The Informants

Terrance Roberts and two anti-gang outreach workers, Bryan Butler and John “Qwest” Lewis, outside the Prodigal Son office.

Tragedy has haunted the Holly from its earliest days. In 1960, the neighborhood around Holly Square, a 3.6-acre plot five miles east of downtown Denver, became Denver’s first experiment in “purposeful integration.” It failed: The experiment became one of the most extreme cases of white flight on record, and the neighborhood rapidly became almost entirely Black. Holly Square and its surrounding streets, known simply as “the Holly,” was home to the Holly Shopping Center, which served as the community hub. In 1968, a police shooting in the parking lot became the pivotal moment in Denver’s civil rights movement. In the 1980s, it became home to Denver’s first Bloods gang.

Terrance Roberts, whose grandmother was one of the first African Americans to move into the neighborhood, became a Blood in 1991 at age fifteen. He served nearly ten years on weapons and assault charges and while inside became determined to turn his life around. When he got out, he returned to the Holly and started an anti-gang program, Prodigal Son. Gang violence subsequently dropped, and Terrence gained a reputation among anti-gang activists as a “rock star for the peace movement.”

In 2013, Roberts shocked the city by shooting a young gang member at his own peace rally. Local reporting suggested he had slipped back into gang life, but I found another theory of what happened in the neighborhood: Roberts was targeted because of his activism.

I had started collecting names of people who had been arrested in the neighborhood and was tracking a number of court cases that began to illuminate the otherwise invisible multi-agency law enforcement operations that were going on in Northeast Park Hill. That was how I learned that in 2012 and 2013, as part of Project Safe Neighborhoods, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), and Denver’s District 2 police force ran a multi-task-force operation called “Operation Bleedout,” which employed informants from inside the Bloods. [….]

In Denver, the 1,440 police officers on the city’s force are expected to cultivate informants if they want to move up the ladder. Within the gang unit, informants are seen as vital to making arrests, because gang loyalty and the mistrust of law enforcement complicate efforts to get information on crimes.

An officer can become an informant’s handler without even arresting them. Terms of the agreements vary. Most state that the informant will give his handler actionable information in exchange for the handler asking the district attorney’s office to request leniency for the defendant in a pending case. But some informants may have long-term relationships with officers, particularly if they are higher up in a gang structure and in a position to consistently identify the players. All informants are paid in cash, disbursed by a district-level manager. They go by nicknames, which they are allowed to choose. Their real names are kept in a safe in Denver police headquarters.

Federal informants were also common in Denver, particularly in northeast Denver’s gang communities. The FBI, DEA, ATF, and Homeland Security all had large offices in the city and dedicated gang agents, who relied on such relationships to do their work.

According to Harvard law professor Alexandra Natapoff, federal law theoretically allows any defendant to cooperate in any case,

It wasn’t considered safe to talk about informants in Northeast Park Hill. They were considered not just dangerous but also to be connected to powerful interests. One didn’t have to be committing crimes to fear an informant. In a neighborhood like Northeast Park Hill, politics ran deep and generations of residents felt they had been unlawfully targeted for any number of reasons, from personal beefs to political disagreements to something indecipherable. For many in the neighborhood, getting arrested on any kind of charge could, at minimum, derail their life and cost them thousands of dollars they didn’t have. In northeast Denver, several conspiracy theories surrounded the arson of the Holly Shopping Center in 2008. Some believed the police were involved. Some thought that the city was behind it, in order to wrest control of the area. Others, including Terrance, believed Rev Kelly was involved, which struck me as far-fetched, but one day when I was with Rev, he surprised me by sharing that he had been with the Crips late on the night that they decided to burn the Holly down. “They always said they would do it if Mike got killed,” Rev told me. I had to wonder if he’d shared with them the information that might have stopped them: that the Bloods hadn’t killed Mike. I had pulled the news coverage that showed Rev misleading journalists at the time, saying there was no connection between the fire and Mike’s death. One thing Rev certainly knew was why the Crips were motivated to commit the arson. The redevelopment of Holly Square – which included a new Boys & Girls Club and was spearheaded by some of Denver’s wealthiest and most influential groups and people, including billionaire Phil Anschutz – was ongoing. Meetings of the Holly Area Redevelopment Project (HARP), which was the community arm of the effort, were held bimonthly at the former Safeway building at the top of Holly Square. Aaron Miripol, the CEO of the Urban Land Conservancy, which had bought the site after the Crips burned down the Holly Shopping Center in 2008, kept a low profile, arriving in jeans and carrying a bike helmet. He sat in back. Sixty-four-year-old Gerie Grimes, the HARP president, who wore business attire, ran the meetings. Usually between ten and twenty-five people attended, a mix of older longtime residents and white representatives of new projects under discussion. I did not see Commander Calo again, and I never saw Senator Johnston. For several months, discussion centered on a new charter elementary school, which was eventually approved. On August 9, Terrance’s thirty-eighth birthday, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. When I got to Terrance’s place, he and his father George were watching the protests on CNN. Ferguson, Terrance said, was a Bloods community. He took me into the office and pulled up Brown’s Facebook page, which included photos of Brown and his friends in red. Terrance began to follow posts of the activists on the scene. Many were gang members who had become politicized by the fight for justice for Mike Brown. Weeks came and went with no charges or media related to Ny Ny’s death. I called the Arapahoe County district attorney’s office and was told that the case was “under investigation” and that the DA had sealed the coroner’s report. It sounded strange that the district attorney’s office would censor the report; I was not given an answer as to why.