Post by Shuftin on Sept 18, 2006 11:11:42 GMT -5
2006-09-17
MAXTON, NORTH CAROLINA — The men moved quietly through the evening, guns drawn, down a darkened path toward the rear of Alex Locklear’s home.
As they positioned themselves, an unmarked Robeson County patrol car sped into the driveway, blue lights flashing.
State and federal prosecutors say this was no authorized drug raid. They say former Deputy Vincent Sinclair and four other men went to Locklear’s home on the evening of March 14, 2004, with a single purpose — to rob the place and terrorize its occupants.
The robbery was just one incident in what has become a host of allegations against Robeson County law enforcement officers in an investigation known as Operation Tarnished Badge. But the allegations against Sinclair stand out for their brazenness and violence.
Locklear, who farms about 400 acres, said he was out of town when Sinclair and four other men raided his home. But Locklear said the men knew he had cashed a check to pay his farm laborers before he left for a motorcycle rally in Myrtle Beach.
His son was home. Nicholas Locklear, who is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair, said the men ordered everybody outside to hit the ground, including a pregnant woman.
They burst onto the back porch, he said, and ordered a man and a woman sitting on a swing to the ground.
“They told him they were going to blow his brains out,” Nicholas Locklear said.
He said the men searched him and ransacked the house.
“They just wanted to know if we had any drugs or any large amounts of money,” he said.
Alex Locklear said the robbers took about $200 from his bedroom.
His daughter, Michelle Jacobs, said she arrived at the home just as the patrol car was leaving and her friends were getting off the grass. She said the woman on the porch broke her arm when she ran and tripped in a ditch.
Alex Locklear said he reported the robbery to a sheriff’s deputy and mentioned that the patrol car used would be missing a front hubcap lost during the raid.
Locklear said the Sheriff’s Office never conducted an investigation.
But someone paid attention later, and a state grand jury indicted Sinclair in September 2005 on charges stemming from the robbery of Locklear and several other crimes.
Sinclair is among nine former sheriff’s deputies and two former Lumberton police officers to be charged through Operation Tarnished Badge.
Since June, the state and federal investigation has led to four deputies pleading guilty in federal court in exchange for their cooperation. Prosecutors say more arrests are possible.
The widening investigation has revealed deputies stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug stops on Interstate 95, beating and robbing people in their homes, swindling money from county coffers and working with drug dealers to steal money and drugs from other dealers.
Some deputies are accused of kidnapping drug dealers and holding them for ransom. One is accused of giving someone two trash bags full of marijuana to burn a pawnshop to settle a personal vendetta. The home of a man who was set to testify against that deputy was firebombed shortly before trial.
Sinclair is accused of trying to extort money from a man he suspected of selling drugs by pouring lighter fluid on the man’s arm and setting him on fire. Prosecutors say Sinclair had gone to the wrong house and terrorized the wrong man. Court records say the man was seriously injured.
Widespread problems
A federal indictment says corruption among deputies has been widespread at least since 1995, the year after Glenn Maynor became sheriff.
Maynor resigned abruptly in December 2004, citing health concerns. His resignation came shortly after he became eligible for a full pension.
Maynor has kept a low profile since his retirement. He is rarely seen in public anymore, and he refuses to return reporters’ repeated telephone calls.
His successor, Kenneth Sealey, declined to comment on the investigation. “You need to talk to the SBI or the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Sealey said. “I have already made my comments on that. We’ll talk one day.” Sealey faces election in November.
Maynor left the Sheriff’s Office in shambles and some of his top deputies in disgrace.
C.T. Strickland, chief of the Drug Enforcement Division, was forced to resign in 2003 because he falsified a search warrant. A federal grand jury has since indicted him on charges that include burning down a drug dealer’s home and stealing drug money.
The same year Strickland resigned, Roger Taylor, commander of the Communications Division, was charged with allowing a convicted felon to carry a gun during a sting operation and impeding an SBI investigation. Taylor has also been indicted on federal charges, including paying off informants with drugs.
Seven of the nine deputies charged through Operation Tarnished Badge worked in the Drug Enforcement Division. The division’s office was next to Maynor’s, and its deputies reported directly to him.
Prosecutors won’t say publicly whether Maynor is a subject of the investigation, causing the question to persist: How could the sheriff not know what was going on?
Prosecutors say some of the deputies charged had spent money lavishly. They bought new homes, boats and cars for their children and themselves. One bought a timeshare at the beach. Another paid for an expensive driveway repaving and spent $16,000 on a pontoon boat.
Bold plot
The prosecutors say Sinclair and former Deputy Patrick Ferguson became so brazen that they kidnapped two men in Virginia in 2004. They acted even though, by then, Operation Tarnished Badge had already resulted in charges against five lawmen.
Ferguson pleaded guilty last month.
Prosecutors say Sinclair and Ferguson learned that two Virginia men were about to buy $450,000 worth of drugs.
Court records say some of the same men who robbed Alex Locklear accompanied Ferguson and Sinclair to Norfolk on Feb. 27, 2004. Here is what happened that day, according to police and court records.
Badges dangling from their necks, six armed men jumped from a red sedan, screamed “Police!” and chased down the two Virginia men at a gas station.
Ferguson, Sinclair and the others believed that Ronald Lamont Wilson and Elton Williams had concealed the $450,000 in their black Chevrolet van.
At the gas station in Norfolk, Ferguson’s group forced Wilson and Williams into the back of the van, where they were handcuffed and someone put duct tape over their wrists and eyes.
When Wilson and Williams refused to reveal where the money was stashed, Ferguson’s group decided to drive the van to Robeson County, where it could be dismantled.
Somewhere between Norfolk and Selma, one of the men shot Williams in either the foot or the leg.
The van and the red car that had been trailing it stopped for gas at a Han-Dee Hugo’s Exxon in Selma. There, Wilson and Williams managed to escape.
Ferguson, Sinclair and their men fled in the red sedan. Near one of the gas pumps, Selma police found a badge reading, “Security Officer.”
Police also found Williams behind the store. He was taken by ambulance to Johnston Memorial Hospital. The van was placed in storage.
Police Maj. Jimmy Norris, who processed the crime scene, said police searched the van, found some hidden compartments but no money, and returned the van to its owner about two days later. Norris said police had no idea what was really happening the day of the kidnapping.
It took another crime two months later to begin to put the pieces together.
Another federal indictment says Robeson County residents Micheal Oxendine, Carl Patrick Locklear and David “Buck” Troy, along with other men, went to Georgetown, S.C., to rob Clifton Blackstock on April 7, 2004.
A Georgetown sheriff’s report from that day says Blackstock told deputies that a car with a flashing blue light pulled up behind him on Dunbar Road. Blackstock told the deputies that two men approached the car, and he was shot as they ordered him to put his hands where they could see them.
Oxendine, Troy and Locklear were arrested a short time later, along with Malik Nelson and Deleon Holmes. Prosecutors say Oxendine, who pleaded guilty this month to the Blackstock robbery, turned against Sinclair and Ferguson. Investigators soon learned about the incident in Selma.
Sinclair, who had worked for the Sheriff’s Office for 10 years, was charged in May 2005 with kidnapping the drug dealers.
But the inquiry didn’t stop there. The more investigators dug, the more they found. Two months before the Norfolk kidnapping, court records say, Sinclair, Ferguson and others kidnapped Darius Bain of St. Pauls and held him until a $150,000 ransom was paid.
Prosecutors will not say how many robberies they believe Ferguson and Sinclair committed. Ferguson’s lawyer, Robert Nunley of Raleigh, called Ferguson’s involvement minimal.
“He’s involved in some, but the number you can count on one hand,” Nunley said.
Financial problems
Nunley said Ferguson, who earned less than $30,000 a year as a deputy, started breaking laws after experiencing financial problems in 2002. Nunley described Ferguson as being “very sorry, remorseful,” today.
Nunley declined to comment on how Ferguson robbed people. But generally, he said, deputies learned from drug dealers that people were taking a large amount of drugs or money to the dealers’ homes. The deputies stopped the people before they got to the homes and took their money or drugs, then gave it to the dealers in exchange for payment, Nunley said.
Other times, he said, the deputies cut out the middle man.
“You have got guys who straight out just stopped cars and took the money,” he said.
Robeson is a poor, multiracial county plagued by high unemployment. It has one of the highest rates of school dropouts and violent crimes in North Carolina. Of the state’s 100 counties, only Mecklenburg had a higher violent crime rate than Robeson last year. Between 1996 and 2005, when law enforcement corruption was at its height, reported crimes in Robeson County increased by 78 percent.
Dr. Mario Paparozzi, chairman of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at UNC-Pembroke, said the actions of corrupt lawmen probably did not cause a significant spike in the county’s crime rate.
“It absolutely accounts for something, but if you wave the wand and clean that up tomorrow, I seriously doubt you will see an overriding decrease because there are other problems in Robeson County,’’ Paparozzi said.
But, he said, the corruption does have serious ramifications. The biggest deterrent to crime is people, not police, he said. Lawmen need to have a good relationship with the people they are sworn to protect.
“The biggest problem I see, when stories get out, people are inclined to become cynical,” Paparozzi said. “If they are cynical and suspicious, they are not going to play, they are not going to go to the police.”
MAXTON, NORTH CAROLINA — The men moved quietly through the evening, guns drawn, down a darkened path toward the rear of Alex Locklear’s home.
As they positioned themselves, an unmarked Robeson County patrol car sped into the driveway, blue lights flashing.
State and federal prosecutors say this was no authorized drug raid. They say former Deputy Vincent Sinclair and four other men went to Locklear’s home on the evening of March 14, 2004, with a single purpose — to rob the place and terrorize its occupants.
The robbery was just one incident in what has become a host of allegations against Robeson County law enforcement officers in an investigation known as Operation Tarnished Badge. But the allegations against Sinclair stand out for their brazenness and violence.
Locklear, who farms about 400 acres, said he was out of town when Sinclair and four other men raided his home. But Locklear said the men knew he had cashed a check to pay his farm laborers before he left for a motorcycle rally in Myrtle Beach.
His son was home. Nicholas Locklear, who is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair, said the men ordered everybody outside to hit the ground, including a pregnant woman.
They burst onto the back porch, he said, and ordered a man and a woman sitting on a swing to the ground.
“They told him they were going to blow his brains out,” Nicholas Locklear said.
He said the men searched him and ransacked the house.
“They just wanted to know if we had any drugs or any large amounts of money,” he said.
Alex Locklear said the robbers took about $200 from his bedroom.
His daughter, Michelle Jacobs, said she arrived at the home just as the patrol car was leaving and her friends were getting off the grass. She said the woman on the porch broke her arm when she ran and tripped in a ditch.
Alex Locklear said he reported the robbery to a sheriff’s deputy and mentioned that the patrol car used would be missing a front hubcap lost during the raid.
Locklear said the Sheriff’s Office never conducted an investigation.
But someone paid attention later, and a state grand jury indicted Sinclair in September 2005 on charges stemming from the robbery of Locklear and several other crimes.
Sinclair is among nine former sheriff’s deputies and two former Lumberton police officers to be charged through Operation Tarnished Badge.
Since June, the state and federal investigation has led to four deputies pleading guilty in federal court in exchange for their cooperation. Prosecutors say more arrests are possible.
The widening investigation has revealed deputies stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug stops on Interstate 95, beating and robbing people in their homes, swindling money from county coffers and working with drug dealers to steal money and drugs from other dealers.
Some deputies are accused of kidnapping drug dealers and holding them for ransom. One is accused of giving someone two trash bags full of marijuana to burn a pawnshop to settle a personal vendetta. The home of a man who was set to testify against that deputy was firebombed shortly before trial.
Sinclair is accused of trying to extort money from a man he suspected of selling drugs by pouring lighter fluid on the man’s arm and setting him on fire. Prosecutors say Sinclair had gone to the wrong house and terrorized the wrong man. Court records say the man was seriously injured.
Widespread problems
A federal indictment says corruption among deputies has been widespread at least since 1995, the year after Glenn Maynor became sheriff.
Maynor resigned abruptly in December 2004, citing health concerns. His resignation came shortly after he became eligible for a full pension.
Maynor has kept a low profile since his retirement. He is rarely seen in public anymore, and he refuses to return reporters’ repeated telephone calls.
His successor, Kenneth Sealey, declined to comment on the investigation. “You need to talk to the SBI or the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Sealey said. “I have already made my comments on that. We’ll talk one day.” Sealey faces election in November.
Maynor left the Sheriff’s Office in shambles and some of his top deputies in disgrace.
C.T. Strickland, chief of the Drug Enforcement Division, was forced to resign in 2003 because he falsified a search warrant. A federal grand jury has since indicted him on charges that include burning down a drug dealer’s home and stealing drug money.
The same year Strickland resigned, Roger Taylor, commander of the Communications Division, was charged with allowing a convicted felon to carry a gun during a sting operation and impeding an SBI investigation. Taylor has also been indicted on federal charges, including paying off informants with drugs.
Seven of the nine deputies charged through Operation Tarnished Badge worked in the Drug Enforcement Division. The division’s office was next to Maynor’s, and its deputies reported directly to him.
Prosecutors won’t say publicly whether Maynor is a subject of the investigation, causing the question to persist: How could the sheriff not know what was going on?
Prosecutors say some of the deputies charged had spent money lavishly. They bought new homes, boats and cars for their children and themselves. One bought a timeshare at the beach. Another paid for an expensive driveway repaving and spent $16,000 on a pontoon boat.
Bold plot
The prosecutors say Sinclair and former Deputy Patrick Ferguson became so brazen that they kidnapped two men in Virginia in 2004. They acted even though, by then, Operation Tarnished Badge had already resulted in charges against five lawmen.
Ferguson pleaded guilty last month.
Prosecutors say Sinclair and Ferguson learned that two Virginia men were about to buy $450,000 worth of drugs.
Court records say some of the same men who robbed Alex Locklear accompanied Ferguson and Sinclair to Norfolk on Feb. 27, 2004. Here is what happened that day, according to police and court records.
Badges dangling from their necks, six armed men jumped from a red sedan, screamed “Police!” and chased down the two Virginia men at a gas station.
Ferguson, Sinclair and the others believed that Ronald Lamont Wilson and Elton Williams had concealed the $450,000 in their black Chevrolet van.
At the gas station in Norfolk, Ferguson’s group forced Wilson and Williams into the back of the van, where they were handcuffed and someone put duct tape over their wrists and eyes.
When Wilson and Williams refused to reveal where the money was stashed, Ferguson’s group decided to drive the van to Robeson County, where it could be dismantled.
Somewhere between Norfolk and Selma, one of the men shot Williams in either the foot or the leg.
The van and the red car that had been trailing it stopped for gas at a Han-Dee Hugo’s Exxon in Selma. There, Wilson and Williams managed to escape.
Ferguson, Sinclair and their men fled in the red sedan. Near one of the gas pumps, Selma police found a badge reading, “Security Officer.”
Police also found Williams behind the store. He was taken by ambulance to Johnston Memorial Hospital. The van was placed in storage.
Police Maj. Jimmy Norris, who processed the crime scene, said police searched the van, found some hidden compartments but no money, and returned the van to its owner about two days later. Norris said police had no idea what was really happening the day of the kidnapping.
It took another crime two months later to begin to put the pieces together.
Another federal indictment says Robeson County residents Micheal Oxendine, Carl Patrick Locklear and David “Buck” Troy, along with other men, went to Georgetown, S.C., to rob Clifton Blackstock on April 7, 2004.
A Georgetown sheriff’s report from that day says Blackstock told deputies that a car with a flashing blue light pulled up behind him on Dunbar Road. Blackstock told the deputies that two men approached the car, and he was shot as they ordered him to put his hands where they could see them.
Oxendine, Troy and Locklear were arrested a short time later, along with Malik Nelson and Deleon Holmes. Prosecutors say Oxendine, who pleaded guilty this month to the Blackstock robbery, turned against Sinclair and Ferguson. Investigators soon learned about the incident in Selma.
Sinclair, who had worked for the Sheriff’s Office for 10 years, was charged in May 2005 with kidnapping the drug dealers.
But the inquiry didn’t stop there. The more investigators dug, the more they found. Two months before the Norfolk kidnapping, court records say, Sinclair, Ferguson and others kidnapped Darius Bain of St. Pauls and held him until a $150,000 ransom was paid.
Prosecutors will not say how many robberies they believe Ferguson and Sinclair committed. Ferguson’s lawyer, Robert Nunley of Raleigh, called Ferguson’s involvement minimal.
“He’s involved in some, but the number you can count on one hand,” Nunley said.
Financial problems
Nunley said Ferguson, who earned less than $30,000 a year as a deputy, started breaking laws after experiencing financial problems in 2002. Nunley described Ferguson as being “very sorry, remorseful,” today.
Nunley declined to comment on how Ferguson robbed people. But generally, he said, deputies learned from drug dealers that people were taking a large amount of drugs or money to the dealers’ homes. The deputies stopped the people before they got to the homes and took their money or drugs, then gave it to the dealers in exchange for payment, Nunley said.
Other times, he said, the deputies cut out the middle man.
“You have got guys who straight out just stopped cars and took the money,” he said.
Robeson is a poor, multiracial county plagued by high unemployment. It has one of the highest rates of school dropouts and violent crimes in North Carolina. Of the state’s 100 counties, only Mecklenburg had a higher violent crime rate than Robeson last year. Between 1996 and 2005, when law enforcement corruption was at its height, reported crimes in Robeson County increased by 78 percent.
Dr. Mario Paparozzi, chairman of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at UNC-Pembroke, said the actions of corrupt lawmen probably did not cause a significant spike in the county’s crime rate.
“It absolutely accounts for something, but if you wave the wand and clean that up tomorrow, I seriously doubt you will see an overriding decrease because there are other problems in Robeson County,’’ Paparozzi said.
But, he said, the corruption does have serious ramifications. The biggest deterrent to crime is people, not police, he said. Lawmen need to have a good relationship with the people they are sworn to protect.
“The biggest problem I see, when stories get out, people are inclined to become cynical,” Paparozzi said. “If they are cynical and suspicious, they are not going to play, they are not going to go to the police.”