Cops Ring Wrong Doorbell on Chesterfield Patch Columnist

In my lifetime I have been falsely accused of things several times. I am not even counting all the times defense attorneys would try to convince a judge that when I was a police detective I didn’t advise their clients of their Miranda Rights or tricked a confession out of them.

Once when I was police detective in a Kansas City suburb, I was assigned the case of a person shot at home. The logical suspect was the victim’s live-in girlfriend, but he claimed he accidently shot himself. The girlfriend was a bartender at a local bar and restaurant. 

I had no plans to pursue the investigation without either a cooperating victim or a dead one, but the girlfriend was unaware of this. Hoping to get me off the case, she filed a complaint against me claiming that I had come into where she worked and threatened her. She claimed I did this when a group of people from the prosecuting attorney’s office and public defender’s office were in the bar. They all stated I was never in the place.

In 2003, I was the primary witness against a suburban Washington, D.C. cab driver in several cases in which his license to drive a taxicab was going to be revoked.

In Maryland, citizens can swear out complaints before a Court Commissioner against people. The cab driver, hoping to get rid of me as the witness against him, filed a complaint that I beat him with a flashlight while he was parked at the Greyhound Bus Station in Silver Spring.

The only problem with his complaint is that when I was allegedly committing an aggravated assault, I was 25 miles away working my second job as a baseball writer in a crowded press box of a Class AA minor baseball team. At the time he swore I was beating him, I was watching Jeff Wilson, a relief pitcher, blow a seventh inning lead for the Bowie Baysox. The court commissioner’s criminal summons was quickly dropped.

Wrongly accused again

In the past week, I was again falsely accused, this time by someone I wrote about for two Chesterfield Patch columns.

In 2011, I wrote two columns about former Chesterfield resident and businessman, Brian Marchant-Calsyn. He is an ex-convict who served time in the Federal Prison in Lewisburg, PA for drug distribution. After prison, Marchant-Calsyn was a salesman for S&K Investment, a company in which the two owners were convicted for running a Ponzi scheme. Marchant-Calsyn wasn’t charged.

All this brings me to Tuesday night. I was the public address announcer at the Gateway Grizzles ballpark off of I-255 in Illinois for a game between Webster University and Washington University. The 7 pm game seemed to last forever. Webster won 12-9. There were 346 pitches in the 8 ½ inning game that was over just before 10pm.

I got home a little before 11pm. I watched a George Clooney movie, The Ides of March, then went into my home office and worked on some writing projects. At 3am I took a couple of sleeping pills, went to bed and read a David Baldacci novel until 3:30am and fell asleep.

Cops turn up

I woke up with two Town and Country police officers at my door. Cpl. Mike Defoe and Officer Greg Messmer wanted to interview me. I got up, put on sweat pants and a sweatshirt, plus a pair of furry bedroom slippers.

The officers wanted to know why I was at the house of Marchant-Calsyn thirty minutes earlier taking photos of moving men loading up vans, then creating a peace disturbance getting into a shouting match. It turns out the house had been foreclosed on and Marchant-Calsyn was leaving the property.

I told the officers I wasn’t there that I was asleep. They said Marchant-Calsyn showed a moving company worker my photo and he identified me as the person taking the photos. I still maintained I was asleep and offered to let them check my cameras. They declined and left.

I made a couple calls and found out from neighbors that someone from a bank had been around recently taking photos and asking if they had seen Marchant-Calsyn.

About 2 o’clock the police called me back and said they interviewed a neighbor of Marchant-Calsyn, who said he was the one taking photos from his own backyard.

I asked if they would be writing a report and charging Marchant-Calsyn with filing a false police report. I was told they would not.

When Officers Defoe and Messmer were at my house I asked if they were familiar with the background of Marchant-Calysn. They said they weren’t.

Later that night, I was at a Clayton restaurant and bar and asked a well known local jazz trumpeter if he knew who Brian Marchant-Calsyn was. He replied, “Oh you mean the drug dealer with the fence around his house who lives by you?”

Sometimes it is an interesting world when jazz musicians know more about the 'hood than our local police.

Additional information on Marchant-Calsyn                     

• In 1999, Brian Marchant-Calsyn started an internet company called MyInjuryClaim.com. Within a year his own lawyer was featured in a Wall Street Journal article accusing him for illegal and unethical practices.
• His name until 2001 was Brian Marchant. It was the name he was convicted under and is listed on the Federal Prison website. In 2001 he changed his name to Marchant-Calsyn. He then started and folded two more internet business-recruiting companies.
• It appeared as if he struck gold with his fourth internet company, called Health Career Agents. Health Career Agents was charging people up to $50,000 for a franchise to recruit doctors for hospitals and medical centers. Marchant-Calsyn moved his offices to a building at I-64 and Mason Road. Then complaints began to be filed with the attorney general’s office. This was followed by lawsuits alleging fraud. At about the same time he sold his Chesterfield home on Eagle Manor Lane and moved to a house on two lots covering five acres at 1761 Topping Road in Town and Country.
• In 2008 he put up a wrought iron fence around his five acres, built a lighted tennis court without a permit, cut down trees without a permit and sent a threatening letter to his neighbors threatening to sue them if they continued to complain to city hall.
• At about the same time it was found that he did not have a business license for his company. By the end of 2008 he was evicted from the offices for non-payment of rent and promptly leased office space for one-year in a building on Swingley Ridge.
• The lawsuits began to mount. One former investor who claimed to have lost $49,000 was Larry White of Michigan. White set up websites that contained the name of all of Marchant-Calysn’s companies but added the word SUCKS at the end of the company name. He listed all the public records including drug convictions, lawsuits and newspaper articles. White’s sites started getting more hits than the Marchant-Calysn’s real sites.
• By 2010 Marchant-Calsyn moved his companies to his house. He listed their address on websites and with the Missouri Secretary of State at a mail drop he had at a UPS store on Manchester Road.
• In 2011 he sued White over his websites.
• White prevailed after spending $21,000 for lawyer fees when Marchant-Calsyn dropped the lawsuit just before trial.
• I also wrote regular updates about Marchant-Calsyn in a Town and Country political newsletter.
• In October, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Stephen Deere had a front page story about Marchant-Calsyn and all of the lawsuit judgments against him and his companies.