HARTFORD — A 45-year-old personal trainer is being held on $100,000 bail after police arrested and charged him with felony drug offenses in a Friday police operation.
Rahm Klampert, of 17 Victory Circle, also faces a misdemeanor domestic assault charge and was being held at Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield, Vt., as of Tuesday morning after a state judge denied a bid by his attorney to reduce his bail to $50,000.
The judge determined that the higher amount was justified, citing the gravity of the felony drug trafficking charges — including the domestic assault allegation — and Klampert’s past criminal charges, including resisting arrest in California and drug possession charges in Massachusetts.
“This is one of the larger drug busts in Hartford and Windsor County history,” Ward Goodenough, Windsor County state’s attorney, said at Klampert’s arraignment hearing.
In seeking imposition of the higher bond, Goodenough said that Klampert is looking at “over 90 years (of) potential incarceration exposure” if found guilty of the three felony trafficking charges.
Klampert, who pleaded not guilty during his arraignment via video in Windsor County Superior Court on Monday afternoon, owns Rahms Results Fitness, a personal training studio in Hartford.
During Friday’s operation, police said they seized a total of 3.3 pounds of cocaine, 2.4 pounds of methamphetamine, 2,700 individual baggies of fentanyl, 12 firearms — including military style assault rifles — and $102,000 in cash from Klampert’s residence and his training studio facilities in Hartford.
Goodenough asserted that search warrants had found that the defendant “has been stashing drugs (at locations) throughout Hartford.”
Police began investigating Klampert after speaking with his former spouse, who reported that she had been contacted by Klampert’s current girlfriend, according to the police affidavit in support of the charges.
The ex-wife told police the girlfriend had gone into hiding and was fearful of her safety after Klampert violently assaulted her during an argument earlier this month.
When police interviewed Klampert’s girlfriend, she told them that he had been selling drugs and was storing a cache of firearms and large amounts of cash at his residence and business locations.
In addition to Hartford police, Friday’s arrest of Klampert at his Victory Circle residence involved police personnel from Lebanon and Brattleboro, Vermont State Police and Homeland Security, according to a news release from Hartford police.
An photograph of Friday’s arrest taken by a neighbor showed law enforcement officers in plain clothes wearing full face coverings.
On Monday, Hartford Police Chief Connie Kelley said that the officers on the scene wearing face coverings were “local officers that are on the (Vermont) Drug Task Force unit,” which is under supervision of Vermont State Police.
“They work a variety of crime cases and they don’t want their identity known because they may be doing undercover work,” she said.
Hartford police do not have a written policy in regard to the circumstances when their own officers may wear face coverings that obscure or conceal their identity.
Officers sometimes wear medical face masks in the field to protect themselves when they are conducting field drug testing, according to Lt. Thomas Howell.
Law enforcement officers wearing face coverings in public has become a topic of debate nationally in recent months. It became a common practice during arrests conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
Kelley emphasized that the masked officers in Hartford “have absolutely nothing to do with deportations.”
Hartford police do not participate in immigration, Kelley said, noting that the Hartford has a “welcoming ordinance,” which voters adopted in 2020, that prohibits any town official from investigating the “immigration status of any person.”
However, Kelley said Hartford police and Homeland Security often collaborate, typically if the investigation involves drugs, illegal firearms or sex crimes, all of which can fall under both state and federal jurisdiction.
Federal agents “know we have the welcoming ordinance, so we can’t be involved in anything to do with” deportations, Kelley said. “And quite frankly they are respectful enough of us in our partnership with them on these other (drugs, firearms and sex crime) cases that they don’t violate that.”
“They tell us nothing if they’re in town, we don’t know about it and they won’t even talk about their immigration cases,” she said.
Vermont State Police spokesman Adam Silverman said that drug task force officers covering their faces during an operation is not new and likely only drawing attention because of the deportation raids by masked ICE agents around the country.
But tactics that may appear similar to observers on the outside are in fact differently governed, according to Silverman.
Drug task force officers — who are drawn from state trooper ranks and from other police agencies around the state — are authorized to wear face coverings as a security measure in order to protect their undercover investigations.
“If there is an undercover officer involved in an overt operation it is a near certainty that an officer will be using a covering during a public-facing element of the operation,” Silverman said. “Concealing their identity is vital to their undercover work.”
Unlike ICE agents, however, a masked drug task force officer is required to identify themselves and the agency they represent during an overt operation should the question be put to them.
“If you ask them for their name, their badge number or what agency do you work for, they will provide that. They will be responsive to questions that they receive,” Silverman said.
That is markedly different from what the public is witnessing unfold on the national scene, he noted.
“The way we expect our officers to act is very different than what we’ve seen” with ICE agents, Silverman said. “This isn’t an instance where people who are non-undercover officers are trying to hide who they are and refusing to identify themselves when asked.”
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
UPDATE: This story was updated on Wednesday, June 25 to incorporate comments from Vermont State Police spokesman Adam Silverman.
