The Mount Vernon Police Tapes: 7 Black Men Allege False Charges Involving Narcotics Detective

This is part of an ongoing series on police corruption allegations in Mount Vernon, New York, based on hours of secret recordings obtained exclusively by Gothamist/WNYC.

Three years ago on a drizzly summer evening in Mount Vernon, New York, Bobby Brown was chatting with a friend on the sidewalk, waiting for his girlfriend to pick him up. As she pulled up across the street, Brown saw a trio of plainclothes police officers approach her white car. He grabbed his phone and started recording. “They harassing us all the time man, they ain’t got nothing better to do,” he said, narrating for the camera.

After about a minute, the officers let her go. But instead of heading out, the officers noticed Brown recording and crossed the street. One of them, bald and muscular, got up in his face. “Let me see your mouth,” he barked, implying that he was hiding drugs there. Brown protested that he had nothing, even swallowing when the detective commanded him to. Without warning, the detective hunched over and began frisking Brown, ordering him to spread his legs.

Brown, like many Black residents in the small Westchester County city, knew this detective well. For years, Detective Camilo Antonini had sparked complaints of police brutality, missing cash, and humiliating searches. But the department kept the investigator on the street, never disciplining him with more than a written reprimand in response to a civilian complaint, according to department records.

So here Antonini was, groping around Brown’s legs while telling him to relax. “You feeling me, you not explaining what you came out here for,” the citizen protested. Antonini, he believed, was “just guessing”—searching him without cause in the hopes of finding something. Brown had a record for dealing, but now at the age of forty he said that life was behind him. “I don’t sell drugs no more, bro. I don’t hustle no more,” he pleaded.

Finding nothing in Brown’s pants, Detective Antonini claimed he had gotten a tip and suggested he would eventually catch him, shaking his hand as if making a bet.

“It’s never going to happen,” Brown shot back.

“And if it does?” the detective trailed off with a faint smirk.

The two continued to argue for a few minutes before the police finally headed back to their unmarked black sedan. Brown recalls feeling a “bad vibe.”

“I felt that my life was gonna crash, but I didn’t know how fast or how soon,” he says.

The crash came almost a year later when a team of officers showed up to his apartment as he was getting ready for his security job at a retail store. Brown was suddenly being accused of possessing and selling crack cocaine eight months earlier. His accuser? Detective Antonini. The date of the alleged crimes? The week after their confrontation.

Brown’s account comes down to his word versus that of the police. But his story is hardly isolated. He is one of at least seven Westchester County residents now saying in on-the-record interviews or lawsuits that they were falsely charged in drug cases involving Antonini and other officers. Some, like Brown, spent time behind bars as a result of their charges. Others lost jobs or had their reputations ruined by police officials who publicized their names and pictures for the press. All are Black men.

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One man has evidence indicating he was in another state at the time Antonini accused him of a drug sale. Another claims the detective and other officers from the county police force forwarded fabricated evidence against him to prosecutors for a drug charge that was eventually dismissed, after the man spent over eight months in jail. A third claims Antonini and his peers arrested him for drugs, which a friend admitted to possessing, in retaliation for his refusal to serve as the detective’s informant.

Antonini declined to comment on the record for this story.

The mounting innocence claims follows Gothamist/WNYC’s series on a trove of phone calls, secretly recorded by Murashea Bovell, a whistleblower who remains an active duty officer in the department to this day. The whistleblower’s tapes captured multiple Mount Vernon police officers describing their colleagues framing and assaulting residents, allying with local drug dealers, and permitting a dangerous gunman to prowl city streets. Detective Antonini is at the center of many of those allegations.

The series sparked outrage and protests in the small city, which is one of Westchester County’s few majority Black enclaves. In response, the Mount Vernon Police Department disbanded the narcotics unit, suspended one of its former members, and put Detective Antonini on desk duty. The department has said it is now pursuing an investigation into multiple former members of the specialized squad.

The Mount Vernon Police Department also declined to comment for this story.

Though the unit is now disbanded, some residents feel city officials, police, and prosecutors need to go much further. Several have recently filed lawsuits seeking compensation. Others are working with the Exoneration Project, a wrongful convictions organization, in the hopes that their records will be cleared.

“The city of Mount Vernon has been suffering under a reign of terror by armed, rogue police officers, and it’s time to go behind the curtain, and figure out how to repair the damage that was done,” said Karen Newirth, director of the organization’s Mass Exoneration Initiative. “That repair would include both vacating convictions, but also figuring out how to police in a community in a way that increases public safety and does not damage and violate the civil rights of individuals on a daily basis.”

Residents with innocence claims are now hoping for relief from Westchester’s incoming District Attorney Mimi Rocah, who defeated the incumbent DA, in part by promising to do more to investigate the allegations in the tapes. In a brief statement, a spokesperson for Rocah noted that the DA-elect could not comment on specific cases, but promised her revamped Conviction Integrity Unit will review all misconduct and wrongful convictions allegations after she takes office in the new year.

Residents Say The Narcotics Unit Ruled The Streets With Their Own Laws

Seven years ago, Murashea Bovell was not a whistleblower. Back then, the young Black cop was learning the ropes in Mount Vernon’s narcotics unit. At first, Bovell liked drug enforcement, but in the summer of 2013 he started to have reservations. The unit had recently gotten a new sergeant, Sean Fegan, who, according to Bovell, emphasized arrest numbers above all else.

That August, he witnessed Detective Antonini coordinating with a drug dealer, who had agreed to become an informant, according to a lawsuit he filed two years later. During a car stop, he said he overheard the dealer telling Antonini where he could find several bags of PCP he had sold earlier to a client. Police got an easy arrest and the dealer got to keep the cash from his illegal drug sale, a crime which Bovell said was condoned by Sergeant Fegan in order to boost the unit’s numbers.

Later that year Bovell returned to the patrol division, but in the years that followed his colleagues told him that the corruption had only taken further root. John Campo, one of the officers he later recorded, claimed that the narcotics unit forged wide-ranging alliances with cooperative dealers. Under Fegan’s command, police allowed dealers to sell with impunity, receive deliveries, and even control territory, Campo said, in exchange for information leading to low-level arrests. Campo and Fegan did not respond to Gothamist/WNYC’s requests for comment. Fegan has previously denied the allegations of favored dealers operating with impunity.

On the other hand, some residents say that those who refused to snitch opened themselves up to retaliation. Two of the seven men identified by Gothamist/WNYC, each of whom had a history of drug dealing in Mount Vernon, claimed that narcotics officers attacked them for refusing to join their team with humiliating strip searches, brutal assaults, and false drug charges.

Alan Seward, 48, claims that Detective Antonini tried to frame him in a failed attempt to coerce him into snitching. He says, a group of hooded officers stormed into a bar where he was playing pool one night in November of 2017, and grabbed him. Police found marijuana on him, but he believes that was not what they were after. Instead, he alleges that Antonini pinned him down in the backseat of their police vehicle outside, stripped off his boxers, and began inspecting his anus with Seward’s bare backside in view of passersby.

Finding nothing, police brought him to his daughter’s apartment, where he says Detective Antonini strip searched him once more. Again coming up empty, Seward says, Antonini strolled into another part of the residence out of view. When the detective returned, Seward recalls, he was holding a baggie of crack cocaine.

“He said, ‘Oh look here what I found, ten grams,’ and that’s when my daughter yelled from the back, ‘Daddy, they searched before you got here and they didn’t find nothing,” Seward remembers.

Seward accused the investigator of planting the drugs, “I said, ‘Oh you can put that ten grams back in your pocket.’” As he was speaking, he claims, Antonini cut him off with a swift punch to the face. According to the lawsuit, he took responsibility for the drugs, after the detective threatened to arrest his daughter for the contraband. In an incident report, police claimed they recovered drugs on Seward at the bar earlier, not at his daughter's apartment.

Despite the supposed drug seizure, when they got to an interrogation room at the station, Seward says Antonini offered him a way out. He recalls the detective saying that—if he was willing to provide information on residents with illegal guns—he could walk out of the station a free man, and take the drugs with him. “You can take the ten grams, go out this door right now, you can get money and you won’t gotta worry about getting arrested, all you gotta do is give me your information,” he remembers the detective saying.

“So I was like, ‘That’s how you be getting these dudes?’ I said, ‘Wow.’

He said, ‘You’d be surprised at how many CIs [confidential informants] I got.’

I said, ‘I don’t even give a f***, one thing I do know is you don’t got me,’” Seward recalls.

After this refusal, he says police charged him with drug possession. That case was disposed of as part of a plea deal in which he pled guilty to bail jumping. This month, he filed a lawsuit against the department for illegal body cavity searches and false arrest.

Yet another Black man, Reginald Gallman attests to a similar experience with Detective Antonini. On the night of March 31st, 2017, Gallman and his friend, Michelle Campbell were heating up hotdogs and Boston baked beans at her apartment, when narcotics officers stormed in and ordered them onto the ground as part of a search warrant execution.

Detective Antonini began punching Gallman and whacking him with his gun, according to a lawsuit the Mount Vernon resident later filed from jail. During the alleged assault, the complaint alleges, the detective mocked him, “You think you’re f***ing slick? I’ll get the last laugh you stupid n*****.”

Like Seward, Gallman believes he was being punished because he had rebuffed the detective’s previous offer to become an informant. After an earlier drug arrest, he says, Antonini took him to a back room in the police department and made his proposal: if Gallman agreed to cooperate as an informant, he could walk out and sell drugs with impunity.

“He said, ‘You can come work for me, everybody doing it,’ Gallman recalls. “He told me what to do, ‘Go and sell out the building like nothing ever happened, and when I sell to somebody, call him and they can come bust him.’”

After the beatdown in her apartment, Michelle Campbell, Gallman’s friend, says Antonini cornered her and pressed his face up close to hers. “I remember the craters,” she says. “He was sweating. His breath was stinking.”

Campbell says she begged the detective to get away. But he was hellbent on getting Gallman, she alleges, even though police found drugs on her which she admitted were hers. “He’s telling me, ‘I know it’s not yours. I know it’s not yours. Just say it’s Reginald’s.’”

Police records show officers claimed to recover scales, a glass pipe, and a razor blade "with residue" in addition to numerous twists of crack cocaine.

After the arrest, Gallman pleaded guilty in exchange for a release for time served. He is now suing the police department, a course of action he has never taken before, despite a history of drug convictions and run-ins with police.

“I’m like, ‘Nah, he not gonna be beating up on me for nothing because I don’t wanna work for him,’” he said. “If you catch me, you catch me. I’ma do my time, go upstate, do what I gotta do, I broke the law ok? But you’re not gonna exceed the law and do what you wanna do to me and think I’ma help you.”

“We All Can’t Be Lying."

The phone calls that the whistleblower recorded point to an out-of-control culture in the narcotics unit which police supervisors quietly tolerated. One detective told Bovell he reported on Antonini for assaulting a civilian in the police station, but saw supervisors take no disciplinary action. Another officer claimed a supervisor was even complicit in a cover up, instructing subordinates to concoct a story about seeing a hand-to-hand drug sale in order to retroactively justify a police pursuit and subsequent false arrest.

Current and former Mount Vernon police officers speculate that higher ups may have ignored the warning signs because of the unit’s perceived productivity. “They were willing to do anything to get these numbers because that’s what the department wanted,” says Bovell, the police whistleblower. Now, after all these years, they do not want to look back, he argues. “How do they punish someone who has all these arrests under their belt that may have to be overturned? There are plenty of people, especially administrators, involved,” he says.

Across the country, police corruption scandals have often centered on specialized, plainclothes units, which are given the herculean task of shutting down thriving blackmarket economies, notes Alex Vitale, a sociologist who researches policing at Brooklyn College.

“Part of the frustration for police leaders is that they’re given a mission that they know they can’t solve with regular policing, or even with legal policing,” he says, pointing to the never-ending demand for drugs. “So there’s a tendency to turn over this problem to insular, specialized units with the message that they should do whatever they need to do to make a dent in this problem.”

According to Vitale, specialized units do bring in arrests over a short period of time, allowing city officials to show they are responding to specific community complaints about drug and gang activity on certain corners or parks. But the demand for illegal goods never goes away, and the persistence of entrepreneurs willing to supply it can frustrate officers.

“If you’re told your job is to suppress the availability of drugs, it is a hopeless mission,” Vitale said. “Officers respond to this, either by withdrawing and becoming cynical or creeping into abusive practices in hopes that if they just carry out the war a bit more aggressively that this will somehow end the harms associated with drugs.”

Earlier this year, in response to Gothamist/WNYC’s series, Mount Vernon police commissioner Glenn Scott shut down the narcotics unit. The commissioner has also said that those officers implicated in the tapes are no longer active in plainclothes operations. Detective Antonini, for example, now collects his paycheck for work at a desk. But while the unit’s heyday has come to an end, the consequences of its actions still reverberate in the lives of those they targeted.

Before his arrest, Bobby Brown, the man who recorded a street encounter with Detective Antonini, says he was on the right track. He claims he had put his drug dealing past behind, and had gotten a security gig at a local retail store. Brown and his girlfriend had a baby girl on the way. Then one day, police showed up at their door for drug sales he says never happened.

After his arrest, Brown remembers Detective Antonini coming down to his holding cell at the police station to greet him. “He’s smirking and smiling, like, ‘I told you I was gonna get you.’ I’m like, ‘Bro you didn’t get me. You put a bulllshit ass sale on me, man.’”

Still, Brown didn’t feel he could fight his case. His girlfriend was pregnant and he didn’t want to miss any more of her childhood than he had too. He took a plea deal that would allow him to get out in a year.

“We lost our house. My girl, she had to go live with her moms. My daughter was born. I was incarcerated,” he said.

After getting out of jail, Brown was arrested again by another Mount Vernon narcotics detective who was also accused of flagrant corruption in the whistleblower’s tapes. “This time, I’m not taking no plea,” he said, referring to his pending case. “I’ma keep fighting because my daughter’s big and I gotta be home for her.”

Brown and his family have since left Mount Vernon.

So too has Michelle Campbell, the woman whose apartment was raided. She says she remains traumatized by her encounter with Antonini.

“He made me feel less than zero. The power. The breathing on my neck. The sweat, and his breath. I’m shaking and I’m saying, ‘Please get away from me, get away, get away,’” she said. “I had to get the hell out of Mount Vernon.”

What really got to her, she says, was the pressure the detective put on her to betray her friends. “It’s bad enough that you’re treating me like shit, but then you’re trying to force me to lie,” she said. “OK, I had my bout with addiction and whatever, but I have morals, principles. I am a Roman Catholic. I believe in God. I don’t lie.”

For years, Campbell says, police leaders have hammered people like her, who need help, while looking the other way when it comes to investigating their own.

“If you make a mistake as an urban or ethnic brown or Black person, it’s like a strike against you, and with each strike, they drop a brick on you. Eventually you dig yourself into a hole you can’t get out of,” she said. “But like Antonini, is he on suspension? No. Basically, he got a slap on the wrist. He should not be working. It’s too many reports against him.”

She wonders how many people like her have to say the same thing for it to be believed. “This is not like it’s one or two people,” she said. “It’s a lot of us. We all can’t be lying.”

This piece is part of an ongoing series on police corruption allegations in Mount Vernon, New York, and Westchester County in partnership with WNYC's Race & Justice Unit. If you have a tip about a prosecutor's office, a law enforcement agency or the courts, email reporter George Joseph at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, Twitter @georgejoseph94, and Instagram @georgejoseph81. You can also text or call him with tips at (929) 486-4865. He is also on the encrypted phone app Signal with the same phone number.