Read more: Inside one of America's most corrupt police squads. . 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. "I'm so sorry to the citizens of Baltimore.". 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. In Baltimores recent history, the police department has consistently relied on such units, even though the conduct of many of their officers would draw criticism from city residents. Wayne Jenkins, who led . 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 . 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. Burley was sentenced to 15 years in prison, which he was serving until federal prosecutors uncovered the task force's corruption and freed him. I'm standing in my pandemic "radio studio" - aka the closet in my apartment - surrounded by hangers holding button-up shirts and dresses. While it may seem incongruous that an officer would be hailed as a hero while racking up complaints, in the Baltimore Police Department it was not. They told me they were disturbed that he was being portrayed as a "monster". 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. Jenkins lied to them, saying he was a federal agent. They drive unmarked vehicles. "It's nothing I've ever imagined. "It's a surreal story. Wayne Jenkins' police vehicle when he was arrested in 2017. It took place as Jenkins and other officers were searching an apartment. 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. That's because in June 2018, Jenkins was sentenced to 25 years in prison. In Baltimore, theyre often referred to as knockers, a reference to their historically aggressive tactics. We knew he wasn't the straight-and-narrow cop that all cops are supposed to be," he said. Oakley took the rare step of getting onto the witness stand to rebut the officers, as did an independent witness who backed his account. This series was supported by the Pulitzer Center. 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. Stepp's moving on with his life - in a sense. Prosecutors investigated and even presented evidence to a grand jury but concluded they didnt have enough evidence to obtain an indictment. He is serving the harshest sentence : 25 years . It was the perfect crime. They claimed they didnt see who did it. His earliest admitted theft was in 2011. But the video captured by closed-circuit TV showed the officers searching the car extensively and never appearing to make a discovery. "This was a great abuse of the public trust," said Judge Blake. They wanted to tell me that Jenkins was a dedicated father, a good football coach. "I'm so sorry for what you're going through. To single him out as a flawed individual in an otherwise perfectly functioning system is a way to avoid change in the police department, to shirk the responsibility of actually preventing this from happening again. Inside was a stack of bills. He idolizes this guy, said Shelley Glenn, another prosecutor. Used to tell me he won it playing poker.". Not long after Stepp flipped on his former friend, Jenkins pled guilty. Jenkins explained that hed already tracked the man to Essex, so he thought they could stake out the home, go through the mans trash and find something to parlay into a search warrant. Yes. But I think he also spoke to me because he doesn't like the image of himself that's been in the media - as a sociopath, as someone almost inhumanly evil. So he gave up and entered a guilty plea. Many Baltimore residents had long distrusted the police, and more so after the death of Freddie Gray. "I did, yes. Instead, they go out looking for illegal activity people exchanging drugs or displaying bulges under clothing that could be guns. 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. "Life in prison with three small children. OConnor had been sloppy drunk, they testified, and his friends said they would get him home. According to the Internal Affairs file, the only times Jenkins had been disciplined by the department was for twice failing to appear in court. 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. But when the officers exited the elevators on the building's second floor, they were met by an FBI SWAT team. "It shows what a committed, sophisticated, devious person can do," Mr Wise said. ", 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. His punches came fast Jenkins was a trained boxer and OConnor soon felt the warmth of blood spilling down his cheek. Jenkins says that the veteran goaded him into taking money. Former Baltimore Police Sgt. I am Agent and Representative as to Mr Jenkins. With the investigations behind him, Jenkins seemed emboldened. . In another man's house, the GTTF broke into a safe and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars. 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. None of the cases led to any police department discipline for Jenkins, his personnel records show. I sold drugs as a dirty cop," he says. 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. "He always had large sums of money in his pocket. "Seen it done, honest to god, 500 times.". I have to try to untangle his answers as he moves from subject to subject, sometimes so fast I can't keep up. The three prosecutors concluded the officer admired Jenkins work even as he may have been trying to protect the sergeant. The dealers would be sitting in a jail cell. The departments Internal Affairs chief at the time says then-Deputy Commissioner Darryl De Sousa intervened to prevent the punishment. 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. At trial, Jenkins and his boss denied any knowledge of who attacked OConnor. During the altercation, a passerby named George Sneed was assaulted by officer Robert Cirello who broke his jaw, leading Sneed to sue. "He's a pathological liar," Stepp says. According to Jenkins convicted partner in the drug dealing, the police sergeant had been stealing drugs off the street for years and profiting from their illegal sale. Wayne Jenkins is a former BPD Sergeant who served as the leader of the Gun Trace Task Force. In Justin Fenton's book We Own This City, on which the HBO series is based, the Baltimore Sun journalist explained that Jenkins would often be "caught in a lie" while giving evidence to a jury, but no complaints were put on his record. It was difficult for me to understand and parse all of Jenkins' denials, now. He was scared. Detective Marcus Taylor on Thursday was sentenced to 18 years in prison on racketeering charges, including robbery and overtime fraud. Sgt. Updated: Mar 1, 2023 / 02:16 PM EST. Hill told Al-Jazeera it was because then-Deputy Commissioner De Sousa got involved. Command created the monster, she said, and allowed it to go unchecked.. Jenkins was given a 25-year prison sentence on June 7, 2018, which he is currently in the midst of serving at a federal prison in Kentucky. 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). At the trial four years later, Jenkins and his fellow officers claimed that the witness had been throwing bottles at them, but security camera footage shown at the trial proved what Jenkins claimed was not true. "He is no more than a common criminal," Davis' daughter, Shirley Johnson, said of Jenkins. Far from it. Victims like Bumgardner and Whiting had the courage to speak out. 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. Former Baltimore Police Department Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, currently inmate number 62928-037 at a federal prison in Kentucky, is on the line. And were not getting Jenkins.. An officer who sometimes worked with Jenkins, Keith Gladstone, pleaded guilty last month to going to the scene of Simons arrest to plant the BB gun a response, Gladstone admitted, to a phone call from a frantic Jenkins asking for the help. The show briefly depicts Wayne Jenkins' wife in episode 5, and we are told that Wayne takes time off for the impending birth of his child. Can this US city go 72 hours without a murder? He was like King Kong, the officer, who still works for the police department, recalled. That made it very tempting when, sometime around 2011, Jenkins approached Stepp and suggested they go into business together. Jenkins had joined the force at 23 after serving three years in the Marines, where he took up boxing. In the gloom I see the number of the bureau of prisons light up my cell phone screen. 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. 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. It turned out that federal agents had the unit under surveillance for months. Both men have requested new trials. Later on, he claims, they'd throw the drugs out the window or down a sewer grate. Jenkins, who is serving a 25-year sentence in a federal prison in South Carolina, declined to speak with The Sun. This partnership lasted for five years. Former Baltimore Police Department Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, currently inmate number 62928-037 at a federal prison in Kentucky, is on the line. During hia time in the department, Jenkins was involved in numerous arrests . You will not be charged for this call. 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 fist felt like a hammer to Tim OConnors face. 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. Wayne Jenkins eyes darted from screen to screen, taking in the surveillance images. They said he prepared an arsenal of weapons and tools to begin carrying out burglaries. Oh, yeah. Sneed was chased and caught, and his jaw was broken in the process. Just how long ago Jenkins began stealing isnt clear. 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. BALTIMORE, MD A Baltimore police sergeant has admitted to robbing citizens, selling stolen drugs and putting innocent men behind bars, among other offenses. Justin Fenton takes listeners inside the investigation on the Roughly Speaking podcast. Jenkins joined Baltimore's police department in 2003, first becoming a beat cop and patrolling the streets of Baltimore. Hill could not be reached by The Sun for comment. "Hi, ma'am," Jenkins says when I pick up. Human error to blame for train crash - Greek PM, At the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece. According to testimony from Ward and Hendrix, Jenkins played an outsized role in the schemes. "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. Credit: Baltimore Police. Critics argue Barksdale was among police leaders who fostered a warrior culture, to the citys detriment. "I've tarnished the badge," he said through tears. 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