It's a small, modest company nestled between Formstone houses and abandoned buildings, but from this printing shop in Pigtown came the matchbook that helped capture the suspected "evil genius" behind the World Trade Center bombing.
Federal counterterrorist officials say that the matchbooks and pamphlets made by the George W. King Co. played a role in last week's arrest in Pakistan of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, charged with being the mastermind behind the February 1993 terrorist plot.
Mr. Yousef's face and a $2 million U.S. reward offer were printed on 37,000 matchbooks -- written in numerous Arabic languages -- and distributed throughout the Middle East. The King company is the sole provider of the printed materials for U.S. counterterrorist officials.
"Matchbooks were chosen because we know that there's a lot of cigarette smoking that's done in those countries," said W. Gregory Bell, one of the matchbook designers for the 95-year-old printing house. "It's kind of a politically incorrect solution for America, but it worked well over there."
Mr. Yousef, on the run since the bombing in New York City two years ago that killed six people and injured more than 1,000, was finally captured after a South African student turned him in for the reward publicized on the King company's matchbooks, authorities said.
"The reward program was one of the reasons the informant came forward," said Rob Born, a deputy with the Department of State's Diplomatic Security Service. The office investigates terrorist activity.
Mr. Born said he didn't know the precise reasons the informant turned in Mr. Yousef but that the printed materials by the King company "definitely did" help in the capture.
The matchbooks, sent to Pakistan through American consulates, were distributed to hotels, bars, restaurants and other public meeting places, government officials said.
"We basically blanketed the country. Smoking is on the decline in the U.S., but that's not the case overseas," Mr. Born said.
Added Andrew J. Laine, a diplomatic security spokesman, "Our thoughts behind it are that people will carry these matchbooks around with them. Any time they pull a match out to light a cigar or cigarette, they're seeing this guy's face."
The federal terrorist officials refused to elaborate on the capture, but George A. Hughes, the president of the King printing house, said he was told by state department officials that the key was either a matchbook or a pamphlet.
"They told me the day before it hit the press that they had caught a big fish, and it was green that did it," he said. The King matchboxes and pamphlets are printed in bright green.
Authorities have described the South African student, whom they have refused to identify, as an unexpected informer who simply walked into the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, and told them Mr. Yousef was staying at a nearby hotel.
In that hotel room, in a rather strange coincidence, arresting officers found not only Mr. Yousef but an August issue of Newsweek magazine that had a story detailing U.S. efforts to catch him through such things as matchbook covers, according to one counterterrorist official.
Mr. Yousef, labeled at one point as the "evil genius" behind the bombing, has been extradited to the United States and is awaiting trial.
The King printing house in the 1200 block of S. Carey St. has about 35 employees and has been designing anti-terrorist ad campaigns, brochures and posters since 1990, starting with the Pan-Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Since then, the printing house -- which began on Howard Street in 1899 -- has printed anti-terrorist media in German, French, Turkish, Farsi, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and three Pakistani dialects, to name a few.
Mr. Hughes, who himself speaks German, French and a little Mandarin Chinese, said there is an artistry to delivering the anti-terrorist message.
"You can't just run an anti-terrorist newspaper ad in a Baghdad newspaper. They won't run it. You've got to think of an alternative," Mr. Hughes said.
At roughly 7 cents apiece, the matchbox idea is a simple and cheap method of counterterrorism, Mr. Hughes said. More than 50,000 other King matchboxes are in the Middle East offering rewards for two suspected terrorists, Mir Aimal Kansi and Abdul Rahman Yasin.
Mr. Kansi is wanted in the Jan. 25, 1993, shooting outside CIA headquarters in McLean, Va., in which two people died and three were wounded. Mr. Yasin is a suspected co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing.
The King company's simple office is in a brick building in a heavy-crime area. Its bread-and-butter business is designing "slick-marketing" brochures designed to lure businesses to Baltimore, Mr. Hughes said.
The anti-terrorist business accounts for only a small share -- about $25,000 to $40,000 annually -- of the company's business.
"Our primary focus is to let people who may know of terrorists and their activities that the young and the innocent are the primary victims. No political aims are really being satisfied through terrorism," Mr. Hughes said. "We use whatever means possible to get that message across."