I Got a Monster
The Rise and Fall of America's Most Corrupt Police Squad
-
-
3.3 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
The explosive true story of America's most corrupt police unit, the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), which terrorized the city of Baltimore for half a decade.
When Baltimore police sergeant Wayne Jenkins said he had a monster, he meant he had found a big-time drug dealer—one that he wanted to rob. This is the story of Jenkins and the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a super group of dirty detectives who exploited some of America’s greatest problems: guns, drugs, toxic masculinity, and hypersegregation.
In the upside-down world of the GTTF, cops were robbers and drug dealers were the perfect victims, because no one believed them. When the federal government finally arrested the GTTF for robbery and racketeering in 2017, the stories of victims began to come out, revealing a vast criminal enterprise operating within the Baltimore Police Department.
Cops planted heroin to cover up a fatal crash that resulted from a botched robbery. They stole hundreds of thousands of dollars, faked video evidence, and forged a letter trying to break up the marriage of one of their victims to keep his wife from paying a lawyer. And a homicide detective was killed the day before he was scheduled to testify against the crooked cops.
I Got a Monster is the shocking history of the rise and fall of the most corrupt cops in America from Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Freelance writer Woods and Baltimore reporter Soderberg chronicle the corruption within the Baltimore PD's Gun Trace Task Force in their fascinating, chilling debut. In 2015, after Freddie Gray, a black suspect, died in police custody and the city's top prosecutor brought charges against six officers involved in the case, the police decided to back off from pursuing suspected criminals, fearful they could get in trouble if another arrest went awry. The murder rate soon rose significantly, and a new police commissioner created plainclothes squads to aggressively combat the violence. Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, the head of one such squad, the GTTF, succeeded in persuading his subordinates to engage in extortion, fraud, robbery, drug dealing, and planting evidence. His modus operandi was simple: target criminals, whose innocence and claims of being robbed wouldn't be believed. Meanwhile, Jenkins and his squad were receiving commendations from the Baltimore PD for their rising number of convictions. Finally, in 2017, through the efforts of Ivan Bates and other defense attorneys representing Jenkins's victims, Jenkins and the six other cops on his squad were indicted on federal racketeering charges. The authors draw extensively on such sources as trial transcripts, interviews, and official documents, and verbatim conversations taken from recordings such as wiretaps lend immediacy. True crime aficionados won't want to miss this engrossing expos .
