Paul Bass Photo
Federal agents celebrate the Operation Bloodline round-up last May.
A federal investigator wanted permission to wiretap the phone conversations of some of New Haven’s alleged top violent drug dealers. He didn’t tell the judge that a bunch of them dated his sister — or that she rented cars for their adventures.
That startling revelation has emerged amid the plodding court progress of “Operation Bloodline,” last May’s roundup of 105 alleged members of New Haven’s Tre/Bloods crack-dealing gang. It was the largest federal drug sweep in Connecticut’s history; it is credited with having helped cut the number of murders and shootings in town.
Hamden cop Dedric Jones, a member of the federal-local drug task force that carried out the operation, received a judge’s permission to conduct police wiretaps in that probe. He didn’t tell the judge who gave him the permission that about his sister’s relationships with targets of his wiretaps. His sister’s voice ended up among those Jones and his colleagues listened in on.
Those revelations surfaced in documents recently filed in the case. Two of the defendants are asking U.S. District Court Judge Robert Chatigny (pictured) to suppress evidence gathered from those wiretaps. Lawyers on both sides argued before Chatigny at a hearing in Hartford Tuesday over whether he should conduct an evidentiary hearing into the matter.
None of the defendants has gone to trial yet. (Click here for a previous story about Judge Chatigny’s previous concerns that feds created a “crisis” by “bungling” what he called a “second-class” prosecutorial operation.) Tuesday’s hearing was one of countless pre-trial court dealings.
“Dedric Jones was not impartial in executing affidavits in support of the wiretap application, but not only knew who I was because of my relationship with his sister, sought to punish me for the same and discourage me from any further contact with her by including me in his description of potential defendants,” Operation Bloodline arrestee Zarkee Sanders wrote in affidavit accompanying a motion to suppress submitted Monday by his attorney, Jonathan Einhorn. Sanders wrote that he was romantically involved with Jones’s sister during the time of investigation, traveling with her to the Bahamas and impregnating her. (She eventually lost the baby, he wrote.)
In a separate motion to suppress, attorney Diane Polan stated that Jones’s sister had romantic relationships with at least three of the Operation Bloodline targets captured on wiretaps. She called that a conflict of interest that Jones should have revealed to the judge approving his request to conduct the wiretaps. She characterized Jones as “the disapproving brother to a sister in an intimate relationship with a subject of this investigation, and he suppressed information regarding his sister’s participation in a wiretapped conversation. Jones kept that fact a secret from the neutral and detached magistrate tasked with evaluating the merits of his wiretap application.” Polan represents a separate defendant whose alleged crack-dealing was also the subject of the wiretapped conversations.
Federal prosecutor Dave Vatti rebutted those allegations in filings in the case.
Vatti, an assistant U.S. attorney, characterized the woman in question as Jones’s “half-sister,” not sister. He also characterized the two siblings as less involved in each other’s lives than as alleged by the arrestees. “Not particularly close” were Vatti’s exact words.
Furthermore, Jones had not been aware of his half-sister’s relationships with all the targets at the time he sought authorization for the wiretaps, and he didn’t know all of those targets would eventually appear in the conversations, Vatti wrote. He claimed Jones knew his half-sister had been arrested in the past but was unaware of her being involved in any of the Operation Bloodline defendants’ criminal activities. As for Zarkee Sanders, “Jones did not become aware that [the sister] was socially acquainted with Sanders until sometime in March 2012 after the wire intercepts of Smith had already terminated,” Vatti wrote.
Vatti called “blatantly false” the charge that Jones “used his position to intimidate or procure arrests of his sister’s boyfriends.”
“Jones was aware that from time to time his sister used rental cars but does not have any knowledge as to where they were rented, does not know if those cars were rented on behalf of other persons or whether they were used to facilitate any drug offenses,” he wrote.
Jones did not return a call seeking comment. His sister, who is 30 years old, could not be reached, and her name did not show up in the directory of a downtown New Haven apartment building which she listed as her home address when Branford police arrested her in March on an unrelated larceny charge. Vatti and the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined comment.
I‑91 Stop
Both defendants seeking dismissal of the wiretap evidence also point to a March 2012 traffic stop on I‑91 in which Officer Jones participated. In that stop, one of the eventual Operation Bloodline defendants was allegedly found with approximately 150 grams of coke and 6 grams of heroin after returning from a visit with a supplier in New York City. He turned out to be one of Jones’s sister’s romantic partners. And it turned out he was driving a car she had rented for him, according to the court filings.
Jones was one of “more than 20 law enforcement agents” involved in that traffic stop, prosecutor Vatti noted in a court filing. Jones “never knew” who had rented that car — not then, and not even now, Vatti wrote. Besides, the incident took place after the conclusion of Jones’ original request for permission to conduct the Operation Bloodline wiretapping.
Much of the back and forth in the court filings concerns how much Jones knew about his sister’s relationships with the investigation targets.
The sister’s role in renting cars for the defendants led to her becoming a subject of the very wiretapping operation for which Jones had received court permission to conduct.
That doesn’t mean he had advance knowledge of that, the government contends.
“Jones was aware that from time to time his sister used rental cars but does not have any knowledge as to where they were rented, does not know if those cars were rented on behalf of other persons or whether they were used to facilitate any drug offenses,” Vatti wrote.
The sister’s “calls were classified by monitoring agents as pertinent because they involved some discussion of rental cars” with an investigation target, Vatti wrote. Only after the completion of the wiretapping did Jones “review the intercept database” and learn that his sister’s phone had been intercepted … and reviewed the calls. However, an another agent, who was not aware of the identity of [the sister] and her relationship to TFO [Task Force Officer] Jones and was assisting prosecutors in assessing charging decisions, made the determination after reviewing these calls that there was no evidence of any criminal activity” on the sister’s part.
Zarkee Sanders claimed in his affidavit that Jones “knew of my intimate relationship” with the sister. He claimed that on Jan. 18, 2011, Jones called the sister and inquired about Sanders. He stated that task force agents subsequently pulled him over while he was driving and Jones “immediately“called the sister. Sanders also stated that Jones saw him pick up the sister and other relatives en route to the airport for the 2011 trip to the Bahamas. Sanders claimed that Jones’s sister told her to stay away from another Operation Bloodline defendant based on information her brother had allegedly passed on after gleaning it from wiretaps.
In a March 13 letter to two federal prosecutors, Attorney Polan, writing on behalf of a separate defendant, charged that Jones’s sister, besides the romantic relationships and car-rentals, “carried or stored narcotics” for one of the wiretapped Operation Bloodline arrestees. She charged that Jones may have made a practice of using “his position as a police officer to intimidate and/or procure the arrests of his sister’s boyfriends.”
“He [Jones] should have disclosed it earlier. He shouldn’t have left it for the defense to uncover,” Michael Doyle, attorney for another of the defendants, said in a conversation Wednesday. “I’m sure the prosecution wishes they knew about it prior to these cases.”
Federal prosecutor Dave Vatti first acknowledged the accusation in a March 19 email message to more than 30 people involved in the case, including defense attorneys.
“[T]he Government has conducted a review of the matter, has concluded that the defendants’ claims of a conflict of interest on the part of TFO Jones have no merit and do not have any impact upon any of the Bloodline wiretaps,” Vatti wrote. “… [T]he Government fully intends to proceed with the prosecutions in the Smith matter and the related Indictments arising out of the Bloodline investigation.”
The conflict-of-interest charge — including whether Jones’s decision not to disclose his relationship with his sister constitutes a “material” omission” — is just one of the issues before Judge Chatigny at this juncture. The two sides are also arguing over whether the government needed to conduct the wiretaps, as the U.S. Attorney’s Office claims, or whether it was seeking a short cut, as attorney Polan contends.