OFF THE WIRE
Somehow, amid the turmoil of the dying Metro Gang Strike Force and his own whistleblower lawsuit against the city he worked for, Minneapolis police Sgt. Kelly O'Rourke put together a case that prosecutors hope will bring down an alleged crime family.
O'Rourke and other investigators saw the fruits of their years-long probe Thursday, with a sweeping 14-count criminal complaint accusing Joseph Duane Gustafson Jr. and his purported top lieutenant with crimes ranging from kidnapping and assault to mortgage fraud and racketeering.
Gustafs on, 36, made his first court appearance on the charges Friday. Hennepin County District Judge Kerry Meyer set bail at $750,000. A prosecutor had asked for a $1 million bail, saying the possible 20-year sentence that comes with a racketeering conviction made Gustafson "a much greater risk of flight."
His co-defendant, Troy Michael Neuberger, 39, was scheduled for a court appearance Friday afternoon but refused to come out of his cell at the Hennepin County Adult Detention Center. In such cases, jailers generally let the inmate stay unless a judge issues an order allowing them to use "reasonable force" to get the person to court.
Neuberger's initial appearance was rescheduled for Monday, and his bail remains at $500,000.
Minneapolis lawyer Joseph Kaminsky, who represents Gustafson, disappeared with his client after the brief court hearing and did not return calls left at his office.
Kaminsky had argued for a lower bail, saying ustafson had known he'd been under investigation for years but had made no attempt to flee. He also said he was monitored by a probation officer from a previous conviction.
"He has done everything that's been asked of him by that probation officer," Kaminsky told the judge. "There would be no incentive for him to leave. If he'd wanted to leave, he could've left a long time ago."
Gustafson's father, Joseph Robert Gustafson Sr., 55, sat in the front row of the courtroom's gallery during the hearing. The elder Gustafson, reputedly at one time a member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, declined to comment afterward.
Although he is named as having taken part in some activities described in the criminal complaint, Gustafson's father is not charged. Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said Thursday that more charges could be forthcoming; he would not elaborate.
The 21-page criminal complaint against the younger Gustafson and Neuberger catalogs crimes over several years. It alleges the men led a group of ex-cons and thugs who called themselves the Beat-Down Posse, or "BDP."
Working under the guise of bail bondsmen hunting bond jumpers, BDP members often would raid homes of people they suspected of dealing drugs, terrorize and beat the residents, and steal any drugs or money they found.
Some of the crimes allegedly were more sophisticated. The complaint accuses Gustafson of being engaged in mortgage fraud.
Gustafson is accused of racketeering, kidnapping, assault, terroristic threats, three counts of selling drugs, two counts of being a prohibited person possessing a gun and four counts of theft by swindling.
Neuberger is charged with racketeering, kidnapping, two counts of assault and one count of making terroristic threats.
The criminal complaint says the Minneapolis Police Department, the FBI, the IRS and the Minnesota Department of Commerce's Insurance Fraud Division investigated the case.
FBI Special Agent Steve Warfield said the case stemmed from the Twin Cities Safe Streets Violent Gang Task Force, established in April. But the investigation into the Gustafsons, of North Minneapolis, had started long before then. Law enforcement officials who spoke on background said the driving force behind the investigation was O'Rourke.
Sgt. William Palmer, a spokesman for the police department, said O'Rourke was declining media interviews.
"It is now in the court system, and it's not something that would be real appropriate to comment on," Palmer said of the case. "It was a lot of agencies involved, and it took an extensive period of time to get to a point where prosecution was possible."
O'Rourke is listed as the complainant in the probable-cause narrative drafted by Assistant Hennepin County Attorney William Richardson. In the 14-page account, Richardson lays out the investigation O'Rourke headed that resulted in the charges.
O'Rourke is an officer who has had his hands full. In fact, on Wednesday, the day before the charges against Gustafson and Neuberger were filed, a Hennepin County judge issued the final order closing a "whistleblower" suit O'Rourke had filed against the city of Minneapolis, the Metro Gang Strike Force and several lawmen who headed it.
Judge Lloyd Zimmerman's order came three months after the defendants settled with O'Rourke, paying him $80,000 after he said police officials had harassed him and retaliated against him because he complained about problems in the gang unit.
In 2005, O'Rourke was assigned to the new strike force, a multijurisdictional unit that replaced the Minnesota Gang Strike Force. The statewide unit had fallen apart after the Legislature cut its budget in 2003.
The new strike force was considered an elite unit, but as a pair of state reports found, its officers had problems with record keeping, handling evidence and targeting innocent people for investigation.
O' Rourke was so concerned about improprieties he saw on the job that he wrote memos about them and complained to his superiors. In a later deposition, he said he characterized his complaints this way:
"This place is a mess," he said of the gang unit. "Their civil procedure is terrible. They have — the cops are going to be committing perjury as soon as they get on the stand and testify to the chain of custody."
Indeed, those problems forced the state to disband the unit in 2009. A report by the legislative auditor's office and a special report ordered by then-Public Safety Commissioner Michael Campion documented numerous instances of officers' conduct that a retired federal prosecutor called "criminal."
O'Rourke complained of the problems for more than a year. But he said that instead of acting on his complaints, his superiors harassed him. Shuttled to a desk job, O'Rourke filed a "whistleblower" suit in state court in August 2009.
The case had been set to go to trial in late November, but just before Thanksgiving, the defendants sought to settle the case and O'Rourke accepted the offer.
