BISPLINGHOFF: Decomposition is setting in rapidly.
He was essentially living the American dream,
trying to provide for his family.
People do crazy things for $50,000.
This person had an idea what to do to get rid of a body.
The pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together.
The thousand-dollar question is who killed Sami Safar?
I'm Sheriff Garry McFadden.
I was a homicide detective for 20 years.
I've worked more than 800 homicides in my career.
But even for the most dedicated detective,
there's no one harder to stop than a killer with a badge.
[phone ringing]
OPERATOR: 911, what's your emergency?
BISPLINGHOFF: A homeless person
was walking through a wooded area.
TREW: He was looking for cans, probably to sell at one
of the places that you can trade those in for money.
BISPLINGHOFF: And he stumbled upon a body in the woods.
NARRATOR: The body is shirtless, laying face-down in the brush.
He was clothed in khaki shorts and no shirt.
This is in July in North Florida.
It's extremely hot.
Decomposition is setting in rapidly.
Fortunately, it was obvious the body had
been there no more than 24 hours.
NARRATOR: Investigators have no clear idea
of who he is or how he died.
BISPLINGHOFF: There was no apparent stab wounds,
no gunshot wounds.
There were some marks in his upper chest area
and around his neck area.
TREW: Based on the marks,
he was probably killed somewhere else, brought there.
He had sticker bushes on his stomach,
and he was left in the woods, where he was eventually found.
BISPLINGHOFF: There was bruising on his back.
But identifying the source of the bruise is
total speculation.
Nothing definitive.
McFADDEN: One of the most difficult things
for a homicide detective
is to have a body with no manner of death,
no cause of death, and with no ID.
What do you have at the scene?
That is the first chapter in your book.
TREW: It was in a remote area.
You would have had to travel to get there.
It was obvious a car pulled up down a wooded road.
This person had an idea what to do to get rid of
a body or was told by someone else what to do with the body.
NARRATOR: Investigators send the body to
the medical examiner for an autopsy.
TREW: Officers start checking missing person reports,
start running everything with his physical characteristics to
see if there's anything that's
been reported as to who this person could be.
NARRATOR: And a name immediately pops up.
BISPLINGHOFF: The brother of Sami Safar
reported his brother missing the night before, Friday.
NARRATOR: Serri Safar began his own search at the bank
Sami went to most Fridays.
BISPLINGHOFF: He found Sami's car parked
across the street from the bank,
and Serri had notified the police.
The vehicle was left in a very suspicious condition.
The windows were halfway down, the keys were in the ignition.
There was cash flowing out of the center console,
easily visible from the outside of the vehicle.
NARRATOR: When they arrive,
police find $1,700 in the car.
McFADDEN: Why is somebody leaving $1,700 cash
on the scene? Is it a robbery?
Is it revenge, or is it staged?
That is something you're gonna have to answer in this chapter.
The fact that there's an active missing persons report
on Sami Safar, and they've now located his vehicle,
the pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together.
NARRATOR: Detectives check the murder victim's prints,
and there's a match.
BISPLINGHOFF: And now the thousand-dollar question is
who killed Sami Safar?
NARRATOR: They learn that 33-year-old Sami Safar moved
to the U.S. from Syria more than a decade earlier.
WAUGH: Sami comes to this country.
He opens one convenience store, then opens two more.
He had a great reputation within the community.
He was friendly, his family was friendly.
He was essentially living the American dream.
He gave credit to his loyal customers.
He gave away toys to needy children.
He was liked in the community.
WAUGH: Part of the work that he offered is
is that he would cash checks.
And so as a result, he very frequently
would have large sums of money.
KLINDT: He needed to have cash available to cash
the paychecks of people who worked on the dock.
That's why the convenience store needed the money.
So there would be the withdrawal of about $50,000
every Friday.
McFADDEN: One of the things that we often do,
patterns, practice, and behaviors.
Somebody's watching his movement.
Somebody's watching his behavior.
Who would know that Sami would come
to the bank every Friday to withdraw $50,000?
KLINDT: It wasn't a random hit like, okay,
I think we'll just rob the next person that comes out,
because you're probably gonna get nothing but a deposit slip
or maybe somebody's cashing a birthday check for 50 bucks.
NARRATOR: Investigators speak to bank employees.
They say that on the day he was killed,
Sami withdrew $50,000 as usual,
then left the bank and drove away.
[Bisplinghoff speaking]
And whoever stole it would become
the suspect in the murder.
McFADDEN: They were setting up a trap or a decoy.
Someone would come by, see $1,700, keys in the car,
take the car -- that would throw anybody off the original track
of the suspect.
But here's the problem.
Nobody took the money.
Somebody set the trap, but the trap wasn't sprung.
NARRATOR: Detectives then start questioning Sami's employees,
including his nephew,
Hussam Tahhan, who manages one of the stores.
They're stunned by what he tells them.
TREW: Hussam was robbed of $50,000 six weeks
prior to Sami at the same bank.
He remembered, obviously very vividly, that day.
A man came up to him, had a gun,
said, you know, "Give me your money."
That's not something that he's ever going to forget.
TREW: This tells me that somebody with the family,
somebody related to the business, or somebody that
works at that bank has to know what's going on.
And when I asked him what it was like for him, that his uncle
had -- had been murdered,
he could not talk about it, because it was so upsetting.
He said, "Please don't -- please don't ask me anymore."
He was afraid.
McFADDEN: The victim's nephew was also robbed, and he lived,
and in this case,
the victim was taken to another location and was killed.
Why would the victim leave his car?
And then secondly, why would you take
the victim to another location to kill him?
Who would do that?
Who would have that ability?
NARRATOR: Sami Safar came to the U.S. with his family
to escape the violence of his childhood.
FRAZIER: Sami Safar was in Syria at the time of civil war.
It was the time of the Damascus bombings,
when terrorists were taking aim and target on civilians.
People were dying in the streets.
So it was then that Sami Safar decided to leave his homeland.
He came to the United States in 1986
hoping for a better life.
WAUGH: Sami Safar was a businessman, and he was very,
very passionate about his family,
very loyal to his family, and his family members were very
loyal to him,
but his family was very afraid of their safety and security
after Sami disappeared.
This family knew something had gone amiss early on.
WAUGH: This man was just doing his job,
trying to provide for his family.
He did nothing wrong but go to the bank
to cash checks so that he could operate his businesses.
McFADDEN: When you have a case like this,
the closest people to find out most of the information about
your victim is the immediate family.
So it's pretty much natural when you're investigating in
a case like this to go to the wife.
The wife will reveal a lot of information that you normally
won't get from anybody else.
WAUGH: His wife said that she had seen
him the night before he had disappeared.
She had tried to reach him and call him.
He wasn't answering any of the phones,
wasn't at any of the convenience stores.
She was somewhat unemotional about it.
McFADDEN: When you tell someone's wife
they have been murdered or killed, and they're
not emotional, that is a clue.
Well, it could be for various reasons,
but one of those reasons is money.
She's believing that he's dead.
I'm gonna get some money.
But you still have to use that
shovel to dig a little deeper in the marriage.
They spoke with the wife's co-workers
that had knowledge of the wife.
WAUGH: It appeared that, based on understanding
their relationship, that it was more
of a financial relationship so that he could work here,
you know, and have citizenship as opposed to something else.
TREW: But at no point did they
have any evidence pointing toward Sami's wife.
NARRATOR: As detectives look for other suspects,
Sami's brother, Serri, calls them to
ask them about Sami's driver's license.
Police say they found Sami's wallet
in his car but no license.
BISPLINGHOFF: Serri is adamant.
There's no way Sami would
be anywhere without his driver's license.
Sami would not stop in his vehicle once he had that money
unless it's a police officer pulling him over.
Who else takes your driver's license?
A police officer.
BISPLINGHOFF: So Serri was very suspicious
that the police were involved.
McFADDEN: So the brother brought up a good idea.
The only person that would want to
see your driver's license is a cop.
It does make sense, but that's definitely
a road that these detectives don't want to go down.
NARRATOR: Serri isn't the only family member questioning police.
Sami's nephew, Hussam, is also suspicious
of an off-duty officer who was
the security guard at the bank when he was robbed
six weeks earlier.
Hussam Tahhan withdrew the $50,000.
He began to walk out of the bank.
Aric Sinclair was working security at that bank
and is with him, escorting him to his vehicle.
NARRATOR: But something happens, and Sinclair is separated from
Hussam, leaving him alone in the parking lot.
BISPLINGHOFF: Hussam walked to his car.
KLINDT: Somebody stuck a gun in Hussam Tahhan's
face in the parking lot.
NARRATOR: Hussam drops the money and runs back to the bank.
He finds Sinclair to tell him what happened.
But by the time the guard gets outside,
the money and the robber are gone.
KLINDT: Aric Sinclair's job as security was to walk
a person like Hussam Tahhan,
in possession of $50,000 in cash, out to his car
so this kind of thing wouldn't happen.
NARRATOR: When Sami Safar is killed
six weeks later, Aric Sinclair is
again moonlighting as a bank security guard.
But Sinclair tells detectives he walked Sami to
his car that day and saw him drive away.
The other employees backed him up.
The witnesses saw him walk the victim out, and he came
back in, so it's really not much they can work with.
But you still got to keep it
in your back pocket, because you never know.
It may come back up again.
BISPLINGHOFF: You start looking at the facts of the case.
Same family, same bank, $50,000 on Fridays.
One's been robbed in the parking lot,
and Sami was last seen alive leaving the bank.
The only common denominator in
the family's mind is Officer Aric Sinclair.
That family was very suspicious.
NARRATOR: Their accusations don't sit well with the police.
KLINDT: They have a hard time believing that
their fellow officer can commit crimes like this.
BISPLINGHOFF: It's not easy for a policeman
to believe another policeman could be
potentially involved in an armed robbery
at a bank in broad daylight.
McFADDEN: As a law enforcement officer,
we will protect our brothers and sisters -- as they say,
the thin blue line.
But now, the detectives have a large blind spot.
NARRATOR: The investigators try to come up with other theories.
They zero in on Sami's nephew, Hussam Tahhan.
The detective began to question
the credibility of Hussam's story.
It just wasn't matching up with
what they thought could have potentially happened.
NARRATOR: They theorized that Hussam could have been trying to
rob Sami, even that he staged his own robbery.
People do crazy things for $50,000.
They do really some crazy, dumb things.
NARRATOR: But there's no evidence connecting Hussam
or any other suspect to Sami's death.
Even the autopsy is no help.
There was no determined cause of death.
They classified it as homicide of unknown nature.
All investigative leads had been exhausted,
and both cases went cold.
Unfortunately, that's common in a lot of our criminal cases,
especially homicides.
We have unsolved deaths,
unfortunately, you know, all the time in Jacksonville.
TREW: It's very nerve-wracking for detectives.
You got family members constantly calling.
You can't provide any information to them.
So we all know that, in a homicide investigation,
the case can go cold,
but we wait for that one day that somebody provides us that
information to make that case red hot again.
And in this case, that's exactly what happened.
NARRATOR: One year after Sami Safar's murder,
investigators are still no closer to finding his killer,
but a break in an unrelated narcotics case
has the potential to blow it wide open.
[siren wailing]
My whole career as a detective was in the narcotics unit.
We were basically chasing drug dealers.
[distant sirens wailing]
Every day, your life is on the line.
You don't know if you're coming home.
NARRATOR: Detective Dave Bisplinghoff is working a case
to take down two of the city's most dangerous drug dealers,
Abdul "Blue" Robinson and Derrick "Smiley" Smith.
BISPLINGHOFF: They are by far the two most notorious,
violent drug dealers in this city's history.
Nobody will ever testify against them because of
their reputation.
NARRATOR: Bisplinghoff, known as Blitz, comes up with a plan.
He wants to catch the dealers bribing
a witness who's working as a CI, or confidential informant.
We negotiate this deal for weeks, and finally,
it is the day that this bribe is supposed to be accepted.
But I get a phone call from another CI
who should know nothing about this bribe.
He tells me almost every detail of this bribe.
We've been snitched out.
TREW: We were burned.
Somebody was telling what we were doing,
and it could be someone within our department.
NARRATOR: And the CI has more to tell him.
BISPLINGHOFF: His exact words were,
"That detective you ride around with every day
"is putting your business on the street.
"You need to be careful.
You're gonna get yourself killed."
NARRATOR: That detective is Blitz's partner, Aric Sinclair,
the same officer working security at the bank
when Sami Safar was killed.
McFADDEN: The person working the bank when the nephew
was robbed and when the uncle went missing
is also the same person leaking
information from the agency.
Is that a coincidence, or is that red hot
information that the detective can work with?
To think your own partner could put your life in danger...
I felt betrayed.
It's as if I'd been hit in the face with a sledgehammer.
-I couldn't believe.... -You was white as a ghost.
Yeah, I couldn't believe what he had told me.
McFADDEN: Leaking information to drug dealers,
who really don't have a conscience,
puts everybody in jeopardy.
when you find out it's your actual partner
who's leaking the information,
that is the ultimate of betrayal.
BISPLINGHOFF: The next morning, I went and told my lieutenant,
I wanted to transfer away from Aric Sinclair, and I wanted to
go to the DA task force, where I partnered up
with Richard Trew.
NARRATOR: The detectives reach out
to the U.S. Attorney's Office for help.
I was involved in
investigating corrupt law enforcement officers.
And they came to our office,
the U.S. Attorney's Office, and they presented some information
that they had.
Detective Bisplinghoff was suspicious of Aric Sinclair.
I had met Aric Sinclair before.
He was a standout high school basketball player.
He went to Eastern Kentucky on a basketball scholarship.
He seemed like a really good guy.
I thought he was gonna be a great narcotics detective.
NARRATOR: The more the prosecutor hears,
the more he's convinced Blitz and Trew are onto something.
We met with the sheriff in Jacksonville, and we said,
"We think that you have a leak in your office."
It's a bad feeling for a sheriff to hear that
a federal agency or another agency is coming to investigate
their agency.
We know we have one crack in the foundation.
Now it's up to the task force to find if there are
other cracks in our foundation,
and if they do, this house is gonna come tumbling down.
KLINDT: The sheriff and I walked out on the steps of the courthouse,
and he announced that there would be a joint investigation
into this breach of trust.
There was at least one, if not more,
police officer being investigated for something
associated with corruption.
All of a sudden, you have Jim Klindt,
a U.S. prosecutor, standing next to the sheriff.
You know that this is a very big deal.
McFADDEN: They are pretty much saying, "We're giving you a heads up,
"we're coming, we're gonna ring the bell,
"and if you know anything, this is the time to come
"and talk to us now.
"We don't want to have to come and talk to you.
You need to come and talk to us."
That definitely puts a lot of pressure on
that task force to push these criminals to surface.
BISPLINGHOFF: We're up against an entire agency.
We're either gonna be right, or our careers are over with.
So we weren't gonna make a mistake.
KLINDT: We talked about what do we need to do next?
Where do we go from here?
What investigative techniques we might use.
NARRATOR: To get more information about the leak,
Blitz and Trew ask their informant for help.
They introduced us to a person known as
Daryl Crowden, AKA Eight Ball.
He knows everything you wanna know about
Aric Sinclair.
KLINDT: Sinclair had arrested Crowden back in 1997.
He found cocaine and marijuana on Crowden,
threw the cocaine away and only charged Crowden
with a small amount of marijuana.
That was the beginning of their relationship.
McFADDEN: Sinclair threw away the cocaine in order to keep
this informant in his pocket.
Puts a lot of pressure on that informant, but then they
believe that the cop had them in their hand.
This is also a classic way for
crooked cops to keep people on the street.
NARRATOR: Getting Crowden to talk isn't easy.
The team arranges to meet him at a secret location.
BISPLINGHOFF: It was like a scene out of a movie.
Um, dark room, a lawyer sitting on the couch,
smoking a cigar, with his clients sitting next to him.
And they said, "Are y'all ready?"
NARRATOR: Crowden throws detectives a curveball.
BISPLINGHOFF: Daryl Crowden began to talk about the robbery
of Hussam Tahhan, who is the nephew of Sami Safar.
He incriminated himself of that robbery on May 15th.
And he also informed us that his brother,
Jeff Reed, was the actual gunman that robbed
Hussam Tahhan,
and he told us the role that Officer Aric Sinclair
played in that robbery at the bank.
NARRATOR: Crowden explains to the team that Sinclair had
inside information because of his off-duty job
as a guard at the bank.
BISPLINGHOFF: Crowden says, once Hussam Tahhan arrived,
Aric Sinclair walked out of the bank, and he tapped
the trunk of Hussam Tahhan's vehicle,
knowing that robbers are watching him.
He's identifying, this is the victim's vehicle.
You'll know that the person driving that car
is the person from the convenience store
with $50,000.
BISPLINGHOFF: Then Hussam Tahhan exits the bank with the $50,000.
He's thinking Aric Sinclair is with him,
and when he turned around,
Aric Sinclair was nowhere in sight, and then Jeff Reed
approaches him with a handgun pointed at him, and Hussam Tahhan
threw the money into the open window of his car.
NARRATOR: Crowden tells them that, after the robbery,
Sinclair obstructed the investigation.
BISPLINGHOFF: Sinclair put out on the radio
bad vehicle description, bad suspect description,
and bad direction of travel.
TREW: We established that Aric Sinclair was
contacting each one of these people.
KLINDT: When you look at cellular telephone records,
you can just follow the timeline of the robbery.
You know, you can see them calling each other at
the time Crowden said they were setting up the robbery.
NARRATOR: It's the first time the task force ties
Sinclair to crimes beyond sharing information with
drug dealers.
They believe there could be even more.
Klindt: We had gone from a drug investigation to a leak
somewhere to what appeared to be a robbery outside the bank.
And Sinclair was involved in all of this.
So I was convinced the robbery and murder of Sami Safar
were tied together, and the common link was
Aric Sinclair.
I don't believe in coincidences.
You're looking at two narcotics detectives that are
working a drug case, and now we're homicide detectives.
Deputy Sinclair is working at
this bank off duty, setting up robberies.
But now one, of these robberies turned
into a murder on Sinclair's watch.
This case now is red hot.
NARRATOR: Sheriff's deputy Aric Sinclair is
the target of a federal task force investigation,
but not everyone is convinced.
KLINDT: There were prosecutors in the State Attorney's office
who just would not believe that he could be
involved in this type of activity.
NARRATOR: They asked their informant, Daryl Crowden, to wear a wire.
We basically sent Crowden in to Sinclair's apartment
to get Sinclair to say things that were incriminating.
And so Crowden went in in a bit of a panic.
He's like, "Hey, I think they're on to us."
Sinclair said, "Hey, if you keep your mouth shut,
and I keep my mouth shut, you know, we'll be okay."
McFADDEN: That is great evidence in this case.
If he said this to an informant,
surely this is not the beginning,
and surely it won't be the end.
He has to be involved in more,
and they wanna know what else he's involved with.
NARRATOR: Investigators are convinced Aric Sinclair was connected
to the robberies of both Sami Safar and his nephew.
But they know that at the time Sami was killed,
Sinclair was still working at the bank.
Someone else must be involved.
BISPLINGHOFF: This is when Daryl Crowden implicated
Karl Waldon as being another officer involved.
He was a good, aggressive police officer.
I never suspected anything other
than good, aggressive police work.
NARRATOR: Detectives now want to see if Karl Waldon is,
in fact, a dirty cop.
Jim Clint calls him before the grand jury to find out.
Having a grand jury convene is
an absolutely great tool in law enforcement.
Why? Because everybody has been sworn in,
and everybody is testifying under oath.
You can dig for what you want to dig for,
ask the questions you wanna ask under oath.
KLINDT: Karl Waldon appeared for the grand jury on February 16th.
I had a stack of photographs that we had put together.
I put a photograph of Sami Safar in there.
And I said, "Do you recognize
the person depicted in this photograph?"
"No, never seen that person before."
NARRATOR: But the next day on the stand, Waldon slips up.
KLINDT: But I said, "The victim of the robbery on July 3rd,
was it a he or a she?"
And he said, "It's a he."
And I said, "Really, how do you know that?"
He said, "You showed me his picture yesterday."
So I handed him the stack of photos, and I said,
"Which one's the victim?"
He pulls out Sami Safar.
I was 100 percent sure that I hadn't told
him who was depicted in any of those photographs.
McFADDEN: The U.S. attorney realized that Waldon was lying.
At that point,
he stopped him, because he did not want Waldon to continue
to talk to cover his tracks,
because he knew he had him in a lie.
KLINDT: After he testified,
I said, "Karl, you just confessed.
You identified the victim, and you identified his vehicle,"
and he said, "Prove it."
And I said, "Well, Karl, that's just
exactly what we're gonna do."
NARRATOR: Detectives dig into Waldon's background and learn
of a local inmate rumored to have information.
His name is Kenny McLaughlin.
Kenny opened up about some robberies, carjackings,
uh, kidnapping stuff that he involved in.
NARRATOR: Then detectives mentioned Karl Waldon.
TREW: I could see tears in his eyes,
and I knew in my mind he was fixing to tell us
something else.
It was eating him up.
He couldn't -- he couldn't sleep, he couldn't eat.
McFADDEN: He was gonna give Waldon to them on a silver platter.
So all you want to do is
sit back and watch the house fall down.
NARRATOR: Kenny says he met Waldon at church.
Kenny McLaughlin had a severe drug problem, and the bishop
thought that Karl Waldon, who was also
a member of the church, as a police officer, would just be
a great mentor for him.
The preacher, the bishop, would confide in Karl Waldon and say,
"Hey, look, my brother is really struggling.
"Help him, you know, find a new purpose in life.
Help him be better."
NARRATOR: But Kenny tells them that Waldon instead recruited
him to help in the robbery of Sami Safar.
BISPLINGHOFF: The plan was not to kill anybody.
It was merely to steal their money.
TREW: Unfortunately, things changed.
Officer Waldon made the decision
that $50,000 is worth more than the life of Sami Safar.
NARRATOR: The task force has found someone who claims
he was involved in the murder of Sami Safar...
...inmate, Kenny McLaughlin.
Kenny says he watched Sami leave
the bank that day with his $50,000.
When they saw the vehicle,
they were going to call Karl Waldon, who was just down
the road, and then Karl pulls him
over like you would any traffic stop.
The plan was for Karl Waldon to tell Sami Safar that there
was a problem with his immigration,
and he was gonna have to take him down to the police station,
and leaving the $50,000 in Sami Safar's vehicle.
And then McLaughlin would just drive over to the car,
break into the car, and take the money.
TREW: But Sami wouldn't leave the money in the car.
He took it in the back seat of the police car with him.
It's at that point that Karl became upset.
NARRATOR: Kenny tells detectives Waldon drove off
with Sami in his police car.
And he said, "He had seen me, we gotta take him out."
NARRATOR: They stopped at a nearby lot.
KLINDT: According to Kenny, you could see Sami Safar
in the back seat, looking terrorized.
It looked like he was trying to kick the windows out of
the police car, because he knew
at that point that he was a goner.
BISPLINGHOFF: Waldon opened up the back door.
Sami Safar tried to get away from him.
Officer Waldon retrieved a piece of rope
from his vehicle.
He then got inside the vehicle and climbed on top
of Sami Safar and he choked him with the rope.
Kenny McLaughlin heard Sami Safar take his last breath.
He heard him gurgling.
Waldon then says, "He's gone. He's dead."
Waldon then ordered McLaughlin to dispose of the body.
McFADDEN: The informant information sounds credible.
But how do you make it better?
What you need to do now is take him to the scene
and allow him to walk you through all the events
to make it bulletproof.
BISPLINGHOFF: We asked him, "Can you take us to where you dropped that body?"
And then that's when he gave us the directions.
He gives us every turn from
downtown Jacksonville to this dirt road.
And we walked out into these woods, and he walks
about 30, 40 feet out into the woods,
and he says, "Stop." Me and Richard
had already seen the crime scene photos,
and I tapped Richard, and I said, "Let's get out of here."
It wasn't gonna get any better for us.
NARRATOR: Kenny isn't the only witness to help the task force.
We started developing a stable of cooperating witnesses.
And on December 12th, 2000,
the grand jury returned a 26-count indictment
against Aric Sinclair and Karl Waldon.
NARRATOR: But before the indictment, Karl Waldon resigns
from the department and moves to Virginia.
TREW: We flew up and arrested Karl.
I can remember as we walked up on him,
he just said, "I knew you was coming."
And, you know, put his hands
behind his back, and we handcuffed him.
He never made any statement.
NARRATOR: Aric Sinclair is more helpful.
KLINDT: Sinclair agreed to cooperate.
So Waldon was the last man standing.
All the rats are jumping ship,
and who are they using for their lifeboat?
Brother Waldon.
NARRATOR: Sinclair claims that Waldon heard about the earlier
robbery of Sami's nephew, Hussam Tahhan, and confronted him.
Waldon told him, "I want part of that action."
And, uh, and Sinclair told Waldon, he said, "Hey, look,
"if there are two robberies in a row,
"the same bank, under the same circumstances,
I'm gonna be under the spotlight."
Waldon really didn't give a damn.
Waldon wanted that $50,000.
So Sinclair told Waldon, "Look, I'll tell you that
"there's a convenience store owner that comes,
"what day he comes, what time he comes,
"how much money he has,
but I'm not gonna participate."
NARRATOR: Waldon then recruited Kenny McLaughlin to assist him.
Once Sami saw Waldon's face that day,
the robbery turned deadly.
KLINDT: Karl Waldon opened the back door of the police car,
and he had a rope in his hand.
And this rope is provided to SWAT team members
so they can practice tying their knots for rappelling.
KLINDT: Karl Waldon was trained at
the police academy in defensive tactics on chokeholds.
McFADDEN: We all have seen cops go bad.
But what's more disgusting is that you use part of
your training and part of your departmental
issued equipment to carry out a murder.
Waldon kept his fellow officers off his trail,
but now, they got him.
NARRATOR: In 2002,
more than four years after Sami Safar was killed,
Karl Waldon goes on trial for his murder.
WAUGH: Every time I would see Sami Safar's brother,
Serri, in court,
I knew he didn't want to be there.
You could tell,
but it felt like he was there because he owed it
to his brother,
and he came every day, leaving in tears, oftentimes kind of
rushing to his car, afraid,
just afraid that what happened to his brother could --
could happen to anyone.
NARRATOR: Waldon is convicted and receives
a life sentence for Sami's murder.
Aric Sinclair is convicted of
conspiracy to commit murder and robbery.
He's sentenced to 17 years in prison.
FRAZIER: These are people who are thugs
with a badge.
They are organized crime.
They bring new meaning to the old phrase cops and robbers.
Kenny McLaughlin is sentenced to 20 years
in prison for felony murder.
Ken McLaughlin really solved Sami Safar's murder,
because had his conscience not
have kicked in, Sami Safar's murder would never have
been solved.
That the informant brought
a lot of information to the detective.
But you had to think, these detectives was
under great pressure, investigating one of their own
for years -- the detectives used all of their resources,
including the informant, to bring this case to a close.
They are the authors of this investigation.
Law enforcement officers followed the evidence,
fearlessly, to get
what I believe was a tremendously just result.
We done what we're hired to do.
If you're a police officer,
it don't give you any right to commit a crime.
I feel sad that any police officer will do something like
this to cast the shadow on the rest of us
that's trying to do the right thing.
BISPLINGHOFF: They have destroyed their careers.
They all had bright futures, and unfortunately, they
crossed the line, and it cost them that future.
This case was dubbed the most significant corruption case in
the history of the -- the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office.
The criminal justice system let down the whole
Safar family.
But I hope they see that the system itself,
in the bigger picture, uh,
worked for them.
I hope that brings them a little bit of peace.
NARRATOR: Many of Sami's family have since moved far away.
I think that this s changed that family forever
and I hate that this happened to them.
Serri felt so nervous and so unsafe in this country
that he had to go back to Syria.
I just, I can't imagine going to Syria to feel safe.
I have never, ever worked a case like this.
I will never forget Sami Safar and what was done to him.
I'll never forget it.
[detective speaking]
I kept asking, "How did she die?"
He betrayed his badge.
[woman] They found who killed my sister,
and I just couldn't believe
it was a fricking cop.