Developer Patrick Turner leaving a Baltimore courtroom today with his lawyer.

Story by MELODY SIMMONS, Photos by FERN SHEN

     She never said thanks.

     That’s what developer Patrick Turner told jurors yesterday when asked if then-City Council President Sheila Dixon ever acknowledged his drop of $1,000 in gift cards to her City Hall office in an unmarked envelope in December 2005.

     “She never thanked me and she never mentioned it,” Turner explained, adding Dixon had the opportunity to do so on many occasions, including a birthday party for Turner’s wife on Feb. 6 at the swank Charleston restaurant in Harbor East.

     Was that because Dixon mistakenly thought they were from her developer-boyfriend Ronald Lipscomb? Or because gift card giving by developers was so perfunctory in City Hall that it wasn’t deemed worthy of comment?

     The Turner details lit up Day 3 of Mayor Dixon’s theft trial before Circuit Court Judge Dennis M. Sweeney at the Mitchell Courthouse downtown, with Turner providing the first written evidence that some of those gift cards Dixon burned through were meant for the poor.

    Turner testified that Dixon asked him to contribute gift cards to a program for “the children of Baltimore” and she “suggested” the type of card he should get. He said he marked down his two $1,000 expenditures on his credit card statement as “OFFICE/CHARITY” and the statement was shown to jurors on a screen.

     The trial entered its second week with some fireworks from Turner, a witness literally running from the courthouse after his testimony and hours of mind-numbing details about gift cards: their origin, purpose, computer footprint and application. In keeping with the surreal quality of the trial, or perhaps to break the monotony, around 4 o’clock, jurors were treated to milk and homemade cookies during a break, compliments of Judge Sweeney and his clerk.

     Dixon meanwhile, whose political career is on the line, maintained her tight composure, sipping from a Starbucks cup, pouring herself water, taking notes and working that Blackberry, under the defense table.

‘Widows and Orphans Fund?’

     Turner said on the stand that he believed the gift cards were headed to needy kids in Baltimore at Christmastime. The millionaire developer said he then forgot about the gift because he often gives freely to charity. So he was surprised, he testified, to find himself under investigation by state prosecutors in June 2008 because Dixon was accused of using some cards for personal expenditures.

     Turner, whose projects include the $150 million Silo Point luxury condos near Locust Point, said he and Dixon had formed a social friendship, and that was the reason Dixon reached out personally to ask for a stack of gift cards at Christmastime.

     (Prosecutors established that Turner has the number for Dixon’s Blackberry stored in his cell phone and the whole courtroom learned both their numbers. It’s not known whether any audience members texted these two trial headliners. One juror, however, appeared to be texting yesterday in the courtroom.)

     Turner was asked how he paid the $1,000 for the Target and Best Buy gift cards.  ”I personally bought them,” Turner said, describing how he used his personal American Express card. He later marked these purchases on his monthly bill “charity” and “office expenses,” for tax purposes, he said.

     He said he had no idea that some of the cards were used to purchase a video camera  and case at Best Buy by Dixon, items found in her home during a June 2008 raid by state prosecutors.

       Purex and Mr. Clean

        A year later, Dixon called again. This time, Turner said, he was on vacation in the Cayman Islands when his cell phone rang, but that didn’t stop him from responding immediately. He forwarded Dixon’s latest gift card request, he said, to another developer in his company, Glenn Charlow.

     Charlow purchased gift cards at Target, and prosecutors allege Dixon used some of them to purchase personal items like Vitamin water, iPod accessories, Purex Liquid and Mr. Clean. They showed receipts on the screen. Some items, it seems, she later returned, including ink cartridges and a $34.99 “Luella for Target” hobo-style purse.

    It’s unclear which Luella bag Dixon purchased. These were the only ones we could find:

A Luella hobo bag from Target (Would Dixon have gone for this graffiti print?)

Another Luella for Target hobo bag. A bit tweenish for the 55-year-old Dixon.

Developer Number Three

     Charlow has been the mystery man in the trial thus far. He was called to testify after the lunch recess yesterday, but after sitting for nearly 10 minutes in the box, was asked to step down from the witness stand after a spirited debate at the bench.

     Defense attorneys have tried to block his testimony, because he was added as a witness just before the trial started last week. Prosecutor Robert Rorhbaugh declined to comment on Charlow’s status as a potential witness.

     Gift Card-o-Rama

     Monday’s testimony began with witness Lindbergh Carpenter, a former assistant commissioner of the city’s Housing and Community Services agency who pled guilty last year to stealing seven gift cards.

     Carpenter described how he purchased 120 Toys R Us gift cards in 2007 for distribution during the mayor’s Holly Trolley tour of underserved communities. Those cards, he said, were kept in a safe in his office. But there was no accounting system in place to monitor them or their distribution during the tour, said Carpenter, who brought batches of cards out from his car for the mayor and others to give to the kids in the middle school choir that sang at the Northwest Community Center and pretty much anybody who showed up at any of the stops and was lucky enough to get one.

     Following his testimony, Carpenter exited the courtroom and broke into a sprint, running like track star through the court hallway and down the sidewalk on Calvert Street, avoiding reporters.

     Another witness, Mary Pat Fannon said Mayor Dixon had given her a $15 gift card to Toys R Us at a staff pot luck holiday party in 2007, the year Fannon worked as a legislative aid on Dixon’s staff at City Hall.

     “She handed me the card and told me to ‘buy something nice for your daughter,’ ” Fannon said. Under quetioning she acknowledged that her yearly salary at the time was $90,000 and that she and her husband, jointly, make more than $500,000 a year.

     Later in the day, Chris Thesing, a former investigator for the Maryland State Prosecutor’s Office, expanded the constellation of gift cards in the trial spotlight. He said he found the bulk of the gift cards in Dixon’s house when he searched it as part of a raid in June 2008.

     Among those cards were several not traced to those purchased for charity he said. They included Nordstrom, Best Buy, ESPN Zone, Caribou Coffee, Dunkin Donuts, Giant, Starbucks, Talbots, Legal Seafood, Blockbuster and Toys R Us.

     Thesing said he found receipts in Dixon’s house for other purchases, including some not paid for with gift cards. One was for a new suit at Nordstrom, a designer St. Johns knit that cost $1,779.75.

     “She paid for that in cash,” Thesing explained.