We Are the Cops (17 page)

So they would break into people’s houses, rob them and torture them if they didn’t tell them where their drugs were. They would cut them, beat them, whatever they had to do to get the information.

Those kind of guys are real Baltimore boys. But we got lucky with them because they left such a trail of mayhem. Even their own people turned against them, because they were brutal. Their people were going to jail and they weren’t necessarily helping them out. They had a good run, though. But they pleaded guilty and got fifty years federal time, which means you don’t get any time off for good behaviour. Fifty years. They decided not to go to trial, which was smart of them, because I don’t think they would have fared too well at trial. And we couldn’t even prove everything that we knew that they did – although we proved everything that we could.

There were some other elements to it too. A couple of female police officers in this department were actually dating some of these guys and having children with them. It was a travesty. We couldn’t even go pull our own police records, because at central records there was a girl working there – a police officer – who actually had a baby with one of these guys.

Some people call Baltimore, Bodymore, or instead of the Charm City, the Harm City. But do you know what else they call it? Smalltimore. It’s a small world in Baltimore; everybody knows everybody. Those female cops knew what their boyfriends were doing.

But that’s not even the worst of it. I actually put handcuffs on three cops and I’ve never even worked in Internal Investigations. It was all drug related. It was all females. It was all their boyfriends. The worst one, she milled the drug deal for her boyfriend – she facilitated a drug deal, with heroin – for her boyfriend, and there was a murder.

But when you take that oath as a cop, some of your family members are no longer going to be people that you can hang out with and some of your friends are not going to be people you can be with. You probably shouldn’t start dating drug dealers. Or having children with them. But it happens in Smalltimore because some of these girls grew up with these guys and they have known each other their whole lives.

The most ingenious guys I’ve ever worked with in my life were these two uniform guys. One is real tall and the other guy is… I wouldn’t say short but he’s not real tall either.

It was Halloween and this crew are selling drugs like mad, out of this one building. I mean, there’d be a line of people all day going in and out of there. So, what these two cops did is, they bought two white sheets. They put holes in them to make eyes and then put the sheets over themselves - like they were ghosts. Then they just went and stood in line. Just standing in line with all these crack heads.

So they walked up to the dealer when it was their turn to get served and the dealer goes, ‘Yeah, what you want nigger? Yo man, what’s this ghost shit, man? What you want?’

The two cops just pulled off their sheets and they had their guns out. They go, ‘We don’t want anything.’ And then they just grabbed them. Ingenious.

We’d do what we called ‘reversals’, where we’d roll in, we’d hit a dude up, do a buy, get a warrant, go bang the door.

We hit this one place, a motel. There were these three gangsters from LA that were there and they’d been selling dope, stealing shit and all that stuff. So we end up getting a couple of buys into it. Now, you have to pretty much picture just a regular motel room: you walk in, the door’s there, immediately to your right is the bathroom, past that’s the one bedroom and then the bed, right? So we roll in there, we bang the place, take the three guys into custody and they’ve got literally bags of shit from Nike and all these outlet stores, that they’ve stolen. So no sooner do we get in there and get them secured before there’s somebody at the door knocking – a customer looking to buy dope. I took this ‘triple X’ Nike black t-shirt and I put it on over my rig and my gear. I’ve got a low-ride holster, black boots, green BDUs – my SWAT gear. But I put the Nike shirt on and the dude knocking at the door couldn’t see any of that.

So I go, ‘Yeah, what do you need, man?’

And they’d go, ‘Give me a rock.’ Or whatever.

All right, I get the rock and say, ‘Come on in.’

They come in, I give them the rock and I’d go, ‘Bad news, I’m a police officer. You’re under arrest.’

So we’d take them into custody, right? We’d just swing them
around in the corner of the room by the bed. Dude, before we even got them put away, there’s another knock at the door. These guys are rollin’ in the dope. It’s so funny because now there are six to eight people in there with handcuffs, stuck in the corner or the room, right? When the door was knocked, we’d be saying to the prisoners, ‘Hey, shhh! Shhh! Be quiet, you guys. Be quiet. Let us do our thing.’

So now these freaking suspects, all handcuffed – six to eight of them – they’re all going, ‘Shhh. Be quite. Be quite!’ Like they’re enjoying it. Like it’s a game.

So I do the thing and give the tagline, ‘By the way, I’m a police officer. You’re under arrest.’

And the other prisoners would turn to this new suspect go, ‘Oh you stupid motherfucker! Are you stupid?’

I’m looking at them and I go, ‘What are you talking about? You’re in cuffs too!’

But once you roll, you just had to keep rollin’. We ended up walking out of there with fourteen people. Took em’ all to jail.

I went on hundreds and hundreds of drug raids. There were gangs, well, crews – that’s what we called them, crews. They were selling crack by the colour of the caps. The top of the vial, they’re colour coded and each crew would have their own different colours. So you’d get the red tops, the blue tops, the green tops, the purple tops.

The crews weren’t organised, though, and when they were first starting out the boss would give a dealer a bag of five hundred
rocks and say, ‘Here, go sit in this abandoned apartment and pass the stuff through the hole in the wall.’

But when the dealer gets arrested, all the crack gets seized, so the bosses started giving them out in little packs of ten. That way, if they got hit by the police, they didn’t lose so much so fast.

Then the dealers started to buy these walkie-talkies; they thought that they were pretty smart. They had their own little walkie-talkies or whatnot but every once in a while we’d get hold of one of their lookouts when they weren’t paying attention. You would just take the radio off them and send them on their way. Then you’d listen to the radio and find out what was going on.

There was this one crew and it was really hard to get to these guys – really, really hard – because they were pretty ingenious. They’d have a hole in the wall and they’d get the local handyman to come and fill the hole in the wall up and re-enforce it – a nice re-enforcement job – so you couldn’t get in without bashing down the walls and by the time you did get it, the dealer would be gone; he’d be away through a maze of abandoned buildings.

So what we did is, we got hold of one of their lookouts and just spoke like they did, over the walkie-talkie we’d taken.

We’d go, ‘Yo! Yo! Come on nigger! They be coming! They be Five O! Bring that shit with you!’

We would have the place surrounded and the dealer would come running out with his bag of crack and shit. We’d get him with all the drugs, the fucking scales, all the money, everything.

Christmas in Harlem is a sad time. You know, you’re making
money, you’re living a good life. I have a nice family, always had everything I wanted, didn’t really need much, and then you see people who have nothing. They know that on Christmas morning they’re getting nothing.

There was this one case: the woman worked and the husband sometimes worked but he has a drug problem. The day before Christmas – it was the 24th or the evening of the 24th – she took the kids out to do something and when she got home, all the presents were gone. Everything was gone. And he was gone too, off on a crack binge. He’d sold all this stuff for next to nothing, for crack.

The two cops that went there, they came back, ran around and we did a quick collection – everybody put in ten or twenty bucks – and they got this guy to open up a store and went in there and bought Christmas presents and a bike and all sorts of stuff for the kids, because at the end of the day, these kids didn’t do anything to deserve what their father did. It was terrible, but it was a nice story where something good happened in the end.

But it’s a sad time of the year. You know that you’re going home at the end of the shift – if you have to work the holiday – and you know when you go home that you’re going to have a nice place and a tree and this and that.

But you go into these apartments and you’re like, Jesus Christ! One wall was covered with roaches. There was no light – they didn’t have electricity, they shut the power off – and if you do put a flashlight on, the whole wall would move, because it was nothing but cockroaches.

A
contact in Washington State led me into a tall, grey building, where we stepped into a lift and he pressed a button for one of the higher-up floors. I had asked to speak with a homicide detective and he had one in mind.

Every now and then I would speak to specific officers because I already knew the story they had to tell and I wanted to record it. But more often than not, I never knew what I was going to get when I talked to someone. This homicide detective in Washington was just such a person. He spoke slowly and softly and I stared out of the window and watched as the rain dribbled lazily down the panes of darkened glass, whilst the detective’s mellow voice began to hypnotise me. Just as I was in danger of drifting off, he said, ‘Let me tell you about the Seattle police officer who became a murderer.’ And just like that, I sat up, leant forward and double-checked that my recorder was running.

This was often how meetings went; me, unsure of what I was
going to be told and worrying that the meeting would be unproductive when suddenly the officer I was speaking to would say something completely unexpected. And a cop turned murderer was unexpected.

When a murder occurs, everything else seems less important. In busy areas, after the initial response, where every cop and his K-9 attends, homicide detectives may simply work in pairs or even alone and have case after case after case to investigate. Every day will deliver them a new body. They will deal with the victims, the suspects, the families, the evidence, the paperwork, the media, their bosses, not to mention their own wives or husbands or families and demons.

The thing that always struck me about the homicide detectives that I spoke to, was just how exhausted they always seemed. It is a fascinating area of policing – particularly when there is a ‘good homicide’ to investigate – but it’s also utterly relentless and it’s no wonder that not everyone is cut out for this type of work. ‘Tenacious’ would be a good word to describe homicide detectives. However, I got the impression that – somewhat ironically – being a homicide detective can send you to an early grave.

We had a saying in the murder squad: Our day begins when your day ends.

Horrific acts occur daily and we tend to have a stoic face on it but inside you’ve gotta be affected. Having said that, I have a friend who was a homicide detective for years and he’s one of the funniest human beings I ever met. He could sit and eat a plate full of
spaghetti whilst he was on a decomposed body. He’s just one of those people who are able to separate it.

Here in the desert, a lot of bodies fill with gases as they’re decomposing. There are funny stories of homicide detectives having to stand at a distance and throw rocks at the body to try and pop it, so that the gases are released.

On the flip side, you hear about detectives arriving at a scene and just as they start to do the preliminary investigation, the body pops all over them. Just imagine how horrible that would be!

In New York we call police stations ‘houses’. Houses are rated A, B, C. A Houses are extremely busy, B Houses are obviously less busy and C Houses are country clubs. My first station was an A House in Central Harlem in the mid-80s. It was the killing fields back then – literally the killing fields.

Now, although there are still homicides, there are nowhere near as many and it’s actually a neighbourhood that’s being gentrified. This was a neighbourhood where the only time white people came there was to buy drugs. Now white people live there.

It’s still classed as an A House – definitely – but it’s not busy like it was. The precinct was less than a square mile and it handled about ninety homicides a year for probably the first four or five years that I was there.

Any homicide that you can’t solve is a terrible burden. Because as a cop, it’s your responsibility to investigate the case and if you don’t solve it, the stress alone takes a terrible, terrible toll on
your personal life. I’ve seen it on a couple of detectives that I’ve worked with.

There’ve been a variety of problems, such as divorce, that have happened over someone throwing years of work into a case that they can never solve.

I don’t like to be around death. I don’t really have an explanation for it – and I’ve been around a lot of different scenes – I just don’t like the surreal nature of a dead body.

I remember the first time it really had an impact on me, I was a graveyard-shift officer and I was asked to respond to a housing area that was under construction, as somebody had seen someone running from the area. I got there and checked the house and there was a body under the stairwell. It was one of the most gruesome things that I’ve ever seen in my life. It was just so gruesome and so surreal and uncomfortable and I had to stay there by myself and wait while other units responded.

So I was there with this dead body that had just been mercilessly beaten to death. A female. It was essentially a sexual assault where a woman was kidnapped and taken up to this construction site and raped and beaten to death with implements – two-by-fours and nails and things of that nature. It was just such an uncomfortable thing, that it affected me, not in a psychological way so that I couldn’t continue to do my job, but it was just like, ‘Wow! I don’t think I could do this every night and deal with horrific crime scenes and the dark side of the investigations.’ It was just so grotesque and it disturbed me.

It kept me from wanting to really delve into the investigations behind murder and homicide. And knowing the impact that this career has on you, I never wanted to pile on more. I was exposed to so much as it was.

I’ve seen more dead bodies and homicides than most people can even imagine. I remember distinctly – and this is no bullshit – handling three homicides in a single night. One upon turnout, one in the middle of the shift and one at the end of the shift.

Back then it was the crack wars. It was the early 90s and it was the crack wars. People getting killed was no big fucking thing. And back then two detectives would respond to the scene. Initially there would be a big response, but only from within the command. Maybe you’d get two radio cars, a sergeant and the detectives. You secured the scene, canvas the area and do whatever else it was that you did. Then you were taken out of the chart for twenty-four hours to handle the homicide and then it was business as usual. Now a hundred people will show up. Everybody and his brother shows up.

But the clearance rate back then was much better than it is now because most of the homicides were all fucking related. ‘Well, I killed him because he killed Johnny and he killed Johnny because he killed whoever.’ You know what I’m saying?

So you would catch one guy and you’d be able to clear five homicides. You’ll still get your occasional homicides related to a robbery or drugs or whatever, but most of the homicides now are more domestic related.

But back in the early 90s there was so much money to be made out of crack. There are still a lot of drug homicides but it’s not like it was.

I’ve been on homicide scenes where we’d have crime scene tape stretched out all over; cops all over the place and police cars with lights flashing. And then here comes this guy, walking down the sidewalk, lifts up the crime scene tape, walks right under it and just about steps on or over the body which is covered in a white sheet.

And when you stop them and you say, ‘You didn’t see the crime scene tape?’

They’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m just going to my cousin’s house and he lives right over there.’

It’s like they don’t give a shit about anything. It’s like they’re on a mission to go ‘here’ and it doesn’t matter that we’ve just had a shooting where someone died.

At another scene, same thing; there was a shooting, the person was dead, we had the crime scene tape up, my car was just about blocking the centre of the road and here comes this car, right down the street, right through the crime scene and it just about ran the body over that was laying in the middle of the road.

The lady said, ‘Well, I didn’t know what was going on.’

My car was just about blocking the entire street; she just about hit my car in order to get through and the crime scene tape was right there – CAUTION! DO NOT CROSS! POLICE.

Are you fucking kidding me?

We had this case where a real estate agent was murdered in 2001 whilst he was showing a house to a man. I think it was January 3rd. They looked at a number of houses and then the guy called him back on the 4th and said he wanted to look at a couple more. They didn’t go into the first house but the second house they went to, this guy attacked the real estate agent and stabbed him to death. He dragged his body into the bathroom and put him in the bathtub and turned on the shower.

It’s really kind of a bizarre case. There was no apparent motive for it. There was an immediate description of the suspect based on what the agent had told his wife the day before. So we put that description out. But then what happened was, the suspect took the agent’s car and drove back to where he was originally picked up, which was a shopping centre in Kirkland. The car was later found there and the description went out for this older man with a cane and sure enough there was an older guy with a cane that frequented the area, so he was an immediate suspect. Turned out he was a real character, with a past. He claimed to be mafia, organised crime from the east coast. So he looked really good as a suspect and there was all this focus on this guy.

Anyway, what happened was, during the altercation – during the murder – our victim got a little bit of the killer under his fingernails, so we had DNA from the beginning. But the DNA didn’t match this one suspect we had and the case just kind of went cold for a long time. Then in 2010 we got a hit on the DNA. Turned out to be a man who was a former Seattle police officer.
He had retired on a mental disability. He had been involved in a couple of deaths whilst he had been on the police department; he shot one guy and chocked another guy out but they were both justifiable. He retired in 1980. By 1984 he was robbing banks – he robbed a bunch of banks over the course of a couple of years and then he got arrested. He was sent to prison probably for about seven or eight years. He got out in the mid-nineties – ‘93 or ‘94, something like that. He had a gambling problem, real strange guy. Then this murder occurred in 2001.

So we got a DNA hit on this guy and we started looking for him. We find out that about six months before we got the DNA hit, he and another fella had attempted a residential robbery of a doctor, down on the waterfront on Lake Washington. But this robbery didn’t work out too well – the doctor fought back and they took off on foot.

Now, this waterfront area where the doctor lived, is down a real steep hill and these guys were somehow down there on foot. We suspected they originally planned on taking the doctor’s car for a getaway but when they had to take off on foot, they ran down the street where they found a dock with a boat on it. They launched this boat – like a rowboat. They started rowing it, trying to row away, across the lake. Well, what they didn’t know was, was that the owner – because it was the middle of winter – had taken the plug out of the back of the boat, so that when it rained the water would drain out. So unfortunately as these two fat old guys started rowing across the lake, the boat started filling up with water. They must have got about half way across before it
sank. So both were dead – drowned. They were down in that lake for six or seven months.

It was about a week or so after we get the DNA hit that our killer pops back up in the lake. You see, the body is decomposing, it’s building up gases and stuff and so they float back up.

Anyway, the investigation proceeded and we started talking to this guy’s wife. She, over the period of several interviews, eventually gave up the fact that this guy had been involved in four other murders over the years. Maybe one or two of the murders even occurred when he was a cop. All the murders that she knew of – that he had told her he had done – were done either for revenge or for a friend. One of them, he had actually killed another former Seattle police officer. In another case he and another fella had apparently killed a guy that had dated the other fella’s wife, before they got married.

Then they killed a guy who was the head of a local labour union who was going to fire a friend of our killer. So, our killer went and killed the guy so he couldn’t fire his friend. And the last one was a bizarre thing, after our killer retired from the police department, he got into real estate and I think he had his own office for a while. Somehow there was some kind of a debt over this real estate business and he owed thousands of dollars. The bank had given the case to some local attorney to collect the money and this attorney had been calling the house and bugging people, particularly calling his wife. You didn’t mess with his wife! So, they made an appointment with him late one night and went in and killed him – shot him a bunch of times and stabbed
him a bunch of times.