One of the owners of the Allen & Family Appliance store on North Gay Street, which was featured prominently in today’s article about a long-running drug feud, called me this morning to dispute any allegations that his business is connected to criminal activity. The store was the setting for a quadruple shooting last May, in which two people were killed. Detectives followed a blood trail inside the store and found ammunition and a handgun. Two of the people who were struck, a confidential informant told an ATF agent, had orchestrated the kidnapping of a rival drug dealer’s brothers, according to documents filed in federal court.

Paul Ray, who said he is a co-owner of the store, said neither he nor those who run the store are connected to drug dealing or violence. “We’re just trying to make a living here,” he said. Ray acknowledged that police are likely monitoring people coming in and out of the store, “and they’ll see what we’re about – we’re hard working and not involved in that stuff.”

When I went to the store Wednesday to try to locate a family member willing to discuss the allegations, I was told no one was available. What I saw was about a half dozen young kids, hosing down refrigerators and dunking rags into soapy water to scrub used washing machines that they sell for $99. Everything about the place was modest, hardly the setting where drug kingpins would have counted $500,000 in ransom money; a typical small East Baltimore business trying to make ends meet.

Ray complained that the article was the second bit of bad publicity for the area in recent weeks. Last month, a company published a list of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country and listed the intersection right where his store sits, at North Avenue and Bel Air Road, as the fifth most dangerous location in the country. The company explained to me a convoluted way that they came to determine this distinction. Still, police stats and the Baltimore Sun’s homicide map indeed confirm that it’s at least one of the more dangerous places in the city, if not the country.

I couldn’t look up Ray in the public court record database (there was a few people with that name and I wasn’t sure which was him), but it’s true that neither he or the store’s other co-owner, Torrance Allen, who is listed as the license holder for the company are believed to be associates involved with the gang, at least according to the sources I’ve consulted. Allen has a drug conviction in which he received 20 years in prison, with 12 years of that sentence suspended, but that was in 1991.

Ray said that they’re going to continue with business as usual.

“We still got washers and dryers,” Ray said.