A Rape Trial Resulting From a Night of Drinking and Drugs Has Left Tampa Wondering How the Sons of 5 Prominent Families Could Have Gotten So . . . : Out of Control

They were the children of privilege.

As boys, they went to school together, joined the same Scout troop and passed their teen-age years around the pool at the Palma Ceia Golf and Country Club or sailing in Tampa Bay.

They dressed a certain way, in khaki and Polo shirts, and met at the same bars. They did the same drugs. They went to college but felt no pressure to finish.

They were boys who grew older but who never grew up.

In a cold, high-ceilinged courtroom last week, former Tampa Tribune President James F. Urbanski listened as one of the boys--his 25-year-old son, Mark--told a jury about a woman he had met in a dance club last spring: “She was not commanding as much respect from the guys as we would normally give other, more ladylike females.”

She used profanity, Mark Urbanski said, and smoked cigarettes, and the green stretch pants and black top she was wearing marked her as, well, different.

So Urbanski and four friends whom he repeatedly referred to as “the boys” or “the fellows” took the woman to his parents’ home. In the master bedroom, they engaged in an orgy of sexual behavior that has shocked this bay-side city from boardroom to boat dock.

Testifying as a prosecution witness, Urbanski detailed a long night of drinking and drug-taking that eventually led to three counts of sexual battery against Carl J. Allison, 26. After “dosing” the 22-year-old Clearwater, Fla., woman with several hits of LSD and possibly rendering her unconscious, Allison was accused of repeatedly violating her with various objects as Urbanski and the three others stood around, jeering and cheering. Urbanski said he took photographs.

The ordeal ended only when Allison grabbed a statuette of Jesus off a bedroom dresser with the intent of using it in the next assault, Urbanski told the jury: “I said, ‘No. We can’t have this. It’s sacrilegious.’ ”

An hour or so after hearing his son on the witness stand, a shaken James Urbanski sat in a dimly lighted hotel lounge and, his hands clasped on the table in front of him, reflected on what he had just heard.

“The statue of Christ!” he exclaimed grimly. “Thank God they had the sense to stop there.”

This is the “other” Florida rape case, an incident that took place 28 days after and 200 miles across the state from the more celebrated one in Palm Beach in which William Kennedy Smith, nephew of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), was accused of sexual battery.

There are similarities: The accuser met the defendant and his pals in a trendy bar. The alleged attack took place at the home of a prominent family. By willingly accompanying the five men after a night of drinking, some have suggested, the woman invited the ensuing events. And, when an investigation of the charges went unreported in the local press for days, a cover-up was alleged.

Late Thursday, another similarity emerged: The accuser wasn’t believed. After almost nine hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted Allison of the three sexual battery charges. He was convicted of intent to deliver LSD and of evidence tampering, both felonies, as well as of a misdemeanor charge of petty theft of the woman’s driver’s license. He is to be sentenced April 27--exactly one year after the incident.

But despite the verdict, which surprised many in Tampa, the differences between the Urbanski case, as it has been known, and that of Smith are profound.

Although the Smith case became a media circus, covered by reporters from around the world, the fortunes of the Kennedy family ultimately have little lasting effect on the people of Palm Beach. The Kennedys are old money, like royalty, and only occasional visitors in a high-society playground where people come and go with the seasons.

This trial attracted little attention from out-of-towners, but the testimony of the five men has rocked mainline Tampa, causing many in this sun-splashed city--particularly those in the stately residential neighborhoods of south Tampa--to take a hard look at who they are.

“I think the general feeling here is, ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’ ” says Nancy Ford, a longtime friend of three of the families involved. “The media has portrayed these boys as spoiled brats, and I hate the thought that the parents are somehow being blamed for what they have done. They treated that woman worse than an object. They went out of control. We call them boys, but they are men--past the point where their families can control them.”

Perhaps no one has publicly suffered more than Jim Urbanski, a former Tampa Citizen of the Year and a civic leader here for decades, a man known for his deeds in the community and in the Roman Catholic church in which his four children were raised.

Called home the day after the incident from his beach house--where he and his wife, Ann, were spending the weekend--Urbanski did not alert his newspaper to the police investigation; a Tampa television station broke the story nine days later. Shortly thereafter, Urbanski was chastised in a Tribune editorial that charged police, politicians and prosecutors with orchestrating a cover-up.

In December, Urbanski ended his 31-year career at the Tribune, 10 months before his 65th birthday--his scheduled retirement date. He denies that he was forced to leave but does insist that he was treated unfairly.

“I think they went beyond what was required in the editorial,” he says. Defending his decision not to tell Tribune editors of the investigation, he adds: “I had no responsibility to report an investigation. A charge, yes, but not an investigation.”

Besides, he notes, “a police detective told us nothing would probably come of it.”

Much did come of it, however. Mark Urbanski was initially charged with one count of rape and with evidence tampering. He admitted destroying a roll of film he took of the partially nude woman lying on his parents’ bed. The rape charge was dropped in January when Urbanski agreed to plead guilty to evidence tampering and to a misdemeanor charge of failing to report a crime. Now enrolled in an alcohol- and drug-abuse treatment center in New York, he has been sentenced to six years’ probation.

Three other “fellows”--Charles Hanlon, 25, Thomas A. Smith, 22, and Michael Petti, 20--were granted immunity in exchange for their testimony against Allison.

Each told the jury that the woman appeared to be unconscious when the sexual acts occurred, and the woman said she could remember little of that night.

But in three hours on the witness stand, Allison asserted that the woman was a willing, conscious participant. And although he and the four others were laughing and snapping pictures and “acting like jerks,” Allison said, “I didn’t think it was wrong. No one was hurting anyone.”

Barry Cohen, a lawyer representing the accuser, whose identity has not been made public, says the five men “thought they didn’t have to follow society’s guidelines. They thought they could get away with this stuff just because of the family you come from.”

Vowing to file a civil suit against the families involved, Cohen contends the case was haunted by insider politics from the start. When the woman finally fled the Urbanski home just after daylight last April 27, she went across the street to a neighbor, George Pennington, who happened to be the top aide to Tampa Mayor Sandy Freedman.

Instead of dialing 911, Pennington called his boss. Mayor Freedman called the police chief at home. The chief called 911.

Police arriving at the Urbanski home interviewed the woman and took her to be examined by a doctor, who found evidence of sexual penetration and bruises on her back. But they did not interview Urbanski, Allison and the others until days later.

Eventually, the Hillsborough County prosecutor withdrew from the case, and Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles appointed a special prosecutor after it was revealed that an assistant state attorney had been with another group of men who had picked up the same woman at another bar several days before the alleged rape. Cohen calls the withdrawal “just an excuse to get off the case, a political excuse not to open that bag of worms.”

But the bag had been opened, and the stories from the witness stand and from sworn statements made many observers squirm.

The sequence of events began late on a Friday afternoon when Florida State University students Urbanski, Hanlon and Smith, along with community college student Petti, left the state capital of Tallahassee in Smith’s black Jeep Cherokee for a weekend at home in Tampa. On the drive south, the four shared a case of beer. Some LSD and marijuana also were consumed.

Arriving at the Urbanski house at about 11 p.m., the four drank more beer, showered and then headed out for a night of barhopping. They went to Pedro’s, where they downed shots of liqueur and were joined by Allison. He said at the trial that he had been tripping on LSD.

From Pedro’s, the five went to a downtown nightspot called the Hub for more drinks. When it closed at 3 a.m., they walked to an after-hours place called the 911. There, the five drank more and, Urbanski said, he and Allison dropped another hit of LSD. And they met the young woman from Clearwater.

Urbanski said he invited her “to party” at the Urbanski home. En route, he testified, Allison reported that he had “dosed” the woman’s beer with LSD. Once in the house, she was fed a cracker on which four hits of acid had been concealed under a bleu cheese salad dressing.

The woman said she had agreed to go with Urbanski because he and his friends seemed “nice.” But, she tearfully testified, she passed out and upon awakening, “I felt so dirty. They were all laughing at me. They said, ‘You were having a good time last night--you enjoyed it.’ ”

In closing arguments, prosecutor Hardy Pickard said: “Too many people feel that unless a man uses physical force against a woman . . . it’s not rape. It’s sad that the young men in the house that night apparently felt that what they were doing to this young lady was not rape, but was in fact fun and games.”

Defense attorney Norman Cannella countered by pointing out inconsistencies in the several versions of events the woman had offered police, creating what he called “a plethora of reasonable doubt, particularly in regard to whether the victim was physically helpless to resist.” He later charged the state attorney with bowing to “public pressure to prosecute because of the high-profile nature of the participants.”

Cannella adds: “I firmly believe that if the young men had $400 (an amount that at least two of the men testified the woman had demanded in exchange for not calling police), we never would have seen the case in court.”

In the aftermath of the verdict, the people of Tampa were left with a variety of impressions based on what they heard in two weeks of often graphic testimony, not only about the alleged assault but also about a style of life.

Nancy Ford says she is sure the case will be a staple of conversations for some time.

“This has scarred Tampa,” she says. “What frightens me is that we might be so far behind in our thinking about women that it has been passed on to our youth. These boys didn’t think of her as a human being, and that really bothers me.”

Cannella, Allison’s attorney, sees it differently.

“This case has been a revelation to the community of Tampa, particularly as to the younger generation’s sexual mores,” says Cannella, whose client attempted suicide last September. “The activities that were described in the trial are commonplace. And it does not worry me. People should be allowed to engage in whatever sexual activity they desire as long as it’s not violent. And I believe that’s what we had here.”

On the day he testified, Mark Urbanski wore a gray suit and a red tie and spoke coolly about the events that he said tumbled “out of control.” He expressed no remorse. For him, he said, the fun in the bedroom was marred when one of his companions leaped off the bed and broke a night stand that “was put together cheaply.”

At that point, Urbanski testified, “I said, ‘That’s it.’ Something had gotten broken, and that’s what I was worried about.”

On the day he heard that testimony, James Urbanski, in the dark of the hotel lounge, promised not to retreat from community activities, to take strength from faith, family and friends, and to keep going.

As he began to enumerate the civic causes for which he still works, the 6 o’clock news came on, and he got up from his chair to watch the report on the trial. Suddenly, the giant screen was filled with the face of his son, who told the jury that after he had chased the others from his parents’ bedroom, he went back upstairs, “hoping I could arouse (the woman) to have sex with me.”

James Urbanski returned to his seat, looking close to tears. “The worst part was that I had a son charged with a sex crime,” he finally said. “But now--whatever happens--he won’t have to go through life with that stigma.”