"This is not the man I know," she wrote. And were not getting Jenkins.. ", Paul Schiraldi/Baltimore Police Department/HBO, Everyone Practices Cancel Culture | Opinion, Deplatforming Free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion. "It's nothing I've ever imagined. He is serving the harshest sentence : 25 years . 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. To learn more about their behavior, The Sun obtained several thousand pages of court records, dozens of body camera videos and hundreds of police department emails and restricted internal files. They ordered us to f--- them up; we f---ed them up, one of the responding officers, Robert Cirello, now retired, said later in an interview with The Sun. Once it left my shop they had reduced the punishment.. They walked far enough so they couldnt be seen from the street. Hed grown up in the working class suburb, where his father worked two jobs, including at Bethlehem Steel. Stepp and Jenkins' history runs deep. . Oh, yeah. The daughters of 86-year-old Elbert Davis also told the court about the 2010 car crash Jenkins caused while he was pursuing a man named Umar Burley. 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. Jenkins must serve three years of supervised release after his custodial sentence. ET on HBO. But the Baltimore states attorneys office continued to use Jenkins. The jury was shown axes, machetes and pry bars, as well as black masks that were found in Jenkins' van after his arrest. 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. According to the Internal Affairs file, the only times Jenkins had been disciplined by the department was for twice failing to appear in court. By Josiah Bates. Just how long ago Jenkins began stealing isnt clear. If I could take everything back in my life, I would have been a prosecutor," he says. He gave me a few reasons. "an inmate in a federal prison," the robot finishes. Shawn Whiting, a man whose house was robbed of $16,000 and a kilo-and-a-half of heroin, testified that he knew that as a drug dealer, his word counted for much less than the officers'. "Right off the bat, we wasn't living lavishly. 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. Their work is not to be confused with undercover operations, in which police officers assume a different identity and worm their way into a criminal organization. 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. Youve got to be willing to dig into their s--- and confront them, Barksdale said. Jenkins started calling Stepp to the scenes of arrests, encouraging Stepp to try to get inside drug dealer's hideouts to steal whatever cash or narcotics he could find. Jenkins admitted that he stole drugs from work and delivered them to Stepp, who would turn around and sell them. He was also the ringleader of a criminal enterprise of police officers who were robbing people and dealing drugs. Jenkins is currently in prison. 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. "Especially because we're short on time, is there anything that you kind of want to just say right off the bat?" Such questions over integrity have in the past prompted prosecutors to stop calling an officer as a witness, forcing the departments hand to take him off the streets. In an incident to which Jenkins would later plead guilty, the officers handcuffed two men. "He's a pathological liar," Stepp says. After an FBI investigation into the unit discovered the GTTF's crimes, federal officers arrested Jenkins alongside several others in the unit. The matter was referred to the police integrity unit of the Baltimore states attorneys office for investigation. Some tried to complain, but were ignored. 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. Its a Viking mentality: You go out into the field among the bad guys, and you bring back a bounty, Davis said. 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. 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. It turned out that federal agents had the unit under surveillance for months. The line goes dead, and I feel like I've barely gotten anywhere. A lot of what he told me was much more systematic. Baltimore Police Sgt. He. They can let a suspect go, if they can lead to bigger fish. 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. "This is Wayne.". Jenkins was developing a reputation within the department as a cop whose aggressive style brought results. He had a criminal case to fight, and his freedom was more important. Just as she was completing her podcast series on the story, she got a very unexpected call from prison. 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 . Weeks later, I search these locations myself to see if I can find anything. "Pills of heroin, bags of marijuana," he says. Plainclothes officers made the most arrests, they seized the most drugs and money, assets, former Police Commissioner Kevin Davis told The Sun. "I never had [theft complaints] because I never took money off individuals. Wayne Jenkins posed as a . Turmoil has continued at the Baltimore Police Department, an agency that saw four commissioners in little more than a year among them De Sousa, now in prison for tax fraud. It feels a little bit like splitting hairs. He was convicted on multiple counts including racketeering, robbery and falsification of records. In an interview from prison, he said it wasnt uncommon for the officers to take contraband and submit it to evidence control without arresting someone. During hia time in the department, Jenkins was involved in numerous arrests . And that is what they want, German said, according to an Internal Affairs report. "It shows what a committed, sophisticated, devious person can do," Mr Wise said. "I'm grateful, very grateful.". In fact, it's highly likely - if not certain - that many of the people Jenkins' put in prison himself had those tactics used on them by prosecutors. 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. "Nobody still knows the truth about what's going on in the city," Taylor told the judge. The bag contained masks and other gear he used while stealing drugs and cash from people he and his team targeted. This is his senior portrait from 1998. I asked him if he thinks that another scandal is inevitable. Wayne Jenkins. "How police act towards people ain't changed," he told me recently. This just begun.". As adults, they ran into each other again at an underground card game frequented by Baltimore Police officers. He is working on a book about the Gun Trace Task Force, to be published by Random House. Oakley took the rare step of getting onto the witness stand to rebut the officers, as did an independent witness who backed his account. In Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Chicago, plainclothes teams have been charged with corruption. I was a hero," Jenkins says of his activity during the unrest. One of the most shocking incidents from the plea agreement is an event that Jenkins now unequivocally denies. It's going to happen again," he said. Both men have requested new trials. This series was supported by the Pulitzer Center. "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. Last month, Mr De Sousa was indicted for failure to pay his taxes by the same prosecutors who brought the GTTF case. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. It was Jenkins, fresh off his heroics in West Baltimore. "It was obvious to me, when I'm taking millions of dollars worth of drugs from the Baltimore Police Department and selling them, that this is not a normal police department.". He says he was told that because these officers were so successful at seizing guns, there was nothing to be done. Ward and the other cop followed Jenkins into the woods. But Internal Affairs was still working on the case that the States Attorneys Office had decided it could not pursue: the suspicion that Jenkins might have planted drugs in a car to justify an arrest. Jenkins idolized his sergeant, Michael Fries, the target of the expletive. Burley was sentenced to 15 years in prison, which he was serving until federal prosecutors uncovered the task force's corruption and freed him. In a recent interview, Simon told The Sun, I never had no BB gun. Stepp testified that the arrangement was so lucrative, he stuck with it for years before getting arrested himself in December 2017. The officer they talked to didnt seem like a candidate for that, the lawyers said. The department valued their work too much to end this style of police work. Inside was a stack of bills. Justin Fenton takes listeners inside the investigation on the Roughly Speaking podcast. "I never took a thing. 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. But the police departments Internal Affairs office still had an open file on the case. They said Jenkins instructed them to carry BB guns to plant on suspects to justify their actions if they made a mistake. He had been stationed in North Carolina and would frequently make trips home to visit his family and his high school sweetheart Kristy, the . Victims like Bumgardner and Whiting had the courage to speak out. I wish I would never have stopped that vehicle," he said. It was a red flag. Updated: Mar 1, 2023 / 02:16 PM EST. "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. Seething frustration was spilling into the streets that afternoon in 2015. 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. 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. One former supervisor never responded. That creates a culture its not unique to Baltimore, but its pronounced here that those guys should be given a pass, Davis said. This kind of mindset assumes that the victims of the Gun Trace Task Force - many of them black and poor - deserved what happened to them. I am Agent and Representative as to Mr Jenkins. Back then, Jenkins escaped scrutiny again. So I kind of had a mental, like maybe a messed up moral code.". Command created the monster, she said, and allowed it to go unchecked.. No single person was in a position to make unilateral discipline decisions.. "I did, yes. In June 2018, after pleading guilty on charges of. The GTTF did not hold a monopoly on harm, of course. 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. Jenkins winced as the handcuffs were placed on his wrists, and US Marshals led him out of a back door of the courtroom. But it's the big man upstairs," he says. Simon's new project will tell a fictionalised version of the Gun Trace Task Force saga, and began filming on the streets of Baltimore over the summer. The same video led to a rare police department disciplinary case against Jenkins, who was internally charged with misconduct in 2015, according to a copy of the case file reviewed by The Sun. 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. Jenkins said hed tried to be nice, but now they were going to jail. Then the feds found him. The three prosecutors concluded the officer admired Jenkins work even as he may have been trying to protect the sergeant. "It strikes at the foundation of our entire criminal justice system.". Today, he's a free man, living without restrictions with his spouse and young daughter in the eastern part of Baltimore County. Wayne Jenkins will be played by Jon Bernthal, the same actor who portrayed "The Punisher". "I have no respect for him.". In the spring of 2015, the city of Baltimore was rocked by civil unrest after the in-custody death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. Jenkins, along with Detective Ben Frieman, had followed an African American man driving a nice car through Northeast Baltimore. "I've tarnished the badge," he said through tears. 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. The tape disputed Jenkins sworn account. FOX45 looks at the 8 former officers of the Gun Trace Task ForceThe ring leader of the squad Wayne Jenkins is currently serving the longest sentence out of the members federally indicted on . Jenkins got a bronze star for his part in the 2009 recovery of 41 kilograms of cocaine $1 million worth in a mans truck. But the suits triggered no internal punishment by the police department. Would they report the incident? Baltimore can be a complicated and dangerous place, and the men and women the officers targeted and abused may have caused harm and abuse themselves. Inside the police department, the Gun Trace Task Force was known for its success in capturing suspected drug dealers, their stashes and their illegal firearms. His police department personnel file shows no punishment related to the case. "This was a great abuse of the public trust," said Judge Blake. "You have nightmares about police officers harassing you, beating you up, just locking you up, it's just a nightmare that I have and it basically hasn't gone away yet," he said. 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. They wanted to tell me that Jenkins was a dedicated father, a good football coach. 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. "Now we're going to burn it down. 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. The fallout of the squad's crimes is still rippling through the city and undoubtedly made Baltimore a less safe place for everyone who lives there. 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. Later on, he claims, they'd throw the drugs out the window or down a sewer grate. The bondsman would take care of selling them, then split the profits with the police sergeant. Within days, prosecutors issued a letter to police saying they were declining to charge Jenkins with a crime. His fee will be donated to the victims of the Gun Trace Task Force. In the years since his arrest, he'd never given a public interview. They said that while they had their backs turned, someone had clocked OConnor and taken off. Jenkins was hired by the Baltimore Police Department in 2003, according to state records obtained by The Baltimore Sun. 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. 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. His earliest admitted theft was in 2011. But when the officers exited the elevators on the building's second floor, they were met by an FBI SWAT team. When the officers circled back later, the two were still outside holding beers. And of course, Jenkins is also hoping for a sentenced reduction of some kind. 2023 BBC. The jury found against the officer who broke Sneeds jaw but cleared Jenkins. 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. This past summer, as I was wrapping up work on "Bad Cops", a strange email appeared in my inbox. The leader of a rogue Baltimore police unit sobbed as he was sentenced to 25 years in prison in a corruption scandal prosecutors called "breathtaking". In February 2017, Jenkins was charged with two counts of racketeering conspiracy; racketeering, aiding and abetting; racketeering; two counts of robbery and aiding and abetting; and two counts of possession of a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence. Historical Accuracy (Q&A): Is Sgt. Your digital subscription helps pay for The Baltimore Sun's investigative reporting. Relatives say he liked to visit his high school sweetheart, Kristy, who would become his wife. He started to worry. Wayne Jenkins from Baltimore was sentenced to 25-years-in-prison. 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. 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. Homegrown commanders took pride in being known as having knockers. Reflecting on the revelations of his misconduct, Lt. Marjorie German concluded that department leaders gave Jenkins too much leeway because they were enamored of his results. "This is a saying we state: 'Don't let probable cause stand in the way of a good arrest,'" Jenkins says. "There was cameras everywhere, so I would never have took a dollar," he tells me. 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. He's opening a consulting service called Stepp Right Consultants, to give guidance and insight to men and women who are about to enter the federal penal system. They also didnt give chase. 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. A plea agreement is a document that lists specific criminal acts that the defendant is agreeing to plead guilty to. But Whiting is not so optimistic. And yet, here we are, me in my closet "studio" and him at the front of a line of 20 to 30 other inmates, all waiting for their turn on the prison phone. 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. Some drug dealers told their lawyers that Jenkins made stuff up to arrest them and had kept a good chunk of their money and drugs before taking them in. 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