Audio By Carbonatix
It’s a good thing Leonard Carlo’s head is almost as big as his mouth. Whenever the 67-year-old former tavern owner locks horns with authorities, which seems to happen a lot, he pays a visit to his favorite tattoo parlor and gets another anti-establishment slogan inked on his hairless dome.
In August 1999, after state liquor investigators raided his notorious Colorado Springs watering hole, Leonard’s II, and confiscated 29 signs featuring his favorite four-letter expletive, Carlo had this tattooed on his head: “Fuck U. Leave Me the FUCK Alone.” And eventually, they did. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, Carlo won a freedom-of-speech lawsuit, the state returned his signs, and the bar remained open (“The Mouth That Roared,” January 13, 2000). The tattoo stayed, too.
But in October 2000, the bearded, cantankerous, pot-smoking grandfather became ensnared in an undercover sting operation that left him facing 21 counts of drug dealing, drug possession and abusing a police informant. This time the bar was closed, and Carlo was tossed in jail for eleven days — without being read his rights, charged with a crime or allowed to post bond, he says. And when he did finally straggle out, he headed straight to Snake’s tattoo parlor and added another salvo: “Bond Me Motherfuckers Right.”
Now Carlo is at it again.
In April, he took his attorney’s advice and pleaded guilty to cocaine possession in exchange for the dismissal of all other drug charges. He’s serving two years’ probation for a crime that he maintains he didn’t commit. To prove his sincerity, he squeezed two more words onto his cranium: “Victim” and “Vicissitude,” in recognition of the unexpected, and unwelcome, changes in his life. “This cost me my house, my wife, my business and my good name,” Carlo laments. “I’m flat fuckin’ busted. I have to live on what my daughter gives me. I’ll tell you, if I could cry, I would cry, but it don’t do no good.”
In their case against him, authorities portrayed Carlo as a violent man who ran a large cocaine-distribution ring from Leonard’s II that produced as much as $40,000 in one night. Carlo says the entire case was built on the word of an informant who took eager law-enforcement officials for a ride. They pressed that case because they wanted to get even with Carlo for his media-generating freedom-of-speech lawsuit, he says.
“Everything they said against me was lies,” he insists. “This is all over one word. It ain’t like I’m a child abuser or a rapist or a robber. I just love the word. And if I ain’t saying it, I’d like to be doing it. But I can’t even do it anymore. They took everything but my faith and my hope and my faith in God.”
Carlo is now trying to find an attorney who will help him fight the establishment once more. So far, he hasn’t found a taker, but he’s undaunted.
“What happened to me ain’t right,” he says. “If they can do that to me, they can do that to anyone.”
And besides, he still has room for another tattoo.
“I’ve got a big head,” he says
