Blogs: The News Hole

After complaining in court about the conditions of his confinement in Maryland’s prison system, Tavon White, the lead defendant in the high-profile racketeering case against alleged members of the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang, today was granted his request to be transferred to federal custody by U.S. District judge Ellen Hollander. The reasons cited...
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Just before Christmas 2007, Baltimore deputy mayor for community and economic development Salima Siler Marriott (D), a former long-time state delegate, had to deal with the news that her son, Patrice Marriott, then 40 years old, had been indicted in federal court for being a felon in possession of a firearm. It was no...
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Not like it really needs saying, but: Don’t take pills and drive, especially if you’re traveling with heroin and lots of cash and don’t have a job. To drive the point home, consider the case of 49-year-old Sandra Diane Rust and 50-year-old Samuel Cornelius Rust, III, a married couple from Pennsylvania. They were driving...
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Maryland U.S. District judge Ellen Hollander today issued a scheduling and discovery order in the Black Guerrilla Family prison-gang racketeering case that has caused a national sensation since the indictment was unsealed on Apr. 23, exposing anew Maryland’s longstanding problem of correctional corruption. The two-month jury trial, scheduled to start on June 9, 2014,...
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Tavon White (pictured), the alleged Black Guerrilla Family leader charged in a racketeering indictment stemming from correctional corruption at the Baltimore City Detention Center, is currently being held at North Branch Correctional Facility (NBCI) in Cumberland – and he’s not happy about his conditions of confinement there, according to a motion for a hearing...
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Sam Daniels (pictured), the executive secretary of the Board of Liquor License Inspectors and a fixture for decades, has announced his retirement, effective July 1 in the wake of a critical state audit of the agency. “OMG……………is it Christmas? Today? Pinch me, seriously!!!” Beth Hawks, a west-side small business owner, wrote in an email...
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Fox News show The O’Reilly Factor yesterday aired a new segment about Maryland’s correctional corruption scandal (watch it below), with correspondent Jesse Watters interviewing an anonymous former Baltimore City Detention Center detainee who described a free-for-all party scene for inmates and confronting Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) and Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services...
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The Maryland state government quietly announced its brand-new online open source data trove last Wednesday. Gov. Martin O’Malley (last seen burying his head in the sand over corruption in state prisons) called the portal “a movement away from ideological, hierarchical, bureaucratic governing and toward information-age governing that is fundamentally entrepreneurial, collaborative, relentlessly interactive and...
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Back when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was building its blockbuster 2009/2010 racketeering case against the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) prison gang – the one that had many of the same elements, including correctional corruption, as the current FBI-investigated racketeering case against the BGF – agents identified Austin Roberts (pictured), who goes by...
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Though Somali piracy on the high seas is on the wane, it’s been making for news and entertainment recently, with a World Bank report on its $18-billion-a-year cost to the global economy and the impending release of a new Tom Hanks movie, Captain Phillips, that retells one of the problem’s more chilling episodes. While...
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As of this morning, six of the 25 defendants have entered not-guilty pleas in the federal racketeering case unsealed April 23 against Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) prison gang conspirators who, with the help of corrupt correctional officers (COs), allegedly  gained operational control of the Baltimore City Detention Center, which is run by Maryland’s embattled...
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The office of Maryland governor Martin O’Malley (D) today issued a statement detailing a seven-point plan to “enhance security and root out corruption” in Maryland’s correctional facilities, in light of last month’s Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) prison gang racketeering indictment that charged 13 Maryland correctional officers (COs) with participating in the gang’s alleged criminal...
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