Hero To Zero 2nd edition (17 page)

The ex-cop and current cop talked things over and came up with a plan. They decided to contact the trooper and try to convince him to drop the charges. The plan was a poor one, and in retrospect, you have to wonder what the hell they were thinking. Regardless, they did contact the trooper, and over a series of meetings offered him a couple of thousand dollars to drop the charges.

He wasn’t about to drop the charges. Soon Johnson was back in the press—front page, as a matter of fact. The article described him as the former police officer who had been accused of stealing a man’s wallet, and who was now charged with trying to bribe a state trooper to drop pending DUI charges.

Johnson had really dug himself a hole. He ended up pleading to the charges; the police officer he had asked to help him was also charged. That cop also lost his job and was found guilty of the bribery attempt.

TIM NELSON WAS SEVENTEEN WHEN
he went into the army. He was trained as an infantryman and then went on to Vietnam. It was late in the war and he would spend about a year there, and was later shipped home to complete his enlistment. He came back to his home state after his army hitch and bounced from job to job until he ended up testing to become a state trooper. He passed the tests, and found he liked the independence the job provided. He excelled as a trooper. This was when I met him. He was at the tail end of his career, and I was at the beginning of mine. I was a deputy sheriff, and we would frequently go for coffee together during the long night shifts.

Tim was a solid guy. Those of us in the sheriff’s department felt that the troopers were not real cops like us. They specialized only handling traffic cases, and were completely out of their element if they showed up to help out at a family fight, or, worse, a brawl at one of the bars that dotted the county. Tim was an exception to that rule. The time he had spent in Vietnam and since, working in various contracting jobs, had seasoned him. He could hold his own in any situation, and we frequently appreciated his arrival on a scene. At least he did no harm, and more often than not he helped us out. He was a pretty big guy, standing 6’3”, and he was fairly fit.

One night the fellas at the local country bar decided they didn’t like the way a group of hippies (yeah, seriously—they said “hippies”) was looking at them. One thing led to another, and a huge fight broke out.

Every available car was called and responded to the fight. We had our hands full trying to get the scene under control. There were just too many combatants and not enough of us.

Tim showed up and started to do what very few troopers would ever do, at least while I was a cop. He waded into the fight and started throwing people out. Literally—he physically grabbed them and threw them out. Anyone who tried to fight back found out fast that Tim might be older, but he was still able to scrap with the best of them. Like I said, he was a solid guy, capable in almost every way.

After the fight was over, we all met up for a quick drink and started to write reports, laughing and reliving the battle we had just survived. That was the reality of bar fights. It came down to survival, and we all knew it.

Things went on like this for some time. Tim liked to work the late shift, and so did most of us. We’d meet up at the closest 24-hour convenience store and talk about the night’s events over a drink or coffee. If there was ever a hint that anything was wrong, this might have been where it was first evident.

There was one moment I remember a look in his eye when a beautiful young woman walked into the store. She had obviously just left the nearby bar and was dressed to kill. He eyed her carefully, almost like a predator.

He then said, “I guess she isn’t drunk, we’ll let her drive home.” That was it. It wasn’t the things he said; it was the look in his eye. Momentarily, he looked evil and predatory.

About nine or ten months later, I showed up for coffee at the usual time, and Tim was not there. I asked around, and no one knew where he was. It was very much a “do not ask” response I received. Finally I went to the information source that all cops go to when they want to know what the hell is going on: dispatchers.

They told me that the solid, down-to-earth Time Nelson had been stopping drivers for speeding on a nearby interstate late at night. If they were men, he wrote a ticket and sent then on their way. If they were women, he would stress that they were likely to get a very expensive ticket for their reckless speeding. The ticket would cost several hundred dollars, and then their insurance would go up as well. This was likely to cost them a lot of money overall. Almost without exception the women would say, “Isn’t there some way to make this go away?” Crying, they did not realize the door that they had just opened.

Nelson would continue to emphasize the cost and the hardship the women had just caused their families, and when he felt he had them right where he wanted them, he would soften his hard-line attitude just a bit.

Maybe there was a way they could come to some kind of agreement. Apparently this worked for some time. Nelson would make the offer of “working out a deal”—a blowjob in exchange for dropping the ticket. Surprisingly, some women apparently did follow through with the deal.

Nelson continued to stop speeders and make deals where he could. He was finally caught when he stopped a car that he had stopped before. He recognized the woman as a previous speeder who had “made a deal.” This time, the woman had a female friend with her.

Nelson felt comfortable making his pitch in a more blatant, in-your-face manner than usual. But the woman had a witness this time, and refused to “deal” the ticket away.

Nelson had made a big mistake. The next morning, the woman was in the section commander’s office with her witness, filing her complaint.

Nelson was relieved of duty, and eventually made a plea deal with prosecutors. He resigned as a state trooper and moved on to another career. We were all shocked, because there was no hint of this behavior in anything we saw—except, as I mentioned, that one day and that predatory look.

LARRY MORAVEC GREW UP IN
a rural part of the county. Every day he would board the bus and begin the long ride to the schools he attended. Every day the bus passed the house of a deputy sheriff whom Larry idolized. He would frequently daydream about what it would be like to be a deputy and patrol the entire county.

As Larry grew older, he noticed the different cars that the deputy would use for work. First, a patrol car—a police package cruiser decked out with light bar, sirens, spotlights, and a fresh, clean paint job. He could see the shotgun rack holding a tactical shotgun, and extra antennas on the trunk and behind the light bar. The car looked awesome, and he imagined himself as the driver heading to a robbery in progress, headed out to make a difference. Later, the deputy had a K-9 truck, and, much later, the unmarked vehicle of an administrator. Larry knew one thing from the time he was a little boy: he wanted to know what it would be like to make a difference and be like that deputy.

Larry graduated high school in the middle of his class. He was one of those guys who had a natural knack for blending in. Everyone liked him, for the most part, and yet when you asked them his name, no one could remember it. In high school, this made him feel disliked or perhaps just tolerated by his peers. No one could seem to remember Larry, and yet he had a gift for making people trust him immediately. That gift would turn out to be an amazing asset.

Larry later said that his parents had raised him always to be direct and honest. They emphasized strongly to him, “When you have a problem, confront it head on—don’t hide from it and just hope it will go away.” Larry took that advice to heart, and it served him well for most of his life.

One day Larry was talking to a guy he had just met at a family party. The man asked him what he planned to do with his life now that he had graduated high school. Larry expressed his lifelong desire to be a cop. He was still too young actually to become a cop, but he was an adult, and could do other things in the field. The guy listened more intently than perhaps Larry realized. Larry did not know it, but the stranger was actually an undercover narcotics officer.

He sized Larry up and watched how well he communicated with other people at the party. He quickly noticed Larry had an amazing gift with people. They were instantly put at ease with his genuine manner and his habit of being direct and honest.

A couple of days later, the undercover cop contacted Larry and asked him if he was serious about the comment he’d made about wanting to be a cop. Larry replied he was, but he was not yet twenty-one and he would have to wait a few more years before he could even apply for any cop job.

The narcotics officer offered him the chance to act as a CI, or confidential informant. He would go undercover, acting as a police agent, and infiltrate local drug rings. Larry would be given an alias and wear a wire. He would make undercover buys as the agent directed him.

It was an opportunity that would scare the hell out of most people. Larry thought it over for about a second-and-a-half and said, “Sure, I’m in—when do we start?” The veteran officer smiled; he knew that Larry would be a one-in-a-million CI.

Larry became “Bill,”—and Bill racked up an unbelievable number of arrests for the narcotics strike force. He had a gift for always being in the right place at the right time.

A few years passed, and Larry was old enough now to enter law enforcement through the front door. He applied and was accepted as a correctional officer by his local sheriff’s department.

He started working his way up the food chain as soon as he arrived, paying his dues in the jail, working shitty assignments without complaining. Soon he was out on the road, driving that patrol car he had dreamed about every day as a young boy. It was his dream come true.

He was finally where he wanted to be. He was married to a beautiful young woman and had the job and the life he had dreamed of. He bought a house and started to build his version of the American dream. One night while Larry was at work, a friend called him. The friend sounded a little weird, and so Larry, being direct as he always was, asked, “What’s wrong?”

The friend paused; he didn’t know how to tell Larry what he had noticed on his way home from work. The friend was a cop too, and lived in the same neighborhood as Larry.

On his way home, as he turned the corner onto the street they both lived on, the friend thought he saw the garage door at Larry’s house closing, and he thought he saw a police car in the garage. Larry was a deputy sheriff, and the car his friend saw was clearly a regular police car.

Larry loved his wife, and she loved him. They had been married barely long enough to be out of the honeymoon phase. He thought it over and decided his friend was playing a mean prank on him, so he blew it off.

When Larry came home that morning, he looked around the house and found nothing out of place. His wife greeted him like always, and they talked about his night. Larry watched her carefully and later admitted that he noticed a distance between them—something in the way she looked away that was barely noticeable, and yet definitely there.

A couple of nights passed, and again Larry’s cop friend called and told him, “Hey, man, I am
not
kidding—there’s a fucking cop car in your garage. I parked a ways off and watched as the car pulled in and the garage door closed.”

Larry said, “Thanks. I’ll look into it.”

Every cop has been on these calls. You feel for the people who are betrayed, you feel their hurt and loss. You just pray it never happens to you. Larry thought it over. He had to see with his own eyes what the hell was going on at his home when he had gone to work.