Billy Madonna's talking again. He shouldn't -- his lawyer objects -- but that's like telling Billy not to breathe. "I'm a talker," he explains, then shrugs.

Billy's a good talker. He's charming, he's solicitous, he's gregarious -- everyone calls him Billy -- and he gives you his full attention. As he talks, he has this disarming habit of gently nudging your hand, your arm, your shoulder, as if he can gain credibility through touch.

Billy has talked to get votes for himself and his favorite Baltimore politicians. He has talked to get a neighborhood playground built. He has talked to get people jobs. He has talked to borrow money from friends.

Right now, in late January, he's talking in a third-floor hallway in Circuit Court. He's sitting on a rock-hard wooden bench, waiting for his trial to continue.

The state prosecutors are not charmed by Billy. They say he's a crook. To them he is William J. Madonna Jr., a former state legislator who parlayed his friendship with a powerful state senator into control of the Baltimore liquor board. They say he took bribes.

The judge will eventually throw out the bribery charge, and Madonna will plead guilty to a lesser offense of violating the state liquor laws, but Billy doesn't know any of that as he sits on the hard wooden bench in late January. For all he knows, he could spend the next 12 years in prison. His lawyer is right; he probably should keep quiet.

But Billy, he's a talker.

"They don't understand," he says. "This is all about politics."

Billy has much to say about his own rise and fall and the way he saw politics practiced in Baltimore. He describes a city of rewards and revenge, of friendships and favors, where the people in charge wink and look the other way if you can deliver the votes. And Billy always could deliver the votes.

"Did you ever see 'The Godfather?' " he asks. "The movie? That was me. I did favors for people."

Billy Madonna as Don Corleone? What a joke. He's about as intimidating as a substitute teacher -- 47 years old, trim, mostly bald, nasal voice. Billy's not going to make anyone an offer they can't refuse.

But in one respect, the comparison is apt. Billy operates a personal Favor Bank. He gets things done for people, prides himself on it, and desperately wants people to know and respect him.

"People knew that if you had a problem that you needed some help with, you could come to him and he could help you," his lawyer, Gary S. Bernstein, says after the trial. "He absolutely loves that image."

Billy's talking again. He's talking about the last time he was in the old neighborhood, in Hampden and Remington, before he was indicted.

"Came up here in August," he says. "Came up to see my friend who has a pizza place. He needed a favor. He needed some Ravens tickets. So I got him two tickets on the 40-yard line. Couldn't get the 50 because it was the first game in the new stadium.

"They call for anything. It could be baseball tickets, football tickets, concert tickets."

And you deliver?

Billy smiles, shrugs.

"Let me put it this way, there's not a ticket that I can't get."

Football tickets, though, those are chump change in the Favor Bank. Billy does big favors, too. Or at least he did. He made people. That's what he calls getting someone else a job.

Billy says he made lots of people -- sheriff's deputies, building inspectors, dairy workers. He says he secured scholarships for students. He says he got the city to cut the grass in his old neighborhood so kids could play baseball.

He's proudest of the playground. That's right, Billy says he got a playground built at the corner of Fawcett Street and Hampden Avenue, in a vacant lot overrun with weeds. He had the city install a see-saw, monkey bars, a basketball hoop and net.

You think that didn't impress the neighborhood? The message was clear: If you vote for Billy's candidate, Billy can get things done.

The playground is gone now, concrete scars where the see-saw once stood, but Billy turns even that to his advantage. See what happens when Billy isn't there to protect you?

"Let me put it this way: If you've got the votes, you've got the power," he says.

He learned that early, sitting on his grandfather's knee. John Stine helped start a Democratic club in Remington. Those were the days when former U.S. Rep. George H. Fallon ruled Baltimore, when every neighborhood had a political club to recruit candidates and get out the vote.

"I used to see things get done," he says. "I would see the snow get removed from the street. When we needed a stop sign, we got it."

When Billy was a boy, the communities of Hampden and Remington represented a town within a city. The demographics were mostly blue-collar, Italian, white (blacks who tried to move in were often harassed), with the requisite chip on the shoulder to distinguish them from the swells in Guilford and Roland Park. Politics was not a sport; it was a way of securing your share.

Billy will never forget the day a man walked into the political club with a job application. One of the elders grabbed the paper and took it to City Hall. The man got a job with the city, just like that.

"That impressed me," Billy says. "I'd see that with my own eyes growing up. Wow. That's power. And it had nothing to do with money."

Billy wanted that power. He wanted to be the person who could get the mayor on the phone. He wanted to be the person other people called to get things done.

"He wanted to be in the 'Godfather' role," says Anthony J. "Tony" Cianferano, Billy's longtime friend. "He loved to be able to do something for somebody."

Remember the opening scene in the movie -- when Don Corleone tells the undertaker that someday he may want his favor returned?

"Billy, he took that literally," Cianferano says.

It worked, too. Billy really could get things done. He got Cianferano a job as a city liquor inspector. Years later, thanks to Billy, Cianferano was promoted to chief liquor inspector. But the state prosecutors said the friends went too far, that they took bribes and broke the law, and Cianferano found himself sitting next to Billy in that same third-floor courtroom, charged with the same crimes.

There was a moment during the trial that seemed to confirm everything Billy said about himself. During a recess, a deputy sheriff walked in. He was out of uniform on this particular day, but this was the deputy who had guarded the courtroom during much of the trial.

The deputy strolled over and gave Billy a big bear hug.

"See that?" Billy says later. "I made him. You think he doesn't remember that? We don't go through the Yellow Pages to give people these jobs. It's political appointments."

Barbara A. Hoffman needed a favor. It was the fall of 1986, and Hoffman was running for state senator from the 42nd District. She had been appointed to the post three years earlier; this would be her first election.

Hoffman thought she had the blessing of the Hampden Democratic Club. After all, she had given the club president's son a job as a city liquor inspector.

The Baltimore liquor board operated as if inspired by old Mayor Richard Daley's Chicago. Patronage ruled. Inspectors and board members were hand-picked by Baltimore's state senators. It was one of the last places where a politician could reward friends and punish enemies.

But Hoffman was double-crossed. The Hampden club endorsed her primary opponent, Rochelle "Rikki" Spector. The election was too close to call; it appeared that Hampden and Remington voters would provide the winning margin.

With the club against her, where could Hoffman turn?

Billy Madonna was relaxing in Rehoboth Beach, Del., when he agreed to meet her. Yes, he would help, Billy says he told her, but on one condition. If Hoffman won, she would allow him to replace the club president's son with his own choice for liquor inspector. That's how Billy remembers it; Hoffman says she only agreed that he could recommend an inspector.

An odd request, unless you knew Billy, his background and the importance he placed on that liquor inspector's job.

"That was the prize," he says. "I wanted it."

He also wanted to send a message to Hampden: After being away from politics, he was back in the game.

"Billy liked being a big fish in a small pond," Hoffman says. "He liked being important, being the big man on campus."

There was a time when Billy had a political future. Everyone thought so. When Thomas Ward and Julian L. "Jack" Lapides formed a new political club, they recruited Billy to run for House delegate in 1975. He was 21 years old. He won, carrying his home base -- Twelfth Ward, Seventh Precinct -- easily.

"Everyone in Hampden and Remington absolutely adored him," Lapides says.

But Billy disliked elected office. "You couldn't tell people what you really think," he says. He preferred to wield power behind the scenes.

"I found out that if I could get the votes, I didn't have to be the politician," he says. "I could still get things done."

Defeated in his re-election bid, Billy became a bar owner. Helping Hoffman would show the people running the Hampden Democratic Club that Billy was a political force once again.

"It was a golden opportunity to show my muscle," he says.

That 1986 primary was a Democratic civil war in Hampden and Remington. On Election Day, the street corners were filled with more people politicking than voters heading to the polls. Billy worked night and day.

Hoffman won, and Billy says he called right after the election.

It was time to collect.

This was the night Billy would always remember His Christmas parties were an annual tradition, but the 1994 version was spectacular. Billy invited everyone to his neighborhood bar on Greenmount Avenue -- named Billy's -- and everyone appeared. Mayor Kurt Schmoke, high-ranking police and fire officers, judges, lawyers, everyone.

"I was in my glory," Billy says. "It was the main event."

He was prepared. Valet parking. Hand-carved sirloin. Fresh ham and shrimp. He called somebody from the city to clean the street.

Who could doubt Billy's power now?

"It allowed him to say, 'The mayor came to my Christmas party," says Bernstein, Billy's lawyer, who also was there. "I think it made him feel that he could, if necessary, call the mayor, but I don't think he could. My guess is he was not as powerful as he perceived himself to be."

If the mayor wanted, he could have played one of Billy's video machines and perhaps won a couple of dollars. This is Baltimore's worst-kept secret. Walk into almost any bar or restaurant, and you can play a video poker machine that will, if you know the owner well enough, pay off like a slot machine. The payoffs are illegal, but who's complaining? "I had policemen who played my poker machines," Billy says. "No one saw any harm."

At one time Billy owned video machines in 10 bars. "I made a lot of money," he says. He also says he took bets on sports or the numbers.

Several liquor inspectors also attended that Christmas party.

Through an unwritten agreement with the governor's office, each Baltimore state senator was allowed to select two or more liquor inspectors. The senators took turns filling vacancies.

Hoffman says she either named liquor inspectors herself, or allowed Billy to recommend a candidate, even though he owned a bar subject to the laws those inspectors were supposed to enforce.

Hoffman testified at Billy's trial that she had never even met many of the inspectors Billy suggested. "It's not something that I have much interest or involvement in," she said.

Billy recommended Donald Cassell. He recommended Donald J. Harlow, who worked in Billy's bar. He recommended Joan Martin, Billy's girlfriend at the time.

Harlow was an unusual case.

"I tried to be a social worker," Billy says. "It wasn't the first time I got kicked in the head after giving somebody a chance."

When Billy met him in the early 1990s, Harlow was a construction worker who had built a banquet room addition to Billy's bar. He also was a former felon who had served six years in prison for assault with intent to murder.

Billy gave him odd jobs, like collecting video game money from other bars. When a liquor inspector's job came open in 1996, Billy recommended Harlow.

But Billy had bigger problems than recruiting liquor inspectors. He was on the brink financially. He blames hard economic times in the bar business -- the number of liquor licenses in the city plummeted as drinking became less socially acceptable. But friends say Billy's gambling, his repeated trips to Atlantic City to shoot craps, was taking its toll as well.

Billy borrowed money from Cianferano. He borrowed money from his girlfriend. He says he wrote checks to Atlantic City casinos, then used the cash to keep his bar afloat. The checks bounced, and the casinos sued.

He filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1996, and the bar was sold at a foreclosure sale.

But Billy still had a powerful friend. Hoffman, now the chairwoman of the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, tried to help him get named executive secretary of the liquor board. When that failed, she helped him get a $46,000-a-year job with the state lottery.

He resigned that job a day before he was indicted. Broke, Billy had to borrow money to pay for his lawyer.

"If you have 10 friends, that's $10,000," he says.

John A. Pica Sr. needed a favor. According to trial testimony, the former City Council member -- and father of a former state senator -- went to Billy's bar to see if anything could be done to help the Twilight Social Club.

Like video poker machines, the Twilight Social Club on Frederick Avenue was one of those Baltimore staples that caused people to look the other way. It was an after-hours club, opening on weekends after other bars closed. It was illegal, but who was complaining?

Well, somebody did. In August 1994, the club was cited for operating illegally. The owners, Joy Nickey and Michael Swidowich, went with Pica to talk to Madonna.

Why Madonna? He wasn't a liquor inspector, or a member of the liquor board, or even a city employee. But he was the power behind the scenes.

Nickey testified that Billy told the owners they would have no more problems with liquor inspectors. In other words, they could continue to operate illegally.

Tony Cianferano, the chief liquor inspector, says he winced when Billy told him about the deal.

"He sure wasn't thinking about the consequences," Cianferano said later. "I told him the Twilight was going to be the downfall. This favor was bad."

So why did Cianferano go along?

"I think the bottom line was, he really wanted the help and I helped him," he says. "He was my friend."

Billy and Cianferano didn't know it, but state investigators were wiretapping their telephone calls. Then the investigators planned a raid of the Twilight Social Club to see what Billy would do. Billy and Cianferano tipped off the owners, the tapes indicated.

Later, Madonna tells John Pica Jr. that he did a favor for the owners. "They love us, that's all I can tell ya, they love us," he said in a conversation that was taped.

Madonna and Cianferano eventually pleaded guilty to thwarting state liquor laws in connection with tipping off the Twilight owners about the raid.

But that's only a small portion of what the trial revealed about the anything-goes nature of the city liquor board. Nobody denied the following:

* Liquor inspectors routinely sold political fund-raising tickets to bar owners. The implication was that if you refused, you put your business in jeopardy.

* Bar owners were frequently told they needed to pay bribes to inspectors to avoid getting citations.

* Bar owners operating illegally were often tipped off about police raids.

* Liquor board members received liquor and food during the Christmas holidays, a violation of board rules.

Nathan C. Irby Jr., the current liquor board executive secretary, says reforms have been enacted since Billy's arrest to address those problems. For example, inspectors are picked by merit, not patronage, but the three people who serve on the liquor board still are political appointees.

It's clear that somebody like Donald Harlow wouldn't get an inspector's job today. But state prosecutors hoped Harlow saw enough during his time as an inspector to put Billy in jail. Harlow was granted immunity for his testimony at Billy's trial -- and it was, when first heard, devastating.

Harlow said he took cash from bar owners in exchange for protection, then delivered envelopes stuffed with cash to Billy, who put the money in an electric steamer in the kitchen of his bar.

"Why did you give Billy the money? asked Thomas M. McDonough, the assistant state prosecutor.

"Because that's who I worked for," Harlow replied.

"Who directed your activities?"

"Billy Madonna."

But Harlow could not have been a worse witness. Hard of hearing, frequently confused, he often seemed irritated by the questions. He also admitted under cross-examination that he would say anything to stay out of jail. Other witnesses contradicted him.

Judge Mabel Houze Hubbard later called him "a bad guy" and said he "sounded like a shakedown artist who made it up as he went along."

In the end, Harlow's testimony didn't matter. Hubbard threw out the bribery charges because the only people who testified they saw money exchange hands were involved in the conspiracy themselves. Maryland law requires independent corroboration.

As Bernstein, the defense lawyer, puts it, "you can't be convicted on the uncorroborated testimony of scumbags."

Did Billy Madonna take bribes? The charge was tossed out of court, but that's a legal victory. Even though Judge Hubbard found Harlow unreliable, she said later that "there were some things he said that I'd put money on."

Billy needed money, that's for certain. "He was desperate for money to pay his gambling debts," his lawyer says.

So did Billy take the money?

The prosecutors still think so, but they spent two years and tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars only to be embarrassed by having their main charge thrown out of court before it even reached the jury.

"I think it's pretty apparent that the liquor inspectors weren't directed by the liquor board," prosecutor McDonough says. "They were directed by William Madonna."

And several of those inspectors were taking money from bar owners. Even so, McDonough could not produce any bar or restaurant owners who said they paid bribes directly to Billy. In fact, the only time Billy talks about money during the taped phone call, he says, "I'll be honest with ya, I wouldn't do it for money."

Bernstein, Billy's lawyer, says taking bribes would have threatened the only thing Billy truly cared about -- protecting his image as a political broker.

"The most important thing to him was being this political conduit," Bernstein says. "Being a bookie wasn't going to screw it up. Helping the Twilight Social Club wasn't going to hurt him. But bribes, any kind of political corruption, would kill it in a heartbeat."

Billy's talking again. He wants to clear his name. He tells a story about when he was a boy and his grandfather took him to a Baltimore department store. There was a toy train that Billy wanted, but he didn't have the money.

You give the man your word of honor, his grandfather told him. You tell him that you will pay a little each week. Billy did, and the train was his that very day.

"Even my enemies will tell you, if Billy gives you his word, forget about it," he says. "It's over. You can take it to the bank. When you've lost everything, and I've lost everything, all you have is your honor, your word."

He says he didn't take the money. If liquor inspectors were shaking down bar and restaurant owners, they were doing it themselves. He wasn't involved.

"My word of honor."

Billy Madonna needs one more favor. He has beaten the bribery charge, but on this day, in early February, Judge Hubbard could still give him jail time for pleading guilty to thwarting the state liquor laws.

Billy's trying to start over. He works six days a week at the Polock Johnny's stand in Lexington Market, wearing an apron, working the grill and asking customers if they want kraut with their sausage. Billy has big plans.

"I'm going to be the sausage king of Baltimore," he says.

He says he hasn't shot craps in three years. He says he wants to repay loans, make things right with friends. Tony Cianferano's wife is furious with Madonna; she rolls her eyes when he begins talking about his word of honor.

Hoffman also is angry. She says she knew nothing about liquor board corruption, or about inspectors selling fund-raising tickets on her behalf. She says she trusted Billy to recommend qualified inspectors.

"I thought he was a different person than he turned out to be," she says. "I really feel that what he did to me was unconscionable, and I don't want to have anything to do with him. By his behavior, he dragged my name through the mud, and I resent it."

Billy says he is a victim of politics. He blames state Sen. George Della for telling state investigators to target him because Della wanted to prevent Billy from getting the liquor board job. Della says he had "absolutely nothing" to do with Billy's problems.

And Billy says the prosecutors then charged him because he refused to finger Hoffman or John Pica Jr. for corruption. Billy's a talker, not a singer, "and there wasn't anything to tell." (The prosecutors say only that they were investigating corruption at the liquor board.)

Nonetheless, the prosecutors hurt Billy. It wasn't the indictment or the legal costs that stung the worst. It was the way old political buddies treated him. Longtime allies looked right past him at fund-raising parties. He was damaged goods. "I was shunned."

That changed when Hubbard threw out the bribery charge. Some old political friends called to congratulate him. Billy expects it will change even more come election time. Civic associations have replaced political clubs, but they still need somebody who can get out the vote.

"They'll need somebody to work the corners at the next election," he says. "They always do."

Billy's talking again. At his sentencing, he stands before Judge Hubbard and rambles about his life, about helping his neighborhood, about his word of honor and what that means.

Hubbard reminds him that men of honor don't break the liquor laws. She sentences Billy and Cianferano to three years of jail, then suspends all of the sentence in favor of probation.

In the hallway, outside the courtroom, Billy spots Auxiliary Bishop William C. Newman, who spoke on behalf of Cianferano.

"Father, will you bless me?" Billy asks.

The two men head over to a corner, where Newman palms Billy's bowed, bald head like a basketball and asks that God grant him peace and tranquillity.

And Billy, the man who runs the Favor Bank, he knows how this works.

"God did me a big favor," he says.

Billy owes Him one.

Pub Date: 03/14/99