Corrupt to the Core: The Black Guerrilla Family Scandal Shines Spotlight on the Prison System’s Culture of Corruption

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, May 1, 2013

The litany of evidence the feds have on Baltimore inmate Tavon White and his Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) prison gang describes a conspiracy of sex, drugs, money, and fancy cars involving a harem of correctional officers (COs) at a jail that White, dubbed a “Bushman” in the BGF hierarchy, believed he ruled. On April 29, White and CO Tiffany Linder pleaded not guilty, with arraignments of the 23 other co-defendants expected in the days and weeks to come.

Not surprisingly, with so many buttons pushed, the media firestorm over subsequent days tossed this narrative into national discussion, where it joined one that was already there: Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley’s potential presidential ambitions.

Prison-corruption stories have been a pretty regular feature of Maryland’s media mill, yet bureaucratic reaction to this one was swift. The national spotlight will do that.

By Friday, three days after allegations of White’s fabulous inmate lifestyle were exposed by the April 23 unsealing of the indictment and search-warrant affidavit in the BGF case, Gary Maynard, secretary of Maryland’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS), moved his office to the Baltimore City Detention Center (BCDC). He started a top-to-bottom integrity review of his staff, including lie-detector tests, as the Maryland General Assembly pounced, announcing a May 8 hearing and promising to set up a commission on correctional issues.

As the story settled in, with flames being fanned under the O’Malley angle, coverage shifted as the media spotlight panned for context. It was quickly found: White’s story is a virtual repeat of another series of BGF indictments, in 2009 and 2010, involving corruption among COs. What’s more, stories about gang-tied COs facilitating inmate crimes had been a consistent part of the Baltimore media landscape since then, including coverage that unearthed prison-agency documentation of gang-tied COs dating back to 2006. This background only made White’s story more embarrassing for those in charge, since it suggested the long-festering, well-documented problem of CO corruption wasn’t being solved by Maynard and O’Malley.

“I can’t believe that Maynard ignored this,” says a law-enforcement source familiar with the prior federal BGF investigation that ensnared COs. “The people in charge did nothing to change it,” says the veteran agent, who agreed to discuss the case in exchange for anonymity.

Maynard, however, claims some credit for White’s indictment. Though he admitted the situation was “on me” and said he didn’t “make any excuses” at the press conference when the indictment was announced, a few days later Maynard tweaked his tune, saying to the Daily Beast that “we asked for this investigation because we knew this was an issue” and that the feds “bring some power to the investigation, but once that investigation becomes public, people are going to look at it and say, ‘What is going on here?'”

So Maynard had every expectation that DPSCS would look bad, and that’s just part of fixing the problem – a new dynamic for Maynard, who’s accustomed to getting credit and praise as federal prosecutors continued to target CO corruption in recent years.

“I want to commend” Maynard “for his commitment to rooting out crime in his facilities,” Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein said at the April 2009 press conference announcing the first round of BGF indictments. A month later, Rosenstein, reporting progress in the case of a CO who helped run an extortion scheme involving contraband cellphones, was again lavish in his praise. “I am grateful to [DPSCS] for combatting contraband cellphones that allow jailed gang members to endanger public safety,” Rosenstein said in a statement, adding that “our ability to prosecute important cases has been enhanced” thanks to “Maynard making it a priority to increase the department’s intelligence capabilities.”

In July 2010, when another CO was indicted in the mushrooming BGF prosecution, bringing to light more details of the depth and breadth of corruption, Maynard promoted the idea that it was evidence of the department’s years-long track record of tackling the problem.

“Today’s indictment shows that developing our intelligence capabilities has become a top priority in the last three years,” he said in the 2010 statement, adding that while “our unprecedented cooperation and intelligence sharing with our local and federal partners has enabled us to root out illegal activities of a few bad apples, 99 percent of our correctional officers and custody staff continue to work hard, maintaining the high levels of integrity and honor standard among our employees.” Maynard also used the occasion to stress that it serves “notice to those employees who would break the law that you will be caught.”

Now it’s nearly three years later, with plenty of intervening news about COs getting caught for corruption, and 13 more are charged for conspiring with the BGF. So does Maynard deserve credit or scorn for the proliferation of corruption cases involving his department? Answers will emerge supporting each contention as this story continues to unfold, pulling public perception this way and that while Maynard’s overseers – O’Malley and the Maryland legislature – try to assess and shape repercussions as facts both newly alleged and already proven continue to inform the debate.

Many proven facts emerged in the 2009/2010 federal cases, showing how DPSCS personnel helped the BGF deal drugs, launder money, engage in extortion, and smuggle contraband into prisons – virtually the same conduct as this month’s indictment. Others come from court records showing that DPSCS, back in 2006 and 2007, had the names of 16 BCDC COs believed to be tied to gangs, and that some helped facilitate prison violence, yet the lieutenant who’d developed the intelligence was ordered to stop writing such reports. These facts emerged in a settled lawsuit brought against one of White’s co-defendants, Antonia Allison, and the fact that she stayed on as CO for seven more years is a measure of the problem’s stubborn fortitude.

More cases emerged – including the one involving Lynae Chapman, a CO who smuggled phones into prison to a BGF member accused of murder who was the father of her unborn child. Yet, despite the mounting evidence that DPSCS had an integrity problem, in 2010 the Maryland General Assembly passed a law giving COs a “Correctional Officer Bill of Rights” (COBR) to invoke when they are accused of wrongdoing. The FBI, in the affidavit against White, invokes the COBR as a factor that worked in favor of White’s “takeover” of BCDC.

The latest BGF charges add 13 more COs to the 15 already charged in another Maryland case being investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. While corruption in the White case surrounds the prison system’s black-market economy, the civil rights case has targeted a “culture” of illegal beatings and subsequent cover-ups in Maryland corrections, in which COs and their supervisors allegedly conspired to undermine efforts to prosecute the assaults. This adds to what the law-enforcement source familiar with the 2009-2010 BGF investigation calls a “culture of corruption” among COs that has been obvious in jails and prisons for years. The DPSCS became “so immune to it that they didn’t do anything about it” until now, when it’s suddenly become an urgent public-corruption emergency.

With court documents citing “the power that White and the BGF are granted by staff at all levels” as an “important cause” of the conspiracy and revealing details about a lieutenant who promised White’s heir-apparent as BGF’s ruler at BCDC that he would have the same arrangement that White had-free-flowing contraband in exchange for BGF’s efforts to keep prison violence down-Maynard’s top-down review seems likely to explode the careers of more than the 13 defendants charged.

“The investigation is ugly,” Maynard told the Daily Beast, adding, “it is not the end though-it is the beginning. It is where I start to take action.”

If so, then Tavon White’s emergence as a notorious public figure may have prompted what all that came before it couldn’t: a demonstrable, from-the-top effort to address the widely known and long-documented problem of corruption at Maryland’s prisons.

All in the Family: An annotated roster of defendants in the Black Guerrilla Family indictment, alleged crimes, and notable quotes

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, June 4, 2013

The April 23 unsealing of a federal indictment of 25 people, including 13 Maryland correctional officers (COs), alleged to have participated in a racketeering conspiracy centered around the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) prison gang, was as much a renewed impeachment of the integrity of Maryland’s prison system, which has been repeatedly exposed for serious corruption problems, as it was of the defendants’ alleged conduct. Nonetheless, it is the defendants who are on the dock, not the bureaucracy.

Here’s a run-down of who they are and what they’re alleged to have done, based on court records, other public documents, and information from the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office (MD-USAO). The co-defendants are listed in the same order in which their names appear in the indictment, and the ages given are those provided by the MD-USAO – which today, after City Paper raised questions about the accuracy of ages given for some co-defendants, said it had inaccurately reported the ages of two of the defendants, as clarified below.

(Note: All “notable quotes” are republished exactly as transcribed in the affidavit)

Tavon White, aka “Bulldog” and “Tay,” 36-year-old inmate, of Baltimore

As the BGF’s leader at the Baltimore City Detention Center (BCDC), who held the title of “Bushman” within the larger BGF hierarchy in Maryland and nationwide, White allegedly became the de facto ruler of everything that happened there. Since he first arrived as an inmate in 2009, he is said to have fathered at least five children by at least four different COs who aided the conspiracy. His cousin and co-defendant, Tyesha Mayo, is accused of having helped supply drugs and launder money for the BGF, and his half-brother and co-defendant, Ralph Timmons, Jr., who allegedly helped set up smuggling operations and financial transactions for the BGF, was killed in a robbery hours before the grand jury handed down the sealed indictment on Apr. 2. In the FBI-led investigation, calls on two of White’s phones – “Target Telephone 6” and “Target Telephone 11” – were intercepted. Among the trove of information the wiretap turned up about White was that he made so much money while running the prison – approximately $16,000, in a slow month – that he shoveled proceeds into buying luxury cars for his harem of COs to use.

Notable quote: “Like, I am the law. My word is law. So if I told any mother-fucking body they had to do this, hit a police, do this, kill a mother-fucker, anything, it got to get done. Period.”

Antonia Allison, 27-year-old correctional officer, of Baltimore

Allison is accused of working with another co-defendant CO, Katera Stevenson, to smuggle prescription pills and marijuana for Tavon White. Her West Baltimore residence at 3047 Arunah Ave. was raided just before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.City Paper in 2009 and 2010 dedicated much coverage to a federal lawsuit filed against Allison by an inmate who accused her of facilitating a brutal, gang-related attack on him, because the case exposed documentation of unaddressed gang-related corruption among COs. The following articles reported developments in the case against Allison, which ended up in 2010 with a settlement agreed to by plaintiff Tashma McFadden: “Ganging Up,” Mobtown Beat, Oct. 21, 2009; “A Big No-No,” Mobtown Beat, Nov. 4, 2009; “Inside Job,” Feature, May 12, 2010; and “The Big Hurt,” Mobtown Beat, Aug. 4, 2010.

Notable quote: “Alright, well do those first, pills [presciption pills] and the strips [Suboxone strips], they the easiest, get them out the way. You know they gonna sell fast.”

Jamar Anderson, aka “Hammer” and “Hamma Head,” 23-year-old inmate (MD-USAO inaccurately reported he was 26), of Baltimore

Anderson’s girlfriend, co-defendant Teshawn Pinder, allegedly conspired with CO Jasmin Jones, another co-defendant, to smuggle pot into prison on Anderson’s behalf. Anderson also allegedly conspired with CO Jasmine Thornton – a paramour, according to a wiretapped conversation between White and CO Jennifer Owens, another co-defendant, in which Anderson is reported to have said, “we did it eight times last night” – to smuggle cellphones and launder money. Anderson was forewarned of impending prison-cell searches when White relayed a message about them he received from CO Tiffany Linder, another co-defendant.Anderson was recently convicted of murder in the double-shooting that killed 17-year-old John Person in 2008. According to City Paper‘s Murder Ink column, “at about 4 P.M. on Aug. 6, 2008, a woman saw Anderson, who was 18 at the time, committing a burglary in her apartment complex in the 2900 block of Garrison Boulevard and called the police. Anderson said he would come back and kill the woman for what she had done. Around midnight, Anderson came back and shot at her, firing 10 rounds from a semi-automatic gun. He missed the woman but hit her cousin, Person, in the back. Person died on Aug. 17, 2008.”

Ebonee Braswell, 26-year-old correctional officer, of Baltimore

An alleged smuggler, including of prescription pills, Braswell’s phone – “Target Telephone 8” – was tapped, and she was heard telling an unknown male that pills are worth much more in jail than they are on the streets. In November, she allegedly obtained an ounce of pot with the help of co-defendant CO Kimberly Dennis.

Notable quote: “Like, say, even if I buy 15’s [prescription pills] up here for $10, right? I could sell them in there for $25. You know what I’m saying? So you still make a $15 off of it. See, they would sell faster if I leave them in there with a nigger. But I don’t trust them niggers, so I take them in there every day myself. Get the money myself. You feel me? So that’s how I do it.”

Chania Brooks, 27-year-old correctional officer, of Baltimore

On Jan. 1, Brooks and White allegedly discussed how co-defendant Steven Loney had been attacked by another BGF member that day; Brooks witnessed the attack, but left her post to consult with White about what to do about it. She is one of 14 COs listed on prison-wall graffiti as willing to have oral sex for $150, and is one of at least four COs who has had sex and become pregnant by White. An alleged pill-smuggler, in Dec. 2012 Brooks filed assault charges in state court against CO Katera Stevenson, another co-defendant in the BGF case who White impregnated. Brooks’ Cockeysville residence, at 511 Lake Vista Circle, was raided shortly before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Notable quote: In a conversation with co-defendant CO Tiffany Linder about the baby Linder was having with Tavon White, Brooks said: “I don’t give a fuck about that baby. That’s y’all baby, not mine. We having one too. So what?”

Kimberly Dennis, 26-year-old correctional officer, of Baltimore

Dennis’ “Target Telephone 1” was tapped during the investigation, and in October 2012 she allegedly told co-defendant inmate Derious Duncan, with whom she coordinated smuggling runs, that she intended to make $2,000 that week from moving contraband into prison. Also in October, she allegedly called another CO to learn whether an internal investigator was at the prison entrance, so that she could avoid him. And in December, she allegedly explained to an unknown male that an inmate was stabbed by the BGF because the inmate was smuggling without paying the required 10-percent tax the BGF charges. Dennis also allegedly smuggled with inmate co-defendant Joseph Young. Her Gwynn Oak residence at 2231 Wheatley Dr. was raided shortly before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Notable quote: On Dec. 3, 2012, the day the inmate was stabbed for not paying the smuggling tax to the BGF, Dennis said to an unknown male: “Yeah, them niggas banged him. It was like six of them. Because when he first got over there he was catching or whatever. It was a, umm, issue ‘cause you know, like, whoever catch, you gotta pay a bill.”

Derius Duncan, 23-year-old inmate (MD-USAO inaccurately reported he was 26), of Baltimore

Duncan, who allegedly coordinated smuggling runs with co-defendant CO Kimberly Dennis, had cellphones and drugs stolen from him by other inmates, and, in retribution, White ordered the punishment of the suspected thieves. A BGF “floor boss,” co-defendant inmate Joseph Young, was directed by White to mete out the punishment, and in October, White ordered the beating of inmate David Warren, aka “Meshawn.” Co-defendant CO Jasmin Jones in November allegedly “stood guard outside a closet” so that Duncan and Dennis could have sex, according to court documents. Last summer, Duncan was charged in state court with murder, conspiracy, witness intimidation, and obstruction of justice, along with three other men – Keyon Beads, Clifford Butler, Jr., and David Johnson – after they allegedly attempted to bribe, and later killed, 55-year-old Ronald Givens, a potential state witness in a guns-and-drugs case against Duncan.

Jasmin Jones, aka “J.J.,” 24-year-old correctional officer, of Baltimore

Jones allegedly helped co-defendant inmate Jamar Anderson launder BGF proceeds by putting $500 onto a Money Pak card “that is used to load money onto Green Dot Visa cards.” She also allegedly picked up pot from Anderson’s girlfriend, Teshawn Pinder, to smuggle into prison for Anderson. Her West Baltimore residence, 401 Nottingham Rd., was raided shortly before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Taryn Kirkland, 23-year-old correctional officer, of Baltimore

One of 14 COs listed on prison-wall graffiti as willing to have oral sex for $150, Kirkland allegedly coordinated with co-defendant CO Katrina LaPrade to smuggle pot for co-defendant inmate Steven Loney, and coordinated with co-defendant Jennifer Owens to smuggle contraband for Tavon White. Her Woodlawn residence at 5 Greenbury Ct. was raided shortly before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Notable quote: “So them dogs ain’t shit,” she tells co-defendant inmate Steven Loney after co-defendant CO Katrina LaPrade manages to walk a lot of pot past the jail’s drug-sniffing dogs.

Katrina LaPrade, aka “Katrina Lyons,” 31-year-old correctional officer, of Baltimore

Allegedly by coordinating with co-defendant Taryn Kirkland, LaPrade managed to smuggle pot past the jail’s drug-sniffing dogs and get it to Steven Loney. Her residence near the West Coldspring Metro Station, 2821 Ridgewood Ave., was raided shortly before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Tiffany Linder, 27-year-old correctional officer, of Baltimore

In January, Linder allegedly did something of great service to Tavon White and his BGF comrades: she tipped him to a planned shakedown at the jail, during which cells would be searched for contraband and other signs of criminal activity. An alleged contraband smuggler, she is one of at least four co-defendant COs who had sex with and became pregnant by White. Her Severn residence, 1858 Eagle Court, was raided shortly before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Notable quote: “I just want to know what it is between us,” Linder told White, “and what are you going to do about the baby ‘cause I’m definitely keeping him. I don’t have time for games.”

Steven Loney, aka “Stevie,” 24-year-old inmate, of Baltimore

An allegedly active distributor of prison contraband, Loney relied on co-defendant CO Taryn Kirkland to manage and record Green Dot transactions involving Loney’s drug customers. On Jan. 1, Loney was attacked by another BGF member, and co-defendant CO Chania Brooks, who witnessed the incident, left her post to consult with Tavon White about what should be done about it. Loney’s phone, “Target Telephone 10,” was tapped from Jan. 10 to Jan. 30.

Notable quote: Loney tells Kirkland that co-defendant CO Katrina LaPrade is getting nervous because of all the smuggling LaPrade been doing, saying, “Man now she talking about too many people coming to her, she about to chill that’s why she changed her number. Folks keep calling her from all these different numbers. She don’t want to make her hot.”

Vivian Matthews, 25-year-old correctional officer, of Essex

Matthews declined requests to smuggle drugs for the BGF, but she did procure them – Xanax and Percocet pills, which she gave to others to arrange delivery into prison. She is one of 14 COs listed on prison-wall graffiti as willing to have oral sex for $150. A Gardenville residence associated with her, 4522 Hamilton Ave., was raided just before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Notable quote: Describing to Tavon White the drugs she has available, she says, “Man I just told you what I got. I got one hundred Xanax’s, ninety of them white and then the ten of them. They orange. They the footballs. No, all of them footballs. And I got twelve Percocets.”

Tyesha Mayo, 29-year-old outside supplier, of Baltimore

Tavon White’s cousin, Mayo allegedly helped him launder money with Green Dot pre-paid debit cards and she allegedly delivered pot to co-defendent Katera Stevenson to take to White. Her West Baltimore residence, at 1021 Pennsylvania Ave., was raided just before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Jermaine McFadden, aka “Maine,” 24-year-old inmate, of BaltimoreCo-defendant CO Katera Stevenson allegedly smuggled cellphones and drugs into prison for McFadden, who currently is facing drug charges in state court and was recently convicted for possessing contraband in a place of confinement.

Notable quote: “You say you going to bring that grass and shit today right?” he asks Stevenson, describing pot and other contraband. When Stevenson says yes, he gives her the details of the smuggling run: “Aight I am a have that nigga on the out for you. Not the one with the glasses but the other that work in the same kitchen.”

Jennifer Owens, aka “O” and “J.O.,” 31-year-old correctional officer, of Randallstown

Owens allegedly has two children fathered by co-defendant inmate Tavon White, has a “Tavon” tattoo on her neck, and is one of 14 COs listed on prison-wall graffiti as willing to have oral sex for $150. Her phone, “Target Cellphone 3,” was tapped from Oct. 12 to Dec. 8, 2012, and her Randallstown residence, at 3926 Noyes Circle, was raided shortly before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Notable Quote: “I understand you stressed out, cuz you locked up, ok, but I am too. You locked up, and I’m fucking pregnant again. Like really, who the fuck does that? Only my dumb ass do shit like that, for real. I can accept that I fucked up. I know I did, but I did that shit cuz I wanted to. I don’t regret it.”

Kenneth Parham, 23-year-old inmate, of Baltimore

Parham allegedly helped with the smuggling into prison of pot, prescription pills, and SIM cards for cellphones. He currently faces gun-and-drugs charges in state court, where he has a lengthy record of criminal convictions.

Teshawn Pinder, 24-year-old outside supplier, of Baltimore

Jamar Anderson’s girlfriend, who coordinated smuggling on Anderson’s behalf with co-defendant CO Jasmin Jones, Pinder faced pot-possession charges that were tabled by state prosecutors in early April. Her West Baltimore residence, at 2512 Edgecomb Circle North, was raided just before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Adrena Rice, 25-year-old correctional officer, of Baltimore

Rice’s alleged dealings with Tavon White, which included smuggling marijuana to him in BCDC, were complicated – White believed she stole an ounce off a package he received. Her Randallstown residence, 9 Mainview Ct., was raided just before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Notable Quote: “When I came back in the jail, I’m like, shit, I’m not going to stop making my money. You feel me? I seen what the fuck was going on, asked a few people, what was up and who was who, and what was what. I am just about my money. You hear me? I got to get it.”

Katera Stevenson, aka “KK,” 24-year-old correctional officer, of Baltimore

Stevenson, whose “Target Telephone 7” was tapped from Dec. 11, 2012, to Jan. 9, 2013, has “Tavon” tattooed on her wrist, in honor of the father of her child, co-defendant inmate Tavon White, for whom she allegedly smuggled prescription pills and pot into prison. She is accused of smuggling for co-defendant inmate Jermaine McFadden, who she told she would smuggle every day. She is one of at least four COs who had sex and was impregnated by White. One Jan. 10, she was arrested after trying to smuggle a vacuum-packed bag of pot into prison, and the case is scheduled for trial in May. Her Northeast Baltimore residence, at 5919 Chinquapin Parkway, was raided just before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Notable quote: Tavon White “think I’m one of the most crazy baby mother’s he has. He said he gonna pay my rent. He gonna pay my rent. 284 every month. That’s what he said.”

Tyrone Thompson, aka “Henry,” 36-year-old outside supplier, of Baltimore

Thompson allegedly delivered pills to co-defendant CO Jennifer Owens and co-defendant Ralph Timmons, Jr., on behalf of Tavon White. His West Baltimore residence, 2920 West Walbrook Ave., was raided just before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Jasmine Thornton, aka “J.T.,” 26-year-old CO, of Glen Burnie

Thornton’s phone, “Target Telephone 9,” was tapped from Jan. 10 to Feb. 8, 2013, and she is accused of smuggling contraband into prison for numerous inmates. In February, Tavon White and CO Jennifer Owens discussed Thornton having sex in jail with co-defendant inmate Jamar Anderson. Thornton was assigned to guard White’s tier, which meant that other co-defendant COs could easily deliver contraband directly to White. Her Glen Burnie residence, 336 Adams Ct., was raided shortly before the indictment was unsealed on April 23.

Notable quote: After Anderson’s girlfriend, Teshawn Pinder, was pulled over by police with pot in her car, Thornton, who witnessed the incident, reported to Anderson: “I was pulling in the, um, Royal Farms the police was behind her, so I called her like did they pull you over. Their lights wasn’t on and she like, ‘yea,’ and then they were just sitting there for a long ass time, so I went and got some gas and all that. Then somebody else came with a dog, and then they brung the dog to the car.”

Ralph Timmons, Jr., aka “Boosa,” 34-year-old outside supplier (deceased), of Baltimore

Timmons’ phone, “Target Telephone 2,” was tapped from Sept. 10 to Oct. 9, 2012, and from Dec. 11, 2012 to Jan. 9, 2013. Investigators say he facilitated criminal activities for his half-brother, co-defendant inmate Tavon White, by coordinating smuggling operations with co-defendant CO Jennifer Owens and handling financial transactions.The MD-USAO reports that Timmons was murdered during a robbery, hours before the indictment was handed down on April 2. City Paper’s Murder Ink column reported that at 9:20pm on April 1, “an 11-year-old boy ran to police patrolling near the 1900 block of Bentalou Street to lead them back to the house where he had been shot,” and responding officers found Timmons, the boy’s father, shot dead in the house. Two men – John Knox, 21, of the 4800 block of Woodmere Avenue, and Joseph Oglesby, 37, of the 1100 block of Greenwood Road in Princess Anne County – were later arrested and charged with first-degree murder as a result of the killing.

James Yarborough, aka “J.Y.,” 26-year-old outside supplier, of Baltimore

Yarborough, who currently has an open state drug charge, alleged helped smuggle pot and pills into prison. Investigators recently saw him with co-defendant CO Kimberly Dennis, walking out of her house, getting into her Camaro, and the two of them driving away.

Joseph Young, aka “Monster,” 30-year-old inmate, of Baltimore

Young’s phone, “Target Telephone 5,” was tapped from Nov. 9 to Dec. 4, 2012, revealing that he’s allegedly an active BGF member with a leadership role as a “floor boss” at BCDC who coordinates smuggling activities with COs and outside suppliers. Young is also alleged to be Tavon White’s heir apparent, should White leave the jail. A unindicted and unnamed lieutenant told Young that, when and if that occurs, Young would enjoy the same agreement White had with prison authorities: smuggle freely in exchange for keeping down prison violence.

The Black Guerrilla Family’s Maryland Chapter Is All About ‘Ben’

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Dec. 9. 2014

Back in 2011, two years before Tavon White and 43 others were indicted in Maryland for running a Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) gang conspiracy in Baltimore’s jails, someone going by the moniker “fire water air” posted a comment on the forum of assatashakur.org, the website of American cop-killer fugitive Assata Shakur. What “fire water air” wrote cut to the core of a central dilemma for the BGF: How can it pursue what it calls “cambone,” a concept that promotes community dignity in a racist society, while actively carrying out what it calls “ben,” the tactics, often criminal, for financially supporting the pursuit of that dignity?

The BGF’s dual roles of cambone and ben were explained in the “Black Book,” a revolutionary self-help guide collectively written by BGF inmates in Baltimore and published by Eric Marcell Brown, the Maryland BGF leader who was convicted in 2011 in a prior racketeering prosecution. In Brown’s case, cambone was a strong factor, as he sought legitimacy while an inmate nearing his release date by appearing to work for good, offering the BGF’s black-separatist ideology as an antidote to the pathology of criminal lifestyles. The fact of the matter, though, as Brown’s case proved, is that ben reigned supreme, and “fire water air” seemed to understand and worry about this in 2011.

“Well the bgf here in baltimore run every aspect of the streets and hold major weight in the prison system,” the post stated, adding that “cambone holds no weight here” and “its run under the b.e.n.” It called the BGF “all love,” but said “the machine is down,” possibly referring to Brown’s take-down, and rued the fact that there are “no more old heads to lead” the “young comrades,” so “it looks like a gang now” and “im very sad about that shit.” The government, meanwhile, “know everything now after they took away our fathers,” it continued, and “i guess everybody want to be a g instead of pushing the revolution,” so “comrades like me are lost now.”

“BROTHERS KILLING AND ROBING BROTHERS EVERYWHERE,” the post concluded, switching to capitalization for emphasis, adding that “THE CODE OF CONDUCT HOLDS NO MORE POWER” and “ITS ALL ABOUT WHO GOT MORE STREET CREDIT AND RANK IN PRISON AND THAT ONE PERSON WILL BE LOOKED AT AS THE BIG GUY FOR THAT REGION OF BALTIMORE.”

It would be interesting to know what “fire water air” thinks about the White case, now being tried before a jury in Baltimore’s federal courthouse, with White himself as the state’s star witness. What White has described from the stand—that, even though he wasn’t a “bushman,” or high-ranking BGF member, he was able to take command of the jail because the BGF hierarchy on the streets believed in his ability to run the jail’s lucrative contraband economy, using correctional officers to smuggle prohibited goods such as pot, painkillers, tobacco, and phones to sell inside at exorbitant, sometimes fraudulent mark-ups in order to make boatloads of money for himself and the BGF, even as he had to deal with rival Joseph “Monster” Young, a bushman who wanted to unseat White—is pure ben.

If White has testified about anything having to do with cambone, it was a reference from the stand to a man named Cleo “Gutter” Blue, who he described as the BGF’s “minister of education” inside the jail. Blue, White explained, would “teach and educate the members” by giving them “quizzes dealing with the literature,” such BGF documents as the “33 constitutions,” the “22 laws,” the “eight morals,” the “11 characteristics,” and the “10 components” of “J,” which is short for “jamaa,” the Swahili word for “family.” According to the Black Book, “jamaa” is “an organization geared towards revitalizing our people and our hoods.” The BGF uses Swahili words, White explained, because “it’s supposed to be the original language of the black man.”

On the ben side of the equation, meanwhile, White testified that a man named “Michael Grey” is the BGF’s “head of street ops.” A BGF member of the same name was described in court documents in Brown’s case, surrounding events in 2010 that are decidedly ben. Grey was suspected of murdering Asia Carter, who was believed to have helped rob the drug operation Grey then ran with David “Oakie” Rich, who, while an inmate awaiting trial on federal armed drug-trafficking charges, also earned a mention in other BGF-related court documents. But Grey, in conversations caught on Drug Enforcement Administration wiretaps, sought to dissuade the notion that he was responsible for the demise of Carter, who was found on 25th Street in Charles Village, slumped over the wheel of his crashed car with several gunshot wounds.

As “fire water air” suggested, the BGF’s cambone-versus-ben dilemma appears to have been solved in Baltimore, and ben won. Thanks to that victory, the BGF continues to find itself among law enforcers’ highest priorities here.

The High Life: Ex-Con Has High-Powered Help in Opening Nightclub

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Jan. 3, 1996

Kenneth Antonio Jackson, Jr., aka “Kenny Bird,” is out to become a leader in minority enterprise in the downtown entertainment market. By opening a big new nightclub, he and his supporters – including state Senator Larry Young and City Council President Lawrence Bell – hope to make “the region’s neighborhood” more inviting to the city’s prominent black middle class.

On December 22, Jackson’s lawyer, former Circuit Court judge and city solicitor George Russell of the law firm Piper and Marbury, received word that the liquor board had approved a liquor license and floor plans for the Sons of Italy building at 410 West Fayette Street, where Jackson has started renovations to open a jazz club/restaurant called the Royal Café. Jackson envisions the club as an upscale venue for national acts such as Lou Rawls and Aretha Franklin, which will attract middle-class and wealthy blacks over 30 years old.

Jackson’s initial plan for the large three-story building was to house a high-end/multistage strip club. Land records show KAJ Enterprises, a company owned by Jackson’s mother, Rosalie Jackson, purchased the building in April 1995 for $250,000 from the Sons of Italy, a fraternal order. (Jackson manages his mother’s strip club, the Eldorado Lounge, at 322 West Baltimore Street.) But when word of his plan circulated among the neighborhood’s main institutions – Lexington Market, the University of Maryland, and the Downtown Partnership – the resulting outcry led him to change his proposal to something more palatable: a reputable jazz and supper club. At a September 28^th liquor-board hearing about the proposal, Russell explained that “at first [Jackson] was thinking about adult entertainment; that is gone. … This is going to be legitimate. … Even I would go there.”

The focus of the hearing was concerns that the Royal Café will exacerbate existing security problems in the neighborhood, which on weekend nights already attracts as many as 2,000 rowdy young adults cruising the streets until the wee hours. Shootings, stabbings, and many arrests have occurred in the area over the past year or so. But Russell suggested that the resistance to this new club is really due to the fact that the owners and operators are black. “It is time for people … downtown to be willing to embrace others different from them, others whose culture may be different from them, to demonstrate to the community that we can get along here.”

Young also testified on Jackson’s behalf at the hearing, saying that the venture is a positive example of minority entrepreneurship. “When it comes to downtown business,” Young declared, “blacks to not have a fair share. And I’m here to say that minorities who come up with the right qualifications, follow the laws, and [do] all that they should do should be given the opportunity to participate. And this is an entrepreneur that I strongly support.”

Unaddressed at the hearing, though, were the issues of Jackson’s criminal past and the financing of his new venture.

Jackson’s rap sheet extends back to 1974, when at age 16 he was charged with murder and acquitted by a jury. In 1977 he was again charged with murder, but pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received a 10-year suspended sentence with five years’ probation. From then until the end of 1984, Jackson faced 47 other criminal charges in Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Howard County, New York, and Falls Church, Virginia, involving narcotics, handguns, murder, theft, bribery, and harboring a fugitive. These included charges stemming from allegations that Jackson was involved in a drug war for control of the Lafayette Courts public-housing project, but those charges were dismissed in 1982, according to a 1989 Sun article.

Federal-court affidavits in 1985 named Jackson as a lieutenant in the drug ring headed by Melvin D. “Little Melvin” Williams, who was sentenced that year to 34 years in prison. Also in 1985, Jackson pleaded guilty to narcotics and handgun-possession charges and accepted a five-year suspended sentence and five years’ probation. When he violated probation by leaving the state without permission – he and two companions were pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike with $91,000 and a large amount of lidocaine, which is used to dilute cocaine, in their car – Circuit Court Judge Elsbethe Bothe gave him two years’ incarceration. Jackson appealed the case in the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, which overturned the probation-violation conviction in September 1988.

In June 1988, Jackson was again pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike, this time with nearly $700,000 in cash in the trunk of his car. He was charged with attempting to bribe his arresting officer with $200,000 and received probation before judgement. In April 1989, Jackson and two other Baltimore men were arrested by federal agents and charged with the 1984 murder in New York of cocaine wholesaler Felix Gonzalez. At the time of his arrest, federal agents also raided the Eldorado Lounge. He was acquitted of the murder charge by a New York State Supreme Court jury in May 1991.

Since returning the Baltimore after his acquittal in New York, Jackson has avoided new charges while making friends in high places. In last year’s elections, for instance, the Eldorado Lounge or Jackson himself gave $1,000 to the Schmoke re-election campaign and $3,500 to Bell’s successful bid for City Council president. When Jackson was seeking liquor-board approval for his new club, Bell submitted a letter to the board expressing his familiarity with Jackson and his support for Jackson’s venture. Both Young and Bell say they did not know of Jackson’s criminal past until asked about it by a reporter.

George Russell would not comment for this article, but Jackson says of his criminal history, “I’m trying hard to put my past in the past.” As indication of his efforts to do so, Jackson points out several public-service awards he has received in recent years, including a 1994 Mayor’s Citation from Kurt Schmoke and a 1990 Congressional Achievement Award from Kweisi Mfume. He is active in the newly formed political-action committee, A Piece of JUICE, which works to get African American men involved in the political process.

Shortly before the April 1995 purchase of the Sons of Italy building, however, Jackson and the building both figured in an undercover FBI investigation into the drug-money-laundering operations of businessman Gregory Scroggins and attorney Zell Margolis, who were convicted in December 1995. First assistant United States attorney Gary Jordan, who prosecuted the case, says that in March 1995, Scroggins introduced Jackson to Edward Dickson, a man he though was a drug dealer but was actually an undercover FBI agent. The purpose was to convince Jackson to let Dickson in on the purchase as a “silent partner,” Jordan says. FBI transcripts of wiretapped conversations in the case document Scroggins’ opinion of Jackson, a childhood friend, as very wealthy, highly intelligent, and “the nicest guy in the world, but he’s a killer and he has killed.”

As for the nightclub’s financing, land records indicate that KAJ Enterprises obtained a $200,000 mortgage from Maryland Permanent Bank and Trust of Owings Mills to finance the $250,000 purchase of the Sons of Italy building. The mortgage calls for monthly payments of more than $2,300.

Meanwhile, court records indicate that Jackson’s employment at the Eldorado Lounge paid $325 a week in 1988, although he says he now makes substantially more than that. Since Jackson is a convicted felon, he cannot apply for a liquor license; Mary Collins, who refused interview requests, applied instead. She is a guidance counselor for Baltimore City Public Schools.

Regarding the financing for the new club, Jackson explains that all expenses not covered by the $200,000 mortgage so far have been covered by revenue from the Eldorado Lounge. The extensive renovations to the Sons of Italy building ultimately will require a sizable bank loan, he says, adding that the Eldorado Lounge has applied for a $500,000 loan from Nationsbank.

Asked why the liquor board did not inquire during the September 28^th hearing about the club’s financing or whether Collins has the money to fund such a major investment, liquor-board executive secretary Aaron Stansbury explained that the board simply chose not to. He also stated that it is “obviously illegal” for a straw person to hold a liquor license on behalf of the actual owner of the club, but his understanding is that Collins is the club owner, while KAJ Enterprises is merely the landlord; Stansbury says that it is legal for a landlord to fund the building renovations on the club’s behalf. “It is presumed by the board that [the money for the club] comes from Mary Collins,” Stansbury said. Of Jackson’s criminal background, Stansbury said the board was not aware of it “to the extent that [Jackson] couldn’t manage the club.”

Mobtown Confidential: Thirty Years After His Mysterious Disappearance, Gentleman Racketeer and Block Kingpin Julius “The Lord” Salsbury Still Haunts Baltimore

By Van Smith

Published in Baltimore magazine, April 2000

“Little Melvin” Williams is shouting through a thick sheet of Plexiglas at the Prince George’s County Detention Center. The burly owner of the recently defunct Scrapp Bail Bonds is awaiting sentencing on a federal conviction for possessing a handgun while on parole for earlier federal crimes related to his career as a major heroin trafficker. Williams has spent 22 of his 58 years in jail; he claims, among other things, to be an accomplished chess player, a martial arts expert, and a speaker of five languages. What he isn’t, he says, is a snitch.

“Mr. Levinson has made a devastating mistake!” he exclaims. “I’m known as ‘Iron Jaws’!”

The source of Little Melvin’s indignation is Liberty Heights, filmmaker Barry Levinson’s latest nostalgic ode to Baltimore. In the film, released last fall, an amiable, soft-spoken racketeer named Nate Kurtzman (Joe Mantegna) juggles his family life, his illegal gambling operation, and his burlesque business on the Block in the 1950s. His downfall comes via a gambling payoff owed to a villainous dope peddler named Little Melvin (Orlando Jones), who first kidnaps Kurtzman’s son and then rats on a bookie. Kurtzman is targeted for prosecution by the Feds and arrested on Rosh Hashanah at a Cadillac dealership. “You know,” Nate says to his lawyer, “over the years in my business, you watch enough shows, you learn. A good performer knows when to get off the stage.” Nate quits the game and gets eight-to-10 years in the Big House.

The movie is fiction, of course, but the real-life Little Melvin knows that the shuckin’, jivin’, bug-eyed bungler in the movie is supposed to be him. And anyone who remembers the Baltimore of a few generations ago can tell that the doomed gentleman racketeer is drawn from the man Williams says once “called me his godson” – Julius “The Lord” Salsbury.

Salsbury, like Levinson’s Kurtzman, was a Block kingpin who was hunted down by the Feds. Unlike his fictional alter ego, though, Salsbury was never caught. After appealing a gambling conviction, he jumped bail and fled the country in 1970, eluding capture ever since. Legend has it that he went to Israel to enjoy the protections afforded Jewish-American criminals under the 1965 U.S.-Israeli extradition treaty. The grapevine says Salsbury died a few years ago, probably in 1995; if he were still alive, he would be 84 years old.

But the Lord never really left town; in his long absence, Salsbury’s legend took on a life of its own. Novelists and filmmakers have mined his tale for material; journalists have told and retold what is known of his tenure as Lord of the Block and entertained speculative reports of Salsbury sightings. In the process, Julius Salsbury became Mobtown’s outlaw hero.

The Salsbury myth holds the Lord up as the benevolent peacekeeping patriarch of the Block-based numbers rackets, an honorable man in a rogue industry that – like the East Baltimore Street nightclub district itself during its fondly remembered heyday – was tinged with menace but basically harmless. The nostalgia-driven take on Salsbury and the Block during its salad days remains common among Baltimoreans. History – at least the popular version of it – has been good to the Lord.

Little Melvin Williams knows all about that, because right now it is being less kind to him: When he’s sentenced in March, Williams will get almost 22 years without parole. He’s locked up, probably for the rest of his life, and cast as the villain in the latest retelling of his fugitive godfather’s story. And the Lord, as always, has escaped without a scratch.

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1915, Julius Salsbury was 12 years old when his parents, Isadore and Sarah, moved the family up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore and opened a lunch counter on Pratt Street downtown. At 16, Julius dropped out of Edgar Allan Poe school on West Fayette to start earning a living full-time. His first vocation – cab driver – began by the time he was 18. By 21, he already lived on the Block and was getting initiated in the rackets.

Salsbury’s education as a gambler was interrupted by World War II. His draft number was picked soon after Pearl Harbor, and he served as a military policeman in Europe. But before the war ended, he accompanied a prisoner back stateside and went AWOL. Salsbury was caught and did six months of hard labor. When he returned to Baltimore in 1945, he was a 29-year-old veteran with a dishonorable discharge and nothing much to do.

In short order, Salsbury was back in the bookmaking business. In between day jobs lending his father a hand re-treading tires, bottling soda, and running a bar, he began to build up a gambling network. He eloped to Miami with Susan Clara Wellman, a young waitress who had moved to Baltimore from Pennsylvania, because his parents didn’t approve of him marrying a gentile. And he took his lumps in the profession – a bookmaking conviction in 1948 was followed by another in 1950. But the battle scars from his run-ins with the law readied him for bigger and better things.

By the early 1950s, the lowdown on the Block was attracting out-of-town press. In Washington Confidential, the bestselling pulp expose from 1951, Baltimore’s red-light strip was described as “one of the most vicious and lawless areas in the world” by muckraking authors Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer. “At this writing,” they concluded, “any and all forms of vice are tolerated and protected. There is a price for everything and it’s not much.”

That same year, the U.S. Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime sent its investigators to root out the Baltimore underworld. Long-established racketeers cooled their heels to avoid trouble from the out-of-town heat. And into the vacuum rose the Lord.

The nickname came serendipitously. At a wrestling match at Carlin Park one night, a grappler called “Lord Salsbury” entered the ring; Julius Salsbury and his cohort, who were there to watch the fights, adopted the moniker on the spot.

It fit like a glove. Salsbury’s demeanor was soft-spoken, aristocratic, and confident – a good match with his distinctive, sharp-featured countenance.

His gambling organization, however, suffered its early setbacks. In 1952, Anne Arundel County police raided his Glen Burnie bunker in a case that Salsbury took to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost; he got six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. In 1954, he was nabbed for keeping a disorderly house and putting on an indecent show at Kay’s Cabaret, the Block bar he managed at the time. And in 1955, the Feds fined him $2,000 for failing to buy a required $50 gambling stamp.

But once Salsbury gained title to the Oasis Nite Club in 1956, he troubles with the law eased. Located at East Baltimore and Frederick streets, the club provided Salsbury with a way to wash his gambling proceeds. It also served as a home base from which to run a burgeoning empire. He bought a nice house in Cheswolde in Northwest Baltimore for his wife and three daughters. A fancy car and yacht rounded out the life of the late-1950s racketeer.

As a gambling kingpin and a Block bigwig, Salsbury was well-connected not only in the criminal world, but also with politicians and lawmen. The Lord operated in a carefully guarded region of society where criminal, political, and law-enforcement interests interweave – an area where corruption and cover-up put down deep and hidden roots.

People who worked for Salsbury remember politicians partying with Oasis girls on Salsbury’s boat. He was close friends with Baltimore political boss Jack Pollack. Pollack’s son, Morton, a lawyer and erstwhile Block habitué, says that “a lot of politicians, judges, and commissioners would go down to the Oasis at night.”

Retired Baltimore police lieutenant George Andrew, who headed the vice squad on the Block during the 1960s, suspected that Salsbury had high-up friends in the police department. “He really had somebody tied up,” Andrew recalls. “He knew somebody, but I don’t know who. But if I went on the Block, nobody would be there when I hit it. I wish I’d known – I’d have sent somebody to jail.”

Even Salsbury’s staunchest detractors admit that the man was a civilized racketeer. He shunned violence as an inducement for debt repayment; rather, he punished debtors by not allowing them to bet again until the account was settled. He was known as a generous philanthropist. And he didn’t hold grudges. When a drugstore owner on the Block was compelled to testify against Salsbury, the Lord stayed friendly with him and continued to eat at his lunch counter throughout the trial, just as he had done regularly for years.

But the image of the Lord as charitable rogue was marred by the reality of life on the Block during his ostensibly nonviolent rule: Murder, strong-arming, kidnapping, and intimidation were regular tactics of the Baltimore underworld in that era. In 1961, a troubling crime spree spurred a grand-jury probe of Block rackets, and the probe in turn set in motion the forces that would eventually bring down the Lord.

The trouble started in October of 1960, when Block restaurant manager Frank Corbi was shot at outside his house. The following May, his nephew Ed was ambushed by three masked gunmen; his bodyguard, Earl Fifer, was abducted and held for six days. In June, a Miami Club waitress was found murdered in a stream near Bowley’s Lane after being questioned by police investigating rackets on the Block; a car salesman named Edward Castranda was shot dead as he sat in his car outside the Dixie Diner in July. The three men arrested – brothers Orlando and Angelo Perrera and Benjamin “Hittie” Wildstein – were all major players on the Block and, as Morton Pollack recalls today, friends of Salsbury.

By September, eight Block club owners – including Salsbury – were indicted for various offenses involving the operation of their establishments. A fearful suspect in a numbers-writing case told the judge, “I can’t help you catch the big wheels. These syndicate people would do away with you.” Maryland’s U.S. Attorney, Joseph Tydings, announced that gambling profits were so great that racketeers nationwide spent an estimated $4 billion annually to bribe law-enforcement officers and sports figures. “Organized rackets are disciplined and able to rid themselves of people they no longer want in very efficient ways,” Tydings said.

In November 1961, Salsbury’s case came up for trial: He was charged in city court for pandering and maintaining a disorderly house. The judge and a state witness both reported receiving threats and received police protection. The witness, an Oasis dancer, testified that Salsbury once beat her up when she asked for a loan and that she and her children were told their lives wouldn’t be worth a “plugged nickel” if she took the stand. Still other witnesses were roughed up, left town, or changed their testimony. During a trial recess, a state’s witness in the custody of police was taken out drinking at the Oasis. Three police officers who patrolled the Block testified at trial that they’d never seen any problems at Salsbury’s club. Ultimately, after a retrial, Salsbury won acquittal. The Lord had slipped off the hook again.

In June 1962, the U.S. Senate had taken testimony about organized crime based on the Block as part of its investigation into corruption in the showgirls’ union. Salsbury – already fingered by the U.S. Attorney General as one of the nation’s top racketeers – was called to testify before the Senate committee, but under questioning asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Based on the information about the Block gathered during the hearings, Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota dubbed Baltimore one of the nation’s “great metropolitan fleshpots” and said its citizens have “the kind of city they want … the kind of city they deserve.”

After Salsbury’s photo was on the front page of the newspapers during the 1962 Senate hearings, he was fixed in the public imagination – and in the sights of federal law-enforcement – as an organized criminal of national proportions. From that point on, his fortunes started to change. The year 1963 brought Salsbury a federal conviction for tax evasion, for which he served eight months in federal prison. In 1965, $745,000 in tax liens were filed against him by the IRS. And from 1963 to 1965, the FBI bugged the Oasis (illegally, it was later revealed) and picked up all sorts of nefarious activities: graft among city police and vice detectives and bribes to IRS agents, according to Paul Kramer, who as an assistant U.S. attorney later prosecuted Salsbury.

“There were people coming in and out of his office and getting picked up on the wiretap – payoffs taking place in his office, exchanges of information, and the women back there with them,” Kramer recalls today as he sits in his memento-crammed office. He now runs a criminal-defense practice. “It did show the corruption that was associated with this kind of behavior. I assume it’s probably worse today, with all the narcotics money involved, than we had with gambling.”

Kramer was in zealous pursuit of Salsbury for much of the 1960s. As one of Salsbury’s defense attorneys, Arnold Weiner – himself a former federal prosecutor – recalls, Kramer “was Captain Ahab and Julius was his white whale.”

Success didn’t come easily. After a 1968 raid on the Oasis, Kramer charged Salsbury with failing to purchase a required $50 wagering-tax stamp; hours later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law on which the case was based. Kramer came back at him in 1969 with a new harpoon – the Travel Act, which prohibits interstate transport of ill-gotten gains. That one connected: Salsbury was convicted and slapped with a 15-year sentence.

“For a guy who got convicted as a nonviolent gambler,” Kramer asserts, “the judge really threw the book at him.” The main rationale for the severity of the sentence Salsbury received, Kramer explains, was the public corruption bred by the Lord’s activities. “What made it was the amount of corruption that was associated with him: law-enforcement corruption, whether it’s the liquor board or federal agents or police officers. He even asked me if I could be corrupted, which I took as flattery.”

Salsbury appealed the conviction and – despite strident warnings by Kramer that the Lord would slip away – was allowed to remain free on bail pending the outcome. Days before the appellate court upheld the conviction, Salsbury fled. Given the high level of corruption surrounding the Lord, suspicions abounded that he had some high-powered help in making his escape.

“Where was the leak in the U.S. Court of Appeals when the decision came down?” asks E. Thomas Maxwell, a former assistant state’s attorney in Baltimore who prosecuted Salsbury in 1961. His raised eyebrows concerning the circumstances of Salsbury’s disappearance are common among afficionados of the Lord. Maxwell speculates that, if Salsbury had not fled and instead been imprisoned, information the racketeer had about public corruption could have erupted in scandal.

Kramer, however, says the question of whether someone leaked word of the appellate court’s decision in order to give Salsbury the opportunity to run is settled. “A lot of people thought that,” Kramer recalls. “There was an investigation and we determined that we do not believe that there is any evidence showing that there was any kind of leak out of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.” Instead, Kramer believes Salsbury “was just playing the odds” on when and how the appeal would come down and fled town just in time.

The Lord took with him everything he knew about criminally culpable public officials, and in his wake he left a red-faced federal law-enforcement community. “The government was just embarrassed for many, many years” after the escape, says Maxwell. George Beall, who was U.S. Attorney for Maryland when Salsbury escaped, agrees. “It was an embarrassment to the FBI, to the government, that he was gone,” he explains. “They turned themselves inside out to try to solve the mystery.”

According to Kramer, Salsbury left his Horizon House apartment on Calvert Street and “went directly to Canada. We later determined that there was a safe deposit box in Canada. We finally got the search warrant for it and found it empty. The best we could determine was that he took a gambling junket to England, probably under an assumed name, and later we could prove he was in South Africa. Money was being funneled [to Salsbury] through Germany, we believe, from businesses being sold in Maryland.”

Besides the government, the other big loser when Salsbury fled was his friend and gambling colleague, the bail bondsman Robert “Fifi” London, who had posted a total of $80,000 bail that had to be forfeited, according to Morton Pollack. “I know for a fact that he was paid back” on Salsbury’s behalf by a third party, Pollack says. Fifi London died in the 1970s after a lengthy prison term for tax evasion, but his bailbonds firm lives on. In fact, Melvin Williams’ Scrapp Bail Bonds was (until it tanked due to Williams’ recent legal troubles) a subagency of London Bonding Agency.

Homicide author David Simon investigated the Salsbury case as a Sun reporter in the 1980s and early 1990s and concluded that the Lord ended up in Israel, living in a townhouse in Tel Aviv. Melvin Williams is full of insinuations that he had been in communication with Salsbury since his flight, has information about the Lord’s whereabouts over the years, and knows the truth about the man’s mysterious fugitive years. But, like any good gambler, Little Melvin plays that card close to his vest.

Back in 1969, as the net closed in around Salsbury, Fred Motz served as co-counsel to lead prosecutor Kramer. Now the chief judge of the U.S. District Court of Maryland, Motz was one of the men who helped hunt Salsbury down, and he understands well why the Lord still haunts the Block. “As you get older, you can romanticize,” he says. “It is an overstatement to say that the Salsbury people were sort of like Damon Runyon characters. [But] there’s a certain poignancy to the fact that that is now gone.”

Never mind that the real-life Salsbury helped cement Mobtown’s still-thriving reputation as a hopelessly corrupt and dangerous town. Forget that, during his reign, the Block was wracked with shocking violence, and the widespread public corruption Salsbury instigated to protect his rackets undermined the public trust in honest government. From the perspective of modern Baltimore, the Salsbury era still inspires a certain nostalgia for the days of honorable outlaws and crime that seemed at least to be organized. Maybe, Motz guesses, it’s only because corruption and violence grew so much worse after he left.

“[Salsbury] was really in quite strong control of the Block, and … after he was taken out, rough people came in and there were a lot more murders,” Motz says. “Nobody’s saying that crime is appropriate, but you are going to have crime. There’s almost a sense of longing for [Salsbury’s brand of crime], as opposed to what you see out on the streets today. I think that’s one of the appeals of the Salsbury story. It is something from a different era. And one senses that things are different now than they were then.”

Mob Rules: Ex-Gangster Charlie Wilhelm is Making a Different Kind of Book These Days, and it’s Opening Up a Lot of the City’s Secrets

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Oct. 6, 2004

Mobtown is not, by reputation, a mob town. Baltimore’s nickname derives from its citizens’ proclivity to riot, not from its role as a home to organized crime—a role that until very recently has been little recognized, much less resisted. Sure, there was Julius “The Lord” Salsbury, who hobnobbed with city pols and lawmen as he ruled Baltimore’s rackets in the 1950s and ’60s, until he skipped bail and fled the country in 1970, never to be heard from again. (Barry Levinson’s Liberty Heights in 1999 retold the Salsbury story). And sure, there’s a 16-month-old outfit in the Baltimore City Police Department called the Organized Crime Division, but it claims to target low-level drug dealers, not racketeers involved in loansharking, narcotics-running, gambling, arson, and murder. Poker-machine guys and titty-bar owners with ties to police and politicians, rogues who maybe bring some coke in from Ocean City or Miami or New York every now and then—they’re not The Sopranos. They’re more like Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

But with the release this week of Wised Up (Pinnacle Press), by gangster-turned-informant Charlie Wilhelm and ex-Sun reporter Joan Jacobson, Mobtown’s long-held denial of its own entrenched organized-crime problem may start to dissolve. Recognition and frank discussion of a problem, as everyone knows, are the first steps on the road to recovery. And Wised Up—Wilhelm’s story, fully corroborated and retold by Jacobson, almost entirely in Wilhelm’s voice, as if he were regaling the reader over rounds of beer at Showalter’s Saloon in Hampden—promises to let that process begin.

The recovery process for Wilhelm—a longtime loan shark, bookmaker, arsonist, drug dealer, and extortionist—started when he hit bottom in the summer of 1995. The police staged an early-morning raid on his house on Keswick Road in Hampden, and Wilhelm’s gut wrenched as he saw his youngest son, a 7-year-old, scared and crying while the house was searched. Wilhelm wasn’t arrested, though, and a few days later his partner in crime, Billy Isaacs, with whom Wilhelm had run for nearly 20 years, appeared at his front door, fresh out of prison after a federal stint for witness tampering. Wilhelm knew Isaacs had gotten away with a murder in 1978. He also knew Isaacs wanted him to kill two men who Isaacs believed were stealing from their operation. Wilhelm, who had never killed, didn’t want to do the job, and was quickly getting sick of the gangster life. Within a week, Wilhelm went to Washington to tell an FBI agent—a childhood acquaintance of his, Wilhelm’s brother’s best friend—that he wanted to turn informant. He brought no lawyer, sought no deal for the crimes he’d committed, and had no pending charges hanging over him. It was the only way Wilhelm saw to get out.

And it worked. Ultimately, Wilhelm’s dicey errands as an undercover informant led to the arrest of 23 people, including Isaacs, who went to prison for the 1978 murder. Wilhelm supported his family on government funds—$2,500 per month, for a total of $140,000—until he could land a legitimate job as a Baltimore-area carpenter, a career he still has. He never entered the federal witness-protection program, instead leaving town in 1996 to live quietly in Alabama, until homesickness drew him and his family back in 1998. Meanwhile, Wilhelm kept a journal to help beat back chronic anxiety, and eventually was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, from which he still suffers. But the journal became the basis for a four-part series by Jacobson in The Sun, published in November 2001, as well as for Wised Up.

“It’s the only thing I ever did right in my life,” Wilhelm said recently during a sit-down at City Paper’s offices, with Jacobson in tow. “Why should I be the one persecuted for doing something right? Even though all that stuff I did before was wrong—if they told me I had to do 30 years, I’m perfectly happy with that. But why should I have to run? You know what I mean? Why can’t the guys that I dealt with be on the run? Why can’t regular people, hard-working people say, ‘Hey, those guys don’t run. He’s right, he did the right thing, let them run off,’ and get them to run away?”

That, in a nutshell, is the central message from Wised Up: Baltimore has to recognize that organized-crime henchmen live and do their dirty work in its neighborhoods, and it needs to reject them, just like Wilhelm rejected his earlier life. “The general public has to make these guys the criminals—the bad cops, the bad politicians, the wise guys,” Wilhelm says excitedly. “Make them be the wrong guys. The public has to say, ‘That’s not right, what you’re doing.’ Like Billy [Isaacs]. Billy goes into Hampden, everybody looks up to him. He’s a murderer! Why don’t you have a problem with that? Why can’t people’s opinions change? That’s the problem. Billy will come out of jail, and everybody will think he’s a hero. That has to change.”

A crucial turning point in Wised Up comes in that pivotal 1995 encounter, when Isaacs ordered Wilhelm to murder the two men, and he balked. Wilhelm figured it would only be a matter of time before a contract would be out on him, too. But what’s most interesting, in terms of the larger lesson of Wised Up about the presence of organized-crime figures in city life, is the identity of one of the men Isaacs wanted killed: a fellow named in the book as Ronnie Jones, whom Wilhelm and Jacobson do not describe further.

City Paper, during the mid- to late 1990s, published numerous stories involving Ronald David Jones, an ex-city cop with a history of involvement in vending machines, bars, real estate, and strip clubs. The paper’s interest in Jones was due to his political ties to then-City Councilman, now Mayor Martin O’Malley. Those ties apparently ended not long after O’Malley was elected mayor in the fall of 1999, according to Jones and others interviewed during the intervening years. But during O’Malley’s formative years as a Baltimore politician, Jones was one of his earliest and most generous financial backers. Jones made donations through his wife, ex-wife, and businesses to O’Malley’s campaigns, and the sum reported in campaign-finance records approaches $10,000. (O’Malley isn’t the only political pony Jones has backed. State Sen. George Della, outgoing City Councilwoman Lois Garey, former City Council President Lawrence Bell, and former state Senators Tommy Bromwell and Vernon Boozer all have campaign ties to Jones, and the full list is likely longer.)

During the decade that Jones was betting on O’Malley and others, he was also involved with Joe’s Tavern, an infamous Dundalk Avenue bar that looms large in Wised Up as Wilhelm and Isaacs’ base of operations. Joe’s took its name from its earlier owner, the late state senator, Joseph Staszak, who died in a mysterious boating accident in 1979 on Old Road Bay near Sparrows Point, three months after pleading guilty to federal charges of mail fraud and filing false tax returns. In 1990, Isaacs and Wilhelm were taking over Joe’s, and Jones was at the table with them from the start—though, in a series of Oct. 1 telephone conversations with City Paper, Jones discounted his involvement with the bar, and the Isaacs-Wilhelm crew, and questioned the truth of the claims Wilhelm makes in Wised Up.

Jones says that “because I lent [Isaacs] money at one point, [Wilhelm] said I had something to do with [Joe’s], but I was never a partner, nothing like that. I lent him 7 or 8 thousand dollars for setting up Joe’s, and that was it.” As for whether there was a contract that Isaacs put on his life, Jones says, “It was bullshit. If Billy had killed all the people he said he wanted killed, you’d have to put [all the names] in a phone book.”

Also, he says, Wilhelm wanted out of the gangster life not because of his unwillingness to do the killings Isaacs ordered but because he had “no money. [Wilhelm and another Isaacs associate] put their own hits in—they were robbing the book and blowing [the money] all over town.” In other words, Jones contends that Wilhelm was stealing from his and Isaacs’ own bookmaking operation, and spending so much money that he was running out of juice, so he ran to the feds in order to make government cash as an informant. “The guy wrote a book,” Jones concludes. “To me, it’s fiction.”

“I robbed all the bookmakers—that’s the way it was,” Wilhelm explains in a follow-up interview, while at his carpentry job. “In July of 1995 [when Wilhelm offered himself as a federal informant], I still had $60,000. I did it for money? Who would put their whole family what I had to put them through for $2,500 a month? That little piece of shit.”

When told of Jones’ contention that Jones had virtually nothing to do with Joe’s Tavern, Wilhelm went ballistic: “He’s an absolute liar—I’ve got the paper on that!” And then he left his job site to retrieve a document, which he shortly delivered to City Paper. It was a handwritten promissory note (apparently in Jones’ hand) for $71,000, with a promise to spend $15,000 more on equipment, lent to Joe’s Tavern by Jones, who signed the document along with Isaacs associate Richard A. Payne (the other man Isaacs later ordered Wilhelm to murder) on behalf of Joe’s. Wilhelm signed the note as witness to the December 1990 transaction, which also secured a 50-50 split between Joe’s Tavern and Ron Jones for all the tavern’s vending-machine business for 10 years. Wilhelm says the document was drawn up and signed at the offices of Baltimore criminal-defense attorney Michael Marr.

“I don’t recall anything like that,” Jones responds, adding, “I never got a dime out of” Joe’s vending-machine revenues. Then he remarked about the promissory note, “Goddamn, I gotta get a hold of that—I could collect on it. If you find anybody else who owes me money, call me.” In a phone message left at City Paper later the same day, he said that his wife at the time, Lois Arreguin, was on the Maryland State Lottery license for Joe’s Tavern for one year in 1990.

The absolute truth of the matter is hard to ascertain, despite the documentation. It’s still possible that the money was never loaned, and that Jones never shared the vending-machine take at Joe’s. But Jones freely admits to a long-term relationship with O’Malley. “I’ve known Martin for 14 years, going back to when he ran against [former state Sen. John] Pica” in 1990. Jones recalls being introduced to O’Malley through John Hubble, a real-estate investor who later, in 2001, served for three months as real-estate officer for Baltimore City government. “Once [O’Malley] became mayor, he got a different life,” Jones says. “I don’t want to be in that circle. If you need the mayor, you’re in trouble.”

In response to questions about the mayor’s relationship with Jones, O’Malley spokesman Steve Kearney would only say that “the mayor’s office has nothing to say other than there have been over 10,000 donors to the mayor’s campaigns over the years.” With Wised Up hitting bookstores on Oct. 9 and also available online (www. wisedupthebook.com), though, one of the mayor’s longtime—though erstwhile—political benefactors is now fingered in print as having been in business with organized-crime figures. Journalists, voters, and other political observers are sure to notice, and it’s safe to predict that a discussion about organized-crime ties to Baltimore politics will enter the civic debate.

Despite Wised Up’s remarkable disclosures and descriptions of mob life in Baltimore, it remains at its core a story about a man who made a change. “I really wrote the book because I thought it was a great story about how [Wilhelm] changed his life,” Jacobson says. “And I understood that there needed to be chapters about loansharking and bookmaking, and it was fascinating, but I really see this as a book about a guy who really turned his life around. And that’s what I think is the most interesting part about this book. That’s what really kept moving me along. I’d never written a book before, and it’s a big, long process. And that’s what kept me going—it’s a great story. It’s a story of hope.”

Working Overtime: Drug Conspirator Eric Clash Says Cooperating Rehabilitated Him

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Apr. 1, 2009

His well-fitted gray suit and good-natured confidence lend 30-year-old Eric Clash the look of an earnest young professional as he stands behind the defense table on March 9 in U.S. District Court Judge William Quarles’ courtroom in Baltimore. With bright eyes shining under his clean-shaven dome and a light, trimmed beard on his chin, Clash doesn’t look like what he is: a second-generation drug dealer who, after agreeing to plead guilty to charges in a massive drug conspiracy, has spent the past three years helping the government make criminal cases. He appeared before Quarles on March 9 to ask for leniency, saying he left the thug life for good when he became a cooperator.

When Clash was first charged in 2005 as a member of the violent, politically connected Rice Organization drug conspiracy, which operated in Baltimore from the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s (“Wired,” Mobtown Beat, March 2, 2005), prosecutors seized about $150,000 from his bank account and said he “occupied a high level” in the group’s hierarchy. Today, with Quarles set to sentence him, Clash is projecting the image of a changed man in grave danger, due to his cooperation with authorities.

Of the 13 Rice Organization co-defendants, Clash is one of three who remains to be sentenced. The other two are Steven Campbell and Anthony Leonard, who also have been revealed in open court to have cooperated with the government. The remaining 10 Rice Organization co-defendants–brothers Howard Rice and Raeshio Rice, Chet Pajardo, Eric Hall, Robert Lee Baker, Michael Felder, Keenan Dorsey, George Butler, Oreese Stevenson, and James Jones Jr.–are serving prison sentences, with release dates ranging from two or three years from now until 2030.

In addition to bringing a steady stream of cocaine to Baltimore, the Rice Organization was responsible for violence, including murder. Among the businesses associated with the crew was Downtown Southern Blues, a restaurant on Howard Street’s Antique Row whose landlord was Kenneth Antonio Jackson, an ex-con and strip-club owner with a long history in the drug game and local politics (“The High Life,” Mobtown Beat, Jan. 3, 1995). Several Rice Organization members gave campaign funds to local politicians, some of whom held fundraisers at Downtown Southern Blues.

One of the Rice Organization members, Pajardo, co-owned an East Baltimore corner-store property with Hollywood actress Jada Pinkett-Smith, the wife of actor Will Smith (“Star-Crossed,” Mobtown Beat, Feb. 9, 2005). Another, Butler, was featured in 2005’s infamous Stop Fucking Snitching DVD, produced in Baltimore to warn off potential cooperators. Clash, who bought and sold Baltimore real estate including a westside bar called the Red Door during his drug-dealing years, is the son of Edward Clash, who himself was convicted of drug dealing in 1994.

Four Rice Organization rivals–Willie Mitchell, Shelly Martin, Shelton Harris, and Shawn Gardner–were convicted of numerous federal organized-crime charges last fall. Among them were murder charges arising from the 2002 stabbing of three Rice Organization members, including Clash and Raeshio Rice, outside the now-defunct Hammerjack’s nightclub in downtown Baltimore, after a birthday party for Baltimore-born rap mogul Kevin Liles. In February and March, three rivals received life prison sentences while Martin received a 400-month sentence.

Both Clash’s lawyer, Robert Simels, and his prosecutor, assistant U.S. attorney Jason Weinstein, tell Quarles that Clash is over and done with his former life in the game, and that he holds promise in lawful pursuits in the future.

Weinstein says Clash is an “extremely bright man” with “impressive potential.” He says Clash’s sentence reduction will be “richly deserved,” since “‘exemplary’ is the word I’d use to describe Mr. Clash’s cooperation.” He reminds the judge that Clash had “less of a role in the conspiracy” than two other indicted Rice Organization members, Steven Campbell and Anthony Leonard, who also cooperated as part of their pending pleas.

Simels’ job is easy, given the prosecutor’s lavish praise for his client: “It is rare in my experience that I have heard an assistant [U.S. attorney] speak as glowingly as Mr. Weinstein has of Mr. Clash,” he says. And Simels, a New York attorney with a decades-long history of representing major drug figures in Maryland (“Team Player,” Mobtown Beat, Sept. 24, 2008), who himself is currently under indictment in New York for witness tampering in a Guyanese cocaine case (“Big Target,” Mobtown Beat, Feb. 12), has plenty of experience.

Simels tells the court that Clash’s cooperation has been “remarkable in terms of his assistance to this community, and the United States as a whole,” as “set forth fully” in a sealed letter to the judge. He says Clash is married now, has professional expertise in real estate and construction, is taking classes, and has “adopted his faith as his guiding light.

“He’s not going to be in trouble again in the future,” Simels says. “At some point we have to demonstrate the sacrifice that he’s made” and “make sure the reward is an appropriate sentence.” The attorney recalls that at one point putting Clash in the witness-protection program was discussed. He says that Clash’s cooperation puts him in danger, and “to incarcerate him at this stage puts a burden not only on the [U.S.] Bureau of Prisons, but also on Mr. Clash, who will be looking behind his back at all times.”

Simels suggests that Quarles impose a “non-incarceration form of sentence.”

“I am pleading for leniency to save my life,” Clash tells Quarles on his own behalf. “I have put my family in jeopardy, myself in jeopardy. . . . I am here to better myself.” Clash says he now plans to help steer people away from crime. “When I was living that lifestyle, I knew it was wrong,” he says. “Nobody forced me into the decisions I made.” He says he wants to write a book to help others, especially children, get the direction he lacked when he was younger.

Clash tells the judge that while he was cooperating with the government, he spent three months working as a mortgage broker in New York, and that he went to Detroit, where he learned about educational broadcasting while working on a documentary for a major cable channel.

Quarles tells Clash that his cooperation “goes some distance to correcting some of the damage you and your cohorts inflicted on this community [by] bringing in more than 3,000 pounds of cocaine.” Instead of the 10-year sentence the federal guidelines call for, Quarles gives Clash 48 months, with credit for 16 months already served.

After the sentencing, U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein explains that Clash received an extraordinary break. As a matter of policy, Rosenstein says, his office recommends a two-level departure for cooperators who help prosecutors in the case they are charged in, and two more levels if they help in other cases. In Clash’s case, he says, Weinstein recommended that Clash get the standard four-level departure for cooperators that helped in cases other than their own, but Quarles tacked on two more, for a total of six years shaved off the sentence.

“You really have to do a lot to get recommendations for departures of more than four levels,” Rosenstein says, but in cases of cooperators who go the extra mile, “we increasingly make exceptions to it. Ultimately, the judge decides.”

In this case, Quarles decided that Clash’s work helping prosecutors was valuable enough to schedule him for release from prison in late 2011, and, in order to enhance his safety, to have him assigned to prisons that maximize protection from the expected threats of other inmates.

It may not be all the leniency Clash was hoping for, but it’s a pretty good deal compared to the long, hard time his old Rice Organization running buddies are serving.

Meet the Neighbors: 2000: My First Mistake–Calling the Cops About the Shady Characters Next Door

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Dec. 23, 2009

At first, in early spring, the business that took over the vacant garage on the alley behind my house seemed like it’d make a good neighbor. Evidently, it required only a blow torch and an air wrench powered via an illegal hook-up off the utility pole. The place hummed: zzzztch-zzzztch, vvvvt-vvvvt, all day long and sometimes into the night. I could see into the garage from my third-floor window, and learned that it worked on cars. With its door yawning open most of the time, it seemed not to have anything to hide.

But soon a fever prompted a series of events that started to change my attitude about the garage. Two o’clock in the morning rolled around and, sleepless blob of warm pus that I was, the ongoing racket boiled me over. One guy was working–zzzztch, vvvvt–and three or four others were playing music and generally having a cussin’ good time. I marched over, ducked under the arm of a guy who tried to block me, and became the textbook definition of the crazy white guy.

They quickly talked me down. The main guy–a giant of a man–was smiling, all mellow, and holding a fat wad of high-denomination cash in his hand, doubled over a finger. “I’m in charge, and I’m telling you right now, if you got a problem, you come to me, and I’ll take care of it.” He introduced himself as Blood, and his sidekick as Red. I went home, thinking, well, that went well.

The cash struck me, though, since I never saw any paying patrons. I put my long-lens camera on a tripod and watched. They were working on nondescript, second-hand cars, installing hidden compartments with electronically activated hydraulic lifts. I started to snap pictures and write down license-plate numbers of cars that frequented the place. I didn’t know what I would do with the information, but I was the homeowner here, and the criminal-renters would have to go.

I drove home in the wee hours one night to find there was no place to park, so I took an illegal space. Blood and Red’s completed inventory had taken over the neighborhood’s once-plentiful parking. I got up to re-park before dawn, and found the inventory–maybe 30 cars in all–was gone. They were doing a brisk business.

One late night in May, the crew was hanging out in front of the garage, smoking blunts and drinking and having a rowdy good time playing craps. The garage door was open, the cars lined up behind them. I called 9-1-1 and gave the operator the address, explaining that they were smoking blunts and gambling in plain view, but the true crime was inside, where they were refitting cars with hidden compartments for delivery of drugs, cash, and probably guns. A passing cop would end up with a major case instead of minor charges. I hung up and went out to my stoop to watch the show.

About a half-hour after the call, a patrol car pulled up to the intersection of the alley, slowed down, turned around, and drove off. That was it.

The next morning, an unmarked police car arrived, and two uniformed cops with portable radios got out and fist-bumped Blood. The three chatted a bit, then the cops got back in their car and drove off.

I realized I couldn’t call the cops on the garage anymore. Though no longer naive, I was very, very scared.

Soon, I contacted the FBI. I met with two agents. I gave them photographs and described what I’d been observing. They tried to persuade me to become a cooperator, to infiltrate the garage, to exploit the friendly terms I’d established with Blood and Red. I went ballistic and profanely refused. They told me that, absent that, it’d be two or three years before they could dismantle the operation.

Meanwhile, Blood and Red menacingly invited me to their Memorial Day cook-out, saying I would be the “guest of honor.” My spacious back yard–once a happy place, with a colorful picnic table and a fire-pit over which many sumptuous meals had been prepared, and where my cats often lounged–became mysteriously and repeatedly bombarded with cinder blocks. For an entire weekend, Blood and Red tried psychological warfare on me, playing one song–“Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown, why is everybody always picking on me”–over and over and over again. Good grief.

I called a retired cop I know, who referred me to a veteran at the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force. The HIDTA guy was enthusiastic, and so was I when he said, “Based on what you’re telling me, we can go in there tomorrow.” Then he asked if I’d shared the information with anyone else. When I told him about the FBI, he said, “You told the frat boys? Well, that’ll probably shut us down.” And it did.

So I called a prosecutor I know, who referred me to a Drug Enforcement Administration guy, who told me they’d maybe get to it on a rainy day someday.

At that point, I wasn’t eating properly, I was hardly sleeping, and I was chain-smoking. I had set up a comfortable chair by the tripod on the third floor, along with an oversized ashtray, a glass, and a bottle of Pikesville rye. I was obsessed with the garage, and it wasn’t healthy.

In July, I told a friend in New York about my nightmare, and he suggested I take over his apartment in August while he and his family vacationed. I did, but on the way out of town, I called the neighborhood association president. “At the next meeting,” I begged, “pass a motion that a letter be sent to zoning enforcement about what’s going on at that garage. I don’t think it’s zoned for what’s going on there.”

When I got back in September, zoning had rousted Blood and Red. The garage was empty again, and the alley had returned to safe, familiar normalcy as a comfortable haven for hand-to-hand drug-dealing and strung-out junkies. I breathed a long sigh of relief.

Wired: Alleged Drug-World Figures Tied to Local Politics

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Mar. 2, 2005

Anthony B. Leonard’s Downtown Southern Blues restaurant on North Howard Street’s Antique Row had a meteoric run starting in 2002, drawing a clientele of local notables, including many in politics. But today, the Howard Street location is closed, and Leonard and his restaurant businesses (Leonard’s Southern Blues carry-out in Randallstown remains open) are allegedly part of a violent drug conspiracy called the Rice Organization, which prosecutors say operated in Baltimore for the past decade. The federal trial in the case is scheduled for next January.

Shades of politics color the background of the Rice Organization case, but they are not spelled out in the 41-page indictment, which was made public on Feb. 2. In fact, very little detail is revealed in that document, other than names and some addresses associated with those charged. From campaign-finance and other public records, though, it’s clear that Leonard, Downtown Southern Blues, and at least two other Rice Organization defendants played the political game, and, in Leonard’s case, entered it on the heels of an earlier chapter in Baltimore’s history of overlapping political and drug-world cultures.

That earlier chapter centered on Leonard’s Howard Street landlord, K.A.J. Enterprises, Kenneth Antonio Jackson’s family company. Jackson is an ex-con strip-club owner whose drug-world past has made his political activities controversial. This time, though, the political dealings of Leonard and others allegedly involved in the Rice Organization occurred while prosecutors say they were running drugs.

The indictment claims that 35-year-old Leonard and his 12 co-defendants, including brothers Howard and Raeshio Rice, ages 38 and 32, raked in $27 million as they distributed more than 3,000 pounds of cocaine and heroin to Baltimore’s streets since 1995. Other co-conspirators include 30-year-old George Butler, a character from the now-infamous Stop Fucking Snitching DVD, which warns viewers against cooperating with law enforcement, and Chet Pajardo, 36, co-owner with movie actress Jada Pinkett Smith of an East Baltimore corner-store property (“Star Crossed,” Mobtown Beat, Feb. 16). The federal government seeks forfeiture of defendants’ assets, including vehicles, the Pajardo-Pinkett property, other real estate, and whatever is left of Leonard’s two restaurant businesses.

The Rice Organization allegations make the political ties of Leonard, Downtown Southern Blues, Pajardo, and 26-year-old co-defendant Eric Clash symbols of how the drug economy is embedded in modern civic life. When Downtown Southern Blues sought a liquor license in 2002, then-state Sen. Clarence Mitchell IV (D-44th District) and former state senator Larry Young (D-44th District) were copied on administrative correspondence. Shortly after the restaurant opened that year, political business came its way. The financial details show only that political money changed hands in ’02 and ’03 involving businesses and people who only recently were accused of being part of the Rice Organization. There is nothing to suggest that any of the parties to the transactions have any other links to the drug world. Here the are details:

> In ’02 Antonio Hayes, the legislative-affairs director for City Council President Sheila Dixon (D), ran and lost in the race for the 40th District Democratic State Central Committee seat; he spent $1,200 on a June 2002 fund raiser at Downtown Southern Blues.

> Democrats for Ehrlich, a campaign committee supporting then-Republican Congressman Robert Ehrlich’s successful 2002 bid for governor, spent $4,000 at Downtown Southern Blues in November of that year for a post-victory reception in honor of Ehrlich’s running mate, Michael Steele.

> In 2002, Leonard and the restaurant made donations to the campaign committees of Mitchell ($250) and Rodney Orange Sr. ($200), the former head of the NAACP’s Baltimore chapter. Mitchell and Orange were running primary campaigns for senator and delegate, respectively, for the West Baltimore’s 44th District. Orange’s campaign also received $80 from Eric Clash. Mitchell and Orange both lost.

> In 2003, the campaign of City Comptroller Joan Pratt, who was running uncontested in the city’s Democratic primary, spent $2,200 on catering from Downtown Southern Blues. Pratt’s campaign also received $200 from Pajardo. The committee of then-City Councilwoman Catherine Pugh (D), who was mounting an unsuccessful campaign to unseat council President Sheila Dixon (D), spent $600 on a party for Larry Young at Downtown Southern Blues.

> Also in 2003, Pajardo donated $100 to the campaign of Democrat Charese Williams, who challenged incumbent City Councilwoman Stephanie Rawlings Blake (D-6th District) and lost in the September 2003 primary.

In a Feb. 28 phone call with City Paper, Rodney Orange Sr. said Leonard and Clash are related to him—they are both second cousins, he explained—so he is not surprised that they donated to his campaign in 2002. At the time of the donations, he continued, “there was no knowledge on my part of any activity on their part that was illegal.” Hayes said he’d booked his fundraiser with Downtown Southern Blues’ predecessor, Britton’s, and he went ahead with the scheduled event anyway. “Fortunately,” he added, “he didn’t contribute to my campaign.”

The other politicians or campaigns whose ties are disclosed above could not be reached for comment by press time.

By 2002, when Leonard leased the space for Downtown Southern Blues from K.A.J. Enterprises, the property’s ties to 47-year-old Kenny “Bird” Jackson were already well known. From 2001 until Leonard took over, the location was used by another Jackson-related company, Universal LLC, to house Britton’s, a restaurant where politicians spent nearly $1,500 in ’01 and ’02 combined, according to state campaign-finance reports. The manager of Britton’s, James Britton, owns Class Act Catering, which has gotten $120,000 worth of business from Maryland political committees since 1999. Britton, like Jackson, earned a drug-related criminal record when he was younger: He pled guilty in 1983 to pot and handgun charges in Baltimore city.

Jackson’s days in the drug business in the 1980s were summed up by The Wire producer David Simon, a former newspaper reporter, in a 1987 Sun series about a famous Baltimore drug trafficker, “Little” Melvin Williams.

“Wholesale exchanges of narcotics were carefully controlled, according to detectives,” Simon wrote, “with Williams represented by tested lieutenants such as Glen Hawkins or Kenny ‘Bird’ Jackson—men identified in court papers as Williams’ most trusted surrogates, men who allegedly had the authority and knowledge to carry large amounts of cash and make purchases without being cheated. The loyalty of such lieutenants was unquestioned.”

Jackson’s convictions in 1978 (manslaughter), 1979 (resisting arrest), and 1984 (a gun charge) were accompanied by dozens of other criminal charges in numerous jurisdictions that didn’t stick. In 1992, Jackson faced bribery charges in New Jersey, but pleaded down to one count of giving false information to a state trooper who had stopped him with nearly $700,000 in cash in his car. Meanwhile, Jackson sought to establish himself as a legitimate manager of his family’s strip club, the Eldorado Lounge, and as an accepted figure in the city’s political circles. In 1995, Jackson was a major backer of a short-lived political-action committee called A Piece of J.U.I.C.E., which was run by one of Orange’s sons. A Piece of J.U.I.C.E., which sought to give political voice to inner-city residents, made a total of $8,000 in contributions to city candidates in 1995, including Pratt, Dixon, Orange, and then-Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke (D).

Later, after the 1999 city elections, as the city’s plans for redeveloping the west side of downtown forced the Eldorado to move, Jackson’s contributions to politicians again became a public issue. Dixon got $2,500 and Mayor Martin O’Malley (D), ducking controversy, returned $2,000 he’d received from Jackson’s mother, Rosalie Jackson. In 1999, Jackson had former governor Marvin Mandel represent him in a paternity case, a measure of Jackson’s access to politically connected help. Meanwhile, donations from Jackson and those tied to him continued at the federal level. In 1999, Rosalie Jackson gave $1,000 to then-Vice President Al Gore’s committee in the 2000 Democratic presidential primary. More recently, in 2003, Kenneth Jackson gave $500 to the National Republican Congressional Committee. And in 2004 Universal LLC, which operated Britton’s, donated $250 to Lt. Gov. Steele’s campaign.

Leonard, in his 2002 city liquor-license application to fill the vacancy left by the closing of Britton’s, wrote that he had been self-employed since 1999, and had previously worked from ’95 to ’99 at the Starlite Lounge, a West Baltimore bar. The sources of funds for starting Downtown Southern Blues were disclosed as proceeds from the Southern Blues carry-out in Randallstown and from Raphael Barber Shop, also in Randallstown Plaza. The purchase price for the restaurant was $350,000, with $3,394-per-month payments to K.A.J. Enterprises. Under Leonard’s proprietorship, violence struck at Downtown Southern Blues in October 2003, when an argument that started in the restaurant spilled outside, resulting in four men shot and another stabbed. Today, a new restaurant called Gambrino’s of Spain is preparing to open up there, with owners who moved here recently from Elizabeth, N.J., and a letter in the files on the property kept by the Baltimore Board of Liquor License Commissioners indicates that K.A.J. Enterprises is considering selling building.

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.