Curio Wellness, a Baltimore County weed provider, quickly dropped a suit against Maryland’s Medical Cannabis Commission (MMCC) which argued that the Commission should not be able to solicit applications for more licenses without conducting an analysis of supply and demand. The MMCC opened up the process to allow more licenses as the result of last year’s last-minute bill intended to correct the lack of diversity in the original licensees. In a state where one third of the population is black, none of the original licenses were given to black-owned applicants.

If Curio had gone forward with the lawsuit and won, they would’ve insured that Maryland’s cannabis industry remains white. Curio did not return requests for comment, but a spokesperson tried to explain the move to the Sun.

“Curio was compelled to file this action to protect their business investments and rights and to enforce the promises made by the state of Maryland and the Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission to induce private sector growers to invest and operate in this important public health program,” said David Nevins, a Curio spokesman. “Those promises include the state not expanding the number of cultivator licenses without first conducting a demand study to determine if additional supply is necessary to meet the demand for this newly established public health program.”

Justice, equity, and the whole culture of weed is less important than profit. Don’t bogart that joint, you know? This isn’t a corner you have to control. I’ve used Curio’s products and I’ve liked them. I have to confess, I’ve even bought, and loved, the Awakening Tablets, which Curio makes under license from a Colorado-based company that is dubbed “Dixie,” as in the popular Dixie Elixers. I didn’t notice the Dixie on the tablets at first. When I did, I was uncomfortable.

It turns out, Curio is headed up by Michael Bronfein, a major Democratic donor and a Bill Clinton bud, and one of its main investors is David Smith, who runs Sinclair Broadcast, which you may remember from last year when Deadspin spliced together anchors all over the country reading the same forced script about “fake news.” Or for the deal they made with Donald Trump Jr. for campaign coverage.

After the news of the lawsuit (which would effectively keep black-owned businesses out of Maryland’s weed game) broke, there was a protest planned at Curio’s dispensary and plenty of criticism and Curio dropped it. Bronfein released a statement that said he had “seen the concerns from our customers on social media about racial insensitivity,” touted Curio’s diversity (and their UB scholarship that gives “2-4 full tuition scholarships for African American students majoring in accounting from Baltimore City”), and that he stood “by the merits of the lawsuit and the State’s failed commitment to uphold the regulatory promises it made to the people who invested.”

New Requirement for Cannabis Patients Begins April 1

This is no April Fools. As of April 1, you have to have an actual medical cannabis card in order to enter a dispensary. Previously, you could save the $50 and they would just check your name in the database. But the law now requires that you now purchase the piece of plastic with your number and your picture. The good thing is, if you do it now, your card is automatically renewed for three years, saving you money on the return doctor trip. And a lot of places are helping you get the card or giving you $50 in product, so check around for deals.  

Just sign in to the MMCC site. And if you didn’t get it before April 1, you can print up a temporary one.

Querkle

Paying too much attention to a bud’s beauty is a fool’s errand, somewhat akin to focusing on the way a guitar looks. Some of the most pleasant and potent strains are embodied in ugly little buds. But flowers are beautiful and it is equally stupid, and sadly utilitarian, to ignore their appearance altogether. With that being said, Querkle, a potent combo of Purple Urkle and Space Queen, has a beautiful, thick and tight buds, crusted with crystals and wrapped in leaves of such a deeply purple hue that they could have written “Highway Star.”

The aesthetic pleasures continue through the other senses as the deep, pine and berry odor transfers into a heavier, almost whiskey-infused flavor when you add fire. Despite all that, I was really not expecting to like this strain as much as I do. So many indica-dominant hybrids—this is 80-20—are of the couch-lock variety and so many sativas are so speedy you hardly really feel high, that Harvest of Maryland’s Querkle hit me like a revelation when it proved itself an ideal strain for performing a task you find both difficult—requiring concentration—and stressful or odious enough that you want inebriation.

I discovered this as I tried to put together an elaborate, mid-century modern coffee table that my wife had delivered. It is not IKEA but it follows an even more cryptic version of the same style of directions as the furniture giant. I had a big pile of wood and a pane of glass plus a bunch of screws and bolts accompanied by a couple pieces of paper with pictures akin to the rebus puzzles you find on the inside of some old-school beer bottlecaps.

I smoked a bow of Querkle and found, to my astonishment, that I was almost enjoying myself—almost—as I waded through the pile of materials and, with relatively minimal cursing, emerged two or so hours later with a new coffee table. I was completely absorbed in the task and relaxed about it—like playing pool after the second beer but before the third one.

Then, the next day, I smoked another big bowl and went out to eat some Mexican food. The Huitlacoche quesadilla, the steaming sopa, and the ice-cold beer I had with it, were all exceptional—and only partly on account of the restaurant. I left, still ravenous. But not just for food. Rather, though it sounds pretentious, I am aware, I was hungry for the world.

The other really nice thing about this strain is that it doesn’t have a noticeable comedown. Even after all of the food and the mid-day beer and a general feeling of celebratory excess, I went about the rest of my day with a sustained feeling of contentment that didn’t drift into lethargy.

I’d only intended to buy a gram of Querkle, but due to a misunderstanding with the budtender, I ended up with an eighth. At first, I was a bit bummed that I’d slipped up (I bought other products and didn’t pay attention to the price as well as I should have). Usually, you don’t need more than a gram of some mediocre strain to get a sense of it. But now I find myself delighted to have a couple extra grams of Querkle to enjoy.

Strength: 8

Nose: Pone, berries, alcohol

Euphoria: 7

Existential Dread: 3

Freaking Out When Crazy Person Approaches You: 2

Drink Pairing: cold water

Music Pairing: “Child in Time,” Deep Purple

Rating: 9

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The post Lawsuit to keep weed white, get your cannabis card, and Querkle reviewed appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

A recent episode of the seemingly-eternal crime drama “Law & Order SVU” featured an Ann Coulter like figure—she had a name in the show but let’s call her Ann Fauxlter—who was raped with a protest sign in a “riot” on a college campus in New York (the fictional Hudson University). The “ripped-from-the-headlines” show engaged in a bit of both-sides-ism worthy of Schrodinger’s cat. At first Fauxlter claims that an antifascist activist wearing all black and a mask raped her. Tracking down leads, the “liberal” cops and prosecutors come to suspect a small-handed alt-right troll whose advances she spurned the night before.

SPOILER ALERT: In the end, it never says who raped Fauxlter, but it pushed hard the general establishment consensus that “both sides”—antifa and the alt-right—are equally bad.

Recent events show, again, that this is bullshit—especially in the show’s depiction of police officers and prosecutors who are more sympathetic to antifa than the alt-right. Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the role of sheriffs in the “Anglo-American” tradition of law enforcement. As so often with Sessions, the phrase was a dog-whistle. He could defend his position and note that the position of sheriff originated in England—think Sheriff of Nottingham—but the racists would hear that he supported them.

In contrast to Sessions, James Comey—the FBI director that Sessions fired over the Russia investigation—gave a speech in 2015 noting that “All of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty.”

The Anglo-American tradition of law enforcement has been one of white supremacy for much of that history—and police departments and sheriff’s offices around the country are still trying to grapple with that.

When the CBS news show 60 Minutes interviewed recovering racist Christian Picciolini a few months back, he talked about how skinheads made a conscious decision to clean up and join law enforcement.

“You know 30 years ago, we were skinheads,” he said. “We wore swastikas and shaved heads, and you could identify us pretty easily. So we decided at that time to grow our hair out, to trade in our boots for suits, and we encouraged people to get jobs in law enforcement, to go to the military and get training and to recruit there.”

A 2006 FBI report worried about white supremacists “infiltrating law enforcement communities or recruiting law enforcement personnel” and leading to “to investigative breaches.”

But one of the first things the Trump administration floated upon coming into office was to changing the name of the Countering Violent Extremism program to “Countering Islamic Extremism” and eliminating a focus on white supremacist terror groups. At the same time, they were ramping up a prosecution of 200 people arrested in an anti-capitalist anti-fascist protest of Trump’s inauguration. More than a year later, 59 people, including a journalist, are still facing decades in prison for wearing black clothes near a “black bloc” action where a few windows were broken.

At the same time, right-wing terror is on the rise. The same week that Law & Order aired its “Info Wars” episode, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a new report showing that individuals who were associated with or influenced by the alt-right killed 17 people in 2017. That doubled the number from the previous year.

Nikolas Cruz killed that many people in one day when he went on a shooting rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida last week. More information about his motives will surely arise in coming days, but the leader of white supremacist militia Republic of Florida (ROF) told the Anti Defamation League that Cruz had trained with the group. Jordan Jereb, ROF leader, soon started trying to distance himself from his earlier statement, blaming the “Jew media,” but this is the second school shooting in the last two months with possible white supremacist ties.

William Edward Atchison, who frequently posted on sites like Daily Stormer, killed two students at Aztec High School in New Mexico. When the FBI visited him in 2015 after he had posted about trying to find a weapon for a school shooting, they concluded that he wasn’t a threat.

The FBI had apparently been warned by a YouTube vlogger that someone with the name Nikolas Cruz posted “I’m going to be a professional school shooter” on his page.

The local sheriff’s office in Leon County, Florida says it has not been able to find any concrete ties between Cruz and ROF—and Jereb may have just been trying to gain attention by claiming the horrendous actions of the MAGA-hat-wearing murderer.

Still, it is clear that the racist, misogynist ideology of the alt-right is a serious threat, and that threat is enhanced when it is equated with anti-capitalist property destruction. The white supremacist violence in Charlottesville was able to reach the level it did because law enforcement stood around the mall across from Emancipation Park, protecting the windows of restaurants and stores from antifa protesters, instead of protecting people from the Nazis who, leaked communications show, were clearly set on violence.

But we know that the FBI and Homeland Security are actively monitoring people who are inspired by a “kind of an antifa ideology,” according to FBI director Christopher Wray, and is actively investigating “black identity extremists.” So when our popular culture starts to mimic Trump and right-wing memes, declaring “both sides” are bad and adding the layer that law enforcement somehow sympathizes with antifascists, it adds yet another dangerous layer to our already deeply toxic political discourse about violence, race, and law.

Baynard Woods is a reporter at the Real News Network. Email baynard@therealnews. Twitter @baynardwoods. Download the Democracy in Crisis podcast on Itunes or Soundcloud.

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Anna Mantegna, a veteran prosecutor in the State’s Attorney’s Office, has been fired in what her attorney calls “a smear campaign” designed to make her appear to be the SAO insider who leaked information to the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF).

GTTF leader Wayne Jenkins said he was tipped off to the investigation of another officer by someone in the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office, setting off fevered speculation in the city about who the rogue prosecutor might be and calls for the SAO to address the leak.

Word spread through the legal community on Wednesday that Mantegna was fired in what many lawyers said is an attempt to make it seem like they had eliminated the leak.

The SAO’s spokesperson Melba Saunders confirmed that Mantegna was no longer with the office in an emailed statement. But Saunders stressed that in confirming that Mantegna no longer worked there, she was not addressing any questions about a relationship with the GTTF: “The [United States Attorney’s Office] has shared components of its GTTF investigation with our office and we are not at liberty to comment. All questions pertaining to the investigation should be directed to the USAO.”

When reached for comment, Latoya Francis-Williams, who is advising Mantegna (who would not comment) said that Mantegna was wrongfully terminated and is being disingenuously floated as the alleged attorney who leaked information to the GTTF.

“This, sadly, is a thinly veiled effort to give the appearance that this was the leak,” Francis-Williams said. “And everyone knows, in that office, that she absolutely is not—including Ms. Mosby.”

Francis-Williams said that no reason was given for the termination.

“She was only provided a copy of her most recent assessment which demonstrated that she is a stellar prosecutor, simply rave reviews,” Francis-WIlliams said. “And so it really leaves us drawing one conclusion. They are trying to use her as a political football.”

Mosby, who is up for re-election, has been widely criticized by defense attorneys for allegedly ignoring information about the GTTF’s crimes. One of those lawyers, Ivan Bates, who held a press conference with numerous victims of the task force on Feb. 2, and is running for state’s attorney against Mosby, praised Mantegna.  

“I had a number of cases with Mantegna,” Bates said. “She was a good lawyer, she was fair. When I had cases involving officers who had done illegal things I could talk to her and she was one of the prosecutors who I knew would dismiss those cases.”

“To lose a person like that concerns me,” Bates continued, noting that more than 90 prosecutors have left the SAO during Mosby’s term. “I was calling for an independent investigation outside of the State’s Attorney’s Office into the issues, and if that didn’t happen then it’s definitely all about politics.”

Frances-Williams said there will be a press conference to address the issue in coming days.

“We believe we have enough text messages and email between . . . the upper management of the State’s Attorney’s Office to demonstrate this is no more than smear campaign.”

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 State’s Attorney’s Office fires prosecutor amid Gun Trace Task Force controversy, lawyers call it a political ploy appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Even after the many police corruption revelations during the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) trial of Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor in federal court, public defender Deborah Katz Levi dropped another bombshell during a motion hearing last week: that there are allegations the cops were using drugs while making arrests in July 2016.

“What were they doing at the time they made this arrest?” Levi asked at hearing for Charles Smith, a man charged with attempted murder. “There is some allegation they were using. I’d like to ask them about their ability to perceive. This entire prosecution stems from their perception.”

This is the first time the members have been accused of using drugs while on the job. During Hersl and Taylor’s rial, former detectives Marcus Ward, Jemell Rayam, and Momodu Gondo all testified that members of the task force stole and sold drugs. And Bail bondsman Donald Stepp testified that Jenkins had supplied him with millions of dollars in drugs—including trash bags of prescription pills stolen from pharmacies during the unrest following the funeral of Freddie Gray.

Levi could not be more specific about the allegations, but seemed confident they would be addressed in the trial of her client, Smith, when the case goes to trial on March 18. Levi, who is overseeing the Office of the Public Defender’s efforts to address all of the cases tainted by the corrupt GTTF—potentially numbering in the thousands—argued that she should be allowed to call Jenkins, Evodio Hendrix, Taylor, and Ward of GTTF to testify in Smith’s trial.

The events resulting in the attempted murder case against Smith occurred on July 21, 2016, when Hendrix, Taylor, and Jenkins heard gunshots as they patrolled Bentalou Street. According to the statement of probable cause written by Hendrix, he saw a man who had been shot run into the middle of the street and fall to the ground. According to Levi, Jenkins yelled out onto the radio: “There is blood everywhere.”

Hendrix wrote that he saw Smith fleeing from the scene with a gun and that he witnessed Smith drop the gun and take off his shirt and his hat. As Smith tried to climb a fence, Hendrix grabbed him and Taylor and Hendrix arrested him. Levi argued that it was important to talk to the former officers in order to assess whether Smith’s statement—in which he admitted to picking up the gun and running with it but not to the shooting—was voluntary.

After Hendrix and Taylor were indicted in March 2017, BPD created a new statement of charges in the Smith case that does not mention them by name and just mentions “Baltimore Police detectives” making the initial observation of the defendant running. It later refers to Taylor and Hendrix as witnesses “who will remain anonymous at this time.”

In court, Assistant State’s Attorney Natalie Hynum argued that it wasn’t necessary to use the testimony of the officers, since there were other witnesses, video, and a statement from the defendant. But Levi argued it was crucial to hear from the cops about those moments before any other officers arrived on the scene.

“What happened in those first minutes when they were there by themselves?” Levi asked.

Judge Marcus Shar ruled first that Hendrix and Taylor could be brought in for a hearing to see if they actually had a legitimate reason to stop Smith, but he still wasn’t sure about bringing them before the jury.

“If they didn’t have this background, would you be calling them as witnesses,” Judge Marcus Shar asked Levi.

“If they didn’t have these backgrounds, the state would be calling them,” Levi responded.

The judge ultimately agreed with Levi, ruling that she could call them as witnesses. And in yet another example of how this case has flipped the familiar courtroom roles, Hynum argued that the defense should be responsible for buying civilian clothes for the former officers, so that their appearance in prison attire does not prejudice the jury. When witnesses who are in prison testify in court, they regularly appear in prison garb.

Judge Shar also ruled that Levi would have access to the former officers’ Internal Affairs files, as well as those of other officers involved in the case. There has been some dispute about whether the police department or the State’s Attorney’s Office (SAO) is responsible for delivering such material to the defense when there is a court order. A number of lawyers such as Joshua Insley, Natalie Finegar, Ivan Bates (who is running for state’s attorney), and Tony Garcia have claimed in press conferences lately that the SAO has known about the GTTF officers corruption for years and has done nothing. Instead of going through the SAO, which still has an obligation to deliver any information that may be beneficial to the defendant, Levi will work directly with the police department to review the files.

If the SAO is perceived as lax in its attention to the effects of the GTTF’s crimes on the foundation of criminal cases, Levi may be seen as obsessed.

“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,” she said in front of the federal courthouse during a break in Hersl and Taylor’s criminal trial, which ended with both GTTF members being found guilty on most charges.

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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Last week, I got a text from my mom flipping out about The Memo. She’s smart but not especially political, and her text made it clear that the #releasethememo movement that began as an alt-right rallying cry had now reached the mainstream. “As a teenager you ranted about the CIA (you were right,)” she wrote. “Now the FBI. Can we trust any politician or any government office?”

It was a strange moment for me because, at the same time every mainstream news network in the country was on “Memo Watch,” I was covering a woefully un-covered trial in Baltimore, where the FBI uncovered a vast police corruption conspiracy after they traced some opioids that killed a young woman back to a drug gang and, upon tapping their phones, realized they were working with a Baltimore Police officer named Momodu Gondo. When they tapped his phone, they realized that he and other officers were regularly targeting citizens whom they thought had a lot of cash—to rob.

Over the last three weeks of a federal trial—six of the officers pleaded guilty, while two maintained innocence and stood trial—we have learned that, according to testimony, one officer executed a man point blank in 2009 because he “didn’t feel like chasing him.” According to Gondo’s testimony, a deputy commissioner came out to the scene to coach everyone on what to say: The victim was about to run them over and he had to shoot. The deputy commissioner announced retirement immediately following the testimony.

We also learned that during the uprising following Freddie Gray’s death, Wayne Jenkins, the ringleader of the elite task force that was indicted, came to a bail bondsman with two big trash bags of pharmaceuticals stolen from pharmacies and told him to sell them.

The bail bondsman testified that Jenkins came to him with stolen drugs almost every night. Jenkins, who did not testify, has come across as something like a demon. Even Jemell Rayam, who shot the man to keep from chasing him, thought Jenkins was excessive. Most of the officers said they were scared of him. He is, in Trump’s language, “high-energy,” and is in many ways the perfect image of Trumpian law-enforcement: If people are poor, or black, or immigrants—unprotected—then they are inherently criminal and nothing you can do to them is criminal.

Jenkins had been involved in this kind of activity since at least 2010, when he and Det. Sean Suiter—who was murdered in November, the day before he was supposed to testify to the grand jury in the case—chased a “target,” causing a fatal car crash, and then planted drugs in the car. And Jenkins, as many people testified, was protected by the local power structure.

But the plodding investigations by the FBI—and prosecutions of the U.S. Attorneys—brought down Jenkins’ long reign of terror.

This is similar to the story told by David Grann in last year’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which is about how the newly formed FBI was able to break through the white-power structure of 1920s Oklahoma law enforcement and expose local authorities’ involvement in killing hundreds of Native Americans in order to steal their payments from oil on Osage-owned lands.

And yet, the national media, which covered every second of the burning CVS during the uprising, was largely silent about the vast police misconduct revealed in the trial, even though they dovetailed in some uncomfortable ways with the Memo Watch hysteria.

The Memo, authored by Devin Nunes, who worked on Trump’s transition team and had a weird midnight Uber ride and secret White House lawn meeting a few months back, ultimately alleged that the Steele Dossier (source of the “pee tape”) was paid for by the DNC and used to get a FISC warrant on former Trump advisor Carter Page.

The Trump team has long alleged that Page, who has done some bragging about his Russian connections, was nothing more than a “coffee boy”—but now this was an attempt by the FBI to take Trump down.

Ultimately, The Memo was a dud—the Democrats are trying to get the president to allow the release of their counter memo—but it does highlight the weird moment where the right attacks law enforcement agencies and the left valorizes them. It’s not hard to find countless examples of FBI malfeasance—the agency’s CoIntelPro is one of the worst incidents of law enforcement over-stepping in American history, as Hoover and his team plotted illegal Jenkins-esque ways to destroy the Black militant movement.

Likewise, the rather young and dashing dynamic duo of federal prosecutors in Baltimore—Leo Wise and Derek Hines—come across as champions of Baltimore’s most vulnerable citizens. But as they pulled out a big bag of black masks and clothes that Jenkins used for burglaries, I couldn’t help but think of their colleague Jennifer Kerkhoff, who, an hour down the road in Washington D.C., is still trying to prosecute 59 people for wearing black clothes during Trump’s inauguration, following a protest where a few windows were broken.

But the Trumpist attempt to undermine the FBI can still be seen as an attempt to protect people like Wayne Jenkins—local law enforcement officers like the super-racist former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, whom Trump pardoned—and give “local control” or “states’ rights.” It is part of what Steve Bannon called the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” An attempt to have lawmen—lawmen in whom the president sees himself—as above the law.

Just as testimony in the Baltimore trial wrapped up, it came out that the Trump team was trying to plan a big military parade on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Surely, that will elicit massive protests—and may be the best gift to the lagging and fractured protest movement—but I couldn’t help but imagine Wayne Jenkins with his grappling hooks and stolen drugs riding with Arpaio at the front of the whole thing as a perfect picture of Trumpian law enforcement.

But he better not wear his black burglary clothes—D.C. prosecutors might mistake him for an anarchist and charge him with another conspiracy.

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network. Tips at baynard@therealnews.com. On twitter @baynardwoods

The post The FBI and Dirty Cops: The memo hysteria and a Baltimore corruption trial highlight the state of law enforcement in 2018 appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

It’s always seemed amazing that Darwin figured out his theory of natural selection on a boat called the Beagle. It’s impossible to imagine humans as varied as dogs are. There are so many, so vastly different varieties of dog. Breeding the “modern dog” was really taking off in Darwin’s day as rich dudes wanted an advantage in hunting and a hobby to occupy their time.

Any time we care for a plant or animal, its varieties proliferate. The Incas had 500 kinds of potato; we have thousands of strains of weed. But as with natural selection, certain varieties get lost and disappear from an area altogether. Back before it was legal, strains of sketchy lineage would come through and disappear. But there were some big ones. A friend who runs a farm outside of Denver said that many of his grower buddies are obsessed with Skunk #1. It was everywhere, the dominant strain for years, but then, like a song played on the radio too often for too long, everyone was sick of it, eager for novelty.

As legalization rolled in, it was nowhere to be found. Now if it exists, it exists outside of the ecology and economy of the legit weed market. That, and memory, make these horticulturists passionately curious, nostalgic even, about finding the big bud of their youth—like when you rediscover songs that moved you as a child. It’s Proustian, sometimes—a bong hit of a certain strain brings memories of other times and places viscerally flooding in.

That happened to me recently when I smoked some Northern Lights. It’s one of the most famous strains in the world. It’s our generation’s Maui Wowie or Acapulco Gold, the kind of weed that gets referenced on sitcoms and square movies.

The buds of this indica knock-out punch look a bit dingy at first. On closer inspection, they are like a fall landscape, all tawny and dead. They smell like ammonia, pine, and deadhead pheromones. It tastes brilliant, possessing a brightness that’s rare in indicas, like a lemon without the sour, if you can imagine that.

Northern Lights has a highly reflective high, putting me almost on the nod as I think about Darwin and a dog smoking a bowl on a boat looking up as the Northern Lights flash across the sky and I remember my youth without being crushed by the weight of age or hatred of my younger, stupider self. Evolution.

• Strength: 6
• Nose: Ammonia, pine, and deadhead pheromones
• Euphoria: 7
• Existential dread: 3
• Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 3
• Drink pairing: The funkiest, most floral IPA you can find
• Music pairing: Lacy J. Dalton & Willie Nelson’s ‘Slow Movin’ Outlaw’
• Rating: 7

The post In praise of Northern Lights, one of the most famous strains in the world and its highly reflective high appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

“I got an entire pharmacy,” former bail bondsman Donald Stepp said from the witness stand in federal court Thursday, 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, an elite police squad charged with criminal conspiracies.

In a trial full of dramatic revelations of corruption, Stepp’s claim was especially significant in this beleaguered city that is about to embark on a third citizen-led Ceasefire 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 the Gun Trace Task Force 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, 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 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, where 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.”

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 stripclub 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.” she 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.”

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The post Gun Trace Task Force trial testimony reveals cops conspired to sell drugs stolen from pharmacies during the Baltimore Uprising appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Tino Fuentes, a former heroin user and dealer from New York, might not be the most obvious advocate for drug testing. But there he is, standing in a Station North warehouse apartment, holding several packets of the single-use Rapid Response drug-testing strips that are supposed to be used to test people’s urine for the presence for drugs. But Fuentes puts them to a different use—one that may save lives.

“After you suck it dry, put your shot to the side, add water to the cooker. All you’re looking for is the residue,” he says to a number of users or former users who are still involved in Baltimore’s opiate community. “You don’t have to waste the drugs at all. Just the residue. . . . I’d be pissed off if you took some of my shot, you know what I’m saying?”

Instead of using the strip to monitor the activities of employees or parolees, Fuentes and others use the strips to test street drugs for fentanyl. Drug checking rather than drug testing.

As the death toll associated with fentanyl, a synthetic opiate 50 times as potent as heroin, rises, users desperately need a way to know just what they’re putting in their veins.

In October, Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, claiming that more than 64,000 Americans had died from opioid overdoses the previous year. Fentanyl is responsible for a large part of that number. In Maryland alone, fentanyl killed 1,100 people in 2016—with close to that number dying in just the first half of 2017 (numbers for the entire year have not yet been made publicly available).

Saving those lives is what it’s all about for Fuentes, who ran heroin houses in the Lower East Side in the ‘80s and now spends his time traveling, preaching harm reduction. When he comes to a city like Baltimore, he usually finds some street drugs and tests them. Fentanyl, which can be easily manufactured in makeshift labs and does not require poppy fields like heroin, is everywhere.

It is technically illegal for Fuentes to check the drugs in Baltimore—when he is testing he is legally in possession of the drugs; in some places the strips themselves are considered paraphernalia—but the weathered and grizzled old New York Puerto Rican with a leather jacket, flat old-man golf hat, and glasses perched on his nose like Ben Franklin doesn’t give a fuck. That’s why, although he consults with some cities, he doesn’t operate as a 501(c)3 or any other legal entity.

Sometimes ethics—saving lives—is more important than the law. But there are places that recognize the need for these harm-reduction strategies.

“I’m not going to sit back and wait for the law to change or the government to help, because they ain’t never helped me and the law ain’t either,” he says to the group. “That’s why I do what I do.”

Insite, a safe injection facility in Vancouver, first developed the technique of using drug testing strips to test for fentanyl.

“It was just trying to find a solution because there are other drug checking methods that are used—primarily actually in communities like nightlife and festival communities—but the kind of tests used in that community are not sensitive enough to pick up fentanyl, which is really active in small doses,” said Stefanie Jones of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). “That’s why using those test strips came about. It was a process of trial and error of how to get it to work most effectively.”

A study conducted at Insite showed that 86 percent of the drugs and 90 percent of the heroin they checked had fentanyl in it. Users who knew fentanyl was in their dope changed their behavior—they were more than 10 times more likely to reduce their dose.

Washington D.C’s City Council has adopted emergency legislation that would allow organizations to distribute the strips and allow individuals to use them without fear of legal consequences.

The Baltimore City Health Department did not respond to repeated requests, made by telephone and email, for comment.

In absence of safe injection spaces and emergency legislation, you need someone like Fuentes, who knows how to talk to users. He knows what it is like and he doesn’t judge. And he looks for other people like himself, who may have some sway in the community. Today, a group of five met him first at a nearby cafe, where he explained who he was and what he was trying to do. Then they all walked, slowly, to a nearby apartment where he would demonstrate the testing.

“We take it and dip it in there for 15 seconds, right,” he says dipping the strip into a small tin votive candle holder that some people use to cook their opiates. “Then you put it up like that, as you see it start getting pink, that’s sucking up the water.”

In a few seconds, lines start to stand out on the strip. If there’s one line, then your dope has fentanyl in it. And if there are two lines, it probably doesn’t. The test only covers 12 fentanyl analogues, including the even stronger carfentanil—but new varieties are developed nearly every day. And the tests can’t check the strength of a drug, only its presence. So even if it tests positive, it may not kill you.

Baltimore has a long culture of heroin use, with an estimated 25,000 users.

“We have to recognize here in Baltimore people have been addicted to heroin and opioids for decades,” the city’s Health Commissioner Leana Wen told the Baltimore Sun. “Individuals have not had access to treatment for many years, and many of these individuals are using drugs when we now have fentanyl.”

In some ways, Baltimore is built on opiates. John O’Donnell named his property Canton, now a yuppie neighborhood, after the region of China because of the money he made there. And a Baltimore-based ship named the Eutaw delivered the first opium from Turkey to China in 1805, some decades before the first of the Opium Wars.

In the post-World War II period, heroin was a boutique affair in Baltimore. But according to David Simon in “The Corner,” his deep study of addiction, the ‘60s changed all of that. “Overnight, the money got serious,” he wrote. “The users, an army unto themselves, were serviced daily in back alleys and housing project stairwells by men who were, on some level, careerists.”

These men worked for people like “Little Melvin, Big Lucille, Gangster Webster, Kid Henderson, Liddie Jones, Snyder Blanchard,” legendary figures who, according to Simon, “became success stories for an increasingly alienated ghetto world, bona fide gangster caricatures with territories and soldiers and reputations.” Still, he writes, they were “serious, cautious.”

It was in this world that William Miller Sr., one of the old-heads gathered in this apartment to learn about the strips, started shooting up, back in the 1960s.

Miller is a dark-skinned man with a long slow drawl and a fierce authoritative intelligence. He has acquired skills and wisdom—he’s had to in order to survive for half a century of dope in Baltimore. He rode the wave of the ‘60s. In the ‘70s, Little Melvin and all the other big names had fallen to Nixon’s war on drugs.

And then in the ‘80s coke came and wreaked havoc on the drug world—and ramped up the war against it. “The heroin trade was limited to the hardcore, but the arrival of cheap, plentiful cocaine in the early and mid-’80s broke down all the barriers and let everyone play,” Simon wrote in his 1997 classic on a Baltimore drug corner.

At almost the same time Simon was writing “The Corner,” drug companies such as Pfizer and Purdue were heavily advertising a new generation of synthetic opiates like Oxycontin. This, along with a revolution in thinking about pain management, made opiates available to a greater public than ever before, leading to a national “opioid crisis,” where addiction and overdose have hit every strata of society.

Fentanyl was developed in the late 1950s and was marketed under the name Sublimaze, but it first came to public consciousness when Michael Jackson overdosed in 2009. Prince died of a fentanyl overdose in 2016 and Tom Petty in 2017. It is considered so dangerous that when Baltimore police raided a corner store where they thought they found 16 pounds of fentanyl, they sent in a hazmat team with gas masks and apocalyptic-looking suits. And, perhaps in a nod to how useful the test strips could be, it took the department a month to realize that they had, in fact, confiscated pounds of Viagra and Cialis, not fentanyl.

Miller has seen it all. But he hasn’t seen anything like fentanyl. “This thing just all of a sudden happened in Baltimore because there wasn’t no fentanyl,” Miller says. “The most deadly drug we had at one time was some China White and I don’t know whether fentanyl was mixed in it or not but that at that time was killing people and that was like the ‘90s.”

But this is different. Miller can’t even begin to count the number of people he’s known who died because of the drug.

“No matter how you feel about people that use, people are gonna get high and this fentanyl thing, man, it is killing people,” Miller said.

Because of the deaths, rumors start to swirl and drug-scare stories sweep the streets and social media. One of the younger men with Miller starts to ask about weed laced with fentanyl, a story that went around the web in the last year or so.

“You can’t put fire to fentanyl,” Fuentes says. “You can’t burn it that way.”

If it was on weed and you smoked it, it wouldn’t do anything. Fact-checking site Snopes.com and Vice have shown the fentanyl-laced weed stories to be false. Other stories circulated that you can die just by touching a speck of fentanyl—they also proved false. But the dangers are real, and real information saves lives.

So now Miller is here with a few of his younger friends to learn about using these strips from Fuentes, who took a bus down from New York City with about 20 strips. After he showed them how to use the strips, he’d leave them with the rest to spread around their community.

They’ve got to do something. The simple economics of it mean fentanyl is here to stay. A kilogram of heroin can cost as much as $60,000. But a kilogram of fentanyl, which is 50 times stronger, costs as little as $2,500.

The logic is similar to the capitalist paradigm that led to the aggressive marketing of opiates over the last decades. Forty-one Attorneys General are investigating the drug companies’ role in the opioid overdose crisis.

“And look, the profit these guys are making, they’re not going to stop pushing their thing. They’re not going to stop eating and taking care of their family,” Miller said of the street dealers and underground chemists who are the heirs of the pharmaceutical companies and their reps, hitting the street to hype their dope.

The street money is what makes what Fuentes does dangerous.

“When I was a dealer, if I thought something was talking shit about my product, I’d put a bullet in them,” he says.

It’s for this same reason that Miller did not want his younger friends to go out and give their friends the strips on the streets. He knows that you have to play it carefully when you are messing with a man’s money. So he took most of the 20 strips that Fuentes was able to bring down and would help introduce the concept to his peers.

“It is some limitations to the strip, but guess what? This is better than not having anything at all,” Miller says. “I do think they can be one of the tools in the toolbox of a harm-reduction method because it will at least let people know what’s happening.”

Fuentes, who approaches the drug problem from the harm-reduction perspective, also sees testing drugs as only one part of a “tool box” of safe use.

“Always, always have naloxone and always use with somebody else because [fentanyl] is not heroin and this, within a couple minutes, can kill you.”

He turns to Miller.

“As old timers, you know, old heroin overdose we’ll be sitting down, nodding out, little by little and then you stop breathing,” he said. Both of the men laughed. “With fentanyl you don’t have that privilege.”

Within two minutes, you can be out.

It’s more difficult to mix fentanyl in the black tar heroin that comes up from Mexico, but Miller has only seen that in Baltimore once. A new study published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs on heroin in the city shows that in Baltimore, heroin is powder—“either raw (Colombian in origin and relatively pure) and scramble (raw heroin traditionally blended with quinine and lactose)” and that as scramble becomes more common, so does fentanyl, with which it is increasingly cut. Some of what is sold as heroin is nothing but fentanyl. And Baltimore is not alone.

“When I went to Ohio I didn’t find anything, anything at all with heroin in it. Everything I bought was fentanyl,” Fuentes says.

And it’s not only heroin. Fuentes has found fentanyl in cocaine, crystal meth, and even Xanax.

“I’ve tested 11 Xanax pills that look just like a bar, like it came from a pharmacy. They were pressed illegally and they were positive for fentanyl. I tested MDMA, positive for fentanyl. In Atlanta, crystal meth, positive for fentanyl,” he says.

“Always test every batch,” Fuentes says. “Don’t assume because the last batch.”

He calls it the “chocolate chip” effect when the drugs aren’t cut well and the fentanyl is not well distributed. And he says it is going to get worse: “For as long as I’ve been doing this, and the type of work I did before, I tell you we’re at like 25 percent of where it is going to get.”

While fentanyl is clearly a problem, the solutions being proposed by law enforcement and government officials are not likely to be effective. Twenty states have passed “drug-induced homicide” laws and many others prosecute drug providers for overdoses, even when they do not have a specific law. DPA and other groups vehemently oppose this return to drug war thinking.

But now white kids are dying too.

“It’s not just us dying anymore,” Fuentes says. “I’m Puerto Rican so when I say ‘us’ I mean people of color. It’s not just us anymore so it’s shifting from a war on drugs to a public health issue.”

The goal is that if Miller and his peers take the technique and spread it in their community, then they can get agencies or nonprofits to start buying the strips.

“It has to come from the community, because that’s who it affected and we’re going to benefit greatly when it comes to this if it’s applied correctly. And we will be hoping the health department adopts it,” Miller says. “Doing it like this, it spreads out among communities. You guys either take it and run with it or you don’t. If you do, so now you’re doing it. If you don’t, that’s fine. I’ll leave some strips, do what you do on your own. Figure it out, go into your neighborhoods or wherever you think it’s deemed necessary and see how it works for you.”

Fuentes tells a story about reversing a fentanyl overdose with three or four doses of naloxone. After the guy got out of the hospital, he bought three bags of heroin. Fuentes tested them for him. They all had fentanyl.

“He threw them out and said call the detox,” Fuentes says. “That’s not the norm and that’s not what I’m looking for because I don’t want people to think he’s trying to push me to get off. No I don’t. I used to get high as shit. Probably if there was no fentanyl, maybe I’d be getting high right now.”

Fuentes, who has been working in harm reduction for 15 years, is half joking. But after a half century of heroin use, the fentanyl deaths helped push Miller to give it up.

“Everything combined pushed me to the state that I’m in at this point. Law enforcement, prison sentences, stigma, the way people treat you, discrimination, all of these things combined, got me to where I’m at now—but most of all the repeated deaths from overdoses, man.”

The post Using invasive drug testing technology to check street drugs for fentanyl could save lives—will the city support it? appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Sgt. Wayne Jenkins was driving his squad’s car the wrong way down a one way street—as he often did—when he saw a man walking with a backpack. He got in a van with Oreese Stevenson. Jenkins slammed on the breaks. This encounter on March 16, 2016 would begin a long saga that illustrates the determined, almost obsessive, corruption in the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF).

There was no probable cause to stop or search Stevenson. But for Jenkins, the backpack was enough. “Anytime someone is over 18 with a bookbag, Jenkins thinks it’s concealing drugs or money,” Maurice Ward testified in federal court at Tuesday’s police corruption trial.

Ward, who worked under Jenkins in two different units, including GTTF, was the first witness in the trial of Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor, both members of the elite task force. Hersl and Taylor, charged with robbery, extortion, using a firearm to commit a violent crime, and fraud charges relating to overtime theft, are the only officers who have not pleaded guilty.

Ward was testifying in the hopes of a reduced sentence and was laying out a series of crimes, committed by himself and with other officers, going back to 2014 and earlier. Jenkins has also been charged by federal prosecutors with planting heroin on Umar Burley in 2010. Detective Sean Suiter was killed the day before he was scheduled to appear before the grand jury to testify in this case.

But even in light of the stories of egregious corruption that have emerged about members of the taskforce, Ward’s testimony about the Stevenson case is stunning.

The officers grabbed Stevenson. Jenkins, who later became the sergeant of GTTF but was at the time the head of a special operations unit, lied to him and told him he was a federal agent and they were there because of a wiretap. Ward opened the bag and found cocaine. The squad then managed to get Stevenson’s keys and did a “sneak and peek”—breaking into a residence to take a look around before seeking a warrant.

In order to do that without arousing suspicion, they pretended to see someone run out of the back of the house. Then some of the officers left to go get a legitimate warrant. Ward was left in the house alone and said he wondered if they were going to split money without him. When they found a safe in the basement during their search of the house, they used a series of tools to pry it open, finding somewhere near $200,000. Jenkins, Ward said, took about half the money. Then they re-sealed the safe and Taylor began filming a recreated discovery of the safe on his cellphone.

“Don’t touch it,” Jenkins yells on the video when they see the stacks of $100 dollar bills. He instructed Taylor to keep recording the money so no one would think they stole any.

Then they called another officer who worked with “the feds” to process large amounts of cash. Stevenson was arrested for drugs, which they also found in the house. Ward went to let his dog out and then met Taylor, Jenkins, and Det. Evodio Hendrix at Taylor’s home—he was the only one who lived alone. They went into Taylor’s basement and split up the money. Hendrix, Taylor and Ward each got $20,000. Ward said Jenkins got more.

But, Ward said, on the way home, he had some time to think. There was nothing he could do with that kind of money. Jenkins warned them not to use the money conspicuously and suggested they have home improvements done by someone he knew who would cook the books for them and issue false receipts. Ward rented. He didn’t want the money in his house so when he got home, he discarded the money, tossing it in an area behind his building.

It was the second time he had thrown away money they stole, he said, acknowledging he would have loved to keep the money if it had been practical. The first time was after stealing 20 lbs of weed and $20,000 from two men they stumbled upon in the middle of a pot deal.

“I didn’t want to be the one on the squad to be, ‘I’m not with that,’ ” Ward said on the stand.

But the jaw-dropping Stevenson story—only one of many from the first day of testimony in what is expected to be a month-long trial—was not over yet. Already it had involved profiling, illegal searches, theft, and faked evidence. But the paranoia that made Ward throw away his money may have gotten ahold of the other officers as well. Ward says that Jenkins listened to the recordings of the calls Stevenson made from jail “like he was obsessed.”

He discovered that Stevenson was complaining about missing money and said he was going to get a lawyer to try to address it. Jenkins also learned that Stevenson’s wife was dealing with the lawyers—and that Stevenson was also talking to another woman.

Jenkins put the pieces together. He got either Hendrix or Taylor—they had neater handwriting, Ward said—to forge a letter to Stevenson’s wife from the other woman. It said that she was having Stevenson’s baby and they should talk, and included her phone number. Jenkins placed the note on the door—the same home where they had stolen over $60,000—knocked, and ran.

A couple months later, in June of 2016, Jenkins took command of the Gun Trace Task Force, where Momodu Gondo, Jemell Rayam, and Daniel Hersl were already working. It was, at that point, largely an investigative unit that brought in about one gun every week. Jenkins brought Ward and Taylor with him and transformed it into a squad that practiced “street rips” to greatly increase those numbers—and charged overtime for them.

Ward testified that under Jenkins the GTTF drove up arrest numbers using “door pops”—pulling up fast on a group of people and slamming on the breaks, acting like you’re jumping out to see who runs. According to Ward they would make 50 unconstitutional stops like this on a busy night. They regularly stopped any car—especially Honda Acuras—that Jenkins, who always drove, perceived as a “Dope-Boy” car. They kept BB guns in the trunk in case they got in a shootout with someone who didn’t have a gun.

“Jenkins liked to profile a lot,” Ward said, noting that he would make up an excuse like a no seat belt or a tinted-window violation after the fact. If they got guns, they could claim overtime. The GTTF had a day schedule with no weekends, and was supposed to work from 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Often, Ward said, they did not even come in to work until their shift had ended—working all of their hours on overtime.

“Your work speaks for itself,” was Jenkins’ response, according to Ward. He testified that the willingness to give “slash days”—days off that aren’t counted as such—and overtime as rewards for getting guns off of the street went all the way to the top of the department with “a wink and a nod.”

“Banging our overtime shit,” Ward explained in a recorded phone call.

Hersl’s lawyer, William Purpura, who also represents Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, referred to the “riots” of 2015 that followed the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. He spoke of the unrest as an exigent circumstance that required more policing—even if the community saw overpolicing as the problem.

“GTTF was to get guns off the street—quite frankly, we don’t care how you do it,” he said, describing the mandate of the unit.”

Jenkins assured Ward and Taylor that “Danny’s good. He’s just like us,” which Ward says he understood to mean, “He would split money and we didn’t have to worry about him.”

Hersl is currently being sued in a civil case for throwing a credentialed reporter to the ground on May 2, 2015 while enforcing the 10 p.m. curfew. But Hersl’s reputation goes back long before 2015.

Hersl had 29 internal affairs complaints by 2006. By 2014, the city had paid out nearly $200,000 settling cases related to his conduct.

Hersl’s attorney argued that his client’s crimes should be treated as theft rather than robbery because he had legitimate probable cause against the suspects. Taylor’s entire defense seems to be based on the fact that the witnesses—whether his co-defendants from BPD or people like Stevenson—are criminals and liars and can’t be trusted.

Not only did Ward’s testimony show that the GTTF falsified statements of probable cause, but Hersl is notorious for misleadingly using rap videos of Kevron Evans, who performs under the name Young Moose, as probable cause warrant to raid his home—the Evans family claimed that Hersl robbed them long before the GTTF indictments came down. They sent videos of a smashed safe to reporters, claiming Hersl was responsible.

The GTTF was a “perfect storm of officers who took advantage of their positions to enrich themselves,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Leo Wise said in his opening statements. “The Gun Trace Task Force wasn’t a unit that went rogue. . . . It was a unit of officers who had already gone rogue.”

Sometime after November 2016—the dates aren’t entirely clear from testimony—Jenkins wanted to meet with Taylor, Ward, and Hersl about “hitting Mr. Stevenson’s house again.”

Ward said he rode over with Taylor, who told him about Jenkins’ plan. At first Ward said, he thought “hitting” meant a raid. But when they met Jenkins and Hersl, who was at the time no longer in the GTTF, in a parking lot by a wooded area where the two men were drinking Twisted Tea, he discovered that Jenkins wanted to “put [GPS] trackers on the cars, kick in the door, and take the drugs and money.”

But Ward didn’t want to do it: “We just took $60,000 from him—why take a chance?”

In the end, the squad ended up not hitting Stevenson again, but they did go on to use illegal trackers against numerous other victims.

Ward was only the first of Taylor and Hersl’s co-defendants to testify against them. Gondo and Rayam previously testified in a related drug case, during which they revealed numerous other robberies committed by the GTTF and their conspirators.

In the prosecution’s opening remarks, Wise said that “this is not a case about overzealous policing or police tactics.” It was, he said, about greed. But he also acknowledged the way their legitimate police work was inextricably intertwined with their criminal enterprise. They were “motivated to seize guns and make gun arrests so they could claim overtime.” And that motivation put them ever more often in situations where “agents were able to abuse their positions in order to commit crimes.”

“They are, simply put, both cops and robbers at the same time,” Wise said.  

An earlier version of this story indicated that police saw Stevenson walking with the backpack, that was incorrect. 

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The post “Cops and Robbers at the Same Time”: Testimony in the racketeering trial of two police officers reveals unprecedented corruption appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

On Thursday, federal prosecutors in Washington D.C. dropped charges against 129 of the 188 people facing rioting charges during protests of Donald Trump’s inauguration last January. The decision comes after a jury found all six of the defendants in the first round of trials not guilty on all charges on Dec. 21.

“The US Attorney has essentially admitted it never had the evidence to charge these innocent people in the first place, and we’re gratified to see they’ve come to their senses,” the ACLU-D.C. said in a statement. “For a full year, the government’s abusive prosecution has upended the lives of these defendants, who’ve endured the anxiety of multiple court hearings and suffered disruptions to their educations or careers while facing the prospect of more than 60 years in prison.”

The government’s notice of intent to proceed lists three reasons for the continued prosecution of the 59 defendants named—and in doing so seems to acknowledge that there was never a strong case against the 129 people, all of whom have spent the last year looking at the possibility of spending the rest of their lives in jail.

“The government is focusing its efforts on prosecuting those defendants who: (1) engaged in identifiable acts of destruction, violence, or other assaultive conduct; (2) participated in the planning of the violence and destruction; and/or (3) engaged in conduct that demonstrates a knowing and intentional use of the black-bloc tactic on January 20, 2017, to perpetrate, aid or abet violence and destruction.”

“By that justification as written, it doesn’t make any sense for me to be one of the people they are focusing on. But it has never made any sense to be focusing on any of us,” said Elizabeth Lagesse, one of the defendants in the case who is also part of an ACLU civil suit against D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department and a number of individual officers who, they claim, violated civil rights or engaged in violence while on duty that day.

“With my case in particular I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that I’ve been outspoken or that I am part of the ACLU lawsuit,” she said.

“This has always been political,” said Dylan Petrohilos, one of the people accused of planning the anti-capitalist anti-fascist march that resulted in some broken windows. “Not only has it always been political, it’s already been a year-long punishment.”

Petrohilos says he was not even at the protest. Months later, police officers raided the home where he was living, taking an antifa flag and copies of progressive magazines like The Nation as evidence.

Since the beginning of the case, MPD and U.S. prosecutors have worked closely with far-right media. On the day of the protest, a police officer released a spreadsheet with the names of everyone who was arrested to the far-right site Gotnews.com. In the first trial, prosecutors made liberal use of videos of an alleged planning meeting secretly recorded by an operative for James O’Keefe’s shady far-right sting site Project Veritas. Although prosecutors had previously argued for a protective order that would prohibit body camera footage from being released to the media, the night before they filed their intent to continue prosecuting 59 individuals, D.C.’s Fox 5 released “new” footage showing some members of the black bloc anti-capitalist protest breaking windows. To the defendants still facing charges, the timing did not seem coincidental.

Journalist Aaron Cantú is among those still facing charges. Eight journalists were initially arrested, although charges against most of them were quickly dropped. Alexei Wood, a photojournalist who was live-streaming the protest, was one of the six acquitted on all charges. Cantú’s lawyers filed a separate motion to dismiss on Friday, hours after the government announced it would continue with its prosecution of him.

“This case doubly implicates the First Amendment, because not only was Mr. Cantú present as a journalist to gather and disseminate the news, but the newsworthy event he was covering was a political demonstration,” the motion reads.

Cantú’s charges are based on the fact that he arrived where the black bloc was meeting, wearing dark clothes, and that he moved with them. His lawyers liken Cantú to a journalist embedded with the military.

“Mr. Cantú’s brand of journalism continues a time-honored tradition of journalists who have

embedded themselves to provide first-hand accounts of important events,” the motion reads. “American history is replete with examples of journalists sacrificing their own personal comfort or safety for the sake of a worthwhile story.”

The decision to continue prosecuting a reporter for the actions of people he was covering comes only one day after Republican Senator Jeff Flake gave a long speech criticizing Trump’s attacks on the press as the “enemy of the people.”

“It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase ‘enemy of the people,’ that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of ‘annihilating such individuals’ who disagreed with the supreme leader,” Flake said. He did not mention the name Aaron Cantú in his speech. Nor did the pundits who attacked the president’s “fake news awards” given out later that same night.

Most of the mainstream media still treats Trump’s war on the press as a Twitter feud. The prosecution of Cantú and others who have talked to the press such as Lagesse and Petrohilos shows that it is far more than that.

In most jurisdictions, these crimes would be prosecuted by state’s attorneys, but in the District of Columbia, the Department of Justice oversees such prosecutions. The suit cites specific DOJ guidelines intended to prohibit just such prosecutions of the press. But when Jeff Sessions’ prosecutors ignore those rules, the mainstream press remains shamefully silent.

Cantú and his lawyers are clear about the the stakes, however. “Prosecution of journalists not only imposes severe penalties on the individual journalists arrested and charged, but it significantly deters other members of the press from exercising their constitutional rights,” the motion argues, claiming that “the government’s conduct amounts to an outright ban on newsgathering at demonstrations.”

But it is not only journalists who enjoy the protections of the First Amendment. Lagesse, who appeared on Vice News days before the government’s notice was filed, was insistent that she would not back down.

“If they’re going to fight, so am I,” she said. “If they think they have a good case against me, then they’re wrong and I want to keep fighting. If it’s because they’re mad that I have been outspoken, I’m not planning on being any less outspoken.”

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