Daryl McCrary

DETROIT — Daryl McCrary is no stranger to the world of violence.

Having spent 21 years with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) he’s worked in places like Los Angeles and Baltimore. He’s gone undercover, he’s bought guns on the street and investigated gangs and violent crime.

As acting head of ATF in Detroit since October, McCrary says Detroit is as violent as any city in America, and more violent than many.

He says while he’s seen criminals in other cities modify their activity to try and avoid detection — and ultimately prison — Detroit criminals haven’t really bent much. He calls them “prideful” when it comes to street survival.

“Drive-by shootings. Home invasions. Aggravated assaults. I see a lot of things that I consider to be a throwback” to the old days.

No better example of the dangers in the city was the shootout last week between members of an ATF task force and a murder suspect they were trying to arrest near Linwood and Hooker on the city’s west side. The task force boxed in the suspect’s car. When officers approached, the suspect opened fire. One Detroit police officer on the task force was shot twice in the leg. Another Detroit cop on the task force suffered what was first thought to be gunshot wounds to the head.

But Deadline Detroit reported Sunday night that the officer may have actually been hit in the head by metal fragments, perhaps from a car, that came from a bullet striking the vehicle. The officer remains hospitalized. The suspect, Matthew Joseph, 23, was killed in the shootout.

To read more including a Q & A click here.

BALTIMORE — The FBI has a long, storied history of infiltrating and prosecuting the Outlaws Motorcycle Club (OMC) as an organized-crime gang, including some high-profile cases in recent years. On Jan. 31, a Baltimore man put himself squarely in the middle of one such probe in Philadelphia by allegedly phoning in threats in an effort to collect money owed for about two pounds of methamphetamine, court documents show. What the Baltimore man didn’t know is that the person he allegedly threatened was pretending to be a biker-gang member and was actually working undercover to infiltrate the OMC on behalf of the FBI.

The man who made the alleged phone calls, 42-year-old Michael James Privett of 6600 Gary Ave. in East Baltimore’s O’Donnell Heights neighborhood, was charged with “collection of extensions of credit by extortionate means,” which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Privett appeared in Maryland U.S. District Court on Feb. 5, after his arrest, and his case was transferred to federal court in Philadelphia.

To read the full story click here. 

ILLUSTRATION BY NOAH PATRICK PFARR/Baltimore City Paper

BALTIMORE — The Lancair IV-P airplane is a sleek four-seater, capable of flying 330 miles per hour and more than 1,500 miles on a tank of gas. The one that was seized in June 2009 from Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport, near Denver, had been purchased the previous summer for $450,000. The buyer, a Delaware company called Air Sky Holdings LLC, still owed the seller about $64,000. But the Lancair was not repossessed due to outstanding debt. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration took it.

What led law enforcers to that Lancair was a game-changing series of events for a sprawling, sophisticated outfit of Baltimore-based potrepreneurs whose illicit, high-volume business had been a veritable license to print money. Its seizure didn’t immediately end the flow of eye-popping amounts of premium weed they’d been moving, but it was a red flag, putting key players on notice that the gig was nosediving into a forest of cops, lawyers, and judges.

And nosedive it did, ultimately resulting in at least three federal cases and possibly dozens of state-level ones, all in Maryland.

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Richard McFeely/fbi photo

During his brief tenure in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore feed office, Richard A. McFeely refocused investigations on corruption and gangs, the Baltimore Sun reports.

Now McFreely is becoming assistant director of criminal and cyber operations at FBI headquarters.

During his thee years in Baltimore, McFreely oversaw high-profile cases, including the investigations of Baltimore police, violent drug trafficker Steven Blackwell, founder of the prison gang Dead Man Inc. and a man who tried to blow up an Army recruiting station, according to the Sun.

McFreely said he wasn’t changing the priorities of the FBI, but believed there was a disproportionate focus on terrorism.

Kevin Perkins/fbi photo

Kevin Perkins is moving up.

The veteran FBI agent has been named the agency’s associate deputy director, the number three spot at FBI headquarters. He’s  replacing Thomas J. Harrington, who is retiring.

In 2009, he was named assistant director of the bureau’s Criminal Investigative Division.

He joined the FBI in 1986 and has worked in Kansas City, Baltimore, Philadelphia and headquarters.

Assemblage by Mel Guapo/baltimore city paper

BALTIMORE — Last April, thousands of miles from Baltimore in the West African country of Ghana, a man known as “Wagba” got on the phone and mediated a Baltimore heroin-dealing dispute.

Nana Boateng, who supplied Baltimore dealers with heroin shipped under Wagba’s direction by couriers traveling to the United States on commercial flights leaving West Africa, was in a heated argument with another Ghanaian, Krist Koranteng, who also supplied Baltimore heroin dealers with courier-carried heroin from West Africa.

The two were threatening one another, with Koranteng saying he’d arrange for men to come from Ghana to kill Boateng if he didn’t pay up for short-changing Koranteng’s friend, Moses Appram, on a 200-gram heroin deal. Boateng, in response, vowed to come to Ghana and kill Koranteng himself.

Since Boateng’s phones were wiretapped as part of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigation, his conversations with Wagba were recorded for posterity.

To read the full story click here.

Illustration Alex Fine/ Baltimore City Paper

BALTIMORE — “It’s hard to promote black nationalism when you have a black man in the White House,” Thomas Bailey said on Jan. 6, 2009, weeks before Barack Obama was sworn in as the first African-American President of the United States. Bailey, a Maryland inmate serving life for murder, couldn’t have known at the time how prophetic his words were, or that they would end up memorialized in court documents.

As Obama was movings into the White House, court documents show that federal investigators with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Maryland—a unit dubbed the Special Investigations Group (DEA-SIG)—were kicking into gear a sprawling probe of the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF), the black-nationalist prison gang for which Bailey ran “the day-to-day operations” at North Branch Correctional Institution (NBCI), a maximum-security prison near Cumberland.

When Bailey uttered those prescient words, he was talking over a prison phone at NBCI with Eric Marcell Brown (“Eric Marcell Brown,” Mobtown beat, May 7, 2009), who was on a cell phone at the Maryland Transition Center (MTC), a correctional facility in Baltimore, where Brown was close to finishing a lengthy prison stint for a 1992 drug-dealing conviction. Brown, DEA-SIG investigators wrote in court documents, was “in command of day-to-day operations” in Maryland for the BGF, a national prison gang founded in California in the 1960s by inmate/radical George Jackson, a Black Panther Party member who espoused the black-nationalist view that African-Americans needed to build separate economic and social structures for themselves.

To read the full story click here.

By Allan Lengel

A 22-year-old Baltimore man pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court in Baltimore to plotting to blow up an armed forces recruiting station in Catonsville, Md., the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore said.

Antonio Martinez, aka Muhammad Hussain, a U.S. citizen, pleaded guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction against federal property. He had been arrested on Dec. 8, 2010, after he attempted to detonate what he believed to be explosives at the armed forces recruiting station.

“We are catching dangerous suspects before they strike, and we are investigating them in a way that maximizes the liberty and security of law-abiding citizens,” said U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein in a statement. “That is what the American people expect of the Justice Department, and that is what we aim to deliver.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said, according to his plea agreement, on Oct. 22, 2010, Martinez broached the subject of  attacking military targets with an FBI confidential source (CS). During the recorded conversations that followed between Martinez, the confidential sources and later, an FBI undercover agent, “Martinez identified his target—an armed forces recruiting station in Catonsville—and spoke about his anger toward America, his belief that Muslims were being unjustly targeted and killed by the American military and his desire to commit jihad to send a message that American soldiers would be killed unless the country stopped its ‘war’ against Islam.”

The feds  said Martinez attempted to recruit a number of people to join in the plot, and one of them tried to dissuade him from committing jihad.

At one point, the FBI confidential source introduced his “Afghani brother”, who ended up being an undercover FBI agent who posed as someone interested in the plot.