Hero To Zero 2nd edition Page 7

  Scott was intensely interested in the city’s raging gang problem. There was one dominant gang in the city at the time, and it was running the patrol officers ragged. Scott spent a lot of time talking to this gang’s members, learning who was in charge, how plans were made by the group, who called the shots. All of this information he passed on to the gang-unit detectives.

  One night, Scott found out that the gang leader’s mother desperately wanted her son out of the gang. Scott was able to spend an hour or so talking to her, and realized that here was the veteran gang leader’s weak link. He loved his mother more than anything.

  It took several weeks of talking to the jaded gang member, but Scott was able to convince him to give up the internal workings of the gang. In exchange for immunity against any pending criminal charges, the gang leader spilled his guts. He sat in interviews with the gang-unit detectives for hours, discussing details, tactics, and plans that had been made.

  Afterwards, the sergeant of the gang unit made a point of thanking Scott. Scott said that the sergeant told him that he had a rare talent for reaching people and talking to them as human beings instead of as criminals. The sergeant said that he greatly appreciated the efforts Scott had made, and was going to recommend him for an award.

  Scott heard the word award and knew that meant attention. He asked the sergeant not to do what he was planning; Scott did not want the attention. The sergeant was baffled—most cops crave attention. Scott’s brother Mike would have jumped at the chance for his peers to see him given an award.

  The sergeant shook his head and said, “Okay, I’ll do as you ask. You really are different from your brother. Are you sure you’re not adopted?”

  Scott smiled and said, “I’ve often wondered that myself.”

  Some nights, Scott and Mike would work overlapping shifts. On rare occasions they would get a call together, which almost always ended badly. Here are a couple of examples to show you how different they really were:

  One night the two brothers were sent to respond to a report of a family fight in progress. They both arrived at the lower west-end residence and started to ask questions and take statements from witnesses. They eventually determined that a fight had occurred at the house, but they could not figure out who was at fault.

  The laws governing domestic violence were in a constant state of flux at the time. This was about ten months after the OJ Simpson trial, and the state legislature was still tweaking the domestic violence laws in a desperate attempt to deal with that continuing hot issue.

  Both the husband and wife involved in the dispute to which the Prestons had responded had signs of injuries. Obviously a fight had occurred; however, at the time, the laws required the cops themselves to determine who the predominant aggressor was and arrest that person.

  In this case, there was no clear sign of which party was the predominant aggressor. Mike asked the husband to step out of the house and into the front yard while another officer spoke to the woman involved. Mike, Scott, and the future Sergeant Leeds surrounded the man; while Mike talked, Scott and Leeds completed a triangle around the suspect. The suspect had nowhere to go should he try to escape. At least that was the idea.

  Mike asked a few probing questions and tried to get the suspect to make some kind of admission, until it became really clear that that was not going to happen.

  Mike suddenly stepped out of the triangle and opened it up, leaving a huge hole that the suspect could run through should he decide to do so.

  Scott was puzzled; WTF was Mike doing? Scott looked at Mike and saw an evil expression, familiar from when they were kids. Mike was plotting something.

  The suspect saw the opening and decided to run while the opening was there. Immediately Mike smiled and let out a loud YAHHOOO! The chase was on.

  Mike could have easily caught the suspect in the first ten steps, but hung back a little. Scott was behind him, and wondered what the hell Mike was doing. Mike said, “Let him get around the next corner before we tackle him.”

  Puzzled, Scott waited till they turned the corner, and then Mike sped up and tackled the suspect. A normal arrest would have involved the two cops grabbing the guy’s arms and handcuffing him, but Mike had other ideas.

  Scott grabbed an arm and brought out his handcuffs. Mike said, “No not yet; don’t cuff him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not done kicking his ass yet!” And Mike started raining down punches on the guy’s head.

  Scott looked at the smile on Mike’s face, and remembered seeing that smile his whole life when Mike got into fights. This was bullshit. Scott stopped the abuse, and handcuffed the suspect.

  He and Mike were instantly in each other’s faces, old rivalries reborn. The two cops nearly came to blows, exchanging insults and shoving each other. It was plain to Leeds, when he turned the corner, that something had happened between the two brothers, but he was much slower than they were and had missed the incident after the suspect was tackled.

  Mike called Scott a rookie and said he had a lot to learn about the streets—his favorite insult. Scott told him never to pull shit like that again. The two brothers departed the scene, and did not speak to each other again for years.

  Another night Mike was dispatched to an aggravated assault in progress. Right after he received the call, he signed out to attend to a parking problem in a grocery store. Yep! Mike put the felony in progress on hold because there was a parking problem in a grocery store that needed immediate attention.

  That is what seasoned veteran officers do, right? They see the bigger picture, realizing at any moment the parking problem could get out of hand—and who knows what could happen then?

  The dispatcher was quite understandably pissed off. It was a summer night, and there were no other units available to handle the aggravated assault in progress. Everyone was tied up on other calls, except the seasoned veteran Mike. The dispatcher ridiculed Mike for choosing to see to the parking incident first, and tried to get him to take the call, but he would not.

  I was with Scott on another call, and he was pissed off immediately. Hearing the exchange between Mike and the dispatcher, he turned to me and said, “Can you believe this shit? You watch, tomorrow he’ll tell our family about how he saved some guy’s life, or rescued some kid from a fire. You would not believe the bullshit he tells our parents.”

  “Do they know about how he is called BIKE-ONE?” I asked.

  Scott laughed and said, “No, and I don’t have the desire to tell them. Mike is my dad’s favorite; he walks on water as far as the old man is concerned.”

  Scott got on his cell phone and told dispatch that he would take the call for the aggravated assault in progress. The call we were on was nearly complete, so he left while I finished up. So Scott went, without backup, on the aggravated assault call, while Mike handled the more important parking problem.

  After Scott arrived, secured the scene, requested medical assistance for the injured victim, arrested the suspect, and was nearly ready to leave the scene, Mike suddenly sounded off on the radio. He was clear of the parking problem and said he was now able to handle the aggravated assault. The dispatcher told him the call had been handled by Scott. Mike just said, “Okay, then I’m available to handle calls.” The dispatcher said nothing. Yep, Mike was available—till another dangerous parking problem arose.

  I asked Scott, “How the hell are you two brothers?”

  Scott rolled his eyes. “I’ve always wondered,” he said.

  Scott continued quietly collecting awards and tried to stay below the radar. He had his own demons to deal with. He had been married several times and could not seem to find the same success in his personal life as he was enjoying at work. He had three kids, and was a great father. His kids were his hope for the future. He told me once that his life-long goal was to make sure that his children never had any idea what it was like to grow up like he and Mike had.

  He did not succeed in being a decent husband, however. On his third
marriage, buried in debt from divorce, Scott started to fall apart. The inability to shut down the bad memories from work, and the stress of divorce and debt, started to take their toll. Scott was a loner, and had no outlet for the stress. He worked out feverishly and tried to use the old tricks that had made his life bearable. Eventually, though, it all fell apart.

  Scott had married a woman he met while working a part-time job, and they had moved into a place in the city. Scott was working two jobs and all the overtime he could scrape up to pay the bills. One night he discovered that his new wife had been having an affair with her boss and her boss’s husband. Scott was devastated, and he went after the couple with whom his wife had betrayed him.

  Scott had a battle plan on the streets. He employed psychological warfare against the hardcore criminals he went after. Upping their stress level making them worry where he was, what he knew, and how he would next come after them. He used this same tactic on the adulterous boss and her husband.

  This time, however, it backfired. His wife’s boss went to the police department and complained. An investigation took place, and Scott was found clearly to be in the wrong. He was given a choice by the department: he could resign, or face public humiliation. The investigators told him they would be forced to release to the press the fact that he had been involved in the incident and had terrorized his wife’s lovers. More attention was the last thing Scott wanted, and the choice was obvious. He resigned from the department.

  Scott had an amazing career that any cop would envy. Multiple assignments, awards, and recognition, and he truly made a difference on the streets. But his personal life was a mess, and it destroyed his career.

  Scott pressed on and recovered financially. He was hired again as a cop, but he never again made the impact on the streets that he had when he was with our department. Scott did a lot that will never be recognized. Years after he left the department he would get phone calls about cases he’d handled and questions about what he was doing now. We kept in touch, and I know that he won’t like being added to this book. Too bad.

  PAUL BAILEY GREW UP IN the inner city, and was a gifted athlete from the time he was a small boy. He was a star on his high school basketball team. He played the forward position, and was a huge reason for the team getting to the state championship his senior year. In the final state game, with three seconds remaining, the point guard passed Paul the ball, and he took the go-ahead winning shot; the ball passed through the rim and made the familiar swish you hear when it touches nothing but net. The team had won their first state championship in twenty years. Paul was the hero of the game.

  Paul’s life was like that—charmed. He secured a full ride scholarship to the local college and completed his four-year degree. While in college, he married his high school sweetheart. She was a gifted athlete as well, and played high school and college basketball. They both graduated from college with academic and athletic honors. They were two gifted and talented people making their life’s dream a reality.

  After college, Paul decided that he wanted to be a cop. He looked at all the local police and sheriff’s departments and decided to go with the sheriff’s department.

  He had an intense love of hunting, and working at the sheriff’s department enabled him to patrol large areas of the county. He was in fact scouting future hunting spots almost daily while he worked, patrolling the large areas of heavily wooded mountain land. Athletics had taught Paul that when there was an opportunity, you had to strike while the iron was hot.

  Paul lived his life like that, sometimes making impulsive decisions that he would later regret, because he thought he saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  Paul hunted every hunting season in his state, and often would travel to Alaska to hunt and fish there as well. He lived to hunt and fish.

  Paul’s other passion was being a cop. He loved the job. He excelled at law enforcement and held several specialties while he was employed by the sheriff’s department. He was selected for the warrants division, and was recognized for his ability to locate and apprehend the most difficult-to-find criminals. Serving warrants came as second nature to him. He said it was like hunting, and he excelled at it, making it a personal quest to “track” and “hunt” the more elusive bad guys. That was his mindset. The more intense the challenge, the more he immersed himself in it. He was truly exceptional.

  After his assignment in the warrants division, he was assigned to the civil division. His talent in hunting down and locating people would be an asset there as well, and the division commander realized that immediately. Paul continued to shine in the department.

  Paul had never had a goal that he did not achieve. Everything that he set his sights on, he achieved. Both at work and in his hunting, he set goals and then pursued them with a single-minded obsession until the goal was achieved. He had been all over North America, hunting and killing various trophy animals. When he set out on a trip, he almost always returned with his hunting tag filled and another animal to take to the taxidermist.

  There was one animal that had eluded him over and over again. That was the large male black bear. Paul had tried and failed several times to hunt and kill a black bear. It was a tough prize to locate, and it tormented him.

  One year Paul and several other deputies had planned a deer hunt. They had scouted the area they planned to hunt and obtained the necessary tags enabling them to hunt legally. They were all cops, and made sure that they hunted by the state fish and game rules. They always hunted on land that they had obtained permission to be on, using legal methods to kill the desired trophy. On this particular hunt, they had set up camp and had decided to go out early the next morning. The set out topographic maps and planned the next day’s hunt. They went to sleep early after drinking beer by the campfire and eating dinner.

  The next morning they set out and began the long trek through the ravines and mountain passes to get to the really big trophy bucks. They had walked about an hour when Paul spied his most elusive prize—the black bear.

  He saw a huge male black bear, and it was unaware of his presence. He got closer, and his goal-driven, strike-while-the-iron-is-hot mentality took over. He later said that he knew he would never again get an opportunity to hunt and kill a black bear this size.

  He raised his rifle, quietly breathed in and out, held his breath while squeezing the trigger on his 30-06, and shot the huge bear. He killed it with one shot. Finally, his goal had been achieved! Paul was elated. He yelled out with incredible joy, screaming and ranting. It was a moment of pure fiero, the Italian word for the primal and visceral gut reaction someone has when they finally achieve a long-sought-after goal.

  Paul finally has his victorious kill, and his cop friends came running, thinking he had bagged a huge buck. There was absolute silence when they arrived and found the excited and overjoyed Paul standing over the monster bear with a huge smile on his face.

  They all knew black bear was not in season. This was an illegal kill. It was a crime to poach any animal out of season, and here they were, all sworn police officers, witness to another cop committing a crime. Paul had put them all in a pretty shitty predicament with his win-at-all-costs mentality.

  There was a long and heated argument about what to do with the bear. Paul intended on keeping it no matter what. He wanted to have it mounted and added to his other trophies. In the end, after a long and heated argument, Paul kept the bear and brought it back to the city.

  That long-desired bear would be the end of Paul Bailey’s career.

  He had a friend who was a taxidermist, and he asked him to mount the bear. This put his taxidermist friend in a bind as well. He could lose his license to do business and be charged criminally as well if he did as Paul requested.

  Rumors began to travel around the sheriff’s department about the bear, and eventually Paul learned the truth about secrets. A secret is only truly a secret if only one person knows it. When two people know, it’s no longer a secret. Paul had no way he could keep th
e bear he’d illegally killed a secret. Either his taxidermist friend or one of his cop hunting buddies turned him in.

  Eventually his illegal killing of the black bear was found out by fish and game cops (we called them fish dicks then, and still do). He was criminally charged as a poacher, and had to resign as a cop.

  The account of his poaching charge was printed in the local newspaper, and he had to live with the public humiliation of failure for the first time in his life.

  WILLIAM ROSS III WAS ONE of the most amazing hero-to-zero stories I ever witnessed. Next to Robert Suggs, he was the single most eye-popping example of a cop-gone-bad I have ever seen. This is his story.

  William Ross III was hired as a cop in the city when I was just entering the military. He paid his dues on the streets and excelled as a cop, learning the ins and outs of the legal system and the courts.

  He decided early in his career that he wanted more than the life of a cop. He knew that he was “better” than the life he was living. He deserved more money, more respect, more of everything—period. He would not be spending the rest of his life hauling piss-soaked drunks to jail and fighting it out with thugs in bars.

  William knew he was more than he appeared to be to his fellow cops. He was smarter than they were, and he just knew he was better than they were as well. He saw a brighter future, and he was hell-bent on obtaining it. He enrolled in night classes and began the long and arduous process of obtaining his degree while working shift work as a cop.

  I arrived back in the city several years later. I did not know William at the time, but I had heard his name mentioned in conversations with other cops. By that time, William had finally made it. He had worked his way off the streets and had passed his bar exams. He was now a lawyer, and was making four or five times the income he would ever have earned as a cop. The other cops were envious, and some were outright jealous to be sure—though I did hear one old-timer say, “I don’t envy him at all; all that money will come back to haunt him.”