It hit the streets 12 years ago with great fanfare and promise at a time when drug-dealing street gangs were killing each other with abandon.

But a week ago, the once highly regarded Metro Gang Strike Force became a thing of the past. It was shelved, perhaps permanently, after a state legislative auditor's report found more than $18,000 of unaccounted forfeited money and at least 19 vehicles improperly forfeited.

A state review is under way as well as an FBI criminal probe looking into document shredding by unit members within hours of the disclosure of the report's findings.

The book was closed on the strike force pending the outcome of the probes. But an epilogue needs to be written here.

Several strike force members I spoke to or corresponded with in recent weeks acknowledged lousy recordkeeping.

"Yep, we sucked at paperwork," said one former member, who requested anonymity because the officer is not allowed to speak to the news media. "No excuses from me, but there was nothing criminal happening from the investigators working the cases. ... I saw fabulous things from the cops at MGSF."

Most blame Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek, Minnesota Department of Public Safety Commissioner Michael Campion and the now-defunct strike force's most recent commander, Hennepin County sheriff's Capt. Chris Omodt, with colluding to kill the anti-gang unit itself for political or personal reasons.

Campion and Stanek, Campion's boss when he headed the

Department of Public Safety, did support merging the strike force with regional drug task forces several years ago.

But strike force supporters, including its then-influential longtime commander, Ron Ryan, successfully lobbied legislators to keep it separate as well as partially state-funded. The unit also began relying on property forfeitures to help finance operations.

Ryan, who retired in October, admitted in an audit interview that he's no fan of Stanek, accusing him of trying to kill funding for the unit through the years.

But Ryan also strongly suggested that some cops in the unit might be taking liberties with seized property. He also proclaimed that he was a cop and not an accountant in response to questions about auditors finding nearly $400,000 in seized cash in an office safe. Most of that money was later properly deposited into a law enforcement account. Omodt declined to comment. Campion did not respond to an e-mail inquiry.

Stanek was particularly incensed after I brought up the accusations last week.

"I helped create that unit," said Stanek, who was a state legislator at the time the strike force was established. "There are 34 members and those (making the accusations) are about a half-dozen malcontents.

"They don't want the light of day shined on them," he added. "I believe there was mismanagement and malfeasance. The state auditor's findings and a pending FBI investigation speak for themselves."

THE SHREDDING

None of the former strike force members had come out publicly since the news broke to give their take on things. But one did last week.

He is Sgt. Jeff Jindra, a 13-year Minneapolis cop and union rep. He joined the strike force five years ago and helped supervise six city cops assigned to the unit.

"Everybody feels like they have been kicked in the stomach and had the rug pulled under them and getting a bad rap because of the accounting (mistakes)," Jindra said.

Jindra, now with the Minneapolis police gang enforcement unit, insisted the cars in question — from a $70,000 Land Rover to old and beat-up vehicles — were properly seized. The better ones — including one sent to the Hennepin County sheriff's patrol station — were put into service as unmarked cars used for patrolling or surveillance. The others were taken to a facility that charged the unit a storage fee. A decision was made to then donate those cars to Cars with Heart, a charity.

"We did not get anything out of them," Jindra said. "But they were legit and above-board."

Jindra said he was not at the unit's New Brighton office the evening that West St. Paul Police Chief Bud Shaver, who chairs the strike force's oversight and advisory board, went there and found several members — most of them St. Paul cops, Jindra said — shredding documents.

Omodt suspended day-to-day operations after he also visited the office and found Dumpsters filled with destroyed documents.

Jindra said narcotics and gang-intelligence officers generate "tons" of paperwork that include completed case files or the names of people, dates and other information no longer needed.

He said officers, having been informed they would be transferred back to their respective police agencies, decided to get rid of documents no longer needed or that they believed could either be misplaced or fall into the wrong hands.

"Every time you are transferred or moved out, you take this stuff and you shred them," Jindra said. "I can't say for a fact, but I'm sure that's what they were shredding. There was nothing criminal about this."

STAFF RANCOR

Jindra said some strike force members did not respect Omodt or care for his leadership. He acknowledged that most of that rancor stemmed from the fact that Omodt replaced Ryan and also worked under Stanek.

"He was taking over from a beloved commander," Jindra said. "That was a tough spot to fill."

He said the already-strained relations came to a boil after it was publicly disclosed that a group of strike force members spent $16,000 of the unit's money to fly to Hawaii in April to attend an annual conference on Asian gangs.

The same conference will be held next year in St. Paul.

Jindra said most people don't know that both Omodt and the advisory board ultimately approved the trip and that the cops, who work Asian gang intelligence, skipped the previous year's conference because they knew the Hawaii trip would be expensive.

Those officers slapped Omodt with a pending lawsuit, accusing him of breaking state privacy laws by publicly releasing the names of undercover officers to the press. The litigation might not have strong legal legs, because the identities of those officers show up in numerous public case documents. But the dust-up further widened the rift between Omodt and some strike force members. Then came the auditor's report.

Jindra said the strike force, with 34 members, was itself one of the largest police agencies in the state. As such, he added, it merited a full-time property clerk, a property and evidence room of its own, and a forfeiture analyst to make sure all seizures and related paperwork met legal and chain-of-custody muster. It had none of that, which Jindra believes led to the fiscal and recordkeeping mess.

"We also did not have a computerized system," he said. "We still did reports on paper that were sent to the home (police) agencies. We also had to keep a cover sheet at the strike force."

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Jindra said he and strike force members are particularly pained by the negative public perception of them in light of the recent woes. Although he believes the FBI probe will find no criminal wrongdoing, he feels that will not erase the lingering black eye of suspicion.

"People think that we were out of control, that there was no control over us, that we were seizing money and executing warrants willy-nilly. But I will put up our record for successful prosecutions against any other similar unit."

He cited the 800 arrests the unit made last year. He detailed a litany of near shootouts and bloodbaths averted in recent months through gang informants and intelligence.

They included an armed skirmish planned between rival members of Los Vatos Locos and Los Sureños at Minneapolis' Powderhorn Park on the eve of Cinco de Mayo.

"They could not go to St. Paul because of the (gang-free safety zone), so we got a tip, set up surveillance and jumped them as they were pulling out their guns," Jindra said.

He detailed confiscating a gun and averting a shootout at the Epiphany Festival in Coon Rapids. Gang unit intelligence also helped solve the recent gang-related slaying of a suspected drug dealer in South Minneapolis.

He also spoke of how the gang unit learned one night a few months ago that members of the Gangster Disciples were on their way from Minneapolis to shoot up Arnella's, a St. Paul nightclub.

Arrests were made in that incident, he said. He noted the unit's work involving ongoing criminal-enterprise probes that take months, as well as gang intelligence and other work that doesn't ordinarily show up on the news or in police reports.

"I feel bad for the Minneapolis cops I represented," Jindra said. "I know these guys ate OT (overtime). They've been shot at, stabbed, injured, lived and died managing informants, to now get drawn, quartered and pasted like this as 'dirty' cops."

I believe the Legislature, the same body that mandated creation of the strike force, should ultimately decide its fate. Hearings should be held, whether this year or during the upcoming session, to take testimony and air what went wrong, but, more important, what can be done right to resurrect this important work.

I could not care less about inside-baseball office politics, personal feuds or petty grievances. The public deserves better. It deserves a tightly managed and effective strike force above reproach.

"It's a terrible thing," Jindra said of the strike force's demise. "We did do a lot of good work."

Rubén Rosario can be reached at rrosario@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5454.

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