Director John Waters, my neighbor

For a few years, director John Waters and I were once neighbors.

Waters lives in the Tuscany-Canterbury section of Baltimore. In this leafy enclave of Tudor-style homes inhabited by white yuppies, it’s easy to forget that you’re in a crime-plagued, drug-infested mess of a city that gave rise to HBO’s The Wire.  My alma mater, The Johns Hopkins University, is a short walk away.

t_680s4cix.jpgMy Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house was also in Tuscany-Canterbury, but I never saw Waters in the neighborhood. In fact, one of my regrets in life is I never went trick-or-treating at the Waters home, which was just a few doors down.

Still, I felt a certain kinship. He made films with dog-poop eating drag queens and my frat brothers and I behaved pretty much like you would expect a fraternity to behave. We were both neighborhood outcasts.

The neighborhood finally had its revenge on Phi Psi last year. Neighbors got the city council to  ban the fraternity from the house on a zoning technicality. Then, last month, the neighborhood association amended its rules so that the private Calvert School next door could raze the building and build more facilities for the elementary students whose parents pay $19,000 a year to send them there.

That was too much for Waters. He wrote a letter to the Tuscany-Canterbury neighbohood association saying that the project would be “construction noise hell. In the letter, Waters also threatened to drive to Calvert Headmaster Andrew Martire’s house and honk his car horn each morning at 6:30 a.m. in revenge for the noise in the neighborhood. “I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again,” Waters wrote.

Thanks John, for being a good neighbor.

If political writers covered baseball

With apologies to The Washington Post.

This is Playoff Week. That, in reality, is about all that anyone knows outside Terry Francona’s inner, inner circle — that sometime in the next week the Boston Red Sox General Manager will announce his pitching lineup against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Beyond that, the baseball world is in a zone of fevered speculation.

Nothing is certain, and one sign of how jittery everyone is about the timing and the choice came a few hours ago, when the gossipy PROSportsDaily.com posted an item that said, “Paper: Red Sox may announce pitching lineup in AM.” That set off alarms in newsrooms across the country until the team’s front office shot it down — although it was not clear exactly what they were shooting down, other than that the announcement would come early this morning.

There was a widespread assumption, based on nothing solid from the campaign, that Francona could make his announcement this morning, this afternoon, or stage a multi-day rollout. Now, in a twist that goes against recent history, there are signs that Francona may wait to announce his choice until this weekend or just before game one on Monday in hopes of providing a big boost before the series opens.

In addition to giving some playoff-eve energy to the Red Sox, a late-in-the-week rollout would have another benefit in the eyes of his loyalists. It could help overshadow the other dominant story heading into the playoff, which is the long-running drama involving Red Sox pitcher Clay Buchholz and his girlfriend, Erica Ericsen, the 2007 Penthouse Pet of the year.

An announcement late in the week suggests that the Red Sox coaching staff believes that, in an era of 24/7 coverage and increasingly shortened news cycles, sustaining interest in a multi-day rollout has become increasingly difficult. Last year, Francona, the World Series winning manager, choreographed a five-day rollout of his choice of starting pitchers. Media attention spans today are considerably shorter.

Francona could move whenever he’s ready, but if he makes his announcement sooner than Friday, it would mean disrupting a schedule that is already set. He will be in Boston on Tuesday for a meeting with the coaching staff, an important event that he probably won’t want to overshadow with a pitching lineup announcement.

One possibility is Curt Schilling will get the call in game one. Schilling ….

Duke Cunningham, Mike Aguirre and Sign On radio

I was on Chris Reed’s radio show on Sign On Radio this morning, an Internet radio station run by the San Diego Union-Tribune. Chris is an editorial writer and blogger at the San Diego Union-Tribune.

We started talking about Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s request for a commutation, but then Chris asked me about a piece I wrote back in February on San Diego City Attorney Mike Aguirre.

That piece caused a bit of a stir, I guess, because I asked a question that nobody else was asking. Aguirre, our elected city attorney, called the mayor “schizophrenic” and told a San Diego Union-Tribune that he was “pathological.”

That struck me as odd because many people say privately that Aguirre is the one with mental problems. But if you, as a reporter, raised this issue, Aguirre suddenly got defensive. Or hinted at forces out to stop him. Or wrote a letter to your editor telling you to get out of the office more.

Then today I spotted news that Aguirre’s brother, a wealthy attorney, is working as an “unpaid intern.” Double the fun!

I voted for Aguirre because I thought we needed someone to shake things up in paradise or Enron-by-the-sea as The New York Times called us.

I just don’t like bullies.

The Princess Mariana

On my way to dinner with some friends last night, I spotted this megayacht docked along Harbor Drive in San Diego.

Today, the Union-Tribune had a small item about this 258-foot yacht. It’s called the Mariana. It’s not just a megayacht, it’s one of the world’s biggest megayachts.  It has six staterooms, a 13-seat cinema, a wine cellar, a pool, and six decks, including a party deck with a dance floor and grand piano. You can rent it for 610,000 euros a week.

The Port of San Diego is rolling out the welcome wagon for the Mariana, the first to dock at its brand-new megayacht “Mediterranean mooring.” Yesterday, the Mariana notified the Coast Guard that it had dumped about 30 gallons of diesel fuel in San Diego Bay.

The yacht’s owner is Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Peralta Quintero.

Peralta made his fortune in 1994 by selling his family-owned Iusacell company to it to Bell Atlantic for $1.2 billion. This is reportedly his seventh yacht.

An investigation by Frontline’s Lowell Bergman turned up a Bell Atlantic confidential document that described the Peraltas as Mexican “robber baron[s]” who have always “had top-level collaborators in the Mexican government.”

In the middle of the Bell Atlantic deal, Peralta wired $50 million to the Swiss bank account of the Mexican president’s corrupt brother, Raul Salinas as part of a handshake deal between the two men. Swiss prosecutors say Salinas used the account to launder money from drug dealers. Peralta insisted the money had nothing to do with drugs.

Peralta also paid Carlos Hank Rohn $100 million as part of the cell-phone deal. Hank Rohn owned the franchise for Guadalajara and that was included in the purchase. Hank Rohn paid $10 million for it — a $90 million profit.

Hank was not only linked to Salinas, but a leaked U.S. government report called the Hank family a “major threat” because of the family helps narcotraffickers move drugs and launder money. (Hank’s flamboyant brother Jorge served as Tijuana’s mayor)

In 1997, Peralta was charged with fraud in Mexico for failing to pay $5 million in taxes and then acquitted. In 2002, he tried to buy the Anaheim Angels from Walt Disney Co. The next year, he got the Mariana, named for his wife.

So welcome to San Diego, Carlos Peralta! The Mariana, by the way, is homeported in the offshore tax haven of the Grand Cayman islands.