Hero To Zero 2nd edition (2 page)

Several months later, Suggs was slated to get out of the military. His enlistment was up. I thought he’d surely be picked up by the Spokane PD. He told me as he left that he had tested for the police department and had scored well, ranking #1 on their list. He was confident he’d be hired. I never learned what happened after that. Later on, I heard that they did not pick him up and that he had failed the psychological exam—but that was a rumor, and I never knew for sure. It was certainly hard for me to believe.

As an MP, he was head and shoulders above the rest of us. He was an expert marksman, fit, and took the job to another level. He was very professional in the way he dressed and acted. He studied regulations and laws, and, as I said, he worked as a reserve for the Spokane PD.

Fast forward: several years have passed, and I too have left the military police corps. I’m working for the sheriff’s department back home in St. Paul’s. I was fortunate to be picked up by the sheriff’s department at a time when hundreds of people would test for only one or two job openings.

One night I was writing a report on an aggravated assault I‘d been investigating. The tempers of patrons at a local truck stop had erupted into a knife fight. Two men were fighting over a woman: one was her husband, the other, her boyfriend. The husband stabbed the boyfriend and the woman called the cops. We investigated the incident, and I’d returned to the office to write my report.

I was sitting at a table we all used to write reports. We wrote them by hand then. PCs were a couple of years away from being practical. I took a break from writing, stretching my hands and looking around the room at the wanted posters hanging on the wall. Suggs had taught me well, and I always kept up on the latest twix, teletypes, and wanted photos available. The other deputies called me paranoid—not for the first or last time in my career.

One of the posters caught my eye. The guy looked really familiar. He was wanted by the FBI. I looked at him and tried to place him in my memory.…I couldn’t remember where I had last seen him. The name listed the wanted man as Robert Michael Allen. The name did not ring any bells, but then, as now, I never forget a face. The face for me is a lock; once I know your face I’ll never forget you. I can’t remember names as easily.

At first, I was puzzled. I knew this face, but from where? The name was totally unfamiliar to me. I read the poster, and it said that Allen had murdered a movie producer and the producer’s father and son. They’d been involved in a business deal and had stolen a couple of hundred thousand dollars from Allen. When Allen discovered the theft he was furious and killed them, shooting them all. The wanted poster listed Allen as a “bodyguard” by profession, who was an expert marksman and an avid gambler. He was considered armed and very dangerous.

I kept looking at the face. Somewhere I knew I had met this guy. At first I accused the other guys in the office of playing a prank on me by making up a fake wanted poster and using a picture of someone I knew as the bad guy. It made sense; we were always playing pranks on each other to break up the tension we all felt. They all looked at me like I was crazy. The Sergeant told me to “quit being an attention whore and get back to your report.” I ignored him. I knew that I knew this face.

The poster detailed a few facts about Allen—his height and weight, eye color, scars. He had a bullet wound on the big toe of one foot, and several aliases. Reading the aliases, I was stunned. While Robert Michael Allen was his given legal name, one of his aliases was Robert Michael Suggs.

The light finally came on in my head. The FBI now wanted the same “Suggs” who had mentored me years earlier in the military for a triple homicide in Culver City, California. He was on the run, armed, and dangerous.

I pulled the poster off of the wall and said, “Holy shit, I know this guy!”

The sergeant replied, “Yeah, yeah—sure you do. We all know someone wanted by the FBI.”

“No, really—I know this guy, I was in the military with him. He was a cop then and mentored me.”

“That explains a lot!” the sergeant replied. “You were mentored by a murderer. Lemme see the fucking poster.”

I handed it to him. “It says here to call the FBI if you have any information about him. Maybe you should call them, Deputy.”

He smirked and looked at the other deputies in the room, and they all started laughing. They thought I was full of shit. I watched this room full of rednecks laughing and giggling about how they were making a fool out of the city boy. None of them had ever left the county they were born in. None had ever worked a murder, or knew a murderer. I had grown up in the city. I saw my first murder at six years of age. It happened across the street from our house. I had known several of the local hardcore criminals in my neighborhood from the time we were all little kids and growing up on the same streets. This bugged the hell out of my co-workers.

I thought it over and said “Yeah, you’re right, I should call. Can I use the phone on your desk?”

The room went silent.

“Sure, go ahead, knock yourself out,” the sergeant said.

I picked up the phone and started to dial the number. The sergeant suddenly took the receiver from me and hung up the phone glaring at me. He redialed the number from the poster and handed me the receiver. This was unreal.

The FBI answered the phone, and I told them what I knew about Suggs. The agent I spoke to was condescending as hell and said that Suggs was a killer and that they would find him. I told them he was well-trained and had been a reserve officer with the Spokane police. That information was not on the wanted poster, and the FBI guy suddenly took me seriously. He asked my name, and spent the next forty-five minutes picking my brain about Suggs.

He then asked where I worked and if he could reach me if anything came up. I said sure. The room was still silent. The sergeant who was so sarcastic was now silent and blankly staring at me. It was a snapshot of what my entire career would be like. An outsider, walking the line between cops and killers, fitting in with neither.

I kept track of Suggs from that point on. About a year later I learned that his body and that of his girlfriend had been found in the California desert. Apparently his girlfriend had been trying to break up with him at the same time that he had been ripped off by the movie producer. Suggs kidnapped her and later killed her. I made a point of telling my arrogant sergeant about Suggs’s fourth murder and his apparent suicide. He had no comment.

This story is an excellent example of what later became a very common and amazing scenario with the cops I worked with and around. I call it Hero-to-Zero Syndrome.

Every one of the cops listed in this book was outstanding in his or her own way. Every single one went from being considered an exceptional cop, respected by his peers, to being a criminal, publically humiliated—or at the very least no longer a cop. All were handed their walking papers and asked not to return. If there is any common denominator among them, it is that they identified strongly with being a cop.

You can read about Suggs on the web. Google the name Robert Michael Allen. He is listed as #434 on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. He was a good cop when I knew him, and he was also, later, a multiple murderer.

He is the only cop I will list by his real name here. The rest of the stories related here are also true, but the names of the people involved have been changed. The cops were real cops, each outstanding in his or her own way. Somehow, they all went down in flames.

JAMES TUCKER JOINED THE POLICE
department St.Pauls after serving a mission for with his church. He was a poster boy for wholesome goodness. He never drank alcohol, he never swore at anyone. He’d have an absolute shit fit if you used the words “Jesus” or “God” in anything but a prayer. I have no idea what the hell he was doing as a cop.

I first met him on a call after he was finished probation and out on the street on his own. He was very straitlaced, wound so tight and so perfect. He had significant trouble speaking to the people we dealt with on the street. I literally had to translate for him when we were on calls together. Here is a brief example of the conversations we had:

Tucker: Sir, I am Officer Tucker. This is Officer Fortier. I am responding to your request for police assistance.

Dude: What?

Me: He wants to know what happened, why you called the cops.

Dude: Oh, yeah! Well, my fucking neighbor’s dog keeps shitting on my lawn. I told the motherfucker I was gonna kill his fucking dog if it happened again and he said that he would kill me if I killed his fucking dog. I want the goddamn dog to stop shitting on my lawn.

Tucker: Sir, I may be of assistance; however, you must please stop using the Lord’s name in vain.

Dude: HUH?

Me: He’s gonna help you, but watch your fucking mouth. (Tucker grimaced)

Dude: Oh, Okay. Sorry.

The rest of the call went like that. It was weird to work with a cop this squeaky-clean. He never swore. He was stiff as a board and walked like he had a stick up his ass. He was really out of his element on the streets, but he had wanted to be a cop his whole life and nothing was gonna change that.

We continued to work the same areas but on different shifts, rarely overlapping on calls. Once in a while he’d show up on a call and listen to me. He pulled me aside once and asked me “How did you learn to talk like them?”

“What?”

“I’ve seen you talk to different people from all walks of life; it’s like you switch vocabularies when you speak to street people.”

“Yeah, well…they have a different set of rules, a totally different reality from the bank president or the college professor. I try to relate to them in their language, their comfort zone.”

He said he felt like they were all trash and “less” than the upper-class people in the city. I told him that was too bad because they made our jobs possible. He asked what I meant.

“You will never get a college professor talking to you late at night in a dark parking lot about a murder he knows something about, or telling you about a drug dealer he knew. These are the people who help us make arrests. All they want is a little respect. You give them that and they’ll remember it.” He seemed to think about this, but made no comment.

Tucker continued in his structured, black-and-white thinking. One of the brass in our department was watching him and began to mentor him. He convinced Tucker that he was too good for the streets. This mentor told him that he needed to go back to school and finish his degree. He suggested that Tucker maybe get a job with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). Tucker liked this idea. He started back to school when he wasn’t at work.

I didn’t work with him much after that. We would pass occasionally in the report-writing room, or in court. I remember once he was booking a suspect into jail for possessing drug paraphernalia. I asked him what he had. “Scales, needles, a kit?” On the street, a kit was called “the works.” It was everything you needed to shoot up: needle, spoon, cotton to filter the drug with when you draw it into the syringe, a lighter, and a piece of rubber tubing to wrap around your arm to make the veins stand out.

Tucker said the guy had a pipe. He showed me a short, hand-held pot pipe. It held one hit.

I said “Really? That’s it?”

“Yes. It’s a class “B” violation. He’s going to jail.”

I shook my head. He looked at me disapprovingly.

He said, “I'm not like you. You’re jaded. I enforce all the laws equally. If you break the law, I will arrest you.”

I said, “Okay, Cagney. Where’s Lacey?”

He glared at me.

I said, “’Sup to you, man, but I say step on the pipe and make sure the guy knows he owes you one. Maybe you quit making misdemeanor arrests and start making felony arrests? Just a thought.”

He glared at me and continued on with the booking sheet.

Much later, I ran into him in court. He was mad as hell, so I asked, “What’s wrong, Tucker?”

“I can’t believe it!” He was fuming.

“What?”

Tucker snarled, “I’d arrested a guy for assault and having a concealed weapon. The guy had a knife on him, and when I arrested him I found it in the frisk search. I measured the closed pocketknife, and it was a half-inch longer than the law allowed. I added the charge of a dangerous concealed weapon to the other charges. When I arrived at court, the prosecutor had thrown out the concealed dangerous weapon charge!”