[Weekend Reading] The Informant
Last month, a Wake County grand jury indicted an RPD confidential informant for manufacturing drug cases, raising serious questions about the department’s unchecked, unchecked, powerful CI system.
Hey, y’all. My apologies for being AWOL. On Monday night, I received confirmation that a tip I’d been chasing was correct, and I spent nearly every waking second since trying to nail down (and write) this story.
Behind the scenes: I’ve been fascinated by this case since I first heard about it last year. A confidential informant for the Raleigh Police was under investigation for faking a dozen drug trafficking cases, and the vice detective who managed him was on administrative duty.
This summer, I began gathering thread, though I didn’t know what to do with it. With the SBI’s investigation shielded from public view, internal affairs documents off-limits—this state’s public records laws need a talking-to—and the lawsuit not yet in discovery (that’s where you get the juicy stuff), there wasn’t anything new to say.
I had figured out who the CI was by early July. Last week, I got a tip that he’d been indicted. That part was easy enough to confirm, but getting the actual indictment took some work, as did confirming that his obstruction charges were related to the drug trafficking cases.
Once I had that, I just had to cram a ton of reporting and 2,800 words of writing into three days. (The Assembly was nice enough to bring in Anne Blythe to help with last-minute research and reporting.) So, no PRIMER this week.
But you get this story, which I’m proud of. Read the whole thing here.
Dennis Leon Williams Jr. said he ran the southeast Raleigh red light because he was in danger. He fled the scene of the accident he caused because he feared for his life. A man in a Ford Fiesta had chased him, pointed a 9 mm handgun at him, and told him he was dead.
Detective Omar Abdullah never doubted him.
On March 12, 2020—three weeks before the accident—Williams helped Abdullah, a member of the Raleigh Police Department’s vice and drugs unit, bust Sherrod Smith for heroin trafficking. Smith had just been released on bail, Abdullah wrote in a police report. Now he was coming after Williams.
The report doesn’t mention any witnesses to Smith’s threats. But Abdullah vouched for Williams, a 26-year-old on parole after serving seven months in state prison for larceny, according to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety.
“[Williams] has been proven to be truthful and reliable and has provided information to this detective in the past that has always been proven and reliable which has led to numerous drug-related convictions,” Abdullah wrote.
It’s since become clear that Abdullah’s informant was anything but truthful.
Last month, a Wake County grand jury indicted Williams on five counts of obstruction of justice, accusing him of making false statements and acting “with deceit and intent to defraud.” Because they deemed Williams “not credible,” prosecutors have dismissed the cases of 15 Black men, including Smith, whom Abdullah charged with heroin trafficking between December 2019 and May 2020.
In every case, the heroin Williams claimed to buy turned out to be fake.
But prosecutors haven’t indicted Abdullah. District Attorney Lorrin Freeman says she doesn’t plan to.
“At this time,” Freeman told The Assembly in an email, “we do not have evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Officer Abdullah or others with the Raleigh Police Department.”
Robin Mills, whose son was jailed after Abdullah accused him of heroin trafficking, doesn’t buy it.
“Nobody could arrest that amount of people and get it wrong that many times without somebody knowing,” she says. “If that’s the case, we should be really concerned about who we’ve got serving and protecting, because clearly, they don’t even understand the basic stuff.”
It’s not yet clear who knew what. But Williams’ story raises questions about how the Raleigh Police Department manages its confidential informants—often referred to as CIs—and why there’s been so little accountability for errors that damaged at least 15 lives.
Men languished in jail for weeks or months after lab results cleared them. Some lost their jobs. Ultimately, it took a public defender, not a cop or prosecutor, to piece together what happened. Her efforts set in motion both the state investigation that led to Williams’ indictment and a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in April.
Whether they lead to justice—and what justice should look like—remains to be seen.