What would have been the final meeting of 2019 by the The Maryland General Assembly’s Marijuana Legalization Workgroup was cancelled on Tuesday. In case you don’t remember, the workgroup announced last month they would not be making any recommendations for legalization in the next legislative session, though the workgroup is still supposed to report their overall findings by the end of the year. In other words, cannabis legalization can wait.

The workgroup’s argument last month was pretty much, “well, legalization is kind of complicated.” And because they intend to do it properly and equitably and not perpetuate the racial disparities that have marred the legal cannabis businesses in states that have already made it legal, they need more time. Namely, they want to locate a way to introduce what are ostensibly, cannabis reparations: using tax revenue generated by cannabis sales to work toward undoing some of the harm done to the Black community caused by decades of the drug war and to reverse some of the disparities already seen when it comes to who can make money off of legal weed.

While the state of Maryland figures out how to do cannabis legalization “right,” people continue to have their lives jammed up due to weed arrests (and those people are primarily, disproportionately, Black). Here’s the thing: There are models for legalization done the way Maryland says it wants to do it already. 

Last month, the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois made national headlines when it announced that reparations would be at the center of its use of cannabis sales-related tax money (in Evanston around 70% of the people arrested for cannabis were Black; in Baltimore, between the years of 2015-2017, 96% of the people arrested for cannabis were Black). At the end of May, Illinois passed the Illinois Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act, which made cannabis legal in the state, and included a “social equity provision” that would expunge the records of those with cannabis charges and prioritize Black business owners when it came to growing licenses. In other words, a lot of the things the Marijuana Legalization Workgroup said it hasn’t quite figured out how to do or fund have been figured out in Illinois.

While there wasn’t anybody in Annapolis on Tuesday digging deep on weed, cannabis was a small part of that day’s Joint Committee on Fair Practices and State Personnel Oversight’s hearing. Among the topics,  “Use of Medical Cannabis and Consideration for State Employment,” with commentary from those responsible for overseeing the drug-testing of state employees.

“Medical cannabis is treated just like any other prescription medication,” said Cindy Kollner, executive director of the Department of Budget and Management’s Office of Personnel Services and Benefits. In short, if you have a medicinal cannabis card, then it won’t be a problem for employment.

There are exceptions though, tied to employees subject to U.S. Department of Transportation regulations. Even if that kind of employee has a prescription, they can still be deemed unable to perform their job if they test positive for pot. Meanwhile, if “safety sensitive” employees—those responsible for the safety of others basically—test positive, they can produce their prescription and there would be a meeting between the employee and the medical review officer where that positive test would be changed to negative without consequence. Kollner explained that since 2018 there have been just, “15 instances of drug tests involving medical cannabis,” an incredibly small number.

Watching the hearing, I thought about how cannabis should be entirely removed from drug testing. And there is a “moral” component to drug testing that never made sense but really doesn’t make sense anymore. Unless someone is clearly under the influence at work, we should not worry about what they are doing in their spare time, medicinal use or not (also all drug use I would argue could be defined as, “medicinal”). As cannabis reporter Amanda Chicago Lewis explained years ago, “a functional marijuana breathalyzer,” is what is needed—if anything is needed at all—and there isn’t one. All testing positive for pot means is you smoked weed at some point in the past few months. Putting “drug exceptionalism” (the bogus idea that some drugs are more “respectable” to use than others) aside for the moment, what could an employer possibly glean from knowing an employee uses cannabis, which is legal in 10 states (plus Washington, D.C.), is prescribed medicinally in Maryland, and is decriminalized here?

This boring meeting seemed profound to me. Like Baltimore’s laws, where cannabis is decriminalized and medicinal exists, but you can still be arrested for possession but the State’s Attorney claimed they won’t charge you for possession, drug testing for cannabis creates a hot mess—a new grey expanded because the state cannot commit to legalization. The joint Committee on Fair Practices and State Personnel Oversight was not as moved. When it was time for questions, the committee had none.

Finally, it seems as though if the legislature is not going to figure out cannabis legalization on their own, then they have the legal weed business to help do it for them—and maybe wine and dine them while they think it through.

On Tuesday night, cannabis brand Select held an invite-only event at the Sagamore Pendry Hotel, “to meet with local elected officials, industry advocates, grassroots organizations and thought leaders currently spearheading the efforts to legalize recreational cannabis in Maryland.” Among those listed as attending were Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and Senator Jill Carter. 

There was no panel or speaker or anything like tht, just a happy hour and dinner afterwards, and in between, some time for “open dialogue.” Select, which is based on the West Coast but is now selling products in Washington, D.C. dispensaries, has established a nonprofit arm called The Possible Plan focused on “equitable access” and “reparatory justice” surrounding weed. Into next year, Select will even host some expungement clinics. The company clearly sees the racial reckoning the country must do with cannabis as part of the pitch on making it legal here.

Yours truly was invited to the Sagamore Pendry pot chat but I did not attend because at its core, this was essentially a lobbying event, even if it is lobbying for a cause I unabashedly support. I’m really not sure what to make of a pro-legalization, woke weed mixer at Kevin Plank’s fancy hotel not long after the legislature has pretty much preemptively announced it will be kicking the can on legalization. Well, onto the reviews. (Brandon Soderberg)

Purple Mindfuck

We must begin with this noxious, goofy-ass name. We’re in straight-up sleaze territory with this Alaska-originated Indica/Sativa hybrid combining Peyote Purple and Thunder Fuck Mountain (TFM) called Purple Mind Fuck — a combination of words and associations conveying the vibe of say, some flyover state morning shock jock wearing Affliction gear and giving away free Five Finger Death Punch tickets (which he would call “tix”): DRUGS! SOMETHING LOUD! THE WORD “FUCK”! EDGY! Oh boy. This strong and singular strain though has little to do with any of that and is instead a tad psychedelic, unmooring most of what’s around you, which is at first terrifying and exciting after that and lastly, curiously calming (THC’s at 28 percent here).

I guess all of that might constitute a “mind fuck” but dear G-d, let’s try and find another way of saying it. There’s an essay in writer and filmmaker Hito Steyerl’s 2012 book “The Wretched of the Screen” titled “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective” that discusses (among other things) this idea that our present moment lacks (metaphorical) solid ground in most ways that matter and with that, a lack of linearity, which means we are all in a sort of figurative free fall.

Maybe the best way to think of this is the disassociative jumble of the internet (better yet, the endless, depressing scroll of Netflix) but it also has to do with “alternative facts” and generally, postmodernism getting a little too postmodern for most of us, leaving us with little to firmly wrap our minds around. “With the loss of horizon also comes the departure of a stable paradigm of orientation, which has situated concepts of subject and object, of time and space, throughout modernity,” Steyerl writes. “In falling, the lines of horizon shatter, twirl around, and superimpose.”

Well, Purple Mind Fuck does something like that to you. It eliminates the horizon, it extracts you from wherever you are and leaves you indefinitely hanging — “in free fall,” which can feel dramatic and scary or like nothing is happening at all. Purple Mind Fuck’s effects snuck up on me and I only got the latter. Frozen, hit with a Zen-ish joy celebrating our awful colonial holiday, I was in the moment, and then a series of associations hung in the air, never quite connecting, a cut-rate clarity that gave way to a chaotic mind spew brought on mostly by a decrease in anxiety I imagine.
I didn’t mind letting my mind fly and maybe even sounding a bit like a dumbass. Usually you understand a heavy high like this in terms of plateaus or phases, but this is more like a maze (Steyerl again: “The horizon quivers in a maze of collapsing lines and you may lose any sense of above and below, of before and after, of yourself and your boundaries”). A high you wander with, an incontinent, beatific buzz. (BS)

• Strength: 9
• Nose: Lemongrass
• Euphoria: 9
• Existential dread: 2
• Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 2
• Drink pairing: An IPA
• Music pairing: Premiata Forneria Marconi’s “Per Un Amico”
• Rating: 8
  

Hurkle

The prohibition of cannabis did unmistakable and almost unfathomable harm. And yet the outlaw nature of its consumption also created a confederation of consumers, an underground band of brothers and sisters who partook. When you discovered that an old friend or family member was a toker, a renewed clandestine bond formed between you. Because it was illegal, you had to have some small degree of trust in the people you toked with.

I learned that early on when I and three other guys who were burners, but not real buddies, got pulled over by the cops ditching school and burning bowls. We were driving by the school parking lot when we got stopped and everyone was out at lunch, so it was a very public affair. I was driving and the other three guys, who were pals with each other, blamed everything on me. I went to jail. They did not.

Now that jail is no longer such a worry, one would hope that the clandestine love that one used to feel could extend to the whole world and we could share in some communal merriment. Ha. As I recently reported in the The Baffler, even the boss right-wing propaganda outlet Sinclair has gotten into the bud business.

Still, a lot of people feel a certain sense of community with other consumers and, like gardeners or winemakers, like to share their wares. The problem is, some folks only like to accept a toke after they’ve been drinking or are in some social situation and they’re not used to it and it turns out bad.

Because so many strains are so much more potent than they used to be, a strong toke off a high-THC strain, or a nearly pure THC pen, might leave an unsuspecting friend wigging out, as it were. Hurkle is an ideal house-bud to keep around for such occasions. The roughly 1:1 CBD-to-THC ratio keeps things chill in this hybrid of Harlequin — a CBD-heavy, Sativa-y strain — and Querkle, a hard-hitting Indica variety. The CBD relaxes and uplifts while the Indica calms and soothes, and the overall effect is a pleasant, classic high. It won’t blow your mind or push you too far in any one direction, neither drooling on the couch nor scrubbing the grout between your tiles, but going about your business of leisure or medication in a smooth, eminently palatable way.

Likewise, this strain isn’t particularly beautiful to look at, though the nicely formed buds are fine and bright green, covered with white and red hairs, and its nose is not particularly pronounced, with subtle but overall pleasant hints of coffee and minty toothpaste. If Hurkle were a president, it would be Barack Obama — a winning moderate who still seems dangerous and communistic to certain factions who imagine radical leanings. But after seeing folks get as paranoid as Rudy Giuliani or Devin Nunes on some super strains, Hurkle is what you need in your weed cabinet, if not on your presidential ticket. If it were jazz, it would be Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” something even your non-jazzbo buds might get down with, but no less great for all that. (Baynard Woods)

• Strength: 3
• Nose: Coffee and mint toothpaste
• Euphoria: 5
• Existential Dread: 0
• Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 1
• Music pairing: Miles Davis, ‘Freddie Freeloader’
• Drink Pairing: A Pilsner
• Rating: 9
  

Sour Cheese

A mix of Cheese and Sour Diesel, Sour Cheese is a 60 percent Sativa, 40 percent Indica hybrid and, well, it feels like that and not much more. Which is to say, you’re in for a break-even sort of high: You’ll get sleepy but won’t be able to go to sleep, and its calming effects will leak through your body, like you’re being poisoned by Zen-like chill, making existing easier, though hardly enhanced.

It’s so much of a social weed that I lost track of what it was doing when I went out after smoking some to see a very intimate noise show involving Attorneys General at Fadensonnen. A show like that? Its context can be a bit anxiety-inducing, like, 20 dude-ers who look like me sitting or standing and allowing glacial guitars to build, build, build and never crescendo for 45 minutes all like, yesssssss — it is both nearly spiritual and completely ridiculous.

Smoking Sour Cheese reduced that anxiety and let me enjoy the show and ignore its trappings (and the trappings-within-trappings that get me thinking too much). At the same time, you want weed to enhance music a little — especially formless, cacophonous improvisation — and enable your ears to better peel back the six to 10 sounds screeching, squiggling and squonking, and Sour Cheese did not do that at all.

For such a sensory-averse high, Sour Cheese is visceral in all the ways that only matter when they’re bad. The color is nearly neon — like a light green highlighter — and in your grinder it looks like shredded Brussels sprouts (or “Brussel sprouts” as most of us have been calling them our whole lives), which is a useful way of understanding this strain’s ultimately limited appeal: Like Brussels sprouts, it is an acquired taste, contingent upon a lot of context and how it is prepared. I mean, the smell is bad — burnt, like when you were a kid and you vigorously erased something with one of those big pink erasers and you could inhale the friction.

The other smell here is a touch of Parmesan (the way good cheese smells bad) and then when you’re smoking, like you set an eraser on fire, just a gnarly whiff you don’t want near your nose. It’s all the more confusing because hidden inside Sour Cheese’s smell is Sour Diesel’s incredibly familiar one, so here you get a kind of twisted, contorted — soured! — version of something that veteran smokers know on a nearly Proustian level.

The smell lingers even as its high is long gone. When I got home from the show, Sour Cheese was still there in my apartment, its cacophony of gross holding on. And what was left of its stench about four hours after smoking was, sorry dear readers—diarrhea—like someone really going through it had used my bathroom hours earlier. Acidic, awful, and weirdly intimate. I was grossed out. I smoked more and then I didn’t mind. It’s hard to care much about —or for— this strain. (BS)

• Strength: 6
• Nose: Parmesan, turds (sorry)
• Euphoria: 7
• Existential dread: 2
• Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 2
• Drink pairing: Basque cider
• Music pairing: Mirror’s “Die Spiegelmanufaktur”
• Rating: 6
  

Lemon Meringue

Some strains seem to sit quietly, somewhere in your bones, radiating out a kind of warmth that ends up enveloping a lot of the world, creating a kind of halo or aura of highness. The similarities between stonedness and beatitude have often been discussed. Back as a high school stoner, I fell into “The Tao of Pooh, which used Winnie the Pooh to explain the tenets of Taoism. From there, “The Tao of Physics” and finally to the “Tao-Te-Ching” itself.

Being high can and does provide glimpses of that state of at-one-ment with the world, even if it manifests with the kind of caricaturish laid-back-ness of the Dude Lebowski. It’s an important glimmering in one’s life, the recognition that we are all in this together. On the darker side, anyone who tries to do anything personally to help in our environmental crisis realizes that individual action, unless addressed at policy, can’t make a dent in the problem.

But then there is the reverse that also comes along with forays into cannabis: the crushing sense of self-consciousness, where the aura of stonedness points back on yourself and makes you feel like everyone is watching you, like anything you say will be dumb, like you cannot even move.

Lemon Meringue toes the line between these two poles in an unpredictable way, but it never goes to too great an extreme in either direction. Still, one time, I was blissing out on the world, and the next, castigating myself in an orgy of recrimination that ended in an exhausted slop.

Which is the other thing about this strain. It’s got kind of a hard crash that is precipitated by a lack of awareness of your surroundings and yourself. I walked in from lunch, after smoking the Meringue and I allowed the apartment door to slam in my wife’s face and then didn’t even hear when she knocked. It wasn’t like being drunk — I didn’t lose motor skills or whatever — but I just wasn’t aware.

And as I write this, I am starting to doze off under the effect of the sharp, hollow citrus of Lemon Meringue. People used to put orange or apple peels in their weed to keep it damp. I thought it made it gross, but that’s what this is like — someone put a slightly rotted apple soaked in a lemon-scented cleaning product in the bag. I know that doesn’t sound great, but I don’t mean it entirely negatively. But smelling it can be almost overwhelming, like smelling salts or ether

I’ve never had the dessert that lent this strain its name, but I imagine it shares some of these qualities — either a sense of community with those you share it with, or a desire to have more of it yourself, followed by a sugary rush and then a nap. (BW)

• Strength: 6
• Nose: Apple peel soaked in lemon cleaner
• Euphoria: 6
• Existential dread: 8
• Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 4
• Drink pairing: Limoncello
• Music pairing: Alejandro Escovedo’s “Outlaw for You”
• Rating: 5
  
  

The post In Maryland, cannabis legalization is complicated—plus, a few weed reviews appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

As Baltimore’s new police commissioner Darryl De Sousa calls for transparency in the wake of revelations of unprecedented police corruption, the Maryland Judiciary scrubbed the names of all arresting officers from Maryland Case Search, the public searchable database of cases, making it much harder for citizens, journalists, and even Internal Affairs detectives to root out wrong-doing among officers.

It is now impossible to search for cases by a specific officer or to see which officers have worked together on cases.

“It’s very important for transparency in the court system and the whole justice system,” said Matthew Stubenberg, the IT director for Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service, who maintains a copy of the database at cluesearch.org. “Everybody else is labeled on Case Search: The defendant’s there, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, sometimes the witnesses, so it seems really odd to just anonymize one person in this whole case.”

David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of The Wire puts it in much stronger terms.

“How dare you ask anybody to cooperate with the police, come into court, and do so publicly, when you, a sworn officer, an armed officer, a member of a police agency that has significant resources to protect—you’re afraid to be publicly identified,” said Simon over the phone. “It’s not just hypocrisy. It’s cowardice.”

Simon is outraged but not surprised. “There’s almost an inevitability to it,” he said. “There’s been an entrenchment in public information in Maryland for the last decade or so.”

Still, the sense of timing is not lost on defense attorneys who are representing victims of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF). The Case Search scrub happened exactly one year after members of GTTF were arrested on federal racketeering charges that shed light on the scope of corruption within the Baltimore Police Department.

“From a defense attorney point of view, we need the opportunity to have Case Search because we found out recently that for the past three years that this current administration would refuse to call officers like [GTTF member Jemell] Rayam because they knew that he had issues in credibility and they would hide him,”  said Ivan Bates, who is currently challenging Marilyn Mosby in the race for state’s attorney. “The Case Search allowed defense attorneys an opportunity to find an officer to make sure that they can potentially be called as a witness.”

Mosby’s office declined to comment.

Bates said this information is vital to prosecutors, to keep them from inadvertently withholding information from the defense that could help clear a defendant—a so-called Brady violation.

The ACLU also sees the connection to the GTTF case—not having remote access to the database makes it harder to connect the dots between officers who often work together.

“In part, the police corruption that was revealed in the GTTF trial could not have occurred but for—and was significantly enabled—the rules that make police disciplinary records secret,” said Senior Staff Attorney David Rocah, adding that this move is just another layer in the “secrecy surrounding [police] records.”

“We don’t see a problem with the information that was already available being on the website,” Baltimore Police Department spokesperson T.J. Smith told the Beat and The Real News over email. He later followed up in a tweet which said, “we believe [Case Search is] an intricate part of transparency.”  

Larry Smith, a former Internal Affairs Department (IAD) detective for the Baltimore Police, says that even IAD used Case Search: “Even as investigators, I used Case Search and I know other people in Internal Affairs used Case Search.”

The department had other tools for looking at cases but “Case Search was much more user-friendly for like, ‘Let me see who his partners are in this case,’” Larry Smith said. “I worked on cases at home and I didn’t have access to internal databases at home. I used Case Search at home if I was brainstorming or trying to come up with questions for an interview.”

“[In Case Search], you can go back to pretty much every arrest an officer has made and that’s important,” said Josh Insley. “You can see if they were involved in controversial cases. You can see if they were involved in cases that were overturned by the appellate courts for bad searches and things like that…What it really does is it stops people from investigating the spread of this corruption from the Gun Trace Task Force. It puts all of it behind a steel curtain.”

It’s important for lawyers and citizens to be able to make these connections because even IAD, Larry Smith says, is not allowed to connect various complaints brought against an individual officer in order to uncover a larger pattern of behavior. When he was investigating an officer who had numerous complaints that demonstrated a pattern of behavior, he was not allowed to make the connections.

“We could not wrap all the complaints into one piece and do a patterns and practice case. We were told we had to take each one individually that we couldn’t put them altogether,” Larry Smith said.  

But with Case Search, he—and the public— could “also look to see who were his partners that day because a lot of the complaints were not against just one officer but sometimes three or four and you just saw the same names over and over again.”

For instance, when Det. Sean Suiter was murdered the day before he was set to testify about the 2010 arrest of Umar Burley, a federal indictment revealed that Suiter, GTTF’s Wayne Jenkins and another officer called a sergeant who came to help plant heroin after Burley’s car crashed into another car, killing its driver. Case Search quickly revealed the other officers working that case and The Real News and other outlets were able to identify that officer as Ryan Guinn, who was subsequently, if briefly, suspended.

The rules committee of Maryland’s top court made the change with no public announcement before making the change. In a statement, the Judiciary said it made the changes “in response to personal safety concerns raised by law enforcement” and stressed that the rule change only limited “remote access” to the information, meaning the database with officers’ names is still accessible at the circuit courthouse. When Sun reporter Justin Fenton went to the Baltimore City Circuit Court, there was no available access terminal to review the information.

“The burden will fall on people of limited means,” Insley said. “If you don’t have transportation to the court house, you don’t have the money to spend 50 cents a page, you can’t remember exactly when it happened, you can’t hire a lawyer to go scour the stuff for you.”

The move to change the rule apparently began with a push by the Anne Arundel County Fraternal Order of Police to remove first names from the records, but their spokesperson told the Baltimore Sun that they did not push for the removal of full names. “At no time did anybody with the F.O.P. or the department lobby or try to have officers’ full names removed.”

“Even removing the first name would be equally wrong and illegitimate,” Rocah countered. “There are lots of police officers with the last name Smith or Jones. The whole point of this is to be able to know what particular officers have done.”

Larry Smith, one of those officers with a common name, says he never felt the need to be shielded on a public database. Civilians meanwhile, have “ their complete, everything, full name, address, date of birth,” in the database, he said. “I would be much more concerned if I was a civilian than an officer.”

“Police officers and public officials who are testifying in court are not similarly situated to any other witness,” Rocah said. “They are professional witnesses. Unlike every other witness in court, they are being paid by the public. The public has a critical interest in knowing what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. And that interest cannot be served or vindicated if their names are taken out of the online databases.”

Long before the change, Stubenberg, of the Volunteer Lawyers, created the Client Legal Utility Engine (CLUE) which “scraped” the Case Search site daily—effectively creating a backup and a more accessible database of more than 700,000 cases from three counties including Baltimore City. The CLUE database removed the names of defendants, who are, he says, far more vulnerable than police and whose information is provided on the court’s database.  

While it preserves the information as of Thursday, it will not be able to include officer information going forward, unless the rule is changed.  

And Rocah stresses that because this is simply a rule, the policy could be changed back immediately.

“It’s as wrong as any decision can be and it can be and ought to be changed today and it wouldn’t require a rule change to restore access. This problem could be fixed literally today,” Rocah 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.

The post Maryland courts remove police officer’s names from database, causing outrage among lawyers, journalists, and other advocates for transparency appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

During the Gun Trace Task Force trial, federal prosecutors Leo Wise and Derek Hines, who secured convictions against Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor, two of the corrupt police officers involved in GTTF, seemed to also be speaking on behalf of Baltimore. Their witnesses, most of them victims of GTTF robberies, presented a wider look at what we previously described as “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.” And in closing arguments, in response to Hersl and Taylor’s defense, which tried to paint GTTF’s victims as drug dealers and therefore not to be trusted, Hines declared, “no man is above the law and no man is beneath it.” We talked to them about where this case may be going and about their motivations going to what defense lawyers called “the depths of the criminal underworld in Baltimore.”

The Real News Network: So in the trial you guys really showed a really deep sympathy for what the defense called “the depths of Baltimore’s underworld,” and this is somewhat opposed to what people think of as a prosecutorial frame of mind generally. But you seem both to be really passionate and sincere about this desire to defend the defenseless.

LEO WISE: We took everybody as individuals, and listened to them and looked for evidence that supported what they said, or didn’t, but we treated everybody with dignity, and believed that everybody deserved the protection of the law, and that no one, as Mr. Hines said, was above the law. And that was genuine. There’s a line that’s used sometimes that the Department of Justice is the only agency with a value for its name, and that’s not a contrivance, that’s something we really feel. And so I remember coming out of those, when we first encountered some of the victims, coming out of those meetings and saying, “I think this is happening. I don’t think this is people making stuff up, or saying things cause they think they can benefit themselves.” I mean, that was something we said at the trial: There was no benefit to any of those people taking the stand and being subjected to cross-examination about whether they were drug dealers, whether they weren’t, nobody was trying to get out from under a charge or get a sentence reduced. They were there because they had to be, and I think the fact that the jury convicted, I think shows that jurors are uniquely capable of assessing people’s credibility and their truthfulness, just like I hope we are, and came to the same conclusion.

DEREK HINES: There was also one of the defendants in particular argued that he had stolen money, which made it sort of, for us, why does it matter if these people were drug dealers or if they had law-abiding professions? Their money was taken and we’re here to prove a robbery and so we were here to defend the interests of everybody and pursue justice for them.

RNN: You both live here in Baltimore and so you were representing the United States but in representing specifically citizens of Baltimore against Baltimore police. Did you feel in some ways like you were also representing the place that you live, in a way that maybe you wouldn’t in doing Enron or Deepwater Horizon or some of the other cases that you all have done.

DH: Absolutely. It felt like we were representing a wide variety of people. People in our office, we had overwhelming support throughout the case from prosecutors here to root out this corruption, even people whose cases were impacted because they had indicted cases using these officers in the past. Other law enforcement agencies, federal and state and local, we felt like we were representing them, they wanted to root out this corruption. As well as the citizens in Baltimore, and being from this area, we had a particularly vested interest.

LW: My wife and I moved here. We moved our family here, and we live here in the city. And one of the things that has really struck me about this case, and it just happened actually this morning, was people come up to us and talk about how the case, how it means something to them, and that they, it’s we’re a small part of a larger team, but sort of on behalf of the team they sort of thank the US Attorney’s office and the FBI for pursuing this and for bringing it to the conclusion that it was brought to because they want a city that’s safe and they want a police department that respects the law and respects the citizens that they’re protecting and serving.

RNN: How did this go on for so long before people became aware of it at a federal level?

DH: The officers preyed on people who, they believed, their word would not be believed at a later date. So they targeted drug dealers, they targeted criminals on the street, and these people did not want to come forward to the Internal Affairs division of the Baltimore Police Department and say they in fact had more drug money or more drugs or a gun that wasn’t reported because they were afraid of the repercussions that would come to them at a later date. So, a lot of this conduct went unreported until the investigation exposed it.

LW: Yeah, and this really wasn’t a case that grew out of Internal Affairs complaints that had been ignored, at all. This, as Mr. Hines said, the people that they targeted either wouldn’t or couldn’t make complaints, and they sort of knew that, and they counted on that, and I think they also counted on—as we said at the trial—that if they ever did, that the defendants at least believed no one would believe them. And I think what the trial demonstrated was that that’s not something any police officer should believe anymore.

RNN: So there was a huge amount of money mentioned in the case, with drugs and especially with Jenkins and Stepp. What is the FBI or your office doing to track down that money and figure out what happened to that?

LW: The most vivid example of something that’s been recovered is that watch that was shown to Mr. Hamilton, I mean that was an expensive wrist watch that was stolen from his home by these officers and it was found underwater at Donald Stepp’s home in Annapolis—nine months after the indictments were originally returned. So we look for assets to seize, there are assets that we were able to seize and were returned to their owners, there were other assets that will be used to try to provide restitution to victims. Unfortunately a lot of the money was spent, it was spent in casinos, it was spent on vacations, it was spent in a variety of ways and so we’ll never be able to restitute all of the funds that were taken, but we’re absolutely committed to doing as much as we can to do that.

RNN: So, in addition to the money, the amount of drugs—the two trash bags full of pharmaceuticals from the unrest after Freddie Gray’s death—that was something that the former police commissioner had blamed the distribution of those drugs for the spike in murders here and the spike in violence. And so, one, I want to ask, do you think that’s an accurate assessment, that those drugs really did disrupt the supply chain and stuff in the kinds of ways that they said could lead to violence? And what does that mean if it’s the police? And two, is there any indication that the grappling hooks and all of that that he did anything other than take those drugs from looters, like he said, but actually actively break into pharmacies while the city was in unrest?

LW: That came from the testimony of Donald Stepp. And I don’t know, from a broader perspective, I don’t know whether the looting of pharmacies pushed greater quantities of drugs into the supply chain. What I will say, though, is what I think came out of the trial is that this unit was part of the crime that was happening at the time, it was not part of the solution. What they were doing on a day-to-day basis contributed to the crime that was seen as spiking in the city, and particularly what Jenkins was doing on such a regular basis, as the testimony from Stepp established. You know, the tools, the burglar’s tools that came out, I mean, there was testimony about proposed robberies that Jenkins pitched to the rest of the unit. In the trial there was testimony about a number of burglaries that he did with Stepp using some of those tools. And part of what we had to prove was that there was continuing criminal conduct, that’s what made this so dangerous. That’s what made this an organized crime case, because organized crime demonstrates that when people get together they can be far more dangerous than when they act independently.

RNN: So, the people in the city and the Baltimore Police Department are using the “few bad apples” metaphor a lot, and I feel like sometimes they don’t understand the second half of that, that a bad apple ruins the whole barrel. Can the Baltimore Police Department—I mean, 12 other names came out—having experience seeing law enforcement, what does this mean for law and order in the city of Baltimore?

DH: One of the things that was really interesting to us in investigating the GTTF to start was learning that really three different sets of officers from three different units had merged into the GTTF and were committing crimes together. And as we went forward in that investigation, we looked back in time and found that each of these three sets of officers, while not working with one another and in entirely separate units, had committed crimes and those crimes were proved at trial recently in the plea agreements of the defendants who pled guilty. So there wasn’t just this unit, at one point in time. There were multiple different units prior to coming together in what Mr. Wise referred to as really the perfect storm, where you had eight corrupt officers working together. And that was eye-opening on a number of different levels.

LW: And I think what the four officers that testified about what they had done before they got together on the GTTF make clear is that—as we argued in our opening and closing statements—these were crimes of opportunity. And the opportunity that presents itself, at least based on their experiences, was that units that were focused on drug-related crimes where there are significant amounts of money. It’s a cash-based business. And so in terms of focusing resources on oversight or reform, I think those are the kinds of units that, at least the anecdotal experience of these officers suggests, should be the area of focus. Not all kinds of units, not all kinds of policing, but really targeting where it seems like there are these opportunities that certain officers then exploit.

RNN: Did it seem in any way that this perfect storm was orchestrated? Some people that were higher up were named in the trial, and right after that, Deputy Commissioner Dean Palmere announced retirement after his name came up in the trial. Is there any indication that these people were being put together because of their criminal activity? Or was it either to put them all in one barrel to knock them off, or to facilitate crime?

DH: I think one of the many important witnesses who testified at this trial was James Kostoplis, who was brought into the unit by Jenkins, and Jenkins proposed to him robbing people, along with 17-year veteran Daniel Hersl. And Kostoplis turned that down, he said, “absolutely not.” I think there were certainly some decisions made about bringing people into the unit, but once James Kostoplis turned that down he was reassigned out of the unit at a later date.

LW: And there was also testimony from [Momodu] Gondo. There was a recording that was actually played that he and Jenkins had had a previous sort of falling out, and patched things up when they got together. And so the evidence presented at trial appeared to suggest that these officers that had committed these crimes before, once they were in the same unit and had sized each other up, got comfortable with one another and then started working together beyond the sort of smaller cliques that had existed, as Mr. Hines said, before they all got together.

RNN: The FBI said during the trial this was on ongoing investigation. Is there any time frame that you can share with us about how long this investigation may continue to go, or if and when other indictments may be coming down or anything looking forward?

LW: The case moved at a very fast pace for federal criminal investigations, even after we indicted the original, seven additional indictments were brought against the original sergeant of the unit, Sergeant [Thomas] Allers, and then two individuals that [Jemell] Rayam recruited to rob a homeowner—an additional officer who was here in Baltimore city and then moved to Pennsylvania and is pending trial. So we will move as quickly as the evidence allows and will follow the evidence. These are very hard cases to make, precisely because the defendants—the targets—are law enforcement, and they know the techniques we can use, they can get ahead of them. And while the original case was brought in a covert setting, it’s now obviously public that we’ve been looking, so it makes it that much harder. So we don’t have a sort of crystal ball about whether and when there might be additional cases but we’ll continue to follow the evidence wherever it goes.

RNN: During closing arguments, Taylor’s lawyer asked about DNA evidence, additional phone records, and so on but it seemed as though that sort of evidence wasn’t necessary. So, what degree of the investigation was revealed during the trial?

LW: So we tried to present enough to meet the elements, but not everything to try to preserve some of the potential tools we might have additional targets that could be brought. Now in an open setting, names were elicited by the defense, we didn’t do that, and that obviously then can hamper ongoing investigations. So we try to strike the right balance where we prove the elements without compromising the potential to continue the investigation.

DH: The witnesses we called were the ones chosen by the defendants—the victims they chose, the codefendants they chose to engage in the conspiracy with. And there’s all kinds of different evidence that can be presented to a jury and I think what Mr. Wise said in opening is that the jury was getting an “inside look.” So they got that behind the scenes because of the ability for us to call those codefendants and those victims as witnesses in the case. And I think that was incredibly compelling evidence, that inside look.

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The post Gun Trace Task Force prosecutors Leo Wise and Derek Hines discuss dirty cops and defending citizens from rogue law enforcement appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Security camera footage of Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) members Wayne Jenkins, Daniel Hersl, and Momodu Gondo burglarizing an apartment in Canton was released yesterday by attorneys Josh Insley, Natalie Finegar, and Tony Garcia.

The footage shows Jenkins trying to sneak into the apartment by posing as a tenant who forgot his key and returning later in his police vest along with Gondo and Hersl, who presents a fake warrant.

Meant to post these earlier. Video of GTTF’s Wayne Jenkins, Daniel Hersl, and Momodu Gondo using fake warrant to rob a Canton apartment pic.twitter.com/eDSZ97scM7

— brandon soderberg (@notrivia) February 15, 2018

“There he is waving, who knows, some papers he had in his car—it’s not a warrant,” Insley said, narrating the video as it was played for reporters.

The three GTTF members then walk behind the desk of the apartment complex and surround the security guard.

“So now they’re taking over the situation. You’ll see the security guard is a rather young gentlemen clearly intimidated by their actions,” Insley said.

Eventually, the security guard walks them up to the apartment of Damon Hardrick and April Sims, whom GTTF robbed.

The security footage is a rare glimpse of Jenkins and GTTF at work and shows how easy it was for them to rob and steal under the color of law. In the video, Jenkins and Gondo have police vests slung over one shoulder, while Hersl remains in civilian clothes—a bright orange Orioles shirt and dad jeans.

During the trial, which ultimately found Hersl and another GTTF member Marcus Taylor, guilty of robbery, racketeering conspiracy, and racketeering, this burglary came up. According to Gondo’s testimony, Jenkins called up Hersl and Gondo, said he had a “fuckin’ baller” because he spotted a Mercedes Benz truck parked outside the building and had observed drug transactions. He said that there was about $50,000 inside the house, and also that he had probable cause for a warrant from a judge.

This is an example of the “sneak and peek” tactics often mentioned during the trial: GTTF enter a residence without a warrant and scope it out, sometimes stealing and returning much later with a warrant proper and other officers who would do actual police work.

Gondo also testified that Hersl said he wanted in on the robbery because he had just bought a new home (Hersl closed on a Joppa home on July 20, 2016; this burglary took place on July 25, 2016) and that Hersl handed Gondo a $5,000 Chanel purse from the apartment, which Gondo gave to a woman he was seeing.

Then here they are returning from apartment with boxes of stolen stuff pic.twitter.com/MZm2DCr0Es

— brandon soderberg (@notrivia) February 15, 2018

Later in the security video, we see Jenkins, Hersl, and Gondo back in the apartment lobby now holding boxes of things taken from the Sims residence, grinning and laughing with the security guard.

“This is just boxes of stuff, they’re just stealing out of these peoples’ apartment,” Insley said, incredulous. “Sneak, peek, and steal.”

A couple hours after that, Jenkins, Hersl, and Gondo returned again with other police officers and a warrant and seized heroin from the apartment and charged Sims and Hardrick with possession of a large amount of narcotics, intent to distribute, and paraphernalia.

Also here is footage of them in the security camera room of this apartment complex pic.twitter.com/mk4LPKjZ33

— brandon soderberg (@notrivia) February 15, 2018

Additional footage shows Jenkins and Hersl messing about in another room of the apartment complex where the security cameras are, returning to the building with other officers who have a proper warrant, and officers in uniform carrying out Sims and Hardrick in handcuffs.

Like the Feb. 2 press conference organized by Insley, Finegar, and Garcia’s partner Ivan Bates (who is also running for State’s Attorney), the larger point here was the failings of the current State’s Attorney’s Office. Sims and Hardrick’s case languished in court because GTTF members did not testify and couldn’t produce the warrant, Insley explained. When the case was dismissed because it violated right to a speedy trial, the SAO simply indicted Sims again. The Sims case was dismissed only after GTTF members were indicted.

“There is no way Marilyn Mosby didn’t know about the credibility of these officers,” Finegar said, highlighting the SAO’s approach of attempting to push through cases with officers with credibility issues simply by not calling those officers with issues to court and relying on the testimony of other officers present.

Garcia characterized the SAO’s approach to prosecution when they had problem officers.

“’Well, we’re not gonna call that officer, we’re gonna simply cut him out of the picture and go with the other officers that didn’t exactly do anything,’” Garcia said. “Well, they’re all complicit because the other officers saw the other officers commit a crime. That’s called conspiracy.”

“It’s about how do I look good, not how do I be good,” Finegar said.

In response to the criticism by Insley, Finegar, and Garcia, the SAO’s Melba Saunders released a statement that said the SAO pushed forward because there was “overwhelming evidence against the defendants, which included 390 grams of heroin recovered at the scene.” Saunders added, “this is yet another example of hundreds of cases where police corruption has impeded our city’s ability to deliver justice on behalf of its citizens.”

Sanders’ statement verifies the lawyers’ accusations against the SAO: They pursued cases even when those cases were deeply flawed. In the Sims case, there is video evidence that Jenkins, Hersl, and Gondo entered the apartment hours before they were allowed to search it and removed items. Given GTTF trial testimony that included stories of GTTF dealing drugs themselves and in some cases even planting drugs on people, the ability to determine where the heroin seized originated should be called into question.

Whistleblowers provided other internal documents to Insley, who was in turn passing them on to the press, as he did with thousands of pages of internal affairs documents pertaining to Rayam, which he obtained from a whistleblower and gave to the Sun’s Justin Fenton last December. Many of these documents involve the same 2009 theft of $11,000 covered by Fenton.

Details in that case are similar to many that came out in the GTTF trials. In his statements to the Internal Affairs Department, Rayam said he and his partner Jason Giordano were driving by when they saw another officer, whom they didn’t know, outside a stopped vehicle. It turned out the other officer was Michael Sylvester, with whom Rayam became friends in the academy. And, as he testified in the federal trial, shortly before this incident, Jason Giordano had already helped him cover up Rayam’s shooting of Shawn Cannady in an alley.

The defense attorneys, who are part of a PAC trying to unseat Mosby, provided a lie detector test given to Giordano regarding the 2009 theft—and it determined that there was a 99 percent chance he was not telling the truth. Giordano, they pointed out, is still on the force with four open cases.

The attorneys also pointed out that Thomas Wilson still has 37 cases pending. Wilson was Jenkins’ former partner and was put on administrative duty after his name came up in the federal trial when Donald Stepp alleged that he helped provide security at Scores stripclub for a Dominican drug dealer visiting from New York and had knowledge of the theft of 30 pounds of weed from two individuals outside the Belvedere Towers apartments.

In an affidavit provided by the attorneys and dated April 8, 2015, Kimberly Demory stated that Rayam forced her to hang up the phone when she tried use 911 to call uniformed officers. When she asked for a warrant, Jenkins “pulled his gun out and placed it to [her] temple.”

Other documents showed that the SAO was aware of Rayam’s credibility problems—but instead of revealing those issues to defense attorneys, as they are required to, the SAO simply tried to bring the case without having to call Rayam. A 2016 memo from Assistant State’s Attorney Kent Grasso sent to the police integrity unit addressed Rayam’s “credibility issues” during a trial overseen by Judge Barry Williams.

Mosby’s office not only ignored concerns about members of the GTTF, Garcia said, but someone in the office tipped Jenkins that GTTF was being investigated.

“Our office learned of the egregious and illegal acts of these officers the same time as the public, when they were federally indicted,” Saunders said in response. She referred all questions regarding the leaker to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Documents provided by Insley, Garcia and Finegar showed, however, that the heads of the police integrity unit and the intelligence unit were aware of the problems—and waited months before sharing those concerns with BPD’s internal affairs. The letter went to Ian Dombrowski, who was named in the GTTF trial as originating the free days off for guns scheme utilized by the officers.

Insley remarked that the new corruption unit announced by commissioner-designate Darryl De Sousa is a “second IAD,” because the existing internal affairs has been “compromised,” like the SAO, by leaking information to GTTF officers. He also criticized Mayor Catherine Pugh and DeSousa who have adopted “a few bad apples” talk when it comes to GTTF.

He mentioned William King and Antonio Murray, two federally-indicted BPD officers who robbed drug dealers in 2005 and were then referred to as “bad apples” by the powers that be. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick used to ignore the problem.

“A few bad apples means ‘I don’t care,’” Insley said.

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On March 6, 2009, Det. Jemell Rayam shot Shawn Cannady at point blank range as he sat in his Lexus in an alley in Park Heights.

“Fuck him, I just don’t wanna chase him,” Rayam explained later on, according to Momodu Gondo, Rayam’s long-time partner, in his testimony Monday in federal court at the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) corruption trial.

Cannady died two days after the shooting. At the time, police said that Rayam, who had previously shot two people in 2007, shot Cannady in order to keep him from running over Officer Jason Giordano, but according to Gondo that story was concocted by Deputy Commissioner Dean Palmere, who “coached everyone about what to say.”

Palmere, the highest-ranking official to be directly implicated in the corruption of the officers indicted with GTTF, announced his retirement almost immediately after the testimony and denied the allegations.

“It’s not true. I would not coach somebody,” Palmere told the Sun. “I’ve always taken pride in my ethics and integrity.”  

Cannady’s family received a $100,000 settlement in 2013 for Cannady’s death.

In court, even Gondo, one of the most notorious members of the squad, who has pleaded guilty to helping a childhood friend-turned drug-dealer in another federal case and who Rayam had said once “laid someone out” seemed disturbed by the case.

“You knew Rayam had murdered somebody?” Christopher Nieto, the attorney for Marcus Taylor, one of the two members of the GTTF to maintain his innocence and stand trial for various racketeering charges, asked Gondo. Nieto referred to transcripts from proffer interviews between Gondo and federal agents, where he recounted a conversation.

“You murdered that guy,” Gondo reportedly said to Rayam in conversations long after the event.

“Yeah I did,” Rayam said according to the notes Nieto was reading.

Gondo seemed resigned to the corruption when he told Nieto why he didn’t say anything about the “murder” to Internal Affairs.

“If you’re in my shoes, if that’s what has happened,” Gondo said. “What’s gonna happen to me?”

The answer echoed a similar answer to the question that has haunted all of the officers at the trial: Why did they follow Sgt. Wayne Jenkins—who it was revealed Monday is not cooperating with the investigation—as he perpetrated a reign of terror on the citizens of the city they were all sworn to serve and protect?

“Wayne brought a whole different dynamic to the gun unit,” Gondo said.

Still, Gondo confessed earlier in the day, that he had stolen money with other officers long before joining the GTTF.  He named several detectives with whom he stole money, including Giordano (who was investigated to for 2011 theft that Rayam admitted to being involved in when he took the stand last week) and Det. Sean Suiter, who was murdered the day before he was to testify to the grand jury about the case on Nov. 15.

Suiter was set to testify about the case of Umar Burley, which began in 2010 and involved Suiter, Jenkins, and Det. Ryan Guinn—who was named for a second time Monday as the person who tipped off the GTTF members that they were being investigated. A member of the State’s Attorney’s Office and someone working in police Internal Affairs also tipped GTTF off.

But, while he was on the streets, Gondo was not afraid of IAD, he testified. “It was part of the culture,” he said. “I wasn’t out there getting complaints—putting my hands on people.”

That answer came about after Gondo was asked whether he was worried that Daniel Hersl was an informant when he first joined the GTTF. But Gondo said he trusted Hersl because of his of his reputation and the suspicion simply arose from Hersl being new to the unit.

“Dan was banned from the whole Eastern District when he got to our squad from complaints,” Gondo said. “Dan had a history.”

And in the twisted world of the GTTF, that meant Gondo and the others could trust him.

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