the dim light of the Baltimore Police Department’s downtown nerve center, Sgt. Wayne Jenkins’ eyes darted from screen to screen, taking in the surveillance images. Seething frustration was spilling into the streets that afternoon in 2015. On the city’s west side, officers were being pelted with bricks; some were hurt.
Jenkins rushed off to join them. 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. He ordered a detective to drive them to the hospital and joined the front lines.
Hours later, in a quiet waterfront neighborhood 15 miles east of downtown, a drug-dealing bail bondsman was roused from his sleep. His supplier needed to offload two garbage bags of pharmaceutical drugs — stolen from people who had themselves looted pharmacies.
It was Jenkins, fresh off his heroics in West Baltimore. He popped the trunk and carried the drugs into the garage. The bondsman would take care of selling them, then split the profits with the police sergeant.
Wayne Jenkins was living a double life.
Then 34, he was already an admired leader of aggressive street squads and would go on to head the elite Gun Trace Task Force, one of the Baltimore Police Department’s go-to assets in the fight against violent crime.
He was also the ringleader of a criminal enterprise of police officers who were robbing people and dealing drugs.
The indictment of Jenkins and six of his gun task force officers on federal racketeering charges rocked Baltimore when the announcement came in March 2017. A squad of veteran police officers stood accused of committing numerous robberies, as well as extortion and overtime fraud. Many Baltimore residents had long distrusted the police, and more so after the death of Freddie Gray. But the scope and breadth of these allegations were staggering.
Inside the police department, the Gun Trace Task Force was known for its success in capturing suspected drug dealers, their stashes and their illegal firearms.
And Jenkins, who’d been identified as a rising talent early in his career, was celebrated among department brass and rank and file officers as a leader with an uncanny knack for delivering the goods.
One officer recalled Jenkins taunting colleagues waiting in line to submit evidence at police headquarters, bragging about how many guns he was getting off the street. “He was like King Kong,” the officer, who still works for the police department, recalled. “I thought, ‘How is he doing it? Why can’t I be like this guy?’”
When Jenkins was on paternity leave, commanders groused that his squad’s productivity dropped. They urged his supervisors to “get him back to work and focused,” according to an internal police department investigation conducted after the indictments.
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.
“If Wayne Jenkins asked you to come work for him, you felt honored,” Ward said.
Jenkins earned praise outside the department, too. Then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake held a news conference to tout one of Jenkins’ big drug busts. The Parkville American Legion Post named him its Officer of the Year.
If his arrest was stunning, the depiction of his civil rights violations, robberies and more wasn’t news to everyone — certainly not to people who had been in Jenkins’ sights, fairly or not, over the years.
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. For the most part, these defendants decided it wasn’t in their interest to tell government authorities that. They might not have been believed anyhow.
Still, a yearlong investigation by The Baltimore Sun found warning signs that Wayne Jenkins wasn’t such a good cop. His supervisors and others either failed to see the red flags — or chose to ignore them.
- From 2006 to 2009, Jenkins was the subject of at least four lawsuits alleging misconduct. The plaintiffs prevailed in three of them, either through a jury verdict or the city’s decision to settle the case. But the suits triggered no internal punishment by the police department.
- Despite the lawsuits — and later, video evidence from his squad’s body cameras — Jenkins’ supervisors failed to scrutinize the arrests he was making. He was getting suspects off the street, but his cases often weren’t holding up in court.
- A surveillance video suggesting Jenkins may have planted drugs in a suspect’s car did make its way to the police integrity unit of the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office in 2014. Prosecutors investigated and even presented evidence to a grand jury but concluded they didn’t have enough evidence to obtain an indictment.
- The same video led to a rare police department disciplinary case against Jenkins, who was internally charged with misconduct in 2015, according to a copy of the case file reviewed by The Sun. Investigators recommended Jenkins be demoted and suspended without pay. The department’s Internal Affairs chief at the time says then-Deputy Commissioner Darryl De Sousa intervened to prevent the punishment. De Sousa, who later served as commissioner and is currently serving time on federal tax charges, says he doesn’t remember the case.
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 department’s most celebrated plainclothes squads.
While Jenkins’ most serious crimes — the drug dealing, the robberies — appear to have been well hidden, it is not surprising they flourished within Baltimore’s permissive plainclothes culture.
These units often operated with little supervision. They had the autonomy to catch and release suspects and develop informants. They employed tactics that straddled — and sometimes clearly crossed — the line that divides aggressive policing and trampling on civil rights.
Amid controversies over the years, police brass would publicly disband the units, then reconstitute them with the same personnel under a different name. The department valued their work too much to end this style of police work.
Plainclothes officers “made the most arrests, they seized the most drugs and money, assets,” former Police Commissioner Kevin Davis told The Sun.
“That creates a culture — it’s not unique to Baltimore, but it’s pronounced here — that those guys should be given a pass,” Davis said.
Just how long ago Jenkins began stealing isn’t clear. His earliest admitted theft was in 2011. 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.
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. Some of his men also have acknowledged stealing well before they came together on the Gun Trace Task Force in 2016. One member of the task force during Jenkins’ leadership, Detective John Clewell, was not charged with any crimes.
Turmoil has continued at the Baltimore Police Department, an agency that saw four commissioners in little more than a year — among them De Sousa, now in prison for tax fraud. Just in recent weeks, two officers have been criminally charged with misconduct.
But the scope of the corruption of Jenkins and his men remains a singular stain on the force.
To learn more about their behavior, The Sun obtained several thousand pages of court records, dozens of body camera videos and hundreds of police department emails and restricted internal files. A reporter also reviewed videos of judicial proceedings stemming from the officers’ arrests.
More than 50 people — including current and former police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys and victims — were interviewed.
Jenkins, who is serving a 25-year sentence in a federal prison in South Carolina, declined to speak with The Sun.
Some defense attorneys say their clients told them Jenkins had robbed them. But most people who worked with him — police and prosecutors — asserted to The Sun they had no idea he and his officers were involved in criminal behavior.
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.”
Reflecting on the revelations of his misconduct, Lt. Marjorie German concluded that department leaders gave Jenkins too much leeway — because they were enamored of his results.
Jenkins gave “150 percent on the street. … And that is what they want,” German said, according to an Internal Affairs report.
“Command created the monster,” she said, “and allowed it to go unchecked.”
Wayne Jenkins’ fist felt like a hammer to Tim O’Connor’s face.
O’Connor had spent much of the day tossing back beers at the Brewer’s Hill Pub & Grill in Southeast Baltimore when the manager asked him to leave. Outside on the sidewalk, he saw a bunch of cops and yelled an expletive at one he knew — who happened to be Jenkins’ supervisor.
Suddenly O’Connor was on the ground.
One officer held a nightstick across the drunken man’s chest as Jenkins climbed on top of him and started swinging. His punches came fast — Jenkins was a trained boxer — and O’Connor soon felt the warmth of blood spilling down his cheek. His eye socket was fractured.
That October evening in 2005, Jenkins had been a Baltimore police officer for just two years. But already he was working in a plainclothes “flex unit” that rewarded dynamic officers and gave them freedom to roam.
Jenkins had joined the force at 23 after serving three years in the Marines, where he took up boxing. His drill sergeant described him as having the “utmost flawless character I’ve seen” in two decades of service. Jenkins was stationed in North Carolina but often made the long trip back home to Middle River. He’d grown up in the working class suburb, where his father worked two jobs, including at Bethlehem Steel. Relatives say he liked to visit his high school sweetheart, Kristy, who would become his wife.
In the police academy, his peers saw a leader. Gillian Whitfield recalled Jenkins as “sweet” and always willing to lend a hand. Dan Horgan said his “mentality was your typical Marine — camaraderie, teamwork. ‘Let’s get this done, but we’re going to do it 100 percent.’ Nothing was 10 percent.”
Jenkins entered a department steeped in “zero tolerance” — a war on crime fueled by arrests for even minor infractions. But that’s likely not what triggered the unprovoked beating of O’Connor. Jenkins idolized his sergeant, Michael Fries, the target of the expletive.
O’Connor, a house painter who missed weeks of work because of his injuries, sued Jenkins and put forward witnesses who backed his account: After O’Connor yelled at Fries, officers had pulled him to the ground, and Jenkins walloped him.
At trial, Jenkins and his boss denied any knowledge of who attacked O’Connor. They said that while they had their backs turned, someone had clocked O’Connor and taken off. They claimed they didn’t see who did it.
They also didn’t give chase. They didn’t call for an ambulance or even write a report. O’Connor had been “sloppy drunk,” they testified, and his friends said they would get him home.
Jenkins, indignant, aggressively shot back at questions from O’Connor’s attorney.
“You tried catching me all day, and you can’t, because I’m telling the truth,” Jenkins told the lawyer. “You didn’t catch me in nothing.”
Despite Jenkins’ bravado, the jury found in favor of O’Connor and awarded $75,000. Taxpayers footed the bill.
His police department personnel file shows no punishment related to the case.
A few months after the O’Connor incident, Jenkins was involved in another run-in where his sworn account was contradicted.
