We Are the Cops, page 15
Over the years I have been on a number of raids with the ‘Narcs’ – narcotic officers – who specialise in targeting crack houses and the like. One of the things that always struck me about the houses we raided was the utter squalor these people operated in. Sure, this was in Detroit, but even so, there was absolutely no glamour in it. And there was far less laughter involved when I spoke to officers about narcotics. Although some did manage to find humour in it occasionally, this was clearly a much more serious environment and subject.
Over a skillet breakfast in the back corner of an unremarkable diner in an unremarkable neighbourhood of a Midwestern city, a former undercover narcotics officer told me about his work buying drugs from dealers and how he had to learn how to bullshit. Dealers were jumpy and buys were tense, he said. Whether they were an undercover officer or a genuine user, buyers were always viewed with suspicion and he told me that dealers would often call his bluff. It was an extremely dangerous occupation; gangs, drugs and cops don’t always mix in the way that they should and even his own colleagues, he whispered, couldn’t always be trusted.
As the waitress topped up our coffee for the fourth time, the door at the front of the diner opened and in walked a heavy set black guy with a skinny black girl. The officer knew the guy and the guy knew the officer; his days of undercover buys were well behind him but he hadn’t been forgotten. We didn’t leave and we didn’t rush our food but the officer continually raised his eyes to look at the guy and I felt extremely uncomfortable, and not just because the officer refused to let me pay for breakfast. Again, I felt that sense of how different and serious the business of narcotics can be.
Although narcotics may be behind much of the crime we see today (‘Take away the drugs and you’ll take away 90% of the crime,’ I was told repeatedly), operating in that world felt totally separate from regular policing. It all felt very, very dark.
I’ve seen people alive with their legs completely infested with maggots – heroin addicts, junkies. They get open sores and lesions and they have giant swollen hands. You don’t want to touch them and you pray that you don’t have to deal with them. You don’t even search them.
These open sores would have maggots climbing in and out of them. It’s horrible and they don’t really care. All they’re worried about is their next fix.
Crack just destroys people – it destroys their lives.
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With street-corner narcotic sales – ‘corners’ – this is how it works: you’ll have your sellers, you’ll have your lookouts and you’ll have protection – guys who are shooters, who protect the spot. Sometimes they have the gun on them but if the lookouts see us coming, they’ll alert them and they’ll put it away – they’ll put it in a bush, they’ll put it underneath a car tyre, in the grass, they’ll just hide it somewhere nearby because if another faction – another gang – shows up and wants to do a drive-by, they have to be there to protect the money and the people.
In narcotics we’d run up to them or sneak up from behind and catch guys making a sale or catch a guy with a pack, which is ten or twenty little bundles of cocaine, heroin or whatever they’re selling.
But they get smarter, they realise that if they get caught with the whole pack, they’re going to do some time. So what they’ll do is, they’ll stash it somewhere – can be anywhere in a bush, in the grass, underneath the garbage, whatever, in a car, in the house. When that sale comes, they’ll get the money, go grab one or two packs – however many they need – and go directly to their car and sell it. So if they get caught off guard, they’ll only have one or two or three – that’s it.
A lot of times, they’ll try to swallow it. A lot of times they’ll try to just pitch it and run. They adapt, though. Some of them are dumb, but a lot of them are smart. If something isn’t working, they’ll change and do it smarter.
So in a lot of ways it’s become harder to be the police on the streets now. You have kids working as lookouts on street corners. Kids on the second or third floor of a house, or on the roof, it depends on the terrain. Sometimes they’ll have the spot in the middle of the block and they’ll have lookouts on each side. If they’re really good, they’ll have lookouts in the alley, because that’s where we used to sneak up and kind of flank ‘em, because we knew that they had lookouts on the corner. So they adapt and they change.
Anything from ten years old to sixty years old, I’ve caught selling. They do it for different reasons. Some of them are kids that join a gang and that’s what they have to do when they start. You’re going to be a lookout initially, maybe become the server after, with promotion. Later, you may take care of the money and after that you may become the shooter – the security.
You’ll have a hype, who’s addicted to whatever drug. You ever hear of a hypodermic needle? Well, a ‘hype’ is somebody who injects – that’s why we call them that. You’ll have a hype that needs to make money for their addiction, so they’ll sell, if the gang trusts them enough. Sometimes they get to the point where they can’t trust the hype because he’s going to steal their money – even if they’re a badass gangbanger – because the hype is controlled by the drug. But if they trust them enough, they’ll let the hype sell. So you’ll get some fifty, sixty-year-old guy out there who’s selling just to make that twenty dollars – for every ten bags he sells, he makes twenty dollars – the rest goes to the organisation.
A lot of times the hypes will see a customer driving down the street and say, ‘I’ll jump in your car, I’ll take you there. But you’ve got to cut a bit off that rock for me.’ So, they’ll do that, they’ll be like, ‘All right, go here, go there.’ They’ll take you to the drug dealer and then they’ll want half of that rock or half of the heroin or whatever, and that’s their fee for locating you for that seller.
It’s extremely organised. Extremely organised. In narcotics, we’ve worked up to a year on one group that would sell on two different blocks. They’re organised – from the lookouts to the guy who serves, to the guy who does security, the guy who handles the money, the guy who runs that spot, the guy who delivers the product every day, to a guy who picks up the money – and then above all that are the bosses.
Sometimes the bosses, if they’re smart, they won’t even show up to the spot. They don’t need to; they’ve got somebody doing everything for them. So it’s a little harder, you’ve got to follow them, you’ve got to find out who’s bringing the product to the spot, you’ve got to find out who’s picking up the cash. Some of them are very complicated but some of them are very basic. Sometimes they just sell out of a house. You grab them, you get search warrants for the house, you hit the house.
The problem is the laws and the judges being so lenient on them; you lock them up and they’ll be on the street in a few months and they’ll start doing the same thing again. There’re times when we’ve hit the same house three or four times. I’ve heard some teams have hit a house up to five or six times; same house that keeps doing the same thing.
My opinion, if you want somebody to stop doing what they’re doing, you’ve got to make the punishment fit the crime – make it a deterrent. Like homicide; if you don’t want people running around killing each other, you have the death penalty and you have judges that sentence. If you don’t get the death penalty, at least put them away for fifty years, just to keep them away from civilisation. That’s it.
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One of the attributes of a good undercover officer is the ability to bullshit, talk, make up stories; ‘It’s not for me – it’s for my girlfriend. I don’t do this shit’. You know, something like that.
There was an incident where an undercover guy was doing a buy but it wasn’t on a street corner; he did it in a bathroom in some bar. It was a one-on-one deal and then two more of their guys came in and threw the undercover guy against the wall and told him, ‘You’re going to do it right now, right in front of us.’
He was forced to take the drugs otherwise they were going to beat the fuck out of him, kill him, whatever. As soon as he gets out of the bathroom he goes to the other undercover guy, who’s with him but was still in the bar, and he’s like, ‘Call everybody in.’
So everybody just converged and they caught them all. It’s all investigated and the undercover goes directly to the hospital and gets his blood drawn, you know? I think he got admitted.
But the department don’t want you to do it – take the drugs. They say, ‘Avoid it. It’s a last resort. If they’re going to kill you and you gotta do it, then you gotta do it. Otherwise avoid it.’
When it happens, they have to investigate it but it’s very, very rare. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you could just walk away from the deal and say, ‘Fuck you man, I don’t want to deal with your shit. You’re not going to tell me what to do.’
But it has happened and the department’s always drug testing us. I think when I worked narcotics I set records for them testing me. But they have caught cops using marijuana, cocaine, whatever. Those officers get fired.
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I bought dope for a little while; I was an undercover officer. I like adrenaline but it definitely doesn’t get any easier. The first time was very hard and any time after that you’re still on edge – really nervous. But you try to get better, you try to use props, you try to use stories or you try to bullshit with them.
Sometimes they won’t even take you. I’ve walked up to a lot of corners and they’re like, ‘You’re too swol’ – meaning swollen – ‘You’re too big. You’re the police.’
They’ll know right away and you just get shut down. So I changed my appearance to try and not look like the police. I try to talk to them – talk them into selling. But some places wouldn’t and then you’d have to send another undercover officer in and try it with them. I’d probably be successful only half the time.
A lot of gangs, they ask for a resume – like a street resume – literally. A lot of the black gangs on the Southside, they won’t sell to anybody that’s not black. A lot of them, they won’t sell to anybody they don’t know from the neighbourhood. They won’t sell to you unless somebody that they know brings you; like, someone to vouch for you. So some of the gangs are harder than others to buy from, to infiltrate, to investigate, to lock up.
A lot of places, they’ll ask, ‘Where are you from? Who do you know? Who told you to come here?’
‘Well this guy sent me.’
Then they’ll quiz you. ‘What colour are our bags? What size are our bags? What’s our product called?’ They ask that because a lot of times heroin has a street name, so they go, ‘What’s our shit called?’
So they’ll quiz you and if they’re not happy, they’ll say, ‘No, you gotta come back. You gotta come back with somebody. You’ve got to come back and bring that person.’
So it’s very hard and they always think you’re the police. They try to figure out if you are or not. Some groups are different; some places will not serve to a white person. They will not sell unless you’re black.
Then you have the groups, like on the Westside. The Westside is crazy. Crazy! Almost everyone on the Westside had a drug spot. Some had multiple drug spots. You go to one corner where you could buy heroin, in the middle you could buy marijuana and at the other end you could buy cocaine. It’s crazy. And they were a little greedy on the Westside – they would sell to a lot more people. You get a lot of people who would drive in from the suburbs – kids, adults, whatever. Suburbanites would come in and go to a gang and buy their drugs and then get right back on the highway and leave. That’s where you’d see three, four, five guys run up to a car and try to make that sale.
But if you’re a little greedier and you want to sell more, the chances are you’re going to get caught.
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I worked on this organisation run by two guys when I was with drug enforcement, and they were basically robbing other drug dealers to get both money and drugs. Drug dealers robbing other drug dealers. And they were dressing up as police, to do it. They were torturing their victims; they were brutal.
It was a group up in northwest Baltimore, they were second generation drug dealers and they had an entire organisation, which they ruled through fear; they shot their own people, stabbed their own people, basically to keep them in line. If their people messed up money, they would hurt them. And part of their enterprise was robbing other drug dealers. They dressed up like the police, put masks on and just robbed them. So they were enterprising in that way. Then they started robbing businesses and they would plan these elaborate heists.
So these guys were really an entire crime wave. One guy even shot his own brother-in-law. He was basically without a conscience – both of them were. They owned a legitimate business – a barbershop – but it was really just a hangout for drug dealers and people in the trade. After all, everybody has to get their hair cut.
But yeah, they would dress up like police. It wasn’t a uniform so much as they got BDU’s – Battle Dress Uniform; you know, pants, police style jackets – and they wore balaclavas over their faces. They just tried to make themselves appear to be police. I don’t necessarily think that people really thought that they were police but if somebody is chasing you down the street and they look like they might be the police, maybe your first inclination is to think that they are.
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.
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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.
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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.’
