Before we get to the reviews, some not-so-great news. Legal cannabis is probably not going to been taken up by Maryland legislature next year. At least that’s the sense from a rather resigned Marijuana Legalization Workgroup meeting last Wednesday. The workgroup, whose chairs are Delegate Kathleen M. Dumais and Senator Bill Ferguson, have been meeting throughout 2019 ostensibly to model what legalization of cannabis could look like in Maryland, which until last week’s meeting, seemed likely to come up in the next legislative session.

So, even though cannabis is currently legal in Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Washington D.C., the workgroup believes the issue is pretty complicated—which it is, of course—and wants to more time to work out the finer details before making a recommendation.

The idea is that legalization in Maryland can avoid some of the pitfalls that legalization in other states has experienced by wrestling with issues such as racial equity, industry monopolies, and expungement before legalization goes into effect rather than after it goes in effect. This desire to do legalization “right” however does continue to have negative effects right now for many Marylanders, especially people of color. As Baltimore Fishbowl and BINJ reported last year, 96% of Baltimoreans arrested for cannabis possession between 2015-2017 were Black; State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s announcement earlier this year that her office would no longer prosecute possession has introduced a complicated grey area especially because the Baltimore Police Department is not on board.

The workgroup’s approach however is encouraging. When it comes to what Senator Jill Carter called, “the collateral consequences of predicate convictions”—how to deal with folks who have been convicted of a cannabis “crime” once cannabis is legal—the workgroup’s stance is expungement, plain and simple.

“If we legalize something that somebody has been convicted of, we obviously need to get rid of the conviction off their record, Delegate Dumais said. “And we may not have the right process in place at the moment but that’s the goal and I think that was the general consensus from the work group.”

Expungement itself however, is complicated and costly. Even if the expungements for cannabis-related “crime” is automatic—meaning, those previously charged or convicted don’t have to make the expungement happen themselves—it still requires a labor. Clerks of the court and cops must locate all the records related to the crime and physically destroy that evidence—on top of removing it from online databases such as Maryland Case Search.

The workgroup is also concerned with the lack of racial equity among cannabis dispensary owners—and out-of-state companies dominating the industry.

“There are three dispensaries in a couple miles of my house and two of them have been bought by out of state companies,” Delegate David Moon said. “It’s a bad look.”

“Maryland consumers will benefit the greatest by having a competitive marketplace that is not monopolized,” Ferguson said.

There will still be one more full meeting this year and there will be a final report but its focus is strictly exploratory rather than instructive at this point.

“I think the consensus is we’re not recommending legislation this session to legalize adult use, we are still in the investigative mode,” Dumais said. “At least that’s my sense of where we are.” (Brandon Soderberg)

Strawberry Banana

A writer friend was having an event, a baby shower, and it was a surprise for his wife. I should have known it was a surprise, but I was going out of town and couldn’t attend and reading the friend’s essays about the impending birth filled me with emotion. I thought I’d write the wife a nice note. In short, dear reader, I ruined it.

I wanted to punch myself in the face. I understood how Oedipus, faced with much greater ignorance, thought that gouging out his eyes might offer some relief. In the scope of the world, mine was a minor mishap and my friends responded with grace. But I still could not stop cringing. It revealed to me a self that I hated. The kind of guy who ruins a surprise.

Grasping for things to think about other than how stupid I was, I recalled this dude I once interviewed who was trying to use weed to quell street beefs and keep guys from shooting each other by getting them to sit down and burn one together. I realized that’s what I needed to do — with myself. Blunt the violence.

I didn’t want anything Sativa-y, because I could foresee the spiral that would engulf me and drag me down further into self-hatred. I settled on Strawberry Banana, an Indica that calmed my mind and made sleep possible. When I put my nose in the jar, there was no hint of strawberry, but the flower did in fact have a faint after-odor of banana peel riding on a scent far more floral, something pungent and dank and not as polite as strawberries, something with the vague hint of death and decay.

Ablaze, there is, however, a flavor that is almost like strawberry, or rather a Strawberry Shortcake doll. I took several long, deep pulls from the pipe, and shortly I could feel the tension held in my spine between my shoulder blades start to give in and relax a little. My brow, which is accustomed to being furrowed, began to smooth over as the edges of my eyes dropped, relaxed. Then the thought of my accursed text to my friend’s wife crossed my mind again. I still cringed and I still hated the person the error revealed to me. But I sat easier with him. I looked at him with a side-eyed hate instead of outright violent hostility.

Such coming to relative peace with ourselves is one of the more medicinal aspects of certain strains. Best of all, unlike booze or dope, this is a salve that doesn’t make you do things that make you hate yourself even more. But I will also add that after another bowl, a shot and a beer in a public place was exactly the thing I needed to allay the self-loathing long enough to finish my evening and to sleep. Strawberry Banana is a good strain, for which I am grateful. (Baynard Woods)

• Strength: 6
• Nose: Banana peels, death, Strawberry Shortcake doll
• Euphoria: 7
• Existential dread: 2
• Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 1
• Drink pairing: Beer and a shot
• Music pairing: Warren Zevon, “My Shit’s Fucked Up”
• Rating: 7
  
  

Gorilla Snacks

The chocolate éclair weighed a pound. A lumpy, dumpy, delicious, football-shaped treat, sun-faded dough sandwiching way too much cream, smooshing it down so it’s really oozing out, and on top of it a helmet-hard layer of chocolate — and I ate half of the thing rewatching, yes, rewatching, Netflix’s “Mindhunter,” a scene where hyper-articulate, coed-killer Ed Kemper goes on and on about murder and how difficult it is in exacting and awful ways playing out in front of me and my plate. It was all pretty weird, I thought. I ate a half-a-pound of chocolate éclair. In this sad, absurd scene, the two main takeaways from Gorilla Snacks (sometimes G-Snacks, fallout from the Gorilla Glue lawsuit to keep all Gorilla-related strains on-brand): It makes you hungry like monstrous Mr. Creosote from “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life,” and it punishes you with self-awareness.

A somewhat buzz-y, relatively new and ultimately derivative strain, Gorilla Snacks combines G.G. #4 and Scooby Snacks backcross Guinness. I dare most folks to differentiate between the G.G. strains — and really, G.G. #4 tastes, smells and feels a lot like the popular G.G. #1 that most people know all about (from a past review of G.G. #1: “[It] has a quick rush around the eyes and gives a chill like a breeze on your neck, that settles into full-relaxed reflection — not glued to the couch”). As for Guinness (presumably soon to get a name change for copyright infringement reasons like Gorilla Glue), if you know Scooby Snacks, a strain that makes you ornery and ecstatic that (also from an earlier review: “You’ll feel sleepy and compromised, like a warm, hard wind’s blowing against you, pushing you back, preventing you from moving too fast,” I wrote), you know Guinness.

And Guinness is an F3 — a third-generation hybrid. This kind of hybrid lingo is not something we’ve dealt with too much in these reviews. Think of it this way: An F1 is a hybrid of two strains with different genotypes; an F2 then, is two F1 hybrids and when you do this again, you get an F3 and again, an F4. Anyways, at its best, Gorilla Snacks’ high suggests it’s a piece of something larger or more complicated, and at its worst it’s like a copy of a copy of a copy.

I have found, FWIW, that if you have a tendency toward a certain kind of hate-eating where you’re eating to not feel anything, eliminating joy and with it, not even tasting what you’re shoving into your mouth (basically, if you abuse food like many abuse drugs or if you abuse food as well as drugs), Gorilla Snacks indulges the diet, caffeine-free version of the death drive and brings back those fleeting blips of ecstasy (chewing feels good man). There are days where that can be revelatory or enough — it’s not just “lmao tha munchies,” you know? The name is fitting, telling smokers the tension inherent in the strain: gorilla (large) and snacks (small). Kind of like a giant-ass éclair. It has a big, little high. (BS)

• Strength: 8
• Nose: Chocolate gummy bears
• Euphoria: 9
• Existential dread: 6
• Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 4
• Drink pairing: A milkshake, fuck it man
• Music pairing: Johanna Knutsson’s “Tollarp Transmissions”
• Rating: 7
  

Dutch Racer

In the summer of 2000, I went to Groningen, Holland, for a conference on the ancient novel. I was presenting a paper on the Roman novel “The Golden Ass” by Apuleius. I’ve been thinking a lot of that remarkable novel lately as I’ve been smoking the nearly pure Sativa Dutch Racer.

I don’t think it’s because of the fact that it’s a Dutch strain, and I talked to a bunch of people about the book nearly 20 years ago. It’s more like the spirit of the book has lingered so long, in the way the weed induces certain recursive thoughts. In the novel, the narrator goes to Thessaly on business. He gets involved in a sexual scenario and, because of a witch, becomes a donkey. It’s a great narrative device because, since he’s a donkey, no one hesitates to talk freely around him. But eventually he manages to eat a rosebud, which is the cure for his asinine shape. And he joins the cult of Isis.

I think I’ve been thinking about the book because I feel like an ass a lot of the time and a Sativa like Dutch Racer helps me feel human and competent again. Isn’t that the ultimate high, to be competent at life? To be human while recognizing all the non-human life around you?

This gorgeously crystalline strain with an odor of Meyer lemons and hyacinth about it incites a dutiful and buzzy wakefulness that, after the initial stoned impulse, does manage to make you feel more accomplished without you really noticing too much that you’re even high. But things are better. No, you feel like you are better at things. And there isn’t really a heavy comedown to leave you feeling tattered and tired at all. It’s like it just changes from intense focused stoned to a more diffuse, less-stoned sense of awareness.

If you smoke more, like the time I smoked a second bowl by myself, it still doesn’t go too far in the Sativa-paranoia direction — but it can get you there as the energy seems to concentrate behind the eyes with a thrumming insistence that comes right to the edge of fear-inducing, and then, though, it gives you a high-five. It’s like a real-life equivalent of an overamped teammate getting in your face and yelling encouragement.

The flavor, when fired, contains the essence of autumn — the hauntings of all the first fires you’ve ever roasted marshmallows over. Medicinally, it is the rosebud that can turn your asinine self back into a better version. And the bud is a better version of pot. But you are still you and the only way to be better is to be better. (BW)

• Strength: 7
• Nose: Hyacinth, Meyer lemons, wet newspaper
• Euphoria: 8
• Existential dread: 4
• Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 0
• Drink pairing: Water
• Music pairing: MC5, “Kick Out the Jams”
  

Venom OG

Can only your knees be high? Is that possible? That’s how it felt after a generous joint full of Venom OG, an unrelenting hybrid that mixes the near-narcotic Poison OG with regrettably named Colorado favorite Rare Dankness #1, a convoluted cross of a crossbreed that alone sends a smoker into a Nighttime Sudafed-like stupor.

Venom OG really does feel like an overdose, or at least a poisoning. My knees felt it almost exclusively, it seemed. The relief around those joints was really whirling, as if the THC was eddying in that one place. And soon enough, Venom OG spread to an all-over-the-body high that tucks aches and throbs somewhere else for a few hours and teases transcendence. It is easily one of the most effective strains for pain around, but it doesn’t dull thoughts or leave you hopelessly distracted — watch out or you’ll end up viewing the first 20 minutes of like six different movies never settling on anything and nodding off to sleep.

One strange side effect is Venom OG hits hard (it’s especially combustible) and that made it tough to breathe after smoking. You should be careful with this one.

In other ways, Venom OG’s an obvious strain. It tastes like it smells: lime and pine, each scent seemingly jumping into one nostril, the scents never quite intertwining, and when you light it up, a burst of salted caramel cookie under all of that. That taste coats your mouth and scrubs away the excitement for flavor, leaving foods either too sweet or really bland, eliminating that base stoner desire to munch for hours. That makes it good for eating if you have to eat and don’t want to eat.

The buds themselves are an over-the-top Kermit the Frog kind of green, and they look like a pointillist painting of a weed because the green ridges and wild orange hairs are so fine, enhanced by a layer of magic hour-hued trichomes. There’s that scene in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” where Cameron, in his Gordie Howe No. 9 Chicago Blackhawks jersey, stares at that famous Seurat painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” and then straight through it, until he has abstracted it, the camera doing the seeing for us through a series of extreme close-ups. A nug of Venom OG looks like one of the trees tucked in the right corner of that painting, where light doesn’t quite hit those leaves enough to get a full view of the distinct little dots, and it’s simultaneously ecstatically real and pretty much a blur. That’s Venom OG’s high in a nutshell: There’s something beautiful there but you can’t quite get to it; you’re shackled, self-conscious — a goof in a dumb, ugly hockey jersey trying to figure it out. (BS)

• Strength: 10
• Nose: Lime and pine
• Euphoria: 8
• Existential dread: 3
• Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 3
• Drink pairing: Ginger lemonade
• Music pairing: Ellen Arkbro’s “CHORDS”
• Rating: 8
  
  

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All afternoon on the second and final day of jury deliberations in the Gun Trace Task Force corruption trial of Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor, Alex Hilton paced around the lobby of the federal courthouse, anticipating a guilty verdict.

He was there for Hersl, a cop he has history with dating back more than a decade.

“If I hear ‘guilty,’ then I know I won’t have to worry about him anymore, he’s a monster man,” Hilton said, as he hiccuped and cried. “A monster.”

Everyone expected an outpouring of emotion in the trials of the officers charged with death of Freddie Gray and with every acquittal, national news agencies swarmed the city looking for signs of “riot” as police helicopters hovered overhead. There were no “riots” though—only a resigned frustration toward a legal system that was clearly broken. But at the courthouse on Feb. 12 following a guilty verdict for Hersl and Taylor on robbery, fraud, conspiracy, and racketeering charges, there was raw emotion everywhere—just far fewer people were interested in it. The GTTF trial shed light on the conditions that led to the Baltimore Uprising, including the “looting” of the pharmacies, which the trial showed corrupt officers profited from via reselling stolen pharmaceuticals.

“Every time they have had the trial, I kid you not, I get up off the bus and right up to the door and I’d sit there and try to will myself to come in but couldn’t come in,” Hilton said.

Today was the first day he made it through the door during the three-week trial and two days of jury deliberation. In 2006, Hilton was picked up by Hersl outside of a substance abuse clinic where he was volunteering.

“I never abused drugs but I sold them,” Hilton said. “But I got out the game pretty early—everything about me now is right. My thinking, my walk.”

That day, Hilton said Hersl searched him and others for drugs, found none, then planted cocaine.

“You always had some asshole cops or whatever but as far as they go would be a threat at you or whatever, I can live with that,” Hilton said. But Hersl was different, more of a bully, who’d focus on people and return to them again and again. “You look into this guy’s eyes man, I don’t know if it’s the hold he has on me—that could be it—but something about his eyes man. It’s that power he got over me. I just want it to end. Until he don’t have power on me, it’s never gonna end, man.”

In 2011, Hilton was working a construction gig near Fells Point. He says plainclothes came up to him as he ate his lunch on a friend’s stoop. Hersl searched him, pulled a cable bill out of his pocket with his brother’s address where he was staying at the time, and took the keys to his brother’s home. As Hilton sat in jail, eventually hit with drug charges he wasn’t even told about—he thought he was arrested for trespassing—his brother’s home was broken into and $1,100 was stolen.

After that, Hilton moved to West Baltimore to avoid Hersl. Although Hilton was not part of the case against Hersl and did not testify, his experience is similar to the story of Herbert Tate, who testified during the trial that Hersl approached him, kept his money, and planted drugs on him. Tate left the city for Anne Arundel County.

“Every now and then I have a nightmare—anything that has to do with prison brings me back to drugs and then I go to him. I just kind of put it to rest, then when this [trial] happened and I see it on the news, it brings up all these memories,” Hilton said.

Before Hilton went into the courtroom for the first time on Monday, he kneeled and prayed. He had prepared himself for the decisive moment—but it turned out everyone had gathered in the courtroom for a question from the jury and not the verdict, at least not yet. Still, Hilton got to see Hersl saunter across the courtroom and sit down.

Studying the back of Hersl’s head, Hilton watched the former detective fidget in court: “He knows how I feel now, look at him, twiddling his fuckin’ thumbs man,” Hilton said aloud in the courtroom to no one and everyone.

When he left the courtroom after the judge answered the jury’s question, Hilton was looser, more clear-headed. The hard part—facing someone he said “terrorized” him—was over.

“See, it’s like some woman been battered all her life and until she knows the judge said ‘guilty,’ she’s never free. I ain’t free,” Hilton said. “I feel crazy because I’m a man and I feel like this. I’m afraid of another man. That just does something to you as a man, you know?”

Then Hilton’s eyes shifted around the courthouse lobby. He looked at the U.S. Marshals, hulking, mostly bald—like Hersl.

“Security, they all look just like him, man,” Hilton spat out. Briefly, he spiralled. So he prayed again.

Soon after, the verdict finally arrived. The tedious, tension-filled roll-out of each of the charges, the majority of which Hersl and Taylor were found “guilty” of committing. Hersl’s head grew red as the verdict landed. Taylor seemed unaffected.

When Hersl went away in handcuffs, Hilton and Hersl’s family—who had been at court every day, often bringing a cooler full of lunch—watched the disgraced cop exit, holding onto the moment together for very different reasons.

“I love you Danny,” Hersl’s brother Steve cried out.

In the lobby, Steve Hersl wailed while the rest of the Hersl family wobbled in shock nearby. Taylor’s family was eerily silent as they moved like ghosts through the courthouse and into the media scrum outside.

“I can go on with my own life without having to worry about and being in fear of somebody who’s supposed to protect me,” Hilton said in the lobby a few feet from a bawling Steve Hersl. “I feel for [the Hersl family], I do, because I’m a Christian man, but right is right and wrong is wrong.”

Outside, Hilton shared his catharsis with reporters.

“It’s crazy. We’re talking about cops. Somebody’s who’s supposed to protect and serve. I finally came to grips with it today because once he got the cuffs put on him I knew he was no longer a police officer,” Hilton said.“I feel I have closure. Is it totally over with? Probably not. There’s a lot more work to be done. It’s going to start from the top up.

Like Hilton, Steve Hersl, a former firefighter, was furious at the cops he considered dirty—he just didn’t think his brother was one of them. He thought “Danny” had been “shanghai’ed” and set up by the higher ups.

“My brother Danny Hersl wasn’t a part of this gang,” he said, his cheek glistening with drying tears. “He tried to get out of this gang. He begged. He cried. He cried to the family. He cried to everybody to get out of the gang. He didn’t want a part of it.”

Steve Hersl blamed higher ups like former Commissioner Kevin Davis and Deputy Commissioner Dean Palmere, who announced his retirement on the same day that Momodu Gondo said Palmere covered up the 2009 murder of Shawn Cannady committed by GTTF’s Jemell Rayam. Gondo also testified that he had robbed people with Detective Sean Suiter, who was was murdered the day before he was supposed to testify before the Grand Jury in the case. Suiter’s death has not been solved.

“When you got guys resigning, walking out the door with their head down—the commissioner, Palmere, all of them. Why are their heads down?” Steve Hersl asked. “Hey, is there an unsolved murder of a police officer? They know what the hell happened. They know. My brother Danny Hersl knows what happened.”

More television cameras surrounded Steve Hersl.

“Do you know what happened?” we asked.

“Oh yeah I know what happened. You’re gonna find out what happened and you’re going to find out a lot more because Danny Hersl is gonna tell you what’s going to happen because he’s going to write a book and he’s gonna do some talking. He’s not done,” Hersl said.

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The post Catharsis and corruption in wake of Gun Trace Task Force conviction appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Gun Trace Task Force members Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor have been found guilty on a number of charges tied to racketeering, conspiracy, and fraud.

The jury of eight white women, three black men, and one Asian woman took about two days—Feb. 8 and Feb. 12—to deliberate before delivering a verdict that declared Hersl and Taylor guilty on most counts. The jury acquit both on gun charges.

As the verdict was being read, Taylor seemed mostly unaffected, quiet. Hersl grew red, rubbing his head with his hands on his forehead. His family broke once they put handcuffs on Hersl.

Stephen Hersl, one of Hersl’s brothers, appeared wrecked. “I love you Danny,” he cried. Taylor’s family moved out of courthouse without comment.

Hersl and Taylor were the only two members of the Baltimore Police Department’s federally-indicted gun unit not to plead guilty, and their trial, which began three weeks ago, revealed numerous shocking tactics used by Baltimore Police officers to enrich themselves, including the illegal seizure of money, drugs, and guns—often keeping some or all of those drugs and money (and in one case reselling a gun)—along with extensive overtime fraud.

“I can go on with my own life without having to worry about and being in fear of someobody who’s supposed to protect me,” said Alex Hilton, a man who came to watch the verdict. Hilton says he was repeatedly harassed by Hersl in the 2000s so much so that he moved to West Baltimore to avoid him.

The trial also implicated a dozen or so other police officers, former and current, including Dep. Commissioner Dean Palmere, who announced his retirement hours after GTTF’s Momodu Gondo testified that Palmere helped cover up a 2009 police shooting (Palmere denies this); and slain detective Sean Suiter, who was killed one day before he was set to testify to a grand jury about a 2010 event involving GTTF’s Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, Ryan Guinn, and an unnamed sergeant who planted heroin in a car—until Gondo’s testimony, which said Suiter stole money with him as early as 2009. The department held a hero’s funeral for the murdered detective.

Hersl’s lawyer William Purpura argued that while Hersl had indeed committed overtime fraud and stolen money from civilians, he was not guilty of robbery (theft by force). Instead, according to Purpura, Hersl seized the money and drugs legally, as a police officer. His only illegal act was failing to turn them in.

But according to plenty of testimony, Hersl was more than aware of plans to rob citizens, and was complicit in the planning and execution of these robberies. As for Taylor, his lawyers Christopher Nieto and Jennifer Wicks argued Taylor’s innocence and mostly said that the witnesses, both police and citizens—most of them current or former drug dealers—could not be believed. She accused the prosecution of going to the “depths of the criminal underworld” to find its witnesses.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Leo Wise countered that it was Hersl and Taylor who had chosen to commit crimes with the former detectives who had testified and the generally vulnerable people they had victimized.

“What these men hoped as they committed these crimes,” Wise said. “Is that someday, if they were ever called to account for these actions that they could hide behind lawyers like Ms. Wicks, Mr. Nieto, and Mr. Purpura,” who would demonize their accusers.

Wise said they had indeed descended into the “depths of the criminal underworld.”

“And what we found in those depths were Daniel Thomas Hersl and Marcus Roosevelt Taylor,” he said.

The FBI is still looking into that underworld. Its investigation into the Baltimore Police Department is ongoing.

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The post Gun Trace Task Force members found guilty appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

During closing arguments in the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) trial, the government’s PowerPoint was the best. Even Daniel Hersl’s attorney, William Purpura, admitted that much.

“That PowerPoint was a thing of beauty,” the acrid attorney quipped, commenting on the photo-filled, graphic design-y presentation from federal prosecutor Derek Hines.

In contrast, there was Purpura’s own slideshow: simple white text on a blue background, mostly in all caps and often times mixing up witnesses’ names. It reflected the shoot-from-the-hip approach of Purpura (who looks like a grizzled Michel Foucault and sounds like Donald Trump) versus the somber, cerebral approach of Hines and fellow prosecutor Leo Wise (who look like a minimal techno duo about to get a New York Times profile).

This is how the GTTF trial of Hersl and Marcus Taylor wound down, with seedy details and potentially police department-destroying revelations giving way to dueling PowerPoint presentations, starkly different emotional appeals, and an arcane unpacking of conspiracy, robbery, and fraud charges.

“No man is above the law and no man is beneath it,” Hines declared, countering the defense’s persistence in presenting the trial’s witnesses as criminal and therefore not to be trusted and not protected by the fourth amendment.

During the trial, the defense’s approach veered into the kind of profiling and disregard for Baltimoreans the GTTF regularly displayed. At times, it seemed to backfire, especially when one victim, Ronald Hamilton, exploded in the courtroom: “THIS RIGHT HERE DESTROYED MY WHOLE FUCKING FAMILY MAN. . . . THEY CAME IN MY HOUSE AND DESTROYED MY FAMILY.”

Hines briefly ran through the experiences of some of the alleged GTTF victims, characterizing them as targets even though the GTTF assumed they would not be believed.

Shawn Whiting, who said he had 4.5 kilograms of cocaine and $23,970 on him even though police reported only 3 kilograms and $7,650.

Jimmie Griffin, who said he had in total $12,000 on him even though police reported only $4,903 (Griffin is the only one of these victims who consented to being searched).

Herbert Tate, who said he had $530 on him even though police reported only $216, and who claimed that blue and white caps of heroin found down the street were not his, though Hersl said they were (Tate’s case was dismissed).

Antonio Santiful, who said he had $700 on him even though police reported $218.

Oreese Stevenson, who said he had 10 kilograms of cocaine and $300,000 on him even though police reported only 8 kilograms and $100,000 (Sgt. Wayne Jenkins wanted to rob Stevenson a second time and discussed it over Twisted Tea with Hersl).

Ronald Hamilton, who said he had $70,000 in his home and $3,000 on his person even though police reported $23,000 (Hamilton wasn’t charged with any crimes).

Dennis Armstrong, who said he had 2 kilograms of cocaine and $8,000 on him, while police reported only about 2 grams and $2,833.

Sergio Summerville, who said he had $4,800 on him even though police reported only $2800. He wasn’t charged with any crimes.

As for the absurd amounts of false overtime from which Hersl made an additional $86,000 in 2015 and $37,000 in 2016, and Taylor an additional $43,000 in 2015 and $44,000 in 2016?

“They were not working hard to rid the city of guns, they were hardly working,” Hines said.

“This is all about the evidence,” Hersl’s lawyer Purpura told the jury, “DANNY HERSL” in all caps real big behind him on his PowerPoint. Purpura offered a fairly artful unspooling of the specifics of the government’s case against Hersl, claiming his client’s involvement was not that deep, while admitting fully to theft (but not robbery understood as theft by force) and overtime fraud.

“Fraud is rampant among aggressive police squads” in Baltimore, Purpura said, adding that higher-ups “acknowledged [it] with a wink and a nod.”

Purpura dismissed the testimony of the GTTF’s victims—all given immunity, some subpoenaed—as “classic cooperators’ testimony you just can’t believe,” and returned to his main argument: What Hersl did was theft rather than robbery—he wrongly kept money he was rightfully allowed to seize as a police officer from drug dealers.

“After 17 years as a street cop, his conduct was wrong,” Purpura admitted.

While Purpura leveled with the jury about Hersl, Taylor’s attorney, Jennifer Wicks, declared Taylor entirely innocent.

It was a lengthy closing argument with a PowerPoint presentation full of clip art and a messy defense of Taylor that reminded jurors of some of the former detective’s lowest moments. Namely, Taylor had a BB gun in his car—GTTF Sgt. Wayne Jenkins told task force members to keep a BB gun on them in case they shot someone and needed an excuse—though Wicks said that Taylor had taken it off a small child who he didn’t want to get hurt, and that he wasn’t even present at an oft-discussed Aug. 8, 2016 raid of a storage facility.

Wicks took the scenic route toward insulting the GTTF victims who testified: a stock image of bags at the airport with the slide titled “Witnesses and their Baggage.”

“They have suitcases of reasons why they are biased,” Wicks said of the witnesses.

Then she indulged an extended scenario in which she asked the jury to imagine they were boarding a plane where many of the government’s witnesses were in charge of getting the jury on board (Rayam is your travel agent, Whiting handles your luggage, the pilot is Stevenson, GTTF’s Evodio Hendrix is the copilot, and so on).

The point seemed to be that if you wouldn’t trust these people to get you into the air safely, you couldn’t trust their testimony. But it mostly offered up another way to consider conspiracy—of which Hersl and Taylor are charged—and made the claim that Taylor was around all of these people and entirely unaware seem outrageous.

Briefly, a slide with the poster from the classic spoof “Airplane!” flashed by, as if Wicks realized it was too much and briskly double-clicked right past it.

For most of the closing argument, Taylor’s other attorney, Christopher Nieto—who was the cruelest in grilling witnesses, resulting in Hamilton’s blow-up—had his head down and looked as though he was going to melt into his seat.

In rebuttal, the government’s Leo Wise picked apart Wicks’ closing argument—this time without a spiffy PowerPoint, just a few documents and a Hollywood courtroom drama sort of sincerity.

Wise characterized the defense as full of “flip flops” who said the witnesses “were all liars—except when they say something [the defense] liked,” and suggested the defense’s argument as, once more, borderline dog-whistle racism.

“Those people don’t deserve to be believed,” Wise said, paraphrasing Purpura, Nieto, and Wicks.

He argued that providing immunity is what made them reliable witnesses and that without it they would have no motivation to tell the truth. Oh, and by the way, if Taylor had a BB gun in his police vehicle because he confiscated it from a child, then why didn’t he turn it in? And Taylor wasn’t present at that Aug. 8 raid only because “he was in the Dominican Republic committing time and attendance fraud.”

Wise dismissed Purpura’s differentiation between Gondo and Rayam’s home invasions and the GTTF raid on Hamilton’s house, reminding jurors that the GTTF entered ahead of the Maryland State Police to search and take money, that they had no warrant, and that Hamilton was not charged with a crime. Then he mentioned Mrs. Hamilton, who was shopping for blinds at Home Depot when the GTTF grabbed her and her husband, took them to “The Barn” (an off-site police facility), and then finally to their homes—never charging her, never telling her what was going on.

“What crime did she commit?” Wise asked.

The rebuttal ended with the audio of the car accident the GTTF caused and then observed from afar, never rendering aid. The jury again heard Taylor saying of the man in the crash “That dude is unconscious, he ain’t saying shit,” while Hersl, in his broad Bawl-da-moore accent, chuckled about changing their overtime sheets so it didn’t look like they were there at all.

The jury spent the rest of Thursday deliberating and will likely return a verdict at some point on Monday.

“The jurors have a difficult job to do to weed through substantial evidence here,” said University of Maryland law professor Doug Colbert outside the courthouse.

Meanwhile, the trial itself offered further proof that the Baltimore Police Department is profoundly broken: A dozen other current or former officers were also implicated during testimony (Sherrod Biggers, Ian Dombrowski, Tariq Edwards, Jason Giordano, Ryan Guinn, Kenneth Ivery, Dean Palmere, Sean Suiter—who was killed in November—Thomas Wilson, and Michael Woodlon), overtime fraud is rampant, and the FBI’s investigation of BPD is ongoing.

“The charges here are so serious. This is one of the most important and serious trials that we’ve had in Baltimore,” Colbert said. “My hope is this is the linchpin to undertaking an investigation, some type of commission that will be able to restore trust in the Baltimore Police Department and identify the extent of the corruption and criminality.”

At a press conference on Friday—his first since he got the job—Darryl DeSousa, who along with the mayor has seemed to be snoozing through the whole thing, floated the possibility of some kind of outside commission looking into the GTTF and said that officers in special units such as the GTTF will now get random polygraph tests and that overtime fraud is going to be investigated. He also said that Thomas Casella, announced on Thursday as the new deputy commissioner, would be for the moment, reconsidered.

This came after Fox45 released a leaked memo dated Jan. 26 that was sent to DeSousa that ran through Casella’s internal affairs files and includes three incidents related to misconduct, neglect of duty, and racial discrimination, which have been “sustained” (found to be legitimate). Then on Saturday, Feb. 10,  BPD’s media spokesperson T.J. Smith released a statement via email that said elements of the leaked memo were “incorrect,” and that “there are no sustained complaints against [Casella] involving race, religion, sex, or any other type of discrimination.”

For those following the GTTF trial closely however, the appointment of Casella, who ran security at the Horseshoe Casino, raised eyebrows long before the specious memo.

On Tuesday, Feb. 6 at the trial, Special Agent Erika Jensen testified that the FBI did not pull records for Hersl from Horseshoe because they were worried that doing so would lead to someone at the casino tipping BPD off about the investigation.

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The post Jury deliberates in the Gun Trace Task Force trial, while new Commissioner struggles with massive police scandal appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Sgt. Wayne Jenkins was out drinking until about three in the morning on Aug. 8, 2016, so the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) wasn’t going to get to work until about two in the afternoon. They’d start late, most likely play fast and loose with the hours they worked, claim overtime, and continue their series of “rip and runs,” “sneak and peeks,” and “door pops,” with the occasional robbery of a high-profile drug dealer along the way.

“We’d use law enforcement tactics to target big-time dealers,” Det. Momodu Gondo said on the stand on Feb. 5 during the GTTF corruption trial.

On Aug. 8, 2016 in particular, the GTTF attempted to stop Dennis Armstrong, ended up chasing him through Baltimore in a car when he fled and on foot when he abandoned his van, hit him with some petty charges, stole his money, took his van, and then,  without a warrant or Armstrong’s consent, raided his storage facility looking for cocaine.

These kinds of over-the-top street tales have been the talk of the trial. But as the prosecution and the defense rested their cases today, the less sensational overtime claims and lies about when they worked are important to explore as well.

“A nigga’s check was over four grand,” Jemell Rayam boasted on a wiretapped phone call with Gondo, as the two laughed their asses off about how much money they were getting. “I’m gonna get at least $13,000 this month.”

According to Open Baltimore data, which lists Baltimore City employee salaries and gross pay from July 1, 2015 through June 30, 2016, the nine members of GTTF (this includes Officer John Clewell, the only one who has not been indicted) in total earned $436,909.41 in overtime during that period.

After Gondo testified, FBI Special Agent Erika Jensen, who led the GTTF investigation, took the stand and discussed the investigation process, stressing that it is an ongoing investigation and that Jenkins —GTTF’s ringleader and a nearly untouchable, highly connected golden boy in the department—is not cooperating.

With Gondo’s accusation from early in the day—that Deputy Commissioner Dean Palmere (who announced his retirement yesterday) helped coach Rayam and others on how to cover up a shooting—still fresh in everybody’s minds, Jensen’s statement of fact seemed to suggest more indictments are coming. When Jensen’s testimony continued today, Feb. 6, she made it clear that the extent of the BPD’s corruption made her “afraid” to provide information to officials or reach out to certain places for evidence of money spent, such as the Horseshoe Casino, for fear of officers being tipped off.

But for most of her time on the stand, she went over officers on trial Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor’s reported working hours and overtime slips, cross-referencing them with bank records, phone records, and receipts, all adding up to an outrageous degree of fraud: Taylor was in the Dominican Republic from Aug. 5-Aug. 9, 2016 but filed hours (his time out of the country proven by plane ticket purchases and bank withdrawals); Hersl hardly worked in October 2016 while he fixed up his new house in Joppa but filed hours (phone records placed him near the Joppa area most of the month and receipts from Home Depot in Bel Air and Lowes in Abingdon corresponded to phone records).

Testimony today from Det. James Kostoplis, who was briefly in the GTTF, claimed that the entire task force essentially did nothing between October 2016, when Jenkins went on leave after his child was born, and January 2017, when he returned to work.

Shortly after that, Jenkins told Kostoplis, “we’re going to go for a ride real quick.” Hersl was standing beside Jenkins, Kostoplis testified, and all three went out to Jenkins’ van, which drove a short distance before stopping on a side street. Jenkins asked him to leave his phone and police radio in the car. The three men got out and walked to the back of the van.

Jenkins asked Kostoplis what he thought about trailing big drug dealers and robbing them.

“That is a terrible fucking idea,” Kostoplis said. “You can’t have a badge on your chest and do something like that. The fact that law enforcement doesn’t do that is what separates law enforcement from criminals.”

On the stand, Kostoplis was dressed in his uniform. He detailed some of the ways he earned overtime—going over 911 calls for armed people and seeing if he could canvass neighborhoods for more information on guns— in contrast with GTTF’s ornate lies.

GTTF’s overtime hustle shows how the task force came to view getting guns off the street as more of a way to get off work as soon as possible than prevent crime (that’s to say when they weren’t planting guns themselves). It’s the logical result of the kind of statistics-fueled policing long criticized for being essentially a numbers game that inverts policing priorities.

“If we get a gun in maybe 10 minutes,” Gondo said, they would then fill out a report and end their day. “The whole process may take an hour.”

Gondo also repeated some of the same claims made during other GTTF members’ testimony related to the regular practice of signing off on each other’s overtime slips (“If two guys came in and got a gun at four, some who just came in, we would all be [listed as part of the seizure] too”), the existence of “slash days” (“you get guns and you get off the next day”) which Gondo said was common in the department at least since the mid-2000s, and Lt. Christopher O’Ree’s approval to file all of that overtime.

Even the expectation that a police officer is always on call was distorted by GTTF: It mostly meant being beholden to the whims of Jenkins. If, say, Jenkins called, all jacked up about a how he has got “a fuckin’ baller” at a Boston Street condominium on the water where a drug dealer kept a Mercedes G-Class SUV, a Mercedes CLK with a Twin Turbo engine, and a whole bunch heroin, among other things, then you have to be ready to get there—and fast.

“I got to be on standby for this man,” Gondo said.

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The post How the Gun Trace Task Force’s outrageous overtime hustle prevented policing appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

The second week in the trial of Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor brought to light a series of shocking revelations as a growing list of witnesses testified to the depravity and devastation shown by the elite Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), which moved with reckless impunity throughout the city dealing drugs and committing robbery, extortion, theft, and over-time fraud. Six other members of the operational unit that was charged with getting guns off the street have pleaded guilty. Hersl and Taylor, who are charged with robbery, extortion, using a firearm to commit a violent crime, and fraud charges relating to overtime theft have pleaded not guilty.

Callous cops and structural inequity: On Aug. 31, 2016, two cars full of Gun Trace Task Force officers watched in the distance as two cars that had just collided sat on the sidewalk badly damaged, with the state of the passengers unknown.

Det. Jemell Rayam suggested they get out and help, but aiding the injured drivers was not an option because Sgt. Wayne Jenkins—who was described by those he commanded in the GTTF as both a “prince” in the Baltimore Police Department and as “crazy”—told them not to do anything.

He had also told them to initiate the chase that led to this moment.

So they listened to the radio, waiting for a concerned citizen to call in the crash or for other cops to come to the scene.

This is all according to Rayam, who pleaded guilty along with all of the officers except for Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor, and seemed visibly shaken and sometimes confused on Jan. 30, his second day testifying in the ongoing federal corruption trial of the GTTF.

And though Taylor’s defense relied solely on presenting the witnesses as liars, what Rayam said was corroborated by audio from a bug the FBI had planted in the car of GTTF Detective Momodu Gondo.

Rayam explained it all began that day when Jenkins saw a car he wanted to stop at a gas station. The car fled and both Jenkins and Gondo, each driving an unmarked car, drove after it in pursuit. The car they were pursuing ran a red light and, in Rayam’s words, was “pretty much T-boned,” by another car.

“It was bad, real bad,” Rayam said. “Both of the cars collided with each other.”

Briefly, he couldn’t answer follow up questions—a crying Rayam wasn’t sure which crash they were asking about.

“There were so many car accidents,” he said.

Intead of checking on the victims of the accident, the members of the GTTF sat tight and waited, worrying that their role in the event may have been discovered.

“None of us stopped to render aid or to see if anyone was hurt,” Rayam said.

On the tape, Hersl suggested covering it up: “We could go stop the slips at 10:30 before that happened. ‘Hey I was in this car just driving home,’” he said, and laughed.

The trial, now in its second week, has presented a tremendous amount of evidence showing that the officers claimed overtime for hours they did not work.

Hersl laughed again on the tape and wondered what was in the car.

Jenkins and others worried that Citiwatch may have it all recorded—they hoped the rain that night would make them hard to see—and worried the pursued may be able to mention he was chased.

“That dude is unconscious. He ain’t saying shit,” Taylor said.

“These car chases. That’s what happens. It’s a crapshoot, you know?” Hersl said.

This was an extraordinary statement to hear coming from Hersl as his family sat in the courtroom. In 2013, a driver—who was being followed, but not chased, by a state trooper—killed Hersl’s brother Matthew in front of City Hall in downtown Baltimore. WBAL said that Stephen, Herl’s other brother, told them Matthew “didn’t drive because he didn’t like traffic and thought drivers were dangerous.”

This incident wherein a chase led to a car crash echoes other events in this case. In 2010, Jenkins, Officer Ryan Guinn, and Det. Sean Suiter initiated a chase that also ended in a crash—one that was fatal. According to the federal indictment, the officers had a sergeant come and bring an ounce of heroin to plant in the back of the car they were pursuing, before giving first aid to the man, who ultimately died. Umar Burley, who was driving the car they chased, was recently freed from federal prison. Det. Suiter was murdered a day before testifying in the case—and the police car bringing him to Shock Trauma crashed on the way there. Guinn was reinstated to BPD after a two-week suspension and, last week in court, another GTTF member Maurice Ward testified that Jenkins told him that Guinn had informed the squad that they were under investigation.

Hersl has admitted to stealing money, but his lawyers argue that because he had probable cause he did not rob his targets—and did not use violence to take the money. He glared at Rayam as he testified about the wreck and various thefts. Rayam has confessed to dealing drugs, stealing drugs, and strong-arm robbery. In court, he suggested that Gondo, with whom he worked closely, had discussed other serious crimes, including a possible murder. Rayam alluded on several occasions to the numerous internal affairs complaints against Hersl, but the judge shut him down—that information was not admissible in court. On another occasion, federal prosecutors asked Rayam if Hersl gave him money for selling cocaine. Hersl’s lawyer objected and the judge sustained the objection.

But the overall sense is that, for the GTTF—and especially Jenkins, who has pleaded guilty but is not expected to testify—Baltimore City was at once a killing field and playground.

It is too easy to see Jenkins and Gondo and Rayam as sociopathic exceptions who are especially depraved. More testimony later the same day showed how this behavior stems from creating a city which criminalizes—or at best contains—a large part of its population. This structural disdain for life became clear in testimony from Herbert Tate, one of the witnesses against Hersl, who was treated like a criminal by defense attorneys.

Tate said he was on Robb Street in the Midway neighborhood on Nov. 27, 2015 to see old friends. A few days earlier, he said, Hersl had stopped him on Robb Street, searched him, and given him a slip of paper—not a proper citation, just a piece of paper—called it a warning, and said, “Next time I see you, you’re going to jail.”

It was about 5 p.m., Tate said, when he was walking up the street with an alcoholic beverage—he couldn’t remember if it was beer or wine—when Hersl, Officer Kevin Fassl, and Sgt. John Burns pulled up on him. Tate says that Hersl told Fassl to grab him. Fassl searched him, including searching his waistband and putting their fingers in his mouth, and then sat him down in handcuffs. In his pockets, they found $530 in cash, some receipts, and pay stubs—but no drugs. Hersl, Tate testified, dug around in vacants and on stoops looking for drugs. He went around a corner for about 10 minutes, Tate said, and came back with “blue and whites.”

Tate testified that he did not know what “blue and whites” were at the time but later learned it was heroin. Hersl sat beside his lawyer, William Purpura, glowering as Tate testified that Fassl asked Hersl what to do with the money and Hersl said, “Keep it.”

When Tate asked them to count it, he says that Burns got angry and bragged about how much money he made. According to a 2016 spreadsheet of Baltimore City employee salary data, Burns brought in a little more than $86,000, but with overtime—one of the main issues at stake in the case—he made nearly double that, bringing in $164,403 in 2016. On Feb. 21, 2017—just over a week before the Gun Trace Task Force indictments came down, Burns took medical leave and began raising funds with a GoFundMe account that claimed he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome triggered, the fundraiser says, from “inhaling fecal matter during a search warrant.”

By the time the money made its way into evidence, the $530 had become $216. When Tate was released from jail, he was given 91 cents back. He never saw the rest of the money.

Defense lawyers made a different issue out of the money. Christopher Nieto, who is representing Marcus Taylor (who was not involved in Tate’s arrest at all), made a point of mentioning that some of the money submitted as evidence was in small bills like singles, fives, and tens.

“Dollar bills suggest drug distribution,” Nieto said.

“Everybody has dollar bills,” Tate responded.

The claim was odd in the context of a trial in which it had been repeatedly stated that large sums of cash also indicated drug dealing. Whatever amount of money African-Americans have in Baltimore City can indicate criminal activity, apparently: Tate had a 2003 charge tied to possession and distribution of narcotics, for which he took probation before judgement and admitted on the stand that when he was in high school he “did some things”—meaning small-time dealing—but had never been arrested back then.

Nieto repeatedly referred to Robb Street as “an open air drug market,” “a drug neighborhood,” and a “not a great neighborhood.” A perception encouraged, in part, because these neighborhoods are criminalized.

“That’s what y’all label it as, but that’s not what it is to me,” said Tate, who testified that he had grown up in the area and had friends and family there and coached a children’s basketball team in the area. Nieto also said that Tate had a black ski mask when he was arrested, though Tate said he had it on him because it was cold and that he was wearing it as “a winter hat.”

This attitude displayed in the questioning of Tate (that certain people are inherently criminal) is the animating force behind the GTTF criminal enterprise, but it isn’t that far from the assumptions of our criminal justice system, which, in 21st century American cities, is based on an almost Calvinist view of crime: If some people are criminal, nothing you do to them can be criminal.

Because of the 2015 arrest, Tate said, he lost his job because he was in jail for four days, then he lost his car because he couldn’t pay for it and couldn’t get another job because of the narcotics charge—and to this day, he owes a friend for the bail.

“I’m still paying them back,” Tate said.

In March of 2016, the state dismissed Hersl’s charges against Tate—a common occurrence in Baltimore. After the charges were dismissed, Tate was able to get another job as an HVAC technician, which he has to this day. He also said that after the arrest, he moved away from Baltimore to Anne Arundel County.

“I got out of the city,” he said. (Baynard Woods & Brandon Soderberg)

The ruined lives and emotional wreckage caused by GTTF: It was toward the end of the day on Jan. 31 at the Gun Trace Task Force trial of Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor when Ronald Hamilton, whose home was raided without a warrant by the GTTF in July 2016, finally had enough.

On the stand, he received too many nagging, loaded questions about where and how he got his money and not enough about what he believed to be the real issue at hand: the full extent of the GTTF’s reign of terror. So, when Christopher Nieto, the defense attorney for Taylor, asked one more time about the $17,000 in cash he put down for his half-a-million dollar home in Westminster, Hamilton blew up.

“I put $17,000 down on the house. You wanna know it right? I put $17,000 down,” he said.

Then he got loud: “THIS RIGHT HERE DESTROYED MY WHOLE FUCKING FAMILY MAN. . . . EVERYBODY’S LIFE IS DESTROYED, MAN. . . . THEY CAME IN MY HOUSE AND DESTROYED MY FAMILY. . . . I’M GETTING DIVORCED BECAUSE OF THIS.”

He added that his kids are afraid to go in their own house now, his wife waits at the nearby Wal-Mart if she gets home from work before Hamilton because she doesn’t like to enter the house alone, and she’s taking medication for stress caused by the raid.

“You want the facts?” he asked Nieto. “Is this what you want?”

Hamilton’s invective was aimed at the pack of federally-indicted cops, along with their defense lawyers, whose entire argument, time and time again, implied drug dealers are not only entirely untrustworthy but hardly even allowed to have grievances (or carry cash).

Attorneys went over nearly every transaction Hamilton made over a period of years, pouring over his receipts, gambling records, and properties. But it was the questioning about his home—which, prosecutors allege, was invaded by the rogue cops who had followed him and his wife to a Home Depot —that set him over the edge.

Hamilton’s outburst may have been one of the pivotal moments in the case, voicing the fear and rage that all of the day’s witnesses seemed to feel.

In March 2016, Oreese Stevenson was arrested by Sgt. Wayne Jenkins’ pre-GTTF special unit (consisting that night of Taylor, Ward, and Evodio Hendrix) after a friend entered Stevenson’s car with a backpack for a cocaine deal. Jenkins and Ward told Stevenson they approached because his windows were tinted too dark—Stevenson said they weren’t tinted “at all”—and Jenkins jumped in the car, grabbed the backpack of money (which Stevenson said he expected to have contained $21,500), and later took Stevenson’s house keys.

Soon after, Keona Holloway, Stevenson’s girlfriend who also testified, got a call from her 12-year-old son that cops were at the house, so she left her nursing job early. Inside the house, Jenkins showed her a piece of paper and claimed it was a warrant. She also said he recorded video of them entering the house, recreating their entry (when GTTF’s Maurice Ward testified at trial the first week, he said that during that same incident they recreated discovery of a safe in the basement).

Stevenson later spotted discrepancies between what he had when he was arrested and what was seized. He said there would have been $21,500 in the car but police said they seized $15,000; he said he had $300,000 in a safe but police said they seized $100,000; and he said he had 10 kilograms of cocaine in a safe but police said they seized 8 kilograms.

“I’ve never seen them stop a car and run right into the house that way,” Stevenson said, reflecting on how the arrest began.

In August 2016, Dennis Armstrong was pulled over by GTTF’s Hersl, Jenkins, and Momodu Gondo but sped off, lobbing cocaine out of his van and onto the street to destroy the evidence. When cops nabbed him after he drove down a dead end street and ran off on foot, they drove his van to a storage facility where he kept his coke, they had learned. He never consented to them accessing the storage unit.

Armstrong was charged with possession, possession with intent to distribute, driving without a seatbelt, and driving with a minor in the car without a seatbelt (he did not have a minor in the car). When he got out of jail, he got his watch, belt, and a bunch of lottery tickets back. He also learned GTTF had claimed they had only seized $2,800 when he said he had $8,000 in his van. And the two kilograms of coke he said he had were not inside his storage locker, which had been wrecked.

The possession charge—for which he received two years probation—was for what amounted to a few “crumbs” of coke, Armstrong said.

In September 2016, Sergio Summerville, who was experiencing homelessness at the time, had his friend Fats drive him to his storage facility near the Horseshoe Casino where he kept his belongings and the “small amounts” of cocaine and heroin he was selling. On the way out of the facility, two unmarked police cars pulled up to Fats’ car. Jenkins claimed they were DEA and had a warrant, and Hersl said they knew Summerville was a big deal drug dealer “from the Avenue.”

Summerville said that he was offered “freedom” if he gave up information on other dealers, and that when they finally let his friend Fats go, Summerville shouted out the code so he could exit the storage facility and that Hersl saved the code in his phone. When Summerville tried to look at Hersl saving the info on his phone, Hersl elbowed him. Summerville was eventually let go too and never charged with a crime. He said GTTF stole $4800 out of a sock in his storage unit where he hid his money.

“They came at me like a gang or something,” Summerville said.

This lineup of witnesses—all of whom had immunity—showed the extent of the GTTF’s targets: big time and small time dealers, current and former, some charged with crimes and some not at all.

But this cast of characters also illustrates the specific nature of drug dealing in a deindustrialized city like Baltimore—dealing as a dependable, dangerous side hustle that is hardly glamorous even if you’re shipping out plenty of product. Stevenson is currently a truck driver and had the job on and off again while dealing. He was using money he earned to start an Assisted Living service with his girlfriend Holloway. Armstrong’s day job was a maintenance worker for public housing and Summerville sold while he was homeless—now he works as a caterer.

GTTF didn’t confine their abuse to those who dabbled in dealing though. Gregory Thompson, a maintenance man for the storage facility near the casino, is about as “square” as you can get and testified that Jenkins and Hersl intimidated him the night of the September 2016 incident with Summerville.

The commotion caused by the GTTF stopping Summerville and Fats caused Thompson to come out to see what was going on. Jenkins and Hersl—he had a hard time remembering who said what—asked to see the facility’s security cameras and he told him they would need a warrant for that. They didn’t like that answer, got “about a foot and a half” away from him, and threatened him.

“You look like someone who needs to get robbed,” Thompson said Jenkins or Hersl told him—he couldn’t remember which one had said it.

“As far as I’m concerned, they both said it to me,” Thompson added.

Thompson’s life wasn’t destroyed by the encounter that night, but he was clearly shaken and angry, more than a year later. (Brandon Soderberg)

One man in front of BPD headquarters demands police disband: Outside of Baltimore Police headquarters downtown about a half hour before the Gun Trace Task Force trials began a few blocks west, Wu Tang Clan-affiliated rapper and organizer Marques Johnson stood quietly, seething with an announcement to make.

“I want to speak Darryl DeSousa, the police chief, and I basically want to let him know that at this point, the police are charged with protecting the community from threats and as of right now, they are the threat,” Johnson, who raps as Andre Roxx, said.

He was there alone but he said already had his own “officers” for his new organization, Protecting Our Own Community (P.O.O.C.), established in response to the GTTF and the BPD.

“When the revelation came out that they were planting firearms I was like, ‘Somebody’s got to do something,’” Johnson said. “It’s an ongoing epidemic—police misconduct—that has resulted in the death of countless black men, women, and children.”

Stories such at those recounted during the GTTF trials are similar to what he heard from his father and grandfather, who grew up in North Philadelphia.

“P.O.O.C. will protect our own community, even against the police,” he said. “We’ll protect ourselves against the police using up to and including deadly force if necessary. Hopefully, they’ll pull out of our communities and we can accomplish this without bloodshed. But I am prepared if necessary to rally the troops and defend ourselves. I mean they’re using lethal force against us, I’m prepared to rally the troops and if necessary in order to defend ourselves, for self protection.”

Then Johnson trudged inside BPD HQ and requested a meeting with the commissioner. He was informed he’d need to make an appointment and introduced himself again.

“My name is Andre Roxx of the Wu Tang Clan, please let him know I’d like to speak to him,” he said. “It’s important.”

After about five minutes, two BPD representatives rather than the commissioner greeted Johnson.

“You have become a threat to this community,” Johnson told the two detectives. “As a representative of the black community as a whole I am requesting that the police leave our community until you get your acts together. I’m letting you know we’re putting this organization together. This organization will be armed. It will be in the streets. And we will protect ourselves.”

BPD representatives nodded, wished him luck, and Johnson left.

“I wasn’t looking for a response so it went exactly how I wanted it to go,” he said back outside in front of BPD HQ. “Now, I’m headed out and I’m starting to recruit.”

In the federal court house, as Johnson drove around the city recruiting, a coke-slinging bail bondsman named Donald Stepp testified that GTTF had a hand in spreading drugs stolen from pharmacies during the April 27, 2015 rioting. (Brandon Soderberg)

GTTF sold drugs stolen from pharmacies during Baltimore Uprising: “I got an entire pharmacy,” former bail bondsman Donald Stepp said from the witness stand in federal court on Feb. 1. He was quoting former police sergeant Wayne Jenkins, the center of the ongoing corruption trial of two members of the Gun Trace Task Force.

In a trial full of dramatic revelations of corruption, Stepp’s claim was especially significant in this beleaguered city that was about to embark on a third citizen-led ceasefire campaign attempting to halt the brutal pace of near-daily murders from Feb. 2 through Feb. 4.

In June 2015, after what was then Baltimore’s deadliest month in decades, then-Commissioner Anthony Batts blamed the spike in murders on drugs looted from pharmacies during the unrest following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in April of that year. Headlines blared: “Baltimore police commissioner: looted drugs during riots causing spike in violence.”

Others have claimed that the murders arose from the “Ferguson Effect,” which argues that police “stood down” for fear of being “the next viral video.”

But Stepp’s claims complicate both of those narratives. According to Stepp, early in the morning on April 28, 2015 as Baltimore police struggled to regain some control after weeks of protest had turned to a day of rioting, Jenkins had his own agenda.

“During the riots of Freddie Gray, he called me again, woke me up, said I needed to open the garage door,” Stepp said.

When Jenkins pulled up, Stepp said, he got out of the car, opened the trunk and took out two large trash bags.

“I got people coming out of these pharmacies,” Stepp, who estimated making a million dollars off of selling drugs Jenkins stole, recalled his old friend saying.

Deborah Katz Levi, the head of the Baltimore City Public Defender Special Litigation Section, calls it callous: “There’s some argument that these guys robbed drug dealers, some people say that, right, and that these guys, you know, committed crimes against other alleged criminals—but when you’re taking prescription medication that the citizens of Baltimore, and in impoverished neighborhoods, really needed, that shows a level of callousness that rises all the way to the top,” she said outside the courthouse Thursday.

But in addition to taking medicine away from citizens, according to then-Commissioner Batts’ logic, Jenkins and Stepp contributed to “turf wars,” which he said were “leading to violence and shootings in our city.”

Batts said 27 pharmacies were looted. And while most people think of the burning CVS at the heart of the unrest in Penn North, the DEA claimed that most of the pharmacies were targeted by organized gangs.

“You see the economic value for these gangs in targeting these pharmacies,” Special Agent Gary Tuggle told WBAL back in 2015, comparing the price of Oxycontin—which he said could go for $30 a pill—to heroin, which was selling for $10-$15 a bag.

Stepp testified that he and Jenkins regularly burgled buildings—and that he bought a wide variety of equipment used in such burglaries, including grappling hooks, crowbars, sledgehammers, and tracking devices for Jenkins and other police officers, whom he did not name.

He described Jenkins as a man in control of the city: “It was easy for him to be able to steal because he had access, incredible access because of his position,” Stepp said.

While the exact role GTTF and other rogue officers played in the looting of drugs and the rise of violence is unknown, it is clear that the task force, which was described by prosecutors as “both cops and robbers at the same time,” profited from it.

Cooperating co-defendants testified that, as the murder rate rose in 2015, then-Commissioner Kevin Davis asked Jenkins how he was keeping his squad motivated. According to Evodio Hendrix, Jenkins told the commissioner he was using overtime to keep his crew happy and getting guns off the streets. Davis allegedly told Jenkins to “keep up the good work.”

Jenkins received a bronze star for his conduct in the unrest. Davis was fired two days before the beginning of the GTTF trial.

The worse the crime, the more easily the GTTF could claim fraudulent overtime. In 2015, Daniel Hersl, one of the defendants who has not pleaded guilty and standing trial, made a salary of $77,591 in 2015, and made an additional $86,880 in overtime that year. Hersl claimed that he worked 1,692.9 hours of overtime in 2015—roughly 28 hours of overtime every single week of the year. And yet, according to another GTTF member, Jemell Rayam, Hersl went as long as a month without coming to work at all as he worked on his new home.

Stepp testified that Jenkins called Hersl “one of the most corrupt cops in Baltimore City.”

Hersl was working on May 2, the night after State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced charges against six officers for their roles in Freddie Gray’s death. He is currently being sued for throwing down a credentialed reporter that night. Sgt. Keith Gladstone, who has been described by someone in law enforcement who knows both men as a “mentor” to Jenkins, and Lt. Christopher O’Ree, a GTTF supervisor who approved some of the fraudulent overtime, were both found guilty of using excessive force on the same night in a recent civil case, in which Larry Lomax was awarded $75,000.

Increased violence did not only offer more opportunities for overtime fraud, but it gave the officers a wider latitude in further criminal activity—creating a viciously circular logic of profit.

“This is not a normal police department,” Stepp said on the stand. He also said Jenkins described the GTTF as “a front for a criminal enterprise.”

Rayam testified, for instance, that on at least two occasions, he sold guns back onto the street and that he helped one drug crew rob another. Other testimony has alleged that Jenkins wanted to rob a drug dealer who shorted a friend of his on a cocaine deal.

Stepp said he had known the Jenkins family for 40 years and that Jenkins sent drugs to Stepp through his older brother for eight years before they began working together directly in 2012. After that, Jenkins dropped off drugs almost nightly.

“It was just over the top. Everything and anything that could be imagined,” Stepp said.

But Stepp’s testimony also showed that Jenkins used him to get around his own squad. In the case of Oreese Stevenson, which other officers had testified about at length, Jenkins called Stepp and tried to get him to break into Stevenson’s house before the squad got there.

Stepp testified that Marcus Taylor, the other officer who has pleaded not guilty and is standing trial, and Sgt. Thomas E. Wilson III accompanied him and Jenkins to Scores strip club and acted as security for a visiting drug dealer.

Wilson, who had previously been charged with perjury and was said to be Jenkins’ former partner, has been placed on administrative duty. As more officers are named in connection with the case, many in the city wonder where it will end.

“The only thought I have racing through my mind every day all day is: Where does it stop, how many officers, how many people’s convictions are called into question by these officers’ brazen and really egregious and horrible criminal conduct,” said public defender Levi, who is charged with reviewing the cases.

She said that testimony earlier in the week pushed the number of tainted cases up to somewhere around 3,000.

“We don’t know who’s involved in this kind of criminality,” Levi said. “And there’s really no increased transparency based on these trials. I don’t see anybody from the police department committing openly to get to the bottom of it; I don’t see anyone from the State’s Attorney’s Office saying ‘come look at our files and we’ll show you what we’ve got’ so we can all be in this together and try to undo it.” (Baynard Woods)

Lawyers claim Marilyn Mosby’s office “encouraged” GTTF crimes: The Gun Trace Task Force trial, which wrapped up its second week on Feb. 1, has already provided numerous allegations of police misconduct. But a press conference on Friday, Feb. 2 held by attorney Ivan Bates called attention to even more allegations and seemed to connect the dots between the GTTF and the State’s Attorney’s Office headed by Marilyn Mosby.

Flanked by fellow attorneys Natalie Finegar and Josh Insley and a number of clients who encountered GTTF, Bates, who is running for state’s attorney, detailed what led him on a “seven year battle with Wayne Jenkins and members of that gang called the Gun Trace Task Force.”

Jenkins, Evodio Hendrix, Momodu Gondo, Jemell Rayam, Marcus Taylor, and Maurice Ward are all involved in the incidents detailed during the press conference—although, the victims made clear, the misconduct was not limited to these officers.

“They were together. If you see one police officer breaking the law, you just as guilty as them if you allow it,” said Shawn Whiting, who was arrested by Taylor and Ward of GTTF, and another officer, Eduardo Pinto, in 2014.

“Here are just a few of the faces that have been terrorized by those criminals called the Gun Trace Task Force and we view them as a gang,” Bates said. “It’s important that we recognize that these few faces that you see are the individuals that you’ve been hearing about in the courtroom but there are so many more people that have been terrorized by these criminals.”

In November 2010, Jamal Walker was pulled over in his car by then-Detective Jenkins, who claimed Walker smelled like weed, searched him, and found no weed but did find cash ($40,000 according to Walker), and then headed to Walker’s home and tried to break in. Walker’s wife Jovonne set off their silent burglary alarm during the break-in, which brought police to the residence. Jenkins sent them away and then searched the home himself. Jenkins said he found two guns and reported $20,000 seized.

In January 2014, Whiting, who testified at the GTTF trial on Jan. 25, had money stolen from him after GTTF members pulled him over, claiming he ran five stop signs.

“This case is bigger than you’ve ever seen,” Whiting told the Beat and The Real News Network after the press conference. “I already know it—through experience.”

In September 2016, Andre Crowder was pulled over and hit with a number of gun charges, which were eventually dropped, but Crowder spent three days in jail, he said during the press conference. His experience demonstrated how devastating even a short stint can be.

“When this occurred I was took away from my family for three days and within those three days I lost my 3-year-old son,” Crowder said. “I’m not a doctor but maybe I could have saved my son or whatever—but the three days I was gone I lost him. So it’s bigger than the charge they put on me.”

The officers involved in his arrest were GTTF’s Ward, Gondo, Hendrix, and Taylor.

Finegar focused on the SAO and stated out loud what she said had been murmurs among lawyers, police, and city insiders for years: The SAO had known about GTTF for years and did nothing to stop it.

“The current State’s Attorney’s Office completely dropped the ball in this situation. They not only turned their back on the possibility that these officers were doing horrible things and violating the law themselves,” Finegar said. “They actually encouraged it by letting these officers get away with things time and time again. Between 2015 and 2017 the current state’s attorney knew these officers weren’t showing up for court. Fifty to 60 percent of the time these cases were being dismissed.”

Finegar, who was until recently a public defender, passed out a Jan. 21, 2016 memo about GTTF’s Det. Jemell Rayam. The memo was from StacyAnn Llewellyn, chief of the SAO’s Public Trust and Police Integrity Unit, and addressed to Major Ian Dombroski in BPD’s Internal Affairs Section. It informed the police department that the SAO would be disclosing the results of a Franks hearing (a hearing held to determine if an officer lied to get a warrant) in which Judge Barry Williams—the judge in the case against the officers charged with Freddie Gray’s death—ruled that Rayam had not given credible testimony when he claimed to have seen drugs in plain view in the apartment of Gary Clayton. The charges were dropped. During Clayton’s arrest, Rayam was with Gondo and John Clewell, the only GTTF officer not to face charges though he has been suspended.

Dombrowski, who received the letter, was mentioned in the GTTF trials, when it was alleged that he came up with the overtime or slash days as rewards for getting guns off the street.

Finegar said that even though the “front office” of the SAO got the memo, “they continued to prosecute cases, they continued to fight the disclosure of records again and again and again.” She then pointed out that there is a state’s attorney who “tipped the officers off about the investigation” and that the SAO has made no comment on whether anything happened to that state’s attorney or not.

Insley detailed an arrest of one of his clients, Avon Allen, whose arrest reflected the approach heard by those who testified during the GTTF trial—“that they rolled up, they popped the doors, and when he flinched, they ran right after him.”

“The statement with the benefit of hindsight is so unbelievable,” Insley said. “It says that [Allen]’s running, they’re running after him, and they grab him by the legs and as he’s falling down, the gun goes flying and it skids right into a sewer. No fingerprints, no DNA because it went into a sewer.”

What happened to Allen illustrates the SAO’s troubling approach to prosecution and echoes the trials of Keith Davis Jr., who activists have said is being unfairly and doggedly pursued by Mosby’s office. When Allen went to trial, Insley said, the cop’s testimony didn’t convince a jury and Allen wasn’t charged. The SAO referred Allen’s case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, who then indicted Allen. But when a U.S. Attorney looked at the file and saw the officers involved, they dismissed the indictment.

“What happens next shows how broken our system is,” Insley said, continuing to describe how the deputy state’s attorney got a warrant for Allen under a new indictment. Eventually, Judge Charles Peters released Allen. Not long after, Insley said, the federal indictments came down. Insley pointed out that as a U.S. attorney, Peters had famously prosecuted dirty cops William King and Antonio Murray in 2006, calling them “urban predators.”

According to court records, the officers involved in Allen’s case were Jenkins, Ward, Hendrix, and Taylor.

In a statement to The Baltimore Sun, Mosby downplayed the press conference: “I realize this is campaign season for those seeking elected office and over the next few months, I fully understand that my administration will be attacked; and while people are entitled to their own opinion, they are certainly not entitled to their own facts,” she said.

The press conference was, in part, a campaign event to be sure. But it also provided important context about the lives that have been disrupted or shattered by GTTF. (Brandon Soderberg & Baynard Woods)

At the end of the week, a video surfaced showing former Commissioner Kevin Davis pinning a bronze star on Wayne Jenkins, the GTTF sergeant whom even Rayam and Gondo thought was “over the top” and “too much,” for his service to other officers during the “riots” following Gray’s death. The moment captures the circularity of the GTTF. The detectives played a major role in creating the animosity toward police that exploded during the uprising. Then they exploited that chaos—resulting in both overtime, accolades, greater latitude, and illegal profit from selling the stolen drugs. If nothing else, the trial reveals that everything most people have thought about the city over the last few years may be false.

Coverage of the Gun Trace Task Force trial is a collaboration between the Baltimore Beat and the Real News Network. Visit therealnews.com for more independent local, national, and international journalism that examines the underlying causes of chronic problems and searches for effective solutions.

The post “Like A Gang Or Something”: Dispatches from week two of the Gun Trace Task Force trial appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

The Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) trial, which wrapped up its second week on Thursday, has already provided numerous allegations of police misconduct. But a press conference today held by attorney Ivan Bates called attention to even more allegations and seemed to connect the dots between the GTTF and the State’s Attorney’s Office headed by Marilyn Mosby.

Flanked by fellow attorneys Natalie Finegar and Josh Insley and a number of clients who encountered GTTF, Bates, who is running for State’s Attorney, detailed what led him on a “seven year battle with Wayne Jenkins and members of that gang called the Gun Trace Task Force.”

Jenkins, Evodio Hendrix, Momodu Gondo, Jemell Rayam, Marcus Taylor, and Maurice Ward are all involved in the incidents detailed during the press conference—although, the victims made clear, the misconduct was not limited to these officers.

“They were together. If you see one police officer breaking the law, you just as guilty as them if you allow it,” said Shawn Whiting, who was arrested by Marcus Taylor, Maurice Ward of GTTF, and another officer, Eduardo Pinto, in 2014.

“Here are just a few of the faces that have been terrorized by those criminals called the Gun Trace Task Force and we view them as a gang,” Bates said. “It’s important that we recognize that these few faces that you see are the individuals that you’ve been hearing about in the courtroom but there are so many more people that have been terrorized by these criminals.”

In November 2010, Jamal Walker was pulled over in his car by then-Detective and GTTF leader Jenkins, who claimed Walker smelled like weed, searched him, and found no weed but did find cash ($40,000 according to Walker), and then headed to Walker’s home and tried to break in. Walker’s wife Jovonne set off their silent burglary alarm during the break-in, which brought police to the residence. Jenkins sent them away and then searched the home himself. Jenkins said he found two guns and reported $20,000 seized.

In January 2014, Whiting, who testified at the GTTF trial on Jan. 25, had money stolen from him after GTTF members pulled him over, claiming he ran five stop signs.

“This case is bigger than you’ve ever seen,” Whiting told the Beat and The Real News Network after the press conference. “I already know it—through experience.”

In September 2016, Andre Crowder was pulled over and hit with a number of gun charges, which were eventually dropped. Crowder spent three days in jail, he said during the press conference, but his experience demonstrated how devastating even a short stint can be.

“When this occurred I was took away from my family for three days and within those three days I lost my 3-year-old son,” Crowder said. “I’m not a doctor but maybe I could have saved my son or whatever—but the three days I was gone I lost him. So it’s bigger than the charge they put on me.”

The officers involved in his arrest were GTTF’s Ward, Gondo, Hendrix, and Taylor.

Finegar focused on the State’s Attorney’s Office and stated out loud what she said had been murmurs among lawyers, police, and city insiders for years: The SAO had known about GTTF for years and did nothing to stop it.

“The current State’s Attorney’s Office completely dropped the ball in this situation. They not only turned their back on the possibility that these officers were doing horrible things and violating the law themselves,” Finegar said. “They actually encouraged it by letting these officers get away with things time and time again. Between 2015 and 2017 the current State’s Attorney knew these officers weren’t showing up for court. Fifty to 60 percent of the time these cases were being dismissed.”

Finegar, who was until recently a public defender, passed out a Jan. 21, 2016 memo about GTTF’s Detective Jemell Rayam. The memo was from StacyAnn Llewellyn, chief of the SAO’s Public Trust and Police Integrity Unit, and addressed to Major Ian Dombroski in BPD’s Internal Affairs Section. It informed the police department that the SAO would be disclosing the results of a Franks hearing (a hearing held to determine if an officer lied to get a warrant) in which Judge Barry Williams—the judge in the case against the officers charged with Freddie Gray’s death—ruled that Rayam had not given credible testimony when he claimed to have seen drugs in plain view in the apartment of Gary Clayton. The charges were dropped. With Rayam during Clayton’s arrest were Gondo and John Clewell, the only GTTF officer not to face charges.

Dombrowski, who received the letter, was mentioned in the GTTF trials, when it was alleged that he came up with the overtime or slash days as rewards for getting guns off the street.

Finegar said that even though the “front office” of the State’s Attorney’s Office got the memo, “they continued to prosecute cases, they continued to fight the disclosure of records again and again and again.” She then pointed out that there is a State’s Attorney who “tipped the officers off about the investigation” and that the SAO has made no comment on whether anything happened to that State’s Attorney or not.

Insley detailed an arrest of one of his clients, Avon Allen, whose arrest reflected the approach heard by those who testified during the GTTF trial—“that they rolled up, they popped the doors, and when he flinched, they ran right after him.”

“The statement with the benefit of hindsight is so unbelievable,” Insley said. “It says that [Allen]’s running, they’re running after him, and they grab him by the legs and as he’s falling down, the gun goes flying and it skids right into a sewer. No fingerprints, no DNA because it went into a sewer.”

What happened to Allen illustrates the SAO’s troubling approach to prosecution and echoes the trials of Keith Davis Jr., who activists have said is being unfairly and doggedly pursued by Mosby’s office. When Allen went to trial, Insely said, the cop’s testimony didn’t convince a jury and Allen wasn’t charged. The SAO referred Allen’s case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, who then indicted Allen. But when a U.S. Attorney looked at the file and saw the officers involved, they dismissed the indictment.

“What happens next shows how broken our system is,” Insley said, continuing to describe how the Deputy State’s Attorney got a warrant for Allen under a new indictment. Eventually, Judge Charles Peters released Allen. Not long after, Insley said, the federal indictments came down. Insley pointed out that as a U.S. attorney, Peters had famously prosecuted dirty cops William King and Antonio Murray in 2006, calling them “urban predators.”

According to court records, the officers involved in Allen’s case were Jenkins, Ward, Hendrix, and Taylor.

In a statement to The Baltimore Sun, Mosby downplayed the press conference.

“I realize this is campaign season for those seeking elected office and over the next few months, I fully understand that my administration will be attacked; and while people are entitled to their own opinion, they are certainly not entitled to their own facts,” she said.

The press conference was, in part, a campaign event to be sure. But it also provided important context about the lives that have been disrupted or shattered by GTTF.

The post Lawyers claim Marilyn Mosby’s office “encouraged” GTTF crimes appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

It was toward the end of the day at the Gun Trace Task Force trial of Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor yesterday when Ronald Hamilton, whose home was raided without a warrant by the GTTF in July 2016, finally had enough.

On the stand, he received too many nagging, loaded questions about where and how he got his money and not enough about what he believed to be the real issue at hand: the full extent of the GTTF’s reign of terror. So, when Christopher Nieto, the defense attorney for Taylor, asked one more time about the $17,000 in cash he put down for his half-a-million dollar home in Westminster, Hamilton blew up.

“I put $17,000 down on the house. You wanna know it right? I put $17,000 down,” he said.

Then he got loud: “THIS RIGHT HERE DESTROYED MY WHOLE FUCKING FAMILY MAN. . . . EVERYBODY’S LIFE IS DESTROYED, MAN. . . . THEY CAME IN MY HOUSE AND DESTROYED MY FAMILY. . . . I’M GETTING DIVORCED BECAUSE OF THIS.”

He added that his kids are afraid to go in their own house now, his wife waits at the nearby Wal-Mart if she gets home from work before Hamilton does because she doesn’t like to enter the house alone, and she’s taking medication for stress caused by the raid.

“You want the facts?” he asked Nieto. “Is this what you want?”

Hamilton’s invective was aimed at the pack of federally-indicted cops, along with their defense lawyers, whose entire argument, time and time again, implied drug dealers are not only entirely untrustworthy but hardly even allowed to have grievances (or carry cash).

Attorneys went over nearly every transaction Hamilton made over a period of years, pouring over his receipts, gambling records, and properties. But it was the questioning about his home—which, prosecutors allege, was invaded by the rogue cops who had followed him and his wife from a Home Depot store—that set him over the edge.

Hamilton’s outburst may have been one of the pivotal moments in the case, voicing the fear and rage that all of Wednesday’s witnesses seemed to feel.

In March 2016, Oreese Stevenson was arrested by Sgt. Wayne Jenkins’ pre-GTTF special unit (consisting that night of Taylor, Ward, and Evodio Hendrix) after a friend entered Stevenson’s car with a backpack for a cocaine deal. Jenkins and Ward told Stevenson they approached because his windows were tinted too dark—Stevenson said they weren’t tinted “at all”—and Jenkins jumped in the car, grabbed the backpack of money (which Stevenson said he expected to have contained $21,500), and later took Stevenson’s house keys.

Soon after, Keona Holloway, Stevenson’s girlfriend, who also testified, got a call from her 12-year-old son that cops were at the house, so she left her nursing job early. Inside the house, Jenkins showed her a piece of paper and claimed it was a warrant. She also said he recorded video of them entering the house, recreating their entry (when GTTF’s Maurice Ward testified last week, he said that during that same incident they recreated discovery of a safe in the basement).

Stevenson later spotted discrepancies between what he had when he was arrested and what was seized. He said there would have been $21,500 in the car but police said they seized $15,000; he said he had $300,000 in a safe but police said they seized $100,000; and he said he had 10 kilograms of cocaine in a safe but police said they seized 8 kilograms.

“I’ve never seen them stop a car and run right into the house that way,” Stevenson said, reflecting on how the arrest began.

In August 2016, Dennis Armstrong was pulled over by GTTF’s Hersl, Jenkins, and Momodu Gondo but sped off, lobbing cocaine out of his van and onto the street to destroy the evidence. When cops nabbed him after he drove down a dead end street and ran off on foot, they drove his van to a storage facility where he kept his coke, they had learned. He never consented to them accessing the storage unit.

Armstrong was charged with possession, possession with intent to distribute, driving without a seatbelt, and driving with a minor in the car without a seatbelt (he did not have a minor in the car). When he got out of jail, he got his watch, belt, and a bunch of lottery tickets back. He also learned GTTF had claimed they had only seized $2,800 when he said he had $8,000 in his van. And the 2 kilograms of coke he said he had inside his storage locker were not there and his storage locker was wrecked.

The possession charge—for which he received two years probation—was for what amounted to a few “crumbs” of coke, Armstrong said.

In September 2016, Sergio Summerville, who was experiencing homelessness at the time, had his friend Fats drive him to his storage facility near the Horseshoe Casino where he kept his belongings and the “small amounts” of cocaine and heroin he was selling. On the way out of the facility, two unmarked police cars pulled up to Fats’ car. Jenkins claimed they were DEA and had a warrant, and Hersl said they knew Summerville was a big deal drug dealer “from the Avenue.”

Summerville said that he was offered “freedom” if he gave up information on other dealers, and that when they finally let his friend Fats go, Summerville shouted out the code so he could exit the storage facility and that Hersl saved the code in his phone. When Summerville tried to look at Hersl’s phone, Hersl elbowed him. Summerville was eventually let go too and never charged with a crime. He said GTTF stole $4800 out of a sock in his storage unit where he hid his money.

“They came at me like a gang or something,” Summerville said.

The day’s lineup of witnesses—all of whom had immunity—show the extent of the GTTF’s targets: big time and small time dealers, current and former, some charged with crimes and some not at all.

But this cast of characters also illustrates the specific nature of drug dealing in a deindustrialized city like Baltimore—dealing as a dependable, dangerous side hustle and hardly glamorous even if you’re shipping out plenty of product. Stevenson is currently a truck driver and had the job on and off again while dealing. He was using money he earned to start an Assisted Living service with his girlfriend Holloway. Armstrong’s day job was a maintenance worker for public housing; and Summerville sold while he was homeless—now he works as a caterer.

GTTF’s alleged actions didn’t stop at those who dabbled in dealing though. Gregory Thompson, a maintenance man for the storage facility near the casino, is about as “square” as you can get and testified that Jenkins and Hersl intimidated him the night of the September 2016 incident with Summerville.

The commotion caused by the GTTF stopping Summerville and Fats caused Thompson to come out to see what was going on. Jenkins and Hersl—he had a hard time remembering who said what—asked to see the facility’s security cameras and he told him they would need a warrant for that. They didn’t like that answer, got “about a foot and a half” away from him, and threatened him.

“You look like someone who needs to get robbed,” Thompson said Jenkins or Hersl told him—he couldn’t remember which one had said it.

“As far as I’m concerned, they both said it to me,” Thompson added.

Thompson’s life wasn’t destroyed by the encounter that night, but he was clearly shaken and angry, more than a year later.

Visit therealnews.com for more independent local, national, and international journalism that examines the underlying causes of chronic problems and searches for effective solutions.

The post Gun Trace Task Force trial reveals lives ruined, money stolen, and emotional wreckage appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

On Aug. 31, 2016, two cars full of Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) officers watched in the distance as two cars that had just collided sat on the sidewalk badly damaged, with the state of the passengers unknown.

Detective Jemell Rayam suggested they get out and help, but aiding the injured drivers was not an option because Sgt. Wayne Jenkins—who was described by those he commanded in the GTTF as both a “prince” in the Baltimore Police Department and as “crazy”— told them not to do anything.

He had also, told them to initiate the chase that led to this moment.

So they waited, listening to the radio, waiting for a concerned citizen to call in the crash or for other cops to come to the scene.

This is all according to Rayam, who pleaded guilty along with all of the officers except for Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor, and seemed visibly shaken and sometimes confused. It was his second day testifying in the ongoing federal corruption trial of the GTTF.

And though Taylor’s defense relied solely on presenting the witnesses as liars, what Rayam said was corroborated by audio from a bug the FBI had planted in the car of GTTF detective Momodu Gondo.

Rayam explained it all began that day when Jenkins saw a car he wanted to stop at a gas station. The car fled and both Jenkins and Gondo, each driving an unmarked car, drove after it in pursuit. The car they were pursuing ran a red light and, in Rayam’s words, was “pretty much T-boned,” by another car.

“It was bad, real bad,” Rayam said. “Both of the cars collided with each other.”

Briefly, he couldn’t answer follow up questions—a crying Rayam wasn’t sure which crash they were asking about.

“There were so many car accidents,” he said.

Instead of checking on the victims of the accident, the members of the GTTF sat tight and waited, worrying that their role in the event may have been discovered.

“None of us stopped to render aid or to see if anyone was hurt,” Rayam said.

On the tape, Hersl suggested covering it up: “We could go stop the slips at 10:30 before that happened. ‘Hey I was in this car just driving home,’” he said, and laughed.

The trial, now in its second week, has presented a tremendous amount of evidence showing that the officers claimed overtime for hours they did not work.

Hersl laughed again on the tape and wondered what was in the car.

Jenkins and others worried that Citiwatch may have it all recorded—they hoped the rain that night would make them hard to see—and worried the pursued may be able to mention he was chased.

“That dude is unconscious. He ain’t saying shit,” Taylor said.

“These car chases. That’s what happens. It’s a crapshoot, you know?” Hersl said.

This was an extraordinary statement to hear coming from Hersl as his family sat in the courtroom. In 2013, a driver—who was being followed, but not chased, by a state trooper—killed Hersl’s brother Matthew in front of City Hall in downtown Baltimore. WBAL said that Stephen, Herl’s other brother, told them Matthew “didn’t drive because he didn’t like traffic and thought drivers were dangerous.”

This incident wherein a chase led to a car crash echoes other events in this case. In 2010, Jenkins, Officer Ryan Guinn, and Det. Sean Suiter initiated a chase that also ended in a crash—one that was fatal. According to the federal indictment, the officers had a sergeant come and bring an ounce of heroin to plant in the back of the car they were pursuing, before giving first aid to the man, who ultimately died. Umar Burley, who was driving the car they chased, was recently freed from federal prison. Sean Suiter was murdered a day before testifying in the case—and the police car bringing him to Shock Trauma crashed on the way there. Guinn was reinstated to BPD after a two-week suspension—and, last week in court, another Gun Trace Task Force member Maurice Ward testified that Jenkins told him that Guinn had informed the squad that they were under investigation.

Hersl has admitted to stealing money, but his lawyers are arguing that because he had probable cause he did not rob his targets—and did not use violence to take the money. He glared at Rayam as he testified about the wreck and various thefts. Rayam has confessed to dealing drugs, stealing drugs, and strong-arm robbery. In court, he suggested that Momodu Gondo, with whom he worked closely, had discussed other serious crimes, including a possible murder.

He alluded on several occasions to the numerous internal affairs complaints against Hersl but the judge shut him down—that information was not admissible in court. On another occasion, federal prosecutors asked Rayam if Hersl gave him money for selling cocaine. Hersl’s lawyer objected and the judge sustained the objection.

But the overall sense is that, for the Gun Trace Task Force—and especially Jenkins, who has pleaded guilty but is not expected to testify—Baltimore City was at once a killing field and playground.

It is too easy to see Jenkins and Gondo and Rayam as sociopathic exceptions who are especially depraved. More testimony later the same day shows how this behavior stems from creating a city which criminalizes—or at best contains—a large part of its population. This structural disdain for life became clear in testimony from Herbert Tate, one of the witnesses against Hersl, who was treated like a criminal by defense attorneys.

Tate said he was on Robb Street in the Midway neighborhood on Nov. 27, 2015 to see old friends. A few days earlier, he said, Hersl had stopped him on Robb Street, searched him, and given him a slip of paper—not a proper citation, just a piece of paper—called it a warning, and said, “Next time I see you, you’re going to jail.”

It was about 5 p.m., Tate said, when he was walking up the street with an alcoholic beverage—he couldn’t remember if it was beer or wine—when Hersl, Officer Kevin Fassl, and Sgt. John Burns pulled up on him. Tate says that Hersl told Fassl to grab him. Fassl searched him, including searching his waistband and putting their fingers in his mouth, and then sat him down in handcuffs. In his pockets, they found $530 in cash, some receipts, and pay stubs—but no drugs. Hersl, Tate testified, dug around in vacants and on stoops looking for drugs. He went around a corner for about 10 minutes, Tate said, and came back with “blue and whites.”

Tate testified that he did not know what “blue and whites” were at the time but later learned it was heroin. Hersl sat beside his lawyer, William Purpura, glowering as Tate testified that Fassl asked Hersl what to do with the money and Hersl said, “Keep it.”

When Tate asked them to count it, he says that Burns got angry and bragged about how much money he made. According to a 2016 spreadsheet of Baltimore City employee salary data, Burns brought in a little more than $86,000, but with overtime—one of the main issues at stake in the case—he made nearly double that, bringing in $164,403 in 2016. On Feb. 21, 2017—just over a week before the Gun Trace Task Force indictments came down, Burns took medical leave and began raising funds with a GoFundMe account that claimed he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome triggered, the fundraiser says, from “inhaling fecal matter during a search warrant.”

By the time the money made its way into evidence, the $530 had become $216. When Tate was released from jail, he was given 91 cents back. He never saw the rest of the money.

Defense lawyers made a different issue out of the money. Christopher Nieto, who is representing Marcus Taylor, who was not involved in Tate’s arrest at all, made a point of mentioning that some of the money submitted as evidence was in small bills like singles, fives, and tens.

“Dollar bills suggest drug distribution,” Nieto said.

“Everybody has dollar bills,” Tate responded.

The claim was odd in the context of a trial in which it had been repeatedly stated that large sums of cash also indicated drug dealing. Whatever amount of money African-Americans have in Baltimore City can indicate criminal activity, apparently: Tate had a 2003 charge tied to possession and distribution of narcotics, for which he took probation before judgement and admitted on the stand that when he was in high school he “did some things”—meaning small-time dealing—but had never been arrested back then.

Nieto repeatedly referred to Robb Street as “an open air drug market,” “a drug neighborhood,” and a “not a great neighborhood.” A perception encouraged, in part, because these neighborhoods are criminalized.

“That’s what y’all label it as, but that’s not what it is to me,” said Tate, who testified that he had grown up in the area and had friends and family there and coached a children’s basketball team in the area.

Nieto also said that Tate had a black ski mask when he was arrested, though Tate said he had it on him because it was cold and that he was wearing it as “a winter hat.”

This attitude displayed in the questioning of Tate (that certain people are inherently criminal) is the animating force behind the GTTF criminal enterprise, but it isn’t that far from the assumptions of our criminal justice system, which, in 21st century American cities, is based on an almost Calvinist view of crime: If some people are criminal, nothing you do to them can be criminal.

Because of the 2015 arrest, Tate said, he lost his job because he was in jail for four days, then lost his car because he couldn’t pay for it because he lost his job and couldn’t get another job because of the narcotics charge—and to this day, he owes a friend for the bail.

“I’m still paying them back,” Tate said.

In March of 2016, the state dismissed Hersl’s charges against Tate—a common occurrence in Baltimore. After the charges were dismissed, Tate was able to get another job, as an HVAC technician, which he has to this day. He also said that after the arrest, he moved away from Baltimore to Anne Arundel County.

“I got out of the city,” he said.

Visit therealnews.com for more independent local, national, and international journalism that examines the underlying causes of chronic problems and searches for effective solutions.

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Lawyers for Keith Davis Jr., a man shot by Baltimore Police in 2015 and subsequently charged with and eventually convicted of the murder of Kevin Jones near Pimlico Race Track, have filed a motion for a new trial challenging the reliability of the prosecution’s star witness, David Gutierrez, and how the State’s Attorney presented, as the motion says, “a member of the notorious Texas Syndicate prison gang,” to the jury.

Among the claims are the the prosecution mischaracterized Gutierrez’s criminal background by presenting him as a “nonviolent, sympathetic” drug dealer (rather than someone who helped set someone on fire, among other violent crimes listed), that the state essentially hindered discovery, and that Gutierrez perjured himself, and that the state knew he did it.

The state’s case relied almost entirely on Gutierrez’s testimony.

“Once the verdict was rendered, we were not given adequate time to vet Gutierrez to know who he was, defense was not given time to do that, so afterwards, after this unfortunate and unjust verdict was rendered we were able to do research and we found that David Gutierrez is a federal inmate serving 25 years for RICO acts as well as murders,” Kelly Davis, Keith Davis’ wife told The Real News in front Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse last month wearing a “FREE KEITH DAVIS” t-shirt. “He was an enforcer for the Mexican cartel and a part of the Texas Syndicate Gang—it is a very dangerous, cruel gang that is within prisons in California and Texas.”

Davis met Gutierrez at Jessup Correctional Institute buying jailhouse wine from Gutierrez’s cellmate, Ihtisham Butt, the state claimed. Butt in a signed affidavit, denied he sold wine or evem saw Davis.

“The state presented this confidential informant but misrepresented the facts surrounding him as far as his incarceration, the crimes he was involved in,” Kelly Davis said. “And also the fact that him and Keith never were together or had ever had a conversation or any interaction whatsoever,”

Davis’ case which found him going to court twice for Jones’ murder (the first time it was a hung jury, the second time he was convicted of second-degree murder) began the morning of June 7, 2015.

According to the police officers who shot him, Davis used a gun to hold up a hack, or unlicensed cab. When the hack pulled up beside a police car and the gunman fled and the pursuing officers, Lane Eskins, Alfredo Santiago, and Catherine Filippou, chased Keith Davis Jr. into a dark garage. They started firing.

In total, 43 shots had been fired and Davis was struck three times. Police charged Davis with 16 crimes, including firing his weapon. The problem was, almost none of it held up. Davis claimed he had been walking down the street on the phone with his then-girlfriend, now-wife Kelly, when he saw officers running. This was only two months after the in-custody death of Freddie Gray and Davis says when he saw the police he was scared and ran.

In court, Charles Holden, the hack driver, was asked to identify Davis.

“If I go closer I can tell you that’s him or not,” Holden said.

When he got up close to Davis the prosecutor asked him if he recognized the man who held him up.

“To my recollection that don’t look like him much to me,” Holden said.

Davis’ gun had not been fired during the exchange, but it did have Davis’ palm print on it. His lawyer argued that the gun had been planted and his prints wiped on it. The jury found Davis guilty of possessing the handgun on March 3, 2016.

After Davis was found guilty of possessing the gun, he was charged with Jones’ murder. According to charging documents, investigators “determined that cartridge cases recovered from the scene of the murder” of Jones, “were fired from the gun recovered by the defendant.”

Davis’ first trial for the murder ended in a hung jury, but he was swiftly convicted in October. The state disingenuously alleged the circumstances of the robbery, of which Davis was cleared, as evidence in the murder and Davis’ acquittal for the robbery was not allowed to be mentioned in court.

“Keith was still referred to as ‘a robber.’ In the prosecutor’s closing arguments, she actually said, ‘He robbed a hack,’” Kelly Davis said. “He was acquitted of all these charges and even though the prosecutor was able to allude to those charges he had already stood trial for, as well as this gun, he’s already been found not to have possessed this gun…she was able to allude to these allegations as if he had never been tried.”

The difference in the second trial was a new witness, David Gutierrez, a federal prisoner being housed at Jessup. Gutierrez testified that Davis told him he shot Jones over a “neighborhood beef” and that he thought he would get away with it because a do-rag made witnesses think he had long hair.

In his initial interview with police, Holden, who was sitting in a car beside Davis, said “he had braids or long hair. He had good size hair. I think it was platted.” And Davis wasn’t accused of getting into the cab for several hours after the murder.

Gutierrez says he got this information from Davis while both were buying jailhouse wine.

“They were never housed together like this gentlemen testified on the stand,” Kelly Davis said echoing the motion.

The motion goes on to argue that Gutierrez has been “parading around the country testifying in homicide cases in order to gain leniency…and Division of Correction records classify him as a confidential informant.”

A sworn affidavit from Ihtisham Butt, Gutierrez’s former cellmate that is included in the motion challenges Gutierrez’s testimony. “He was shown two photographs of Mr. Davis, and that he has ‘never met encountered or engaged in any transaction with Keith Davis Jr.,” nor to his knowledge had Mr. Gutierrez,” the affidavit reads. It also notes that Butt is a practicing Muslim and thus, forbidden from consuming or selling alcohol (records show that Butt is currently incarcerated for sexually abusing a 14 year-old girl).

A second affidavit including in the motion comes from a member of the hung jury from the first trial, Ivan T. Henson, who swears that the only juror who voted against acquitting Davis did so in direct and knowing opposition to jury instructions issued by Judge Alfred Nance (who The Maryland Commission on Judicial Disabilities recently said should be expelled for “sanctionable conduct,” related to comments made toward public defender Deborah Levi).

“Myself and other jurors believed that even if Mr. Davis handled the handgun in question, it did not mean he was associated with the murder at the Pimlico Race Track,” Henson’s affidavit reads. “The sole juror holding out was of the impression that Mr. Davis’ counsel had to prove his innocence.”

“I believe that Keith did something unprecedented in the city of Baltimore where most cases are pleaded out. He took the narrative of Baltimore City Police and State’s Attorney’s office to court and ultimately in that first trial he was acquitted and won,” Davis said. “In Keith’s case, the facts of the case never changed. He never robbed a hack, he never had a gun, and still she’s come after him because he stood, we stood up. I think that the vendetta she has is personal because we feels as though we came after her.”

Davis notes that when Davis Jr. was found guilty the State’s Attorney tweeted, “Victory.”

“Notice she didn’t tweet ‘Justice,” Davis points out. “That’s all we’ve ever been looking for.”

Last night, Davis, members of Baltimore Bloc, and 20 or so others rallied near Gaslight Square in Pigtown where Marilyn Mosby was holding a fundraiser (among the hosts for the event, Senator Nathaniel Oaks, federally charged with bribery, fraud, and obstruction of justice, Kelly Davis pointed out).

The group posted a large “Free Keith Davis Jr.” banner across used a megaphone to outline many of the issues in the motion to those arriving for the fundraiser.

This morning, Judge Lynn Stewart-Mays considers the motion and Davis goes to court for sentencing.

“I don’t feel like [Davis] got a fair shake from the judge but in the judge’s defense, I also don’t think she knew the things that were at-play with the State’s Attorney’s office. I don’t believe they were forthcoming with her. They lied to her just like they lied to a jury,” Kelly Davis said. “I know for a fact that enough damage was done law-wise in that court room that Keith has secured a laundry list of appeals.”

The post Lawyers for Keith Davis Jr. file a motion for a new trial, allege the State’s star witness never met Davis, committed perjury, more appeared first on Baltimore Beat.