A short, link-littered history of City Paper’s Black Guerrilla Family coverage

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper in April, 2013

The Black Guerrilla Family (BGF), though long known to be active in Maryland’s prisons and Baltimore’s streets, has suddenly become hot news, with the April 23 announcement of a federal indictment against 25 alleged members, including 13 Maryland correctional officers (COs). But the BGF had already burnished its image in the public’s mind in April 2009, when federal prosecutors announced two indictments against alleged BGF members, including correctional officers.

City Paper jumped on the story, covering the press conference announcing the indictments and the BGF’s ties to a Baltimore bar called Club 410. From that point on, the stories kept rolling – starting with the unnerving news that the BGF had offered $10,000 to anyone who killed people involved in helping to build the case. A series of profiles, dubbed “Family Portraits,” was assembled, spotlighting co-defendants Nelson Arthur Robinson, Rainbow Lee Williams, Randolph Edison, Eric Marcell Brown, Deitra Davenport, Calvin Renard Robinson, and The Black Book (pictured), the BGF’s 122-page self-improvement guide that was subtitled “Empowering Black Families and Communities.” A lengthy feature provided a birds-eye view of the case.

By the fall of 2009, the first guilty pleas were entered, including by two COs, and a few defendants were sentenced, including Marlow Bates, the son of a famous Baltimore gangster. Meanwhile, City Paper discovered an inmate’s federal lawsuit that had unearthed a trove of evidence that Maryland’s prison administrators had turned a blind eye to the long-known problem of gang-tied COs, including the lawsuit’s defendant, Antonia Allison, who the inmate accused of facilitating his brutal beating by a group of gang-members. (Allison is now one of the 13 recently-indicted COs.)

Driving home that the issue was an ongoing problem, a state criminal case was brought against another CO, Lynae Chapman, accused of delivering a cellphone to her unborn child’s father, a BGF member who was in a Baltimore jail awaiting trial on murder charges. Chapman’s case was intriguing, in part because she initially was denied the opportunity to enter a guilty plea. Then, in March 2010, another CO was charged for bringing pot and cellphones into the Baltimore City Detention Center.

Almost exactly a year after the 2009 BGF indictments, prosecutors took another whack at the gang, and this time the focus was on its infiltration of an anti-gang non-profit group. One of the more fascinating defendants was Kimberly McIntosh, a health-care worker with no criminal record who was accused of being at the “epicenter” of the gang’s street-level operations.

Shortly after the 2010 indictment was filed, City Paper ran a lengthy feature examining the issue of corrupt COs, and how the Maryland General Assembly had just passed reforms that would make it harder to discipline them. After the article ran, concerns were elevated as another CO, Alicia Simmons, was charged in the federal BGF probe, when the 2009 and 2010 indictments were rolled into one, big racketeering case, and another inmate gained traction with another federal lawsuit alleging a gang-tied CO facilitated his prison beating.

Finally, in 2012, after covering the courthouse fates of some of the BGF defendants here and there, City Paper ran a lengthy feature about the BGF probe’s impact – which, given recent developments, would seem to have been lacking. Maybe this next round, as it unfolds, will have more lasting repercussions.