The Last Dirty Picture Show: The Heyday of the Apex Theatre Has Come and Gone. Can It Rise Again?

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Jan. 27, 2010

Tuesdays are Retro Night at Baltimore’s 580-seat Apex Theatre, meaning old VHS porn tapes are projected on the big screen instead of the usual DVDs. On a recent Tuesday, the onscreen action featured a mustachioed guy with a champion mullet going down on a big-breasted blonde. It’s a long, quiet scene, with no musical accompaniment, so in the cavernous silence it’s hard to miss the sounds in the seats: a zipper zips down front, and in the back, someone’s moving rhythmically. The two other patrons of tonight’s show would seem to be enjoying their solitary, if somewhat public, recreation.

A sign in the foyer baldly declares no sex acts performed in this building, but someone has scratched out the no. After all, pulling the juice in the dark is pretty much what X-rated movie theaters are all about.

Behind the Plexiglas at the Apex’s entrance, DVDs, snacks, and sodas are for sale. The cashier estimates that, on average, five customers an hour pay $10 to pass through the theater’s turnstile. Asked when to visit should one be looking for a crowd, he thinks for a second, takes a sip from his paper cup, and says: “About 1965.”

It’s a funny answer. But for the Apex’s owners, it points to an obvious problem: In today’s smut economy, they may as well be wearing powdered wigs and writing with quills. Porn consumers for decades now have been easily getting off in the privacy of their own homes, thanks to the boom of home-video technology in the 1980s and, more recently, the ubiquity of cheap, or even free, porn on the internet.

Today, according to cinematreasures.org, an ever-growing online catalog of more than 27,400 movie theaters around the globe, the international inventory of adult cinemas is down to 105, with 31 in the United States. They still hang on in big cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and in less bustling locales, such as Bay City, Mich., Youngstown and Toledo, Ohio, Clarksville, Ind., and East St. Louis, Ill. But they are steadily on the wane. Since the Earle Theatre on Belair Road closed in 2006, the Apex–located on Broadway in Upper Fells Point–is Baltimore’s only remaining adult theater.

Apex owner Isa Mufareh (whose business partner is his son, Maurice) acknowledges that the business model is anachronistic, but says the theater still makes money. “With home entertainment, it’s available everywhere,” he says of adult films. “But keep in mind,” he continues, “there are always some lonely people in this world. Our patrons, many are older people who don’t have that [technology] at home, and they don’t want to be at home alone. They want to mingle with other people who are in the situation they are in. There will always be people like that–we need more of them.” As for profits, Isa Mufareh says the business is “sustaining. We’re not getting rich out of it, just breaking even.”

The routine at the Apex is quite simple. The theater, other than the VCR tapes shown on Tuesdays, screens DVDs. “We buy them by the hundreds,” Mufareh explains. “We just take them out of the box and, well, just show them one after the other. On Thursdays, it’s the gay movies. We get about 100 people coming in on Fridays and Saturdays, half of that in the middle of the week.” As for costs, he says, “normally, there are one or two people working,” manning the cash register, operating the projector, and ensuring that patrons are behaving. Other than that, there are rent, insurance, and utility bills to pay.

Inside, the Apex retains its allure as a historic, single-screen theater. Four fleur-de-lis shaped sconces on the walls shed red light upward, and though a bit rag-tag in places–the ceiling is showing its age, and the bathroom has some plumbing issues–its homely grandeur is generally well-preserved. Upstairs, the projection room serves now as storage (the DVD projector used today is housed behind the last row of seats), but still boasts two vintage Motiograph projectors and some 35mm prints of old porn films, such as Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones III, Education of the Baroness, and Freedom to Love. The marquee, according to erstwhile Senator Theatre proprietor Tom Kiefaber, is “the second best marquee in Baltimore [after the Senator’s] in terms of its look, its maintenance, proper spacing, and matched letters.”

Isa and Maurice Mufareh, along with a third partner–Khalid Darraj, Isa’s nephew, whose one-third share in the business, Isa explains, was purchased by Maurice two years ago–have been running the Apex since 2003. Back when it was first converted from a bowling alley in 1942, it screened major Hollywood releases, but it has been an adult theater exclusively since the mid-1960s. With a market that consists largely of older, technologically unconnected people, the Apex is up against the law of attrition: Such patrons die off, and it’s not clear who, if anyone, will replace them. So the question becomes, how much longer can the Apex survive screening porn?

It’s a question that Khalid, Maurice, and Isa, incorporated as KMI Entertainment, tried to resolve several years ago by attempting to turn the Apex into a strip club. After the city liquor board consented to the change, in 2004 the Mufarehs and Darraj applied for a building permit for $250,000 in planned renovations, but zoning officials balked. In court documents, their lawyer, Fred Lauer, argued that “the Apex is used as an adult entertainment business and would continue such use, the only difference being that the adult entertainment would now be live.” The zoning board didn’t buy it, so in 2005 KMI Entertainment appealed to Baltimore City Circuit Court, where judge Evelyn Cannon didn’t buy it either. Live adult entertainment “is not similar in nature” to adult movies, she wrote in her 2006 opinion.

“The neighborhood made a fuss about it and filled up the courtroom,” Isa Mufareh recalls. “We said the law would let us do it, but [zoning officials and the judge] interpreted it differently–they wanted to interpret differently–so we didn’t get it. You can’t fight City Hall–if they don’t want it, then they don’t want it, and that’s that.”

Neither did the Apex’s neighbors. In letters to the zoning board, and in testimony before the board at the June 2005 hearing on the matter, several officials of neighborhood groups stridently opposed KMI Entertainment’s plans, essentially saying they preferred an existing X-rated movie theater to the possibility of a strip club instead–all the while attacking the theater, nonetheless.

“The Apex Pornographic Theater,” offered one letter-writer, “is a stark reminder of the troubled past of the surrounding area. It is time that this business stops being a hindrance, a moral drain and impediment to continued improvements” in the neighborhood. “I would like to see it resurrected as another general movie theater, not an adult theater,” wrote another.

In testimony at the hearing, neighborhood leaders observed that the Apex appeared to be struggling. “I don’t see people coming in, I don’t see people coming out,” said Edward Marcinko, president of the Upper Fells Point Improvement Association, concluding that “they’re not making any money. That’s why they want to bring in a nude adult entertainment complex.” Isa Mufareh, answering boardmembers’ questions, confirmed his dilemma: “No one wants to run a business that is not successful,” he explained, adding that “whatever we do within the law, we hope that we’ll make a profit out of it.”

“Those movie theaters are dying,” Isa Mufareh says today of X-rated cinemas, “but live entertainment is not dying.” Recalling KMI Entertainment’s efforts to bring Apex’s neighbors on board with their strip-club plans, he says: “We tried. We met with them, but everything was against us.”

It seems everything was, in fact, against them. The meeting Khalid, Maurice, and Isa had with community leaders, in a failed effort to appease them, occurred on Jan. 14, 2005. But first thing in the morning the day before, KMI Entertainment’s owners awoke to other, more serious troubles: Internal Revenue Service agents with warrants knocking on the doors to their homes, looking to turn up evidence of suspected tax evasion in connection with KMI Enterprises, a company owned by the three men that operated the strip club Christina’s Female Revue on North Point Boulevard in Baltimore County. The resulting searches turned up evidence that KMI Enterprises’ owners also were underreporting their income from KMI Entertainment, doing business as the Apex Theatre.

“I can’t talk about it,” Isa Mufareh says today of the criminal case that resulted–though he contends that “that subject has nothing to do with the Apex Theater.” It is relevant, though. Mufareh and his partners were convicted of underreporting the theater’s income, indicating that the Apex–despite its appearance of barely scraping by–makes enough money screening porn to merit hiding some of its revenues, however ill-advised the tactic turned out to be.

All three owners of KMI Entertainment and KMI Enterprises were charged with tax evasion and pleaded guilty in December 2008. The warrant described the IRS’ undercover operation targeting KMI Enterprises, doing business as Christina’s, and their owners, who had advertised the club for sale. The investigation began in August 2004, just as KMI Entertainment was applying to renovate the Apex Theatre. An agent posing as a prospective buyer called the real-estate agent representing Christina’s, and then, in September, met with Isa Mufareh, who told the agent that “the business was making a profit, but not on paper,” according to the warrant.

Meetings and conversations about the prospective sale continued into December 2004, with Isa Mufareh and Darraj increasingly disclosing the ways in which Christina’s operated under two sets of books, and how they and Maurice siphoned off unreported cash from the business, including through revenues from illegal gambling on video-poker machines. But the owners were cagey about sharing their records of the unreported income. “Isa Mufareh,” the warrant states, “stated that the law can get you for anything, such as money laundering. ‘We have to be careful with who we are dealing with.’ Khalid then stated ‘I do not want to end up someone’s girlfriend in jail.'”

When agents raided their homes on Jan. 13, 2005, the records showing that the Apex Theatre kept two sets of books were recovered from Maurice Mufareh’s house. The plea agreements in the case explain that the three owners each held a one-third share of the Apex, and that each “did in fact receive a one-third share of the earnings of Apex. Comparison between the second set of books recovered for Apex with the tax returns filed in 2003 for KMI Entertainment revealed that the conspirators had engaged in a similar pattern of underreporting the revenues of the theater” as they had with Christina’s. The amount of Apex’s underreporting came to $26,643, according to the plea agreement, compared to almost $300,000 for Christina’s.

As Isa Mufareh sat in a federal courtroom in downtown Baltimore in February 2009, preparing to be sentenced, he appeared comfortable with his fate, laughing and smiling with his attorney, Larry Nathans. Once the hearing got underway, a reason for this became clear: The prosecutor, Michael Hanlon, praised the defendants for taking “a very dignified approach” to the case, saying they were “on the right track from the go,” and recommended that U.S. District Court judge Catherine Blake hand down a lenient sentence.

When Isa Mufareh rose to address the judge, he was profoundly apologetic, acknowledging that “Four years ago, I made a mistake.” He described a long life of hard work and service, and said with sadness that “Two months from today, I will be celebrating my 40th wedding anniversary, perhaps alone.” Blake, after saying “Mr. Mufareh is, I’m sure, punishing himself with regret,” agreed with Hanlon’s recommendation of five months’ imprisonment followed by three years of supervised release, including five months of home detention, and, of course, restitution in the amount of $19,771. The other two defendants received the same sentences, though their restitution amounts were greater: $31,779 for Darraj and $20,667 for Maurice Mufareh.

In 2006, KMI Enterprises and its liquor license for Christina’s was transferred to Marc’s Vision, LLC, and Marcello Burdusi, state records show. KMI Entertainment survives to keep showing porn at the Apex Theater, with Isa and Maurice Mufareh as the remaining partners.

“We were thinking about it recently,” Isa Mufareh says, when asked by a reporter whether he’d ever considered showing something other than X-rated flicks at the Apex, “but couldn’t come to any conclusions.” When the possibility is raised of showing Spanish-language films, given the high density of Latinos living in the theater’s immediate vicinity, he says, “You are right, there are thousands. When I go to the theater, they are always asking me if I have any work for them. It could be done.”

Tom Kiefaber, who owned and ran the Senator Theatre as a first-run movie house for major Hollywood releases from the early 1990s until last year, agrees. In fact, he says he’d raised the possibility before with the Apex’s landlord, Mark Wagonheim, who is a beneficiary of the family trust that owns the Apex property. Wagonheim, who did not return a message asking to discuss his family’s history in the film-exhibition business in Baltimore, is the son of Howard “Boots” Wagonheim, Kiefaber explains, who helped chart Baltimore’s film-exhibition history as vice president of Schwaber Theatres.

“That’s what’s needed there,” Kiefaber says of the idea of screening Spanish-language films at the Apex. “That’s what its ideal cinema use would be, because of the population base. If you look at other cities where this is done, the audience can be very loyal and enthusiastic, so much so that it almost becomes a throwback to the heyday of the motion-picture business. There are enough people within walking distance to really make that location one which serves the community. It would be the ideal evolutionary move that not only would be more profitable, but would allow the landlord to improve this historic structure and provide a heightened sense of community. It would be win-win all around.”

Jessica Contreras, the mayor’s office liaison to the Hispanic and Latino community, also agrees. “It would be a great opportunity not only for the community, so they have someplace to go with their families, but also beneficial to the business owner–it would open the door for him to grow his business,” she says, pointing out that, while “no one really knows” the size the Spanish-speaking community in Baltimore, “most people would put it at between 30,000 and 35,000. How great would it be if the community does respond? It’s a very good business opportunity. There’s definitely a market for it.”

Kiefaber cautions that he prefers to be “reticent about telling someone else how to run their business, because I’ve heard enough of that myself over the years,” but he can’t contain his fervor when it comes to this subject. The Apex “is crying out for” Spanish-language film programming, he says, “and has been for years.”

Given the Wagonheims’ long history in Baltimore, Kiefaber adds, a successful shift to Latino films at the Apex would, in a certain sense, be a repeat performance. “What Boots did at the old Parkway Theatre and the Playhouse, it changed our culture in Baltimore, bringing in the Euro films, the art movies. It fostered a salon atmosphere, where people talked about films, engendering a community with common interests in, say, seeing and discussing [Ingmar] Bergman films. The Wagonheims utilized their theaters in Baltimore to change the film-viewing culture here, and I think they probably have an opportunity again with the Apex, don’t they? Sure got my vote.”

Isa Mufareh’s eyes, magnified by thick glasses, look friendly in his round face, and, for being in his mid-60s, he’s quite well-preserved. A short, unassuming man, one would never guess by the look of him that he’s an X-rated movie purveyor who used to be in the strip-club business. And it’s clear, as he gives a tour of his theater, that he’s not out to hurt anyone, only to make money.

“You should never run out of thoughts about improving things,” he says, reflecting on the option of screening Spanish-language movies. “I don’t want to upset the neighborhood. If anything comes up, it is not going to be derogative to the neighbors.”

Inside Job: Evidence of Corruption in Maryland Prisons Has Been Mounting. Can Current Reform Measures Clean Things Up?

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, May 12, 2010 (Illustration by Mel Guapo)

At about 9 p.m. on March 8, 2009, Musheerah Habeebullah called Eric Brown to dish about people they know. Three things were notable about the call. First, Habeebullah was a correctional officer at the Metropolitan Transition Center (familiarly known as “the Pen”) where Brown was, and is, an inmate. Second, even though they were talking on cell phones, not prison landlines, the call was being recorded. Third, the people they discussed were fellow corrections officers (COs) and inmates in the Maryland prison system who were doing business together.

They got to talking about one inmate who had recently transferred to the Pen from another institution, where he had monopolized the market for smuggled goods among inmates. He was finding the prison economy at the Pen much more competitive.

“You know down there, there are so many people who doing shit, you know it’s impossible, it’s impossible to be the only one,” Habeebullah said of the Pen.

“Right, right, everybody going to get their thing on,” Brown responded.

Habeebullah said that at the inmate’s prior prison, only a small number of corrections officers helped smuggle goods to inmates–“like one on each shift that be really making moves.” But at the Pen, “you got like seven, eight people. Soon it’s the whole damn shift,” she continued, so how “is it possible for you to take over” as the only inmate with contraband for sale?

“You ain’t gonna be on top like you was down there,” she went on, “cause it’s too many horses. Too many ways” to bring in contraband.

“Yeah,” Brown agreed, “ain’t nobody going to be the only game in town. . . . They ain’t just gonna let a motherfucker take over.”

Habeebullah told Brown how she’d provided another inmate, nicknamed “Baby,” with smuggled cell-phone parts, and how other prison guards smuggle contraband for inmates, identifying four correctional officers (COs) by name.

Inmates are not supposed to have cell phones, and, obviously, COs are not supposed to smuggle contraband into prisons. Nor are they supposed to have relationships with inmates outside of the normal routine of their official duties. But based on this conversation–and many others that were intercepted by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Special Investigations Group (DEA-SIG) investigators as they built a drug-trafficking case against the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) prison gang in Maryland, which Brown is alleged to head–contraband-smuggling by COs and extracurricular relationships between COs and inmates are rife in most Maryland prisons.

Habeebullah got caught. So did two other COs–Terry Robe and Asia Burrus–and a prison kitchen worker, Takevia Smith. They were among 25 defendants indicted by a federal grand jury in April 2009 for taking part in the BGF’s drug-dealing scheme; all later pleaded guilty to knowingly aiding the BGF by smuggling contraband, including cell phones. Robe, Burrus, and Smith are currently serving federal prison time, set to be released next year; Habeebullah awaits her sentence.

Last year’s BGF indictments were not alone in uncovering suspected or confirmed integrity issues among state corrections officers. Evidence has surfaced that a prison investigator was ordered to stop a probe into gang-affiliated COs; that a veteran CO shared a house and a bank account with a murderous Baltimore drug dealer; that COs have been running extortion schemes on behalf of gangs; that COs have been having sex and becoming pregnant with inmates; and that COs have smuggled drugs and cell phones into the prison system–including to a man awaiting trial for murder who had just learned whether or not his codefendant had given a police statement about the case. In a capital murder case over the killing of a CO, lawyers for the two inmates charged have maintained that the stabbing was over a contraband-smuggling ring among COs that the victim–who was nicknamed “Homeland Security” by inmates due to his by-the-book approach to his job–wouldn’t tolerate.

The list of recent CO scandals is long, but it only includes circumstances in which the details have reached the light of day through the courts. These instances may well point to more widespread problems, though the reality inside prison facilities–where fear, stress, the potential for violence, and power struggles among and between staff and inmates are part of the day-to-day grind, and where the flow of information is tightly controlled–is hard to gauge.

During the past year, City Paper has been contacted by COs concerned about corruption within their ranks, offering to help get the public a truer picture of the depth and breadth of the situation, but their fears over the potential for harm to themselves or their families got the better of them. Attempts to reach out to COs and other prison staff–outside of official channels, so they can speak freely on background–have gone nowhere.

But a December 2009 letter to City Paper from an inmate, responding to coverage of the BGF indictments, provided a shocking glimpse of the environment within one of the prison system’s facilities in Baltimore. (The writer’s name and place of incarceration will be withheld, to protect the inmate’s safety.)

“I just wanted to correct the thought that is was [sic] just Eric Brown and a few accomplices,” the inmate wrote of corruption inside prison walls, “because it’s bigger and more widespread than printed [in the paper].” The letter contended that “I can honestly say that I am a witness to the ‘BGF’ running the correctional system here in Baltimore. Seriously, there are some [sic] many correctional officers working here associated with either the ‘Bloods’ or ‘BGF,’ it almost tallies [sic] the inmate population. And what unnerves me is that they openly flaunt it.”

The letter explained that COs’ “tattoos of ‘stars’ on wrists, behind ears, on arms, necks, and even faces, ‘butterflies’ and ‘beetles,’ help to tell . . . [the] level of their affiliation. They offer sex, money, and drugs to ‘move’ up in their rank or affiliations. There really has not been a day that I have spent here, where these things are not witnessed. It amazes me how the older correctional officers turn a blind eye to these occurances [sic] . . . a thorough purging of this system and investigation is necessary immediately.”

Rick Binetti, director of communications for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Service (DPSCS), urges that corruption problems be kept in perspective. “There is no systemic issue” with corruption among COs, he says. Despite overwhelming evidence of widespread problems, he asserts that “there is an ugly case here or there coming out, but it’s not necessarily all gang-related.”

Binetti points out that of the nearly 7,000 COs statewide, 70 were fired last year. Twenty of those firings were for fraternizing with inmates and another four were for possessing contraband. Currently, Binetti says, the department is investigating three COs for having contraband cell phones. Binetti adds that, under current law, firing COs can prove difficult due to a 30-day timeframe for completing an investigation into wrongdoing. “You can’t build a solid case in that amount of time,” he says.

Meanwhile, Binetti adds, “our efforts in identifying these gangmembers [who are COs] is so much better than it was three years ago. We’re figuring out who those people are, and they are getting the chop.” New state regulations put in place late last year by the Maryland Police and Correctional Officer Training Commission require that CO applicants answer specific questions about gang ties and that DPSCS background investigators scour law-enforcement gang databases to see if applicants are listed. “If there is any sort of gang affiliation in your background, you could be out,” Binetti says.

“The department is trying” to confront the integrity challenges among its staff, Binetti concludes, “and we’re doing a hell of a lot more than we were three or four years ago.”

Last November, to mark Terry Robe’s conviction for her role in the BGF drug-dealing conspiracy, DPSCS Secretary Gary Maynard issued a statement to buttress the case that the department is getting better–and succeeding–in combating gang influences and contraband smuggling in prisons. He noted that gang-intelligence efforts had yielded a 35 percent increase in identifying gang members among prison inmates, that improved security had yielded a one-third increase in the number of cell phones recovered from inmates (to a total of 1,658 in fiscal year 2009), and that 24 Body Orifice Security Scanners (highly sensitive metal detectors known as BOSS chairs) installed in the state’s prison facilities had provided new opportunities to detect and prevent contraband from getting in.

The department’s confidence in its anti-corruption efforts is bold, and it is getting legislative help. During this year’s General Assembly session in Annapolis, which ended in April, two bills addressing the hiring and firing of COs were passed and will soon be incorporated into departmental regulations.

One, House Bill 1402, entitled Public Safety–Preemployment Polygraph Examinations for Correctional Officer Applicants, allows DPSCS to order lie-detector tests to screen applicants. Already, Binetti says, nearly 70 percent of applicants–which number 4,000 to 4,500 per year–are rejected because they don’t pass the background check. Ordering polygraphs on a selective basis may make it even harder to gain employment as a CO.

The other bill, Senate Bill 887, Correctional Services–State Correctional Officers’ Bill of Rights, affords new protections and procedures for COs accused of wrongdoing. It was backed by unions representing COs, and Binetti says DPSCS also supported it. “It establishes procedures for correctional officers to be interrogated and investigated, and it gives them a trial board, like police officers have, when they are accused” he explains. A strong plus, he adds, is that it extends the 30-day period for conducting investigations to 90 days, allowing more thorough work before investigators have to either file formal charges or drop the case.

Patrick Moran, director of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in Maryland, praised the bill-of-rights measure on a number of fronts. “Correctional officers accused of wrongdoing are now innocent until proven guilty, just like the prisoners they are surrounded by every day,” he says. “It gives people solid due process, where they didn’t have that before.”

As for bad actors, Moran says the new bill-of-rights law won’t protect them if the evidence is tight. “The vast majority of correctional officers are honest, solid citizens, working in a very stressful environment unlike any other job in the world. But there are always exceptions to the rule, and those who are found to be corrupt ought to be dealt with roundly and sharply, because it affects everybody,” he says. Now, he adds, the department “will have more time to investigate those situations, so they’ll find the evidence if it’s there, and the wrongly accused will have their opportunity to fight the charges if it’s not there. Before, the department was prosecutor, judge, and jury all at once.”

The bill’s chief sponsor, state Sen. Donald Munson (R-Washington County), says his main concern in bringing the legislation was a troubling case of COs getting railroaded by the existing disciplinary process over charges of inmate abuse a couple of years ago. When asked how it will affect the department’s efforts to rid itself of gang-tied COs assisting inmates in criminal schemes, Munson says, “I’ve never thought of this measure in this context. My guess is that the correctional officers who are going to be judges are going to be very hard on those cases.” He adds, “If it doesn’t work, we’ll fix it in the future.”

Robert Walker, a veteran law enforcer whose long career began as a correctional officer with the Maryland Department of Corrections in the 1950s, knows a thing or two about gangs and corrupt COs. After leaving Maryland, he began a decades-long career in federal law enforcement (including for the DEA). He retired to return to prison work in the South Carolina penal system, doing internal investigations and running the gang unit, where he developed a gang identification and tracking system in order to monitor inmates. Today, he is a gang consultant, serving as an expert witness in trials and teaching law enforcers and prison personnel the ins and outs of gangs.

Walker is a strong supporter of COs, and, just as strongly, has antipathy for corrupt ones. When told that Maryland is grappling with CO integrity problems, he says, “I hope they are really going into heavy penalties for that. To turn to the other side and try to make a buck is truly outrageous. You have got to have some honest people–and most of them will be honest. There are maybe 10, 15 percent, at the most, who are on the other side.” Given the litany of revelations about CO corruption coming out of Maryland courts, though, he adds, “I may have to change my assessment of the percentage . . . the worst thing that can happen is to engage in denial, because that means the problem will get bigger and bigger.”

As for the proposed reform measures, Walker likes them all–except for the selective pre-employment polygraph law, which he believes should be universal, not only among prospective COs, but among all staff. To save money, he says the state should hire its own polygraph examiners and lie-detecting equipment. “With so many concerns about so much wrongdoing, you have got to find the money to do it right,” he says.

Whether DPSCS’ ongoing efforts to combat corruption will have any significant effect will become evident as time passes. In the meantime, integrity cases keep popping up.

In February, two COs were arrested, one in Western Maryland and another in Baltimore City. In the Western Maryland case, Correctional Dietary Officer Justin Wayne Smith was caught trying to bring a balloon filled with heroin and a syringe to an inmate at the maximum-security Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland. In Baltimore, CO Shanika Johnson’s bag was searched as she entered the Baltimore City Detention Center and was found to contain an ounce of marijuana and two cell phones. She told investigators that an inmate, who she refused to name, was going to pay her $1,000 for delivering the contraband.

A serious case was brought against CO Lynae Chapman in October 2009. The father of her unborn child, BGF member and murder suspect Ray Donald Lee, was detained pending trial at the Baltimore City Detention Center when his prison cell was searched in late September, turning up marijuana, tobacco, and a cell phone that investigators quickly determined had been procured by Chapman. When confronted about the phone, Chapman promptly confessed to delivering it to Lee. At the time, discovery in Lee’s murder case had reached the point when he would learn whether or not his codefendant, Quinard Henson, had given a statement to police. Recovering the phone Chapman had provided Lee may have forestalled the potential for Lee to use it to arrange for retaliating against Henson. Chapman is scheduled for a June trial, after having been re-indicted in March for misconduct, contraband delivery, and–with Lee as her codefendant–drug dealing.

Also last fall, a federal civil-rights case brought against CO Antonia Allison by inmate Tashma McFadden brought to light DPSCS internal documents, supported by depositions, showing that a prison investigator, Santiago Morales, had developed evidence in 2006 and 2007 of 16 COs at the BCDC who had gang ties. Morales had named the 16 COs in written reports to BCDC’s warden at the time, William Filbert, who promptly ordered him to stop writing the reports.

McFadden’s case alleges that Allison is a Bloods gang member, and that, after a verbal argument with McFadden, she unlocked his cell to allow fellow Bloods members who were inmates to attack him, resulting in 32 stab wounds. Allison, who is represented by the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, denies the allegations. Recent activity in the case includes a motion by the defense to keep jurors from hearing testimony about Allison’s alleged gang ties, as well as Morales’ suspicions of gang-tied COs.

Meanwhile, McFadden’s attorney, Aaron Casagrande, on Apr. 27 filed a motion to re-open discovery in the case. The reason, the motion explains, is that McFadden was recently put in administrative segregation at the Eastern Correctional Institution to protect him because other inmates there, who are Bloods members, have ordered him murdered for bringing the case against Allison. Attached to the motion is an inmate’s letter that alleges McFadden’s murder has been ordered and describes Allison as “doing right by us . . . all she asked from her brothers was to keep her safe . . . that’s what we did.”

Nothing beats last year’s BGF case in federal court for suggesting that dirty COs are a major and ongoing problem for the DPSCS. Habeebullah, Robe, Burrus, and Smith may have been indicted and convicted, but the evidence in the case includes troubling references to other COs in on the gang-related action.

One of the DEA’s sources for building the BGF case provided details of a BGF extortion scheme that relies on the assistance of corrupt COs. The scheme–similar to a case from 2007 involving a former CO, Fonda White, who also pleaded guilty–was described in a lengthy affidavit.

“Several guards with the Department of Corrections are assisting BGF members with an extortion scheme under which BGF offers ‘protection’ while in jail to newly arrested persons who are not BGF members,” the affidavit states. It continues:

In exchange for this “protection,” an arrested person is required to pay money to BGF. Specifically, BGF supplies the person to be protected with a credit card number of a prepaid credit card (sometimes referred to as a “Green Dot” card), and the person to be protected is required to have family members or friends place money onto the card when periodically directed to do so by BGF. The credit card is often held by one of the corrections officers who are assisting BGF or by BGF members on the street. The credit card is then used to pay for items for BGF members. If the newly arrested inmate does not agree to pay for the “protection,” then he or she is targeted for violent crimes while in prison.

The affidavit also describes CO corruption at the Supermax, as described in intercepted cell phone conversations among inmates. Eric Brown, on the same day he spoke with Habeebullah about COs smuggling at the Pen, talked on a cell phone with a Supermax inmate, Melvin Gilbert, who was awaiting a federal trial on charges of drug-dealing and murdering a witness. They discussed the difficulties they were facing in getting contraband cell phones due to a crackdown by prison authorities. Though Brown had been able to get three phones recently, there were still “holes”–meaning dirty COs–to be discussed.

“If we don’t open a hole up by the end of this month, it probably don’t be no more than about 20 phones left in this motherfucker. I’m telling you. They’re tearing our ass up, Melvin,” Brown said.

“Yeah, they heavy over here, too,” Gilbert responded.

Later in the conversation, Gilbert asked Brown if he knew a CO named “Simmons,” and Brown said he did. “Man,” Gilbert said, “holler at that bitch for us. She over here [at the Supermax] and she working, but she’s staying away from me.” Gilbert complained that “Simmons” was instead doing favors for other inmates, whom Gilbert called “low budget.” Then Gilbert talked about another CO he thought was smuggling contraband into the Supermax, and another who was carrying his child. This last CO, Gilbert said, was suspected of snitching on inmates and had been threatened for it recently, but Gilbert said he told her: “Don’t you ever call me and tell me, like, you’re worried about another motherfucker. Them niggers be bluffing. I’m not a bluffer. I’m the one that you gotta worry about.”

Later last year, Gilbert was convicted on drug-dealing, witness murder, and other murder charges, and was sentenced to life in prison. He is currently housed at the high-security United State Penitentiary–Canaan, in Northeast Pennsylvania.

What Gilbert and Brown were discussing–and what facts in other corrupt-CO cases describe–suggest a prison culture where COs smuggling for inmates, having sex with them, and having other inappropriate contact with them are a given. However, as Gilbert and Brown noted, a crackdown on cell-phone smuggling was working–and still is, according to Binetti, who points out that “we may have a reached a tipping point” since fewer cell phones are being found in prisons this year than in prior years. If a bill currently before the U.S. Congress passes, allowing prison systems to employ cell-phone jamming technology, any phones that remain may become useless.

But perhaps the best indicator that DPSCS’ attempts to thwart corruption are taking hold is the most recent federal indictment of alleged BGF drug dealers: No COs were among the defendants in the case, indicted in mid-April, which was built on a continuing investigation from last year’s indictments. That’s not to say the new BGF case doesn’t reference CO corruption, though.

In a Feb. 18 conversation that DEA investigators intercepted between one of the defendants, Duconze Chambers, and a drug dealer known as “Chips,” reveals that Chambers knows a CO at Brockbridge Correctional Facility that could smuggle something in for Chips’ cousin, Bug, who’s an inmate there. Other than that, the only evidence in the case so far is that one of DEA’s sources gave up a cell phone number for a “female correctional officer” said to be “an active BGF member.”

If that’s all the DEA-SIG investigators turned up this time around, well, that’s improvement over last year. One has to wonder, though, if such a problem can be eradicated so quickly.

Puzzling Evidence: The Confession of a Boy Convicted of Raping and Murdering a Child Outweighed Indications That He Might Not Have Done It

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, July 30, 2008 (Photo from Baltimore City Police Department)

“Come here with an ambulance, quick!”

15-year-old Ronald Alberto Hinton cries over the phone to the 911 operator just after noon. “My little cousin fell on the porch, hit her head, she ain’t getting up. Come on, hurry up!” Seconds later, he tells the operator she “fell and hit her head on the ground.” When the responding medics and police arrive, Hinton, who is the baby sitter, tells them that 4-year-old Ja’niya Ebony Woodley fell while jumping on the bed.

Hinton is at 2908 Goodwood Road in Northeast Baltimore, a house rented by his uncle Leland Slater and Slater’s longtime companion, Deborah Wall, who are the unconscious girl’s grandparents. Daikwon Eaddy, the girl’s 7-year-old brother, is the only other person at the house when the authorities arrive. He corroborates the fall from the bed, but his version differs from Hinton’s on where she landed.

The first responders quickly conclude the child’s extensive injuries–the most obvious are that her face is black and blue and swollen, her lower lip is busted, and there are bite marks on her chest and thigh and bruises all over, especially on her thigh and back–resulted from child abuse, some of it sexual. The boys’ stories don’t hold up. One of the medics, according to her statement in the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) homicide file of the case, says that “seeing the bruises, I knew that no matter how high the bed was, the bruises were older than what [Hinton] made them appear to be.”

Shortly after 1 p.m. on June 21, 2006, the victim is transported by ambulance to Johns Hopkins Hospital in East Baltimore, where Dr. Jamie Schwartz examines her and tells Baltimore police detectives that her injuries “are not accidental,” noting her condition: “critical with minimal brain activity, a bite on her nipple, old bites on chest, and left thigh.” Injuries to the vaginal area are also observed, and a kit used to gather evidence of rape is administered, including a swab to test for genetic material left in the bite marks on the left thigh.

Also arriving at the hospital are several of the victim’s relatives, and a chaotic scene soon erupts when the child’s actual parentage becomes known to shocked family members for the first time. Her name is not Ja’niya Woodley, it turns but, but Ja’niya Williams. Tempers flare as the child’s mother, Joy Eaddy, is caught having lied to Keenan Woodley, who up until that moment thought he was Ja’niya’s father, and John Williams, the child’s actual father, who learns suddenly that Keenan Woodley was also helping to raise the child. The shift in the family tree also means Hinton is not Ja’niya Williams’ cousin, as he thought when he called 911 a couple of hours earlier, and that Slater and Wall are not her grandparents.

A city Department of Social Services (DSS) social worker attempting to interview family members reports that she encounters rage and indignation as they start “yelling they did not abuse” the victim. Joy Eaddy does “not show any signs of remorse, sadness or concern” over her daughter’s injuries, and is “quickly angered” and refuses “to answer any more questions.” A distraught Wall tells paramedics and the police that the child is not abused and that her only injuries occurred the day before, when she fell into a fan and hurt her head. Another DSS caseworker informs police that Joy Eaddy “has a DSS history of child neglect,” without providing details, but tells them that Daikwon Eaddy “was to have no contact with his mother . . . until further notice.”

At police headquarters downtown, at 10 p.m. later that night, Hinton sits in a waiting room with his mother, Francine Toney; he’s been there since shortly before 5 p.m. Daikwon Eaddy is there, too, in Slater’s care. They are waiting to speak with two detectives–William Wagner of the child-abuse section and homicide investigator Todd Corriveau–who have just arrived after spending the afternoon and evening at the hospital, gathering information about Ja’niya Williams’ injuries and family circumstances. At quarter to midnight, after taking a statement from Slater, the detectives start to tape their interview of Eaddy.

Eaddy, the detectives write, says Hinton was “slamming [his sister] on the bed” and “kept on messing with her,” even though “she kept crying for me” to help and Eaddy was telling Hinton to “Stop! Stop!” He describes his sister as “unconscious,” “bleeding from her nose and mouth,” and as having “many bruises on her body.” Eaddy recalls Hinton “was holding his sister’s hands and shaking her,” and also “dragging his sister on the steps inside the home.”

At 12:06 a.m. on June 22, right after Eaddy’s statement is taken, Corriveau writes in his log of the investigation that “Ronald Hinton is now a suspect,” though Hinton and his mother do not know this.

At 12:35 a.m., Hinton is advised of and waives his Miranda rights in the presence of his mother, who is then ushered away. The detectives begin an hourlong preliminary interview, which is not tape-recorded. At 1:36 a.m., they turn on the tape recorder and go over it all again for posterity.

Wagner writes in the charging papers that Hinton confessed to “performing cunnilingus on the victim, fondling and digitally penetrating the victim’s vagina with his fingers, and putting his penis partially in the victim’s vagina. The defendant also bit the victim on her right breast and bit the victim twice on her left thigh. He struck her multiple times with an open hand to the face. At one point the victim ran downstairs and he pursued. He caught her and carried her back upstairs, retrieved a black belt from a closet and beat her with it.”

The detectives note that “Hinton provided information that only he–the suspect–had knowledge of, such as the exact injury to the victim’s body and how her injuries were inflicted,” though the detectives, too, know Williams’ injuries.

At 3:15 a.m., Hinton is charged with rape and assault and put in temporary lockup at the Central District police station. At 4:10 a.m., Corriveau checks to see if Ja’niya Williams is still alive. She is, though she never regains consciousness and dies of her brain injuries on June 23. The next day in the early evening, after the medical examiner rules her death a homicide, murder is added to the list of Hinton’s charges.

When Hinton is transferred to the Central District Intake Facility and is preparing for his bail-review hearing on June 26, his cousin, correctional officer Robin Smith, recognizes him. She looks at his paperwork and listens to what he has to say. “They said I tried to murder somebody,” Smith recalls Hinton saying. “I didn’t do it,” he continues, crying. “They made me sign something, and [said] if I didn’t I would never get to see my mother again, and I’d never go home. They forced me. They made me say I did it, but I didn’t do it.”

After listening to Hinton’s story, Smith gives him some advice: “Don’t talk to no one if they’re not your mother or your lawyer.” She also tells him not to show his charging papers to anyone, warning him that “papers like that can get you killed in here.”

When Ja’niya Williams’ autopsy is conducted on June 24, the medical examiner, Dr. Laron Locke, fills out a diagram with front and back views of a human body. It is used to indicate and describe her external injuries, and it is crowded from her head to her knees with circles and dots connected with lines and arrows to short descriptions of what is observed at various locations. Regarding the head, the notes say: “Whole forehead = general bruise,” with “minor scratches” and a “bruise” around the eyes, while both cheeks are described as “swollen” and the left lower lip is “swollen” with a “small cut” inside.

Corriveau attends the autopsy and compares the findings with Hinton’s confession. He learns that she died as a result of suffering a subdural hematoma, in which veins inside her cranium ruptured, causing blood to constrict and ultimately shut down her swelling brain. Corriveau writes in his summary of the autopsy that this, along with “general blunt force injury to her head,” is “consistent with suspect’s confession that he `beat’ the victim about her head.” He also points out that “skull not fractured; no specific contact `point of impact’ on victim’s head,” and that there are no signs “of any type of strangulation/smothering.”

Corriveau continues his comparison. He notes “abrasions to outside of vagina,” and is reminded that Hinton said he “put his fingers/penis in/on and `rubbed’ victim’s vagina.” He finds the bruising observed at the entry of her vagina, along with the fact that her hymen is intact, consistent with Hinton’s admission “that he `only put it in a little bit.'” Hinton said “he hit her in her bottom lip with his hand,” which explains the swollen, cut lip. The bite marks–on the right breast and on the left thigh–correspond to Hinton’s statement that he “bit her `on her right breast'” and “repeatedly” on the left thigh. The “small linear abrasion to lower back,” Corriveau surmises, is “possibly caused by belt striking her, per suspect’s confession,” and the “bruising and/or possible faded bite marks to right rear buttock” is “consistent with suspect’s confession that he struck her in buttocks with belt.”

Many of Williams’ injuries do not directly correlate to Hinton’s confession, Corriveau notes. The “swollen cheeks,” the “general redness/bruising to forehead,” the “minor scratches/bruising to eyes & in between eyes,” the “bruising to right shoulder,” the “scratch on right arm,” the “bruise to front of right thigh,” the “abrasion to left clavicle,” the “abrasions/contusion to left rear shoulder,” the “bruising to inner left bicep/outer left bicep,” the “bruise” on the “left forearm,” the “scratches/bruise to left hand/wrists,” and the “large contusion/abrasion to middle top back”–these aren’t explained by Hinton’s description of how he injured Williams.

The bite marks on Williams’ body, Corriveau writes, “appear more similar to severe `hickeys’ than to actual puncture wounds or tears to her skin.” But, he adds, “the shape of a mouth is clearly seen on the bite marks, with some spots having clear indications where teeth touched the victim’s skin.” So Corriveau has the medical examiner prepare photographs of them, to scale, “for future comparison purposes to the suspect’s teeth.” The photos, he explains, “will be a better indicator” for comparison that “actual cut-out samples of the victim’s skin,” given the skin “not being drastically broken by the bite marks.”

Two days after the autopsy, Corriveau contacts forensic odentologist Warren Tewes, of the University of Maryland, and discusses with him the possibility of getting “dental molds of the suspect’s teeth, via search warrant, for comparison purposes to the photos of the bite marks on the victim.” On June 28, Corriveau meets with Tewes, who says that dental molds of Hinton’s teeth–which ultimately were not obtained–“are not applicable” for comparing to the photos because the bite marks “have a `lack of definition’ that is necessary for effective and conclusive comparison purposes.” However, Corriveau continues, “Tewes provided general, basic information regarding the bite marks on the victim’s skin that may or may not be of relevance for court and/or testimony purposes” at trial.

The day of the incident, police seize all manner of property from Slater and Wall’s home: sheets, pillows, towels, comforters, a washcloth, a T-shirt, a pair of panties, a pair of flip-flops, a cap, and a pair of shorts with blood on them. They also take swabs of suspected blood from a dresser, a bathroom, a foot stool, and a wall. On June 24, they return and retrieve a belt with “possible blood stains.” Hinton told police about the belt during his confession two days earlier, but the warrant is served only after the autopsy “corroborated the suspect’s claim that he beat the victim with a belt (mainly a 2-3 inch linear abrasion on her back, as well as other bruises on her body),” Corriveau writes in his reports.

After getting the blood and DNA profiles of Ja’niya Williams and Hinton, whose fingerprints are also obtained, Corriveau on July 5 asks for lab work to be done on the seized property. He orders that the belt be analyzed for possible fingerprints and blood, and also asks for the blood on the shorts and the four blood swabs taken from the house be compared to Hinton’s and Williams’ blood. The DNA comparisons he asks for are from a hair found on a sticky pad from the victim’s body at the hospital, and from the swabs taken from Williams’ bite marks, vagina, and anus. He explains that these swabs, which were taken “approximately four hours after” the incident, “are most likely better samples for comparison purposes” than those taken at autopsy three days after Williams arrived at the hospital.

Meanwhile, Corriveau spends the midmorning of June 24 canvassing neighborhood residents. He writes in his report that several of them say they already told news reporters their thoughts about Ronald Hinton, which are, as Corriveau summarizes them, that he “has a history, over the past 4 years (approximately), of violence, lying, abusive language, and sexually charged comments to neighborhood women.” The residents request anonymity and don’t give recorded statements, though Corriveau has their names and contact information. Later that day, he phones a DSS Child Protective Services worker and e-mails BPD public-information officer Donny Moses to inform them of his findings.

Twice more, on July 3 and July 9, Corriveau visits the neighborhood to collect firsthand knowledge of Hinton’s past behavior from four more nearby residents. They, too, ask to remain anonymous. They tell him Hinton is “easily argumentative,” “very confrontational,” and that he “has been seen `beating on’ his `little brothers and sisters’ in his front yard until they either ran away or until `his big brother’ physically stopped him from doing so.” They recall that Hinton “strangled their son approximately 5 years ago, by using both his hands to squeeze their son’s throat, and that suspect had to be physically pulled from their son.”

(Toney reacts to the details of the neighbors’ anonymous accusations with indignation. “It makes me furious,” she says. “We weren’t really welcome to the neighborhood when we moved” there in the mid-`90s, she observes, and alleges that her family has periodically been subjected to racist comments from neighbors. She says her son has taken his share of guff around the neighborhood over the years, and that at times he’s taken the bait–such as the time several years ago that another neighborhood child “hocked spit in his face,” and they fought. But as for the contention that he beat up his younger siblings, Toney says “that didn’t happen.” And she dismisses the suggestion that he makes sexually inappropriate comments as the neighbors “just trying to make him out to be a monster. He did things some children do, he’s not perfect, but that he’s this monstrous thing–I won’t accept it.”)

Corriveau finds that Hinton has no prior juvenile criminal record, though he was the victim of an alleged aggravated assault two years earlier. And a review to see if he has a record of any “citizen contact receipts”–documentation of police-initiated interactions that don’t result in charges–turns up nothing.

On July 10, Corriveau joins the prosecutorial team handling the case–Baltimore assistant state’s attorneys JoAnne Stanton and Temmi Rollack–to interview Daikwon Eaddy at his mother’s home. He arranges the meeting “in order for Stanton and Rollack to meet” the young boy, “ask him preliminary questions regarding the incident in question, and to obtain a `feel’ for him, in terms of his pending court testimony.” The star prosecution witness has a surprise for them.

“During the meeting,” Corriveau writes, Daikwon Eaddy “disclosed that on the day of the incident in question, suspect Ronald Hinton beat him with a belt (previously undisclosed).” Two other people, whose names are redacted from Corriveau’s report, recall that “each observed marks on his back, consistent with being hit with a belt” when Eaddy returned to his grandmother’s house after his June 21 interview with police.

In December 2006, Francine Toney calls City Paper. It is not the first time she’s been in contact with the paper. More than a decade ago, City Paper published an extensive, investigative cover feature and two follow-up news articles about the 1992 death of her husband, Baltimore police trainee Sean Hinton, who was Ronald Hinton’s father (“Dead in the Water,” May 8, 1996; “Another Look,” Mobtown Beat, Dec. 4, 1996; “Questionable Death,” Mobtown Beat, June 4, 1997). Over the intervening years, she stayed in touch, but attempts to reach her after Ronald Hinton’s confession had been fruitless: She’d changed her phone number and moved. Now she’s on the phone, and the emotions are running high.

“The DNA [analysis of evidence in Williams’ homicide] came back, and Ronald couldn’t have done things he confessed to,” Toney explains. “The detectives told me, `The DNA will show everything,'” she continues, in tears. “Now it’s back, and it shows he didn’t do it!” She asks if police would go out and find who killed Williams, now that it was obvious her son didn’t. When asked why he confessed, she says, “he’s afraid of police because of what happened to Sean [Hinton]. The detectives balled up their fists and threatened him, and told him he could go home if he said he did it. He just wanted to be out of there.”

Toney says she does not have all the details, but she knows this much: Ronald’s DNA was not in the bite marks; somebody else’s was. “He didn’t bite her,” Toney says. “Somebody else did. And there’s other people’s DNA at other places, too, different people.” She adds that since her son has been held in jail, turmoil between the two families has been taxing, but the new DNA findings are “going to make things worse. Who did these things to that poor child?”

Toney takes out a second mortgage on her house to hire Janice Bledsoe as her son’s criminal-defense attorney in early 2007. She invites a City Paper reporter to go with her and several members of her family for a February 2007 meeting about the case at Bledsoe’s office. Color photographs of Ja’niya Williams lying face up in a Hopkins hospital bed are reviewed, prompting remarks (including by this reporter) that some of the bruises look less than fresh. No one in the room is an expert on such matters, but everyone bruises, and therefore knows that bruises change color over time. Some of Williams’ many bruises appeared to have a greenish-yellowish hue, suggesting some time had passed since they were sustained.

If someone’s DNA other than Hinton’s is in the bite marks, and if Williams’ sustained earlier injuries when Hinton was not present, then Toney and the rest of Hinton’s family have hope that perhaps his confession can be overcome at trial. The jury is going to need an explanation of why Hinton confessed falsely, and the one that Toney suggests–his deep-seated fear of police, because of what he believes about his father’s death when he was an infant–is the only one available.

During the weeks after the incident, the issue of prior injuries to Williams is brought up during Corriveau’s interviews with family members, as transcribed in the homicide file. He asks the witnesses if Hinton has been the children’s baby sitter on prior occasions, and if any injuries were observed at those times. He learns that Hinton has, and that no injuries were noticed before–except on the day before the incident, and Corriveau gets different versions of the story.

Deborah Walls, at the hospital on the night of the incident, is on record mentioning that Williams had injured her head in an accident with a fan. But when she’s interviewed later by Corriveau, she tells it differently. “When I got home I noticed a hickey on her forehead, on her left side,” Walls says during a July 1, 2006, taped interview. “I said, `Where did you get that?’ And she said she had fallen getting a towel, and I got right on the phone immediately and called her mother and let her talk to her mother. I tell her mother any time they got injured playing or anything, that’s the first thing I did.” By “hickey,” she explains, she means “a bump, as a bump on the head.” She says Ronald Hinton told her that “[Ja’niya] fell.”

Leland Slater is also interviewed on July 1, and in his version, it’s the fan that hurts Williams, but on her back rather than her head. He recalls he was in the kitchen with other family members on the night before the incident, and somehow Williams’ shirt rode up her back. He says he saw “marks on her back,” and when Williams was asked about them, he recalls Ja’niya saying that “I was upstairs” and “I fell over the fan.”

The conflicting explanations of the nature and cause of Williams’ injuries the day before raises the question: Are there any other indications that some of Williams’ injuries may have happened before June 21? And there are. The medic, for instance, who helped treat Williams before she arrived the hospital, and who told police she thinks some of the “bruises were older.” And Dr. Schwartz at Hopkins, who described “old bites on chest, and left thigh,” a phrase that was used in the charging documents and search-warrant affidavits in the case against Hinton. Corriveau himself, in his report about the autopsy, describes “bruising and/or possible faded bite marks to right rear buttock” (emphasis added).

Corriveau clearly suspected Hinton had abused Williams before, but witnesses didn’t corroborate that idea. As a result, his investigative record suggests Williams had older injuries–including at least some of the very bite marks that Hinton confessed to giving her.

Raising the importance of the bite marks even further is the fact that the ones on the upper left thigh were swabbed and came back positive for the presence of DNA belonging to an unknown person other than Hinton. Yet the homicide file has nothing in it to suggest investigators even considered taking steps to try to identify that person. Nor are there any indications in the file that attempts were made to learn the source of the DNA recovered from a variety of other locations on the tested evidence belonging to people other than Hinton.

After all, who needs DNA when you already have a confession?

“Ronald Hinton is the son of Sean Hinton and Francine Toney,” Bledsoe tells the Baltimore City Circuit Court jury. She’s five minutes into her opening statement on the first day of the trial, April 23, 2008, and she is trying to tell the jurors why, if Hinton didn’t rape and beat Williams, he would tell the police he did. “The Hinton family has an unusual history,” Bledsoe says. “Sean Hinton was a police officer–”

“Objection,” Stanton says.

Bledsoe shrugs in frustration as she and Stanton approach the bench to argue before Judge John Addison Howard. Stanton hardly says a word in the ensuing debate, though, as it is apparent that Howard has already made up his mind: Bledsoe won’t be allowed to discuss Hinton’s father in front of the jury.

“It’s a bunch of hooey and a lot of hearsay,” Howard tells Bledsoe during the bench conference, “and you’re not going to be able to go into it.”

Bledsoe explains the situation to Hinton and his family out in the hallway–that the main thrust of his defense was just yanked out from under him. She adds that it is even worse than that, because the jury, having heard only half of her sentence, is left with the impression that since Sean Hinton was a police officer, his son would have strong reasons to trust the police, not to fear them. The last guilty-plea offer from the prosecutor, prior to the beginning of the trial, was 20 years of imprisonment, but Hinton and his family still don’t want to take the deal. Ronald is innocent, they say, and they want a trial. So the trial continues.

The tape of Ronald Hinton’s confession is played. Though it doesn’t appear in the transcript–and though Corriveau and Wagner testify that once they turned on the tape recorder, they never turned it off again until the confession was over–Bledsoe points out to the jury that the very beginning of the tape has a split-second of a human voice loudly saying, “Stop messing with me!” It sounds like Hinton’s voice.

Corriveau insists that he didn’t use leading questions when interviewing Hinton, didn’t suggest Williams’ injuries so that Hinton had the information he needed to admit to details about the injuries that Corriveau knew from visiting her in the hospital–and then Bledsoe proves he did on two occasions, when Corriveau asked Hinton whether or not he put his hands between Williams’ legs and his fingers in her vagina. Corriveau explains that Hinton had already provided that information in the preliminary interview.

Wagner testifies that he took notes rather than record the preliminary interview in order to have a complete record–and then admits that, yes, recording the preliminary interview, too, would have provided a more complete record of what transpired in the interview room. (Hinton’s false-confession claim was included in a City Paper article [“Fess Up,” Mobtown Beat, Jan. 23] about a law that passed in Maryland’s 2008 General Assembly session requiring police to videotape all aspects of interviews with suspects in murder and sexual-assault cases. The law is intended to help create foolproof confessions, while also assuring police interviews are on the up-and-up.)

Corriveau’s theory that Hinton had abused Williams on prior occasions does not come up at the trial. In fact, other than the “hickey” on Williams’ forehead, no one–not Corriveau, not the medic, not Dr. Schwartz–testifies that they observed any signs that some of Williams’ injuries may have occurred before the harm Hinton confessed to inflicting. Under cross examination, though, the medical examiner admits the possibility that Williams’ death could have been caused by more than one brain injury in succession. In other words, it’s theoretically possible that whatever harmed Williams’ head on June 21 may have worsened a brain injury that occurred earlier.

The conflicting stories used to explain Williams’ hickey–was it tripping on a towel, falling into a fan, or both?–are not brought up for the jury. Nor is there any mention of the marks on her back that Slater said he observed in the kitchen the night before the incident. In fact, Slater doesn’t testify at all. Whatever became of Corriveau’s attempt to compare Hinton’s dental pattern to Williams’ bite marks also is not in evidence at the trial.

Daikwon Eaddy, now 9, gives confusing testimony broken up by bathroom breaks and a tearful inability to answer questions. He says nothing about Hinton beating him with a belt, and though his testimony describes menacing behavior by Hinton, he does not say Hinton committed the violent acts he’d told investigators about the night of the incident.

At one point, Judge Howard comes down off the bench, crouches next to Eaddy, and has a quiet conversation with him in front of the jury. “You’re doing good,” the judge tells him. When Bledsoe asks twice for a recess, so the jury won’t continue see Howard giving Eaddy a pep talk, the judge gets testy: “I heard you the first time, Ms. Bledsoe.”

The DNA evidence is presented, including a dramatic cross examination of the DNA expert by Bledsoe’s partner, Sandra Goldthorpe, who reveals to the jury that the DNA in the bite marks not only isn’t Hinton’s but that it’s a female’s. All told, six of the analyzed items excluded Ronald Hinton’s DNA, but included the DNA of others, male and female. If any of the jurors want a solid basis on which to build reasonable doubts about Hinton’s guilt, it is the DNA evidence. But they still have the confession to consider, and they still don’t have an explanation for why anyone would lie about such things.

The prosecution team wraps up its case, and Ronald Hinton takes the stand in his own defense. He accuses Corriveau and Wagner of threatening to beat him up in the interview room if he didn’t confess. “That’s when I kept on telling them, like, `Leave me alone,'” Hinton testifies. “And that’s when I said I didn’t do nothing. That’s when they said, `If you tell us you did it, we’ll let you go home.’ I thought I was going to go home, because I was scared, because I thought something was going to happen to me, because I don’t like police officers, and the reason I don’t like them–”

“Objection,” the prosecutor says.

“Sustained,” the judge says.

Bledsoe tries to elicit Hinton’s response in a variety of ways and is blocked two more times by sustained objections before the judge allows her line of questions to continue.

Bledsoe turns to Hinton and asks, “Why were you afraid?”

“Because my father,” Hinton answers, “he was killed by policemen, even his own partners.”

That’s all Ronald Hinton’s jury heard about his father’s story: two mentions on either end of the trial, with no details, no context, and no questions asked or answered. It’s a case that stands out in the memories of many Baltimore police officers, and it has deeply haunted the Hinton family.

Sean Hinton was 22, weeks away from his city police academy graduation, and had just undergone field training in the Western District with police officer Stanley Gasque. On Oct. 24, 1992, a Friday night, Hinton had a minor car accident downtown and was arrested and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol. The next day, after getting his car out of the tow lot, he walked out of his home. His last contact with his family was a phone call from the Amtrak station in Baltimore to his family.

Ten days later, his body was recovered from the New York Harbor off Battery Park in lower Manhattan. His wrists were bound tightly in front of his body with the drawstrings of a jacket, and though the autopsy report did not note head trauma, it appeared evident in the accompanying photos. His fingers and hands still had skin on them, though it had slipped a bit, but his swollen, misshapen face was devoid of skin from the scalp to below the chin.

New York medical examiner Mark Flomenbaum, after three weeks of consideration and after learning from the Baltimore police that what was characterized as a suicide note had been found, on Nov. 27, 1992, ruled the case a suicide by drowning. He attributed the condition of the body to the postmortem effects of floating in the water.

City Paper published photos from Hinton’s autopsy, with his family’s permission, in the 1996 article titled “Dead in the Water.” It explored a variety of facts that Flomenbaum did not have at his disposal when he made the suicide ruling, including the contents of the letter he left for his family and the very suspicious circumstances involving Hinton and Gasque that occurred the week he disappeared. Those circumstances involved accusations that together they robbed a drug dealer in West Baltimore, and that federal law enforcers suspected Gasque was protecting a drug organization known for torturing and robbing other drug dealers. It took years of investigating before, ultimately, nothing came of the accusations against Gasque and Hinton.

The members of Sean Hinton’s family, though, say they have no doubt that he was murdered before he shared information about unaddressed police corruption. The story is fact in the Hintons’ minds, even if it never can be proven. And their interpretation of the fact that the BPD mounted a 21-gun salute at Sean Hinton’s funeral–a rare police honor–is that they’re not the only ones who believe Hinton was killed in the line of duty.

Not so the jurors, who learn nothing of the family’s story, nor of the facts about Sean Hinton’s death. They also have no expert testimony to explain the female DNA in the bite mark–though Stanton, in closing arguments, assures them that it was attributable to contamination during Williams’ medical treatment. And she points out that, at the end of his confession, Hinton apologized–something, she argues, an innocent suspect would not do. After four hours of deliberation, the 12 jurors unanimously decide Hinton’s confession was true and voluntary, and on May 5, 2008, they convict him on all counts.

On July 21, Ronald Hinton is sentenced to life in prison, plus 25 years. He files an appeal the same day, and in June he sends a letter from jail to the Innocence Project, a group that uses DNA and evidence of false confessions to work for the release of innocent convicts. To date, Toney says, Hinton has not heard from the organization.

“If the DNA matched, I would accept that he did this,” Francine Toney says of the case. “It doesn’t, so I still believe he said he did it because he’s so afraid of the police.”

If the appeal succeeds, Hinton might get a crack at another jury. If not, he’s in for the long haul, serving life for the rape and murder of a child–crimes that tend to put an inmate convicted of them in low esteem among fellow prisoners. If he didn’t do it, that’s a particularly hard position to be in. If he did, well, prison authorities are responsible for keeping him safe, as best they can.

“I got a letter from him,” Toney explains over the phone on July 25. “He’s in a cell by himself, with two shelves and a bed. The bed is comfortable, and there’s enough room for him to pace back and forth and pray to God.”

She starts to cry. “It hurts me, because I feel so helpless now that I can’t help him. It’s so sad. Ja’niya is gone, and that hurts me, too. But what about the DNA? The prosecutor said [to the jury] don’t worry about the DNA, the DNA doesn’t matter in this case. Well, what’s so different about Ronald’s case?

“I am so tired of the falsehoods about my family–my husband killed himself, Ronald did this to Ja’niya, Ronald is abusive. I am just not going to accept it. If the DNA matched, I’d have no choice to accept it. But it didn’t, and I won’t accept it.”

Ja’niya Williams’ father, John Williams, speaks to a reporter on July 26, while working at his job as a drug-store security guard. He has no doubts whatsoever that Hinton did it. Asked about prior wounds on his daughter’s body, especially any bite marks, Williams says: “I know about that. She got bit on her arm, playing with her cousin a few days before,” indicating his left bicep. When informed that others observed older bites and bruises at other locations, and that the jury did not hear about that evidence, Williams sticks to his guns. He’s 100-percent certain they’ve got the culprit behind bars.

“That boy boxed himself in,” Williams observes. “I would never, ever say I did anything I didn’t do–especially something like that.”

Dead in the Water: In 1992, the Body of a Baltimore Police Trainee Was Found Floating Off Manhattan, Wrists Tied Together. It Was Ruled a Suicide. But Did Anyone Besides Sean Hinton Want Sean Hinton Dead?

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, May 8, 1996

A 22-year-old Baltimore police trainee, married with three children and living in a public-housing apartment, has a career-shattering week that includes being arrested for drunken-driving and being accused of involvement in police corruption. He disappears after leaving a cryptic good-bye note to his wife.

Ten days later, he turns up dead in New York, floating facedown in the water off the southern tip of Manhattan. No one knows how he got there. His wrists are tied together in front of him. Initial reports filed by New York officials who recovered the body describe head trauma and a possible bullet hole in his cheek, but the autopsy report notes no signs of injury or a struggle. Three weeks later, a New York medical examiner rules the case a suicide by drowning.

The Sean Hinton case is a tantalizing riddle with very few clues. The Baltimore City Police Department (BCPD) recently released Hinton’s personnel file, which includes the results of a questionable-death investigation. BCPD’s Internal Investigations Division (IID) conducted probes and there may have been other Baltimore-based investigations as well, but the results haven’t been released. The New York Police Department (NYPD) won’t comment, saying the case is still under investigation. Hinton’s family wants answers. But a limited number of documents and other pieces of evidence, and the recollections of a few reliable sources, are all they have to go on.

Considering the clues that are available, there are only two plausible explanations for Hinton’s death: suicide or homicide. It is possible to reconstruct, blow by blow, the verifiable events that led the medical examiner to conclude – with some speculation – that it was a suicide. It is also possible to find oversights and misinterpretations – at least one of which bears strongly on the suicide ruling – in the autopsy report.

Autopsy photos show an obvious dent above Hinton’s right temple. Today, the medical examiner says the injury occurred after death. But he did not describe it in his autopsy report three-and-a-half years ago, even though the head trauma was noted when the body was pulled out of the water. This oversight leaves open the question of whether the dent occurred before or after Hinton’s death – a question that is vital to determining whether or not Hinton killed himself.

Judgment calls are a necessary part of a medical examiner’s work; not every death can be explained based only on the physical evidence and the known circumstances. But not all deaths have a possible murder motive, either. Hinton’s did. And the medical examiner didn’t know about it when he ruled on Hinton’s death.

Two nights before Sean Hinton disappeared, his family recalls, he spent about eight hours at home preparing extensive police paperwork. Two days before that, he had made a drug bust with BCPD Officer Stanley Gasque, whose career has been marked by complaints of alleged corruption, according to published news accounts and court records. After the arrest, the suspect filed a complaint with IID alleging that Gasque, Hinton, and another officer burglarized his house. Within a year of this incident, the eight members of the Western District drug-enforcement unit to which Gasque belonged had been reassigned, although no criminal charges were ever filed against them. Hinton’s family now believes that Sean knew something and was planning to report it.

BCPD Lieutenant Robert Stanton, who worked on the Hinton case for the homicide department, says his investigation ended after the suicide ruling, a week after he started. His December 10, 1992 report on the case concludes: “It is obvious that a number of questions concerning this incident will long linger and possibly remain unanswered. The fact that the body is found out of jurisdiction and never viewed by anyone from this agency puts us at a disadvantage from the start.”

Stanton says he “wasn’t made privy to most of” the IID investigations of Hinton’s death and the alleged burglary. “IID is a separate entity,” he explains, adding, “I didn’t find anything that made the connection” between his investigation and theirs. Once the death was ruled a suicide, Stanton’s investigation was closed.

Had the manner of death been listed as “undetermined,” Stanton would have pursued the questionable-death investigation further. Perhaps he would have turned up more clues or discovered the possible murder motive; the case for ruling the death either a suicide or a homicide might have been bolstered. As it is, based on what little information has been made available to them, Hinton’s family is convinced Sean was murdered and the truth covered up.

It is Saturday, October 24, 1992. Hinton returns to his Lafayette Courts apartment after getting his car out of impoundment. The young police trainee is due to graduate from the academy in a few weeks, but his fledgling career is suddenly a shambles.

A drug suspect Hinton helped bust on Tuesday the 20^th has filed a complaint alleging that Hinton and two officers burglarized his house after the arrest. The night of Friday the 23^rd, Hinton had been arrested on drunken-driving charges. Saturday morning, still in the police lockup, he called his friend, 67-year-old Forrest Lee Moore – the man Hinton called “Granddaddy” – and said he expected to have to beg to remain with the police department. (In fact, three days after Sean disappeared, he was fired for misconduct, according to documents in his personnel file.)

Back at home, Hinton opens a spiral notebook and writes a letter to his wife, which she finds eight days later. “24 Oct 92, 540 pm time written. Francine you have dealt with me 4 years, and you never seemed to believe I really loved you – I do love you. You have Jehovah on your side. I have no one. I need Jehovah but I just can’t seem to reach him. So I guess I’ll see someone. Please take care of our children for me. 1744 hrs. Sean Hinton.”

Then he walks out of the apartment and heads toward Orleans Street, leaving his car behind. About an hour later, he calls home to say he’ll be right back. When he fails to show, his mother, Jean Hinton, consults her caller-ID system and discovers he had called from Pennsylvania Station at 6:48 P.M. Shortly after midnight, the Hintons report Sean missing.

Ten days later, on Tuesday, November 3 – the same day Bill Clinton is elected president – Hinton turns up dead. His body is found floating facedown in the water behind New York’s Batter Park Coast Guard Station, the wrists tied up in front with the drawstring of his jacket. His wallet contains $42.95 and several pieces of identification, including a Fraternal Order of Police membership card.

It is around 10:30 A.M. when the body is taken out of the water. An investigator from the New York Medical Examiner’s Office arrives at the scene. He writes in his report, “Decedent is an app. homicide victim. Hands are bound, and head trauma noted.” Several New York police officers also are present on the dock. One files a report at 10:55, noting the body is a “Poss. homicide, hands tied together with black cord and poss. bullet hole left cheek.” When the body is transported to the medical examiner’s office, it is labeled with a tag that reads HOMICIDE.

Five hours later in Baltimore, Joseph Kleinota, BCPD missing-persons detective, who up until then had no breaks in the Hinton case, reports that he has spoken to New York homicide detective Joseph Burdick. His report documents Burdick as saying that a “preliminary investigation reveals that subject committed suicide. … It appears that the person had tied his own hands.”

Burdick also files a report of the conversation. He writes that Kleinota told him Hinton had left a note and that he “had recently become despondent over an arrest and a dept. Disciplinary hearing he was due to attend regarding this arrest.”

The next day, November 4, New York medical examiner Mark Flomenbaum conducts the autopsy. Given the level of decomposition, he figures Hinton has been dead for several days at least. He notes fluid in Hinton’s chest, abdomen, and lungs, indicating drowning as the cause of death. Examining the bound wrists, he jots on his autopsy work sheet: “Comment: appears to req. great deal of facility to do by self.” He describes “soft metal fragments” lodged in the victim’s windpipe. Other than the effects of decomposition, Flomenbaum notes nothing else remarkable about the body.

After the autopsy, Flomenbaum decides the case is a possible suicide. But he isn’t sure yet, so he files a death certificate stating the cause as drowning and leaving the manner of death open, “pending further studies.” On November 27, convinced after consultation with various New York and Baltimore investigators that Hinton intended to and was capable of tying his own wrists to hinder his ability to swim, Flomenbaum changes his ruling to suicide by drowning.

In a nutshell, that is the story of Sean Hinton’s demise. According to Francine Hinton, the police department expressed its sympathy by covering the funeral costs, paying out insurance money, and outfitting their children – Ronald, Sean, Jr., and Shatia, then one, three, and five years old – with some new clothes.

She isn’t satisfied with the explanation that Sean committed suicide, though. Neither are his mother, sisters, brothers, and friends.

That is to be expected; authorities say family members and friends almost always respond to suicide with disbelief. But Sean Hinton’s case is not like most suicides. First, there is a possible motive for murder.

On October 20, 1992, Hinton was working with Gasque, who had returned several months before to the Western District drug-enforcement unit after being moved to patrol because federal officials suspected he was connected to a drug ring, according to a 1993 Sun article. Why a police trainee was working with this particular officer is unknown, but it is a question the family would very much like to have answered.

After receiving information from a confidential informant, Gasque and Hinton arrested Eric Thomas on drugs and firearms charges in a school zone in West Baltimore. Shortly after the arrest, Thomas complained to IID that Gasque, Hinton, and another, unnamed cop confiscated his keys while booking him and went to his house and stole property, including money. A Baltimore City grand jury heard testimony from several witnesses who said they saw the burglary, but no indictment was handed down. BCPD Lieutenant Stanton explains that one of the witnesses was considered unreliable because of a murder conviction.

The drugs and firearms charges against Thomas were dropped after his attorney subpoenaed records of the investigations of Gasque’s conduct and Hinton’s disappearance and death. On November 5, 1992, Thomas was arrested again, this time on a charge of robbery with a deadly weapon in connection with an October 10, 1992 incident at the Money Service Center on West Baltimore Street. According to sources close to the case, Thomas was arrested at his house by Detective Arnold Adams just as IID detectives were arriving to tell Thomas he had passed the polygraph test he took in connection with his complaint against Gasque and Hinton.

According to court records, the armed-robbery charges against Thomas were dismissed by a Circuit Court judge after prosecutors refused to provide eyewitness’ statements given to Adams on November 3, 1992 (the day Hinton’s body was found), when Thomas was allegedly picked out of a photo array.

(Adams is no longer with the BCPD; his career ended last summer when he was caught collecting rewards for having an accomplice call in crime tips to Metro Crime Stoppers’ anonymous tip line, according to accounts in The Sun.)

In May 1994, Thomas was arrested again on drug-conspiracy charges. This time, the charges stuck and he was sentenced to federal prison. Before the case was moved to federal court, Thomas wrote a letter to Baltimore Circuit Court Judge John Themelis. After naming officers connected to his case whom he believed were under IID investigation, Thomas pleaded: “I pray that your honor sees these views on my behalf before this puzzle goes any further. There are things that the courts and your Honor should know especially [sic] about some Dead Police Officers [emphasis is Thomas’].”

Eric Thomas’ burglary claim is the only known allegation of police misconduct involving Hinton. Gasque, on the other hand, has weathered several investigations, according to a 1993 Sun article by David Simon. In late 1991, federal officials linked Gasque to a telephone pager being used by a member of a drug organization, and suspected he was in regular contact with the group. In 1992 came Thomas’ complaint. In the summer of 1993, after serving a search warrant based on informant information, Gasque refused to produce the informant for an interview with prosecutors, who suspected the informant did not exist.

Federal officials say they suspected that Gasque was protecting the “Strong as Steel” drug organization. According to federal court documents, Strong as Steel – which operated out of West Baltimore from 1991 to 1993 – was known for robbing and torturing members of other drug organization, and using a former police cadet disguised as a police officer in many of its crimes.

The allegations against Gasque and other Western District drug officers led officials in the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office to urge the BCPD to reassign the entire unit, which the police department did in July 1993. After the purge, Gasque served in another plainclothes unit, the Western District’s “flex unit,” which mostly does street-level drug work. Later, he was reassigned as a Western District turnkey, letting booked suspects in and out of lockup.

The fallout from the allegations against Gasque didn’t end with his reassignment, though. Prosecution of westside drug cases suffered as a result of his reputation. Defense attorneys on cases involving Gasque – staring with Eric Thomas’ attorneys – found that prosecutors tended to dismiss cases or make attractive plea offers if the defense subpoenaed records of the investigations into Gasque’s conduct and Hinton’s death.

In all, between August 1993 and May 1994, 14 of 38 Circuit Court defendants in cases involving Gasque and other former Western District drug-enforcement-unit officers saw their charges dropped or placed on the inactive docket, according to a 1994 Sun article.

Two days after the Eric Thomas arrest, Hinton’s family remembers, Sean came home after work and spent about eight hours doing extensive police-related paperwork in the kitchen. They say they never asked what he was working on, out of respect for his professional need for confidentiality. Stanton notes that Hinton could have been writing up field-training reports rather than reporting police corruption, but Hinton’s family says they had never seen him concentrate so extensively on police paperwork at home. They now believe Hinton was preparing to report alleged corruption to the authorities. If so, someone may have had a motive to shut him up.

The autopsy report sets down the anatomical evidence on which the suicide-by-drowning ruling was based. The report describes no injuries to the body whatsoever. In an interview at his office last month, medical examiner Flomenbaum asserted that initial reports of a possible bullet hole in the left cheek and apparent blunt trauma to the head were mistaken. “There was no trauma to his body,” he said adamantly while reviewing the autopsy report.

Looking at the autopsy photos on a slide project, though, Flomenbaum is asked to zoom in on an obvious dent in the right side of Hinton’s forehead, just above the temple. “This is not anything but decompositional changes,” he says. “Any pathologist worth his salt would see that.” The body probably got knocked around a bit while floating in the water or while being retrieved and transported for autopsy, he says.

But the autopsy report did not note this dent. Regarding the postmortem condition of Hinton’s head, the report notes “red discoloration of the face and anterior aspects of the scalp” and “bloating of the lips, eyelids, and tongue.” During the internal examination of the body, the medical examiner reported “the scalp has no contusions … the skull has no fractures … [and] there are no grossly apparent focal lesions.” Thus, if the dent caused internal damage to the head, it wasn’t found during the autopsy.

After looking at the dent in the slide-projector photos, Flomenbaum qualifies his earlier statement. “There was no trauma at autopsy that couldn’t be accounted for by submersion,” he says. But why didn’t the autopsy report note any trauma at all, even that for which there was a postmortem explanation? “We never would describe things like that if it is just denting of soft tissue,” Flomenbaum explains. “Unless there is something that can be confused with something else, we just tend to give a general description.”

There were other apparent omissions in Flomenbaum’s autopsy report that don’t necessarily bear on how Hinton died, but might call into question the report’s thoroughness. Though it mentions “slippage of the skin at the waist, back, wrists, and ankles,” the report doesn’t point out skin slippage on the face, noting only the “red discoloration.” In fact, the face lacks most of its skin. As one former law-enforcement official who viewed the photos says, “This is more than just red discoloration of the face – the skin has slipped right off.”

Flomenbaum agrees that the skin on Hinton’s face “just wasn’t there.” He explains that he didn’t describe skin slippage on the face because the term applies only where you can still see the skin is in the slipped position.” Since the facial skin was mostly gone, he didn’t describe it at all. The report also makes no mention of Hinton’s shirt, although it lists all other clothing he was wearing. (“I must have missed that,” Flomenbaum explains.)

The autopsy report also describes two half-inch-by-half-inch “soft metal fragments (of unidentified origin) in the right main bronchus, just below the carina.” The objects do not appear in the X-rays of Hinton’s chest, which would clearly show them were they actually metal. During the April interview, when Flomenbaum opened a specimen bottle containing samples of Hinton’s tissues, two objects of approximately the same size were included. They appeared to be fragments of a bivalve shell, not soft metal.

“If these were what was in his [windpipe], they must have looked like metal at the time,” Flomenbaum says. He speculates that the solution in which they were stored dissolved the metal away from the surface of the objects.

Finally, Flomenbaum acknowledges that, as a rule, “there is nothing that can prove drowning.” This was confirmed by other medical examiners, who say that drowning cases don’t always display the tell-tale signs of drowning. Flomenbaum explains that he ruled that Hinton drowned because “the body was found in the water and any other anatomical explanation has been excluded.” But his autopsy report overlooks a point some pathologists say bears on the question of drowning – whether there was water in the sinuses.

John Smialek, Maryland’s chief medical examiner, explains that “there are certain indications that are usually present but not always present” in drowning cases, such as “water in the stomach and air passages, especially the sinuses, which confirms the person was breathing in the water.” The Hinton autopsy report notes “blood-colored watery liquid in the chest and in the abdomen” and that “both lungs contain abundant clear fluid,” but the condition of the sinuses is not described.

The gaps in the autopsy report are not unusual. Mistakes happen in medical examiners’ offices, as anywhere else; they are part of the tricky business of examining dead bodies. And in New York, where in 1993 the medical examiner’s office had an average caseload of 5.3 autopsies per week (the National Association of Medical Examiners recommends no more than 3.8 per week), the high volume of work can be expected to cause difficulties.

Due to possible oversights, corpses are sometimes exhumed for second autopsies which can reveal previously overlooked details that help solve mysteries. In a celebrated early-1980s case, for instance, an Illinois coroner missed three skull fractures on the head of a woman named Karla Brown. The fractures were discovered after Brown’s body was exhumed four years later, a step that led to a murder conviction.

In addition to a possible murder motive and the questionable autopsy, the Hinton case is curious because of the manner and cause of his death. Only one or two percent of all suicides are by drowning, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

And there is the larger question of Hinton’s bound wrists. Flomenbaum, looking at slides of Hinton’s wrists, concludes, “This is not somebody trying to immobilize him. It is a simple knot that is possible to do by yourself.” He says reliable sources involved in investigating the case informed him that Hinton could have done it himself. And he dismisses as naivete his comment in his initial autopsy notes that the knot would require a “great deal of facility to do by self.” The autopsy report says the wrists were tied together with a square knot, a knot that seems impossible to use in binding one’s own hands. (This reporter tried several times and could not do it in a way that would adequately bind the wrists.) Perhaps Hinton tied the knot, then twisted his wrists up tight into the knotted drawstring. Either way, if Hinton bound himself it took considerable dexterity and effort.

When Flomenbaum ruled the case a suicide on November 27, 1992, he was not aware of the allegations of corruption surrounding Hinton. The first he heard of them was in March 1996, when a reporter called him to discuss the case. At the time of the ruling, he said during the April interview, all he knew was that Hinton disappeared after being charged with drunken driving and after leaving a note for his wife. “People kill themselves for a lot less than DWIs,” he says.

Flomenbaum describes Hinton’s note as “very weird. … There’s no mention that he’s going to kill himself.” But he says he still believes it “very strongly supports suicide.” And the new information about Hinton’s circumstances at the time he died, Flomenbaum believes, only bolsters his initial ruling.

“It looks like he was probably involved with some big-time, major shit,” Flomenbaum says. “He saw no way out. He probably wanted to do something right, but was so trapped, it seemed [suicide] was his only option.”

Besides, Flomenbaum continues, “if someone did have a motive to kill him, how did they do it? This is not a homicidal drowning. Homicidal drownings are very, very rare.” He’s right; they are even more rare than suicideal drownings. According to the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, in 1992 there were only 29 murders by drowning in the country, about one-10^th of one percent of the more than 22,000 killings committed that year.

“I think the circumstances of why he disappeared should be investigated,” Flomenbaum concludes, “but the physical evidence of the ruling is compelling for suicide. I don’t have an anatomy of a murder. There was no struggle. He had his wallet on him. Everything we’ve seen is what happens when people are in the water. …

“If I can be convinced in a reasonable way that I was wrong [in ruling it a suicide by drowning], I will change it to a homicide,” Flomenbaum says. “I am more than willing to have my mind changed. But, right now, these are exceptionally good reasons to make it a suicide. There is nothing physical that suggests someone else did this to him.”

Moreover, Flomenbaum sees no reason to change his manner-of-death ruling to “undetermined,” which would reopen the questionable-death investigation. “’Undetermined’ is usually when we have ambiguous findings at autopsy. The more I hear about the circumstances, the less ambiguous [this case] seems.”

Cyril Wecht, a Pittsburgh medical examiner who is nationally known in the field, reviewed Hinton’s autopsy report and judged it a “fairly decent report.” But Wecht also says, “I don’t understand how they call it a suicide. How does this guy go about tying these things and jumping in the water? It just doesn’t make sense.” He says most forensic pathologists would call it a homicide or undetermined, “absent information from homicide investigators that would indicate suicide.

“There is no basis to challenge [drowning as] the cause of death,” Wecht concludes. “But the manner? You have to wonder.”

On the Saturday morning after the drunken-driving arrest, Hinton could have been pondering several options. He could come clean, reporting whatever he might have known about police corruption. He could “turn” – go criminal, that is, and do what federal court documents describe the Strong as Steel organization as having had former police cadet Doncarlos Williams do: Dress up as a cop and rob rival drug dealers. Or he could take his own life.

The suicide scenario is easy enough to imagine from the standpoint of Hinton’s likely emotions. Hinton comes home that Saturday, despondent over his arrest and a possible disgraceful end to his police career. He is the great hope of the Hinton family – about to become a police officer and take his wife and kids out of the projects. But the dream has faded in the course of one extremely bad week. So he leaves a good-bye note for his wife, takes the train to New York, ties himself up, and hurls himself in the river. What raises questions for Hinton’s family are the presence of a possible murder motive, the location of Sean’s death in New York, and physical evidence they believe argues against suicide, most notably the bound wrists.

Going criminal could also have ended up with Hinton’s death, but that scenario doesn’t comport with the portrait his friends and family paint of his character. Hinton was interested in law enforcement since boyhood. He completed the Baltimore police department’s “Officer Friendly Program” and was honored with a Junior Citizen Award by the city. His friends and family say he was exceptionally reliable, loyal, and affable. He didn’t hang around on the corner when he was growing up; rather, he was always running home to be with his family. “He was kind of naïve about the world,” Robert Templeton, a friend of Hinton’s and his manager during a stint working at Pizzeria Uno at the Inner Harbor, recalls. This is not the picture of someone who enters the police department and almost immediately becomes involved in the drug trade.

So, suppose Hinton decided to come clean. That would explain the sudden flurry of off-duty paperwork a couple of days after Thomas’ arrest. The current whereabouts of the documents are not known, but the family believes Hinton must have taken them with him to work the next day. If they were police reports and Hinton turned them over to IID, then at some point he was going to have to testify about the allegations.

Francine remembers Sean saying to her, as they lay on their bed together the Saturday he disappeared, “I’m going to tell the truth. Them cops ain’t nothing but crooks. I’m going to do my time and get out of it.” She did not mention this conversation to Stanton during his investigation in late November 1992, and Stanton doesn’t recall asking the family if Hinton said anything before leaving.

Later that day, the family remembers, Sean took a long shower. He brought the phone into the bathroom with him and asked his brother Kevin, who is in a wheelchair, to get him his notebook and a pen. Kevin asked him if he still was planning to go to their sister Janet’s anniversary party that night, and Sean said yes. Then he got out of the shower, got dressed, and left the apartment, heading toward Orleans Street on foot. The family can’t recall if he said anything else.

Sean’s last call home was made from the train station. His mother, Jean, spoke with him. “When he called from Penn Station, he said he was coming home and that he wanted to talk to Granddaddy [Forrest Lee Moore], and Granddaddy was not home,” she says. Moore and Sean had worked together for a year in the late 1980s at Edenwald nursing home in Towson and had become close companions. They had been out drinking together the night before Hinton disappeared, but Moore says he doesn’t remember Sean saying anything about police corruption.

Hinton’s mysterious note can be interpreted as jibing with the come-clean theory. “I have no one,” he wrote. If was accusing a senior officer of corruption, he indeed would have been nearly alone. The IID detectives and prosecutors would protect him, but he would have few friends on the force. Whatever trouble he faced, it was police-related and he was facing it in virtual solitude.

“I need Jehovah but I just can’t seem to find him. So I guess I’ll see someone,” the note continues. As a corruption complainant ratting on cops, he would have to face the forces he was fingering eventually; perhaps he was pressured into meeting someone to discuss the charges. The pressure would have had to be severe enough to keep him cooperating – perhaps a threat to his family.

And Hinton closes his note with, “Please take care of our children for me.” As a cop-crime suspect coming clean, he figured he’d either be prosecuted, convicted, and do time, or something disastrous would happen to him at the hands of those he had exposed. Either way, he knew he’d be gone long enough that Francine would need to care for the children alone.

So Hinton went to Penn Station. No one knows what happened to him between his call home at 6:48 P.M. that Saturday and when his body was taken out of the water in New York 10 days later. It seems likely he took the train to New York, but he had no ticket stub when he was found. He did not have a credit card, and the family’s and investigators’ accounts differ on how much money Hinton had when he left home. (Francine disputes that he had enough to buy a $59 one-way ticket to New York.)

If the come-clean interpretation of the good-bye note is correct and he did meet with someone connected to corruption allegations, perhaps he was forced to accompany the person or person to New York and was told everything would be fine for everyone if he cooperated.

The killer or killers would have reasoned that, in Baltimore, a drowned 22-year-old city-police trainee would attract a lot of attention and a lot of press – and police here might quickly discern a possible murder motive. If he dies in New York, the case would probably get a lot less notice – and, with a waterlogged body and a wallet full of identification, it might look like a suicide.

The murder scenario continues like this: Arriving in New York, the party – with Hinton still cooperating – disembarks from the train without incident and heads for a desolate stretch of Manhattan waterfront. Hinton is knocked in the temple and falls unconscious without a struggle. The killers bind his wrists to make sure he can’t swim, throw him in the water, and walk away.

The come-clean scenario stand or falls with the question of when the trauma to Hinton’s head occurred. Did it happen before or after he drowned? And while the autopsy report says the skull isn’t fractured, medical examiners have missed skull fractures before.

The question of suicide versus murder would be addressed, if not cleared up, by exhumation and a second autopsy to examine whether Hinton’s head injury occurred before or after death and whether the skull is fractured. “That would cost somebody thousands of dollars and not turn up anything,” Flomenbaum says. It’s a process, though, that the family considered initiating shortly after Hinton’s funeral in November 1992.

According to Mark Zaid, a Washington, D.C., attorney working on the John Wilkes Booth exhumation case currently pending before the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, “It is a simple process that can be made complicated if someone wants to make it so.”

First, all immediate family members must agree to request exhumation, then approach the cemetery with their request. If the cemetery agrees, all the family needs is permission from the jurisdiction’s state’s attorney’s office and money to pay for the exhumation and examination. If the cemetery rejects the request – and that doesn’t happen in most cases, according to Zaid – the family can go to court.

Another possibility for obtaining more clues to help solve the Hinton mystery is disclosure of more reports of investigations into the circumstances surrounding his police work and his disappearance and death. The autopsy report, Hinton’s police personnel file, and Stanton’s questionable-death report have been released. As Hinton’s court-appointed representative, Francine also plans to obtain copies of documents subpoenaed (but never released) in the Eric Thomas drugs-and-firearms case: two IID files (one on the alleged Thomas burglary, the other on Hinton’s death), and records of a probe by the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office, including grand-jury testimony about the alleged Thomas burglary. She also intends to request all other Hinton-related police information to which her husband would be entitled if he were alive.

In New York, NYPD spokesperson Detective Julio Martinez told CP that “the case is under active investigation” and the report of its questionable-death investigation on Hinton will not be released. “Obviously, this is an unusual case and the chief of detectives is not going to comment on it until all aspects of it are cleared up,” Martinez says. He also declined a request to interview Joseph Burdick, the NYPD homicide detective who was assigned the case back in 1992.

In addition to the evidence reported here, the family’s suspicions of foul play are provoked by disputed facts, street talk, and innuendo-laden coincidences that suggest to them the documented record of Hinton’s disappearance and death is woefully inadequate. Recollections and questions about Sean are part of the Hinton’s daily routine. “There’s not a day that goes by I don’t think about Sean,” his mother Jean says.

Hinton’s friends also wonder about his death. “It’s hard for me to believe it was suicide because Sean wasn’t that type of person,” Forrest Lee Moore says. He believe Sean was more likely to face his career problems and start anew than to kill himself over losing a job, especially since he was so young, so hard-working, and so easy to get along with. “If you met Sean, you would like him right off the bat,” Moore comments. “Everybody liked him.” Robert Templeton, Hinton’s friend and former boss, is more adamant: “The whole thing stinks from beginning to end,” he says.

Hinton’s family and friends continue to believe that many of their questions will eventually be answered. “Sooner or later, it’ll all come out,” Jean Hinton likes to say. But neither she nor the rest like the wait.

“I haven’t had no comfort since Sean’s been dead,” Jean laments. “That prayer didn’t get answered.”

Hung Jury: Circuit Court Expunges Controversial 1992 Grand-Jury Report

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, June 5, 1996

The report of the May Term 1992 Baltimore City Grand Jury, which called for a state investigation of the city police department and the state’s attorney’s office after alleging “gross misconduct” on the part of members of both agencies, was expunged by order of Circuit Court Judge Edward Angeletti January 18. The order was signed without a hearing because no opposition to the expungement petition was filed with the court. The outcome of the proceeding in January drew little public notice, even from people involved in the jury process.

State Department of Juvenile Justice Secretary Stuart Simms, who was the Baltimore City state’s attorney when the grand jury issued its report in March 1993, teamed up with current city State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamyn to enter the expungement petition last November. Angeles, who was assigned the case by Circuit Court Administrative Judge Joseph H.H. Kaplan, concluded that the grand jury, in violation of its common-law authority, “exceeded its powers” by criticizing the local criminal-justice establishment without handing down indictments.

The 23-member grand jury found that the evidence produced during its six-month investigation (including testimony from 50 law-enforcement officials and prosecutors) “clearly demonstrates a hands-off approach when the targets were certain well-connected members of the community … . There is an organized structured effort of some present and former members of each agency to perpetuate the protection of a select few to further obvious illicit gains.” A follow-up probe by the state prosecutor’s office determined that the allegations were “unsubstantiated.”

The report specifically mentioned Simms in connection with some of its corruption allegations, according to Angeletti’s decision. A sealed version of the report, which was submitted to Kaplan in early 1993, named individuals targeted by the grand jury. The publicly released version, though, was purged of names, including Simms’. Angeletti says the expungement order calls for an effort to recover and destroy copies of the report.

The jury, which was asked by Circuit Court Judge Kenneth Lavon Johnson to look into why Baltimore’s “war on drugs” wasn’t working, unleashed a litany of scathing criticisms in its report. It claimed that the police department’s rotation policy, in which officers are reassigned to other police units, was used to thwart criminal investigations; it noted a pattern of investigations halted by the upper echelons of the police department and the state’s attorney’s office; it alleged there was abuse of the police overtime-pay system and that there were racially discriminatory employment practices; and it claimed the police department mismanaged its criminal investigation division’s drug-enforcment section (CID-DES), which was said to operate “on its own terms with little control or direction.”

Furthermore, the grand-jury report criticized the police department brass for failing to recognize or try to stop the advance of New York drug organizations into Baltimore. And it said “contempt” and “resistance” was displayed by the state’s attorney’s office while the grand-jury investigation was conducted.

The jury made several recommendations based on its findings, including that a special prosecutor investigate the police department and the state’s attorney’s office. The jury asked that a prosecutor look into several particular allegations: selective enforcement and prosecution to protect well-connected people and drug activity in particular geographic areas; abuse and misappropriation of police overtime funds, and discriminatory police employment practices. It also called for an independent audit of the police department’s budget, focusing specifically on the fiscal accounts of CID-DES, and the jury concluded that drug drug-enforcement-section supervisors should be reassigned. Finally, the jury suggested that the police department invest in a computer-networking system and a centralized database.

State Prosecutor Stephen Montanarelli conducted the recommended investigation. In his August 1994 final report, he wrote that “the allegations in the report have been found to be unsubstantiated. We hope that whatever damage has been done to the reputation of innocent persons has been repaired to some extent.”

In his decision, Angeletti argued that, because Montanarelli’s investigation found that the grand jury leveled unsubstantiated accusations without indictments, the officials named in the report had “no procedural safeguards to protect against loss of reputation.” To correct this, Angeletti expunged both versions of the grand jury’s report.

Simms vehemently attacked the grand jury’s work after its report was released in March 1993. He called the report “amateurish” and, in a letter published in The Sun, its process “flawed,” and its judge “misinformed.” The jury’s allegations came just as Simms was said to be on the Clinton Administration’s short list of a high-level position with the U.S. Justice Department, according to press accounts. He didn’t get the job, and nearly two years later he was appointed by Governor Parris Glendening to head the newly renamed Department of Juvenile Justice. Repeated calls from City Paper to Simms for comment on the expungement went unanswered.

Judge Johnson had no comment on the report’s expungement. Robert Massey, the foreperson of the grand jury that released the report, says he didn’t know that expungement proceedings had been initiated, but he’s not surprised the courts are quashing the report. He says he doesn’t understand the point of expungement, though.

“I don’t really see how once something has been released to the public, it can be expunged,” Massey says, pointing out that the jury’s findings were debated in the press for months after the report was issued. He says the report was “all over the place” and “a lot of tangential things” were included in it. “If anything was ever going to happen with it, it would have happened before now,” he concludes.

Montanarelli was not available to comment on the expungement order. Another prosecutor from his office, Jim Cabezas, explains that “commenting about the expungement would violate the spirit of the expungement” order.

City Council member Martin O’Malley (D-Third District), who, as a member of the council’s public-safety committee watched the grand jury’s activities closely, says he believes the report may have implicated some people unfairly but that Judge Johnson’s charge was “courageous” and “raised very relevant issues.”

“When you don’t have prosecution of corruption [in Baltimore] that you do have in other cities on the East Coast,” O’Malley says, “… it make you wonder, especially as the [drug-crime] problem continues to worsen. The problem is that there is a hell of a lot of discretion within the police department and the state’s attorney’s office, so we should be extra vigilant in making sure it isn’t abused.”

Out of Reach: The Black Guerrilla Family Gang Aimed to Show a Way Out of the Criminal Lifestyle – Until Its Criminal Activities Brought It Down

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Feb. 15, 2012

“It’s hard to promote black nationalism when you have a black man in the White House,” Thomas Bailey said on Jan. 6, 2009, weeks before Barack Obama was sworn in as the first African-American President of the United States. Bailey, a Maryland inmate serving life for murder, couldn’t have known at the time how prophetic his words were, or that they would end up memorialized in court documents.

As Obama was moving into the White House, court documents show that federal investigators with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Maryland—a unit dubbed the Special Investigations Group (DEA-SIG)—were kicking into gear a sprawling probe of the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF), the black-nationalist prison gang for which Bailey ran “the day-to-day operations” at North Branch Correctional Institution (NBCI), a maximum-security prison near Cumberland.

When Bailey uttered those prescient words, he was talking over a prison phone at NBCI with Eric Marcell Brown (“Eric Marcell Brown,” Mobtown beat, May 7, 2009), who was on a cell phone at the Maryland Transition Center (MTC), a correctional facility in Baltimore, where Brown was close to finishing a lengthy prison stint for a 1992 drug-dealing conviction. Brown, DEA-SIG investigators wrote in court documents, was “in command of day-to-day operations” in Maryland for the BGF, a national prison gang founded in California in the 1960s by inmate/radical George Jackson, a Black Panther Party member who espoused the black-nationalist view that African-Americans needed to build separate economic and social structures for themselves.

Numerous conversations between Bailey and Brown were intercepted by DEA-SIG, unbeknownst to them at the time, and they show that the two, and their many BGF comrades, seemed to have a genuine desire to promote a better, less violent, more productive path for ex-cons and street hustlers. They weren’t the first. Jackson’s ideas were wrapped up with the Panthers’, and few would question that at least some of their intentions were good. It was their tactics and internal contradictions—along with the machinations of law enforcers—that quashed their ambitions. The same, it now appears, could be said of the BGF in Maryland.

As the DEA-SIG’s probe began in late 2008, Eric Brown had already established himself as a soon-to-be-released inmate prepped to become a force for economic and social good, both in prisons and on the streets.

Brown and his wife, Deitra Davenport (“Deitra Davenport,” Mobtown Beat, May 27, 2009), had started a nonprofit, Harambee Jamaa Inc., “to improve the lives of our people who are living under sub standard conditions here in Baltimore” and “to educate, invigorate and liberate our people from poverty, crime, and prison,” according to its incorporation papers. They had formed DeeDat Publishing Inc., which had printed and distributed The Black Book: Empowering Black Families and Communities, a “living policy book” intended to serve as “a deterrent to continued criminal behavior and prison recidivism.”

The Black Book condemned drug dealing as “genocide” and “chemical warfare,” and promoted a vision for “Jamaa”—the Swahili word for “family,” which The Black Bookuses to refer to the BGF—to build “legitimate and organized ventures” and to “establish Jamaa in a positive light in the prison system and in the streets.”

The rhetoric was persuasive. The Black Book’s back cover featured glowing blurbs from Andrey Bundley, a Baltimore City Public Schools administrator and two-time mayoral candidate; two Anne Arundel Community College professors; former FBI agents Tyrone Powers and Leslie Parker Blyther; Bridget Alston-Smith, executive director of the nonprofit Partners in Progress, which works with at-risk children in Baltimore City’s public schools; and Michael Curtis Jones, an author and youth counselor based in Washington, D.C.

“Kudos, to Eric Brown (E.B.) for not accepting the unhealthy traditions of street organizations aka gangs,” Bundley’s blurb stated. “He has availed his leadership capacity in Jamaa to guide his comrades toward truth, justice, freedom and equality.” Blyther’s blurb called Brown “an extraordinary human” who “deserves our respect,” and said that “what he has to say” is “life changing!”

But DEA-SIG’s success torpedoed the love-fest. Scores of Bailey’s “comrades”—the term BGF members use to address one another—would plead guilty to a host of federal charges brought in 2009 (“Black-Booked,” Feature, Aug. 5, 2009) and 2010 (“Round Two,” Mobtown Beat, April 28, 2010), including racketeering, heroin trafficking, extortion, assault, money laundering, and smuggling contraband into prison. Those convicted include inmates (though not Bailey, who, like many of the investigation’s targets, ultimately wasn’t charged), prison personnel, and previously law-abiding citizens.

The presence of prison staff in the scheme prompted City Paper to look at the issue of corrupt correctional officers in Maryland, in connection both with the BGF and other gangs (“Inside Job,” Feature, May 12, 2010), but there were other defendants with legitimate-looking careers. Todd Duncan was a gang-interventionist for a government-funded nonprofit (“Inside Out,” Mobtown Beat, April 14, 2010). Rainbow Williams was a youth mentor for Baltimore City Public Schools students (“Rainbow Lee Williams,” Mobtown Beat, May 1, 2009). Kimberly McIntosh was a health care worker (“Health Care Worker Accused,” Mobtown Beat, April 16, 2010). Tomeka Harris was a mortgage broker (“Day of Reckoning,” Mobtown Beat, Dec. 22, 2010). And Calvin Robinson was a Baltimore City wastewater worker with a clothing boutique (“Calvin Renard Robinson,” Mobtown Beat, June 10, 2009).

In all, as much as City Paper could determine from federal court records, 40 people were charged in connection with the probe, and at least 28 of them—maybe more; the court docket is vague on the fates of some defendants—have pleaded guilty so far. According to a Jan. 12 press release issued by the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office, “all the indicted high ranking members of BGF, and their associates, including four employees of state prisons, have pleaded guilty to charges relating to their BGF activities.”

In reality, the problem for Bailey and the BGF was not “a black man in the White House.” It was their hubris and hypocrisy in promoting themselves as a legitimate alternative to the criminal lifestyle, when, in reality, they were committing crimes like any other prison gang. And they got caught.

Though Brown and his BGF comrades claimed to be engaging potential re-offenders in an effort to set them on a more productive path in life, court documents show they were, in fact, engaged with a who’s-who in Baltimore’s underworld as they carried on like common gangsters.

“You are trying to do good,” explains a BGF member who wasn’t charged as a result of DEA-SIG’s investigation, but who knows many of the now convicted BGF leaders and members well, “but you are doing so much fucked-up shit at the same time.” The member, who asked that his real name not be published (in this article, he’ll be called Sam) so that he could speak freely and stay safe from retribution, identifies what may be the BGF’s central contradiction: “You [can’t] tell people about uplifting your people but you’re one of the biggest drug dealers around. There’s no gray area in the struggle. You’re either in it, or you’re not. You can’t say you’re a revolutionary and you’re in the struggle, but you’re a dope-slinging, gangbanging, shooting motherfucker. That ain’t what the struggle is about.”

Because there was no trial in the prosecution of the BGF racketeering probe, the full scope of the evidence that yielded the long cascade of guilty pleas is not publicly available. What is available, though, is abundant. DEA-SIG’s affidavits supporting search warrants and wiretap orders provide hundreds of pages of detailed information about what the investigators were finding. A host of them, attached to a motion filed in the case last year by Assistant U.S. Attorney James Wallner, show that investigators linked BGF leaders—especially its main heroin trafficker, Kevin Glasscho, who has prior convictions for murder, handgun possession, and drug trafficking—to a roster of suspected and convicted drug traffickers, some of whom have been the focus of City Paper articles in recent years.

Glasscho ended up on DEA-SIG’s radar thanks to a confidential informant, identified in court documents as “CS1” and described as a BGF member incarcerated at NBCI. On March 3, 2009, CS1 told the investigators that Glasscho “is a major Baltimore drug trafficker and a drug-trafficking associate of Melvin Williams, a/k/a ‘Little Melvin,’ a notorious convicted drug dealer from Baltimore who is now back on the streets of Baltimore.”

Williams is a legendary figure in Baltimore, and his alleged ties to Glasscho add perspective to the extent of the BGF’s reach in the city’s streets—as well as its affinity to people who suffer their own contradictions.

Williams had an acting role in the HBO series The Wire, playing a church deacon who tries to draw hustlers out of “the game.” In real life, he served a lengthy federal prison sentence, starting in the 1980s, for bringing heroin to the streets of Baltimore in bulk. He says he put his gangster ways behind him in 1996, when God appeared to him in a vision (“Little Melvin’s Holiday,” The Nose, Jan. 22, 2003). After his release from prison, he became a bail bondsman, and in 2000 was convicted of possessing a firearm, but his 22-year sentence for that crime was reduced in 2003 to time served, courtesy of U.S. District Judge Marvin Garbis. In 2005, Williams’ house in Randallstown was raided after investigators intercepted phone conversations he’d had with Antoine K. Rich, a major Baltimore drug trafficker with whom Williams claimed to play high-stakes craps (“Redemption Song and Dance,” Mobtown Beat, March 19, 2008). The raid turned up more than $100,000 in cash, including $90,000 stashed in the ceiling of his basement bathroom. Ultimately, though, Garbis in 2006 ordered the money returned to Williams, calling it “unlawfully seized property.”

Two days before CS1 described Glasscho’s alleged relationship with Little Melvin Williams, investigators intercepted a phone conversation between Eric Brown and Glasscho. According to the affidavits, the two discussed the then recent murder of Frederick Jeffrey Archer, a 68-year-old who had been stabbed and bludgeoned with a brick inside a Harlem Park apartment complex for senior citizens. They referred to Archer as “Archie,” and talked about how “Melvin”—a reference to Williams, according to DEA-SIG—was upset about the murder, because Archer had been a “close associate” of his. They agreed that Glasscho, who was already investigating the murder, would handle the punishment. In another call later the same day, Brown told Davenport that “when they find out who did it, I know they going to torture his ass. That whole West Baltimore love old man Archie, boy.”

(Baltimore police say the murder of Archer, who in 2002 was charged in a cocaine and heroin conspiracy and received a three-year federal prison sentence, remains unsolved.)

During their conversation, according to the affidavit, Glasscho also told Brown that “Melvin want some trees. I got to get him some damn trees.”

“Some what?” Brown asked.

“Trees,” Glasscho responded.

“What the hell is that?” Brown asked.

“That weed shit,” Glasscho said.

“Oh, oh, oh, the trees,” Brown said.

The DEA-SIG investigators believed the two were referring to Little Melvin Williams, according to court documents.

When City Paper told Williams over the phone about how he was described in the affidavit, and what Glasscho and Brown had said while DEA-SIG was listening in, he said, “I don’t have a clue who Glasscho is, and you do what you want to do” with the information. Asked if he knew Archer, Williams said, “I don’t know none of these people. Whatever the U.S. attorney wants to do they can go ahead and do. I’m through with this.” After a short pause, he hung up the phone.

DEA-SIG’s probe into Glasscho’s criminal activities monitored his phones to develop evidence tying him to 27 people who had figured in DEA investigations in recent years. Investigators came up with this list of people by tracking back which phones his phones had called, and which phones those phones had called, thereby mapping a network of contacts linked to Glasscho.

Perhaps Glasscho was working his network in order to draw them into BGF’s path of greater legitimacy, or perhaps he was leveraging his high-level criminal contacts in order to boost the gang’s standing as a drug-trafficking enterprise. Either way, the picture that emerges from this list is that the BGF was fully embedded with Baltimore’s underworld on the streets.

Some of those named in the affidavit have no record of being charged with crimes, though many have been convicted in federal court. Among the latter are:

• Sherman Kemp, who made an appearance in the famous Stop Fucking Snitching DVD (“Skinny Suge Presents Stop Fucking Snitching Vol. 1,” Film, Jan. 19, 2005). Kemp pleaded guilty in Maryland in 2008 to federal cocaine and firearms charges, receiving 180 months in prison (“Return Flight,” Mobtown Beat, Dec. 24, 2008), and in 2010 in Pennsylvania, after a months-long jury trial, he was found guilty for his part in the massive Phillips Cocaine Organization conspiracy, and received a 30-year federal prison sentence.

• David Funderburk, a co-defendant in Frederick Archer’s 2002 coke and heroin case. Funderburk’s bail documents were found in bailbondsman and stevedore Milton Tillman Jr.’s car (“Another Tillman Court Document Comes Available,” The News Hole, Aug. 28, 2008) during the high-profile 2008 federal raids that led to Tillman’s indictment on tax and fraud charges (“Milton Tillman and Son Indicted in Bailbonds Conspiracy,” The News Hole, March 17, 2010), to which he has since pleaded guilty.

• James Henderson, who in 2008 was sentenced to five years in federal prison for his part in a heroin conspiracy centered at Fat Cats Variety (“All the Emperor’s Men,”Mobtown Beat, Aug. 27, 2008) in Southwest Baltimore, a business that was co-owned by one of Tillman Jr.’s bailbonds agents.

• Duane Truesdale, a co-defendant in 1990 with Savino Braxton (“The Wire Meets Baltimore Reality, Redux,” Mobtown Beat, Sept. 10, 2009) in the legendary Baltimore heroin conspiracy headed by Linwood Rudolph Williams.

• David Zellars, who last year was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison for his part in a large cocaine conspiracy.

• Richard Cherry, who in 2009 was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison for a cocaine conspiracy.

• Tahlil Yasin, who in 2007 received a 92-month federal prison sentence for a heroin conspiracy.

Among those whom DEA-SIG tied to Glasscho is Noel Liverpool, who, despite having a clean criminal record, is described in the affidavit as “a multi-kilogram cocaine trafficker operating the Baltimore area.” When the Tillman Jr. raids went down in 2008, the feds seized evidence involving Liverpool (“All Around Player,” Mobtown Beat, Oct. 8, 2008), whose business ties to Tillman Jr. and his son, Milton Tillman III, (“Creative Licensing,” Mobtown Beat, April 9, 2008) have been reported by City Paper. Another Liverpool associate is Shawn Green (“Flight Connections,” Mobtown Beat, March 12, 2008), a former federal fugitive now serving time for drug trafficking and money laundering; court documents also link Green to the Phillips Cocaine Organization in Pennsylvania, though he was never charged in that prosecution.

Attempts to reach Liverpool, who was a basketball and football star at Morgan State University in the 1980s, were unsuccessful. His attorney, Jeffrey Chernow, did not return phone calls, as was the case in prior City Paper articles that mentioned Liverpool.

Drug dealing, money laundering, violence—this was far from the image Brown was trying to project through The Black Book and Harambee Jamaa. Rather than ushering ex-cons and hustlers to their redemptions, with hopes for productive lives to come, the BGF was organizing and executing crimes, undermining the very communities it was ostensibly trying to build up. What were they thinking?

BGF members are supposed to operate in secrecy, but City Paper was able to get incisive perspective from Sam, a BGF member who wasn’t charged in the investigation. He spoke at length about the gang’s mentality, potential, and shortcomings.

From Sam’s perspective, very few of BGF’s members in Maryland are even faintly aware of the gang’s ideological underpinnings. “Do dudes get involved in it because of the revolutionary aspect and the struggle?” he asks, rhetorically, then answers: “Hell, no. Two-thirds of them never even heard of that shit, nor do they care. Not even a fucking clue. Because if they did, and they had any understanding of it, [the BGF] wouldn’t be where it is now, and never would have went where it went.”

Asked whether the BGF prosecution had any impact, Sam at first says, “None at all. It actually probably made it worse for the simple fact of this: The few people that actually had the ability to steer and think and really, truly put some shit in motion are gone. The only people left keep it on a street level, the motherfuckers who can’t think bigger than this corner or this neighborhood.” Later in the conversation, though, Sam says DEA-SIG’s investigation put a stop to something that could have become truly insidious—a gang masquerading as a do-gooding organization supported by the city’s political class.

“We were getting ready to take it to a whole different level,” he recalls. “We were ready to come on the street and really try and put that Black Book to work and be able to make money and make some changes in the way shit was going.”

The wherewithal to effect change, though, required that some damage be done, Sam says. “You might have one neighborhood selling drugs and the next neighborhood over you have rotating food kitchens,” he says. “The streets would have provided the money. We would have got the city to provide grant money. If it had worked,” Sam speculates, “that shit would have gone in the fucking history books, and Baltimore would have been a city where every fucking mayor and every fucking councilman is corrupt. That’s what that shit would have been. That’s the direction it was going.

“There’s a duality to it, though,” Sam continues. “In [the gang’s] laws, it says you’re not even supposed to use drugs, not just [not] sell them. But here’s the biggest level of hypocrisy—you have so many motherfuckers that are up here [in charge], who violate all that shit, and then you got motherfuckers down here, and I’m trying to discipline you for the same shit these motherfuckers up top are doing? Come on, man. You can’t get more hypocritical than that.”

The BGF’s efforts to become an “organization,” not a gang, were bound to fail, whether or not DEA-SIG dismantled its ambitions, Sam says, because its members never rose above their ingrained street-level mentality.

“Baltimore’s a fucked-up city,” he observes, “and these dudes are a product of the streets, a product of what they know. They always do what they’re comfortable doing. Motherfuckers comfortable with that street shit, so why not join something that’s going to keep you in the street? That’s what it comes down to.” Many ostensible BGF members “ain’t even official,” he says. They might think they’ve been made members because someone initiated them, but often it’s actually a farce. “OK, here’s the oath,” he says, pretending to be a BGF recruiter. “You got it. It’s yours. You’re a comrade. Alright, go shoot him. You’re a comrade, you gotta do what I tell you to.

“The real struggle,” Sam continues, “is about overcoming the condition, the situation, learning from it, and bettering that situation—whether it be yourself, your family, your neighborhood, your whole community and all that shit. And it’s a fucking shame that the blueprint is there—George [Jackson] and them laid that shit out in the ’60s. But [many BGF members in Baltimore] are a product of what George tried to fight against—you become an actual enemy of your own fucking people.

“Do people have to die in a revolution? Sure, absolutely, but they die for a cause, not because he owed me $100 or he called my girl a bitch. There’s got to be a purpose to it. A revolution is a full and complete change. It’s a turnaround. None of these motherfuckers are doing that shit. You come from [prison], being a part of classes and learning [about Jamaa], and now all of the sudden you’re out and you’re running a regime uptown and you guys have the highest crime rate in the fucking city. How the fuck are you in the struggle?

“They don’t know the difference between the animal ‘gorilla’ and the revolutionary freedom-fighter ‘guerrilla,’” Sam says. “They get tattoos of gorillas on them—that’s how fucking stupid they are.”

Though Eric Brown and the BGF’s positive spin may have been utterly discredited by the DEA-SIG probe, at least one man—Tyrone Powers, the ex-FBI agent who endorsed The Black Book—doesn’t blame the message. “I still believe that much of The Black Book can provide positives,” he writes in an e-mail. “Endorsing the book does not endorse the criminal behavior of Eric Brown.”

To drive home his point, Powers draws an analogy to this country’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Endorsing the messages of those documents, he says, does not endorse “the criminal and genocidal racist actions of those that owned slaves, such as Thomas Jefferson and others who were involved in authoring these historic documents that called for justice.” He points out that Jefferson wrote that African-Americans “are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind,” yet “Jefferson has a monument in Washington, D.C., and not one president has denounced him—not even our current black president.

“I do suggest that that damage done to Blacks and the ‘Black Community’ of that time by Jefferson was more detrimental than what Eric Brown pled guilty to,” Powers writes. “This does not exonerate Eric Brown, but it does say that his written work can have merit even if he lived a contradiction.” Powers explains that he continues to engage gang members in unorthodox ways in order to get them to stop the violence, and Brown facilitated his ability to do that work.

Powers was “able to have access to gang members via Eric Brown,” he writes, and that fact “may still change the deeds of at least one of them, in spite of Eric Brown.”

Corner Cartel: A Federal Trial Shows How Mexican Cartel Drugs Get to Baltimore Street Corners

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Feb. 23, 2011

Photo-illustration by Frank Hamilton

Ronald Eugene Brown was a natural target for Baltimore narcotics investigators. The 6-foot-6-inch, 240-pound man, nicknamed “Truck,” had already served many years in prison for 1990s drug-dealing and robbery convictions, and his rehabilitation after getting out was, well, dubious. The 44-year-old had lost his low-paying job as a forklift operator, yet he somehow could afford to have two Baltimore County residences (in Overlea and Ten Hills), a BMW, a Mercedes, and a Dodge Ram pickup truck. His comfortable, middle-class lifestyle defied explanation—but for the fact that he was a habitué of the drug-infested Monument Street corridor near Baltimore City’s Northeast Market.

When the probe into Brown began, it was standard Baltimore cop fare: A confidential source arranged to buy a small amount of drugs from Brown on the evening of April 27, 2009, and the cops followed Brown to see where he would lead them. Before the sun rose the next morning, they had about $750,000 in heat-sealed, aluminum-wrapped cash at the Marriott Waterfront Hotel and two men suspected of being Brown’s suppliers. The case’s significance snowballed, and by February 2010, it had unearthed mammoth shipments of Mexican cartel cocaine and marijuana coming to Baltimore from Texas every two weeks.

Indications of drug cartel ties to Baltimore are not new. The 1991 assassination of Baltimore shipping executive John Shotto outside a Broening Highway warehouse, for instance, was ordered by the Cali cartel after Shotto crossed them on a deal involving a drug-transporting ship. More recently, in 2008, federal defendants in Baltimore with ties to the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang and the politically connected Rice Organization cocaine ring (“Wired,” Mobtown Beat, March 2, 2005) were nabbed for bringing drugs to Baltimore from the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico (“Mexican Connection,” Mobtown Beat, March 4, 2009; “Stuck in the Middle,” Mobtown Beat, Aug. 26, 2009). And last year, a Mexican drug trafficker was caught by law enforcers unpacking cocaine from a car he was dismantling in a secure garage in Owings Mills (“Direct Connections,” Mobtown Beat, March 3, 2010).

What’s different about this case is how thoroughly and publicly it connects the dots between Baltimore players and the cartels. For reasons only they know, Brown’s suppliers—45-year-old Wade Conroy Coats of Baltimore and 43-year-old Jose Roberto Cavazos of Midlothian, Texas—decided not to plead guilty. Perhaps it was due to the fact that one of the investigators in the case, former Baltimore Police Detective Mark Lunsford, is serving prison time for theft and lying after pleading guilty to crimes tied, in part, to this investigation (“Costly Charges,” Mobtown Beat, Nov. 11, 2009). But since Coats and Cavazos fought the charges, the evidence against them was paraded before a jury, who listened, riveted, to five days of testimony in February.

To help persuade the jury, assistant U.S. attorneys James Wallner and Peter Nothstein debuted a government cooperator named Alex Noel Mendoza-Cano, who detailed how he got hundreds of pounds of cartel drugs to Cavazos, Coats, and their co-conspirators until he was arrested in December 2009. Combined with the mountains of other evidence in the case, including phone and financial records and step-by-step accounts of investigators’ work, Mendoza-Cano’s testimony revealed how sophisticated and skilled high-level drug traffickers are in cloaking their high-volume dealings behind appearances of legitimate business activity. The jury apparently believed what it heard, since it convicted the two men on Feb. 7, after deliberating for about an hour.

While law enforcers say this was the first time Mendoza-Cano testified in open court, it is likely not the last. As the man who, for five years prior to his arrest in Texas on drug charges, coordinated massive shipments of drugs and cash across the United States on behalf of the Gulf and Los Zetas cartels in Mexico, Mendoza-Cano “knows too much,” he told the Baltimore jury. Mexican cartels’ drug-fueled violence is deemed responsible for 34,000 murders in Mexico over the past four years, and Mendoza-Cano says he intends to share what he knows about cartel operations—not just in this case, but others as well—in a bid for leniency when he is sentenced eventually.

Mendoza-Cano’s testimony was a rare public moment in law enforcement. It gave the cross-continental context for the drugs that change hands on countless street corners every day in Baltimore and other cities. But the trial is also a striking example of how law enforcers, with some luck and persistence—and despite mistakes along the way, including corruption in their ranks—can turn a penny-ante probe into a major case that rattles the cartels’ supply chain.

Coats and Cavazos entered the courtroom as if entering a boardroom. With their stylish suits and eyeglasses and casual confidence, they had the look and bearing of lawyers, not drug defendants escorted by U.S. marshals. It’s hard to believe they’d been chilling in prison ever since their arrests 21 months ago; rather than a bunk behind bars, they look as if they’d slept in a nice bed in a nice house in a nice part of town. They’re both stocky, though Cavazos is taller than Coats, and both had well-groomed hair and mustaches.

Until they were charged, neither one had a criminal record. They were the picture of legitimate businessmen, plying their trades. Coats had a cell phone store called Keeping it in the Community, on Duncan Street near the Northeast Market. Cavazos, who testified under direct examination by his defense attorney, Marc Zayon, that he helped found a Hispanic business association in Dallas, was a car dealer and pawnshop owner. They met, according to Cavazos, in the late 1990s at a small-business convention in Dallas, and struck up a friendship based on Cavazos’ desire—never realized—to add cell phones to the mix of products he sold.

Coats, according to court filings by his attorney, Ivan Bates, was born in Jamaica, though he has lived in Baltimore since coming here as a youngster. Until his arrest, he’d believed he was a U.S. citizen, and has since applied to become one. He’s a political donor, having given $500 to Republican Michael Steele’s unsuccessful campaign to become a Maryland U.S. senator and another $800 to the Republican National Committee (“Armed Drug Dealer for Steele?” Mobtown Beat, June 17, 2009). He is the father of four; two, from a previous marriage, are now adults and live in Ohio, and two are children, living in Baltimore with Coats’ fiancee.

Cavazos described himself to the jury as a hard-working businessman who bootstrapped himself up from humble beginnings in Mexico. He came to the United States in 1975, became a legal U.S. resident in 1979, and in 1980, when he was 12 years old, moved with his family to Dallas from San Bernardino, Calif. He attended school “until my father pulled me out in 10th grade,” he said, since in his culture “the oldest child usually has to help the father with his siblings.” After years of working a variety of jobs—at a Denny’s Restaurant, at a pawnshop, in lawn-care, and as a security guard—he ended up as a pawnshop owner, and then started selling used cars bought at auctions and fixed up. The businesses flourished, and, as the years rolled by, he became a business leader in his community. He married in 1987, and has five children and three grandchildren.

So how did these two men, with longstanding success in running small businesses and no criminal records, end up accused of being cartel drug traffickers? It started on a Wednesday night, April 27, 2009, when the police watched “Truck” Brown meet a man in front of Milan restaurant and nightclub in Little Italy and slip a package of what they suspected was cash into the man’s car. They then watched the man drive to the nearby Baltimore Marriott Inner Harbor hotel, enter the hotel with luggage, and, about half an hour later, leave empty-handed. The man then went briefly to Mo’s Seafood House in Little Italy and on to a cell phone store on Duncan Street. He parked his car and entered the store.

At 1:35 a.m. on April 28, when the man exited the cell phone store, he was calmly and cordially interviewed by the police, who learned his name was Wade Coats. It was the beginning of the end for Coats and Cavazos, whose legitimacy quickly started to unravel.

Brian Shutt has clocked in on some serious cases since he first became a Baltimore cop in 2002. But this investigation, which he led as a task-force officer assigned to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Group 54 Major Drug Trafficker Initiative (HIDTA Group 54), is huge. Before the jury, his eyes often beamed and flashed beneath his short-cropped blond hair, belying the emotional and professional investment he has in convincing them that, despite its problems, this case is solid.

There were several moments during Shutt’s testimony that revealed his guilelessness about how the investigation progressed, warts and all. Embarrassing, yes, but he owned them—though he wasn’t going to play up the missteps as all that important, either. When they arose in the course of the trial, he addressed them, and looked at the jury as if to say, “I wish it wasn’t so, but it is what it is.”

The first misstep put him and his Group 54 colleagues in danger, though no one was harmed. It happened during the arrest of Wade Coats.

Their interaction with Coats on Duncan Street had resulted in a host of reasons to suspect that criminal activity was afoot. The detectives had observed Coats entering and leaving the hotel earlier, yet when Shutt interviewed him, Coats denied he’d been there. So Shutt called a K-9 unit to the scene, which alerted police to the odor of drugs in Coats’ rented car, giving the detectives the right to search the vehicle. They found no drugs, but they did find a scanner set to monitor Baltimore Police and DEA frequencies and two Maryland drivers’ licenses in Coats’ name—in addition to the one Coats had already shown Shutt when they first spoke.

While searching Coats’ car, Shutt told the jury, he started “watching Mr. Coats’ body language because it had changed. I saw him start blading himself”—“blading” being a “characteristic of an armed person,” in which they keep the side of the body where a gun is turned away from the police. That’s when Shutt realized “no one had patted down Mr. Coats.” Now there wasn’t going to be a pat-down.

“I reach right in, I feel the gun, and I scream, ‘Gun!’” Shutt testified. Coats was tackled, cuffed, and read his Miranda rights. He’d had a loaded .40-caliber handgun in his waistband the whole time. He also had $7,000 in cash on him, $5,000 of it stuffed in his sock.

“It was a bad move on my part,” Shutt told the jury, regarding his failure to pat Coats down. “I should have done it as soon as we suspected criminal activity was afoot, especially when the dog hit.” It was a “very, very scary” and “potentially very violent” situation, he said.

As for the scanner, Shutt testified that Coats said, “’I got it from K-Mart and it came with those frequencies,’” adding, “We kind of laugh at that, because that’s not true.”

Later, as Coats was being loaded onto the police transport to take him to lockup, Shutt told the jury, “He stops, turns around, and says, ‘There’s your side of the story, there’s my side of the story, and there’s the truth. We’ll see what the judge believes.’”

Shutt and his crew hightail it to the hotel, Coats’ three IDs in hand. When they get there, the hotel staff checks the registry and finds that Coats has rented Room 943. Shutt, his crew, and hotel security go up to the floor and walk down the hallway toward the room—a “fatal funnel,” Shutt explained, since “we don’t have any place to hide to shield ourselves from being shot.” His “senses are heightened” and he believes “we need to act swiftly and tactfully at this point,” but the hotel security staff balk at letting them in without a warrant. So they knock on the door, screaming “Police!” Cavazos answers it, and “could not have been” more cooperative and agreeable in what was a very tense situation.

Shutt’s second mistake was harmless, but telling. According to Cavazos, Shutt screamed “We got kilos! We got kilos!” after he’d found a bag of vacuum-packed, heat-sealed blocks wrapped in aluminum foil in Cavazos’ room. “He was jumping up and down,” Cavazos recalled on the stand, and “people next door were complaining about the noise.”

Shutt’s account was more muted. “I get very excited, because I think I just found kilos,” he told the jury.

But Shutt was wrong.

After reading Cavazos his Miranda rights, Shutt testified, “Mr. Cavazos informs me it’s not drugs, it’s money,” adding that Cavazos admitted to him that “he is just the money counter,” “that there are no drugs here yet,” and that “I count the money to make sure it’s right, and then the drugs come.” And there was a lot of money—all told, about three-quarters of a million dollars, found in the hotel room and in Cavazos’ minivan, parked in the hotel garage.

Cavazos, however, testified that all he told Shutt was, “That’s my money,” and nothing else.

Shutt’s third mistake, though, goes to his credibility. Shutt admitted under cross-examination that, in June 2009, he misled a federal grand jury about the case. Contrary to his trial testimony, he told the grand jury that neither Coats nor Cavazos made any statements after being read their Miranda rights. Confronted on this by Coats’ defense attorney, Ivan Bates, Shutt meekly contended that he “may have been confused by the question from the grand jury.”

The most acute vulnerability of the case against Coats and Cavazos was not Shutt’s conflicting testimony or his tactical errors. It was, instead, the case’s most hard-fought legal issue during the many months before it came to trial: former HIDTA Group 54 detective Mark Lunsford’s involvement in the investigation, and to what extent information about Lunsford’s crimes—in which he falsely credited information to a paid informant, with whom he would split the proceeds, and stole valuables from suspects—should be available for the jury’s consideration.

The question even led to the cancellation of a previously scheduled trial in the case, for which a jury was seated and then dismissed in October 2010. Ultimately, U.S. District Judge William Quarles, who presided over the trial, blocked defense attorneys’ efforts to have Lunsford take the stand before the jury. But, on the last day of testimony, the two sides agreed to stipulate for the jury that Lunsford was in prison after a conviction for theft and lying, that a watch belonging to Coats had been found in his possession, and that he had given clothing that belonged to Cavazos to a cooperating source in the FBI investigation that ultimately led to the September 2009 charges against him.

The defense team exploited the Lunsford factor as best it could. Since there were discrepancies in the investigative record about the amount of money recovered from Cavazos’ hotel room and minivan, there was room to create doubt about whether Lunsford had helped himself to some of it. Shutt had testified, after all, that Lunsford was left alone for hours in the hotel room and with the minivan. This meant that when Cavazos testified, and told the jury that all that money was not for cartel drugs, but was actually his winnings in an illegal Texas Hold ’em poker game that took place over a four-day period in Baltimore just prior to his arrest, he could boldly state that he’d been robbed by the police.

“They stole over $200,000,” Cavazos told the jury. “It was taken by the police. . . . They lied and they stole.”

Shutt shared his feelings about Lunsford’s crimes with the jury. After a long, thoughtful pause, he said: “I don’t lie, cheat, or steal, and I don’t tolerate anyone who does. It was a black mark on my police career because someone I worked with, without my knowledge, was committing criminal acts. It has taken a toll on me personally and professionally.”

After arresting Coats, Cavazos, and Brown, and conducting search warrants all over town in connection with their suspected drug-dealing scheme, Shutt knew there was more yet to find. The first order of business was to try to secure Brown’s cooperation. That was obtained immediately; given Brown’s serious criminal background, which would expose him to a severe sentence in this case, he was eager to help himself in any way he could in order to gain the possibility of leniency. But Brown’s help only went so far—he could say he had gone into business with Coats, selling about five to 10 kilograms of cocaine Coats had provided him in 2008 and 2009, but he didn’t know who Coats’ supplier was, and he’d never even heard of Cavazos. Based solely on the fact that Cavazos was a Hispanic male from Texas, Shutt suspected cartels in the picture, but he had nothing to prove it.

So Shutt started going through what he had so far. He had a flash drive from Coats’ briefcase that contained photos of two people Brown did know: associates of Coats, whom Brown called “Jimmy” and “B.” By following other clues—records of phone calls, text messages, financial dealings, airline flights, and the like—he established numerous links between Coats and Cavazos. But who were “Jimmy” and “B”?

Shutt told the jury that communications are drug dealers’ “weakest link,” and narcotics investigators such as himself are trained to exploit them. In Coats’ phone, he found something to exploit: phone calls and a text message from James Bostic, all right around the time Cavazos was staying at the Baltimore Inner Harbor Marriott. The text message read: “Home boy is alright. I’m about to head up.” Shutt’s interpretation of this, he explained to the jury, is that Bostic is letting Coats know that Cavazos has arrived at the hotel, and that Bostic is taking the elevator up to meet him.

The Bostic angle was tantalizing. Shutt was able to learn that Bostic owned a house in Dover, Pa., outside of York, two doors down from one owned by Coats and his fiancee, Shannon Best. He was able to determine that the man Brown called “Jimmy” was, in fact, Bostic. He knew Bostic was involved somehow, but he needed a break.

Shutt’s big break came in December 2009, when the FBI in Dallas called him shortly after they’d arrested a man in Texas with nine kilos of cocaine. This man, the FBI said, had immediately begun to cooperate, and had provided intelligence that James Bostic was Wade Coats’ partner. This man, of course, was Mendoza-Cano, and Bostic did not yet know Mendoza-Cano had been arrested. Neither did the Mexican cartel for whom he had been working. The investigation suddenly kicked into high gear to nab Bostic—and to establish with unexpected clarity that, despite its origins as a routine drug bust of a run-of-the-mill Baltimore drug dealer nicknamed “Truck,” this case was really about the far reach of ruthless Mexican cartels.

Like Coats and Cavazos, 34-year-old Mendoza-Cano did not look like a stereotypical drug dealer. Unlike the defendants, though, he didn’t look like a businessman, either. Instead, he looked like someone who could easily pass by unnoticed—a useful trait, given his chosen profession. A small man with dark hair, he wore a dark blue tunic and pants with a long-sleeved white T-shirt underneath. Over the course of his translator-interpreted testimony, his eager, matter-of-fact candor seemed not to match the shocking words coming out of his mouth. Despite the trouble he’s in—with U.S. law enforcers, with the cartel—he seemed not to have a care in the world. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself.

Mendoza-Cano said he was one of the Gulf cartel’s Houston-based distributors, orchestrating regular, large-scale shipments of Mexican drugs to points in the United States. Sometimes the drugs arrived from Mexico “in trailers,” he said; other times “in a car, between six and nine kilos in a car, five to 10 cars per day.” Thus, counting only the amounts brought in by cars, Mendoza-Cano’s outfit was receiving up to 3 tons of cocaine each month, not including whatever came in trailers. Marijuana, he explained, came in “refrigerator truck trailers, 2,000 pounds per truck.”

Once in Houston, the drugs were transferred to other large vehicles, which delivered them across the country. “My line,” Mendoza-Cano said, “was [from] Houston to the central region [of the United States] and east. There are other people who work the West.”

Every two weeks, Mendoza-Cano would leave Houston in a motor home or moving van packed with 150 to 200 kilos of cocaine, make deliveries in Arkansas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, then fill the vehicle with his customers’ cash on the return trip. Once back in Houston, he and the other route drivers would unload the cash for counting, re-packaging, and shipping to Mexico in tractor-trailers and cars—or sometimes jet skis and small boats crossing lakes along the border.

When Coats and Cavazos were arrested, the money Cavazos owed the cartel for 24 kilos of cocaine ended up in law enforcers’ hands. At $23,000 per kilo, Mendoza-Cano testified, Cavazos’ debt came to about $552,000, and someone needed to answer for it. James Bostic stepped up to the plate, offering to work it off by selling in Baltimore the cartel’s drugs that his now-incarcerated partners could no longer sell. Every two weeks during the second half of 2009, Mendoza-Cano delivered to Bostic 20 to 30 kilos of cocaine, or 600 to 700 pounds of marijuana, for distribution in Baltimore.

As Mendoza-Cano was dealing with Bostic, meanwhile, his cartel world was shaken. Los Zetas, which had previously operated as “the armed force” of the Gulf cartel, protecting its distribution routes, morphed into a cartel itself. Mendoza-Cano’s Gulf cartel boss, “Charlie,” met an untimely demise—“he was killed and he was cooked,” he testified—and was replaced by a Zetas called “Munchie,” who became Mendoza-Cano’s new boss. Then Mendoza-Cano was arrested.

When he was first charged, Mendoza-Cano said “the cartel provided me with” a lawyer, “but I refused that attorney, because any and everything I did would be provided as information to the cartel in Mexico. The reality was, I know too much. I was between a rock and a hard place. I’ve seen others go down and meet their end, and their families. In the type of work we did, it was either jail or death.” He took a Spanish-speaking public defender, who persuaded him to plead guilty and cooperate. First on the agenda? “I turned Jimmy in.”

Shutt and the FBI worked quickly. They wired a hotel room in White Marsh, and on Dec. 29, 2009—a mere 20 days after Mendoza-Cano’s arrest—played host to a pre-arranged meeting there between Bostic, a Zetas named Ismael Zamarro Villareal, and an American woman named Jessica, who had long served as Mendoza-Cano’s interpreter and aide-de-camp and now was his partner in cooperating with the government.

The resulting video was played for the jury, showing Bostic entering the room and bantering with Jessica as he opens a suitcase filled with approximately $590,000 in cash. The heat-sealing machine comes out, and the task of packaging the money for shipment—the same way Cavazos’ money was packaged when Shutt found it at the hotel—takes hours.

Later that night, Shutt watched as Villareal stashed the cash in a Ford Explorer parked outside. The next day, Jessica and Villareal left in the Explorer, which was pulled over on I-95 south of Baltimore. The money was seized, but Villareal was allowed to leave in order to protect Jessica’s cooperation.

Bostic, too, was not arrested after making this cartel payment. Instead, Shutt and the FBI set up another pre-arranged meeting, in a different wired hotel room in White Marsh, on Feb. 2, 2010. Jessica was there again, but this time the Zetas representative was not Villareal, but an undercover FBI agent. And this time, the purpose was not for Bostic to pay the cartel, but for the cartel to deliver drugs—actually 12 kilos of DEA cocaine, packaged in cartel fashion—to Bostic. The meeting didn’t last long. As a raid team moved in to arrest Bostic, he dropped a drug-laden suitcase and ran outside the hotel. After a short chase, Shutt tackled him into a snowbank.

The coup de grace in the investigation wasn’t aided by Mendoza-Cano. It was another stroke of luck for Shutt.

Earlier in the investigation, he’d figured out who the other guy was in the photo found on Coats’ flash drive, the guy Brown had called “B.” It was Brandon Isiah Barnes of Columbia, Md. Earlier, Shutt had been tracking phone communications between Bostic and Barnes, but with all the activity resulting from Mendoza-Cano’s cooperation, Barnes had gotten lost in the shuffle. Now that Bostic was arrested, Shutt checked his e-mails and noticed that the GPS coordinates of Barnes’ phone were still being sent to his inbox. They showed the phone was moving across the country, towards Midlothian, Texas, the Dallas suburb where Cavazos was from.

Shutt hustled out to Midlothian to look for Barnes, to no avail. So he kept watching the phone. Its GPS coordinates showed it traveling back to Baltimore. As Barnes drove up I-81 in Virginia, Shutt and his team eyeballed him when he passed them—they actually saw him at the wheel. When Barnes’ car entered Howard County in the wee hours of March 10, 2010, a Maryland State Police trooper who’d been alerted by Shutt clocked it speeding, pulled it over, and called for a K-9 scan. Lo and behold, about one and a half kilos of cartel coke was inside.

Barnes faces cocaine conspiracy charges in a separate federal case, scheduled for trial in August. Brown pleaded guilty, and his trial testimony established for the jury that Coats was his cocaine supplier; his sentencing hearing has not yet been scheduled. Bostic also pleaded guilty and received a 210-month prison sentence last year.

As for Mendoza-Cano, well, after his testimony ended he was whisked out of the courtroom, bound for parts unknown to help the government prosecute cartel cases elsewhere.

On Dec. 16, though, as the Coats-Cavazos case was gearing up for trial, a new drug-conspiracy indictment was filed against Mendoza-Cano, his Texas co-defendant, and two other men, in federal court in Ohio. The docket there indicates he didn’t show up for his arraignment in that case, scheduled for Feb. 10, eight days after he testified in Baltimore. Of Mendoza-Cano’s failure to appear, the Ohio court docket says this: “U.S. Marshal is unable to transport the defendant to Court as he is in Federal Custody in another District.”

It’s a safe bet the judge won’t hold it against him.

Future of Sonar in Doubt: Shuttered Club’s New Ownership May Involve Milton Tillman III

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, July 18, 2012

Even before Baltimore’s Sonar nightclub suddenly closed after its July 8 show (“Death of a Rock and Roll Club,” Noise, July 9, 2012), plans for its future had already been put in place, public records show.

On June 27, the Baltimore City Liquor License Board received an application to transfer Sonar’s liquor license to Eagle Entertainment LLC, which disclosed in its application papers that it had put up a $10,000 down payment on the $65,000 price tag for the license, with the balance due at closing. The payee, Daniel McIntosh, would be the majority owner of Sonar’s current license. Whether that transaction will actually take place is unclear, though, since the company’s attorney, Neal Janey, told City Paper on July 16 that the application will be withdrawn and a new one will be submitted instead, possibly involving a separate company.

The application’s resubmission would likely delay the potential reopening of the club, which was going to take time and significant investment in any event, given what online photographs of the club last show—damage to the club’s bathroom, at the very least, and a sign announcing a “liquidation sale” of its contents.

Eagle Entertainment’s June 27 liquor-board application lists Brian L. Winfield as the anticipated licensee. Winfield is described in the application as an 80-percent stockholder in the company, with the other 20 percent held by Milton Tillman III.

Tillman III is the son and business partner of Baltimore bail bondsman and real-estate investor Milton Tillman Jr., a three-time federal convict who is currently serving a 51-month prison term for tax-and-insurance fraud and owes $120,000 in restitution. Tillman III was charged in the same 2010 indictment as his father (“Milton Tillman and Son Indicted in Bailbonds Conspiracy,” The News Hole, March 17, 2010) , but the charges against him were dismissed last year as part of a deal in which he pleaded guilty to failing to file tax returns and received five yeas of probation and a $12,500 restitution order, which he still owes, according to court records.

In 2000, Tillman III survived a gunshot wound after a botched drug deal spawned a violent dispute that left two other men dead, according to court records of the successful federal prosecution of the drug organization involved in the incident. During 2002 court proceedings in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Luna stood up in court and called Tillman Jr. “one of the most notorious drug dealers in Baltimore City history,” adding that “there is no question that Mr. Tillman [III]’s father is a reputed drug dealer, a violent type of guy” (“Grave Accusations,” Mobtown Beat, April 23, 2008). Luna’s lifeless body was found face down in a Pennsylvania stream in 2003, a mysterious and controversial death that continues to haunt law enforcers.

Winfield, who has faced charges of petty theft and bouncing checks, has a history of business dealings with the Tillmans, including at Lucky’s Tavern at 1601 N. Milton Ave., a Tillman-owned property that has been in the Tillman family for years. In 2009, Winfield filed to take over Lucky’s liquor license (“Creative Licensing,” Mobtown Beat, April 9, 2008).

In the liquor-license transfer application for Sonar, Winfield says he worked in the mortgage business until 2009, when he went to work for the Baltimore City Department of Finance until Aug. 2010. Since 2006, according to the application, he’s also worked for Baltimore Winfield Showcase, which its website describes as a vending-machine and catering-equipment rental business.

Calls to Winfield and the attorney who filed the liquor-license application, Melvin Kodenski, were not returned. Tillman III, though, spoke briefly to CP on July 12, confirming that he’s “just a stakeholder” in Eagle Entertainment, and that “I’m not going on the license at all.” He then cut short the conversation, saying he wanted his lawyer, Neal Janey, to handle the interview. Later that day, Janey said that Tillman III “is not a 20-percent owner,” and that “the information in that application is incorrect.” Asked if Tillman III would have any involvement at all in the proposed club, Janey said “the only possible involvement would be as a contingent guarantor” on Eagle Entertainment’s debt.

On July 16, Janey informed CP that “the application will be withdrawn; a new application will be filed” that reflects that Tillman III “will have no interest in the business,” though he allowed that it is “still possible” that Tillman III will be a contingent guarantor. “It will probably even be a different LLC [than Eagle Entertainment] that will be involved in the transaction now.”

Under McIntosh, Sonar is alleged to have played a role in a massive, cross-country marijuana conspiracy, currently being prosecuted by the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office (“Feds Namedrop Baltimore’s Sonar Nightclub in New Pot-Conspiracy Indictment,” The News Hole, April 12, 2012). McIntosh is one of 16 people charged in the case, and, unlike most of his alleged co-conspirators, has not pleaded guilty; he is scheduled for trial in September. Baltimore developer Jeremy Landsman (“Smoked Out,” Mobtown Beat, February 29, 2012), a stakeholder in the LLC that owns Sonar’s building, pleaded guilty to his part in the conspiracy in June. In his plea, he admits that a number of his property-owning LLCs—including the one that owns the Hampden property where another McIntosh business, McCabe’s Tavern, is located—also played a role in the conspiracy.

Since shortly after Sonar closed July 8, McIntosh has been telling CP that he intends to post a prepared statement online to explain his ordeal with the club, including why it shut down, and that he would grant an interview about the situation once he had done so. As of press time, the statement had not been posted on Sonar’s website or Facebook page, and McIntosh has not responded to CP’s emails since July 13.

Weighty Issues: Garnett Smith Says Bringing a Ton of Cocaine to Baltimore Doesn’t Make Him a “Monster”

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Feb. 5, 2014

Assistant U.S. Attorney James Warwick had choice words for admitted drug trafficker Garnett Gilbert Smith on Jan. 30, when Smith appeared for sentencing before U.S. District Judge William Quarles. Warwick called Smith a “predator” who “perpetuated, encouraged,” and “fueled” Baltimore’s drug-driven violence by delivering to Baltimore’s streets “over a ton of cocaine” and “kilogram quantities of heroin” in 2010 and 2011.

But when Smith – a large, broad-shouldered 44-year-old who dropped out of school in eighth grade, the court was told, but later got a GED and two semesters of college under his belt – rose to speak on his own behalf, he said, “I am not the monster that I’m depicted to be.” Rather, Smith explained, “I wouldn’t hurt a soul,” adding that “you got to give good to get good” and “I’m on the path of righteousness.”

Smith ended his colloquy by saying, “I want to thank the prosecutor and the [Drug Enforcement Administration] agents” whose work was about to put him behind bars for decades.

Smith’s attorney, federal public defender Teresa Whalen, emphasized that Smith “has another side” to his character, referring to numerous letters written to the court on Smith’s behalf which describe him as “very generous” and “giving” in his “attempts to help other inner-city youth.” Whalen pointed out that Smith “was not just donating money, but was hands-on” in his support of community efforts to help those less fortunate.

Whalen also referred to the high regard in which Smith is held by Adrian Muldrow, who was the vice president of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP and the program manager of the Druid Heights Community Development Corporation when he wrote a letter to the court saying he’s known Smith “all my life,” and that Smith, who is “very giving to various causes,” has worked “to genuinely help people, including me when I was incarcerated.”

Echoing the glowing review of Smith’s other side was Antonio Hendrickson, an ex-convict who started a prison program called Lead by Example and Reverse the Trend, which seeks to reform inmates. Hendrickson, testifying as a character witness for Smith during the hearing before Quarles, claimed the program has “brought down the violence” at the Chesapeake Detention Facility (CDF), where Smith has been held for 17 months since his arrest. He said that Smith helped him build up the program, which he credited with rehabilitating 400 inmates.

Smith “did do good things in that institution,” said Hendrickson, who in 2012 pleaded guilty in a federal heroin-trafficking conspiracy that included famed Baltimore gangster Walter Ingram, and who last fall was sentenced to time served since his 2010 arrest.

Warwick, though, cast a different light on Smith’s time at the CDF, saying he received $3,500 in money orders while in jail and that he “paid for thousands of dollars of consumer items which were delivered to the jail,” where he would “pay correctional officers to deliver lavish meals to him.” Warwick added that Smith “has engaged in significant harassment of former girlfriends” while in detention, and that his generosity in supporting community causes amounts to “a pittance compared to the money he made selling drugs.”

Warwick’s sentencing letter to Quarles adds that Smith, despite being under court order not to “transfer or diminish his assets,” “can be heard in numerous recorded jail calls encouraging third parties to help him hide and liquidate assets not already seized by law enforcement.”

The Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office went to unusual lengths to alert the media to Smith’s sentencing, emailing to reporters copies of Warwick’s sentencing letter – a court document that typically is only publicly accessible at the courthouse computer terminals – and a Powerpoint presentation about Smith’s drug-derived assets. The presentation included photographs of $4,800-per-month condominiums Smith rented in McLean, Va., and Beverly Hills, Calif.; $1.6 million in jewelry seized from Smith’s Studio City, Calif., condominium and home in Gambrills, Md.; and vehicles he bought worth more than $1.1 million, including a $262,300 Lamborghini Murciélago and a $165,000 Aston Martin.

Smith’s seized jewelry and vehicles now belong to the government, pursuant to his guilty-plea agreement, along with more than $2.4 million in cash, the contents of four bank accounts, and his interest in two companies, described in court documents as “ASA Enterprises LLC” and a real-estate investment trust called “Tryad Group LLC (Ridge Goodman LLC).” Also in government hands are three pieces of real estate: a parcel in Durham, N.C.; a residential property in Georgia, south of Atlanta; and a condominium at 414 Water St. in downtown Baltimore.

(Federal authorities are currently seeking to take ownership of another 414 Water St. condominium owned by Paul Eugene Sessomes, who’s been indicted in New York for drug-money laundering involving Colombian heroin traffickers. Yet another condo there, meanwhile, is co-owned by former criminal defense attorney Robert Simels, who’s currently serving a 14-year prison sentence for witness intimidation, and Rosalie Jackson, the mother of Kenneth Antonio “Bird” Jackson, a longshoreman with a drug-world past who heads Four One Four LLC, which owns the strip club at 414 E. Baltimore St. on the nearby Block.)

The method they used-secreting cocaine and cash in hidden compartments in vehicles transported to and from Maryland and California by a truck car-carrier-mirror those in a separate case in which investigators allege George Sylvester Frink Jr. and Gerald Lamont Jones, the owner of Pimlico Motors and the Gold’s Gym in Owings Mills, moved between 2,050 and 2,990 kilograms of cocaine from California to Maryland between 2008 to late 2010.

Frink was charged last fall as a result of that investigation, while Jones has not been publicly charged-though prosecutors filed a lawsuit in December, seeking to let the government take ownership of 10 pieces of Jones’ real estate in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Florida, claiming they are assets tied to drug trafficking or money laundering. Jones’ attorney in the forfeiture case, Kobie Flowers, declined to comment.

In addition to the two cases involving Smith and Frink, federal law enforcers took down several other high-volume cocaine-trafficking organizations that operated in the same time frame.

A cocaine conspiracy allegedly tied to Jones, and involving his fraternity brother Charles Dwight Ransom Jr., shipped 400 kilograms of cocaine to Baltimore from California in late 2010, when it was brought to an abrupt end with a California indictment. In early 2011, a conspiracy involving Richard Anthony “Richie Rich” Wilford was stopped with the seizure of 150 kilograms of cocaine brought to Baltimore from California. In the second half of 2009, meanwhile, a case with direct links to Mexican cartels-the men prosecuted in Baltimore included Wade Coats and Jose Cavazos-involved the delivery of between 240 and 360 kilograms of cocaine to Baltimore.

The sum totals of cocaine involved in these five cases are astounding: Between 2008 and late 2011, according to court documents, they accounted for between 3,920 to 5,340 kilograms of cocaine-the equivalent of between 110 to 150 kilograms per month. And that’s just the flow that was stemmed by law enforcers.

Still, the end of these operations must have had a significant impact on the availability of cocaine in Baltimore-and court documents indicate that in early 2012, a shortage was indeed in full effect. In January 2012, Edward Neal Ellis – who would soon, along with his co-conspirators, be charged for the attempted armed robbery of what he thought was a drug trafficker in what was actually a sting operation set up by law enforcers – explained to a cooperator involved in the sting “that cocaine was increasingly scarce in Baltimore City and, as a result, the opportunity to steal a bulk quantity of cocaine would be particularly lucrative.”

Smith’s piece of the cocaine-trafficking action leading up to this shortage was significant, with Warwick describing him in the sentencing letter as “one of the largest cocaine and heroin dealers to be prosecuted in Baltimore in recent history.” Smith put more than a ton of cocaine “in the hands of drug dealers and addicts in this city – and all of this occurred during a period of less than two years. Smith’s activities made him wealthy and arrogant, enabling him to support a lifestyle of luxury and excess.”

Quarles sentenced Smith to 25 years in prison, saying “he’s not a monster” but “an amalgam of good and bad.”

Shut Your Pie Hole: Mouthy Judge Faces Rare Suspension

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Sept. 12, 2007

Baltimore County District Court Judge Bruce Lamdin is known for telling it like it is (“Bench Talk,” Mobtown Beat, April 18), but the rhetorical boundaries he crossed on the bench may end up unseating him for a spell. On Aug. 28, 10 members of the Maryland Commission on Judicial Disabilities (CJD), which is responsible for holding judges accountable for their conduct, unanimously ruled that Lamdin’s pattern of making inappropriate comments from the bench were “actionable conduct” for a judge. The CJD’s order recommended to the Maryland Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, that Lamdin be suspended for 30 work days without pay and that his courtroom behavior be monitored regularly by CJD staff.

If the Court of Appeals accepts the commission’s recommendation, Lamdin, who was appointed in 2002 by then-Gov. Parris Glendening, will become the first Maryland judge to be suspended without pay as a result of the 41-year-old commission’s work since 1996. That’s the year the CJD was reconstituted after public outcry over its toothless leniency in disciplining judges who made outrageous comments about crimes against women. Since then, its public cases normally have resulted in reprimands. In some instances, judges have resigned rather than face the commission’s charges in public hearings.

Lamdin’s case looked like it was headed to a reprimand, too, but was ratcheted up to a recommendation for suspension after the June 18 hearing on the matter before the commission. The CJD’s counsel, Peter Keith, and Lamdin’s attorney, Alvin Franklin, had mutually agreed to a public reprimand, the written decision explains, but the commission felt that wasn’t sufficient. “The imposition of a public reprimand,” the commissioners wrote, “is not commensurate with the serious pattern of misconduct in office committed by Judge Lamdin and does not not reassure the public that Judge Lamdin will be deterred from making similar comments in the future.”

Now that the CJD has sent it recommendation to the Court of Appeals, Lamdin’s legal options are spelled out in the Maryland Rules of Procedure. He has 30 days from the date he received the commission’s order to file “exceptions” to it with the high court, and, if he does so, the commissioners have another 15 days to respond to them. Then a hearing is scheduled, after which the Court of Appeals may do one of three things: impose sanctions (either those recommended by the CJD, or any others permitted by law), dismiss the case, or send it back for more proceedings. If Lamdin chooses not to file exceptions, then the Court of Appeals may reach its decision without a hearing.

Lamdin stipulated to the commissioners that his courtroom speech in 14 cases before him violated the state’s Canons of Judicial Conduct, and the commissioners found his comments to be “undignified, discourteous, and disparaging.” His offensive speech included comments about children, the Baltimore City judiciary, the Maryland correctional system, the state of Pennsylvania, the Baltimore County Circuit Court and its judges, and drug treatment. “Do you think I just came in on the watermelon truck today?” he asked one defendant. To another, he declared that “if there is a pile of shit there you’ll step in it,” according to the CJD’s findings of fact in the case.

Lamdin failed to impress the commissioners during the June 18 hearing, according to the written order. “During his sworn testimony at the Hearing,” the order reads, “Judge Lamdin admitted that his stipulated comments were ‘wrong,’ but never indicated any appreciation of exactly what was ‘wrong’ about those comments. … Judge Lamdin expressed no remorse for his comments; instead, he attempted to justify his comments through explanations and excuses. In response to questions from members of the Commission, Judge Lamdin was generally defensive, sometimes evasive, and, on at least one occasion, arrogant and hostile.”

The hearing was lively, if transcripts set down in the order are any indication. Lamdin grew combative with commissioner Paul Shelton, for example, who had asked Lamdin whether he would still tell “a person that appeared before you that the Circuit Court judges are spending the afternoon drinking cocktails?” Though Lamdin was stipulating that his from-the-bench comments broke rules of judicial behavior, he sometimes tried to defend them. For instance, when he had asked a lawyer whether his client’s head was “out of where he had it inserted earlier today,” Lamdin told the commissioners, “I think the comment fit the situation quite frankly at the time.”

Lamdin told the commissioners that, in some instances when his speech turned offensive, he was attempting humor. Such was the case, he explained, when he had described himself to a defendant as “a merciless SOB” – a comment he told the commissioners had been taken “out of context” in CJD’s charges. Another attempt at humor, which he admitted was “a mistake,” was when he said this in open court: “I get in trouble because I told some lady we confiscate cell phones and we put the cell phones in plastic bags and send them down to Annapolis. I suggested maybe we ought to do the same thing with children except poke holes in the bag.” In regard to this, the commissioners wrote that Lamdin “never expressed remorse, nor did he acknowledge that his disparaging comments about children in [that instance] might lead the public to believe that he was biased or prejudiced against children.”

The general excuse Lamdin offered regarding his offensive speech was that he was trying to communicate to defendants in “terms [they] could understand.” When the commissioner’s chairman, Court of Special Appeals Judge Patrick L. Woodward, asked what Lamdin was doing now that was different from before the charges arose, Lamdin said he was taking defendants back to his chambers to talk because “I can find out where their true desire is and whether they really want treatment or help, of if they’re a lost cause. And if they’re a lost cause there’s not much time to be wasted on talking to them.” The commissioners wrote about this answer: “Did he intend to continue using profanity, vulgarity, and name-calling, only now ‘back in chambers,’ or did he simply want a setting more conducive to finding out whether he could help a particular defendant? The commission truly hopes that it is the latter. Nevertheless, Judge Lamdin’s answer is disturbing to the Commission.”

Reached by phone at his court office in Towson on Sept. 7, Lamdin was characteristically feisty: “Why would you think I would want to talk to you?” he asked. When told a reporter must attempt to contact the subject of a story, he added, “I have nothing to say.” Asked whether he intended to file exceptions to the CJD’s order, Lamdin referred questions to his attorney, Alvin Frederick. As of press time, Frederick had not returned messages. Keith and staff at the CJD declined to comment on the case.

The CJD’s business is done largely in private, and only enters the public domain when the matter rises to a level of severity that calls for a hearing by the commission. Approximately 53 cases taken by the commission since 1996 resulted in measures that fell short of the public-hearing threshold, such as warning letters, private reprimands, or probationary terms. Eleven cases involved public outcomes – a dismissal, nine reprimands, ad a recommendation for removal from the bench.

Nationwide in 2006, only 18 judges were suspended without pay, according to Cynthia Gray, who tracks such things as director of the Center for Judicial Ethics of the American Judicature Society.

Lamdin has backers, including attorney David Irwin, who says he wrote a character letter to the commission to defend the judge. Irwin has in the past served as co-counsel with Lamdin before Lamdin became a judge. “I’ve just known and admired Judge Lamdin for a long time, and I hope it’s not over for him,” Irwin says, adding that “he’s a really good judge, and it saddens me” to hear of the recommended suspension.