PR. GEORGE'S POLICE ARREST 2 IN MARIJUANA-SHIPPING PLOT

One Package Went to Mayor's Wife

Prince George's County police announced yesterday that they have
arrested a deliveryman and another man who they say are involved in a
scheme to smuggle marijuana by shipping packages addressed to
unsuspecting recipients, including a delivery last week to the wife of
the mayor of Berwyn Heights.

The county Sheriff's Office SWAT team and narcotics officers raided
the home of Mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife, Trinity Tomsic, after
intercepting a package addressed to her that was filled with 32 pounds
of marijuana. During the raid, officers broke down Calvo's door and
fatally shot the family's two black Labrador retrievers.

Police said the package was one of about a half-dozen retrieved by
authorities in the past week along the route of a deliveryman in
northern Prince George's. The packages contained a combined 417 pounds
of marijuana valued at about $3.6 million.

Police Chief Melvin C. High would not rule out that Calvo and Tomsic
had some involvement in the delivery. Asked whether police had cleared
them, he said: "From all the indications at the moment, they had an
unlikely involvement, but we don't want to draw that definite
conclusion at the moment." He later said, "Most likely, they were
innocent victims."

Neither he nor Sheriff Michael A. Jackson apologized for the raid,
which they said was conducted responsibly, given what deputies and
officers knew at the time.

Calvo declined to comment. Timothy Maloney, an attorney for Calvo and
Tomsic, said the arrests confirm that Tomsic was a "random victim of
identity theft at the hands of major drug traffickers."

"This crime was compounded by law enforcement when it illegally
invaded the Calvo home, tied up the mayor and his mother-in-law, and
killed the family dogs," he said in an e-mail. "The Calvo family is
still waiting for an explanation from law enforcement as to how this
could possibly have happened."

Police had been tracking the package since a drug-sniffing dog in
Arizona drew attention to it. Calvo has said law enforcement officers
burst into his home moments after he picked up the package from his
porch and brought it in. It had been left on the porch on the
instructions of his mother-in-law by police posing as deliverymen.
Calvo has said sheriff's deputies entered without knocking and began
shooting immediately.

High said one of the men arrested was an independent contractor who
worked as a package deliveryman. The police chief did not release the
name of either man.

High and Maj. Mark Magaw, commander of the county's narcotics
enforcement division, said the two suspects worked in tandem. The
officials said that the deliveryman would drop off the package and
that the other man would come by shortly thereafter and retrieve it.

At other times, the officials said, the suspects exchanged packages
face to face in parking lots. In two instances, Magaw said, the
deliveryman mistakenly took drugs to the wrong address, then went to
the houses and asked for the packages.

He said police investigating the case uncovered a separate and
parallel scheme to use the package delivery system to send marijuana.
They arrested two other men yesterday in connection with that
conspiracy and seized about 100 pounds of marijuana.

High and Jackson spent much of a news conference yesterday defending
the raid on Calvo's home. They said using a SWAT team was appropriate
because guns and violence are often associated with drug rings.

"In some quarters, this has been viewed as a flawed police operation
and an attack on the mayor, which it is not," High said. "This was
about an address, this was about a name on a package . . . and, in
fact, our people did not know that this was the home of the mayor and
his family until after the fact."

High said Jackson's team was responsible for determining how "dynamic"
an entry was required. Jackson said that the search warrant
authorizing the raid was obtained by the police department and that
his team was there only because the police's SWAT team was busy on
another assignment.

Neither explained why police spokesmen initially said a "no knock"
warrant had been authorized, giving law enforcement officers
permission from a judge to raid the home without announcing their
presence. Magaw said there was no such thing as a no-knock warrant and
denied telling public information officers that one exists. Legal
experts say a law adopted in 2005 created such a warrant.

Police are allowed to enter without announcing themselves even without
the authorization, but only if specific circumstances at the scene
lead them to reasonably suspect that evidence might be destroyed or
officers' lives endangered.

Jackson said yesterday that his team was justified in entering the
home as forcefully as it did because Calvo's mother-in-law screamed
when she saw the officers approaching the house. The noise, he said,
could have alerted any armed occupants of the home or allowed time for
destruction of any evidence.

He also defended the shooting of the dogs. He said his deputies were
"engaged" by the dogs, by one as they entered the house and by the
other as they made their way through it. Neither dog bit a deputy, he
said.

Calvo maintains that his dogs were peaceful.

Maloney said yesterday that it was "demonstrably false" to suggest the
dogs were threatening law enforcement, and on the whole called the law
enforcement's statement about the raid "defensive" and
"outrageous."

Neither agency has asked for the family's version of the raid, he
said.

"It is clear that neither agency can conduct an independent review
into the law enforcement misconduct that occurred here, nor are they
willing to review their policies involving no-knock entry and the
killing of innocent family pets," Maloney said.

The family will hold a news conference today to address the issues.
Calvo, 37, works part time as the mayor and serves as director of
expansion for the SEED Foundation, a national nonprofit group that
runs urban public boarding schools. Tomsic is a finance officer for
the state.