What began as a suspicion that a Baltimore police officer was aiding a drug dealer led to one of the nation’s biggest police corruption scandals. Leo Wise, an assistant U.S Attorney with a long career prosecuting corruption, was at the center of the investigation into the department’s Gun Trace Task Force. This month, he released a book years in the making: “Who Speaks For You,” an inside look at how the investigation unfolded and the challenges he and his colleagues faced along the way.
Wise is a graduate of The Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School, and his trial experience includes delivering justice against the tobacco industry and top executives of Enron, as well as against former mayor Catherine Pugh after the Healthy Holly scandal. Wise won’t see a penny from his book. Federal ethics rules prevent him from profiting, and he has signed away the rights to his work. A Baltimore resident, Wise, 46, took the title of his book from the words spoken by a judge to the jury in the police trial. Judges ask the jury who will speak for the entire panel in rendering a verdict. In the 2018 trial of officers Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor, the only black person on the jury was selected as the foreman. Wise knew at that moment, as the verdict was about to be rendered, that the symbolism of the foreman selection meant that he had won the case that cast fresh light on the divide between Black and White Baltimore. Wise spoke recently with Baltimore Fishbowl via Zoom, and the views he expresses are his alone, and not those of the Justice Department or U.S. government.
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