A 63-year-old former janitor at the Little Rock office of the FBI was sentenced to three years in prison Wednesday for snapping a cellphone picture of a chart agents were using in a drug-trafficking investigation, and sharing it with one of the targets of the probe.
Billy Wayne Smith, who had worked as a contract janitor at the federal agency for 17 years, told Chief U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. that he liked the people he worked with and wasn't trying to undercut them, but simply wanted to help a friend whose photograph he recognized on the chart of investigative targets.
"There wasn't no use in me doing it, but I did it," Smith said.
He pleaded guilty Aug. 15 to a charge of obstruction of justice, which is punishable by up to 20 years in prison, but for which federal sentencing guidelines recommended 37 to 46 months in prison in his case, since he is a first offender.
"It's a difficult matter, because you have led a law-abiding life" otherwise, Marshall said. Referring to letters sent to the court on Smith's behalf, the judge added, "It's clear from these letters you've been a good citizen and helped other people."
But he said he had to agree with Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Peters that "this was a very serious crime that endangered other people."
Marshall said trust is important among workers in an FBI office, and that agents can't be looking over their shoulders in their own office.
While Smith's court-appointed attorney, Darrell Brown Jr., argued that Smith should be sentenced to time served since his arrest in August 2018, Marshall said he agreed with Peters that the sentence has to be punitive "and deter others who might be tempted to break faith if they learn something while working in a law enforcement office."
Marshall sentenced Smith to 37 months in prison, with credit for time already served, plus a year of supervised release.
According to court documents, on Feb. 26, 2018, agents and task-force officers met at the FBI's Little Rock office to discuss an investigation of a drug-trafficking organization in the greater Little Rock-North Little Rock area.
Smith, who lived in North Little Rock, later saw a chart of anticipated targets of the investigation that Agent Josh Hubbard had presented at the meeting. The chart contained photographs of the targets and information about them, as well as their relationship to one another in the organization.
Among the information on the chart was a picture of one of the targets and information concerning two controlled drug buys from that person the previous month.
On Feb. 27, 2018, agents sought permission from a federal judge to place a wiretap on that person's phone to help them determine the identity of the person's cocaine supplier.
But on March 5, the person whose phone was to be tapped contacted the FBI and said he had seen a picture of the chart, and described it in detail, according to the documents. He told agents he had initially considered harming the person who made the buys, whose identity he knew, but later decided to try to cooperate in exchange for recommendations of leniency in charging decisions.
The target initially thought the cellphone photo had been forwarded to him by his cocaine supplier, but when the supplier was arrested on June 1, and insisted he had never seen a chart, agents then determined that the source of information about the chart was Smith. The man who had told the FBI about seeing the chart realized he had been confused about who showed him the chart, "due to his level of intoxication" during conversations about it.
The man recalled that his cousin had texted him a message telling him he was "on the list" of targets, citing information from Smith, and that he and his cousin met with Smith the following day so that Smith could show him two photographs on his cellphone that each showed half of the large chart.
Smith allowed the man to write down specific details from the photographs on a piece of paper, which the man later provided to FBI agents on March 5, 2018.
The documents said that on June 9, 2018, the man went to Smith's house, equipped with recording devices that captured Smith saying,"Ya'll pictures still up there," referring to the chart. The man who was now playing the role of a cooperating witness asked if Smith could get another photo of the chart, and Smith replied, "I'll see what I can do. ... It's hard to do that, though. ... See that day, I barely did get it that day when I got it."
Documents show Smith told the man during that meeting at his house, "They be working on different cases man. They be working on a lot of s*** man."
When agents later interviewed Smith, he admitted he had photographed the chart from an agent's desk and showed it to the two cousins.
The documents show that the cooperating witness -- the man who was initially alerted that his picture was on the chart -- eventually helped agents determine that his supplier operated a drug-trafficking ring in the two Central Arkansas cities between April 2017 and June 2018, leading to an undercover agent's purchase of 1 kilogram of cocaine from the supplier in March 2018.
During the execution of search warrants on the day of the supplier's arrest at his home and storage unit, officers recovered about 7 kilograms of cocaine and 13 guns.
Metro on 02/21/2020
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story listed an incorrect amount of cocaine recovered during a search of a supplier's home and storage unit.