Man paid two D.C. police employees $40,000 in bribes for crash reports
Washington DC August 5 2019
A Washington-area man pleaded guilty to one count of felony bribery Wednesday, admitting he paid more than $40,000 to two D.C. police employees to obtain confidential information from traffic crash reports after police restricted the release of such reports in 2015.
Marvin Parker, 60, faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
In a plea agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, prosecutors and the defendant agreed on a sentence recommendation of 24 to 30 months.
Parker entered his plea before U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson.
No sentencing date was set, Parker has not been detained, and plea papers include no mention of any cooperation agreement.
Parker is the owner of RPM Associates, prosecutors said, a consulting firm that Maryland state business records show registered in Silver Spring. His attorney, Damon Colbert, declined to comment.
Parker in plea papers admitted to making cash payments from August 2015 to October 2017 to D.C. police employees who gave him crash reports in violation of their official duties.
Parker admitted to using the reports to identify people involved in traffic crashes, whom he then would call with offers of help to obtain legal representation and medical services, plea papers said.
Parker met one of the police employees before 2014 at the department’s First District station on Capitol Hill, at a time when police policy allowed for the viewing and copying of such reports, prosecutors said.
After the department changed that policy by general order on Jan. 14, 2015, and restricted access to copies of reports, Parker began making payments to that employee and also to a second one whom he contacted after the policy change, according to plea documents.
Parker said he paid the first employee about $50 to $200 per week for emailed reports and the second person about $400 to $500 per week for emails or texts of photos of her handwritten summaries of reports.
On June 7, the same day Parker was charged, prosecutors separately charged a third employee, D.C. police Officer Walter Lee, with accepting $14,000 in bribes from another unnamed individual to turn over crash report information.
Like Parker, Lee was charged by information — a type of charging document used when a defendant waives indictment by a grand jury and that may indicate a plea deal with prosecutors. A plea hearing for Lee has been set for Aug. 12.
Lee, who has been on the force for nearly seven years and was assigned to the Sixth District patrol area, remains on noncontact status with pay, said Dustin Sternbeck, a police spokesman said.
Lee’s attorney, Gayle Terry, declined to comment Wednesday.
Sternbeck on Thursday said one of the employees referenced in the Parker case was a civilian who no longer is with the department, but Sternbeck said he did not know the circumstances under which she left the department.
The other employee referenced in the Parker case was terminated in 2017, said Kristen Metzger, a police spokeswoman.
Washington Post
