Whitey's Payback (19 page)

To begin, Lucas, Bray, and the task force made a list of targets. The plaintiff’s attorney and many of those falsely accused say task force members gave the list of suspects—and quite possibly the entire investigation—the informal name “Niggers with Rims,” as in black males with no discernable income driving around in cars with expensive hubcaps. The theory was they had to be drug dealers—or close enough to be guilty by suspicion. According to Bray, Lucas set the tone by telling him “we get them any way we can” in order to “get the motherfuckers off the street.” Lucas accompanied Bray on the first few undercover buys. He knew how to act and talk like a thug; it was part of his repertoire.

The buys went off without a hitch. People knew Bray well; he was an established dealer in town. Later they’d say the reason Bray went into business with the law in the first place was to eliminate his competition.

Operation Turnaround was not designed for random buys; as with any big drug case, the agents needed to establish a conspiracy that connected various suppliers and sellers. They focused on Dwayne Nabors, the thirty-three-year-old businessman and father of three who owned Platinum Status, a custom-made rims and auto accessories store. To the agents, it made sense. If you were going after niggers with rims, why not go after the man who sold them the rims?

Nabors often saw Bray around the shop. “I called him Mister Talk-a-Lot,” says Nabors, “because his mouth was always running.” Nabors even knew that Platinum Status was under surveillance. He saw what he assumed were narcotics agents’ cars parked in a lot across the street. He figured they were tracking Bray. “I used to say, ‘Let them watch,’ ” remembers Nabors. “There was nothing going on here.”

A sociable type with an easygoing manner, Nabors had once pleaded guilty to drug possession. He was eighteen at the time, “young and stupid,” he says. After serving three and a half years, he married, started a family, and built a successful business, which he first ran out of his home before moving to one of Mansfield’s main thoroughfares. By all accounts, Nabors was an exemplary citizen and a shrewd businessman. He rose early, worked six days a week, paid his taxes promptly, and spent much of his free time being a father to his children.

Then in November 2005, the foot soldiers of Operation Turnaround descended on his home at 4:30 a.m. and arrested him on federal narcotics charges. His house was searched. There were no drugs, but cops found two handguns that belonged to Nabors’s brother, so illegal possession of a firearm was added to the charges.

While in the county jail, Nabors was astounded to hear that Lucas and Ansari claimed that he had been involved in directing the sale of $10,000 worth of cocaine to Bray. In an affidavit and before a grand jury, Ansari claimed he saw Nabors and a dope dealer named Albert Lee access a secret compartment in a Buick by removing a side panel right before Bray went inside a house to finalize the deal. In addition, the agents identified Nabors as the kingpin of a cocaine conspiracy, with Platinum Status as a front for the sale of dope and laundering of profits.

At trial, he was able to show he was nowhere near the coke transaction, and little evidence was produced to prove him a drug kingpin. The trumped-up charge was likely a ploy to force him to plead guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence. Nabors took a huge risk turning down the plea bargain. He was facing a life sentence. “I was scared,” he remembers. “I got kids who were maybe never going to see their father again. I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing, but I knew I was innocent.”

After a one-week trial Nabors was acquitted of the narcotics charges but found guilty of gun possession. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

Operation Turnaround was like a sick tree, with long branches and plentiful foliage but rotten roots. Investigators knew early on there was reason to believe Nabors was not a coke dealer. Three days before the trial, Ansari and Blas Serrano interviewed the third man in the alleged coke transaction, Albert Lee. After pleading guilty and being sentenced to ten years, Lee told investigators that Nabors hadn’t given them cocaine and gave them the name of the person who had. By law, Ansari and Serrano were required to record Lee’s statement and put it in a memo, which they did. They were also required to turn such evidence over to the defense. Instead, they buried it.

“That’s the kind of conduct that could cost you your ticket to practice law,” said Sam Shamansky, Nabors’s attorney. “That’s the kind of conduct that costs a person his freedom.”

Of all the criminal tactics used in Operation Turnaround, the most egregious was the use of stand-ins, willing or unwitting substitutes for the marks Bray, Lucas, and other cops later fingered for crimes. Among the first stand-in cases to be exposed involved Roosevelt Williams, who was on a flight to Chicago—and had documents to prove it—at the time Bray testified that he participated in two separate drug transactions.

Lucas and Bray swore under oath that Williams was their man, though, again, they had been warned they had the wrong person. On the night one transaction took place, a Mansfield police undercover squad just happened to have the same location under surveillance for another investigation. Perry Wheeler, a veteran Mansfield police detective with a long history of investigating dope and gun cases in north-central Ohio, saw the deal go down. Wheeler was familiar with Williams, and he knew the man Lucas and Bray identified as Williams was somebody else. Wheeler met with Lucas, cop to cop, and told him so. He sent Lucas a photo of Williams, all to no avail. Lucas said he was positive he purchased crack from Williams.

When Wheeler attempted to investigate further, Metcalf called a police sergeant and left a message: Word on the street was that if Wheeler kept prying he would be shot at by a Mansfield hood who went by the name of Uncle Wee Wee. Wheeler knew Uncle Wee Wee as an associate of Bray’s.

The stand-in used to get Williams indicted was actually a thug named Robert Harris. Bray was slick—he staged the event so that Harris sold $2,000 worth of crack to him and Lucas. Bray identified the dealer as Williams, then Harris gave the money back to Bray.

Another innocent Mansfield man, Lowestco Ballard, was almost framed this way. A crack transaction was videotaped by a backup unit, though it was done so the participants’ faces were impossible to identify. At trial, Lucas testified that he was face-to-face with the dealer, who he swore was Lowestco Ballard. Fortunately for Ballard, the man they used was five foot nine, while Ballard is a lanky six foot four. Ballard was able to show he wasn’t on the tape. He was found not guilty, but only after he spent nearly a year in pretrial detention.

Geneva France was not so lucky. She was framed by Shaynessa “Shay Shay” Moxley, a female friend of Bray’s girlfriend. France knew Shay Shay, and she had also met Bray a few times. Bray once tried to get France to go on a date. When she turned him down, he told her he could put her in the trunk of his car. “I’ll take you to Cleveland,” he said, “and nobody will ever find you.” When France heard Bray had said she’d sold him crack, it sent a chill up her spine. At trial, she was fingered by another man, a person she had never seen before in her life: Lee Lucas.

In order to verify France had sold them crack, Lucas and the task force claimed to have used a photo of France for positive identification. The photo they used was not entered into evidence at trial, so ruled by presiding Judge Gaughan. Only after France had been convicted was it revealed that the photo they had was a school photo from the sixth grade, when France was eleven years old—a picture that bore little resemblance to the woman they framed on drug charges.

“When I finally saw the photo they used to frame Geneva,” says France’s attorney, Edward Mullin, an ex-Cleveland cop, “it made me sick to my stomach.”

By mid-2007 Operation Turnaround had seemingly run its course. As with most federal narcotics busts, the fear of severe mandatory minimum sentences led to plea bargains in the majority of cases (the Drug Policy Alliance estimates that 95 percent of all federal narcotics cases are plea-bargained). The Nabors and Ballard cases resulted in acquittals, as did two others, but twenty-three people, a good number, had been incarcerated, which justified the federal expenditures and man-hours. Niggers with Rims was a success.

It all began to unravel in May, when Carlos Warner of the public defender’s office came to handle the case of Jashawa Webb, the only white defendant. Webb had been convicted on minor narcotics charges twice before. In fact, he told Warner, “I’m a drug dealer. I’ve sold marijuana and powder cocaine to my friends, but I’ve never sold crack. I didn’t do what they said I did.”

“Of course I was skeptical,” says Warner. “But Josh is the kind of person who, in the past, when guilty of something, would cop a plea and seek the best deal for himself. Here he was saying no to a plea deal even though he was facing a possible life sentence. He insisted he was innocent and Bray and Lucas were lying.”

The task force had submitted audiotapes as evidence in the Webb case. Warner listened to them and became convinced the voice identified as Webb was not his client’s. Furthermore, the tape had strange gaps and elisions. The lawyer had the tapes analyzed by two separate experts; each concluded they had been altered.

Warner had questions, and only one person could give him answers: Bray.

Since Operation Turnaround concluded, Bray had reverted to form. He had been paid at least $8,450 for the Mansfield drug busts and was back on the street. Emboldened by his Justice Department training, he set up a $700 marijuana purchase. Midway through the deal, a participant pointed at Bray and shouted, “Hey, that’s the guy who set up my bro.”

Bray pulled out a .38-caliber handgun and opened fire, hitting one of the dealers in the back and stomach. He was caught and charged with attempted murder.

According to Bray, he immediately placed a call to his benefactor, Lucas. Bray told him, “You gotta help me out. After all I did for you, you gotta take care of me.” Lucas reassured Bray, telling him, “You’re like a brother to me.” He said he’d see what he could do.

The next day, Lucas contacted Bray’s brother and told him the wounded man was the stepson of a police officer. There was nothing he could do for Bray.

By the time attorney Carlos Warner arrived at Cleveland City Jail, the former star CI had stewed in lockup for a week. In a visiting room, Warner told Bray, “I believe this audiotape has been tampered with.”

Responded Bray, “You’re only scraping the surface with that tape stuff.”

In two meetings, Bray poured his heart out to Warner and another investigator. Bray claimed that at least thirty people were put in jail for crimes they hadn’t committed. Even some of the people who had pleaded guilty were innocent. He had been encouraged to make cases by Lucas, Serrano, and the task force.

Bray’s confession bordered on hysterical. He cried, pounded the table, and told Warner that by telling the truth his life was in danger. Lucas and Ansari, he said, were bigger than the government, and he was afraid of them. He said, “I’m letting you know, man to man, everything I tell you may spin your head, but it’s true. Go look up Dwayne Nabors’s case, go look up Geneva France’s case, go look up—what’s the other?—there are just so many of them.”

“There’s no investigator that can protect me and my family… I am a no-good, lying scum that slept with this shit.”

Bray claimed that when he was on the stand at the France trial, he looked at her face and realized for the first time that what he was doing was wrong: “It was just my thirst for money, and I couldn’t get a job.” He said prosecutors and agents had told him they could help him out, and Serrano prepared him for trial by telling him if he ever felt like he was lying to say, “I don’t understand.”

Warner mentioned how federal prosecutors would come down hard on Bray. “They want to shut you up. They don’t want you to talk.”

“Let me tell you something,” said Bray. “From me to you, this might be the universe punishing me for the shit that has happened to other people’s lives, not being able to see their kids, their mothers, their sisters, their brothers. Understand what I’m saying: This might be it right here.”

After Bray’s confession became public, naysayers went on the offensive: Bray was seeking to save his own skin. He had turned on Lucas because Lucas would not help him beat an attempted murder rap. He was a stone-cold liar. But on a tape recording of Bray’s second interview with Warner, the anguish and regret in his voice are palpable and real.

Bray was now the proverbial hot potato. Federal authorities placed him in protective custody and assigned as his counsel John McCaffrey, a former FBI agent turned criminal defense attorney. McCaffrey tried to verify many of Bray’s claims. It was at first a bumpy ride. Bray failed two polygraph tests. “It was his nature to withhold information,” says McCaffrey. “He kept wanting to keep things to himself that he could use for bartering purposes down the road.” Eventually, McCaffrey and other investigators obtained signed confessions from many of the people Bray used as stand-ins. Concurrently, the FBI reopened an investigation into the career of Lucas.

Throughout 2008 and into 2009, the dominoes began to fall. First eight people convicted via Operation Turnaround were released from prison, then fifteen more. Bray pleaded guilty to lying on the witness stand and committing civil rights violations; he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In May 2009, Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Metcalf pleaded guilty to one count of civil rights violation for his role in the Dwayne Nabors case. Later, Ansari agreed to cooperate with federal investigators in exchange for immunity.

In June, three men convicted by Lucas in a separate case involving the sale of PCP demanded and received a hearing regarding circumstances surrounding the trial. Under questing from Special Prosecutor Greg White, Joseph Pinjuh and others in the U.S. Attorney’s Office took the stand. They acknowledged that Lucas made cases too quickly and was sometimes sloppy. “He was running at a hundred and fifty miles per hour,” said one assistant U.S. attorney. Pinjuh described Lucas as “a loose canon.” However, none of them said they doubted his truthfulness or veracity.