Hero To Zero 2nd edition (8 page)

Ed could not believe what he was hearing. His medical bills started to pile up, and he was unable to work because of the injury.

This was the beginning of the end for Ed. As the bills piled up, he eventually lied about his condition and came back to work before his shoulder was healed.

He tried to work his way out of the bills, picking up every overtime shift he could. His new wife was mad that he was never around to help with their new child—while his ex-wife was pushing for more child support for his first child.

He was getting jammed from every angle. To make matters worse, soon after this happened, his ex-wife was charged for check fraud, and he had to take custody of their child while she served time in prison. He kept fighting back, working hard, and nursing the injured shoulder. He was under a lot of stress.

There was an apartment building in the center of the city that housed mostly poor people. Entire families would be housed in one-bedroom apartments. The building had been an upscale apartment house in the 1940s, but fifty years later it was run down and overpopulated.

One night, an elderly man was sitting in the basement of the building, in a recliner someone had thrown away. Somehow it had made its way into the basement, and it was where this man slept if he found it vacant at night.

The man was homeless. This was one of many places he had found in the inner city to stay, which was out of the elements, and relatively safe. He would sift through the cigarette butt cans outside the apartment building, looking for discarded portions of used cigarettes. One night he found several, and began to smoke in this favorite throw-away chair in the basement of the building. He fell asleep, and the cigarette fell out of his hand into the cracks of the chair’s upholstery.

An hour later, he woke up to find his chair on fire. He ran from the building, but warned no one. The building was quickly engulfed.

Ed was on duty that night, and responded to the report of the fire. He and many other officers arrived and were out of their vehicles. They entered the burning building, grabbing children, old men, women, and anyone they could save, dragging them from the smoke.

Ed finally really was a hero, and the reality was painful. He and his fellow officers saved a lot of people, but not everyone. He had to stand by and listen while people screamed from inside the building as they burned to death. His shoulder had not healed, and in the rush to save people he had aggravated the injury.

I talked to him the next day, and he broke down in tears. He told me about hearing little children screaming from inside the burning building, and feeling helpless and unable to do anything while they burned alive.

His shoulder was really in bad shape now, and he asked me to tell no one how bad it really was. I agreed not to tell anyone. About a month went by, and he decided to try to get a job in another department.

This happens a lot after an incident like that fire. Cops will leave to try to get away from the memories of death. Ed was testing for the new job, and could not pass the physical because of his injured shoulder. He was really depressed afterwards, and started to drink a lot.

Soon after, he was caught drunk-driving and arrested for DUI. His medals and work ethic meant nothing now. He was a DUI enforcement officer and had been caught driving drunk. He was disgraced. He was convicted and lost the job that had meant so much to him. His new wife left him as well. His entire life fell apart in the space of six months.

He joined Alcoholics Anonymous and tried to recover his life. The last I heard, he was running a backhoe for an outdoor pool company. He was now digging the holes for installing the swimming pools out of which he had pulled the alleged drowned infants years earlier.

OUR DEPARTMENT HAD SEVERAL SETS
of brothers working as cops. Looking back now, I recall at least five sets of brothers working for the department. But none of them were more dysfunctional than the Preston brothers. They are great examples of amazing cops who went down in flames.

The Preston brothers were as different as night and day. Mike, the older one, was tall, thin, and had a head full of dark hair. He loved attention, loved to party, and went to all the department functions. Scott, the younger one, was stocky, athletic, had thinning hair, and was edgy as hell. He hated parties. He trusted and socialized with no one. Both were gifted in their own way. Here are their stories:

MIKE PRESTON

Mike Preston had one major goal as a kid. He wanted to be a cop more than anything. He watched every Dirty Harry Callahan movie, every John Wayne movie, and every cop show there was to watch on TV. He had to become a cop; it was an obsession. But he had some very serious obstacles to overcome to make that goal a reality.

First, Mike and Scott were both raised poor in the city in which they worked. That meant baggage from inner-city life. Mike was a high-school dropout. At seventeen, he had been kicked out of every high school within driving range for fighting and failure to attend classes. He could not overcome the demons of his childhood. Angry and looking for a face to smash so he could vent his anger, he fought all the time, and when there was no one to fight, there was always his favorite punching bag: his brother Scott.

At twenty-four, Mike decided it was time to turn his life around. He was working as a gas-station attendant for minimum wage. He had not graduated high school. He had an arrest record for drugs. He was married to a woman he had met at a drag race in which he was driving, and he had impregnated her with one of the five illegitimate children he would eventually sire. But in spite of all that, he decided one day to try to become a cop.

If he had had any idea what a long shot it was for a convicted drug grower and user to become a cop, he would have tried for something else. But he had no idea that people who get arrested for drugs never make it as cops. So he charged forward.

To make a very long story short, he amazingly overcame all those obstacles. He had his criminal record expunged, obtained his GED, he divorced the crazy drag-racing groupie he’d married, and through a series of incredibly lucky breaks became a cop in the city in which he and his brother Scott had grown up.

In his mind, Mike had arrived. He had dug himself out of a crushing hole of poverty and no future and had become a cop. He bought a used Corvette to reward himself.

He worked all the overtime shifts he could get, and saved up for his dream house in the mountains above the city. He was not a good father, or a good husband. But he had achieved his childhood dream of being a cop.

His father was immensely proud of Mike, his oldest son, and of his accomplishments. He bragged about him often at the coffee shop in the afternoons, after work, and on the weekends.

One day Mike’s dad had coffee at his favorite coffee shop with a man who was also a cop.

“Do you know my son, Mike? If so, what do you think of him?”

“You should be proud of him. Mike is an outstanding rookie and a bright star in the department. Mike has some issues, he has a hard time controlling his anger, and the department has taken his nightstick away for excessive force, but overall he is going to be a solid cop…someday.”

Mike’s dad beamed with pride at this report on his oldest son. Think of how he felt, knowing his oldest son was a cop in the city in which he had raised him. He could not have been more proud of his son and all that he had overcome to get where he was.

Mike paid his dues in patrol. He handled calls like the rest of the rookies. He had a few bumps along the way, and nearly lost it all when one day a senior patrolman suddenly remembered who Mike really was. Mike had a past in the city as a drug user and a street cruiser who did nothing but look for fights. Mike told me one night while we sat and talked in a parking lot that one day a senior patrolman suddenly remembered the loser version of Mike and remembered that he had been arrested for growing pot in his apartment. This should have shown up on his background investigation when he was hired, but it had not.

The hunt was on. The senior patrolman was out to rid the department of Mike and shatter his dream of being a cop. Mike told me that he was seriously worried that his past had come back to haunt him. He was called in to the administration and had to meet with a crusty old lieutenant, who also was in charge of the computer and records section for the department.

The lieutenant had already discovered that Mike had expunged his arrest record. He had access to the state file at an admin level, which granted him unlimited access to the records. He asked Mike to explain the arrest.

Mike admitted that he was really scared. His dream was slipping away, but he came clean and told the lieutenant everything—all of it, more than was even in the files. The lieutenant was impressed by his honesty, and thought it over. This was before software had the ability to track a user’s action in a program, and when he’d finished thinking about it, the lieutenant simply deleted Mike’s arrest and conviction record, and then told him to act like this had never happened. Mike never saw his records deleted; they just never existed.
Understood
?

Mike understood. His dream had been saved, and he never forgot the gift he had been given. Mike told me of the incident and how he could not believe his luck. This couldn’t happen today, but in 1985 it was possible, and did happen. The witch-hunt stopped and Mike continued on with his career.

Mike had a passion. Like every other cop in this book, he was exceptional at something. In Mike’s case, he was exceptional at finding stolen bicycles.

To understand Mike’s passion you had to know his history. For most of us at the department, Mike’s passion was a mystery, so I asked Scott, his brother, why Mike was so determined to locate every stolen bike in the city. Scott rolled his eyes.

“You have to understand, Mike had a bike when he was thirteen years old. He saved all his money and bought the bike of his dreams—a Schwinn Continental. He had it for about one month, showing it off to the whole neighborhood, and then one day it was stolen from behind our garage.”

Mike blamed Scott, of course. He said Scott had left the bike lock undone, and that the Hispanic family across the street must have taken it. Mike was pissed beyond belief, and heartbroken.

Their dad also thought one of the Hispanic kids must have taken it. At the time, Scott was hanging out with one of that family’s kids, and he invited him over for dinner and to play basketball, much to his dad’s disapproval. When the bike was stolen, Mike’s dad confronted the eight-year-old Hispanic boy, and told him that he could no longer come over to play with Scott.

“I know that you had something to do with stealing Mike’s bike and you are no longer welcome here,” Mike’s dad said. The boy tried to explain that he had done nothing, but there was no reasoning with the older man.

I asked Scott, “Are you serious? This is why he has made it his mission in life to recover stolen bikes?” I mean it was an obsession—Mike was ridiculed by all the other cops, and even the dispatchers had assigned him the unofficial call sign of “BIKE-ONE,” mocking his unrelenting mission to find stolen bicycles.

Scott replied, “Yep that’s it. That’s the reason why. The funny thing is, thirty years later I actually found out who
did
steal the bike.”

Scott said, “I was working an event for overtime pay, and I was talking to one of the DJs at the event. The DJ and I had grown up in the same neighborhood and we remembered each other. We started talking, and out of nowhere, the DJ admitted to stealing Mike’s bike.”

Scott said that the DJ had been arrested several times as a kid for breaking into homes and stealing items. He said that the DJ gave a detailed account of stealing the bike and selling it, and then using the money to buy pot. The DJ laughed at how heartbroken Mike had been and said, “That’s what he gets for showing off his bike, the arrogant dumbass.”

”So now you know the reason for the unrelenting search for stolen bikes by ‘BIKE-ONE.’ Mike wanted to try to make sure that he did what he could to get back every stolen bike for every kid in the city. It was a personal goal for him to make a difference to the kids.”

Mike had a few assignments in the department, but for the most part, aside from catching bicycle thieves, he was not very motivated. He had a reputation for doing the absolute bare minimum to get by. He tried out for Motors, but was rejected.