They called him “Godfather.” And he was so hellbent on revenge, he wouldn’t let a life sentence stop him from ordering murder.
From a prison cell, the notorious gang leader ordered his henchmen to kill the father of an assistant district attorney by stuffing a sock in his mouth and putting a plastic bag over his head, a federal prosecutor said Tuesday.
According to a report from The Associated Press, prosecutors told jurors at the opening of Kelvin Melton’s trial that they wiretapped a cellphone he used inside a North Carolina prison. They say the recording catches Melton ordering gangsters to kill the father of a North Carolina assistant DA in 2014. That state prosecutor had helped convict Melton in a 2012 case that sent him to life in prison.
Quoting the wiretap, federal prosecutor Leslie Katherine Cooley told jurors that the conversation captures Melton ordering someone to put a plastic bag over Frank Janssen’s head, cinched tight, and wait until the lack of air “do what it do.”
“You don’t need an interpreter to understand the words of this man, ‘Dizzy,’ ‘Old Man,'” Cooley said, pointing at Melton and using his nicknames.
Melton watched the jurors, his lips pulled tightly over his gold-encased front teeth.
Defense attorney Gerald Beaver urged jurors not to believe Melton’s gang crew when they testify against him, including the four who kidnapped, pistol-whipped and tortured Janssen with a stun gun during his four-day ordeal in April 2014.
All nine of Melton’s co-defendants struck plea deals to avoid the death penalty or life prison sentences for earlier shootings and aborted kidnapping plots, Beaver said.
“Simply because somebody told someone a story, it doesn’t mean it is true,” Beaver told jurors. “Look at the witnesses’ motivations to try and please the government. … Every one of those witnesses have received a plea agreement.”
Melton founded United Bloods Nation, an East Coast offshoot of the street gang originally formed in Southern California, during a 1980s stint in a New York state prison.
Melton is accused of commanding gang members to abduct the prosecutor but his underlings botched the plan and snatched the prosecutor’s father instead, prosecutors said.
Janssen’s captors were finalizing details to kill Janssen and dispose of his body when a SWAT team stormed an Atlanta apartment and rescued him, authorities said.
Prosecutors said Melton used smuggled cellphones to direct gangsters to carry out crimes including the killing of a rival gang member in Warner Robins, Georgia; the home invasion, robbery and shooting of a gun collector in Covington, Georgia; and plans to kidnap people in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and High Point, North Carolina.
The kidnappings would have been of people related to the defense attorney who lost the North Carolina trial that led to Melton’s current life sentence.
The federal trial is expected to last three weeks. If he is convicted, Melton could be sentenced to another life sentence, this time in federal prisons from which there is no early release opportunity
Maybe Obooby will pardon him.
Kill all those motherfuckers
A perfect example of why our country needs the death penalty!
The people in prison and jail are there for a reason. Instead they get 3 hots and a cot ,then gym time all the phone calls they can .
I thought they had to be put in and lose all rights as they have done wrong . Sure a big change from the old prison system rules .
THE DEATH PENALTY WOULD STOP ALL THIS KIND OF STUFF & REDUCE THE STAGERING COST OF INCARSORATION ! ! ! TAKE A LIFE & YOU LOOSE YOUR LIFE PERIOD THAT WOULD CURTAIL CRIME IN THIS COUNTRY ! ! ! WE ARE NOT MAKING PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME WE ARE TOO LAXED WITH FELONS WAKE UP AMERICA GET TOUGH ! ! !
I agree with you on a life for a life
this is a reason why I will never go to jury duty,cuz I would convict the motherfuckers guilty or not point blank.
Can someone explain why the prisons cannot install cell/mobile phone blocking emitters on the cell blocks? Those frequencies are specific, well known, sitting there waiting. I would think it could be done without affecting the 2-ways, the fiber optic and land lines, if the latter exists.
North Carolina has RTP, with enough brains in it to give Einstein a run for his money.
I don’t get it.
Maybe this guy should get the death penalty. If that isn’t possible, he should get to spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement for the hit he ordered from his jail cell. Solitary confinement would basically end this demon’s contact with anyone else. He would get to spend the rest of his life in a prison cell with no concept of time. In some ways it would be better than the death penalty because it would possibly give him several decades of punishment.
Organized crime is a serious problem. We can’t have gangsters threatening prosecutors and judges. I do not believe in capital punishment, but I say lock him up and throw away the key! Let him rot in maximum security the rest of his life!
This country needs a death penalty that takes place when it is placed. Not years later. Kill the bastards at once and maybe just maybe some of these idiots will think twice before they commit some of these crimes
He deserves the death penalty. But Hello, What about at least the very HARSH PUNISHMENT of NO CELPHONE. But then the
bleeding hearts would call that (no cellphones) Cruel and Inhumane punishment. (We have no punishment. We are a Joke.
This man should be given the Death pentally that is the only thing that will stop him causing or trying to cause harm to others he has anger against.