Hero To Zero 2nd edition Read online

  “In his typical raw, rough and real style, Zach Fortier brings another page-turner of a book! A realistic look inside the lives of the people that carry a badge, and what happens when they tarnish it.”

  • Ashley Fontainne

  Award-winning Author of

  “Number Seventy-Five •

  “I found Hero to Zero to be a compelling read and it provides unbelievable insights into “cop life.” It reaffirms the myth about the secrecy and confidentiality inside the brotherhood of blue—it does exist even if on an expiry date.”

  • Eager Reader •

  “…an interesting account of those in uniform whom most of us look up to, look to for help, look to for guidance, and wouldn’t ever imagine acting in any way like those they are protecting us from. This book gives us the inside scoop in the no-nonsense way that Zach sees life around him and is written in that same no-nonsense way.”

  • Greatreader •

  “The stories are each fascinating in their own way, as are the behind-the-scenes details of life in law enforcement. Fortier has put out another excellent work with this book.”

  • Holly Cochran •

  “The stories are gritty, told in a personal and conversational manner. It feels like you’re chatting over a beer or something, which makes it a quick and enjoyable read.”

  • S. Boddie •

  HERO TO ZERO

  Copyright © 2013 Zach Fortier

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by

  SteeleShark Press

  ISBN-13: 978-0615914367

  ISBN-10: 0615914365

  DURING THE 1980S, I WAS working as a military cop. It was a time of nuclear protests and people were nowhere near as pro-military as they are today. People hated you instantly if you were in the military. To be a military cop was the lowest of lows, the bottom of the military shit pile. This was where I met Robert Suggs.

  He was a military cop as I was, but he was very different from the rest of us. He embraced the “cop lifestyle” with a zeal that was somehow intoxicating. He had a passion for being a cop that was unheard of in the environment of the military. Everyone else who wore the uniform looked down on us. Suggs brushed all the criticism aside and looked upon being a cop as a worthwhile pursuit—a calling. He saw it as something to devote your life to and never feel ashamed of. His passion was feverish.

  He not only worked as a military cop, sometimes sixty hours or more a week (we all worked long, long hours due to staffing levels being at bare minimums), he also volunteered as a reserve police officer for the Spokane Police Department. He lived breathed and ate cop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

  I started to talk to Suggs on night shift when our patrols would overlap. I made it no secret that I wanted to learn what he had learned from the Spokane cops. Military police tactics were old and out-of-date; we all knew that. Talking to Suggs was like jumping ahead twenty years in tactics and techniques, compared to the mindset that we were taught as military police, or MPs. Suggs started to mentor me when he realized that I really was interested in the newer, cutting-edge tactics being taught on the streets of Spokane.

  He tested the waters with me one night to see how committed I was to learning the newer stuff. He called for a meeting over the handheld radio, and I met him in a parking lot. He had another cop meet us there as well. The other guy was newer, like me, and Suggs had been working with him, too—teaching him, undoing the mindset the military had instilled in him.

  Suggs asked me how comfortable I was with the military’s standard search technique. Did I think that I could find a gun or knife and still keep my suspect under control? Yeah, I did. I was pretty physically fit and cocky. I thought there was no way a suspect could get the best of me, search or not. I worked out constantly; it was a life-long obsession. I told him I was pretty good at searching. He smiled, and I knew I had just made a mistake.

  He laid out the scenario for me. A guy had broken through the gates of the installation, and was trying to access the nuclear-loaded aircraft area. I had stopped him and removed him from his vehicle and now had to search him. Suggs cut out the normally tedious and long-winded process of removing the suspect from the vehicle, which is similar to the current “felony stop procedures police now use and took me straight to the search. This was to be a test of my toughness and my real desire to learn, as I was about to find out.

  He had me start to search the “suspect”—the other cop, a guy I didn’t know—and as soon as I found the weapon, everything went to shit. Suggs had told this guy to fight like his life depended on it as soon as I found the weapon.

  The fight was on. This was not like the military training I had been accustomed to. This guy turned on me and was seriously kicking my ass. There was no time out. It was a no-holds-barred, fifteen-minute dog fight. By the end of the fight, we were both bloodied up pretty good. Uniforms were torn, and our usually highly polished boots were shredded. Neither one of us could defeat the other.

  The idea of searching and containing the suspect was gone. I was raging mad, and so was the “suspect.” Suggs watched us fight and was talking shit to me the entire time, telling me I was losing and that I was going to die. He said, “I thought you wanted to be a cop? This is a sad excuse for police work—you’ve let your suspect kick your ass.” He kept talking shit to me until I was finally able to get the guy into an arm-bar and nearly broke his arm. I was taunting him by this point, yelling, “Now what? Now what?”

  Then Suggs stopped the fight. He separated us, standing between us, keeping us at arm’s length. For us, the fight was not over. This had gone ‘way beyond training. Suggs laughed at us and told the other guy to go to his car. He left, staring at me the entire time. “Mad dogging,” we would later call it on the street.

  Suggs said to me, “Okay. I see that you’re serious and want to learn. First thing that you need to learn is you can never take for granted that you are gonna make it home. You survive the night by being meaner, tougher and, most importantly, smarter than the other guy. You get cocky like you were tonight and you’re gonna get killed.”

  He said that was the most important thing he learned from Spokane’s cops. He said they did the same thing to him. They had him search a “suspect” and then it went to shit. He had to fight until he too overcame his “suspect.” They told him 75 percent of the cops who came to their academy failed this test and were washed out.

  “Congratulations,” he said to me. “You just passed their first test.”

  Over the next several months we had a number of meetings like this one. They weren’t as violent, but they were just as challenging. Suggs always had a concept to teach, or an idea or technique that I had to learn, practice, and master. He taught me a lot. The most important thing he taught me was always to challenge what I was being taught. To make it work for me on the streets or get rid of it. He changed my mentality from following the rules and conforming to the ways that the military had taught me to what actually carried me through my entire career. Challenge everything: every technique, every theory, and every tactic. Right or wrong, he shaped the way I saw police work from then on.

  Several months later, Suggs was slated to get out of the military. His enlistment was up. I thought he’d surely be picked up by the Spokane PD. He told me as he left that he had tested for the police department and had scored well, ranking #1 on their list. He was confident he’d be hired. I never learned what happened after that. Later on, I heard that they did not pick him up a
nd that he had failed the psychological exam—but that was a rumor, and I never knew for sure. It was certainly hard for me to believe.

  As an MP, he was head and shoulders above the rest of us. He was an expert marksman, fit, and took the job to another level. He was very professional in the way he dressed and acted. He studied regulations and laws, and, as I said, he worked as a reserve for the Spokane PD.

  Fast forward: several years have passed, and I too have left the military police corps. I’m working for the sheriff’s department back home in St. Paul’s. I was fortunate to be picked up by the sheriff’s department at a time when hundreds of people would test for only one or two job openings.

  One night I was writing a report on an aggravated assault I‘d been investigating. The tempers of patrons at a local truck stop had erupted into a knife fight. Two men were fighting over a woman: one was her husband, the other, her boyfriend. The husband stabbed the boyfriend and the woman called the cops. We investigated the incident, and I’d returned to the office to write my report.

  I was sitting at a table we all used to write reports. We wrote them by hand then. PCs were a couple of years away from being practical. I took a break from writing, stretching my hands and looking around the room at the wanted posters hanging on the wall. Suggs had taught me well, and I always kept up on the latest twix, teletypes, and wanted photos available. The other deputies called me paranoid—not for the first or last time in my career.

  One of the posters caught my eye. The guy looked really familiar. He was wanted by the FBI. I looked at him and tried to place him in my memory.…I couldn’t remember where I had last seen him. The name listed the wanted man as Robert Michael Allen. The name did not ring any bells, but then, as now, I never forget a face. The face for me is a lock; once I know your face I’ll never forget you. I can’t remember names as easily.

  At first, I was puzzled. I knew this face, but from where? The name was totally unfamiliar to me. I read the poster, and it said that Allen had murdered a movie producer and the producer’s father and son. They’d been involved in a business deal and had stolen a couple of hundred thousand dollars from Allen. When Allen discovered the theft he was furious and killed them, shooting them all. The wanted poster listed Allen as a “bodyguard” by profession, who was an expert marksman and an avid gambler. He was considered armed and very dangerous.

  I kept looking at the face. Somewhere I knew I had met this guy. At first I accused the other guys in the office of playing a prank on me by making up a fake wanted poster and using a picture of someone I knew as the bad guy. It made sense; we were always playing pranks on each other to break up the tension we all felt. They all looked at me like I was crazy. The Sergeant told me to “quit being an attention whore and get back to your report.” I ignored him. I knew that I knew this face.

  The poster detailed a few facts about Allen—his height and weight, eye color, scars. He had a bullet wound on the big toe of one foot, and several aliases. Reading the aliases, I was stunned. While Robert Michael Allen was his given legal name, one of his aliases was Robert Michael Suggs.

  The light finally came on in my head. The FBI now wanted the same “Suggs” who had mentored me years earlier in the military for a triple homicide in Culver City, California. He was on the run, armed, and dangerous.

  I pulled the poster off of the wall and said, “Holy shit, I know this guy!”

  The sergeant replied, “Yeah, yeah—sure you do. We all know someone wanted by the FBI.”

  “No, really—I know this guy, I was in the military with him. He was a cop then and mentored me.”

  “That explains a lot!” the sergeant replied. “You were mentored by a murderer. Lemme see the fucking poster.”

  I handed it to him. “It says here to call the FBI if you have any information about him. Maybe you should call them, Deputy.”

  He smirked and looked at the other deputies in the room, and they all started laughing. They thought I was full of shit. I watched this room full of rednecks laughing and giggling about how they were making a fool out of the city boy. None of them had ever left the county they were born in. None had ever worked a murder, or knew a murderer. I had grown up in the city. I saw my first murder at six years of age. It happened across the street from our house. I had known several of the local hardcore criminals in my neighborhood from the time we were all little kids and growing up on the same streets. This bugged the hell out of my co-workers.

  I thought it over and said “Yeah, you’re right, I should call. Can I use the phone on your desk?”

  The room went silent.

  “Sure, go ahead, knock yourself out,” the sergeant said.

  I picked up the phone and started to dial the number. The sergeant suddenly took the receiver from me and hung up the phone glaring at me. He redialed the number from the poster and handed me the receiver. This was unreal.

  The FBI answered the phone, and I told them what I knew about Suggs. The agent I spoke to was condescending as hell and said that Suggs was a killer and that they would find him. I told them he was well-trained and had been a reserve officer with the Spokane police. That information was not on the wanted poster, and the FBI guy suddenly took me seriously. He asked my name, and spent the next forty-five minutes picking my brain about Suggs.

  He then asked where I worked and if he could reach me if anything came up. I said sure. The room was still silent. The sergeant who was so sarcastic was now silent and blankly staring at me. It was a snapshot of what my entire career would be like. An outsider, walking the line between cops and killers, fitting in with neither.

  I kept track of Suggs from that point on. About a year later I learned that his body and that of his girlfriend had been found in the California desert. Apparently his girlfriend had been trying to break up with him at the same time that he had been ripped off by the movie producer. Suggs kidnapped her and later killed her. I made a point of telling my arrogant sergeant about Suggs’s fourth murder and his apparent suicide. He had no comment.

  This story is an excellent example of what later became a very common and amazing scenario with the cops I worked with and around. I call it Hero-to-Zero Syndrome.

  Every one of the cops listed in this book was outstanding in his or her own way. Every single one went from being considered an exceptional cop, respected by his peers, to being a criminal, publically humiliated—or at the very least no longer a cop. All were handed their walking papers and asked not to return. If there is any common denominator among them, it is that they identified strongly with being a cop.

  You can read about Suggs on the web. Google the name Robert Michael Allen. He is listed as #434 on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. He was a good cop when I knew him, and he was also, later, a multiple murderer.

  He is the only cop I will list by his real name here. The rest of the stories related here are also true, but the names of the people involved have been changed. The cops were real cops, each outstanding in his or her own way. Somehow, they all went down in flames.

  JAMES TUCKER JOINED THE POLICE department St.Pauls after serving a mission for with his church. He was a poster boy for wholesome goodness. He never drank alcohol, he never swore at anyone. He’d have an absolute shit fit if you used the words “Jesus” or “God” in anything but a prayer. I have no idea what the hell he was doing as a cop.

  I first met him on a call after he was finished probation and out on the street on his own. He was very straitlaced, wound so tight and so perfect. He had significant trouble speaking to the people we dealt with on the street. I literally had to translate for him when we were on calls together. Here is a brief example of the conversations we had:

  Tucker: Sir, I am Officer Tucker. This is Officer Fortier. I am responding to your request for police assistance.

  Dude: What?

  Me: He wants to know what happened, why you called the cops.

  Dude: Oh, yeah! Well, my fucking neighbor’s dog keeps shitting on my lawn. I told the motherfuck
er I was gonna kill his fucking dog if it happened again and he said that he would kill me if I killed his fucking dog. I want the goddamn dog to stop shitting on my lawn.

  Tucker: Sir, I may be of assistance; however, you must please stop using the Lord’s name in vain.

  Dude: HUH?

  Me: He’s gonna help you, but watch your fucking mouth. (Tucker grimaced)

  Dude: Oh, Okay. Sorry.

  The rest of the call went like that. It was weird to work with a cop this squeaky-clean. He never swore. He was stiff as a board and walked like he had a stick up his ass. He was really out of his element on the streets, but he had wanted to be a cop his whole life and nothing was gonna change that.

  We continued to work the same areas but on different shifts, rarely overlapping on calls. Once in a while he’d show up on a call and listen to me. He pulled me aside once and asked me “How did you learn to talk like them?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve seen you talk to different people from all walks of life; it’s like you switch vocabularies when you speak to street people.”

  “Yeah, well…they have a different set of rules, a totally different reality from the bank president or the college professor. I try to relate to them in their language, their comfort zone.”

  He said he felt like they were all trash and “less” than the upper-class people in the city. I told him that was too bad because they made our jobs possible. He asked what I meant.

  “You will never get a college professor talking to you late at night in a dark parking lot about a murder he knows something about, or telling you about a drug dealer he knew. These are the people who help us make arrests. All they want is a little respect. You give them that and they’ll remember it.” He seemed to think about this, but made no comment.

  Tucker continued in his structured, black-and-white thinking. One of the brass in our department was watching him and began to mentor him. He convinced Tucker that he was too good for the streets. This mentor told him that he needed to go back to school and finish his degree. He suggested that Tucker maybe get a job with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). Tucker liked this idea. He started back to school when he wasn’t at work.