Innocence Plea: Florida lawyer charged in jail smuggling case claims he was set up by his own client 

An operation begun last year to stem the flow of illegal drugs into the Duval County Jail has netted more than 20 arrests, according to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, but only one defendant has been publicly named so far: defense attorney Nathan Williams.

Jacksonville Undersheriff Shawn Coarsey held a press conference on January 7 to announce the arrest of Williams, who was admitted to the Florida Bar in 2014, on felony charges alleging Williams smuggled a total of six pages of “paper dope” – documents soaked in a powerful synthetic form of marijuana also called K2 – into the jail on two separate occasions. 

“For financial gain, he put the lives of inmates at risk,” the undersheriff told the assembled media. “Moreover, through his criminal activity, he dishonored an honorable profession.”

He characterized Williams as a bold smuggler who thought he was outsmarting authorities. “He did not seem to be too concerned about being caught,” Coarsey told reporters. “He thought he was pulling the wool over the investigators’ eyes.”

The allegations, illustrated with the bearded Williams’ mugshot, spread at the speed of light across northeast Florida and across the country. And Williams, in an exclusive interview with the Florida Trident, said it was true that he wasn’t worried about being caught – because he had no idea he was doing anything wrong. 

The 37-year-old lawyer said he was the unwitting pawn of a former client looking to work a deal for his freedom and a sheriff’s office eager to score a high-profile arrest in the jailhouse investigation dubbed “Operation Stamp Collection.” 

“In one single press conference the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office wrongfully accused me, judged me guilty, destroyed me professionally and destroyed us financially,” Williams told the Trident. “Worse, they have destroyed my precious family emotionally.” 

His arrest report shows Williams was indeed following the instructions of Jenard Ketter, a 30-year-old inmate and veteran jailhouse informant whom he began representing in 2022. Williams said Ketter tricked him into picking up and delivering the documents he believed were legitimate legal papers.  

Williams had previously represented Ketter, who is facing armed robbery and violation of probation charges, as he cooperated with Duval County prosecutors in multiple homicide cases in exchange for leniency, according to court records. Those efforts met with disaster, Williams said, when Ketter was dropped as a witness and his deal for freedom terminated after he was accused of deceiving prosecutors in the case.

The following month Ketter, under the watchful eye of deputies, was orchestrating the apparent attempt to bring drugs into the jail, according to the report.

“I believe [Ketter] set me up to get leniency from the state and favor with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office,” said Williams, whose arrest report shows he too was under “constant surveillance.”

Ketter hasn’t been charged in the case; the extent of his cooperation in the smuggling case isn’t known. Both Coarsey and Sheriff T.K. Waters refused to comment on the ongoing case and Ketter’s new attorney, John Rockwell, registered a “no comment” when reached by phone and asked that Ketter, who remains in jail, not be contacted.

While the case is still ongoing, the sheriff’s office has yet to present evidence Williams had anything to do with the making of the “paper dope” or any indication he ever discussed payment with anyone for their delivery, according to an extensive review of the case by the Trident. And of more importance, said Williams, is there is no proof he had actual knowledge of the scheme.

“The crimes that I have been charged with require knowledge and intent,” the accused lawyer said. “I had no knowledge of what my client was doing or what was happening; therefore I had no intent.”

Innocent or not, Williams seems a most unlikely suspect for such a crime. Married with a nine-year-old son, he’s not just once but twice sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution, as both a criminal defense attorney and an active member of the Army National Guard. A check with the Florida Bar shows no previous discipline or actions against his license.

“Even when my innocence is proven,” he said, “I’ll be branded a criminal and my wife and little boy will never again have a safe space.”

Converged paths

As she sat on an overstuffed sofa in their 972 square-foot, neat-as-a-pin concrete block bungalow on the westside of Jacksonville, Raquel Williams emotionally spoke with reverence about the man she married in 2008. 

“My husband is one of those rare and decent human beings who puts service above self,” she said as her husband sat beside her on Feb. 7, a month after his arrest. “He truly cares about his clients and does more free legal work than what he gets paid for.”   

While six-feet tall with a stout military deportment, Williams sounds almost childlike in his reverence for the legal profession.

“To me being a lawyer was never about making money,” he said. “It was a way to set things right for all people. To achieve justice for those who couldn’t help themselves.” 

He also wanted to become a soldier, joining the Army National Guard in 2008 at the age of 21. While deploying to hurricanes and emergencies throughout the state, he put himself through school at Florida A&M University College of Law in Orlando. 

After graduating a decade ago, Williams practiced civil, criminal, and family law at two Jacksonville firms before setting up his own one-man law office in 2019. While following referrals from his former firm and doing favors for a local minister at the Baptist church where he grew up and still attends, Williams began representing several incarcerated inmates. In 2022, his network at the jailhouse led him to Jenard Ketter.

A glimpse of Ketter’s life as a Jacksonville teenager is captured on an old Facebook page from 2011. As a 16-year-old aspiring rapper, he posed with a gun and posted his rhymes online. “When you coming to down me playa please don’t miss, ’cause dat a do nothing but get my trigga finger pissed,” he wrote in one.  

There was rap talent in his family. His younger half-brother, Charles Andrew Jones II, gained success and a measure of fame in the rap business under the name Julio Foolio. Jones II, according to authorities, was also a member of the Jacksonville gang KTA (“Kill Them All”), which has been involved in a deadly shooting war with rival gang ATK (named for rapper Yungeen Ace).

Both brothers faced tragedy as teens when their father was shot dead in 2011 at the age of 38 in what was described in the Florida Times-Union at the time as a “revenge” shooting following an argument. Just three months after his father’s murder, Ketter was charged with two armed robberies, ultimately sentenced to 20 years prison. He’d just turned 17-years-old. 

In January 2022, after Ketter served more than a decade of his sentence, prosecutors transferred him to the Duval jail to better assist them in several crimes, said Williams. Court records show that one of those crimes was the 2019 shooting death of 30-year-old Freddy Patterson. 

The following month Ketter hired attorney Williams to negotiate his deal with prosecutors. Williams said Ketter paid him a $1,200 retainer, and the lawyer quickly entered a motion to reduce Ketter’s prison sentence based on his assistance in “multiple murder cases.” That September, two Jacksonville men, Shawn Bossard and Jeffery Herring, were charged with first-degree murder in the Patterson case. 

With no objection from the prosecutors, Ketter was freed from jail in December 2022 after serving 11 years and four months of his sentence; his continued assistance to prosecutors on criminal cases was a condition of his release. 

Out of jail, Ketter was soon back in trouble with the law. According to Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office reports, he used a gun to rob a woman at a daycare center in January 2024 and three months later was caught on camera robbing an ATT store. In May, he was arrested for both robberies as well as violation of probation and domestic abuse. 

While Ketter was back in jail, his brother Foolio was killed in Tampa while celebrating his 26th birthday this past July. Five suspects have been charged in the case.

According to Williams, Ketter claimed Foolio had left him a large sum of money generated by his rap success, a portion of which he promised Williams would go to his unpaid legal fees.

“I never really believed [Ketter] would get any Foolio money or that I would ever get paid,” said Williams, adding that he was never paid anything more than the retainer. “I just wrote off the legal work I did for him and others as a tithe and hoped for the best.” 

In his bid to again bargain for his freedom, Ketter provided information in a murder case being prosecuted by homicide division director Alan Mizrahi, according to Williams. And Ketter was still listed as a witness in the Patterson case, which was being prosecuted by Chyna-Michele Makarowski. In exchange for Ketter’s cooperation, Mizrahi and Makarowski offered to recommend Ketter a “full release” from his legal issues after he provided testimony in court, said Williams.

In September 2024, Makarowski and Mizrahi began to suspect Ketter “was not being truthful” about the murders and other cases, according to Williams, who was in contact with both prosecutors at the time. Court records show one of Ketter’s friends, Arthur Davis, testified Ketter “made him” confess on a recorded line to multiple crimes he did not commit. That prompted the prosecutors to drop Ketter as a witness and end his cooperation deal, Williams said.

While Mizrahi’s case had already led to a conviction by plea, Makarowski dropped the murder charges against Bossard and Herring in the Patterson case in November, just as a trial was set to begin. Neither prosecutor returned calls and emails from the Trident requesting comment.

Despite being dropped by the Duval State Attorney’s Office, Ketter still wanted his attorney to find a way to reduce his charges and eventually be released, said Williams. But he had no easy answers for his client on that score. 

Williams said Ketter told him in early December he had found a new criminal attorney, John Rockwell, to represent him in some of the remaining felony cases, but he wanted Williams to stay on several of his cases and serve as his power-of-attorney regarding the alleged inheritance from his slain brother. 

Williams was relieved another attorney was taking the lead on most of the cases – but said he now believes Ketter had decided to cooperate in another high-profile criminal case –  his own.

A “sticky” piece of paper

Williams’ arrest report details how, on December 16, Ketter put into action his plan for his lawyer to bring “paper dope” into the jail. As he did so, sheriff’s deputies listened in on the inmate’s routinely recorded phone calls and had Williams under constant physical surveillance as well. 

That day, Ketter asked him to pick up a letter Ketter urgently needed to get to attorney Rockwell, said Williams, as well as financial information regarding inheritance money from Foolio.

Williams was told to pick up the documents from someone Ketter claimed was his aunt, a woman later identified in Williams’ arrest report as 41-year-old Makita Hunt. After Ketter provided Williams the address, he picked up an envelope from Hunt’s home and drove to the jail, where he said he inspected the contents in the parking lot.

Inside the envelope there was no letter or any financial information, he said, only a multi-page document regarding inmate disciplinary actions and a single piece of “sticky” paper with obscure printing on it. The lawyer said he just figured someone had spilled something on the paper and thought nothing more of it.  

Williams entered the jail’s interview room just after 8 p.m. to give the documents to Ketter, who said he needed to give the attorney information about the canteen accounts of himself and another inmate. Williams said because he had nothing else to write on, he told Ketter to write the information down on the sticky piece of paper and he’d take it with him. Ketter agreed, but after Williams handed him the paper, he left the interview room and didn’t return. 

Abandoned by his client, Williams asked the corrections officer to bring his client back, only to be told Ketter refused. Williams said he then told the officer the inmate had taken a piece of paper and reminded him of the jail policy prohibiting inmates from taking any original documents back to the dorm. The officer told Williams a copy had been made of the paper and the original shredded. Williams then left the jail.

Williams’ account of his movements substantially matches the account given in the arrest report, which includes a description of the attorney openly showing Ketter the sticky piece of paper and folding it in half in the jail’s interview room. 

“I had no idea what the paper was,” said Williams. “If I wanted to pass drug paper, I surely wouldn’t be waving it in my hand with cameras recording my every move and guards monitoring what was going on.”

Nowhere in his arrest report does it indicate Williams incriminated himself that day in any phone calls or had knowledge that he was smuggling contraband into the jail.  It details how Ketter mobilized Williams, Hunt, and others to deliver the documents. 

A corrections officer is quoted in the arrest report as saying he believed Williams was “acting suspicious” and appeared “relieved” when told the original piece of sticky paper – which later tested positive for cannabinoids – had been disposed of by deputies. Williams said he wasn’t acting suspicious but was in fact relieved after learning the paper had been destroyed and jailhouse rules regarding documents hadn’t been violated. 

According to the arrest report, Williams sent a text to someone Ketter claimed was his sister. “Ricka, I am so post [sic] to meet you or your sister Lashai for the money for Jenard,” Williams wrote. “I need to meet Lashai so I can get the phone situation situated; code zipfettie. The amount $6500; paper doper cash only.” 

The mention of “paper doper cash” might seem damning, but Williams explained that the text and every word in it was dictated by Ketter, who had asked him to send the text to help him get $6,500 for his canteen account and said it had to be worded in a way his sister would know it was really from him. Ketter often used the word “doper” to denote many things, said Williams, and he thought he just meant cash. According to JSO, “zipfettie” is a code for fentanyl, but Williams said he had no idea what that meant either. 

“All this gang stuff and street lingo was, and is, like a foreign language to me, so stupidly I sent the message as Ketter dictated,” he said. “The text went unanswered and I never thought anything about it until I saw it in the report.” 

At the time the text was sent, Williams had lost faith in Ketter and had begun the process to legally untangle himself. On Jan. 2, he filed a motion in court to officially withdraw from Ketter’s cases.  

“The working relationship between the undersigned counsel and defendant has broken down and is no longer functional and no longer effective,” Williams wrote in the motion. 

Just three days later, the attorney’s own world would break down in spectacular fashion. 

January 5 

The following is Williams account of the day that upended his life: 

In the early evening, he met Ketter in the jail after receiving calls that the inmate needed legal help to review a music contract. There an excited Ketter told Williams he’d just learned a company wanted to buy Foolio’s music catalog, a sale from which Ketter claimed he stood to gain about $850,000. 

He asked Williams to pick up an envelope from Hunt containing the contract and a letter from his deceased brother and bring it back. Williams agreed to deliver the documents as a “parting gift” to his soon-to-be former client. 

“While he was excited that he would finally get the big payoff from his brother, Ketter seemed really emotional about the letter,”  Williams said. “He asked me to please allow him to open the envelope first and read his dead brother’s last letter to him.”  

On his way to pick up the documents, Williams received a text from Ketter’s supposed girlfriend telling him not to “peek” at Ketter’s dead brother’s last letter to him.

Once at Hunt’s residence, a young woman with a phone in her hand brought Williams a thick sealed envelope.  The woman said Hunt was on the phone and wanted to make sure Ketter signed the forms properly and they were returned to her immediately. Williams agreed.   

Upon returning to the jail, Williams handed the sealed envelope to Ketter and reminded him that if he wanted to keep his brother’s letter, he must get a corrections officer to copy it and return the original to Williams. Ketter said he also wanted a copy of the contract and would give the documents “to the sergeant in the control room” to get copies and then bring the originals back to Williams so they could review the contract.

In a repeat of Dec. 16, Ketter then left and never returned. Concerned, Williams told the corrections officer on duty his client was supposed to be getting documents copied and was to return the originals to him. One of the documents, he said, was a legal contract he needed the inmate to sign and return. The corrections officer said he would call for Ketter. When he reappeared, the officer said Ketter had “mouthed off” and was sent back to his dorm. 

Again, Williams told the officer that he needed the legal document and asked if Ketter got the documents copied per the policy? The officer said he didn’t know and directed the attorney to come back the next day. 

Exhausted, Williams rode the elevator down to the first floor to leave. Exiting the elevator, he was immediately handcuffed and arrested.

JSO’s own narrative again didn’t substantially contradict Williams’ version of events. From the arrest report: “Prior to his arrival at the Duval County jail, Williams was directed to go to Hunt’s residence and was told to pick up paper from her and bring it back to the jail to give to Ketter. … Williams handed Ketter a sealed envelope containing multiple pages. Ketter left the meeting room and went to the hallway.”  

With Williams in the dark, deputies immediately seized the envelope from Ketter. Five pages inside tested positive for the presence of illicit cannabinoids, according to the report, which also noted that Williams told deputies after his arrest he “thought he was just picking up paperwork” for his client and never even saw the documents inside. 

“There is no taking it back” 

After his arrest, the sheriff’s office seized William’s 2019 Toyota Highlander and his phone that was inside it. When Williams had his phone data uploaded to an old phone from the cloud, he saw that all calls and texts after Dec. 1 had been erased from his phone and from the cloud. 

“My phone could have cleared me of some of the things they accused me of,” Williams says. “But the detectives didn’t seem interested in anything that would clear me.”

While Ketter hasn’t been charged in the case, court records show Makita Hunt was arrested on Jan. 21 on six felony counts related to the smuggling case. An attempt to reach her by cell phone was unsuccessful and her attorney, Regina Wright, did not return a call for comment. 

After her husband’s mugshot was splashed across the media, Raquel Williams said some who’d previously considered her husband a “good man” now turn away from the family. She said she’s anguished as she watches her husband “keep helping people even after the terrible ordeal he has been through,” and is terribly worried about her son. 

“He is filled with fear and has nightmares,” said Raquel, tears streaming down her face.  “There is no undoing what has been done by the JSO. There is no taking it back.”

Despite the arrest, Williams continues his legal work. He said he lost two clients, but continues to represent 20 inmates in the Duval County Jail. Because of his charges, he isn’t allowed to visit them, but has spoken with some on the phone.

“It’s eerie – I seem to have lost a lot of trust in my jailed clients,” Williams said. “Because of Ketter, I keep wondering how far are they willing to go to get out of jail?”