Check One: True or False?

More than a month ago, I wrote a piece about some Lower West Side delis whose owners told me that Ellicott District Councilmember Brian Davis had bounced checks in their stores.

The story originally came my way via Buffalo firefighter Bryon McIntyre, who unsuccessfully ran against Davis in the 2007 Democratic primary. McIntyre heard about the bounced checks while walking the district, talking to voters. He told me what they had told him, and I went and talked to some store owners, who reluctantly confirmed they’d had some trouble with Davis’s checks. They were reluctant because they were scared. “He has done bad to me,” one store owner finally admitted, “but I don’t want to do bad to him.” Then he told me that Davis had given him a check and asked him to wait two weeks to cash it. He said it was about two months before the check was made good.

Last week, McIntyre dropped off the photo below and to the right, which he took in that same deli.

That’s Davis’s check, up on the wall, the traditional public outing for a bad check. It’s difficult to read his name on the check because of the quality of the photo, but the signature is unmistakably that of Davis, as you can see by comparing it to Davis’s signature on his 2008 ethics disclosure form (pictured above the check), filed with Buffalo’s City Clerk.

The check was taped to a copy of Davis’s district newsletter. The amount appears to be $430. When I brought the photo to the deli and showed it to the owner—the man who had told me before about his trouble with Davis’s check—he flipped out. He told me he didn’t want trouble, and that he’d told the same thing to the other reporters and TV news crews who’d come to visit the store, asking about Davis’s checks. About 10 minutes after I left his store, his nephew called me and told me that nothing his uncle had told me in February was true. Rather, he said, an employee had posted the check on the wall—which he confirmed belonged to Davis—by mistake, after trying to cash it sooner than he was supposed to. He said the check had cleared after five days, just as Davis had told him it would. He said his uncle was not the owner of the store; when I asked him why his uncle and another employee had told me the uncle was the owner, the nephew said he didn’t know.

So I now had two different stories. In both stories, Davis bounced a check, but there are two explanations: the first version, in which Davis bounced a check that took some time to be made good; and the second version, in which an employee posted the check on the wall by mistake, after trying to cash it too soon. Which story is true?

I’ve been trying for nearly two months to get Davis by phone or by email to talk about this issue, but he doesn’t return my calls. I emailed him a copy of this photo on on Monday, March 23. He made no reply, so I emailed it again the next day—and then again that Friday, saying I’d publish the picture online very shortly if I did not receive an answer. To that, his chief of staff, Kimberly German, replied. She wrote back that Davis was out of the office until Tuesday, March 31, but he would call me then. She said she’d spoken with the nephew at the market in question, who told her he’d spoken to me, too, and he had assured her there had been no problem with the check. She said he’d told him had paid for supplies for a community event.

I replied that it sounded like the sort of expense that would be paid for or reimbursed out of a campaign account. I told German that I could find no record of such an expense in Davis’s campaign finance disclosure forms. I asked her if she could tell me what the event was, and find some record of the purchase—and possibly tell me the date the check was written and the date it cleared the bank.

She wrote back that Davis would call me when he got back into the office on Tuesday. He hasn’t called.

I don’t really believe the nephew; it’s my experience that the first version of a story is usually closest to the truth. My guess is that Davis told the store’s owner to wait a certain amount of time to cash the check. (This alone is problematic. Would the store’s owners take a post-dated check from me or you? Did they take the check because Davis has the power to close their store, as indeed he had already done once before?) When that period of time had elapsed, I think they tried to cash the check and it bounced. I think they got angry and posted the check on the wall, where McIntyre saw it and snapped a picture of it. I think that eventually the check was made good, either by Davis or someone else, and the check came off the wall.

And I think now they wish they’d never put it there to begin with, because they’re terrified of retribution. And I don’t blame them.

In January, it came out that Davis had bounced a much larger check—about $3,500—for rent for the restaurant One Sunset. Davis and his lawyer successfully negotiated with Buffalo Police to have that treated as a civil matter. (A party involved in the police investigation tells me that Davis apparently gave Brinkworth the check on a Friday, but dated it for the next day; in the eyes of the BPD, that made the check a “promissory note,” which removes the criminality from the fact that the check bounced, that Davis kept assuring Brinkworth he’d make it good but never did, that Davis stopped taking Brinkworth’s calls.) Two deli store owners pointed out to me that if Davis was able to wriggle out from under that bounced check, then he’d live another day to punish them for talking about the checks they’d bounced in their stores.

But I think Davis is scared, too, because he’s been dodging questions on this allegation since February. The most he’s said is that the allegations were spread by “a political rival.” Well, it’s true that McIntyre remains a political rival, but the story McIntyre told me, and backed up with photographic evidence, was confirmed by three deli store owners on the Lower West Side.

Until one of them recanted.

On Wednesday, I once again asked German to provide some record of the check in question, and to name the event for which it was supposed to have been used to buy supplies. She did not reply, and neither did Davis.

Council President Dave Franczyk has a letter asking him to investigate Davis’s behavior before it begins to reflect badly on the Council as a whole. (Davis tried unsuccessfully to keep that letter out of the public record, pretending to the City Clerk’s office that he had negotiated with its author, attorney William F. Trezevant, to retract it.) Franczyk has said that he would like Davis to respond to these allegations and clear th e air, to “get ahead of this.” So far, Davis hasn’t done that.

There are the elements of the story. What do you think is true?

—geoff kelly