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TRUST YOUR MECHANIC
Amid complaints that he's deceptive, belligerent and a nuisance, garage owner Charlie Calanni claims that he's the victim.
By Michael Gill
CHARLIE CALANNI
I can counter anything they say. It's all bullshit.
THE PHONE RINGS ENDLESSLY at Calanni's Auto Service . Mostly it's people who want to know when they can pick up their cars, which are parked bumper to bumper in the small parking lot. Cynthia Calanni answers and passes the phone to her husband, Charlie, who exudes casual confidence as he tells one caller, It'll be another hour, boss.
He tells another, We're waiting on a part, Mom. Call again later this afternoon. And still another, We're still working on it. Try us tomorrow morning. When he's not on the phone, he's talking to mechanics and customers in person. He never gets a chance to sit down.
In the office, car keys are lined up on two shelves, across two desks, and on grids of hooks on the walls. Some are dusty. A quick count of the rows and columns adds up to about 300 keys in plain sight. They add to the general clutter of magazines and car parts. There are also gumball machines, and a teddy bear and a toy backpack wrapped in plastic to protect them from the car shop grime are offered for sale.
The walls are covered with a scrapbook collage of Calanni's younger days framed photos of the new business owner supervising the extraction of fuel tanks from the former gas station back in the '80s, photos of old American muscle cars, plaques from vocational schools.
A sign over the door cautions, Be sure brain is in gear before engaging mouth.
Nothing about the scene suggests that Calanni is at the center of a neighborhood dispute that has quietly simmered since he opened the business more than two decades ago. For nearby merchants, it's about parking: there's never enough in Lakewood, a fact that under the best conditions strangles business in a city built for streetcars. Calanni's neighbors say he monopolizes what little space there is by parking customers' cars at metered spots on the street, sometimes for weeks. They say he uses the street as an extension of his lot, even making repairs there.
One neighboring business owner complains, He's murdering this neighborhood with the constant grind.
Now the situation is boiling over with more serious allegations that the mechanic preys on poor and minority customers, holding their cars hostage with storage fees until he can declare them abandoned and, under Ohio law, claim title.
Even that weighty allegation is only the top layer of a murky pool filled with complaints and counter-complaints of stalking, harassment, trespassing, and over and over again, gross abuse of parking throughout the neighborhood of his Lakewood shop. Nearby business owners say the city has been inept at best, and possibly corrupt in dealing with a situation that spans four mayoral administrations.
But today Calanni faces multiple lawsuits, including an unprecedented attempt by the City of Lakewood to use laws written with nuisance bars and drug houses in mind to shut Calanni down.
LEONARD JOHNSON
Didn't expect $4,000 in storage fees.
ALL I WANT him to do is be upfront with people, says Leonard Johnson. Tell them, If you leave your car 30 days, this is what will happen.'
Last August, Johnson brought his maroon 1991 Eagle Talon into Calanni's shop with a broken timing belt. He'd seen Calanni's full-page ad in the Yellow Pages. He called other garages as well, but he says Calanni offered to replace 16 valves, the head, and timing belt, all for $750 half the cost of the next best estimate. So he had the car towed from southeast Cleveland to Lakewood, passing dozens of other car shops on the way.
Johnson says the mechanic told him the job would take a week because a lot of other people were in line before him. Ten days later, the mechanic told him the price would be a little higher, too: more like $1,300. Still, it was hundreds less than the next best quote. Johnson says he told Calanni that he'd need some time to get the money together, and was assured that would be no problem.
When his mom, Madeline Johnson, took $600 to the shop in October and asked for papers documenting work that had been done, she says Calanni told her there was no need for any.
Months went by. On May 9, Johnson returned with another $700, He says Calanni accepted the money and promised delivery two days later. At this point Johnson believed his outstanding balance was just $298. But then the game changed.
When he called to ask when he could drop by to pay off the balance, suddenly the car wasn't ready. And on subsequent calls that week he got more of the same. The battery was dead and needed to be charged. The tires were low. It was parked behind other cars.
The first time I heard about the storage fees was Friday, the 13th of May, Johnson says. Calanni told him that for leaving the car from August 'til May, Johnson owed another $4,000. That's about $400 per month enough to rent a small apartment in the same city.
I have to charge $15 a day for storage, Calanni says in an interview. He also insists he told Johnson this up front.
But having agreed to no such thing, Johnson called the police and filed a report, only to be told it was a civil matter just another dispute between a business and customer. They also told him this happens at Calanni's place two or three times a month. (Other sources told the Free Times the same thing.)
Two days later, the Johnsons tried again, going with police to the car lot. This time Calanni told Mrs. Johnson he would work with her on the storage fee, but that he'd need a day or two to get the vehicle out of storage.
So Johnson formed a posse with Lakewood assistant law director Tom Corrigan, another angry Calanni client named Marianna Glass (whom he met at the Lakewood police station while waiting for Corrigan), her lawyer, and two more Lakewood police officers, to demand their cars. According to the police report, Calanni became flustered when asked for paperwork on estimates, parts, labor, or notification of storage fees. He said he'd need time to retrieve them. Johnson's car was being stored off-site, and the mechanic couldn't find the keys to Glass' Volkswagen Passat, which also did not have its license plates.
I do 20 cars a day, Johnson remembers Calanni saying, I don't do paperwork.
On June 2, Johnson returned, this time wired with WKYC-TV investigative reporter Carl Monday, but still didn't get the car. And the next day he waited three hours before being told to come back yet again. He says that at the time, Calanni had the car sitting with a battery charger, but that it wasn't connected. Several other people were also waiting for their cars.
On June 4, Johnson finally got his car back but only after paying another $948, for a total of $2,248 and signing a handwritten contract. The document, which had some spelling errors, declared that Johnson would take the car as is and not hold the mechanic responsible for anything that had happened in the previous nine months.
Only later did he learn that in March, Calanni had filed an affidavit with the state to claim the car as abandoned, but sent the paperwork to the wrong address.
SAAMIA ALAM
Calanni has had her car since May 2004.
JOHNSON WAS LUCKY. Saamia Alam brought Calanni her lipstick-red 1992 Mazda Miata, which she describes as hot, in 2003. Over the course of two months, while he said he was waiting for parts, the price rose from $350 to $526. One day she grabbed her key off the counter in Calanni's office, and during the altercation that ensued, Calanni jacked the price up to $997, plus $3,000 for storage.
That was in May of 2004. She still doesn't have her car back.
Alam is of Indian descent. Johnson is black. Their cases and others have led some to speculate that Calanni factors skin color into his dealings with clients.
Leslie Moore concurs. She's a lawyer with George Forbes' firm, Forbes Field and Associates, and is compiling cases for a multiple-party suit against the mechanic.
Moore says Calanni targets poor and minority customers, luring them with low estimates, stringing them along while the price and, unbeknownst to them, storage fees, grow even beyond the value of the car.
According to BMV records, Calanni has filed affidavits to claim title on 49 vehicles since 1994, and has succeeded in taking title to ten. The law requires that he send certified letters to the customer before the claim can go through. According to Fred Stratman, spokesperson for the BMV, Calanni has complied with the letter of the law, though he acknowledges that there are claims that Calanni has sent notice to incorrect addresses, or that he hasn't adhered to cost estimates.
There are things on that end that would seem to warrant investigations, he said.
Meanwhile, the Ohio Attorney General's office has ten mediation cases open against Calanni. A spokesperson would not confirm rumors that the Attorney General's office is considering its own suit, but Madeline Johnson says the office contacted her and Leonard last week.
He uses racial slurs, Moore says, adding that he's called at least one neighbor a ###### lover.' But he's very nice when you first come in. He's charming.
But customers aren't the only ones charging bigotry. Calanni has said repeatedly, and his lawyer, Lucian Rego who happens to be law director in Fairview Park has even speculated in letters, that the problem is that his neighbors can't stand to see a Sicilian succeed.
CHARLIE CALANNI OPENED Calanni Auto Service in 1980 in a building that had been an oil, gas or service station since the 1920s. He had the gasoline storage tanks removed as part of a zoning variance request to use the property for light repairs. He says the repair business is more lucrative than selling gas.
He was right. County records show that Calanni owns five commercial buildings and four houses in Lakewood, and a $400,000 home in Westlake.
But according to Lakewood Building Department and other records, his run-ins with the city began soon after he opened.
A 1982 letter notifies him to come to the city prosecutor's office for a hearing about past failure to comply with a notice from the building department. After that, records indicate, attention to his business would pick up every couple of years, almost always for unlicensed vehicles on the lot or for working on cars outside the garage.
But everybody does that, Calannni says, sounding weary of the allegations. He offers a driving tour of other shops in the city, and by the way he drives, it seems he's done this tour before. He knows exactly where the back and side driveways are. At most of the shop, he points out cars outside with hoods up, cars with expired or no tags, employees parking at meters on the street, tires stored outside.
Why are they picking on just me? he asks, with apparent sincerity.
Tom Corrigan of the Lakewood Law Department counters, Other people have hoods up and unlicensed vehicles, but there's no one like Charlie. And the police don't ticket every speeder on the highway. They ticket the ones they catch.
But Calanni wonders if someone wants his property for condos, which are under construction or planned for three other formerly car-related properties in the city. He speculates that the city is trying to get rid of service stations. He suspects anti-Sicilian bigotry. But mostly he blames Silvia Weber.
The record of complaints and citations picked up dramatically in 2001, when Silvia and Gerald Weber opened Weber Architecture across the street. They've meticulously restored the site inside and out, which makes Calanni think they want the whole neighborhood to look like their building.
Weber dismisses this. Mr. Calanni appears to be a master at creating smokescreens and intimidating people to divert attention from the situation he has created, she says.
The real issue, Weber contends, is Calanni's monopolization of the few metered parking spaces in the busy neighborhood, home to apartment buildings, bars, several other garages, a high school and a church and 37 metered spaces. She says she asked Calanni's employees three times to stop filling all the spaces with customers' cars, but was ignored.
After a few months, the Webers took their complaint to city council. Mr. Weber went prepared with an itemized list of city building code violations in evidence on Calanni's property. Ms. Weber brought photos of meter feeding, cars disemboweled in the street and parked across the sidewalk, and other infractions. The Webers and Calannis haven't spoken since, but they watch each other and take pictures from opposite sides of Madison Avenue.
What had been a game of ignoring and annoying has recently moved into the courtroom. Mr. Weber has filed a menacing suit against one of Calanni's employees, charging that when Mr. Weber was taking a picture of the employee feeding meters, the man asked him, How would you like to get your face beat in?
It never happened, Calanni says.
And the Webers have filed suit against Calanni himself for criminal trespassing, after seeing him in the driveway next to their building and catching him on camera. (I got a call from a customer to check on a car behind the next building, Calanni explains. It just happens that they share the driveway.)
Calanni retorts that the Webers lead what his attorney describes as a cabal of neighbors.
Number two in the alleged cabal are Joan and Gary Link, the recently retired owners of VS Die Molding. The neighborhood parking issue is a little more personal for the Links, because they share a driveway easement with Calanni, who happens to own the building next to theirs.
One night last fall, they got a call from a neighboring business that Calanni was charging people $5 to park in their lot during the St. Ignatius-Glenville football game. When they drove to the shop, Gary Link says, the mechanic actually tried to wave them into the lot with the other paying customers.
What's a guy who's supposedly a millionaire doing on a Friday night charging $5 to park in a lot that's not his? Link asks.
Calanni says he was only charging for his own spaces, behind his own building. Oh, and the Links tried to run him down.
I can counter anything they say, he adds. It's all bullshit.
The Links also worry that the shop represents an environmental and fire hazard, because they can't figure out what he does with his oil. They believe he's dumping it into a tank beneath the building that dates from the 1920s, but Calanni says there is no tank. He points to photos of the old gasoline storage tanks being removed in the '80s. An inspector from the Ohio Bureau of Underground Storage Tanks and Lakewood Fire Marshal Scott Gilman have also said there is no evidence of a tank.
Charlie says he stores the oil in 55-gallon drums. But with all their watching and videotaping, none of the neighbors has ever seen drums taken away.
Number three in the so-called cabal is Beth Sayler, who lives down the street. She says she and her family got on Calanni's radar by complaining about cars parked in the neighborhood, and that since then he and his employees have antagonized them driving in and out of her driveway, or revving the engines or honking the horns of cars they are test-driving, just to let us know he's there. She says it happens five, six, maybe ten times a day.
WEST SIDE SKATES' BRIAN JULES
Calanni calls his videotaping stalking.
Brian Jules opened West Side Skates across the street from Calanni in 1995. He's been fighting for his customers' right to park ever since.
When we opened, I noticed cars parked in front of the store cars that had been there for weeks. I have moms parents of some of my customers circling the block looking for parking spaces, and he'll have his daughter out feeding the meters all the way down the block.
Jules has compiled hours of videotape of Calanni's employees pushing inoperable cars in and out of street parking, working on cars in the street, working on cars on the sidewalk.
You don't see Firestone or the guys at Lucas [a nearby Sunoco station] doing this shit, he says.
Calanni responds to Jules' videotaped evidence by calling it stalking.
A few doors down, Charles, the proprietor of My Mind's Eye record store, who doesn't want his last name used, says he's tired of trying to get the city to do something.
Have I been to council meetings? Yes. Have I talked to they mayor? Yes. Have I called the police? Yes. All they do is placate us. The kindest word I could use for the city is ineffectual.
Calanni employees repairing a vehicle on the sidewalk
In fact, action has been taken against Calanni, but the consequences have not been severe.
Records show that since 1994, Calanni has been in the city's court 65 times on a multitude of charges. Last fall the neighbors saw Calanni taken into Lakewood Municipal Court for not providing parking to tenants in his storefront building, across the street from his car shop. Judge Pat Carroll fined him $100, but suspended all but $15. Last Monday he was convicted of two zoning code violations working on cars outside the building, a minor misdemeanor and fined a total of $250 plus costs.
Most of the parking meters in Lakewood offer 30 minutes of free parking. On one occasion the city revoked that for Calanni's neighborhood, and on another, it covered the meters to eliminate parking altogether. The result, neighbors say, is that everyone suffered for Calanni's sins. And the situation never changed. Some area business owners wonder if corruption is involved.
We have no evidence that he has gotten away with anything he shouldn't have, says law director Brian Corrigan. The statements that there is corruption, I believe, are made out of frustration because people are convinced that he must know somebody.
But the neighbors are still waiting for action.
Do I still see the same cars on the street week after week? Charles asks rhetorically. Yes. Will he park in front of my store all weekend so I have no space? Yes. Does he still park on his easement, blocking the parking lot behind the building? Yes. Does he have cars all the way to the sidewalk? Yes. It's little, petty, childish things that add up.
A SUIT FILED LAST WEEK by Corrigan asks the judge to declare Calanni Auto Service a nuisance a charge typically reserved for drug or prostitution activity, as the city did under the previous mayor with the Yorktown Hotel. Assistant law director Tom Corrigan (no relation) believes this may be the first case where a city has charged that a business's normal, legal practices are a nuisance.
It's been a continuous line of complaints, says Brian Corrigan, the accumulation of misdemeanors, bad business practices and practices that walk the line between acceptable and unacceptable. He takes up a lot of city resources just answering complaints. Charlie is very good at frustrating the city.
Whether the judge will find the collection of misdemeanors as offensive as the city does, though, is anyone's guess.
He's very believable, Corrigan observes. He can be an almost sympathetic character.
Calanni says he's had enough, too. After shopping for more space in Lakewood for several years, he says he plans to buy at least one new car lot in Cleveland, maybe as many as three.
I'll take the bulk of my business there, move most of my guys there, he says. It's not Lakewood, but it's still close to my customers.
TRUST YOUR MECHANIC
Amid complaints that he's deceptive, belligerent and a nuisance, garage owner Charlie Calanni claims that he's the victim.
By Michael Gill
CHARLIE CALANNI
I can counter anything they say. It's all bullshit.
THE PHONE RINGS ENDLESSLY at Calanni's Auto Service . Mostly it's people who want to know when they can pick up their cars, which are parked bumper to bumper in the small parking lot. Cynthia Calanni answers and passes the phone to her husband, Charlie, who exudes casual confidence as he tells one caller, It'll be another hour, boss.
He tells another, We're waiting on a part, Mom. Call again later this afternoon. And still another, We're still working on it. Try us tomorrow morning. When he's not on the phone, he's talking to mechanics and customers in person. He never gets a chance to sit down.
In the office, car keys are lined up on two shelves, across two desks, and on grids of hooks on the walls. Some are dusty. A quick count of the rows and columns adds up to about 300 keys in plain sight. They add to the general clutter of magazines and car parts. There are also gumball machines, and a teddy bear and a toy backpack wrapped in plastic to protect them from the car shop grime are offered for sale.
The walls are covered with a scrapbook collage of Calanni's younger days framed photos of the new business owner supervising the extraction of fuel tanks from the former gas station back in the '80s, photos of old American muscle cars, plaques from vocational schools.
A sign over the door cautions, Be sure brain is in gear before engaging mouth.
Nothing about the scene suggests that Calanni is at the center of a neighborhood dispute that has quietly simmered since he opened the business more than two decades ago. For nearby merchants, it's about parking: there's never enough in Lakewood, a fact that under the best conditions strangles business in a city built for streetcars. Calanni's neighbors say he monopolizes what little space there is by parking customers' cars at metered spots on the street, sometimes for weeks. They say he uses the street as an extension of his lot, even making repairs there.
One neighboring business owner complains, He's murdering this neighborhood with the constant grind.
Now the situation is boiling over with more serious allegations that the mechanic preys on poor and minority customers, holding their cars hostage with storage fees until he can declare them abandoned and, under Ohio law, claim title.
Even that weighty allegation is only the top layer of a murky pool filled with complaints and counter-complaints of stalking, harassment, trespassing, and over and over again, gross abuse of parking throughout the neighborhood of his Lakewood shop. Nearby business owners say the city has been inept at best, and possibly corrupt in dealing with a situation that spans four mayoral administrations.
But today Calanni faces multiple lawsuits, including an unprecedented attempt by the City of Lakewood to use laws written with nuisance bars and drug houses in mind to shut Calanni down.
LEONARD JOHNSON
Didn't expect $4,000 in storage fees.
ALL I WANT him to do is be upfront with people, says Leonard Johnson. Tell them, If you leave your car 30 days, this is what will happen.'
Last August, Johnson brought his maroon 1991 Eagle Talon into Calanni's shop with a broken timing belt. He'd seen Calanni's full-page ad in the Yellow Pages. He called other garages as well, but he says Calanni offered to replace 16 valves, the head, and timing belt, all for $750 half the cost of the next best estimate. So he had the car towed from southeast Cleveland to Lakewood, passing dozens of other car shops on the way.
Johnson says the mechanic told him the job would take a week because a lot of other people were in line before him. Ten days later, the mechanic told him the price would be a little higher, too: more like $1,300. Still, it was hundreds less than the next best quote. Johnson says he told Calanni that he'd need some time to get the money together, and was assured that would be no problem.
When his mom, Madeline Johnson, took $600 to the shop in October and asked for papers documenting work that had been done, she says Calanni told her there was no need for any.
Months went by. On May 9, Johnson returned with another $700, He says Calanni accepted the money and promised delivery two days later. At this point Johnson believed his outstanding balance was just $298. But then the game changed.
When he called to ask when he could drop by to pay off the balance, suddenly the car wasn't ready. And on subsequent calls that week he got more of the same. The battery was dead and needed to be charged. The tires were low. It was parked behind other cars.
The first time I heard about the storage fees was Friday, the 13th of May, Johnson says. Calanni told him that for leaving the car from August 'til May, Johnson owed another $4,000. That's about $400 per month enough to rent a small apartment in the same city.
I have to charge $15 a day for storage, Calanni says in an interview. He also insists he told Johnson this up front.
But having agreed to no such thing, Johnson called the police and filed a report, only to be told it was a civil matter just another dispute between a business and customer. They also told him this happens at Calanni's place two or three times a month. (Other sources told the Free Times the same thing.)
Two days later, the Johnsons tried again, going with police to the car lot. This time Calanni told Mrs. Johnson he would work with her on the storage fee, but that he'd need a day or two to get the vehicle out of storage.
So Johnson formed a posse with Lakewood assistant law director Tom Corrigan, another angry Calanni client named Marianna Glass (whom he met at the Lakewood police station while waiting for Corrigan), her lawyer, and two more Lakewood police officers, to demand their cars. According to the police report, Calanni became flustered when asked for paperwork on estimates, parts, labor, or notification of storage fees. He said he'd need time to retrieve them. Johnson's car was being stored off-site, and the mechanic couldn't find the keys to Glass' Volkswagen Passat, which also did not have its license plates.
I do 20 cars a day, Johnson remembers Calanni saying, I don't do paperwork.
On June 2, Johnson returned, this time wired with WKYC-TV investigative reporter Carl Monday, but still didn't get the car. And the next day he waited three hours before being told to come back yet again. He says that at the time, Calanni had the car sitting with a battery charger, but that it wasn't connected. Several other people were also waiting for their cars.
On June 4, Johnson finally got his car back but only after paying another $948, for a total of $2,248 and signing a handwritten contract. The document, which had some spelling errors, declared that Johnson would take the car as is and not hold the mechanic responsible for anything that had happened in the previous nine months.
Only later did he learn that in March, Calanni had filed an affidavit with the state to claim the car as abandoned, but sent the paperwork to the wrong address.
SAAMIA ALAM
Calanni has had her car since May 2004.
JOHNSON WAS LUCKY. Saamia Alam brought Calanni her lipstick-red 1992 Mazda Miata, which she describes as hot, in 2003. Over the course of two months, while he said he was waiting for parts, the price rose from $350 to $526. One day she grabbed her key off the counter in Calanni's office, and during the altercation that ensued, Calanni jacked the price up to $997, plus $3,000 for storage.
That was in May of 2004. She still doesn't have her car back.
Alam is of Indian descent. Johnson is black. Their cases and others have led some to speculate that Calanni factors skin color into his dealings with clients.
Leslie Moore concurs. She's a lawyer with George Forbes' firm, Forbes Field and Associates, and is compiling cases for a multiple-party suit against the mechanic.
Moore says Calanni targets poor and minority customers, luring them with low estimates, stringing them along while the price and, unbeknownst to them, storage fees, grow even beyond the value of the car.
According to BMV records, Calanni has filed affidavits to claim title on 49 vehicles since 1994, and has succeeded in taking title to ten. The law requires that he send certified letters to the customer before the claim can go through. According to Fred Stratman, spokesperson for the BMV, Calanni has complied with the letter of the law, though he acknowledges that there are claims that Calanni has sent notice to incorrect addresses, or that he hasn't adhered to cost estimates.
There are things on that end that would seem to warrant investigations, he said.
Meanwhile, the Ohio Attorney General's office has ten mediation cases open against Calanni. A spokesperson would not confirm rumors that the Attorney General's office is considering its own suit, but Madeline Johnson says the office contacted her and Leonard last week.
He uses racial slurs, Moore says, adding that he's called at least one neighbor a ###### lover.' But he's very nice when you first come in. He's charming.
But customers aren't the only ones charging bigotry. Calanni has said repeatedly, and his lawyer, Lucian Rego who happens to be law director in Fairview Park has even speculated in letters, that the problem is that his neighbors can't stand to see a Sicilian succeed.
CHARLIE CALANNI OPENED Calanni Auto Service in 1980 in a building that had been an oil, gas or service station since the 1920s. He had the gasoline storage tanks removed as part of a zoning variance request to use the property for light repairs. He says the repair business is more lucrative than selling gas.
He was right. County records show that Calanni owns five commercial buildings and four houses in Lakewood, and a $400,000 home in Westlake.
But according to Lakewood Building Department and other records, his run-ins with the city began soon after he opened.
A 1982 letter notifies him to come to the city prosecutor's office for a hearing about past failure to comply with a notice from the building department. After that, records indicate, attention to his business would pick up every couple of years, almost always for unlicensed vehicles on the lot or for working on cars outside the garage.
But everybody does that, Calannni says, sounding weary of the allegations. He offers a driving tour of other shops in the city, and by the way he drives, it seems he's done this tour before. He knows exactly where the back and side driveways are. At most of the shop, he points out cars outside with hoods up, cars with expired or no tags, employees parking at meters on the street, tires stored outside.
Why are they picking on just me? he asks, with apparent sincerity.
Tom Corrigan of the Lakewood Law Department counters, Other people have hoods up and unlicensed vehicles, but there's no one like Charlie. And the police don't ticket every speeder on the highway. They ticket the ones they catch.
But Calanni wonders if someone wants his property for condos, which are under construction or planned for three other formerly car-related properties in the city. He speculates that the city is trying to get rid of service stations. He suspects anti-Sicilian bigotry. But mostly he blames Silvia Weber.
The record of complaints and citations picked up dramatically in 2001, when Silvia and Gerald Weber opened Weber Architecture across the street. They've meticulously restored the site inside and out, which makes Calanni think they want the whole neighborhood to look like their building.
Weber dismisses this. Mr. Calanni appears to be a master at creating smokescreens and intimidating people to divert attention from the situation he has created, she says.
The real issue, Weber contends, is Calanni's monopolization of the few metered parking spaces in the busy neighborhood, home to apartment buildings, bars, several other garages, a high school and a church and 37 metered spaces. She says she asked Calanni's employees three times to stop filling all the spaces with customers' cars, but was ignored.
After a few months, the Webers took their complaint to city council. Mr. Weber went prepared with an itemized list of city building code violations in evidence on Calanni's property. Ms. Weber brought photos of meter feeding, cars disemboweled in the street and parked across the sidewalk, and other infractions. The Webers and Calannis haven't spoken since, but they watch each other and take pictures from opposite sides of Madison Avenue.
What had been a game of ignoring and annoying has recently moved into the courtroom. Mr. Weber has filed a menacing suit against one of Calanni's employees, charging that when Mr. Weber was taking a picture of the employee feeding meters, the man asked him, How would you like to get your face beat in?
It never happened, Calanni says.
And the Webers have filed suit against Calanni himself for criminal trespassing, after seeing him in the driveway next to their building and catching him on camera. (I got a call from a customer to check on a car behind the next building, Calanni explains. It just happens that they share the driveway.)
Calanni retorts that the Webers lead what his attorney describes as a cabal of neighbors.
Number two in the alleged cabal are Joan and Gary Link, the recently retired owners of VS Die Molding. The neighborhood parking issue is a little more personal for the Links, because they share a driveway easement with Calanni, who happens to own the building next to theirs.
One night last fall, they got a call from a neighboring business that Calanni was charging people $5 to park in their lot during the St. Ignatius-Glenville football game. When they drove to the shop, Gary Link says, the mechanic actually tried to wave them into the lot with the other paying customers.
What's a guy who's supposedly a millionaire doing on a Friday night charging $5 to park in a lot that's not his? Link asks.
Calanni says he was only charging for his own spaces, behind his own building. Oh, and the Links tried to run him down.
I can counter anything they say, he adds. It's all bullshit.
The Links also worry that the shop represents an environmental and fire hazard, because they can't figure out what he does with his oil. They believe he's dumping it into a tank beneath the building that dates from the 1920s, but Calanni says there is no tank. He points to photos of the old gasoline storage tanks being removed in the '80s. An inspector from the Ohio Bureau of Underground Storage Tanks and Lakewood Fire Marshal Scott Gilman have also said there is no evidence of a tank.
Charlie says he stores the oil in 55-gallon drums. But with all their watching and videotaping, none of the neighbors has ever seen drums taken away.
Number three in the so-called cabal is Beth Sayler, who lives down the street. She says she and her family got on Calanni's radar by complaining about cars parked in the neighborhood, and that since then he and his employees have antagonized them driving in and out of her driveway, or revving the engines or honking the horns of cars they are test-driving, just to let us know he's there. She says it happens five, six, maybe ten times a day.
WEST SIDE SKATES' BRIAN JULES
Calanni calls his videotaping stalking.
Brian Jules opened West Side Skates across the street from Calanni in 1995. He's been fighting for his customers' right to park ever since.
When we opened, I noticed cars parked in front of the store cars that had been there for weeks. I have moms parents of some of my customers circling the block looking for parking spaces, and he'll have his daughter out feeding the meters all the way down the block.
Jules has compiled hours of videotape of Calanni's employees pushing inoperable cars in and out of street parking, working on cars in the street, working on cars on the sidewalk.
You don't see Firestone or the guys at Lucas [a nearby Sunoco station] doing this shit, he says.
Calanni responds to Jules' videotaped evidence by calling it stalking.
A few doors down, Charles, the proprietor of My Mind's Eye record store, who doesn't want his last name used, says he's tired of trying to get the city to do something.
Have I been to council meetings? Yes. Have I talked to they mayor? Yes. Have I called the police? Yes. All they do is placate us. The kindest word I could use for the city is ineffectual.
Calanni employees repairing a vehicle on the sidewalk
In fact, action has been taken against Calanni, but the consequences have not been severe.
Records show that since 1994, Calanni has been in the city's court 65 times on a multitude of charges. Last fall the neighbors saw Calanni taken into Lakewood Municipal Court for not providing parking to tenants in his storefront building, across the street from his car shop. Judge Pat Carroll fined him $100, but suspended all but $15. Last Monday he was convicted of two zoning code violations working on cars outside the building, a minor misdemeanor and fined a total of $250 plus costs.
Most of the parking meters in Lakewood offer 30 minutes of free parking. On one occasion the city revoked that for Calanni's neighborhood, and on another, it covered the meters to eliminate parking altogether. The result, neighbors say, is that everyone suffered for Calanni's sins. And the situation never changed. Some area business owners wonder if corruption is involved.
We have no evidence that he has gotten away with anything he shouldn't have, says law director Brian Corrigan. The statements that there is corruption, I believe, are made out of frustration because people are convinced that he must know somebody.
But the neighbors are still waiting for action.
Do I still see the same cars on the street week after week? Charles asks rhetorically. Yes. Will he park in front of my store all weekend so I have no space? Yes. Does he still park on his easement, blocking the parking lot behind the building? Yes. Does he have cars all the way to the sidewalk? Yes. It's little, petty, childish things that add up.
A SUIT FILED LAST WEEK by Corrigan asks the judge to declare Calanni Auto Service a nuisance a charge typically reserved for drug or prostitution activity, as the city did under the previous mayor with the Yorktown Hotel. Assistant law director Tom Corrigan (no relation) believes this may be the first case where a city has charged that a business's normal, legal practices are a nuisance.
It's been a continuous line of complaints, says Brian Corrigan, the accumulation of misdemeanors, bad business practices and practices that walk the line between acceptable and unacceptable. He takes up a lot of city resources just answering complaints. Charlie is very good at frustrating the city.
Whether the judge will find the collection of misdemeanors as offensive as the city does, though, is anyone's guess.
He's very believable, Corrigan observes. He can be an almost sympathetic character.
Calanni says he's had enough, too. After shopping for more space in Lakewood for several years, he says he plans to buy at least one new car lot in Cleveland, maybe as many as three.
I'll take the bulk of my business there, move most of my guys there, he says. It's not Lakewood, but it's still close to my customers.
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