We weren’t asking them to deduct any number of votes from Penny Hubbard; we were asking the court to say that because the legitimacy of outcome is seriously in question, we should have another vote.” This is why Roland still remembers that “holy crap” moment when an election worker revealed that more than 100 absentee ballots had been tabulated without envelopes. It turned the case from one of systemic ballot harvesting to one of math: Hubbard had won with a margin of just 90 votes. Around 140 absentee ballots were cast in person at the St. Louis Election Board offices without envelopes, violating the state’s rules

Four years later, the ups and downs of the FranksHubbard drama are echoed in the legal battles waged by the Trump campaign in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. intended to prevent fraud. Roland doesn’t see a similar mathematical opening for Trump’s legal team, which has attempted various arguments to disqualify ballots from Democratic areas that arrived or were counted after Election Day. Biden’s victory margins are measured in the thousands and tens of thousands, making it “virtually impossible to engineer the number of ballots that you would need to without getting caught,” Roland says. Maybe, Roland suggests, the Trump campaign could focus on whether mail-in or absentee votes “strictly complied” with the statutory requirements. “But the campaign didn’t really do that,” he adds, noting that instead “they had this grab bag of ideas, and they were just throwing everything at the wall and hoping things would stick, if not in the minds of the judges, then in the mind of the public that would question the legitimacy of the outcome of the election.” Even while the cases fail in court, it’s the latter possibility, with its emphasis on doubt and potential cover-up, that continues playing out across the country, including in Missouri. Weeks after the election, “Stop the steal” protesters with Trump flags and MAGA-adorned trucks continue to rally in Missouri and across the country.

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The challenges are also maintaining political pressure on Republican politicians — pressure to which Missouri’s top elected officials are not immune. On November 10, U.S. Senator Roy Blunt moved to cast doubt on an election that was already a week old, telling reporters, “The president wasn’t defeated by huge numbers,” and, “In fact, he may not have been defeated at all.” Meanwhile, Missouri’s junior U.S. senator, Josh Hawley, spent part of election night as a guest on the show of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. During the segment, Hawley acknowledged that he didn’t know if allegations of voter fraud in Detroit were “well founded or not,” but he didn’t let that stop him from lambasting the election system as “begging for” and “inviting” abuse. Roland raised the theoretical possibility that if state boards had refused to certify votes, the election could have been decided by state lawmakers in Republican-dominated legislatures. But he believes the practical political and legal barriers to such a strategy would make it impossible. Then again, there was a time when Roland and his candidate faced seemingly insurmountable barriers, only to snatch an improbable victory. And Trump still has powerful allies willing to go to bat for him. Even though Trump is allowing the General Services Administration to start the transition process to the incoming Biden administration, the president continues to push conspiracies. In a paroxysm of tweets sent over the Thanksgiving weekend, Trump maintained that his loss could only be the result of “a massive fraud, a RIGGED ELECTION!” and called on Georgia’s GOP governor to “overrule his obstinate Secretary of State” in order to investigate the “the number of envelopes versus the number of ballots.” No one knows what Trump might do. Whatever it is, he still has allies. On November 20, Hawley told the Associated Press that he “wasn’t concerned” about Trump inviting Michigan state lawmakers to the White House in an attempt to influence that state’s election certification. When asked whether Trump could reverse the election, Hawley responded: “Anything’s possible.” n

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Feds Won’t Seek Death for Sweetie Pie’s Star Written by

DOYLE MURPHY

ederal prosecutors won’t seek the death penalty against Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s James “Tim” Norman if he’s convicted of orchestrating his cousin’s murder, but they haven’t made a determination about another man charged in the case. Norman is accused of paying an exotic dancer from Memphis in 2016 to lure his nephew Andre Montgomery outside to be gunned down. Norman, who is the son of famed performer and restaurateur Robbie Montgomery, had secretly taken out $450,000 worth of life insurance on the nephew, ac-

Tim Norman is accused of a murder-for-hire plot. | MADISON COUNTY, MISS., DETENTION CENTER cording to an indictment. n a memo filed last wee prosecutors wrote that the U.S. attorney general had directed them not to pursue the death penalty against Norman or the dancer, Terica Ellis. In August of this year, Norman was indicted along with Ellis in what the feds say was a murderfor-hire plot. Two others have

since been indicted as well — a music-producer-turned-insurance-agent named Waiel “Wally” Yaghnam, who allegedly helped file bogus documents for the life insurance policies, and 29-yearold Travell Hill, who was charged earlier this month. Norman, Ellis and Hill were all charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Federal prosecutors are still withholding the full details of what they think happened in Montgomery’s killing, but they say phone records show the killing was coordinated through Norman. The reality-show star was living in Los Angeles in March 2016 but flew into t. ouis the day before his nephew’s killing. He began communicating with Ellis through burner phones once in town, prosecutors say. Ellis had already been trading messages with Montgomery, telling the twentyyear-old she’d be visiting St. Louis and making plans to meet. On March 14, 2016, Ellis contacted Norman and Hill and told them where they could find Montgomery, the indictment says. GPS coordinates from the phone

Ex-Cop Accused of Excessive Beating Written by

DANNY WICENTOWSKI

n ex-De Soto police officer who was charged last week with assault for allegedly beating a handcuffed man previously worked as a cop in St. Louis, where he was investigated by internal affairs and accused of masturbating on the job. The officer, 55-year-old James Daly, is also the unnamed subject of an October report by KMOV which covered the outrage around a De Soto police officer’s Halloween display that featured a graveyard and cross with the epitaph, “Here lies Michael Brown, a fat ghetto clown.” The Halloween display led to an internal investigation by the De Soto police department. The results of that investigation haven’t been made public, but the Jefferson County sheriff noted in a news release on November 25 that Daly’s job with De Soto had ended prior to him being charged in the alleged assault. It wasn’t the first time the public had complained about the veteran cop’s behavior. In October 2018, when Daly was an officer with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, a “female citizen” contacted a police investigator with

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Ex-cop James Daly faces an assault charge. | COURTESY JEFFERSON COUNTY SHERIFF

Officer Bethany Zarcone was also charged. | COURTESY JEFFERSON COUNTY SHERIFF

screenshots and texts between her and Daly, “as well as a video recording of the officer masturbating while on duty at the South Patrol division station,” according to a copy of the investigation file. Daly became the subject of a misconduct report for “Alleged Conduct Unbecoming of an Officer” and was interviewed by the department’s Internal Affairs division on December 12, 2018. In an email Monday, SLMPD spokeswoman Evita Caldwell said the department

can only confirm Daly was employed there from 1999 to 2019. “We would not discuss the results of an internal matter unless the investigation led to criminal charges,” she wrote. “As such, we do not have anything further to provide.” This week, the Jefferson County sheriff arrested Daly and two other officers in connection to the beating of an unnamed victim during the “post-arrest booking procedure” at the De Soto police station on September 30.

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showed she was nearby when Montgomery was shot to death in the 3900 block of Natural Bridge. She immediately drove home to Memphis, where she deposited $9,000 — part of $10,000 Norman allegedly paid her — in various accounts during the next couple of days. She, Norman and Hill stopped using their cellphones shortly after the shooting. Two days after the killing, Hill was recorded on a prison phone as he talked to his brother about “Tim” and the killing, authorities say. According to the indictment, ill’s brother Tony hitfield was heard on the call laughing and saying, “I heard that motherfucker finally got him.” Hill was paid $5,000 by an unnamed witness, who got the money from Norman at the Chase, authorities say. In their November 25 memo, prosecutors said although they wouldn’t seek death for Norman or Ellis, should they be convicted, a decision on Hill was “still pending” an analysis. None of the defendants have been convicted of a crime in connection with Montgomery’s death. n According to a probable cause statement, Daly “grasped and held the handcuffed victim by his hair and throat” and “then grasped the victim by his neck, pushed him onto the bench, and held the victim, by his neck, on the bench for a period of time.” The handcuffed man said he couldn’t breathe while Daly was pressing his head into the bench. (Or, as the police reportjargon describes it: “Through investigation, it was discovered a statement was made by the victim indicating while James [Daly] was holding his throat, the victim’s airway was restricted.”) During the beating, a second De Soto officer, Bethany Zarcone, “struck the handcuffed victim in his groin area with her knee,” investigators say. The probable cause statement doesn’t describe the evidence behind the charges in detail or whether the incident was captured on video. However, it notes De Soto officer Allayna Campbell took “numerous digital photographs” of the arrested victim but deleted them after the incident. “When questioned,” the report continues, Campbell “stated she was instructed to delete the photographs by a supervisor” and “further stated she believed she was requested to delete the photographs due to them containing evidence of an assault.” Prosecutors in Jefferson County have charged Campbell with tampering with physical evidence, a misdemeanor. Both Zarcone and Daly are charged with felony assault in the third degree. n

[OPINION]

Black Apologists for 1994 Crime Bill Assuage White Guilt BY BLAKE STRODE

he 1994 crime bill was a disaster for Black people. And Black people did not ask for it. First, let’s be clear about what the ’94 federal crime bill—formally, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—actually did. This bill, the largest and most comprehensive piece of crime legislation in the country’s history, represented a massive expansion of the nation’s criminal punishment apparatus. It provided for 100,000 more law enforcement officers, $9.7 billion for new prison construction, expansion of the federal death penalty, and new classes and broadened definitions for various categories of crimes. The bill also included a “three-strikes” sentencing provision, which has resulted in thousands of people serving mandatory life sentences for a wide range of offenses, and incentive funding for states and carceral institutions to ensure that convicted persons serve the full length of their sentences. The bill even eliminated opportunities for incarcerated people to receive higher education, in a particularly gratuitous insult that revealed the level of animus and dehumanizing intent underlying the legislation. The law had its intended impact. Incarceration rates continued to grow; prison populations boomed; average sentences increased; and industries serving this system of mass caging raked in billions of dollars. Communities across the country were also devastated, none more than poor and working-class Black communities that saw millions of people, disproportionately young men, snatched out of their communities and thrown into this perverse assembly line of human devastation. For this reason, many lawmakers who supported the legislation at the time have come to disavow and apologize for it. This includes Democratic Party standard-bearers Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Despite this legacy, and the bill’s highly questionable efficacy in actually reducing crime—with most researchers attributing the decreasing crime rate in the 1990s to economic prosperity, the “dot com” boom, and reduced unemployment, as opposed to the crime bill—some people still insist on mounting a defense of the crime bill and the people who supported it. The argument tends to be that we shouldn’t criticize this awful piece of policy targeted at criminalizing poor people and Black people because crime

was, in fact, really bad, the bill did some good, and Black people wanted to see this bill passed as much as any group. Such is the crux of the argument put forth by former St. Louis alderman Antonio French in a recent editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. French is wrong. For all of the reasons stated at the outset, this single piece of legislation is among the most devastating examples of racist policy in the past 40 years, and a driver of what Michelle Alexander famously named the “New Jim Crow” in America. But he is also wrong to parrot false talking points about the politics of the time. In his column, French directs his ire at “many young progressives, who were not alive in 1994” for criticizing politicians who supported the crime bill when “[m] ost Black leaders also supported it.” (I feel pretty safe in assuming French basically means people like me, even though I was very much alive in 1994.) He goes on to enumerate Black politicians who voted for it and Black religious leaders who lobbied for it, as a kind of inoculation against criticism of better-known white political figures who championed it, and the many more who passively supported or condoned it. But this ahistorical narrative misses so much. As Michelle Alexander wrote in The Nation in 2016, It is absolutely true that black communities back then were in a state of crisis, and that many black activists and politicians were desperate to get violent offenders off the streets. What is often missed, however, is that most of those black activists and politicians weren’t asking only for toughness. They were also demanding investment in their schools, better housing, jobs programs for young people, economic-stimulus packages, drug treatment on demand, and better access to healthcare. In the end, they wound up with police and prisons. To say that this was what black people wanted is misleading at best. Three Black academics made a similar observation in another op-ed published in the same year by the New York Times, describing this dynamic as policy makers “selectively hearing black voices on the question of crime”: It’s not just that those demands were ignored completely. It’s that some elements were elevated and others were diminished—what we call selective hearing. Policy makers pointed to black support for greater punishment and surveillance, without recognizing accompanying demands to redirect power and economic resources to low-income minority communities. When blacks ask for better policing, legislators tend to hear more instead. Black activists and organizers from Angela Davis to Mariame Kaba have noted that there were absolutely Black

ArchCity Defenders Executive Director Blake Strode. | COURTESY ARCHCITY DEFENDERS voices, particularly Black feminists, at the time sounding the alarm about the ways in which the crime bill would be destabilizing for Black families and communities, and exacerbate their existing challenges. Those voices simply did not win out in the debate. Even if we only consider the views of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1994, the story is far more complicated than French and others would have us believe. While, as French points out, two-thirds of the CBC ultimately voted in favor, that came at the end of an extended period of CBC members withholding support precisely because they were concerned the overly punitive elements of the bill would land hardest in their communities and had no real counterbalance in terms of alternative approaches and prevention. In August of 1994, when these members finally switched over to supporting the bill after sustained pressure from the White House and congressional leadership from both parties, a headline in the Baltimore Sun read, “Black Caucus yields on crime bill.” So when French writes that he recalls “Black leaders demanding, and fearful mothers begging, for government leaders to do something about the violence,” and insists that the “something” was the crime bill, he conveniently omits the very complications and nuances of history that he purports to champion. Perhaps the most troubling assertion of all by French is that maybe the crime bill was also a good thing, one that “both saved and destroyed” his north St. Louis neighborhood: “The arrests and convictions that resulted from the law cost thousands of men and women their lives. But it also saved thousands of others. It’s a tragedy. An eye for an eye left us blind.” This head-spinning series of nonsequiturs reveals the intellectual emptiness of the proposition being offered by French and others. The bill was bad. The bill was good. “We” did wrong. But

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“they” did wrong, too. A pox on all our houses. Don’t waste your time searching for the “there” there. This policy, and its impact, is not a paradox; it’s a problem. And the state of north St. Louis today has everything to do with policies like the ’94 crime bill. But the key thing to understand is that revisionist histories by commentators like French about racist American policies—whether the crime bill, school segregation, redlining and suburbanization, or even slavery itself—are not actually about the wisdom of those policies. They are about absolution for white supremacy. They are a salve for the aching guilt, not of unapologetic bigots and racial reactionaries, but rather for well-meaning neo-liberals and “moderates”—mostly, but not all, white, as French rightly notes— who have been so complicit in this legacy of racial control and domination. This is not new. Black defenders of policies that sustain racial hierarchy are always in demand. Names like Clarence Thomas, Tim Scott, and even Candace Owens come to mind. There is nothing exceptional about these characters. Why do we even know these people? It is because they are telling many white Americans what they want to hear about race and racism. To make possible the work that lies ahead to transform ourselves and our society in favor of racial justice and liberation, we need to recognize this dynamic, name it, and oppose it at every turn. Comforting as it may be to believe that the crime bill was not so bad, and all of its proponents well-meaning and incapable of anticipating its disparate racial impact, it is a delusion. The bill was as much a reflection of the racial, and racist, politics of its time as the Fugitive Slave Act, the Black Codes, and the whites-only GI Bill were of their respective times. We should know the historical context for all of these, but we should excuse and sanitize none. To do so only serves to perpetuate the very culture of anti-Blackness that birthed these policies in the first place. James Baldwin, one of history’s greatest truth-tellers about American white supremacy, famously wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” As we wrestle now with our present moment and work toward a different future, the question for each of us is whether to finally face the truth about policies that have produced the outcomes we see in cities and towns across America, including St. Louis, or to continue a long history of justification and rationalization. The cost of having done the latter for generations can be seen all around us. Blake Strode is the Executive Director of ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit civil rights law firm in St. Louis, Missouri providing holistic legal advocacy and combating the criminalization of poverty and state violence against poor people and people of color.

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FALSE W Will an old enemy save Felix Key from prison? BY RYAN KRULL

n the spring of 2011, Marian Jolliff, an arborist for the forestry division of St. Louis’ parks department, was at home after work when she got a call from the man who put her son in prison for 28 years. Shelton Buchanan was calling to say how sorry he was. Just a few years prior, when Jolliff’s son, Felix Key, was in high school, Buchanan had been his enemy, once going so far as to beat him unconscious. But that’s not what Buchanan was calling about. In April 2009, he had been shot in south St. Louis, and he told everyone who would listen that Key was the gunman. Key was arrested, tried and found guilty of armed criminal action for the shooting, thanks almost entirely to his rival’s testimony.

By the time of Buchanan’s phone call, Key was already a few months into a 28-year sentence. Now, Buchanan was telling Jolliff he’d lied on the stand. He felt bad about it. He hadn’t known her son would get locked up for so long. “Basically he was explaining it wasn’t supposed to go this far,” Jolliff says.

According to the mother, Buchanan told her, “I didn’t think they would give him so much time. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do. Your son and I always had our differences. We were, you know, at each other, but I don’t want to see him spend the rest of his life behind bars.” Continued on pg 18

Felix Key’s mother Marian Jolliff and wife Latasha Kates at the dead end of Oregon. | STEVEN DUONG

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FALSE WITNESS Continued from pg 16

Jolliff says that, “as a mother,” she really didn’t know what to think about the call. As far as she was concerned, Buchanan had tried to ill her son twice first out on the street with his fists then in the courtroom with his false testimony. “My son is doing twenty years, and you’ve called me talking about being sorry,” she says. “I just, I don’t know ….” I didn’t know what to think either when Key’s wife, Latasha ates first contacted me about this story. Would a person really send an innocent man to prison because they were “at each other,” even if doing so meant letting the person who had actually tried to kill him go free? I had my doubts. Then I saw the video. Taken by a private investigator and made public for the first time by the Riverfront Times, the video shows Shelton Buchanan seated calmly at a table in a private residence. The private investigator doesn’t waste any time. “On April 15, 2009: Do you know who shot you?” “No.” Later, the investigator asks, “Were you coerced or forced to come to the trial to testify against [Key]?” “Yes, I was trying to stop, I didn’t want to have nothing to do with it anymore, but they told me they were going to subpoena me and make me go.” About halfway through the fourminute-long deposition, the investigator gets to the heart of the matter. “Did Felix Key shoot you?” “No.”

THE DEAD END OF OREGON By the time Felix Key was seventeen, he’d already been shot multiple times, a fact that he says was partially his fault given that as a id he had a love for fighting. “I wanted to be a boxer,” he wrote to me in a letter. “But it got me in a lot of trouble.” He went to Roosevelt High School in Tower Grove East, though he says that it was less of a school than “a meeting place” where kids who hadn’t gone to class in years would sneak drugs and weapons in through side doors to evade the police officer patrolling the halls. He lived with his mom at his grandmother’s house in Gravois Park, near “the dead end of Ore-

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gon,” a block where Oregon Avenue abruptly stops at a chain link fence and graffitied wall. single set of stairs lets pedestrians through, but cars need to find a different route. The lac of traffic made it a good spot to hang out. Key was a big kid. His friends called him “fats.” But he was also quicker than most of them, and his combination of size and speed made him a formidable athlete. Throughout the early ’00s, the dead end of Oregon kids feuded with the “Cave” kids from Compton Avenue up the road. One of those Cave kids was Shelton Buchanan. In the deposition, the investigator asked Buchanan about his relationship with Key. “We knew each other through rival gangs.” Key wrote to me about Buchanan: “My friend probably had an incident with one of his friends and vice-versa. To prove to your friend that you’re a loyal person you’re going to be right in that situation with your friend. The word loyal can get to a point where you’re at fault trying to be so loyal.” On July 2, 2007, Key, who had turned seventeen that spring, was walking in his neighborhood when, he says, Buchanan and six other Cave kids rolled up on him, chased him up a flight of stairs and beat his head with a brick. Someone stabbed him with a bottle. He was found unconscious alongside Miami Street and taken to the hospital where he lay in a coma for four days. When Key got out of the hospital, his mother says she made him go down to the police station and file charges. The police picked up Buchanan, charging him with assault. The charges were dropped before trial, but he spent six months in jail because he couldn’t make bond. He blamed Key for the time spent locked up, claiming the teen had ratted him out to the cops. Key recovered from the attack, but he was leery of returning to school. The next time he went to Roosevelt, afraid of getting jumped again, he brought a gun with him. police officer at the high school caught him with the firearm. hile out on bond for that gun charge, he got in trouble again for shooting a gun wildly into the air. Key, who was still seventeen, was convicted of unlawful use of a weapon and served an eighteenmonth sentence the first portion at St. Louis’ Juvenile Detention Center before transferring to the city’s Justice Center. In all of Key’s letters to me he

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Shelton Buchanan after a trespassing arrest in September. | ST. LOUIS METROPOLITAN POLICE goes out of his way to say that he’s not perfect. ne of the first things he wrote to me was to not believe what his wife and mother say about him, because they see him through rose-colored glasses. His mother talks about her son’s humor, his unrelenting positive attitude, the years he spent as a kid accruing badge after badge in the Boy Scouts. All that is true, but Key also talks about the mistakes he made as a young person. “I’m not against me having to open my eyes while being locked up,” he says about the eighteenmonth sentence. “I really needed it.” After his release in 2009, at nineteen, he was determined to not go back. He moved in with his mom, who was now living near Dellwood, far away from Shelton Buchanan and the dead end of Oregon. His dad was “heavy into drugs.” Key never really got to know him, but in north St. Louis County, he had his mom as well as an uncle and five cousins to eep him out of trouble. On April 15 of that year, the day Shelton Buchanan was shot, Key had been a free man for less than a month. He says he stayed home that night, as he did most nights, with his family. In south city, Shelton Buchanan was also at home. His friend Dominique Darden came over to get some pills from him. But, according to testimony Buchanan would later give, he had already tried the pills by the time Darden arrived and realized they were fake. So Darden didn’t stay long. But 45 minutes later, he was back. Now there were two men in hoodies standing on the sidewalk outside Buchanan’s house. Their hoods were pulled tight over their faces. One of them asked Darden what time it was. Darden went up to Buchanan’s front door and knocked. Buchanan answered, and shots rang out from

the sidewalk. “Oh shit!” Darden yelled. He and Buchanan ran into the house for cover. Darden was unscathed. Buchanan was hit in the side. On the phone with the 911 operator, in the ambulance with EMTs, at the hospital with police — again and again Buchanan used what he believed to be his last breaths to tell whoever would listen that Felix Key tried to kill him. Not long after, Key went to the probation office in north t. ouis County to check in with his parole officer. e was placed under arrest and charged with three felonies first-degree assault armed criminal action and unlawful use of a weapon.

THE TRIAL Dramon Foster, now a lawyer in private practice, was the public defender who represented Key at his trial in January 2011. Foster was assigned the case at the last minute when Key’s original public defender realized he had a conflict because he was already defending Buchanan in a separate case. At the time, there was a public defender shortage, and Foster was already overloaded. He already had more than 200 clients in his caseload. But he still remembers Key. It was a tough case from the start. Dominique Darden had supposedly identified ey in a photo lineup and, most importantly, prosecutors had Buchanan’s socalled “dying declaration.” In the moments after he had been shot, he repeatedly claimed the gunman was his old enemy. Normally, witnesses’ accounts of statements like that would be considered hearsay and not admissible. But the legal theory regarding dying declarations is that someone who has been seriously wounded and believes they are going to die has no reason to lie. That’s why such declarations are not only admissible but often carry a special gravitas in courtrooms. Foster says the prosecutor, John Mantovani, was at an advantage because he had Buchanan’s “dying words” as well as the living Buchanan to testify. However, as a witness for the prosecution, the alive Shelton Buchanan was far less forthright than the Shelton Buchanan who thought he was about to die. One person who attended the trial said that Buchanan seemed high and kept nodding off while on the stand. According to the transcript, he frequently answered in one-word responses, occasionally replying “yes” or “no”

to questions that weren’t yes-or-no questions. Countless times attorneys for the prosecution and defense asked him to please speak up. “He didn’t seem all that believable,” Foster says. “He was evasive. He wasn’t being as straightforward as you’d expect a true victim to be. He was withholding information. If he just wanted the whole truth to get out, it didn’t make any sense why he’d be so hard to work with.” At one point during cross-examination, Foster asked Buchanan, “You actually knew of more than one person who would retaliate against you that day?” Mantovani objected. The judge called both lawyers to the bench and, after a brief backand-forth, decided that Buchanan didn’t have to say whether anyone other than Felix Key might have wanted him dead. “Felix would have been more of an enemy than the guy who actually shot him,” Foster says. “As crazy as that sounds.” Foster says that he believes Buchanan feared for his family if he named the person who actually shot him. Instead, he used the opportunity to get back at Key. Darden, the other man present when Buchanan was shot, testified as a witness for the prosecution but did little to support the prosecution’s theory of the case. After the shooting, he was taken to the police station where he gave an officer a deposition in which he stated that he couldn’t identify the shooter beyond the fact he was wearing jeans and a blue hoodie. Then, a little before midnight the day of the shooting, a detective showed Darden a photo lineup of possible suspects, including Key. Darden circled Key’s photo, initialing and dating the sheet. However, when Darden was questioned during the trial about the photo lineup, things took a left turn. “Is that the person who you believed you saw shooting the weapon?” Mantovani asked, referring to the photo lineup in which Key’s picture was circled next to the initials DD. “I mean, just off basically a guess,” Darden replied. “You just made a random guess?” “That’s who I thought I seen.” Later, Mantovani tried to get Darden to clarify. “So, Mr. Darden, you are saying this was a complete guess. Is that your trial testimony today?” “Yes.” Under cross-examination by Foster, Darden’s story only became more convoluted. Foster told me that in a pre-trial depo-

Felix Key, shown with his mother Marian Jolliff and wife Latasha Kates, is serving a 28-year prison sentence. | COURTESY OF THE FAMILY sition Darden stated under oath that a detective had tried to steer him toward Key’s mug shot in a photo lineup, suggesting that the man who shot Buchanan was somewhere near the top corner of the six-photo array. After the prompt, Darden circled and initialed Key’s photo. However, when Foster asked Darden to recount at trial what he’d said in the deposition about the detective’s heavy-handed tactics, Darden wavered. He wouldn’t confirm that the detective had influenced his selection of ey in

the photo lineup. But he wouldn’t say that hadn’t happened either. “Is it your testimony that the detective said, ‘He’s up here somewhere?’ Is that what the detective said while he was pointing at the picture?” Foster asked. “It’s been so long. I don’t remember,” Darden replied. ou specifically recall the detective referring to the top row as opposed to the bottom row?” “I’m not sure, man.” The transcript continues on like this, with Foster trying to get arden to affirm what he already

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said in the deposition and Darden stating that he doesn’t remember the deposition, despite a copy of it being in the courtroom. The judge eventually told Foster he needed to move things along. “Are we going to sit here until five o’cloc with this, or what are we doing?” the judge asked. After that, Foster took a different tack, asking Darden if he would have circled Key’s photo if the officer had not been in the room. “I forgot,” Darden said. “If I circled the photo. I don’t know.”

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“You thought you had to circle [Key’s] photo because of the detectives in the room?” “I don’t know. I go through stuff like this there’s not a lot I can do.” “That means you felt you had to because of who was in the room with you?” “Yes.” In an interview, Foster says it’s strange that Darden would not repeat at trial what he had already said under oath in the deposition. “There’s no reason for Darden to get tripped up over that,” Foster says. or an officer to implicate Felix, and for Darden to not come out and say that’s what happened, that shouldn’t happen.” Mantovani declined to comment for this story. He is now an assistant United States attorney for the Department of Justice. Later in the trial, Buchanan was back on the stand, and Foster again asked him if he knew anyone who may have wanted to “retaliate” against him on the day he was shot. This time, the prosecution didn’t object. Buchanan responded that “yeah,” he did. There were other problems with the trial. At one point, a juror approached the judge and said that during arguments he realized he knew both Shelton Buchanan and Dominique Darden. Not by name, but he recognized them when they took the stand. The two, the juror said, “were run out of my neighborhood for pushing drugs. And I have people I know who know him, too. They’re after him.” Despite Buchanan’s shakiness on the details, his testimony had ultimately been consistent on the main point: From the ambulance to the hospital to the courtroom, Buchanan said that Felix Key was the man who shot him. The jury bought it, returning a guilty verdict after the second day of arguments. In March of that year, Key was sentenced to 28 years in prison. A few months later, Buchanan started calling Key’s mom to tell her how sorry he was.

SHELTON BUCHANAN For six weeks, I made every effort to talk to Shelton Buchanan, knocking on doors of addresses associated with him, leaving notes on stoops when no one answered. We’ve had two very brief phone calls. Both times he hung up on me. I tried to contact people I thought might be related to him. After a few days of doing this, he texted, “don’t come to my house anymore.

Latasha Kates and Marian Jolliff have been working to overturn Felix Key’s conviction, but their hopes hang on Key’s old rival. | STEVEN DUONG that’s my only time saying it.” The private detective who took the videotaped statement said he had no trouble getting ahold of Buchanan. Buchanan actually called him. He was homeless at the time, staying at a temporary shelter the city had set up on North Tucker Boulevard. The investigator, who as ed not to be identified in this story, says he picked Buchanan up, and they drove back to the investigator’s home, where Buchanan gave his statement. The initial frames of the video show Buchanan setting up the camera and turning it to face himself. “The screen’s gone blank,” says the investigator at one point. Buchanan waves away the concern. “It’s still recording,” he says and keeps talking. The investigator is asking the questions, but if the video could be said to have a director, it’s clearly Buchanan. The investigator asks Buchanan why back in the ambulance in 2009 he brought up Key’s name as the shooter. “He had just got released from jail,” Buchanan replies. “I wanted to get back at Felix for something he did with me, pointing me out in a case. So I just brought his name up.” Buchanan is referring to the six months he spent in jail, unable to make bond, after Key had told police that Buchanan had been one of the people who beat him unconscious. In the video, taken in April 2019, Buchanan looks much younger, more put together and lucid, than in a booking photo taken two years prior. Jolliff, along wth Key’s wife, Lata-

sha Kates, says that over the years Buchanan has vacillated from offering help to at other times being fla y and uncommunicative. t one point, Jolliff says Buchanan asked her for a few thousand dollars to recant his testimony. “To be honest, if I had $2,500 to get my baby out of jail, yeah, I’d probably have done it. Sure. But at the time, it wasn’t doable,” she says. “You realize that would have been bribery and have changed the whole case?” says Michael Abernathy, an investigator the Key family has recently hired. “Yeah, I thought about that. But also thought about my flesh and blood and him doing 28 years.” Earlier this year, Buchanan again texted Kates asking her for money for his cooperation. He sent her his CashApp account and then, a few hours later, a different account to send money to. “If I ain’t got dat by Sat I’m done with it,” Buchanan wrote. “Real talk.” Kates and Jolliff say neither of them paid Buchanan anything and he slipped out of contact again. The investigator who filmed Buchanan’s statement says Buchanan was in no way compensated for speaking with him. The only money that has ever changed hands has been from Buchanan to Key. In 2014, out of the blue, Buchanan put $40 on Key’s commissary, according to inmate records. To this day, Key’s old rival remains a maddeningly elusive figure. Private investigators and Key’s family members who have spoken to Buchanan describe a man

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torn between a guilty conscience and a fear of going to jail for perjury. All of this is complicated by addiction issues. A source in the St. Louis Division of Corrections tells me that Buchanan has come into city facilities multiple times for detox treatment. In July 2017, he was arrested for shoplifting liquor from the Schnucks downtown and for unlawful use of drug paraphernalia. Ten days later, he was arrested again at the same store for again attempting to steal alcohol. Buchanan is not the sort of man in whose hands anyone would choose to trust their freedom. But the reality for Felix Key is that this erratic ex-rival from his teenage years is his best hope of being released before the end of his sentence, which, as of right now, is not set to expire until 2039. “I’m going on twelve years of being incarcerated for this,” Key told me. “I haven’t got a chance to do anything with my life.” The second time Buchanan and I talked, the conversation lasted about 30 seconds over a scratchy connection. I reiterated that I was writing a story about him and Felix Key and had been talking to Key’s family. “I don’t want nothing to do with that,” he said. “They know what’s up.” “What do they know?” I asked. He’d already hung up. n Ryan Krull is a freelance journalist and assistant teaching professor in the department of communication and media at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

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SHORT ORDERS

Joe McMahon started out as a Mission Taco Joint fan and is now managing the kitchen at its Kirkwood location. | ANDY PAULISSEN

[SIDE DISH]

Living the Dream Joe McMahon of Mission Taco Joint always knew he wanted to be a chef Written by

CHERYL BAEHR

oe McMahon can’t remember a time when he wasn’t planning on becoming a chef. Even as a little kid, poking around in his grandmother’s kitchen, he wanted to be part of the action. “My mom’s side is Italian, so cooking has always been a part

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of our daily routine,” McMahon says. “Since I was old enough to see over the countertop, I’ve been in the kitchen cooking with my grandma. That’s where I got interested, then all through grade school and high school, I knew I wanted to be a cook.” McMahon’s line from cooking at his grandma’s house to managing the kitchen at Mission Taco Joint’s (105 East Jefferson Avenue, Kirkwood; 314-666-5757) Kirkwood flagship is fairly straight thanks to his unwavering desire to become a professional cook. As soon as he was old enough to work, he got a job washing dishes, then worked his way up in the kitchen until he graduated and was able to enroll in culinary school. McMahon’s culinary school experience confirmed that he was on the right path, as did working at the Great Lakes Naval Station. He worked at the massive operation throughout school and for a few

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years after, eventually leaving to work for P.F. Chang’s. Attracted to the sian-inflected chain because of its growth opportunities, McMahon soaked up all that he could about the business and operations side of the kitchen. He was so successful in his role that he was promoted and moved from his native northern Illinois to the St. Charles location of P.F. Chang’s. It was a demanding gig, so when he wanted to decompress after work, McMahon headed across the street to Mission Taco Joint. He quickly became a regular and was struck by how happy everyone seemed to be working there. It inspired him to make a change in his own professional life. “I loved the food, drinks and atmosphere, and became friends with the staff,” McMahon recalls. “Everyone seemed happy to be there, and no one had anything negative to say. When I got the opportunity to interview with [chef

and co-owner] Jason Tilford, he walked me through how they do things and what they do for their employees. I was wowed, because you don’t really see that in the restaurant business anymore. They are very passionate about making sure that their employees are well treated.” McMahon was hired on as the kitchen manager for the restaurant group’s Kirkwood location. Because the restaurant had not yet opened, he was able to train in all of the Mission Taco Joint kitchens, an experience he credits with giving him a rounded-out view of the restaurant’s vision. It also placed him in the challenging position of being tasked with opening a restaurant in the midst of a pandemic, which, though it’s had its share of challenges, has been overall rewarding thanks to the support of his employers, coworkers and guests. “Opening the store helped us get a sense of normalcy — there’s

still a crisis going on, but we are going to get this team together, open and do a great job,” McMahon says. “We’ve had to react and learn quickly; some things have worked and some haven’t. But we’re always going to be prepared and do the right thing for our employees and guests.” McMahon took a break from the kitchen to share his thoughts on the St. Louis restaurant community, the changes he thinks will be in store for the hospitality industry going forward and what gives him hope during this challenging time. What is one thing people don’t know about you that you wish they did? I like hugs, but I’m too shy to initiate them. If you could have any superpower, what would it be? The ability to teleport long distances. That way I could visit people and places whenever I want. Which ingredient is most representative of your personality? Tomatoes. They get along with everything, and they can be on the sweet side or sour side. What is one thing you make sure you do every day to maintain a sense of normalcy? Cook dinner. Even after working at the restaurant, I’ll still cook dinner when I get home most days. What have you been stress-eating/drinking lately? Soda. Particularly Mountain Dew. The more caffeine and sugar the better. I’m not big on coffee, so soda’s my vice. You have to be quarantined with three people. Who would you pick? My partner Dony, and my coworkers Amber and Erin. I’m pretty much already quarantined with them! We see each other every day and have a lot of fun, so I know we’d get along together in quarantine. What would be your last meal on earth? Probably my grandmother’s family recipe soup. It’s a cross between chicken noodle and Italian Wedding soup. It’s a chicken-stockbased soup, but the noodles are acini di pepe noodle, which is a small, almost seed-sized pasta. It’s finished with tomato sauce. hen she makes it, I’ll eat it for every meal until it’s gone. What do you think the biggest change to the hospitality industry

will be once people are allowed to return to normal activity levels? I think the biggest difference will be the level of appreciation the public has for those who work in hospitality. After being limited or restricted by what they can do, where, and for how long, I think that many people will come out of this with a greater appreciation for the services that are some-

times taken for granted. What is one thing that gives you hope during this crisis? The support of my family, friends and cowor ers first and foremost but for the industry as a whole, it’s been amazing to see the camaraderie of our community, both inside and outside of the restaurant. For our Mission Taco Joint team, everyone is willing to jump in and

support one another. I’ve seen people step outside their comfortability to be there for a coworker in need. There has also been an overwhelming response of customers. People go to restaurants to be served, and even when that is taken away, people still come out to support us. It shows me that people want us here, and that’s a great feeling. n

[SHORT ORDERS]

Meat Me in St. Louis BEAST, Bolyard’s, Kenrick’s named three of the best butcher shops in the country by Food & Wine Written by

CHERYL BAEHR

BEAST has supplied home cooks through the pandemic with top-quality meats. | MABEL SUEN

he St. Louis food scene got another ego boost from the national food press, this time for three of its retail shops: BEAST Butcher & Block (4156 Manchester Avenue, 314-94-6003), Bolyard’s Meat & Provisions (2810 Sutton Avenue, Maplewood; 314-647-2567) and Kenrick’s Meats & Catering (4324 Weber Road, 314-631-2440) were named three of the best butcher shops in America by Food & Wine. The magazine announced the honorees on November 20, placing the three St. Louis-area shops on its list of nearly 100 establishments from around the country. In putting together its selections, the magazine noted the popularity of such establishments during the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to a rise in home cooking. Both BEAST and Bolyard’s were praised for the high-quality products they’ve helped St. Louis diners bring to their home tables. BEAST, in particular, was recognized for its Wagyu brisket, Duroc pork and Salami Cotto, as well as its insistence on empowering home cooks even though the butchery is affiliated with an acclaimed smokehouse. Bolyard’s earned its high marks for owner Chris Boylard’s unwavering commitment to sustainability and local sourcing. Kenrick’s nod centered around its

Chris Bolyard is expanding his already amazing operation in Maplewood. | MABEL SUEN legacy in the city’s meat market scene, with the article noting that it has been doing things the same way since its founding in 1940. The magazine also notes the impressive size of the shop, as well as its barbecue packs, which are a staple of St. Louis summer cookouts. Though BEAST and Bolyard’s could bask in the glow of their accolades, neither are taking time to rest. David and Meggan Sandusky, BEAST’s owners, are getting ready to open their third location, BEAST Southern Kitchen & BBQ, in Columbia, Illinois. Billed as a new concept, focused on Southern-inspired

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dishes with a focus on local farms and heritage breeds, the restaurant is slated to open in the coming months. Meanwhile, Bolyard’s recently announced that it is relocating from its Maplewood storefront to a larger space down the road, complete with a full kitchen. The new spot will expand upon the current location’s sandwich menu to include a full-service dining experience, even as it remains committed to its butchery roots. You can read the full list of winners at foodandwine.com/meat-poultry/bestbutcher-shops-in-america. n

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Off the Wall, from the Mission Taco Joint team, features “boardwalk eats.” | CAITI CARROW CHANEY

[SHORT ORDERS]

Switch Stance Off the Wall, a burger pop-up, is now open at Mission Taco Joint in Kirkwood Written by

CHERYL BAEHR

or seven years, Adam and Jason Tilford have been blessing the St. Louis community with their excellent take on West Coast-style Mexican food. Now, they’re giving the same Mission Taco Joint (multiple locations including 105 East Jefferson Avenue, Kirkwood; 314-666-5757) treatment to burgers, corn dogs and more with their new burger pop-up, Off the Wall Burgers, which launched at their Kirkwood location this week. Described as “classic boardwalk eats,” the menu at Off the Wall consists of smash burgers, Philly cheesesteaks, corn dogs, Coney Island dogs and other eats to evoke the sort of whimsical, carnival fare that reminds the Tilfords of growing up on the West Coast. The Off the Wall offerings are available for takeout only, and will be available at the Kirkwood location only until current dining restrictions, prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, are lifted. “We have to think of creative ways to support our staff at this time,” says coowner Adam Tilford. “We will continue to hustle, and Off the Wall Burgers builds some excitement around the Kirkwood location, which needs some love while closed for indoor dining. Plus the menu is killer, and something that Jason has been working on for a long time.” The Kirkwood location of Mission Taco Joint opened in June of this year and is the restaurant group’s flagship and

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Jason Tilford. | CAITI CARROW CHANEY

home to its tortilla-making operation. Though takeout, outdoor and limited indoor dining have been able to sustain operations thus far, Off the Wall will give the group an additional lifeline to get it through the upcoming winter months — a struggle in the midst of already crippling struggles that is weighing heavily on the minds of hospitality industry professionals throughout the area. With its whimsical, nostalgic offerings, Off the Wall hopes to be more than an additional revenue stream, though; the idea is to bring some levity to such fraught times. For co-owner Jason Tilford, the menu represents a longtime dream of a burger concept that allows him to be creative as he thinks back on fond memories from his youth. “We have a test kitchen inside of our Kirkwood location for fun pop-up menus like this, but we haven’t had the chance to utilize the space yet due to the pandemic,” Jason explains. “I was a skater kid growing up, so the name is a reference to Vans shoes’ slogan back in the day.” Off the Wall Burgers will be offered alongside the regular Mission Taco Joint menu and can be ordered through the restaurant’s website or by calling the Kirkwood restaurant. n

CULTURE

[VENUES]

Cooler Heads Prevail St. Louis’ DIY punk, metal and hardcore scenes rally behind the Sinkhole in its hour of need Written by

DANIEL HILL

t was around the midway point of 2020’s ninth iteration of March, known to some as “November,” when Matt Stuttler decided to really take stock. His Carondelet venue the Sinkhole (7423 South Broadway) had been closed since the first March of the year, when the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States and lockdown orders shuttered businesses across the nation. He’d kept it closed even as those restrictions were lifted — the Sinkhole’s small, shotgun setup certainly wouldn’t be able to safely accommodate much in the way of social distancing, making it unlikely he’d be able to come up with a plan to host shows again that the city would approve, even if he wanted to go that route. The one event he had on the books — a flea-mar et fundraiser for the venue for which several bands in the local punk, hardcore and metal communities had agreed to participate and peddle their wares — was looking like it would need to be canceled, too, as infection and hospitalization numbers hit record highs and triggered a new batch of restrictions meant to slow the spread of COVID-19. So, looking around the South Broadway space, Stuttler set his sights on the beer coolers behind the bar. Those weren’t getting any use anyway at the moment, he figured so maybe he could just sell them so that he could make rent. He could always buy new ones when the pandemic was over. He soon posted a photo of the coolers to social media, looking for buyers. That same week, James Carroll, guitarist of St. Louis’ Time

Matt Stuttler, owner of the Sinkhole, says his venue won’t host shows again until it is safe to do so. | STEPHEN INMAN and Pressure and promoter with Gateway City Hardcore, who had organi ed the flea-mar et event reached out to Stuttler. He agreed that the fundraiser would need to be canceled, but he also wondered if Stuttler would be willing to let him set up a GoFundMe for the space. In the interest of keeping his rent paid, Stuttler said “sure.” In just four days, that GoFundMe had already raised more than $6,000 — well over the amount any flea mar et could have brought in. “I went from thinking about how to make it through the next few months — I was like, ‘Eh, we’ll sell the coolers, we’ll sell the PA next,’ you know, stuff we can figure out on the other side of the pandemic,” Stuttler says. “And then now it turns out I don’t have to do any of that, which is pretty cool.” Credit the success of the crowdfunding effort to the Sinkhole’s sterling reputation as an artist-

friendly, exceptionally accommodating venue, one that has, in particular, become something of a headquarters for St. Louis’ punk, hardcore and metal scenes, and any other musicians and promoters who operate under a DIY ethic. Carroll has been booking shows at the Sinkhole for years, he says, and has even worked a few shifts behind the bar from time to time. For him, trying to raise some funds to keep it from going under was a no-brainer. “If that place closes down, we’re fucked,” he says. “It’s a good spot. I’ve never met anybody who has a bad thing to say about fucking Matt Stuttler,” Carroll continues. “And it’s a really welcoming place. Anybody can book shows there, anybody can play there. I’ve seen a bunch of different kinds of music there, booked a bunch of different bands there. He’s just really an accommodating dude, and I think a bunch of people just like that spot and don’t like the idea of having

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another venue close here. Especially one that is as accessible for small promoters like me, or just anybody who wants to put on a show without having to deal with the worry of paying a bunch of money to book that show and end up losing it.” That accessibility comes from the DIY ethos of the space and its owner, who does not charge promoters to rent the room like many venues would, thereby allowing all of the money to go to the bands — a great incentivizer for those booking events in niche genres that won’t necessarily draw huge crowds. “All ages, all the money to the bands, no room rental fees. Those are tenets of the hardcore community,” Stuttler says. “It’s all about scene-building, where it’s like, some shows don’t do as well, and then some shows are huge turnouts. So if you treat everybody the same way whether there’s five

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SINKHOLE

Continued from pg 25

people at the show or 50 people at the show, then that’s how you get around to building a community.” f the outpouring of financial support in the Sinkhole’s hour of need is any indication, that approach toward scene-building is working. So too are its efforts to document some of the city’s finer bands — the Sinkhole’s main source of income since the pandemic started has been through its in-house recording studio, which has played host to a few live-streamed shows from acts including Bastard Squad, Boreal Hills, Fight Back Mountain and the Maness Brothers, and even proper recording sessions with acts including Sunwyrm, NoPoint

and Hurt Feelings. Asked if COVID-19 brings any additional hurdles to those sessions, Stuttler says he hasn’t been terribly concerned. “It’s not too bad, because most recording sessions, it’s usually just myself and the band,” he says. “So you’re talking maybe four people, five at most. nd a lot of times the people that are coming in to record, they’ve been kinda quarantined together throughout the entire pandemic. But there’s also a level of separation — they’re in the live room, I’m in the control room. I have people bring their own vocal mics in. “It’s pretty chill. It’s a lot more chill than going to, like, Schnucks,” he adds with a laugh. “I feel a lot less worried about a recording session where I can be sure that we’re all on the same page about

being safe than I do being out in public, I guess.” For now, Stuttler plans to press on with those recording sessions, while the venue itself will stay closed. And thanks to the community that has built up around his venue he won’t have to fire-sale any of his equipment as he waits patiently for that unknown date in the future when he can reopen for events again. “I’m a lot more optimistic now than I was last week,” Stuttler says. “I don’t know. I mean, who the fuck knows what’s gonna happen, but I’m setting my sights toward spring, March or April, as the hopefully targeted period of time that we’ll be able to reopen, hopefully, whether that means that a vaccine has come through or we figured out how to uarantine safely. But I don’t know. The

fundraiser’s definitely gonna get us through the winter, which, I mean historically at a venue that’s the hardest time to get through. So having the backing of the fundraiser is like — I don’t know. It blows my mind that we’re gonna be OK going forward for a minute. But yeah, hopefully whenever it’s safe to do so we’ll do shows again. And we won’t do that until it’s safe. I’d rather close than endanger people’s lives, you know?” Even with the uncertainty, Stuttler is mostly feeling grateful. “It’s truly mind-blowing,” he says. “I went from being like, ‘Oh shit, gotta sell the coolers,’ to being like, ‘Oh shit, it’s all gonna be OK.’” To donate to the Sinkhole’s GoFundMe, visit gofundme.com/ f/270pupxsqo. n

[VENUES]

Listening to Reason Old Rock House postpones remaining ‘Listening Room’ shows due to COVID-19 Written by

DANIEL HILL

ince September, Old Rock House (1200 South Seventh Street, 314-588-0505) has been hosting reduced-capacity, socially distanced shows, designed to be safe in an era of COVID-19. The Listening Room series was the venue’s first slate of shows since its stage went dark for six months when the coronavirus first came to the area. Now, as cases and hospitalizations due to the virus rise to the highest point yet seen in the St. Louis region, that stage will go dark again. e have made the difficult decision to postpone the remainder of our 2020 concert schedule. Considering the dramatic rise in the number of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths, this might not seem li e a difficult decision but it is,” Old Rock House co-owner Tim Weber writes in a statement posted to social media. t’s difficult because we believe that music is life. t’s difficult be-

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Old Rock House will close up shop through the end of the year. | PAUL SABLEMAN/FLICKR cause we believe that people are meant to gather together. It’s difficult because we have so much love for the fans, the bands and the staff that make this place go. t’s difficult because it’s and everything is difficult. “That said, it’s also the right decision,” he adds. “We will see you in 2021.” The postponement means that scheduled performances by Alligator Wine (December 4) and Rhoda G. (December 18) will not go on as planned. Though the venue says these shows are postponed

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rather than canceled outright, no new dates have been announced. Old Rock House was one of the first full-time venues in t. ouis to resume shows since the pandemic forced them all to close back in March. The venue’s COVID-19 safety measures upon reopening were extensive, including mandatory masks, a limit of only 50 guests in the building (10 percent of Old Rock House’s capacity), tables spaced six feet apart, temperature checks at the doorway and increased sanitization efforts.

And though, according to Weber, those efforts were effective, the current rate of infection in the St. Louis area has given the venue owner pause. “The concerts we have hosted the last few months have been incredibly safe (zero incidents of anyone getting sick),” Weber writes. “The staff has been amazing, the bands and fans have been supportive and understanding — and that simply might not be enough anymore. Our promise to everyone who gathers here is that Continued on pg 27

Kelton Rucker (left) and Rasheme Bridges, better known as the Benji Brothers. | ST. LOUIS REGIONAL CRIMESTOPPERS

[REUNIONS]

Benji Kellz Released From Federal Custody Written by

DOYLE MURPHY

enji Kellz is back home. The twenty-year-old St. Louis Benji Brothers rapper, whose given name is Kelton Rucker, was sentenced last Tuesday in federal court to time served in a 2018 gun crime. Rucker was charged in October 2019 alongside the other half the Benji Brothers duo, Rasheme “Benji Bam” Bridges. The two were accused in a Caronde-

OLD ROCK HOUSE Continued from pg 26

we will keep you safe, and we are not certain we can keep that promise under the current conditions.” Hospitalization numbers in the state continue to break records day after day, in recent weeks. The startling and ongoing uptick in these numbers has led worried health-care professionals to beg the governor to enact a statewide mask mandate before the hospitals become overwhelmed, but Mike Parson has so far stubbornly refused to even consider such a measure. Preposterously, that puts the health and safety of Missouri residents in the hands of responsible

let stickup, allegedly stealing a pound of weed during the armed confrontation. Rucker agreed in July to plead guilty to a charge of firing a gun during a drug traffic ing crime and prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s ffice agreed to drop conspiracy to possess guns and marijuana charges. “I’m a changed person. I don’t want to be in the streets,” Rucker told U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry last week via video conference, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. Bridges, who also pleaded in the case, had already been sentenced to time served and released, according to the Post-Dispatch. Before their arrest last year, the Benji Brothers had signed to the Cinematic Music Group, a New York City-based label that’s home to Joey Bada$$ and other Pro Era rappers. Bridges has continued to release music while awaiting Rucker’s release, including a music video posted on Youtube this summer called “Time Served.” n local businesses, like the Old Rock House (and, last week, the Fox Theatre), to do what’s right and postpone their entire calendars in an attempt to slow the virus — despite the fact our gridlocked federal government’s inability to pass a second stimulus package means such responsibility could put those venues’ ability to financially survive in jeopardy. “Our hope is that you will understand and respect this decision,” Weber writes. “Our hope is that you will take the money you were going to spend here and instead spend it at a local restaurant. Our hope is that you will take the time you were going to spend here and instead spend it supporting our healthcare workers who are sacrificing so much.” n

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DECEMBER 2-8, 2020

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SAVAGE LOVE LOSING OUT BY DAN SAVAGE Hey, Dan: I’m a lesbian and my girlfriend is bi. I’ve read your column and listened to your podcast for a long time, Dan, and I always thought I’d be fine with having a partner ask me about being monogamish. Then my girlfriend of about a year and a half told me she wants to see what other women are like. She says the thought of me sleeping with other people turns her on, but the prospect of her sleeping with other people only makes me nervous. She came out later and I’m the only woman she’s been with. I understand that, as a woman, I’ll never be able to give her what she might get from a man sexually and that sometimes she’ll want that, so there’s also that. We’ve talked about it, and it would have to be a Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell agreement, I would also get to step outside the relationship, the other people would have to know we’re in a relationship, and there couldn’t be any “dates.” On top of all that, we’re long distance for now. She says she loves me and I believe her, and she says she doesn’t want to lose me. But she also says she’s been dealing with these urges for a while and needs to address them. I don’t want to lose her. Do you have any advice? Fretting Endlessly About Relationship Situation I understand your fears. People in committed non-monogamous relationships have been known to catch feelings for their outside sexual partners. And while that doesn’t always doom the primary relationship, FEARS, catching feelings for someone else inevitably complicates things. And while a non-monogamous couple can make rules that forbid the catching of feelings, feelings aren’t easily ruled. But people in closed relationships have been known to catch feelings for people they aren’t sleeping with, i.e. coworkers, friends, friends-of-friends, partners of friends, siblings of partners, partners of siblings, etc. So the risk that a partner might

catch feelings for someone else isn’t eliminated when two people make a monogamous commitment — and yet sane, stable, functional people in monogamous relationships manage to get through the day without being nervous wrecks. Because they trust their partners are committed to them. And even if their partners should develop a crush on someone else … which they almost inevitably will … they trust that their partners aren’t going to leave them … which they still might. By which I mean to say, there’s risk in every relationship, and it’s trust that helps us manage our fears about those risks. So if you trust your girlfriend to honor the terms you’ve agreed to — DADT, fucks are okay, dates are not, the other women know she’s taken — and you trust she’s telling the truth when she says she loves you and doesn’t want to lose you, FEARS, then you should choose to believe her. Just like a person in a monogamous relationship chooses to believe their partner when they say they won’t fuck anyone else (even though they might) and won’t leave them for anyone else (even though they could), you can choose to believe your girlfriend will honor the rules you’ve laid out. Hey, Dan: I’m at a bit of a loss. I met a guy that I really like at a nudist resort of all places. I didn’t realize at the time just how much I was falling for him. He was trying to be more in the beginning but I missed some very obvious signs. Hindsight is 20/20. I’m incredibly guarded after growing up in an emotionally abusive household and am still dealing with some trauma after being raped a few years ago. By the time I realized how I felt about him, he surprised me by telling me he had a girlfriend. I was trying to arrange a time to see him after I disappeared for a bit to face some demons from the past. I wanted to tell him how I felt in person. Before I got that chance, he already had a girlfriend. He and I run in the same kinky circles and I ran into them at an event. I actually got a horrible sinking feeling in my stomach which I didn’t expect. I never told him how I felt about him. I’m happy that he is happy with her but it hurts, nonetheless. He matters enough to me that I would be content keeping him in my life even

“Should I tell him how I feel and risk losing him altogether, or do I let him be happy with his girlfriend and not tell him that I fell hard for him?” if it’s just as a friend. My question is: Should I tell him how I feel and risk losing him altogether, or do I let him be happy with his girlfriend and not tell him that I fell hard for him? I know he might not reciprocate my feelings. That’s OK if he doesn’t, but the not knowing I think hurts more than the truth would. Hopeless Romantic Nailing The Hopeless Part If the not knowing hurts more than losing his friendship would — the not knowing whether you had a shot with him and blew it — then you should tell him how you feel (or felt) and express regret for missing the obvious signs and disappearing on him. And as painful as it might be to hear that he wouldn’t want to be with you even if he were single — and that’s the worst-case scenario — you will get over it and get over him. Best-case scenario, HRNTHP, he had no idea you were into him, he’s not serious about the new girlfriend, and he’d rather date you. Less-than-bestcase scenario, he might be willing to date you if 1. things don’t work out with his new girlfriend and 2. you’re still single at that point. In the meantime, don’t pass on any other opportunities that come your way and be courteous, polite and non-toxic when you run into them together at kinky events. Hey, Dan: I’m writing to beg you — to implore you — to make some sort of desperate, last-ditch attempt to hold back the tide of linguistic confusion over the word

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“come.” Yes, that is the word, readers of Savage Love. It’s “come,” it’s not “cum.” The past tense is “came,” not “cummed.” (Yes, Dan, people are now saying and typing “cummed.”) In the past I’ve been content to merely grumble cantankerously. The final straw came over the last several months when, while watching a lot of international TV and movies, I noticed — to my horror — that the people responsible for the subtitles are using “cum.” Yes, the semi-literate usage of online free-porn-posters has now polluted the entire planet’s comprehension of this simple English word. I turn to you, DS, to do something about this. To come out loudly and proudly for coming, loudly and proudly. This isn’t just about spelling. It’s about losing the meaning of the word: It signifies an arrival. Canadian Opposes Mangled English P.S. You owe me one, Dan. I was raised in Winnipeg, whose inhabitants, Winnipeggers, refer to their home affectionately as “The Peg.” You’ve turned any reference to my hometown into a source for snickers amongst the same sort of childish people who use “cum.” The least you can do, in recompense, is to restore the simple dignity of “come.” I’m on your side, COME. I’ve been fighting a lonely battle against “cum,” “cumming” and (shudder) “cummed” for as long as I’ve been writing this column. I confess to having sinned a few weeks ago when I used the term “cumblebrag.” But in my defense, that was obviously a pun and — for the record — my one-time use of “cum” in the service of a joke should not be construed as an endorsement of “cum.” (The eye stumbles over “comeblebrag,” so it wouldn’t have worked to use “come.”) As I’ve written before, we don’t have alternate spellings for other words that have both sexual and non-sexual meanings. Seeing as we don’t “suk dik” or “eet pussee,” there’s no earthly reason why we should “cum” on someone else or be “cummed” upon ourselves. P.S. Sorry about that, Winnipeggers. mail@savagelove.net @FakeDanSavage on Twitter www.savagelovecast.com

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