A Clayton County grand jury handed down a 64-count racketeering indictment Thursday against detainees of the jail that former Sheriff Victor Hill once called the toughest paramilitary facility in the nation.
Prosecutors allege that dozens of detainees of the Clayton County jail, along with several others outside the building, acted in coordination to run the facility as a mini-criminal enterprise, with the exchange of money, drugs, weapons and bribes to keep the operation going.
Family members of those detained were allegedly coerced to pay thousands of dollars to the operators of the scheme through cash apps, some of it used to purchase contraband in the facility like cellphones.
To control the detainee population, the accused used kidnapping, arson, extortion and violent assaults, such as stabbings and a beating with a trash can, as their weapons of choice, the indictment said. They also were allegedly connected to gangs, including the Bloods, Crips and Gangster Disciples.
“The defendants conspired to associate together and with others for the common purpose of illegally obtaining money and contraband through a pattern of racketeering activity,” the indictment said.
In all, close to 70 people, with nicknames such as “Big G,” “Lil’ Pooh,” “2step,” and “Hot,” were named in the indictment on charges that included aggravated assault, arson in the first degree, battery, theft by extortion, false imprisonment, bribery and possession of a prohibited item by an inmate.
Clayton County District Attorney Tasha Mosley told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the scope of the enterprise at the jail was a first for her.
“I’ve been prosecuting since 1998. I started off in the solicitor general’s office and I’ve moved my way up the ranks. In all those years I have never seen nor heard anything like this,” she said in a phone interview Thursday.
Clayton County’s jail has a long history of problems, including assaults, abhorrent facility conditions and lawsuits alleging abuse by staff. Last year, the AJC reported that at least 27 detainees have died in the jail as of 2009, according to records attained by the newspaper. Five people died in 2021 alone, the highest number of deaths at the facility in more than a decade.
The jail’s long-time leader, former Sheriff Victor Hill, was himself convicted in October by a federal jury of violating the civil rights of six detainees by ordering they be strapped to restraint chairs as punishment, which is an illegal use of the device. Hill was sentenced to 18 months in prison and was ordered earlier this week to report to a federal facility in Forrest City, Arkansas on May 15.
Mosley said her office began investigating the alleged scheme around the fall of last year. Investigators Terry Tuck and Brian Busch pieced together the alleged criminal operation from extortion accusations from family members and defense attorneys and from charges brought by the sheriff’s office.
The time period of the indictments fell during the administrations of former interim Clayton Sheriff Roland Boehrer and current interim Sheriff Levon Allen. (Former Sheriff Victor Hill had been suspended from the job by Gov. Brian Kemp by the time of the investigation because of his own indictment).
Allen, who is running to succeed Hill in a runoff Tuesday against Clarence Cox, chief investigator for the Fulton County Solicitor General’s Office, took credit for the indictments Thursday in a post on Nixle, a social media site that he and Hill have favored to speak to the general public.
“An extensive jail investigation (some undercover) ordered by the Clayton County Sheriff Levon Allen to clean up violence and contraband at the jail has resulted in over 100 arrests related to various crimes,” he posted on Nixle.
Mosley, however, pushed back on that assertion. She said that while the sheriff’s office played a role in bringing individual actors to their attention, it was Tuck and Busch who made the connections that eventually led to the swath of indictments.
“The evidence a lot of times would branch off into another pre-trial detainee that we didn’t know anything about,” Mosley said, adding that she anticipates more individuals will be indicted as additional information becomes available. “And then that one would branch off into somebody else. All of a sudden it just kept growing and growing and growing.”
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