NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS CHOICE The astonishing true story of one of the most startling police
corruption scandals in a generation (The New York Times) from the Pulitzer Prize nominated
reporter who exposed a gang of criminal cops and their yearslong plunder of an American city
NOW AN HBO SERIES FROM THE WIRE CREATOR DAVID SIMON AND GEORGE PELECANOS A work of journalism
that not only chronicles the rise and fall of a corrupt police unit but can stand as the
inevitable coda to the half-century of disaster that is the American drug war. David Simon
Baltimore 2015. Riots are erupting across the city as citizens demand justice for Freddie Gray
a twenty-five-year-old Black man who has died under suspicious circumstances while in police
custody. Drug and violent crime are surging and Baltimore will reach its highest murder count
in more than two decades: 342 homicides in a single year in a city of just 600 000 people.
Facing pressure from the mayor s office as well as a federal investigation of the department
over Gray s death Baltimore police commanders turn to a rank-and-file hero Sergeant Wayne
Jenkins and his elite plainclothes unit the Gun Trace Task Force to help get guns and drugs
off the street. But behind these new efforts a criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scale was
unfolding within the police department. Entrusted with fixing the city s drug and gun crisis
Jenkins chose to exploit it instead. With other members of the empowered Gun Trace Task Force
Jenkins stole from Baltimore s citizens skimming from drug busts pocketing thousands in cash
found in private homes and planting fake evidence to throw Internal Affairs off their scent.
Their brazen crime spree would go unchecked for years. The results were countless wrongful
convictions the death of an innocent civilian and the mysterious death of one cop who was
shot in the head killed just a day before he was scheduled to testify against the unit. In
this urgent book award-winning investigative journalist Justin Fenton distills hundreds of
interviews thousands of court documents and countless hours of video footage to present the
definitive account of the entire scandal. The result is an astounding riveting feat of
reportage about a rogue police unit the city they held hostage and the ongoing struggle
between American law enforcement and the communities they are charged to serve.
