by Van Smith

Published in City Paper, June 26, 2014

After the polls closed at 8 p.m. on June 24, it quickly became clear that Heather Mizeur was not going to be the Democrats’ standard-bearer heading into November’s general election, much less Maryland’s first gay, woman governor elected by tapping into the state’s public campaign-financing system. But judging from how her supporters reacted as they gathered on election night at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore to hear her concession speech, she—and they—somehow still seemed victorious.

“Heather! Heather!” the crowd of a couple hundred supporters and campaign workers cheered, as Mizeur basked in the intense glow of the TV news teams’ lights.

“We now have a core, organized movement going forward—I have names and numbers,” said Karen Stokes, the Mizeur campaign’s Baltimore City coordinator and the executive director of the Greater Homewood Community Corporation. State Del. Mary Washington, who represents Northeast Baltimore, added that “no one feels tonight that they’ve lost. They’re moving the progressive agenda forward. Their voices were heard. This is exciting. Six months ago, could anyone imagine her breaking 20 percent?”

In a telephone interview two days after the election, Mizeur makes it clear “I was in it to win it,” but says the campaign was “never really about winning an election as much as it was about raising consciousness and encouraging people to stay involved.”

Mizeur did break the 20-percent mark, getting about 100,000 votes from Maryland’s Democratic electorate, only 11,000 or so fewer than Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler, a well-established statewide political figure who came in second behind the overwhelming victor, Maryland Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown, whose campaign raised and spent many millions. Not bad for a two-term state delegate from Takoma Park.

“Maryland politics will never be the same,” declared Delman Coates, the Prince George’s County pastor who ran for lieutenant governor as Mizeur’s running mate. “This is not a moment in time, but a movement,” he said while addressing the crowd, adding that Mizeur “compelled us to believe in new things to make our communities better” and “did not run for governor to make history or further her political career,” but “to make change.” Addressing Mizeur directly, Coates added: “You have started a movement and I will happily ride with you.”

When Mizeur spoke, she declared that her supporters “have shown the power a movement can have when we work together for positive change.” Claiming that “the pundits, the media, the politicians all agree: We ran, hands down, the best campaign in this election,” Mizeur exhorted the crowd for having “changed the way campaigns will be run in Maryland” and argued that “we have restored so much integrity to the electoral process” by showing that voters “can come together to build community again.” That process, she continued, “does not stop with an election”—after “building this movement” and having “changed the conversation” in Maryland, her supporters need to make sure “Maryland becomes a truly progressive state and heeds your call for change” by creating “Maryland’s new ruling progressive class.”

The progressive policy template that Mizeur touted on the campaign trail was tailored to advance basic notions of societal equality though targeted government policies. Tax relief for working families and small businesses, educational reform funded in part by legalizing and taxing marijuana, assuring workers earn a living wage, ending what she calls the “cradle-to-prison pipeline” created by existing criminal-justice policies, and expanding access to affordable healthcare—these and many other proposals she advanced on her website, her campaign advertising, during media interviews, and in the televised debates.

The extent to which Mizeur’s ideas resonated with Maryland’s Democrats can be measured not only by the 100,000 votes she received, but by the grass-roots fervor reflected in her campaign finances, as compared to Brown’s, during the final weeks leading to the election. Brown’s campaign took in almost 1,300 contributions totaling more than $1.1 million since May 1, for an average donation of almost $900. At the same time, Mizeur’s campaign got more than 3,800 contributions, yielding around $420,000 in private contributions (another $270,000 or so came in the form of matching funds from the state’s public-financing system), for an average contribution of just over $100. That’s an impressively broad base of citizen donors.

The preliminary election results show where Mizeur’s campaign did best. While nearly 60 percent of her votes came out of Baltimore County, Baltimore City, and Montgomery County, she led the pack in Kent County on the Eastern Shore—where she and her wife, Deborah Mizeur, have a farm—and came in second in Baltimore City and Carroll, Frederick, Garrett, and Howard counties.

After Mizeur’s speech was over, the crowd slowly thinned and the camera crews broke down their equipment. In the days following, City Paper contacted some of Mizeur’s Baltimore-area supporters to see if they thought Mizeur’s stab at the State House could have a lingering effect on Maryland politics.

“I think other politicians will take notice of the type of campaign she ran and realize that they can run positive, idea-driven campaigns and thrive because of it,” suggests Keith Gayler, a former research director at the Abell Foundation and policy analyst at the Maryland State Department of Education. “She ran an unapologetically progressive campaign when progressive is often used as term of derision,” Gayler continues, adding, “who else was really talking about inequality, the issue of our time?”

Thomas Dolina, a lawyer who says he first met Mizeur when both were at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, says Mizeur’s qualified success as a gubernatorial candidate is partly due to the fact that “she’s a progressive without demonizing those who disagree with her, and I find that to be a rare attribute.” He says the fact that she performed so well at the polls “while making a sacrifice not to take money” the way campaigns traditionally do—without the constraints of the public-financing system, which limits a campaign’s fundraising and spending—”creates a model where that kind of methodology is successful.” He’s not so sure that the progressive coalition that backed Mizeur will be able to keep its momentum going. “I’ve seen that happen so many times,” he says. “It’s a ripple. It might turn into a wave.”

Joanne Nathans, the founder of the Job Opportunities Task Force, a Baltimore-based nonprofit that seeks to economically empower the working class and unemployed, says Mizeur “carried off a really impressive grass-roots campaign” in which “a large number of people supported her and her ideas” even though “she sort of came out of nowhere. She’s now a force to be reckoned with.” As for the “future impact” of the campaign, Nathans notes that Mizeur is “a progressive, principled person” who “respects the voters” and “became a credible candidate despite having very little name recognition initially,” so “other candidates will pay attention to how Heather conducted herself in this campaign.”

Mizeur says her campaign organization and supporters “have loosely discussed having a retreat to explore how to keep everyone engaged” after the election. The issues her campaign sought to address, she continues, “are not going away, so I’m thinking about the best way for me to continue to make a difference” through “this movement of people who are pressing our government and leaders to make these changes.”

In particular, Mizeur says she believes work needs to be done to change the culture at like-minded, progressive institutions in the state that “support me on the issues, but weren’t willing to back the campaign because they are part of the establishment. There’s a sense that some of these organizations have become part of the problem, not part of the solution, and we have to figure out how to harness that.”

Despite the loss, Mizeur says she is committed to continuing the work her campaign started. “There are lots of ways for me to serve,” she says, “and I’m very open to figuring out the best way. I’m not walking away from this work, or this movement, or this state that I love so dearly.”

by Van Smith

Published in City Paper, May 18, 2011

Arriving at a bar by boat seems to make the subsequent drink more rewarding. The adventure of getting there, of steering a vessel according to the liberal rules of the road that boaters get to enjoy, of having the sky above and the water below as you glide across the surface, soaking in the sights along the shore—somehow, enjoying these freedoms, though they are their own reward, calls for a toast. You worked for it, even if the work itself was really recreation.

Baltimore City’s waterfront has opportunities for this: a few, select places where you can tie up your boat, disembark, try to pay the harbor master, and head for the closest watering hole. You can go for a boat-in drink at, say, the Inner Harbor’s Rusty Scupper, Harborview’s Tiki Barge, or Bo Brooks and the Bay Café in Canton. But if you’re departing from the Patapsco River’s Northwest Branch—the harbor’s geographic name—these don’t really qualify as destinations. To get to them, you don’t even leave the harbor and its 6 mph, no-wake speed limit inside Fort McHenry.

Beyond the harbor, you can dock to get a drink at Nick’s Fish House and Grill, next to the Hanover Street Bridge on the Patapsco’s Middle Branch. It’s a dandy place to boat to, with a mile or two of fast boating along the way, but it’s not quite enough of a voyage to feel you’ve earned much reward. You’re still in the city, and all you’ve done to get there is hug the Locust Point shoreline.

To claim a trophy drink, you need to go some distance. You need to head out over open, unrestricted waters, get a little wet at a high rate of speed. You need to build your thirst, see some new sights, gain your sea legs.

Some local old salts who know the lay of the land suggested this: Glen Burnie’s Furnace Branch, about eight miles over water from Fells Point. Along its sandy shore, there’s a biker bar called Reckless Ric’s, in a neighborhood known as Point Pleasant. There, you can dock your boat, take a table perched on sand among palm trees, have your drinks and grub brought to you by barely clad waitresses while you listen to 98Rock-style jukebox music, and look out over the water you came in over.

If that sounds like a worthy outing, rustle up some friends, board a willing vessel, and head out of the harbor past Fort McHenry. Keep to the Patapsco’s south shore, giving the industrial peninsula of Fairfield a wide berth until you reach the mouth of Curtis Bay, just shy of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Hawkins Point, with the W.R. Grace and Co. chemical plant and the Quarantine Road Landfill, looms in the background.

As you go upstream, Curtis Bay gives way to Curtis Creek. Along the way, remaining vestiges of Baltimore’s industrial past still show some muscle, though its ghosts—partially submerged wooden barges and an old tugboat, rotting slowly in the shallows—also haunt the scene. Further along, the very active U.S. Coast Guard’s Curtis Bay Yard comes into view, across the creek from the old U.S. Army Depot, largely abandoned as authorities try to clean up its contamination.

Here, where Curtis Creek forks to become Marley Creek and Furnace Branch, the industrial shoreline gives way to woodlands and, on the Point Pleasant peninsula, a special kind of suburbia where nearly everyone’s backyard has a dock. And here, along Furnace Branch, is where you’ll find Reckless Ric’s dock, with enough room for maybe six small boats.

If you enter Reckless Ric’s the way most people do—from its parking lot, generally packed with motorcycles and muscle cars—it seems like just another biker bar. But if you enter from its dock, you can pretend you’re in Key West. Next door is an old-fashioned, family-style joint called Duke’s Tavern, with its own dock (in disrepair during a recent visit) and, rather than palm trees and sand, a giant oak tree and a grass lawn with a horseshoe pit and picnic tables.

After hitting Reckless Ric’s and Duke’s, you can re-dock downstream at the Point Pleasant Beach Tavern, maybe shoot some pool and get one more for the road—or the river. You’ve earned it.

by Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Dec. 30, 2014

U.S. District Judge Catherine Blake ruled in the government’s favor in a gun case today, allowing a gun to be used as evidence in the case of Arthur Jeter, who’s charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. But Blake noted “troubling issues” involving the conduct of Baltimore police officers who seized the gun from Jeter.

Without elaborating, Blake writes that Jeter’s attorney, Brendan Hurson of the Office of the Federal Public Defender, “raises troubling issues concerning the handling of a confidential informant (‘CI’), the apparent failure of the city police to disclose the existence of that CI to the city prosecutor, and the reliability of the lead detective’s recollection.” During a September motions hearing in the case, according to the transcript, Blake commented that “this is a fairly unusual case,” noting that at an earlier motions hearing, Hurson “was surprised” when he “learned a lot of information . . . that had not previously been disclosed.” 

The informant “was not anonymous,” Blake continues in her written opinion, “but rather agreed to become a CI to avoid a drug charge (and backup time on an armed robbery).” In October 2013, the informant “told Det. Robert Clark ‘he would be able to have a friend bring him a gun,'” and Clark “told him that if he did so, he would not be charged with the drug offense.” So, “outside the Baltimore City Police Department’s Southeast District,” the informant spoke with Jeter “on a cell phone placed on speakerphone so Det. Clark could hear the conversation,” and told Jeter “he needed a gun,” and “Jeter agreed to give him one the following day.”

The next day, Jeter was indeed found in possession of a gun while in a car with the informant, and Blake ruled that the officers “had reasonable, articulable suspicion that Mr. Jeter possessed a gun when they seized him by approaching and surrounding the car.” However, she adds in a footnote that “the defense identified numerous inconsistencies in the testimony concerning the events leading up to the seizure of the gun,” as well as “omissions from the statement of probable cause to support the initial charges” against Jeter. But she concludes the omissions “appear intended to protect the identity of the CI.”

Hurson, in previous motions in the case, argued that Clark, “in addition to drafting a statement of probable cause riddled with misrepresentations and critical factual omissions,” offered testimony at a motions hearing that “was repeatedly contradicted by the government’s purported eyewitness, the CI.” He pointed to “undisclosed calls to internal affairs by the CI and his girlfriend, the failure to record or  memorialize any of the critical interactions between the CI, Mr. Jeter, and the police, and the apparent inability of Det. Clark to recall any detail adverse to the government’s case at all” in urging the court to suppress the gun evidence because of “inconsistencies in witness testimony coupled with other glaring ‘red flags’ of improper police conduct.”

“While a jury may reach a different opinion on credibility” of the officers on the case­—Clark, Sgt. Edward Davis, and detectives David Kincaid and Sabrina Hill—Blake writes that “I do not find the inconsistencies and omissions sufficient to conclude there was no reasonable suspicion of criminal activity when the officers seized the individuals in the car.”

Sounds like a close call in favor of the government, and plenty of doubt-raising fodder for Hurson to play up before a jury, should this case go to trial.

by Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Jan. 2, 2015

Drug dealing isn’t always the quick-buck, easy-street business it is sometimes thought to be. It’s often hard, demanding work, and, as court records in a recent drug-trafficking takedown in Baltimore show, sometimes involves unruly, hard-to-manage workers causing no end of trouble for their bosses.

Richard “Fat Boy” Smith is alleged to be at the top of drug-trafficking organization that is “pervasive in the Western Police District of Baltimore,” the records say, and “acts as the final arbiter for organizational decisions.” In October, while in Miami on a trip, Smith had to make such a call, over the phone.

“Nah my nigga,” Smith tells one of his underlings, Brian “Pitt” Nettles, “you ain’t even got no business to be on the block no more. You fired, yo.”

Turns out, Pitt had started trouble in a convenience store near one of the group’s street-level drug shops. As mid-level manager Eldridge Dubois put it to Smith, “Pitt in there fucking with yo, in the store man” and “threw juice in the window and all that dumb shit man,” prompting a police response, which was bad for the drug business. So Smith tells Nettles, “Yo, give them niggas whatever yo got yo and don’t come back up that motherfucker till Tuesday my nigga,” when Smith was due to be back from Miami. “Give them the money you got and them motherfucking pills yo,” he adds, since “I ain’t got no time for that dumb ass shit man.”

Earlier, in September, a couple of Smith’s lieutenants had to manage a different kind of situation: While one of their street-level slingers, Marvin Germany, was selling in an alley, the rest of the crew was hanging out in a convenience store, chatting, rather than keeping lookout like they were supposed to be doing. Bruce Jeffries, a lieutenant, calls up mid-level manager Darrell Randolph and says Bernard “Jig” Kingsborough is “watching yo, and he’s saying the same thing I’m saying, ain’t nobody watching Marvin while in the alley yo. Ain’t no way in the world niggas should be all in that store right there while a nigga hittin yo.” Randolph takes the orders well: “Alright,” he says, “I got it.”

In October, it becomes clear why having lookouts in place is important. Randolph gets a call from his brother, Pernell Randolph, and tells him that “Fresh just robbed Marvin, put the gun to his head and all that,” and “Cuddy acting like he don’t want to go get the joint and shit.” He’s talking about Marvin Germany, who is “in the house, he ain’t trying to come outside, he said he wants the joint.” The “joint” is a gun, so Germany can avenge the robber, Thomas “Fresh” Chambers, but Vincent “Cuddy” Jones doesn’t want to give him a gun. “Oh no,” Pernell Randolph responds, “where’s Cuddy at? I may tell Cuddy get that for him.”

Jeffries had to light a fire up under the crew again in October, when he called Darrell Randolph, who’s supposed to overseeing them, to ask why no one was working. Randolph, when Jeffries asks him where he is, is cagey, saying “right here on Monroe Street,” but Randolph was already there. “I’m on Monroe Street” Jeffries says, “so where at on Monroe Street?” Randolph covers himself, saying, “I’m talking about riding down Monroe Street.”

Jeffries then gets to the point—and learns that, rather than working, the crew is horsing around. “I’m trying to figure out why ain’t nobody out here selling dope yo,” he says to Randolph, “I’m like, nobody out here, nobody. Not one nigga out here yo.” Randolph explains that “Ticket on a dirt bike,” referring to Dedrick Coates, and “Pernell was just, Pernell just pulled up right there.” Jeffries gets angry: “What the fuck is his fat ass doing on a dirt bike? Niggas need to start, yo, alright.”

Work-ethic complaints cut both ways, though, as happens in November, when another of Smith’s lieutenants, Brian Carr, takes some guff from one of the lower-level managers, Kevin Grey, for starting work late in the day for a drug trafficker.

“Damn yo,” Gray says, “I’m glad I called you at six o’clock and just didn’t come straight outside,” to which Carr replies, testily, “Yeah, that’s what the fuck you going to always do.” Gray then has to cajole Carr to bring more drugs to sell. “Uhh,” says Carr, “I really don’t feel like going up there for real,” and Gray urges him to re-up, since the shop’s almost empty, saying “it’s nothing down here but half a joint,” a reference to the quantity of drugs.

Fear of the boss is evident in the records, as when, in October, Jeffries orders up some more drugs to sell, asking Derek Shorts to bring them to Darrell Randolph on Baltimore Street, and advises him to be smart about it, because Smith was watching. “Be careful how you move,” Jeffries tells Shorts. “Be careful how you move because Fat Boy on Bmore street too.”

Bosses can be tightwads, giving no leeway when it comes to the till. In November, Jeffries, after counting up the crew’s take, calls up Dubois to complain: “That shit was twelve dollars off yo” because “when I put it together it come up to thirteen eighty-eight” and “it supposed to count fourteen hundred.” Dubois acknowledges that the count came up short, so Jeffries says, “tell them niggas, one of them niggas they have short money man,” so “tell them niggas to get six dollars a piece for that shit man.” Dubois agrees, saying, “alright, well say no more.”

by Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Dec. 30, 2014

The end of former Baltimore Police Department (BPD) detective Joseph Crystal’s career was well-documented in the media this year, as two of his colleagues were convicted of misconduct arising from beating up a drug suspect. Crystal was a key witness in the case against the officers, Anthony Williams and Marinos Gialamas, and while the case was being investigated, a dead rat was found on Crystal’s car windshield in Nov. 2012. Publicity about the dead-rat incident prompted BPD Commissioner Anthony Batts in June to appoint outside investigators to look into the matter, but Crystal resigned after finding himself the target of an internal investigation involving a take-home police vehicle.

On Dec. 21, with Crystal’s filing of a free-speech retaliation lawsuit in Maryland U.S. District Court against BPD, his detailed account of what happened to him is now a matter of public record. The 21-page complaint portrays BPD as an agency imbued with the same stop-snitching culture that prevails on the streets it is sworn to patrol.

“Crystal has experienced taunting, intimidation, personal threats, and harassment that have endured since blowing the whistle on the police misconduct” in 2011, the lawsuit states, and suffered “an intolerable and hostile work environment” as “his position, assignments, and career were directly affected” in the aftermath of his whistle-blowing, including being “unjustifiably investigated” by Internal Affairs. Due to this treatment, the lawsuit continues, Crystal “resigned and is no longer with the Department,” while Williams, Gialamas, and “the supervisors and fellow employees who retaliated against him remain with the Department.”

Initially, Crystal’s BPD career appeared exceptionally promising, the lawsuit explains. He was “Class Commander” at the police academy, and at graduation in 2009, he received the “Police Commissioner’s Award” for “being the trainee that demonstrated the most leadership.” By the end of 2010 he’d been promoted from officer to detective, and was assigned to the Violent Crime Impact Section.

Then, in late 2011, Crystal’s career quickly started to tank after he and his colleagues chased a drug suspect, Antoine Green, who kicked in the door of an East Baltimore house to take refuge. The home happened to be the abode of BPD officer Williams’ girlfriend, and Green was arrested. While Green was en route to Central Booking, however, Gialamas called for him to be returned to the house, where Gialamas and an off-duty Williams assaulted him—the initial conduct for which both were later convicted.

At first, though, what Gialamas and Williams did went unreported, “despite multiple officers . . . being present and/or aware of this incident,” the lawsuit states, while “attempts were made to ‘cover up’ the assault.” So Crystal reported it to the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office, resulting in charges filed in October 2012 against Williams and Gialamas.

The day after Williams and Gialamas were charged, the lawsuit recounts that Lt. Tracey Geho in a police meeting said, “I told you Gialamas was fucked” and “I want to know who the source is.” Geho “then got very close” to Crystal’s face and, “while pointing his finger” in Crystal’s face, said: “What the fuck are you going to say?!” adding that “you are going to get charged with perjury when you testify” and “your story better not change even a little bit.”

A week later, Sgt. Robert Amador called Crystal on the phone, the lawsuit claims. “You better pray to God you are not the star witness,” Amador is quoted as saying, “because your career is already fucked, but if you’re the star witness you may as well just resign.” Amador allegedly added that Crystal “did not have to lie,” but he “did not have to bury the motherfucker. You better pray you are not the star witness against ‘G.’” Amador also, in person, told Crystal that “people don’t like you and you need to watch your back,” the lawsuit states, which Crystal took as “a direct threat of physical harm” and “feared for his safety.”

After Amador’s call—as well as a subsequent incident, in which Amador allegedly ordered him to “falsify” a “confidential informant slip” in order to “set him up with altering the police voucher,” the lawsuit states—Crystal “knew that the culture of the Defendant Baltimore City Police Department would condone this type of behavior.” He was “thereafter labeled a ‘rat’ and was constantly referred to as such by police officers both behind his back and to his face.”

Crystal’s efforts to seek help over the situation from the police union and internal affairs were fruitless, the lawsuit continues, and then the dead-rat incident occurred on Nov. 23, 2012. From that point on, Crystal’s “safety was at stake,” because “he would call for backup in certain situations” while working the streets “and no backup would come.”

The alleged retaliation against Crystal started to affect his assignments in 2014, when the media started to report on the case against Williams and Gialamas, including the loss of his security clearance, his being pulled from working with the FBI, and his being assigned to burglary and rape details, with confusing or contradictory instructions from supervisors about where and when he was to report for duty.

“With pervasive retaliation against him condoned and fostered by Defendants,” the lawsuit states, “and with his career as a Detective destroyed by the Defendants,” Crystal “resigned on Sept. 3, 2014.” During this time, “efforts were made by the Defendants to smear and tarnish” Crystal’s reputation, the lawsuit states, “including with news reporter Justin Fenton” of the Baltimore Sun, “who was contacted and advised” by BPD members that Crystal “was quitting because he was about to be fired. This was not true.” Fenton, asked to confirm this alleged contact, said he cannot discuss any tips he may have received.

What’s more, the lawsuit alleges that “nothing has come of the investigation” that Batts ordered into what happened to Crystal “for whistleblowing police misconduct.”

Crystal’s lawsuit asks for $500,000 in compensation for his allegations of freedom-of-speech retaliation, and another $1 million in punitive damages. He also alleges he is owed approximately $10,000 in unused sick and vacation time, and that he “requested his last paycheck,” but BPD “has refused to pay,” so Crystal seeks an additional $30,000 in compensation and another $5 million in punitive damages. Finally, claiming that he “did not resign in order to avoid being fired,” but that he was “forced to resign” because “he was reasonably fearful of his safety as a result of the Defendants’ actions,” Crystal seeks another $500,000 in damages for “constructive discharge,” plus another $5 million in punitive damages. BPD spokesman Jarron Jackson, asked if the department would like to comment on the case, said that “we do not comment on active litigation.”

Court records in the lawsuit indicate that Crystal now lives in Florida. His attorneys are A. Donald C. Discepolo and Alan B. Neurick of the Baltimore firm Discepolo LLP. Discepolo and Neurick did not respond to an email requesting comment about the case.

by Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Apr. 8, 2015

While the City of Baltimore has been fighting back hard against lawsuits brought by two men who were wrongfully convicted of murder and each spent decades in prison, it now faces a new suit brought in late March by a man who spent 19 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

The latest case, brought by 44-year-old Sabein Burgess, joins one brought by 54-year-old James Owens in 2011 and another brought by 63-year-old Wendell Griffin in 2013, who both are suing members of Baltimore’s famed 1980s-era squad of detectives whose work inspired David Simon’s celebrated book “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets” and the popular television series based on it. Griffin spent nearly 31 years in prison, and Owens spent nearly 20 years, until they were released when serious flaws were found in the evidence used to convict them.

The stories of each man’s experience in Baltimore’s criminal-justice system bear similarities to one another. In all three, evidence discovered long after they’d been sentenced cast new and dubious light on the manner in which they were convicted. All three convinced judges they should have new trials, and in Burgess’ and Owens’ case, prosecutors opted to drop the charges rather than try to mount a new trial. Before a new trial was ordered for Griffin, though, he agreed to a plea that reduced his life sentence to time served, allowing his immediate release from prison rather than wait for prosecutors to decide whether to keep trying to prosecute him.

Owens’ case, in particular, shows the lengths to which the city’s lawyers will go in defending taxpayers against liability for claims involving wrongful murder convictions. After Owens’ case was dismissed by U.S. District Judge George Russell in 2012, last fall it was sent back for further litigation after Owens’ attorneys successfully argued before the federal appellate court in Richmond that the dismissal was wrongfully granted. Now, with the case back in active litigation, the city’s lawyers have prepared and submitted a lengthy petition for the U.S. Supreme Court to review the appellate court’s decision, and have asked that further proceedings in the case be put on hold until the high court rules.

Owens’ lawyers call the city’s move for Supreme Court review a “Hail Mary petition.” They point out that Owens’ two decades in prison for the 1987 murder of Colleen Williar resulted from a flawed trial. The evidence against him “had been tainted by police and prosecutorial misconduct” and relied on “junk science” and “a hunch based on a tip from a pathologically lying witness.” While the city’s lawyers “continue to throw up every roadblock possible to prevent him from being compensated for their misdeeds,” Owens’ lawyers argue that they “should not be permitted to delay justice any longer.”

Wrongful murder convictions in Maryland haven’t always prompted lengthy and expensive litigation. The first person in the U.S. exonerated from death by DNA evidence, Kirk Bloodsworth, in 1993 received a gubernatorial pardon and $300,000 from the state of Maryland. Ten years later, Michael Austin, who spent 27 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, also received a gubernatorial pardon and the state gave him $1.4 million.

In Griffin’s case, lengthy appellate briefs submitted in writing by both sides are to be reviewed by a three-judge panel in Richmond, which will either return an opinion or ask for more arguments at an appellate hearing, according to an order filed in February. A key point of contention in the appeal is whether or not Griffin obtained a “favorable termination” of his life sentence when he consented to a time-served agreement rather than await a new trial. The prospect of a new trial arose after a judge in 2012 agreed with Griffin’s post-conviction claims that detectives had suppressed exculpatory evidence, including the results of photo arrays, contradictory witness statements, and evidence that pointed to others being responsible for the murder of James Wise in 1981.

Given the city’s track record in these wrongful-murder-conviction cases, Burgess can expect a long, dispute-riddled battle. His conviction for the 1994 murder of his girlfriend, Michelle Dyson, was overturned last year, after he proved that Baltimore police “withheld and fabricated evidence” in the case, his lawsuit contends. “The real killer confessed to the crime,” the lawsuit contends, and evidence against Burgess derived from gunshot residue “was exposed as a sham,” while the police also “concealed statements of the victim’s son revealing that he had seen” the killer and it wasn’t Burgess.

Representing Burgess is the Chicago-based civil-rights firm Loevy & Loevy, which is celebrating a just-announced $20 million settlement in an Illinois wrong-conviction lawsuit brought by Juan Rivera, a man who served 20 years in prison for a murder and rape he didn’t commit. Attempts to reach Loevy & Loevy’s Gayle Horn were unsuccessful. Owens and Griffin are both represented by Charles Curlett, who declined to comment. The city’s lawyers have a policy of not commenting on pending litigation. 

While Burgess, Owens, and Griffin are pursuing civil suits seeking compensation for the time they were imprisoned for wrongful murder convictions, another Baltimore murder convict—Richard Nicholas, who was found guilty of the 1997 murder of his 2-year-old daughter, Aja—has been seeking federal review of his conviction since 2006, claiming it was wrongfully obtained. On March 30, U.S. District judge Richard Bennett ruled in Nicholas’ favor, overturning state-court judges’ opinions that his conviction should stand. Bennett has ordered a new trial for Nicholas, because statements given to Baltimore police by two witnesses, who both said they heard gunshots at about the time and place Nicholas said Aja had been shot—which bolstered Nicholas’ version of events, while undermining the state’s case—were illegally withheld from his defense.

“There was absolutely no basis for the state courts to conclude that the suppressed statements conflicted with [Nicholas’] theory of the case,” Bennett wrote in his opinion, adding that “it is clear that no fair-minded jurist could have concluded that the suppressed statements were not material” to the case. “In sum,” Bennett concluded, because “the State put on a circumstantial case in which much of their evidence was disputed,” and because the suppressed witness statements touched “on the critical point of the State’s theory—the time of Aja’s shooting,” they were “likely to have an effect on the outcome” of the trial. The result, he wrote, was “a verdict unworthy of any confidence.”

by Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Feb. 3, 2015

Dec. 8, 2011, was the beginning of the end of Eugene Arnell Thomas’ second career as a major drug trafficker. That’s when a young man, Christopher Alves, was murdered in Edgewood, Maryland. Thomas had nothing to do with Alves’ demise, and in fact was living in Atlanta at the time. But it still was a turning point in his life, which had already been marked by a 2000 federal coke-and-crack conviction. 

The murder investigation prompted wiretaps on phones of persons of interest who, it was discovered, were drug dealers. Through twists and turns and some major busts that resulted in federal charges against 23 people in two separate cases in 2012 and 2013, the resulting drug investigation uncovered the big connect: Thomas, in Atlanta, using couriers to bring in bricks of coke and heroin to Baltimore, and carry money back. 

Thomas was indicted in 2013, was arrested and pleaded guilty in 2014, and on Jan. 27 U.S. District judge Richard Bennett announced his sentence: eight years, followed by 10 years of supervised release. Not bad, for a federal two-timer. By comparison, another defendant in one of the related cases, Eric Winder, is serving nine years, his first time in. As prosecutor John Purcell said at Thomas’ sentencing hearing, “Winder was nothing compared to what the defendant was doing,” noting that one of Thomas’ couriers “moved kilos two or three times a week” into Baltimore. 

“I don’t want people to fail, and he clearly has failed,” Bennett said of 42-year-old Thomas from the bench, after a lengthy, sealed bench conference after which Thomas’ advisory sentencing range had gone from 168 to 210 months down to 87 to 108 months. Bennett also called Thomas’ return to federal court for a second conviction “extraordinary” and “very, very rare.” 

Despite Bennett’s suggestion that second-timers were rare in his courtroom, the path of the probe that eventually landed at the doorstep of Thomas’ fancy Georgia home is littered with return offenders. Antoine Wiggins was Thomas’ main sidekick in his 2000 conviction, and got 135 months in prison. Brian Drake was sentenced on a federal gun charge in 2010, only to return for another sentence in 2013 for distributing Thomas’ drugs. Marlow Bates, the son of the same-named famous Baltimore gangster who is said to have inspired the Marlo character on “The Wire,” pleaded guilty in 2009 for his part in a major Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) prison gang drug-trafficking conspiracy. Anthony Miles, who supplied Bates with Thomas’ heroin, in 2005 got 96 months in federal prison for gun-and-drugs crimes. That makes five previous federal offenders in the probe that ended with Thomas, out of 24 charged in all. 

To some extent, this was a family affair: Bates’ sister Keya Dean got caught up in it, for instance, as did Thomas’ brother-in-law Edward Kearney and Miles’ cousin Enzo Blanks, whose girlfriend Rebecca Belete was also indicted. Mostly, though, what’s striking about the facts that come to light in the court documents in the three cases is how they map the detailed interconnectedness of it all. 

Heroin sold by Bates’ street-level crew at Edmondson Avenue and Kingston Road in far West Baltimore’s Westgate neighborhood got there via Miles connecting with higher-ups on downtown Baltimore streets, including in front of Norma Jean’s strip club on the Block and near Lexington Market and the Redwood Apartments, where Blanks lived. Above those suppliers were Wiggins and Drake, receiving the bricks from Thomas in Atlanta and stashing them in swank places such as McHenry Row in South Baltimore and Domain Brewers Hill in Canton. 

Those at the top had nice rides. Blanks and Wiggins drove Bentley convertibles, and Miles, when he wasn’t being chauffeured by the probe’s most prolific informant, cruised around in a Mercedes-Benz Brabus. Thomas had an Aston Martin Rapide to use when he was in Baltimore. Thomas and Wiggins co-owned a 33-foot Doral powerboat kept in a slip at Baltimore Marine Center at Harborview, and frequently met on the boat together, along with Blanks. 

Bates and Miles were caught on wiretaps discussing the money that was being raked in. “I wipe my ass with ten grand,” Bates said at one point. At another, Miles “raised up a large stack of cash, holding it with both hands, and screamed that he just made $20,000 in an hour.” Yet “the money that he was making selling heroin was ‘chump change’ compared to the money” coming to Blanks, who he claimed “was making $150,000 a day ‘with his eyes closed.’” 

Though no violence was charged in the cases, Miles touches on the possibility. There was “a rumor going around that someone was going to rob [him],” the court documents state, but “if anyone did try to rob him he was ready” because “he had an M16 with a ‘fifty round clip’ inside of his house.” He “bragged that if they came to rob him he would go outside shoot them and then go back in and rest,” and talked of having an “auto-loading shotgun” that “you don’t need to pump.” 

The brashness of some of the defendants belies a failed commitment to keeping a low profile. When Wiggins, for instance, was pulled over in February 2013 in his brand-new black Honda Accord, and police were awaiting the arrival of the canine unit, he just up and drove away “at a high rate of speed and began throwing a large quantity of gel capsules” filled with heroin “out the car window.” About 15 minutes later, the police found the Honda abandoned in front of a house in Parkville, with gel capsules next to the driver’s side door, and “they followed the path through the lawn and discovered more.” Similarly, Miles was pulled over in November 2012, and when police asked him to step out of the car, he pushed the officer to the ground and fled on foot, tossing heroin out of his pockets as he ran. 

The key moment for Thomas was a raid and arrests in and near the Domain Brewers Hill apartments at 1200 S. Conkling St. in Canton. It happened on April 19, 2012, after investigators had learned Kearney, Thomas’ brother-in-law, was coming up from Atlanta to meet a customer, Edward Harris. Agents had seen Kearney at Unit 416 of the luxury apartment complex, before he was driven by Thomas’ courier, Tara Sneed, to the meeting at a nearby parking lot. Kearney gave Harris a backpack with 1.5 kilos of coke in it, and they were arrested. The same day, they raided the apartment and found Drake, who they arrested, and two kilos of heroin, one kilo of coke, and $71,000 in cash.

Six days after the Canton raid, agents executed a search warrant at Thomas’ home in Georgia. Among the items they found there were two “jack presses” in the garage. These were used to “re-compress ‘bricks’ of diluted kilos of cocaine and heroin in order to make them appear as originally packaged,” after Thomas and others would “break up packaged bricks” and “dilute them with various cutting agents.” This was also done “at stash houses maintained in Atlanta,” the court documents explain. 

Before Thomas’ current legal troubles, according to his wife and mother, who spoke at his sentencing hearing, his life took a dark turn after the death of a co-defendant in Thomas’ 2000 case, Clinton Wallace, who they described as Thomas’ brother. Wallace, according to news reports at the time, jumped off a boat at the mouth of the South River in the Chesapeake Bay in 2009 to go swimming, got caught up in the wind and currents, and drowned. Thomas’ wife, Nicole Thomas, said after that “freak boating accident,” Thomas “just changed.” His mother, Deborah Canty, said, “I really worried about him” after “my son died in 2009.”  

Thomas’ attorney, Christopher Nieto, saying there was “no excuse” for Thomas’ conduct, argued that nonetheless “there is an explanation.” When Thomas’ prior sentence ended in 2008, he explained, he was not granted six months in a halfway or any re-entry services to reassimilate, but just came home. After he moved to Georgia to escape the “poisonous environment” in Baltimore, a “litany of incidents” befell him, including his brother’s death and failed attempts at legitimate business. So, in “an ignorant attempt to try to provide” for his family, “he fell back into a business he knew would succeed.” Then the two related cases came down, with Winder and Wiggins on the top of each, and drugs and cash were seized, and he was “now on the hook for an outstanding debt” in the neighborhood of $180,000 to $200,000. The man he owed had “significant connections to a Mexican drug cartel,” and it is “still outstanding,” Nieto explained, so that was the “reason for the continued activity” after his co-conspirators were taken down in succession.

“Not everything that is done for money is done for greed,” Nieto said. But Purcell adamantly dubbed Thomas “a dealer in death” who “did it for piles and piles of money,” and predicted that “if he were released today, he’d be selling cocaine or heroin by Friday.” Thomas should be about 50 when he’s released, leaving plenty of time to do it again or learn the lesson the government’s trying to teach: that along with the short-lived glitz and street cred come “victims who are not in the courtroom,” said Bennett, so the game just isn’t worth it. “The whole thing,” Bennett added, “is a tragedy.”

by Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Jan. 7, 2015

Usually, mail sent to undeliverable addresses are returned to the senders or end up in the so-called “dead letter office” of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) in Atlanta. But in Baltimore, USPS letter carrier Antoinette McDaniels accepted $100 every time she went the extra mile to get fictitiously addressed packages to their intended recipients: alleged drug dealers.

This premium, under-the-table service facilitated the delivery last year of 30-plus packages of weed from California, Florida, and Arizona to Baltimore, according to court documents, and ended with drug charges brought in October and November against McDaniels and two of her alleged clients, Gary “Short” Coleman and Cyril “Indian” Boodoo. The alleged ringleader of the scheme, Sulieman “Bey Bey” Pasha, appears to not have been charged.

McDaniels’ delivery route, dubbed “Postal Route #18” in a federal warrant made public in court records yesterday and sworn out in December by USPS postal inspector Douglas Henegar to search phones seized from McDaniels and Coleman, includes the Harwood neighborhood in Baltimore, where the alleged deliveries took place. Less-detailed information about the investigation came to light in another December warrant sworn out by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) task-force officer Jamile Boles to search Coleman’s Asquith St. home and Honda Accord.

The probe began last April, when postal inspectors “became aware of suspicious parcel activity that was occurring on Postal Carrier Route #18,” the court documents explain, due to “a large number of parcels that were being delivered through the U.S. Mail that were consistent with narcotics trafficking.” After one of the parcels was opened pursuant to a warrant in October, and found to contain 2,750 grams of marijuana, postal inspectors and agents of the DEA and Maryland State Police set up a surveillance operation of the route, and promptly watched the scheme unfold as the opened parcel was delivered by McDaniels, after she had left in her postal-service vehicle from the Waverly post office, to Boodoo at 26th Street and Guilford Avenue on Oct. 6. After Boodoo put the parcel in his car and “left the area at a high rate of speed,” he was arrested.

The next day, agents approached McDaniels and “asked if she wished to discuss her involvement with the identified drug trafficking organization.” She did, and went to DEA’s Baltimore office to tell her story.

McDaniels explained that while she was on her deliver route last January, Pasha, who had previously lived along her route and “had received numerous large parcels weighing between 10-15 lbs at his previous residence,” the court records state, approached her and “asked if she wanted to make some extra money receiving packages for him.” More specifically, he asked her “if she would be willing to deliver parcels directly to him, though the parcels would be addressed to fictitious addresses.” She agreed, and received $100 for each package—”approximately 1-2 parcels per week . . . for approximately 11 months.” She also “provided several vacant addresses to Pasha,” which “would subsequently appear on the subject parcels she ultimately delivered to Pasha.” She explained that “Pasha communicates with McDaniels by text messaging to alert her that he has an incoming parcel,” and Pasha would meet her on her route so they could exchange money for the packages.

Come August, though, Pasha grew nervous about the arrangement because he “told [McDaniels] that he thought ‘law enforcement’ was following him,” the court documents state. So he introduced her to “Indian” and “Short,” who continued the scheme on Pasha’s behalf.

Coleman was the next to be arrested, after an arranged delivery by McDaniels of two weed packages on Nov. 7, when she gave them to him in the 300 block of East Lorraine Avenue, also in Harwood. Then, after an arrest warrant was issued for McDaniels on Nov. 9, she was arrested on Nov. 10.

In all, the court records state, the alleged conspiracy oversaw “the trafficking of several hundred pounds of marijuana in and around the Baltimore Metropolitan area.”

McDaniel’s dope-delivery scandal is the second recent criminal probe involving USPS’ Waverly branch. Last year, branch manager Richard Lewis Wright III was charged in a bribery-and-kickback scheme involving janitorial and landscaping contracts, and has since pleaded guilty. His sentencing is scheduled for March.

by Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Dec. 17, 2014

Moryne Louden’s mugshot is all over the internet because the Baltimore Police Department on Oct. 16, 2013, tweeted it with the caption that he “was arrested by #BPDSWD in the 3200 Block of W. Baltimore St. for a handgun violation.” The case against him ended up in federal court, where he was charged for being a felon in possession of a firearm—charges that are now imperiled, because today Maryland U.S. District judge James Bredar ruled that virtually all of the evidence against him “must be suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree.”

The reason: BPD officers’ traffic stop that resulted in Louden’s arrest was an “unlawful seizure,” since they had no “reasonable suspicion” that crime was afoot until just after the stop occurred.

In the motions battle leading up to Bredar’s ruling, federal prosecutors presented the facts of what transpired prior to Louden’s arrest.

A plain-clothes team of officers in an unmarked police car noticed a blue Ford Windstar parked at the intersection of West Baltimore and South Hilton streets, and watched a man later identified as Louden approach the vehicle, engage in a brief conversation with the driver, and then enter it. Seconds later, another man got in, too.

So the officers, “suspecting that a hand-to-hand drug transaction was about to occur,” pulled up on the scene and “activated their lights and exited the vehicle.” As soon as they approached the Windstar, Louden got out, and the cops immediately “detected the odor of burnt marijuana emanating from within the Windstar.” They asked Louden who had the pot, and he responded: “No one. We just finished smoking. You can check me.” So they did, patting him down and finding a handgun in his waistband.

All the prosecutors could come up with in defending the traffic stop was that, thanks to the officers’ “knowledge of and experience in this particular part of Baltimore City, as well as their experience investigating drug activity,” and the fact that the “officers were personally aware of recent criminal activity that had occurred in the area” and “knew the area to be known for violent crime and drug activity,” they had “ample grounds to believe they were witnessing a potential drug transaction.”

In Bredar’s judicial estimation, that’s just not good enough. Had the Windstar been parked illegally, or its taillight been broken, or its windshield cracked, perhaps this case would still have legs, but a man approaching a car in a bad neighborhood, talking to its driver, and getting in does not justify a police response. And if the traffic stop is illegal, it doesn’t matter that Louden consented to a pat-down and had a gun.

With any luck, this story will have a happy ending. Louden’s been out on pre-trial supervised release, and according to a Baltimore Sun story by Justin George that ran in July, called “Transforming cars and lives,” he’s been getting job training as a car detailer at a nonprofit program for offenders called Vehicles for Change. When Louden got his certificate for completing the program, he was wearing a court-ordered ankle bracelet and tearfully told the audience, according to the article, “I want to thank Vehicles for Change, because we still be changing.” Perhaps, because in all likelihood Louden will now beat his federal charges, keeping his freedom will give him a better chance than prison to straighten out his life.

by Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Dec. 16, 2014

“Shut the fuck up!” Latoya Eaton yelled at her 11-year-old daughter. What the daughter had just said—”That’s not my mom’s money!”—is now in play in a $4,530 drug-money forfeiture case filed Dec. 9 in federal court in Maryland.

The case is part of the fallout from the arrests of nine men on Aug. 11, seven of them in the parking lot of Baltimore’s Mondawmin Mall. They’d gone there after a drug supplier—a man who, unbeknownst to them, had been arrested days earlier by the FBI with several kilograms of cocaine and heroin, and promptly turned informant—had called each of them to set up a series of government-controlled coke-and-dope deals. All nine have since been indicted and pleaded not guilty, with many filing motions challenging the constitutionality of the case.

The role of Eaton and her daughter was a sideshow of the big takedown. One of the nine defendants is Ronald Sampson, whom Eaton had driven to the mall. After Sampson was arrested, agents approached the Honda Accord he’d arrived in and saw Eaton “attempting to hide a large stack of U.S. currency under her leg,” the lawsuit states. The cops removed Eaton from the vehicle and found she’d been trying to hide $820, and that’s when Eaton’s daughter blurted out her fateful words. Ultimately, the search also turned up “a roll” of $1,550 “inside of Eaton’s open purse” and “a second roll” of $2,160 “in plain view, lying in the vehicle’s console under the radio.”

Eaton and her daughter were free to leave in the Accord after the money was seized, and in October Eaton filed a petition for its return, writing, “I didn’t have anything to do with the situation that took place I was just in my car and it was taken because I drive someone to mondawmin [sic] with my daughter not knowing anything of the circumstances,” according to the lawsuit.

Turns out, the lawsuit states, “over 700 calls between Ms. Eaton and Mr. Sampson” were made over jail phones after Samspon’s arrest, and they indicate the two “are involved in a personal relationship,” since Eaton refers to Sampson “as ‘baby’ in these calls.”

In one of the calls, made two days after the arrests when Sampson was at the Chesapeake Detention Facility in Baltimore, Sampson told Eaton what was stated in his charging papers—that he was going to buy a kilogram each of heroin and cocaine for $75,000 and $38,000, respectively—and added, “but I had ten-thousand five hundred (10,500) on me,” the lawsuit states.

Given that Sampson was arrested holding $6,000 and another $4,530 was taken from Eaton, totaling $10,540—almost exactly the amount Sampson said he’d brought to the deal—it’s looking like her daughter’s exclamation was spot on. No wonder Eaton wanted her to keep her trap shut.