Convicted

by Jameel Zookie McGee

  I looked at him and said, “Get it from them,” and nodded toward Lange and Modigell. At this point I’d cooperated about as much as I felt like cooperating.

  Lange answered all the questions for me. I stood there as the processing officer filled out his forms. Once they were finished, Lange and Modigell turned to leave. As they did, Lange said, “See you in ten years.” Modigell chuckled and they walked away.

  I did not see them again until my trial, where Lange had all sorts of stories to tell about me.

  —

  The entire time I was in the Benton Harbor jail I’d worn my street clothes. Now the first thing they did in Grand Rapids was order me to strip. Everything came off. Once I was completely naked, an officer said, “Bend over.” I did as I was told. “Squat.” I complied. “Cough.” I coughed. “All right, turn around. Raise your sac.” I lifted my testicles to show I wasn’t hiding any drugs or weapons.

  Keep in mind, I had also been strip-searched when I was booked in Benton Harbor. I never left my cell and never had contact with another human being except the two officers who drove me to Grand Rapids. Still, I was strip-searched when I arrived at the federal justice building in Grand Rapids. It was the first of many searches I went through. Every prisoner is strip-searched whenever he moves from one facility to another.

  To me, the whole thing seemed to be about dehumanizing me and making sure I understood that I was nothing in this world and nothing in my community and nothing to anybody. It’s a hard lesson to miss.

  The whole time this was taking place I kept shaking my head in disbelief.

  One of the officers said something like, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Man, I didn’t do this. I had nothing to do with it. I’m innocent.”

  The officers in the room snickered and laughed. I kept my mouth shut after that. Finally I was taken to a cell and locked up. Unlike the day I was arrested while working on my buddy’s car, I already knew how this was going to turn out, and it wasn’t going to be good for me. I sank down on my bunk, depressed. Surely the people who put me here knew I was innocent. Why would they do this to me? What had I ever done to deserve this?

  Andrew

  About a year before I arrested Jameel, I was out on patrol on a cold, snowy day when a call for officer assistance came over my radio. I flipped on my lights and siren and headed toward the south end of Benton Harbor. Eventually I found the car of the county narcotics officer who had radioed for help. The man was a living legend in the area. Dealers I’d arrested said when the Legend came to town, it was time to close up shop until his shift was over. That was the reputation I wanted. I tried to learn everything I could from him.

  When I pulled up to the scene, the Legend walked out from behind a house red faced, out of breath, and angry.

  “Anthony got away—right here!” he shouted.

  Right here was a snow-covered alley. A set of footprints led down the alley from a new Chevy, the motor still running and the driver’s door open. I recognized the name Anthony. Everyone in town knew he was a heroin dealer. I’d questioned him a few times and had good rapport with him.

  The Legend went on, “I pulled him over because I knew his license was no good. When I walked up to his car, the guy punched it and took off. I chased him here, but he got away on foot. I know he has drugs on him. The guy never runs unless he’s carrying.”

  “I’ll search the car,” I said.

  The Legend took off, following the footprints down the alley. At this point in my career I didn’t have a lot of experience, but I knew how to search a vehicle systematically. We called it “tossing” a car, which means exactly what it sounds like. When you toss a car, you tear out everything, and I mean everything.

  Right off I knew this Chevy had to be a rental because it was the cleanest car I’d ever seen. Drug dealers often use rentals to do business. They’ll have a girlfriend or relative rent the vehicle so it can’t be traced back to them. If they flee from the police in a rental, there is no paper trail. Dealers also prefer rentals because it keeps police from seeing them using the same vehicle week after week, something that is pretty easy to notice in a small town like Benton Harbor. The fact this was a rental car didn’t stop me from making a mess of it. I even tore out the back seat, looking for drugs or weapons. I didn’t find a thing.

  After I searched the car, I heard on the dispatcher radio that they’d discovered footprints leading to a house. I jumped in my car and drove to the location. The Legend and some other officers were already there. As we started to search the house, I heard a bloodcurdling scream from behind. I spun around to see a female officer with her gun drawn, pointing toward a backyard shed.

  “He’s in there,” she yelled. “I opened the door and he was right there, looking back at me.”

  Officers descended on the shed. I went with them. When I stepped inside, I spotted Anthony hiding behind some junk in a corner. He knew me, which made this part a lot easier.

  “Come on out, man. You’re caught,” I said.

  Anthony threw his arms in the air. The look on his face was sheer terror.

  “Collins, man, don’t let that dude whip me,” he pleaded.

  “I won’t, man. Come on out,” I said.

  When he stepped out, the Legend and another county officer rushed past me, tackled Anthony, and threw him to the ground, all the while screaming at him to stop resisting. One of the officers kicked Anthony in the side after he’d been handcuffed. He told Anthony that’s what he got for running. I felt sorry for Anthony, but I didn’t speak up. There’s an unwritten code that you always protect your fellow officers. I wasn’t going to break that code for a heroin dealer.

  Eventually I hauled Anthony up off the ground and to my patrol car.

  Over and over he asked me, “Why, Collins, why’d they have to do that, man?”

  I didn’t have an answer. I tried to assure him nothing else was going to happen to him as long as he cooperated. I doubt he believed me, not that I could blame him.

  After securing Anthony in the back seat of my patrol car, I drove to the alley where Anthony had dumped the rental car. While I sat in my car with Anthony, I watched the Legend and the county officer who had kicked Anthony go back and search his car. It seemed like a waste of time. I had already tossed it pretty good, but these two took tossing to a completely different level. They absolutely destroyed the car. The more they searched, the madder the Legend became because the car was clean.

  Finally, the two officers went to the trunk of the Legend’s car and stood talking for a couple of moments. Then the Legend pulled something out of his trunk. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw what appeared to be a plastic baggie filled with what looked like marijuana.

  Anthony saw it too. “They gonna plant something in my car. I know they is,” he shouted.

  “Relax, you have nothing to worry about. I’ll check it out,” I said.

  I went over to the Legend as he exited Anthony’s car. He smiled at me and waved the baggie of marijuana in the air.

  “At least now I know he’ll get strip-searched when he gets to the county lockup,” he said.

  And that is exactly what happened to Anthony. He was booked for possession of marijuana. I learned that day that if a suspect was brought in for a drug-related offense, they were routinely strip-searched to protect the jail from contraband. Anthony was not found with any “additional” drugs, and the drug charges were dropped after he pleaded guilty to fleeing and eluding. But that confession sent Anthony off to prison.

  After watching what happened to Anthony, I promised myself I would never plant evidence. The Legend may have carried a supply of dope in his trunk to give a boost to a weak case, but I wasn’t going to do that. I told myself I had too much integrity to stoop that low. I soon discovered, however, that once you cross the line and play fast and loose with the truth, there are no rules you won’t break, not even the ones you set for yourself.

  I kept that promise, sort of. I did not car
ry drugs in my patrol car on a regular basis. Once I became a full-time narcotics officer, though, that promise to myself disappeared. I kept a stash of dope in a purple Crown Royal bag in my office at the station. I never planned on collecting drugs that I could use as evidence in a weak case. The whole thing started pretty much by accident and laziness.

  One afternoon, not long after I became a narcotics officer, I stopped a group of teenagers I knew had some dope. When I pulled up, they all sort of froze. “Where’s the dope?” I asked, and they melted. They all knew they were about to go to jail for possession. I could have taken them in, but these weren’t the kind of offenders I was after. These kids were customers, not dealers. I made them surrender their bag of marijuana and sent them home with a stern warning.

  When I got back to the station that night, I should have processed the pot and written up a report, but the report would have raised a lot of needless questions. The way I saw it, no one expected me to bring in some kids with a bag of pot they’d pooled their money to buy. Writing a report wasn’t worth the hassle for me, them, or anyone. But if I didn’t write the report, how was I to explain the bag of pot I’d taken from them? I didn’t want to think too much about that question. Instead, I tossed the pot into my duty bag and sort of forgot about it.

  Over time I made more stops like this, where I caught guys with dope and didn’t run them in. I confiscated their drugs and let them off with a warning. I started to collect so much dope that I stopped carrying it in my patrol bag and switched to a Crown Royal bag. My bag started to fill up, and it didn’t take long for me to find a use for it. Honestly, I felt I had to.

  In the middle of winter during my second year on the force, I pulled up to a known drug house in a known drug area and saw two guys standing in front of the house near an electrical box. The weather was so cold that no one would be standing around outside for their health. Another officer was with me, and we approached the two guys. As we got close to them, they took off in opposite directions. I caught up to my suspect, wrestled him down, and frisked him for drugs or weapons. My partner caught the other. Both men had large amounts of money in small bills with no explanation for it, along with cell phones that kept ringing. Both the small bills and incessantly ringing cell phones screamed drug dealer.

  I walked back to the electrical box where the men had been standing. When I opened it, I discovered a large amount of individually packaged bags of crack cocaine. Immediately I arrested the men for possession of crack with intent to distribute.

  To me, this looked like an open-and-shut case. The prosecutor, however, was very cautious after I told her I had not seen either defendant touch or move toward the electrical box. (Obviously, this took place before I arrested Jameel McGee.)

  “Are you sure you didn’t see any furtive gestures when they were moving away from that electrical box?” she asked me.

  “No, I didn’t,” I replied.

  She sighed. “This is going to be a tough case now. I wish you had seen them touching that box. That would make this case much easier,” she said.

  Fast-forward a year or so. I stopped the car of a known drug dealer. I’d been after him for a while. When I approached the car, the smell of marijuana was very strong. The defendant climbed out, but he was less than cooperative. A big, boisterous guy, he threw a fit about being pulled over. When I patted him down, I found what looked like marijuana seeds in his pocket. The man was also driving without a license. I booked him for possession, but that was going to be a hard case to make since I’d found only seeds on him.

  An idea popped into my head. I went back to my office and removed a baggie of the pot I’d stashed in my purple Crown Royal bag and added it to the evidence from the arrest. Since I smelled pot in the car and found seeds in his pocket, supplementing the evidence I needed to make my case did not seem like a big deal. The guy was guilty. I just helped the case along a little. At least that’s what I told myself.

  —

  Later on I used my stash of drugs to help myself out financially. I didn’t sell them. I would never do that. But as a narcotics officer I often made what is called a controlled buy from an informant. On a controlled buy, money was given to a confidential informant to buy drugs at a specific location. Once the snitch brought back the drugs and provided a brief description of the inside of the house, we paid him for his service. The going rate was ten dollars to buy the drugs and twenty to thirty dollars for the actual service. I was paying upward of fifty dollars for a ten-dollar rock. This, of course, was a ten-dollar rock before the informant cut off a small amount prior to meeting me at the rendezvous point.

  One Friday night I was in my office, feeling down and unappreciated. I had recently gotten married and had promised to take my wife out on a date, but I was broke. Benton Harbor is a small police department, and my pay reflected that. This Friday night I was flat broke, and payday didn’t roll around until the following Wednesday. This did not seem fair.

  During my time as a police officer, Michigan had a civil forfeiture law, as do many other states. The law allows the government to take cash, cars, homes, and other property suspected of being involved in criminal activity. Suspected is the key word. When I busted someone for drugs, the city of Benton Harbor confiscated any cash we found on the suspect, as well as the car the suspect was driving and even his house if we believed it was a key part of his drug business. All charges could eventually be dismissed or the suspect could be found not guilty, but he didn’t get his property back. Instead, the money and property rolled into the local police department and city government. Part of the money could also go to repay crime victims, but not in narcotics, the world in which I worked. All the money went to the department. Part of it went into the narcotics fund, which was supposed to finance our part in the war on drugs, and a lot of it just went into a general fund.

  Because I made more drug arrests than anyone else, and because I was one of the most aggressive officers in the department, I brought in a lot of money to the city and the police department. Even so, my pay was so low I couldn’t afford to take my new bride out to dinner on a Friday night.

  The more I thought about all this, the angrier I became. I bring in tens of thousands of dollars to the police department, but they don’t have the decency to pay me enough to take my wife out on a date! At no time did I consider the fact that I had mismanaged my money and put myself in the position of being broke before payday. That thought never crossed my mind. Instead, I stewed on the injustice of it all until I convinced myself the department owed me big. And now it was time for them to start making things right.

  Rather than march into the chief’s office and ask for a raise, I wrote a report describing a controlled buy from an informant who didn’t know I was using his name. I turned in the report along with a baggie of dope from my stash. The department then “reimbursed” me to the tune of forty dollars, and I had enough money to take my wife out to dinner. To me, this wasn’t stealing because the money came out of the money I’d brought in through civil forfeitures. When I put the money in my pocket, I didn’t feel guilty because I’d convinced myself I’d earned it.

  I “earned” several more “reimbursements” over the next few months. Because I made so many legitimate arrests, no one questioned these fake reports and no one audited my books. After all, I had the drugs to go with the report, which meant no one had a reason to suspect a thing.

  Later in my police career I figured out another way to make a little extra cash from the narcotics fund. The department started a new program where we paid informants $500 if the information they gave us resulted not only in an arrest but also in a gun coming off the streets. It was a good policy, and I found a way to make it even better for me.

  The idea came to me one day while I was conducting a search with a warrant I’d secured without any information from an informant. The case involved drugs, but I also found a handgun in the suspect’s possession. A light bulb went on. When I got back to the station to write up my
report, I added the name of an informant who’d supposedly provided the information. The name was real, but the information was not. Again, the informant had no idea I was using his name. Since the department paid informants in cash and I was supposed to deliver it to him, I simply pocketed the $500. The informant had to sign a receipt for the money, but that was an easy fix. I just scribbled his name on the line and turned it into my superiors. No one questioned what I was doing nor did I think too much of taking the money, because, again, I had convinced myself that I had earned it. I brought so much money into the department that I deserved to have a little of it come my way.

  Taking money from the narcotics fund, which I helped build up, was one thing, but I told myself I would never take money from a drug dealer’s pocket. Whatever money I found while making a bust I gave to the department. I wasn’t being entirely altruistic. As our narcotics team brought more and more money into the department, we were given more freedom to do our jobs, no questions asked. And I really wanted that freedom.

  Every day I became more and more aggressive in the way I carried out my job. If I bent the rules a little, no one seemed to mind. And if I skimmed a little walking-around money for myself, what did that matter as long as I pulled bad guys off the streets, along with the money and property they forfeited to the city?

  With time, the money I personally brought in through civil forfeitures topped $50,000 a year, and this in a city that covers a mere four square miles. I had to file a report with the state of Michigan every year, describing how much money was forfeited because of this law. The police department then posted stats every month showing how much each officer had brought in through civil forfeiture. Whenever the new stat sheet went up, officers gathered round, comparing who did better in what category. Seeing how incredible my forfeiture totals were compared to the others’ fed my ego. For me, this scorecard proved I was the star of the department, the indispensable narcotics officer this little town was lucky to have. Not only was I a great police officer, but I even paid my own way. The honest taxpaying citizens of Benton Harbor received my incredible services free of charge because I brought in far more money than it cost to employ me.