Glen Arm man pleads guilty to paying bribes to Baltimore City Hall employee

A 54-year-old Glen Arm man pleaded guilty Thursday to federal bribery charges for paying a Baltimore City Hall employee in exchange for wiping away city property tax bills.

James Carroll Erny Jr. admitted to paying at least $25,000 in bribes in order to make at least $147,500 in bills owed to the city go away. Some payments were made in cash in the bathroom of the Abel Wolman Municipal Building, prosecutors said.

“How much u got for it man lol,” the employee, Joseph Gillespie, asked in a 2022 text message exchange.

“As much for you and as little for them as possible?” Erny responded, adding: “F the city.”

U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett accepted the guilty plea at Thursday’s hearing. At his sentencing scheduled for June, Erny faces up to 10 years in prison.

Erny is the second known person charged in connection with the scheme. Gillespie, for his role, received four years in federal prison last February.

“I’m happy to pay u instead of corrupt politicians,” Erny texted Gillespie, according to court documents.

Prosecutors said Gillespie accepted some $125,000 worth of cash bribes from 2016 until his 2023 arrest, costing the city more than $1.25 million in revenue. He resigned from the city in 2024.

The case fueled increased anger over byzantine nature of the city’s tax sale program, which a 2023 Baltimore Banner investigation found predominantly affects Black neighborhoods and largely bypasses mostly white ones. Housing justice advocates have long decried the process, which they said allows too many vulnerable homeowners to fall through the cracks and lose their homes, sometimes even due to the city’s own mistakes.

Tax sales, though, serve as an important revenue collection tool for cash-strapped Baltimore. It also helps the city take possession of some vacant and abandoned properties that otherwise would be left to rot.

A federal judge last month temporarily paused a lawsuit challenging Baltimore’s tax sale system after the city agreed to make changes over the next two years to improve the process.

Gillespie, a former city Department of Finance employee working in revenue collections, claimed in court that he had become frustrated with the tax sale system and had attempted to fix it himself.

“I just took it way too far,” he said at sentencing.

Bennett, the federal judge, dismissed that rationale, calling him a “thief” who took advantage of his job.

In addition to the bribery scheme, Erny acknowledged in his plea that he had also defrauded the federal Paycheck Protection Program. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the nearly $1 million fraud was based on falsely claiming dozens of ghost employees at his real estate firm, The Jackson Group. He agreed to pay a total of nearly $450,000 in restitution for both schemes.

Banner reporter Hallie Miller contributed to this report.