At the intersection of 80th and Greenwood, in the first floor of a Masonic lodge, there’s a barber shop that doubles as a hang-out where the hip-hop crowd can pass the time in comfort and style. Clients waiting for their appointments can shoot pool or lounge on a sofa to read a sports magazine or watch a wide-screen television. An empty DJ booth holds down a corner. Murals of naked women and photos of lowrider cars that the barber took himself adorn the walls. The decor is sleek and shiny and black-and-white. On the door the words “Keep faded” are painted in a fat, funky font. On the window, the store’s logo, “V” for Valentine, vaguely suggests the ears of the Playboy bunny. Located in the heart of white middle-class Soccermomia, it’s a glamorous-looking joint that makes one sit up and take notice. That’s part of the reason that Thaddeus Rakeem Valentine, 28, chose this address for a barber shop that proudly caters to black and Latino teenagers.

Unfortunately, at least one cop isn’t excited about styling in Greenwood. Earlier this year, Officer Steven Strand handcuffed Valentine while the barber was in the middle of cutting one poor fellow’s hair. Valentine was never charged with a crime and Strand is now under investigation by the police department. “We get the urban atmosphere and they can’t handle that,” Valentine observes.

Greenwood Avenue is changing. A few Latino-owned restaurants and shops thrive among the yuppie antique stores and clothing boutiques. It’s become a neighborhood where a young Latino client can come in to get his hair cut, strike up a conversation, and discover that he and Valentine have many mutual friends and acquaintances through a shared interest in lowriders.

Valentine himself appears to be Caucasian. A thin guy with a sharp, sculpted face, pale skin, and green eyes, he says his ethnic background is Russian, Irish, Greek, and Italian. But suggest that he’s white and he seems offended. “In your eyes, maybe,” he answers. He mumbles a lot, but when you can make out what he says he speaks with conviction about the plight of urban youth, about how he and his associates have been stereotyped, about the need for positive role models for teenagers. He sees himself as such a role model, an especially effective one since he shares his clients’ “lifestyle.”

He also, as he himself admits, likes to say things that aren’t true. So you have to take it on faith that the scrappy personal history he relates is genuine: He doesn’t know where he was born; he lived briefly in LA when he was a teenager and had to quit high school to avoid involvement in gang turf wars; his adopted middle name, Rakeem, was the name of an old friend who was killed in a gun battle.

It is true that he himself has no criminal history. It’s also true, as he discusses more reluctantly, that he’s had a troubled family life. His older brother has been in and out of prison for crimes related to a methamphetamine addiction. Valentine says his brother has been an example of how not to behave.

Valentine opened his first shop, in Ballard of all places, in 1994. The space had been occupied by a barber who retired, and when Valentine moved in he picked up his predecessor’s customers. Many of them were old Swedes and Norwegians who made Valentine their regular barber after being impressed by his mastery of the classic flattop. Some became such loyal customers that they now drive to Greenwood for haircuts. Valentine also outfitted his Ballard space with a pool table and covered the walls in graffiti, quickly attracting kids from other parts of the city in their jacked-down, souped-up cars. At that location the kids had a tendency to spill out of the shop and hang out on the sidewalk. “It was a little too much for this neighborhood,” says Linda Gilbert, who runs a day care center across the street from the former Ballard store. Rumors circulated that Valentine or his clients were selling dope, a charge Valentine says is “stupid.”

So far there aren’t any rumors floating around Greenwood that he’s breaking the law. But one North End police officer who developed distrust for Valentine in Ballard arrested him at his Greenwood location last April. Officer Steven Strand had nothing concrete on the barber but busted him on suspicion of racketeering, says Valentine. Strand can’t comment because he is under investigation by his own department for the incident.

Valentine hasn’t had a run-in with police since. But this wasn’t the first time since he went into business that he’d been busted. In 1995, Valentine says, two other officers arrested him at his Ballard location for robbing a bank. According to Valentine, it turned out he was the wrong guy, so they let him go and each got a two-week suspension for making an improper arrest. The police department won’t comment, claiming the earlier incident is part of the internal investigation of Officer Strand.

Valentine argues that he’s always so busy cutting hair he doesn’t have time to break the law. His shop opens at around 10 or 11 in the morning and officially closes at 10pm, but sometimes Valentine and his two employees, Isaiah and Jose, are there cutting hair late into the night. Valentine claims he doesn’t put up with misbehavior at his store and has kicked kids out for everything from smoking weed to just being a jerk.

Even so, spooky things can happen at Valentine’s. One night when I was there, a man walked in talking about something that had transpired there several nights previous. He was laughing so hard, the only words I could make out were “break-in.” I was about to ask if somebody had burglarized the shop when the man saw my writing pad and asked, “Are you a reporter?” with a horrified look on his face. He stopped talking about whatever it was, and I couldn’t get an explanation. But while I was making small talk with Valentine I heard him say to one of the other employees, “How was I supposed to know who she was?”

Several days later, the barber seemed reluctant to discuss the incident. “Crazy people, crazy world, crazy barbershop,” was the only explanation he’d give at first. But then he said some gang members got mad because he had kicked them out of his store. In retaliation, he claimed, they tagged the outside windows and the brick wall around them. He said he had to scrape and clean off the spray paint. Maybe. But walk by and you won’t notice any scuff marks on the bricks around the windows. What really happened?

Or perhaps the question should be, does it matter what happened? The line waiting for Valentine’s clippers often includes a young kid from the lowrider set, a local bartender on break, an old man from Ballard, and a yuppie white Greenwoodian like my husband, who recently came home from the shop with an awfully nice haircut. Maybe people go in for the hipness factor, the conversation, or just the haircut. Or maybe it’s the shades of criminality, real or imagined, that keep fascinated North Enders and minority teenagers alike coming back.