I Got a Monster

May 25, 2020
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 exposé. Agent: Brandi Bowles, United Talent Agency.