Firearms Fiasco: Baltimore County police return seized guns as owner’s lawsuit exposes cops’ missteps

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, March 27, 2013

After two and a half years of fighting a lawsuit against Baltimore County police, gun collector David Bord’s pursuit of justice appears poised to bear fruit. Nearly all of the $250,000 worth of historic firearms, mostly machine guns, seized from him in a December 2009 raid on his home and business, were returned to him in December 2012. What remains to be determined is the how much damage his collection suffered during the three years they weren’t in his possession—and how badly law enforcers behaved in claiming a legal right to seize them in the first place.

“We’re going to do Baltimore like Fast and Furious,” says Bord, referring to the scandalous Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) operation that allowed illegally purchased firearms to continue in circulation, “but it’s going to be The Fast and the Stupid, because that’s how they handled this.”

“We are absolutely on the warpath,” adds Bord’s wife, Robin Bord. “How dare they do this to my family?”

The lawsuit (“Gun Trouble,” Mobtown Beat, June 6, 2012) claims that detective Erik Socha and Cpl. Anthony Kidwell led raids on the Bords’ home and auto-repair business that were based on a bad warrant “in order to intimidate” David Bord and cause him “economic injury.” The operations also were undertaken “for gratuitous sport rather than for proper law-enforcement purposes,” according to court documents, and Socha and Kidwell, when presented with all the proper firearms paperwork after the raids, said “save it for court,” that the paperwork was “wrong” or “bull***t,” and “words to the effect” that David Bord “would never get his property back.”

Now that the guns have been returned, a trial in Baltimore County Circuit Court before Judge H. Patrick Stringer Jr. seeks to determine the value of the damages the weapons suffered between the time they were seized and returned, as well as establish the costs borne by Bord for bringing the lawsuit and for legal representation while he was unsuccessfully prosecuted for gun crimes, according to statements made during the proceeding by William Butler, David Bord’s attorney. The trial so far has spanned three days, from March 19 through March 21, and is scheduled to resume on April 29.

The delay, says David Bord, is due to the sudden emergence of photographs of the guns as they were being seized, the existence of which he says Baltimore County previously had denied. Once the photographs have been properly analyzed, he explains, the trial will resume with better evidence to determine how badly the firearms were damaged during the three years they were gone.

While David Bord awaits Stringer’s determination of how much money Baltimore County should pay him, he can already enjoy some level of satisfaction from testimony about the cops’ missteps during the firearms seizure and its fallout. “Money is not my overriding issue,” he says, adding that Socha “spilled his guts” while testifying.

“He admitted on the stand that he has tire tracks on his back from being pushed under the bus” to take the fall after the ill-advised raids, which were based on a warrant in which Socha swore to having machine-gun expertise, yet “he never knew anything about machine guns,” David Bord says. “He signed his name on the warrant,” Bord continues, “and they knew it was all bad, and now they left him out to dry. By his own admission, he’s probably going to have to go get a new job.”

The county attorney handling the trial, Shawn Vinson, declined to comment, saying “the case is still ongoing,” while Butler was unavailable for comment before press time.

At the beginning of the trial, on March 19, Vinson told Stringer that “Baltimore County acknowledges that the plaintiff is entitled to possession” of the seized machine guns, but asserted there was “no admissible evidence” that they were damaged while in the county’s hands, pointing out that the seized collection also spent time with the ATF before they were returned. Butler, meanwhile, said the “wrongful taking and detention” of the collection, which was “mistreated” by law enforcers, means Bord “needs to be compensated.”

The collection’s seizure was the result of an ATF tip that Bord had a Hatton Industries machine gun he’d purchased at the Armory, a gun store in Annapolis, that agents thought was part of an allegedly fraudulent gun-registration ring based in Arizona that “harvested” serial numbers from older machine guns not covered by a federal ban, and welded them onto new guns they manufactured and then sold as pre-ban guns (“Blunderbusted,” Mobtown Beat, Aug. 5, 2010). The Arizona case ended in December jury convictions for the two defendants—including Marylander Randolph Rodman—who hadn’t previously pleaded guilty.

Down for the Undercount: Baltimore’s homeless count is a fluke this year

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Oct. 2, 2013

Given the long-struggling state of the economy and the society’s shrinking social safety net, the suggestion that Baltimore City’s homeless population is in rapid decline may seem like a pipe dream. But here are the latest figures, according to Baltimore City’s recently released report on its biennial homeless count, conducted on Jan. 27: 35 percent fewer people were sleeping in homeless shelters or outdoors this year than in 2011. The tally’s steep drop is in stark contrast to the 2011 count, which found a 20 percent rise—and 50 percent increase in homeless youth—over 2009.

In reality, though, the report—which was released quietly, posted on a city website without announcement or press release—undercuts its own numbers by asserting that the extent of homelessness in Baltimore has likely remained static in recent years.

The report, entitled the “2013 Homeless Point in Time Count Report” and released by the Homeless Services Program of the Mayor’s Office of Human Services, explains that an effort this year to account for inaccuracies in prior tallies due to inconsistent methodologies “suggests that the total count of homeless persons in Baltimore did not undergo large changes during the period from 2007 to 2013.”

Thus, though “there were 2,638 homeless persons identified during the count, a 35 [percent] decrease from 2011,” when 4,088 homeless people were counted, the number “does not precisely reflect the actual number of homeless persons in the City” because the “methodology [used] in Baltimore is imperfect and has varied across the years,” the report states.

As Health Care for the Homeless’ executive director Kevin Lindamood quips, “rumors of the demise of homelessness have been greatly exaggerated,” adding that the report was released to the public “very silently.”

Lindamood says “the city this year is pressing the reset button” on how it conducts its point-in-time (PIT) homeless count, and “I applaud the direction,” with “its intent to improve the methodology.” He worries, though, that “some people use the number from the PIT count as the data point measuring homelessness,” even though “it is an incomplete measure if we are going to look at the broader issues of homelessness.”

In September, for instance, USA Today ran a story under the headline, “Homeless population dips,” reporting on numbers released by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, which uses federally required PIT counts from around the country to track trends in the nation’s homeless population—and found it has dropped 17 percent since 2005.

Lindamood, though, says his experience working with Baltimore’s homeless population belies the downward trend, because he has watched the demographics of his group’s clientele change over the last 20 years in ways that suggest more people, not less, are without a stable place to live.

“Twenty years ago,” Lindamood says, “85 percent of our clients were single adult men between the ages of 25 and 44. This year, 35 percent were women, and in the past five or six years, we’ve been seeing more intact families and children. As safety nets have been eroding, we start to see other populations—children and families and even seniors—who we used to be able to find housing for but now are on the streets in greater numbers.”

Homeless advocates say counting homeless young people is a particularly challenging task, and in prior years the city’s PIT-count report was accompanied by a parallel study conducted by the Center for Adolescent Health (CAH) at the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. Rather than seeking to count homeless youth on a single night, the center worked with service providers over a period of weeks to try to gain a firmer grasp of the population—and its data showed this population had increased 135 percent between 2007 and 2011. No such study was conducted this year, though, according to the center’s lead investigator for its 2011 study, Nan Astone, who left for another job in May—after the parallel study would have been done.

This year’s PIT count does, however, try to account for homeless people under 25 years old. It identified “2,030 who self-reported (or whose parents self-reported) to a service provider or to the school system that they were homeless or unstably housed during or at some point prior to the PIT Count,” the report states. However, most of them were not included in the official tally because of incomplete records about their housing status. In the end, the count included 555 young people, 431 of them under 18 years old, and six of those unaccompanied by a parent or guardian. They comprised 20 percent of all the homeless people counted.

Astone, in an email to City Paper, was astounded that only six unaccompanied homeless children were counted, asking, “Are they kidding?” In 2011, the CAH study found more than 200 unaccompanied homeless youth under the age of 18, almost a third of the 640 young people it found between 13 and 25 were homeless in Baltimore.

Lara Law, program director for Youth Empowered Society, a safe haven in Charles Village for homeless youngsters that opened in 2012 and, according to Law, has since served 140 people who are 25 or younger, calls the report “a dismal undercount of homeless adolescents and young adults,” who number “in the hundreds, if not thousands” at “any given time in Baltimore.”

A telltale gauge of how undercounted children were in this year’s homeless tally is the number of students enrolled in Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS) that the system identified as homeless: 2,716 in the 2012-2013 school year, according to its official enrollment data. That’s 78 more homeless people than the PIT count found in the entire city this year. The discrepancy arises due to differences in how homelessness is defined. The PIT count’s definition of homelessness—those sleeping in shelters or outside—is more restrictive than the school system’s definition, which includes all students who “lack a fixed, regular and adequate night-time place of residence,” according the BCPS website.

Despite advocates’ concerns about undercounting, the report says “the 2013 PIT Count is the most comprehensive to date,” is “more useful for planning and policy decisions” than past efforts, and has helped identify “the most vulnerable homeless individuals and families in the City in order to connect them with housing and supportive services.” In the future, the report states, the city’s PIT counts will seek to maintain “consistency in the counting methodology” while improving “the thoroughness and accuracy of the count.”

Good Cop, Bad Cop: Accused officer allegedly facilitated drug dealing on same days she busted people with drugs

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, June 12, 2013

Since the mid-2000s, when Baltimore police officers William King and Antonio Murray were busted for robbing drug dealers and received combined sentences totaling hundreds of years, the string of corruption scandals involving the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) has been notable for its persistence.

Since 2005, prosecutors have brought cases against BPD law enforcers for rape, murder, theft, gambling, fraud, stalking, lying, obstructing justice, extortion, drug dealing, assault, and prostitution. And the cases keep coming—the latest was unsealed on May 31 against Ashley Roane, a BPD officer accused in a gun, drugs, and fraud case investigated by the FBI (the News Hole, May 31).

Sometimes the crimes were committed while on duty, other times not, but all point to a powerfully intriguing characteristic of corrupt cops: their split personalities, manifesting the human capacity for both good and evil that all people share yet few exhibit to such a trust-busting extreme. Though sworn to uphold the law—which they did on a daily basis—they also broke it, sometimes in shockingly egregious ways, perhaps due to a sense of impunity borne of being an armed badge-holder.

In Roane’s case, her alleged criminal conduct, the evidence of which spanned several months, occurred on two days when she also busted alleged lawbreakers. The proximity in time of her law-enforcing and alleged lawbreaking activities brings the duplicitous nature of police corruption into stark contrast.

Though the accusations against Roane are fresh and unproven, the evidence is weighty, based on the FBI’s observations of her conduct and interactions with what court documents call a “Confidential Human Source” (CHS) who she first approached, but who thereafter conspired with her under the FBI’s watchful eye. She thought the CHS was a high-level drug dealer with a job as a tax preparer and she allegedly offered to provide protection for his supply-side drug transactions while also getting him names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers from law enforcement databases which she thought he would use to file fraudulent tax returns.

On the afternoon of April 24, Roane was on the job, patrolling the 500 block of South Catherine Street—an area of the Mill Hill neighborhood known for drug activity—with another officer, Richard Pinheiro, when she noticed a woman, 33-year-old Sariah Parker, enter the yard of a vacant house that had previously been the target of burglaries.

When the two officers got out of their patrol car and entered the yard, court documents say, they heard voices coming from inside the house, so Pinheiro knocked on the back door. A man—48-year-old John Toomer—opened the door and said he lived there, and while the officers waited for him to produce verification, they saw Parker and another man, 24-year-old Ricky Warren, standing around the kitchen table. After admitting he couldn’t prove he lived there, Toomer took two gelatin capsules out of his pocket and put them on the kitchen table, and all three people were placed in custody.

In a subsequent search, Roane and Pinheiro recovered from the suspects two sandwich bags of pot, a pill container with six ziplock bags of crack, 10 gelatin capsules of heroin, and a folded-up piece of paper containing heroin, according to court records. All three have criminal convictions in their past—including an armed-robbery conspiracy for Parker—and Warren has since been charged in two separate Baltimore City circuit court cases involving drugs and weapons charges. On the day before the federal charges against Roane were made public, though, state prosecutors declined to proceed with the case against Parker, Toomer, and Warren.

The same day Roane and Pinheiro arrested the three drug suspects, the FBI says Roane called and texted the CHS to arrange payment for having previously provided the CHS with the identification information of 10 people so that fraudulent tax returns could be prepared in their names. The payment occurred later that day, in front of Roane’s Pikesville house while Roane wore a tan bandana and a white T-shirt, according to court documents.

“Roane expressed her displeasure at only receiving $1,500,” court documents state, since “she thought she would have received $3,000,” but she stated that “she was preparing for next tax season and wanted to provide CHS with the names earlier in the tax season.” The money, she said, would be used “to pay her traffic tickets.” When the CHS said he would soon need her protection during a drug meeting in the upcoming week, Roane said “she was still working evenings next week and would be able to assist CHS during the meeting.”

On the day of the meeting, April 30, the CHS called Roane to explain the details—to look for a certain brown Ford Explorer in the parking lot of the Westside Shopping Center and that the CHS “would pay her for her assistance,” according to court documents. Roane texted back: “Ok sound good.”

When the time came, Roane called the CHS to say she saw the Explorer—in which agents had placed “a blue backpack containing a brick-shaped package of white powder wrapped in tan tape which resembled a kilogram of heroin,” according to court documents—and then she drove a patrol car, with another woman in plain clothes and a yellow baseball cap in the passenger seat, and parked behind the Explorer. The CHS then drove up, took the backpack out of the Explorer, and drove away, as did Roane and her passenger.

Minutes later, Roane, now alone and in a different patrol car but still in uniform and carrying her holstered service firearm, met the CHS in the 400 block of South Longwood Street. There, according to court records, she “hugged” the CHS, “acknowledged that she saw CHS retrieve the bag,” and received $500 in payment for her services.

Later, according to court records, the CHS texted Roane: “Wassup lady dat my bag was real good it’s was a fucking whole boy for 60K thanks boo the time hope u can start helping me more and I will bless ur pocket So we cool.” Roane texted back: “awesome…. Yup.”

Also on April 30, Roane and Pinheiro were again patrolling the 500 block of South Catherine Street, which is right next to the Westside Shopping Center parking lot where she’d provided protection for the CHS. As they were driving in the patrol car, they noticed a man who, when he noticed them, quickly stepped out of their view into the yard of a vacant property.

Roane and Pinheiro got out of their patrol car, approached the man, 61-year-old Richard Floyd, and eventually found he had a baggy of suspected crack and a gelatin capsule of suspected heroin in a small container attached to his key ring. Floyd—whose record of petty, drug-related criminal charges in Baltimore City stretches back nearly 20 years and suggests he has long struggled with substance-abuse problems—was once again charged with drug possession. He’s scheduled for trial in August.

Thus, if the charges Roane is facing are proven true, on April 30 she thought she was using her police powers to facilitate the distribution of addictive drugs in Baltimore. And on that very day—and in nearly the same location—Roane’s routine policing handed Floyd yet another entry on his ever-growing rap sheet that appears to have resulted largely from the distribution of addictive drugs in Baltimore. That would be a perverse and cynical twist on the “good cop/bad cop” routine.

Archival Revival: Efforts to salvage the Baltimore City Archives get a boost

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, July 3, 2013

Screen Shot 2019-03-31 at 4.35.34 PM — Robert Schoeberlein, left, and Gerald Roberts with a vintage map of Baltimore.

The Baltimore City Archives (BCA), the repository of city records going back centuries to the local government’s earliest days, is abuzz with the work of about a dozen employees scanning historic documents, cataloging records, and otherwise tending to collections. Yet only one—records administrator Gerald Roberts—is on the city payroll. And while computers sit on tables all over the facility, located just east of Greenmount Avenue off 27th Street, Roberts says the city owns only one of them—and none of the six scanners used to digitize the BCA’s holdings.

Though the city rents the office-and-warehouse space that houses the archives and pays all utilities and other incidental costs, such as cleaning crews, Roberts explains, the Maryland State Archives (MSA)—a state agency headed by Edward Papenfuse, who is set to retire this fall after nearly two generations at the helm of the state’s repository of similar materials—covers the salaries of all other workers and, with the exception of that one computer, owns all the digitization and computer technology at BCA that modern archives management requires.

The resource-sharing arrangement began in 2009, according to city records, when MSA received permission to store some of its Baltimore-related records at the BCA in return for providing the BCA with technological services. The agreement was expanded in 2010, when, in return for $90,000—the equivalent of the salary and benefits of a BCA position that had recently become vacant—the MSA agreed to provide day-to-day management and staffing for the BCA.

On June 26, the Baltimore Board of Estimates approved a new agreement, which, according to city documents, “will consolidate the two previous agreements and extend their terms” for five years, until 2018.

It wasn’t always like this. Until it moved to its current location in 2008, Roberts explains, BCA was located at 2165 Druid Park Drive. There, Roberts says, “there was mold and mildew, due to the nature of the building,” and, according to Robert Schoeberlein, the MSA’s director of special collections, who now helps Roberts run the BCA’s day-to-day operations, there was “plastic over the tops of the stacks because of the roof leaks.”

More colorful descriptions of BCA’s prior facility were published in this spring’s issue of Baltimore Gaslight, the newsletter of the Baltimore City Historical Society. Matthew Crenson, an emeritus Johns Hopkins University professor who’s working on a comprehensive history of Baltimore City’s government, described it as a “dank, leaky, vermin-infested warehouse,” while Garrett Power, an emeritus University of Maryland law professor, wrote that the BCA had fallen into “disuse, disorganization, and decay” as records “had been placed in a leaking, decrepit warehouse that posed a clear and present danger to both the papers themselves and the intrepid researchers who used them.”

On a recent visit to the new location, Seattle University professor Emily Lieb was at BCA, going through housing data for a book she’s writing about the impact of a 1970s-era Baltimore City housing program on the Rosemont neighborhood in West Baltimore. She used to put in long hours at BCA’s Druid Park Drive warehouse, and, while she misses it in some respects, she appreciates the importance of the BCA’s revitalization and modernization at its current location.

“What was really wonderful about working over” at Druid Park Drive, Lieb says, was that “essentially they were open stacks, so I could just poke around and see what I find and just stumble across stuff,” which is “not something I would be able to do in a place managed like every other archive is managed, and like this is now managed. I realize it was not the best way to run an archive for preservation purposes,” she adds, “but, for me, I got a lot done. I was thinking just this morning, What kinds of things am I missing now because I don’t know that they exist and I don’t know to ask for them?”

Lieb says the Druid Park Drive location would get “very, very hot” and “very cold,” and, since she has “an irrational phobia of large insects, I was always a little worried I’d run into them there. But here, they definitely don’t have giant bugs.” She also appreciates that she no longer works alone: “I don’t think I ever saw another person” at Druid Park Drive other than Roberts, she says, “and here, I’ve seen all kinds of people really making use of the stuff, which is great—that’s what it’s for. It’s great that it’s more accessible and that people feel comfortable using it.”

As Roberts and Schoeberlein give a tour of the office and warehouse, they describe some of BCA’s holdings. Behind the office, in the warehouse stacks, Schoeberlein pulls out what he describes as “records that detail the payments and the outreach to widows and children” of Civil War soldiers in Maryland, and part of a “survey of buildings in the 1930s, early 1940s, that were in the path of possible slum clearance, and a lot were pulled down.” He describes a collection of “studio portraits of Baltimore firefighters with their uniforms on” just after the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, and “a series in the 1890s of Russian-Jewish street peddler applications with some demographic information about them.”

Most recently acquired, Roberts says, are “maps laying out where all the storm drains and sanitary systems are under the streets,” as well as “engineers’ field books for sewer connections to houses sometime in the early 1900s” and, Schoeberlein adds, “an aerial survey of Baltimore City from 1927.” Soon, says Roberts, “we’ll be taking in 65 pallets of 40 boxes on each pallet of Law Department files” that date as far back as the 1890s.

“In the past,” Schoeberlein explains, “a city agency might request to have files returned, and it’s troubling because the idea of getting them back or keeping track of them while they’re gone—well, files might not be returned.” Now, says Roberts, “we pull it, scan it, and send it to them as a PDF, and the actual file will never leave here.”

To Roberts, “the situation today—it can’t be improved,” he says. “The tools are here to lay our hand on anything we have, almost immediately. When we were on Druid Park Drive, we didn’t have the computer programs or the computers, so every search we made was on paper and pencil, and then we’d go out and look for it. Now, it’s all right there on the computer, no matter what you want.”

Here’s Mud On Your Robes: The Nose is aware of a long history of racially troublesome neighbors here in the Mobtown region

Published by City Paper, Sept. 11, 2013

The lyrics of Brad Paisley’s country-Western song, “Mud on the Tires,” strike a chord with the Nose: we’re as partial as the next desk-bound yahoo to getting out to the middle of nowhere and spreading a blanket as the sun sets, listening to crickets and watching the stars blink on. And so, apparently, is Team Hell, a Baltimore-based off-road truck-racing outfit that fields its vehicle—a 1966 El Camino body affixed to a 1977 Chevy Blazer frame—at events in the area. Its YouTube video of the near-monster truck’s reconstruction is set to Paisley’s number-one Billboard hit from 2003.

Here’s the rub, though: Team Hell’s driver/owner is Richard Preston, the self-described imperial wizard of the Confederate White Knights, a Rosedale-based Ku Klux Klan group that’s emerged recently to hold protests at Antietam National Battlefield and Gettysburg National Military Park, with some members wearing Klan robes.

No wonder, then, that online photos of Team Hell’s El Camino feature it festooned with a Confederate flag.

The Nose has, over the years, made efforts to keep tabs on Maryland’s “active hate groups,” so dubbed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). As of Sept. 6, the SPLC listed 17 of them in the Free State—but the Confederate White Knights isn’t one of them. Preston’s creation, then, has either been flying under the radar—until suddenly making national news with its protest plans—or is a newly minted Klan group. Either way, the group’s website touts its motto—“Save the land, Join the Klan!”—has photos of a cross burning, and implores members to “always do your duty for the preservation of the white race.”

The Nose is broadly tolerant of our neighbors, no matter how much they may appall us. Team Hell, after all, is not the Confederate White Knights—even if they do share a leader—and is known for its efforts to support cleaning up the degraded water in Bear Creek and other Chesapeake Bay tributaries in our area.

But lest, dear reader, you find this an outlier—that Baltimore, or Maryland for that matter, a state built on tolerance and, in these times, held up as a bastion of political liberalism—be reminded: we have a history of hate too, so don’t be surprised.

Remember: Last year the Human Rights Campaign dubbed Pasadena debt-collections attorney Michael Peroutka, a former Constitution Party presidential candidate and an influential supporter of ultra-conservatives such as Maryland State Del. Donald Dwyer, “an active white supremacist and secessionist sympathizer.”

Remember: In 2009, white supremacist Calvin Lockner and two others savagely beat up an elderly African-American fisherman at Fort Armistead Park, just for kicks.

Remember:In 2009, Annapolitan James von Brunn, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier, opened fire at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., killing security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns.

Remember: In 2003, Highlandtown resident Lovell Wheeler, reportedly a white supremacist and member of the National Alliance hate group, was arrested when police with a search warrant found an arsenal of guns, ammunition, gunpowder, and gun-making machinery in his house.

Remember: In 1991, Hampden’s Robert Poole Middle School was beset with white-supremacist threats thanks to skinhead parents.

Remember:In 1990, a white-supremacist skinhead group was granted a permit to march through Hampden.

Remember: In 1989, five Ku Klux Klan activists were convicted of assault or weapons charges in Baltimore’s federal court.

Remember: In 1988, two Hampden men were convicted of throwing bricks and stones through the windows of a black family, the Boyce-Beys, who’d moved into the neighborhood.

Remember: In 1964, segregationist George Wallace nearly won the Democratic presidential primary in Maryland.

All of which is to say the Nose is aware of a long history of racially troublesome neighbors here in the Mobtown region. Just like the Confederate White Knights, they’re entitled to their views—just not to commit crimes while trying to force them on others. So have a nice protest, Preston, and enjoy getting mud on your tires—just don’t get any on the rest of us.

Arrested Development: Police lied for Baltimore raid warrant to arrest innocent man, lawsuit claims

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Nov. 13, 2013

Close to midnight on Jan. 16, a SWAT team used a battering ram to break down the front door of 4823 Aberdeen Avenue, a rowhouse near Herring Run in Frankford. Inside, they found their man: 19-year-old Kyle Brandon Wills, a suspect in two armed robberies in Howard and Baltimore counties. After two days in jail, Wills made bail in Howard County, but was immediately arrested by Baltimore County police and spent another day locked up there.

Turns out, though, it was the wrong man. What’s more, in order to convince a judge to sign the raid warrant leading to Wills’ arrest, the detectives on the case—Mark Claypoole of Baltimore County and Wade Zufall of Howard County—falsely claimed Wills had recently been arrested with the other suspect in the armed robberies, according to a lawsuit filed Nov. 6 in Baltimore City Circuit Court.

After prosecutors in Howard and Baltimore counties learned of “the terrible mistake that had been made,” the lawsuit explains, the charges against Wills were dropped and another man—Wills’ cousin, Stanley Berry—was charged instead. But the damage wrought by the raid and Wills’ detentions, all based on the detectives’ allegedly false claim, had already been wrought: three days in jail, two strip searches, a required medical intravenous injection, emotional trauma, still-ongoing monthly payments to pay back the bail money, and an arrest record for serious charges in two jurisdictions.

As a result, Wills, his mother, Vickie Wills, and brother Calvin Clifton—the three people present when the SWAT team came through their door—are suing Claypoole, Zufall, and their police forces for false arrest, assault, battery, false imprisonment, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, seeking $75,000 in compensation and another $75,000 in penalties. Their attorney, Charles Curlett says Wills, a 2012 Patterson High School graduate, is employed at University of Maryland Hospital, helping prepare operating rooms for surgery.

“I don’t see how this could be an honest mistake,” says Curlett, adding that the detectives’ allegedly false claim that Wills had been arrested was the “lynchpin of probable cause” in the affidavit that supported the raid. “I think it is a very strong case.”

Howard County prosecutors declined to pursue the charges against Wills on Feb. 13, and two days later his Baltimore County charges were dismissed. The cases against Berry and Michael Elliott Dickey—the man who was originally charged with Wills—remain intact, though. Both pleaded guilty in their Howard County cases, receiving 10-year sentences with five years suspended, and both are scheduled for trial in their Baltimore County cases.

Howard County initially was proud of the detective work in the case, issuing a press release on Jan. 24 announcing the charges against Dickey and Wills—and repeating the detectives’ false assertion that Wills had previously been arrested with Dickey.

“Wills is a known associate of Dickey’s,” the press release states, “who was recently arrested with Dickey for an unrelated incident in another jurisdiction. Surveillance video in both cases show Dickey and Wills together, each wearing the same clothing in both incidents.”

The details of how Claypoole and Zufall pursued the case are spelled out in the lawsuit. The two-county probe was spawned after two men robbed an Exxon gas station in Columbia by throwing hot coffee on the clerk’s face and then taking cash out of the register while brandishing guns. That was on Jan. 5—three days after the exact same tactics were used by two men in an armed robbery of a Quick Mart in Cockeysville.

Dickey’s fingerprints were found on the coffee cup at the Exxon, and it was soon discovered that he’d been arrested the day after the Quick Mart robbery for petty theft at a Walmart store—and at that time had been accompanied by a man who had not been arrested, but who identified himself as “Kyle Wills.” So Claypoole showed the Wal-Mart security officer Wills’ driver’s license photograph, and the security officer confirmed it was the same man who’d been with Dickey during the theft.

At that point, Claypoole and Zufall wanted to raid Wills’ home and arrest him—“but they had a problem,” the lawsuit explains. In order to get a warrant, they “needed to establish a likelihood that Dickey’s friend from Wal-Mart was also Dickey’s accomplice in the coffee robberies,” yet “nothing had been done to reliably confirm that person’s identity.” The security officer’s confirmation was not sufficient—but an arrest would be, since “his identity would have been established through fingerprinting, and they would have been able to rely on the arrest to tie that person to Dickey,” the lawsuit explains.

Absent an actual arrest, Claypoole and Zufall allegedly made one up. “Rather than admit what they did not know,” the lawsuit states, “they misled the court” with the following information that was stated in the raid-warrant affidavit: “Arrested along with Dickey during the Theft at Wal-Mart was the following individual: KYLE BRANDON WILLS BM 507 150 DOB = 9/18/1993.”

“When I saw the affidavit” for the raid warrant and saw the assertion that Wills had been arrested, Curlett recalls, he looked for it on the online court records and couldn’t find it. “‘Where is it?’” he says he asked himself. “‘Why isn’t it here? It is there for the other guy.’”

Not only was Wills not arrested at the Walmart, he wasn’t even there. But, according to the lawsuit, his cousin Berry—a man who was wanted on several open warrants—was, and told the security guard that he was Wills, who has no prior criminal record.

Based on the detectives’ “perjured testimony,” the lawsuit continues, a no-knock warrant was issued for the Wills home and a SWAT team “broke through the door of the suspect’s Baltimore City home and restrained his family at gunpoint and in handcuffs while they searched the house.”

Given that anyone, including a judge who’s considering signing a warrant, can check online to see if someone’s been charged with a crime, it seems a risky proposition for detectives to lie about such a thing. Curlett speculates that such “hubris may be borne of the unlikelihood that anybody’s going to challenge” the information. “So many cases plead out,” he continues, “the risk of airing dirty laundry like this is slim.”

With the Wills’ lawsuit, though, Claypoole and Zufall have run headlong into that risk.

Party Crasher: Clean-water group’s failed legal effort to help oversee Baltimore’s sewage-repair plan exposes lax enforcement

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Oct. 30, 2013

After years of watching state and federal regulators fail to enforce violations of Baltimore City’s 11-year-old agreement to fix its leaking sewer system, Blue Water Baltimore (BWB) this summer “went forward and took action,” says the clean-water group’s executive director, Halle Van der Gaag. But BWB’s bold step—litigating to become an intervening party in the 2002 lawsuit that crafted the “consent decree” that dictates how the city is to spend nearly $1 billion to overhaul its sewers—failed on Oct. 1.

That’s when U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz denied BWB’s motion to intervene, leaving intact the existing roster of parties: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE), the plaintiffs who alleged the city was committing chronic violations of the federal Clean Water Act, and the defendant, Baltimore City, which avoided massive fines and legal costs by accepting the terms of the consent decree—but, as a result, had to send water and wastewater fees on users soaring in order to fund the required upgrades.

The system, though, remains rife with leaks and overflows—a point that BWB drove home in its legal filings, which also exposed seemingly lax enforcement by EPA and MDE for apparent violations of the consent decree.

In one instance, Baltimore City estimated that a sewage overflow on Herring Run last fall amounted to 8,100 gallons—versus the 800,000- to 1,000,000-gallon estimate calculated by BWB volunteer Thayer Young, an environmental engineer who lives nearby the spill and is an expert in tracking sewage contamination. What’s more, the city’s official report of the leak attributed it to wet weather from Superstorm Sandy, but Young observed the leak already occurring before the storm hit Baltimore.

“I believe that the City of Baltimore highly underestimated the flow rate and total sewage overflow volume” of this “sewage overflow incident,” Young concluded in an affidavit attached to BWB’s recent court filings. “Furthermore,” he added,” although Super Storm Sandy clearly exacerbated” the incident, “the overflow actually began at least 12 hours before the storm showed an impact” on the Herring Run’s water levels.

The discrepancy in the estimated amounts of leaked sewage is important not only because of public-health and environmental concerns arising from such a massive release into a Baltimore stream, but because the City of Baltimore, under the consent decree, is required to pay fines based on the amount of sewage it estimates was released. In this case, the city’s estimate was two orders of magnitude lower than Young’s, which was based on meticulous observations and technically proficient calculations based on video recordings and engineering concepts.

Yet, according to David Flores, BWB’s longtime water-quality manager who was recently appointed as Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper—a BWB program that seeks to apply the law to attain cleaner water—“there hasn’t been any enforcement” by MDE or EPA over this incident.

In its legal filings, BWB’s attorneys wrote that the city’s estimate of the amount leaked during the incident is tantamount “to the flow rate from a standard drinking water fountain”—which photos of the leaking sewer give lie to—and that the city “has not provided any correction of its inaccurate volume estimates or any explanation as to how those estimates could be so far off the mark.”

When CP asked the two agencies and the city’s Department of Public Works (DPW) about this, EPA and DPW each provided a copy of an 80-page document prepared in May in response to BWB’s numerous concerns about ongoing sewer-related problems under the consent decree. On page nine, the document explains what was done: Last November, an inspection revealed “roots and debris” had clogged the sewer line, so it was cleaned and the manhole was rebuilt.

“It is believed that all of the problems causing previous overflows at this location have been resolved,” the document concludes—without addressing at all the seriously low-balled estimate of the size of the overflow.

“EPA understands that sewage discharges in Baltimore are a serious problem and we have been working with the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore to curtail them,” EPA spokesperson David Sternberg writes in an email to City Paper, adding that “sanitary sewer overflows are being addressed within the context of the 2002 federal consent decree.”

But BWB’s court filings detailed numerous instances of apparent consent-decree violations by the city that appear not to have prompted any regulatory response by EPA or MDE. They included continuous leaks from a sewage structure and large periodic sewage overflows along the Jones Falls near the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, a stretch of the river where a heavily used pedestrian and bike path is located; evidence of unreported overflows from the Jones Falls Pumping Station in Hampden; a June 2012 week-long sewage discharge into the harbor, of unknown origin; repeated sewage overflows on South Clinton Street in Canton; and failures to adequately clean up or warn the public of sewage contamination after overflows occur.

The 80-page document that EPA and DPW provided to City Paper addresses most of the issues BWB raised—but it does not indicate that any penalties or other enforcement action was taken by federal and state regulators as a result. It merely explains the problems and how they are being addressed.

After helping to document all of these problems, Flores has been disappointed by the official response. “We documented all the violations that we observed,” he says, and put them “in a written report to EPA and MDE, and rather than investigate and enforce them, they requested a response from Baltimore City, which was inadequate.”

Van der Gaag says she’s “disappointed” and “frustrated” that Motz denied BWB’s attempt to intervene in the consent decree, because having a citizen group at the table would help “ensure accountability” in the sewer-upgrade process. So far, she points out, “hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent with very little outcome that the water quality is getting better.”

Cat Crusader: “Mike the cat guy” has made befriending felines his mission

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Aug. 29, 2012

Ewan Meiklejohn frequents the Park Heights corridor, favoring the alleys and back streets. “Gran-be-bes! Gran-be-bes!” he calls out loudly as he approaches his spots, the same places he goes nearly every day as he plies his trade. In short order, desperate souls emerge from abandoned houses, stepping into debris-covered lots, eager to see him coming.

The call-and-response is not unlike what plays out over much of this stretch of drug war-torn Baltimore, where corner boys sling heroin and cocaine, calling out the brand names of the day’s mind-altering products, doing their parts in an enormous underground economy.

But Meiklejohn, who goes by the nickname “Mike,” is not selling heroin or cocaine. He’s giving away food and water. His customers aren’t junkies; they are cats and kittens. Thus, many who are aware of his mission in life simply know him as “Mike the cat guy.”

Meiklejohn makes 27 to 30 stops nearly every day, he says, setting out about 25 pounds of cat food and 15 to 20 gallons of water in various containers around the trash-strewn properties the cats have colonized. On a typical day, he starts at eight in the morning and gets home around 2 P.M., he says. After happily taking City Paper’s offer to drive him on his route on a recent morning, the whole outing took about three hours.

He’s been doing this since he came to Baltimore, in 1997, in between working odd jobs as a shop clerk, laundromat attendant, and cleaner for a variety of Park Heights businesses, in addition to doing laundry for a network of nearby clients. His cat-feeding capabilities have been greatly aided in the past year, though, since a community of animal lovers stepped up to help him out.

“I’m in all these alleys all the time,” Meiklejohn says. “When I came to America and I saw these dogs and cats that were being abused,” he continues, “I said to myself, ‘Wow, this is my time to shine.’ Maybe I can put a damper on it and a little bit of awareness. I started feeding them, taking them to the vet, and getting them well, finding homes for them. Sometimes I trap them, get them neutered, release them again.”

Growing up in Jamaica, Meiklejohn recalls a rough stretch he survived during adolescence. Though he says he grew up “privileged” before then, in the home of his adoptive parents, whom he describes as “jet-setters,” Meiklejohn spent three years on his own between the ages of 14 and 17.

“I lived in the streets, eating out of garbage cans, sleeping in abandoned buildings, being raped, beaten up, stabbed up,” Meiklejohn remembers, tears welling in his eyes. “So I grew up with this kind of abuse, sleeping in back alleys. I wasn’t able to go to school, I never slept in a bed. I would roam around, find a big trash can close to a restaurant, search for food, and then I would go and eat berries and grapes and sugar cane and bananas on properties where I didn’t belong.”

Reflecting on this part of his life, Meiklejohn draws an analogy between himself and the animals he cares for. “I was an abandoned cat, abandoned dog,” he says, “so there is no one better than myself to understand their plight. I lived it too. I’m [60] years old, not as young as I used to be, and I have aches and pains, but when I think about the animals, pain doesn’t come anywhere close to me. When they see me coming, they come out and it brings a joy over me. I’ve found my niche in life, my purpose, and I want to do it for as long as I can.”

Last summer, Meiklejohn was uprooted from his prior home base in the Park Heights corridor, after his abode and belongings were torn up by police conducting a drug raid. He says he neither does nor sells drugs, but that, thanks to his efforts to stop the drug activity in the house where he lived, he ended up as collateral damage.

He soon found new digs near the Mondawmin Mall and tapped into an animal-lover network that now supports his endeavors by helping with expenses and transportation. His two Facebook pages have fans such as Feline Rescue Association and volunteers and staffers at other animal-rescue organizations such as BARCS Animal Shelter. A recent post says, “Mike is in need of cat food! If anyone can help him out, please do!”

A recent tag-along with Meiklejohn on his cat-feeding routine shows he’s a fixture on his route. Along the way, friendly folks with garden hoses let him refill his water bucket. He greets an apparent drug dealer as “soldier,” and a postman is happy to see Meiklejohn, cracking jokes about his cat-tending ways. He tries hard to keep his stops low-key (he asked that no specific locations be disclosed in this article) for fear that someone might come to abuse the cats.

Over the years, Meiklejohn has met with some resistance—he recalls a woman chasing him with a baton, screaming for him to stop feeding the cats, and a man who showed him his gun, saying Meiklejohn was trespassing on his property—but such antics don’t stop him. “You can kill me,” Meiklejohn says, “but I’m not going to stop.” He feels empowered now, thanks to all the help from the larger Baltimore-area community of animal lovers who know and support him.

“I’ve tapped into a network now, bless their souls,” Meiklejohn says. “Things are on a roll now. They’re helping with food. Sometimes the cats have to go to the doctor, they help me with that, too, with eyedrops, antibiotics, and formula, and with TNR [trap, neuter, return]. All the people online, they’re involved with me now, so I’ve found some help. It makes a big difference.”

Best Intentions: The list of Baltimore’s drug-dealing gang-interventionists grows

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, Aug. 8, 2012

Back in 2007, Brian Morris, then Baltimore City’s public schools board president, was impressed by Kevin Foreman. At the board’s Aug. 28, 2007, meeting, Foreman declared that he’d “left the private industry to come back and work . . . to service these children, these gangs, this issue with education, the drop-out rate and what have you” via a group Foreman had started with a former Baltimore City policeman, Trevor Britt. Morris responded, “We do need to find a way to plug you in.”

Earlier that year, Foreman and Britt were listed in incorporation papers as the two directors of Continuous Growth Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit that set out to provide “education, counseling, and mental health services to at-risk and/or disadvantaged youths,” ages 12 to 21. Britt also formed Continuous Growth, LLC, a business that provides “education and reclamation for high school dropouts in addition to counseling services,” according to its incorporation papers.

Four years later, in July 2011, Continuous Growth, LLC was indeed “plugged in” to the school system, having clinched a three-year contract for conflict resolution and extended learning services for city students. But Foreman was in big trouble: On June 16, he had been caught in a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sting operation, while trying to close a 10-kilogram cocaine transaction with someone he thought was directly linked to a Mexican drug cartel.

The investigation into Foreman’s drug-dealing activities began in January 2011, according to court records. That’s when one of Foreman’s co-conspirators, David Humphries, introduced him to someone Humphries thought was a Mexican drug-dealer, and Humphries had told the Mexican that Foreman was the “man with all the money.” Foreman told the Mexican that he could handle transporting shipments, as his drug organization “already had vehicles that had concealed compartments”—two of them, with a combined capacity of 30 kilograms. Foreman drove to meet the Mexican in an Audi SUV registered to Continuous Gro, LLC, at 2119 St. Paul St., two blocks south of Foreman’s apartment.

Though Foreman had told the Mexican in January that “he was currently out of cocaine and had many customers waiting,” and that he had enough money to buy 17 kilograms immediately, the deal was delayed until June 16, 2011, when Foreman and another co-conspirator, Andre Carter, went to the Fairfield Inn in White Marsh to meet the Mexican. They shelled out $150,000 for 10 kilograms of cocaine, with the remaining balance of $125,000 to be paid after the coke was sold.

The Mexican turned out to be a DEA confidential source, and Foreman and Carter were immediately arrested after the transaction took place. A search of Foreman’s Charles Village apartment turned up a .45-caliber semi-automatic handgun, 15 rounds of .45-caliber ammunition, a money counter, a digital scale, a kilogram of suspected cocaine, Foreman’s Continuous Growth business card, and a document reflecting that Britt owed money to Foreman’s landlord.

Foreman pleaded guilty, and is now serving a 10-year prison sentence, as is Carter. The two were caught as a result of a joint investigation involving the DEA, the FBI, and the Baltimore City Police Department, that also snared two other major drug-dealing operations, one of which caught former Baltimore City cop Daniel Redd, who is awaiting his sentence on a heroin-conspiracy conviction. Foreman has a prior federal conviction for wire fraud and, in 2004, was sentenced to three years of probation and nearly $40,000 in restitution.

According to David Barney, a publicist representing Continuous Growth, Foreman has a master’s degree in education “as well as years of classroom experience.” In an e-mail, Barney describes Foreman as a “dedicated and passionate professional whose genuine concern for providing support and guidance . . . made him a valuable asset to the organization.”

As for Foreman’s criminal conduct, Barney says Continuous Growth “can’t always be with our employees every minute of every day” and “cannot control what a person might do or has done outside of the organization. Just like the youth we try and reach, we know that we will not change the lives or direction of each and every youth that we look to serve. We can only do our best at providing skills and dedication needed to help bring about a change of habit and direct them in making a conscious decision to adopt new behaviors.”

After Foreman was arrested, Britt tried to convince the federal judge on the case to allow Foreman to keep working at Continuous Growth, though the motion to allow him to do so ultimately was withdrawn.

In a July 22, 2011, e-mail that was submitted as part of the court record, Britt called Foreman “an indelible part of our program,” and that, if allowed to continue working, he would “help the company conduct interviews, perform staff trainings in crisis prevention and intervention, negotiate services with schools, compose manuals concerning protocol as it pertains to services rendered, and solicit new services to principals in the Baltimore City public school system.”

Foreman joins several others in Baltimore who, in recent times, while working to help solve the problems faced by at-risk kids in Baltimore’s streets and schools, were accused and convicted of committing the same kinds of crime they ostensibly sought to prevent. Three men indicted and convicted for their parts in the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) prison gang—Rainbow Williams, Todd Duncan, and Ronald Scott—were so employed; Williams worked as a mentor for at-risk Baltimore City public school kids through a company called Partners in Progress, while Duncan and Scott were outreach workers for a West Baltimore group called Communities Organized to Improve Life. In addition, BGF leader Eric Brown incorporated Harambee Jamaa, a nonprofit that sought to promote peace and betterment in Baltimore’s poverty- and crime-stricken communities.

Heroin “Hustlin’”: Courthouse hot dog vendor sold heroin with cop

By Van Smith

Published by City Paper, July 31, 2012

Shanel Stallings works hard selling hot dogs from a cart in front of Baltimore’s downtown circuit courthouses, as City Paper reported recently (‘Every Day I’m Hustlin’, July 18). But her other gig—at least between January and July last year, when she was indicted in federal court—was selling heroin.

Stallings, according to her April guilty plea, hustled between one and three kilograms of junk with four co-conspirators, including Baltimore City cop Daniel Redd, whose supplies were smuggled to the U.S. from Ghana. All five defendants have pleaded guilty, and all have been sentenced but Redd, who is scheduled to learn his fate on Sept. 6. Stallings received her sentence on July 11 and is set to start serving her 30-month prison stint on Sept. 10.

Stallings’ role in the conspiracy is detailed in FBI special agent Craig Monroney’s 51-page search warrant affidavit, used to justify searches of 11 locations last summer, including Stallings’ Cedonia home and the 2007 Cadillac Escalade she and Redd used. The document includes transcriptions of phone calls intercepted by wiretaps, which picked up Stallings and Redd discussing the hard times they’d been facing obtaining more heroin to sell and the potential need for Redd to intervene on Stalling’s behalf should she be stopped by police or be threatened with a robbery by customers looking to take her money or heroin.

Stallings’ conspiracy was unearthed as a result of a lengthy joint investigation by the FBI, DEA, and the Baltimore Police Department. The probe resulted in two other federal indictments: a cocaine case against Kevin Foreman and Andre Carter, and a heroin-and-cocaine case against Will Evans and five codefendants.

Foreman had been a Charles Village resident working as a gang-interventionist for at-risk Baltimore City Public Schools students through the non-profit organization, Continuous Growth, prior to his arrest. Carter has a long history of drug arrests and convictions. In June 2011, according to court documents, the two men went to a hotel room near White Marsh Mall, believing they were buying 10 kilograms of cocaine from a representative of a “Mexican-based drug-trafficking organization,” but it turned out to be a sting operation set up by the DEA. They have pleaded guilty and been sentenced to long prison terms.

The Evans case, which, according to court documents, was centered at Club 2300, a West Baltimore bar operated by codefendant Clifford Andrews, and supplied Eastern Shore communities, is still winding its way through the court, with two defendants—including Samuel Brown, in whose name the Cadillac Escalade used by Redd and Stallings was registered—still fighting the charges.

The Stallings-Redd case also overlapped with a case in which one of Stallings’ co-defendants – a Ghanaian named Abdul Zakaria, also known as Tamim Mamah – testified as a state’s witness in the federal heroin-conspiracy trial of Moses Appram, which ended with a conviction on May 2. That case involved other Ghanaians who smuggled heroin into the United States from West Africa using couriers aboard commercial flights.

Zakaria’s sentencing hearing was held on July 17, though what happened remains a secret, as the proceeding was sealed as a result of a motion by Zakaria’s attorney, who wrote in a since-sealed letter to U.S. District Judge William Quarles that CP’s recent coverage involving Zakaria (“Straight Outta Accra,” May 23) had given rise to threats against his client.

The case against Stallings was remarkable for the presence of Redd, a heroin-dealing police officer who sold drugs while on duty and in uniform, including from the department’s Northwestern District parking lot. But Stallings, too, was not a typical drug dealer. Not only did she sell hot dogs in front of a courthouse where defendants, cooperators, and grand-jury witnesses regularly go in and out, but she also sold food at the municipal pools, according to court documents.

Stallings “prepares the tastiest food and work[s] tirelessly for patrons who attend the pools,” wrote Darryl Sutton, director of the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks Aquatic Division, in a June character letter, written on City of Baltimore letterhead and submitted as part of the court record in Stallings’ case. “She has become an essential member of our team,” Sutton continued, “as we serve more than 100,000 visitors at the pools each year.”

Another letter, written by a former employee of Stallings’ hot dog business, who was offered the job despite a lengthy criminal record, including convictions for drugs and armed robbery, was glowing in its estimation of Stallings’ character.

“I understand that she has made a grave mistake,” wrote Timothy Wrenn, “but if at all possible don’t take her from her children for too long. She is truly a great person.”