fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Tavon White, Alpha Male

A reader sends a jaw-dropping Washington Post account of the sick world inside a Baltimore detention center. Excerpts: To investigators, Tavon White is a thug who has been in and out of jail since he was 18, most recently on charges that he shot a fellow drug dealer four times. He is allegedly a high-ranking […]

A reader sends a jaw-dropping Washington Post account of the sick world inside a Baltimore detention center. Excerpts:

To investigators, Tavon White is a thug who has been in and out of jail since he was 18, most recently on charges that he shot a fellow drug dealer four times. He is allegedly a high-ranking “bushman” in the Black Guerilla Family, a gang with a reputation for not just killing its enemies but also burning down their homes.

But during his three years at the state-run detention center, White, 36, was allegedly a figure who commanded respect, not only from fellow inmates in jumpsuits but also from many of the women in blue collared shirts and pressed slacks guarding him. Thirteen of them allegedly smuggled cellphones and drugs inside their hair, lunches and underwear for the man they called “Bulldog” or “Tay.” One tattooed his name on her neck, another on her wrist. Four have carried his children.

Through court documents, an affidavit from an FBI agent that contains transcripts of wiretapped conversations, and interviews with people familiar with White, the 13 officers indictedin April and the jail, a portrait emerges of a place where sex and drugs were swapped with stunning casualness, where thousands of dollars flowed in and out each week, and where one man’s power was, by all accounts, no match for a badge.

Just weeks before the two pregnant guards talked about the children they were expecting, a third allegedly pondered possible names for her son.

“What if I name the baby King?” Katera Stevenson, 24, asked in a wiretapped call to her sister recounted in the affidavit. “I like the name King. King Tavon White.”

These are guards. White is a hardcore thug from way back. But he has a way with the ladies:

What his criminal history doesn’t reveal, a family member said, is the loyal grandson and doting father who attended PTA meetings, accompanied his children to church and took them to Six Flags and Sesame Place. (In January, White called his grandmother Bessie Timmons from the detention center to tick off the due dates of the guards he had impregnated, according to the affidavit.)

In jail, he played chess and read novels, court records show. Between prison stints, he cleaned swimming pools and packed boxes for a moving company. That is what he was doing when he met Danielle Hall at a Wendy’s down the street from McCulloh Homes. The two moved in together and had a daughter, who is now 7.

“Tavon will always be a good guy in my book,” said Hall’s mother, who asked not to be identified by name, because of safety concerns. She said she was floored by the allegations that White was a gang leader at the detention center but not by his appeal to so many of the female corrections officers.

“He’s a hunk,” she said. “He’s got a mean-looking body, a body that’s all that, that says, ‘Catch me if you can.’ ”

Loyal grandson, doting father, stone-cold hoodlum, serial babydaddy. What a world. How does this happen? What kind of freakish culture produces dirtbags like Tavon White and his idiotic babymamas?

UPDATE: Let me be more precise. The world of Wall Street is not my world, but it’s easy  for me to understand how extreme money and power could corrupt a person, and a community. What I don’t understand is how people like those women put themselves in thrall to a criminal like Tavon White — and how the community doesn’t treat someone like that, who does not take care of his children, like anything but a pariah.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now