Twelve Virgin Islanders are deciding whether to convict Calvert White, the former Sports, Parks and Recreation commissioner, and Benjamin Hendricks, his alleged accomplice, on charges of wire fraud and bribery.
The jury began deliberating at approximately 1:37 p.m. Thursday after hearing closing arguments from the U.S. Justice Department and from White and Hendricks’s respective attorneys, Clive Rivers and Darren John-Baptiste. Deliberations will resume Friday.
Over the course of a week, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Conley said during closing, jurors had “delved deep” into the world of greed, corruption and backroom deals. Conley said White had a duty to the people of the Virgin Islands but that, unfortunately, it wasn’t worth much, “as his loyalty could be bought for $16,000.”
Conley rehashed the timeline of events that led White and Hendricks to be indicted by a federal grand jury in January for allegedly soliciting a bribe equal to one percent of a federally funded $1.6 million contract to install surveillance equipment at DSPR facilities across the territory.
The government cited a Dec. 28, 2023, phone call recorded by its cooperating witness, David Whitaker, who owned the cybersurveillance company Mon Ethos Pro Support at the time. During the call, White asked Whitaker if he’d had a chance to talk to “Benji.” Whitaker said he hadn’t yet.
“OK you gonna need to have that conversation and you need to do it sooner than later OK,” White said.
“That call is how the scheme unfolded,” Conley told jurors Thursday, with Hendricks as the “middleman, helper, aider and abettor.”
Whitaker claimed Hendricks approached him on St. Croix later that day and told him to pay White $16,000 to ensure that the DSPR surveillance camera contract went to Mon Ethos. During a recorded call later that night, Whitaker told Hendricks, “I just want to make sure I heard you right. He only wants one percent? 16,000?”
“I told him 16,” Hendricks replied. “He say ‘Benji I easier.’”
John-Baptiste argued that there had clearly been conversations between Whitaker, White and Hendricks prior to that first call in December, declaring that “something is missing” from the government’s timeline of alleged criminality. On the stand earlier this week, Whitaker acknowledged having known White and Hendricks prior to alerting the Federal Bureau of Investigation to their scheme, and Whitaker was already working with the FBI as a cooperating witness in the agency’s investigation into former Police Commissioner Ray Martinez and Management and Budget Director Jenifer O’Neal.
Conley also reminded jurors of a Jan. 2, 2024, conversation between the trio at the VIPD’s mobile command center during the Crucian Christmas Festival, during which White was heard showing Whitaker confidential bid documents from rival bidders and telling them not to take pictures.
“I have seen people lose a job, seen people gone to jail over something like this,” White said. “I’ve been doing this a while, and I know the less evidence you have, the better you’ll be. So I hope you all got a photographic memory because I want you to take a look at this document.”
The meeting continued in the parking lot outside the mobile command center, where Whitaker asked White to “just let me know how you want me to get you the sixteen that we talked about.”
“Yeah, no it can’t be a check or nothing like that,” White replied.
After that meeting, prosecutors said, Hendricks told Whitaker to “get him four going into the meeting,” an apparent reference to an upcoming meeting of the V.I. Property and Procurement Department’s evaluation committee. Later, Hendricks messaged Whitaker: “5k for C.”
“Not 4,” Whitaker confirmed. The two discussed how the payment should be made in a call recorded on Jan. 3, 2024, after which Whitaker wired $5,000 from his FirstBank account to an account belonging to Hendricks’s company, A Clean Environment. He labeled the payment “Partial payment for contract.”
“Wire sent for Cal,” he texted Hendricks.
“Does this sound like someone who is ‘duped’ to you?” Conley asked the jury Thursday, anticipating renewed claims from the defendants that Whitaker — a convicted felon whom Rivers repeatedly called a “con man of the highest class” — had entrapped them.
John-Baptiste pointed to Whitaker’s own testimony this week in which he admitted to planting listening devices in government offices, claiming it was at then-Commissioner Martinez’s behest, which he then “discovered” after being hired by the VIPD to sweep the buildings.
“That’s what his modus operandi is,” John-Baptiste said. “That’s what he does.”
Throughout the trial, the prosecution made no secret of Whitaker’s extensive criminal history, which included working with law enforcement in exchange for a dramatically reduced sentence in a sting operation against search giant Google. John-Baptiste noted that Whitaker “has felled greater people than who we have here in the courtroom.”
“He’s a criminal. He’s a felon several times over,” Conley acknowledged, adding that he was presented to jurors “warts and all.” Conley told jurors that they didn’t have to like Whitaker to accept his testimony, and he and trial attorney Alexandre Dempsey noted that Whitaker’s checkered past was precisely why the government “flooded” the courtroom with audio recordings, text messages and bank statements in making their case against White and Hendricks.
“He’s still not likable,” Conley said of Whitaker, “but his testimony fits with the other evidence.”
In arguing that White steered the contract award to Mon Ethos, the government attempted to show that he colluded with Whitaker to make the latter’s bid more competitive across multiple DPP meetings without the knowledge of the department’s evaluation committee. During one Jan. 8 conversation, White was recorded as saying he had “no doubt in my mind, had I not get into this evaluation, SmartNet would have got this contract.”
During one Jan. 19 meeting, White texted Whitaker, “Letting you know I’m watching” and “Make sure you reiterate that cost can be decrease [sic] by reducing the number of drops/cameras.”
On Feb. 5, Whitaker called White while he was in a meeting with the evaluation committee that did not include bidders and coached him on how to make Mon Ethos’s bid submission more attractive. One of the committee’s members was Kim Spencer, an evaluation supervisor at Property and Procurement, who the government called to the witness stand Wednesday. Spencer told the court that it was “absolutely not” usual for a bidder to be on the line while committee members discussed contract negotiations with representatives from a user agency — in this case, DSPR.
“Ms. Spencer is by the book and she would have shut this down” had she known, Conley said Thursday.
Speaking to Hendricks after the Feb. 5 meeting, Whitaker said they just had to figure out how to bring the cost down.
“Yeah, I made a phone call to … an individual. Actually, one of … the Senators,” Hendricks said. “And he said ‘Benji, don’t worry about it …. He said ‘They’ll get it.”
On the stand this week, Whitaker said he did not know the identity of that senator.
White eventually emailed the evaluation committee to let them know that DSPR had accepted Mon Ethos’s revised cost of $1.43 million, and the committee recommended that the contract be awarded to Whitaker’s company on March 12, though it was never executed. The federal investigation into Martinez and O’Neal, in which Whitaker played a similarly central role, came to light the following June. Both subsequently resigned.
Ninety days after Whitaker wired the $5,000 installment to Hendricks, the same amount was deposited into one of White’s bank accounts. Asked about the three-month time difference Wednesday, FBI Special Agent Kiernan Whitworth began to say that their investigation revealed there is “a belief” in the U.S. Virgin Islands, but the defense objected and jurors did not hear the rest of his statement. On Thursday, Rivers rhetorically asked jurors who would hold on to $5,000 in cash for three months without spending any of it and claimed that the FBI essentially cherry-picked from White’s bank statements.
Whitworth said Hendricks made a statement to the FBI in June 2024 and admitted to receiving $5,000 from Whitaker. He then agreed to call White to ask if Whitaker still owed him money.
“You had said something about sixteen thousand or whatever,” Hendricks prodded.
“Yeah, yeah. Uh – uh – uh – uh – I’ll talk to you in person on that,” White replied.
Rivers framed this exchange as a denial during Thursday’s closing arguments. Dempsey said White never denied anything on that call.
“He said, ‘come talk to me in person,’” he said.
After the parties presented their arguments, U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney gave jurors their instructions. After they were discharged to begin deliberations, Kearney denied the defendants’ request to dismiss the case on the grounds that the prosecution had not met the burden of proof. Though some pieces of evidence could be open to interpretation, Kearney said, a jury could reasonably decide to convict White and Hendricks.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated at 8 p.m.
