Rise of the Warrior Cop (20 page)

This time the White House circulated a preliminary list of names, which met with derision in the media and parts of the Senate. Nixon then had to withdraw the first two nominees he announced after they were deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association. Nixon finally turned to Louis Powell, a Virginia lawyer who had previously served as president of the ABA. Powell was quickly confirmed.

Nixon’s nomination for the other position was something of a surprise. William Rehnquist was head of the Justice Department’s
Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), where his job was to write legal opinions when the administration requested them. (A critic might argue that the office exists to give the executive branch a legal argument justifying it to do just about anything it wants.) Nixon often mistakenly called him “Renchberg.”

From his position in the OLC, Rehnquist signed off on all of the controversial provisions in Nixon’s various crime bills, including preventive detention, expansive wiretapping powers, and the no-knock raid.
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He was as hawkish on crime as anyone in the administration. John Mitchell once said that Rehnquist was the “only lawyer I know who would willingly defend the Sheriff of Nottingham.”

Rehnquist had a bumpier road to confirmation than Powell. But after some often contentious hearings and debate—including some aggressive questioning from Sen. Sam Ervin about Rehnquist’s time at the OLC—he was confirmed in December 1971 by a vote of 68–26.
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The man who had written the legal justifications for Nixon’s crime policy now had a seat on the US Supreme Court.

B
Y THE SUMMER OF
1971,
NINETEEN STATES HAD ADOPTED
Nixon’s model antidrug legislation.
⁴¹
His brute force approach to attacking the drug supply had begun to filter down to local police agencies. But Nixon was stewing over the fact that despite their success in making crime an issue and pushing through some of the toughest crime bills the country had ever seen, they’d yet to reap much political benefit from the effort. The evidence lay in the modest results of the 1970 midterms. “We still haven’t gotten through the strong position on law and order despite our leadership in this field, all of the public relations devices we use to get it across, and my hitting it hard on the campaign,” Nixon wrote in a December 1, 1970, memo to his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman.
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An internal poll taken a few months later confirmed his analysis—the public feared crime but was still largely unaware of anything Nixon was doing about it.
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The White House needed something tangible to tout to the public. If they couldn’t use actual crime data to show their initiatives were working, perhaps they could just create their own impressive statistics by generating lots of arrests and convictions at the federal level. The journalist Edward Jay Epstein writes, “[Nixon] reminded Ehrlichman and Krogh that there was only one area in which the federal police could produce such results on demand—and that was narcotics.”
⁴⁴

But there remained the question of how to do it. While the federal narcotics enforcement agency, BNDD, had been expanded from four hundred officers in 1969 to two thousand by 1971, Nixon and Mitchell had been persuaded early in the administration to focus the agency’s energy on targeting high-level traffickers, at home and overseas. Its mission was to drain the drug supply, which meant long, complicated investigations that in theory would result in high-
quality
arrests, but not in a high quantity of them.
⁴⁵
Krogh had asked BNDD director John Ingersoll to reverse course and devote resources to making easy, high-profile arrests of low-level offenders that the administration could use for PR purposes. Ingersoll refused, arguing that those sorts of arrests might have made for good politics, but they did little to reduce crime or addiction. The BNDD was just one among several federal bureaucracies that had been pushing back on Nixon’s increasingly aggressive antidrug policies. He was also getting frustrated by the lack of cooperation from the Treasury Department and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

So the White House crime team came up with a plan. They would launch an all-out PR offensive to scare the hell out of the public about crime, and to tie crime to heroin. Once voters were good and terrified, they would push for reorganization to consolidate drug policy and enforcement power within the White House. Krogh put together a quick-hitting but multifaceted strategy that included planting media scare stories about heroin, publicly recalling ambassadors to embarrass heroin-producing countries like Thailand and Turkey, and holding high-level (but entirely staged)
strategy sessions that they’d invite the media to attend. The plan culminated with a planned speech from Nixon that would forge new frontiers in fearmongering. An aide to Krogh told the journalist Epstein years later, “If we hyped the drug problem into a national crisis, we knew that Congress would give us anything we asked for.”
⁴⁶

G. Gordon Liddy, who the next month would head up the White House “plumbers” group implicated in the Watergate scandal, motivated his PR team with a series of films to educate and inspire them about the power of government propaganda. According to Epstein, Liddy’s movie nights concluded with
Triumph of the Will,
Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous (but brilliant and effective) 1934 film glorifying Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
⁴⁷

The scare strategy was executed as planned. Nixon’s June 17, 1971, speech more than met expectations. He declared drug abuse “public enemy number one” and asked for emergency powers and new funding to “wage a new, all-out offensive.”
⁴⁸
Years later, both this speech and a similar one he gave the following year would alternately be considered the start of the modern “war on drugs.” In a poll taken the following month, Americans named drug abuse as the most urgent domestic problem facing the country.
⁴⁹

A few weeks after the PR offensive, Liddy began working on a new plan to shift enforcement power to the White House. To work around obstinates like Ingersoll at the BNDD, Liddy ensured that the new elite enforcement agency would operate directly out of the White House. It would consist of narcotics “strike forces” to be dispatched across the country and populated with personnel pulled from other federal law enforcement agencies and local law enforcement. They would fund the program through the LEAA, which would allow them to use grants to persuade local police departments to cooperate. The strike forces would get high-profile, media-friendly arrests, generate empty but impressive-sounding arrest statistics Nixon could tout, and operate directly under Nixon and his top aides. By autumn, Nixon had given it the green light.
⁵⁰

The new agency would be called the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, or ODALE. Nixon appointed forty-four-year-old Myles Ambrose to lead it. Ambrose favored a much more aggressive, rough-’em-up style of drug enforcement. He had been head of Customs during Operation Intercept, and it probably didn’t hurt that these clashing philosophies about law enforcement had led to repeated feuds with Ingersoll, the BNDD head who was currently a thorn in Nixon’s side. Ingersoll only learned about the new agency while watching a TV news special in late December 1971.
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But ODALE was always strictly for show. It would never have more than a few hundred agents. Nixon’s executive order creating the agency even included an eighteen-month sunset provision. That wasn’t nearly enough time or personnel to fulfill the agency’s lofty mission to “stop the proliferating addict population.” ODALE existed to show off the Nixon administration’s showpiece crime tools—no-knock raids, copious use of wiretaps, preventive detention, and the power to jail witnesses who refused to testify before grand juries. Federal narcotics agent John Finlator would say in a couple years that the office “was strictly a political thing. They were trying to prove the No. 1 problem was drugs, as Nixon said. They were under pressure to produce.”
⁵²

In March 1972, all was set to go. The strike forces began . . . striking. The problem was that they weren’t always sure exactly
what
they were striking.
⁵³

H
UMBOLDT
C
OUNTY
, C
ALIFORNIA, LIES ABOUT TWO HUNDRED
miles north of San Francisco along the Pacific Coast. It is vast, mountainous, heavily forested, and sparsely populated country, home to a sizable portion of the state’s towering redwood trees. Over the last several decades, the county’s immensity, forest cover, and terrain have made it ideal for covert marijuana cultivation—and the hippie, agrarian pot culture that goes with it. And that has often put Humboldt County in the crosshairs of the drug warriors. On
April 4, 1972, just a few weeks after the new Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) was up and running, Humboldt was also the setting for the violent death of twenty-four-year-old Dirk Dickenson, the first fatality in Nixon’s new “all-out war on drugs.”
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Local Humboldt County law enforcement had already produced one drug war casualty. Deputy Mel Ames, a hard-nosed, fifteen-year cop, had a knack for spotting drug offenders. In the spring of 1971, Ames had sniffed out two four-foot-high marijuana plants growing along the Eel River. After setting up a stakeout nearby, he watched for days in hopes of catching whoever had planted them. When the weekend came, he handed watch duty off to twenty-seven-year-old deputy Larry Lema. On October 4, 1970—a bright Sunday afternoon—Lema spotted twenty-two-year-old Patrick Berti, who was on his way to law school in the fall, and a friend walking along the river. When the two stopped to inspect the plants, Lema realized he’d found his pot cultivators. He emerged from the bushes to apprehend them. Lema and Berti, it would turn out, had known one another all their lives. When Lema confronted Berti, Berti turned, still holding a twig from one of the plants in his hand. Lema mistook it for a gun and shot him.

“Christ, Larry, you shot me,” Berti said. Those would be his last words. He died there in the woods. Berti’s friend had grown the marijuana. Berti had merely come to see the plants out of curiosity—he’d never seen pot plants that tall. A Humboldt County grand jury ruled Berti’s death a justifiable homicide.
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The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department had since signed on to Nixon’s more warlike federal drug initiative. They welcomed the help. Most local police feared that the county had been overrun by the counterculture. Starting in about 1970, “longhairs” had begun moving into the area and taking up residence in and around the town of Garberville. Probably not coincidentally, there had also been at least a dozen unsolved arsons in that area since 1971. All of the torched buildings had been occupied by the newcomers. If you were to draw a perimeter around the burned residences, somewhere near the middle you’d find the ranch where Dirk
Dickenson lived with his girlfriend. In the fall of 1971, Humboldt County sheriff’s deputy Archie Brunkle led a recall campaign against the Garberville justice of the peace for being “too soft on hippies.” He ran the campaign out of the Garberville branch of the Sheriff’s Department.

Against that backdrop, an informant allegedly told the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) office in San Francisco that they’d find a major drug operation on Dirk Dickenson’s ranch. Dickenson, the informant said, was running a million-dollar PCP lab. The BNDD office contacted the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department with the tip, and Undersheriff Bob Bollman agreed to investigate. (Bollman, incidentally, had been running the department since Sheriff Gene Cox had taken leave to treat his own addiction—Cox was an alcoholic.) Bollman assigned Deputy Ames to do some reconnaissance. Ames conducted two flyovers of the property. Neither revealed any signs of a drug lab. So Ames then recruited a local dogcatcher to work his way inside the house, under the guise of investigating a complaint about Dickenson’s two Saint Bernards. The dogcatcher returned and reported that he’d seen some roaches in a few ashtrays around the house. That and the informant’s tip were enough to get a search warrant.