never would have been convicted if the jury had heard that tape. How he can be so sure is unclear, because he hasn’t heard it, either. Prosecutors, no doubt, would point out that a Roberson confession alone hardly exonerates Wilson. They never argued Wilson was the triggerman, but the getaway driver. The police memo saying Roberson confessed doesn’t refute any of this. For now, though, Wilson isn’t asking anyone to believe him. He just wants the tape so he can prove what he’s saying. And his argument is pretty straightforward: If he’s going to be sentenced to almost half a century in prison for a crime, then surely he deserves a chance to listen to the recorded confession the government had in its possession. So far, he cannot. Wilson is an able jailhouse lawyer. When MPD rejected his initial request, he appealed to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office, later arguing that if MPD really didn’t have the confession, then it violated D.C. law requiring the preservation of evidence in murder cases. “The June 14, 1999 audio recording was a case solving piece of evidence in a double homicide committed within the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia,” Wilson wrote in his appeal letter. “It is simply not reasonable to accept the assertion that someone in the agency just ‘surrendered’ this evidence to someone outside the agency. It is not merely unbelievable, it is unlawful.” After receiving Wilson’s appeal, the mayor’s office told MPD to search its files. He scored a similar—if fleeting—win with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia in an open-records request to federal prosecutors. Initially, federal prosecutors refused to confirm or deny the existence of the tape. After Wilson filed a lawsuit from prison, a judge ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office to search for it. So far, neither agency has found any recording. After all, the FOIA law requires only that agencies conduct “an adequate search.” Still, Wilson’s persistent efforts to pry loose the recording have created a paper trail of responses, denials, and appeals that raise questions about evidence handling, records preservation, and the public’s right to access records under the Freedom of Information Act. So far, these records make clear, a murder confession has gone missing. And nobody will explain why. Around 2 a.m. on Aug. 17, 1998, with five bullets in or through him, Ronnie “Squid” Middleton managed to drive from the 1500 block of Congress Place SE about a mile up Alabama Avenue SE. He probably knew enough to fear his life would end this way. And then it did. And after years of piling up bodies, when it finally was his turn, Middleton drove himself not to D.C. General (which, in the summer of 1998, was still a hospital) but to the Seventh District MPD headquarters. Perhaps he wanted to say something about who did this to him, but when he finally arrived, he had little to say. The white Ford Bronco barreled up to the front door of the station. As officers ran outside with their guns aimed at the Bronco, one spotted bullet holes in the driver’s side door. “He’s
shot!” someone yelled. Officer James Craig tried to get Middleton to talk while paramedics were called. “He did not respond to questions I asked and he appeared to be fading in and out of consciousness and he also appeared to be having trouble breathing,” Craig later wrote in a statement, though a detective later testified Middleton managed to say where the shootings had happened. Another officer remembered discovering Bradley in the backseat, moaning. She had been shot, too. According to prosecutors, a third person was in the car that night and managed to escape through a window. Within hours, Middleton and Bradley would be dead. Tommy Edelin was the first person charged in the Middleton and Bradley murders, though the killings were hardly the only crimes alleged. A massive federal conspiracy case charged Edelin with leading the 1-5 Mob drug gang. Prosecutors at the time said the organization sold hundreds of kilos of crack in Southeast throughout the 1990s and was responsible for at least a dozen murders, including those of a 14-year-old girl and her 20-yearold brother. They were shot and killed in a case of mistaken identity on the way home from a church Christmas party, though Edelin was acquitted in those killings. The government’s theory in the 2001 trial was that Edelin was worried whether Middleton—
his most trusted and efficient hitman—might turn and cooperate with the government. In the summer of 1998, Edelin and just about everyone facing charges in the case was locked up, but Middleton was still free—and on heroin. Prosecutors said Edelin feared that as soon as Middleton got locked up and started going through heroin withdrawal, he’d stand little chance of resisting efforts to get him to cooperate. “And Tommy feared that although [Middleton] was a friend, it was just too big of a chance. So Tommy reaches out, and being the smart, manipulative guy that he is, he reaches out to an unlikely ally,” a prosecutor explained to jurors. That ally, according to prosecutors, was the Congress Park Crew. A government witness testified that Edelin confided how, from jail, he reached out to the rival gang to have three men—identified in transcripts as “LT,” “Das,” and “Cool Wop”—kill Middleton and Bradley. But while Edelin was convicted in four murders and a host of other felony charges, then sentenced to life in prison, he was acquitted in the Middleton and Bradley murders. Years later, prosecutors put forward another theory: Middleton was killed not to protect Edelin but to get back at him. Wilson wanted revenge, they said, after Middleton killed a close friend named Maurice Doleman. The killing triggered a bloody war between Edelin’s 1-5 Mob and the Congress Park Crew, according to prosecutors, who said Wilson drove the getaway car for his two purported accomplices—Draine
and Roberson—both dead by the time Wilson went to trial in 2007. Unlike in the Edelin case, however, jurors rejected conspiracy and racketeering charges. “Conspiracy? A crew? With the evidence the prosecutor presented, not one among us could see it,” one juror, Jim Caron, wrote to the sentencing judge after learning that some defendants faced decades in prison despite only being convicted of minor drug transactions (see sidebar below). Caron died of a heart ailment a few weeks after writing the letter in 2008. Prosecutors had better luck against Wilson. He was convicted of aiding and abetting in the Middleton and Bradley murders. He was sentenced to more than 45 years in prison. There were no eyewitnesses tying Wilson to the murders, the defense argued, but several witnesses testified against him, including Bobby Capies, whom Wilson and his lawyers believe is the undercover informant who elicited the confession from Roberson. On the stand, Capies told jurors that Wilson confessed to him. “He was telling me that it was him [Wilson], [Draine], and [Roberson], said they was riding around smoking,” Capies told the jury. “And they rode through there and they seen [Middleton] in a truck, looked like he was smoking.” “They went back around the block to get a gun. They pull up, and I guess they was going to a conclusion of whoever who was going to get out. [Wilson] said, ‘There ain’t no time for this, man. Y’all idling.’ So [Roberson] was like, ‘Man,
“Every time they talk about me... they describe me as a drug dealer. I wasn’t.” George Ball took a rare afternoon off from his job as a meeting planner for a trade group to spend some time in a U.S. District courtroom. He was attending the July 9 sentencing of Matthew Lowry, the FBI agent who pleaded guilty to taking at least 20 bags of seized heroin— some containing hundreds of grams—from the FBI’s evidence room. Ball is one of more than two dozen drug defendants whose cases were tossed because Lowry tainted the evidence. There’s been much press attention about how the Lowry case robbed the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office of the chance to try complicated drug conspiracy cases that can take years to investigate and prosecute. The courtroom was packed with reporters and family, so Ball, 67, was nearly turned away. He insisted on a seat. After more than an hour, he said, he found himself sitting alongside Lowry’s family, near the front row. “I was determined to see how justice works on the other side of the case,” Ball later tells City Paper in an interview. Ball says Lowry’s conviction actually robbed him of the chance to clear his name, and that he didn’t want to see his own charges dismissed on a technicality. He says that even though he risked more than decade in prison, he told his attorney that he wouldn’t be pleading guilty. “The whole time I was under this cloud for a year and half, never was my name associated with the word ‘innocent,’” Ball says. “I kind of feel sorry that Lowry got into this trouble because now I’m in this limbo. Every time they talk about me—the judge, the prosecutor, the defense attorney—they describe me as a drug dealer. I wasn’t.” Ball wasn’t just thinking about his own case when he attended the Lowry sentencing. He recalled coming to the same courthouse a few years earlier to watch the sentencing of his son, Antwuan, a co-defendant with David Wilson in the Congress Park Crew case. Antwuan was
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acquitted of all but one of the charges against him: a $600, half-ounce, hand-to-hand crack transaction recorded by an undercover informant. Still, Antwuan Ball received a sentence of nearly two decades in prison. That’s largely because Judge Richard Roberts found that, for sentencing purposes, Ball was part of a drug conspiracy—even though jurors acquitted him of the conspiracy charge. Under federal rules, however, judges can hand out tougher sentences based on charges the jury rejected or never heard at trial. Antwuan Ball’s appeals lawyer, Stephen Leckar, argued in court papers that Ball would have received a little under five years—at most—if sentenced solely on the drug quantities of which he was convicted. The judge’s finding nearly quadrupled his sentence to just under 19 years. He remembers the difficult time he had leaving the courtroom after his son’s sentencing four years earlier. “When I went to my son’s sentencing, I was 100 percent positive that he was coming home with me that day,” Ball says. “I just felt so good. Then I was going through my head, huh, 200-something months? After everybody left I couldn’t move. Everybody was outside wondering where I was at, but I couldn’t move because I could not believe this.” Ball and two co-defendants, facing similarly long sentences in the Congress Park case, appealed theirs. They fell just one vote short of having their case heard in the Supreme Court last year. The appeal produced an unlikely dissent that joined the court’s most liberal and conservative factions: Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Ginsburg all sought to accept the case. After Lowry’s sentencing, George Ball walked out of the hearing shaking his head, wondering how the same courthouse could send his son away for more than 18 years for a half-ounce. The exFBI agent got three years. —Jim McElhatton