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. Jenkins signed a plea agreement in 2017 that detailed seven robberies that he participated in along with other members of the unit, as well as his drug dealing partnership with Donald Stepp, the former bail bondsman and cocaine dealer who testified at trial. "It's that simple.". Jenkins must serve three years of supervised release after his custodial sentence. Maurice Ward, a former detective now serving a seven-year prison term for committing crimes with Jenkins, said he and other officers jockeyed to get on his team. Seething frustration was spilling into the streets that afternoon in 2015. But nothing more. In Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Chicago, plainclothes teams have been charged with corruption. But in less than a year, Sergeant Jenkins was put in charge of the new plainclothes squad in West Baltimore. Prosecutors pointed to the fact that Jenkins fabricated evidence, like producing a bogus iPhone video of his officers cracking a drug dealer's safe, when they had in fact already broken into it and stolen $200,000 in cash. 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 also acknowledged stealing the man's $4,000 (2,956) watch, which he gave to Stepp to sell. 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. Jon Bernthal embedded with Baltimore police to play city's dirtiest cop in HBO's "We Own This City" On "Salon Talks" Bernthal reveals he spoke to the real Sgt. But the suits triggered no internal punishment by the police department. His police department personnel file shows no punishment related to the case. Former Baltimore Police Department Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, currently inmate number 62928-037 at a federal prison in Kentucky, is on the line. Former Baltimore Police Sgt. He ordered a detective to drive them to the hospital and joined the front lines. No one had called police to complain, but Jenkins and Fries told the men to go inside. Critics argue Barksdale was among police leaders who fostered a warrior culture, to the citys detriment. "I never took a thing. But the Baltimore states attorneys office continued to use Jenkins. What if a complaint was made? He was scared. The GTTF was made up of eight officers, all but one of whom were indicted. "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. Jenkins got a bronze star for his part in the 2009 recovery of 41 kilograms of cocaine $1 million worth in a mans truck. Jenkins started calling Stepp to the scenes of arrests, encouraging Stepp to try to get inside drug dealer's hideouts to steal whatever cash or narcotics he could find. Until this point, I'd only heard Jenkins on secretly taped FBI recordings, wiretapped phone calls, body camera footage and at the hearing in June 2018 when a federal judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison. I got gangster charges, racketeering charges, things they usually give the mob, who were burying bodies in cement.". Jenkins, who is serving a 25-year sentence in a federal prison in South Carolina, declined to speak with The Sun. In the bedroom, Jenkins says he and a veteran supervisor found a suitcase filled with tens of thousands of dollars in cash. So he gave up and entered a guilty plea. A strange back and forth with a man who used to be Jenkins' cell mate ultimately ended up with me in my closet waiting for that call. 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. Jenkins pleaded guilty in court on January 5, 2018, for numerous counts of four of these charges. Wayne Jenkins from Baltimore was sentenced to 25-years-in-prison. Outside on the sidewalk, he saw a bunch of cops and yelled an expletive at one he knew who happened to be Jenkins supervisor. Read about our approach to external linking. And were not getting Jenkins.. The first 15 minutes are over in a flash. 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. Image Credit: Baltimore Police Department. He reminds me that the US Attorney's office found him more credible than Jenkins. Donald Stepp was released from federal prison back in January of this year. In the gloom I see the number of the bureau of prisons light up my cell phone screen. By the time his criminal streak was in full swing, it entailed high-stakes robberies and breaking and entering even as he was bringing in paychecks totaling over $170,000 in a year, in part because of overtime fraud. The courtroom was also packed with Jenkins' family and friends. He is serving the harshest sentence : 25 years . Then they spilled out of the house and onto the sidewalk, struggling. There is no love lost between these two former friends. They employed tactics that straddled and sometimes clearly crossed the line that divides aggressive policing and trampling on civil rights. "I'm wrong, God knows I'm wrong," the 37-year-old said. Then they could enter the house and take the money, only later calling county officers to say they were executing the warrant. "He always had large sums of money in his pocket. In January 2018, a long list of victims took the stand - many of whom had ties to the drug trade - and told harrowing stories of how they were robbed by the officers during car stops and searches of their homes. Wayne Earl Jenkins tearfully told the court: "I've tarnished the badge", (L-R) Evodio Hendrix, Daniel Hersl, Jemell Rayam, (L-R) Maurice Ward, Marcus Taylor, Momodu Gondo, Prosecutors showed evidence of Jenkins' building up the tools needed to do full-fledged robberies, Elbert Davis' daughters speak after Jenkins' sentencing, Former GTTF member Momodu Gondo testified during the trial, At the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece. "I have no respect for him.". The daughters of 86-year-old Elbert Davis also told the court about the 2010 car crash Jenkins caused while he was pursuing a man named Umar Burley. Some defense attorneys say their clients told them Jenkins had robbed them. "I felt comfortable with it because all the police officers that I met, which were many during the card games, in my opinion, they owned the city," Stepp would later tell the jury at the GTTF trial. When one of the men darted into his home, Jenkins rushed in after him. Jenkins and members of his squad were praised for their work getting guns off the streets in an October 2016 police department newsletter. He resigned and the top spot at the Baltimore Police Department remains vacant. Just as she was completing her podcast series on the story, she got a very unexpected call from prison. Become a subscriber today to support investigative reporting like this. Not long after Stepp flipped on his former friend, Jenkins pled guilty. Jenkins had joined the force at 23 after serving three years in the Marines, where he took up boxing. He's doing, as he likes to say, "rather swell". "an inmate in a federal prison," the robot finishes. The bottles were winged at us. He claims that he was told early on to lie on police reports and warrant applications in order to make their arrests sound like they were done with proper probable cause, meaning a legal reason to stop someone. In our conversation, Jenkins says that that's not true - members of the squad did steal money that day, but from somewhere else in the house. 'You say this, you say that, right?' It took place as Jenkins and other officers were searching an apartment. "He's never been a true friend," Stepp says. 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. . VideoAt the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece, Havana Syndrome unlikely to have hostile cause - US, How 10% of Nigerian registered voters delivered victory, Sake brewers toast big rise in global sales, The Indian-American CEO who wants to be US president, Blackpink lead top stars back on the road in Asia, Exploring the rigging claims in Nigeria's elections, 'Wales is in England' gaffe sparks TikToker's trip. Sneed. I mean, it had velocity, Jenkins said. "You have nightmares about police officers harassing you, beating you up, just locking you up, it's just a nightmare that I have and it basically hasn't gone away yet," he said. I continued working on this story for as long as I did out of some hope that the more the public learned about the corruption in the police department, the better chance there might be of some kind of true, systemic reform. Simon's new project will tell a fictionalised version of the Gun Trace Task Force saga, and began filming on the streets of Baltimore over the summer. Jenkins' lawyer mentioned that he has been assaulted at least once by another inmate who was targeting him for being a former police officer. In the spring of 2015, the city of Baltimore was rocked by civil unrest after the in-custody death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. 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. 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. Despite the lawsuits and later, video evidence from his squads body cameras Jenkins supervisors failed to scrutinize the arrests he was making. He had been stationed in North Carolina and would frequently make trips home to visit his family and his high school sweetheart Kristy, the . They walked far enough so they couldnt be seen from the street. He served 20 months of a five year sentence in connection with the Gun Trace Task Force case, before being granted a compassionate release. Oakley took the rare step of getting onto the witness stand to rebut the officers, as did an independent witness who backed his account. He also apologised to Burley, who was not in the court, to his wife and to his father, and begged the judge for the opportunity to get out in time to be a grandfather. It's going to happen again," he said. It turned out that federal agents had the unit under surveillance for months. Jenkins had told his squad hed 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. Jenkins tells me he traded some sausages with other inmates in the line, bartering his way to the front. A loyal friend. Credit: Baltimore Police. What had he gotten himself into? Jenkins winced as the handcuffs were placed on his wrists, and US Marshals led him out of a back door of the courtroom. It was the perfect crime. In We Own This City, that dynamic is highlighted through the story of Wayne Jenkins - a star police officer played by The Walking Dead alum Jon Bernthal, with a pretty solid Baltimore accent . Meanwhile, his Twitter account is full of pictures of him on set, hamming it up with Bernthal and some of the other actors. Here is everything you need to know about the real Jenkins and where he is now. Not likely, Ward thought. Burley was sentenced to 15 years in prison, which he was serving until federal prosecutors uncovered the task force's corruption and freed him. That the GTTF's leader, a former Marine and amateur MMA fighter named Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, was a hero who'd plunged into a violent crowd during the unrest to rescue injured officers. He also says that he only made roughly $75,000 off of the narcotic sales, as opposed to the figure put on it by Stepp. Oh, yeah. "If you've got to lie about what you've seen or what you heard or what you witnessed, as long as he's dirty, he's got the drugs and he's got the guns and he did the crime - just get him.". the dim light of the Baltimore Police Departments downtown nerve center, Sgt. They said that while they had their backs turned, someone had clocked OConnor and taken off. But I did call them, and the Baltimore Police Department, to see if anyone would respond to this laundry list of allegations. In an interview from prison, he said it wasnt uncommon for the officers to take contraband and submit it to evidence control without arresting someone. Wayne Jenkins' police vehicle when he was arrested in 2017. The matter was referred to the police integrity unit of the Baltimore states attorneys office for investigation. 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. Your digital subscription helps pay for The Baltimore Sun's investigative reporting. "I'm finally trying to get my life back on track," he told me. Investigators recommended Jenkins be demoted and suspended without pay. I'm staring at my cell phone in the dark. And that's what I did.". Right away I learn that Jenkins is an incredibly fast talker. Sneed was chased and caught, and his jaw was broken in the process. Later, Jenkins did more than talk about such a theft. These misconduct allegations came as Jenkins was serving in various plainclothes units well before his appointment in 2016 to head the Gun Trace Task Force, one of the departments most celebrated plainclothes squads. What was Jenkins really going to do with the drugs? But the scope of the corruption of Jenkins and his men remains a singular stain on the force. The apartment complex had a camera in the parking lot. Here's what the public was led to believe about the Gun Trace Task Force, before the FBI arrested almost every member of the squad: That in a city still reeling from the civil unrest that followed the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody, the GTTF was a bright spot in a department under a dark cloud. 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. But then, about an hour later, the phone rings again. Wayne Jenkins, 37, pleaded guilty in January to robbery . Dan Horgan said his mentality was your typical Marine camaraderie, teamwork. Wayne Jenkins, who led . "There was cameras everywhere, so I would never have took a dollar," he tells me. Would they report the incident? Wayne Jenkins, ex-police sergeant, leading the Gun Trace Task Force Sergeant Wayne Jenkins was a decorated leader of the corrupt plain-clothes police unit in Baltimore whose detectives robbed . When the phone rings, I put the call on speaker and hear a robotic, pre-recorded female voice: "You have a prepaid call. It's no wonder people come out meaner than when they come in.". "Right off the bat, we wasn't living lavishly. He told the other officers to leave their cell phones and police vests in the car. Hill could not be reached by The Sun for comment. "Now we're going to burn it down. Stepp testified that the arrangement was so lucrative, he stuck with it for years before getting arrested himself in December 2017. 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