Quentin T. Glenn, 49, owner of Glenn Services, has admitted to paying $100-a-truckload bribes to Department of Public Works employees who manipulated a scale house computer to wipe away evidence of his trips to Baltimore’s Quarantine Road Landfill.

A company truck driver, Jessie L. Wilson, Jr., 40, also pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to conspiracy and bribery.

The pleas are the latest coming from a joint investigation by the FBI and Baltimore Inspector General Robert Pearre into widespread corruption at the South Baltimore landfill and the Northwest Transfer Station.

The investigation had previously netted three ex-city employees and three commercial trash haulers.

Long-standing criminal schemes uncovered at the facilities have cost Baltimore taxpayers nearly $7 million in lost revenues, according to Rod J. Rosenstein, U.S. attorney for Maryland.
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The Brew’s prior coverage of the landfill scandals

• Waived fees and thievery by DPW employees cost city nearly $7 million (6/2/15)

• Trash haulers plead guilty to bribing city workers (7/22/15)

• Landfill supervisor admits he accepted bribes over 30-year period (8/17/15)
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Escaping the Dumping Fee

Commercial haulers of trash are supposed to pay a waste disposal fee of $67.50 per ton of trash deposited at the sprawling Quarantine Road dump in far South Baltimore.

DPW scale operators are responsible for weighing each truck as it enters the landfill on a computer and re-weighing each truck before it leaves the facility. The net weight of the dumped trash and required disposal fee is then calculated by the computer and printed on a receipt that is handed to the driver for payment.

In their guilty pleas, Glenn and Wilson said they paid scale house employees $100 per truckload of trash to circumvent the disposal fee.

Cash in a Parking Lot

After a certain number of unpaid trips, Glenn would arrange to meet a scale house operator to pay the balance of the cash bribes, according to a statement of facts issued today by Rosenstein’s office.

In a phone conversation recorded by investigators last January 29, Wilson told a city employee he needed the “numbers for the dinner,” and the employee replied that Glenn Services owed “34,” or $3,400.

On February 1, Wilson met the employee at a parking lot in West Baltimore and gave the employee $2,500 in cash. “He said that Glenn would give her the rest later in the week, and complained about the times Glenn Services was actually charged a disposal fee,” investigators said.

On April 21, 2015, the employee told Wilson that Glenn Services owed for 39 trips since February 1, plus for five other trips, for a total of $4,400. Wilson then arranged a meeting in which $4,000 in cash changed hands. This was followed by a meeting in which another $5,000 was handed over to the DPW employee.

Glenn and Wilson face a maximum sentence of five years in prison for conspiracy and 10 years in prison for bribery. They are scheduled to be sentenced next January by U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis.

Two ex-DPW employees – Tamara O. Washington and William Charles Nemec, Sr. – have pleaded guilty to participating in the bribery scheme, along with three commercial haulers – Larry Lowry, Mustafa Sharif and Adam Williams, Jr.

Another ex-DPW employee, Michael T. Bennett, has pleaded guilty to a related “junking” scheme in which employees used cellphones to alert each other of scrap metal dumped in the city facilities, then used their personal trucks to cart off the metal to sell at salvage yards.