By Kenneth C. Rossignol

ST. MARY’S TODAY

LEONARDTOWN — For quite a long time in Leonardtown, and other county seats around the nation, lawyers and real estate dealers have set out to find property at a low price, often land or lots which either have boundary problems or fail to be able to host a sewage system, find a way to fix the problems and resell the property at a profit.

These entrepreneurs sometimes find such transactions to be difficult and give up the effort while others persist.

In the days after the Navy came to St. Mary’s County and began to buy up the land at Pearson and Cedar Point for a new Naval Air Station in the early 1940’s, the late attorney Joe Weiner began to track down heirs to properties in the vicinity of the proposed new main gate of the base for the late Hiram Millison, who promptly bought all the land he could find for as little as he could pay.

Millison ended up with most of what is now the downtown of Lexington Park.

Within a few years, Marine pilot Jack Daugherty, now deceased, got out of the service and asked his banker father to leave his bank in Kentucky for a week long visit.

Daugherty said many years later that when he took his father back to Union Station in Washington to return home, his father who had said nothing about the area for the week he was here, gave him simple advise: buy as much land as you can for as small a price as you can and put as little cash down as they will take.

Daugherty amassed quite a bit of land prior to his death and in the process, founded a dozen businesses including his own bank, and did his share to build a growing and vibrant Southern Maryland.

In and around Leonardtown, lawyers such as the late Oliver Guyther, the late Judge Joe Weiner and the late Senator Paul Bailey became owners of major farms and real estate parcels due to their willingness to buy land, often cheaply and many times from poor blacks who found themselves in need of money to bury relatives, bail them out of jail or secure funds to build a home and were willing to sell off land.

Judge Philip Dorsey, who ran a political machine prior to passing away in 1975, amassed a number of large parcels which has kept his son and grandson busy for the last thirty years subdividing and developing.

As the years have passed from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and life in St. Mary’s County has moved from the days of 2400 watermen working to bring in the bounty of the Bay and tobacco wagons clogging the roads to the Hughesville auction house, the area has become populated with sprawling subdivisions and a large office building complex spread along what is now a 8 lane highway leading to the Patuxent River Naval Air Station.

The watermen are almost all gone, the tobacco crop is a fraction of what it once was since the farmers all went on welfare with the tobacco buyout funds and the county has zoomed up to over 100,000 souls with almost all of them dependent on the base or driving to the DC metro area for work.

But one consistent economic activity has been that of real estate.

Most folks know real estate as being the trade and practice of placing a home up for sale or buying one. Most folks go thru a couple of such transactions in their lives, most of the time the routine is painless but filled with paperwork and fees and the sooner it is all over the better.

For real estate investors, the business is far different.

For the long practiced trade of watching tax sales for land which fails to have it’s taxes paid and snatching the land for often a couple hundred dollars as well as buying out heirs to land and homes, is still practiced by real estate dealers who gamble a little to make a lot.

Lawyers who handle foreclosures or property being sold due to divorce are often in the position to find bargains and pass them on to investors, who sometimes perform as straw buyers for the lawyer, who later pockets the profit and should the Attorney Grievance Commission learn of such deals, could lead to the disbarment of an attorney.

Sometimes those real estate dealers and or attorneys lose money on the risk that they can cure what ails the land but, fortunately for them, most of the time they win.

Those who sell cheap, for the most part, don’t even have a clue as to what to do to cure their deficiency and often don’t care. As in most cases, the land was inherited, doesn’t yield any money, doesn’t have hidden assets such as a gold mine and comes with an annual tax bill, the heirs are glad to peddle their land or their ownership interest in the land to the sharp cookies that come along and make them an offer.

It is against the above backdrop that attorney John A. Mattingly Jr. and Daniel Brown come into the story.

Mattingly had been practicing law for about 12 years and had built his law practice from the standard run of the mill legal representation to one handling class action lawsuits.

Mattingly has won several significant consumer cases which have protected his clients and reaped both them and himself significant financial rewards, leaving Mattingly making far more money than the average lawyer in the area trying to make a living off of preparing wills and sorting through busted marriages for a few nuggets of gold.

Along the way he was lucky enough to pick up the trade of a friend: Terry Clarke.

Clarke had progressed from being in trouble with drugs after high school to forming a successful commercial world-wide diving business and leaving the wild times behind him as he built his trade. Clarke’s attorney, A. Shane Mattingly (not a close relation to John Mattingly), says that Clarke has become a very different person as he has grown older, building a successful business, taking the role of the father of two seriously and donating to the well being of the community through support of charitable and civic causes.

One scar that Clarke picked up while screwing around with drugs was a felony conviction. That event, for selling a quantity of drugs more than 20 years ago, would figure prominently later in his life and lead to the disruption of the lives of many others.

Late in December of 2007, Clarke was at his home one afternoon off of St. Andrews Church Road. Persistent shooting by duck hunters firing at ducks on a pond on his rural property, resulted in birdshot allegedly landing on his home. Such an event had occurred once before and the second time led to a temper outburst.

Letting his ire get the best of him, Clarke reached for something guaranteed to scare the daylights out of the interlopers. Clarke grabbed for a gun to fire into the air and it wasn’t just any gun. It was an automatic weapon.

Firing a gun into the air to ward off interlopers is about as American as apple pie in St. Mary’s County but the firearm of choice is usually a shotgun loaded with birdshot and the noise created simply by loading the shotgun is enough to make the wise fleet-footed.

The hunters were scared but they also knew that the firing of automatic weapons could help them cause trouble for the property owner by simply calling the cops. But it is unclear who really did call the cops as both the police and the attorney for Clarke didn’t know when asked on Friday.

When police arrived after whoever called them, the warning volley of automatic weapon gunfire was admitted by Clarke and the plot began to thicken.

Clarke’s horsepower was run by the deputies who quickly learned that his felony conviction from 1986 prevented him from owning a firearm. Police say that background check, which is routine in any incident when an officer shows up for a call, led to the illegal ownership of firearms by Clarke, which led to a search warrant calling for the seizure of all his weapons.

The search warrant was served and among the weapons hauled in from the net cast by the cops was one found at Clarke’s home and owned by St. Mary’s Deputy Randy Wood.

Deputy Wood was deployed in the National Guard to serve in Iraq and he had recently been wiped out financially by his attorney, Julian Isydore, law partner to prominent attorney and land developer Phil Dorsey.

Isydore, who had stolen from an estate left to the deputy by Wood’s late mother, was disbarred and convicted of felony theft.

The deputy, wiped out by his lawyer and now off serving his nation at war, was eventually disciplined administratively by the Sheriff’s Department for leaving his automatic firearm with a convicted felon, thus he became the first casualty of Clarke’s automatic firearm reaction.

While police were conducting the search and seizure raid at Clarke’s home, Clarke’s wife placed an emergency call to lawyer John A. Mattingly Jr., reaching him as he was in the shower at home.

John Mattingly had performed a growing amount of legal business for Clarke’s firm, Marine Technologies, Inc., which has its headquarters in Baltimore and operations here and abroad.

With the panicked phone call for help from Clarke’s wife, John Mattingly considered himself still an attorney for Clarke’s business but criminal law was not his expertise, which doesn’t seem to hinder him from filing for election as States Attorney, which is the fulltime post of prosecuting criminals.

John Mattingly advised Terry Clarke that he would need to hire either Shane Mattingly or Daniel Slade as both maintained warm and cordial relations with States Attorney Richard Fritz and both were competent criminal defense attorneys.

But John Mattingly offered some extra advice for Clarke on how to motivate one of the two attorneys into taking his case. He suggested that Clarke go to the bank and bring $20,000 cash to Leonardtown.

It is said that money talks and BS walks. In this case, in addition to the BS, the money walked.

Clarke followed the advice and brought the money to John Mattingly’s office.

John Mattingly had served Clarke’s marine construction firm for years and had developed a warm and strong friendship, with his client often paying to fly him to Texas for Redskins games and luxurious and lavish dinners. But John Mattingly had been considering opposing Fritz in the 2006 election, coming close to running as the Democratic nominee for prosecutor. That near-candidacy didn’t win him any good feelings with the prosecutor known for his extreme vindictiveness.

The financial records of Fritz’s campaigns in 2002 and 2006 were heavy with large donations, as much as $500 each from Slade and Shane Mattingly making either a good choice for Clarke to choose from. Thus, John Mattingly gave his commercial business client good advice in choosing a criminal defense attorney.

Sitting in John Mattingly’s office when Clarke came in the door with the loot was attorney David Weiskopf, who now is the deputy county attorney.

At the time, Weiskopf was in the process of resuming his practice of law after a period of suspension. During his suspension, which had been voluntary while he went to rehab for substance abuse, Weiskopf had been manager of Clarke’s popular Tiki Bar business.

According to the search warrant applied for by St. Mary’s Sheriff’s Cpl. Michael Labanowski and issued on Sept. 24, 2009 for the home of Daniel Brown, the police claim that Weiskopf reports that the $20,000 he witnessed walk in the door is now missing.

Curiously, Weiskopf, who says that the money is missing, is cited in the search warrant sworn to by police, as saying that the $20,000 cash was used to bribe witnesses for the benefit of Clarke.

When not witnessing bribes, Weiskopf presently advises the St. Mary’s Board of Commissioners on such real estate transactions as the Hayden Farm purchase and that of the Rose’s Place strip club.

What the search warrant sworn to by the police and signed by Circuit Court Judge C. Clarke Raley doesn’t state is the path the bag of cash took prior to going missing.

The search warrant doesn’t actually allege a crime, which might be more than a minor problem in the future.

The bag of money allegedly was taken down the street on Courthouse Drive from Mattingly’s office to Daniel Slade’s office where the money was reportedly tossed up in the air in a party atmosphere and those in attendance reportedly took photos of each other while playing with the money.

Clarke ended up with Shane Mattingly as his attorney but Shane Mattingly says he did not end up with the money. Shane Mattingly said he has never seen the photos of the money party but has heard of the existence of the photos.

Daniel Slade has built a solid reputation as being a top notch attorney and is the son of District Court Judge John Slade who is expected to retire this year. Daniel practices law with his brother, John Slade.

Weiskopf, according to police, says that the money was used by Daniel Brown to bribe the "victims" of Clarke’s temper outburst which triggered the burst of gunfire from an automatic weapon on a December afternoon.

Brown says that he never used that money to offer to settle a possible civil action against Clarke after the initial criminal charges were dropped. Brown says he cashed a check at his own bank for ten thousand dollars and since he was neighbors with the "victims" decided to attempt to settle the civil action which he thought was forthcoming. Brown said that he approached the victims only after the criminal charges which had been first placed against Clarke were dropped by Fritz.

The charges against Clarke were dropped by the States Attorney’s office and one of the assistant states attorneys at the time allegedly told the "victims" that the guy who scared them with the gun was "loaded" and they could bring a civil action against him and clean him out of some big bucks.

As Clarke owns the Tiki Bar located at Solomon’s Island as well as his multimillion dollar commercial marine diving and construction business, the prosecutor’s assessment was likely right on the mark.

Brown met with one of the ‘victims’ at Cooksey’s Store in Charles County and at the home of the other. There was reportedly considerable interest but no one took the money.

Still, the twenty thousand dollars in cash that Terry Clarke took to Leonardtown to use to hire an attorney passed in front of, through the hands of and near at least four attorneys before disappearing forever, which ought to be a good lesson to anyone wanting to hire an attorney in St. Mary’s County to stay the hell away from Leonardtown.

Clarke was recharged by way of a 41-count indictment on the various firearms charges and in January of this year he pleaded guilty to one count with all of the others dropped as part of a plea agreement.

Clarke has yet to be sentenced.

His attorney, Shane Mattingly, said on Friday that Clarke’s plea agreement calls for him to be cooperative with the current investigation which began with allegations of obstruction of justice and witness tampering against Brown and John Mattingly.

Shane Mattingly said that he was sure that Judge Missouri would take into account the level of cooperation Clarke provides to investigators in determining his client’s fate, as well as his clean record over the last twenty years.

Just about the time that a parade of witnesses began to gather at the door of the Grand Jury room last winter, where the spring term consisting of a panel of 23 citizens soon began to learn about the allegations surrounding Clarke’s case, the actions of John Mattingly and Daniel Brown, John Mattingly decided to announce his candidacy for States Attorney.

Witnesses for the state reportedly have told the Grand Jury that John Mattingly concocted his sudden campaign in order to thwart the probe into his affairs as simply a political witch-hunt by States Attorney Fritz.

Since bringing charges against an opponent has taken place before, in the case of the late Joe Weiner who, as States Attorney, indicted a potential opponent for the judgeship, such a scenario isn’t too far fetched.

John Mattingly says that he decided that he had done about as much as he could in consumer law and he was disturbed by the ‘lets make a deal’ environment of the prosecutor’s office. John Mattingly accused the prosecutors of allowing defendants to buy off criminal charges by donating to the favorite charity of the assistant states attorney and that rarely were cases tried, instead simply plea bargained away by the lawyers who all made fat donations to the campaign of Fritz.

John Mattingly successfully argued the first case brought to the U. S. Supreme Court by a local attorney and won the case.

Daniel Brown, the real estate partner of Mattingly is a public relations disaster for the bright attorney but as a "land-shark" as he advertised on his vanity license plates, email address and business cards, he has become without equal.

Brown says that he was beat up by a stepfather and was on his own at the age of 14, learning to work to support himself.

At the age of 18, he began to do home improvement work and soon had his own contracting business. Over the next 10 years, Brown opened and ran a chain of auto parts stores specializing in selling custom rims to a clientele which included most of the area’s drug dealers.

With his ball cap turned backwards on his head in true punk fashion, Brown talked the talk of jive and fast money, sporting around in a Mercedes and a souped up truck.

But Brown was a quick study in real estate and could unearth good deals and find broken land which needed to be fixed.

Bringing such deals to Mattingly the two soon became partners in the real estate business and now own nine rental properties and buy land under the name of the firm Graydon Sears LLC.

With Brown making a good income from his auto parts stores and Mattingly elevating his status to being one of the top earning local attorneys, the two say that they became the object of envy by those who live paycheck to paycheck.

Brown said that the worst thing they did was to open an office across the street from the Circuit Courthouse in Leonardtown where the lazy staff of the States Attorney’s Office could observe some of the fruits of the hard work that let he and Mattingly afford such vehicles as BMW’s and Mercedes.

Mattingly says that the persecution he is experiencing is the result of challenging Fritz and that the investigation that began into Clarke, led to an obstruction of justice probe and now centers on the land deals of Brown and himself is all about Fritz trying to smear him.

John Mattingly said that there never was a victim due to any of his land deals.

Police say that is not true and that the probe started due to a complaint made by victim’s family member.

What started with that complaint has now led to a search warrant document which reveals that widespread fraudulent use of notary public certification has taken place.

John Mattingly said last week that it is common place for oral certification of signatures to a notary to take place in the practice of real estate.

But the real extent of the probe likely doesn’t end with that aspect as ST. MARY’S TODAY has confirmed that John Mattingly’s mother-in-law has lost her job at the Farm Credit Office, even though it is said that she retired. Brown admits that his mother’s loan for the purchase of a property came from the Farm Credit Office and questions about the loan caused the job to end for the woman, noting the second human casualty to this tangled web.

Other persons are reported to have been fired from private employers as well, but at this point, their identities are not known.

The search warrant states that Captain Daniel Alioto, who as commander of the drug and vice unit of the St. Mary’s Sheriff’s Department, is leading the probe, went to Baltimore to interview 3 persons who signed a deed to Mattingly and Brown.

Labanowski swore to the court that police interviewed the pair’s secretary who admitted to falsely signing and affixing her notary seal to the deed even though she didn’t witness the signatures. She further said that the pair told her later that the police would be coming around to ask her questions about the deed.

Police say that they have confirmed that at least 10 such transactions were conducted in that fashion by three different notaries.

Mattingly said that the lack of a proper notary doesn’t make the transaction invalid and that he took photos of the driver’s licenses of those who signed the deeds and of the persons in the act of doing so.

Police say that John Mattingly took an oath and signed the deeds with a statement that they were prepared by him and under his supervision to conform to the law, which calls for notaries to only certify the signatures of those who sign in front of them.

In Leonardtown, it has been commonplace for notaries who work for lawyers in the regular practice of real estate to certify the signatures of those who are known to them and orally certified by the attorney conducting a settlement after hours.

Police advise that their probe goes far beyond the notary public issue and that the case is not a witch-hunt and is a paper case with evidence that will send those involved to prison.

Mattingly says that if there was a case against him he would already be buried under the jail.

According to the return on the search warrant, there were no drugs found in Brown’s home, which sits at the end of a gravel lane outside of Leonardtown.

The search warrant did not specify that the thirty officers who arrived at Brown’s residence on Sept. 24th at 6:30 pm, all wearing masks, could seize the client files of John Mattingly.

Mattingly and Brown say that various items including titles to vehicles owned by Brown and the client files of Mattingly, which had been in locked storage in the basement, were seized without cause and should be returned.

Police say that a great number of items are available to be picked up but calls left for the two have yet to be returned.

Alioto would not comment on whether John Mattingly’s client files were seized in the raid, but 12 boxes of his files were listed on the search warrant return to the court as having been seized.

Also seized from Brown’s home, which is owned by John Mattingly’s mother and rented by Brown for the last 18 months, were several guns.

Brown showed a handgun permit he was issued by the State of Maryland and that the guns which were taken from him were all legally purchased and registered.

Police say that the circumstances of the reasons stated on the application for the handgun permit are under investigation and point out that a permit is issued for express purposes and cannot be construed to allow the holder to carry a gun everywhere instead of the express purpose of transporting money from a business to a bank.

The existence of the handgun permit was not included in the search warrant application and the court was advised by police that Brown carried a handgun at the time he allegedly attempted to bribe the witnesses to Clarke’s firing of the assault weapon.

John Mattingly says he is taking immediate action to secure his closed client files and safeguard the confidential information and to oppose the actions taken by police.

Mattingly consented to the viewing of the search warrant by ST. MARY’S TODAY but said he was not authorized to release a copy of the warrant. The Clerk of the Circuit Court office said that the search warrant was sealed and if one didn’t know the number of the warrant a request could not be made and that Judge Raley was gone for a month. A motion was made addressed to "any judge" for the search warrant and at press deadline no response was provided by Administrative Court Judge Karen Abrams who is in charge of the Circuit Court.

A copy of the search warrant was provided to ST. MARY’S TODAY by Daniel Brown who said he had nothing to hide.

Allegations of fraud, Brown acting without a contractors license, bilking a widow out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, whom had been represented by John Mattingly and paying too little for property are answered to various degrees by both Brown and Mattingly, who both ascertain their innocence and say that the cops and prosecutors are unfamiliar with real estate practices.

When asked about the widow, Brown said that the procedures for obtaining home improvement licenses are cumbersome and he had acted only as a consultant to have work performed for the woman who was missing a leg and needed a ramp and other work done to her home after Mattingly won her an award of $500,000 in the wrongful death case of her husband. Mattingly said he had been saddened over the woman’s death had provided a rental for the woman’s daughter who at this point still has not paid several month’s worth of electricity fees.

At this point, there are no charges against John Mattingly or Brown and Mattingly said that the police investigation is so flimsy that the cops have never bothered to question him about any aspect of it.

The police counter that they don’t need to talk to him, they are following the paper trail, but as of Friday, no one says that they know where the missing $20,000 is, and when asked if the cops knew, Capt. Alioto said he couldn’t comment.

While the $20,000 is missing and no one knows where it is, there are no court records to reflect that a civil suit was ever filed against Clarke, giving credence to one path the missing money may have taken.

While Fritz may not have been required under ethics laws to recuse himself from any participation in the investigation into John Mattingly, legal experts say that since the Sept. 23rd election filing of Mattingly that Fritz should immediately petition the Circuit Court for the appointment of an independent special prosecutor.

Mattingly says that the reason that Fritz had not done so before is that any independent review of the facts would have ended the investigation long ago.