MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. – On Wednesday, March 8, a Miami-Dade narcotics detective was shot.
It was a close call as a bullet grazed the officer’s head, but he would be OK.
An arrest report said the shooting happened while that detective was doing surveillance on Atiba Moore.
When the detective was following Moore, something went wrong and he crashed into the back of the suspect’s vehicle.
After getting out of his unmarked police car, police say the detective was shot by Steve Gallon IV, the son of Miami-Dade School Board member Steve Gallon III.
Sources tell Local 10 News that the surveillance the detective was conducting on Moore is connected to an even larger public corruption investigation involving drugs being smuggled into Miami-Dade County jails by a ring of people that includes corrections officers.
An arrest report said when detectives searched Moore’s car after the shooting, they found a sheet of paper laced in drugs.
Adam Goodman is a criminal defense attorney with no ties to the case, but what allegedly is happening in the jail is affecting his job.
Attorneys like Goodman can no longer take paper discovery or evidence into the jail with them when they visit their clients.
“You can still mail in discovery to inmates,” he said. “That’s how they review the paperwork, so you would mail it in.”
But Goodman knew something was off when he got a package returned to his office that he never sent.
“I ended up getting a call from one of the prison facilities asking if I sent a package to an inmate I didn’t know,” he said. “That same day I got a package return to sender.”
It was a simple manila envelope, and because it looked like any other package, Goodman opened it up.
“The package was sent to me, and I handed it over to police, and it turns out there was drugs soaked on the paper,” he said.
Goodman said the paper was noticeably different.
“You could tell the paper was a little bit different, the color was a little off, it’s a little damp,” he said. “It was in between stacks of regular paper, so when you get a package with 50 sheets of paper, you don’t even think ‘what is this?’”
Goodman is just one of the defense attorneys whose name is being used as the sender of those kinds of dangerous packages to jails.
“It either comes in one of two ways, and that’s probably the easiest way to get it in, mailing it and hoping someone misses it,” he said.
In 2022, two inmates died in consecutive months. Their cause of death, according to the medical examiner, was fentanyl.
“Someone had a drug overdose in the jail and it had to get in there some way, and the only way to do that is through a person or through the mail,” Goodman said.
Sources told Local 10 News that arrests are expected to be made in this case.