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Speaker 2: Previously on Bad Cops for weeks, Detective David McDougall has
Speaker 2: been tailing Baltimore drug dealer Aaron Anderson. He suspects that
Speaker 2: Anderson's been supplying a lot of the city's deadly heroine.
Speaker 3: I started doing lengthy surveillances and following him, trying to
Speaker 3: piece together his organization.
Speaker 2: When McDougall finally moves in and arrests him, he finds
Speaker 2: a mysterious GPS tracker stuck to the bottom of Anderson's car.
Speaker 3: I'm thinking somebody else was on my guy and didn't
Speaker 3: tell me.
Speaker 2: McDougall discovers the device belongs to a Baltimore City cop,
Speaker 2: but it's not police issue. The cop bought it with
Speaker 2: his own credit card.
Speaker 3: There's no way a police officer is going to pay
Speaker 3: for his own tracker that really wasn't adding up.
Speaker 2: After his arrest, Anderson tells McDougall that just a few
Speaker 2: nights before, while he was out, two mass men kicked
Speaker 2: down his door and ransacked his apartment. McDougall starts to
Speaker 2: think the unthinkable.
Speaker 3: At the time the home invasion happened, Anderson's far away
Speaker 3: from his apartment. That is a great time to try
Speaker 3: to steal his drugs and money because he's not there.
Speaker 3: What if the police officer put the tracker on Anderson's
Speaker 3: car the track his movements to conduct the home invasion.
Speaker 2: A cop robbing a drug dealer, and not just any cop,
Speaker 2: an officer from an elite, plain closed unit, one of
Speaker 2: the crown jewels of the Baltimore Police Department. I'm Jessica
Speaker 2: and hop and this is bad Cops from the BBC
Speaker 2: World Service. The True Story of Baltimore's Gun Trace Task Force,
Speaker 2: Part two, The Wire Tap. It's two thousand and seven.
Speaker 2: The homicide rate in Baltimore is rising out of control.
Speaker 2: As part of a new strategy to fight back, the
Speaker 2: city's leaders create a specialized plane clothes unit, the Gun
Speaker 2: Trace Task Force.
Speaker 3: Their mission is to target gun dealers, trace guns used
Speaker 3: in crimes, and stem the flow of illegal weapons.
Speaker 2: This is supposed to be a smarter era of policing
Speaker 2: in Baltimore. Plain clothes officers like the Gun Trace Task
Speaker 2: Force are investigators. They don't answer nine one one calls.
Speaker 2: They're not confined to any one part of the city.
Speaker 2: They drive around in unmarked cars, wearing jeans and sneakers,
Speaker 2: trying to blend in with the neighborhood on the streets.
Speaker 2: Locals call these officers jump out boys because they pull
Speaker 2: up fast on street corners, throw open the doors and
Speaker 2: jump out on whoever runs. That's how they rack up
Speaker 2: the arrests. The top brass love it. It means press
Speaker 2: conferences with guns laid out on the table. The commissioner
Speaker 2: gets to stand behind the podium looking good. The Gun
Speaker 2: Traced Task Force are the Baltimore Police Department's Golden Boys,
Speaker 2: but Detective David McDougall suspects that one of these Golden
Speaker 2: Boys is involved in the robbery at the home of
Speaker 2: drug dealer Aaron Anderson. It's a hunt he has to
Speaker 2: keep a secret because if he's right, the implications are
Speaker 2: massive and anyway, McDougall's a drug detective, it's not his
Speaker 2: job to investigate other cops, so he takes his information
Speaker 2: to the people who do the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Speaker 2: The case is assigned to FBI Special Agent Erica Jensen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, he and I already talked about that, We're
Speaker 4: going to do it this way, just to assure the
Speaker 4: audio quality.
Speaker 2: Erica Jensen's works some tough cases, running down Colombian and
Speaker 2: Mexican drug cartels, trekking street gangs in Baltimore, and at
Speaker 2: this point she's part of the FBI's public Corruption Squad
Speaker 2: going after dirty cops and politicians. Investigating police is tricky work.
Speaker 2: In the past, cases were blown when word of the
Speaker 2: investigation leaked out.
Speaker 4: Police officers no tactics. They know how law enforcement works,
Speaker 4: so we knew that we had to be super careful,
Speaker 4: and it did drive a lot of the techniques we
Speaker 4: used and techniques we didn't use.
Speaker 2: Agent Jensen knows she has to keep the case tightly
Speaker 2: under wraps. No one outside of her team can be
Speaker 2: allowed to know a thing, not even the Baltimore Police Commissioner.
Speaker 2: Detective MacDougall briefs Agent Jensen about the mystery tracker he
Speaker 2: found under the car of drug dealer Aaron Anderson and
Speaker 2: how it was bought by a cop from this elite unit,
Speaker 2: the Gun Trace Task Force. While McDougall continues his drug investigation,
Speaker 2: agent Jensen starts looking into the task force officer. She's
Speaker 2: looking for any kind of link between him and Anderson.
Speaker 4: It was very plausible to me that there was a
Speaker 4: police officer that might have been involved in protecting a
Speaker 4: drug crew. That was where we were in the very
Speaker 4: early stages.
Speaker 2: But she finds no connection the task force officer. The
Speaker 2: owner of the tracker is clean. Still, Erica's gut tells
Speaker 2: her something's not quite right here, so she starts looking
Speaker 2: into the other officers in the same unit, and she
Speaker 2: pulls their files. One of them belongs to another detective
Speaker 2: in the squad, Jammel Rayam, and as she's flipping through
Speaker 2: the pages of his file, she spot something.
Speaker 4: I shook my head like I must be looking at
Speaker 4: like did I mix the files up? Like this can't
Speaker 4: possibly be right?
Speaker 2: Who was right? On a list of Ram's previous addresses,
Speaker 2: she sees that he used to live on the same
Speaker 2: street as Aaron Anderson, the dealer whose apartment was broken
Speaker 2: into by the two masked men.
Speaker 4: Not only was it the same street address, it was
Speaker 4: the same apartment building. The apartments were one away from
Speaker 4: each other.
Speaker 2: Right away, she knows this can't be a coincidence.
Speaker 4: He would have known how to get in the building.
Speaker 4: He would have known what that door was like, he
Speaker 4: would have known what the apartment looked like, just all
Speaker 4: of it.
Speaker 2: Now she's thinking, maybe Detective Ram was one of the
Speaker 2: masked men at Anderson's apartment, and if Rayam is involved
Speaker 2: in the home invasion, there's a good chance that his
Speaker 2: task force partner is too, because they're not just work buddies,
Speaker 2: they're really close. And this guy's name is Momodu Gondo.
Speaker 4: That was the moment when I think I was like, yep,
Speaker 4: they were in there. These guys did this. They did
Speaker 4: this home invasion. They had to have.
Speaker 2: Rumors have been floating around Gondo for years. He's from
Speaker 2: a pretty rough part of northeast Baltimore, and he stayed
Speaker 2: close with a few of his old friends from the neighborhood.
Speaker 2: Some of them have grown up to be players in
Speaker 2: the city's drug game, and when FBI Special agent Erica
Speaker 2: Jensen starts looking through Gondo's phone records, she sees he's
Speaker 2: in regular contact with a pretty major heroin dealer, Antonio Shropshire.
Speaker 2: He's a rival of Aaron Anderson. Drug cop David McDougall
Speaker 2: has been investigating both of these guys and he's been
Speaker 2: running a wiretap on Shropshire and other members of his crew.
Speaker 5: WHOA, what's that?
Speaker 6: I ain't lying? You've got an attention stow yesterday?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Oh yeah yeah love Yo listen yo stolen yo I
Speaker 6: mean oh no, no, I ain't know.
Speaker 5: It's like that yo.
Speaker 6: No yo, no, Yo, I ain't know it's like that yo.
Speaker 2: Detective McDougall is pretty troubled by what he's hearing on
Speaker 2: some of these calls.
Speaker 3: This is a cop talking to a drug dealer. He
Speaker 3: knows he's a cop, he knows he's a drug dealer.
Speaker 2: It all sounds awfully suspicious, but it doesn't really prove anything.
Speaker 2: McDougall needs way more to build his case. He needs
Speaker 2: to know where Shropshire is going and who else he's
Speaker 2: meeting with.
Speaker 3: So we made a decision to put a tracker on
Speaker 3: his car. It comes to the tracker again.
Speaker 2: So with the tap on Shropshire's phone and now with
Speaker 2: a tracker on his car, McDougall waits, he's in what
Speaker 2: he calls the war room. It's where all the wired
Speaker 2: tap calls come in. It's kind of hectic. He's got
Speaker 2: a bunch of phone lines to monitor. Scribbled across a
Speaker 2: whiteboard are all the tracker numbers they're using. And so
Speaker 2: he's sitting there and then he's got a text message.
Speaker 3: It's a GPS removal alert.
Speaker 2: It's an alert that tells him one of his trackers
Speaker 2: is being tampered with. McDougall's not immediately alarmed. He uses
Speaker 2: a lot of trackers. He thinks it's probably an old
Speaker 2: one from a previous job, but seconds later.
Speaker 3: Door tamper alert.
Speaker 2: The same tracker is now being opened and examined.
Speaker 3: All right, now, I'm a little concerned, and I'm like,
Speaker 3: what tracker number is at I pauls for a second,
Speaker 3: and I scream at my partner he found the tracker.
Speaker 2: Antonio Shropshire has discovered McDougall's tracker under his car.
Speaker 3: We're complete nuclear meltdown mode at that point, looking at
Speaker 3: each other like, at this point, there's something we can do.
Speaker 2: What McDougall doesn't realize is that Shropshare has taken his
Speaker 2: car in for service. The mechanics in the garage, put
Speaker 2: the vehicle up on a lift and looking underneath, Shropshire
Speaker 2: spots the device Back in the war room. As McDougall
Speaker 2: is scrambling to figure out what to do next, a
Speaker 2: number flashes across his screen. It's Shropshire's cell phone. He's
Speaker 2: making a call. McDougall listens in.
Speaker 6: Hello, hold up Poppy, Hello, what's up?
Speaker 5: Brother?
Speaker 2: Shropshire is calling his friend, Mamma Duke Gondo, the Task
Speaker 2: Force detective, and he's got an important question for him.
Speaker 6: I'm listening to the set the car to the shop, okay,
Speaker 6: and uh, the thing was the thing was?
Speaker 7: What it?
Speaker 6: Okay?
Speaker 2: Shropshire is telling Gondo. He's taken the car to the
Speaker 2: shop and the car was lit. He means the tracker
Speaker 2: he's just found underneath it. He wants Detective Gondo's advice,
Speaker 2: and his friend is happy to oblige.
Speaker 6: Yeah, basically, when that something like that happened, you know,
Speaker 6: is basically you know what I mean. On the other side,
Speaker 6: you know, it's just a loss you feeling, but definitely
Speaker 6: somebody's been tracking you.
Speaker 2: Somebody's been tracking you. Detective Gondo tells his friend someone
Speaker 2: from the other side, the police, his own side. Then
Speaker 2: Gondo seems to check himself. It's like he realizes he
Speaker 2: said too much.
Speaker 6: You know, I know no topics. So whatever you do,
Speaker 6: you do.
Speaker 2: I don't even know who I'm talking to. It's an
Speaker 2: odd moment. Is Gondo thinking someone might be listening in?
Speaker 6: Just be mindful? Yeah, just be mindful of that, brother,
Speaker 6: that's whatever you do. But yeah, you definitely go get
Speaker 6: rid over it.
Speaker 2: The call ends with Gondo telling Shropshire to ditch the tracker.
Speaker 2: In the war room, Detective McDougall is sitting there, floored
Speaker 2: by what he's just heard.
Speaker 3: Like the purposes phone call is, hey, help me out.
Speaker 3: I'm your Joe Delar friend, and this is what's going on.
Speaker 6: I need help you.
Speaker 2: McDougall shares the call with Special Agent Erica Jensen, his
Speaker 2: contact at the FBI. It's exactly what she's been waiting for.
Speaker 4: It was what we would call like the dirty call,
Speaker 4: the criminal call.
Speaker 2: She's hoping she can now convince a judge to greenlight
Speaker 2: a wire tap on Detective Gondo's cell phone.
Speaker 4: You don't just write a wiretap on someone's phone because
Speaker 4: they're a criminal. You have to show that they're using
Speaker 4: their phone and furtherance of the crimes. And this was
Speaker 4: the call that got us that.
Speaker 5: Yeahs get the spicy chicken, no tomato, no no notice,
Speaker 5: She's I mean no none as I mean.
Speaker 2: Now, Agent Jensen's catching all kinds of snippets of conversation
Speaker 2: from Gondo's phone. Most of it has nothing to do
Speaker 2: with illegal activity, but it opens a window onto just
Speaker 2: how close some of these guys really are. At one point,
Speaker 2: Gondo even confides in a member OF's crew about his
Speaker 2: ailing mother.
Speaker 5: They're talking about my mother.
Speaker 6: Gonna have to have hospite kid.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know what I mean. Shit won't be too
Speaker 6: much longer. Man ass his course, right, Just know, whenever
Speaker 6: you're ready talking right in, bro right right right right?
Speaker 5: I got you, yo, all right.
Speaker 2: The call ends with the dealer telling the cop that
Speaker 2: he's there for him. It's a very human moment. But
Speaker 2: even more suspicious than his calls with drug dealers are
Speaker 2: Gondo's calls with his own Task Force partner, Detective Jamel
Speaker 2: ram I can't do it no.
Speaker 6: More, Yo. It's either we get it or we don't,
Speaker 6: or we come close to something. But hey, and you
Speaker 6: get away with.
Speaker 5: A lot you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: He's the cop agent Jensen suspects rob the home of
Speaker 2: Shropshire's rival dealer Aaron Anderson.
Speaker 4: I mean they have.
Speaker 2: Yeo she I feel sure that Ram and Gondo are
Speaker 2: up to something.
Speaker 6: Stupid, stupid, yo, stupid.
Speaker 2: But what exactly? It's impossible to know.
Speaker 4: You hear conversations over a wiretap, but that's not everything.
Speaker 4: So you only see a little piece of it, sometimes
Speaker 4: just a tiny portion of it.
Speaker 6: Not talking. That's what you got paid cash.
Speaker 4: You don't see everything, and you're not hearing the whole
Speaker 4: story about the dynamics. You're not hearing about conversations occurring
Speaker 4: when they're not talking on the phone.
Speaker 6: God.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So what are her options? Well, one of them
Speaker 2: is surveillance, but that's super risky. Gondo's a detective. He
Speaker 2: knows how to spot a tail.
Speaker 6: Me yo, he got a method to his men.
Speaker 4: This was the kind of case where we did not
Speaker 4: do a lot of surveillance for very good reasons. We
Speaker 4: did a very small amount of surveillance, but we were
Speaker 4: very careful to not get burned. To get seen and
Speaker 4: identified by a subject. It does happen, because certainly they
Speaker 4: would understand what that meant, and either they would change
Speaker 4: their behavior their tactics, or they would stop the behavior altogether.
Speaker 5: Imagine bringing up.
Speaker 2: There is something else. She could try, bugging Gondo's vehicle
Speaker 2: with a listening device, but that's going to take some
Speaker 2: real planning. Gondo spends a lot of time in that car.
Speaker 2: Agent Jensen decides bugging the car is her best option,
Speaker 2: and the opportunity comes when Gondo leads town on a trip.
Speaker 2: Jensen and her team have just a few hours to
Speaker 2: execute the plan. An FBI unit races over to Gondo's house.
Speaker 2: They disabled the car alarm, but they need more time.
Speaker 2: It's a complex operation which could easily attract unwanted attention,
Speaker 2: so they swapped the car out with an identical decoy vehicle,
Speaker 2: and then they spirit Gondo's car off to another location.
Speaker 2: They're the FBI technician and start installing the bug and
Speaker 2: it's no easy job. Gondo's trained in surveillance. He knows
Speaker 2: how to spot a listening device, so the agents have
Speaker 2: to hide it someplace in his car where he'll never
Speaker 2: find it. While the agents are doing that, under the
Speaker 2: front seat of Gondo's car, they find something else. It's
Speaker 2: a bag of heroin. It's a crazy discovery, but Erica
Speaker 2: knows she's onto something much bigger, so she tells her
Speaker 2: people put the heroin back. Finally they're done. Gondo's car
Speaker 2: is now bugged and back just where he left it,
Speaker 2: parked outside his house. The agents slip away unnoticed. The
Speaker 2: next night, Gondo's out driving in his car. Riding up
Speaker 2: next to him is his wingman, Jamel Raham. Agent Jensen
Speaker 2: is in the FBI war room listening in. Almost all
Speaker 2: of the gun trays task Force are out on this night.
Speaker 2: They're riding in separate vehicles, and the bug hidden in
Speaker 2: Gondo's car picks up the radio calls between them, they
Speaker 2: spot a driver at a gas station. Something about him
Speaker 2: attracts their attention, and the driver notices them too. He
Speaker 2: hits the gas and takes off. The cops scrambled to follow.
Speaker 6: The light.
Speaker 2: No light, no lights, no lights, that's ram he's saying.
Speaker 2: Not to turn on the red and blue flashing lights.
Speaker 2: All Agent Jensen can hear are the sounds of engines
Speaker 2: revving and broken bits of voices. Hello, you can't really
Speaker 2: make it out on this recording, but there's just been
Speaker 2: a huge wreck. The car they were chasing, blows through
Speaker 2: a red light and plows into another car. Both vehicles
Speaker 2: are totaled and the drivers are badly injured.
Speaker 7: Oh like, go around, lay up the help out.
Speaker 2: But Gondo, Raam and the rest of the unit don't stop.
Speaker 2: They speed through the streets of Baltimore, driving a few
Speaker 2: more blocks before finally they pull over. Behind them is Carnage,
Speaker 2: but they seem more concerned that they might have been
Speaker 2: caught on camera.
Speaker 7: Wayne, y, they got here, but we didn't.
Speaker 2: They reassure each other that no one saw them. Another
Speaker 2: of the unit's detectives, Daniel Hersel, is even joking about it.
Speaker 7: Hey, I was in the car, just driving out.
Speaker 2: I was just driving home.
Speaker 7: What but with Wayne all we heard like bullet Bardy,
Speaker 7: what we could go with what he beardy?
Speaker 2: We could go and stop the slips at ten thirty.
Speaker 2: That's Daniel Hersel again. He's now suggesting they should falsify
Speaker 2: their time cards, make it look like they weren't even
Speaker 2: working when the accident happened.
Speaker 7: That Wayne, you know, Carky, that what happened, you know, right.
Speaker 2: That's the thing with Wayne, These car chases, this is
Speaker 2: what happens they're talking about. Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, the leader
Speaker 2: of the Gun Trace Task Force. He's known for making
Speaker 2: big arrests and going beyond the call of duty. Just
Speaker 2: the year before, he even got a bronze star for bravery.
Speaker 7: Hey, I wonder what was that car? But I'll be cured.
Speaker 2: Go back to HQ. That last voice is Jenkins. He's
Speaker 2: ordering his men back to headquarters. In the FBI War Room,
Speaker 2: Special Agent Erica Jensen has been listening to all of
Speaker 2: this drama unfold.
Speaker 4: At the time, we were you know what just happened.
Speaker 2: She's just heard a group of police officers who swore
Speaker 2: an oath to serve and protect fleeing the scene of
Speaker 2: a serious accident that they caused, all on the orders
Speaker 2: of their boss, Jenkins.
Speaker 4: To me, it was just the dereliction of duty. The
Speaker 4: way they hid, you know, and stood by but yet
Speaker 4: didn't assist. It just bothered me a lot, you know,
Speaker 4: I was angry about it.
Speaker 2: The case is now blown wide open. Agent Jensen realizes
Speaker 2: it's way bigger than she imagined. She thought the task
Speaker 2: force might have a couple of dirty cops. Now she
Speaker 2: believes most of the unit is rotten.
Speaker 4: We are no longer looking at all, right, We might
Speaker 4: have a couple guys that are basically associates of a
Speaker 4: drug organization or a drug conspiracy. We have a whole
Speaker 4: other set of conduct that's going on. So that was
Speaker 4: really the beginning of the shift, I think in the investigation.
Speaker 2: And right at the heart of it all is the
Speaker 2: Baltimore Police Department's golden boy from the Gun Trace Task Force,
Speaker 2: Sergeant Wayne Jenkins. So what else have Jenkins and his
Speaker 2: crew been trying to cover up? And just how dirty
Speaker 2: are these cops? That's next time you've been listening to
Speaker 2: Cops from the BBC World Service with me Jessica Lussenhock.
Speaker 2: The program was mixed by Neil Churchill additional mixing by
Speaker 2: James Beard. The producer is Ben Crichton and the editor
Speaker 2: is Richard Varden.
Speaker 1: If you're enjoying bad Cops, make sure to check out
Speaker 1: season one of The Burden. You'll meet the greatest detective
Speaker 1: in Brooklyn history. He takes on the worst criminals until
Speaker 1: one day the criminals take him on