On game days, Peter G. Angelos surveys the streets around Camden Yards and can't quite stomach what he's seeing. Ticket scalpers -- two to three dozen hustling entrepreneurs -- are working the streets, clutching tickets and trying to close the next high-priced sale.
"It's offensive to see what goes on out there," says the Orioles owner. "There's a husband and a wife. A father and a mother. They go to the window, 'Sorry, no tickets.' But the scalpers are walking around with handfuls, waving them under your nose, holding out a $10 ticket and asking $35, $40, $50.
"See where I begin to get irritated?"
Mr. Angelos is doing more than stewing over the scalping problem. Halfway through his first season running the team, he's overseeing a major effort to put scalpers out of business, or at least push them away from the ballpark's gates.
The Orioles are battling the problem on several fronts. This year, the club is paying for a police undercover detail specifically to zero in on ticket scalpers. The cost of the four-person team is $700 to $1,000 a night, say club officials. The Orioles also say they soon will open a window or kiosk at the ballpark for fans who want to exchange their tickets or obtain refunds.
The Orioles also are scrutinizing their ticket office and dealing with employees suspected of supplying scalpers. Although such incidents are rare, club officials say a part-time employee recently was fired after billing $4,000 worth of tickets to a single credit card. The circumstances of the sale suggested the buyer might be a ticket broker, club officials say.
That incident followed the prosecution this year of a ticket office employee charged with misapplying more than $42,000 in payments from season-ticket customers.
In his anti-scalping campaign, Mr. Angelos has sought -- and received -- help from Baltimore City Council. Urged on by the Orioles owner, himself a former councilman and mayoral candidate, the council last week put new teeth in the city's existing ban on ticket scalping.
Council members passed two scalping bills, including one that would prohibit the resale of tickets on streets and sidewalks within one mile of Camden Yards, even if the seller wants only the ticket's face value. The measure, which is waiting Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's signature, could become law next month.
Ticket scalping is illegal in Baltimore, but legal in every other jurisdiction in Maryland. Police make on average of three scalping arrests per game at Camden Yards. But offenders, after paying fines of $250, often are back the next day, say police. Under the new law, the maximum fine would be $1,000.
Mr. Angelos' efforts have earned praise, especially from those who deal most often with the scalpers.
"Mr. Angelos is taking a very impressive stand on this. He's on top of it," says Lt. Russell Shea, who directs the Camden Yards police detail.
But scalpers are upset with the owner.
"He's greedy," says Gino Brown, a veteran scalper from Baltimore, as he stood across the street from the ballpark last week. "He should be concentrating on safety inside the stadium, not us outside."
Michael Hugley, 32, is a laid-off construction worker who says he relies on his scalping income to support his family and help his mother.
"I don't have a high school degree. I don't have a college education," Mr. Hugley says. "I learned how to hustle all my life. And this is the safest hustle I ever hustled."
The scalpers declined to talk about what they earn selling tickets.
For his part, Mr. Angelos says his objections to scalping have nothing to do with the quick money scalpers earn. "I don't care about that. If people can make a profit, great," he says. "What I'm concerned about is fans being required to pay exorbitant prices for tickets, because somehow we are not masters of the situation.
"I feel responsible for what's going on, because, in a sense, our fans are getting fleeced."
To be sure, Mr. Angelos isn't the first Orioles owner to discover the scalping problem or to try to curb it. But he has inherited a frenzy for Orioles tickets that exceeds what most past owners dreamed possible.
During their 38 years at Memorial Stadium, Orioles games frequently were played before more empty seats than paying customers. With ticket demand low, opportunities for scalpers were lean. Still, there were a few celebrated cases. Bobby Shriver, whose father, Sargent Shriver, later was an Orioles investor, was arrested for scalping tickets during the 1983 World Series.
Rising demand
Demand soared when the Orioles moved to Camden Yards in 1992. Since then, 171 of 198 Orioles games at the ballpark have been sellouts. Buying a ticket now requires planning months ahead or searching out a seller on the street.
On any given night, 500 to 750 tickets selling for double face value and more are held by scalpers outside Camden Yards, police say. Prices vary greatly, depending on interest in the game and when the ticket is sold. Scalpers stuck with tickets when the game begins often unload them at face value or less.
Many scalpers' tickets are purchased legitimately, mainly from fans dumping their unwanted seats.
Other tickets are stolen property, and can cause the unsuspecting buyer a lot of grief. The Orioles often issue duplicate seat passes when tickets turn up missing, opening the possibility that two fans could be vying for the same chair.
"I had a full colonel in the Army and his wife from Virginia come through the other day," says Lt. Shea. "They bought two $15 seats for $30 apiece. Here comes a woman with a seat pass saying, 'My tickets were stolen in a robbery.'
"It was a little embarrassing for everyone," he says.
Not surprisingly, Camden Yards is among the league leaders in scalpers, says Kevin Hallinan, an ex-police officer who oversees ballpark security for Major League Baseball.
"Wherever you have great demand, the scalpers are there," says Mr. Hallinan. "But it's being addressed very aggressively in Baltimore."
Mr. Angelos concedes he'll never eliminate scalping, but says the Orioles are searching for ways to control their tickets better. Group sales appear to be one of his major targets.
The Orioles market heavily to groups, which might buy as few as 50 or as many as several thousand tickets to a game. Mr. Angelos expresses concern that a small percentage of group sales might go to ticket brokers and tour operators. Next year, Mr. Angelos says, the club may require group leaders to pay for tickets with checks drawn from company organization accounts.
Employees may be involved
Although he declines to go into details, Mr. Angelos apparently believes that there may be isolated cases of employees' obtaining tickets for scalpers. These concerns seem supported by suspicious circumstances in a recent case involving a former ticket-window employee.
Club officials noticed that the former employee had handled two unusually large ticket orders on consecutive days and that both were billed to the same out-of-state credit card. Their suspicions were heightened because the tickets had recently been released for sale, indicating that someone working in the ticket office might have tipped the buyer.
The case of Ronald Zappacosta doesn't involve scalping, but illustrates how money can slip away from the Orioles. Mr. Zappacosta, an ex-club employee, worked in the ticket office. One of his assignments was to receive payments from customers and apply them to ticket accounts, court documents say.
On 24 occasions between December 1992 and May 1993, Mr. Zappacosta received payments sent in by ticket holders and applied them to his and his father's season-ticket accounts, according to allegations contained in court records.
Mr. Zappacosta was given probation before judgment on a theft charge, and ordered to pay restitution to the Orioles of $42,000.
Mr. Zappacosta's lawyer, Howard Muhl, declined to comment on the case Friday.
A key to Mr. Angelos' anti-scalping campaign may be fans' response to a more liberal ticket exchange and refund policy. Under the current rules, only season-ticket-holders can exchange tickets, and they must turn in their seats 24 hours before the game. There are no refunds.
The Orioles hope to present their new policy next month. It is expected to offer refunds or exchanges to most ticket-holders.
The success of the program depends on whether fans turn in their tickets. Mr. Angelos says he's confident that customers will, knowing that when they do business with a scalper, "they're putting tickets in the hands of someone who very likely will charge an outrageous price."
Back on the street, scalpers don't appear to be leaving their corners. Despite the roadblocks being thrown up, most vow not to be run off by Mr. Angelos and the politicians.
"It's going to be hard, real hard," says Mr. Hugley, reflecting on the hardship of the one-mile zone. "But as long as the people want the tickets, it'll be OK."