The Mount Vernon Police Tapes: A Cop Describes A Gunman Roaming The Streets With Impunity, As High Profile Murders Go Unsolved

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.

Nearly three years ago, John Campo, a police officer in Mount Vernon, New York, was venting to another officer, Murashea Bovell, on the phone. Campo didn’t know that Bovell was recording the call.

Campo told Bovell that a drug suspect was cruising city streets looking for men who had previously tried to gun him down. But in the secretly recorded conversation, Campo claimed police were unwilling to intervene, allowing the man to roam the streets of Mount Vernon for several weeks, armed and potentially dangerous.

“They let a dude, this dude Migo, that’s up on a wire -- the DEA is doing something with him -- ride around with a gun for the past month and a half, after he got shot by the Goonies or something like that,” Campo said, referring to the drug suspect, “Migo,” and a local gang, the “Goonies.”

Mount Vernon police were choosing to let “Migo” drive around with a handgun, searching for the men who had shot him, Campo said, because he was the target of an ongoing federal Drug Enforcement Agency investigation. “That’s basically saying, ‘Ok I'm gonna let you go kill the people that just shot you,’ Cause obviously that’s why he has the gun. People tried to murk him off,” the officer said.

Listen to George Joseph's report on WNYC:

At one point, Campo alleged that police stopped Migo while he was driving with a gun in his car. But Campo said, also on tape, that his colleague, Detective Camilo Antonini, let the suspect go, even though a boy was in the back seat, Migo’s son. Their supervisor in the narcotics unit, Sergeant Sean Fegan, was willing to risk residents’ lives for the good of the DEA operation, Campo claimed.

“Fegan was like, ‘Well, you know, if he starts going crazy, and people start getting shot, we’re gonna have to take him down,’” Campo recalled. “So it's going to take you ‘til the point where people get shot for you to f*cking act and do your job?”

Officer Campo and Detective Antonini declined to comment for this story. Fegan did not respond to requests for comment. But federal court records do establish that a Mount Vernon resident with the street name “Migo” and a lengthy criminal record was the target of a DEA operation several months before the recorded call.

Between June and August of 2017, William Hardee, known as “Migo,” was accused of selling cocaine three times to a confidential informant working with a DEA task force officer from Mount Vernon.

Court records also show that authorities did not arrest Hardee for those alleged drug 2017 sales until last November, well over a year after Campo complained about him roaming the streets. The DEA and the Mount Vernon police department declined to comment on Campo’s claims, or why law enforcement took so long to arrest the suspect. Hardee’s federal drug case is still pending. His attorney declined to comment for this story.

“There’s no shortage of bodies in Mount Vernon. They’ve had many people killed, many murders, many of them unsolved,” said Peter St. George Davis, a defense attorney and former Westchester County prosecutor. “To me, it is a dereliction of duty. They should have gotten a search warrant, searched the car, searched the house. Find the weapon and get it off the street immediately.”

Campo’s secretly recorded call was one of numerous phone conversations captured by Bovell, the whistleblower cop in Mount Vernon, a small, majority Black city just north of the Bronx. Between 2017 and this year, he recorded hours of phone calls he had with his fellow officers, gathering claims of police framing and assaulting innocent residents and working with favored drug dealers, as Gothamist/WNYC has previously reported.

“The city can say Black Lives Matter all they want, but as long as they have officers like this, [having] people riding around with guns as a free for all, they don’t care,” said Bovell, who is still an active duty officer in Mount Vernon. “I’m risking my life, trying to get these dirty cops off the street, but the city is not doing anything.”

Campo’s claims of police turning a blind eye to a potential shooter also incensed Black activists, who have spoken out for years about law enforcement’s failure to solve homicides in the Westchester County city.

“They don’t care if we live or die,” said Jesse Van Lew, an anti-violence activist with the group Save Mount Vernon. Referring to the Mount Vernon police tapes, he continued, “What other city would hear cops talking about letting somebody go who is selling drugs, different gang wars, letting a kid drive around with a gun in the car with his son? They’d be fired.”

In a statement, Daniel Terry, a spokesman for the city of Mount Vernon, said the accusations are “deeply troubling” and reiterated past claims that the police department is investigating the allegations in the tapes. “Since this new administration has taken office, we have made it a top priority to transform the Police Department and strengthen our connection with the community,” he said. “We have made several changes in policy, practice and personnel since the tapes were brought to our attention.”

Campo’s allegations about the alleged gunman are only the latest to surface following months of Gothamist/WNYC investigations into alleged police corruption in the city. Thus far, the allegations have prompted the department to bench one of its controversial detectives and to disband its narcotics unit. The series also became the pivotal issue in June’s Democratic primary race for Westchester County District Attorney, which saw the defeat of a sitting district attorney. Mimi Rocah, the Democratic primary victor, is running effectively unopposed in the general election and has promised to probe the allegations within her first hundred days in office.

But to this day, all of the narcotics officers, accused of misconduct in the tapes, remain on the force, despite repeated promises of reform from city and police leaders.

If the Mount Vernon Police Department is unable to root out corruption internally, it needs to be disbanded and replaced, argues Lauren Raysor, a defense attorney and former corporation counsel for the City of Mount Vernon. “We have to bring in a new police force,” she said. “We have to have a way of ridding the department of these bad cops. We can’t get an investigation to do that. It doesn’t seem like we have the will to do it. So the only way you do it is by defunding.”

Unsolved Murders And The Cycle of Retribution

The drug suspect who Campo was referring to in the tapes may have felt he had legitimate reasons to protect himself. In another call from February of 2018, Campo said the man had been shot three times. Members of the Goonies, the gang who Campo suggested had attacked him in an earlier call, have previously been accused of robbing and killing city drug dealers.

Studies across the country have found that many people carry illegal guns because they feel unsafe in their neighborhoods and do not trust police to protect them. This trust deficit is particularly acute in Mount Vernon, where civilians have accused police of corruption for years.

When law enforcement systematically fails to solve shootings, a culture of self-policing and tit-for-tat justice can take root, argues Jill Leovy, the author of Ghettoside, a 2015 book that probed the epidemic of unsolved murders in Los Angeles.

“You leave people with no choice,” Leovy said. “They can just be scared and want to defend themselves, or ravaged by grief and outraged that the person is still walking around. These impulses become endemic and once it starts going more and more people get involved in the cycle of extralegal violence.”

According to New York State data, between 2014 and 2019, Mount Vernon, a city of only about 70,000, averaged about six murders a year. That murder rate is significantly lower than national outliers such as Baltimore and St. Louis. But in such a small community, the killings have significant reverberations. In recent years, the city’s majority-Black south side has suffered several street murders that police have failed to solve, sparking accusations of incompetence and indifference from victims’ families.

Rubin Davis was fatally shot and killed on June 26th, 2011, at a park in Mount Vernon. On the afternoon of March 27th, 2016, twenty year-old Jovelle Stewart was shot on the right side of his head as he sat in his parked car. He died before he reached the hospital. On August 31st, 2016, twenty-eight year old Mario Frater was shot as he sat in his car. He tried to drive away but crashed into another car stopped at a red light. Frater died as he was being taken to a hospital.

Years later, these murders remain unsolved.

Police departments across the country struggle to solve murders, and Black communities suffer most from their at-times stunning failures. A 2019 Washington Post analysis of data from the country’s fifty-five largest cities identified 26,000 murders over the last decade that came and went without an arrest. Of those murders, nearly three-quarters involved Black victims.

Police often blame scarce investigative resources and witnesses who refuse to cooperate with them because of fears of retaliation from criminals or neighborhood gangs. But researchers say police cannot simply blame the communities they serve. Tom Scott, a researcher at the RTI Center for Policing Research and Investigative Science, notes that police have to earn trust and offer support to residents who would be willing to testify.

“It’s a big step to get someone to go into witness protection, to get them to move, give up all their friends, their family,” Scott said. “But even if people are willing to do it, there’s a lack of resources to help them do it. Until that’s fixed, the police are basically begging people to cooperate, offering nothing in return. And those people put their lives on the line.”

Raysor, the Mount Vernon attorney, believes police need to do more to solve homicides and believes that federal authorities should take the lead on these cases. But she also wants the city to invest more in youth programs to divert people from going to the streets in the first place.

“We have to do this for these young men, who are out here, or Mount Vernon is done,” she said. “We’re dealing with the now because we want closure, but if we keep dealing with just the now, then it’s gonna be somebody else’s child tomorrow.”

The Murder Of Wilbert “Junior” Francis

Nazarene Duncan is one of several mothers still waiting for Mount Vernon police to solve her son’s murder.

On the night of June 10th, 2016, she remembers her then twenty-four year old son, Wilbert Francis, who she called “Junior,” leaving the house to go out with friends. The mother of three went to bed, thinking little of it, but then her phone started ringing. “My oldest son called and said, ‘Mom, I think something happened to Junior,’” she recalls.

Junior had been shot fourteen times outside an apartment building on South Second Avenue in Mount Vernon.

As rumors of a shooting began to trickle out to Duncan’s family, she scrambled to find him. She called Mount Vernon police, she says, but they wouldn’t tell her where he was. They just told her to come to the department. Duncan rushed to three hospitals across Westchester county desperate to get to him.

“I want to know where my son is. Where’s my child? You got us going on a wild goose chase,” she said. “Where’s my damn child?

Duncan finally heard from a friend that he may have been at a hospital in neighboring New Rochelle. But she got there too late. Entering the hospital, she saw three doctors coming down a hallway. Two of them remained stone faced, but one, a Black doctor, locked eyes with her and dropped his head. She knew Junior was gone. The doctors later told her that her son didn’t die in the street. He had made it to the hospital barely alive.

“I just feel like for that maybe hour or so that we were running, looking, maybe my child would have heard my voice. He would have fought,” she said. “Nobody was around him. He’s alone. He was alone.”

Soon afterwards, Duncan remembers being back at her home. Richard Thomas, the then-mayor of Mount Vernon, came by to express his condolences. “He came over to me. I was on the edge of my bed,” she recalled. “And I stood up and he said to me, ‘We’re going to do everything in our power to make sure this person gets off the street, and we’re gonna catch them. But if you want to do something, I’m okay with that too.”

Duncan says she perceived this as a green light to take matters into her own hands, to retaliate, an option she refused. “I begged everybody to please remain civil and let the police do it,” she said.

Thomas, the former mayor, did not respond to specific questions about that conversation, but claimed in an email that he “brought peace to the streets” by partnering with federal authorities and strengthening local law enforcement.

For months after the shooting, Junior’s case and several others dragged on with no resolution. In February of 2017, after months of political in-fighting in city hall and turmoil in the police department, several victims’ families, including Duncan’s, held a rally in downtown Mount Vernon. They accused police leaders of failing to prioritize all homicides and ignoring their calls for updates.

After the rally, Duncan says police replaced the detective on her son's case, who she liked, with one who now barely reaches out to her. Four years later, the investigation remains unsolved. “I believe my son’s case was put on the backburner,” she said.

When Gothamist/WNYC described the allegations that a gunman with the street name “Migo” had been allowed to roam Mount Vernon, Duncan said she was not surprised. “They need a full investigation to disinfect that rat hole of a police department,” she said. “How many people gotta die before you guys do something?”

The City of Mount Vernon did not respond to questions about Junior’s case.

“The Whole Mount Vernon Knows. Everybody’s Talking About It.”

This year, Glenn Scott, a new police commissioner, took power in Mount Vernon, after months of chaos and contested leadership in the department. One of Scott’s first major moves came in July, when he created a Violent Crimes Unit dedicated to combating gun violence following a spate of shootings. In an email, Daniel Terry, the city spokesman, noted that in recent weeks, that unit and another specialized squad had successfully confiscated several illegal firearms and made multiple arrests.

Still, numerous murders remain unsolved. Duncan says she is still holding out hope that the new administration will do more than previous ones to solve the cases. “To this day, it’s not that they don’t know who it is,” she said. “The whole Mount Vernon knows. Everybody’s talking about it.”

Duncan believes her son’s murder may have stemmed from a false street rumor. In 2017, an FBI official said that he believed Junior’s killing and several other unsolved murders in Mount Vernon were gang-related. Police often cite a lack of cooperating witnesses in these kinds of cases. And in meetings with her, Duncan says Mount Vernon police have also trotted out this explanation.

“‘Oh the streets don’t talk. We can’t this. We can’t that,’” she said, recalling the meetings. “You just want the streets to solve it and you hand in the paper and take the credit? No. Years ago, police got out and did footwork.”

The mother believes some witnesses may be willing to come forward because of the goodwill Junior had across the city’s neighborhood gang lines. Behind the scenes, she said, her son was a peacemaker, attempting to lessen tensions in the streets.

Duncan, who is a teaching assistant, recalls a former student of hers, who eventually joined a gang in another part of the city when he got older. “I told him after my son died, ‘Did you know that my son protected you?,” she said. “Don’t bother him, my mother love him, please don’t bother him,” she recalled him telling gang leaders in his neighborhood.

At a recent community forum, the department’s new deputy commissioner Ernest Morales insisted that police had not forgotten about the unsolved murders. “We are now together as a new team, looking at these cold cases and reviewing them, one by one, speaking to my federal partners and the Westchester County DA’s Office, to go over these cases methodically and thoroughly,” he said.

Leovy, the police scholar, says the department will struggle to tackle such cases if its reputation is tainted by persistent allegations or corruption and criminal associations.

“When you are asked to be a witness, you are being asked to take a risk on principle,” she said. “The people who ask that of you must themselves be principled, or their requests will have no weight.”

This piece is part of an ongoing series on police corruption allegations in Mount Vernon, New York, and Westchester County. 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. George is also on the encrypted phone app Signal with the same phone number.