Dark Deeds
No one save the participants knows what exactly happened outside the Map Room, the Bucktown bar, early in the morning two Sundays ago. The only clear thing is the result: Malukosamba leader Venicio de Toledo spent most of the next week in a coma. He came to last Wednesday, and remains in the intensive care unit at Cook County Hospital.
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De Toledo is a Brazilian native in his mid-40s who’s lived in Chicago for about 20 years; the band is a club-scene fixture, dispensing a souped-up samba through a large and shifting group of musicians. A benefit for de Toledo is scheduled for December 11 at Rosa’s. Friends, who held a prayer vigil for the musician outside the bar this past Saturday night, whisper of dark deeds done on the street to an innocent man; more than one person mentions that drugs may have played a part in the incident. But the facts are murky, and the principals either won’t or can’t talk: de Toledo is still in the hospital; the roommate who was with him that night is incommunicado; and the management of the Map Room is keeping mum as well.
One of the men in the fight was allegedly Map Room manager Andre Pleasance. The bar’s owner, Mark Blasingame, said Pleasance doesn’t work there anymore. “I really don’t have much to say,” Blasingame said. “A police investigation is going on on both sides.” Pleasance, outside of stressing that “the Map Room doesn’t have anything to do with this,” says that he “can’t talk about it right now.”
