‘Ace Capone’ Coles details variety of business ventures

He made money running a barbershop, a water-ice stand, and a day-care facility in Chester.

He generated cash by hosting parties and by raising and fighting pit bulls.

But he never sold kilograms of cocaine.

That was the message Alton "Ace Capone" Coles delivered to a jury Monday after taking the stand in his federal drug trafficking trial.

Wearing an orange cable-knit sweater over a highly starched white dress shirt and a white skullcap, Coles spent about two hours quietly offering a thumbnail sketch of his life and times.

He portrayed himself as a small-time drug dealer who had spent about nine months in prison on minor drug charges before his arrest in the current case. When he was released from a Delaware County Jail in August 1997, he said, he stopped "hustling" and started to concentrate on legitimate ways to make money.

"I didn't want to go back to jail," he told the jury.

Coles, who will be back on the stand when the trial resumes Tuesday morning, said he was making more than $10,000 a month in cash from his various enterprises. "I never paid taxes," he added.

Federal authorities, however, allege that Coles, 34, made millions dealing large quantities of crack and cocaine. They contend that he used his Southwest Philadelphia-based Take Down Records as a front for a $25 million cocaine- and crack-distribution network and that over an eight-year period he was responsible for putting a ton of cocaine and a half-ton of crack onto the Philadelphia drug market.

Five others, including Timothy "Tim Gotti" Baukman, 31, who co-founded the record company and whom authorities have described as Coles' top lieutenant in the drug conspiracy, are also being tried.

The case is now in its fifth week.

Coles' decision to testify in his own defense is an attempt to refute those allegations. He has insisted that he is not the kingpin that authorities have made him out to be.

Smiling occasionally and talking in a calm, matter-of-fact manner that was in sharp contrast to some of his angry tirades picked up on wiretaps played earlier in the trial, Coles said he was born in Darby, and grew up there and in Southwest Philadelphia.

He said he got the nickname "Ace" because he was a card player and gambler. At the casinos, he said, his games of choice were blackjack and craps.

Was he good at it, his lawyer, Christopher Warren, asked?

"Great at it," Coles responded without missing a beat.

He also claimed that he developed a significant income selling high-quality "cut" to drug dealers who hung out at his barbershop.

Cut, he explained, was an additive that dealers used to dilute and expand a quantity of cocaine.

Coles said he had a supplier in North Philadelphia from whom he bought cut known as "fish scale" for about $800 a kilogram. He said he would sell it, often in smaller quantities, to dealers, generating a profit of $1,000 to $2,000 for each kilo he had purchased.

He also outlined his personal relationships with three different women, two of whom are the mothers of four of his children.

One of those women, Kristina Latney, has testified for the government in the current trial.

Two other women who have also been identified as girlfriends are currently on trial with Coles.

One of his first drug arrests, he said, came as he and a girlfriend were heading for the Feather Nest Inn in Cherry Hill for a romantic tryst.

They had rented a "theme room" at the motel after returning from a night of gambling in Atlantic City where he had won $5,800, he said.

He was driving a friend's car and was stopped in the parking lot of the motel because he was spotted drinking a beer. Inside the car, he said, police found 14 small, individual-sale bags of crack cocaine.

That drug case was pending, he said, when he was jailed in Delaware County on unrelated drug-dealing charges also involving small quantities of crack and marijuana. He eventually spent about eight months in prison.

Coles said he went to barber school after graduating in 1993 from Glen Mills School, a residential school in Delaware County for court-adjudicated male delinquents. He said he opened his first shop, Outlines, in Chester in 1997 after he was released from prison.

It quickly became a neighborhood hangout and attracted local drug dealers, he said. He said he was making about $1,500 a week cutting hair himself and an additional $600 a week "renting" chairs in the shop to other barbers. A day-care center he opened next door that was run by one of his girlfriends netted about $3,000 a month, he added.

And in addition to the sale of cut to the dealers who hung as his shop, he said, he had a steady income from his dogs: pit bulls that he bred and raised for fighting.

"I couldn't even count it," Coles said when asked how much money he had made gambling on and raising fighting dogs. "I made a lot of money in dog fights."

Coles said he had formed Take Down Kennels to breed his dogs. He said he considered them "athletes," and insisted that he took "good care of" his animals.

He never saw a dog killed, he said.

"To me it was no different than a boxing match," he said of the dog fights he would attend and often sponsor. He said he had seen matches where gamblers bet from $2,500 to $93,000 on a single fight.

He said his dogs were trained, exercised and well-fed. He also acknowledged that he would inject them with steroids before a match.

Steroids, he said, "enhanced their speed, their agility and their bite."

Coles was asked by his lawyer whether he knew Michael Vick, the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback who was convicted in a high-profile illegal dog-fighting case in Georgia.

Coles replied "yes," but before he could say any more, federal prosecutor Richard Lloret objected. Judge R. Barclay Surrick would not permit Coles to continue.

Coles had just begun explaining how he got started as a rap music promoter and independent record label owner when the trial recessed for the day.

When the trial continues, the jury is expected to be shown a rap music video, "New Jack City: The Next Generation" that Take Down Records produced.

Coles and Baukman face potential life sentences if convicted.

Also on trial are James Morris, 33, a reputed cocaine supplier from Salem County, N.J.; Morris' girlfriend, Thais Thompson, 32; and two other women, Monique Pullins, 24, and Aysa Richardson, 27, who have been described as girlfriends of Coles'.