But the police departments Internal Affairs office still had an open file on the case. All of the other officers would have to be inaccurate in their testimony if it is to be believed that Detective Jenkins was manufacturing information for the affidavit, she said. Jenkins rushed off to join them. Wayne Jenkins was on a mission to find big dealers and steal their drugs and cash. He said he started dealing drugs at age 9, selling. Some of the most upsetting conversations I had were with people who felt victimised twice -- by both the officers and by the criminals. Finally, in March 2015, Internal Affairs chief Rodney Hill informed Jenkins that he was being charged internally with misconduct, neglect of duty and failure to supervise the officer in his charge, according to a leaked copy of the case file obtained by The Sun. Jenkins idolized his sergeant, Michael Fries, the target of the expletive. 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. "I'm finally trying to get my life back on track," he told me. That made it very tempting when, sometime around 2011, Jenkins approached Stepp and suggested they go into business together. "He is no more than a common criminal," Davis' daughter, Shirley Johnson, said of Jenkins. In September 2021, Jenkins spoke with BBC journalist Jessica Lussenhop from behind bars, and he claimed he never took money from Baltimore citizens. I couldn't help thinking about the many victims of the squad that I'd met over the three years I've been working on this story. The leaked case file doesnt say why. Wayne Jenkins in prison,. Read about our approach to external linking. "If you've got to lie about what you've seen or what you heard or what you witnessed, as long as he's dirty, he's got the drugs and he's got the guns and he did the crime - just get him.". Wayne Jenkins. I have to try to untangle his answers as he moves from subject to subject, sometimes so fast I can't keep up. Some of his men also have acknowledged stealing well before they came together on the Gun Trace Task Force in 2016. He is very remorseful.". Now, the recommended punishment was significant: a demotion, a transfer and suspension for 15 to 20 days, including a period without pay, Hill told the television network Al-Jazeera. Please sign up today and help make a difference. Jenkins also tells me that any time an officer's misconduct gets picked up by Internal Affairs or by an outside law enforcement agency, it was routine for the involved officers to meet up, to tailor their stories to avoid punishment. 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. In May 2014, three Baltimore prosecutors convened a meeting. The message read: "Greetings. Over the years, I wrote to all of these former officers in prison several times, asking them to help me understand their breathtaking crimes. 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. By the time his criminal streak was in full swing, it entailed high-stakes robberies and breaking and entering even as he was bringing in paychecks totaling over $170,000 in a year, in part because of overtime fraud. On 1 March, 2017, Sergeant Wayne Jenkins and six of his subordinate officers from the Gun Trace Task Force walked into the Baltimore Police Department's Internal Affairs building, believing they were there to clear up a minor complaint about a damaged vehicle. Jenkins, who until his arrest was viewed within the Baltimore Police Department as one of its most high-performing officers, is serving 25 years in prison after he pleaded guilty in 2017 to. You guys willing to go kick in the dudes door and take the money? "I ain't have a trial because the simple fact is I knew [the court] would believe them over top of me," he told the jury. In part due to his cooperation in the case, he received a much shorter sentence than the officers of the GTTF. More than 50 people including current and former police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys and victims were interviewed. 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). Sergeant Wayne. His account and Jenkins claim that hed found the gun is evocative of testimony by two of Jenkins officers in the 2018 Gun Trace Task Force trial. Then they spilled out of the house and onto the sidewalk, struggling. It was difficult for me to understand and parse all of Jenkins' denials, now. Donald Stepp was released from federal prison back in January of this year. Despite Jenkins bravado, the jury found in favor of OConnor and awarded $75,000. The indictment of Jenkins and six of his gun task force officers on federal racketeering charges rocked Baltimore when the announcement came in March 2017. 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. You didnt catch me in nothing.. 2023 BBC. For the first three years of his sentence, Jenkins was doing time at the federal prison in Edgefield, South Carolina . 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. Sneed was chased and caught, and his jaw was broken in the process. The jury found against the officer who broke Sneeds jaw but cleared Jenkins. Wayne Jenkins, who led . 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 . This is his senior portrait from 1998. Not likely, Ward thought. No single person was in a position to make unilateral discipline decisions.. His fee will be donated to the victims of the Gun Trace Task Force. Then 34, he was already an admired leader of aggressive street squads and would go on to head the elite Gun Trace Task Force, one of the Baltimore Police Department's go-to assets in the fight against violent crime. "I thought it was a winner.". Far from it. Jenkins and Fries would later say in sworn depositions that Sneed had been yelling expletives about police and throwing glass bottles at them. "Obviously I'm in here now, so I see both sides. "I felt comfortable with it because all the police officers that I met, which were many during the card games, in my opinion, they owned the city," Stepp would later tell the jury at the GTTF trial. He says Stepp pressured him into it. I mean, it had velocity, Jenkins said. They employed tactics that straddled and sometimes clearly crossed the line that divides aggressive policing and trampling on civil rights. When Jenkins was on paternity leave, commanders groused that his squads productivity dropped. 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. 'You say this, you say that, right?' He also acknowledged stealing the man's $4,000 (2,956) watch, which he gave to Stepp to sell. I lived modest, we wasn't enriching ourselves," he answers. "It strikes at the foundation of our entire criminal justice system.". But the suits triggered no internal punishment by the police department. He admitted to knowing . And Jenkins says, Did you look in the console? And he pulls the rug back and boom. Prosecutors pointed to the fact that Jenkins fabricated evidence, like producing a bogus iPhone video of his officers cracking a drug dealer's safe, when they had in fact already broken into it and stolen $200,000 in cash. "He always had large sums of money in his pocket. And Jenkins, whod been identified as a rising talent early in his career, was celebrated among department brass and rank and file officers as a leader with an uncanny knack for delivering the goods. Detectives Maurice Ward, Evodio Hendrix, Momodu Gondo and Jemell Rayam all pleaded guilty. Donny made every piece of that up.". The two police officers came over because they had nothing else to do.. When one of the men darted into his home, Jenkins rushed in after him. Back before our interview, Jenkins' representative wanted me to speak to some of his old high school friends. "an inmate in a federal prison," the robot finishes. Meanwhile, his Twitter account is full of pictures of him on set, hamming it up with Bernthal and some of the other actors. While Jenkins most serious crimes the drug dealing, the robberies appear to have been well hidden, it is not surprising they flourished within Baltimores permissive plainclothes culture. The line goes dead, and I feel like I've barely gotten anywhere. I'm staring at my cell phone in the dark. He walked into the court wearing a maroon prison uniform. Wayne Jenkins eyes darted from screen to screen, taking in the surveillance images. Image Credit: Baltimore Police Department. It didn't take long before Stepp began to suspect that Jenkins ratted him out. 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. A loyal friend. Jenkins doled out $5,000 to each of the two officers and instructed them not to make any big purchases. It's going to happen again," he said. On June 7, 2018, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. If Wayne Jenkins asked you to come work for him, you felt honored, Ward said. Using wiretaps and hidden recording devices, they had accumulated a wealth of evidence showing the officers were robbing citizens, filing for hundreds of hours of overtime they never worked, stealing drugs and even selling illegal firearms back on the streets. That while the homicide rate was on a historic rise, this elite, eight-officer team was getting guns off the streets at an astonishing rate. The second declined to comment. But when the officers exited the elevators on the building's second floor, they were met by an FBI SWAT team. Jenkins, along with Detective Ben Frieman, had followed an African American man driving a nice car through Northeast Baltimore. Homegrown commanders took pride in being known as having knockers. In a 26 page letter hand written from his cell at the Federal Corrections institution in South Carolina, former Baltimore Police Sergeant Wayne Jenkins tells a judge that he saved a . They urged his supervisors to get him back to work and focused, according to an internal police department investigation conducted after the indictments. "So you did take money, ultimately?" "I could have spoken up.". He says something that I've never heard anyone admit out loud. In Jenkins' plea, it says that "in April 2015 following the riots after the death of Freddie Gray, Jenkins brought DS prescription medicines that he had stolen from someone looting a pharmacy so that DS could sell the medications". Prosecutors urged the judge to sentence him to the maximum 30 years, adding that the unit's corruption affected 1,700 criminal cases. I was a hero," Jenkins says of his activity during the unrest. Jenkins joined Baltimore's police department in 2003, first becoming a beat cop and patrolling the streets of Baltimore. But the Baltimore states attorneys office continued to use Jenkins. "It ain't over. But, he added, I think that if I am held responsible for my actions, then the same should be with the officers for their wrongdoing.. BALTIMORE, MD A Baltimore police sergeant has admitted to robbing citizens, selling stolen drugs and putting innocent men behind bars, among other offenses. 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. What was Jenkins really going to do with the drugs? My hope - maybe a naive one - was that hearing one of these men speak candidly about how he crossed over to the dark side would help the public better understand the casual, day-to-day corruption that can happen in policing. In federal court, Mickey Oakley argued that the officers who arrested him including Jenkins and future Gun Trace Task Force member Daniel Hersl had lied about the circumstances leading up to the arrest and had illegally searched his home. As adults, they ran into each other again at an underground card game frequented by Baltimore Police officers. They had the autonomy to catch and release suspects and develop informants. Jenkins entered a department steeped in zero tolerance a war on crime fueled by arrests for even minor infractions. "I got 25 years. "Right off the bat, we wasn't living lavishly. Although she did not address the court, in a letter to Judge Catherine Blake, Jenkins' wife Kristy asked for leniency. The GTTF did not hold a monopoly on harm, of course. De Sousa, who is now serving a federal sentence for tax evasion, said through his attorney that he does not remember the Jenkins case. With the investigations behind him, Jenkins seemed emboldened. In reality, he says, they were making arrests by any means necessary. It was the perfect crime. Read about our approach to external linking. But Davis, Baltimores police commissioner from 2015 to 2018 and a veteran of two other departments, calls plainclothes units necessary and critical to the crime fight. They go looking for guns and drugs, he said, and often are successful. Jenkins was a rising star in the department, because of his ability to regularly bring in huge seizures of drugs and guns. So he gave up and entered a guilty plea. He was arrested along with almost every member of the unit in March 2017. When I saw the video, Webb later told The Sun, it didnt corroborate what was in the statement of probable cause at all.. He ordered a detective to drive them to the hospital and joined the front lines. ", Explaining the tactics of the GTTF, he also told the publication: "This is a saying we state: 'Don't let probable cause stand in the way of a good arrest. 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. I think about Shawn Whiting, a former heroin dealer who went to prison for years after the officers robbed him. Ward wasnt sure what to make of it. For the most part, these defendants decided it wasnt in their interest to tell government authorities that. 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 almost daily basis, including heroin, cocaine and prescription painkillers. Not all the allegations against Jenkins came from lawsuits. Wayne Jenkins, who led . The BBC is not naming these three former supervisors, since none of them has been charged with a crime in connection with this case. He told me that frequently, when he or his fellow officers didn't feel like submitting the drugs they seized or doing arrest paperwork, they'd simply confiscate people's drug stashes and let them go. Jenkins names two specific locations where he says the drugs get tossed: a train bridge near the Eastern District police station, and a wooded highway off-ramp on the way to the Northern District police station. That the GTTF's leader, a former Marine and amateur MMA fighter named Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, was a hero who'd plunged into a violent crowd during the unrest to rescue injured officers. Sergeants are the eyes and ears of the command, the front-line supervisors trusted to keep close tabs on their officers. Then they could enter the house and take the money, only later calling county officers to say they were executing the warrant. Wayne Jenkins, who . Though Simon says he reported the incident to the police departments Internal Affairs office, he ultimately stopped cooperating on advice from his defense lawyer. When Jenkins was allowed to speak, he turned first to face the Davis family and apologised repeatedly. 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. And that's what I did.". It wasn't the first time I've heard that word to describe Jenkins. One of the most surprising witnesses was a man named Donald Stepp, a bail bondsman, who revealed that he'd been selling drugs Jenkins brought him from work. 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. Jerry Rodriguez, a career Los Angeles police officer who was a deputy commissioner in Baltimore from 2013 to 2015, said the department was resistant to change. He started to worry. One officer recalled Jenkins taunting colleagues waiting in line to submit evidence at police headquarters, bragging about how many guns he was getting off the street. 2023 BBC. One former supervisor never responded. OConnor had spent much of the day tossing back beers at the Brewers Hill Pub & Grill in Southeast Baltimore when the manager asked him to leave. 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. When the phone rings, I put the call on speaker and hear a robotic, pre-recorded female voice: "You have a prepaid call. For the past four years, Jessica Lussenhop has been reporting on the rise and fall of a corrupt squad of Baltimore police officers. And were not getting Jenkins.. 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