This story is an account of cop brutality, forfeiture transgressions, and injustice in the American justice system.

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For Ex-Defendant, The Nightmare Continues

BY COURTLAND MILLOY

02/07/99

Harry Davis had been in bed that morning a year ago when he heard a knock on his apartment door in Fort Washington. He got up, put on his pants and opened the door.

Fifteen police officers, carrying assault weapons and dressed in black garb that looked like some kind of ninja outfits, stormed in, knocked Davis to the floor and held him there with a shotgun to his head.

"They ran through the house and pulled my girlfriend out of bed with no clothes on,
and then they spread her legs out like she was hiding something up in her," Davis said. "I'm wearing pants and no shirt and she's naked, and they open the windows. It's winter. We're freezing. Then they proceed to destroy the place."

Davis was arrested in a crackdown on the "P Street Crew," an alleged cocaine distribution ring operating in Northwest Washington. Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Stanley Sporkin dismissed the case against him.

"The evidence did not have him in any actual drug transaction," said Justin Williams, an assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the case. "All I can say is that there is nothing further pending against him."

Except harsh recollections of the United States mocking its constitutional ideals.

During the raid on Davis's apartment, police tore out the walls and crushed family photographs in their frames. They confiscated his automobile and seized his car-leasing business.

When the charges were dropped, Davis asked for his car and was told that it had been forfeited back to the bank because he had not kept up his monthly payments.

He was told that his business papers would be returned, if government clerks could find them. But he would not be compensated for the damage to his apartment and personal belongings.

Police had charged that Davis, 49, used his business to launder $100 million in drug money. Inside his apartment, they found $8,000 in deposits from customers who had leased cars from him. There were no drugs, no guns or any evidence of the dirty millions that he was supposed to have washed.

Nevertheless, then-Attorney General William Barr held a spectacular news conference at the Justice Department and announced that 450 law enforcement officials from as far away as New York had smashed the notorious P Street Crew.
Davis was implicated as the mastermind and portrayed on television every night for nearly a week as yet another so-called black coke kingpin in handcuffs.

The law does not always respond this way. In 1989, Anne Arundel County police seized seven pounds of cocaine, more than 60 pounds of marijuana, five pounds of hashish, $70,000 in cash and numerous weapons from the home of two National Security Agency psychologists. They did not destroy the house, nor confiscate property.

In fact, police were careful to allege that the drug operation was run by the couple's 21- year-old son. The parents were not charged.

To add insult to Davis's injury, police then transported him and the other 17 P Street defendants across state lines to have their cases tried in Virginia, where juries are whiter and reputedly harsher on black defendants. U.S. District Court Judge Albert V. Bryan saw their arrival for what it was, a charade, and he
ordered the defendants returned to D.C.

Before his arrest, Davis had worked part time as an amateur boxing referee and trainer at a gym in suburban Maryland. There he met some of the youths who also were arrested and later plea bargained for three-year sentences in the P Street case.

Davis said he had tried to help one of the youths "get his act together" by giving him a job as an office cleaner and messenger in his car-leasing company. According to Davis's attorney, the relationship was distorted by an informer who was bargaining with police in a desperate bid to keep himself out of prison.

After being released on bond, Davis found work as a car salesman. "A customer recognized me as `that man from the P Street Crew,'" Davis recalled. "My employer checked my record and found this `felony arrest.'"  He was fired.

During court proceedings dismissing the drug charges last week, prosecutors reserved the right to refile charges against Davis.

"I'm still a suspect?" Davis asked.

"It's not a word we would be using," Williams said later.

Judge Sporkin had said that refiling charges against Davis would be "unwise." But the request by prosecutors had the effect of leaving Davis's innocence in question. That the government had acted immorally, however, was beyond the shadow of a doubt.

"What about my reputation? I have done nothing wrong," Davis said in court. "You break into my home, humiliate my friend, destroy my business and after investigating me for a year, just drop the charges. What can you say to me?"

"You're free," the judge told him. "Next case."
 
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