Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Chicago Sun-Times
by Natasha Korecki and Frank Main

They stood guard over drug shipments.

They watched over high-stakes poker games.

Except they were the police.

Drug charges were unsealed Tuesday against 15 officers: four Harvey cops, 10 Cook County correctional officers and a Chicago Police officer. The FBI orchestrated 12 fake drug deals over the last year.

They "sold out their badges and agreed for money to help drug dealers do their business," U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said.

Two of the men are serving with the Army National Guard in Afghanistan and will be brought back to Chicago to face charges.

The 15 officers took up to $4,000 each to act as lookouts and intervene if police or rival drug dealers tried to interfere with shipments of cocaine and heroin, prosecutors said. Two officers were charged with selling cocaine.

In May, a plane landed at DuPage Airport, where jail guards Ahyetoro Taylor and Raphael Manuel boarded and allegedly began counting what they thought were 80 kilos of cocaine stashed in four duffel bags.

Taylor and Manuel believed they were guarding a drug dealer, but he was really an undercover FBI agent. They were each paid $4,000 and allegedly recruited others in law enforcement to do the same kind of moonlighting.

Many of the men knew each other from their jobs as jail guards. Timothy Funches, Richard Hall and Robert Kelly were all hired Nov. 1, 2004, county records show.

Also caught up in the sting was Harvey officer Archie Stallworth, who is accused of accompanying an undercover agent to DuPage Airport on Aug. 11 and accepting $1,000 after handling three duffel bags purportedly containing 30 kilos of cocaine.

The undercover FBI agent was posing as an employee of a strip club in Harvey, sources said.

In 2005, a Harvey Police dispatcher and a Harvey Police officer were among 15 people charged in federal court with failing to report income they earned while moonlighting as guards at strip clubs, including the Skybox in Harvey.

Stallworth, who also worked as a Metra conductor and was seen as a right-hand man of Harvey Mayor Eric Kellogg, was fired from his Metra job Tuesday. He resigned last week from his police job.

Harvey officer Dwayne Williams is accused of taking $400 to provide muscle during a purported $100,000 poker game staged by FBI agents. Fellow officer Antoine D. Dudley allegedly got $400 in protection money.

They allegedly teamed up with Harvey Police Officer James Engram Jr. to provide protection for a fake 25-kilo cocaine deal Feb. 29.

Chicago Police Officer Kyle T. Wilson also was charged in the sting. He allegedly accepted $500 for working security on a staged deal Oct. 24, 2007.