For years, the patrons of Art Bar and the many incarnations of the club at the corner of Park and Lady Streets, most recently Moda Lounge, have enjoyed free parking at night in the lot between the two Vista bars.

As many of you recently have learned, those nights are gone.

The new owner of the lot, which tax records show is a company called Park Street Parking, LLC, has an agreement with Collision1 Auto Body to patrol the lot and tow any illegally parked car, according to two metal signs posted in along the Park Street edge of the lot.

Employees of Garden Bistro, a restaurant located behind Art Bar, found out the hard way the lot is being patrolled during the daylight hours, too, as several of their vehicles ended up at Collision 1's shop.

Last Saturday night around 1 a.m., the bands at Art Bar were loading out their equipment in Art Bar's narrow strip of parking spaces when a Collision1 tow truck swooped into the lot with lights flashing, stopped in front of a vehicle parked in the middle of the lot and started lowering the tow bar.

The tow truck driver, who didn't want to give his name, said he wasn't going to tow anyone that night. Asked what he was doing there if he wasn't going to tow any cars, he replied “we're here to instill a presence.” He also said they intend to put up a barrier around the edges of the lot, “so there's no gray area.” The tow truck driver added, “If you park here and you don't have a decal, you knew better.”

He left the lot a few minutes later without any vehicles in tow.

Cars towed from the lot can be picked up at Collision1's West Beltline Boulevard facility the next day for $185; after that, they charge $25/day in storage fees.

Efforts to reach the person listed as the corporate registrant for Park Street Parking, LLC, a fellow named Brian Dumas, were unsuccessful. We wanted to ask him what his plans are for the lot but we weren't able to speak with him before press time. Mr. Dumas, if you're out there, give us a call.

Meantime, Vista bar crawlers can always leave the driving to a cabbie. Probably safer that way, anyway.

“If you want to hear some gossip,” Rod Shealy said, a speaker-wire nest of graying chest hair and an unkempt beard poking out of a Hawaiian T-shirt shirt, “come to my Christmas party.”

It was late December 2007, and Shealy was leaning against a wall in a chair in the senate office of one of his most well known political clients. 

Across the desk, Republican S.C. Sen. Jake Knotts smiled big and turned away.

The two had been digging through a stuffed black binder, an investigative dossier on Gov. Mark Sanford that the senator had compiled. There were emails, news clippings and copies of checks. The two had been plotting.

“He’ll be there,” Shealy said and jerked his thumb at Knotts, a former cop Shealy had helped craft over the years from humble beginnings into an incorrigible clot in the bloodstream of the state’s Republican establishment. “Won’t you.”

It was — as a certain charmed contingent of politicos in South Carolina had long come to understand — not a question employed by Shealy for its traditional linguistic purpose, but rather pushed as stated fact.

Knotts muttered something about a trunk full of liquor somewhere. His RSVP was implied.

Rod Shealy, who had cancer and died of brain bleeding on Aug. 18, published a half-dozen local newspapers and was the folksy proprietor of a soda fountain in Irmo, though that wasn’t the source of much of his fame. A Harper’s magazine reporter once wrote that South Carolina insiders deemed Shealy the smartest and shrewdest political consultant in the state.

A protégé of the late Lee Atwater, Shealy played politics like they were war games with the emphasis on the latter. He was an anything-goes operative who once called getting caught for violating campaign law the equivalent of receiving a political traffic ticket. 

“I don’t think I ever once saw him in anything but a Hawaiian shirt,” once said former York County Republican Rep. Carl Gullick, one of many current and past South Carolina office holders to employ Shealy as an advisor and wartime consigliere.

Known for riding dark-horse candidates from the back of the pack into public office, Shealy ran 12 of Republican Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer’s campaigns and recently helped the first black Republican House member, Tim Scott, win a Lowcountry congressional primary against a crowded field that included the son of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond.

It might be hard to say exactly how many politicians owe their careers to Shealy, but his imprint on the State House -- and, by extension, public policy in South Carolina -- would be hard to overstate.

To those who worked with and against him, Shealy was known as a mastermind of his trade, a skillful strategist in mud-pit politics with a sixth sense for the pressure points in opposing campaigns. It’s a cutthroat, street-hustling industry and he’d learned from the best during the decades that South Carolina earned its reputation as a shark-tank and the nation watched a gang of young men from the Palmetto State break into the Washington Beltway like it was a carjacking and forever change the way that hacks would run campaigns.

For close to a decade, Shealy had used Gov. Mark Sanford as a useful foil during legislative campaign seasons, which came to a head during the Republican primaries in 2008.

It was believed the governor, through a network of operatives, had given tacit consent to a legislative "hit list" targeting roughly a dozen Republicans in the General Assembly for removal in the June primaries, some of them Shealy's clients.

Former Richland Republican Rep. Bill Cotty was one of them. In his Columbia law office one day in late 2007, Cotty was filling an ashtray with Salem ultra lights and singing Shealy's praises. He said if there was one person, just one, who could bring the governor down, it was Shealy, and he might not stop until he did.

Sanford ended up taking himself down, but those who followed the governor’s fall still privately wonder if Shealy might have acted as an accelerant in the way members of the media eventually learned of Sanford's 2009 disappearance to Argentina.

"He was a 'oner'," Cotty says now, reflecting on his friend. "A o-n-e-r, exclamation point. One of a kind. He could fill your heart with joy or put fear in it. He was just plumb fun."

A disciple of Karl Rove, Shealy was known as a dirty trickster who didn’t mind being taken to the carpet for it. Those who knew him best say he found such criticism as funny as he found the game itself fun.

"He was unique in his style," says Roan Garcia-Quintana, an Upstate conservative political consultant who had worked on projects with and against Shealy in the past. "He was a very competent guy, a very colorful person."

But Garcia-Quintana doesn't hold back in describing a change he saw in Shealy, one that might draw similarities in the life of his mentor Lee Atwater, who also died from brain cancer later in life.

"Towards the end there [Shealy] started [not to] care much for the philosophy of the voters, which was one thing he used to care about," Garcia-Quintana says. "We [used to] put the philosophy above the money."

Garcia-Quintana says he recalls a conversation the two had in 2006, when Shealy was running rural Prosperity doctor Oscar Lovelace's insurgent campaign against Sanford in the Republican primary.

"[Shealy] told me he had run all the races against the conservatives up here in Greenville, and I had to hold my jaw literally with my hand," he says. "Because 20 years ago he would have never done things like that. He was always conservative anti-establishment and then in 2006 he tells me 'I don't care what they believe as long as they pay me.'"

Regardless, Shealy will leave behind much blank space on future expenditure reports for many politicians who literally owe him their careers.

And for many, Decembers will never be the same.  

Every year Shealy sent out personal invitations for his office Christmas party, an event that has become legend in Palmetto State political circles. Congressmen, legislators, policy wonks, operatives, reporters and constitutional officers would trade war stories in his Irmo newsroom as Shealy moved through the crowd, the consummate host in the nexus of South Carolina politics. 

Shealy died unexpectedly Aug. 18, though he was battling brain cancer, according to family members. He was 56.

Visitation will be from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday at Caughman-Harmon Funeral Home in Lexington, and the service will be at 11 a.m. Saturday at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Lexington.

 

 

The most famous candidate in the country was in Columbia Thursday evening, making his way through a small crowd and shaking hands, schmoozing and introducing a member of a documentary film crew that has been following him along the most written about campaign trail in America.

The candidate is not running for president, but the U.S. Senate. His name is Alvin Greene. Maybe you’ve heard of him.

Greene was in town for a meeting of the South Carolina Democratic Party executive committee and gave a brief speech to a room of about 50 at the state party's headquarters on Hampton Street.

He asked the Democrats there -- many had recently voted down a protest to his surprise primary win June 8 over former judge and legislator Vic Rawl -- to support him in the fall election against Republican U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, Green Party nominee Tom Clements and write-in candidate Mazie Ferguson.

There was a smattering of applause.  A man shouted out “I’ll vote for you.” A woman seconded it.

Greene’s speech clocked in at around 23 seconds, which is consistent with what his campaign adviser Felipe Farley had predicted weeks ago, when he noted that Greene wasn’t going to be doing any long barnburners on the stump.

When Greene finished, one of his newer advisers stood up.

“I would like to say that Alvin isn’t being short with you -– my name is Georgean McConnell and I’ve been working with Alvin -– and we have a speech committee and so forth and so I didn’t want him to get into no debates tonight or anything, because it’s really not fair since he’s been very cooperative with us.”

McConnell works at the University of South Carolina School of Music in the Center for Southern African-American Music as the gospel music ambassador. She went on to describe Greene as a quick learner and a knowledgeable person.

“So I think, in a very short time, you’re going to be seeing a very different Alvin Greene,” she said.

Following the meeting Greene met with members of the state party executive committee. He was flanked by McConnell and Upstate attorney Farley who is working in an advisory role as part of the Los Angeles-based Warren Group that is professionally handling the campaign.

The Warren Group had earlier sent out a news release announcing they’d left the campaign when Greene hired on Greenville lawyer Suzanne Coe as a campaign manager. The firm signed back on about a week later.

The possibility of another staff shakeup, though, might be lingering on the horizon.

McConnell says she’ll probably end up as Greene’s campaign manager.

Asked if she was going to take over Coe’s duties, she said, “I don’t know, I don’t necessarily have to but I’m going to have to do what has to be done.”

Regardless, whether it's genuine or just typical Southern hospitality it appears the state Democratic Party has come around to warming up to Greene's candidacy. Or maybe they've just accepted it.