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GREENSBORO — Is that all there is?

After a 10-month SBI investigation of misconduct under former police Chief David Wray resulted Monday in indictments of two low-level figures, city officials spent the week answering that question, in one form or another.

Did these seemingly small-bore charges of obstruction of justice and computer hacking against a detective and his sergeant justify the troops and artillery expended?

"It sure doesn't seem as serious as the other things that have been going on," said defense attorney Joel Oakley, who accompanied former Special Intelligence Sgt. Tom Fox to turn himself in Friday. "I'm not seeing where Tom Fox committed a crime."

Seeking resolution of a two-year scandal that continues to envelop City Hall on the eve of a primary election, the City Council voted Friday to air more details of Wray's abrupt resignation in 2006. City Manager Mitchell Johnson said the case brought by the state's special prosecutor is still unfolding.

"These (indicted) officers had a direct chain of command to Deputy Chief (Randall) Brady and Chief Wray," Johnson said. "I don't think it's trivial. I think it goes to the heart of what the police department is."

"When an officer of the law is charged with conspiring to obstruct justice, that is the single most devastating charge that an officer or a department can have," he said.

Tactics questioned

Wray has refused comment to the News & Record through his lawyers. The attorney who represents Brady and indicted former Detective Scott Sanders said earlier last week that Sanders had conducted "justified investigations ordered by his superiors." Sanders, a 19-year veteran, also turned himself in Friday and is free on a written promise to appear.

The first set of grand jury indictments charge that Sanders, 42, misled an SBI agent into illegally accessing a computer. The computer had been issued by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to Greensboro police Officer Julius Fulmore.

Fulmore is one of a list of black police officers that Special Intelligence had been assigned to investigate for possible corruption, according to a city-commissioned report by Risk Management Associates, an independent firm in Raleigh.

Before RMA was brought in, two assistant city attorneys determined that both Wray and Johnson had received repeated warnings that Special Intelligence and vice detectives were using improper and unethical methods to do covert investigations of their fellow officers. On paper, the job of investigating officer misconduct belongs to Internal Affairs.

The investigative tactics of Special Intelligence were, in the words of the RMA summary, "sometimes questionable and its effectiveness was minimal."

The assistant city attorneys wrote in their preliminary report in 2005 that Fulmore's former vice-narcotics commander told Wray that Sanders was a "loose cannon" who bore a "hatred" for Fulmore. Meanwhile, the staff attorneys reported, the SBI district supervisor gave Wray the same warning, and personally cautioned Sanders about his tactics in investigating Fulmore.

According to the report, the SBI supervisor, James Bowman, told Sanders that his focus on black police officers could be seen as racially motivated. The report says Bowman also cautioned Sanders that his tactics — for example, paying an informer to try to sell Fulmore stolen TV sets — could constitute entrapment.

The second set of indictments last week focused on obstruction of justice and conspiracy charges against Sanders and Fox, 47, who has been with the department since June 1983.

As of last week, Fox and Sanders had been suspended with pay since October 2006. Fox's salary is $65,437 per year; Sanders, $52,933.

The second set of charges allege that Sanders told a Winston-Salem police officer and a fellow Greensboro police officer not to cooperate in an investigation being handled by black officers Ernest Cuthbertson and Norman Rankin.

Cuthbertson and Rankin were trying to investigate a confidential informant's claim to have seen a photograph of a black police sergeant with a prostitute. According to the indictment, Sanders said that Rankin and Cuthbertson's investigation "needed to fail."

Sanders allegedly told the white officers that if the black investigators obtained an incriminating photograph, "they would probably do something with it." According to the RMA report, the confidential informant was later found to be "a notorious police impersonator" who was not a credible witness.

Focus on fellow officers

Unknown to Sanders, the white Greensboro police officer documented the alleged exchange and reported it to his own supervisor, Capt. Gary Hastings, the Criminal Investigations Division commander. Hastings said Friday that after Wray's resignation, a departmental review of the activities of Special Intelligence revealed that the unit's primary focus had been investigating fellow officers.

That unofficial mission, in which the unit reported directly to then-Deputy Chief Brady, took the place of the unit's traditional assignment, monitoring gangs and hate groups.

Hastings' CID detectives, and later the SBI, had looked into allegations that Special Intelligence, in the course of investigating black officers, engaged in extortion, intimidation, fabrication of evidence and even a case of kidnapping.

RMA President Michael Longmire, who on Friday spoke publicly for the first time about his team's investigation, said that even though investigators turned up "shocking" practices under the Wray administration, the evidence of wrongdoing did not always meet the legal definition of a crime.

Longmire referred, for example, to the tape recording released last winter of Sanders and Brady discussing how to rid then-chief Wray of a meddlesome neighbor. Longmire also referred to would-be scam artist Nicole Pettiford allegedly being detained, without being charged or read her rights, for a six-hour interrogation by Sanders.

"Just because it doesn't meet all the elements of the crime doesn't mean something bad didn't happen," Longmire said.

War of words

In contrast to those allegations, any trial of the charges filed last week against Sanders and Fox would hinge neither on the testimony of a meddlesome neighbor nor an accused con artist, but rather on the word of fellow police officers and SBI agents testifying for the state.

In discussing the charges filed by the state's special prosecutor, Senior Deputy Attorney General James Coman, the mayor, city manager and Councilwoman Florence Gatten all invoked the lesson of the last case Coman was called in to resolve: the Duke lacrosse case.

Each cautioned against a rush to judgment before the evidence is heard. Yet in last week's accelerating war of words between Wray's civil lawyer, Ken Keller, and city officials, there was no neutral ground.

Keller accused the city of having "played the race card" and making Wray the scapegoat. That position escalated last week with an interview in the weekly publication, The Rhinoceros Times, in which Wray described his college-age daughter trying to pry posters of Wray with a Hitler mustache off trash cans on the UNCG campus in 2006.

"That happened because of Mitchell Johnson," Wray is quoted as saying. "That happened because of the way he handled things. He set that in motion, and my daughter got down on her knees trying to scrape off that poster on that can."

Johnson called that claim "ludicrous" and said the most egregious violation of personnel procedures has been the selective leaking of personnel and Internal Affairs files to the Rhinoceros Times and other outlets.

Although the allegations of misconduct by black officers, including Lt. James Hinson, were presented as new information, Johnson said they had been investigated several times and were unsubstantiated.

"It's not evidence. Much of it was unproven, much of it was based on conflicting information and you are not being told that other side of it," he said.

Can views be reconciled?

All that information was scrutinized during Wray's administration by people in his direct line of command: If it were true and merited disciplinary action, why didn't the ex-chief act on it when he was in the driver's seat, the city manager asked.

Instead, Johnson said, the former chief kept answering "no problem" to Johnson's repeated inquiries about the complaints of unequal treatment and harassment made by black officers.

He trusted Wray implicitly at first, Johnson said. But the tide turned as new pieces of information came to light that showed serious problems did exist, Johnson said.

"I trusted him absolutely," he said. "I asked him time and again: 'The issue about the black officers, is there anything to this? Is there any possibility?'"

In candidate forums leading up to the fall council and mayor's election, officials have seen firsthand the polarizing effect the case continues to have on the public. So sharp is the division, some question whether the opposing views could ever be reconciled, even by a final judgment in court.

RMA President Longmire, a retired Raleigh police commander, said if Wray were the victim of a conspiracy, that conspiracy would have to include the city manager, city attorney, nine-member City Council, SBI and now the state's special prosecutor.

"How can people believe they all came together in this big conspiracy?" Longmire said Friday. "What is it about the culture of Greensboro, that people don't seem to ever let go? I think this is going to be another one of those things people don't let go."

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

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or twireback@news-record.com