Hero To Zero 2nd edition (11 page)

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 the 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.”

The other cops laughed at the veteran cop and made fun of his simple remark. He replied, “You all know what we see every damn night. The very rich are no better off than the very poor.” He continued, “I’ll be surprised if all that money doesn’t ruin his life.” I thought about that and wondered.

A couple of years later I was called to William’s new house on a report of prowlers. I parked a block away and walked in. After I confirmed that the prowlers had left, I met him in the darkened driveway. We walked around his luxurious new house with a flashlight, checking to see if anything had been stolen. We walked together, talking quietly as we checked the grounds. William had bought a piece of land on this, the most recent street to be cut into the mountains high above the city.

His house was the last house on the street, and had manicured grounds and low-voltage lighting along all of the walkways. He paid a gardener to maintain the grounds, and kept two huge Rottweilers as guard dogs for the estate. He had a huge Bayliner boat, a motor home, and a decked-out Jeep CJ. He proudly showed me all of his beautiful new possessions as he told me that he, too, had once been a cop, but had worked himself out of the job and into the courts as an attorney.

He said, “I used to be one of you, I know what it’s like on the streets, but that life was not for me. I had greater aspirations, but I still keep in touch with what is going on in the streets.” I smiled and listened.

When we finished and found nothing was missing, I left his immaculate house. I would never lay eyes on him again. I did, however, follow the events of his life.

While I was driving away I thought of how it was curious that, no matter what happens to cops, they always seem to identify most with their time spent in the streets. Some cops get promoted and become administrators, and no matter how much time will have passed since they actually worked the street, they think that they’re still a part of it. Here was William, living in a million-dollar home, surrounded by the best that he could purchase, and he still felt the need to make sure I knew he had not lost his edge and was “in touch with the streets.” Yeah, right.

Any good cop will tell you that once you leave the streets, even for a moment, you lose touch. It is a constantly changing and dynamic environment. If you are not constantly aware and listening, just one slip-up and your arrogant ass is dead. These administrators and lawyers no longer had any idea what the streets were about.

The next day, the shift sergeant invited me to lunch and asked me to meet him at one of the nicer restaurants on the west side of the city. I walked in and was immediately struck by how beautiful the hostess was. I could go on and on about her. The truth is that words cannot describe women like this. They are rare.

The sergeant was watching me and smiled, waving me to his table. After we had ordered lunch, he said, “I heard you were dispatched to William Ross’s home last night.”

“I was sent there on a prowler call, but I found nothing.”

The sergeant smiled. “What did you think?”

“Of what?”

He began to fill in the blanks for me and told me about William’s rise to riches.

“William married into one of the wealthiest, if not
the
wealthiest, families in the area. He went to law school and became a lawyer, but more than that, he joined the elite socialites of the area by marrying a millionaire’s daughter. A lot of the things William showed you he’s earned, and a lot came from his wealthy wife.”

I shrugged. It didn’t really matter me how William obtained the things he owned. He still wanted me to know he was in touch with the streets while living his million-dollar lifestyle.

I told the sergeant what William had told me, and he laughed too. Then he said, “There might be more to that than you realize.” I asked what he meant.

He said, “Did you notice that sweet Porsche 944 in the parking lot, with the personalized license plates?” I had; it was pristine and had a beautiful dark-red paint job.

“Why?”

“The car belongs to that hostess you were staring at when you came in here.”

“No shit! How does a hostess afford a car like that?”

The sergeant smiled, “
That
is the correct question to ask.” He continued, “Rumor around the restaurant is she also has a wicked cocaine habit as well. Two very expensive habits, fast cars and drugs—and she works part-time as a hostess. Tell me, Zach, how do you think she can afford either?”

The only things that came to mind were high-end prostitution or porn. I mentioned both to the sergeant. He laughed and replied, “Sure, or you are the girlfriend of a certain high-priced lawyer married to the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the state.”

The light came on. Now I knew why the sergeant had invited me to lunch at the restaurant. I watched the hostess as she continually sniffed and brushed at her irritated nose. She looked like she had a cold, one of the more subtle signs of snorting coke. I said, “Really?” I had talked to Williams wife at the house and she was amazingly beautiful as well, and the fact that this one guy has two amazingly hot women was unbelievable.

The sergeant said he had it on pretty good authority (whom he refused to name) that William had bought the beautiful hostess the Porsche and that he frequently took her on vacations to Grand Cayman Island when he went on “business trips.” He also kept her supplied with cocaine. William was living large, just like he’d planned.