Pubdate: Thu, 27 Jul 2006
Source: Wilmington Advocate (MA)
Copyright: 2006 Community Newspaper Company
Contact:  http://www2.townonline.com/wilmington
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3796
Author: Laurel J. Sweet, Boston Herald
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

WITNESS: SENIORS WERE DEALING

A Wilmington man, who saw a fortune built on making bagels lost to 
cocaine, told a jury in a Boston courtroom Monday that seemingly 
wholesome grandparents Andrew and Winifred Schlehuber were secretly 
kingpins of a Boston-based cocaine cottage industry. Mark Smith, 
founder of the Newton-based Finagle-a-Bagel chain, claimed that he 
was the Schlehuber's former top customer: a bagel tycoon who says 
they helped him blow his fortune up his nose. The Schlehubers, both 
69 and looking like a perfect Norman Rockwell pair, are on trial for 
allegedly running a high-volume mom and pop drug mart from their 
former home on LaGrange Street in West Roxbury.

The Schlehubers have denied the charges.

Smith testified yesterday he agreed to housesit for the vacationing 
Schlehubers for a week in March 2000, in exchange for a 50 percent 
discount off his $200-a-day coke habit. Smith's drug habit was 
already draining his wealth when, to make matters worse, the cops 
showed up while he was there. Smith said he tried to block the cops 
that night, but yesterday he willingly took jurors on a sordid verbal 
tour of the Schlehuber homestead. Smith described how they stashed 
rocks of coke in paper cups in their bedroom dresser drawer, while 
hiding still more drugs in a diaper bag in the woods, "for fear of 
the house being broken into." Andrew Schlehuber, a white-haired 
father of seven, "had problems in the past with other people watching 
his business while he was gone," Smith testified. That's why he 
volunteered to housesit. "I was more than happy to help," said Smith.

The obliging Smith said he was painting the Schlehubers' house in 
between scooping coke off a plate with a six of clubs for their 
regular customers, like a chimney sweep and a well-heeled Boston bar 
owner, when the cops came knocking on March 31, 2000. Smith told 
jurors he was welcomed into the Schlehubers' inner circle after 
selling Finagle-a-Bagel for more than a half-million dollars in 1998. 
In addition to paying off his debt to the couple, he said he treated 
them to a trip to St. Martin. Andrew Schlehuber "let me cuff (buy on 
credit) a lot of cocaine and I owed him $23,000," Smith said. "When I 
paid him off, I thought it was only fair to give him a bit more." In 
addition to a spiral notebook from CVS with specific instructions on 
what their drug clientele normally bought and how much they paid, 
Smith said the Schlehubers left a bucket of water in their upstairs 
bedroom in which he would toss the drugs in the event of a raid. But 
after the cops showed up that night in March 2000, Smith never made 
it upstairs. He told them he was unauthorized to let them in and 
tried to block the door with his body. They pushed him in, threw him 
up against a wall and arrested him, he said.

The Schlehubers had supporters in court yesterday, including several 
of their grown children. The Rev. Shaun Harrison of Boston's Youth in 
Crisis Ministries told the Herald he doesn't buy Smith's story. 
Andrew Schlehuber, Harrison said, "is a blessed man," who for the 
past five years has opened his heart and wallet to the city's troubled youth.

"I'm a good judge of character," Harrison said. "I don't believe 
what's going on here. I think he's being railroaded."
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman