Arrest-Proof Yourself (17 page)

1. Never, under any circumstance, touch a police officer, even when the cop deserves a good swat. Cops rule the streets, with the power of the state behind them. Even when they do wrong, their punishment is limited by civil service regulations and union contracts.

2. An arrest record is tantamount to a conviction. All prospective new employers were alarmed by the fact that she had been arrested, and they seemed not to care that the case was dropped and that she was not prosecuted.

3. The door to the police cruiser was a magic portal through which she passed onto the electronic plantation and a life of low-wage labor. Her arrest record was expunged from state records, but not from the servers and databases of the World Wide Web. It cannot be removed from the NCIC.

4. Large companies and government agencies are astonishingly skilled at obfuscating their intentions and covering their corporate fannies with paperwork that makes it difficult to litigate against them.

5. Lawyers get paid big fees even when they lose.

’Nuf said.

4

GETTING WISE TO REAL BAD GUYS

P
arts of this chapter are going to piss off many readers, especially mothers and sisters of guys who are at risk of getting arrested, and anyone employed by the schools and the social services plantation. I’m going to discuss career criminals and also the attractions of a life of crime. Goody Two-Shoes homilies don’t work with young men. In order to choose to become an upstanding citizen, you need to know what real bad guys do and why they do it. Crime is a choice, not an inevitability.

We’ve talked about cops, who are (generally) the good guys. Now let’s discuss the second group of criminal justice players. These are the premium prey, the real bad guys. These are the criminals the cops are
supposed
to spend most of their time pursuing. Bad guys are easy to classify. They

hurt people

steal things

sell things that are illegal

You can add that they
enjoy
crime. It’s what they do. As any cop will tell you, crime is not always a bad gig. As a crook, you work when you want to. You don’t have a boss, you don’t pay taxes, and you thumb your nose at The Man. To choose a life of crime is to shuck off emasculating constraints and return to the primitive world of the barbarian. Here cunning, strength, and violence rule. Men raid alone or in packs, led by an alpha male. Women are seduced and discarded, or taken as booty. Everything is rape, pillage, fight, and have fun. Because these are primal male activities, you feel good about yourself.

Taking risks, the prototypical masculine behavior so censured in the schoolmarmy world of education and social work, can be richly rewarded in crime. Can you run dope up the highway without the sheriff getting wise? Or make your women sell their bodies? Can you sneak tax-free smokes into the big cities or smuggle weapons into those outlying burgs with gun laws? Big bucks await if you can.

In Crookland there are no rules. Stay up all night and sleep all day. Do a job only when money runs low. Most bad guys have been processed through the social service plantation, and crime is a welcome change from that suffocating, feminine world of rules, behaving, and taking orders. Crime means escape from social workers, psychologists, and counselors who talk nonsense, scribble in fat files and want to “understand” you.

On the street, bad guys play their music loud, strut their stuff, and tell anyone who annoys them to stuff it. They can wear crazy hair, tattoos, wild clothes, and gang colors that identify them as members of the exclusive Crook Club, or hide behind the finest tailored suits. When people cross them, they take revenge with fists, knives, and guns. There’s an enormous thrill in violence.

Bad guys get to see enemies quaver in fear. They savor their panic before sliding in the knife or blowing their brains onto the sidewalk. They dispense life and death like God Almighty. Of course, the cops are always in pursuit. Bad guys have to run, hide, evade, and avoid. Life is an adrenaline rush of intense sensation.

Generally bad guys live off girlfriends, sisters, and their mothers. They get a free crib, so everything they steal is gravy. Let’s say they boost a $60,000 car and sell it for $1,000 to a chop shop or underground auto exporter. With that grand they can party, get high, and have sex for days until they have to work again. Bad guys regard working hour after hour for a paycheck with horror. Only squares could be so dumb.

An undercover narc was telling my coauthor just the other day that
two
marijuana plants, lovingly watered, fertilized, and stimulated with growth hormones and grow lights, will yield $60,000 or more per year—all in the comfort of the home. That’s real Miracle Grow. Of course crooks have to do business with other crooks, who will cheat and sometimes kill them, but nobody’s got it perfect.

Crooks are innovative. A client told me a story that demonstrates this perfectly. One of his buddies bought a brand-new Chevy Corvette. This guy drives it directly from the showroom to a party in Manhattan. He’s not a complete idiot, so once he parks, he gets friends to move their cars and squeeze his car in by touching their bumpers to his. The ’Vette is jammed in tight, and the guy figures he’s safe. Wrong. Hours later he finds the Corvette is gone—
poof
. All that’s left are two streaks of heavy lubricant. The thieves jacked up his hot rod and slid it out on planks. Smart, huh? “Greased skids” is not just a figure of speech.

Invent computers, and bad guys invent computer crime. Make credit cards universal and voilà, credit card fraud. Cheap 800 lines make possible the phone scams for which South Florida is famous. The Emerald Mine Shares and First Mortgage Certificate scams were works of genius. Con artists love South Florida because it’s only 20 minutes by air and a few hours by fast boat from the Bahamas and all those banks whose last name is
Suisse
. They appreciate the skilled services of Miami’s identity forgers and the attorneys who know how to make money vanish into a labyrinth of phony corporations. The sun and the nightlife aren’t bad either.

Great crime often has a breathtaking simplicity. Years ago, before the coastal setback laws made filling wetlands and waterways illegal, a developer was permitted to create an artificial island in Miami’s Biscayne Bay. Similar artificial islands had become some of the most valuable real estate on planet Earth. So this developer borrows $100 million to get started and bangs down a row of pilings to impress visiting loan officers. Once they approve the loan, he just wires the money offshore and vanishes over the Atlantic in his jet. He has never been found.
Adios
, 100 megabucks.

Crooks think they’re smarter than ordinary people, and some of them are. Some of the serial killers I arrested while I was in the FBI had studied police procedures and crime-scene investigative techniques. They devoured instructional manuals dense with mathematics, microscopy, and chemistry. These were smart guys who trained to make crime a career.

Unfortunately, pain and misery are not inherent in the life of crime. They have to be applied externally by the criminal justice system. If criminals were victims, society wouldn’t need police, just social workers to give solace to crooks weeping in the streets. Fat chance! The bad guys are sassy and full of themselves. They have to be hunted, jailed, and processed by the justice machine.

It’s amazing to see the change that comes over bad guys when they do get caught. The swagger is replaced by cowering. The strut becomes a slouch. The mean stare turns into a shifty flickering of the eyes. Jail, for most crooks, is hell. Even if they escape being raped or beaten, the subjection to strict rules is almost unbearable.

For the worst criminals, crime pays off emotionally even while they’re in custody. They get fan mail, love letters from women, and flattering media attention. The notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, who was pursued by local police and the FBI in Tallahassee, received fan mail from other serial killers who sought advice on how to avoid being caught. He was the big man in prison until the State of Florida fried his brains in the electric chair.

Wayne Williams, who killed dozens of young boys around Atlanta, had the opportunity during his trial to be the star of the drama of a lifetime. He had perfected the persona of a normal person and was so convincing while testifying in his own defense that he might have been acquitted had he not goofed during a prosecutor’s question and let slip the demon within.

A sharp crook indeed was my buddy Wayne. He studied police evidence-gathering procedures and left almost no clues. We never did find out exactly how he killed those boys. All the bodies had a single ligature mark indicating they had been strangled, yet there were never any marks or injuries indicating resistance. Tox screens for drugs were negative. So, Wayne, did you slip a noose around their necks while they slept? Did you give them little teddy bear kisses while they struggled? Your old interrogator would like to know.

MONEYED THUGS

This is a category of criminal more common than people think. I refer here to bad guys who have education and money but choose crime because they get a kick out of it. Some are white-collar crooks whose swindles fill the newspapers. Others use their scientific knowledge to manufacture designer drugs that addict and kill but are not on the narcotics schedule because of small variations in the chemical formulas. Many of the Dilaudid knockoffs and amphetamine derivatives come from these crooks. The first large shipments of ecstasy, a drug that causes irreparable brain damage, were brought into the United States from Europe by Orthodox Jews when it was outlawed. No one suspected that such educated, pious people could be criminals, so they were able to bring tens of thousands of tablets through airport customs without being searched.

Rich bad guys are wily and difficult to catch. They generally drive street-legal luxury cars and rarely get searched or arrested, except perhaps for DUI during traffic stops. Almost never are they dumb enough to carry drugs and guns in their automobiles. When anything happens, they lawyer up fast with the biggest and the best. This makes them nearly impervious to arrest by routine policing methods. When is the last time you heard about your police force making an arrest for a complex multi-million-dollar fraud? Generally the federal government tackles the rich guys, and leaves clueless gorks to the local boys and girls in blue.

Because moneyed thugs have no excuse for criminal behavior, hunting them is particularly satisfying. It has been my pleasure and privilege to arrest and convict several millionaires. Barging into their corporate headquarters is almost as much fun as busting into a crack house. You march in, flash the FBI credentials, and walk right past flabbergasted receptionists. You blow by the secretaries, the flunkies, the flacks, and the mouthpieces. Is Mr. Big in a meeting? Meeting adjourned! Perhaps he’s carousing with a young thing in his executive hideaway bedroom? Out she goes, and into jail he goes. Perp-walking these goons out the front door in chains is partial recompense for the drudgery and paperwork that comprise so much of an FBI agent’s career. Of course, now that I am a defense attorney, it is my pleasure and privilege to defend the moneyed elite. Life is not without irony, even in the grubby precincts of justice and law.