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GREENSBORO - They might have been a favorite topic for conspiracy theorists, but the "secret police" were purely an urban legend, former Chief David Wray often said.

After all, how secret was a unit that listed its number in the blue pages, as the Special Intelligence Section did, and even had a sign on the door?

But in the end, what went on behind that door was precisely what brought down Wray's administration. The squad, which under the two previous police chiefs kept tabs on gangs and hate groups, would now take on another unofficial function.

Sworn in with what he saw as a mandate to clean up the department, Wray had Special Intelligence train its field capabilities less on the Klan or the Crips in favor of a more elusive target: police corruption itself.

In investigations that spanned more than two years, court records and internal documents show, the squad used surveillance, photographs, eavesdropping and the collaboration of prostitutes in an effort to gather evidence against fellow officers. Through it all, not a single charge against an officer was ever produced.

And though the Wray administration's motives and use of resources continue to be points of debate in the community, the consequences they had are not. Revelations about what the squad was doing have brought the resignation of the chief, the launch of an FBI inquiry into possible racial profiling of black officers and threats of lawsuits against the city over the covert squad's alleged tactics, which included:

• Coercion of suspects;

• Attempted entrapment of targeted officers;

• Racial profiling through the use of a "black book" that pictures 19 African American patrolmen and 95 other people , used during interrogations.

Still, the worst fallout may be hardest to measure: the damage to Greensboro's self-image as a progressive town with a police force to match.

"It looks bad, " City Councilwoman Yvonne Johnson reflected recently, "because, baby, it is bad."

The seeds of distrust

By the time the series of investigations reached their disastrous conclusion in late 2005, it enveloped the department, as the city manager put it, in "an atmosphere of fear and distrust," reaching high enough to target Wray's handpicked executive officer.

In hindsight, the seeds had been sown just weeks after Wray's July 30, 2003, swearing-in, when a paddy wagon of officers carried out a back-street raid that never made the news. Vice-narcotics officers were running video surveillance that summer on an unlicensed club in Glenwood that had raised eyebrows in the neighborhood. Every Thursday night, cars backed up on Grove Street on their way to the Game Time Lounge.

What drew the clientele to the nondescript brick storefront, according to a search warrant application, was live sex on s tage, drug use, $3 condoms at the bar and, in a "VIP room," sessions with dancers with such n ames as "Hennessey" and "Orgazimm."

But during a raid of one of those late-night parties shortly after midnight on Aug. 22, 2003, Game Time owner Otis Dunlap said it was neither narcotics nor prostitution allegations that appeared to interest investigators most.

After police kicked in the door and drew their guns, Dunlap said, he was questioned for hours about police corruption and shown a "black notebook" of officers' photos.

Other than a High Point fi refighter who worked the door, Dunlap maintained that there were no public safety employees involved. Despite the scale of the raid, the result was only four misdemeanors to which Dunlap pleaded guilty, according to court records.

And though investigators refused to say whether the raid produced any evidence of police collusion in the shady activities at Game Time, the inv estigation was far from over.

A new mission

When he moved into the chief's office and began dismantling the directives of his predecess or, some of Wray's initiatives were cosmetic. A new paint scheme on the cruisers, say, or a rule that officers had to trade in their baseball caps and return to wearing "bus-driver" hats.

But Wray, a former schoolteacher with little field experience in the department where he worked for 20 years, was mulling over deeper changes. He sensed that polic e integrity was under siege, and in reviewing investigations by the Internal Affairs Section into alleged corruption, he "had reservations about their thoroughness," he later wrote to the City Council.

Under Chief Robert White, allegations against police officers were handled in one of two ways. Internal Affairs, with the help of Special Intelligence, reviewed violations of policy. If the accusations were criminal, detectives might be used from various divisions - vice-narcotics, for example, or fraud.

Before White's tenure, Chief Sylvester Daughtry had used Special Intelligence to investigate allegations against officers, but he said recently that it was only on rare occasions, under the command of an Internal Affairs captain.

Wray broke from his predecessors - and the practice of most police departments - in fall 2004, when he moved the unit out from under Internal Affairs. At that point, it became an autonomous squad reporting directly to Wray's confidante of two decades, Deputy Chief Randall Brady, who increasingly used the uni t to investigate alleged corruption. Wray, who declined to be interviewed for this article, never publicly explained why he moved Speci al Intelligence.

His former boss, City Manager Mitchell Johnson, said that question remains. Johnson argues that time-honored policies of the department "are there for a reason."

"When you're dealing with an officer's career, you need to be talking about evidence and not intelligence," Johnson said. "It's clear that over some period of time the process got changed to the point where we've ended up today."

No stone unturned

What changed in 2004 was not so much the allegations that had been made about officers. It was the determination with which Special Intelligence pursued them - in some cases after Internal Affairs could find no wrongdoing.

Such was the case of a convicted cocaine kingpin suspected of having ties to a police lieutenant. Even though Internal Affairs investigated the ties and ruled them "unsubstantiated," the case was reopened by Special Intelligence.

Elton Turnbull, who was sentenced in a $10 million Greensboro cocaine ring, said in a recent phone interview from federal prison that Internal Affairs detectives visited him in custody in summer 2004 to ask whether he knew "a police lieutenant," whom they left unnamed, was involved with people in the narcotics trade.

Turnbull said he told investigators he did kno w Lt. James Hinson through a mutual girlfriend and through purchasing a house from the officer. But Turnbull said he had nothing incriminating to offer, even with the prospect of a reduction in his 30-year sentence.

Lawyers for Hinson declined to comment for this story. In a News & Record interview last summer, however, Hinson acknowledged that he sold Turnbull a house in 1999 but didn't realize he was a drug dealer.

After Internal Affairs visited Turnbull and two female co-conspirators, Wray wrote in a recent memo, they reported that there was nothing to the allegations of a link and no reason to confront Hinson. Wray remained unconvinced.

Instead of ending the investigation, a scrap of information Turnbull offered unrelated to the narcotics case would send Special Intelligence on another line of inquiry, this time an effort to entrap police officers soliciting sex.

Turnbull told police that the two women, one a topless dancer and low-level drug courier, the other a more key associate in the drug conspiracy, recalled attending a bachelor party for Hinson, as well as other parties attended by Greensboro police officers of various rank.

So it was that Bridgett Holman Ekwensi, according to court records, cooperated with Special Intelligence Officer Scott Sanders. While awaiting federal sentencing in the international cocaine ring, the records show, the former Twiggy's dancer was baiting a trap for police officers whom Sanders suspected of soliciting sex.

The only person caught in the trap was a nonsworn police employee recorded negotiating a price for sex. The employee resigned and received a prayer before judgment for solicita tion - which means the offense will not go on the em ployee's record if he behaves for a set period of time - but his lawyer remained perplexed by the phone tap and wondered what his client had blundered into.

"(My client) was not a high-profile case," attorney Joel Oakley said in a recent interview. "Why in the world would they have him on tape?"

Tales begin to swirl

It was during this time that the rumor of a covert operation targeting officers began making the rounds at the department. According to the grapevine, the department had hired back retired police officers and assigned them to help Special Intelligence investigate officers ­­­­- on paper, the role of Internal Affairs.

The ranks, whom a union survey suggests already were bitter over shift changes adopted in January 2004, as well as Wray's style, nicknamed the unit "the secret police."

It would be almost two years into Wray's tenure before these rumors were s hown t o be true - when Hinson found a tracking device on his cruiser last June and caught a private eye "hireback" tailing him.

But well before this incident made the story public, the investigations of Hinson and a circle of black officers who all attended the academy at the same time had already drawn the notice and disapproval of criminal justice officials from other agencies.

In a confidential memo Wray sent to the City Council after his Jan. 9 resignation, he wrote that two unnamed law enforcement officials voiced concern to him about the activities of Special Intelligence.

Meanwhile, Wray recalled in his memo, the office of then-District Attorney Stuart Albright expressed alarm about an "inappropria te" com ment that Brady, the d eputy chief , was said to have made about the Hinson probe.

According to Wray's memo, Brady, after hearing that a prisoner with information about a homicide also had possible information incriminating Hinson, had remarked that gathering intelligence on Hinson took priority over the unsolved homicide. Brady, who filed a lawsuit against the city Jan. 30 to get his retirement pay, declined to be interviewed for this story, and Albright, now a sitting judg e, has de clined to comment.

The district attorney had flatly refused to be involved in prosecuting Hinson, according to Wray and the city manager, but the Hinson investigation continued with a review of leads that had previously led nowhere for Internal Affairs.

For example, Tammy Steele, a former reven ue agent for the city, said she had raised questions two years earlier about Hinson' s off-duty dealings with club owners and whether he had ties to an unlicensed security company, 2 Tyght Security. Steele said the information she provided to Internal Affairs at that time apparently had not resulted in any finding of wrongdoing. But then last June, a Special Intelligence detective, and later two private detectives hired back by the department, came to question her about her complaints to the Private Detective Services Board in Raleigh.

"You went all the way to Raleigh," Steele recalled asking Sanders from Special Intelligence, "just to come back here and talk to me?"

But even as the Hinson investigation appeared to be retracing trails that already hit dead ends, Special Intelligence concluded there was fresh evidence of police corruption among the black officers.

This time, the pro be would reach higher than ever - into the chief's own front office.

The end of the trail

The episode that would lead the Special Intelligence probe in its most tenuous direction was bizarre from the outset.

On a late October evening at the Residence Inn off High Point Road, Greensbor o resident Nic ole Pettiford said she was interrogated by Special Intelligence officers, including Sanders.

Pettiford, 36, said she was pulling out of a McDonald's with her children in the back seat when plainclothes city officers pulled her over. Without explanation, Pettiford said, the officers had her drop off her children at a sister's home and then go with them to the hotel for what she said turned out to be a six-hour interrogation.

Lawyer David James, who represents Sanders - who is temporarily assigne d to duties outside Special Intelligence - said his client "did nothing wrong and followed proper procedures," noting that a department directive prevents Sanders from commenting.

Pettiford, who has a record of minor convictions including bad checks, said Sanders played a tape of her calling the associate of a major marijuana supplier and saying that she "knew a lot of cops" and could sell him inside information.

Though she did know a number of city police officers, Pettiford told the News & Record that her c laim of inside information had been a bluff in the hope of making quick cash.

Instead, she apparently blundered into a federal wiretap in a major marijuana smuggling case, touching off a new round of internal investigations by Special Intelligence.

Confronted in the hotel room interview, Pettiford said she was questioned about a long list of black officers, including two sergeants, a corporal and another officer without rank.

In a book of surveillance photos, she recalled a photo of one officer talking to her in the parking lot of Sam's Club.

"It made me think," Pettiford recalled, " ‘How much time and money have they spent on little old me?' "

The most inexplicable detail in Pettiford's account is the identity of the officer she said Special Intelligence had photographed her talking to in the p arking lot at Sam's Club.

A month before the hotel interrogation, that officer - Lt. Brian James - had been promoted to the secon d most visible jo b in the police department: right-hand man to Wray.

Assigned to accompany the chief to p ublic appearances and community events, he was Wray's executive officer and media spokesman.

Lt. James, citing department directives, would not comment, and it remains unclear whether Wray knew, at the time, that the investigation had reached as high as his newly promoted assistant.

What is clear is that the ramifications d id not stop at Wray's front office. By fall 2005, Johnson, the city manager, hired another set of private detectives, this time from out of town, to begin a new investigation: of Special Intelligence and the conduct of the police chief himself.

That city-commissioned review culminated in Wray's resignation Jan. 9, three days after the city manager locked Wray out of his own office.

Staff writer Amy Dominello assisted in this report.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lahearn@news-record.com

and Eric J.S. Townsend at 373-7008 or etownsend@news-record.com