Undercover

I know where beef comes from. The town where I grew up, St. Joseph, Mo., once had three major meatpacking operations - Swift, Armour and Dugdale. When I was a kid, my Cub Scout pack toured these plants, watching suspended cattle carcasses swing from chains. As a teenager, I tried but failed to get a summer job "in the yards" running livestock from the pens into the slaughterhouses. But even with my cow-town past, I had a hard time watching the footage of the downer cattle at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. in California.

$100 million lawsuit filed over police brutality claim A Baltimore police officer who was charged last week with assaulting an undercover internal affairs detective was named yesterday in a $100 million civil lawsuit by a man who says the officer assaulted him during a stop in Southeast Baltimore last year. In documents filed in Baltimore Circuit Court, Steven Vernarelli of Rosedale alleges that Officer Jerome K. Hill assaulted him Oct. 22 near Curley and Monument streets. Two other officers witnessed the assault and did nothing to stop it, and then all three officers drove away, the lawsuit alleges.

A Baltimore police officer was charged yesterday with assault after he allegedly punched an undercover detective who was posing as a man waiting to buy drugs - a sting set up by detectives investigating a citizen complaint against the officer, according to documents filed in court. The officer, Jerome K. Hill, 35, has been suspended without pay. Hill, a four-year veteran, was charged with second-degree assault, a misdemeanor.

LOS ANGELES -- To the dismay of some city leaders, a gun company is marketing a line of high-end pistols named for the Los Angeles Police Department's Special Investigation Section, an elite group of plainclothes detectives with a history of fatally shooting suspects. The guns were created for the undercover unit at the LAPD's request. Kimber, a Yonkers, N.Y.-based gun maker, is marketing a slightly modified version to the public, touting the weapons as the "hot new SIS pistols" on its Web site.

A Westminster woman charged with solicitation to commit murder was being held at the county detention center on $100,000 bail after a review hearing yesterday. Mary L. Gates, 46, was arrested Tuesday afternoon, according to Maryland State Police. Gates' husband, Kevin L. Gates, had contacted the Carroll County state's attorney's office last month with concerns that his wife was trying to have him killed, police said. During an investigation, state police discovered allegations that Gates had tried several times to hire someone to kill her husband, with whom she lived, police said.

The Baltimore police officer who shot and wounded a man Monday night has been identified as Jonathan Riker, 28, who has been on the force three years, a city police spokesman said. Riker is assigned to the Northwestern District's drug enforcement unit. Police said the man wounded in the left shoulder is a 37-year-old Baltimorean with a long arrest record. He has been charged in a warrant with drug and handgun violations, but police have not released his name pending formal charges after his release from Maryland Shock Trauma Center.

The city liquor board yesterday penalized two strip clubs on The Block where undercover police said dancers offered to perform sex acts in exchange for money. The 2 O'Clock Club, at 414 E. Baltimore St. was hit with a $1,200 fine and a three-day suspension of its liquor license starting Oct. 24. Another club, Lust, at 408 E. Baltimore St., was fined $500. The fines come at a time when city police and liquor board officials appear to be focusing attention on The Block, the nickname for adult bookstores and strip clubs in the 400 block of E. Baltimore St. and several side streets.

In the glut of awards shows, the second annual BET Hip Hop Awards already stands out - even before it airs tonight. Multiplatinum-selling, Grammy-winning rapper T.I., up for a leading nine awards, was arrested hours before he was to appear on the show, recorded Saturday in Atlanta. The rapper-actor born Clifford Harris was busted in the parking lot of an Atlanta shopping center, where he allegedly tried to pick up three machine guns, two silencers and a pistol from an undercover officer.

Like a lot of people with dirt under my fingernails, I have a hard time saying goodbye to my vegetable garden. This year, Mother Nature has added an interesting twist to the separation ritual. Namely, she has refused to change seasons. Plants should have been battling autumnal chills weeks ago. Instead, they have had to cope with summer-like 90-degree heat and almost no rain. This fall, if you watered it, it thrived. If you didn't, it fried. Still, I figure that at some point, the weather will turn cold.

An undercover police detective shot a 16-year-old boy in the shoulder early yesterday after the youth threatened officers with a gun, according to a city police spokesman. The boy is being treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital, said Agent Donny Moses. The teenager starting fleeing on a bicycle when approached by plainclothes officers about 1:40 a.m. at Jefferson Street and North Belnord Avenue in McElderry Park, Moses said. The officers chased him several blocks before he crashed his bike as they cornered him in the 2700 block of Jefferson St., Moses said.