The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (3 page)

All over Baltimore, whenever I asked people about cooperating with the law, I got the same response. “Why would you talk to the police? All you are doing is putting a label on yourself,” said Barry Nelson, a 42-year-old part-time handyman who was waiting for a meal from a charity the day I met him. “They ain't going to be back to protect you after you done told on some cats.” Randolph Jones, a retiree who was sweeping leaves from the sidewalk in front of his house in Northwest Baltimore, said he would call the police if something happened on
his
block. But the drug dealing and shootings on the next block over? He won't pick up the phone. Jones said the police try, but as soon as they arrest one
corner boy, another moves in. “You got to live here, and the police can't do much,” he said. “You don't want to end up like that family in East Baltimore, the Dawsons.”

The Dawsons come up in almost every conversation about reluctant witnesses in Baltimore. Angela Dawson had tried to shoo drug dealers away from the sidewalk outside the East Baltimore row house where she lived with her husband, Carnell, and their five children. She had frequently called the police. The dealers decided to strike back. In October 2002, the Dawsons' house was firebombed. Angela Dawson and all her children were killed in the blaze; Carnell Dawson died in the hospital a week later. A drug dealer named Darrell Brooks was convicted of the crime and is serving life without parole. But the sentence has done little to reassure potential witnesses. More than four years later, the Dawsons still haunt the city.

 

J
OHN
D
OWERY
knew Boo-Boo and Moo-Moo had shot someone; he prayed that it wasn't Jay, that it was the other guy. But the next day's newspaper confirmed his fear about his friend. Jay's death shook Dowery. But it also made him more determined to get his life back on track. And in the tragedy of his friend's murder, Dowery sensed opportunity. If he told the police what he knew about the killing, perhaps he could get a lighter sentence on his gun charge. On the other hand, talking was dangerous: If Boo-Boo and Moo-Moo found out, they might come after him or his family. So Dowery struggled with the decision. A day went by, then a week. Then he picked up the phone and called his public defender.

On October 27, Dowery, along with his lawyer and the prosecutor handling his gun charge, met with Michael Baier, the Baltimore homicide detective assigned to Jay's murder. Dowery told Baier what he knew about the killing. He also said that Boo-Boo and Moo-Moo, who were still hanging around Bartlett, had
ditched their distinctive white Lexus. His statement provided a crucial break in the case.

Another break came the following week, when Joseph Bassett, Jay's accomplice, was busted selling heroin to undercover cops. With his long rap sheet, Bassett knew he was in trouble. He tried offering up an illegal .32 he kept at home, in the hope that the officers would let him go in exchange for getting the gun off the street. When that failed, he said he might know something about a murder on Bonaparte. The officers brought Bassett downtown to homicide, where he told Baier about robbing Reds. He also said he had seen two men in a white Lexus circling the block, and that he saw the car stop and a man get out and shoot Jay. Baier showed him a photo lineup. Bassett identified Tracy Love as the driver of the car and Tamall Parker as the shooter.

Parker and Love were picked up two days later. Baier had several other pieces of evidence: The two suspects' mother had recently returned to the dealership a white Lexus with the temporary license tag 38491L. Video from a warehouse surveillance camera near the murder scene had captured what appeared to be a white Lexus circling the block in the minutes before Jay was killed. An analysis of Love's cell phone records determined that the phone had not left East Baltimore that day, a finding that directly contradicted Love and Parker's alibi: They said they had spent the day in their mother's hair salon, in West Baltimore.

Baier did not have a confession or a murder weapon, however. So at trial, a lot would depend on the testimony of Dowery and Bassett—convicted felons who had come forward at least in part because they were facing charges themselves. Eventually they would be joined by a third witness, also in trouble with the law: Doris Dickerson, picked up for prostitution, told police that she was heading toward Jay when she heard shots. She saw Jay fall to the ground and Moo-Moo run away. She too identified Parker as the killer from a photo lineup.

Witnesses of this sort would once have made a prosecutor
blanch. Now, they are usually all prosecutors have. One problem with such witnesses is that defense attorneys can use their records to attack their credibility. The fewer witnesses the state has and the more a defense attorney expects to be able to discredit them, the more likely she is to advise her client against a plea bargain. This means more cases go to trial, at significant expense to the state. And at trial, there is a decent chance—in Baltimore, about 50 percent in a nonfatal shooting, and 38 percent in a murder—that the defendant will walk.

Witnesses in the drug trade are also highly susceptible to being coerced into changing their stories or not showing up in court. If a witness goes missing, his prior statements generally aren't admissible. And a witness who “backs up”—legal slang for recanting—can create doubt, including reasonable doubt, in the minds of jurors.

Not surprisingly, defense attorneys have a different take. Elizabeth Julian, Baltimore's chief public defender, believes the problems of witness intimidation are overstated. She told me that the real issue is police tactics that encourage suspects to lie about their knowledge of other crimes, and she pointed out that it is perfectly legal for police to mislead potential witnesses into thinking they won't have to testify in court. “If you are being asked, and you are getting a ‘Get Out of Jail Free' card tonight, people take it. That's human nature,” she says. In her view, many witnesses who back up are telling the truth on the stand. It's their initial statements that were false—either outright fabrications or some mixture of fact and rumor. Julian jokes that the word on the street, rather than “Stop snitching,” ought to be “Stop lying.”

 

A
S IT HAPPENED,
Dowery decided to become a witness just as witness intimidation in the city was about to explode into a national story. The spark was an underground DVD titled
Stop Fucking Snitching
that began circulating in Baltimore in November 2004.
In it Rodney Thomas, a rapper known locally as Skinny Suge, talks about what he thinks should happen to informants: “To all you snitches and rats…I hope you catch AIDS in your mouth, and your lips the first thing to die, yo bitch.” The DVD also includes numerous segments in which young men on the street rail against snitches.

In its subject matter, the DVD was more evolution than revolution. The slogan “Stop snitching” had been around since at least 1999, when it was popularized by the Boston rapper Tangg da Juice. The video would have remained a local curiosity except for one thing: It includes a cameo by Carmelo Anthony, a Baltimore native who became an NBA star with the Denver Nuggets. Anthony appears in only six of the film's 108 minutes, and spends most of that time poking fun at a former coach and a rival player. As he later told
The Baltimore Sun
, “I was back on my block, chillin'. I was going back to show love to everybody, thinking it was just going to be on the little local DVD, that it was just one of my homeboys recording.” But his celebrity, combined with the DVD's charged subject matter, created a sensation.

For Baltimore's police, prosecutors, and judges, eager to raise awareness about witness intimidation,
Stop Fucking Snitching
was a gift. “Think how bold criminals must be to make a DVD,” Baltimore Circuit Judge John M. Glynn told the local press. “It shows that threatening snitches has become mainstream.” Patricia Jessamy, the state's attorney for Baltimore, had hundreds of copies made and distributed them to politicians and the national media. The publicity helped her win passage of a tougher witness-intimidation law, one the Maryland legislature had voted down the year before. The police department made a show of arresting the DVD's stars, including a man accused of carrying out contract killings, and created its own video,
Keep Talking
, to encourage future witnesses to come forward.

Stop Fucking Snitching
was produced by Rodney Bethea, a 33-year-old barber and entrepreneur. I met him in his small West
Baltimore store, One Love Underground, which pulls double duty as a barbershop and a boutique from which he sells his own line of urban fashions. Bethea told me the authorities and media had misinterpreted the DVD. It was not intended to encourage violence against witnesses, he said; he had simply set out to make a freestyle documentary, and snitching happened to emerge as a major theme. He also said that the term
snitch
has a very specific meaning on the streets and in the video. “They are referring to people that are engaged in illegal activities, making a profit from it, and then when it comes time for the curtains to close—you do the crime, you do the time—now no one wants to go to jail,” he told me, pulling on his goatee. “That is considered a snitch. The old lady that lives on the block that call the police because guys are selling drugs in front of her house, she's not a snitch, because she is what would be considered a civilian.”

Bethea believes there is a double standard—and perhaps a tinge of racism—in law enforcement's criticism of the “Stop snitching” culture. “When you think about it, I mean, who likes a snitch?” he said. “The government don't like a snitch. Their word for it is
treason.
What is the penalty for treason?” He pointed out that the police have their own code of silence, and that officers who break it by reporting police misconduct are stigmatized in much the same way as those who break the code of silence on the street.

Bethea's argument has a certain elegance. But the distinction he draws between the drug dealer who flips and the civilian who is just trying to get dealers off her stoop has ceased to mean much. Just ask the Dawsons. Or Edna McAbier, a community activist who tried to clean up drugs in her North Baltimore neighborhood. The local chapter of the Bloods considered blowing her head off with a shotgun but settled for firebombing her house, in January 2005—not long after
Stop Fucking Snitching
made news. McAbier escaped with her life, and her house was not badly damaged; those responsible received long prison sentences. But though the gang members didn't succeed in killing her, they did silence
her: She left Baltimore out of fear for her safety. And the city got the message: If you break the code, you are in danger—even if you are a “civilian.”

 

B
Y THE TIME OF THE
M
C
A
BIER FIREBOMBING,
John Dowery was starting to reap the rewards of his decision to testify in the state's prosecution of Tracy Love and Tamall Parker. His own trial had been postponed indefinitely. He had been released from home confinement, his drug-treatment program was going well, and he had started working.

So far, Baier had kept Dowery's name out of the investigative records, referring to him simply as “a Federal Suspect” and “the Source” so the state would not have to disclose him as a witness until closer to the trial date. He had also deferred taking a taped statement from Dowery, out of concern for his safety. These were sound precautions: On several occasions, prosecutors have intercepted “kites”—letters from a defendant, smuggled out of jail—detailing the prosecution's witness list and instructing friends or relatives to “talk” to those on it. But Baier could not keep Dowery's name a secret forever. Sooner or later, the government would have to tell defense lawyers that he was going to testify. In the meantime, suspicions about Dowery had already begun to circulate in the neighborhood. “Somebody approached me saying, ‘Yeah, you snitching on us,'” he told Baier.

The case against Love and Parker languished. A trial was set for early April 2005 and then postponed until May, and then postponed again, and then again—seven times in all. In Baltimore, as in most major U.S. cities, the large number of cases and the shortage of judges, courtrooms, and lawyers make such delays common. Some cases have been postponed more than 30 times and have dragged on for more than five years. And each postponement increases the risk that witnesses who were cooperative will cease to be so—that they will move and leave no forwarding ad
dress, change their stories, genuinely forget facts, or turn up dead. “The defense attorneys play this game,” says Brian Matulonis, the lieutenant in charge of Baltimore's Homicide Operations Squad. “If the witness is not there, they are ready to go. If the witness is there, they ask for a postponement.”

On May 20, 2005, Baier finally took a taped statement from Dowery. It was delivered to defense lawyers in June. Soon afterward, Dowery got a phone call from Love.

“That's fucked, man. Why you gonna do me like that?” the defendant seethed.

“I said I didn't know what he was talking about,” Dowery would tell the jurors during the trial. “I was testifying the whole time. But I just act like I didn't know what he was talking about.”

A few weeks later, Love called Dowery again. “He like, ‘Man, the other guy, he say he ain't gonna testify. What about you?'”

Dowery again played dumb. “I say, ‘Man, he lied. I don't know whatcha talking about. You cool.” Love seemed satisfied. “It was, like, a friendlier conversation the second time,” Dowery would testify.

Dowery was nervous about the calls and about becoming known in the neighborhood as a snitch. But he didn't believe he was in immediate danger. The trial kept getting pushed back. Summer gave way to fall. Then came the morning when two men met him at his front door with a gun.