wayne jenkins baltimore

His fee will be donated to the victims of the Gun Trace Task Force. Then, in November 2017, he was given further charges of destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations, and deprivation of rights under color of law. Read more: Inside one of America's most corrupt police squads. Command created the monster, she said, and allowed it to go unchecked.. 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. He gave me a few reasons. "Absolutely. When I tell this to Stepp, he's angry. Back before our interview, Jenkins' representative wanted me to speak to some of his old high school friends. Instead, while their cash and drugs were gone, the dealers were free men. Homegrown commanders took pride in being known as having knockers. A surveillance video suggesting Jenkins may have planted drugs in a suspects car did make its way to the police integrity unit of the Baltimore States Attorneys Office in 2014. Justin Fenton takes listeners inside the investigation on the Roughly Speaking podcast. Sneed was chased and caught, and his jaw was broken in the process. Not long after Stepp flipped on his former friend, Jenkins pled guilty. Jenkins doled out $5,000 to each of the two officers and instructed them not to make any big purchases. He also says that he only made roughly $75,000 off of the narcotic sales, as opposed to the figure put on it by Stepp. In the police academy, his peers saw a leader. I sold drugs as a dirty cop," he says. It was a red flag. He kept $10,000 for himself, saying he planned to install a front-end crash bar so his department-issued vehicle wouldnt get damaged in his frequent collisions. Former Baltimore Police Sgt. 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. The plaintiffs prevailed in three of them, either through a jury verdict or the citys decision to settle the case. Today, he's a free man, living without restrictions with his spouse and young daughter in the eastern part of Baltimore County. However, the focus on quantity rather than quality led Jenkins and the seven other GTTF officers to start planting evidence, take money from the homes they invaded, and even resell the drugs they seized back onto the streets. It feels a little bit like splitting hairs. "It's nothing I've ever imagined. In another man's house, the GTTF broke into a safe and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars. Plainclothes officers, as the description suggests, just work in street clothes usually casual rather than uniforms. Federal prosecutors displayed the contents of a bag found in the trunk of Sgt. Hours later, in a quiet waterfront neighborhood 15 miles east of downtown, a drug-dealing bail bondsman was roused from his sleep. 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. Sneed's attorney Michael Pulver concluded, per Fenton, that the officers had "fabricated this story to hide the fact that they intentionally assaulted and falsely arrested and imprisoned Mr. They testified he told them to carry BB guns to plant if they ever injured or killed an unarmed person, that he often took large quantities of drugs off of suspects without submitting them to the police evidence room. No one believed Oakley. Or harm you or even kill you.". Some of his men also have acknowledged stealing well before they came together on the Gun Trace Task Force in 2016. 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 Departments go-to assets in the fight against violent crime. Please sign up today and help make a difference. They might not have been believed anyhow. "I'm in prison for 25 years, there's no reason to lie.". Wayne Jenkins and former Det. BALTIMORE, MD A Baltimore police sergeant has admitted to robbing citizens, selling stolen drugs and putting innocent men behind bars, among other offenses. I lived modest, we wasn't enriching ourselves," he answers. Wayne Jenkins who was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for years of robberies, drug dealing and other crimes has asked a judge to release him just four . It was there that the full extent of the officers' misconduct became public. "I never had [theft complaints] because I never took money off individuals. During his time on the streets of Baltimore Jenkins was involved. Wayne Jenkins was on a mission to find big dealers and steal their drugs and cash. "It strikes at the foundation of our entire criminal justice system.". The drop-offs included marijuana, cocaine and MDMA, all of which Stepp did his best to sell. Amid controversies over the years, police brass would publicly disband the units, then reconstitute them with the same personnel under a different name. Wayne Jenkins was living a double life. He acknowledged that he could tell something was off with Jenkins around the time of the GTTF crime spree. Ex-police sergeant Wayne Earl Jenkins apologised in court for the crimes he committed while heading an elite squad called the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF). Ward, now working with Jenkins for the first time, recalled the officers pulling over a car in East Baltimore that had two trash bags full of money. A few months after the OConnor incident, Jenkins was involved in another run-in where his sworn account was contradicted. Ex-police sergeant Wayne Earl Jenkins apologized in the courtroom for the crimes he committed at the same time as he was head of an elite squad referred to as the Gun Trace Task . They can let a suspect go, if they can lead to bigger fish. 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. Jenkins lied to them, saying he was a federal agent. You're taught that - the second someone gets in trouble we meet up, and we talk face to face," he says. He was arrested along with almost every member of the unit in March 2017. 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. If Wayne Jenkins asked you to come work for him, you felt honored, Ward said. Wayne Jenkins, ex-police sergeant, leading the Gun Trace Task Force Sergeant Wayne Jenkins was a decorated leader of the corrupt plain-clothes police unit in Baltimore whose detectives robbed . It was surreal hearing his voice, talking to me. Detective Marcus Taylor on Thursday was sentenced to 18 years in prison on racketeering charges, including robbery and overtime fraud. They had the autonomy to catch and release suspects and develop informants. Jenkins, who later led the GTTF, pleaded guilty to civil rights violations for participating in the coverup and is serving 25 years in prison for crimes including robberies and selling drugs. A reporter also reviewed videos of judicial proceedings stemming from the officers arrests. Ward wasnt sure what to make of it. 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. Prior to this, they'd been lauded as some of the best gun cops in the city - seizing dozens of illegal firearms every month, and demonstrating a "a work ethic that is beyond reproach", in the words of one supervisor. Here is everything you need to know about the real Jenkins and where he is now. He reminds me that the US Attorney's office found him more credible than Jenkins. He idolizes this guy, said Shelley Glenn, another prosecutor. I ask this friend why he didn't say anything to anyone. This is his senior portrait from 1998. I never heard back, and he didn't seem to be responding to anyone else, either. 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. Wayne Jenkins grew up in Middle River and is a graduate of Eastern Technical High School. Maurice Ward, a former detective now serving a seven-year prison term for committing crimes with Jenkins, said he and other officers jockeyed to get on his team. "He's a pathological liar," Stepp says. 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. Not all the allegations against Jenkins came from lawsuits. They tracked other dealers and broke into their houses when no one was home. Over the years, I wrote to all of these former officers in prison several times, asking them to help me understand their breathtaking crimes. They weren't being paid by the taxpayers to keep the city safe, and weren't operating with all the power and protections that police have. Wayne was a cops cop, local hero kind of guy, said Cirello, the retired officer. Barksdale, the former deputy commissioner who crafted department strategies from 2007 to 2012, leaned heavily on plainclothes units. In September 2021, Jenkins spoke with BBC journalist Jessica Lussenhop from behind bars, and he claimed he never took money from Baltimore citizens. He says Stepp pressured him into it. In a recent interview, Simon told The Sun, I never had no BB gun. They told me they were disturbed that he was being portrayed as a "monster". 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. I thought, How is he doing it? This past summer, as I was wrapping up work on "Bad Cops", a strange email appeared in my inbox. Read about our approach to external linking. As backup arrived, Jenkins spotted a man named George Sneed across the street. Stepp testified that the arrangement was so lucrative, he stuck with it for years before getting arrested himself in December 2017. Wayne Jenkins, Gun Trace Task Force officer, The woods of Powder Mill Park, where Det. 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. But it's the big man upstairs," he says. OConnor, a house painter who missed weeks of work because of his injuries, sued Jenkins and put forward witnesses who backed his account: After OConnor yelled at Fries, officers had pulled him to the ground, and Jenkins walloped him. One was that he felt he'd been railroaded into his plea agreement by the US prosecutors (the Maryland US Attorney's Office declined to comment). Once it left my shop they had reduced the punishment.. Its a Viking mentality: You go out into the field among the bad guys, and you bring back a bounty, Davis said. Some tried to complain, but were ignored. On an oddly balmy January night, Jenkins and Fries were working the McElderry Park neighborhood in East Baltimore when they noticed two brothers drinking Steel Reserve beers on the sidewalk outside their rowhouse. He said he started dealing drugs at age 9, selling. I dont know the nuances, what was said, what wasnt. He was getting suspects off the street, but his cases often werent holding up in court. Prosecutors investigated and even presented evidence to a grand jury but concluded they didnt have enough evidence to obtain an indictment. That creates a culture its not unique to Baltimore, but its pronounced here that those guys should be given a pass, Davis said. I did give drugs to Donny [Stepp, who testified he and Jenkins sold $1 million worth of narcotics] for the last couple of years I was police, but I didn't take people's money because then they would know you were dirty. They said Jenkins instructed them to carry BB guns to plant on suspects to justify their actions if they made a mistake. Sneed hired an attorney, who obtained footage from a city surveillance camera on the corner. He also apologised to Burley, who was not in the court, to his wife and to his father, and begged the judge for the opportunity to get out in time to be a grandfather. From 2006 to 2009, Jenkins was the subject of at least four lawsuits alleging misconduct. When Jenkins called him to a house the GTTF was investigating, Stepp took pictures of the officers going in and out. Many Baltimore residents had long distrusted the police, and more so after the death of Freddie Gray. 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. "I got 25 years. At trial, Jenkins and his boss denied any knowledge of who attacked OConnor. The two said Jenkins had found drugs in the ceiling of a mans vehicle. 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