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Detective Set To Spend The Rest Of His Life In Prison After Decades Of Framing People, Sexually Assaulting Witnesses

A clas­sic case of Prosecutors’ refusal, and unwill­ing­ness to pros­e­cute crim­i­nal cops.

A for­mer Philadelphia homi­cide detec­tive con­vict­ed of sex­u­al­ly assault­ing wit­ness­es and infor­mants through­out his 20-year career pos­si­bly will spend the rest of his life behind bars as a penal­ty for his crimes. 
The court claimed the offi­cer “groomed” his male vic­tims to engage in sex­u­al acts while extract­ing infor­ma­tion from them as inves­ti­gat­ed var­i­ous cases. 

Former Philadelphia Detective Philip Nordo was sen­tenced to 24.5 to 49 years in prison after he was found guilty of rape, sex­u­al assault, stalk­ing, offi­cial oppres­sion, and theft by decep­tion. (Photo: YouTube screenshot/​FOX 29 Philadelphia)

On Dec. 15, a Philadelphia judge sen­tenced Philip Nordo, 56, to 24.5 to 49 years in prison after he was found guilty of rape, sex­u­al assault, stalk­ing, offi­cial oppres­sion, theft by decep­tion, and relat­ed charges ear­li­er this year, NBC 10 report­ed.
A jury found in addi­tion to hav­ing inap­pro­pri­ate sex­u­al rela­tions with and lying on the vic­tims. He also stole $20,000 in crime reward mon­ey that was being offered in a case about the 2015 mur­der of an off-duty offi­cer named Moses Walker.
Evidence revealed he spent the stolen loot on one of his victims.
A 2019 grand jury report alleged the for­mer detec­tive “groomed” the vic­tims while work­ing on cas­es and cre­at­ed a cli­mate that made those men “more sus­cep­ti­ble to his sex­u­al­ly assaultive and/​or coer­cive behav­ior,” which last­ed over a decade.
The ex-officer’s defense attor­ney Michael van der Veen said Nordo’s accusers could not be trust­ed because they are “crim­i­nals, liars, and thieves” whose accounts were incon­sis­tent and lacked cor­rob­o­rat­ing evidence.
One of those peo­ple was Milique Wagner.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports Wagner, then 21, was arrest­ed and inter­ro­gat­ed by Nordo regard­ing the fatal shoot­ing of 29-year-old Braheem King on Feb. 10, 2010. The then-detec­tive was deter­mined to asso­ciate Wagner with Reafeal Fields and Kelvin Bryant, who were co-defen­dants in the case of King’s killing.

Nordo used a man named Amine Payne to give a state­ment that linked Wagner to the oth­er men. The North Philly native was vul­ner­a­ble. In addi­tion to expe­ri­enc­ing the loss of his moth­er when he was 9 and wit­ness­ing his best friend get shot in front of him when he was 19, he start­ed to self-med­icate with drugs (mar­i­jua­na, opi­oids, and cough syrup) to deal with his men­tal trau­ma. The legal stacks were against him. It also made him an easy mark for his sex­u­al escapades. After the ini­tial ques­tion­ing about the King case, Nordo intro­duced anoth­er top­ic, accord­ing to Wagner. He probed the “sus­pect” about his desire to shoot porn. “He says … he has a porn ring from out in New Jersey,” Wagner recalled, describ­ing the detec­tive as slick and sneaky as he tes­ti­fied that Nordo asked him, “Would [I] ever con­sid­er doing guy-on-guy porn?” Later Payne would tes­ti­fy that he nev­er met Wagner; his state­ment was fab­ri­cat­ed and he admit­ted he was the one who mur­dered King.

He said dur­ing the mur­der tri­al, he had tried to con­fess ear­li­er but was shut down. “When you said these gen­tle­men did it, I told you that I did it,” he said. “You don’t want to lis­ten. I told y’all about the shoot­ings, the mur­ders that I com­mit­ted, and you want to sit here and blame these peo­ple. For what, I don’t know.” Fields said he knew Nordo coerced var­i­ous infor­mants to iden­ti­fy him as a killer in King’s death. “I was wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed of a crime that I didn’t com­mit, all because of a dirty detec­tive named Philip Nordo and the cor­rupt and bro­ken sys­tem,” he said, after being in prison for more than 10 years. Another one of the wit­ness­es against Nordo that van der Veen tried to dis­cred­it tes­ti­fied that the offi­cer raped him in a Chinatown hotel room. “Sadly, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to stop Nordo in his tracks as ear­ly as 2005, before he became a homi­cide detec­tive and com­mit­ted these crimes,” Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, whose office pros­e­cut­ed Nordo, said. “At that time, the DAO was pro­vid­ed with very strong evi­dence of sex­u­al mis­con­duct by Nordo toward a young man he was inter­ro­gat­ing and dis­re­gard­ed it at a time when the Philly DAO was not known for hold­ing law enforce­ment account­able, to put it mild­ly.” Nordo was fired in 2017.

According to Krasner, the con­vic­tion com­pro­mised “dozens” of crim­i­nal cas­es and has result­ed in mul­ti­ple exon­er­a­tions since the sum­mer. “This is some­one who we now know was pro­found­ly cor­rupt and was will­ing to turn things any which way to get what he want­ed,” Krasner said. “So, we have to essen­tial­ly dis­re­gard any­thing that he did. We have to regard it as being sus­pect. And then, we have to look at what evi­dence remains. Sometimes, that evi­dence is com­pelling.” The Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) has been review­ing about 100 of Nordo’s cas­es and, accord­ing to CIU super­vi­sor Michael Garmisa, iden­ti­fied approx­i­mate­ly a dozen that should be vacat­ed. One case that Garmisa dis­cov­ered was not going to be easy to vacate was Marvin Hill, who alleged­ly had almost iden­ti­cal impro­pri­eties as the Wagner case. After the DA’s office pre­sent­ed an analy­sis of video evi­dence, which they believed exon­er­at­ed Hill, Judge Barbara McDermott still decid­ed to uphold her orig­i­nal guilty verdict.
The pros­e­cu­tion had oth­er charges they had hoped to try him for. However, after one of Nordo’s accusers went miss­ing, the office had to drop more than half of the counts ini­tial­ly filed.