Baltimore detectives convicted in corruption trial with shocking details

BALTIMORE – Two Baltimore detectives were convicted Monday of fraud, robbery and racketeering in a trial that laid bare shocking crimes committed by an elite police unit and surfaced new allegations of widespread corruption in the city's police department.

Daniel Hersl, 47, and Marcus Taylor, 30, join six colleagues from the Gun Trace Task Force who already had pleaded guilty. But the guilty verdicts offer small comfort for a city where homicides keep rising and guns violence rocks neighborhoods even as the police department struggles to overcome accounts of bias and lawbreaking.

The head of internal affairs has been transferred and a deputy commissioner has retired after both were implicated in misconduct during trial testimony. Thousands of convictions in cases handled by the task force are now being questioned by defense attorneys.

"This trial took you inside the Baltimore Police Department," Assistant U.S. Attorney Leo Wise told jurors last week. "It showed you things more horrible in some cases than you ever could have imagined."

Over two weeks in federal court, four former members of the once-lauded unit who earlier pleaded guilty took the stand in their new prison uniforms and admitted crimes denied for years during internal investigations and lawsuits. The cops stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, drugs, guns, and luxury accessories while pretending to be seizing the goods for legitimate enforcement objectives. They concocted reasons to chase and search suspects or enter houses without warrants to sift through goods they wanted. They covered up their involvement in car crashes when rogue pursuits went bad.

The officers who pleaded guilty accused several others of stealing from citizens, including a detective killed with his service revolver late last year a day before he was set to testify before a grand jury in the police corruption case. The death last November of Detective Sean Suiter, who lived in York County, Pa., remains unsolved. The FBI has said there is no reason to believe it was connected to the corruption probe.

One officer gave his girlfriend a stolen Chanel purse, according to his testimony. Other officers provided security for a high-level drug deal at a strip club.

They doubled their salaries by lying to claim extravagant overtime when they were actually at bars or, in another instance, out of the country on vacation.

Hersl and Taylor were part of a years-long scheme first exposed in 2015 by a Drug Enforcement Administration wiretap on a suspected dealer's phone. The DEA alerted the FBI.

Momodu Gondo, the officer picked up on the wiretap, pleaded guilty last year, along with task force sergeant Wayne Jenkins, its former sergeant Thomas Allers, and detectives Evodio Hendrix, and Jemell Rayam, and Maurice Ward.

Gondo, Hendrix, Rayam and Ward all took the stand, as did a young officer who was transferred soon after joining the unit, having declined to commit crimes.

Only one task force member, detective John Clewell, was not charged and remains on the force.

Most of the behavior charged in the case took place even as the department was already under federal investigation by the Justice Department for routinely violating residents' constitutional rights, particularly in dealings with African Americans.

That 14-month Justice investigation began in the wake of protests and rioting after the death of Freddie Gray from an injury in police custody and ended in August 2016 with a scathing report and a consent decree under which police have started wearing body cameras, begun new training, and submitted to community and judicial oversight.

The squad's victims, many self-described drug dealers, took to the stand to recall how they were handcuffed and interrogated about their wealth by officers more interested in finding money than pressing charges.

"They getting ready to rob," one victim, Ronald Hamilton, recalled telling his wife as the officers asked how much cash he had at home. "They trying to rob me."

Officers admitted taking about $20,000 from Hamilton and his wife in 2016. Wayne Jenkins, the sergeant of the task force, was caught on a wiretap telling members of his unit to pretend Jenkins was a federal prosecutor to intimidate Hamilton, who denied he was dealing drugs at the time.

Wiretaps let jurors hear firsthand how the cops freely discussed divvying stolen cash and coordinated lies about their exaggerated work hours.

One conversation from August 2016, recorded by an FBI device hidden in an officer's car, captured task force members reacting to a chase through the rain that ended in a bad car crash.

"Dude's unconscious, he's ain't saying" anything, Taylor is heard saying.

Hersl suggests they change their timesheets to hide their involvement. "Hey, I was in the car just driving home," he says, laughing.

The officers did not offer aid to the injured citizens.

Rayam cried on the stand remembering that day.

"It could have been any of us," he said of the injured passengers. "It could've been you."

Mayor Catherine Pugh and Acting Police Commissioner Darryl De Sousa have tried to minimize the impact of the revelations, suggesting a few rogue cops are the heart of the corruption and of the civil rights violations that put the city under a Justice Department consent decree.

"That particular unit has been already broken up," Pugh said at a news conference last Wednesday when asked about the trial. The problems, she said, are limited to "a few members of our police department."

She brought on De Sousa last month, after firing Police Commissioner Kevin Davis for failing to stem violent crime.

But some of the startling allegations aired in court involved conduct that was never charged, as the officers on trial tried to shift the focus on their ex-colleagues' misdeeds. Testimony portrayed the 3,100-member department as riddled with opportunists who cut corners and broke rules.

Rayam testified that Gondo told him that before joining the force, the fellow detective "laid someone out," meaning he killed a person.

Gondo claimed on the stand that Rayam "murdered" someone in a 2009 shooting and that Deputy Commissioner Dean Palmere helped him cover it up.

Rayam also denied the allegation. His attorney, Dennis Boyle, said Rayam "has admitted everything he has done, including significant criminal violations."

Palmere retired after the testimony while denying ever coaching officers to lie.

Court documents suggested the problems seeped beyond the police department.

All six plea agreements state that someone in the state's attorney's office leaked information about the federal investigation to the task force members, and several officers testified fellow cops gave them a heads-up as well.

Several officers called by prosecutors to testify about employment records and other issues admitted reluctantly under cross-examination that department leaders regularly hand out unearned overtime as a reward for taking guns or drugs off the streets.

"If it's fraud, the fraud is rampant among the aggressive police squads of Baltimore City and right up the chain of command it was acknowledged with a wink and a nod," Hersl's attorney William Purpera said in closing arguments last Wednesday.

Wise, the prosecutor, responded by acknowledging that "this rampant, rampant fraud" may well be "even worse than what was charged." But, he added, "that doesn't make it right."

Prosecutors did not challenge the testimony implicating other officers, saying the FBI investigation into the department is ongoing.

Pugh, the mayor, said in her weekly briefing last Wednesday that she had been too busy to follow the trial closely or read Baltimore Sun coverage detailing possible lawbreaking by police officers still on the force and members of the city prosecutor's office.

De Sousa has responded to the trial with a trifecta of new units focused on corruption, constitutional abuses and overtime abuse. Officers will be subjected to random polygraph tests and approached by undercover cops who will test their integrity by encouraging them to commit crimes.

"We are working diligently to investigate and hold those who tarnished the badge and violated public trust accountable for their actions," police spokesman T.J. Smith said in a statement last week.

But the new acting chief has also echoed Pugh, repeatedly blaming "a few bad apples" for giving the force a bad name.

"When you have an idea that there's just a few bad apples, unless you inspect the entire barrel you have no ability to make that determination," said state Delegate Mary Washington, a Democrat who represents parts of the city and confronted De Sousa about the gun task force cases during a recent meeting in Annapolis. "You cannot operate for years without there being a system that supports that, and that has to be rooted out."