TORPY: The case that helped kill Buckhead’s party, 25 years after Ray Lewis

They ended up bleeding out on a Buckhead street from vicious knife wounds delivered in a frenzied and utterly stupid late-night brawl.

The case sparked intense publicity. It had a future Hall of Famer, a limousine, mink coats, politics, sheer brutality and, ultimately, renowned lawyers locked in a bitter fight.

That notoriety is often cited as the death knell for the rambunctious nighttime scene of perhaps 50 bars and clubs that made up Buckhead Village. The case didn’t actually kill it. But it sure cemented its demise.

The area around Peachtree Street and East Paces Ferry Road back then was a regional destination.

“There was something for everyone: Dueling pianos, a Seventies bar, hip-hop and sports bars,” said Michael Krohngold, co-owner of Tongue & Groove, a club then in the heart of that scene. For bar owners, he added, the area “was fish in a barrel.”

Sunday nights were largely dead, that is until bar manager Brian Arlt thought to bring in DJs and cater to a Black clientele. The wildly popular “urban nights” were born, pumping new life — and money — into the scene.

“Nightlife was booming,” Arlt told me this week. “Atlanta was open until 4 a.m., and then there were the after-hours clubs.”

Arlt’s nightclub was reborn as Cobalt and was a hit with African Americans, bringing in rappers, pro athletes and folks who wanted to experience the vibe. Other clubs followed suit.

But with success came the backlash to increased noise, traffic and violence.

Just two weeks before the Super Bowl, when Ray Lewis and his crew partied at the Cobalt, a man was shot to death outside that same nightclub. That killing barely registered a blip in the news.

Then came Jan. 31, 2000.

At about 3:30 a.m. — closing time — Lewis, wearing, in his estimate, a “quarter-million dollars” of jewelry and fur, left the Cobalt with his contingent of six men and four women.

They ran into the Akron group. Trouble seemed preordained. Both groups had been drinking, were armed and had men with criminal records. Both had rappers who reveled in tales of the mean streets. Both even had a guy nicknamed “Shorty.”

A Lewis acquaintance named Reginald Oakley started jawing with the Ohio bunch. Lewis shoved him into the limo, but Oakley jumped out again to continue the debate, and Jacinth “Shorty” Baker smashed a Champagne bottle over his head.

Several people piled out of the limo, including Joseph Sweeting, AKA “Shorty,” who was thrown to the ground by two men and pummeled. He regained his footing and tore into an attacker, a witness said.

Credit: AJC

Credit: AJC

Duane Fassett, Lewis’ longtime limo driver, told police he saw Oakley chase and slam Baker to the street, striking him while he was down. He also said Lewis grabbed Lollar, and then Sweeting hit him.

Former Fulton Prosecutor Clint Rucker told me that then-Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell and then-Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard met that morning, just hours after the killings. The matter was that sensitive to the leaders of this image-conscious city.

The case was hurriedly indicted, although Rucker and detectives wanted to investigate further. Lewis, Sweeting and Oakley were charged with murder, and then their attorneys, a star-studded bunch in their own right, called the DA’s bluff and demanded a speedy trial.

As it turned out, the prosecution was not ready.

Potential witnesses melted away, and others, like Fassett, the limo driver, changed their stories or suddenly got forgetful. Howard, who was rusty in his courtroom demeanor, was caught flat-footed during Fassett’s bout of amnesia. And then Howard, to the astonishment of legal observers, did not introduce Fassett’s earlier, more damning statements to the jury.

“Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong,” said Rucker, who carved out a career as the Fulton DA’s big-case prosecutor over the next two decades.

Credit: Kimberly Smith/AJC File Photo

Credit: Kimberly Smith/AJC File Photo

Lewis pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge mid-trial and, suddenly, morphed from star defendant to star witness. But he gave prosecutors only tepid testimony.

Steve Sadow, Sweeting’s attorney, made the muddy debacle look like a case of self-defense, which it very well might have been.

Sweeting and Oakley were acquitted by a jury who had no earthly idea what really went down that night.

Lee Morris, an Atlanta City Council member from Buckhead, stepped up his campaign to curtail nighttime activity.

But, he said, “The issue became one of race, as all things do in Atlanta. They were saying: ‘You’re doing this just because Black people are coming to the bars.’”

Soon, Cobalt closed, its reputation in tatters.

Three years later, a wild shootout outside the aptly named Club Chaos led to the deaths of two men, including a former bodyguard for music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is now having his own legal woes.

A man named Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory was charged with murder but never indicted. He was later sent away for running BMF (Black Mafia Family), a massive drug gang that had a hip-hop arm to launder proceeds.

Credit: special

Credit: special

Within a month of the Chaos shootout, Atlanta’s new mayor, Shirley Franklin, and the City Council cut back bar hours. In 2007, Buckhead Village was razed for new development.

Frank Ski, a longtime radio DJ and impresario, was in nightclubs five nights a week back then.

The Lewis case, he said, “changed the whole landscape in Atlanta. That single event.”

The professional teams put the kibosh on their athletes nightclubbing, he said, curtailing a key ingredient of the clubs’ celebrity cache.

And, he added, publicity from the case “was also the nail in the coffin that separated white and Black nightclubs.” Before, the clubs were clustered together, he said. But not so today.

It was a violent night long ago that changed a fiber of a city.