A month before the 2020 presidential election, the Justice Department announced that the FBI had foiled a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose pandemic lockdown measures drew harsh criticism from President Donald Trump and his supporters.

The alleged plot coincided with growing concern about far-right political violence in America . But the FBI quickly realized it had a problem: A key informant in the case, a career snitch with a long rap sheet, had helped to orchestrate the kidnapping plot. During the undercover sting, the FBI ignored crimes that the informant, Stephen Robeson, appeared to have committed, including fraud and illegal possession of a sniper rifle.

The Whitmer kidnapping case followed a pattern familiar from hundreds of previous FBI counterterrorism stings that have targeted Muslims in the post-9/11 era. Those cases too raised questions about whether the crimes could have happened at all without the prodding of undercover agents and informants.

For the FBI, the stakes in the Whitmer case were high. If defense lawyers learned of Robeson’s role in the kidnapping plot, the FBI agents feared, they’d be accused of entrapment. The collapse of the case, built over nearly a year using as many as a dozen informants, two undercover agents, and bureau field offices in at least four states, would have been a public relations coup for right-wing politicians and news media . Both groups have used the problematic investigation as evidence that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” against conservatives — despite a decadeslong public record proving the opposite — and as fuel for conspiracy theories that the January 6 Capitol riot was engineered by the FBI.

But the truth about the Whitmer kidnapping case is far more complicated. This story is based on thousands of pages of internal FBI reports and more than 250 hours of undercover recordings obtained by The Intercept. The secret files offer an extraordinary view inside a high-profile domestic terrorism investigation, revealing in stark relief how federal agents have turned the war on terror inward , using informant-led stings to chase after potential domestic extremists just as the bureau spent the previous two decades setting up entrapment stings that targeted Muslims in supposed Islamist extremist plots. The files also suggest that federal agents have become reckless, turning a blind eye to public safety risks that, if addressed, could disrupt the government’s cases.

The FBI documents and recordings reveal that federal agents at times put Americans in danger as the Whitmer plot metastasized. In one instance, the FBI knew that Wolverine Watchmen militia members would enter the Michigan Capitol with firearms — and agents suspected that one man might even have had a live grenade — but did not stop them. (The grenade turned out to be nonfunctional.) Another time, federal agents intervened when local police officers in Michigan were about to confiscate firearms from two of the FBI’s targets, who were on a terrorist watchlist. Local law enforcement had received reports from concerned citizens who saw the men loading their guns before entering a hardware store.

The files also raise questions about whether the FBI pursued a larger, secret effort to encourage political violence in the run-up to the 2020 election. At least one undercover FBI agent and two informants in the Michigan case were also involved in stings centering on plots to assassinate the governor of Virginia and the attorney general of Colorado .

The FBI refused to answer a list of questions. “Unfortunately, due to ongoing litigation, we are unable to comment,” said Gabrielle Szlenkier, a spokesperson for the FBI in Michigan. Robeson, through his lawyer, also declined to comment.

Federal agents paid Robeson nearly $20,000 to participate in a conspiracy that evolved into a loose plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, according to the documents. But FBI agents knew that two other informants and some of the defendants in the Whitmer case believed that Robeson was the plot’s true architect.

So on December 10, 2020, agents called Robeson into the FBI’s office in Milwaukee in an apparent attempt to silence him. In an extraordinary five-hour conversation, which FBI agents recorded, one of Robeson’s handlers told him: “A saying we have in my office is, ‘Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,’ right?” Despite federal and state trials involving the kidnapping plot, this recording — which goes to the heart of questions about whether the FBI entrapped the would-be kidnappers — was never allowed into evidence. The Intercept exclusively obtained the full recording and is publishing key portions for the first time.

“A saying we have in my office is, ‘Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.’”

The FBI agents asked Robeson to sign a nondisclosure agreement and proceeded to coach and threaten him to shape his story and ensure that he would never testify before a jury. Their coercion of Robeson undermines the Justice Department’s claim, in court records, that Robeson was a “ double agent ” whose actions weren’t under the government’s control. The agents also made it clear that they had leverage: They knew Robeson had committed crimes while working for the FBI.

“We know we have power, right?” an FBI agent told Robeson during this meeting. “We know we have leverage. We’re not going to bullshit you.”

“We’re speaking from a position of power. That’s why we’re here. We planned this out. We know we have power.”

Robeson’s role as an informant in the Whitmer kidnapping plot was supposed to be a tightly held secret. FBI agents had written the charging documents to conceal his identity.

But the FBI’s paperwork was sloppy. Supporters of the 14 defendants began to piece together clues from details like the FBI’s descriptions of passengers in a car that had been driven near Whitmer’s vacation home in Antrim County, Michigan. The clues appeared to point to Robeson as a snitch — or, in the FBI’s terminology, a confidential human source . After the October 2020 arrests, a panicked Robeson started calling targets of the FBI investigation and denying that he was an informant.

“So when you call, your intentions are to keep some of the heat off of you, right?” an FBI agent asked Robeson during the December 2020 meeting. “To point people in the other direction?”

“Anywhere but me,” Robeson answered. “Not at anyone specific, just away from me.”

FBI Special Agent Henrik “Hank” Impola, one of the lead investigators in the Whitmer kidnapping conspiracy, testifies in a Michigan court on Aug. 31, 2020. Photo: Eric L. VanDussen

Robeson was talking to Henrik “Hank” Impola and Jayson Chambers, two of the lead FBI agents in the Michigan case. Chambers, who previously played in a rock band that “bases all of its music on the fact that Christians are in a spiritual war,” was the registered owner of a private intelligence company whose purported CEO ran a Twitter account known for right-wing trolling and that appeared to tweet about the Michigan case before it was announced.

The two agents started up a good-cop, bad-cop routine with Robeson. Chambers assured him they had done all they could to conceal his role as an informant. Impola, meanwhile, said they needed to come up with a plausible cover story.

Adam Fox, left, and Stephen Robeson, right, in a 2020 photo, became fast friends. The FBI tried to position Fox as the leader of the Whitmer kidnapping plot, but Robeson was also deeply involved, FBI records show. Photo: FBI evidence

“Robey’s Idea From Day One”

From the start of the investigation, the FBI knew that Robeson, like many paid informants , had credibility problems. Robeson has been in and out of the criminal justice system since the early ’80s, charged with having sex with a minor, writing bad checks, bail jumping, and many other offenses. Robeson also acknowledged to the agents that he was previously a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang . “I can’t blame what I did on anybody else,” Robeson told FBI agents of his criminal record. “I’m doing what I hope is better now.”

Sexual misconduct is a repeated claim in allegations involving Robeson, and his handlers at the FBI knew this. A local police report in the FBI’s files describes how a 17-year-old claimed Robeson coerced her to have sex in return for a promise to put her pictures in a calendar. He pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charge.

More recently, according to an internal FBI report, a woman who lived in Robeson’s garage in Wisconsin told federal agents that Robeson pressured her for sex because he said she wasn’t contributing enough to the household. “I would not call it rape,” the woman said, though she acknowledged to federal agents that she did not believe she had a choice. The woman also told FBI agents that Robeson sold marijuana and prescription drugs out of his house, according to internal bureau documents. She reported that she suspected he was selling firearms as well. (The Intercept is not publishing these reports because they contain identifying information about alleged sex crime victims.)

Robeson’s career as a government cooperator appears to have coincided with his career as a criminal. In 1985, he testified that a member of a violent motorcycle gang with whom he had shared a jail cell confessed to him that he had “hit a girl on top of the head” before her body was found in a burned-out bar, which was allegedly set ablaze for insurance money. More recently, in the mid-2000s, Robeson helped police set up a Wisconsin farmer, who wanted to harm a romantic rival, in a murder-for-hire scheme .

Defense lawyers say the FBI used a nondisclosure agreement with Robeson — which they claim was never turned over as evidence in the Whitmer cases — to prevent Robeson from talking publicly about his work as an informant. As Special Agent Chambers reminded Robeson in their recorded meeting: “So when you get asked, ‘Why did you have to go to the FBI, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?’ You don’t have to talk about what we’re talking about here.”

Federal agents were particularly troubled by messages Robeson had sent to Barry Croft Jr., a primary target in the investigation, that alluded to using violence against elected officials. Croft’s lawyer could use those messages to suggest that the kidnapping plot had been Robeson’s idea, not Croft’s, the agents feared.

“This is something that we’re all going to have to overcome,” Impola told Robeson, adding a few minutes later: “It quickly becomes, from a defense strategy, ‘Well, this was Robey’s idea from day one.’”

Joe Morrison (third from right), Paul Bellar (second from right), and Pete Musico (right) of the Wolverine Watchmen were among protesters inside the Michigan Capitol on April 30, 2020. Photo: Seth Herald/REUTERS

“I Let the FBI Know”

In the spring of 2020, as the United States grappled with a deadly coronavirus pandemic, Whitmer, a Democrat, issued a “stay home, stay safe” order in Michigan that barred “in-person work that is not necessary to sustain or protect life.” Covid-19 skeptics, along with many Republicans, were enraged . On April 17, Trump weighed in with a tweet : “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

Two weeks later, as many as 1,000 protesters attended a rally at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing in what a state senator later described as a “ dress rehearsal ” for January 6. The so-called American Patriot Rally was organized by Ryan Kelly, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan who was later sentenced to 60 days in prison for taking part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Many of the protesters inside the Michigan Capitol were armed , including an FBI informant and former Army sergeant named Dan Chappel. The FBI had hired Chappel to infiltrate a ragtag group of gun enthusiasts he’d met through Facebook who called themselves the Wolverine Watchmen. “I let the FBI know that there was talks of storming the Capitol,” Chappel, known to the militia group as “Big Dan,” later testified.

About 10 members of the Wolverine Watchmen were with Chappel at the state Capitol, unaware that he was working for the FBI. Although he informed the FBI in advance that the Wolverine Watchmen planned to storm the Capitol that day, federal agents did not try to stop them, Chappel later testified . FBI agents knew the militia members had discussed the locations of police officers at the Capitol and how to start “ the boogaloo ,” code for a civil war. (A year after arrests were made in the Whitmer kidnapping plot, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel confirmed in a podcast interview that law enforcement perceived violence at the Capitol as a real threat. “There was a plan for mass execution that day,” Nessel said.)

The April rally in Lansing was so successful that the same organizers held another, on June 18, 2020. The protesters, including Chappel and other members of the Wolverine Watchmen, milled about outside the Capitol that day , showing off their firearms and military cosplay for the news cameras.

That’s where Chappel first met Adam Fox, who lived in the basement of a vacuum repair shop and liked to work out, smoke marijuana, and rant on social media. A stout man with a beard, Fox had already met Robeson, who was the Wisconsin chapter president of the Patriot Three Percenters militia and had started working for the FBI as an informant in October 2019, according to the bureau.

Adam Fox, photographed outside the Michigan Capitol on June 18, 2020, lived in the basement of a vacuum repair shop. He liked to work out, smoke marijuana, rant on social media, and had become fascinated by the militia movement. Photo: Matthew Dae Smith/Lansing State/USA Today Network

Robeson had come to the FBI’s attention in part through a secret program known as Operation Bronze Griffon — first revealed publicly in 2022 to Republican House investigators by a whistleblower who misspelled it as Bronze Griffin — through which Facebook provides user activity information to federal agents without a search warrant or subpoena. According to an FBI report obtained by The Intercept, agents received a Bronze Griffon lead on Robeson for posting “possibly violent rhetoric in support of the militia movement and the Boogaloo concept.” The FBI recruited Robeson to be an informant, and he told agents that he knew of fellow militia members who had spoken about attacking law enforcement officials.

Once on the FBI payroll, Robeson organized and led several militia planning meetings, including one in Dublin, Ohio , that Fox and Croft attended on June 6, 2020.

Chappel’s face-to-face meeting with Fox at the Michigan Capitol would bridge two federal investigations, known internally as Operation Cold Snap and Operation Kessel Run , and link two informants, Chappel and Robeson, each of whom was unaware that the other worked for the FBI.

Chappel’s face-to-face meeting with Fox would bridge two federal investigation and link two informants, Chappel and Robeson, each of whom was unaware that the other worked for the FBI.

The informants went to great lengths to position Fox as a leader. Robeson suggested that Fox launch a Michigan chapter of the Patriot Three Percenters. On June 21, 2020, just three days after Fox met Chappel, a third FBI informant, Jenny Plunk, created a private Facebook group called “Michigan Patriot III%ers.” (The FBI classifies Three Percenters as a domestic terrorism threat.)

The Facebook group’s first members were Plunk and Robeson, both on the FBI’s payroll, and Fox and his girlfriend, Amanda Keller. Plunk lived in Tennessee, where, according to her FBI cover story, she led a small militia. While Plunk and Robeson administered the Facebook group, Fox invited several Wolverine Watchmen and other gun enthusiasts to join, bringing the group’s membership roster to 28. Although the FBI’s informants had created the Facebook group for Fox, Robeson announced in a welcome message that Fox was the “C.O.” — a military acronym for “commanding officer.”

Robeson often spoke in the vernacular of a soldier. He never served in the military, but he was so gung-ho that he had obtained forged paperwork that made it appear he’d been a Marine, according to FBI reports. Using military lingo, Robeson posted an invitation to the new Facebook group for a weekend tactical training session in Cambria, Wisconsin, about 40 miles north of Madison.

More than 30 people attended that weekend event in July 2020, including Fox, his girlfriend, and a few members of the Wolverine Watchmen. At the time, Robeson was running scams related to a fake charity he called Race to Unite Races, whose mission was “to bridge the racial divide.” Internal FBI reports indicate that Robeson used proceeds from the fake charity to buy supplies to build a shooting range to train in close-quarters combat, known as a “ kill house .”

Militia members practice inside a “kill house” during a July 2020 training session in Wisconsin organized and partially financed by FBI informant Stephen Robeson. Screenshot: The Intercept/FBI evidence

Videos from the FBI files show the attendees shooting at targets in the kill house. Robeson, a firearm holstered at his side, can be seen giving directions. Chappel, who had combat experience in Iraq, also appears in several videos demonstrating tactics. FBI agents gave Chappel permission in advance to share combat tactics with the militia members, telling him: “ You can do what’s on YouTube. ”

In a group photo from the event, many attendees hold up rifles, offering the reluctant half-smiles of an awkward family picture. Robeson is off to the left, wearing flip-flops, American-flag swimming trunks, and a sleeveless T-shirt that hangs over his large belly. He’s holding up three fingers, the sign of the Three Percenters.

The events of that weekend were critical to the Justice Department’s case, as they appeared to show the men training for scenarios they’d encounter in their supposed attempt to kidnap Michigan’s governor. But by the time the FBI spoke to Robeson in December 2020, federal agents were deeply concerned that the fine details of that weekend might suggest entrapment.

“You’ve got a Wisconsin Patriot Three Percenter role-playing the kidnapping with Wolverine Watchman at the training you’ve set up, right?” Impola, the FBI agent, said to Robeson.

“It wasn’t just me,” Robeson said. “I set it up and —”

“These are things we need to discuss,” Chambers interrupted.

“You’ve got a Wisconsin Patriot Three Percenter role-playing the kidnapping, with Wolverine Watchmen at the training you set up, right?”

Impola told Robeson that the FBI’s case notes show that a Wisconsin agent was aware of the training, but that federal agents did not know that Robeson was the one who had organized it.

“I don’t want to put these words in your mouth, but the question is —” Impola said.

“Did I do it under FBI directive?” Robeson interrupted.

“Right,” Impola answered.

“No, it wasn’t just — What I’m saying is, it wasn’t me. It was Adam [Fox] that asked if they could do that —”

“Yup,” the two FBI agents said in unison.

“It was Barry [Croft] who asked if we could get a joint one together. It was Illinois. And I asked before I said yes.”

“The question becomes: Did a bunch of terrorists Shanghai your training for their purposes, or did you set up a training for terrorists?” Impola asked. “That’s the question, right? There’s a training that happened in which a terrorist operation was planned and played out, and you’re involved in setting it up.”

“I Need to Come Play With Y’all”

Robeson’s organizing and financing of the weekend training in Wisconsin wasn’t the FBI’s only problem.

In multiple videos from the training, Robeson can be seen using firearms. As a felon, he wasn’t allowed to have guns. But FBI agents apparently believed that handling firearms would be critical to his credibility among the militia members, so they had asked the Justice Department for a waiver to let Robeson handle “nonfunctional” weapons in his undercover capacity, according to internal emails.

In photos and videos taken during the FBI sting, informant Stephen Robeson can be seen with firearms even though the Justice Department had instructed the FBI not to allow Robeson, a convicted felon, to use guns during the operation. Photo: FBI evidence

The Justice Department said no, reminding Robeson’s handlers that he was prohibited from handling even an inoperable firearm. “Just the receiver satisfies the federal definition of a firearm,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Rita Rumbelow told the FBI in a May 21, 2020, email , referring to the tube that houses the firearm’s bolt.

Internal FBI records show that Robeson and his handlers found creative ways to get around the Justice Department’s directive. One month after the Wisconsin training event, the FBI assigned Robeson a new handler, Corey Baumgardner, an agent in Wisconsin. Baumgardner later testified that he collected a firearm from Robeson : an AR-15-style rifle with an illegal suppressor and a launcher attachment. Instead of handing the firearm to the agent, Robeson left it on the ground in front of his truck. Baumgardner collected the gun, without having to see Robeson handle it.

The gambit appeared to allow Robeson and the FBI to have it both ways: Robeson could have access to guns, maintaining his credibility with the militia members, and FBI agents wouldn’t directly see him handle firearms.

Federal agents went to great lengths to maintain this sleight of hand. As part of the sting, the FBI in early August 2020 went to Delaware, where Robeson and Plunk met with a group that included Croft, a truck driver Robeson started messaging online in 2019 about targeting politicians for violence, and Frank Butler, a Navy veteran from Virginia.

Butler had been in contact online and in person with both Robeson and Chappel, and Chappel had discussed with him a fantastical plan to fly an explosives-laden drone into the Virginia governor’s North Carolina vacation home, though the plot went nowhere. Butler, who was never charged with a crime, later told investigators that Robeson and Chappel “were literally brainwashing me” and “weaponizing me.” (Prosecutors acknowledged in a court filing that Robeson had offered to provide money to “purchase weapons for attacks” and “the use of a drone, to aid in acts of domestic terrorism.”)

After their meeting in Delaware, Robeson had something for Croft. Baumgardner, the FBI agent in Wisconsin, had driven the AR-15-style rifle he’d collected next to Robeson’s truck more than 900 miles to Delaware. The rifle had originally belonged to Croft, and Robeson tried to give the weapon back to him. According to internal FBI reports, Croft refused to accept it, saying he couldn’t keep it at that moment. Plunk, the other FBI informant, took the illegal gun instead.

The following month, two undercover FBI agents and three FBI informants — Robeson, Chappel, and Plunk — gathered for another training event in Luther, Michigan, with around 26 others, including Croft from Delaware and Fox from Michigan. Plunk secretly recorded audio and video during the training event. In one recording, Robeson proclaimed that he was now the national leader of the Patriot Three Percenters militia and had appointed someone else to run his chapter in Wisconsin. “I’m no longer the state C.O.,” Robeson said. “I’m the national C.O.”

Also during this training event, on the afternoon of September 13, 2020, Plunk gave the rifle to Croft, who, in turn, handed it over to Chappel, according to FBI reports.

The story of the firearm only revealed the FBI’s heavy hand in the investigation.

FBI agents appeared to view the rifle with an illegal suppressor and attached launcher as a critical piece of evidence in their conspiracy case. But the story of the firearm only revealed the FBI’s heavy hand in the investigation. The illegal rifle made a full circle, from the FBI and back, through the hands of three paid informants, never staying long with any targets of the investigation.

The gun anecdote is emblematic of the larger sting: The FBI’s informants were ham-fistedly encouraging their targets to discuss plots to harm elected officials. Those efforts reached farcical levels on September 12, 2020, during a meeting and training exercises in Luther.

For that meeting, Chappel brought a friend nicknamed “Red,” a slender man with a 187th Airborne sleeve tattoo on his right arm. “Red” was in fact Timothy Bates, an undercover FBI agent who identifies himself in government recordings as “UCE 7775,” referring to his FBI undercover employee number. Just three weeks earlier, Bates had been in Denver, where he encouraged political violence. In Colorado, an FBI informant named Mickey Windecker introduced Bates to a racial justice activist who expressed interest in assassinating the state’s attorney general — a plot that, like the one targeting Virginia’s governor, ultimately fizzled.

Bates and Chappel, both Army veterans, led a close-quarters combat training for the Wolverine Watchmen. Bates also told the group gathered in Michigan that he could supply explosives. The group’s rough plan to kidnap Whitmer at her vacation home involved possibly blowing up a nearby bridge to slow rescue efforts.

“So my guy up in Minnesota, he can pretty much get whatever. He has access to whatever one would want,” Bates said in an undercover recording. Bates had brought along several videos showing men assembling and detonating homemade bombs. These videos were all stage-managed by the FBI, with agents pretending to be rogue bomb-makers.

In this screenshot from a video produced by the FBI, a man demonstrates how a pipe bomb can destroy a vehicle. An FBI undercover agent showed this video to attendees at a training session in Luther, Mich., on Sept. 12, 2020. Photo: FBI evidence

One showed an SUV obliterated by a pipe bomb. “It’s a short video,” Bates told the group.

“Oh, yeah!” Robeson said, laughing approvingly at the explosion.

Bates explained that some of the bombs used C-4 inside pipes, with timing devices. Others used liquid explosives, he said.

“I need to come play with y’all,” Plunk said excitedly.

As he watched the video, Fox asked Bates: “What kind of price tag we looking at?”

“Depending on how big you want it,” Bates answered. “For that right there? That’s pretty cheap — 1,600 bucks, maybe. Maybe a thousand bucks.”

It wasn’t the first time Bates had offered bargain prices. In Colorado, Bates suggested he could hire a hitman for $500 to kill the state’s attorney general. In Michigan, he was offering explosives for pennies on the dollar.

That evening, Robeson, Chappel, Bates, and a few militia members drove near Whitmer’s vacation home. They inspected the bridge they’d bomb, tried to view Whitmer’s home from across the lake, and drove down her road. This apparent reconnaissance trip was central to the government’s case.

But true to form, Robeson mucked up the evidence. Fellow Wisconsinite Brian Higgins was the one who drove past Whitmer’s home — a seemingly incriminating act — but Higgins later told federal agents that Robeson had said they were hunting for sexual predators. In his December meeting with FBI agents, Robeson confirmed that Higgins was not initially aware of the kidnapping plot and instead believed they were out “hunting pedophiles.” But once he was in Michigan, Higgins learned that some of the attendees had a rough plan to kidnap Whitmer. Higgins drove down Whitmer’s road using a dash camera and provided the video to Chappel. After he returned to Wisconsin, Higgins claims he told Robeson he didn’t want to be involved in the plot.

The FBI’s own informant was telling a man he thought was the target of an investigation to destroy evidence.

Feeling guilty for tricking him, Robeson tried to protect Higgins from criminal exposure — a fact federal prosecutors admitted to in a court filing . Robeson called Chappel, still unaware that he was also an FBI informant, and told him to destroy his copy of Higgins’s dash-cam video. The FBI’s own informant was telling a man he thought was the target of an investigation to destroy evidence.

During the December 10, 2020, recorded interview with Robeson, Impola tried to coerce the informant into changing his story about what Higgins knew before the drive: “If you’re sticking with the story that [Higgins] was out there on a pedophile ring,” the FBI special agent said, “you’ll be his star witness in the defense. There’s zero options for that.”

A Confederate flag hangs from a porch on a property in Munith, Mich., where members of the Wolverine Watchmen militia group trained with an FBI informant named Dan Chappel. Photo: Nicole Hester/Ann Arbor News via AP

“We Have One Chief”

When arrests and charges were announced in the Whitmer plot , the Justice Department portrayed Adam Fox as the leader. But FBI recordings suggest the informants were the ones in charge.

On October 7, 2020, as the government was making arrests in the case, Robeson, Chappel, and Plunk were on a recorded phone line talking about who should make future calls to action — in other words, who should be the leader.

“I was thinking we should have one person … to make the call for both states.”

“I mean, I’m good with Robey, because you’re the national guy, the president,” Chappel said, adding a minute later: “We have one chief.”

“We can definitely roll,” Robeson said. “That’s fine.”

The FBI arrested 13 people that day, and the foiled kidnapping plot made national news. (Higgins, the 14th defendant, was arrested a week later.) After the initial arrests, Robeson made a series of calls to Chappel; the girlfriend of one of the militia members; and others who orbited the supposed kidnapping plot. Robeson offered several outlandish claims, including that he believed Croft, a primary target of the investigation, had leaked information that caused the arrests. FBI reports indicate that Robeson again called Chappel, still unaware that he was also working for the FBI, and told him to throw the rifle with the illegal suppressor and attached launcher into a lake. Chappel, however, had already returned the gun to his bureau handlers.

During these calls, Robeson told fellow informant Plunk that he believed Chappel was an informant. Robeson appeared to be flailing after the arrests, pointing fingers to avoid being revealed as a government snitch.

His behavior in the immediate aftermath of the arrests was so concerning to FBI agents that federal and state prosecutors discussed charging him with witness tampering, according to emails that circulated among more than a dozen FBI agents the day after the kidnapping plot was announced. The bureau then began to investigate Robeson, internal records show. Agents reinterviewed the woman living in his garage, who claimed he had coerced her into having sex with him. That woman told the FBI that during the undercover sting, Robeson had an arsenal of weapons in his bedroom; that he was bringing in drugs from out of state; and that he had proposed taking her to rallies and training events in other parts of the country so she could make money, which she described to the FBI as “sex trafficking.”

For his part, Robeson appeared to realize that he had crossed the line from informant to participant in the kidnapping plot, putting himself in legal jeopardy. An internal FBI report said Robeson told another informant that he was worried he could be linked to “product,” by which he meant explosives.

Illustration: Jess Suttner for The Intercept

“I Did This Trying to Keep My Undercover Position”

The Whitmer kidnapping plot has yielded five acquittals, five convictions, and four guilty pleas in federal and state courts. Robeson didn’t testify in any of the trials. When defense lawyers tried to compel him, he told the federal court that he would assert his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. The Justice Department claimed that Robeson was a “double agent” whose statements would not be “binding admissions of the government itself.”

The recording of Robeson’s December 2020 meeting with the FBI reveals that the “double agent” ploy was a carefully planned strategy. When Robeson was called into that Wisconsin FBI office, agents described three possible scenarios for him.

The first was that all the defendants would take plea deals, in which case “your name is not on the witness list,” Impola said. The second was that Robeson could be a government witness or, in the third option, a witness for the defendants whose testimony could support their claims of entrapment.

At the time, the agents errantly assumed that option one was the likeliest. “I am fairly confident that when anybody looks at that witness list, they’re not going to trial now because they know the ramifications,” said Impola.

But what he didn’t say was that the second and third options — involving Robeson testifying in court — weren’t real options at all, at least not in the view of the FBI. There was also a fourth option that the agents didn’t mention: The Justice Department could jam Robeson, a felon, with firearms charges for crimes he committed while working undercover for the FBI.

And that’s what happened. On March 3, 2021, the Justice Department indicted Robeson in Wisconsin on a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Prosecutors alleged that Robeson bought a .50-caliber sniper rifle, among the most powerful firearms available to civilians in the United States, and later sold it on Facebook — all while working for the FBI.

At his plea hearing , Robeson claimed he’d bought the gun to bolster his FBI cover. “I did this trying to keep my undercover position where I was at and kind of make me look a little more aggressive in the organization,” Robeson said in court.

Robeson was sentenced to probation on a federal felony charge that could have carried a 10-year sentence. He and his handlers knew he had illegally possessed, purchased, and sold multiple firearms in the course of the sting; the single gun charge represented a threat of more to come if he were to testify in any of the state or federal prosecutions.

With that threat, FBI agents stopped the facts from getting in the way of their “good story” about the Whitmer kidnapping plot. In their zeal to protect a career-making case, those federal agents also poured jet fuel on conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and the January 6 Capitol riot that will be central to this year’s presidential election.

The post The Informant at the Heart of the Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Plot Was a Liability. So Federal Agents Shut Him Up. appeared first on The Intercept .

F ederal judges handling the criminal cases of hundreds of people charged in connection with the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol have overwhelmingly issued sentences far more lenient than Justice Department prosecutors sought, an analysis by The Intercept reveals.

In 82 percent of the 719 January 6-related cases that have been resolved, and in which the defendants have either pleaded guilty or been convicted, judges have issued lighter sentences than federal prosecutors requested, the analysis of Justice Department data through December 4, 2023, shows. They imposed the same sentences sought by prosecutors in just 95 cases and harsher sentences in only 37.

Illustration: Daniel Zender for The Intercept

Nearly every one of the 24 federal judges handling the massive docket of January 6 cases has shown leniency toward the defendants, regardless of whether the judges were appointed by Democratic or Republican presidents, the data shows. Perhaps the most surprising finding is that the judges appointed by President Joe Biden have been slightly more lenient than those appointed by former President Donald Trump. Biden appointees issued lighter sentences than prosecutors sought for January 6 defendants in 24 of the 26 cases they handled, or 92 percent, effectively tying with George W. Bush appointees as the most lenient. Judges appointed by Trump, meanwhile, have issued more lenient sentences in 90 percent of their cases.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed that the federal judicial system has been unnecessarily punitive in its treatment of January 6 defendants, complaining that they are “political prisoners” who have been unfairly persecuted for trying to prevent the congressional certification of Biden’s 2020 election. One leading January 6 defendant compared himself to a Jew living in Nazi Germany and said that his “only crime is opposing those who are destroying our country.”

Illustration: Daniel Zender for The Intercept

The Intercept’s analysis sharply contradicts that right-wing narrative. In many cases, judges have rejected prosecutors’ requests for prison time, often reducing defendants’ sentences to home detention or probation. Defendants have been sentenced to standard prison terms in only 429 out of 719 cases, or 60 percent. Another 31 defendants were sentenced to intermittent incarceration, meaning they only had to serve time on nights or weekends. Home detention was given instead of prison in 101 cases, while defendants in 135 cases got probation.

“There is no evidence that the judges in these cases are handing out sentences that are excessive,” said Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and former chief White House ethics lawyer in the Bush administration. “I think this shows that the system is working.”

The Intercept’s analysis is the most comprehensive examination so far of how federal judges appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents ruled in January 6 cases that have reached a final resolution in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which is handling all the criminal cases stemming from the insurrection. Hundreds more cases are still in progress and will likely be assigned to the same group of judges. A total of 1,233 individuals have so far been charged in connection with the January 6 mob, according to a running tally compiled by the Associated Press.

The January 6 defendants have been charged with a wide range of crimes, including low-level violations like disorderly conduct and unlawful entry that would be forgettable if they were not committed with the aim of derailing the peaceful transfer of power. But the charges also include far more serious offenses, such as assaulting law enforcement officers and members of the media; theft; entering restricted areas with deadly weapons; disrupting Congress; and seditious conspiracy. About 140 police officers were assaulted as they tried to protect the Capitol and members of Congress, according to the Justice Department.

Graphic: The Intercept/Getty Images

Judges have issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors recommended across the board. The Justice Department is now appealing some of them.

“This dispels the idea that [the January 6 defendants] are victims,” said William Banks, a law professor at Syracuse University, when The Intercept told him about the analysis.

Lisa Klem, a spokesperson for the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., declined to comment on the statistics.

The pro-Trump revisionist history surrounding the January 6 defendants is part of a larger effort to downplay the significance of the insurrection while perpetuating the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The campaign to anoint the January 6 defendants as martyrs began soon after the uprising at the Capitol and quickly gained momentum. The following year, a former defendant sat in a phony jail cell in what amounted to a performance art installation created for attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and last spring, a group of January 6 defendants singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” over a prison phone line became a hit on iTunes . Many January 6 defendants have sought to cash in on their fame and have raised millions of dollars from right-wing supporters, particularly through the Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo. Prosecutors have asked judges to impose fines to counter the flood of donations.

The right-wing support for January 6 defendants has continued even as many have apologized in court for their actions and blamed Trump for lying about the election results and inciting them to storm the Capitol. One recent study by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found that 174 January 6 defendants have said they believed they were doing Trump’s bidding.

Lawyers for Peter Schwartz, who threw a chair at police officers and attacked them with pepper spray, told the court that he was only following Trump’s directions. “There remain many grifters out there who remain free to continue propagating the ‘great lie’ that Trump won the election, Donald Trump being the most prominent,” they wrote in an April 2023 court filing . “Mr. Schwartz is not one of these individuals; he knows he was wrong.”

Trump and the MAGA right have ignored these statements of remorse and continue to treat the defendants as heroic figures. At a campaign event in Texas in November, the Republican front-runner described incarcerated January 6 offenders as “hostages, not prisoners.” Last June, Trump attended a fundraiser for January 6 defendants, calling them “great people” who have “been made to pay a price.”

J. Michael Luttig, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, said that the pro-Trump attacks on the judicial process in the January 6 cases are deeply damaging to the nation. “The American people, as well as the courts, must understand that the former president will continue these disgraceful, condemnable attacks on our institutions of law and democracy until he has succeeded in delegitimizing them in the eyes of a sufficient number of Americans that not only will they not accept the justice system’s verdicts against him, but they will return him to The White House in 2024 precisely because of those verdicts.”

Graphic: The Intercept/Getty Images

Federal sentencing guidelines establish a range for each crime, but the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that sentencing guidelines are not mandatory. Federal judges must consider the guidelines, but they are not required to follow them. Prosecutors usually make recommendations in criminal cases, often reflecting the guidelines, while defense attorneys tend to propose lower sentences. But judges can ignore both recommendations.

The judges handling the January 6 cases have taken advantage of the leeway they are granted under the law to largely ignore prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations. Luttig, who was appointed to the federal bench by President George H.W. Bush, said he always had confidence that judges handling the January 6 cases were not persecuting the defendants as Trump and his supporters had alleged, and were instead following normal and consistent sentencing patterns. He said he was not surprised “by the fact that the judges appear to have sentenced this group of defendants to lesser terms of imprisonment than was generally recommended by the prosecutors,” nor that “the party affiliation of the president appointing the judges” was not “a variable” in their sentencing patterns.

“This is as it should be,” Luttig said.

Obama appointees have handled the most January 6 cases, and they, too, have issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought in the vast majority. They have presided over 337 cases that have been resolved and have issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought in 281 of them, or just over 83 percent.

Judge Tanya Chutkan — who is presiding over Trump’s own federal trial on charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and who Trump and his supporters have accused of being out to get the former president — has actually been lenient in many of the other January 6 cases she has handled. She has issued sentences lighter than prosecutors sought in almost exactly half — 19 out of 39 — of her January 6 cases. Those statistics contradict a media narrative promoted by the MAGA right that Chutkan, an Obama appointee, has meted out unusually harsh sentences in cases related to the Capitol riot and that she may be exceptionally tough on Trump as well.

Judges appointed by Trump have issued lesser sentences than prosecutors wanted at only a slightly higher rate than Obama appointees. Out of 173 cases, Trump appointees gave lighter sentences than the government requested in 156. Trump appointees agreed to the sentences recommended by prosecutors in 16 cases, while issuing a harsher sentence in one.

By contrast, judges appointed by President Bill Clinton have meted out the harshest sentences, yet they have still been more lenient than prosecutors recommended slightly more than half the time. George W. Bush appointed judges have issued lesser sentences than prosecutors sought in 50 out of 54 cases, or 92 percent, while judges appointed by Ronald Reagan issued more lenient sentences in 42 out of 68 cases, or 61 percent.

Illustration: Daniel Zender for The Intercept

Judges handling the January 6 cases have been relatively lenient even when sentencing the most prominent defendants charged with the most serious crimes. Some leaders of militant groups were convicted of seditious conspiracy — plotting to use force to keep Trump in power — and received long sentences, but those penalties were still significantly lighter than what prosecutors had recommended.

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in prison by Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee. That struck many as a long sentence for the 58-year-old graduate of Yale Law School, but it was seven years less than prosecutors recommended for a man the government says was one of the insurrection’s key leaders. Mehta imposed the lesser sentence despite finding that Rhodes’s actions constituted terrorism, which calls for longer sentences under federal guidelines. The Justice Department has appealed the sentence, along with those of other Oath Keepers who received much lighter sentences than prosecutors recommended.

When it came time to mete out punishment for Kelly Meggs, the leader of the Oath Keepers Florida chapter who joined other members of the group to march up the steps of the U.S. Capitol in a “stack” formation to storm the building, Mehta issued a sentence of 188 months in prison; prosecutors had sought a 252-month sentence. Prosecutors asked that Oath Keepers member Roberto Minuta — a tattoo shop owner in Newburgh, New York, who was also convicted of seditious conspiracy — serve 204 months in prison, but Mehta sentenced him to just 54 months. On his way to Washington, Minuta filmed a video of himself warning that “millions will die” in a looming civil war; just before the Capitol riot began, he and Meggs were part of a security detail for Trump adviser Roger Stone.

Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy, was sentenced to 22 years in prison by Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee. Tarrio’s is the longest sentence given to any January 6 defendant so far, but it was still much shorter than the 33 years that prosecutors had recommended. The Justice Department has indicated that it plans to appeal the sentences of Tarrio and four other Proud Boys.

Jacob Chansley stormed the U.S. Capitol shirtless, covered in face paint, and wearing a horned headdress. He became known as the “QAnon Shaman” and got all the way up to the Senate rostrum, where he wrote a threatening note to Vice President Mike Pence, who was due to preside over the congressional certification of the presidential vote. “It’s only a matter of time,” the note read. “Justice is coming!”

Prosecutors described Chansley as “the public face of the Capitol riot” and asked that he be sentenced to 51 months in prison after he was convicted in 2021 of obstructing an official proceeding. Senior Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, sentenced him to 41 months, but Chansley was released after just 27 months. In July, Lamberth dismissed an effort by Chansley to get his conviction overturned, noting that new information obtained by prosecutors showed that Chansley may have been aware that a gallows had been erected outside the Capitol when he wrote his threatening note to Pence — evidence that Lamberth said might have convinced him to issue a longer sentence.

Chansley is now gearing up to run for Congress, the institution he helped invade on January 6. As he launches his bid for a House seat in Arizona’s 8 ^th District, the 36-year-old says he may rebrand himself as “ America’s shaman .” Just before Christmas, Chansley attended a conference of Turning Point USA, a major conservative group, in Phoenix and had his photo taken with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing House member from Georgia. Chansley wore the same costume he’d had on at the Capitol; Greene said she was honored to meet him .

The most lenient individual judge handling January 6 cases was not appointed by Trump or Biden, but by George W. Bush. Judge John Bates, now on “senior” or semi-retired status, issued sentences more lenient than prosecutors sought in all 28 of the January 6 cases he handled, often turning down requests for prison time and letting defendants walk free.

Take the case of Abram Markofski, an active member of the Wisconsin National Guard when he stormed the Capitol. After Markofski agreed to plead guilty to one of four charges against him — parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building — prosecutors asked for him to spend 14 days in jail; Bates gave him two years’ probation instead. Prosecutors sought a sentence of 30 days in jail for Thomas Fee, a retired New York firefighter who pleaded guilty to a parading charge that carried a sentence of up to six months in prison, but again Bates sentenced him to probation. Prosecutors sought seven months in jail for right-wing Florida pastor James Cusick; nine months for his son Casey Cusick; and seven months for David Lesperance, a member of Cusick’s congregation. Bates reduced their sentences to just 10 days each.

Bates has shown leniency toward even the most violent January 6 defendants on his docket. He sentenced Joseph Padilla, a former corrections officer from Tennessee who threw a flagpole that hit a police officer in the head, to 78 months in prison, less than half the 171-month sentence sought by prosecutors. Bates gave Padilla the lower sentence even after describing him as “one of the most aggressive rioters” on January 6.

“The judge was fair, I have to admit,” Padilla’s wife wrote in September on GiveSendGo, the Christian fundraising website.

Bates was also lenient in the wild case of Nathan Pelham. The same day Pelham agreed to surrender on charges related to the Capitol riot, the Texas man was arrested for shooting a gun in the direction of law enforcement officers. The shooting happened in April, after an FBI agent called Pelham to inform him of the January 6 charges. Later that day, when a local sheriff’s deputy was sent to his home for a welfare check, Pelham fired in the deputy’s direction. Prosecutors wanted Pelham to spend six months in prison for his role in the insurrection, but Bates sentenced Pelham to just a $500 fine in the January 6 case. Separately, Pelham pleaded guilty to a charge of illegal possession of a firearm in connection with the shooting and was sentenced to two years in prison.

One Obama appointee has been nearly as lenient as Bates. Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the District Court in Washington, D.C., has issued sentences more lenient than prosecutors sought in 34 of the 37 cases he has handled.

William Cotton of Rhode Island was a low-level member of the mob that breached the U.S. Capitol, and he quickly cut a plea deal with the government. But prosecutors contended that he should still spend some time in jail because they said he showed no remorse for his actions. “Cotton does not view this case or his participation in the Jan. 6 riot as serious,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. “Put differently, Cotton does not take this case seriously because he does not expect this Court to take it seriously.” It appears that Cotton was right; while prosecutors sought a 21-day prison sentence, Boasberg gave him probation instead.

Boasberg also issued a lighter sentence than prosecutors sought in the case of a defendant involved in one of the riot’s most violent incidents. On January 6, Jonathan Munafo of Albany, New York, stole a police officer’s shield and repeatedly punched him, causing “the officer’s head to snap back,” prosecutors wrote in a statement. The government sought 37 months in prison, but Boasberg reduced the sentence to 33 months, despite the fact that Munafo had been arrested in another election-related case for making death threats to a Michigan 911 dispatcher in a series of deranged calls on January 5, 2021. Munafo, who reportedly spent much of 2020 following Trump around to campaign events, was separately sentenced to 24 months in prison on charges related to the death threats.

Kevin Seefried, second from left, holds a Confederate battle flag as he and other insurrectionists loyal to President Donald Trump are confronted by U.S. Capitol Police officers outside the Senate chamber inside the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, has also been extraordinarily lenient, issuing lighter sentences than prosecutors sought in 48 of the 50 January 6 cases he has handled, including cases involving some of the day’s most infamous incidents. Kevin Seefried of Delaware was photographed carrying a Confederate flag through the Capitol building, an image that went viral and captured the extremist, racist aspect of January 6. Seefried also confronted U.S. Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, a Black man, and threatened him with the flagpole. Seefried, the first rioter to encounter Goodman, cursed at the officer and chased him up a flight of stairs in a scene famously captured on video. Goodman testified that Seefried told him, “You can shoot me, man, but we’re coming in.” The flagpole with a Confederate flag on it, prosecutors noted, “was brandished by a man standing at the front of a volatile, growing mob towards a solitary, Black police officer.”

Goodman said that Seefried jabbed the flagpole in his direction several times while demanding to know “where are the members at, where are they counting votes?” Prosecutors recommended 70 months in prison for Seefried, but McFadden sentenced him to 36 months.

In the case of Geoffrey Sills, a Virginia man who stole a baton from a police officer and beat him with it, prosecutors sought 108 months in prison, but McFadden determined that he should only serve 52 months.

Chutkan, the judge handling Trump’s federal trial, has also issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought in cases involving January 6 defendants convicted of violent crimes. Matthew Capsel of Ottawa, Illinois, fought National Guard soldiers protecting the Capitol, charging a line of troops and ramming into their shields. Capsel — who filmed himself fighting the soldiers on TikTok and whose Facebook profile name was “Mateo Q Capsel,” suggesting he was an adherent of QAnon conspiracy theories — only stopped fighting after he was pepper-sprayed, prosecutors wrote in a statement. Capsel kept posting about January 6 afterward, writing that “on the 6 ^th good men had to do a bad thing.”

Capsel was charged with civil disorder and reached a plea deal with prosecutors, who recommended that he be sentenced to 31 months in prison. But Chutkan reduced that to 18 months, well below the 27 to 33-month sentencing guideline range for his offense, according to prosecutors, and not much more than the sentence proposed by Capsel’s defense lawyers.

Perhaps the toughest January 6 judge has only presided over a small handful of cases and thus has not had much impact on the overall figures. Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Clinton appointee now on senior status, has handled nine cases and issued sentences harsher than prosecutors sought in five, the same as prosecutors sought in two others, and more lenient sentences in only two.

During the sentencing hearing in the cases of John Getsinger Jr. and Stacie Hargis-Getsinger, a married couple from South Carolina who joined the mob storming the Capitol, John sought to influence Sullivan by expressing regret and acknowledging that “we brought this on ourselves.”

Sullivan wasn’t buying it. Although prosecutors recommended just 45 days in jail for each, Sullivan gave them 60 days apiece.

Graphic: The Intercept/Getty Images

Some January 6 defendants may soon find their sentences reduced or completely thrown out thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court agreed in December to consider an appeal of one of the charges brought by the government in a large number of January 6 cases: obstruction of an official proceeding. A lower court judge ruled that federal prosecutors inappropriately used the law against January 6 defendants. That ruling was overturned by an appeals court, and now the Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case.

Obstruction of an official proceeding is the sole charge in 24 out of the 719 January 6 cases in which defendants have been convicted and sentenced, according to the Intercept’s analysis; in many other cases, it is one of several offenses of which defendants were found guilty. If the Supreme Court determines that the obstruction law was misused, the defendants who have only been convicted of obstruction could presumably have their records cleared.

As the cases of hundreds of January 6 defendants continue to work their way through the legal system, Trump’s own trial on charges stemming from January 6 and his efforts to overturn the election is looming in the same federal courthouse, an imposing white stone building on Constitution Avenue just a few blocks from the Capitol. Trump is facing a charge of obstructing an official proceeding, along with other charges, so a Supreme Court verdict could affect him as well.

But while Trump has repeatedly spoken out in support of the January 6 defendants, he’s trying to block special counsel Jack Smith from even mentioning the Capitol mob during his trial, which is scheduled to begin in March. In a recent court filing, Smith made clear that he plans to highlight the insurrection as the culmination of Trump’s illegal post-election efforts to remain in power. But Trump is now trying to distance himself from it. His lawyer has argued that any mention of the Capitol riot is “not relevant” to Trump’s case and would be “prejudicial and inflammatory.”

The post Federal Judges Have Shown Leniency in Nearly All Jan. 6 Cases appeared first on The Intercept .

1 Secrets of Stardom

Only a few bones remained and there was no clear cause of death.

In the realm of murder cases gone cold, this was a challenging one — even for Kelly Siegler, a veteran prosecutor from Houston, Texas, with a nearly perfect conviction record and an evangelical fervor for solving cold cases using circumstantial evidence.

There were a few facts to start with. Twenty-nine-year-old Margie Pointer had disappeared in 1987. What was left of her was found in a ravine near Alamogordo, New Mexico, 17 years later. Despite the best efforts of a local cop haunted by the case, it remained unsolved. The Alamogordo Police Department needed help, and Siegler, star of the true-crime reality show “Cold Justice,” was there to answer the call.

Siegler arrived in town with her co-stars, Yolanda McClary, a former Las Vegas crime scene investigator, and Johnny Bonds, a retired Houston homicide detective. They had their work cut out for them, but there was an additional hurdle: “The statute of limitations for second-degree murder has run out,” Siegler explained at the start of the episode. “So our job this week is to see if the evidence warrants a first-degree murder.”

“A first-degree murder in New Mexico has to be committed in a willful and deliberate way,” she went on. “Since we don’t have a crime scene or any DNA, we’re gonna need to find witnesses who can show that it was committed in a willful or deliberate way.”

In other words, determining what happened to Pointer wasn’t the aim so much as ensuring they landed on a scenario that would make her alleged killer eligible for punishment.

In the world of “Cold Justice,” identifying new suspects isn’t what Siegler and her team are there to do. Instead, they arrive in town with the objective of wrapping up a cold case within a week. They always have a couple of suspects in mind, individuals the local cops have previously investigated. In Alamogordo, they quickly latched onto Pointer’s former co-worker, a man with whom, rumor had it, she was having an affair. The day Pointer went missing, he showed up at a friend’s cabin 4 miles from where her bones were later found with a hurt thumb and a scratch on his cheek. In the absence of a body, cause of death, or any other physical evidence, these injuries convinced Siegler that she knew how Pointer had met her demise.

At the Alamogordo Police Department, Siegler reenacted her theory of the murder. She and Bonds demonstrated how Pointer could have been strangled to death and her attempts to fight back could have produced the injuries found on their suspect. With his hands around Siegler’s neck, Bonds explained that Pointer would have tried to pull the killer’s thumb off her throat. Siegler, pulling his thumb with one hand, reached toward his cheek with the other. “Scratch, scratch,” she said. Bonds said it would take 15 to 20 seconds for Pointer to black out and at least another minute to kill her.

“A minute and a half of consistent pressure without letting go, never changing your mind,” Siegler said. “How is that not deliberate?”

“All right, sounds good,” the police investigator said. They decided to take it to the district attorney.

The DA was less convinced and declined to seek an indictment. Siegler and the investigator returned looking crestfallen. Bonds sunk his head into his hands.

“Here’s the good news: Your case is strong, your case is great,” Siegler told the investigator. “It might be circumstantial, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s ready to go right now. But she doesn’t want to do it yet.”

The episode, titled “Sunspot Highway,” aired in July 2014 as part of the show’s second season. Although “Cold Justice” had been running for less than a year, Siegler had already attracted a devoted following, and the Alamogordo DA’s decision did not go over well. Fans were convinced that Pointer’s co-worker had killed her and Siegler had figured it all out. “This is a slam dunk case for everyone except the DA,” one viewer wrote on the show’s Facebook page. “WTF is with that idiot DA,” another wrote. “You guys handed her the killer on a silver platter and she refused to charge him!”

That a case so lacking in direct evidence could convince Siegler’s fans of the man’s guilt was a testament to her skill in crafting a narrative, whether for a TV audience or a real-world jury.

As an assistant district attorney in Harris County, Texas, Siegler was known for her courtroom theatrics. She once famously straddled her colleague atop a bloody mattress at trial to reenact for jurors how the defendant had stabbed her husband 193 times. Siegler’s flair for the dramatic was perfect for TV, while her reliance on circumstantial evidence allowed her to spin bare facts into a compelling theory that might or might not be supported.

While “Cold Justice” often boasts about its track record — it has helped bring about 49 arrests and 21 convictions over six seasons, the Oxygen network reported in May — the show has also weathered a series of defamation lawsuits. Many of the cases Siegler assembled eventually fell apart precisely because there was too little direct evidence to convict whomever she identified as the killer.

Siegler’s TV career has not suffered for the controversies. In September, she took the stage before a cheering crowd in Orlando, Florida, as one of the headliners at CrimeCon, an annual conference for true-crime fans and creators. She was there to promote two shows. Not only had “Cold Justice” begun taping its seventh season, but she would also be starring in a new series, “Prosecuting Evil With Kelly Siegler.” The program, which premiered on November 18, takes her back to her home state to examine “the most harrowing homicides and toughest trials in Texas history — all told with Kelly Siegler’s unique insight and unparalleled access.”

“Prosecuting Evil” will revisit some of Siegler’s old Harris County cases, offering fans a behind-the-scenes look at the celebrity prosecutor’s “superhero origin story,” as one of her fellow speakers put it. “Both of our shows are about reality. There’s no faking,” Siegler told the crowd. “We’re the real deal.” She waxed nostalgic for her years in the district attorney’s office. “All those big cases,” she said, “no one’s ever told those stories.”

On paper, Siegler’s record as a Harris County prosecutor is far more impressive than the stats boasted by the Oxygen network. Over her two decades in Houston, Siegler handled more than 200 trials, securing more than 60 murder convictions and 19 death sentences. But the stories behind some of those convictions raise serious questions about their integrity. While Siegler’s formula for closing cold cases might make for great television, it has left a trail of wreckage in its wake.

Kelly Siegler, left, and Yolanda McClary, center, on Season 1 of “Cold Justice” in 2013.
Photo: Rick Gershon/©TNT/Courtesy: Everett Collection

As Siegler’s TV star has been rising over the last decade, a parallel reality has been playing out in Texas courts, where allegations of prosecutorial misconduct have tarnished Siegler’s reputation. Appellate litigation in murder cases handled by Siegler has exposed a history of withholding exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys, including in death penalty cases. One prominent criminal defense attorney has called on the Harris County District Attorney’s Office to review all of Siegler’s convictions.

Some of the most disturbing evidence of Siegler’s conduct is documented in the files of a case that has largely gone unnoticed: the 2002 conviction of Ronald Jeffrey Prible. Prible was sent to death row for the murder of a Houston family. The evidence tying him to the crime was entirely circumstantial. He has maintained his innocence for more than 20 years.

In 2020, a federal district judge overturned Prible’s conviction on the basis of Siegler’s suppression of evidence, ordering the state to retry or release him within six months. Instead, Texas fought the order, persuading the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate Prible’s death sentence on procedural grounds. The court did not address Siegler’s actions. Prible appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in June, the justices declined to intervene.

Today, Prible faces execution despite the fact that the case against him has unraveled. A monthslong investigation by The Intercept — including a review of thousands of pages of court records — shows that Prible’s case contains numerous hallmarks of wrongful convictions, from a shockingly inept police investigation to unsupportable junk science peddled by prosecutors at trial.

But particularly alarming is the way Siegler weaponized a network of confidential informants to construct her case against Prible, as the federal district judge found.

The star witness was a man named Michael Beckcom, who testified that Prible confessed to the killings while they were imprisoned together in southeast Texas. Beckcom, who was doing time for the audacious murder of a federal witness, was part of a ring of informants at the same lockup in Beaumont, each trying to game the system in an effort to shave time off their sentences. Several informants offered information to Siegler before they had even met Prible, according to a petition challenging his conviction filed in federal court. The petition details how Siegler encouraged Beckcom to extract details from Prible that would help her convict him and hid the extent of the informants’ involvement at trial.

“American criminal law has essentially created an underground market in which we permit the state to trade leniency for information.”

To Harvard law professor Alexandra Natapoff, author of “Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice,” the role of informants in Prible’s case is emblematic of a deeper problem that corrupts the criminal legal system. “American criminal law has essentially created an underground market in which we permit the state to trade leniency for information,” she said. Prosecutors have wide discretion to avail themselves of informants who have an obvious incentive to lie about what they know — a leading cause of wrongful convictions.

“Because so much of these negotiations and transactions take place under the table, the likelihood that anyone will ever find out is extremely low,” Natapoff said. “And because we reward police and prosecutors for arrests and convictions, we have a baked-in, dysfunctional incentive for them to use bad witnesses, bad evidence, over and over again.”

Court records reveal that Siegler repeatedly used informants in murder cases despite reasons to doubt their credibility. Details of the Beaumont snitch ring only came to light after Prible and another man Siegler sent to prison realized that she had relied on the same network of informants in both their cases. Despite strict limits on communication between incarcerated people, the two men, whose cases were otherwise unrelated, managed to connect the dots.

Siegler not only gained a reputation as a prosecutor who was willing to help informants seek sentence reductions, but she also advocated for them even when she didn’t consider their information reliable, court records show. Taken together, the records paint a damning picture of a prosecutor who cut corners and betrayed her professional obligations in order to secure convictions in weak or shaky cases. At best, Siegler was reckless in her use of informants and careless about scrutinizing the information they provided. At worst, as Prible’s lawyers argue , she actively conspired to use dubious testimony from a ring of snitches to win a conviction despite knowing the case wouldn’t otherwise hold up — framing an innocent man for murder.

Siegler has denied any wrongdoing. She declined to be interviewed for this investigation. “A second grader could see that you are biased and in no way inclined to listen to the truth or appreciate what really happened with these prosecutions,” Siegler wrote in response to questions from The Intercept. “I took an oath to seek justice and justice is what these defendants got.”

2 House Full of Bodies

Gregory Francisco lifted his garage door before sunrise on Saturday, April 24, 1999, and immediately smelled smoke. As he rushed across the street toward the home of his neighbor Steve Herrera, Francisco could see it too, billowing from the turbines on the roof and curling out from the garage doors.

The night before, Herrera had invited Francisco to one of his regular get-togethers to drink beer, play pool, and listen to music inside the two-car garage. Francisco didn’t make it, but as far as he could tell, things looked like they usually did: The music was on, and the garage doors were raised to shoulder height. By the time Francisco headed to bed around midnight, the gathering appeared to be winding down.

Now, however, as Francisco rang Herrera’s doorbell, he could hear music blaring — “maxed out,” he later testified. No one answered, so he rushed to a side door, which was hot to the touch. Francisco kicked it open. Inside the garage, he found Herrera face down on the floor between the pool table and a washer and dryer. Francisco yelled for Herrera to wake up, but then he saw blood. His neighbor was dead.

Firefighters were the first to arrive on the scene. In a den just beyond the garage, they made a grisly discovery: Herrera’s girlfriend, Nilda Tirado, was slumped on a smoldering loveseat. Next to her charred body was a can of Kutzit, a volatile solvent; on the floor was a red gas can. The walls were covered in soot, and the couple’s big screen TV had melted.

First responders found the children in the bedrooms. In one, Herrera’s 7-year-old daughter, Valerie, was face down on a bed; Tirado’s 7-year-old daughter, Rachel, was nearby on the floor. In the master bedroom, firefighters found the couple’s 22-month-old daughter, Jade. The medical examiner determined that Herrera and Tirado had been killed before the fire was set, each shot once through the back of the neck in what she called an “assassin’s wound.” The children, whose airways were full of soot, had died from smoke inhalation.

Word of the murders spread quickly. Relatives of Herrera and Tirado gathered outside the brick home as investigators processed the scene. The house was tidy, and there were no signs of forced entry or a robbery gone wrong. Herrera’s wallet, with approximately $900 inside, was found in the back pocket of his shorts. No weapon was found, nor any shell casings, which led investigators to believe a revolver had been used to shoot the couple. They gathered bottles and cans from the garage to process for fingerprints but failed to preserve what appeared to be blood stains on the wall and washing machine — evidence that could have been left by the perpetrator.

Curtis Brown, a detective with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, led the investigation. Court records reflect it was a less than robust inquiry. At trial, Brown confirmed that he spoke to just four people the day of the murders, including Herrera’s brother Edward and his brother-in-law Victor Martinez. Those interviews led him to Jeffrey Prible, who had been a friend of Herrera’s since grade school. From there, Brown looked nowhere else.

According to Edward, Herrera and Prible were at the house playing pool Friday night and had paged him looking to score an eight ball of cocaine. Edward and Herrera were both dealers, Edward told investigators, and Herrera was a regular user. Edward said he tried to find some but never did.

Martinez had been at Herrera’s that night. He told Brown that he picked up cigarettes and a 12-pack of Bud Light on his way to the house, arriving around 10 p.m. Later, with the beer almost gone, Herrera and Prible loaded into Martinez’s white Ford Escort, and the three men made their way to Rick’s Cabaret, a nearby strip club. Prible was friendly, Martinez said, and nothing seemed off. After several drinks, the men headed back to Herrera’s around 2 a.m. They smoked a joint outside before Martinez headed home. Prible and Herrera went back into the garage to continue playing pool.

On Saturday afternoon, Brown and Deputy Ramon Hernandez made their way several blocks west to Prible’s home. Prible, then 27, had been honorably discharged from the Marines in 1995 and was living at his parents’ place along with his 7-year-old son. The deputy said Prible was shocked to learn about the murders. He agreed to go down to the sheriff’s station to provide a statement.

Prible’s statement largely mirrored Martinez’s. After Martinez left, Prible said, he and Herrera played pool until Tirado came into the garage, fixing Herrera with a “look” that Prible took as a sign it was time to wrap things up. He said Herrera drove him home around 4 a.m. Prible went straight to bed and slept until early afternoon. He was hanging around the house, playing with his son, until the cops came knocking.

The deputy later testified that he believed Prible’s statement to be “truthful.” Nonetheless the cops asked Prible to take a polygraph, the results of which indicated deception. They read Prible his rights, and he sat down to provide a second statement. There was something he’d left out, he told them: He and Tirado were involved in an affair and had sex in the bathroom after the men got home from the club. He failed to mention this, he said, because he worried it would “ruin” Tirado’s reputation.

Prible provided a DNA sample and let the cops photograph him naked. They did not find any soot, burns, or other wounds on his body. Investigators searched Prible’s parents’ house, collecting the clothes he’d worn Friday night, which had no traces of blood, smoke, or any accelerant. They collected firearms, magazines, and ammunition. They found paperwork related to a .38 revolver but didn’t find the gun. DNA collected from Tirado was soon matched to Prible, but given his story about their sexual tryst, there was an explanation for that.

On Monday, police took a statement from Cynthia Garcia Flores, a childhood friend of Tirado’s. It was the first in a string of statements that raised new questions, not only about Prible, but also about Herrera — and what the two were up to in the weeks before the murders.

Flores said Herrera had told her husband that he and Prible were involved in a bank robbery and Herrera’s take was $12,000. Herrera had paid her husband, Vincent, for a “job” with some of the cash from the heist. Vincent said Herrera used the money to pay him for cocaine. Another woman, who said she’d been having an affair with Herrera, told police that a month before the murders, Prible handed Herrera a bag full of money. And Edward, Herrera’s brother, said that he’d seen both Prible and Herrera with large amounts of cash.

As it turned out, Prible had robbed six banks since March. The robberies went down the same way: Prible donned a ball cap and drove his mother’s car to a bank carrying a stack of manila envelopes and a note for the teller. One read, “This is a robbery,” while later iterations included a warning that he had a gun or a bomb, though he never brandished a weapon. Prible would instruct the teller to put the cash in an envelope and wait 15 minutes before “doing anything,” he later told a detective with the Houston Area Bank Robbery Task Force, which had dubbed the serial robber the “15-Minute Bandit.”

The robberies were part of an absurd scheme Herrera and Prible had devised to come up with enough money to buy their own nightclub. Prible would rob the banks, then Herrera would launder and grow the cash by buying drugs that he would sell for a profit. “After we bought one club, we would then open some more,” Prible told a task force investigator. “I trusted Steve. … I thought he could use his drug connections to make us a lot of money. Steve was a smart guy when it came to things like that.”

In all, the robberies netted the friends about $45,000. In the wake of the murders, the cash disappeared and has never been found.

On May 21, 1999, Prible confessed to the robberies. Three months later, he was sentenced to five years and shipped east to the federal correctional institution in Beaumont.

The investigation into the murders of Herrera, Tirado, and the three children went cold.

Prosecutor Kelly Siegler, right, points toward defendant Susan Wright, left, during closing arguments at Wright’s murder trial on March 2, 2004, in Houston.
Photo: Pat Sullivan/AP

3 A Real Trial Tiger

The day after Christmas in 1999, the Houston Chronicle published a glowing profile of a star prosecutor at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office: 37-year-old Assistant District Attorney Kelly Siegler. Titled “One shrewd cracker-barrel lawyer,” the article traced her evolution from a small-town girl from Matagorda County to a gifted prosecutor who’d shot through the ranks to “symbolize the aggressive and colorful spirit of a powerful office in a county that sends more people to death row than anywhere else.”

Born Kelly Renee Jalufka, Siegler grew up in tiny Blessing, Texas, “a wart of a town on State Highway 35 … surrounded by rice farms,” as Texas Monthly described it in a 1977 feature highlighting her mother’s homestyle cooking. Siegler’s father, known as Big Billy, ran a barbershop and worked as the local justice of the peace; he “went shoeless and held court between haircuts,” the Chronicle reported. Siegler played high school basketball and was valedictorian of her graduating class. At the University of Texas at Austin, where she graduated early after studying international business, she was known in her dorm as “the hick.”

Siegler joined the DA’s office straight out of law school in 1987. As an intern in the office’s family criminal law division, she had come face to face with domestic violence cases, which fueled a desire to seek justice for victims. The issue was personal for Siegler, who was just a child when she urged her mother to leave her abusive stepfather and watched helplessly as the system protected him. “I grew up in a world where ladies walked around all the time with black eyes,” she later said in a clip from “Cold Justice.”

Siegler arrived at the DA’s office as legendary District Attorney Johnny Holmes was becoming famous for seeking the harshest possible punishments. Before long, she was making her mark as an overachiever. Evaluations contained in her personnel file show that Siegler quickly gained a reputation as “a real trial tiger,” in the words of then-supervisor Chuck Rosenthal, who would eventually replace Holmes as DA. “I have seen her try a murder case based solely on circumstantial evidence and get a life sentence from the jury,” another supervisor wrote.

Siegler won her first death sentence in 1992. Her mother sat in the courtroom as Siegler urged jurors to send an alleged skinhead with a low IQ named Brian Edward Davis to death row for a crime he committed when he was 22. Despite her victory, Siegler cried and was sick to her stomach after the trial. “He was like every boy I grew up with,” she told the Chronicle.

But if she had any reservations about seeking the ultimate punishment, there was no hint of it in her record. Siegler was repeatedly lauded for securing convictions when the evidence was thin, or as Rosenthal put it, for her ability to make “a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Investigators and police detectives sent letters to Holmes praising her talent. “No average ADA would have gone to trial under the heading ‘Murder,’” one letter read. “‘Luckily, you don’t have an average ADA in Kelly Siegler.’”

Jurors were won over by Siegler’s folksy appeal and knack for weaving compelling stories from circumstantial evidence. She spent a ton of time preparing her witnesses — and it showed. Siegler credited her humble roots for helping her relate to jurors. “I practice every argument and time it out like I’m in that barbershop,” Siegler told the Chronicle. “I figure if I can talk to a jury like I’m explaining it to Daddy and his buddies, then I’m doing OK.”

At the start of the new millennium, Siegler was at the top of her game. Holmes, who retired in 2001, had transformed the DA’s office, putting Houston on the map as the most aggressive death penalty jurisdiction in the country . Siegler was both a product of the office and a trailblazer: a woman who thrived in a good ol’ boys club while pushing the boundaries of prosecutorial performance. She estimated that she’d won “at least 80 percent of the 150 felony jury trials” she’d handled, according to the Chronicle, although co-workers said the number was “much higher.” If there was anyone who could resurrect the cold case murders of Herrera and Tirado and win a conviction, it was Siegler.

The Season 4 “Cold Justice” cast from left to right: Aaron Sam, Steve Spingola, Tonya Rider, Kelly Siegler, and Johnny Bonds.
Photo: Kurt Iswarienko/Oxygen Media/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

It’s not entirely clear when Siegler first decided Prible was guilty of murder.

Brown, the lead detective, testified that he first brought his file on the murders to her office in late 2000. But it was another detective who helped Siegler revive the cold case: Harris County DA’s investigator Johnny Bonds, who would later become Siegler’s co-star on “Cold Justice.”

Like Siegler, Bonds started his career as an overachiever. Once the youngest Houston Police Department officer ever assigned to the homicide unit, he was immortalized in “The Cop Who Wouldn’t Quit,” a 1983 book chronicling his quest to solve a triple murder. After leaving the police force, Bonds did short stints working private security and home remodeling but quickly returned to detective work. In 1989 he joined the Harris County DA’s Office.

On March 1, 2001, Bonds received a fax from a Dallas-based DNA analyst named Bill Watson, who had examined forensic evidence submitted by the sheriff’s department, including the blood, hair, and saliva samples taken from Prible. The fax was a copy of Watson’s original two-page report from 1999. His findings were not revelatory. Scrapings taken from beneath Tirado’s fingernails had yielded only her DNA. A pair of white tennis shoes belonging to Prible was tested for blood, but Watson found none.

Still, one part of the report interested Siegler. Two male DNA profiles had been obtained from semen collected from Tirado’s body. Vaginal and anal swabs showed sperm that came from Herrera. Sperm from an oral swab was linked to Prible.

In his statement divulging the affair, Prible told detectives that Tirado had performed oral sex on him in the bathroom, which would explain the presence of sperm in her mouth. But Siegler was skeptical. Although Prible said the two had been “messing around” for some time, friends of Tirado’s rejected the notion that she was cheating on Herrera with Prible. Flores, the friend who told police about Herrera’s involvement in the bank robberies, said she’d known Prible since middle school and he gave her the creeps. Another friend said Tirado shared this opinion. “Nilda told me that she always thought Jeff was creepy,” the woman told detectives.

When these statements were first collected in 1999, the DA’s office did not consider the evidence strong enough to form the basis of a murder case. But with Siegler in charge, things changed. By the summer of 2001, Siegler had concluded that the DNA evidence from the oral swab could only be the result of sexual assault. In the absence of any other physical evidence against Prible, this would be a linchpin to her case.

In a probable cause affidavit, the DA’s office laid out the evidence against Prible, describing the bank robbery scheme and noting that Prible was the last person known to have seen Herrera and Tirado alive. The affidavit mentioned the weapons and paperwork recovered from the home of Prible’s parents; records from a local firearm retailer showed that Prible had purchased a .38 Taurus revolver in 1998, yet this weapon “has yet to be found among the defendant’s possessions.” A firearms examiner said that a projectile recovered next to Tirado’s body was “consistent with a .38 caliber.” The affidavit suggested that Prible shot Herrera and Tirado with the .38 Taurus, then successfully got rid of it.

Finally, the state cited the DNA evidence taken from sperm on the oral swab and the woman who said Tirado found Prible “creepy.” She “does not believe the complainant was having any sort of affair with the defendant based on what she thought about him.”

On August 29, 2001, a grand jury indicted Prible for capital murder.

The Harris County Criminal Justice Center on Sept. 12, 2023, in Houston.
Photo: Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

4 Texas v. Prible

Opening statements in the State of Texas v. Ronald Jeffrey Prible Jr. took place on October 14, 2002, at a courthouse in downtown Houston. Presiding over the trial was District Judge Mark Kent Ellis, a former Harris County prosecutor-turned-defense attorney who was elected to the bench on a Republican ticket. Siegler was accompanied by Vic Wisner, an ex-cop and veteran of the DA’s office with whom she’d teamed up in previous death penalty cases.

Siegler kicked off the state’s case with a provocation: “‘What kind of a man can go in a house and take out a whole family and come out clean?’” she began, over an objection from Prible’s lawyers. “‘That kind of person is a bad motherfucker — and I’m that kind of motherfucker.’ Those are the words of this defendant. … That’s what this man said about what he did on April 24, 1999.”

Prible’s words, Siegler told jurors, had been revealed by a man named Michael Beckcom, who was incarcerated at the federal prison known as FCI Beaumont. “And I’m going to stand here today and tell you he’s a vile, disgusting man himself,” she said. “He’s going to make you sick to your stomach.” But his testimony was crucial. This man would describe how he befriended Prible at Beaumont — and how Prible ultimately confessed to the crime.

Siegler previewed the state’s other key piece of evidence: the DNA taken from sperm found in Tirado’s mouth. A forensic expert would prove that Prible assaulted Tirado just moments before he shot her, set her on fire, and left her children to die, Siegler said. That’s the kind of man Prible is, she declared. “And he’s guilty of capital murder.”

The trial lasted two weeks, with the first several days focused on the fire and the deaths of the three little girls. Amid repeated warnings from the judge, who urged people in the courtroom to control their emotions, prosecutors introduced autopsy photos showing soot and mucus on the children’s faces, emphasizing their struggle to breathe before they died. Yet basic elements of the fire remained unclear, including precisely how or when it was set. Also puzzling was the missing murder weapon. Despite the affidavit arguing that Prible had used a .38 revolver, the same ballistics expert now testified that the weapon had likely been a 9 mm pistol.

But perhaps the most confounding testimony came from Brown, who said that he’d never considered any other suspect apart from Prible, a fact Siegler saw fit to reiterate. Yet the detective could not explain why his investigation justified such a singular focus. He didn’t pay attention to Prible’s interrogation, he said. Nor did he remember the names of anyone he interviewed in the aftermath of the murders.

Among the people Brown apparently did not recall was the most critical witness for the defense: a 12-year-old girl named Christina Gurrusquieta, who lived next door to Prible’s parents. She told police that she had seen Prible and Herrera arriving before dawn on April 24, 1999. Although there was no record of her eyewitness account in the police reports — Brown said he did not document their conversation — Gurrusquieta’s testimony lent credence to Prible’s claim that Herrera had driven him home around 4 a.m.

Gurrusquieta had turned 15 by the time she took the stand. She said she knew both Herrera and Prible; Herrera used to curse at her and her siblings when they played kickball and accidentally hit his car. In the early morning hours of April 24, she said, she got out of bed to use the bathroom and spotted the two men from her window, which faced the front of the house. It had to be after 1 a.m., since that was when her parents came home after working at the Mexican restaurant they owned. Gurrusquieta and her sister waited up for them on Friday nights. That night, Prible and Herrera “were just standing outside beside Jeff’s dad’s truck talking. And then I saw Jeff walk into his house and I seen Steve leave.”

Siegler did her best to pick apart Gurrusquieta’s account. “Is it possible, Christina, that the night you’re remembering was Thursday night instead of Friday night?” No, Gurrusquieta said. Did she “look at the clock to write down or memorialize forever what time it was when this all happened?” No, Gurrusquieta said. “Because a 12-year-old little girl would never do that, right?” Siegler said.

Siegler asked Gurrusquieta to read part of Prible’s statement aloud. “I then asked Steve to take me home. It was about 4 a.m.,” she read. So if Herrera did drop Prible off, Siegler said, “you wouldn’t have been awake to see if Jeff snuck back out of the house to get back over to Steve’s house anyway, would you?”

If it seemed like a stretch for Prible to have left Herrera’s place after a night of heavy drinking only to return to murder the whole household, Siegler and Wisner didn’t push this scenario very hard. Instead, they left the timeline vague. Jurors sought clarity during deliberations, asking the court to read back testimony about what happened when. The jury also seemed intrigued by Gurrusquieta, requesting more detail on when she was first interviewed by Brown.

But in the end, the alibi provided by Gurrusquieta was no match for the two witnesses at the crux of the state’s case: Beckcom, the jailhouse informant, and Watson, the DNA analyst.

A 41-year-old former bodybuilder who once managed a Gold’s Gym, Beckcom was a smooth talker, fit and confident in his prison uniform. Siegler was upfront about Beckcom’s incentive to testify, asking him to describe his deal with the state. “We have an understanding that if I testify truthfully to this court that you will reciprocate by calling my federal prosecutor,” he said. The prosecutor would file what’s known as a Rule 35 motion to Beckcom’s judge. Under the federal rules of criminal procedure, the judge could reduce Beckcom’s sentence if he was satisfied that Beckcom had provided “substantial assistance” in the Prible case. But he had to be truthful, Siegler emphasized, or else no deal. Right, Beckcom said.

Beckcom testified that he’d gotten Siegler’s name from his cellmate at Beaumont, Nathan Foreman. After getting in touch with Siegler in the fall of 2001, Beckcom met with her and Bonds. She seemed skeptical of “another inmate maybe spinning a yarn,” Beckcom said. But after he laid out everything he knew in a letter, Siegler was convinced.

Beckcom said he’d met Prible through his exercise partner at Beaumont. Prible used to stop by while they worked out. One day he struck up a conversation with Beckcom directly. “I was sitting on the bleachers in the rec yard just catching some sun, listening to my radio, and Prible approached myself and Nathan Foreman,” Beckcom said. According to Beckcom, Prible was seeking advice on his case. Before long, they were discussing it every day, while also making plans to go into the asphalt business together.

Beckcom said that Prible’s account evolved over time. At first he said, “I didn’t do it.” He conceded that his DNA had been found on the female victim but said everyone knew they were having an affair. Did he say anything about a weapon? Siegler asked. Yes, Beckcom said. Prible said the cops were looking for a .38 caliber revolver he owned but that he’d sold it. That wasn’t even the murder weapon, Prible told him. Instead, he intimated that he’d successfully gotten rid of the weapon, telling Beckcom, “Asphalt’s good sometimes for hiding things.”

Eventually, Beckcom decided to get as much information as he could from Prible, thinking he could use it to his advantage. After becoming aggravated by Prible insisting on his innocence, Beckcom said, he told him, “I know what you did. … I don’t care.” After that, Prible spilled everything. The details Beckcom shared on the stand could only have come from Prible, Siegler told the jury. “How would Mike Beckcom know all the things that he does know unless the killer told him?” When Beckcom asked Prible how he got in and out of the house without being seen, he said Prible pointed to his time deployed as a Marine. “It’s a typical high-intensity, low-drag maneuver,” he said, in what was presumably special ops speak.

“It was over money,” Beckcom said Prible confessed. Herrera “fucked me out of my money and then he was going to kill me, so I handled my business.”

To illustrate the level of trust that had developed between the informants and Prible, Siegler displayed a photograph taken at the Beaumont visiting room in November 2001. It showed Prible with his mother, Beckcom with his mother, and Foreman with his parents. “He called us his brothers and said he loved us,” Beckcom said. Still, Prible was aware they might betray him. At one point he told them, “You’re the only ones that could convict me,” Beckcom said. “If you do that you’ll have to live with it. I’m prepared to die.”

He used those words? Siegler asked. “He used those words,” Beckcom said.

A group photo taken at FCI Beaumont on the day that Jeffrey Prible, right, allegedly confessed to Michael Beckcom, center, and Nathan Foreman, left. The three men are accompanied by their parents.
Screenshot: The Intercept

Prible’s lead attorney, Terry Gaiser, asked Beckcom if he had ever lied under oath. “Yes, I have,” Beckcom answered. In fact, Gaiser continued, hadn’t a federal judge in California explicitly found that Beckcom lied in a different case? “That’s correct,” Beckcom said. Yet Gaiser did not elicit further details about Beckcom’s apparent history of perjury.

If Beckcom’s testimony filled the gaps in the state’s case against Prible, Watson, the DNA analyst, gave prosecutors the tools they needed to conjure a final harrowing image of Tirado’s death. “Have you thought about what Nilda went through in the last moments of her life?” Siegler asked the jury. According to Siegler, DNA had unlocked this story.

Watson, 36, had spent two years as a forensic analyst for the Fort Worth Police Department and one year at the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office before moving to a lab called Gene Screen. In his years testing swabs for the presence of semen, Watson testified, he’d found that anal and vaginal swabs could retain usable quantities of sperm for roughly two to three days. But he couldn’t recall ever getting even a partial male profile from an oral swab, even in cases where the evidence was submitted quickly.

Watson drew a damning — and highly speculative — conclusion from this: Given the large amount of sperm on the swab, Tirado had not had a chance to eliminate Prible’s semen by spitting or swallowing before she was shot. Would the evidence “be consistent with the male depositing the semen in Nilda’s mouth moments, if not seconds, before she was killed?” Wisner asked. “It certainly would be consistent with that,” Watson said.

In his closing, Wisner exaggerated Watson’s testimony for maximum effect. “There is no way in the world that that semen wasn’t deposited either moments before or seconds after Nilda died,” he said. Prible shot Herrera, then “forced Nilda to orally copulate him at gunpoint and executed her as soon as he finished. As horrific as that sounds, that is the only logical conclusion that you can draw from that evidence.”

Siegler was even more dramatic: “She left this world with his penis in her mouth, knowing her husband was dead, hoping to God that her babies would survive the nightmare that is Jeff Prible.”

On October 23, Prible was convicted of murder. Two days later, jurors sentenced him to death.

It was another signature Siegler victory. “Her ability to do what few others can is a continual amazement to some, but not to those who watch her work,” her supervisor wrote in her next performance review. But while her colleagues in the DA’s office celebrated, others watched with a growing sense of alarm. For one man sitting in a Beaumont prison cell staring at a life sentence, the secret to Siegler’s success was starting to come into focus — and the picture looked eerily familiar.

The post Kelly Siegler Is a True-Crime Celebrity. Did She Frame an Innocent Man for Murder? appeared first on The Intercept .

I first encountered officer Raymond Piwnicki in the summer of 2001. At the time, the citywide demolition of high-rise public housing was gathering momentum in Chicago. Having recently regained control of the Chicago Housing Authority after a period of federal receivership, the administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley was making a concerted effort to replace its high-rise public housing developments with “mixed income communities.” Among its first actions was to disband the CHA police force, established a decade earlier by the housing authority in an effort to offset the Chicago Police Department’s neglect of its tenants. That, in turn, required beefing up the CPD’s Public Housing Section. While the public housing unit was ramping up, members of the Special Operations Section — an elite unit charged with rooting out, as Daley often put it, “gangs, drugs, and guns” — were deployed to public housing developments. Piwnicki was among them.

The heat in Chicago on July 9, 2001, was blistering. At the Stateway Gardens public housing development, it was the sort of midsummer day that draws tenants and their children outside in hopes of catching a breeze. As adviser to the resident leadership at Stateway, I worked out of an office on the ground floor of a high-rise on South State Street with a small team of residents known as the Neighborhood Conservation Corps. One of our projects — a collaboration with professor Craig Futterman and law students from the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School — was to monitor police performance in an effort to improve police-community relations. That afternoon, we were meeting with Futterman and two of his students to discuss an incident that had occurred a few months earlier.

Kenya Richmond, one of my colleagues, had witnessed white officers in a police vehicle strike a young Black man they were pursuing outside our State Street office. Richmond attempted to document the incident. The officers responded by arresting him on false charges, destroying his notes, and subjecting him to racist invective. En route to the police station, they told him to stay out of their way — “Who the fuck do you think you are?” — and called him “a fucking monkey” and “a fucking nigger.” The officers involved in the incident were members of the Special Operations Section, or SOS. When they failed to appear in court, the judge dismissed the criminal charges against Richmond. We were meeting on July 9 to prepare a civil lawsuit .

Our meeting was interrupted by a commotion outside. When we emerged on State Street, we found a middle-aged Black man — his name proved to be Nevles Traylor — pinned under a police car. He was moaning in pain and distress. Within a few minutes, the two white SOS officers were surrounded by a curious and then increasingly angry crowd of roughly a hundred residents. The officers’ names, we later learned, were Raymond Piwnicki and Robert Smith.

We fanned out through the crowd and set to work documenting the incident. According to multiple witnesses, Traylor had been riding a bicycle across the grounds of the development. Piwnicki, who was driving the squad car, had deliberately struck his bike from behind, pinning him against a fence. Piwnicki had then jumped out of the vehicle and repeatedly struck Traylor in the head.

Among the witnesses were several Black officers from the public housing unit. I spoke with one who was as outraged by what she had witnessed as any of the residents. Another exchanged sharp words with Piwnicki, then used wire cutters to cut through the fence and extricate Traylor from under the police car.

An ambulance arrived and Traylor, having been handcuffed by the SOS officers, was taken to the hospital. As the ambulance drove off, a television news crew drove by, assessed the situation, then, apparently realizing they had missed the “when it bleeds, it leads” moment, drove on.

Traylor was charged with two counts of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, felonies that would require, if he was convicted, a mandatory minimum sentence of four years and would allow a maximum sentence of 15 years. Unable to make bond while awaiting trial, he remained in jail for four months.

The Mandel Legal Aid Clinic represented Traylor in his criminal case and later brought a federal civil rights suit against Piwnicki and Smith. In the criminal case, the officers testified that they had observed Traylor engage in a hand-to-hand drug transaction and had undertaken pursuit in the course of which he had fallen off his bicycle. They also claimed that they had found no money from the drug transaction on his person because he had flung it away during his flight. The defense demonstrated that it was physically impossible to see what the officers claimed to have seen from the location a block away where they placed themselves. (As a witness for Traylor, I testified on that point.) They argued that the officers struck Traylor with their vehicle to amuse themselves, then fabricated evidence and falsely arrested him to cover their abuse.

The judge found that Piwnicki and Smith arrested Traylor without probable cause, in violation of his constitutional rights, and dismissed all charges. The subsequent civil suit was settled in 2003.

Illustration: Daniel Stolle for The Intercept

On the day of the incident, a complaint was filed on Traylor’s behalf with the Office of Professional Standards, which at that time was the agency within the police department that investigated police shootings and citizen complaints of excessive force. As chance would have it, the OPS office was less than a block away from the site of the incident. Yet the investigator made no effort to interview any of the scores of witnesses to the incident. Nor did he interview the accused officers. On the basis of an interview with Traylor, his medical records, and written statements from Piwnicki and Smith denying the allegations, he made a finding of “not sustained” “due to lack of evidence to either prove or disprove” the alleged misconduct. After the judge ruled in the criminal case that Piwnicki and Smith had violated Traylor’s constitutional rights, OPS saw no need to reopen its investigation.

Racism as Sport

In 2006, the SOS unit imploded in scandal. Not surprisingly, in view of the quality of the Traylor investigation, OPS played no role in exposing the criminal activity within the unit. Rather, investigations were initiated by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and later pursued by the U.S. attorney, after it became apparent that SOS officers were consistently failing to appear to testify in drug cases.

The investigations exposed a robbery and home invasion ring within SOS: A group of officers had begun by shaking down drug dealers, then graduated to robbery, extortion, and kidnapping of anyone likely to have cash on hand.

Ultimately, 11 officers were convicted. Jerome Finnigan , the reputed ringleader (and one of the officers who abused Richmond), was given a 12-year sentence for crimes that included soliciting the murder of another SOS officer whom he believed would testify against him. And the city has paid out millions of dollars in settlements and awards in civil suits brought by victims of the rogue SOS officers.

The political fallout from the scandal was intense. Together with other high-profile police misconduct cases at the time, it generated a serious crisis for Daley, who responded by forcing the resignation of his police superintendent, disbanding the SOS unit, and replacing OPS with a new investigative agency: the Independent Police Review Authority.

The true mission of OPS — to protect officers from discipline while maintaining the illusion that there was a system in place to investigate misconduct complaints — was made clear when it was revealed that an extraordinary number of citizen complaints accused Finnigan and his co-conspirators of precisely the forms of criminal activity for which they were ultimately convicted, yet they had virtually never been disciplined.

Finnigan is near the top of the list of CPD officers with the most citizen complaints. Also high on that list is Piwnicki. The difference is that Finnigan went to prison for his transgressions, while Piwnicki remains on the force. His career was not affected by the SOS scandal, for most of the citizen complaints against him allege not corruption, but racist abuse — something which the accountability system, then and now, largely ignores.

That is not to say that Finnigan and his cohort of rogue SOS officers were not deeply racist. Their racism was apparent in their selection of victims: Black and brown residents of low-income neighborhoods rendered vulnerable and presumptively not credible due to the criminalization of their communities by the war on drugs — a war in which the SOS unit served as shock troops. And it was apparent in their fluency with racial invective such as they as inflicted on Richmond and many others. (I once heard an SOS officer, making a routine announcement about a traffic matter over the loudspeaker of his vehicle, address the residents of Stateway Gardens this way: “Listen, you hood rats.”)

Yet it was not their overt racism that brought down the SOS officers. Nor is that how their crimes are categorized. Their racism only made news as a coda to the scandal, when some nine years into Finnigan’s incarceration, a photograph became public in court documents that had been taken in a police station in 2003 or thereabouts. It shows Finnigan and Timothy McDermott , another member of SOS, holding rifles while kneeling over a Black man with antlers on his head and his tongue hanging out — their hunting trophy.

The photo provides a glimpse of something at once fundamental and elusive: the practice within the CPD of racism as sport. Officers so disposed have enjoyed license to toy with Black and brown Chicagoans. The performance of racial contempt is not incidental to some other purpose. It’s the point of the exercise, an end in itself, a perverse source of pleasure.

The U.S. Department of Justice report on its investigation of the CPD, undertaken in the wake of the police murder of Laquan McDonald, speaks to the failure of the department to identify and discipline patterns of racist behavior: “We have serious concerns about the prevalence of racially discriminatory conduct by some CPD officers and the degree to which that conduct is tolerated and, in some respects, caused by deficiencies in CPD’s systems of training, supervision and accountability.”

The report notes elsewhere that the sort of racist mindset reflected in the Finnigan hunting trophy photograph “has desensitized many officers from the humanity of the people of color they serve, setting the stage for the use of excessive force.”

In the years since the January 6 insurrection, the Chicago Police Department, like other law enforcement jurisdictions across the country, has been forced to acknowledge the problem of white supremacists in its ranks. It has, however, been slow to address the problem. Now the issue is receiving renewed public attention due to a Chicago Sun-Times series on the failure of CPD to terminate officers whose names appeared on Oath Keepers membership rolls made public by NPR in 2021.

In response to the Sun-Times series, Police Superintendent Larry Snelling, who assumed office in September, has said that the department will undertake “stringent” and “thorough” investigations of suspected “members of hate groups” and “will do everything we can to remove those members from our ranks.” A recently established citizens oversight panel — the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability — has adopted a policy banning officers from being active members of certain hate groups. And Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx has placed active CPD members affiliated with the Oath Keepers on the “no call list” of officers barred from testifying in Cook County criminal cases.

Predictably, a dissenting voice has been that of John Catanzara, president of the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police. While he agrees that “there’s things officers should be disqualified over,” he has characterized the proposed remedies as “a broad brush” and argued that officers should be judged by their actions rather than solely on the basis of their affiliations.

He has a point. Whatever the merits of monitoring officers’ political affiliations and social media activity — both of which raise possible First Amendment issues — the department has failed to make use of the most powerful tool at its disposal for the purpose of identifying white supremacists on the force: pattern analysis of citizen complaints. Such analysis can reveal racist behavior that is in plain sight, and it can illuminate the systemic conditions that allow racists to operate with impunity as police officers. For both purposes, the 25-year career of Chicago police sergeant Piwnicki, who has no known affiliation with extremist organizations, is instructive.

“Unfounded” Allegations

The 2001 incident at Stateway Gardens occurred early in Piwnicki’s career. A complaint filed against him with the Independent Police Review Authority, or IPRA, more than a decade later illustrates a pattern repeated again and again throughout his career. The occasion was a backyard family barbecue in the Englewood neighborhood on May 5, 2012. The alleged victim was 37-year-old Kendall McClennon. As McClennon tells the story, he stepped out into the alley to relieve his bladder at about 7:15 p.m. Moments later, Piwnicki and two other officers — Brian McDevitt and Thomas Carey — burst into the yard with their guns drawn. Piwnicki did a takedown of McClennon, forced him down on a wooden deck, handcuffed his hands behind his back, and struck him repeatedly.

McClennon’s 39-year-old sister Cicely took out a camera to document what was happening. One of the officers seized the camera and cuffed her hands behind her back. McClennon, face down on the ground in handcuffs, asked the officers to leave his sister alone. Piwnicki responded by discharging his taser into McClennon’s body. When the taser malfunctioned, he reset it to “dry stun” — a mode in which it functions as a “pain compliance” tool without incapacitating the subject — and applied it to McClennon’s ear. Throughout the incident, McClennon alleges, Piwnicki directed racial invective at him and his family, at one point calling them “animals.”

Piwnicki tells a different story : While patrolling the neighborhood, he and his partners observed McClennon urinating in an alley. When McClennon saw the police car approach, he fled. The officers gave pursuit and entered McClennon’s cousin’s backyard. McClennon resisted arrest. When Piwnicki attempted to handcuff him, a struggle ensued, in the course of which McClennon’s nails cut Piwnicki’s wrist.

After Piwnicki tased him, McClennon no longer resisted. When they searched him, the officers found a dime bag of marijuana. They arrested him and charged him with aggravated battery of a police officer, resisting an officer, possession of cannabis, and urinating in the public way. The aggravated battery charge is a Class 2 felony carrying a three- to seven-year sentence.

That evening, Cicely filed her formal complaint. Two years later, on May 29, 2014, IPRA issued the results of its investigation. The investigator, Alice Chico, determined that the allegations of excessive force against Piwnicki were “unfounded.” That is, she found that the alleged misconduct did not occur. Chico’s analysis focused on the accounts given by McClennon’s sister and his cousin who was the host of the barbecue. (Contacted on the night of May 5, 2012, at a hospital where he was being assessed for injuries, McClennon declined to be interviewed by IPRA.) In her interview, Cicely stated that when her brother was handcuffed on the ground, Piwnicki punched him five times in the face, kicked him once in the abdomen, and tased him. She also stated that Piwnicki smelled of alcohol and that officers took her digital camera but did not inventory it or return it.

The cousin was inside the house when the police entered the backyard. When she went to her back door, she found that three of her guests, including McClennon, were handcuffed. She says she saw Piwnicki strike McClennon once on the left side of his face. They struggled, and Piwnicki tased him. She also stated that as Piwnicki escorted McClennon out of the yard, he slammed him against the back gate.

Chico wrote that the two witnesses “gave conflicting accounts of the incident,” that there was no evidence McClennon had suffered any injuries, and that Piwnicki was within department policies when he tased McClennon, “who was an assailant.” She also noted that Piwnicki passed a Breathalyzer test and that Cicely’s camera was, in fact, inventoried.

“Based on the totality of the circumstances surrounding this incident,” she concluded, “there is no evidence to establish that the incident occurred as alleged.” In light of her finding of “unfounded,” she did not find it necessary to obtain reports from Piwnicki and the other officers on the scene.

The 2001-02 investigation of the Traylor complaint by OPS and the 2012-14 investigation of the McClennon complaint by IPRA share two characteristics that make findings of “not sustained” and “unfounded” all but inevitable.

First, the investigator’s assessment of credibility is heavily weighted toward the police: The credibility of officers is assumed, while that of complainants and witnesses is sharply questioned. In neither instance does the investigator find it necessary to interview the accused officers; a written statement suffices. In the case of community members, by contrast, any inaccuracies or inconsistencies, no matter how marginal to the alleged misconduct, are seized upon to impeach credibility.

Second, the investigators do not consider the officer’s disciplinary history in assessing the allegations in the particular case. This is not an oversight. The collective bargaining agreement between the police union and the city in force at the time effectively barred the agency from employing even the most rudimentary pattern analysis — e.g., reviewing a past history of complaints alleging similar misconduct — as an investigatory tool. In negotiations with the union, Chicago, like a number of other cities, had over the years made concessions with respect to discipline in lieu of increasing compensation and benefits. As a consequence, an accused officer’s disciplinary history could only be considered at the point at which the investigator, having sustained the complaint, was determining what discipline to recommend, and only past “sustained” complaints could be considered for this purpose.

At the time of the 2012 incident, McClennon, a man in his late 30s, had no criminal record. Piwnicki, by contrast, had accumulated a total of 87 complaints over his 14-year career, putting him close to the top of the list of active officers with the most complaints. In McClennon’s criminal trial, the defense demonstrated that in 42 instances, the complaints allege the same pattern of misconduct by Piwnicki: Approaching people of color, they argued, he subjected them to physical and verbal violence. When they challenged his behavior, he imposed false charges. Each of these elements of abuse — excessive force, racial verbal abuse, and false arrest — figured in the McClennon complaint. Yet those patterns were not considered by the investigator. She assessed the complaint in isolation and concluded that there was no way to determine whether the alleged abuse had occurred.

In 2014, in Kalven v. City of Chicago, a case in which I was plaintiff, the Illinois Appellate Court ruled that completed police misconduct investigations are public information under the Freedom of Information Act. Prior to that, the disciplinary histories of officers and underlying investigative files known as complaint registers, or CRs, were hidden from the public behind a heavily defended wall of official secrecy. Occasionally, CRs were produced in discovery in civil rights lawsuits, but under protective orders that barred the parties from sharing them with the public.

The victims of abusive policing practices had no doubt about the realities, and, despite the long odds, some brought formal complaints, but because the investigations of those complaints were kept from the public, it was impossible to document the nature and extent of the phenomenon.

According to CPD records, Piwnicki currently has 99 complaints, putting him in the 99.9th percentile of officers with the most complaints.

In the wake of the Kalven decision, that changed. The Invisible Institute created the Citizens Police Data Project , a public database that currently contains information about 250,000 investigations of allegations of misconduct and the disciplinary histories of 34,000 officers.

According to CPD records, Piwnicki currently has 99 complaints, putting him in the 99.9th percentile of officers with the most complaints.

Contacted through the Chicago Police Department, Piwnicki declined to be interviewed or provide comment.

It also should be noted that there is a large ghost phenomenon of individuals who believe they have been abused by the police but do not file a formal complaint. Studies by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics based on national survey data indicate a ratio of roughly one complaint for every eight people who believe they were subjected to excessive force by the police. There is reason to believe that ratio is conservative, at least with respect to populations most affected by unconstitutional policing.

Illustration: Daniel Stolle for The Intercept

Nothing to See Here

Although these aggregate numbers are stunning, they do not fully reveal the realities. To grasp the racist nature of the abuse and the institutional failure to identify and discipline it, it is necessary to examine the CR investigations themselves. This is not only a matter of capturing concrete narrative detail; it is also necessary because of the manner in which CRs are categorized. When, as is often the case, a complainant makes multiple allegations of abuse, the CR is coded according to the investigator’s judgment as to the most serious of the allegations. As a result, allegations of racist behavior tend to disappear from an officer’s disciplinary profile, for excessive force will generally trump and thereby bury allegations of racist verbal abuse. But the difference between beating someone up and beating someone up while spewing racist invective is essential. Indeed, in another context, these would be elements used in identifying a hate crime.

Here is a sampling of complaints against Piwnicki and the outcomes of investigations of those complaints. Although none of these complaints were sustained by investigators, the pattern they form is powerful evidence.

August 13, 2000
A Black pregnant woman alleged she was stopped at gunpoint by an unidentified partner of Piwnicki, who forced her to get on the ground. She was handcuffed and placed in the back of a squad car, where she got into a verbal argument with Piwnicki, who slapped her face. Piwnicki’s partner said, “We don’t like black pregnant women,” and made other derogatory statements of a racist and sexist nature.
Not sustained. ( CR 266694 )

August 13, 2000
A Black man alleged Piwnicki and officer Louis Gade approached him in an unmarked police car in an alley and told him to come to the car. When he ignored the officer’s request, Piwnicki sprayed him in the face with pepper spray. Gade then hit him in the face with a flashlight. He fell to the ground. Piwnicki and Gade repeatedly kicked him. He was handcuffed and taken to the station. The officers refused his request for medical treatment.
Not sustained. ( CR 265117 )

October 26, 2000
A Black man alleged that he was walking to a restaurant when he was stopped by Piwnicki and other officers. Piwnicki searched under his car and claimed to find narcotics. He was arrested, handcuffed, and put in a squad car. While cuffed in the car, Piwnicki punched and slapped him in the face and punched him in the stomach.
Not sustained. ( CR 267343 )

November 27, 2000
A Latino man alleged that he was walking down the street when Piwnicki and two other officers stopped him and searched him for drugs. Piwnicki slapped him in the face, one of Piwnicki’s partners elbowed him and also slapped him in the face, and the third partner called him a “fucking Puerto Rican.” A bystander witnessed the incident and reported it to the OPS.
Not sustained. ( CR 267496 )

March 8, 2002
A Black man alleged that he was walking with his cousin, sister, and girlfriend when they were approached by a police car. Piwnicki and Robert Smith exited the car with their guns drawn. Smith pushed him against a wall, handcuffed him, and put him in the squad car, where Piwnicki punched him in the face. The officers accused the man of being involved in a car accident that caused damage to a police vehicle. When he denied the allegations, one of the officers said, “This one is going on you.” When he asked why he was being falsely charged, one of the officers said to him, “Shut up you black bitch. You are a waste of sperm, nigger.”
Not sustained. ( CR 279202 )

March 23, 2002
A 13-year-old Black girl alleged that she was playing with her brother and cousins when she threw a stick in the street as Piwnicki and Smith were driving by. The officers exited their car. Piwnicki approached her, pushed her face with his hand, grabbed her arm, and pulled it behind her back. He threatened to “smack the shit out of her” and called her and the other children “cocksuckers.”
Not sustained. ( CR 279250 )

June 2, 2002
A Latino man alleged that he was driving with his wife, father, and brother when he was stopped by Piwnicki and Smith. Piwnicki told him to “put his fucking hands up,” grabbed him, yanked him out of his car, and handcuffed him. When he asked what was going on, Piwnicki told him “to shut the fuck up” and smacked him on the back of his head. When he attempted to read Piwnicki’s badge, Piwnicki told him not to look at him. Piwnicki also told the man’s wife to “shut the fuck up” and ordered her away from the car. The complainant, who was not arrested, identified the license plate of the car driven by Piwnicki.
Not sustained. ( CR 281125 )

August 13, 2002
A Black woman alleged that she was standing inside the gate of her apartment building when Piwnicki approached and asked her where she lived. She replied, “I live here where I am standing.” “You better tell me, bitch,” he said and threatened to throw her to the ground and arrest her for trespassing. She countered that he could not do that because she was not trespassing. He grabbed her by the arm, called her a “cunt,” threatened to put marijuana on her, and handcuffed her. “You had to get fucking smart on me,” he said. “Now you are going to jail.” When she asked why he put the handcuffs on so tight, Piwnicki said, “Shut up you cunt nigger bitch,” and slapped her face. Piwnicki then put her in his squad car. “Why did you put your hands on me?” she asked. Piwnicki stopped the car, grabbed her hair, and struck her repeatedly in the face. Later, at the police station, when she asked to speak to a sergeant, Piwnicki grabbed her by the neck, threw her down on a bench, and said, “Shut up you fucking cunt.” Piwnicki falsely charged the woman with drinking on the public way. Witnesses unrelated to the woman corroborated her allegations of physical and verbal abuse. The victim received medical treatment for her injuries. The investigator sustained the allegations against Piwnicki. During the command channel review — the process by which supervisors review a complete complaint investigation into allegations against an officer under their command — Piwnicki’s supervisors objected to the findings, and the findings were overturned.
Sustained finding overturned. ( CR 283229 )

May 10, 2003
The complaint alleged that three Latino men and two Latina women were parking their car when the drivers in two vehicles behind them honked their horns. After parking the car, one of the men was approached by Piwnicki, who was in plainclothes. “What the fuck,” he said. “Why are you rolling your eyes?” The man replied he didn’t know Piwnicki. “Shut the fuck up, wetback,” said Piwnicki. The man told Piwnicki to leave them alone. Officer Jennifer Chapin Mayoski , who was also in plainclothes, approached and said, “You don’t know who you are fucking with,” and drew her gun. When the complainant started to write down the license plates of the police cars, Mayoski told Piwnicki they should go. As Piwnicki was leaving the scene, he punched the man in the face, breaking his glasses. A second Latino male in the car corroborated the allegations of the first. He also reported that as Piwnicki was leaving, he punched him in the jaw and said, “You ain’t going to do nothing! Fuck you, you spics, you wetbacks.” The two female passengers corroborated the versions given by the two men and further noted that both Piwnicki and Mayoski called them “fucking Mexicans” and “stupid Mexicans.”
Not sustained. ( CR 289333 )

October 5, 2003
According to the complaint, two Black men were approached by Piwnicki and officer Keith Rigan after one of them was in an altercation with a third party. They alleged that Piwnicki and Rigan asked the third party if they were having a problem with these “niggers and animals.” The officers then punched one of the men in the neck, knocked him to the ground, picked him up, and kneed him in the groin several times. The other man alleged that he was punched, knocked to the ground, and kicked. Both men received medical treatment for their physical injuries.
unfounded. ( CR 292855 )

June 17, 2007
A Black woman alleged that Piwnicki and officers Russell Willingham and Anthony Martin ordered her and two companions to get out of their parked car and pick up litter around the vehicle. In the course of the interaction, the officers called them “morons,” “ignorant,” and “nigger.”
No affidavit. ( CR 1006665 )(No action was taken because the complainant did not execute the required affidavit.)

June 17, 2007
A half hour after the incident above — a Black woman alleged that Piwnicki said to her, “Pick up this fucking trash from the ground, this is what niggas do, you fucking moron.”
No affidavit. ( CR 1006666 )

February 20, 2011
A Black man alleged that he was standing on the street giving his mother a hug when Piwnicki and officer Daniel Sullivan drove up in an unmarked squad car. Piwnicki ordered the man over to the car, saying, “Get over here, you fat greasy nigger.” When the victim responded “wow” and failed to head toward their car, Piwnicki and Sullivan exited their car, chased the man, and knocked a bottle of juice out of his hands. He was criminally charged.
Not sustained. ( CR 1043517 )

May 18, 2011
According to the complaint, a Puerto Rican woman was driving through an alley en route to a medical appointment when she was stopped by Piwnicki. When she acknowledged that she was cutting through the alley, Piwnicki told her that she was breaking the law. “You people should go back to Mexico,” he said. “Because of people like you, this City is messed up.” The complainant then exited the alley, parked her car, and returned to the area to request Piwnicki’s name and badge number. Piwnicki responded by handcuffing her tightly. He put her in the back of his squad car and berated her: “You people only understand beatings.” When she informed him the handcuffs were too tight, he responded, “I don’t care what the fuck they are.” He also threatened her with the loss of her job as a special education teacher, saying he was going to contact Chicago Public Schools and inform them of her arrest. She was eventually released from Piwnicki’s custody and received medical treatment for the slight fracture she sustained to her wrist from the handcuffs Piwnicki placed on her too tightly.
Not sustained; unfounded. ( CR 1045507 )

Notwithstanding the long odds of achieving redress, the complainants, all of them Black or brown — and presumably unacquainted with each other — independently filed strikingly similar complaints against Piwnicki alleging excessive force coupled with racist and sexist verbal abuse. The pattern that emerges has probative value, despite the fact that it cannot be determined, in the absence of further investigation, whether the allegations in any given case are true. In a high-functioning accountability system, that pattern would have been discerned early in Piwnicki’s career and prompted appropriate interventions. In a system committed to removing white supremacists from the force, analysis of that pattern would be a priority. In the system we currently have, it has been willfully ignored.

Illustration: Daniel Stolle for The Intercept

Beyond Impunity

The systemic conditions that have allowed Piwnicki to operate with virtual impunity throughout his career despite these multiple accusations are further illuminated by the rare instances in which complaints against him have been sustained. There are seven such cases:

July 15, 2000
A Black female CPD sergeant filed a complaint alleging that Piwnicki and two other officers were insubordinate, inattentive to duty, and disobeyed a direct order. Piwnicki received a reprimand.
( CR 2000-0263967 )

May 6, 2005
A CPD lieutenant initiated a complaint against a CPD police officer for engaging in a bar fight while off duty, in the course of which he was accused of injuring a Black man and calling him a “fucking nigger.” The altercation resulted in the officer’s arrest by the Lake Geneva Police Department. Piwnicki, who was not present at the scene of the incident, subsequently bailed the officer out. Found to have violated a rule requiring that CPD officers file a report when a member of the department is under investigation by a law enforcement agency other than the CPD, Piwnicki received a reprimand.
( CR 297735 )

September 29, 2005
A Black husband and wife were at the county courthouse to attend a court date for a relative. The wife alleged that while she was attempting to step into the elevator, Piwnicki (who was wearing a shirt that covered his uniform) slammed his hand across her chest and moved her away to create space for his partner to step onto the elevator. When the woman’s husband verbally confronted Piwnicki, he responded, “Shut the fuck up you coon … You fucking cluck.” Piwnicki then pushed the woman and started swinging at her husband. Piwnicki and the husband attempted to strike each other. During the encounter, Piwnicki grabbed the husband by the neck and called him a “nigger.” Cook County deputy sheriffs separated the husband from Piwnicki and held him against the wall. Even after the husband was physically restrained by deputy sheriffs, Piwnicki continued to attack him saying, “I’ll see you in court you fuckin coon, and I’m going to see to it that you will pay.” In addition to the wife and husband reporting these events, several deputy sheriffs corroborated the portions of the incident they witnessed. Piwnicki followed through with his threat and falsely charged the husband with making threats to an officer. The criminal charges were ultimately dismissed. The allegations made by the couple were sustained, and Piwnicki was suspended for 20 days.
( CR 308792 )

October 12, 2005
Piwnicki had a verbal and physical altercation with a Black male CPD officer. He was in the process of arresting two Black women, when the officer, who was in plainclothes, approached him and asked to see his identification. Piwnicki refused. “I don’t know who the fuck you are,” he is alleged to have said to the officer, who proved to be Sgt. Ronald Watts. (It would later be established that Watts was the leader of a criminal enterprise that preyed on residents of the public housing development where the confrontation between the two officers occurred.) Piwnicki and Watts grabbed at each other. “I know how you motherfuckers roll,” Watts is alleged to have said. “You’re not on the plantation anymore.” The Internal Affairs Division found that the two officers engaged in an unjustified altercation. Each was suspended for 10 days.
( CR 309085 )

July 10, 2006
A Black female CPD officer filed a complaint on behalf of her son. She alleged that her son was sitting in his yard when Piwnicki approached him. He told him, “Come here, you fucking Negro,” then slapped him in the face repeatedly and placed an empty alcohol bottle that was laying on the street in his back pocket. When the man removed the bottle from his pocket and threw it on the ground, Piwnicki kicked him in his groin area and repeatedly called him “nigger.” Piwnicki falsely arrested the complainant for drinking on the public way. The man’s mother observed the incident and heard Piwnicki call her son a “nigger.” The investigator sustained the allegation that Piwnicki verbally abused the man, finding there was “sufficient evidence to support the allegation that PO Piwnicki used profane and derogatory language toward the victim.” Piwnicki received a reprimand.
( CR 306868 )

June 10, 2010
A Black woman was sitting on the porch of her home with several neighbors. From his squad car on the street, Piwnicki is alleged to have addressed them as “motherfuckers” and ordered them off the porch. “Well, sir, I live here,” she responded. Piwnicki is then alleged to have threatened “to lock her black ass up.” A male neighbor approached the porch and encountered Piwnicki, who is alleged to have said, “You gonna run, nigger?” “No,” he replied, “why would I run if I haven’t done anything?” Piwnicki got out of his vehicle, grabbed the man, and handcuffed and arrested him. As he left, Piwnicki told the woman on the porch, “When I come back, I’m locking your black ass up, too.” The woman called her landlord, a CPD officer, who advised her to call a sergeant to file a complaint. When the sergeant arrived, he refused to take her complaint. Piwnicki received a 10-day suspension, and a complaint against the sergeant was also sustained.
( CR 1037059 )

March 15, 2019
Piwnicki failed to serve notice on the person named in an order of protection. The individual who had secured the order filed a complaint against Piwnicki for failure to provide service. The complaint was sustained, and he was given a reprimand.
( CR 2019-0003252 )

Putting aside the last of these complaints, the other six sustained complaints against Piwnicki share a common feature: All involve other law enforcement personnel as antagonist, complainant, or witness. Under those circumstances, the disciplinary system responded. What it has proved unwilling to address are the scores of complaints alleging racist abuse by Piwnicki filed by Black and brown Chicagoans without any connection to law enforcement.

Despite the massive public record describing Piwnicki’s racism, the only change in his status within the CPD over the course of his career is that he was promoted to detective in 2013 and then to sergeant in late 2017. The latter promotion came more than two years after the political upheaval precipitated by release of the video of the police murder of McDonald and a year after the release of the Department of Justice’s report on its investigation of the CPD in which it expressed “serious concerns” about patterns of racially discriminatory conduct by CPD officers and found that “the impact of CPD’s pattern or practice of unreasonable force falls heaviest on predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods.”

Since his promotions, Piwnicki has had relatively few CRs. An obvious reason for this is that the nature of the job is different. There is less direct contact with community members. At the same time, as a sergeant, he remains in a position to do harm. It is a widely shared belief among those working to advance police reform that sergeants as first-line supervisors are the key to changing institutional culture. By the same token, Piwnicki’s promotion to sergeant puts him in the position to perpetuate the ugly racist subculture within the department that he has embodied throughout his career.

Piwnicki’s promotion to sergeant puts him in the position to perpetuate the ugly racist subculture within the department that he has embodied throughout his career.

Just as the Office of Professional Standards was replaced by the Independent Police Review Authority in the wake of a police scandal, the IPRA was replaced in 2017 by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability in the wake of the police murder of McDonald. Over time, the quality of COPA’s investigations of misconduct complaints has significantly improved, but it remains constrained by the police union contract from doing the sort of pattern analysis necessary to effectively curb the immense damage to public trust caused by officers such as Piwnicki.

Although those constraints have been relaxed somewhat, they continue to hobble effective pattern analysis. Under the most recent version of the union contract, negotiated last year, COPA and the Bureau of Internal Affairs may consider complaints up to seven years old alleging excessive force, racial verbal abuse, and criminal conduct for the purpose of assessing credibility. They may only consider other categories of complaints if they are sustained. And under no circumstances can they consider complaints that have been determined to be “not founded.”

Fraternal Order of Police president Catanzara’s argument that officers should be judged by their actions is impeached by his union’s long history of using collective bargaining to block such accountability. Applied to Piwnicki, the seven-year look back would not even begin to reveal his career-long pattern of behavior that results in complaints of racial abuse by Black and brown Chicagoans.

If the administration of Mayor Brandon Johnson is serious about addressing racism within CPD ranks, it will go beyond investigating officers affiliated with extremist groups and will prioritize vigorous pattern analysis of citizen complaints, while taking steps to remove the constraints imposed on such analysis by the police union contract. Unless and until it does, the career of Piwnicki will stand as the cautionary tale: An officer who, for over a quarter century, has been allowed to openly act out his racial hostilities by an oversight system that has only seen fit to discipline him when his abusive behavior spills over onto others in law enforcement.

Toward the end of his tenure, I asked Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson what he had learned since assuming leadership of the department. A Black officer who had not sought the position, he had been appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the aftermath of the McDonald revelations.

Johnson replied that he had been surprised above all by the intensity of the racism within the department — an unexpected observation from a Black officer who had risen through the ranks — and he expressed the hope that the problem would be resolved over time by the retirement of certain older officers.

Piwnicki refutes that hope. As he approaches the end of his career, his complaint history is a teaching. To the extent that the department has allowed him to abuse people of color with impunity while promoting him first to detective and then to sergeant, his career stands as a model for others disposed to engage in racial abuse within their job descriptions as Chicago police officers.

In response to inquiries from The Intercept, the Chicago Police Department provided the following statement:

The Chicago Police Department’s members are held to the highest standard and expected to conduct themselves with the utmost professionalism both on and off duty. Per CPD policy, all members are prohibited from engaging in any illegal discrimination against an individual or group on the basis of any protected class under federal, state and local law.

We have also been working to implement a strengthened policy prohibiting members from participating, supporting and associating with criminal and bias-based organizations. We are updating this policy in close collaboration with the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA), which recently voted to approve the revised policy.

Allegations of Department members violating CPD policy are thoroughly investigated. During the course of these investigations, members are afforded due process. Members found in violation will be held accountable based on the findings of these investigations.

The post Why Does the Chicago Police Department Tolerate Abusive Racists in Its Ranks? appeared first on The Intercept .

S hortly after October 7 , after Hamas entered Israel, murdered over a thousand people, and took more than 200 others hostage, the Israeli artists Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid quickly formatted “kidnapped” flyers with the photographs and names of some of the captives. They said their motivation wasn’t political, that they were looking to work through their “ fear in a dark time ” by keeping public attention on the captives. Soon, Mintz and Bandaid made the flyers available online, translated into 22 languages, and now the images can be found in cities and on college and university campuses around the world, any place that has a stake in the great game of Middle East politics. Even as some Israeli hostages begin to come home, the posters remain flashpoints of global polarization.

Some opposed to Israel’s disproportionate assault on Gaza think the flyers are propaganda, a crass manipulation of suffering designed to cement a bond between the United States and Israel and ensure that Washington continues to give Israel both a free hand and what it wants in weapons to continue its assault on Gaza, exempt from the so-called Leahy Law, which prohibits supplying weapons to states involved in wide-scale human rights violations. As we approach the two-month mark since the hostage-taking, the posters have become rallying points in what is shaping up to be a global war for hearts and minds. Videos of people ripping down the flyers have gone viral , providing evidence that those who claim to speak on behalf of Palestinians are heartless and inhumane. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” CNN’s Jake Tapper recently said of the posters being ripped down. Some Americans, Tapper said, “are actually rooting for the hostage takers.”

As a New Yorker and historian who has worked on political terror in Latin America, I think there is another way to tell the story of the controversy these posters are causing, why some see them as a plea for help and others a call for war. They exist in a loop. In psychoanalytic terms, we might say it’s an endless return, a vortex of shared, unending trauma, starting with the Holocaust, continuing through death-squad terror in Latin America, onward to 9/11, and now to Gaza and back to the Shoah.

Relatives of missing people hold portraits of presidential candidates with the question “Where Are They?” covering their eyes during a demonstration demanding their loved ones return alive in Guadalajara, Mexico, on April 10, 2018.
Photo: Ulises Ruiz/AFP via Getty Images

Night and Fog

In Latin America, the repressive tactic of “disappearing” enemies of the state came into widespread use in the early 1960s, as Washington mobilized its allies to ensure the containment of the Cuban Revolution. The tactic itself emulated Adolf Hitler’s famous 1941 Nacht und Nebel , or Night and Fog, decree, which directed security forces operating in occupied territories, mainly France, to capture dissidents and hold them incommunicado. Most were executed. The Nazis coined a neologism for these victims, vernebelt , which loosely translates as transformed into mist . Latin Americans called their missing los desaparecidos , the disappeared. It was an especially cruel method of repression. Family members and friends exhausted their energies dealing with labyrinthine bureaucracies trying to find some hint of where their loved ones might have been taken, only to be met with indifference by government officials. “To disappear” is normally an intransitive verb, meaning the object of the sentence is doing the action. “My keys disappeared.” “That book disappeared.” Latin Americans turned it into a transitive verb, used often in what linguists call the adversative passive voice, to indicate an unfortunate occurrence: “She was disappeared.”

By whom? Everyone knew. The sentence’s subject noun was left unstated, underscoring the covert nature of the death squads: Fue desaparecido . Into the mist.

People prepare pictures of missing people on International Day of the Disappeared in Mexico on Aug. 30, 2023.
Photo: Jair Cabrera Torres/picture alliance via Getty Images

As violence intensified in Guatemala in the early 1980s, relatives and comrades of those taken by security forces would, within days, put up flyers on city walls with their faces, names, and dates of disappearance, along with, often, the unions or political organizations to which they belonged. The walls of union halls were filling with photographs of the missing, yet this was still a moment when it was possible to believe that the Left was in ascendence. Deborah Levenson, a historian who documented the 1985 siege of Guatemala City’s Coca-Cola plant during this period, says that images of the missing were not meant to convey defeat, nor to preserve what later would be called “historical memory.” Levenson, in response to a query for this essay, recalls that the bottling plant’s cafeteria was adorned with large photographs of the vanished staring down on surviving militant unionists as they ate. The missing and the dead alike were understood to be something like Christian martyrs, who had sacrificed their lives for those fighting for a better life. The subtext was clear, she said: “The loss of this person will not stop us but make us stronger.”

But the Left in Guatemala, as throughout Latin America, was defeated, brutally so, and the meaning of the public photographs of the missing changed. They evolved from inspiration to accusation, evidence of crimes against humanity, proof that this person once lived and now is gone. By the end of the 1980s, death squads, police units, and military detachments had, in addition to committing run-of-the-mill extrajudicial assassinations and massacres, disappeared thousands in Chile; tens of thousands in Argentina; around 10,000 in El Salvador; and 45,000 in Guatemala. As Gabriel García Márquez told his Swedish audience in his 1982 Nobel acceptance lecture, it’s “ as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala .” This form of repression has outlived the Cold War; more than 100,000 Mexicans have disappeared over the last two decades, victims of a never-ending war on drugs.

Defeat brought forth the need to find an appropriate way to render the disappeared, a way to fully represent both the specific individual who had been taken and the magnitude of what had been lost. In Argentina, the junta had been disappearing people since 1976, but it wasn’t until the early 1980s, in increasingly bold actions taken by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo , that people began to openly come out into the street with photographs of their missing. Elías was last seen in the clandestine concentration camp El Vesubio on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1978. His son, a friend of mine, remembers his mother making their placard with a heavy black marker. The family had little money, so a human rights organization paid to have the photograph from Elías’s citizenship card enlarged.

In late 1983, a collective of Argentine artists working with relatives of the disappeared decided it was time to defy the generals and stage a large demonstration, and they searched for an artistic medium that could convey the enormity of the suffering, some way to represent both humanity and its loss. One of the organizers landed on panel series titled “ Each Day at Auschwitz ” by the Polish artist Jerzy Skapski . Skapski had crammed each poster with thousands of silhouettes, meant to represent the people who were killed daily at the death camp.

Skapski’s silhouettes captured exactly what the Argentines hoped to convey: an outline of loss, a trace of something that was at once particular and universal, a human and humanity.

It made sense for this group of activists to look to the Holocaust for ideas on how to represent loved ones taken. The Argentine junta was viciously antisemitic, and Latin America was indispensable in the creation of Israel, casting more than a third of the total United Nations votes in 1947 in favor of partition and voting unanimously, all 18 Latin American nations, for Israel’s admission into the U.N. The horror of Hitlerism resonated in Latin America. Pablo Neruda made anti-Nazism a topic in his writings, and Jorge Luis Borges addressed the Holocaust in his short stories. For decades, the Latin American Left understood itself as struggling against local variants of fascism, as if World War II hadn’t ended but merely shifted venues.

Skapski’s silhouettes captured exactly what the Argentines hoped to convey: an outline of loss, a trace of something that was at once particular and universal, a human and humanity.

On September 21, 1983, as Buenos Aires’s city center, the Plaza de Mayo, filled with protesters, organizers asked those who had lost family members to lie down on sheets of white paper and let an artist draw outlines of their bodies. The name of the disappeared, along with the date they went missing, was then painted on the silhouette . By the end of the day, thousands — some say 30,000 — silhouettes were plastered on the walls of government buildings surrounding the plaza and adjacent streets. Later, the sheets were turned into stencils and the images spray-painted on walls, making it look as if ghostly shadows were walking the streets of Buenos Aires.

The event was called the siluetazo , which might best be translated as silhouette-a-thon, and it was the largest protest against disappearances in Latin America of its time. Soon, similar silhouettes began to appear in other Latin American cities. Most recently, the silhouette image was used to represent the 43 Mexican students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, who, in 2014, were brutally executed and disappeared by Mexican security forces.

I’ve walked by untold numbers of desaparecido posters. One still sees them today, decades after the worst of Central America’s terror, plastering walls in the center of Guatemala City; Santiago, Chile; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. “ Where are they? ” they ask.

Memorials and photos of missing loved ones after the September 11 World Trade Center attack in New York City in 2001.
Photo: Joan Slatkin/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The 9/11 Missing

In New York after 9/11, the spontaneous display of “ missing ” posters seemed familiar. The flyers reportedly started in response to rumors that the city’s hospital beds were filled with thousands of unconscious, unidentified victims and that some people were found walking the streets with amnesia. The first set was done in a rush, with hastily compiled information about a missing person , including their height and weight and the color of their hair and eyes, along with where they worked and on what floor, in either the north or south tower. As the days went by and the rumors of unidentified survivors proved untrue, the posting continued, with physical details giving way to more personal information , including details about their children, their partners, and their hobbies.

Within a week, they were everywhere in the city, taped to chain-link fences, pasted on walls and lamp posts and on subway entrances. The walls of St. Vincent’s — since closed and sold to developers, like so many of New York’s community hospitals in the early 21st century — were covered with them. Many of the victims and left-behind family members were of a different status than the Latin Americans who were disappeared. They lived in the most powerful nation in the world, in history, and presumably most weren’t especially politically active, unlike the majority of Latin America’s disappeared. The World Trade Center, though, employed hundreds of migrant workers , many undocumented, from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador. The union UNITE HERE counted 43 immigrant workers at Windows on the World among the dead.

“The whole United States was forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido, with no certainty or funeral possible for those missing.”

Class and status mattered nothing in the dust and rubble. All shared a disorientation that was recognized by Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean writer who has devoted himself to considering the problem of Latin America’s “disappeared.” “Suddenly,” he wrote in an essay published in the Los Angeles Times just after the towers fell, “the whole United States was forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido, with no certainty or funeral possible for those missing.” Such pain was routine for much of the world, leading Dorfman to hope for a kind of reconciliation, a way to end the “famous exceptionalism” that had kept the United States sequestered from much of the world. “Their suffering is neither unique nor exclusive,” he wrote, but rather connects them “with so many other human beings who have suffered unanticipated and often protracted injury and fury.”

Dorfman was wrong on that score. George W. Bush’s advisers were already determined to “move swiftly” — as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said before the sun set that first day, according to the notes of an aide — to “go massive – sweep it all up, things related and not.” Liberal and neocon hawks were quick to lay out the case for an expansive war, not just to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice, but also to remake the Middle East in a way that would ensure U.S. global dominance. On September 14, George W. Bush, standing atop a crushed fire truck with a bullhorn in hand and a firefighter by his side, let the world know it would soon hear from the United States.

The “missing” flyers, though, were like flowers pushing up through cracks in cement. Some displays had American flags, but they were small and had nothing of vengeance about them. They conveyed a range of feelings, none of them warlike. It took your breath away, coming upon a wall or a chain-link fence papered with them. The photographs showed victims as their relatives wanted to remember them: holding pets, hugging partners, or playing with their children, or just a close-up portrait. Some had hearts and flowers drawn in yellow, blue, red, and green, perhaps by the victims’ children. They were intimate portraits, handmade by people who knew the missing, and, like their Latin American counterparts, they were affirmations of humanity.

For a few brief weeks, as the country was being prepped for what we were told would be a prolonged campaign, these flyers continued to affirm life’s fragility, as brittle as the tape holding them in place. No doubt many families of the World Trade Center dead did want revenge and were roused by Bush’s rallying cry. Yet judging from the composition of most flyers, the people who made them weren’t thinking about geopolitics or civilizational wars. They weren’t trying to crystalize an us-versus-them absolutism. I don’t remember any of them mentioning Al Qaeda. They were the closest atheist New Yorkers would come to the sacred.

Protesters hold posters with pictures of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas during a demonstration in London on Nov. 5, 2023.
Photo: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Pointless Provocations

The posters made on behalf of the October 7 Hamas victims are different. Mintz, one of the artists who came up with idea, describes herself as a “ visual poet ,” but there’s no poetry in this particular work. Moral values are inescapably artistic in nature, as E.L. Doctorow wrote in his 1977 essay “False Documents,” and these flyers convey a martial aesthetic. They are starkly uniform in arrangement, all topped with an uppercase “KIDNAPPED” headline running in block letters. Under the header to the left is a picture of a victim or victims, and to the right, their details. The information, though, is sparse. Sometimes the flyers don’t even give names, but simply say “entire Israeli family” or “young Israeli couple.”

It’s the generic sameness of the posters , complete with QR codes, not the individuality of the missing, that is most striking. Sen. John Fetterman has wallpapered his entire outer office with these flyers, a strident brick-like array of red, black, and white. Fetterman says they are staying up until all the hostages come home. Over 200,000 Arab Muslims, including many Palestinians, live in Pennsylvania; were they to enter that antechamber, would they feel welcomed or excluded by what they saw there?

The critic Roland Barthes used the word “ punctum ” to describe an eye-catching detail in an image that establishes a relationship between a viewer and the objects and people in the image. In these “kidnapped” posters, the punctum, to me at least, is the word “ Israeli ,” an insistence that the most important thing about the kidnapped is not their humanity, but their nationality. In this sense, they differ from their Latin American and 9/11 forebears, which stressed a universality, a shared human vulnerability and collective mourning. The nationalism of the “kidnapped” flyers is underscored by the artists’ decision not to include, in some form or other, Palestinians in Gaza in their art project. A few posters do make mention of “Argentines” and other nationalities, including unidentified “migrant workers,” taken by Hamas. Yet amassed together on a wall , they don’t — as did past projects to visually eulogize victims of political terror in Latin America, New York, and during the Holocaust itself, including Skapski’s memorials — seem concerned with transmuting terror into a deeper commitment to a shared universalism. The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is different: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.

The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is different: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.

Over the last few days, after a blessed but limited ceasefire went into effect, Hamas and Israel have exchanged scores of captives. Among those released by Hamas were a number of migrant Thai workers , while both sides have freed children and elderly people. For a moment at least, the joy of family reunions, smiles, tears, and hugs among both Israelis and Palestinians raised hopes that out of shared pain and vulnerability, a common humanity could emerge, a reprieve from the bellicosity of the “kidnapped” posters. As I write this, I can almost hope that the peace will hold. But Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has made it clear that “the respite will be short.” Once the ceasefire is over, the Israel Defense Forces will resume its assault on Gaza “with intensity” in a war that may last months more.

Meanwhile, the “kidnapped” posters have been transformed into antagonistic performance art. Supporters of Israel put them up, at times in places intentionally meant to provoke , such as near Palestinian restaurants. And then advocates for Palestinians pull them down, with the video of the act posted online, taken as evidence that what really moves those who claim to care about Palestinians is antisemitism, that they are so coldhearted they can’t bear to leave a memento of a stolen child on the wall. A report in Miami’s New Times found cases in which individuals had put the poster up with a clear intention of videoing someone tearing it down, in a bid to have them fired from their place of employment. Viral videos posted by defenders of Israel show defaced posters, some with feces .

We live in a precarious time of heightened sensitivity. Contretemps over slogans, placards, and posters can deepen schisms, charging routine acts with malicious meaning, transforming every utterance into an insult. We should tread carefully and avoid, at all costs, pointless provocations.

War does radicalize, so it is useful to keep in mind that even the most obscene slurs and outrages — including painting synagogues with antisemitic graffiti, or Israel’s supporters telling anti-Zionist Jews that Hitler should have gassed them — are byproducts of the main thing: killing and kidnapping; siege; occupation; dispossession; the bombing of hospitals, bakeries, and refugee camps; the denial of water and electricity to civilians; and the massacre and maiming of children.

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President Richard Nixon was in rare form, though in reality, it was none too rare. “The whole goddamn Air Force over there farting around doing nothing,” he barked at his national security adviser Henry Kissinger during a phone call on December 9, 1970. He called for a huge increase in attacks in Cambodia. “I want it done!! Get them off their ass and get them to work now.”

As Nixon rambled and ranted — calling for more strikes by bombers and helicopter gunships — Kissinger’s replies were short and clipped: “Right.” “Exactly.” “Absolutely, right.” We know this because, while Nixon was fuming about “assholes” who said there was a “crisis in Cambodia,” the conversation was being recorded. It wasn’t the secret White House taping system that finally laid Nixon low as part of the scandal that came to be known as Watergate , but Kissinger’s own clandestine eavesdropping system. Later, it was up to Kissinger’s secretary Judy Johnson to transcribe that night’s exchange and add in the single, double, triple, and even quadruple exclamation points to capture the spirit of the call and accurately punctuate the president’s words.

Johnson was new on the job when she heard the December 9, 1970 , exchange. She was just one of many Kissinger secretaries and aides who, during his years working for the White House, either listened in on an extension and transcribed conversations in shorthand or typed up the transcripts later from Kissinger’s own Dictabelt recording system that, according to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s 1976 book “The Final Days,” was hooked up to a telephone “housed in the credenza behind his secretary’s desk and … automatically activated when the telephone receiver was picked up.”

The transcripts offer a window into policymaking in the Nixon White House, Kissinger’s key role, and how so many Cambodians came to be killed by American military aircraft. Johnson was somewhat reluctant to talk about them and expressed surprise that they were publicly available.

Decades later, the heated December 1970 exchange didn’t stick out in Johnson’s mind, she told The Intercept. None of their conversations did. It was a long time ago and, she said, “there was a lot of stuff going on” at the White House. Johnson didn’t know whether Nixon was aware of Kissinger’s eavesdropping activities or why her boss recorded all his calls. Ask him yourself, she said. When I tried to interview him, Kissinger stormed off and his staff ignored follow-up requests for more than a decade. Johnson also cautioned that it was very hard to get an accurate sense of a conversation from the transcripts alone. There were nuances, she said, that were missing.

“Those conversations were strenuously edited,” said Roger Morris, a Kissinger aide who resigned in protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970 and had listened to many conversations between Nixon and his national security adviser. The men and women who took down the text didn’t completely eliminate the spirit of the conversations, but if you were listening to calls in their raw, original form, it was more disconcerting. “It was worse because the words were slurred and you knew you had a drunk at the other end,” he said of Nixon.

Did Johnson suspect that Nixon had been drinking when he called to direct policy and give orders? “If I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” she said. Any evidence is apparently gone forever. In a 1999 letter to Foreign Affairs, Kissinger claimed that the tapes of phone calls made in his office were destroyed after being transcribed. No notes or other materials involved in the transcription survived either, according to a 2004 report by the Nixon Presidential Materials Staff of the U.S. National Archives.

Johnson joined Kissinger’s staff in late 1970, before moving on to the White House press office in 1971 where she stayed until Nixon’s resignation in 1974. After a brief stint in the administration of President Gerald Ford, she moved to California and worked as a researcher for Nixon , who was then writing his memoirs. She might have been starry-eyed when she first arrived at the White House, she told me, but listening in on high-level phone conversations quickly disabused her of the notion that these were “super people.” She termed Nixon’s coarse talk “typical male language.”

Johnson took down Kissinger’s conversations using shorthand, she told me, repeatedly emphasizing how difficult it was to transcribe conversations like these perfectly. A “shit” or a “damn” might go missing, but there was no deliberate censorship and nothing was sanitized, she said. Morris recalled it differently. While Nixon’s remarks might be prettied up, he told me, it was Kissinger’s own acid-tongued ripostes that subordinates were supposed to excise to protect their boss. Privately, Kissinger called Nixon a madman, said he had a “meatball mind,” and referred to him as “our drunken friend.”

“I just had a call from our friend,” Kissinger told his aide Alexander Haig moments after getting off the phone with Nixon on that December night, according to Johnson’s transcript. The president “wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia,” Kissinger told Haig. “He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?” In a notation, Johnson indicated that while it was difficult to hear him, it sounded as if Haig started laughing.

When I mentioned these orders and asked about Nixon’s drinking, Johnson emphasized that there were buffers in place. Policy changes, she told me, weren’t as simple as a presidential order given by phone. Many discussions would occur before instructions were carried out. But Kissinger’s immediate and blunt relay of Nixon’s command suggests otherwise. The raw number of U.S. attacks in Cambodia does too. While they had no explanation for it at the time, The Associated Press found that compared with November 1970, the number of sorties by U.S. gunships and bombers in Cambodia had tripled by the end of December to nearly 1,700.

Was the reason for it — and the Cambodian deaths that resulted — a drunken president’s order, passed along swiftly and unquestioningly by Henry Kissinger? Nixon and Haig have been dead for many years, and Johnson passed away earlier this month . That leaves only Kissinger to answer the question — and to answer for the deaths.

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