Convicted

by Jameel Zookie McGee

  —

  Once I got out I went to work. I found a job in a factory as a pot tender pouring molten metal into molds. It was a pretty good job. I worked there until 2005 when I went to work for a friend of mine at his full-service car wash. A couple of months later he started talking about how I needed my own shop. He’d already started looking for a second location and had found a place in Michigan City, Indiana, about forty miles from Benton Harbor. We worked out a deal where he helped with the financing to get me off the ground and the two locations shared a name. But the Michigan City location was to be all mine. We found the perfect site next to a gas station. I opened for a trial run toward the end of the season and the business took off. We closed for the season when the weather turned bad, with plans to open permanently the following March.

  When I was growing up, my grandma and my dad taught me the value of work. My grandma had Jamal and me out picking blueberries in the fields and that sort of thing from as far back as I could remember. I always worked. Now that I had a chance to build a business of my own, I worked it as hard as I could. Most days I worked twelve hours, sometimes more. I ran specials and offered pick-up and delivery services for people’s cars. I even did some late-night service so that guys who were getting ready to hang out with their friends could come through and have their cars detailed. I loved the work. I knew the location was going to be a hit. When the weather turned, which it does pretty early next to Lake Michigan, we started working on the paperwork to hit the ground running in the spring of 2006.

  I loved my work, but my girlfriend did not. We started dating in 2003 and moved in together a little after that. As a Christian, I knew this wasn’t right, but since I had left any thoughts of God back in the prison, I did it anyway. I thought we would eventually get married, especially after we found out she was pregnant, but my long hours working created a lot of problems for the two of us. I tried to explain why I worked so much and how I wanted to provide a good life for us and our baby, but the relationship fell apart.

  As I mentioned earlier, my girlfriend moved out before she had the baby, and I didn’t hear from her until the day she called my brother to say she was going to bring my son over to see me. That’s why I went to the store, where I was arrested, and how I ended up back in jail, even though I had not done anything wrong. I didn’t know anything about anyone’s dope. The worst thing I had done was let Will use my cell phone.

  After they arrested the two of us, I found out Will’s name wasn’t even Will. That was his street name, short for his last name, Williams. He could have cleared this whole thing up by telling the cops that it was his dope, not mine, but I knew he wasn’t going to do that. If he did, he’d put himself in line to go to prison for a long time. Now that jail time was hanging over me.

  I kept thinking this whole thing was going to go away. First, there wasn’t any evidence against me. All they had was my phone, and if this drug sale had been set up in advance by phone, the cops had to see that I didn’t make any calls to anyone connected to any of this mess prior to the one call Will made on my phone while I was in the store.

  Speaking of the store, Will had parked his Durango right in front of an outdoor security camera. All they had to do was look at the tape and they would see me get out of the passenger side and walk into the store. They would also see Will get out and walk around to the passenger side and get in. I was so sure the tape would prove I was innocent that I asked my aunt, who came to see me, to go to the cops and make sure they looked at that tape.

  But the biggest piece of evidence that I knew was going to set me free was the police report itself. They brought me a copy while I was in a cell, waiting to make bail. When I read the first line I thought, Boom, that’s it, I’m good to go because they have the wrong guy. The report named Ox as the defendant, not me. I’m not Ox. I’m Zookie. I know Ox because he is my cousin (I have a lot of cousins), but I hardly ever saw him because he had moved to Atlanta a couple of years earlier. I didn’t know why the police thought I was Ox or whether or not he had anything to do with drugs in Benton Harbor. It wasn’t like we were close or anything. We saw each other maybe once every few years. I didn’t know anything about his business, and I didn’t want to know anything about his business. What he did or did not do was up to him.

  I didn’t bother reading the entire report. I didn’t have to. The first line was enough to give me real hope that this was all going to just go away. The moment they realized I wasn’t Ox, I’d go free.

  I wasn’t even worried about it. I knew I was innocent, and all the evidence proved it. That should have been enough. After all, in America aren’t you supposed to be innocent until proven guilty?

  * * *

  * Kotlowitz, Other Side of the River, 101.

  Andrew

  A couple of days after I arrested the man I thought was Ox, an FBI agent called my cell phone. I knew the FBI was working on an indictment for Ox on federal drug charges, which was going to be a great career booster for me. Anytime a small-town cop, like me, makes a big enough bust to get on the FBI’s radar, everybody takes notice. It felt pretty good and created quite a buzz at the station.

  I picked up the phone, a little nervous, a little excited. And then the agent asked, “Do you know you didn’t get Ox?”

  “I didn’t?” I said very nonchalantly, trying to play it cool.

  “No. You got his cousin, Zookie.”

  “Huh,” I said as calm as I could while my mind raced, trying to come up with an answer to the question I knew he was going to ask next.

  “But in your police report you wrote that you got Ox. So what happened?” the agent asked.

  “Well, you know how it is. There are so many street names out there it’s hard to keep them all straight. I just got them confused,” I said.

  “Okay, well, I need to get all the facts straight for this indictment. Did your informant tell you that you were looking for Ox or did he tell you that you were looking for Zookie?”

  Without missing a beat I lied and said, “He told me I was looking for Zookie. I just messed it up in the report.”

  “All right. I need you to amend the original report to reflect that you were looking for Zookie, not Ox. This happens all the time. It’s not a big deal. Once you have the amended report, send a copy over to me,” the agent said.

  “Sure. No problem,” I said.

  I hung up the phone and pulled up the original report I had filed. I could not just change the names. The report had already been submitted. Prosecutors and judges had already read the original report. Following police procedure, I added an amendment at the end stating that I meant to use the name Zookie, not Ox. Jameel McGee replaced Anthony R. as the drug dealer I was looking for when I went to the store on Fair Street. Then I signed the amendment, filed it, and sent a copy to the FBI agent working on the federal indictment. The amended report was filed two days after I had arrested Zookie.

  Was the amendment a lie? Absolutely. Did I feel bad about it? Not for a minute, not then at least. I didn’t care what the guy’s name was. I found a softball-sized rock of crack cocaine that belonged to him. Sure, the car clearly belonged to the other guy, but I didn’t give that a lot of thought. The bottom line was I had made a good bust. I wasn’t about to let it fall apart. The whole question of guilt or innocence was settled in my mind the moment I found the dope in the cup holder. I didn’t really care if the guy it belonged to was named Ox or Zookie or Mickey Mouse. I’d caught him in the act. Case closed. One more drug dealer off the street.

  —

  Amending the arrest report didn’t present any more of a deep ethical dilemma than the way I had changed some of the details of the arrest in the first report. It wasn’t like this was the only time I wrote a police report to reflect what the prosecutor needed to hear rather than the facts of the case. When I was still a fairly new narcotics officer, I was involved in an operation with the local FBI office. Two federal officers chased a man into a liquor store, where they wrestled h
im to the ground. The man had thrown off a jacket as he sprinted into the store. After the arrest the officers searched the jacket and found a small amount of crack cocaine in one of the pockets. I arrived as the two officers led the suspect out of the store. One of them looked over at me. “We need you to write the report for us,” he said.

  I laughed. “I didn’t see what happened.”

  “Do you know how to write a report?” he snapped back.

  “Uh, yeah,” I stammered.

  “Good. This is now your suspect and your case. Thanks for taking care of the report for us,” he said. They transferred the prisoner over to me and left. I wrote up the police report as if I had been right there with them as they made the bust. I felt a little funny doing it, but they had caught the suspect red handed. Who was I to question the methods of the FBI?

  I had a similar experience on a bust with a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent. My partner and I went into an apartment with the agent. We had legal access to the residence because the renters of the apartment let us in. While my partner and I were conducting a protective sweep of the apartment to make sure there were no potential threats inside, the DEA agent began searching the residence without consent. Under a pile of clothes on a computer stand in the living room he discovered close to eight ounces of crack cocaine, which is a lot of crack.

  There was just one problem with the bust: the search was a clear violation of the suspect’s constitutional rights protecting him against illegal search and seizure. We didn’t have consent or a warrant to conduct a search. The renters allowed us into the apartment only to come in and talk. Once inside we told them we needed to search for other people, which they said was okay. We heard a lot of noises coming from the back bedroom, which gave us reason to be cautious. But we never asked for permission to search for drugs. Now this huge bust was about to come apart because of what we saw as a technicality. After all, if we had taken the time to get a warrant, the crack might have disappeared before we could find it.

  Rather than withdraw the arrest, the DEA agent coached me as I filled out the police report on the bust. I said the crack was in plain view when we entered the apartment. Because it was right out in the open, no search warrant was needed. I said we just glanced toward the computer table and the crack was right there for anyone to see. Thanks to the report, the suspect was indicted on federal drug charges.

  Shaping the truth to ensure an indictment was something I learned was a necessary part of police work. In my mind, we had to do it. I came to believe all the legal advantages went to the drug dealers rather than law enforcement. Not long after I started at the Benton Harbor Police Department, a sergeant in the Berrien County narcotics unit explained it to me like this:

  Two plus two equals four. If you know someone is selling drugs and they run from you and when you catch them all you can find on them is a cell phone and a pocket full of cash in small denominations, you can deduce that they had drugs on them at some point with intent to distribute. If you walk back and retrace your path and find a baggie full of dope, you know it was his. You don’t have to have seen him drop the dope to say that you saw him do it. Two plus two equals four. I also know that if you don’t say you saw him drop it, you will not likely get a conviction. Therefore, you say what you need to say to make sure the bad guys are taken off the streets.

  Two plus two equals four applied to a lot more than foot chases. I overheard a county sheriff’s department senior narcotics officer bragging about how he always got consent to enter a residence where he suspected drugs were being sold. “I just have a couple of officers go around back. When I knock on the front door they yell, ‘Come in.’ How am I supposed to know it wasn’t the people in the house inviting me in?” he said with a smile.

  This same officer used an equally effective technique to get consent for searches without a warrant from the Hispanic community in our area. He’d ask someone if they spoke English. When they told him, “No,” he’d nod his head and smile in agreement. More often than not, whomever he wanted to search would smile and nod too. This officer then claimed the nod was a visible consent to the search. Few ever put up a fight at the scene when he started searching a residence or vehicle. Many of the Spanish-speaking population with whom we dealt in our area were afraid of the police and never objected as their rights were violated. Claims from an officer that they nodded and gave consent always held up in court. I learned pretty fast that prosecutors, judges, and juries usually, if not always, believe the testimony of a law-enforcement officer over the word of a drug dealer.

  Defense attorneys were also swayed by the testimony of a police officer, even when they knew things were not always as they appeared. I had an interesting conversation with a defense attorney after one case. We ended up in the elevator of the courthouse together, just the two of us. He turned to me and said, “I know how this works.” I smiled and told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. He went on to assure me that he golfs with a lot of police officers and they share that sometimes it’s necessary to lie under oath to get the job done. I almost let my guard down but instead responded, “That’s terrible they do that.” My smile probably betrayed my words.

  Once I learned how to bend the rules, I found it easier to do my job. Not long after I started at the department, I expressed frustration to a fellow officer because I just knew a car had drugs in it but I had no reason to pull it over. This conversation took place during the winter. Since Benton Harbor sits on the shores of Lake Michigan, we get a lot of lake-effect snow. Little did I know that snow can be a very helpful tool for police work. My fellow officer told me how.

  “You know, Collins, it’s a violation to have snow built up on your license plate when it obstructs the view from vehicles behind it.”

  I sort of shrugged and said, “That won’t do me any good. His plate was clear.” I felt proud that I had been thorough enough to at least look for that violation.

  The officer smiled and shook his head in disbelief. “Do you think the driver knew his plate wasn’t covered?”

  “No,” I said, unsure of what he was saying to me. Then it hit me.

  “When you pull the car over, walk around back and do a little sweep across the tag. That way the driver can’t deny his plate was covered because he saw you clean it off. And while you have him pulled over, you might as well check the car for drugs.”

  Since we did not have in-car dash cameras, this tactic worked.

  When spring rolled around and the snow stopped falling, I learned another trick. Michigan, like every state in the country, has a seat-belt law. However, sometimes it’s hard to tell from behind whether or not a driver is wearing his or her seat belt. Seat-belt violations gave me a convenient excuse to pull over cars I suspected for drugs. When I walked up to the driver’s-side window, I acted relieved that the driver was buckled up. Since I was such a fair officer, I did not give him a ticket for a seat-belt violation. However, I always needed to check the car to make sure there was nothing illegal inside. Before the driver knew what hit him, he was thanking me for not writing him a seat-belt ticket while I transported him to jail for the drugs I found after the illegal stop.

  Finding probable cause to search a car wasn’t nearly as difficult as I initially thought. A more experienced officer from a different department told me the magic words that always justify a search: “I thought I smelled marijuana.” I also became an eagle eye at spotting possible marijuana seeds on a car floorboard or on the upholstery. No judge ever threw out a vehicle search conducted because of a possible marijuana seed. I felt very confident using these methods because older officers as well as officers from other departments and agencies did the same thing. I also justified my actions by telling myself I was taking drugs and drug dealers off the street. With time, I started gaining a reputation for being a hard-nosed cop that drug dealers didn’t want to mess with. I loved that reputation.

  I do not want you to think my work as a cop was what caused me to compromise my inte
grity. Long before I could even find Benton Harbor on a map, I had already compromised that part of my life. When I was growing up, my situation was a little different from most of the guys I knew. My mom was only fifteen when she had me. I didn’t meet my biological father until I was twelve. Because my mom was so young, there were times she was more like a sister to me than a mother. We lived next door to my grandparents, who provided the stability I did not always get at home. Their house was my safe haven. They took me to church, and when I was seven I gave my life to Christ. But I didn’t exactly live what I said I believed.

  My mom and stepdad smoked and drank, so I tried both. I started smoking when I was a young teenager. I could say my mom didn’t care, which isn’t exactly true. I’m sure she cared, but her philosophy was that if I was going to do something, she preferred I do it in front of her instead of hiding it. My grandparents, however, were another story. It wasn’t so much that they forbid smoking. I knew they didn’t like it, but there was more to it than that. I didn’t want them to know that I smoked, because I knew how much it hurt them that my mother smoked. I did not want to disappoint them too.

  One day I had been smoking at a friend’s house and then went to my grandparents’ house. Before I got there, I chewed a piece of gum and did all the other little tricks smokers do to try to get rid of the smell. I went into the kitchen and started talking with my grandmother. At one point she said, “Honey, why do you smoke?”

  “Why do I smoke?” I said, a little panicked. “I don’t smoke.”

  “I can smell it on you,” she said.

  “Oh, I was over at David’s house, and his parents smoke, so it must be on my clothes,” I lied, trying to cover my tracks.