The Unarmed Truth - 1 - JUMP STREET In 1989, shortly after finishing high school in Orange, Virginia, I left for the Army. My mother had driven me to Fredericksburg and cried as she watched me board a Greyhound bus. Uncle Sam spares no expense for his boys. After a quick overnight at the Military Enrollment Processing Station in Richmond, my next stop was Basic Training at Fort Leonard, Missouri. Nine weeks later, I then went on to my Advanced Individual Training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Eighteen years old, I had never been off the east coast before, and never so far from home. Arizona was a different world for me; I may as well have been walking on Mars. The desert, the vistas, the desert, the mountains, the desert .
there was a lot of desert. Not many people go through Fort Huachuca, or the thriving metropolis outside its front gate, Sierra Vista, and ever want to come back. It''s a small, somewhat secluded town near the Mexican border. Not a whole lot goes on there. I imagine most would want to stay as far away as possible, but for me it was different. Something about Arizona resonated in me; I felt a connection with it, a kinship if you will. I was so captivated that after having to leave, for nearly the next two decades I was haunted by the words "Go west, young man, go west" and I was always on the lookout for some way to get back. My job in the Army was intelligence, an unanticipated side effect of scoring well on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.
Although it sounds sexy, military intelligence (MI) isn''t as cloak-and-dagger as you might think. A lot of it is book work, research, memorization, plotting, graphing, and even some statistics. As I was taught: "Information goes up-intelligence goes down." So you''re always trying to find more, gather more, uncover more so that you can figure out more. It''s a constant state of learning. But of all the things I learned in MI, the most important was to analyze. Not "how to analyze" or "how to think analytically"-but rather, to analyze . to be analytical.
After MI school I saw everything differently. I learned that everything is a puzzle-and every puzzle has a solution. In short, my job was to solve puzzles. So although not the super-secret, black-bag ninja warrior who teleports in and takes out all the bad guys with a paper clip and piece of gum, I knew how to figure out who the bad guys were, where to find them, and how to get into their heads. After the Army, I went into law enforcement. It seemed a natural fit. At first I became a sheriff''s deputy in Orange County, Virginia, where I had grown up. When I got the job as a "road dog"-a patrol cop-in Orange County, it was a very small department: the sheriff, chief deputy, one lieutenant, two investigators, two civil process servers, four or five court security personnel, and eight of us assigned to work the road in the Patrol Section.
My academy graduation was on a Saturday at noon. The following Sunday, just before midnight, I used the radio in my old Chevy Caprice patrol car to mark "10-41" (on duty). I immediately heard the others marking "10-42" (off duty). I was it-thirty-six hours after graduating from the academy, I was the only law enforcement officer for all 343 square miles. "Sink or swim" rang through my head. I''ll never forget that feeling. You see and deal with it all when you work as a cop in a small department. There''s no CSI: Orange to call and have them come out to work the murder scene.
No Bones to solve your case for you. You do it all. That, however, doesn''t stop the large departments, big-city police, and especially the feds from looking down on us "Podunk" officers. After the sheriff had hired me and during the months I was attending the police academy, the other road guys began referring to me as "one of us." "How''s it feel to be one of us?" "Glad you''re one of us." I felt like I had just been picked to be part of some elite cadre, a coveted position on a special squad, an appreciated member of the team. It was a good feeling. It didn''t take long after that first midnight shift to learn the true meaning of "one of us": a dead body floating in a pond-one of us (me) had to go in and get it.
The town drunk with puke all over him who had just shit himself-one of us (me) had to take him to jail. The local crazy lady in her tinfoil hat screaming that her neighbor was controlling her mind . you get the idea. Truth is, I garnered more experience in those first few years than many cops or agents do in their entire careers. Being one of only eight meant that there was no room to hide. You were always held accountable. The sheriff was also held accountable by the citizens he worked for. Those were the fundamentals of law enforcement.
It was in Orange, Virginia, that what it really meant to be a "cop" was instilled within me. I remember being told by my supervisor then: "Remember-protect and serve. Yes-you respond to calls, work wrecks, write tickets, arrest people, and we track all those stats. But the one thing we don''t know, can''t measure, and can never track is also the most important part of your job-preventing crime." Success back then wasn''t judged on how many arrests we made, how many tickets we wrote, or who got the big case; we were successful when no one got hurt, no businesses got robbed, and no drunks were driving down the highway. When crime was down and people felt safe and were safe-that''s when we knew we had done our jobs. Over the next two decades, however, what it meant to be a cop would change. An entirely new standard would be set.
After my time in Orange, I did a brief stint at the Newport News, Virginia, police department until being offered a job at the sheriff''s office in Loudon County. The progression seemed logical to me; after five and a half years of working the street (pushing a cruiser), I grew tired of having to turn all my good cases over to some detective. So I put in for it, got promoted, and became a detective in the vice-narcotics section and street crimes unit. I had a dual role when I worked narcotics: one as a detective with the county, the other with the federal government as part of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) task force. County cases were mostly low-level narcotics enforcement and street crimes-the little guys selling dope out of their houses or hanging on the corner dealing. We also dealt with vice crimes like prostitution and illegal gambling. If I thought my first day on the road was sink or swim, my first day in vice-narcotics was more akin to "learn to fly or crash and burn." The vice-narcotics (Narcs) office was located outside the Sheriff''s Office.
Disguised as a dummy corporation, it was a clandestine office, backstopped as a small business working out of a warehouse in an industrial complex just outside Leesburg. When I arrived that first day, I was handed a wad of cash and the keys to an old, beat-up Oldsmobile and told not to come back until I had grown my hair out, pierced my ear, and bought a bag of dope. Mind you, I was twenty-seven years old, had had four years of JROTC in high school, went straight into the Army, and then worked more than five years as a uniformed patrol officer. My hair had never before touched my ears. Unlike the other detectives working property or violent crimes, those of us in Narcs essentially had to embed ourselves in the criminal element. We got to know the players, the hustlers, the dealers, and the crooks. All of it was undercover work, many times in deep cover, backstopped and supported with complete undercover identities, fake driver''s licenses, phony vehicle registrations, and untraceable credit cards. We had secret apartments, got jobs in warehouses, on farms, or in bars, and then went about our mission and started to develop contacts.
Our first order was simple: buy drugs, as much and as often as we could. From there we tried to work every case up the ladder and back to the source of supply, to infiltrate the organization, identify the conspiracy and all its conspirators, and then put a noose around its neck and bring it all tumbling down. The minefields in doing so, however, are many: living that life, surrounded by that element, fearing you''ll be found out, trying not to get killed, not to break the rules, not to get too deep, too close, or too drunk, all the while trying to build a good case that will withstand the scrutiny of some overpaid defense attorney. Your goal is to get the information, get the evidence, make the case, and then get the hell out. Until then, there''s no going home. No time-outs or do-overs. You can''t risk blowing your cover. Occasionally, you''d meet other narcs in some darkened alleyway, vacant lot, or maybe a rest-stop bathroom and hand over some crucial pieces of evidence or information.
You were always cautious that someone might be watching, that you would be recognized or outed. A degree of paranoia kept you alive. My time in Narcs and on HIDTA had afforded me the opportunity to work some big cases, use all the expensive equipment, and deploy the most (for that time anyway) cutting-edge tactics on nearly every kind of criminal and criminal organization. As big cases often transcend different genres of criminality, it also allowed me to work hand in hand with just about every variant of "alphabet soup" that you can think of (DEA, FBI, ATF, INS, USSS, USMS, FPS, NCIS, DCIS, and on.