"Now we're going to burn it down. Far from it. Jenkins did not testify at the trial, but in a way, he was the star of the entire proceeding. Two officers said he spoke openly about doing home invasions on high-level drug dealers that he called "monsters", because of the amount of drugs and cash he hoped they'd have stashed in their houses. What was Jenkins really going to do with the drugs? Jenkins tells me he traded some sausages with other inmates in the line, bartering his way to the front. Jenkins was developing a reputation within the department as a cop whose aggressive style brought results. 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. "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. "I thought it was a winner.". I wasnt privy. In fact, Fries went on to promote Jenkins in June 2006 into a high-profile plainclothes unit called the Organized Crime Division. A reporter also reviewed videos of judicial proceedings stemming from the officers arrests. The Parkville American Legion Post named him its Officer of the Year. 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. 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. "Especially because we're short on time, is there anything that you kind of want to just say right off the bat?" 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 September 2021, Jenkins spoke with BBC journalist Jessica Lussenhop from behind bars, and he claimed he never took money from Baltimore citizens. "What chance do we have when you have people like Jenkins and his co-defendants fabricating evidence?". 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. 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. But the scope and breadth of these allegations were staggering. Jenkins said: "I never had [theft complaints] because I never took money off individuals. 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. I mean, it had velocity, Jenkins said. Critics argue Barksdale was among police leaders who fostered a warrior culture, to the citys detriment. Ward and the other cop followed Jenkins into the woods. Please sign up today and help make a difference. I lived modest, we wasn't enriching ourselves," he answers. Oakley took the rare step of getting onto the witness stand to rebut the officers, as did an independent witness who backed his account. Washington (AFP) - A police officer described as perhaps the most corrupt in the history of the Baltimore police department was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday. I have to try to untangle his answers as he moves from subject to subject, sometimes so fast I can't keep up. It is simply not true., U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake denied Oakleys motion to suppress the evidence. I am Agent and Representative as to Mr Jenkins. It wasn't the first time I've heard that word to describe Jenkins. And were not getting Jenkins.. Of all seven men, the last person I thought would ever agree to an interview was Jenkins, the fallen "golden boy" of the Baltimore Police Department. As backup arrived, Jenkins spotted a man named George Sneed across the street. I've been reporting on Jenkins, and the elite Gun Trace Task Force squad he once led, for nearly four years. There is no love lost between these two former friends. Wayne Jenkins grew up in Middle River and is a graduate of Eastern Technical High School. Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton spent a year delving into the operations of Wayne Jenkins and his officers, both as members of the Gun Trace Task Force and before. The line goes dead, and I feel like I've barely gotten anywhere. "I'm so sorry to the citizens of Baltimore.". Donald Stepp was released from federal prison back in January of this year. They said Jenkins instructed them to carry BB guns to plant on suspects to justify their actions if they made a mistake. Here is everything you need to know about the real Jenkins and where he is now. Instead, while their cash and drugs were gone, the dealers were free men. Detective Marcus Taylor on Thursday was sentenced to 18 years in prison on racketeering charges, including robbery and overtime fraud. Used to tell me he won it playing poker.". While researching the We Own This City true story, we confirmed that the real Wayne Jenkins had spent three years in the Marines before joining the Baltimore Police Department in 2003. Near Druid Hill Park, amid the shouting, sirens and buzzing choppers overhead, he commandeered a state prison department van and helped pull injured officers inside. Read about our approach to external linking. "Seen it done, honest to god, 500 times.". So he gave up and entered a guilty plea. It was Jenkins, fresh off his heroics in West Baltimore. But already he was working in a plainclothes flex unit that rewarded dynamic officers and gave them freedom to roam. Sneed hired an attorney, who obtained footage from a city surveillance camera on the corner. However, he was also sued for misconduct before his arrest in 2017. Why cant I be like this guy?. 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. Stepp and Jenkins' history runs deep. Later, Jenkins came out carrying two kilos of cocaine he tossed in Stepp's vehicle. 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. Wayne Jenkins from Baltimore was sentenced to 25-years-in-prison. Wayne Jenkins is the leader of the rogue police unit in Baltimore who was sentenced to 25 years of prison in a corruption scandal prosecutors called "breathtaking". 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. 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. 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. All this happened over nothing, one of the brothers, Charles Lee, recalled recently. The jury found against the officer who broke Sneeds jaw but cleared Jenkins. Jenkins got a bronze star for his part in the 2009 recovery of 41 kilograms of cocaine $1 million worth in a mans truck. When Jenkins was on paternity leave, commanders groused that his squads productivity dropped. It was there that the full extent of the officers' misconduct became public. During the altercation, a passerby named George Sneed was assaulted by officer Robert Cirello who broke his jaw, leading Sneed to sue. Wayne Jenkins fist felt like a hammer to Tim OConnors face. "I never had [theft complaints] because I never took money off individuals. Wayne Jenkins posed as a . "I never took nothing from a looter, so help me god. 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. 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. His wife is also depicted earlier in the series when Wayne, in his early days, attends a barbecue with his colleagues from the Baltimore Police Department and is annoyed by how they have more money than him. Become a subscriber today to support investigative reporting like this. After the indictments, one of Jenkins supervisors told Internal Affairs investigators she had believed he was the best gun cop this department has ever seen.. Although she did not address the court, in a letter to Judge Catherine Blake, Jenkins' wife Kristy asked for leniency. Justin Fenton takes listeners inside the investigation on the Roughly Speaking podcast. But in less than a year, Sergeant Jenkins was put in charge of the new plainclothes squad in West Baltimore. But when I tell him that I've interviewed Wayne Jenkins, his one-time drug partner, Stepp is displeased, to put it mildly. I hoped it could spur a more honest discussion about what it's going to take to reform or even redefine what it means to be a cop in the US. 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. His police department personnel file shows no punishment related to the case. Others were raised by defense attorneys and their clients, who said an overzealous Jenkins skirted legal standards in making arrests. It was his first public appearance since he was arrested along with six other officers last year. He resigned and the top spot at the Baltimore Police Department remains vacant. He said they were confiscating the cash and 20 pounds of marijuana. Then-Police Commissioner Anthony Batts had created a Force Investigation Team to inspire public trust that police leaders were keeping an eye on officers use of force. 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. Five of the former officers, including Jenkins, pleaded guilty. One officer held a nightstick across the drunken mans chest as Jenkins climbed on top of him and started swinging. Five years later, Simons claims were confirmed. Wayne Jenkins was on a mission to find big dealers and steal their drugs and cash. Hed grown up in the working class suburb, where his father worked two jobs, including at Bethlehem Steel. It was billed at the time as the largest cocaine seizure in department history, one of Jenkins many large-scale seizures. He. Jenkins lied to them, saying he was a federal agent. For the past four years, Jessica Lussenhop has been reporting on the rise and fall of a corrupt squad of Baltimore police officers. Wayne Jenkins eyes darted from screen to screen, taking in the surveillance images. "It ain't over. He idolizes this guy, said Shelley Glenn, another prosecutor. Read more: Inside one of America's most corrupt police squads. What had he gotten himself into? This call is from", A human voice breaks in: "Wayne Jenkins.". Blake who in 2017 would wind up presiding over the Gun Trace Task Force corruption case noted that the other officers present backed Jenkins account. In the gloom I see the number of the bureau of prisons light up my cell phone screen. 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. HBO asked Stepp to be a consultant on the project, which he enthusiastically agreed to do. A plea agreement is a document that lists specific criminal acts that the defendant is agreeing to plead guilty to. "I'm finally trying to get my life back on track," he told me. After three weeks of astonishing testimony, the jury found the two remaining officers guilty. 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. He's also at work on a memoir, which he says will reveal the contents of videos and photos he took of Jenkins that were never released publicly. That October evening in 2005, Jenkins had been a Baltimore police officer for just two years. In the annals of the Baltimore Police Department, Wayne Jenkins name was not being associated with wrongdoing. At that time, it was within De Sousas purview as the deputy commissioner in charge of administrative matters to intervene to resolve a discipline case, according to another former deputy commissioner, Jason Johnson. Oh, yeah. "Life in prison with three small children. "This is a saying we state: 'Don't let probable cause stand in the way of a good arrest,'" Jenkins says. They might not have been believed anyhow. The pair also stole valuables, like high-end wrist watches, in break-ins. Wayne Jenkins was living a double life. That creates a culture its not unique to Baltimore, but its pronounced here that those guys should be given a pass, Davis said. Becoming Wayne Jenkins: Jon Bernthal's Deep Dive Into We Own This City 's Corrupt Cop For the HBO miniseries, the actor went on nightly ride-alongs and spoke at length with the imprisoned. But during the subsequent investigation, Frieman told detectives that he never saw a gun in Simons hand and that rather than being in imminent danger he was around a corner and out of sight when Jenkins ran down Simon. He's even got a clothing line coming out around his defunct bail bond business, Double D Bail Bonds. Its a Viking mentality: You go out into the field among the bad guys, and you bring back a bounty, Davis said. The three prosecutors concluded the officer admired Jenkins work even as he may have been trying to protect the sergeant. On the off-ramp, I find four empty dime bags scattered along a section of sidewalk with no foot traffic. Plainclothes officers, as the description suggests, just work in street clothes usually casual rather than uniforms. 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. The apartment complex had a camera in the parking lot. 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. He claims that it was Stepp's idea to start selling drugs together, not the other way around. Stepp says Jenkins started bringing over shipments of drugs on an almost daily basis, putting them in a locked shed behind Stepp's house. And while searching the area, Jenkins claimed, he found a BB gun under a nearby car. But it's the big man upstairs," he says. He's doing, as he likes to say, "rather swell". 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. Fenton joined The Sun as a suburban reporter in 2005. Former Baltimore Police Department Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, currently inmate number 62928-037 at a federal prison in Kentucky, is on the line. Jenkins doled out $5,000 to each of the two officers and instructed them not to make any big purchases. In federal prison, inmates are only allowed to talk on the phone for 15 minutes before the line is automatically cut. Then they could enter the house and take the money, only later calling county officers to say they were executing the warrant. "It shows what a committed, sophisticated, devious person can do," Mr Wise said. He states flatly that Jenkins is lying to me. "Later on that evening, Gondo did give me money, that means hours later, I'm talking hours later, he gave me money.". Some of his men also have acknowledged stealing well before they came together on the Gun Trace Task Force in 2016. De Sousa, who is now serving a federal sentence for tax evasion, said through his attorney that he does not remember the Jenkins case. But nothing more. No single person was in a position to make unilateral discipline decisions.. All seven now sit in federal prisons scattered across the country. He walked into the court wearing a maroon prison uniform. The topic: Can we get Wayne Jenkins? A loyal friend. Human error to blame for train crash - Greek PM, At the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece. The two said Jenkins had found drugs in the ceiling of a mans vehicle. I just knew it was a lie, Ward recalls. 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. Someone once told me that it will take a generation for the direct impact of the Gun Trace Task Force to start to fade, and it will be impossible to measure how the victims' trauma will play out in the lives of their children, families and friends. They can let a suspect go, if they can lead to bigger fish. And Jenkins says, Did you look in the console? And he pulls the rug back and boom. He points to the plea agreement, in which Jenkins agreed that his cut of their drug sales came to roughly $250,000. Later, Jenkins did more than talk about such a theft. As Jenkins is telling me this, he is naming names. Jenkins, along with Detective Ben Frieman, had followed an African American man driving a nice car through Northeast Baltimore. "I'm here because of greed," he said. He says he was told that because these officers were so successful at seizing guns, there was nothing to be done. When I tell this to Stepp, he's angry. It was in 2007 that Jenkins became a part of the GTTF, a new unit of plain-clothed officers focused on targeting suspected criminals believed to have big supplies of guns and drugs, in a bid to reduce the city's high murder rate. Hill told Al-Jazeera it was because then-Deputy Commissioner De Sousa got involved. Jenkins had to affirm under oath in front of a federal judge that what the document said was true. "Obviously I'm in here now, so I see both sides. 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. Many plainclothes units would work out of a satellite office inside a trailer in Northwest Baltimore. We Own This City, an HBO Max miniseries out April 25, about a Baltimore Police Department (BPD) task force unit that went rogue, highlights some of the . "I'm grateful, very grateful.". 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. Jenkins pleaded guilty in court on January 5, 2018, for numerous counts of four of these charges. He was serving his sentence at the Edgefield Federal Correctional Facility in South Carolina until 2020. Wayne Jenkins, Gun Trace Task Force officer, The woods of Powder Mill Park, where Det. The spouse of the third left a message telling me I could take what Jenkins told me and "stuff it". In May 2014, three Baltimore prosecutors convened a meeting. Jenkins joined Baltimore's police department in 2003, first becoming a beat cop and patrolling the streets of Baltimore. 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. These units often operated with little supervision. In my conversation with Jenkins, he spent a lot of time disputing Stepp's account of their partnership. Baltimore detectives convicted in shocking corruption trial Stepp grew up in Middle River, where he was friends with Jenkins's older brother. By Josiah Bates. But the Baltimore states attorneys office continued to use Jenkins. 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Sun as a cop whose aggressive style brought results are successful on top of him started... Also sued for misconduct before his arrest in 2017 barely gotten anywhere 'm because.? `` I see both sides who fostered a warrior culture, to the detriment. 'S the big man upstairs, '' he says reporter in 2005, Jenkins had found drugs the... One afternoon, he was a lie, ward recalls agreeing to plead guilty to ourselves.

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