Kenneth McGriff, a drug organization leader from southeast Queens, was convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn on February 1, 2007, of racketeering, two murders-for-hire, drug trafficking and illegal financial transactions with drug money. The jury found that he paid $50,000 to have two men killed in Queens in 2001: Eric Smith, who died on July 16 of that year, and Troy Singleton, who died in October. The Justice Department sought a death sentence. The same jury could not reach the unanimous verdict that a death sentence requires, and on March 9, 2007, Judge Frederic Block sentenced McGriff to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
The case ran in two parts. The first was a long investigation by the NYPD, the FBI, the IRS and the ATF, which produced an indictment unsealed in January 2005. The second was a dispute over the death penalty itself. The Attorney General authorized a capital notice against McGriff and four co-defendants only days before the first trial date, the notice was challenged as late, and the case went to a second, separate trial for McGriff alone. By January 2007 the judge presiding over it was urging the prosecution to drop its request for death.
McGriff was 46 years old at the time of the 2007 verdict. He came from South Jamaica, in Queens. Prosecutors described him as the founder of a drug-dealing organization that operated from the Baisley Park area of southeast Queens beginning in the early 1980s, and that at its height took in about $200,000 a day through a network of dealers.
He was sentenced to ten years on drug charges in 1989. After his release prosecutors said he went back to the drug trade, working in New York and in the Baltimore area. His lawyers told the jury a different story: that by the late 1990s he had turned to legitimate business, and that his efforts in film and music were an attempt to change the direction of his life. A direct-to-video film that he produced was released in 2001.
The Baltimore connection produced a federal case of its own. In 2003 he pleaded guilty in the District of Maryland to a federal charge and received a sentence of 37 months. When the New York indictment was announced in January 2005, he was still serving that term.
The New York indictment also described a drug distribution location in the Baltimore area, which McGriff and two co-defendants were charged with operating. A jury later convicted McGriff of narcotics trafficking that included a Maryland distribution point outside Baltimore.
Two deaths in Owings Mills, Maryland, in August 2001 were charged against another defendant, not against McGriff, and were not part of the case on which he was convicted.
Eric Smith died on July 16, 2001, in Laurelton, Queens. Prosecutors told the jury that he was killed in revenge for the death of an associate of McGriff in 1999. The conspiracy to have him killed was charged as running from December 1999 to July 2001.
The prosecution's account was that McGriff ordered the killing and paid for it, and that the men who carried it out were found through intermediaries. Prosecutors also charged a co-defendant with helping to arrange the killings. The men who carried them out were not indicted in the case. They testified for the prosecution as cooperating witnesses, and the jury forewoman said afterward that the agreements made with them were among the factors that counted against a death sentence.
Relatives of the dead opposed a death sentence for McGriff. Prosecutors sought one regardless.
Troy Singleton died in Jamaica, Queens, in October 2001, a little more than three months after Smith. The prosecution's explanation was that McGriff feared Singleton would retaliate for Smith's death and had him killed for that reason. The conspiracy to kill him was charged as beginning on October 1, 2001.
The Second Circuit's later description of the evidence connects the two deaths. The court said that McGriff ordered the killings to re-establish and maintain the reputation of his drug enterprise after the two men had disrespected him, and that the reputation mattered because it helped him obtain drugs on credit. It also found that McGriff planned and coordinated both killings using a facility of interstate commerce.
The federal case developed in stages over nearly two years. On November 2, 2004, a grand jury in the Eastern District of New York indicted two other defendants for the murder of Eric Smith under 18 U.S.C. § 1959, the federal statute on murder in aid of racketeering. A first superseding indictment on January 18, 2005, charged McGriff in the Smith killing and charged another defendant in the Maryland deaths. It was unsealed on January 26, 2005, before Magistrate Judge Roanne L. Mann. Nine people and two corporations were charged in it. U.S. Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf said in announcing the charges: "We will not tolerate violent drug organizations and those who help them prosper by laundering their illicit proceeds." The release stated that the charges were allegations and that the defendants were presumed innocent.
A second superseding indictment on June 23, 2005, charged McGriff and a co-defendant in the Singleton killing. A third, on January 13, 2006, added a further co-defendant to both killings and added charges under 18 U.S.C. § 1958(a), the federal murder-for-hire statute. A fourth, on March 10, 2006, added an attempted murder as a racketeering act against McGriff. A fifth, on March 31, 2006, was the version on which McGriff was tried. It carried a notice of special findings listing the aggravating factors that the prosecution would rely on if the case went to a penalty phase. McGriff was arraigned in February 2006. Vash-Ti Paylor, who was charged only with narcotics offenses, pleaded guilty.
The prosecution's decision to seek a death sentence became its own issue in 2006. The U.S. Attorney's recommendations reached Washington on February 24, 2006. The Attorney General authorized a capital prosecution of all five death-eligible defendants on March 21, and the government filed notices the next day, March 22. The trial of all five was set for April 3. On March 23, the defendants moved to strike the notices as untimely under 18 U.S.C. § 3593(a), which requires notice a reasonable time before trial. On April 4 the government withdrew the notices against every defendant except McGriff.
Judge Block ruled on April 13, 2006. He found that the notice had not been filed a reasonable time before trial, with only twelve days left, but that striking it was not the right remedy. He denied the motion, severed McGriff from the other defendants and set a later trial date, and he found that McGriff was partly responsible for the delay. The aggravating factors in the notice for the Smith and Singleton killings included that McGriff "procured the commission of the offense by payment"; the notice also relied on a claim of future dangerousness.
McGriff appealed the ruling at once. On January 5, 2007, the Second Circuit dismissed the appeal for lack of appellate jurisdiction. The panel, Judges B.D. Parker, Wesley and Hall, held that § 3593(a) does not create a right not to be tried, so the order was not open to appeal before a verdict. McGriff could raise the issue after a conviction and final judgment, and the court did not decide whether the notice was late.
The case began in Brooklyn federal court on January 10, 2007. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Jones told the jury in his opening that the case was "about a man with the power and the will to get people murdered." The prosecution team was Carolyn Pokorny, Jeffrey Rabkin and Jason Jones. David Ruhnke, who also represented McGriff in the appeal over the death notice, told the jury: "This was an effort to make money legitimately, to change the direction of his life." The defense argued that the government's case depended on cooperating witnesses who were giving false testimony in exchange for leniency.
The jury was anonymous. During the trial two jurors, identified in the appeal as Jurors 6 and 12, recognized people in the courtroom and told other jurors that they were afraid. Judge Block questioned each juror individually. All but Juror 6 said they were unaffected; he dismissed Jurors 6 and 12 and sent the remaining jurors back to deliberate.
Before the verdict, Judge Block urged prosecutors to reconsider their request for death and called a penalty phase an "absurd" waste of time and money. Prosecutors answered that Justice Department officials had not changed their decision.
On February 1, 2007, the jury returned its verdict. It convicted McGriff of racketeering, two murder-for-hire homicides, narcotics trafficking, and engaging in illegal financial transactions with drug money. It acquitted him of some lesser counts. A prosecutor said outside the courtroom that McGriff was "one of the most dangerous, feared, ruthless gangsters in all of Queens." Ruhnke said: "We're pretty confident this jury will spare his life."
Because the murder-for-hire counts were capital offenses, the same jury then heard evidence on whether to sentence McGriff to death. By February 9, 2007, after about two and a half hours of deliberation, it had not reached the unanimous vote that would have been needed. Three of the twelve jurors were understood to have voted for death; a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn said he did not know the count. The jury forewoman said that the agreements prosecutors had made with the cooperating witnesses, including the men who carried out the killings, and McGriff's own fear at the time of being targeted for violence, were mitigating factors against a death sentence. Ruhnke said his client felt relief. Outside the courtroom a mother of one of the dead had said: "Death is not the answer."
Without a unanimous verdict for death, the sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole followed as a matter of course, and a spokesman for the prosecutors called the formal sentencing "a formality at this point."
Judge Block formally sentenced McGriff on March 9, 2007, in Brooklyn. The U.S. Attorney's release named the sentence as life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Mauskopf said: "The defendant was one of the most dangerous and feared narcotics traffickers in New York," and: "We are gratified that McGriff will now spend the rest of his life behind bars."
The sentence was later described by the Second Circuit as eight concurrent life sentences, including a life sentence on a drug count designated Count 14, together with two concurrent ten-year sentences on the money-transaction counts. The convictions it listed were racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, two counts of murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire, conspiracy to distribute and distribution of controlled substances, and two counts of conspiring to engage in and engaging in unlawful money transactions.
McGriff appealed his convictions to the Second Circuit. The court affirmed the judgment in a summary order on July 24, 2008. It raised three questions. On whether the evidence supported the racketeering counts, it called it "a closer question" whether the murders of Eric Smith and Troy Singleton were related to the enterprise, but found the testimony sufficient for a rational juror to find a criminal enterprise run by McGriff. On the jurors who had recognized people in the courtroom, it found that the district court had not abused its discretion in questioning the jurors individually, dismissing two, and refusing a mistrial. On the challenge to the murder-for-hire statute, it held that because the killings were coordinated through a facility of interstate commerce, no separate showing of a substantial effect on interstate commerce was needed. The order closed: "we AFFIRM the judgment of the District Court."
In June 2020 McGriff, acting for himself, moved under section 404(b) of the First Step Act of 2018 for a reduction of his sentence. The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 raised the drug quantity thresholds, and the First Step Act allows a court to reduce a sentence for a covered offense as if those changes had been in effect when the offense was committed. Judge Block found McGriff eligible but denied the motion on July 10, 2020, reasoning that a reduction on the drug count would make no practical difference because McGriff's other life sentences were not affected. He also denied McGriff's request for appointed counsel.
On March 28, 2022, a Second Circuit panel of Judges Pierre Leval, Raymond Lohier and Beth Robinson rejected most of McGriff's arguments. It held that the court did not have to apply the sentencing factors of 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) in every First Step Act case, that it was not an abuse of discretion to take the other life sentences into account, and that there is no statutory right to counsel in such a proceeding. It remanded on one point only. The record did not show whether the district court had calculated the reduced forty-year statutory maximum on the drug count, and the panel ordered the court to explain the effect of that maximum on its decision and, if it had not considered it, to reconsider the motion.
The two statutes under which McGriff was tried are 18 U.S.C. § 1958, which makes it a federal offense to use a facility of interstate commerce in a murder-for-hire, and 18 U.S.C. § 1959, which covers murder in aid of racketeering. The Second Circuit treated the first as satisfied by the use of such a facility, without a separate showing of a substantial effect on commerce. In McGriff's case the question of whether the killings were part of the racketeering enterprise was the closest on appeal.
In a federal capital case the Attorney General authorizes the request for death, and the government must give notice a reasonable time before trial under 18 U.S.C. § 3593(a). A death sentence requires a unanimous jury vote of twelve to nothing. Without it, McGriff faced life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
The defense told the jury that McGriff had left the drug trade and was working in film and music, and that the cooperating witnesses against him were lying to earn leniency. The jury rejected that account and the Second Circuit found the evidence sufficient. The connection of the killings to the enterprise, the element of the racketeering counts on which the appeal was closest, was resolved against McGriff.
The Maryland deaths of August 2001 were charged against another defendant, and McGriff was not convicted of them. The attempted murder added as a racketeering act in March 2006 remained an allegation. The men who carried out the two Queens killings were not indicted in the case and gave evidence as cooperating witnesses.
In March 2022, when the Second Circuit sent his First Step Act motion back to the district court on one limited point, McGriff was serving the life sentences imposed in 2007.
Early 1980s: McGriff founds a drug-dealing organization in southeast Queens.
1989: Sentenced to ten years on drug charges.
1999: Killing of a friend of McGriff, which prosecutors later said led to the Smith killing; conspiracy against Smith charged from December 1999.
July 16, 2001: Eric Smith dies in Laurelton, Queens.
August 2001: Two men die in Owings Mills, Maryland; charged against another defendant.
October 2001: Troy Singleton dies in Jamaica, Queens.
2003: McGriff pleads guilty in the District of Maryland to a federal charge and receives 37 months.
November 2, 2004: Two other defendants indicted for the Smith killing.
January 18, 2005: First superseding indictment charges McGriff; unsealed January 26.
June 23, 2005: Second superseding indictment adds the Singleton killing.
January 13, 2006: Third superseding indictment adds § 1958(a) counts.
February 2006: McGriff arraigned.
March 21-22, 2006: Capital prosecution authorized; notices filed.
April 4, 2006: Notices withdrawn against all defendants but McGriff.
April 13, 2006: Judge Block severs McGriff and orders a continuance.
January 5, 2007: Second Circuit dismisses the appeal on the notice.
January 10, 2007: Trial opens in Brooklyn.
February 1, 2007: Jury convicts McGriff.
February 2007 (by the 9th): Jury does not reach a unanimous death verdict.
March 9, 2007: Sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
July 24, 2008: Second Circuit affirms.
June 2020: McGriff moves for a reduction under the First Step Act; denied July 10, 2020.
March 28, 2022: Second Circuit remands on one point.