his infidelities and workaholic tendencies, and he fathered two children out of wedlock. With ex-wife no. 1, he was on the losing end of the biggest divorce settlement in Maryland history. And when it was clear he was going down in flames, he tried to stick it to her attorney by paying his court-mandated fee of $277,000 in small coins.
Determined to keep unions out of his trucking and barge businesses, he got so many death threats he started packing a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, hired a bodyguard and wore a flak jacket at public events. He even looked into buying a bullet-proof car built like a tank, but balked when told it got only six miles to a gallon of gas.
There were multiple business setbacks, too, misfortunes so profound his friends thought he belonged on suicide watch.
He lost millions when a truck dealership he owned went belly-up. Years later, he lost many millions more and was left empty and saddened when he stepped down as chairman and CEO of his beloved 1st Mariner Bank, the “neighborhood bank” that foundered during the housing crisis and had federal regulators circling like vultures.
And when he couldn’t obtain permanent financing and had to sell the iconic 17-story 1st Mariner Tower --- the one he built that helped transform the blighted Canton waterfront into East Baltimore’s “Gold Coast”—another little piece of Hale’s soul seemed to go with it. As did another huge chunk of his bank account.
In the midst of it all, he survived three plane crashes. After one, in which he splashed down in the Chesapeake Bay at the height of his squabbles with the Teamsters and International Longshoreman’s Union, a former FBI supervisor urged him to have the engine tested to see if it had been tampered with.
The test came back negative. But Hale was only slightly comforted, subscribing as he does to the theory famously articulated in Joseph Heller’s brilliant anti-war satire “Catch-22”: “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.”
Someone, it seems, was always after Ed Hale: union goons, divorce attorneys, bank regulators—even the angry ex-boyfriends of some of the stunning young women he dated over the years. And along the way there was a strained relationship (to put it mildly) with his father and bitter feuds with his three children, other family members, former business associates and friends that often lasted for years.
“He doesn’t just burn bridges, he stomps on their embers,” says long-time friend A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the former head of the venerable investment firm Alex. Brown & Sons and former executive director of the CIA.
“He’s the best friend you could have—and he’d be the worst enemy,” says Edie Brown, the veteran Baltimore publicist who has known Hale for decades or since, she says, “he was poor.”
But if you had a friend in Ed Hale, you had a friend for life—especially during the bad times.
Go ask Bill Eyedelloth, a longshoreman and one of Hale’s hunting buddies, about Hale’s kindness and generosity toward his pals when they’re down.
Four years ago, Eyedelloth is working a crane at the Port of Baltimore when he’s overcome by a stabbing pain at the base of his skull. The pain worsens until his head feels ready to explode. He waves off worried pleas from co-workers to let them call an ambulance. Instead, barely able to focus, he somehow drives himself to University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Medical Center in Bel Air, where his wife, Cathy, once worked as a nurse.
The doctors examine him. The diagnosis shakes him to his very core: brain hemorrhage.
“Call Ed,” Eyedelloth gasps to Cathy from a gurney in the Intensive Care Unit. “He’ll know what to do.”
Hale gets on it right away. He makes a few calls, arranges to have Eyedelloth transferred to Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, with its top-notch neurology and neurosurgery units. Eyedelloth spends 10 excruciating days in a haze of painkillers as doctors monitor the healing of a “vein bleed” in his brain.
On the day he finally gets word that he won’t need surgery, 15 of his worried family members are gathered at the hospital. Hale is there, too. He promptly offers everyone the use of his condo to shower and freshen up, then takes them all out to dinner in Little Italy and picks up the tab.
Ken Jones, a former vice-president of Hale’s trucking firm, is another who can tell you what it’s like to have Ed Hale in your corner during a crisis.
When Jones’ dad is dying of cancer in 2000, Hale comes to him one day and says: “Pick out a Saturday.” Hale knows Jones’ dad likes to gamble. But Hale also knows a long car trip to Atlantic City would be too much for the old fellow at this late stage of his illness.
So Hale puts his plane and pilot at Jones’ disposal. And on a glorious weekend morning, Jones, his mom and his sick dad fly from Martin State Airport in Middle River up to Atlantic City.
The old man has the time of his life and wins five grand playing the slots and blackjack. And when the three arrive back at the plane for the return flight home, there’s champagne chilling in an ice bucket, courtesy of Ed Hale, to cap off the day.
“My dad talked about it for the next month or two before he finally passed,” Jones said. “It was the high point of his life.”
Hale’s fierce sense of loyalty to those he’s close to is why Maryland Congressman C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger calls him a “foxhole friend.”
“In politics, you’re up, you’re down,” Ruppersberger said. “But it seemed Ed would always be with you when times were tough or times were good. But if you weren’t his friend, watch out. I think he saw almost everyone as an adversary.”
Yes, there’s that side of Ed Hale, too.
He remains, at 67, a polarizing figure. For every one who speaks glowingly of his accomplishments, there’s another who wants to push him down a flight of stairs. As with many wealthy and powerful individuals, allegations of unsavory business practices have dogged him throughout his career. Over the years, he gained a reputation as a tough, ruthless businessman with a penchant—at least early in his career—for suing at the drop of a hat. (For the record, he won the vast majority of those suits.)
“If I had an 800-lb gorilla sitting on Ed and a .45 at his head, he’d still be telling me he’d kick my ass,” said John Arnscott, who bought Hale’s dying Peterbilt truck dealership years ago after a series of tooth-and-nail negotiating sessions.
Proud, impatient, demanding, profane, vain—sure, he’s had a little work done on his face, which he’s not secretive about—Hale is all of those things, too. Like many who have achieved enormous success in life, he’s a complicated man.
He’s also funny, thoughtful, well-read, a life-long Democrat with a finely-honed sense of social justice who nevertheless espouses traditional Republican ideals of lower taxes, curbed entitlement programs and wariness of government intrusion in the free market.
Long ago, he bleached almost all traces of a “Bawlmer” accent from his speech in order to appear more worldly in his business dealings. He arranges dried flowers and has designed the interiors of both his homes, not to mention the exterior of the distinctive 1st Mariner Tower that rises from the Canton landscape like the jutting finger of God.
Yet his humor can veer to the sophomoric and the scatological, especially when he’s hunting with his buddies on his Easton, Md., farm or off on fishing trips to the pristine lakes of northern Canada.
(This much is certain:
