Armed with an incriminating photo, a band of blackmailers hustled $200,000 from a prominent New Haven attorney. They demanded more — then Det. Robin Higgins and her “take-down team” stepped in.
Seeking help after a year of torment, the attorney came to Higgins in October. One day later, she had the first suspect in handcuffs.
A 17-year veteran of the city police force, Higgins (pictured) is one of the top detectives who handle sex-related crimes. When the department learned of a high-profile extortion case, they sent it right to her.
Higgins and Det. Angela Augustine-Day sat down with the attorney and heard his story for the first time.
“He was desperate,” Higgns said.
The man, an elderly New Haven attorney whom Higgins declined to name, told of a pattern of abuse that was threatening his marriage and his reputation and draining his retirement funds. Vexed by the matter for a whole year, he had shed 35 pounds.
At first, she said, he “acted like a lawyer,” telling her what to do. A 43-year-old mother of two young kids, Higgins speaks in a warm but assertive manner. She laid down the ground rules. “I said no — you’re going to answer my questions.”
He did. He told her he had spent the last year under the demands of a band of street criminals who had gotten their hands on an incriminating photo.
The photo showed the attorney getting oral sex from a female prostitute named “Mama,” according to someone familiar with the case. Someone, apparently in cahoots with Mama, had snapped the photo and turned it into a business opportunity. The attorney’s face wasn’t in the photo, but the evidence was damning enough to prompt him to pay thousands of dollars to keep it from his wife.
At his first estimate, the attorney figured his blackmail payments had totaled about $100,000.
“It sounds like the Sopranos or something,” said Higgins, recounting the tale one recent afternoon at a downtown bookstore cafe. She found out it was true. Police would later calculate he had spent twice that much, about $200,000, trying to keep the secret safe.
The pattern of extortion started about a year ago, when a former client came to him with the photo, Higgins said. The client threatened to show it to his wife unless he paid money. The attorney complied, handing over some cash in envelope.
Then the alleged blackmailer got some friends in on the business. Strangers, using aliases, started calling the attorney, demanding up to $5,000 in cash at a time. For a year, the requests kept pouring in — from six, seven, eight different people.
“They kept coming back, kept coming back,” said Higgins. They threatened to tell his family. They even showed up at his house.
For a year, the attorney declined to turn to police because he didn’t know if he’d get busted for the incident in the photo, Higgins said. But when the alleged blackmailers approached his wife, he felt he didn’t have a choice. After the secret got out to his wife, he turned to the police.
At that point, the attorney had been digging into his retirement savings to make the payments, Higgins said.
“He was a sad, desperate man.”
The Take-Down Team
On the same October day that the attorney went to Higgins for help, he got another blackmail request, according to Higgins. It came to his office through his fax machine. The person left a number to call.
Higgins told the attorney not to call the number back; she would take care of it. With three cops for backup, Higgins zeroed in on the suspect the next day. They followed the fax number to its origin. At the end of that electronic trail, they found their first suspect. They made the arrest on the spot.
Before much longer came a second opportunity to put the blackmailing to a stop. An arrest warrant tells the story of how a sting operation netted three more suspects in the case:
On October 28, the attorney got a call from a man named “Germaine,” according to the warrant. He also got a visit from an unknown man at the reception desk of his downtown office. While he was on the phone with Higgins, he got a knock on his office window. He didn’t see who was there.
Higgins told the attorney she would be right there. At the office, cops didn’t find any mystery visitors. They did find a note from the visitor with a phone number. With the number in hand, the detectives agreed to set up a time the next morning to bust the blackmailer.
They headed back to police headquarters to hatch a plan.
At 9:20 a.m., Higgins gathered the special investigations unit and gave instructions to six different teams.
She dispatched five teams to stake out the perimeter of the attorney’s office, in unmarked police cars.
Inside, Higgins and three others would serve as the “take-down team.” They set up a recording device on the attorney’s phone and instructed him to call the blackmailer. They gave him an envelope of $100, divided into one fifty-dollar bill and fifty ones.
The idea was to lure the suspect to the office, where cops would be waiting to catch him red-handed with the cash in hand.
At about 9:30 a.m., the plan was a go: The attorney called Germaine. He wasn’t there. They didn’t leave a message. He didn’t call right back. So the attorney called the next on the list of alleged blackmailers, a woman by the nickname “Tameika.” She didn’t pick up. But she saw a missed call and called the attorney back, demanding $2,000. She agreed to come to the office to pick up the money.
She arrived at the office in the passenger seat of a red vehicle. She went into the office, took the envelope from the attorney, and headed for the door. As she left the office, she was met with a surprise — 14 police officers waiting for her. Cops took the money and immediately slapped her with a litany of charges: Five counts each of first-degree larceny, conspiracy to commit first-degree larceny and second-degree harassment.
The man who had driven her to the office was detained, too. Cops had the attorney come look at him. The attorney identified him as a man named “Joe,” who had allegedly blackmailed him three times.
As Tameika and Joe were taken to police headquarters for questioning, a third suspect fell into the grips of another sting.
The attorney tried to reach Germaine again. Two minutes after they called him, a man named “Jeff,” aka “Bogey” called back. He demanded $4,000. The attorney agreed to pay the fee, but Jeff had to come to his office, according to the warrant. Like Tameika, Bogey took the fall — he took the envelope of money and got slapped with five counts of the same charges as Tameika.
Down at police headquarters, Tameika admitted to shaking down the attorney once before, according to the warrant. She said she was introduced to the attorney through a friend named LaShonda. The friend had gotten her hands on the incriminating photos, and told her she could make some money, too.
The suspects who were arrested were small-time criminals with not much money and histories of robbery, larceny and gun charges.
At headquarters, Bogey “thanked us for arresting him because he was tired of living the hard life,” Higgins wrote in the warrant.
“This Policing Thing”
With four arrests in the hopper, Higgins said there may be more to come.
The Sopranos-style case has capped a career that began in the records division as a civilian clerk. From her seat at the records desk, she took a look around at the police at work.
“I thought, I could get into this policing thing.”
She was right — in 1991, she became a cop, patrolling the streets of Farren Avenue on a walking beat. Seven years later, she made detective. Along the way, she met her husband Ronnel Higgins on a domestic violence case. Higgins, a former Independent cop of the week, is now assistant chief of the Yale police department.
Now she maintains the sex offender registry, teaches about sex crimes at the police academy, and is one of the top detectives in the city’s special investigations unit.
A modest person, she thanked the detectives that backed her up on this unexpected, high-profile case. She downplayed the work she did in cracking the case — “It just fell in my lap,” she said.
Read other installments in the Independent’s “Cop of the Week” series:
• Shafiq Abdussabur
• Det. Scott Branfuhr
• Dennis Burgh
• Sydney Collier
• David Coppola
• Joe Dease
• Brian Donnelly
• Anthony Duff
• Bertram Etienne
• Jeffrey Fletcher
• Renee Forte
• William Gargone & Mike Torre
• Jon Haddad & Daniela Rodriguez
• Dan Hartnett
• Ray Hassett
• Ronnell Higgins
• Racheal Inconiglios
• Hilda Kilpatrick
• Anthony Maio
• Steve McMorris
• Stephanie Redding
• Tony Reyes
• Luis & David Rivera
• Salvador Rodriguez
• Brett Runlett
• David Runlett
• Marcus Tavares
• Martin Tchakirides
• Stephan Torquati
• Kelly Turner
• Alan Wenk
• Michael Wuchek
• David Zaweski
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