To the contrary, the lawsuit alleges that “the Five Black Officer Lineup was shown to criminals by the GPD in 2003, 2004 and 2005 to elicit false allegations from such persons of improper conduct by Officer Fulmore.” The lawsuit offers no evidence to back up the claim.

Another “discriminatory method” noted in the lawsuit is a digital photo array of all black officers employed by the Greensboro Police Department that Sanders allegedly placed on his laptop computer.

The circumstances or indeed whether the array existed at all remains a matter of controversy. In July 2005, when concerns about lineups surfaced within the department, Sanders referenced a digital photo array in a memo to Brady. The memo states that Bridgett Ekwensi, who was a participant in Hinson’s 1997 bachelor party, had mentioned a lone white officer among the black cops. “In October 2003, she was allowed to view more photographs,” Sanders wrote. “These were displayed on a laptop computer screen from files that were on a recorded CD. These were the best collection at that time of all Greensboro Police Department employees, which resulted in approximately 750 photos in alphabetical order.”

Endless investigations

The RMA report dates Fulmore’s assignment to a federal task force investigating Terry Bracken for drug trafficking to 2003. That fall, a Guilford County Jail inmate named Pamela Williams claimed, as the RMA report described it, “to have seen Fulmore and Bracken together and claimed to have a video tape of them together at a party where drugs were openly displayed.”

The allegations led to an investigation by the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office, the State Bureau of Investigation and the Greensboro Police Department. Sanders was assigned to the case on behalf of the GPD. Fulmore’s complaint makes note of the fact that the Greensboro Police Department elected to continue the investigation after the SBI determined that Williams’ allegations were baseless, and the department used such tactics as placing a GPS tracker on Fulmore’s police vehicle and having Sanders surreptitiously review

Fulmore’s e-mails. 

Special Agent James Bowman, who worked the case for the SBI, testified in Sanders’ trial in February that agents went down to South Carolina and enlisted Pamela Williams’ daughter to call Fulmore and tell him that a Secret Service agent had been coming around and asking about security tapes that purportedly showed Fulmore and Bracken “meeting for drug business.”

Fulmore told Williams’ daughter that he didn’t know the Secret Service agent, and that the agent could contact him, Bowman testified.

The SBI agent added that investigators took another measure: They had Williams’ daughter call Fulmore and tell him her grandfather was threatening to destroy the tapes.

“Fulmore instructed her not to do that,” Bowman said. “In my mind that was completely exculpatory to Fulmore.” Bowman and Sanders compared Fulmore’s phone numbers with Bracken’s phone numbers, and Bowman testified that they found “no significant information.” Another allegation leveled against Fulmore by Williams — that he came to jail to threaten her — proved to be contradicted by jail records.

“I developed a concern… that Detective Sanders had what I would call ‘tunnel vision’ as to this particular person we were investigating,” Bowman said in court. “He felt that Fulmore was guilty of something, and despite contrary evidence he continued to see it only one way.” No criminal charges or administrative citations resulted from the investigation, but just when the Williams case seemed to be winding down, in early June 2004, a vice-narcotics detective initiated an inquiry based on a discovery that a room at the Red Carpet Inn had been registered in Fulmore’s name. Detective LT Marshall reported that hotel staff informed him of suspected prostitution activity occurring in the adjacent room. An unsigned narrative matching Marshall’s perspective states that the vice-narcotics detective called Fulmore’s city-issued cell phone, and then contacted Sanders “of the special investigations division [SIC], who also works with Detective Fulmore. Detective Sanders stated that Detective Fulmore was in training. I then advised Detective Sanders of the circumstances and why I wanted to contact Detective Fulmore. Detective Sanders advised me that he would meet with me and for me to stay where I was. Detective Sanders responded and I showed him where the hotel room was located. Fulmore’s complaint alleges that Sanders, Marshall and Brian Bissett, a second vice-narcotics detective who was on the scene, “had absolutely no evidence that Officer Fulmore engaged in any sort of criminal conduct.”

Rosa S. Torres, an employee of the Red Carpet Inn, would later recall during an interview with internal affairs investigators that three white males identifying themselves as vice-narcotics officers requested access to the room registered in Fulmore’s name. “Ms. Torres advised when they came out she went in to clean, at which time she discovered a cigarette box and a pipe with cocaine under the covers of the bed,” the report records. A used condom was also recovered from the room. The occupant of the adjacent room was Brenda Weidman, a white prostitute who happened to be one of Fulmore’s informants.

Weidman told investigators that she went into Fulmore’s room in the night in question, and the black detective pulled out a bag of powder cocaine and asked the prostitute to cook it. An administrative report continues: “She alleged she cooked the cocaine and smoked a small amount to confirm it was good. Ms. Weidman alleged Detective Fulmore gave her $100 worth of the cooked crack-cocaine before placing the rest in a plastic bag and keeping it. She alleged she and Detective Fulmore then had consensual oral and vaginal sex.” Fulmore denied Weidman’s allegations. He was suspended with pay while the case was investigated.

Three days after the hotel room was rented, Fulmore’s complaint alleges that Chief Wray informed Capt. Gary Hastings, who headed the criminal investigations division, about the discovery. “Wray told Hastings that Brady had been working the investigation of Officer Fulmore, and through Brady’s hard work ‘they’ had ‘taken down’ Officer Fulmore,” the complaint reads.

“Also in the June 5, 2004 conversation, Wray told Hastings that Officer Fulmore had committed crimes involving prostitution, narcotics and association with criminals.”

An evidence control form listed a glass tube containing an off-white residue and used condoms. An investigation determined that the condoms were Fulmore’s, but the drug paraphernalia belonged to an associated.

Reached at the police department, Hastings, now an assistant chief, would not comment on the veracity of the complaint, and Fulmore’s lawyer declined to disclose the source of the allegation.

The complaint charges that “Wray’s statements to Hastings were indicative of the disparate treatment that Officer Fulmore was subjected to as a result of his race, in that non-black officers were presumed innocent prior to the conduct of investigations of alleged wrongdoing, while black officers were not.” In fact, Fulmore had rented the room for an employee at the automotive shop he operated on Randleman Road. The employee, Greg Lewis, had recently been put out of his mother’s house, where he had been staying to that point. Before Lewis arrived at the hotel to go to sleep, Fulmore and a female friend had used the room to have sex. To protect the young woman’s privacy and because police reports indicate that her boyfriend at the time was angry about her involvement with Fulmore, YES! Weekly is withholding her name. However, there should be no doubt that she is not the same woman as Brenda Weidman, and no one has ever suggested that she was a prostitute.

An administrative report signed by both Fulmore and Wray records that Fulmore told investigators that he and his female friend watched television in the hotel room. The off-duty detective drank a Natural Light beer and smoked a Newport cigarette, and the female friend drank a diet soda. Then, Fulmore told investigators, the two had sex three times using condoms that he provided.

The administrative report records that Lewis told investigators that “he had a glass tube used to cook crack in a cigarette pack inside his pocket, which possibly fell out of his pocket and was left in the room.” “If you want to put it on me, I’ll take it,” Lewis told Sanders, Bissett and Marshall. “Not Jay.” Fulmore told investigators that Lewis showed up at his shop a couple weeks after the hotel incident to apologize.

“He advised he told Mr. Lewis he did not want to talk about the situation, because he was very upset and wanted to let things pan out,” the report reads. Notwithstanding his discontent, Fulmore said he never let his anger show to Lewis.

DNA swabs were taken of Fulmore, Weidman and the used condom recovered from the room rented by Fulmore, and sent to the SBI lab for analysis. The results excluded Weidman as a match for the DNA taken from the condom, but did not rule out Fulmore.

At the end of the criminal investigation, the final administrative report indicates, Sanders and Bissett presented their findings to the Guilford County District Attorney’s office, which determined they lacked sufficient evidence to support the elements of criminal charges. The administrative investigation sustained a single allegation that Fulmore violated a departmental directive by failing to fill out a contact card to document his contact with Weidman on a number of occasions before the hotel incident took place.

The city legal report noted that Fulmore’s punishment was transfer to patrol, “according to the chief, to ‘watch what he was doing.’”

Capt. Matt Lojko, commanding officer of the division of professional standards, reviewed the case at Wray’s request in September 2005, and could find nothing wrong with it. “There were no indications of disparate treatment of the affected employee,” he wrote.

A 2005 internal city legal report, drafted a month or two later, determined otherwise. “Det. Scott Sanders of SID has had substantial contact with several female informants, but according to him he has not completed any documentation of this contact. Moreover, according to Sanders, his superiors were aware of these contacts and did not require him to complete such documentation. Both Fulmore and Sanders were assigned to the SID unit at the time of their failure to document contact with confidential informants.”

In February 2005, while internal affairs was wrapping up its administrative investigation of Fulmore, Sanders created a lineup book containing photographs of 19 black officers that came to be known among African-American officers as the “black book.” The book’s purported purpose is innocuous enough, but the incident of alleged misconduct that prompted its creation remains shrouded in mystery.

“It has been rumored that investigators with the special intelligence division created a book containing pictures of all the African-American officers,” the city legal report observes. “It was further rumored that special intelligence was showing these pictures to suspects and informants. It has not been confirmed that a ‘black book’ exists.”

Subsequent revelations raise the question of whether the so-called “black book” was a decoy designed to throw off efforts to track Sanders’ multiple investigations.

As Fulmore’s complaint notes, the city has alleged that the “Black Officer Lineup Book” was created pursuant to a prostitute’s allegation that a black GPD officer groped her in a motel room. The lawsuit states, “Despite the city’s allegations, no GPD investigative report or other GPD documentation from the time of the supposed sexual harassment allegations exists to substantiate that a prostitute ever made such allegations.”

Police attorney Maurice Cawn told YES! Weekly in 2008 that the department had no incident report documenting the alleged assault.

Pat Boswell, the city’s public affairs director added, “At this time, it seems that the GPD does not have a date for this alleged event.” And yet a memo from Sanders to Brady that was written months after the fact states, “I searched records and compiled a list of all black male police officers who were on duty in uniform at the time frame that the victim/witness said that this incident occurred.”

Chief Bellamy has also expressed doubt about the incident, telling council members during a January 2005 closed-session meeting that the police department had never had 19 black officers on duty at one time. In March 2005, Fulmore alleges, Sanders launched a new investigation of Fulmore,

which lasted through the end of the year, that “was not based on new credible evidence or new credible allegations implicating any crime or administrative violations.” Fulmore alleges that Sanders and others operated out of a covert location on South Elm Street. The co-owner of the 14-story Guilford Building has previously confirmed to YES! Weekly that police use of the building dates back to the mid-1990s.

Where to?

Fulmore’s lawsuit argues the police department’s reorganization of special intelligence to report to the criminal investigations division commander and the city’s acceptance of Chief Wray’s resignation “constitutes an admission that the city engaged in racially disparate treatment of Officer Fulmore.”

While the RMA Report focuses more on questions about Wray’s integrity and honesty in his dealings with his boss, then-City Manager Mitchell Johnson, investigators reported finding “evidence that tends to support allegations made by employees of disparate treatment.” (Wray has argued that the RMA report contains “numerous factual errors and unjustified conclusions.”)

Fulmore’s lawsuit argues that “the city’s failure to deny the findings of the RMA report constitutes an adoptive admission” of its conclusions.

Facing heavy public pressure to redeem the honor of Wray and his allies on the force, city officials have been hard pressed to acknowledge any wrong done to the black officers — a concession that would obviously undermine the city’s negotiating position. Earlier this year, the US Justice Department launched two investigations of the Greensboro Police Department, one to evaluate claims by the 39 black officers who are plaintiffs in the other discrimination suit against the city, and another prompted by a discovery that blacks are underrepresented in the department’s entry-level positions. Having fired Mitchell Johnson, who took steps to address the black officers’ grievances, the city appears to have backed itself into a corner.

According to a Rhinoceros Times report, District 4 representative Mike Barber was one of four council members who changed their vote last November and withdrew a $750,000 settlement offer to the 39 black officers after the conservative weekly published their names and stirred a firestorm of public objection.

Barber, who has announced that he will not run for reelection, now says he supports a settlement even though he does not believe any of Fulmore’s claims are valid.

“My role is to make decisions based on the longterm health and success of our city,” said Barber, who is a lawyer. “I’m quite certain 95 percent of the people I talk to would be absolutely opposed to a settlement. I support a settlement because I deal with lawsuits and I know the damage they can do. “I will not make my decision based on public sentiment and the changing political winds,” the councilman continued. “I will take my beating like a man.”

‘Wray’s statements to Hastings were indicative of the disparate treatment that Officer Fulmore was subjected to as a result of his race, in that non-black officers were presumed innocent prior to the conduct of investigations of alleged wrongdoing, while black officers were not.’ — Fulmore lawsuit