Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?
But what happens when the bad boys...are the cops?
This is the story of the police squad that took corruption to another level.
The Baltimore Police Department was in a troubled time, operating under a cloud
following the death of Freddie Gray. While the officers involved were acquitted at trial,
many felt the whole department was rotten from the ground up,
However, the department pointed to some bright spots, such as the elite Gun Trace Task Force. A
small task force consisting of only nine officers, they were tasked with getting guns off the streets
and tracing them back to past crimes. The task force seemed to move almost impossibly fast,
taking 132 guns off the streets and arresting over a hundred criminals in less than a year.
And at the head, was an officer who was the closest thing the force had to a superhero.
Sergeant Wayne Jenkins was a man with one heck of a resume.
The former Marine had returned home apparently with a passion to serve.
He spent several years as a cop on the streets but gained fame when a protest turned violent and he
dove into an enraged crowd to get an injured officer to safety. He was highly decorated,
earning the police department’s Bronze Star, and if that wasn’t enough, he had a taste for
excitement in his private life as well - beginning a career as a mixed martial arts fighter.
He seemed too good to be true - and he was.
In 2016, the Gun Trace Task Force was a rare bright spot in a department that had been
accused by the Justice Department of systemic racial bias and corruption. But on March 1st,
2017, it all came crashing down. Wayne Jenkins and six of his fellow officers arrived at the
Internal Affairs office to settle what they thought was a minor complaint and instead
were all quickly placed under arrest. An FBI SWAT team was waiting for them,
making it literally a federal case. The government had been watching them for
months - and the charges they were about to unseal would shock the whole country.
What had the Gun Trace Task Force been up to?
The Gun Trace Task Force was famous for bringing in guns, drugs, and ill-gotten money,
but the problem was, not all of it made it back to base. After all, who makes an easier target
for a robbery than a criminal? No one’s going to believe them over a police officer. The task force
was accused of stealing over $300,000 in cash, kilos of drugs, and any other valuables they got
their hands on. Embezzling from crime scenes is a pretty common type of police corruption
and officers get arrested for it all the time - but the scale here was mostly unheard of.
But that wasn’t the only thing that put this case on the map.
The cops were also scamming the department. Task force officers work off-hours whenever
they’re needed and mostly police their own work patterns. That allowed this task force to mark
down high levels of overtime, both when they were technically working and when they weren’t at all.
It might be impossible to show when the police were abusing overtime when they were on the
job - but the feds were pretty sure that officers shouldn’t be charging overtime
when they’re fixing their house or on vacation in Myrtle Beach.
But the task force’s crimes went far beyond theft.
The officers had taken to committing robbery and even selling their ill-gotten goods back
on the streets. In one case, they stole a man’s house keys and looked up his address.
They then conducted an illegal search of his home, cracked open a safe where
they found drugs and cash. They took half the cash for themselves, closed the safe,
and then informed their superiors as if they were finding it for the first time.
Even during the riots the previous year, they were up to their dirty tricks - when they stopped
looting at a pharmacy, they bagged the stolen drugs and sold them to their drug dealer contact.
And when they found drugs and a gun in an illegal search, they sold it themselves for cash.
But nothing was more shocking than how the task force trapped innocent people.
To make a stop and search someone, you need a cause. That was part of what made the Freddie
Gray case so controversial - the knife the officers arrested him for was technically legal.
But when the Gun Trace Task Force needed a victim, they would manufacture the cause. They carried
BB guns with them, planting them on people in case they needed fake cause to make an arrest
legitimately. And because fleeing from the cops is considered a reasonable cause for a search,
the officers would speed up their cars and drive at people, sending
them running - and then use the people running for their lives as their cause.
And when they had their sights on people, nothing would stop them.
The task force would chase people for weeks, watching them get involved in drug deals. But they
wouldn’t arrest them - when they believed they had a big fish, they would wait to get close to
wherever their home base was. You need cause for a judge to grant you a warrant for surveillance,
but the Gun Trace Task Force didn’t believe in things like “judicial overview”. They would use
illegal GPS trackers placed on people’s cars to track them before they arrested
them - if they even arrested them at all. Sometimes they would just rob them blind.
So how did it all come crashing down?
Well, as usual where the government is concerned, the wheels of justice move slowly.
In fact, the city’s internal affairs department received their first tip
that Wayne Jenkins was robbing drug dealers in 2015 - but turning in one of your fellow officers
is always risky even when said officer isn’t a serial robber. So the officer who observed
it gave the information to a local officer, who reported it anonymously to internal affairs...who
didn’t apparently do much with it, even when they had dozens of other complaints on file.
But there were other red flags that eventually clued the feds in.
Jenkins often used an unmarked police car for his robberies, which wouldn’t look like much to
a civilian but might be more obvious to a fellow officer. But it still led to relatively little
action - at least on the parts of the Baltimore Police Department. Lawyers were more active,
finding one client after another who was claiming to have been set up by Jenkins
and his fellow plain-clothed officers. They reported abuse, illegal searches, robbery, and
police brutality - but the lawsuits were ongoing and the police department was closing ranks.
And slowly but surely, the FBI was gathering their evidence.
Wayne Jenkins was beginning his corrupt reign before he got transferred into the Gun Trace Task
Force, and the added freedom let him step it up. The task force seemed to have its own corruption
problems before he entered the picture, and the combination of the two gave the FBI the push they
needed to move forward with their investigation. As they looked into the history of the department,
it became clear that the BPD knew there were allegations against Jenkins and the task force
- but they were all swept under the rug because the officers involved were considered valuable.
But they weren’t valuable to the FBI.
When the charges were filed, it quickly became one of the biggest scandals in the
police department’s history - and there were a lot of those. The department was notorious for
arresting people for minor offenses, with their court appearances delayed
long after what was legally required for them to be charged or released.
That created an atmosphere where Jenkins and the task force could operate with impunity, with the
threat of arrest hanging over their victims if they tried to fight back or file a complaint.
But now they had been exposed - and there was nowhere to run.
In total, nine officers were charged - but it wasn’t the nine belonging to the task force.
While one was never charged, the corruption had expanded beyond Baltimore and snagged an
officer from Philadelphia. Officer Eric Snell had previously worked in Baltimore and became
a critical contact for the Gun Trace Task Force. He had been picking up much of the
group’s drugs and was charged with conspiracy to distribute heroin and cocaine. While he
could have faced decades in prison, he pled guilty mid-trial and got nine years in prison.
Similar fates would await the other officers.
Most of the officers were charged with racketeering and robbery offenses, which carried
even heavier penalties. Four detectives - Momodu Gondo, Evodio Hendrix, Jemell Rayam, and Maurice
Ward - all pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy and some other charges and received between seven
and twelve years in prison. Sergeant Thomas Allers also pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy and
was treated more harshly as one of the men giving the orders - he received fifteen years in prison.
But not everyone was smart enough to plead guilty.
Detective Daniel Hersl and Detective Marcus Taylor chose to go to trial on
counts of racketeering conspiracy, aiding and abetting, racketeering,
robbery, and possession of a firearm while committing a crime. The two high-level officers
chose to go to trial and were promptly hit with an overwhelming barrage of evidence.
They pled their case, but the jury was not having it. They were convicted on all counts
except the firearms charge and wound up hit with a whopping eighteen years in prison.
But what was the fate of the mastermind?
Wayne Jenkins Mug Shot, Via Baltimore Police Department.
Sgt. Wayne Jenkins led a trail of chaos across Baltimore both as part of the task force and as
a solo officer, and he was hit with the harshest charges of anyone. Not only was he charged with
multiple racketeering, robbery, and firearm offenses, but the feds later tacked on charges
of destroying or altering records in federal investigations and depriving his victims of
their civil rights. Facing enough prison time that he could be locked up for the rest of his life,
Jenkins decided to cut his losses and plead guilty - and still received
the harshest sentence of anyone, being sent to federal prison for a whopping twenty-five years.
The Gun Trace Task Force had fallen, but the chaos they caused was far from over.
As part of their plea deals, several of the officers took the stand and told of the full
extent of their corruption. That included thousands of potentially illegal arrests,
with a disproportionate impact on Baltimore’s black population.
The eight indicted officers in the task force had been involved in three thousand arrests,
and now the state government needed to take a look at all of them. How many were legitimate
arrests? How many were arrests of real criminals that were tainted by corruption? And how many were
arrests of innocent people targeted by a criminal gang of officers? No one knew - and the work
to investigate the cases is still ongoing, and may lead to the release of countless convicts.
But the biggest damage may have been invisible.
Baltimore and its police force had a tense relationship at the best of times.
Many people thought about the incidents of police brutality when they saw an officer
and were hesitant to cooperate with them to get criminals off the street. Now they looked at the
officers and wondered - are they protecting the public, or are they only enriching themselves?
The Baltimore State’s Attorney even created a list of officers involved in complaints or abuse
that she didn’t consider reliable enough to testify in court. And while the Gun
Trace Task Force and its mastermind will all be in prison for a while yet,
the city may be sorting through the mess they made just as long.
Check out “The Rampart Scandal - Horrible Crimes Committed by
Police” for another shocking case of police misconduct,
or watch “Shocking Cases of Cops Planting Evidence” for how some almost got away with it.