Thread by @AoDespair

Thread: Grand and bittersweet that Baltimore now has the full answer to one of its most quaint and enduring crime mysteries. Christine Tkacik did the best thing a reporter can do. She went back to ask again, and finally, for the family, it was time.
news.yahoo.com/baltimore-bloc…

2) Salsbury's whereabouts were a source of fascination if you were a police reporter in Baltimore and in the 1980s and early 1990s, I bought drinks now and then and tried to stay friendly with Pam Gail, his former girlfriend and ex-burlesque queen. Salisbury left her...

3) ...the Oasis Club and Ms. Gail always claimed that she had no idea where Salsbury was, but I thought she gave away something when she went out of her way to tell me that Salsbury's ex-wife was a fine lady and that if I had any conscience, I would leave her and Salsbury's..

...three daughters alone. As it had been a couple decades since the disappearance, I realized at that moment that Ms. Gail must be maintaining contact with the family to have such continuing regard for them and I assumed then that Salsbury's means of getting money to his family..

...probably involved Ms. Gail and money from the club. Once, I said as much to her and Ms. Gail only smiled and said "I don't know where he is. So drink up." Sure enough, the FBI sent a man to her funeral, but Salisbury, of course, did not post...

As a small bit of trivia, fans of Barry Levinson's diner will remember the blonde stripper strutting the runway at the beginning of the scene involving Steve Gutenberg and Tim Daly hanging on The Block. That was Ms. Gail, at, I believe, age 50, giving it a last turn.

As to Salsbury's presence in Tel Aviv, that one was offered to me by a couple Block oldtimers and one law enforcement source. Israel was a smart money bet. Court documents showed that he bought a lot of Israeli bonds in the 1960s. But everything was rumor until today...

Lastly, delivering a 15-year federal sentence to someone on interstate gambling charges seems, in this day and age of greater sin, to be an especially brutal misuse of prosecutorial authority. I said as much to the lawyer who had been the lead AUSA in the case....

He acknowledged the extremity but revealed a subtext that wasn't known at the time of sentencing. According to him and confirmed by another courthouse source, Salsbury had managed to bribe two IRS-CID agents who were investigating him and his tax status. The corruption...

...of the two agents, when it came to light in federal wiretap transcripts, motivated the aggressive prosecution of Salsbury. But tellingly, the courthouse source portrayed the narrative differently. To me, he confided that Salsbury had not so much sought to bribe the agents...

...as he was a target for their shakedown. They came to him, hands out, saying that they could deep-dive into his taxes or he could pay them upfront to go away. So he paid, but he was hardly the corruptive element.

Last thing I might add is that the moniker of Julius "The Lord" Salsbury, or Lord Salsbury was not a title bestowed on some feared gangster who dared not be crossed. The man had no use for violence and once, when Mickey Ward, one of his lieutenants, went...

...so far as to rough up a customer with a gambling debt, Salsbury was caught on a wiretap berating Ward. We don't do that, he told his man. A guy doesn't pay, we cut him off from playing more until he does. No, the nickname was a joke on the lofty, Anglicized last name...

of Salsbury, adultered from a Jewish childhood and Salzburg, and, at most, an acknowledgment that he sat atop Baltimore's sports book and the East Coast numbers racket, with layoffs in NY and Boston. He was good at what he did. He was no gangster.

I'm proud of my alma mater for finally answering the big question, but also, I kind of wish we had been able to talk to Julius one last time before he departed this vale. He would have had some stories, to be sure.