EXGIRLFRIEND TELLS HOW COP ROBBED DRUG DEALERS

At Least 20 Were Shaken Down, She Tells Grand Jury

The former girlfriend of a Gresham District tactical police officer
scheduled to go on trial Monday on corruption charges has testified she
witnessed her boyfriend rob drug dealers of narcotics or cash as many as 50
times in recent years.

The woman's secret grand jury testimony, part of a defense court filing
obtained by the Tribune, paints a picture of rampant corruption and Chicago
cops out of control.

The federal trial is the first stemming from allegations that tactical
cops, the city's frontline troops in the battle against drugs and gangs,
shook down undercover law enforcement officers posing as drug dealers,
robbing them at gunpoint of cocaine and cash.

The Chicago Police Department was rocked in December 1996 when seven
officers from the Austin District, on the city's West Side, were arrested
and charged with corruption. In a separate probe, three officers from the
South Side's Gresham District were indicted in March on strikingly similar
conspiracy charges.

The beginning of the trial of those three officers comes just days after
Police Supt. Matt Rodriguez announced his resignation Friday in the wake of
a series of setbacks climaxed by disclosures in the Tribune of
Rodriguez's longtime friendship with a convicted felon, in violation of a
little enforced department rule.

Gresham Officers Baxter Streets, Gerald Meachum and Tyrone Francies have
pleaded innocent to charges they took a combined $23,000 in two robberies
of undercover officers posing as drug dealers in November and December 1996.

A civilian, Robert Meeks of Calumet City, is accused of aiding the officers
in setting up the suspected drug dealers.

The former girlfriend whom prosecutors have asked not to be identified
because of alleged attempts to harass her previously said she was 15 when
she met Streets in the summer of 1989.

By the time she was 19, the two had three sons together, she testified.
Streets, who was married and had a family with his wife, was supporting the
girlfriend and their children with cash he stole from drug dealers,
according to the girlfriend's grand jury testimony.

A transcript of the secret grand jury testimony was included in a motion
filed by lawyers for Streets and Francies that unsuccessfully sought to
block the former girlfriend's testimony at trial. IN another filing,
Patrick Truit, one of Street's lawyers, alleged the woman is "mentally
incompetent" and indicated Streets regards her statements as "total and
outright fiction."

The government intends to subpoena the woman as a witness, although in a
letter she wrote to Streets this month she threatened to plead insanity if
she had to testify, according to another defense filing.

"I refuse to testify against you," she wrote. "It won't benefit me any."

In her testimony before the grand jury, she said Streets allegedly robbed
drug dealers who operated near her home "to keep them away from his children."

"What did he do?" a transcript of the grand jury testimony quoted a
prosecutor as asking her.

"In the beginning he would talk to [the drug dealer's]," said the woman,
who was 24 when she testified before the grand jury in July. "The once he
got to know them, he would take the drugs instead of taking them to jail."

"He would take the drugs?"

"Yes, instead of taking them to jail," she replied. "That was because he
said it was to keep it away from kids."

"Did he also take their money?" the prosecutor asked.

"Yes," the woman said.

"Was it your understanding that he didn't arrest any of these individuals?"

"From the times that I was with him, no, he didn't," she said.

"What did he do with the money, to your knowledge," the prosecutor asked.

"It was said to support his kids, his family," she said. "...I can't say
one way or other what he did exactly with it."

The woman said she saw Streets take narcotics or money from drug dealers,
but she was unsure of how many times. That prompted the prosecutor to ask
her if it happened in her presence more than 20 times.

"Yes," she replied.

"Over 50?" he asked.

"No," she said.

"So somewhere between 20 and 50?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "...Usually [Streets] was on his way to my house or he was
just leaving my house; and I was out there with him when he would stop
people."

The woman said she rode a couple of times a week with Streets and his
various partners in their unmarked police car while they were on duty. On
one of those occasions, she said, she saw Streets and codefendent Meachum
chase a man down an alley. The man was not arrested, she testified, but
Meachum returned waving cash in his hand.

The woman also told the grand jury that another night she was in the police
car when Streets and Francies stopped a woman suspected of prostitution.
Instead of arresting her, Francies took her to a hotel and had sex, the
former girlfriend testified.

Francies developed a relationship with the woman, "Giving her money and
stuff to keep her from prostituting," Streets' former girlfriend testified.
"And later down the line, he wound up supporting her drug habit."

The narcotics Francies supplied to the woman came from the thefts of drug
dealers, according to the former girlfriend, who said she twice saw
Francies hand the woman a tiny plastic bag of what appeared to be narcotics.

Francies "Got to the point that he said why should he spend his money when
he can giver her the drugs that he get (sic) from the drug dealers," the
exgirlfriend said.

The woman suspected of being a prostitute is scheduled to testify for the
prosecution at the trial, according to a government filing in federal court.

According to that government filing, Streets allegedly tipped off an
admitted crack cocaine dealer of police activity in his neighborhood
because of a relationship Streets had with a relative of the dealer.

Another admitted drug dealer is expected to testify that Streets planted
narcotic on him and arrested him in March or April 1995 and stole money
from him and an associate in the winter of 1996.

Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday, though it could be delayed a
day because one of the defense attorneys is wrapping up a trial in Cook
County Criminal Court.