Gang leader Tavon White’s trial testimony describes rise to power at Baltimore jail
By Justin Fenton December 1 at 10:38 PM
The former leader of the Black Guerrilla Family at the Baltimore City Detention Center spoke publicly for the first time Monday from the witness stand, describing his unlikely rise to power and the gang’s inner workings.
Tavon White, 37, has admitted heading a racketeering conspiracy as part of a plea deal in which he also agreed to testify against the eight remaining defendants — inmates and corrections staff members — charged in the case.
White told Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Harding that when he entered the city jail in 2009 on an attempted-murder charge, his chief goals were to “make money” and “run the jail, pretty much.”
“I wasn’t trying to be some flunky,” White testified.
Prosecutors allege that the defendants on trial — two inmates, five corrections officers and a kitchen worker — were part of a conspiracy that involved drug dealing, extortion and witness intimidation.
At the center of the allegations is White, who prosecutors have said made four corrections officers pregnant. The revelations have received national attention.
As part of the agreement, White will serve 12 years in prison, to run concurrently with a 20-year sentence for the unrelated attempted-murder conviction.
White walked into the courtroom at U.S. District Court in Baltimore with extra security around him. He leaned forward attentively in the witness box, answering Harding’s questions with little hesitation.
White said he joined the Black Guerrilla Family in 1997 while serving time for murder at a prison in Hagerstown, Md. That was more than a decade before the gang’s hold on the state’s correctional institutions would be thrust into the spotlight as part of a 2009 indictment about corruption.
As time passed, the gang’s influence spread from inside the state’s jails and prisons to the streets. But White said he was not an active member of the gang after his release.
After he was arrested on the attempted-murder charge in 2009, he rejoined the gang at the Baltimore jail. Even though he wasn’t among the highest-ranking BGF members, he was chosen to lead the BGF in the jail.
Being a leader enabled a member to “sit back and kick your feet up,” he said.
In one recorded phone conversation played for the jury, an adoring corrections officer, Adena Rice, can be heard asking White how he accumulated so much power.
“I stepped back for the first week, watched who was who, who was doing what, and I made myself into what I was,” White told her.
A key mechanism for the gang’s rise to power, prosecutors have said, was taking over the “working man” posts within the jail. Those slots are supposed to go to inmates displaying good conduct.
Instead, prosecutors say, the BGF persuaded staff members to put gang members into the positions, which facilitated the smuggling of drugs and cellphones.
