Im feeling a lot of remorse for my actions I have led through my life, Oakley said at his sentencing. Weeks later, I search these locations myself to see if I can find anything. Wayne Jenkins, Baltimore's dirtiest cop, is sentenced: It still doesn't feel like justice Jenkins was supposed to get guns off the street in Baltimore but wound up running a vicious. Critics argue Barksdale was among police leaders who fostered a warrior culture, to the citys detriment. Nobody said yes or no, instead expressing ambivalence. The matter was referred to the police integrity unit of the Baltimore states attorneys office for investigation. When the phone rings, I put the call on speaker and hear a robotic, pre-recorded female voice: "You have a prepaid call. He started counting the money, $20,000 in all. Until this point, I'd only heard Jenkins on. But when the sun came up on 1 March 2017, the city awoke to a vastly different reality. While he may not be ready to let go of his animus towards Jenkins, Stepp's strange journey seems - at least for now - to be heading towards a happy ending. In 2010, when Deputy Commissioner Anthony Barksdale wanted a special squad to go after elusive suspects, Jenkins was picked for the group. But overall, plaintiffs prevailed in at least three lawsuits accusing Jenkins of beatings or other misconduct from 2006 to 2009, resulting in $90,000 in taxpayer payouts. During his time on the streets of Baltimore Jenkins was involved. This partnership lasted for five years. For example, in January 2006, Jenkins and Sergeant Michael Fries had an altercation with brothers Charles and Robert Lee after they continued to drink beer on the front step of their grandmother's home when the policemen had told them to stop. Later that year, the mayor held a news conference for another of Jenkins busts. When I point out he already pleaded guilty to all these incidents, Jenkins tells me he only signed the agreement because he feared that if he went forward to trial, he could've wound up behind bars for life. Outside on the sidewalk, he saw a bunch of cops and yelled an expletive at one he knew who happened to be Jenkins supervisor. Jenkins got a bronze star for his part in the 2009 recovery of 41 kilograms of cocaine $1 million worth in a mans truck. Then he said something that struck Ward as bizarre: He said he was going to take the marijuana to his home, and burn it all. In a recent interview, Simon told The Sun, I never had no BB gun. Baltimore leaders have agreed to pay a $6 million settlement to the family of a driver who was killed during a 2010 police chase involving Gun Trace Task Force officers. Many plainclothes units would work out of a satellite office inside a trailer in Northwest Baltimore. In the years since his arrest, he'd never given a public interview. He also acknowledged stealing the man's $4,000 (2,956) watch, which he gave to Stepp to sell. While no one should forget for an instant that Jenkins and his officers caused untold harm to Baltimore citizens, I don't find it helpful to try to write him off as a "monster". You're taught that - the second someone gets in trouble we meet up, and we talk face to face," he says. In May 2014, three Baltimore prosecutors convened a meeting. It was billed at the time as the largest cocaine seizure in department history, one of Jenkins many large-scale seizures. But they needed more information. He names the veteran he says coached him into stealing for the first time. "It was a front for a criminal enterprise," Stepp said of the Gun Trace Task Force. The two said Jenkins had found drugs in the ceiling of a mans vehicle. He ran me over because I was getting away.. Hill said in the interview that De Sousa reduced the punishment to verbal counseling in effect, no punishment at all. He says he couldn't risk it as a father with a young family. Not all the allegations against Jenkins came from lawsuits. Hill could not be reached by The Sun for comment. I asked him if he thinks that another scandal is inevitable. When I tell this to Stepp, he's angry. He was like King Kong, the officer, who still works for the police department, recalled. Plenty of times he's gone behind me and found them.. During his trial, on January 5, 2018, Jenkins pled guilty to one count of racketeering, two counts of robbery, one count of destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in a federal investigation, and four counts of deprivation of rights under color of law. BALTIMORE The Baltimore City Board of Estimates paid out a $6 million settlement Wednesday to the family of a bystander who died during a police chase by the . But the suits triggered no internal punishment by the police department. Had the officers done things by the book, the cash and drugs would be registered with evidence control. Plainclothes officers must constantly be checked by leadership, Barksdale said, with commanders inquiring about irregularities in their work and excessive overtime pay. According to the Internal Affairs file, the only times Jenkins had been disciplined by the department was for twice failing to appear in court. Jenkins pleaded guilty in January and admitted taking part in at least 10 robberies of Baltimore citizens, planting drugs on innocent people and re-selling drugs he stole from suspects on an. "This was a great abuse of the public trust," said Judge Blake. Last month, Mr De Sousa was indicted for failure to pay his taxes by the same prosecutors who brought the GTTF case. His fee will be donated to the victims of the Gun Trace Task Force. The sergeant took no one else from the flex squad. No one believed Oakley. Donald Stepp was released from federal prison back in January of this year. "I did, yes. Jenkins had told his squad hed heard over wiretaps that Belvedere Towers, a high-rise apartment complex in North Roland Park, was the scene of large drug deals. One afternoon, he took two officers there and they wound up stopping a drug deal in progress. It wasn't the first time I've heard that word to describe Jenkins. The actions of former Baltimore police Sergeant Wayne Jenkins and his team of plain-clothed officers in the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) are explored in We Own This City. Former Baltimore Police Sgt. I ask, slightly confused. De Sousa handled the discipline, and they had worked a deal, Hill said, according to a transcript of the interview. Later on, he claims, they'd throw the drugs out the window or down a sewer grate. Officers in plainclothes units often operate in the shadows of a police department. At trial, Jenkins and his boss denied any knowledge of who attacked OConnor. "I fear nothing he knows or anything. Back before our interview, Jenkins' representative wanted me to speak to some of his old high school friends. "It's that simple.". Becoming Wayne Jenkins: Jon Bernthal's Deep Dive Into We Own This City 's Corrupt Cop For the HBO miniseries, the actor went on nightly ride-alongs and spoke at length with the imprisoned. De Sousa, who is now serving a federal sentence for tax evasion, said through his attorney that he does not remember the Jenkins case. As adults, they ran into each other again at an underground card game frequented by Baltimore Police officers. The conversation with Jenkins gets more complicated when we turn specifically to the crimes of the Gun Trace Task Force. Jenkins winced as the handcuffs were placed on his wrists, and US Marshals led him out of a back door of the courtroom. "an inmate in a federal prison," the robot finishes. "He drew first blood," Stepp says of Jenkins. That creates a culture its not unique to Baltimore, but its pronounced here that those guys should be given a pass, Davis said. I got gangster charges, racketeering charges, things they usually give the mob, who were burying bodies in cement.". Jenkins said hed tried to be nice, but now they were going to jail. "There was cameras everywhere, so I would never have took a dollar," he tells me. Barksdale, the former deputy commissioner who crafted department strategies from 2007 to 2012, leaned heavily on plainclothes units. Credit: Baltimore Police Department, Its a Viking mentality: You go out into the field among the bad guys, and you bring back a bounty. "I'm here because of greed," he said. Attorneys in the integrity unit had approached another officer involved in the arrest, asking him pointed questions about whether Jenkins had lied about the drugs. Wayne Jenkins a former Marine? A squad of veteran police officers stood accused of committing numerous robberies, as well as extortion and overtime fraud. He has covered the Baltimore Police Department and crime in Baltimore since 2008. Can this US city go 72 hours without a murder? De Sousa, who later served as commissioner and is currently serving time on federal tax charges, says he doesnt remember the case. "We said, 'You know, he's robbin' the pieces of shit of Baltimore that are the reason that me and my kids can't walk down the street and feel safe," he says. But he added, All disciplinary decisions were put through the proper consideration by command staff and BPD legal department. "It's nothing I've ever imagined. On June 13, 2016, Jenkins became the Officer in Charge of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF,) a specialized unit within the Operational Investigation Division of the BPD. Hours later, in a quiet waterfront neighborhood 15 miles east of downtown, a drug-dealing bail bondsman was roused from his sleep. Sneed. Another was to talk about how futile life inside the penal system is. Over the years, I wrote to all of these former officers in prison several times, asking them to help me understand their breathtaking crimes. He reviewed hours of body camera footage from their arrests, watched tapes of their courtroom appearances, reviewed several thousand pages of documents, including internal police department files, and interviewed dozens of people including two of the convicted officers, some of the gun unit's victims, other current and former Baltimore police officers and commanders, defense attorneys and prosecutors. It was a red flag. A loyal friend. Jenkins was a member of the Baltimore police department's Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a plain-clothed unit tasked with finding guns and drugs in bulk in a bid to tackle the city's high murder. His supervisors and others either failed to see the red flags or chose to ignore them. For example, I asked him about the robbery of a man who lived in a large mansion in the suburbs of Baltimore - a robbery he pled guilty to in his plea agreement. When Jenkins called him to a house the GTTF was investigating, Stepp took pictures of the officers going in and out. But it's the big man upstairs," he says. Jon Bernthal embedded with Baltimore police to play city's dirtiest cop in HBO's "We Own This City" On "Salon Talks" Bernthal reveals he spoke to the real Sgt. Stepp says Jenkins started bringing over shipments of drugs on an almost daily basis, putting them in a locked shed behind Stepp's house. He's even got a clothing line coming out around his defunct bail bond business, Double D Bail Bonds. As Jenkins is telling me this, he is naming names. In his plea deal, Jenkins admitted he planted heroin on Burley to try to justify the fatal collision. "I'm grateful, very grateful.". The bottles were winged at us. It turned out that federal agents had the unit under surveillance for months. "I still maintain my innocence. He counters that the units helped bring down crime, and says he made it a point to scrutinize their conduct. It was during these games that Stepp heard Jenkins boasting about the large drug stashes he often came across during his work as a plainclothes police officer. Until this point, I'd only heard Jenkins on secretly taped FBI recordings, wiretapped phone calls, body camera footage and at the hearing in June 2018 when a federal judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison. Detectives Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor went forward to trial and a jury found them guilty of robbery, extortion and fraud in February. Jenkins and members of his squad were praised for their work getting guns off the streets in an October 2016 police department newsletter. What Detective Wayne Jenkins wrote in his affidavit for the search warrant was a complete fabrication, Oakley said. After he was sent to federal lock-up, I wrote Jenkins a letter once a year - along with many other journalists, book authors, producers and documentary filmmakers - requesting an interview. In the gloom I see the number of the bureau of prisons light up my cell phone screen. 'You say this, you say that, right?' He says he was told that because these officers were so successful at seizing guns, there was nothing to be done. "It's a surreal story. He and six members of that unit now sit in federal prison for crimes including conspiracy, racketeering and robbery, all committed under the guise of legitimate police work. ", Paul Schiraldi/Baltimore Police Department/HBO, Everyone Practices Cancel Culture | Opinion, Deplatforming Free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion. Even though we've known for weeks that Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal), Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles), Jemell Rayam (Darrell Britt-Gibson) and the rest of Baltimore's Gun Trace Task Force were . "This is not the man I know," she wrote. He couldn't get anyone to believe him at the time, and to this day, he fears law enforcement. They tracked other dealers and broke into their houses when no one was home. Then they spilled out of the house and onto the sidewalk, struggling. It was in 2007 that Jenkins became a part of the GTTF, a new unit of plain-clothed officers focused on targeting suspected criminals believed to have big supplies of guns and drugs, in a bid to reduce the city's high murder rate. It's a depressing fact that this is a viewpoint likely shared by many in Baltimore, and is a part of the reason why the GTTF got away with what they did for so long. Jenkins did not testify at the trial, but in a way, he was the star of the entire proceeding. Over the course of four phone calls (courtesy of some traded bags of crisps), Jenkins paints a picture of the Baltimore Police Department as a place where indoctrination into corruption starts almost immediately. Maurice Ward says he, Sgt. But most people who worked with him police and prosecutors asserted to The Sun they had no idea he and his officers were involved in criminal behavior. The idea that the Gun Trace Task Force went rogue simply because their sergeant was uniquely evil ignores all the systemic ways in which he was encouraged to operate the way he did, and the larger policing culture that supported him (it should also be noted that several of the squad's members started stealing money long before they joined the GTTF). The three prosecutors concluded the officer admired Jenkins work even as he may have been trying to protect the sergeant. "Everything I tell you, I will take a polygraph," Jenkins says near the beginning of that first phone call. They stole drugs and cash, sold seized narcotics and guns back on the street, planted evidence on people, even committed home invasions. Wayne Jenkins, who led the Gun Trace Task Force, was sentenced to 25 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges including racketeering, robbery and falsifying records. Jenkins, indignant, aggressively shot back at questions from OConnors attorney. The officer they talked to didnt seem like a candidate for that, the lawyers said. As backup arrived, Jenkins spotted a man named George Sneed across the street. He also names two former supervisors who he says he complained to about his former subordinate officers, Momodu Gondo and Jemell Rayam, saying they had bad reputations for stealing money. "I'm so sorry for what you're going through. Read about our approach to external linking. It showed Sneed calmly standing across the street looking on, never even raising his arms. The officers with him hesitated, Ward said. He admitted to knowing . But there was just enough room for doubt Sneed had been off camera briefly that Jenkins could argue the video didnt show the full story. We knew he wasn't the straight-and-narrow cop that all cops are supposed to be," he said. Blake who in 2017 would wind up presiding over the Gun Trace Task Force corruption case noted that the other officers present backed Jenkins account. But during the subsequent investigation, Frieman told detectives that he never saw a gun in Simons hand and that rather than being in imminent danger he was around a corner and out of sight when Jenkins ran down Simon. I lived modest, we wasn't enriching ourselves," he answers. Detective Marcus Taylor on Thursday was sentenced to 18 years in prison on racketeering charges, including robbery and overtime fraud. I wasnt privy. Within days, prosecutors issued a letter to police saying they were declining to charge Jenkins with a crime. At one point, dozens of pharmacies were looted and millions of dollars worth of medication went missing. Of all seven men, the last person I thought would ever agree to an interview was Jenkins, the fallen "golden boy" of the Baltimore Police Department. "Later on that evening, Gondo did give me money, that means hours later, I'm talking hours later, he gave me money.". Then they could enter the house and take the money, only later calling county officers to say they were executing the warrant. "I thought it was a winner.". As the leader of the unit, he received the longest prison sentence and the federal authorities who prosecuted the squad viewed him as its most culpable member. Some of the most upsetting conversations I had were with people who felt victimised twice -- by both the officers and by the criminals. Why cant I be like this guy?. But that day, Jenkins drove toward the edge of town, bobbing in and out of traffic and running red lights, until he pulled over near a wooded area off Liberty Heights Avenue. In 2018, Jessica wrote a piece which detailed the explosive trial at a Baltimore federal courthouse that revealed the unit's crimes, She then turned that story into a new seven-part podcast series called Bad Cops which you can listen to in its entirety below. I asked Wayne Jenkins several times why he wanted to do the interview with me. Wayne was a cops cop, local hero kind of guy, said Cirello, the retired officer. Its a Viking mentality: You go out into the field among the bad guys, and you bring back a bounty, Davis said. Meanwhile, his Twitter account is full of pictures of him on set, hamming it up with Bernthal and some of the other actors. He calls Stepp "the biggest exaggerator I've ever met in my life". They are not typically tethered to specific posts, or burdened by responding to 911 calls. Despite Jenkins bravado, the jury found in favor of OConnor and awarded $75,000. But two pronounced their innocence and went to trial, which I covered for the BBC. Wayne Jenkins posed as a . HBO's new true-crime drama stars Jon Bernthal as Jenkins, with the show examining Jenkins' rise in the city's police department and eventual arrest after a two-year federal investigation into the GTTF. He was serving his sentence at the Edgefield Federal Correctional Facility in South Carolina until 2020. Sneed was chased and caught, and his jaw was broken in the process. The man, Demetric Simon, 31, said he did have drugs on him and knew someone was following. If Wayne Jenkins asked you to come work for him, you felt honored, Ward said. Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton spent a year delving into the operations of Wayne Jenkins and his officers, both as members of the Gun Trace Task Force and before. Credit: Baltimore Police. "And I remember taking the $10,000.". 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