Baltimore almost had a revolution.
On an April morning in 2015, Baltimore Police officers tackled a young black man named Freddie Gray and pulled him screaming into a van where his spine was broken and his throat was crushed. His death kicked off weeks of protest and one day of rioting that ended with cop cars and pharmacies in flames, an illegal curfew, and National Guard troops and police occupying the streets. To many people in the embattled, deeply segregated, postindustrial city, this uprising had been a long time coming.
The new commissioner’s response to 2015’s near revolution was a cop counter-insurgency in the form of re-emboldened plainclothes police squads, known as knockers or jump-out boys, who prowled the city looking for trouble.
In this environment, one plainclothes cop thrived: Sergeant Wayne Jenkins. He ran his squad like a war machine. He did not take a knee. He took territory, guns, and drugs, and police brass loved him for it. He was the kind of guy they’d all grown up watching in war movies and cop shows—a hard-charging hero who was willing to break some rules and cause some chaos to bring in the bad guys.
On March 22, 2016, almost a year after the death of Freddie Gray, when Jenkins rolled up Oreese Stevenson, a drug war veteran, the familiar battle between cops and dealers in Baltimore would be waged in new territory, for higher stakes than either imagined. Ultimately, it would lead to a number of federal indictments against police and an investigation into Baltimore Police Department corruption that is still ongoing.
***
Police robbery gear (Courtesy US Attorney’s Office)
Sergeant Wayne Jenkins was going the wrong way. He steered a silver Malibu full of plainclothes cops against traffic on a residential street, rolling past brick row houses with white trim and pitched roofs resting atop dappled hills spotted with resurgent spring grass. He was looking for a monster.
Jenkins, the only white man in the car, was the driver, and he was the boss, the officer in charge of this brutal, four-man squad. Detective Marcus Taylor, the runner, sat in the front seat beside Jenkins, ready to jump out and give chase. In the back seat, Maurice Ward, the unit’s steady hand, and Evodio Hendrix, the squad member most often burdened with completing the paperwork that would legitimize the baroque kind of bust about to play out on Jonquil Avenue, a one-way street in Northwest Baltimore.
These men in tactical vests, cargo pants, and running shoes, part of the Baltimore Police Department’s Special Enforcement Section (SES), knew as much as anyone about the city’s underground economy of guns and drugs and the desperation that drove people to them.
“Sarge,” as they called Jenkins when they weren’t just calling him Wayne, was always further indoctrinating them into his philosophy of hot-rod policing, wrinkling his forehead with two big creases folded horizontally above a nose slightly too narrow for his wide, doughy face as he squinted and gesticulated, giving orders, never just saying but emphasizing—yelling, whispering, condemning, cajoling.
The words of Wayne Jenkins were actions.
Over his thirteen years on the force, he had studied the habits and customs of the drug trade and developed an arcane set of rules about how the game is played. Acura TLs, Honda Accords, and Honda Odysseys were “dope boy” cars, he explained, and stopping them often paid off. Driving the wrong way on one-ways added the element of surprise. Pulling up fast on a corner and popping open the passenger door and chasing whoever ran did too. He called it a “door pop.” It was a numbers game. The more people they stopped, the more likely they were to get drugs or a gun.
These rules were all variations on a principle Jenkins had learned well: Don’t let probable cause get in the way of a good arrest.
Another rule: Stop and search anyone over eighteen years old with a backpack.
So when Demetrius Brown, a thirty-six-year-old black man, jogged out of one of the row houses with a camo backpack and got into a minivan idling against the curb, Jenkins hit the gas. His prowling, weaponized midsize sedan rigged with a siren and flashing lights sprang forward and then stopped short, inches from the van’s front tire, at an angle, just close enough that there was no way the van could pull out.
Oreese Stevenson, the van’s driver, saw SES detectives fanning out of the car, heavy black vests flashing police in white letters, a burly, bulldog-like white guy and a thin black guy with a flat-top coming up on each side of the van, and right behind them, two more. One superfast, nervous and wormy, and the other bearded, older looking.
They did not draw the weapons hanging from their waists.
They didn’t need to.
Wayne Jenkins, Evodio Hendrix, Marcus Taylor, and Maurice Ward (Courtesy US Attorney’sOffice)
“How much money you have in the box between your feet?” Jenkins barked in his Baltimore white-boy accent—part Philly whine and part Southern drawl with smashed, elongated vowels tempered by the black slang he’d picked up on the streets.
“What money?” Brown asked, moving the backpack that held a Quaker Oats box packed with $20,000 out of view with his feet.
Stevenson, a thirty-six-year-old black man with the bulk of an over-the-hill linebacker—or an ex-con—said little, stoic in a minivan on a suburban street at 3:30 in the afternoon on a cloudy spring day, March 22, 2016.
“You don’t have a warrant,” Brown said, tightening his ankles around the backpack on the floor of the van. “You can’t search me.” There was no legal reason for this stop, but the two black men were not shocked to see the cops come jamming up the wrong way and block them in. The city was at war, had been ever since they could remember. People said police had been lying low since Freddie Gray. You couldn’t tell it from these guys.
Hendrix said something about how Stevenson’s windshield was tinted—that always looked good on paper, even if the tints weren’t dark enough to violate the law.
Ward slid the van’s door open and saw another backpack, zipped shut in the middle seat. He unzipped it, found a half kilo of coke, and said something to his squad about the Steelers, the hated Pittsburgh rival of Baltimore’s beloved football team, the Ravens.
Steelers was code SES used to announce drugs or guns. “Don’t move. Put your hands up,” Jenkins said.
They pulled Stevenson and Brown from the car. Taylor handcuffed them. Jenkins patted them down, took their keys and their cell phones—Stevenson had more than one phone on him—and read them their Miranda rights.
“At any time being questioned by myself or another officer, you have the right to answer questions or refuse to answer questions,” Jenkins said.
He usually rushed through the words, impatient and nearly poking the culprit in the chest with his restless, stubby fingers, annoyed to have to go over all of this again by rote.
Taylor filmed the ritual with his cell phone. Smart cops created and controlled video. Always be aware of how you tell the story, on paper and later in court, and always make sure you’re the one with the footage, and don’t fuck up and forget about a security camera up on a pole or let bystanders take their own video that might contradict you.
Smart cops created and controlled video. Always be aware of how you tell the story, on paper and later in court, and always make sure you’re the one with the footage, and don’t fuck up and forget about a security camera up on a pole or let bystanders take their own video that might contradict you.A woman came out of the house they’d seen Brown exit. She had her phone out. Taylor saw it too and rushed right past her and into the house. She turned to follow Taylor, and Jenkins snatched her phone so she couldn’t record or call for help. Inside the house, Jenkins started asking her questions. She was the mother of Brown’s children. Taylor went upstairs and looked around for drugs, for cash, for guns.
Nothing. They walked back outside.
Jenkins had to work fast. A serious gambler, he often got lucky, but he wasn’t lucky enough to pull up on a cocaine deal in a residential neighborhood by accident. This was more than investigative intuition. Jenkins had studied up on Stevenson, researched his history and the federal drug case that had snagged him a decade earlier. He had shown Ward the news stories about Stevenson and all his high-powered, politically plugged-in associates who had been charged. Now many of them were back at it, and he was watching them.
“This is a big one,” Jenkins told Hendrix.
He followed a procedure: Tell Stevenson he could go free if he’d flip and give them another name—his plug or a rival dealer. Jenkins would work his way up the ladder that way. All that stop-snitching talk was bullshit that applied only to testifying. On the street, most people were more than ready to talk if it meant that they could walk and nothing ever went on paper, especially younger guys who would give up their own mama if it helped them out.
Jenkins put Stevenson back in the van, in the middle seat where the coke had been, and got in beside him.
***
Reared under the equally strict regimes of Stop Fuckin’ Snitching and Zero Tolerance, Stevenson and Jenkins had more in common as enemies than they had with anyone out there in the straight world.
In the early 2000s, after getting out of prison for manslaughter, Stevenson was running a dope shop for a crew that the feds dubbed the Rice Organization in the Park Heights neighborhood in Northwest Baltimore. Howard and Raeshio Rice and their crew funneled $27 million in heroin into the city. Stevenson helped, and when they got snagged in a federal investigation, he got caught on the wiretap which was enough for RICO Act conspiracy charges.
Stevenson pleaded out to a state charge to avoid federal time on the RICO claim, but he stood tall and didn’t rat on nobody. He was home in 2011 and got a truck-driving job, lost it, and eventually ended up here, sitting handcuffed in a van, about to be questioned by a wily jump-out boy with big dreams.
When the Rice Organization case began in 2003, Jenkins was just a skinny, shy-eyed rookie on the force. While Stevenson was away, Jenkins transformed himself into a supercop, a star of statistical policing, scooping up guns, making arrests, getting numbers. He broke the rules sometimes and wrecked a lot of cars along the way, but that was the culture.
In 2009, Jenkins made an arrest that led to the headline Baltimore Police Make Largest-Ever Drug Seizure. He and his partner turned in forty-one kilos of coke and $11,000. Jenkins said the dealer didn’t want the detectives to disturb his mom, so he led them straight to the massive bricks of blow stacked in the unlocked bed of his truck. It was that easy. No one questioned the story.
Top brass loved all that coke laid out for news cameras, and Jenkins got a Bronze Star for the bust.
Other cops marveled at his prowess and joked that Jenkins could nab the lowliest street dealer with a single gel cap of heroin one day and have the kingpin supplying the raw the next day.
Now these two old soldiers, each more than a decade deep into the endless drug war, sat in a minivan together on a leafy street, Stevenson saying nothing at all, and Jenkins running through his tricks.
He would try to level with a target first, talk real low about “keeping it a hundred” with him, floating freedom in front of him in the form of a question: “If you could put your own crew together and rob the biggest drug dealer you know, who would that drug dealer be?”
It wasn’t exactly snitching if you were answering a hypothetical question about a robbery.
He told Stevenson that he was a federal agent, one of his most common lies. The coke deal had come across a wiretap, he claimed. They knew who Stevenson was working with and who he was talking to, and now they had his phones, and since Stevenson wasn’t the target and they were after someone bigger, he should give up his connect.
Jenkins asked Stevenson where he lived. He gave them the address on his driver’s license, on Presstman Street in West Baltimore. They knew that wasn’t true. They said they had been watching his house. He lived on Heathfield Road in East Baltimore.
“Where do you live, sir?” Jenkins asked again.
“4100 Heathfield, sir,” Stevenson said, giving Jenkins the wrong street number.
Both men were strangely formal like that, calling each other sir. It was an act that had to play out even when everyone was lying to each other.
Jenkins mentioned Stevenson’s actual address on Heathfield, where he lived with his wife, Keona Holloway, and their kids. He told Stevenson that they had a team there right now, executing a search warrant. They had taken his keys and would use them to prove he lived there. They might end up arresting his wife. Stevenson didn’t give anybody up, but, Jenkins said, he copped to his stash—coke, cash, and guns. That was enough.
The interrogation ended.
Jenkins hopped out of the van, excited, his thick frame electrified. He called a wagon to come and take Stevenson and Brown to Central Booking.
They had two addresses for Stevenson, Jenkins announced to the squad. It made sense to check the Presstman Street place first. It was a plausible dope pad. Jenkins said he would call a sergeant from the Northeast District and tell him to go sit on the other house, the one on Heathfield Road, and make sure none of Stevenson’s boys got anything out of there before SES arrived.
Jenkins didn’t call the sergeant. He called Donny Stepp, a bail bondsman, cocaine dealer, and longtime Jenkins family friend.
“I need you to come to this address as quick as you can,” Jenkins told Stepp, giving him the Heathfield address. “I got a monster.”
***
Donny Stepp in 2018 (Courtesy Alpine Labs)
Stepp, cue-ball bald, with a giant gold cross hanging from a thick chain around his neck, knew what Jenkins meant by a monster—it was one of Jenkins’s favorite words, an honorific applied to dealers really worth robbing.
They’d had this kind of arrangement for years. Jenkins would tip Stepp off to a stash or deliver stolen drugs to him, and they would split the profits. They would sometimes watch a guy for months. Stepp bought all sorts of specialized equipment through Double D Bail Bonds, his bail bonds company.
Stevenson had not been one of their shared targets, so Stepp wasn’t sure what Jenkins knew, but, generally, he wouldn’t leave the house unless it was a big job. Some $20,000 pissant robbery didn’t do it for Stepp, but if Jenkins had a monster, he was in.
Jenkins gassed Stepp up some more over the phone, told him Stevenson was a “drug lord.”
“There’s a quarter million dollars on top of a safe in the bag, there’s $500,000 inside the safe, and there’s ten kilos in a closet six feet from it, Jenkins said. “I got the whole squad here so they don’t know.”
Jenkins assured Stepp that no one was at the house and directed him to pull his truck up in the alley and break and enter through the back door and clean the place out.
“You can throw the safe on a dolly, throw it in the back of the truck, and drive out,” Jenkins said.
According to GPS, it was a twenty-minute drive from Middle River in the county where Stepp lived.
Stepp sped off, headed into the city, thinking of a score that would bring him, if he did his math right, about $1.75 million. He’d never made that much from a single heist before, but he believed it was possible. Calls like this were why Stepp always answered the phone when Jenkins called.
Jenkins and his crew cut southeast toward Stevenson’s house on Presstman. He would try to hold his squad there and buy Stepp time to get to the other house first.
***
Stepp pulled up to Stevenson’s house and saw a young man—a kid, really—running out the back with a bag.
They made eye contact.
Someone was already in the house, cleaning it out.
He called Jenkins and told him about the kid. Jenkins told him to make sure he was looking at the right house. Go back out front and look at the address and count how many houses it is from the corner and then count again in the alley. Just get inside.
Jenkins could only stall his crew at Stevenson’s other home for so long. The rickety two-floor row house on the West side was pretty much empty except for boxes and boxes of adult diapers inside. The house was about to be turned into an assisted living facility. Jenkins couldn’t keep them there much longer, so Stepp had to hurry.
Stepp hung up. As a bail bondsman, risk assessment was his job, and this wasn’t worth the risk.
But the stash of a supposed “drug lord” still tempted Stepp so he decided to stick around. He parked half a block away and watched Stevenson’s house through binoculars. He took a picture as Jenkins opened the front door—he was often taking photos and videos of Jenkins, for “insurance,” he said.
Jenkins walked inside Stevenson’s home, a nice place with hardwood floors, leather sofas, and African art on the walls. He hurried down the carpeted stairs into the half-finished basement and into a sort of semifinished rec room, with an overstuffed white leather reclining couch and a flat-screen TV. The other side of the basement was unfinished, cold concrete floors and walls, a washer and dryer. Near the steps, there was a cooler full of kilos and cash—two black Glocks in there too.
Jenkins dug down into the cooler and proudly pulled out a kilo of cocaine, wrapped and packaged as the squad came down the stairs.
“When was the last time y’all seen one of these?” he said. He kept searching.
In a small closet under the stairs, Jenkins found a safe, haphazardly hidden under a mountain of shoeboxes. He told his guys he was going to run out to the car to get a ram and a pry bar so they could open the safe up. He walked up the stairs and outside, with two kilos stuffed down into his police vest.
“He come out the door looking like Santa Claus,” Stepp said. “He was protruding from the vest, so I knew—I was thinking it was the ten kilos that he was talking about and the quarter million dollars that was on top of the safe.”
Jenkins stashed the kilos in the trunk of his Malibu. Then he called Stepp and asked where he was.
“Look up the street,” Stepp said.
Jenkins told Stepp to drive to a cross street nearby.
As Stepp eased his truck up the street, Jenkins came flying up behind him. They both pulled over. Jenkins opened the passenger door and threw two kilos into the truck.
“Where’s the other eight?” Stepp said.
Jenkins told Stepp that Taylor had seen the eight kilos, so he had to bring it to evidence control.
Then he told Stepp he was about to go on vacation. “Can you get me $5,000 within this week?” he said. “Yes,” Stepp said. “I ain’t got a problem.”
Jenkins told Stepp to drive the speed limit and, if he got pulled over, call so Jenkins could come and fix it. Though he was nearly fifty and bald with almost invisible eyebrows, Stepp still looked like a kid, especially around his mouth when he got excited, and as he drove away, he was as giddy about the score as a child on Christmas, even if he was a little disappointed in the end that the fat man hadn’t brought as much as he’d promised.
On the slow drive home, Stepp got to thinking. If there was a quarter million on top of the safe, he had not gotten a cut. He was the one risking his life here. Either Jenkins double-crossed him or Stevenson’s people had already taken everything. Or both. Stepp was accustomed to Jenkins’s exaggerations and deceits. It amazed Stepp how many schemes Jenkins could hold in his mind at one time. He could never be straight with anyone. And that was dangerous.
“He knew someone was in the house,” Stepp recalled. “Had I kicked that door, I probably would’ve been killed.”
Still, Stepp wasn’t going to complain too much when he was driving away with two kilos of coke. A kilo went for $30,000 wholesale, and Jenkins would give it to him for $15,000. Since he sold grams for $100–$125, he could net nearly $200,000 off today’s quick trip into Baltimore.
Police photos of seized cocaine, guns, and Stevenson’s safe (Baltimore Police Department file)
***
With Stepp gone, it was time for Jenkins to get a search warrant for the house they had already entered and looted. Jenkins took Hendrix and Taylor with him to get the warrant and made Ward wait there alone to watch Stevenson’s house.
Ward was stranded there without a vehicle. All he had was his service weapon. If Stevenson was really as big-time as Jenkins said, any crew he sent to raid the place and take the safe would be much better armed than Ward, and he would be dead. Depending on how much money was in the safe in the basement, that was a very real possibility.
There were three entrances to Stevenson’s house, and no way he could watch all of them. This was sneak-and-peek purgatory. Ward sat down. He got up. He checked the front door with its cut-glass window in a flower shape shifting the light. He checked the back door. The door in the basement. That one was the worst. Anyone could park in the alley and roll through.
Back in 2015, when Jenkins had asked him to come over to SES, Ward happily accepted. It was an honor when Jenkins wanted to work with you. The position promised an 8:00 a.m.– 4:00 p.m. schedule, no nights or weekends, plenty of overtime, and ample opportunities to steal. Ward had stolen plenty—he and Taylor had lifted a little cash together before they’d worked with Jenkins, and he had taken money with Momodu Gondo, who was now a detective in the Gun Trace Task Force. When cops stole money together, it brought about a new level of trust. When he was in patrol, Ward had believed such trust was the only way to make it into a plainclothes squad.
When Ward joined Jenkins’s unit, he became fast friends with Hendrix, who also skimmed a little money here and there. Hendrix was a workingman with a family. He had five kids to support, and his wife was a full-time student, so he’d fill in the gaps, buy little things here and there, with the proceeds filched from a dope boy’s pocket.
That was where Ward was when he’d joined Jenkins’ new SES unit—a serious cop who took care of his family and was not above making a few extra bucks. He quickly realized Jenkins played for much higher stakes than that. Almost immediately after Ward joined, Jenkins pulled over a car with two trash bags of cash in it. It had seemed like a random stop at first, but then Jenkins told Ward he’d already tracked the car back to its owner’s house in the county. At first, he talked about going into the house and finding an excuse for a warrant and then calling in the county cops. Then he changed his tack.
“You guys willing to go kick in the dude’s door and take the money?” Ward recalled Jenkins saying.
Ward, Hendrix, and Taylor all hesitated. No one knew what to say. Jenkins let it drop, but not long after that, they rolled up on a weed deal at Belvedere Towers, an apartment complex stuck between the tony neighborhoods of Roland Park and Mount Washington, where Jenkins, Taylor, and Ward took $15,000 and about thirty pounds of pot from two men. Jenkins told the dealers he was a federal agent following up on a wiretap, and he was confiscating the drugs but would not make an arrest. When they left, Jenkins started weaving in and out of traffic, taking Ward and Taylor out to a park, where they left their police vests and their phones and radios in the car and got out and walked into the woods and split the money, like in a movie.
Ward asked Jenkins what he was going to do with the weed in the trunk of his car, and Jenkins said he was going to take it home and burn it. Then he changed the subject and demanded that they all go out and party.
Jenkins liked to celebrate success, whether it was a bust or a robbery. Another of the weird rules one learned quickly working with Jenkins was drinking a Twisted Tea, the alcoholic iced tea, together at the end of the night. He called it “teatime,” and he expected everyone to join in.
After stealing the weed and the cash from Belvedere Towers, Jenkins insisted that they stop by a strip joint in the county.
Ward sat at the club sipping a drink while Jenkins threw money around, got a lap dance from a dancer, and then took her out to the car, where, it seemed to Ward like his new boss straight up robbed a stripper.
That night, Ward never retrieved his cut of the money from the trunk, and Jenkins never mentioned it. Ward’s wife was a vice cop, and he wouldn’t be able to explain where that kind of money had come from. And he had a son in his teens, the age when kids start snooping around the house, getting into everything.
If theft was supposed to breed trust, it wasn’t working that way with Jenkins. Balancing a life as a cop and a robber was stressful.He often thought about asking to get out of Jenkins’s unit. If theft was supposed to breed trust, it wasn’t working that way with Jenkins. Balancing a life as a cop and a robber was stressful. Belvedere Towers kept Ward paranoid. He imagined the guys they robbed were undercover or that it was all caught on camera somehow.
Ward would have to accept whatever money they took from Stevenson when Jenkins returned with a warrant. There was no way he could just leave it in the trunk. He would be blackballed.
Maybe he already was. Maybe they’d stopped trusting him after Belvedere Towers where he’d forgotten his part of the cash. Maybe this was all a setup to ambush him. The three entrances to Stevenson’s house promised some kind of retribution for everything he’d ever done wrong. Time was an interminable terror.
Then the thing he feared happened—a car, a couple of voices, someone pounding at the door.
It wasn’t gangsters with guns ablaze but the sister of Stevenson’s wife and her girlfriend. Ward wouldn’t let them in, and the girlfriend was raising hell, acting all aggressive.
He called Jenkins, who told him he was working on the warrant with Hendrix. Taylor was submitting the evidence and would be back as soon as he could. Ward called to get a cop in uniform to help him watch the house. Hours earlier, Jenkins said he’d called a sergeant to watch the location in the first place. You never could trust what Jenkins said.
A patrol officer arrived and helped Ward drive the two women away, and then Ward stood there with a uniform waiting for his squad to return to rob the place.
When Taylor finally arrived, they sent the uniform away.
Then Stevenson’s wife, Keona Holloway, and Stevenson’s mother walked in the door.
The women asked the cops what they were doing there. “Oreese sent us here,” Taylor said.
He showed Holloway a paper that said they had found drugs and money in Stevenson’s van. That would be enough for a warrant on this house. The cops kept both women in the living room like prisoners. The room was dim, lit by lamps that cast long, ominous shadows. Holloway sat in a chair against the wall, her phone casting dead blue glow across her face. Ward and Taylor stood back across from the couch and took turns looking around the house.
They had worked hard on the affidavit. The trip to Stevenson’s Presstman home was omitted from the narrative entirely, and the whole confusing saga of the fleeing kid was condensed into a plausible and brief explanation for entering the house. It claimed Stevenson had told them everything, that he had hung his head and begun breathing heavily and had asked how he could get out of it; that Stevenson had told them to open his phone and find his sources; that when Jenkins started to get out of the van, Stevenson had said, “Wait, you won’t arrest my child’s mother.” Then, the affidavit said, Stevenson told them he had “seven, maybe eight” kilos and guns and a safe full of money in the house.
Jenkins waved the paper in Holloway’s face as he entered. Then he went back out the front door, and Taylor recorded video of him using the key, to show that it fit and enabling them to make a connection between the drugs in the car and the drugs in the house.
Jenkins read Holloway her Miranda rights, and Taylor recorded that too.
“Ma’am, do you understand your rights?” Jenkins asked. “Mmm-hmm,” Holloway said.
“Yes or no, ma’am,” Jenkins snapped. “Yes,” she said.
“Okay, what do you do for a living?” he asked. She told him she was a nursing assistant.
“Do you know, in this house, if there’s any firearms, narcotics, or money?” Jenkins asked.
“No, I don’t,” she said.
She clutched her phone, and Jenkins leaned forward, asking about drugs, guns, and money again.
“No,” she answered.
“Okay, ma’am, what you’re—” Jenkins said and stumbled over his words, trying to talk too fast.
“We’re about to search your residence.”
Taylor turned off his camera. They told Holloway she had to leave.
***
Photo of the inside of Stevenson’s safe and Stevenson’s house (Baltimore Police Departmentfiles.
Jenkins and his squad eased the bar into the creases between the door and body of Stevenson’s safe in the basement and pounded the back of the bar with the ram.
There is a sense of wild satisfaction when a safe pops open. Especially when it is full.
“How much did he say was in there? Was it a hundred?” Jenkins asked Hendrix, looking at the stacks of hundred-dollar bills.
Hendrix said Stevenson told them $100,000.
Jenkins pulled out the stacks and started to count each bundle of $10,000. Well over ten bundles. He left $100,000 in the safe and put the rest of the money in a black duffel bag and shut the safe.
He had an idea: Close the safe, break into it again, and capture the whole thing on video like they were cracking it for the first time. Jenkins took the bag of money, told Taylor to start recording the re-creation on his phone, walked upstairs, and waited to be called just before they got it open.
Ward and Hendrix attacked the safe, grunting for the second time, now for the camera.
“Hey, Sarge?” Taylor yelled. “Come downstairs right quick. They about to get it open.”
“You ain’t got it yet?” Jenkins asked as he walked down the steps.
“They almost got it,” Taylor said.
“Oh, shit,” Ward said when the safe snapped, nearly open now. “Oh, there it is,” Hendrix said.
The safe was open.
“Stop right fucking there,” Jenkins said. “Take a picture of it, Taylor. Or record it. Do not, nobody touch it, you understand me?” A flashlight illuminated the stacks of hundred-dollar bills nestled in the upturned safe.
“Keep your fucking camera on that,” Jenkins said. Taylor stopped recording. It was a convincing act.
In the police report, Hendrix claimed they had found $100,000 and eight kilograms of cocaine—more than $100,000 and two kilos erased.
It was not a bad day. They had spotted Brown with a backpack at 3:30 p.m.—half an hour before the end of their usual 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. shift—and now, it was getting close to dawn and they had clocked up an entire shift worth of overtime.
A heist on time and a half.
***
Taylor was the only one who was single, so they met at his new town house in the suburbs twenty minutes from Baltimore to split up Stevenson’s money.
They sat around a table in Taylor’s basement den like they were playing cards, except everyone walked away a winner. Jenkins hoisted up the black bag onto a table and zipped it open.
Tall stacks of cash.
Hendrix, Taylor, and Ward each got $20,000, and Jenkins kept the rest. He warned them not to spend the money conspicuously. Don’t buy a car or a boat or anything flashy, and whatever you do, don’t deposit it in a bank.
Hendrix was gonna hide his loot in the basement and use it to feed and clothe his five children.
Taylor was all about spending the cash on home improvements, as his sergeant suggested. Jenkins even had a guy who would cook the books for them and issue false receipts.
Ward looked at the money. All that dirty green paper that had been passed around the upper echelons of the streets was his, and he didn’t know what to do with it. He pondered the problem as he drove home. He rented his townhome—he couldn’t build a deck. Just bringing the money into the house would put his wife’s career in jeopardy. He couldn’t keep the money. It was an unnecessary risk. They were all getting plenty of overtime. Every gun recovered brought a “G day” or a “slash day,” a quasi-official police policy that rewarded cops with a paid day off for each gun seizure. Jenkins added to that, by giving extra overtime for guns too.
Ward couldn’t keep the money.
He parked his car in front of his town house, one of a few dozen identical ones. He popped the trunk of his car. The money was still in bundles wrapped in rubber bands inside a duffel bag.
There was no one around.
As Ward later remembered it, he lifted the bag, heavy with the cash, and walked across the parking lot, past a wooden fence hiding a dumpster, toward a wooded area with a small dirt path connecting his complex to another one through the trees. He slipped into the strip of woods. A small stream of water nearby gurgled.
Ward opened the bag and heaved it, chunking stacks into the woods, the bundles of bills hitting the tangled brush, others landing in the dirt. He went inside, knowing, even if the money was gone, this was not over.
___________________
