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. None of the cases led to any police department discipline for Jenkins, his personnel records show.

In fact, Fries went on to promote Jenkins in June 2006 into a high-profile plainclothes unit called the Organized Crime Division. The sergeant took no one else from the flex squad. At O’Connor’s trial, Fries remarked that the others were “worthless” and “didn’t meet the standards” of the organized crime unit.

Jenkins, meanwhile, was “the best officer I had working under my command,” Fries said.

Not all the allegations against Jenkins came from lawsuits. Others were raised by defense attorneys and their clients, who said an overzealous Jenkins skirted legal standards in making arrests.

One such warning came in 2010 from a Baltimore man caught drug dealing. In federal court, Mickey Oakley argued that the officers who arrested him — including Jenkins and future Gun Trace Task Force member Daniel Hersl — had lied about the circumstances leading up to the arrest and had illegally searched his home.

About the series 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. 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. Fenton joined The Sun as a suburban reporter in 2005. He has covered the Baltimore Police Department and crime in Baltimore since 2008. 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. “What Detective Wayne Jenkins wrote in his affidavit for the search warrant was a complete fabrication,” Oakley said. “It is simply not true.”

U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake denied Oakley’s motion to suppress the evidence. 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. She said she found Hersl in particular to be “very credible.”

“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.

No one believed Oakley. So he gave up and entered a guilty plea.

“I’m feeling a lot of remorse for my actions I have led through my life,” Oakley said at his sentencing.

But, he added, “I think that if I am held responsible for my actions, then the same should be with the officers for their wrongdoing.”

In the annals of the Baltimore Police Department, Wayne Jenkins’ name was not being associated with wrongdoing. Far from it.

A star

Jenkins was developing a reputation within the department as a cop whose aggressive style brought results. Current and former officers said he was generally regarded favorably as a “cowboy” type who found big cases through a frenetic pace of citizen stops, which sometimes yielded information leading the way up a chain of drug dealers.

“Wayne was a cop’s cop, local hero kind of guy,” said Cirello, the retired officer.

Jenkins got a bronze star for his part in the 2009 recovery of 41 kilograms of cocaine — $1 million worth — in a man’s truck. It was billed at the time as the largest cocaine seizure in department history, one of Jenkins’ many large-scale seizures.

Jenkins, shown here with then-Commissioner Kevin Davis, was awarded a bronze star in April 2016 for his efforts to save injured officers during the unrest a year earlier. Credit: Baltimore Police Department

In 2010, when Deputy Commissioner Anthony Barksdale wanted a special squad to go after elusive suspects, Jenkins was picked for the group. Later that year, the mayor held a news conference for another of Jenkins’ busts. He and other officers had raided a car wash, recovering more than a kilogram of drugs and $4,000 from a hidden desk compartment — which could be opened only using magnets within a fish tank.

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. Wayne Jenkins and his plainclothes colleagues operated in a world where success and misconduct were not mutually exclusive — and sometimes seemed to go hand in hand.

‘Knockers’

Officers in plainclothes units often operate in the shadows of a police department.

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. Plainclothes officers, as the description suggests, just work in street clothes — usually casual — rather than uniforms. The outfit change is designed to allow them to blend in.

They drive unmarked vehicles. They are not typically tethered to specific posts, or burdened by responding to 911 calls. Instead, they go out looking for illegal activity — people exchanging drugs or displaying bulges under clothing that could be guns. These officers often operate with a great deal of independence. They can let a suspect go, if they can lead to bigger fish.

In Baltimore, they’re often referred to as “knockers,” a reference to their historically aggressive tactics.

Across the country, these plainclothes squads have often been where scandals are born. In Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Chicago, plainclothes teams have been charged with corruption.

It’s a Viking mentality: You go out into the field among the bad guys, and you bring back a bounty Kevin Davis, former police commissioner

But Davis, Baltimore’s 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.

“It’s a Viking mentality: You go out into the field among the bad guys, and you bring back a bounty,” Davis said.

In Baltimore’s 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.

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. Homegrown commanders “took pride in being known as having knockers. Any attempts to make the force become less of a warrior and more of a guardian was looked at terribly,” he said.

Many plainclothes units would work out of a satellite office inside a trailer in Northwest Baltimore. It was nicknamed “The Barn” — an apparent homage to the offices of a corrupt police unit on the television series “The Shield.” The show, modeled after a 1990s Los Angeles Police Department scandal, featured a strike team that roughed up suspects, lied about their investigations and took a cut of their drug busts.

Barksdale, the former deputy commissioner who crafted department strategies from 2007 to 2012, leaned heavily on plainclothes units. Critics argue Barksdale was among police leaders who fostered a “warrior” culture, to the city’s detriment. He counters that the units helped bring down crime, and says he made it a point to scrutinize their conduct.

Plainclothes officers must constantly be checked by leadership, Barksdale said, with commanders inquiring about irregularities in their work and excessive overtime pay. “You’ve got to be willing to dig into their s--- and confront them,” Barksdale said.

In November 2012, Wayne Jenkins was promoted to the rank of sergeant — giving him new authority and freedom. Sergeants are the eyes and ears of the command, the front-line supervisors trusted to keep close tabs on their officers. They direct their work, approve overtime pay and provide reports to higher-ranking supervisors.

His promotion required him to return to uniformed patrol for a time, and he was assigned to the Northeastern District.

But in less than a year, Sergeant Jenkins was put in charge of the new plainclothes squad in West Baltimore.

In crosshairs

In May 2014, three Baltimore prosecutors convened a meeting. The topic: Can we get Wayne Jenkins?

As in the past, a video had surfaced that conflicted with the written account of a drug arrest by Jenkins and another officer. The two said Jenkins had found drugs in the ceiling of a man’s vehicle. But the video — captured by closed-circuit TV — showed the officers searching the car extensively and never appearing to make a discovery.

A line prosecutor, Molly Webb, had been notified by a defense attorney of the footage — footage that the police department hadn’t submitted to her. It was a red flag.

“When I saw the video,” Webb later told The Sun, “it didn’t corroborate what was in the statement of probable cause at all.”

The matter was referred to the police integrity unit of the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office for investigation. Prosecutors went as far as having witnesses appear before a grand jury, according to records obtained by The Sun.

But they needed more information. 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.

Now, the lawyers were sitting with Paul Pineau, chief of staff to then Baltimore State’s Attorney Gregg Bernstein, according to an account of the meeting obtained by The Sun.

“Have we raised the possibility of a wire?” Pineau asked.

The officer they talked to didn’t seem like a candidate for that, the lawyers said.

“He goes on and on gushing about Sergeant Jenkins,” Assistant State’s Attorney Jenifer Layman said.

“Oh, yeah. He idolizes this guy,” said Shelley Glenn, another prosecutor.

She described how the unnamed officer talked about Jenkins: “He’s probably the best drug detective in the city. There’s been plenty of times where the suspect has said, ‘The drugs are in the car,’ and I go and I can’t find them. And Jenkins says, ‘Did you look in the console?’ And he pulls the rug back and boom. Plenty of times he's gone behind me and found them.”

The three prosecutors concluded the officer admired Jenkins’ work even as he may have been trying to protect the sergeant.

“He’s given us all he’s going to give us,” Glenn said. “And we’re not getting Jenkins.”

Within days, prosecutors issued a letter to police saying they were declining to charge Jenkins with a crime.

Jenkins, who had been suspended during the investigation, went back to work, making no fewer than three dozen arrests over the rest of the year, most of them gun cases.

But the police department’s Internal Affairs office still had an open file on the case.

And in the midst of that investigation, another arose. 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.

The unit began looking into a case involving Jenkins, in which he had run down a young man with his unmarked Dodge Avenger early in 2014.

Jenkins, along with Detective Ben Frieman, had followed an African American man driving a nice car through Northeast Baltimore. When the man stopped his car and started to run away, Jenkins drove after him and into someone’s front yard, where he struck him.

The man, Demetric Simon, 31, said he did have drugs on him and knew someone was following. He was scared. He thought Jenkins and Frieman might have been impersonating police.

“At that time, I didn’t think they were officers,” Simon said.

Jenkins later alleged in official paperwork that Simon had pointed a weapon at Frieman — and that he ran Simon down to stop the threat.

And while searching the area, Jenkins claimed, he found a BB gun under a nearby car.

But during the subsequent investigation, Frieman told detectives that he never saw a gun in Simon’s hand and that — rather than being in imminent danger — he was around a corner and out of sight when Jenkins ran down Simon.

In a recent interview, Simon told The Sun, “I never had no BB gun. I never aimed nothing at him … . He ran me over because I was getting away.”

His account — and Jenkins’ claim that he’d found the gun — is evocative of testimony by two of Jenkins’ officers in the 2018 Gun Trace Task Force trial. They said Jenkins instructed them to carry BB guns to plant on suspects to justify their actions if they made a mistake.

Five years later, Simon’s claims were confirmed. An officer who sometimes worked with Jenkins, Keith Gladstone, pleaded guilty last month to going to the scene of Simon’s arrest to plant the BB gun — a response, Gladstone admitted, to a phone call from a frantic Jenkins asking for the help.

Back then, Jenkins escaped scrutiny again. Though Simon says he reported the incident to the police department’s Internal Affairs office, he ultimately stopped cooperating on advice from his defense lawyer.

He had a criminal case to fight, and his freedom was more important.

Internal affairs, a deal

But Internal Affairs was still working on the case that the State’s Attorney’s Office had decided it could not pursue: the suspicion that Jenkins might have planted drugs in a car to justify an arrest.

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.

According to the Internal Affairs file, the only times Jenkins had been disciplined by the department was for twice failing to appear in court.

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.

But none of that happened.

More on the Gun Trace Task Force View all articles on the Gun Trace Task Force on The Baltimore Sun. Learn more.

The leaked case file doesn’t say why. Hill told Al-Jazeera it was because then-Deputy Commissioner De Sousa got involved.

De Sousa “handled the discipline, and they had worked a deal,” Hill said, according to a transcript of the interview. “I don’t know the nuances, what was said, what wasn’t. I wasn’t privy. Once it left my shop… they had reduced the punishment.”

Hill said in the interview that De Sousa reduced the punishment to verbal counseling — in effect, no punishment at all. Hill could not be reached by The Sun for comment.

At that time, it was within De Sousa’s 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.

Maurice Ward, the former detective now in prison, also remembers De Sousa “coming to the rescue” and reducing the punishment, though he believes Jenkins was still suspended.

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 he added, “All disciplinary decisions were put through the proper consideration by command staff and BPD legal department. No single person was in a position to make unilateral discipline decisions.”

Such questions over integrity have in the past prompted prosecutors to stop calling an officer as a witness, forcing the department’s hand to take him off the streets. But the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office continued to use Jenkins.

Cash in woods

With the investigations behind him, Jenkins seemed emboldened.

Later in 2015, he took over a new squad of plainclothes officers within the latest rebranding, the Special Enforcement Section. 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. No one took anything, but Jenkins later mused about the possibilities.

Jenkins explained that he’d already tracked the man to Essex, so he thought they could stake out the home, go through the man’s trash and find something to parlay into a search warrant. Then they could enter the house and take the money, only later calling county officers to say they were executing the warrant.

After outlining this, Ward said, Jenkins reconsidered. He suggested another option.

“You guys willing to go kick in the dude’s door and take the money?” Jenkins said.

The officers with him hesitated, Ward said. Nobody said yes or no, instead expressing ambivalence.

Later, Jenkins did more than talk about such a theft.

Jenkins had told his squad he’d 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.

You guys willing to go kick in the dude’s door and take the money? Wayne Jenkins, Gun Trace Task Force officer

In an incident to which Jenkins would later plead guilty, the officers handcuffed two men. Jenkins lied to them, saying he was a federal agent. He said they were confiscating the cash and 20 pounds of marijuana. Jenkins released the men and told them he’d follow up with them later.

Ward wasn’t sure what to make of it. In an interview from prison, he said it wasn’t uncommon for the officers to take contraband and submit it to evidence control without arresting someone. Having taken money before with previous squads, he expected the officers might skim some and submit the rest as cover.

But that day, Jenkins drove toward the edge of town, bobbing in and out of traffic and running red lights, until he pulled over near a wooded area off Liberty Heights Avenue. He told the other officers to leave their cell phones and police vests in the car.

Ward and the other cop followed Jenkins into the woods. They walked far enough so they couldn’t be seen from the street.

The woods of Powder Mill Park, where Det. Maurice Ward says he, Sgt. Wayne Jenkins and former Det. Marcus Taylor split up $20,000 in cash they stole in 2015. Credit: Kevin Richardson / Baltimore Sun

It was still daylight, and Jenkins opened a black and red duffel bag. Inside was a stack of bills. He started counting the money, $20,000 in all. Jenkins doled out $5,000 to each of the two officers and instructed them not to make any big purchases. He kept $10,000 for himself, saying he planned to install a front-end crash bar so his department-issued vehicle wouldn’t get damaged in his frequent collisions.

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 just knew it was a lie,” Ward recalls.

He started to worry. The apartment complex had a camera in the parking lot. What if a complaint was made? What if one of the men who was robbed turned out to be a federal informant? What was Jenkins really going to do with the drugs? What had he gotten himself into?

Had the officers done things by the book, the cash and drugs would be registered with evidence control. The dealers would be sitting in a jail cell.

Instead, while their cash and drugs were gone, the dealers were free men. Would they report the incident? Not likely, Ward thought.

Sure enough, no report was ever made. It was the perfect crime.

It would by no means be the last.

Contact Justin Fenton at jfenton@baltsun.com

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