Pass the coke grandpa

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http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=149841

Client sticks nose in trial: Seniors were coke dealers

By Laurel J. Sweet

Tuesday, July 25, 2006 - Updated: 06:45 AM EST

Seemingly wholesome grandparents Andrew and Winifred Schlehuber were secretly kingpins of a cocaine cottage industry, claims their former top customer: a bagel tycoon who says they helped him blow his fortune up his nose.

Coke dealing grandparents: Related articles, multimedia & images » On the books

The Schlehubers, both 69 and looking like a perfect Norman Rockwell pair, are on trial for allegedly running a high-volume mom and pop drug mart from their former home on LaGrange Street in West Roxbury. The Schlehubers have denied the charges.

Mark Smith, founder of the Auburndale-based Finagle-a-Bagel chain, testified yesterday he agreed to housesit for the vacationing Schlehubers for a week in March 2000, in exchange for a 50 percent discount off his $200-a-day coke habit. Smith’s drug habit was already draining his wealth when, to make matters worse, the cops showed up while he was there.

Smith, of Wilmington, said he tried to block the cops that night, but yesterday he willingly took jurors on a sordid verbal tour of the Schlehuber homestead. Smith described how they stashed rocks of coke in paper cups in their bedroom dresser drawer, while hiding still more drugs in a diaper bag in the woods, “for fear of the house being broken into.â€

Andrew Schlehuber, a white-haired father of seven, “had problems in the past with other people watching his business while he was gone,†Smith testified. That’s why he volunteered to housesit. “I was more than happy to help.â€

The obliging Smith said he was painting the Schlehubers’ house in between scooping coke off a plate with a six of clubs for their regular customers, like a chimney sweep and a well-heeled Boston bar owner, when the cops came knocking on March 31, 2000.

Smith told jurors he was welcomed into the Schlehubers’ inner circle after selling Finagle-a-Bagel for more than a half-million dollars in 1998. In addition to paying off his debt to the couple, he said he treated them to a trip to St. Martin.

Andrew Schlehuber “let me cuff (buy on credit) a lot of cocaine and I owed him $23,000,†Smith said. “When I paid him off, I thought it was only fair to give him a bit more.â€

In addition to a spiral notebook from CVS with specific instructions on what their drug clientele normally bought and how much they paid, Smith said the Schlehubers left a bucket of water in their upstairs bedroom in which he would toss the drugs in the event of a raid.

But after the cops showed up that night in March 2000, Smith never made it upstairs. He told them he was unauthorized to let them in and tried to block the door with his body. They pushed him in, threw him up against a wall and arrested him, he said.

The Schlehubers had supporters in court yesterday, including several of their grown children. The Rev. Shaun Harrison of Boston’s Youth in Crisis Ministries told the Herald he doesn’t buy Smith’s story. Andrew Schlehuber, Harrison said, “is a blessed man,†who for the past five years has opened his heart and wallet to the city’s troubled youth. [continue]