Chief Justice Bryan Sykes, in reviewing the transcript of telephone conversations between a Crown witness and Stephanie “Mumma” Christie — the sole female defendant in the ongoing Klansman gang trial — on Monday said if those records are true and she was properly identified before the court, then the witness’s assertions would be “consistent with” the Crown’s theory that she was no angel.

Witness Number One, a former gang member turned State witness, had testified that he gave the police three phones with recordings of conversations between himself and members of the gang, including the alleged leader Andre “Blackman” Bryan, beginning in January 2019. The witness said he downloaded a call recording app that was set to automatically record cellphone conversations, and saved them. He forwarded those recordings to cops at the Counter Terrorism and Organised Crime Investigations Branch, where the recordings were transcribed in his presence with him identifying each voice he heard to the cops. Those transcripts and the recordings were entered into evidence in the trial which began in 2021.

On Monday, in a transcript with several phone conversations assessed by the trial judge, Christie is heard telling Witness Number One about a cop assigned to the Spanish Town Criminal Investigation Branch who, she said, kept her informed about the plans of the police, telling her everything “from a pin to an anchor”. She boasted that he was the one to tell her that Bryan, who had been held by the cops, would be released soon because they had insufficient material to mount a case against him.

On Monday, Sykes, who has been summing up the evidence in the case since January, said the testimony, coupled with what was heard in the recordings, “would tend to lend some credence to the assertion that she has this role”.

“Added to that we have the evidence of (the senior retired investigator) who said after he met her, she tried to get information from him about the movements of the police. If his evidence is accepted, it would mean that what was said about her had some truth to it,” the trial judge said.

According to Witness Number One, Christie had orchestrated the elimination of individuals who were thought to be a threat to Bryan’s leadership. Christie, whom the witness has said is a pastor and who was arrested on the grounds of her St Thomas church, in an expletive-laced rant in one recording lamented the absence of loyalty among the remaining members of the gang, charging that “di bwoy dem a hitch while we a defend Blackman”.

The chief justice — in scrutinising a conversation in which Christie was heard saying, “Things can be done” while bragging to the witness that she knew the private cars that belonged to the police and had even the licence plate information of the newest car — said, if this evidence is accepted it would further show she had connections with the police.

He further noted that her conversations in the recordings, which ranged from guns to her control of cops, was contradictory to the picture she painted of herself in her unsworn statement as a people person and businesswoman. He said the witness’s account of her was not denying her insistence that she was only a doer of good deeds but was suggesting that there was “another dimension to her life”.

In noting that the number attributed to Christie featured in the calls in which her voice was heard when the main witness contacted her, he said that it was the same number dialled by one of the accused when taken into custody at Denham Town Police Station using the phone of the lead detective.

The trial judge, in pointing out that the inference could be drawn that the number was associated with her, said it “undermined her claim that she was a person of pristine character”.

The matter resumes today at the Supreme Court in downtown Kingston at 2:00 pm.