New court filing lays out details of sex trafficking conspiracy case against Golubski | Opinion

The latest court filing in the federal conspiracy case against former KCK cop Roger Golubski, who ran the department’s homicide unit but according to prosecutors was batting for the bad guys all along, is a far more detailed account than I’d seen before of how four men allegedly held girls as young as 13 in “involuntary servitude.”

The 43-page motion is so granular that it gets into everything from Golubski’s erectile problems to the beguiling way he spoke to his underage victims: When the teenager described in the filing as Person 2 “repeatedly cried in pain” as he raped and choked her and pulled her hair, the motion says, “Golubski repeatedly said, ‘You like it like that, bitch.’”

She liked it so much, the filing says, that she vomited after he left.

What big strong men he and his three drug-dealing co-defendants would have to have been, I kept thinking while reading this vomitous document, to have overpowered and then profited off the bodies of already hurting and homeless children — yes, children — through rape, beatings, death threats and confinement in a room with bars on the windows and a door that locked from the outside.

Convicted drug kingpin Cecil Brooks, who owned the apartments at KCK’s Delavan Avenue and 26th Street where all of this allegedly went on between 1996 and 1998, was also charged in the conspiracy, along with his “lackeys” LeMark Roberson and Richard Robinson.

Golubski stands accused of protecting the operation from any real police scrutiny. He was seen receiving envelopes of cash in return, along with his pick of underage girls.

“Person 2 observed Golubski come to the working house” — where the girls trapped there waited to be sent to private rooms for sex — “and choose primarily young Black girls ranging in age from about 13 to 17 years old.”

The girls, who were given drugs and were “sometimes considered to ‘belong’ to one of the defendants at a time, would be forced to provide sexual services to that defendant primarily, and sometimes to others.”

Golubski often met with Brooks alone in his office at the Delavan Apartments, the filing says. But “on other occasions, Golubski parked outside Delavan, where he would be handed a bundle of money through his car window by Brooks or those working for him.”

In a hearing last July, prosecutor Stephen Hunting told the court that a uniformed KCKPD officer once called to Delavan by a resident worried about the girls being held there was told by management that he should call Golubski. When he did, the detective actually showed up, called the woman who’d made the report crazy and convinced his fellow officer that everything was just fine.

All four defendants are pleading not guilty to all charges.

Invoked 5th Amendment 555 times in one sitting

When Golubski was asked in a 2020 deposition in a civil suit if he’d ever raped an underage girl in his cop car or had a lucrative side hustle in drugs and prostitution or investigated a crime he himself had committed, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. He did that 555 times in a single sitting.

One particularly troubling piece of apparently key evidence in the conspiracy case, mentioned several times in the new filing, is a 2001 FBI interview with one of the victims, whose story, it says, has never changed in all this time. I say troubling because how did it take 21 more years to charge anyone in connection with this horror in plain sight?

Another surprise in the filing was a reference to the fact that it was Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, may he rest in peace, who successfully pushed for the part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 that makes it possible, in cases in which a defendant is charged with a sex crime, for federal prosecutors to introduce evidence of the defendant’s bad character in order to prove that the defendant committed the crime.

“The new rules are unusual,” a 1999 University of Arkansas Law Review article explained, “in that they permit a prosecutor to prove the government’s case through … evidence of prior misconduct on the part of the defendant.”

Thank you, Senator Dole, for seeing 30 years ago what some still cannot, which is that because there is almost never an eyewitness to a rape, because even DNA evidence doesn’t prove whether or not the sex was consensual, and because even physical injuries are too often still written off as proof of nothing more than rough sex, evidence of other, similar allegations against the same defendant has got to be allowed if anyone who doesn’t kill his victim is ever to be held to account.

Seven such “prior bad act” witnesses are going to be allowed to testify in the other case against Golubski. In that case, he is charged with civil rights violations for acting “under color of law” to rape and kidnap two women between 1998 and 2002, starting when one was 13 years old.

‘Controlling, terrorizing and sexually abusing minors’

The conspiracy case focuses on how Golubski and the three drug dealers “selected young girls who were runaways, who were recently released from Beloit Juvenile Correctional Facility” and who had no place else to stay. The woman called Person 1 in the motion, for example, had lost her mom to suicide and had just been released from juvie.

She describes hearing other women screaming and being told by Roberson that one of them had been left hanging upside down in a closet because she didn’t do what was asked of her.

“As Brooks observed and laughed,” the motion says, Roberson beat her with an iron and pulled her down a staircase by her hair. This after Brooks told him that she had smiled at another man while he was in jail.

She was also, according to the filing, denied medical care while suffering severe abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding from an ectopic pregnancy. When she finally was able to escape and get to a hospital, she had to have emergency surgery.

For years, the four men implemented “their common plan and scheme of controlling, terrorizing and sexually abusing minors and young women,” according to the motion, which argues that five “prior acts” witnesses should also be allowed to testify in the conspiracy case.

The trial date hasn’t been set yet, but when that date finally comes, hopefully while all parties are still with us, the trial “will turn entirely on victim credibility,” the motion says. It will all come down to whether a jury believes the two then-teenagers these men are charged with conspiring to abuse and traffic, and the five other victims who will back them up with similar testimony about their own experiences.

All of the women who have come forward, who have told their stories and agreed to testify, are beyond brave. Especially because they do so knowing that they were preyed on because they were considered throwaways, and were not likely to be seen as credible by the same authorities who claim they never had reason to doubt Golubski.

One woman told investigators that during her time at Delavan, “I thought that Golubski ran the streets and I thought that Cecil was God.” And so, if we believe the charges, did they.