I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad

The explosive true story of America's most corrupt police unit, the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), which terrorized the city of Baltimore for half a decade.

When Baltimore police sergeant Wayne Jenkins said he had a monster, he meant he had found a big-time drug dealer—one that he wanted to rob. This is the story of Jenkins and the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a super group of dirty detectives who exploited some of America’s greatest problems: guns, drugs, toxic masculinity, and hypersegregation. (St. Martin’s Press, with Brandon Soderberg)

Old-Time Folks

On the day his new album, Old-Time Folks, was released, Lee Bains III was at a muffler shop in Atlanta hoping that the mechanic there might be the one who could finally figure out what was wrong with his ailing van. But Bains already knew the real trouble and it came like a gallows humor punchline.

“422,000 miles is a long and gracious life,” he texted me. “But this would be a hell of a time for it to go.” (Oxford American)

Writing a Book About My Whiteness Forced Me to Confront My Own Lies

All reporters have to learn to deal with sources who lie. Lies were at the heart of my last book, I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad (co-written with Brandon Soderberg). The story centered around a group of plainclothes cops who lied on warrants, in arrests, and on the stand, robbing from drug dealers and selling the drugs. They lied to each other—about how much money they found, what happened to the drugs, and on overtime slips that allowed them to fleece the citizenry as well…

My co-author and I spent countless hours digging through documents, debating each other, and testing theories to try to figure out who was lying and what was the truth behind all the lies. We couldn’t figure everything out, but in the end, by cross-referencing countless different stories, many of them told under oath, we were able to put together a pretty good picture of the case.

But when I started working on my new book, I found myself facing off with a source whose tricks beguiled me and whose fables I could not distinguish from the truth. That liar, my subject and source, was myself. (Lithub)

THE CRIME OF MY LIFE

I was in a canoe on the Edisto River in South Carolina with my dad when I stumbled onto a crime story that would, over the course of many years, shake me to my core. It was a reverse murder mystery. I was presented with the killer, but not a victim.

It was raining and we were sheltering beneath a bridge when I asked him why his father, who was white, had the name Hernando.

My dad told me that Hernando’s father, Dr. I.M. Woods had to hide out in Texas for a time after the Civil War and a Spanish speaking woman saved his life and he promised to name a child after her husband.

“Why did he have to hide out after the war?” I asked.

“He killed a man,” Dad said, looking away. (Crime Reads)

My name is a Confederate monument, so I cross it out when I write it

As an inheritor of racist history, changing my name was not an option for me. Seeking some way to acknowledge the past embedded in my name without continuing to honor it, I recalled the philosophical strategy of putting a word “under erasure.” It was a technique popularized by the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, who argued that certain words contain their own negation, which he signified by crossing them out. Such words, he suggested, are unavoidable tools for speaking and thinking, but they are also inadequate. As such, they had to be eliminated while also remaining legible. (Washington Post)

The Condition of Gray Itself

The first time I saw the artist Jasper Johns’s 1962 charcoal and graphite pencil drawing Edisto, I was overwhelmed by a synesthetic memory of South Carolina, crabbing in the Store Creek, down from my great-grandmother’s decrepit house behind the Old Post Office, which her husband had run, along with the general store that gave the creek its name. Spartina grass shimmered a rigid gold in the wind-sun. Stray oyster shells stuck up through the ultra-sheened gray mud inscribed with the tiny tracks of fiddler crabs cutting angry pirouettes from hole to hole, big white claws waving. We were carrying strings we’d tie around rotten chicken necks to lure crabs toward our waiting nets. (Oxford American)

In Baltimore, Police Officers Are the Bad Guys With Guns: Plainclothes police officers are waging war on citizens.

We spent the last two years reporting a book on the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force, a once-celebrated police squad whose members were ultimately indicted on federal racketeering charges in 2017. We learned that a war on guns in Baltimore looks a lot like the war on drugs: It is a city waging war on its own citizens. And it doesn’t work. (New York Times, with Brandon Soderberg)

CREDIBLE MESSENGERS: Baltimore’s Violence Interrupters Confront Shootings, the Coronavirus, and Corrupt Cops

“HEY, OFFICER FRIENDLY with the cherry cheeks,” a Black woman said to an unmasked, white Baltimore police sergeant as he approached her outside a public housing project in April. In response, the sergeant intentionally coughed on the woman and kept walking. (Intercept, with Brandon Soderberg)

Trump’s mob at the Capitol was following an old white supremacist playbook

Seeing the Confederate battle flag inside the occupied Capitol building should have been a reminder that white supremacy has taken this form before. This is not “un-American” or alien to who we are — it is the fruit of everything we have ignored since Reconstruction was overthrown in South Carolina in 1876. (Washington Post)

The Supreme Court's originalism is white supremacy

Even as the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court was sworn in Thursday, the slate of rulings from the newly empowered, right-wing and originalist court majority this term has made it clearer than ever that the court is motivated by a reliance on the white supremacist patriarchy of the Constitution’s framers. (NBC)

Beards, binaries and the dangerous hypocrisy of Republican gender essentialism

A couple weeks ago, I shaved my face for the first time in several years. It was only the second time I’d used a blade to scrape away my beard in the last two decades. And, because I had not done it in so long, the act felt exceedingly strange and … unnatural. I’d had that realization as a young hippy, as well. But now, as many on the political right turn the gender binary and our physical expressions of it into a political platform, face-shaving hits differently. (NBC)

ESQUERITA AND THE VOOLA

Esquerita and Little Richard stayed in touch as friends, collaborators, and rivals until 1986, when Little Richard was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Esquerita died, a victim of AIDS who was buried in an unmarked grave on Hart Island, New York. Their careers had mirrored each other over rock & roll’s first thirty years, playing out the dualities of the sacred and the profane, music and money, and God and the Voola, what Esquerita called his mojo, the spirit that motivated his music. (Oxford American)

What Happened to Tyree Woodson? A Reexamination of a Death in Police Custody

“Eight years before my son was ever shot, police threatened him. Southwest District cops threatened him,” Woodson’s mother said. “My sons had told me that what they said to them was ‘We know y’all sell drugs. We can’t catch y’all but we gon’ get you off the street one way or another.'” (Baltimore Beat)

Tale of two Baltimores: why Freddie Gray protester may face tougher sentence than officer on trial

In a quiet Baltimore courtroom, three stories above the court where officer William Porter was facing a jury for his alleged role in the death of Freddie Gray, another young African American man was on trial this week for entirely different offenses related to Gray’s death.

Gregory Butler was facing charges for allegedly carrying a knife, trying to steal a cigarettes from a looted 7-Eleven store and escaping from police custody during the riot that followed Freddie Gray’s funeral. He also now faces federal charges over allegedly poking holes in a hose that was being used to put out a fire at CVS. (Guardian)

Charles Manson Was Not a Product of the Counterculture

With some historical distance, and after Mr. Manson’s death on Sunday at age 83, we can see that the simplistic counterculture dichotomy of “freaks” versus “squares” caused people to lump Mr. Manson in with the freaks (for he certainly wasn’t a square). Apart from the long hair and the casual sex, however, Mr. Manson, who spent much of his life in prison with a swastika carved into his head, had more in common ideologically with far-right groups like the John Birch Society than he did with the anarchic leftism of, say, the Yippies (New York Times)

Baltimore officers cited for mistreatment of women in DoJ report

Secondary findings in Department of Justice report include hostility towards assault victims, public strip-searches and claims of sex in exchange for immunity (Guardian)

Charlottesville and the shattering of America

I am writing this later the same night as the attack and I won't to pretend to know what it means for our country. The racism is not new. The argument Steppe and Knight were having in their hometown could have happened any time in the last 50 years. But the way the battle over white supremacy was being waged around them was new, and Charlottesville was not ready for it. None of us are. (syndicated)

'I hear the screams every night': Freddie Gray's death haunts man who shot video

Kevin Moore sits on a low stone wall at the edge of the handicapped ramp where Freddie Gray was apprehended, thrown to the ground and hogtied with a knee on his neck in Baltimore in April 2015. There is a small shrine to Gray, who died of injuries he sustained in police custody, that has been there for more than a year now. Liquor bottles, candles, a small mural of Gray’s name with wings, and some black balloons, which the wind was blowing away. (Guardian)

Only white people can save themselves from racism and white supremacism

I am white. I was born and raised in South Carolina, a state to which my grandmother’s family came in the 1600s. They owned slaves. Part of her family were Pinckneys, which means that someone in my family may have owned someone in the family of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in the terrorist attack on Charleston’s Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church Wednesday night. (Washington Post)

My wife and I don't want kids. Ever. So I decided to get a vasectomy.

When I first told my doctor I wanted a vasectomy, I was 42 years old. She said I should wait, just to make sure. My doctor is younger than I am, and she had just had her first child. My wife and I do not have any children, and the doctor wanted to make sure that we didn’t prematurely preclude ourselves from the joys of parenthood.

Two years later, I told the doctor that my wife, Nicole, has been on birth control pills for most of her adult life. We are in our 40s, and we were certain we did not want to have children. It was time for me to bear the burden of preventing pregnancy, and since I could not do it chemically, it would have to be surgical. And permanent. (Vox)

The Battles of Lexington: City Paper goes deep inside and under Baltimore's oldest market

Lexington Market is too vast to comprehend. When you look at one thing, you are missing thousands of others. There are 97 vendors in the market: 18, such as the produce stalls and butcher shops, sell staple food; 12, including Konstant's Nut House and Total Health, serve specialty food; 53, including half of Faidley's and all the fried chicken places and the restaurant Memsahib, sell prepared food; and 14 specialize in nonfood items such as shea butter, vapes, cigarettes, or services such as shoe repair. But to the customer, the designations between them are often murky: Fresh fish is a staple; crab cakes are prepared; and if anything on Earth is a specialty item it is muskrat. (Baltimore City Paper)

Trump has been prosecuting protesters since the day he took office

In the District of Columbia there were “470 individuals arrested and processed for curfew violations, riot-related burglary and other riot-related events” between May 30 and July 17, 2020. More than 100 of these charges were “felony riot.” This is no surprise. More than 200 people were arrested during a “riot” in Washington on the day of Trump’s inauguration, Jan. 20, 2017 — often called the J20 case, because of the date. (Washington Post)

Exile On Charles Street

Restaurateur Qayum Karzai's life is split between Baltimore and his native Afghanistan. He is a small man with a sandy complexion, a bald crown, and a small graying mustache. He is quiet, dignified, and slow moving. He speaks like Marlon Brando, in a quiet, husky tone—until he wants to make some emphatic point. Somehow, he carries himself like he could be both a restaurateur and the leader of a country. (Baltimore City Paper)

Baltimore tried reforming the police. They fought every change

As calls to defund police departments gain prominence nationwide, police officers and their unions are already beginning to push back. And politicians are taking note. In place of more radical calls to defund or abolish police departments, they offer milder improvements. the response of Baltimore police to the 2015 uprising that followed the in-custody death of Freddie Gray is especially instructive. Baltimore is a useful case study precisely because it promised aggressive fixes that were thwarted by a more aggressive police force. (Washington Post, with Brandon Soderberg)

Sinkhole: What is happening beneath the ground downtown?

The sinkhole has been there so long it is hard to remember a time before the road caved in and the army of robots took over Centre Street, or what was left of it, in what came to seem like a titanic battle with the very earth itself as engineers in white hats stood and stared into the abyss, backlit, an American flag flapping behind them, nightly checking their progress against decay. (Baltimore City Paper)