Blue Mob

"Police have people around here so scared!" Karen Bryant is talking about a June afternoon last summer, the day she saw Warren police officer Greg Hoso approach Lyndal Kimble's white Cadillac, and how she screamed to her neighbor to get his video camera.

She watched Hoso reach through the car window, wrap his hand around Kimble's throat and squeeze. Kimble writhed as officer Frank Tempesta approached the passenger side.

The home video shows Hoso release Kimble's throat only to punch the black man in the face three times. Hoso would later say he saw Kimble put drugs in his mouth and needed to prevent him from swallowing them.

The officers pulled Kimble from the car. In an amazing show of strength, Tempesta lifted him high in the air and slammed him to the sidewalk. The enormous young cop sat on Kimble's back while Hoso searched the ground. Then he found it -- a small Baggie of cocaine.

Officer Michael Stabile entered the fray, and as the videotape rolled, police used an intriguing combination of martial arts, pepper spray, and sucker punches on the slim 28-year-old, who cowered in the fetal position.

At one point, Kimble raised his head, gasping under the weight of Tempesta and Stabile. Hoso kicked his head like a football.

"If I could have become a man for five minutes that day . . ." Bryant clenches her teeth, not finishing her sentence.

Once the cruiser pulled away, she yelled to her neighbor. "I said run with that motherfucker [videotape], and don't you stop until I figure out what to do!" She eventually gave it to a local news station.

By that afternoon, Bryant was all too familiar with the Warren police. Two years ago, Hoso was one of four officers who beat her son so severely, he ended up in the hospital. But unlike Kimble, Marcus Bryant had no record. His only crime was failing to show up for traffic hearings.

So when she watched Lyndal Kimble being beaten that day, Bryant recognized the tightly muscled, olive-skinned officer immediately.

Her working-class neighborhood of small, wooden frame houses, just minutes from the Trumbull Homes projects, is Hoso's regular beat. But his name is known far beyond this area. "He has a certain reputation in the African American communities," says former Safety Service Director Fred Harris. "People are scared to death of Hoso!"

Said to be the great-nephew of an influential Catholic monsignor, Hoso belongs to a large, important family in Warren, where church and politics have always been an acceptable mix. He has an additional advantage: a BA from Youngstown State, while most of his colleagues have only the police academy under their belts.

When Bryant talks about Marcus, her teenage daughter makes grumbling noises. Angelica doesn't want summer to come. When the weather is warm, she explains, the neighborhood goes outside, providing police with more people to beat. But she doesn't want to hear her mom tell the story of Marcus again. She's sick of reliving the day of her 14th birthday, just before Christmas in 2001.

That afternoon, there was a knock on the door. A neighbor screamed that Marcus, 23, had been beaten by police. Bryant rushed to police headquarters, where she was told that her son, who had never been in trouble before, was in the hospital. But when she called Trumbull Memorial, the nurse said he'd fled, and that Hoso and the equally notorious Sergeant Rob Massucci were looking for him. Bryant knew she had to find him before they did.

Marcus will not speak openly about that day; he fears police retaliation. But the five-page, handwritten letter attached to his citizen's complaint speaks for itself. In neat black cursive, the 23-year-old wrote:

"Me, Darrell Gates and Sadd Battee were on our way to get the Playstation to take over Brandon's house to play until it was time for our basketball game. While walking past the [community center] we saw officer Hoso . . . we paid him no mind and proceeded to Darrell's."

They may have ignored Hoso, but according to his report, Hoso had taken note of them, because he didn't recognize their faces. He followed the trio to Gates's building.

"Hoso ran past the window to bam on the backdoor," Marcus writes. "We are all in the apartment froze stiff."