by Earl Swift
He didn’t have time to redo it, anyway. When he pulled up the Chevy’s carpeting, he discovered that rust had obliterated large sections of the floor. It was so bad that if he drove through a puddle, water would splash into the cockpit, soaking the rear seat and doors. So bad that on the road, the wagon filled with the sound of whooshing air and the rumble of the tires. He and his friends sang the Flintstones theme when he drove the Chevy. That’s how bad it was.
Which is why he didn’t drive it much. He never took it to school, never drove it on the interstate. He braved a journey the six or seven miles across Norfolk only once. Most of his time in the ’57 was spent close to home, on brief weekend joy rides through the neighborhood.
Faced with an extra semester in high school, Chris Simon left without graduating and got a job in demolition. Like his dad, he grew his hair until it coursed past his shoulder blades. He moved out of the house and into a buddy’s condominium, taking the wagon with him. He longed to restore it, talked about how sweet it would be when he did. In those early days of his relationship with the Chevy, he talked about that a lot.
But demo work didn’t pay much. Money was too tight for the basic repairs necessary to make the car safe, let alone expensive chrome, paint, and upholstery. So months passed with the wagon parked at the curb a block from the Chesapeake Bay, salt air and weather countering whatever small progress he made on its salvation.
The months became years. He and a girlfriend got an apartment together in a complex just outside the gates of the naval base. It was a modest place with linoleum floors and hand-me-down furniture, decorated with model airplanes that Chris built and hung on thread from the ceiling, model battleships and cars on the bookcases, a rebel flag tacked to the living room wall. It little resembled the fantasy suburban home of the mid-fifties. The Chevy sat out on the street, along with a beat-to-hell Oldsmobile Cutlass that Simon used as his daily driver.
He was approaching his mid-twenties now, but in economic terms was not much better off than he’d been when he left home. The jobs he landed paid little. He didn’t have a telephone of his own: He used his girlfriend’s cell when she wasn’t at work. His budget was tested by maintenance on the Olds, which he had to keep healthy before he could consider any further investment in the wagon.
Simon did hunt down replacement floor pans—only to decide, once he had them in hand, that the installation was beyond his abilities. He couldn’t find anyone who would do the necessary welding at a decent price. So the car sat all but immobile through its forty-fourth year, its forty-fifth, and its forty-sixth.
His father got on him about it. That car’s sliding fast, he told Chris. Fix it or sell it. Put it in the hands of someone who’ll do right by it. Don’t let it fall to pieces. That, son, would be sacrilege.
A FEW MILES away, the new Tommy Arney was grappling with profound change. Three years had passed, give or take, since Krista ushered him out of the house. Now, at long last, he moved back in—believing, he says, “that if I didn’t go back home and focus, there would be no telling how my children would turn out.”
He was an attentive parent, involved in the kids’ schooling, insistent that they strive for good grades, eager to take an active hand in their projects. Still, it took him a while to find his rhythm, especially with Ryan. Arney was accustomed to getting his way, to snuffing resistance and neutralizing trouble with preemptive force. It was a leadership style uncalibrated to the quiet life, and especially the fragile sensibilities of a pubescent son. Arney offered Ryan advice. It came across as criticism: The boy’s clothes weren’t different from his own, they were wrong; the kid’s music wasn’t unfamiliar, it was crap. Arney strove to be engaged. It played as overbearing. For all his postcancer mellowing, he had strong opinions on just about everything—the right things to eat and drink, the right way to tighten a bolt, the right way to treat a car or a woman or a dog.
Ryan already had ample reason to resent him; now, as he entered his teens, he retreated into silence around the old man, escaping him further by drinking on the sly. Once, liquored up, he came close to sawing down the street sign where he’d spent so many hours waiting for Arney’s weekend visits, and where he’d been so often disappointed.
Arney’s public life was no less dramatic. Even with insurance, the expense of his cancer treatment required him to divest many of his holdings. Some of his car collection had to go, as did most of his go-go empire: By the time I met him, he owned just the original Body Shop.
As he rebuilt his financial affairs, he considered buying a vacant church near the bar and turning it into a soda-pop joint—a gentlemen’s club that served no alcohol and thus was beyond the reach of the ABC and its rules about what dancers could wear and do onstage. The Church of the Everlasting Body and Soul, he planned to call it. He’d invite his friends and the Body Shop’s best customers to “services” on Sunday afternoons, presided over by the Right Reverend Skinhead, who at Arney’s behest sent off for a mail-order ordination. The reverend, the product of a churchgoing youth, could cite Bible verses like a TV preacher; he would open the proceedings with a brief sermon, a female choir behind him on the altar—“and then the music would start,” Arney says, “and the girls would all rip off their robes and they’d be wearing pasties and [g-strings] underneath.
“We would have been protected by the federal government, because all they’d have to say is that Jesus told ’em to take their clothes off.”
Unfortunately, the church’s owner died with the sale in the works, and the deal fell apart. It wasn’t long after that, as Arney tells it, that his daughter, Ashlee, nine or ten years old, was talking with her classmates about what their parents did for work, and Ashlee announced that her dad ran the Body Shop. Ah, her teacher said, Ashlee’s father fixes cars. No, Ashlee said, my dad has girls dancing onstage. Krista Arney was not pleased when she heard this, Arney says. She told him that it was time to sell the bar. The demand had muscle: Krista still held the liquor license.
In 1995 Arney bought a restaurant in suburban Chesapeake, in a busy strip shopping center surrounded by an edge city of apartment complexes, office buildings, and a sprawling mall. Maxwell’s would become popular with lunching office workers and neighborhood regulars for the consistent quality of its short but wide-ranging menu. And the following year, in a move that broke his heart, Arney got out of the go-go business.
He tried to keep the Body Shop in the family by selling it to Slick, but the transfer was complicated by his iffy relationship with law enforcement. A former associate—a man who’d been a close friend to the old Tommy Arney, who’d worked with him for years, who’d joined him in numerous dustups, and who had amassed a lengthy criminal record before and during their friendship—found himself a defendant one time too many and facing serious prison time. In exchange for leniency he offered up his boss and compatriot: Arney, he said, was a major player in the Norfolk drug trade, and the Body Shop a marketplace for the trafficking of cocaine and a Laundromat for drug income. Bill Taliaferro says that this accusation dovetailed with a long-standing article of faith among local law enforcement officials that Arney was a drug kingpin, and that finding the evidence to prove it was only a matter of time. “They always thought Tommy was involved in drugs, and I can tell you that, to the best of my knowledge, never—never, ever, ever—was he involved,” the lawyer said. “Honest to God, I’m telling you, I don’t think there was any truth to it.”
Arney, for his part, denied the story and insists today that it was untrue; he never had his hand in the drug business, he says. Still, a subsequent investigation into the former associate’s report, along with an ABC probe into whether Arney retained a hidden interest in the Body Shop’s liquor license, hamstrung the club’s operation. “They were looking for any angle to get us,” Slick told me. When ABC agents popped her for what she described as a bookkeeping error (and which the ABC termed “filing a report . . . which was fraudulent or contained a false representation”), she locked the doors.
BEFORE WE BID a final farewell to the old Tommy Arney, let’s review the criminal record he amassed on the long journey to his new life—a record that, although it lists dozens of arrests, bears witness to only a fraction of the assaults, batteries, and malicious woundings he describes. Why is this? Well, for one thing, a slender few of his adversaries—or victims, if you prefer—brought charges against him. The fellow he hit with the soup can? Arney says he never had to answer for that. The melee with the marines, in which he brandished a firearm and swung a steel hook through a man’s cheek? No legal intervention there, either. Same goes for the fellow he kneecapped, the man he more or less neutered, the two he stabbed, the plank wielder, the man who didn’t pay his power bill, the scores of others he beat while performing his duties as a bouncer, and the scores more who were foolish enough to swing at him first.
The Norfolk of the seventies and eighties was inured to fistfights, Bill Taliaferro says, and its police were disinclined to bring charges themselves against someone answering a first punch, even if that answer was cataclysmic, and “especially if it happened in a bar.” That left it up to the participants to pursue charges—and Taliaferro found that many “so-called victims” could be talked out of it. “Many of them knew they were not entirely blameless, that they didn’t have entirely clean hands,” he told me.
By way of example, he cited the case of two brothers, co-owners of a used-car lot, who badmouthed Arney to a prospective customer. When she passed along their comments the following day, Arney decided he needed to set the men straight. In typical fashion, he announced his intentions on arriving, then followed through—beating both brothers so badly they were all but unrecognizable; both Arney and Taliaferro told me the men’s heads were swollen to the size of basketballs. “They showed pictures in court,” Taliaferro said. “I’d never seen anything like it.” Arney faced charges of malicious wounding, but once they were before the judge the brothers lost their will for retribution. They “just wanted to end this,” the lawyer said. “They’d been hit by a tornado, and they wanted to get away from it.”
Had he been arrested for every fight in which he’d hurt someone, Arney’s rap sheet would run into the hundreds of offenses. That’s his own assessment, and one that Taliaferro backs up: “I represented him on a lot of assaults,” the lawyer told me. “I don’t know how many times I represented him. I couldn’t count how many times.”
Arney’s actual numbers were almost modest. An official Norfolk Police Department printout of his record, prepared in May 2005, lists sixty-seven offenses for which he was arrested, and a 2012 federal accounting of his criminal past turned up another five, for a total of seventy-two.
Of these charges, thirty-five, or almost half, were dismissed by a judge or dropped by prosecutors—and of those, twenty-nine no longer appear in court files because in the summer of 2005, Taliaferro argued that their “continued existence and possible dissemination” could give people the wrong idea about his client, and he succeeded in getting them expunged from Arney’s record. Among the expunged charges were one misdemeanor assault, one felony assault, one assault on a police officer, one brandishing of a firearm, and fifteen assault-and-batteries.
Of the thirty-seven charges for which he was found guilty, many of those adjudicated in Norfolk’s General District Court—the equivalent to what some communities call the “police court”—have been purged from the files as part of the court clerk’s periodic disposal of old paperwork. The surviving documents attest that his convictions—all misdemeanors except the 1974 grocery store burglary and safe heist—included seven disorderly conducts, three assaults, nine assault-and-batteries, one charge of shooting into a vehicle, one of brandishing a firearm, and one of fornicating in public.*
And the record shows one charge of assault on a police officer—a case that spent some weeks wending its way through the court system before Arney was convicted on or about April 15, 1988, as best as I can tell, and which addressed his most storied and mythologized moment: his reputed confrontation with, and domination of, a Norfolk police dog and its handler.
This much can be said of the incident without fear of contradiction: that on the night in question, Arney was involved in an expansive fistfight outside Knickerbocker’s, a bar and restaurant catering to sailors and working-class townies; that the lawlessness was of sufficient scope and intensity that a seasoned Norfolk police veteran would recall it in a conversation with me more than a quarter century later; that among those arrested was Arney, who was subsequently charged with assault on a police officer, a misdemeanor.
That’s as far as consensus goes. Arney’s own account is that he went to Knickerbocker’s to discuss some business with a man running the place, and that at meeting’s end he emerged from a back room to find a fight erupting in the bar. Arney says he played the good citizen, stepping into the fray to break it up. He had one of the troublemakers in a full nelson and was advising the man to calm down when a squad of bouncers materialized, assumed he was the instigator, and rushed him. He defended himself.
Taliaferro verifies the story thus far. “That’s one time when he was an innocent party, I swear to God,” he told me. Arney again: The bar cleared and several dozen people spilled into the parking lot, he and the bouncers among them. He was holding his own—not winning the fight, but not losing it, either—when the police arrived in force. He heard someone yell his name, looked over his shoulder, and found a K-9 cop a few yards away, holding a German shepherd by a short lead. Stand down, the cop said, or I’ll put the dog on you.
Arney says he was busy at the time. Between swings he replied: Please don’t put that dog on me. Then don’t move, the cop said. Don’t move or I’ll put the dog on you. Look, you can arrest me, Arney says he told him. But don’t put that dog on me, or I’ll fuck up your dog. Taliaferro told me that later, in court, Arney was quoted saying “something like ‘I can tell you love that dog. But if you put that dog on me, I’ll hurt it.’ ” He added: “Those may not have been his exact words.”
The cop advanced to within a few feet of him, Arney says. The dog was going crazy, barking and growling, fur on end, spittle flying. Don’t move again, the cop said, or I’ll release the dog. And that, Arney says, was one warning too many. He was already annoyed that he was being treated as a lawbreaker, when he’d actually been attempting to do good. Fuck it, he thought, I’m going to jail anyway—and he reached over and thumped the cop on the chest. As he did, the cop let the shepherd go.
Arney whipped up his hands, caught the leaping dog by the throat, and held it off the ground as it kicked and snapped at him, squeezing the animal’s neck, biting deeply into its ear, bellowing, How do you like that, huh? The cop jacked him in the jaw, knocking his head back, so Arney swung the dog at him, landing a heavy blow that staggered the officer. The cop punched him again. Arney again swung the dog, out cold by now, harder this time, and knocked the cop off his feet. As he did, he lost his own footing on the parking lot’s loose gravel. Down he went, the dog’s inert weight on his chest. He was charged with assaulting the dog, rather than its handler; in court, Arney says, he told the judge that he didn’t realize the animal was a police officer because it wasn’t wearing a uniform or a badge.†
Taliaferro seconds many aspects of this account. “They put the dog on him, and damn if he didn’t grab it,” he said. “I asked him how he did it, and he says, ‘The secret is that you have to get their legs off the ground.’ ” Arney choked the animal until it “was about to check out,” Taliaferro said. “Finally, he dropped the dog and it ran off to [a police] va
n.”
He did “seem to remember,” he added, that the dog was so traumatized by its brief acquaintance with Arney that it had to be retired from service—it “had to go to a nice family.” Arney makes this claim himself, and he’s also corroborated by the late lawyer and substitute judge Peter G. Decker Jr., who became a close friend of Arney’s and whom I asked about the incident in November 2011, shortly before his death. “He was no longer a K-9 dog,” Decker said of the animal. “The police were a little upset with Tommy.”
The cops I spoke with differed with many of the story’s particulars. Betty Whittington, a secretary in the K-9 unit for decades, said through an intermediary that she recalled no such injury to a police dog. A seasoned police spokesman told me he remembered hearing the man-bites-dog tale as a young cop, but couldn’t say it wasn’t an example of the mythmaking that pervades any police department. Retired police captain Carmen Morganti, whom Arney remembers being present during his booking, and who recalls the Knickerbocker’s melee and Arney’s arrest himself, told me he believes the part about the dog was “probably bullshit.”
Arney says not only did it happen the way he describes, but for months afterward, Norfolk K-9 cops would demonstrate their lingering displeasure over the episode by parking outside the Body Shop on their breaks and staring down those who entered and left. When he confronted one of them as he sat in his SUV, his dog in the back, Arney says the cop growled: I’d like to see you try to choke this dog.
