Salvatore “Soccer Sam” Fantuzzo, Ashley Elizabeth Flamholz, Jim Gast, Alexandra Hale, Bonnie Fleck, Barry Hale, Buddy Harrison, Kevin Healey, Henry Hopkins, Jennifer Gilbert, Carol Hale, Phil Jackman, Ken Jones, Melvin and Ruth Kabik, James Kallstrom, Michele Kearns, Blast coach Danny Kelly, Dan Kelly, Jim Kraft, Harvey Kroll, A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, Drew Larkin, O. James Lighthizer, Harry Lipsitz, George Mantakos, Dickie McGee, Bob Meehan, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Judge Joe Murphy, Kevin O’Connor, Kevin O’Keefe, Dottie O’Neill, Gov. Martin O’Malley, Joe Poiter, Ty Pruit, Rep. C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger, the all-knowing Cindy Smith, Department of Transportation secretary James Smith, Shale Stiller, Douglas Schmidt, Tony Tranchitella, Sheila Thacker, Mark Wasserman, Mike Watson, Gregg Wilhelm and John Williams.
My thanks and eternal gratitude to all.
Kevin Cowherd
September 2014
Cockeysville, Md.
FOREWORD
BY MARYLAND GOVERNOR MARTIN O’MALLEY
Ed Hale’s amazing story is one I’ve followed since my earliest days on the Baltimore City Council, when he was already a force in the community, a leading entrepreneur and banker with a passion for helping his hometown.
And help it he did. The people who make this world a better place and the people who create wealth and create opportunities and reclaim abandoned areas, they’re the people who have the ability to see what it can actually be. And more than that, have the courage to risk action on the faith that they can make it so.
And that’s one of the things I’ve always loved about Ed Hale. Win or lose, he steps up to the plate. He swings at the pitches. And he hits a lot of them. And people can talk about the ones he didn’t hit, the ones he swung at and missed. But the fact of the matter is, the guy makes his own bat. He did not wait for anyone else to make it for him.
For a lot of people in Baltimore, Ed Hale represented a sort of Everyman. Folks saw that the guy could be their brother. They thought: he did build this bank for me—that was more than just another soul-less corporate slogan when Ed started and nurtured 1st Mariner.
But from the very beginning, Ed was always more than just another CEO. What people crave in these times of large failing institutions and large fumbling government is the authentic person. Somebody who actually lives the American Dream. It’s not something that we’ll take our children to see only in museums or talk about how, in another generation, people used to work hard, sweat, work three or four jobs, risk it all, fail, pick themselves up, try again, succeed, succeed more greatly, fail, succeed again.
That’s what America’s all about. I think there are a lot of people in Baltimore—and I’m certainly one of them—who admired the guts and courage and unrelenting optimism that Ed Hale threw at life every single day.
And now when I go down to Canton to see the places that Ed built, see the properties that he got rolling and onto the tax rolls, see the number of young people that think it’s hip and cool to live in the city again, it’s a pretty remarkable transformation in a short period of time. And Ed was a pioneer down there.
Now, in this engaging biography by author and former Baltimore Sun columnist Kevin Cowherd, Ed’s story comes to life. It’s all here, from his modest upbringing in Sparrow’s Point to his wildly-successful careers in trucking, shipping, banking and real estate to his ownership of the Baltimore Blast and championing of indoor soccer, his secret work for the CIA, his often-turbulent family life and the difficult business setbacks he weathered later in his life.
As you’ll see, it’s a story well worth telling.
INTRODUCTION
You wonder what Hollywood would do with a story like Ed Hale’s.
You wonder if they’d screw it up, focus only on the power and wealth, the women and the expensive toys, and miss the essence of the man: the chip on his shoulder the size of a sequoia that drives him, the business wizardry that seems hard-wired in his DNA, the lust for action and competition and the work ethic that made him a bootstrapping folk icon in his hometown of Baltimore.
Still, you figure a big-shot movie producer would happily set fire to his Maserati to get a script like this: scrappy kid from a working-class enclave who couldn’t hack community college goes on to hit it big in trucking, shipping, banking and real estate.
A millionaire before he’s 29, he pals around with members of Congress, governors and mayors, buys a pro soccer team, lives in an historic mansion that once housed the Duchess of Windsor and later in a 10,000-square-foot tower penthouse that looks like the Ritz Carlton, entertains Saudi princes on his luxury yacht and is the only man in history known to have turned down a dinner date with the achingly beautiful actress, Halle Berry.
A larger-than-life figure, he knows only one way to think, and that’s big.
A dozen years ago, he looks at 22 acres of forlorn brownfields and rotting wharves along the Baltimore waterfront and announces plans to build a $1 billion complex, including an office tower, condos, stores and restaurants.
The critics tell him he’s nuts, it’ll never work, you couldn’t get people to go down there if you held a gun to their heads. But today the area is thriving, a civic jewel overrun with hordes of yuppies and hipsters who drop $30 for crab cakes without blinking an eye and prattle on and on about their favorite craft beers and artisanal wines. And the Shops at Canton Crossing, the area’s new outdoor mall, is generating millions of dollars in revenue, forever preserving his legacy as a genuine hometown visionary.
Oh, and there’s also this: it turns out that at the very pinnacle of all this success, he’s secretly working for the Central Intelligence Agency, in on the ground floor of the early hunt for the arch-terrorist, Osama Bin Laden.
And that’s just the bare outline of the story of Edwin Frank Hale.
The American Dream? The man didn’t just chase it. He bear-hugged that sucker and dragged it to its knees, lived it better and more fully than most men ever will.
Of course, any story about Ed Hale worth its salt would have to chronicle the dark times, too. And there were plenty of those.
Even as his various business empires grew, his home life was often tense and chaotic, sad and dysfunctional.
“I was a terrible husband and a terrible father,” he says in a typically self-lacerating assessment of his failed attempts at domesticity.
Both his marriages broke up, at least in part, because of his infidelities and workaholic tendencies, and he fathered two children out of wedlock. With ex-wife no. 1, he was on the losing end of the biggest divorce settlement in Maryland history. And when it was clear he was going down in flames, he tried to stick it to her attorney by paying his court-mandated fee of $277,000 in small coins.
Determined to keep unions out of his trucking and barge businesses, he got so many death threats he started packing a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, hired a bodyguard and wore a flak jacket at public events. He even looked into buying a bullet-proof car built like a tank, but balked when told it got only six miles to a gallon of gas.
There were multiple business setbacks, too, misfortunes so profound his friends thought he belonged on suicide watch.
He lost millions when a truck dealership he owned went belly-up. Years later, he lost many millions more and was left empty and saddened when he stepped down as chairman and CEO of his beloved 1st Mariner Bank, the “neighborhood bank” that foundered during the housing crisis and had federal regulators circling like vultures.
And when he couldn’t obtain permanent financing and had to sell the iconic 17-story 1st Mariner Tower --- the one he built that helped transform the blighted Canton waterfront into East Baltimore’s “Gold Coast”—another little piece of Hale’s soul seemed to go with it. As did another huge chunk of his bank account.
In the midst of it all, he survived three plane crashes. After one, in which he splashed down in the Chesapeake Bay at the height of his squabbles with the Teamsters and International