Hero To Zero 2nd edition (4 page)

I was instantly on alert. I remembered, but I didn’t act like I was interested. I said, “Ray and his secret? No, not really.”

She laid it all out. When she was done, it all made sense. The details fit into what I already knew.

Ray had been transferred to the narcotics strike force after his latest success in the department’s specialty units. He had been an instant success, as was usual for Ray. He still had the boundless energy, the attention to detail, the single-minded focus on the job. He immediately started to make an impact. Ray had an intuition for narcotics, a sixth sense that was uncanny.

Ray loved to run to keep in shape, and his running partner was the sergeant of the unit—another fast-tracked, guaranteed performer who succeeded at every assignment he was given. Sergeant Billy Webster was a force to be reckoned with on the street. (He gets his own story later in this book.) The two cops were partners on and off the streets. They fit. They worked tirelessly and partied hard.

Billy Webster was the heartbroken girl’s short-lived roommate/romance. She told me that both men bragged to her often about taking narcotics—pain pills, mostly—that were seized in raids while working their cases in the undercover world of the narcotics strike force.

Both of them admitted this to her as they partied at her apartment, drinking hard liquor and popping the prescription pain pills. Each of them bragged about how they manipulated the paperwork and evidence documents during raids to hide their activities. According to her, they also bragged about how they spent money intended for undercover buys on their personal expenses, and she claimed that she had personally witnessed them popping handfuls of pain pills “like they were candy.” She said that they were both barely affected by the handfuls of pills, and in her opinion they were both hard-core addicts.

I listened and thought about the suspicions I’d had for years. I have mentioned in my other books the fact that leaks would occur in the department’s databases; information about informants would somehow seep out. The narcotics strike force would be planning to make a raid on a drug dealer, and ten minutes before they arrived, the phone would ring, the house would clear out, and the drugs would disappear. When they got there, there would be nothing. It all suddenly became really clear.

I listened as she recalled the conversations. It all fit; another piece of the fucked-up puzzle of the streets fell into place. This was the reality of the streets I worked, and the people I worked with.

Ray kept this demon at bay for some time. He hid in the world of undercover drug buys, fast money, and fast women. Eventually his body’s tolerance for the painkillers rose to such a level that he couldn’t hide the huge amounts he was stealing from the strike force’s drug seizures. He needed thirty to forty pills of hard-core prescription narcotics just to make it through the day. He was a junkie.

This explained the limitless energy Ray had. He was “jonesin’.” He was in withdrawal. I think that was why his leg bounced, why he kept moving and could not stop. He was in pain.

Ray’s addiction eventually drove him to make a serious error. One day he was at a local pharmacy, picking up a list of people who used the place to fill their prescriptions. He cross-referenced the list against other pharmacies’ lists of customers. Drug addicts who abuse prescription drugs often “doctor shop,” getting multiple prescriptions and then filling them at different pharmacies. The lists were provided to law enforcement to help battle the problem.

Ray had worked himself into the prescription drug specialist for the narcotics unit. It fit his needs. He now was a wolf in charge of watching the sheep. He thought he could keep his addiction problem hidden forever. It had worked so far, so why not?

He fucked up, though.

While the pharmacist was printing the lists, Ray grabbed a couple of bottles of strong pain pills off of the shelves to feed his increasing addiction. The pharmacist had been suspicious of some earlier losses of pills and had installed hidden cameras. He knew that someone was stealing from him, he just didn’t know who or how.

Ray was caught red-handed. The pharmacist reported the theft immediately. Ray ended up losing everything. His career, retirement, respect—all gone.

The people we worked with were surprised, shocked. They could not believe that Ray had done the theft. I met with Billy Webster’s ex-girlfriend later and she said, “I told you they were both dropping pain pills like they were candy.”

She was right. Everything she told me had been true. Webster would go down in flames as well a few months later, but for a different and unrelated incident.

AS AMAZING AS RAY FOSSUM
was as a cop, Billy Webster was even more so. I met him one day after he had just been assigned his first tour on the narcotics strike force. I was riding as an observer with a cop I knew, trying to see if I wanted to transition from the Military Police Corps to the civilian side of the house. Billy was friends with the cop I was riding with.

We were leaving the jail after he finished booking a suspect and were crossing the parking lot, when Webster pulled up in an unmarked car. Smiling his million-dollar smile, he started laughing, making us jump to the side as he pulled up fast, stopping hard, tires screeching. I was instantly pissed off, having no idea who this metrosexual-looking crazy man was who was trying to run us over.

He said, “Hey, what’s up?” to the cop I was with. I was glaring at him as they talked, and he said to the cop, “What’s this guy’s fucking problem?” Then to me, “Hey, we got a fucking problem here?” I didn’t answer.

The other cop explained I was a ride-along, and then he told me that Billy was an undercover cop. We continued to stare at each other. I was, as I still am, stubborn as hell, and when I get mad, I’m even more so. Finally I walked away, heading back to the patrol car while the two friends talked.

Later, the cop I was riding with explained that Billy was the single most amazing cop he had ever worked with. He said that Billy had an uncanny knack for knowing what was going on in the streets. He said that it was eerie the way Webster could locate people who were on the run or hiding from the cops, and that he’d been sent to the narcotics strike force “early,” meaning he was sent ahead of the normal time frame in which a cop was considered able to contribute to the unit.

I wouldn’t see Webster again for some time. Four years passed, and I ended up working for the same department as Webster and Fossum. I’d spent some time in the sheriff’s department and decided it wasn’t for me. I had tested at the police department while working at the sheriffs department and finally been hired. I was in training, and my training officer was introducing me to the other officers in the department.

We were leaving the jail, and there was the amazing Billy Webster. He’d just left the strike force. It was his turn to rotate out and back to patrol. Webster was fatter, straining the buttons on his old uniform shirts, and out of touch with the patrol side of the streets. Narcotics is a whole other world, and he’d specialized in it.

He had a drunk driver he was booking and was obviously nervous about what to do with the suspect. He asked my training officer if he would like to have his “new” rookie take the DUI for the experience. My trainer immediately saw through this ploy and said, “Nope. You catch it, you clean it”—meaning “You caught him, the work is yours to do.”

He commented on the excess weight Webster had gained and the way his buttons were barely containing his newly acquired pot gut. They exchanged “fuck-yous” and we departed.

I would run into Webster occasionally after I completed training, as our shifts overlapped and we worked the same area. He was every bit as streetwise as I’d been told. He knew everyone on every call in the inner city, and not only did he know
them
, he knew their families and associates. He was very aware of the people around him and the non-verbal communication they exchanged.

I tried to learn as much from him as I could. I was always asking questions, trying to see what he saw, hear what he heard. It seemed I could never quite understand how he grasped so well what was going on from the smallest and most insignificant details. Every call with him was an education.

I tried to keep up with him one night as he chased down, on foot, a rapist who had just broken into a house and raped a woman. Webster arrived at the scene as the guy took off on a bicycle. Webster was already out of his car, walking the area, looking for the guy. Webster saw him and sprinted off on foot after him, quickly closing the gap and tackling the suspect, knocking him off his bike and slamming him into the ground.

It was pretty cool to see his enthusiasm. Even more amazing, I later found out that he had sprinted after the rapist piece of shit on a damaged knee. He wore a knee brace every day at work and never complained.

Webster hated to lose in court as much as he hated to lose on the streets. He had a very high record of convictions in the courts, and the judges admired his ability to close a case.

I personally had a district court judge tell me while he was signing a search warrant for me that he thought very highly of Webster. He asked me if Webster was involved in the incident I was working on, for which he was signing the warrant. I told him that he wasn’t. The judge said that was unfortunate, as he liked seeing him in his court. He described Webster as “ballsy” and the best cop he had ever known—which is very high praise from a sitting district court judge.

One night I was sitting with Webster in a parking lot, parked side by side and I asked him about a narcotics case he’d lost in court. It rarely happened, and he was pissed. He told me all about it and then said, “But that’s okay, in the end they got theirs.”

“What do you mean?”

He laughed and made me promise not to tell. I said of course I wouldn’t tell. He smiled and told me that he’d gone to the suspect’s house while off duty and slashed their recently purchased tires on their jacked-up 4x4 truck. The tires were hugely oversized and very expensive. He Webster said, “No one gets one over on me, ever.” He said, “ What the courts won’t take care of, we will. We are cops and we keep the shitbags in line, no matter what.” He then smiled and drove away.

Another incident occurred when Webster was on a call with one of his friends in the department. The other cop was training a new guy we called “Skidmark.” All three were sent to a child-abuse call, and when they arrived, they found that the man had indeed sexually abused this young child.

There is a special place in every cop’s heart for child abusers; it is a dark place you don’t want to visit. The rules start to break down there. Anger seeps in at the inadequacies of the system, and it becomes harder and harder to follow what the rest of the world sees as the right or correct thing to do.

That night, the two veteran cops lost it, and beat the abusive suspect up a bit. Not a lot, but more than the self-righteous Skidmark could live with. He turned them in to the department’s internal affairs unit. They were investigated and given time off without pay after having been found to be in the wrong on the incident.

It isn’t pretty, but it happens. All cops have been there. Webster’s street-cred went up with his fellow cops for caring enough about the abused child to lose it on the suspect and beat his ass. Meanwhile, Skidmark had sealed his fate as on the department as a rat and a snitch.

Webster lived larger than life when off duty. Cops don’t make much money, but he often went on Caribbean cruises with his wife and kids. They owned a new motor home and a new boat, and had recently purchased a new home on the southeast side of the city.

When other cops questioned him about the lifestyle he lived, he claimed his wife made a lot of money at her job, and that he was a better money manager than they were. He added that he was also in the National Guard, and made money there. Cops are a suspicious bunch, and no one bought this explanation.

One night while I was out to dinner with a couple of old-timers from the force, I heard them discuss the tight- knit group of friends Webster had and how they all lived above the standard a cop could normally afford. These guys had seen a lot in twenty-or-more years of law enforcement, and they knew that if it walked like a duck and quacked like a duck, it was probably a duck—even if you couldn’t prove it. I listened and watched.

Webster had a friend who owned a towing company in the city. Often the friend would ride along when Webster worked at night, accompanying him on the calls he was assigned. Webster was known as a “shit magnet,” meaning he could get into some very hairy situations, so going on calls with him was always an adrenaline rush. The two friends went on vacations together and hung out often when they were not at work. Everyone was suspicious of the friendship.