The Washington City Paper’s second Best Of D.C. issue since 1987 hits newsstands today. Since this is our staff’s second Best Of, we’re honoring the District’s second-bests in 2009. My picks—including “Second-Best Strip Club Excuse,” “Second-Best Item of Clothing to Remove at a Gay Bar,” and “Second-Best George Mason Personality” (pictured)—are after the jump.

Second-Best Dog

Second-Best Item of Clothing to Remove at a Gay Bar

Second-Best Place to Prepare for the Upcoming Apocalypse

Second-Best Use of the Postcard

Second-Best Strip Club Excuse

Second-Best Way to Pick Someone Up

Second-Best DURKL Brother

Second-Best Reason to Claim a Pew

Second-Best George Mason Personality

Second-Best Celebrity-Watching with Side of Half-Smoke

Second-Best Dude Blogger

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Vasile Graure, the Arizona truck driver convicted of setting fire to Glover Park strip club Good Guys in 2007, will be sentenced tomorrow morning at 9:30 a.m. The sentencing has been postponed several times already this year. Maybe tomorrow, we’ll finally get it over with.

On November 20, 2008, Graure was convicted of the following charges:

- Three counts of assault with intent to kill while armed

- Four counts of assault with a dangerous weapon

- One count of aggravated assault while armed

- One count of mayhem while armed

- Two counts of burglary in the second degree while armed

- One count of arson

- One count of felony destruction of property

Here’s what he could face on those charges:
- Assault With Intent to Kill While Armed (three counts): 30 years per count

- Assault With a Dangerous Weapon (four counts): 10 years per count

- Aggravated Assault While Armed: 30 years

- Mayhem While Armed: 30 years

- Arson: 10 years

- Burglary II While Armed (two counts): 30 years per count

- Felony Destruction of Property: 10 years

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

- Three counts of assault with intent to kill while armed

- Four counts of assault with a dangerous weapon

- One count of aggravated assault while armed

- One count of mayhem while armed

- Two counts of burglary in the second degree while armed

- One count of arson

- One count of felony destruction of property

Graure’s sentencing hearing will be held in January.

Defense lawyer Andrew Ferguson argued that several of the eight individuals named in the case were “misnamed and misidentified,” noting that a few never appeared to testify in front of the jury, some were unable to be located by the defense, and one, Jessica Schaeffer, was referred to in court almost exclusively by her stripper name, “Golden.” Ferguson also argued that the charge of “intent to kill” the eight individuals named had no precedent in District of Columbia arson cases—and that alighting a building did not equate to an intent to kill specific individuals.

Judge Robert Richter called the argument “silly” and said it could be argued that the people inside the strip club and close to the blaze were within a reasonable “zone of danger.” Richter denied the defense’s motion to have the charges dropped, leaving the jury to decide whether “pouring gasoline on someone and lighting them on fire” equated to an intent to kill.

Later, the customer removed his cell phone and took a photo of Gabriella. She came over to him and held out her hand for the phone, Raucci says. The man gave it to her. She waved her finger at him, as if to say, “don’t do that.” She put the phone by her purse and resumed dancing. He continued to offer her money as she danced. She ignored him.

When she left the stage, Raucci says, Gabriella gave the phone to a manager—nit not Lazorchack. The three of them spoke briefly. The music was too loud to hear. Eventually, the man paid his bill and left. Raucci didn’t see Lazorchack escort him out, he says.

At the bachelor party near Raucci, a waitress was helping a Marine remove his over-shirt and put on a Good Guys tee. Raucci heard a commotion near the door. He saw two individuals grappling. He identified one as the man with the cell phone. In court, he points to the defendant—Vasile Graure.  He had a small flame in his hand. That’s when the flame erupted into a “huge fireball,” he says.

“Everyone started yelling and trying to get out,” says Bond, a Marine Corps captain. When the flame ignited, he and his friends rushed to the exit. He looked over his shoulder and saw “an individual completely engulfed in flames.” He thought he saw another member of the bachelor party “trying to roll some of the flame off of him.” It wasn’t working.

After exiting the club, says Bond, he and another member of the party made their way to the front of the club. They opened the front door to try to find anyone left behind. They went next door to get a fire extinguisher, then returned to Good Guys and extinguished the rest of the flame, which was still burning in the club’s tables and chairs. A couple minutes later, he says, emergency personnel arrived.

At 10:30 this morning, the prosecution called Arefaine Berhane, an employee of the Glover Park Chevron station, to the stand. Berhane, who is Eritrean, speaks English at the Chevron station but appeared with a translator in court.

Berhane took over cashier duties at the Wisconsin Ave. Chevron at around 8 p.m. on the night of the fire. His first customer entered the small store attached to the station and told Berhane his car was out of gas. The customer asked to buy a red gas can with a yellow and black cap. Berhane told him the price of the gas can with tax, took the customer’s money, and then gave him his change. The customer left, tried to fill the can with some gas outside, then returned to Berhane and asked to pay for the gasoline with cash. He also asked to buy a lighter.

Berhane told the customer the price of the smallest lighter, plus tax. “Do you have tax on everything?” the customer asked him. “I then joked with him, and said that if you keep asking, I’ll tax you on what you’re saying as well.”

The customer asked Berhane if he had any children. He asked their age. He asked where they were. Berhane told them that they were back in Eritrea. The customer told him it would be great if they could join him here. Then, Berhane sold the man a red lighter to match the color of the gas can.

The man left without getting his change. Berhane expected he would come back once he’d filled his car’s tank with gas. The customer never returned. Instead, Berhane says, he heard a rush of sirens. Police descended on the Chevron station. It wasn’t long before Berhane realized that their questioning had something to do with the gas can he sold.

Gary told the story of the scale model. He woke up at 3 a.m. one day to visit the club in its off-hours, arriving at 4:30 and working until mid-morning. Gary measured 14 Good Guys tables, a “representative chair,” an ATM, a jukebox, a cigarette machine, three stages, and a bar. He then returned to his workroom, where he recreated the strip club in a one inch to one foot scale. He’s been doing this for years.

Prosecutors called Gary down to the model and asked him to peek under the curtain, where his model stood. “Do you recognize what is under that sheet?” the government attorney asked Gary. Defense attorneys appeared visibly amused as they craned their heads, trying to get a glimpse of the secret, expertly-built strip club set.

The jurors in Graure’s trial have heard testimony detailing a panicked club fire, a horrific struggle, and a man burned within an inch of his life. But the trial is punctuated by light moments, too: an attorney refers to the thickness of his own hair; a police officer reveals his familiarity to the club with an emphatic “oh, yes, sir”; a curtain is whisked away, revealing a tiny strip club on wheels.

“They’re laughing,” one witness told another after she left the courtroom yesterday. She had just delivered testimony about watching a co-worker exit a burning nightclub, his skin singed off. “They’re making jokes and stuff.”

Richter explained that the corrections officer informed him the infection “could be cellulitis. She also mentioned a few other terms that I didn’t know,” he said, before suggesting the trial be postponed at least one day: “There’s no way he’ll be here today. He could be here tomorrow. I don’t know. It could be very serious.”

Richter, Graure’s attorneys, and the attorneys for the prosecution then discussed how to inform the jury of the development. Graure’s counsel first asked Richter to inform the jury of the postponement outside of the courtroom. “I just think it looks better,” said defense attorney Andrew Ferguson of the more discrete option. “Even though it’s a facade, we continue to play this game of pretending that he’s not locked up,” Ferguson said of Graure, who appeared yesterday in court in street clothes.

Ferguson then agreed to have jurors file in to hear the news so that the exchange could be recorded by the court reporter. The 15-member jury, 11 male, four female, entered the courtroom briefly before being excused. “As you can see, Mr. Graure is not here,” Richter told the jurors, declining to discuss the defendant’s whereabouts, or reveal his status as inmate. “He is undergoing medical treatment for a condition which is legitimate, and might be serious.”

Fennell also testified as to why there might have been a Secret Service agent outside the club when he arrived: Good Guys backs up against the Naval Observatory. “Where the Vice President resides,” Fennell says. Secret Service officers routinely patrol the Glover Park neighborhood for that reason, Fennell says. In all, Secret Service, police, ambulance, and fire department officials responded to the blaze, while employees and bystanders stood around in shock, Fennell says.

“I can’t recall any of the faces, but I do remember some of the females, consoling each other and crying,” Fennell says.

The man, she says, was “nice”—if loud, obnoxious, and appearing drunk. After their exchange, Kremer says she didn’t see the man for about 20 minutes—when she saw him return to the club carrying a “can of gasoline and a lighter.”

“Vladimir [Djordjevic] had his arm around him to make sure he didn’t get any further into the club,” Kremer says. The man “was pouring gasoline anywhere he could possibly pour it.” Kremer says she smelled the gasoline. She didn’t see the fire ignite, but felt the heat on her back and ran toward the bar to tell the bartender what was happening. She says she has no doubt it was the same person who complimented her appearance earlier in the evening.

Later, Kremer made it down to the basement kitchen, where she saw Djordjevic again. “He was like, engulfed in flames,” Kremer says. He was on fire, head to toe, and trying to put himself out with a hose attached to the sink, normally used to clean dishes. It wasn’t working. When Kremer turned and ascended the stairs, she says, Djordjevic was still on fire.

When it was all over, Kremer’s backside and shoulder were badly bruised. She didn’t go to the hospital.

During the cross-examination, the defense questioned whether Kremer actually saw a lighter in the patron’s hand. “You didn’t actually see a lighter,” the defense attorney argued. “I saw a lighter,” replied Kremer. “You saw something shiny.” “It appeared to be a lighter.”

Later, another waitress who was on duty that night, Stephanie Palmer, took the stand. Palmer was working as a “Shooter Girl,” a waitress who circles the club with a tray of shots, trying to sell them for $9.75 a pop. She didn’t sell any that night before the fire. Shortly after she sat down with her tray, “Vladimir and this guy came in,” she says. “They were wrestling. The guy had a canister and he was pouring it all over him, and all over the floor.”

Palmer says she noted the stranger was wearing a red jacket and blue jeans. She and her coworkers looked on, confused at what was happening. Then, the gasoline ignited. “The flames hit the ceiling. It blocked off the doorway,” she says. Everyone ran. There was pushing and shoving. “I felt like my hair was on fire.”

At one point, Palmer lost her shoe and went back to retrieve it. The dancer on the stage nearest the fire, “Golden,” jumped off stage. “She flew,” Palmer says.

When Palmer finally got outside, she watched Djordjevic exit the building, she says. “He came up next to me and said, ‘don’t touch me, don’t touch me,’” she says. Girls began crying and puking from the scent. Palmer stayed with Djordjevic until the ambulance arrives, she says.

Good Guys is a gentleman’s club. That means it has “strippers—ladies that dance,” the prosecution clarifies for the jury. On the evening of Nov. 4 3 of last year, Lazorchack noticed a man she had never seen before watching those ladies dance. He was “standing up, waving money at the dancers,” she says—the strip club sign for “Hey, pay attention to me.” He was a white male with dark, thinning hair, Lazorchack says. She identifies him as Vasile Graure, the defendant. He sits in the court room, wearing a light green shirt and spotted tie.

On the night of the fire, Lazorchack says, a dancer named Gabriella suspected that that man had taken a photo of her. That’s against the rules of Good Guys. So his cell phone was confiscated and brought to Lazorchack to check out. Lazorchack cycled through the phone and found a photograph of a naked woman from “behind, from the neck to the back of the knees, but mostly in the butt area.” She could tell the photo showed Gabriella. “You know Gabriella’s butt,” she says

Lazorchack informed the man that he wasn’t allowed to take photos. “I’m sorry, but it’s time to go,” she said. The man said he would leave, took a sip of his drink, and headed for the exit, drink in hand. When Lazorchack followed him and asked him not to take his drink outside, he said, “Fuck you, you can shove it up your ass,” Lazorchack says. He then threw down the glass near the door. It shattered.

Lazorchack spent the next several minutes doing chores—having a busboy clean up the mess and retrieving a t-shirt for a bachelor party that was going on that night. Within about 20 minutes, Lazorchack says, she heard a “rumbling noise. An unhappy noise.” She had just made an announcement about the bachelor party. “It wasn’t the happy noise I was looking for,” she says. “It was loud. It was scared.” When Lazorchack looked up, she saw the front of the bar consumed in flames. It was wall-to-wall fire, she says.

Lazorchack called 911. She saw everyone tumbling toward the exit. She could see people, but couldn’t make them out through “the black and the flames and the smoke.” But she could hear them. “You could hear them screaming,” she says.

She told 911 the address of the club, then exited the building to the alley. She retrieved a flashlight from her car and went back to the club to try to help people. A man in a military uniform stopped her from going back into the club, she says. She heard screaming people, burning and crackling. That’s when she saw Vladimir Djordjevic, a manager of the club.

She could see his face, she says, but every other part of him was consumed in flames, “like a frame . . . a frame of fire.” He was exiting the building. He looked charred from “head to toe,” says Lazorchack. The only clothing that was left was “in the bathing suit area.” He kept his arms out from his sides so he wouldn’t touch his own burned body. His skin was “charred, burned, glistening, black,” she says. Clothing parts were “dripping” off his body.

Outside, it was chilly. “We were all cold,” she says. “Half of us didn’t have any clothes on.”

When she approached Djordjevic, he told her to stay calm. He told her not to touch him. She asked him how it happened. Lazorchack says he replied, “I saw that man coming back with a can, and a tried to stop him.”

Once Djordjevic was transferred to a stretcher and put in an ambulance, Lazorchack assessed the damage to the club. “Everybody was standing around, crying and shaking,” she says. “I had a lot of naked employees that needed clothing.” Other employees had “cuts and bruises from falling down stairs and over tables.” Inside, the club was “burnt down.” Everything was black. TV’s were melted. The ATM was melted, too. “There was a gas can on the floor,” Lazorchack says.

One year later, many of the dancers who were working at the time of the fire have now left. “Gabriella is gone,” Lazorchack says. “Golden is gone. Royale is gone. Star is gone.”

I’ll have more on the trial when it resumes later this afternoon.

Anez, 37, is married to Vladimir Djordjevic, a manager bartender of the club. Djordjevic suffered second and third degree burns in the blaze. Anez had been married to Djordjevic just three months before the incident. Through tears, Anez described what happened to her on the night of November 4 3, 2007.

Around 7:45 p.m., Anez drove with a friend to pick her husband up by car at the end of his Good Guys shift. She stopped outside the Wisconsin Ave. club, greeted him, retrieved some cash from him, then went to the nearby Whole Foods to pick up ingredients for a small dinner party she was planning to hold that evening. Djordjevic was taking a smoking break outside the club. When Anez returned, he entered the car. He was in a hurry. He asked Anez for a pen. Anez found a pencil, gave it to him, and watched him reenter the club. When she saw him next, he had burns all over his body.

Fewer than ten minutes after Djordjevic left her sight, Anez noticed a group of people gathering around the club. She thought there might be a fight, and asked her friend to go check it out. She says she waited in the car about two more minutes before going to see what was happening. She saw smoke coming out of the club. Then, another door opened. Flames were coming out of it.

Anez knew her husband was inside. Someone told Anez that people were coming out the back door. She ran through an alley to the back. There were a lot of people there, she says, mostly employees. Vladimir came down the exit stairs.

He was burned. Most of his clothes were gone. Anez could see smoke coming out of him. His clothes were in “its and bits,” she says; the rest were “smoked and bright red.” She tried to reach him but someone held her back. Vladimir was screaming to the people around him. He was very frantic, she says. He was very awake, and very nervous. As he came down the stairs, he walked like a mummy. He shouted “it’s the guy, it’s the guy,” Anez says.

Anez waited for an ambulance. She couldn’t speak to Djordjevic on the way to the hospital. He’s been there ever since.

By last April, six months after the incident, his legs, arms, part of his torso, and his back were still injured. The legs and back were the worst, Anez says. He had to use a machine to help him breathe, and had a tracheotomy to help clear his lugs. He could not feed himself. He was hydrated through an IV. In a video, taken last summer, Djordjevic appeared asleep in a hospital bed, covered in bandages.

Now, Anez says, Djordjevic is “better.” He is “aware, more awake. He knows where he’s at. He knows how long he’s been there.” But he’s still never left the hospital. A few times, recently, he’s been able to go out the patio. He cannot sit up or speak. He’s lost his hearing. He communicates with his wife through notes on a white board. She reads his lips. He can whisper a little. So far, he’s undergone as many as 50 surgeries. Anez expects he will require more.

“He has good days and bad days,” Anez says. “He’s grumpy.”

When Anez steps down from the stand, she whispers to an observer. “Is that the guy?” she asks, pointing to the defendant, Vasile Graure. “I don’t know,” he tells her.

One year later, the 38-year-old Romanian citizen, a Phoenix resident, is being tried in D.C. Superior Court. Opening statements in the case began on Monday; I’ll be at the trial all day today, posting updates of the proceedings as they happen.