After fleeing from a federal indictment in early 2007 (“Flight Connections,” March 12), Shawn Michael Green was arrested Dec. 14 in Pennsylvania and taken to Maryland to face drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges.
Aside from those charges, court records in other proceedings point to connections with an allegedly violent cocaine conspiracy under indictment in Pennsylvania involving associates of Green, who has hired New York criminal defense titan Robert Simels as his lawyer.
First appearances in federal court in Baltimore on Dec. 19 set a high-profile tone for Green’s case, in part because Simels is under indictment in New York on charges of witness intimidation (“Team Player,” Sept. 24.)
Between the Pennsylvania and Maryland cases, Green and his associates, who have alleged drug ties to Mexico and property interests all along the Eastern Seaboard, are now under the federal looking glass.
“It is a big country,” Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein said in a statement, regarding Green’s arrest. “But most fugitives on federal felony warrants are caught before long. We look forward to Shawn Green having his day in court.”
According to federal court documents, Green was a “known narcotics trafficker” in February 2006 when federal agents observed him in a Prince George’s County parking lot with two men currently indicted in federal court in Philadelphia: Maurice Phillips and Anthony Ballard, leaders of the alleged Phillips Cocaine Organization (PCO). After the meeting, in which Phillips retrieved a black duffel bag from Green’s car, agents stopped Ballard and seized more than $900,000 cash.
Phillips was indicted in 2007 on drug-trafficking, money-laundering, and murder-for-hire charges. Ballard, a 38-year-old Baltimore man with Eastern Shore ties, has agreed to plead guilty to drug-conspiracy charges in the PCO case, and in October in Maryland he pleaded guilty to drug-distribution charges and participation in a Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration identity-theft scam.
Green’s precise role in the PCO is unclear, and he has not been indicted in that case, but according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Linwood C. Wright Jr., in Philadelphia, “You can match the overt acts of the Phillips indictment” with the allegations against Green in Maryland “and draw your own conclusions.” In all, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland says it has seized or forfeited five properties belonging to Green, Ballard, or Phillips, who owns real estate from New Jersey to North Carolina. Another Baltimore man charged in the PCO case, Sherman Kemp, featured in the Stop Fucking Snitching DVD, pleaded guilty in Maryland in July to drug conspiracy and was sentenced to 180 months in prison.
In addition to his Pennsylvania ties, Green is an associate of politically connected businessman Noel Liverpool (“All Around Player,” Oct. 8.) Green, whose Reservoir Hill house was forfeited this spring, and Liverpool, a Morgan State University two-sport star in the 1980s, were in business together in the 1990s in a clothing store, Total Male II. Liverpool has never been the subject of drug-related charges.
While Green, age 42, was on the lam, his co-conspirator and mother, Yolanda Crawley, was convicted and sentenced for mortgage fraud and drug-money laundering. Lawyer Rachel Donegan and mortgage broker David Lincoln also pleaded guilty in the fraud scheme, which involved luxury homes in Maryland, Georgia, and Florida. Green’s role in this conspiracy is part of his current indictment.
The accusations against Green “demonstrate how criminal drug dealers operate in Baltimore,” according to Rosenstein. “People who do business with drug dealers often know where the money comes from,” he says. “Drug-enforcement efforts can be successful only if we follow the money.”
On Dec. 19, Simels arrived in Baltimore to enter his appearance on behalf of Green, who already had been brought before U.S. District Court judge James Bredar on Monday, Dec. 15, the day after his arrest. Perhaps 15 to 20 family members and friends of Green packed the courtroom, and several conferred at length with Simels before the hearing.
Though Simels did not contest prosecutor Kwame Manley’s request that Green be detained pending trial, he cautioned against holding him at the Supermax facility in downtown Baltimore, where he is currently detained. “I’m concerned about the potential cooperators also housed there that he may be unfortunately exposed to,” Simels said. Bredar left the issue to be worked out between counsel and set scheduling on motions leading up to a trial date that has yet to be set.
A booking photo of Shawn Michael Green, dating from the 2000s.
By Jeffrey Anderson and Van Smith
Published in City Paper, March 12, 2008
For more than two decades, East Baltimore clothing store Total Male has been associated with fashionable urban attire. Located on a bustling block of Monument Street, not far from the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, the popular store has also sold tickets to concerts and hip-hop DJ events.
But a federal drug and money-laundering indictment unsealed last year against 41-year-old fugitive Shawn Michael Green, who was the president of an affiliated West Baltimore store called Total Male II, complicates Total Male’s image as simply a place for scenesters to buy clothing and tickets to parties.
The indictment also opens a window into two well-connected East Baltimore businessmen with interests in Total Male–and in politics: Milton Tillman Jr., a sizable figure in real estate, nightclubs, and bail bonds, who was part of the company that owns Total Male, which is located at 2330 E. Monument St.; and Noel Liverpool Sr., a former football star at Morgan State University who has had interests in bars, apparel, and real estate, and who helped Green open Total Male II, in Mondawmin Mall in 1996; Total Male II has since closed.
The ties between these two men and Green suggest an overlap in the city’s legitimate business economy and the drug underworld.
Green suddenly disappeared sometime around March 26, 2007, when federal agents attempted to bring him in on drug charges after arresting his mother, Yolanda Crawley, and serving search warrants on a number of their Maryland and Florida properties. As a result, the investigation was disrupted, but the unsealed indictment accuses Green of drug trafficking since 1998 and calls for forfeiture of $4 million in cash, property, and other assets. On March 20, a four-story Reservoir Hill apartment building owned by Green is scheduled for auction as a result of the forfeiture.
Though Green remains at large, three of his co-conspirators–lawyer Rachel Donegan, mortgage broker David Lincoln, and Green’s mother–pleaded guilty last year for their parts in his alleged drug and money-laundering scheme and await sentencing in the coming weeks. All three copped to wire fraud that allowed Crawley to purchase luxury homes in Maryland and Florida using false loan applications. The probe into Green’s alleged conspiracy is ongoing, according to the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the indictment mentions “others” who are allegedly involved, in addition to Green, Crawley, Donegan, and Lincoln.
Green’s case is intriguing in part because he fled, but also because of the stature of Tillman Jr. and Liverpool Sr. Nothing to tie Tillman Jr. and Liverpool Sr. to Green’s alleged conspiracy has come to light publicly so far.
To some, these two businessmen are icons in the underserved communities of East Baltimore. Together, the two are fully in charge of large swaths of property that bear the scars of inner-city poverty. Between them, Tillman Jr., Liverpool Sr., and their family members, along with their various companies, own scores and scores of properties around the city and surrounding counties, including more than a few along East Monument Street. On a recent afternoon on Monument, for example, near where Total Male operates, there was a palpable sense of disorder along the strip of liquor stores, carry-outs, bail-bonds companies, and tax-service providers that populate the block. A Baltimore police officer was writing up an older gentleman for what appeared to be loitering while ignoring a crew of young street-bike riders as they tore off down the street popping wheelies.
The trade name Total Male was registered from 1993 until it lapsed in 1998 to All Pro Sports Enterprises Inc., which was formed in 1985 with Tillman Jr. as a board member. In 1996, Liverpool Sr. helped Green set up Total Male II, according to the attorney who filed the incorporation papers, with the written permission of Total Male’s resident agent.
Green is listed in incorporation papers as president of Total Male II, and his mother and his father, Michael Green, are also listed as officers of the company. Corporate records list the principal office as 2339 Eutaw Place–the address of Green’s forfeited apartment building scheduled to go to auction, which also served as home base for Green’s Platinum Hill recording studio.
Among the many mysteries surrounding Green and Total Male is the claim to the brand name. Anthony J. Dease of Royal Supreme Motors, an auto dealership and tag-and-title service a block away from Total Male’s East Baltimore location, claims that “I was in Total Male long before Shawn Green was there. I started the business like 25 years ago.” Dease was convicted for stealing city funds in the mid-1980s, but adds, “I work for the city now.”
Confusion about Total Male’s ownership structure is only partly cleared up by state business records. The trade name was owned by All Pro Sports, and in 1992 Dease was listed as the company’s president. In 1993, John H. Bates Sr.–who owned the Monument Street property that houses Total Male and other Tillman businesses–became the resident agent. The property is now owned by Tillman Jr.’s son Milton Tillman III, who bought it in 2005. Reached by phone in early March, Bates contends that he is “one part of Total Male, the one in Mondawmin Mall,” and when asked if he knows Shawn Green says, “Yes, I do,” but declines any further comment.
The formation of Total Male II comes with its own backstory. Attorney Leronia Josey drew up its corporate papers in the mid-1990s. She recalls dealing not with Shawn Green but with Noel Liverpool Sr. in setting up the company. Though she confirms that Bates gave Green written consent to use Total Male II as a business name, she says she never met Green.
“I remember [Liverpool] as an enterprising person who wanted to own a piece of the American Dream,” says Josey, a former member of the University System of Maryland Board of Regents who currently sits on the Maryland Higher Education Commission. “I do a lot of work for churches and small businesses. There was a big push for economic development at the time.”
According to Josey, Liverpool saw a market for fashionable urban apparel. “I went to Mondawmin Mall and said, `I need to see what you’re doing with this store,'” she recalls. “There were all these nice coats and jackets.” She says she hasn’t had contact with Liverpool in more than a decade.
Green’s indictment potentially sullies the images of Tillman Jr. and Liverpool Sr. as community leaders and raises questions about whether Baltimore’s illicit economy is intertwined with its legitimate business and civic landscape.
Most emblematic of this, perhaps, is their ties to politicians. One of Liverpool’s companies, Liverpool Enterprises Inc., has donated $4,000 to each of the campaign committees of Baltimore Comptroller Joan Pratt and state Sen. Joan Carter Conway. Conway’s CIG Professional Tax Services is located directly across the street from Total Male, at 2331 E. Monument St., and her husband, Baltimore City Liquor License Board employee Vernon Conway, is her partner in that business.
One of Tillman Jr.’s real-estate companies, New Trend Development, has donated $1,000 to Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith’s campaign and $500 each to former Baltimore City Councilman Keiffer Mitchell and former Baltimore State’s Attorney Stuart O. Simms, who ran for Maryland attorney general in 2006. Tillman’s 4 Aces Bail Bonds has contributed $4,750 to politicians since 2001, including $1,200 to Maryland Del. Talmadge Branch and $1,000 to state Comptroller Peter Franchot.
Though Liverpool Sr. has a clean criminal record in Maryland, Tillman Jr. has twice been convicted in cases that reverberated in Baltimore political circles. The first, in 1993, was an attempted $30,000 bribe of Gia Blatterman, then the acting chair of the Baltimore City zoning board. In 1996, shortly after Tillman was released from prison in that case, a jury convicted him of tax evasion for his use of front companies to hide hundreds of thousands of dollars in nightclub revenue. Most recently, Tillman Jr. and others were acquitted of illegally using property to underwrite bail bonds in criminal cases.
Attempts to reach Liverpool Sr. and Tillman Jr. for this article were unsuccessful. Jeffrey Chernow, an attorney for Liverpool Sr., did not return several calls. Tillman Jr.’s attorney Gregory Dorsey said he would relay a message to his client, who did not return the call.
Much less is known about Shawn Green. Despite being indicted as a longtime major drug trafficker, he has managed to fly below the radar. Federal court records in Florida indicate he has had previous drug arrests, but in Maryland he’s only been charged before with one crime: a 1992 disorderly-conduct charge in Baltimore City. In 2006, according to court documents, federal law enforcers seized more than $900,000 in cash from people they identified as Green’s associates. Federal law enforcers decline to say how the cash seizure helped investigators move the conspiracy case forward–or any other details or insights about the case against Green.
Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein insists that Green’s sudden disappearance last March is not unusual. “Usually we catch them in a week or two,” he says. “About five or 10 suspects a year remain at large.” He says he has no idea when Green fled but believes it was after federal agents arrested his mother and served search warrants at six properties on March 26, 2007. Rosenstein also does not seem flustered by Green’s flight. “There were two priorities,” he says, pointing to the intended arrest of Green and seizure of drugs, money and documents. “The main priority was to execute the search warrants.” He adds, “We have lots of evidence that we won’t disclose unless or until we go to trial.”
Which means there’s more to Shawn Green than what’s in the public record. And though Josey may have been satisfied that Total Male was simply helping its owners chase the American Dream, court records show that some of its employees and principals have engaged in illegal activity. Other than Dease and Tillman Jr., who have criminal backgrounds, those records show at least two Total Male employees were convicted on federal drug trafficking charges.
And then there’s Shawn Green, indicted for major drug-related crimes, but yet to be caught or convicted.
Robert Simels, the New York criminal-defense lawyer who for decades represented some of Baltimore’s most notorious drug-world defendants, won’t be using his Water Street condominium in downtown Baltimore anytime soon. In early January, he began serving a 14-year prison sentence for intimidating witnesses on behalf of one of his clients, Shaheed “Roger” Khan, a former Marylander convicted in New York of running a massive Guyana-based cocaine conspiracy.
Simels purchased Unit 1201 at 414 Water St. with Rosalie Jackson in 2008 for $362,300, according to land records. Rosalie Jackson is the mother and business partner of Kenny “Bird” Jackson, the politically connected ex-con who owns the Eldorado Lounge strip club on East Lombard Street.
Over the years, Kenny “Bird” Jackson made use of Simels’ prodigious skills as a criminal-defense attorney, including for a New York case in 1991, when Jackson was acquitted of the 1984 murder of cocaine wholesaler Felix Gonzalez after Gonzalez’ relatives testified against the government at trial. Today, in addition to running the Eldorado, Kenny Jackson is the producer/director of The Baltimore Chronicles: Legends of the Unwired, a series of docu-dramas that claim to tell the real-life stories behind HBO’s The Wire.
Other notable drug-world clients of Simels who appeared in Maryland courts over the years include:
Eric Clash of the politically connected Rice Organization drug conspiracy, which also involved restaurateur Anthony Leonard of Downtown Southern Blues, a tenant of Kenny Jackson’s; Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff, a legendary Queens, N.Y., gangster who faced gun charges here; and former fugitive Shawn Michael Green (“Flight Connections,” Mobtown Beat, Mar. 12, 2008), an associate of accused kingpin Maurice Phillips, who is currently facing the death penalty in a lengthy drug-conspiracy trial in Philadelphia. (See also our stories on Green’s arrest [“Return Flight,” Motown Beat, Dec. 24, 2008] and his guilty plea [“Shawn Green Pleads Guilty,” The News Hole, Dec. 11, 2009] made in Dec. 2009.)
On Thursday, Feb. 5, the Justice Department took two shots at Robert M. Simels (pictured, from http://www.simelslaw.com), the self-described “Rolls Royce” of criminal-defense attorneys.
In New York, where Simels is charged with witness intimidation in connection with his defense of former Marylander Shaheed “Roger” Khan (“Team Player,” Mobtown Beat, Sept. 24, 2008), who is accused of running a violent Guyanese cocaine conspiracy, prosecutors called Simels a “palpable danger” to public safety and convinced a judge to keep Simels’ bond, which is secured with his $2.5 million Westchester, N.Y., home, at $3.5 million.
Meanwhile, in a Baltimore case that appears unrelated to Khan, another Justice Department attorney asked a judge to order Simels to cough up detailed information to a grand jury about how he’s getting paid to represent accused drug trafficker and money launderer Shawn Michael Green (“Flight Connections,” Mobtown Beat, Mar. 12, 2008).
Just another day in the decades-long war between Justice and Simels.
In the mid-1980s, shortly after Simels had entered private practice on the heels of a career as a young federal prosecutor, Rudy Giuliani, then New York’s U.S. attorney, tried and failed to get information about Simels’ fee arrangements with clients. But today in Maryland, according to local attorneys, the law is clear that grand juries are entitled to look at attorneys’ fee arrangements, though they rarely do so.
“It’s rare but not unheard of,” says former federal prosecutor and longtime defense attorney David Irwin, when asked about how frequently the grand jury goes after attorneys’ fees. He predicts that “the government is going to win the motion and Simels is at best filing a delaying action.”
Simels is famous in New York for representing high-profile clients such as Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff (“New York Boys,” Mobtown Beat, June 4, 2003) and Henry Hill, whose gangster stories have entered popular culture. But Simels’ Baltimore clientele over the years, such as Green, tend not to be household names–though they are accused of being high up in the game and are often well-connected. Two of them–Eric Clash of the Rice Organization (“Wired,” Mobtown Beat, Mar. 2, 2005) and Kenneth Antonio “Bird” Jackson (“The High Life,” Mobtown Beat, Jan. 3, 1995), who owns the Eldorado Gentlemen’s Club–have known ties to Baltimore politics.
The motion filed against Simels in the Shawn Green case, by assistant U.S. attorney Kwame Manley, is stunning for its disclosures about a secret grand-jury investigation. Green was captured after nearly two years on the run, and at his first court appearance in December 2008, Simels was at his side. In light of what the Justice Department reveals in Manley’s motion, the grand jury is interested in whether or not Simels was getting paid to represent Green during his lengthy stretch on the lam.
What’s known about Green so far is based largely on court records in Baltimore and in connection with a sprawling federal prosecution in Philadelphia against the Phillips Cocaine Organization (PCO), in which Green is not a defendant. Real-estate lawyer Rachel Donegan, mortgage broker David Lincoln, and Green’s mother, Yolanda Crawley, pleaded guilty last year to their parts in Green’s allegedly illicit assets and activities, with interests spanning the East Coast from Florida to New Jersey.
Yet the Justice Department, according to the motion to compel Simels to open up his books, thinks Green kept up the conspiracy while on the run, after his co-conspirators were arrested. It expects to file more charges. The grand jury, the motion continues, “is continuing its investigation of Green and other individuals,” and “the Government believes that during Green’s nearly two-year period as a fugitive, he continued to launder proceeds of illegal activity through known co-conspirators in this case.”
The specific information sought by the grand jury from Simels concerns “attorney fees and retainers received for the representation of Green, the amount of funds received, the identity of the individuals who provided such funds, and the dates and manner in which such funds were provided (i.e., cash, check, wire, etc.).”
Last March, with Green still a fugitive, Simels told City Paper in a telephone interview that he was not Green’s attorney. The question was raised because court records show that Simels had been sent mail from U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein in connection with the federal forfeiture of Green’s Reservoir Hill apartment building and recording studio.
Simels did not respond to messages left at his office for this article. The Justice Department declined to comment.
The government’s strong language came in reaction to a Feb. 2 bond-modification request by Simels’ attorney, Gerard Shargel, who sought to remove the secured money bond as a condition of Simels’ release pending trial. In it, Shargel points out that the bond set on Sept. 10 “was not based on any judicial finding that Mr. Simels poses a risk of flight or a danger to the community,” and thus asserts that the prosecutors cannot show that Simels poses such risks.
The prosecutors, Steven D’Alessandro and Morris Fodeman, went ahead and called Simels dangerous anyhow, while arguing that they are not required to prove that he is. In doing so, they restated the allegations–that Simels sought to bribe and threaten witnesses, including with violence–and note that Simels is wealthy, that the evidence against him is strong, and that his behavior was conducted in his role as an attorney.
“The Court can have little confidence,” the prosecutors continued, that Simels will not further obstruct justice “now that Simels, as opposed simply to a client, would benefit” from such crimes. Thus, they concluded, “there exists a palpable danger were the defendant released without significant pre-trial conditions,” such as the high bail set when he was first arrested.
The New York round went to the government when the judge agreed last Friday to keep Simels’ bond set high. Green’s judge in Baltimore, J. Frederick Motz, set a Feb. 23 deadline for Simels to submit his opposition to Manley’s attempt to open up his books on the Shawn Green account.
Sherman “Goose” Kemp, one of the cash-loving, drug-dealing stars of 2004’s anti-rat Baltimore street-culture documentary Stop Fucking Snitching Vol. 1, already had a prodigious list of prior drug-related convictions before he was charged anew in early 2012 with conspiring to smuggle heroin into federal prison, where he was serving a 30-year sentence, and sell it at a huge mark up: two federal convictions in the 2000s and one Maryland conviction in the 1990s. Now, having copped to the new charges, Kemp’s list of priors is even longer.
After signing a guilty-plea agreement in October, Kemp (pictured, in a Stop Fucking Snitching scene) was recently sentenced – and received a pretty good deal, given that such priors often result in draconian sentences: four more years added to his existing term, shifting his release date from 2035 to 2039, when he’ll be about 60 years old. He actually got a 10-year sentence, but U.S. District judge Catherine Blake ordered six of them to be served concurrently with his existing prison term.
According to the plea’s statement of facts, “beginning in April 2011, through November 7, 2011, Sherman Michael Kemp, agreed with Lasheta Claybourne and others to smuggle heroin from Baltimore, Maryland, into FCI Beckley, West Virginia, where he was serving a federal sentence. Once the heroin was smuggled inside the prison, Kemp and other distributed the heroin at approximately $600 per gram.”
The statement has an additional sentence, with lines drawn through it, indicating that Kemp and the government do not agree that this could be proven: “Additionally, in September through November 2012, Kemp worked with others to try to smuggle heroin into the Chesapeake Detention Facility in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was being held pretrial.” The facility is run by Maryland’s prison agency and now is used to house federal pretrial detainees, but until early 2011, it had long been used as the state’s “Supermax” prison, formally known as the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center.
Kemp’s 2008 firearm-and-cocaine conviction in Maryland, for which he received a 180-month sentence, was followed with a jury conviction in a Pennsylvania case that yielded Kemp’s 30-year sentence and $31 million judgment for his part in the sprawling and murderous Phillips Cocaine Organization, in which other Baltimore players were in the picture, including Anthony Ballard and Shawn Green. Kemp’s name also appeared in court documents in the 2010 racketeering case against the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang in Maryland, with his phone tied to that of the gang’s on-the-streets heroin dealer, Kevin Glasscho.
Sherman “Goose” Kemp, one of the cash-loving, drug-dealing stars of 2004’s anti-rat Baltimore street-culture documentary Stop Fucking Snitching Vol. I, already had a prodigious list of prior drug-related convictions before he was charged anew in early 2012 with conspiring to smuggle heroin into federal prison, where he was serving a 30-year sentence, and sell it at a huge mark up: two federal convictions in the 2000s and one Maryland conviction in the 1990s. Now, having copped to the new charges, Kemp’s list of priors is even longer.
After signing a guilty-plea agreement in October, Kemp (pictured, in a Stop Fucking Snitching scene) was recently sentenced – and received a pretty good deal, given that such priors often result in draconian sentences: four more years added to his existing term, shifting his release date from 2035 to 2039, when he’ll be about 60 years old. He actually got a 10-year sentence, but U.S. District judge Catherine Blake ordered six of them to be served concurrently with his existing prison term.
According to the plea’s statement of facts, “beginning in April 2011, through November 7, 2011, Sherman Michael Kemp, agreed with Lasheta Claybourne and others to smuggle heroin from Baltimore, Maryland, into FCI Beckley, West Virginia, where he was serving a federal sentence. Once the heroin was smuggled inside the prison, Kemp and other distributed the heroin at approximately $600 per gram.”
The statement has an additional sentence, with lines drawn through it, indicating that Kemp and the government do not agree that this could be proven: “Additionally, in September through November 2012, Kemp worked with others to try to smuggle heroin into the Chesapeake Detention Facility in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was being held pretrial.” The facility is run by Maryland’s prison agency and now is used to house federal pretrial detainees, but until early 2011, it had long been used as the state’s “Supermax” prison, formally known as the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center.
In the prison-heroin case, another Beckley inmate ratted Kemp out, according to court records, prompting investigators to uncover a complex smuggling scheme involving Claybourne, who has not been charged publicly. She is described in court documents as a licensed nursing assistant at University of Maryland Medical Center who arranged for heroin shipments to be sent to Kemp in Beckley and managed the scheme’s money.
Kemp’s 2008 firearm-and-cocaine conviction in Maryland, for which he received a 180-month sentence, was followed with a jury conviction in a Pennsylvania case that yielded Kemp’s 30-year sentence and $31 million judgment for his part in the sprawling and murderous Phillips Cocaine Organization, in which other Baltimore players were in the picture, including Anthony Ballard and Shawn Green. Kemp’s name also appeared in court documents in the 2010 racketeering case against the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang in Maryland, with his phone tied to that of the gang’s on-the-streets heroin dealer, Kevin Glasscho.
Back in 2004, before Sherman “Goose” Kemp went to prison to serve 30 years for successive federal drug-trafficking convictions in Maryland and Pennsylvania, his appearances in Stop Fucking Snitching made law enforcers bristle. The Baltimore street-culture documentary’s core message-that those who cooperate with cops should be silenced by violence-went viral on both sides of the issue, and when Kemp’s 2007 Maryland indictment came down, Baltimore DEA’s then-assistant special agent in charge, Carl Kotoswki, said in a press release that “if convicted, Kemp, a self-proclaimed star of the streets, will have years in federal prison to refine his acting skills.”
In February 2012, Kemp, now 34 and serving a sentence set to end in 2035, was indicted again in federal court, this time for running heroin in prison. Details that emerged in court on June 28 reveal that, just as in his prior two cases, snitching made it happen. If convicted, he faces a possible life sentence.
In September 2011, a fellow inmate at Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Beckley, in West Virginia, sparked a new DEA investigation into Kemp’s alleged heroin-dealing at the medium-security prison. The scheme, as described in court documents, involved an intricate chain of phone calls, text messages, shipping, and smuggling that made Kemp “responsible for the majority of the heroin that is being smuggled into and trafficked within” FCI Beckley, which has an inmate population of 1,643, plus another 416 in an adjacent minimum-security camp.
Each of the inmates served by Kemp’s alleged scheme had to give him half the heroin they smuggled in, which, according to court documents, commanded a price of $600 per gram-much higher than the $200 or so per gram it costs on the street. Thus, the single 10-gram package agents tracked and seized during the investigation could have been sold for $6,000; Kemp stood to make a good living this way – and based on what Kemp had to say in Stop Fucking Snitching, it’s the only kind of living he cares to make.
In one scene in the movie, according to court documents, Kemp talks with his friend Tremain Tazewell as they sit in the West Baltimore bar they then ran together, Pete’s Place. Kemp declares that it doesn’t “count” if “you got money from your grandmother dying or your mother passed away or someone died on an airplane,” or “you were hurt from when you were born,” or “you made your money from baseball, basketball, football and shit.” The only money that “counts,” he says, is “street money, blood money, money in rubber bands,” adding that “if it don’t come in rubber bands, vacuum sealed, freezer bags, or ziplock bags, shit don’t count.” Then Tazewell chimes in: “And trash bags.”
Tazewell later ended up convicted of drug crimes; now 34, he’s scheduled to be released from federal prison in 2025. Many others who appeared in or helped make Stop Fucking Snitching, including producer Ronnie Thomas (better known as Skinny Suge), Van Sneed, Akiba Matthews, George Butler, Warren Polston, and Eric Bailey, were later convicted in federal court on drug-related charges. In addition, two former Baltimore City police officers mentioned in the film, William King and Antonio Murray, were convicted of robbing drug dealers and selling the drugs themselves.
The details of the investigation into Kemp’s prison-heroin indictment emerged when prosecutors filed documents in Maryland U.S. District Court on June 28 to oppose Kemp’s argument that investigators employed unlawful tactics to build their case. The filing offered the first public glimpse of the evidence against Kemp.
The alleged scheme involved numerous steps. First, once Kemp “approved of an inmate receiving heroin inside of FCI Beckley,” court documents say, the inmate would be provided the cellphone number of Kemp’s “female associate in Baltimore City, Lasheta Clayborne,” described as a licensed nursing assistant at University of Maryland Medical Center. The inmate would then have his girlfriend call Clayborne and say, “I’m calling for (insert inmate’s name); he said to give you an address.” Clayborne would respond by telling the girlfriend to “hang up and text her the address,” and then would mail to the address a package, “usually a box of candy,” that “contained a quantity of heroin secreted in small balloons.” Once the heroin arrived, “it was then up to the inmate’s girlfriend to smuggle the heroin inside to the inmate”-usually by “body carrying” in “private areas of the body” or by “mouth transfer” when kissing the inmate.
Clayborne, who has not been publicly charged for her alleged involvement in Kemp’s case and could not be reached for comment, also had an important role on the money side of the alleged scheme. “Kemp frequently directs Clayborne to send money to other individuals involved in his heroin smuggling operation,” court documents say, and she “sends money into Kemp’s account via Western Union.” Kemp’s prison customers, meanwhile, are “directed to have someone on the outside send an amount of money to Clayborne,” who then “notifies Kemp the money has arrived” in payment.
Kemp has maintained his innocence in the prison-heroin case, as he did in the Pennsylvania case-in which he was one of 11 defendants in a violent drug-conspiracy case against the Phillips Cocaine Organization (PCO) which included the murder of a federal witness. Kemp and two others, including kingpin Maurice Phillips, stood trial for three months as co-defendants, and cooperators testified for the prosecution. After Kemp was convicted of a single cocaine-conspiracy count, he asked for a new trial, saying the government had failed to disclose to him, as required, evidence that could have been used to impeach one of the cooperators who testified against him. When his motion was denied, he appealed, and still awaits a ruling.
Back when Kemp was a “star of the streets,” kicking it in his posh waterfront apartment at Spinnaker Bay in Baltimore’s Harbor East neighborhood and owning a sporting goods store on Loch Raven Boulevard, life carried some risks. In the early 2000s, for instance, when a vicious drug-dealing outfit headed by rap-music producer Willie Mitchell was warring with the infamous Rice Organization, a rival drug crew with political pull, Mitchell’s underlings hatched an aborted plan to rob and kill Kemp, according to court documents.
But Kemp lived large-as seen in Stop Fucking Snitching, when, hanging at Pete’s Place, he “pulls wads of cash out of his pocket” that are “wrapped in rubber bands,” court documents say. No matter what happens in his prison-heroin case, those days are long gone.
Van Smith 