Ernesto’s Bar and Package Store was the kind of dive where happy hours were downright scary. “You could hear guns hitting the floor,” a former Tampa police chief once recalled, characterizing the atmosphere of the Ybor City bar when his officers walked through it.
In 1985, Ernesto’s was the site of two homicides.
Police closed the place for good in 1987 as a public nuisance, and the city tried for years thereafter to get building owner Vincent S. LoScalzo to clean up or knock down the abandoned structure at 2608 N. 20th St.
LoScalzo, 64, reputed head of the Trafficante crime family, ignored city pleas as well as tens of thousands of dollars in code fines.
With $187,609 in code liens, a property owner isn’t supposed to be able to sell his real estate without paying the delinquent fines. But that’s what LoScalzo did last year.
In fact, LoScalzo — or a company to which he signed over his claim to the property — appears to have realized a modest $12,467 gain on the sale.
How does the owner of a former mob bar, which drained law enforcement budgets for years, walk away with money in his pocket from a city-supervised transaction?
How does a code-fine scofflaw go from $187,609 in the hole to $12,467 ahead?
Weary taxpayers growing accustomed to questionable city real estate deals might have guessed that Tampa-Hillsborough Action Plan Inc. was involved.
THAP paid a company called Columtom Inc. $40,000 for the old Ernesto’s site in February 2000. THAP is one of the nonprofits behind Mayor Dick Greco’s push to revitalize inner-city Tampa.
The organization also figures in a federal grand jury investigation of Greco development czar Steve LaBrake. The tax-supported nonprofit showered costly favors on LaBrake and his pregnant mistress, who doubled as one of his top aides. In turn, the couple funneled tens of thousands of dollars in grant money to THAP.
City policy allows code fines to be waived if a nonprofit is buying a distressed property, according to Assistant City Attorney Jorge Martin. Martin said that was what LaBrake aide Corine E. Linebrink requested on THAP’s behalf for the purchase of the former Ernesto’s property. City Attorney James D. Palermo approved the waiver last year, Martin said.
THAP Executive Director Chester M. Luney told the Weekly Planet earlier this year that his group had big plans for the property.
Luney spoke vaguely of putting a training center for underprivileged youth on the land. However, Linebrink told Martin in a January 2000 memorandum that the property would be used “to provide housing, green space and the general improvement of the East Tampa area.”
In any case, nothing has risen from the now-vacant lot in almost two years of THAP ownership. As of Nov. 9, city records showed no permits had been pulled or development plans filed for the site.
Florida Department of Transportation officials have their eyes on at least part of the lot as they widen nearby Interstate 4.
It doesn’t look as if THAP can embark on new real estate ventures while federal agents circle and auditors constrict the nonprofit’s lifeblood, public money.
The story of the Ernesto’s land deal starts, not with Vince LoScalzo, but with segregated early 20th century Tampa.
The building that came to house Ernesto’s originally opened in 1903 as a Catholic school for black children. The Sisters of St. Joseph named the school for St. Benedict, patron saint of African-Americans.
The Sisters of St. Joseph taught there for almost 40 years, with a brief interruption around 1916. The nuns had to suspend classes. They were threatened with arrest after Florida legislators outlawed the instruction of black children by whites in a black school. The law was later overturned.
Raymond J. Schneider, a retired University of South Florida professor, unearthed much of this history while trying to save the building seven years ago.
In 1951, the building was sold to a Spanish lodge, which held social functions on the premises until the 1960s. After that, Tampa’s ill-conceived, so-called urban renewal of Ybor City plunged the area into poverty.
The doors of Ernesto’s swung open under LoScalzo’s management in 1975. The bar was part of a network of mob-owned liquor establishments catering to blacks in Tampa’s minority neighborhoods.
In the case of Ernesto’s, owners included mob associate Luis Charbonier, who sold the property to LoScalzo in 1980.
Charbonier, who died in May at the age of 74, was best known for helping inspire a scene in the Martin Scorsese-directed motion picture GoodFellas, during which a loan shark debtor is tossed in a zoo cage with lions.
In 1970, Charbonier and his late brother Raul employed New York gangsters to collect a gambling debt from a Temple Terrace tavern owner. The New York enforcers pistol-whipped the man and threatened to drown him in a pond at Busch Gardens, seal his kids in a refrigerator, and force his wife into prostitution.
In 1972, Charbonier and his brother began a three-year stretch in federal prison on gambling and extortion charges.
LoScalzo was a rising Tampa mobster, according to police, when he took over Ernesto’s in 1975. The bar turned into a hangout for drug dealers and killers. The Tampa police blotter was filled with Ernesto’s incidents.
In 1979, a patron was beaten about the head with a brick in May and another stabbed in September. In 1980, a patron’s face was slashed with a knife in July and two shots were fired from Ernesto’s courtyard at a passing motorist on Columbus Avenue in October.
In 1981, a LoScalzo company sold the bar for $90,000 to a man described by police as the alleged gangster’s cousin. LoScalzo retained ownership of the property. LoScalzo’s stepson, Steven D. LaPerna, wound up with the liquor license in the end. In 1992, LaPerna sold the license for $30,000.
Regardless of who was in charge, blood flowed along with the booze. The year 1985 was especially vicious. Two patrons were shot to death, one in February and another in September. A third survived two gunshot wounds sustained over that summer.
Donald W. Newberger, Tampa police chief at the time, had enough. City lawyers went to court in 1985 and LoScalzo’s company, Lo-Val Inc., agreed to shut down the bar.
In 1987, LoScalzo borrowed $60,000 against the Ernesto’s property from Key Bank of Florida, a now-defunct Tampa financial institution where local gangsters rubbed elbows with downtown civic and political figures.
Two years later, city inspectors brought their first code case against LoScalzo. The city fined LoScalzo $100 a day after he neglected to secure the abandoned Ernesto’s.
By 1993, LoScalzo had run up $136,900 in code fines, and the city sued to collect. Despite the liens, Key Bank renewed LoScalzo’s 1987 mortgage note.
Around that time, Key Bank executives and underworld borrowers were rounded up in a racketeering investigation. In conjunction with that probe, Hillsborough County sheriff’s detectives filed court records identifying LoScalzo as successor to the late Tampa Mafia leader Santo Trafficante Jr. Most of the Key Bank charges were eventually thrown out of court.
After the arrests, Key Bank executives, under regulatory pressure to clean up their ledgers, sued to foreclose on LoScalzo. The reputed mob boss responded by blaming the bank.
LoScalzo accused Key Bank executives of arbitrarily yanking his overdraft protection and mishandling insurance on a collateralized property that was torched by an arsonist. All that led him to default on the Ernesto’s mortgage, LoScalzo argued in court papers.
Schneider, the retired USF professor trying to save the historic building, said he went to visit LoScalzo at the reputed mobster’s Tampa jazz club in 1994. Neighbors were complaining that Ernesto’s had become a dangerous eyesore. LoScalzo told Schneider that he would be selling the Ernesto’s property to pay other debts, according to the retired professor.
While a judge ordered enforcement of a $147,434 Ernesto’s code lien in 1994, Tampa lawyer Thomas S. Martino came to LoScalzo’s rescue in the foreclosure lawsuit.
Columtom, a company whose name combined portions of the name of the avenue where Ernesto’s was located with Martino’s first name, bought the mortgage from Key Bank. Martino told city officials that he set up Columtom and was a principal in the company. Columtom planned to foreclose on LoScalzo, Martino said, although it is unclear whether that happened.
Martino and LoScalzo didn’t return telephone messages from the Planet .
City inspectors kept up the pressure on LoScalzo, who hadn’t paid taxes on the property since 1991. The city condemned the structure in 1995. Yet Martino was able to hold off the wrecking ball for four years with promises such as a plan to sell the building to a day school.
In 1999, however, it was the city that had to pay to have what was left of Ernesto’s taken down. City records show that William D. Doherty, Tampa’s chief code inspector, kept LaBrake’s office apprised throughout the demolition process.
The city billed LoScalzo, through Martino’s office, for the $40,175 cost of the December demolition. That brought the 10-year total of liens to $187,609.
Less than a month later, however, city records show Tampa code board hearing officer Paul S. Erni released LoScalzo from liens dating back to 1989 for $6.
In another month, THAP Homes Inc. had the property. On Feb. 11, 2000, LoScalzo and Martino quit-claimed their interest to Columtom for $100 each. Then, on the same day, Martino liquidated Columtom by selling the property to THAP for $40,000.
After paying $27,053 in back taxes, Martino’s company came away with $12,947, according to the closing statement.
THAP’s Chet Luney told the Planet that no public money was used to buy the property. But Frank H. Wright, who helped his brother-in-law Martino try to find private buyers for the property, said city officials put together the whole transaction for THAP.
Since talking with the Planet, Luney has come under fire for doing favors for LaBrake and the city official’s mistress, Lynne McCarter, and for allegedly misspending THAP’s government grant money.
The THAP governing board has muzzled Luney after his recent press interviews opened up new areas of inquiry for federal investigators.
Tampa lawyer Warren H. Dawson, the new spokesman for the nonprofit, didn’t return calls seeking comment on when or if THAP will get around to developing the former Ernesto’s site. Contact Staff Writer Francis X. Gilpin at 813-248-8888, ext. 130, or frangilpin@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2001.
