This story is part of the RFT's exploration into how bad cops get hired, and then re-hired. See this week's cover story, "The Trouble With Bad Cops," for more.
Before he was charged by state and federal authorities for sodomizing men he arrested, Marcellis Blackwell ran a company in the Chicago area called One Stop Transportation. It's difficult to say what the company did, if it did anything at all.
Two women who worked closely with Blackwell at that time tell the RFT they had grave concerns about the company — to the point that they feared it was a scam.
"One Stop Transportation, that company was fraudulent. That was not a legitimate company," says Charnice. "It was all fraudulent."
Charnice and another One Stop employee, Brittany, asked the RFT to refer to them by their middle and first names, respectively. They said that Blackwell hired them to help grow what he said was a trucking company he'd founded that had secured a big contract with Mattress Firm. They had uniforms and Blackwell had an assistant and office space in an upscale area in the Chicago Loop that, in retrospect, the women think Blackwell may have been sleeping in.
"We got there early one day and it was like he was getting up off the floor or something," says Brittany.
A big part of the women's jobs was to recruit drivers. On one occasion Blackwell sent them to a VA hospital to do just that, and a social media post from 2015 shows both women and Blackwell at what looks like a career fair. The two women say they collected information from the potential drivers, including copies of their social security cards, under the impression they were onboarding new hires.
But things quickly went awry. At first, their paychecks were slow to materialize. Then, when they did, the checks bounced.
"When it was time for him to pay us, he literally stopped answering [calls]," says Charnice. "After that he just disappeared."
When the women came to the conclusion that One Stop Transportation wasn't legitimate, they started destroying information about the so-called "new hires." They shredded copies of social security cards and did whatever they could to keep people's private information out of Blackwell's hands.
In the wake of the operation's disintegration, the two women tried to figure out what Blackwell's end game had been. They wondered if he was stealing social security numbers and other information from the people they were tasked with recruiting. That's just a theory. It would have been a rather baroque plot to conduct identity theft. Why then, for instance, would he have rented a box truck and taken the two women to an empty parking lot and trained them to drive it? They still can't figure it out.
"I wondered about what it was he was gaining from having us?" says Charnice. "It's lost on me."
"It was just very weird," says Brittany.
The two women's employment with Blackwell was a strange chapter of their lives, but also short-lived. Things were more serious for Jill Paris.
Also around 2015, Blackwell had reached out to Paris, a Chicago-area insurance agent who worked for her dad's insurance agency. Blackwell said he was looking to buy an insurance policy for what he described as his transportation business. At the time, Paris says, a lot of the school districts in the Chicagoland suburbs were outsourcing their bussing to independent contractors, and Blackwell's One Stop Transportation was going to cash in on the trend on the Indiana side of the border.
The two met at Starbucks.
"He definitely did not come across as a savvy businessman," Paris says. However, she went ahead and secured him a policy. "I was a young and hungry insurance agent," she says. "This was a good piece of business for us. Marcellis told me he was going to send several other drivers my direction."
From here, things get a bit into the insurance industry weeds. Essentially, Paris' company purchased a policy for Blackwell's company from an insurance wholesaler. When Blackwell's check bounced and he disappeared into the ether, Paris and her father's company were left on the hook for the $19,000 premium.
Like Brittany and Charnice before her, Paris says she did what she could to minimize the potential damage. She called the superintendent of the district where Blackwell said he hoped to do business and told him what had happened and that Blackwell's company was uninsured. The superintendent assured Paris he wouldn't get any work from the school.
"Having two young children, I panicked that he would be behind the wheel of a bus," she says.
Paris also filed a lawsuit that led to the garnishment of Blackwell's wages, but Blackwell did his best to dodge those efforts. She guesses she's recouped only about $900 from him.
She tells the RFT the incident became a sore spot between her and her father. She ended up leaving his firm and starting her own.
Yet for all the questions about Blackwell's transportation company, perhaps the biggest question about his past involves his name change. Prosecutors say he legally changed his name to Marcellis Blackwell from Willis Green Overstreet in 2013. It's unclear what, if anything, he did under that name that would have left any sort of record.
Over the course of several days in October, I called a few dozen numbers belonging to people with the last name Overstreet in Indiana and Illinois who were associated with the same addresses as someone named Willis Green Overstreet, who happened to be the exact same age as Blackwell.
No one answered, but one woman did call me back. She knew who Marcellis Blackwell was and seemed to know he was living in St. Louis. She said some variation of "I don't want anything to do with it" at least a half-dozen times in a conversation that lasted less than two minutes.
"I'm just trying to understand why he changed his name," I said.
I don't want anything to do with it, she replied.
"He's in some trouble," I said.
I don't want anything to do with it.
"If Marcellis Blackwell is someone you care about you should probably Google him," I said, talking over her.
"OK," she said, and then she hung up.
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