Tag: Jonathan Luna

Plot Device: Equal Parts Rant and Amateur Investigation, “The Midnight Ride of Jonathan Luna” Looks For a Conspiracy Behind the Death of a Local Prosecutor

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Feb. 23, 2005

“There’s time for a second edition,” says William Keisling, a 46-year-old Pennsylvania writer whose 515-page The Midnight Ride of Jonathan Luna was just published by his own Harrisburg, Pa.-based house, Yardbird Books. He’s defending the fact that the book is nearly devoid of interviews, and instead relies on court documents from the final case prosecuted by Jonathan Luna, an assistant U.S. attorney in Baltimore until his death on Dec. 4, 2003, when his body was found in a Lancaster County, Pa., stream, stabbed 36 times. But readers can easily be left wondering whether to trust Keisling to give a solid interpretation of the events leading up to Luna’s death. And trusting the writer is paramount here: In Midnight Ride, Keisling finds the most likely suspect in Luna’s death to be an FBI agent.

“People will know where I’m coming from, if I don’t get totally destroyed over this,” Keisling worries as he finishes a crab cake at Mamie’s Café at 911 W. 36th St. in Hampden—an address the restaurant once shared with Stash House Records, the rap studio at the center of a drug investigation that was the last case Luna worked on. “I really put myself out here with this book,” Keisling continues. “I really hung myself out. But I really care about what’s going on in this city, and I really care about what happened to [Luna] and his family.”

Keisling is guileless in his attempt to construct a theory of Luna’s death. He’s flabbergasted by the lack of attention given to the story so far, he says, and he’s outraged by leak-fueled media coverage that the case may be a suicide, or that Luna had a sordid personal life that had something to do with his fate. But the result of Keisling’s effort to put the pieces together is a display of fantastic logic, as hard to believe as it is, at times, to read.

Court transcripts (and, by Keisling’s estimate, 200 to 300 pages of Midnight Ride are taken up with them) give raw narration recorded under oath, but they don’t give insights into body language, inflection, and the things that go on when the recordings stop. Instead, Midnight Ride riffs freely off the court record and ends up pointing the finger at a federal agent as the likely culprit—without even providing the accused an opportunity to respond. (Due to that lapse in protocol, this review won’t mention the agent’s name.)

Of course, Keisling’s theory could end up being the right one. Since the book itself presents this theory in convoluted layers, here it is in Keisling’s spoken words: “It points to an internal courthouse murder. He’s stabbed 36 times, once for every thousand bucks missing from the safe. Coincidentally, [that is] also the number of times that the Dawsons called 9-1-1. The theory of the case is that he was covering up FBI and Justice Department culpability in the Dawson murder[s].”

Some explanation is necessary. As the book points out, in a previous Luna case from October 2002, $36,000 used as evidence went missing between the courtroom and the nearby evidence storage area, and Luna, another prosecutor, and federal agents were the only ones who had access to it. Midnight Ride assumes that an agent who worked with Luna on the Stash House Records case also figured in that unsolved theft case. This same agent, Midnight Ride claims, bungled the handling of a cooperating witness in the Stash House case, allowing a violent drug offender to go free, discharge a firearm, and deal drugs while on the FBI payroll as a paid informant.

The public furor over the arson murders of the seven members of the Dawson family in East Baltimore, who died at the hands of a repeat offender while the FBI was working the Stash House case, made the misadventures of the Stash House informant a sensitive issue for Baltimore’s federal law-enforcement bureaucracy, Midnight Rideasserts. The local police, with its corrupt leadership, didn’t help the Dawsons in time, so where were the feds? the book asks. Paying criminals to continue committing crimes, it answers.

Compounding the public-relations threat alleged in Midnight Ride were congressional investigations that were pulling the covers off of FBI informant scandals. On the morning that Luna’s body was found, the mishandling of the Stash House witness would have come to light in the courtroom—unless a plea deal could be reached, and Luna was preparing those agreements when he suddenly left his office to meet his demise. But, Midnight Ride discloses, the plea deal—which was accepted by the court the next morning—was patently improper, flouting federal rules by letting a suspect off the hook for a drug-related murder. After Luna’s death, the leaks began, disparaging the prosecutor’s character and throwing the public off the scent of what the book concludes is manifest: that the feds killed Luna. Presumably, Luna had balked at finishing the questionable plea deals and thus was going to let the Stash House embarrassment come out in court the next day.

In the end, Keisling says, Luna’s death was like that of Christopher Marlowe, the early English dramatist and spy whose death, centuries later, remains a much-argued mystery. Keisling, with Midnight Ride, is the first to fire a salvo in the neglected debate about Luna’s mysterious death, and he begs for others—especially Congress—to enter the fray. Fourteen months of federal investigation have gone by, without any answers—not even a hint about what the motive may have been. At some point—especially given the facts Keisling dug out of the courthouse about the Stash House case—Congress has a duty to step in and take a close look at how the Justice Department has handled Luna’s death. Maybe then Keisling’s inventive theory will be exonerated. Or maybe, by then, Midnight Ride’s second edition will come out—with its literary flourish replaced by the fruit of hard, investigative labor.

Grave Accusations: Dead Prosecutor Luna Dubbed Bondsman Tillman Jr. a “Violent Drug Dealer”

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Apr. 23, 2008

In May 2002, federal prosecutor Jonathan Paul Luna stood up in a Baltimore courtroom and called bail-bondsman Milton Tillman Jr. a “violent drug dealer,” even though Tillman Jr. hadn’t–and still hasn’t–been convicted of violent, drug-related crimes. Luna was not yet famous; that would come after his violent death in a rural Pennsylvania stream, in December 2003. But Tillman Jr. was and is famous, at least locally, a fact that was part of Luna’s point: In gangland Baltimore, he argued, Tillman Jr.’s role as the patriarch of a drug-dealing family strikes fear in the hearts of other gangsters.

The case at hand was against Eric Lamont Bennett’s drug organization, which had operated in the late 1990s in Baltimore and Westminster, and the crimes Luna was prosecuting included the East Baltimore shooting, in 2000, of Tillman Jr.’s son, Milton Tillman III, nicknamed “Mo.” The violence erupted over a drug deal gone bad, and though Mo survived, two other men were murdered before the night was out.

By May 2002, Luna had won convictions against men held responsible for these and other crimes, including Bennett, Solomon Jones, and Tavon Bradley. The three have since won appeals and Jones and Bradley been reconvicted and resentenced. Bennett was scheduled to be resentenced on April 18, but the hearing was postponed and has not yet been rescheduled.

The three convicts had been part of a team of drug dealers who had sold Mo and two other buyers a bag of baking soda for $3,000 on Jan. 18, 2000. Before Mo and his friends could learn they’d been burned, Bennett’s gang went gunning for them. Luna asserted that, having robbed Tillman Jr.’s son, they figured they were as good as dead unless they struck first.

Luna based his comments on the trial testimony of Damien Simmons, the man who shot Mo three times in the back and became a cooperating witness against Bennett and the others, and on a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration memo. That document, dated March 2000, called Tillman Jr. the head of a crime family with a 20-year history in the East Baltimore heroin trade and warned that the then-imprisoned Tillman Jr. appeared to be conspiring to hit back at Bennett and his crew.

The portrait of Tillman Jr. painted by Luna at Bennett’s first sentencing hearing complicates Tillman Jr.’s public persona, which has been forged by years of press coverage. News consumers would think Tillman Jr. is simply a politically connected bail-bondsman, real-estate investor, and nightclub impresario with convictions in the 1990s for attempted bribery and tax evasion. Luna’s statements about Tillman Jr., which have not been disclosed in news reports until now, get at the Tillman family’s street-level reputation as a force to be reckoned with in Baltimore’s drug-fueled shadow economy.

Luna’s focus on Tillman Jr. does not discount the alleged criminal career of at least one other family member: Stanford Stansbury. After Tillman III was shot in 2000 and thought he might die from his injuries, court records show, he told detectives that his cousin Stanford Stansbury would know the last name of “Ericky,” the man Tillman III believed to be responsible for the shooting. Last March, Stansbury and two other men, Harry Burton and Allen Gill, were federally indicted for running a murderous, decade-long drug conspiracy based at the Latrobe Homes housing project in East Baltimore. Today, Stansbury has secured a guilty-plea agreement in which he is a cooperating witness against Burton and Gill, whom prosecutors are seeking to give the death penalty in a trial scheduled for June.

Stansbury’s lawyer, Stuart O. Simms, a former Baltimore City state’s attorney and former secretary of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, did not return a call for comment. Simms, as city state’s attorney in the 1980s, oversaw probes into Tillman Jr.’s suspected criminal activities. In 2006, New Trend Development, Tillman Jr.’s main real-estate company, contributed money to Simms’ failed run for Maryland attorney general.

The Tillman family’s business dealings drew public attention during a trial last year in which a jury determined that Tillman Jr., his son, and the other defendant, Bernard Dixon, did not intend to post multiple bails on properties in order to spring high-bail defendants out of lockup, as state criminal charges had contended. Since March, City Paper has published five articles in which Tillman Jr. was part of the story. Two were about a fugitive drug trafficker (“Flight Connections,” Mobtown Beat, March 12; “One Angry Man,” Mobtown Beat, March 26); one was about a felonious, bounty-hunting minister (“Preacher, Teacher, Forger, Spy,” Feature, April 16); another covered the Baltimore City Board of Liquor License Commissioners’ scant control over criminals influencing the city’s bar business (“Creative Licensing,” Mobtown Beat, April 9); and one second-guessed the deaconlike image of a former heroin trafficker (“Redemption Song and Dance,” Mobtown Beat, March 19).

Tillman Jr.’s success in bail bonds and real estate appears to have soared since his release from prison in 2000. His Four Aces Bail Bonds has rapidly put a large dent in the dominance of the Baltimore City bail-bonds market traditionally enjoyed by Fred W. Frank Bail Bonds. “There is no question he has affected our business,” company President Barry Udoff confirms. New Trend Development, related businesses, and Tillman Jr. associates have acquired nearly $10 million in Baltimore-area real-estate holdings since 2000, according to property records. Meanwhile, Tillman Jr.’s political clout has also grown, as measured by the thousands of dollars in donations from Four Aces and New Trend to local politicians since his release from prison.

Luna’s career was cut short by his death in Pennsylvania in early December 2003. His body was found before dawn, drowned in a stream in Lancaster County, midway between Philadelphia and Harrisburg along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He’d been stabbed dozens of times, though not deeply, and his car sat idling close by. He had last been seen late the night before at his downtown Baltimore office. The local authorities deemed it a homicide, while the FBI leaked information to the press suggesting it was suicide, but the case remains unsolved. A book has been written about it, The Midnight Ride of Jonathan Luna (“Plot Device,” Books, Feb. 23, 2005), and U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, continues to press for progress in getting it solved.

The Bennett prosecution was but a piece of Luna’s caseload against violent drug dealers, and it was over a year and a half before Luna died. There is nothing to suggest that the mysteries surrounding Luna’s death are in any way tied to Tillman Jr. or members of his family.

Luna’s insights into the Tillmans in the Bennett case gives the public an evidentiary record that the family was in the drug game. “Let me speak very frankly,” Luna said, according to the court transcript. “It is not news to most people in this courtroom that Mr. Tillman is the son of one of the most notorious drug dealers in Baltimore City history. That is a fact.” Luna also said that “there is no question that Mr. Tillman’s father is a reputed drug dealer, a violent type of guy.”

Underscoring Luna’s contention was a March 2000 DEA memo stating that the agency’s “investigation into the Tillman family has revealed that the family has been active for the past 20 years in the Baltimore, East-side based, heroin traffic. Milton Tillman, Jr., the patriarch, is currently in the last six months of a Federal prison sentence in Butner, North Carolina for tax evasion. Phone conversations made by Tillman, Jr., from . . . Butner to his son and associates indicate that a retaliatory strike against the Bennett organization is imminent.”

The Bennett trial testimony of Damien Simmons, the man who shot Tillman III, also supported Luna’s statements that Tillman Jr. was known as a feared, high-level player in the drug game. The trial transcript shows that Simmons answered “Yes,” when asked if Bennett told him to shoot Tillman III and his associates because of whom Tillman III’s father is. Simmons pleaded guilty to his part in the Bennett organization’s crimes and is scheduled for release from federal prison in 2017.

“Jon Luna wasn’t just relying on the DEA memo when he said these things about Tillman Jr.,” recalls defense attorney Harvey Greenberg, who represented Jones in the Bennett case. “He also had Simmons’ testimony. Luna was trying to be frank about the background of the shooting and what prompted it. He was being open and honest, and telling what he knew to be true with evidence to back it up.”

Tillman Jr. did not respond to detailed messages left at his office and with his attorney, Greg Dorsey. U.S. Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Marcia Murphy says her agency would not comment about Luna’s statements regarding Tillman Jr., and also would not respond to questions involving the Bennett or Stansbury cases, because “we don’t discuss our charging decisions or prosecution strategy.”

Some of the politicians who have received campaign support from Tillman Jr.’s companies, however, did respond to City Paper‘s inquiries. “I did?!” Baltimore County Circuit Court Associate Judge Mickey Norman exclaims, when told his judicial campaign committee in 2005 got money from one of Tillman Jr.’s companies. “I honestly don’t know about that,” Norman says, explaining that judges’ campaigns are set up so the judges themselves are insulated from the fundraising process and have little, if any, knowledge of who’s supporting their candidacies.

“Did I?” Baltimore City Deputy Mayor and former state delegate Salima Siler Marriott asks when told about Tillman Jr.’s donation to her campaign. She says she doesn’t know the man, either by name or personally. Messages left with nine other politicians–eight of them Democrats, including Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith; House of Delegates Majority Whip Talmadge Branch (45th District); Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot; former Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich; and Sen. Nathaniel McFadden (45th District), the chairman of the Baltimore City state Senate delegation–were not returned by press time.

Greenberg, however, is intrigued by City Paper‘s inquiries, suggesting that what Luna had to say about Tillman Jr. is already widely recognized among lawyers, law enforcers, and others familiar with the local crime scene. “Do you find Luna’s comments remarkable?” he asks. “Because I don’t.”

Additional reporting by Jeffrey Anderson And Chris Landers