Hero To Zero 2nd edition (5 page)

The towing company started to receive more than its share of tows from the crashes handled by the department, and the other towing companies complained. The department policy stated that there would be an automatic rotation of the towing companies selected by dispatch unless the drivers involved in a crash requested a particular company.

When drivers did select the company, more often than not, they would request the towing company that belonged to Webster’s best friend. This was investigated over and over at the request of the rest of the towing companies in the city; however, nothing was ever found to be suspicious. This went on for several years.

Webster was as adept at department politics as he was on the street, and started to get promoted up the food chain—first to sergeant, and then later tested for lieutenant. He was next in line to promote. He was once again sent to the narcotics strike force, this time as the supervising sergeant.

The strike force flourished under his supervision: arrests went up, drug seizures went up. Under his tutelage, the strike force seized an unprecedented volume of vehicles used in narcotics transactions. The proceeds from the sales of those seized vehicles came back to the strike force after the courts upheld the seizures.

Webster was a rising star in the department, on his way to at least assistant chief.

That was when Webster’s personal life started to go to shit. His high-maintenance wife was having an affair, and he used strike-force wiretaps to monitor her phone conversations with her boyfriend illegally from his own home. He told me about the affair one day at a local clothing store where we both worked part-time providing security.

He began dating, and later moved in with, one of the women who worked sales at a nearby cosmetics counter. After they broke up a few months later, she told me about the wiretaps he did at home and his addiction to painkillers. I did not believe her at first, but later it all fell into place.

After his second stint on the narcotics strike force, Webster came back to patrol as a sergeant. He was still dealing with a lot of personal issues, and perhaps that made it harder to keep his extracurricular activities on the down low. It became clear that he had a personal investment in making sure that his buddy’s towing company received a majority of the tows from the department.

I was present when he went up to another towing company’s driver and told him that he would arrest him if he did not leave an accident scene. He then convinced the driver to request his friend’s company, telling the driver that they were the best in the city.

His interest was more than just looking out for a friend, that part was obvious. At the time, however, I was generally viewed as paranoid and seeing conspiracies where there were none, so I did not comment. I filed the incident away mentally as noteworthy and continued to watch.

One night I was on a call and Webster showed up. He was usually calm and cool; even during his wife’s affair, very few people knew what was going on. That night, however, I could see that he was noticeably shaken.

Something had him worried, and I asked him about it. He said that I was seeing things and that I was paranoid (yeah, yeah—I heard that my whole career). I replied, “Yep, it’s me, seeing things again, sure. That’s why you’re shitting yourself with fear.”

Webster didn’t respond. Another sergeant showed up and they dismissed me, basically telling me to leave while they discussed sergeant matters.

I was not about to be dismissed by anyone. I was on a call. I said, “Hey, this is
my
call—you showed up, you leave!”

Normally that would not have floated past two veteran sergeants. It was a test, and they failed. I should have had my ass kicked on the spot for being insubordinate. Instead, they shrugged and walked about fifty feet away to talk.

Later I found out, after bugging Webster about the incident, that he was being investigated. The rumors about his ties to the towing company were flying again. The other sergeant who had shown up was involved in the investigation, and Webster had asked him off the record how serious the charges were. Webster told me the other sergeant had said that they would “take care of it,” and not to worry. Webster was noticeably relieved.

A week later, he was relieved of duty while the investigation blossomed. Several of Webster’s friends were then also relieved of duty, and they and Webster were eventually fired. All were accused of violating the department’s policy on tow trucks being called to car crashes. They were never formally charged, however; Webster was a force to be reckoned with on the streets of our city—street wise, smart, and tough.

But his career was over.

Many years later I would talk to Ray Fossum about the tow truck incident involving Webster. He said that Webster offered him an opportunity to make money by taking kickbacks of cash from his best friend’s towing company in exchange for directing tows to them. He said Webster had been doing it for years, and that in exchange for the information Fossum had on Webster, the county attorney had offered to reduce Fossum’s prescription drug charges.

Fossum refused to tell what he knew about his friend, and went over to Webster’s home to tell him what had happened. He said that when he arrived, Webster took him into the garage and turned up a stereo as loud as it would go. While the sound was echoing off the walls, Webster said, “Go ahead, talk now!”

Fossum was devastated. Webster evidently didn’t trust him, and thought that he was wearing a wire; the music would have made it impossible for any wire to pick up the conversation they had. Fossum said that he told Webster, “Fuck you, man!” and left.

They were two of the best cops I would ever meet. Each had his demons. Each went painfully down in flames.

WE’D HIRED A LOT OF
new guys to deal with the turnover created by the hiring of a new chief. He was hell-bent on making his mark on the department’s culture and getting rid of what he considered deadwood. He defined “deadwood” as anyone nearing retirement.

Personally, I think that the veterans threatened him. They knew who he really was, since he, too, had risen through the ranks. They all knew his public face nowhere near matched the reality of the prick he really was. He was busy pushing them out, and replacing them with new hires.

That was when Lance Edwards came to be a patrolman in our department.

He was a former MP, and came to the department with a wealth of experience in the military police environment. He had travelled the world, enforcing military laws. He retired from the military and was immediately picked up by our department.

He loved police work—seriously loved the job and most everything about it. He immediately made a name for himself as an outstanding patrolman. He had a knack for finding stolen cars that was unprecedented. It was an amazing and quirky gift. He recovered more stolen cars than anyone else on the department, and he continued to do so the entire time he worked for us.

I asked him to teach me his technique for recovering the stolen cars one night, and he showed me dozens of lists of stolen cars he had made from BOLOs (“be on the lookout”) that had been put out by dispatch. He cross-referenced them, making lists just for Chevys, just for trucks, just for out-of-state plates, and just for four-door vehicles. When he saw a car whose description fit one of the lists and felt it was suspicious, he would look up the plate, and
boom
! There it would be.

He also had a knack for making felony arrests. He made more felony arrests than any other patrolman in the department. It was not that he made just a couple more arrests; he made a lot more arrests. He made more DUI arrests than any other patrolman in the city, and nearly as many as the entire patrol section combined. He had a knack for finding drunk drivers that was creepy; it was almost like a sixth sense.

He was a poster boy for the kind of cop the chief wanted. He would drop anything and everything to come to work and cover a shift. He would work any shift he was called to fill and complete any task he was asked to do. He really loved being a cop.

The chief was elated, and used him as an example of what the “new” patrolman should aspire to be. This was what he was looking for when he pushed out the old guard—blue flamers, go-getters, guys who could make a difference, and for a smaller paycheck than the grizzled and, in his words, “lazy veterans” he had pushed into retirement.

The chief recognized Lance Edwards as Patrolman of the Year several times. The chief bragged about his “new breed of patrolman” in chiefs’ meetings, and mentioned Lance often to the city council.

Lance had a pretty amazing reputation right away. He was also very social, which is unusual for a cop. He liked to party, and would often have friends over to his house. He had a passion for camping, and his camping parties quickly gained popularity among the patrolmen. He invited everyone, and played no favorites with any of the internal social cliques in the department. Detectives and patrolmen were all invited. The parties were quietly talked about in the hallways of the department, whispered about in the weight room, mentioned in the twenty-four hour convenience stores while guys were getting a quick drink.

Rumors of wife-swapping and public sex acts on a drunken dare started to emerge from the parties as people started to open up about the goings on. Lance was an instant favorite among the more wild and reckless patrolmen.

I asked Lance about the rumors one night, and he laughed and denied that anything like that had ever happened. Later, however, when I pressed him about the rumors, he admitted that he had on several occasions been involved in sex parties, and he had, in fact, on a dare, had sex with a woman on a picnic table while his partygoers watched.

“She was willing and I was willing, so what the fuck?” He laughed about it.

I asked him if his wife was cool with it.

“Hell, no!” he said. “She wasn’t there. She’s never invited to the parties I have. That would defeat the whole reason for having the party in the first place.”

This was his life for several years: exemplary service as a patrolman, and wild drunken parties off duty. He eventually bought a boat, and the parties were transferred to the nearby lakes and reservoirs in the area. I actually talked to one cop’s wife who heard about the parties and asked her husband if she could go out on the boat with Lance. I guess her husband had no problem with the idea of his wife and Lance on the boat together, or maybe he had no idea of what happened there; I don’t know. I do know Lance and the other man’s wife each bragged in great detail to their friends later about the day they spent on the boat.

The chief never heard about the parties, or if he did, he didn’t mention them in his bragging about the new breed of patrolman he had hired to make a difference in the city.

Finally, the lifestyle and partying caught up to Lance. He believed that his wife never had any idea of his parties and what went on at them. She was not, however, blind, and eventually got fed up.

She was devastated at first by the betrayal, but eventually found her own distractions. She had a steady boyfriend whom she would meet while Lance was camping or on the boat with the “boat babes.” Lance had no idea, and when he found out, his reaction was surprising.

One day I came to work to find that Lance had left—just left. There was no explanation, no note from the chief. Lance was just gone. No one knew if he had quit or been fired. I asked around, and all I could find out was he was gone and no one knew why. It was very odd.

Usually there were rumors floating around. They were almost always wrong, and they were almost always wild and crazy stories that were nearly impossible to believe. This time, I guess, the brass decided not to assist the rumor mill.

No matter who I asked, they all shrugged and said they had no idea where Lance had gone or why. The shining example of the chief’s new breed of patrolman had just disappeared. It would be several years before I would find out what happened.

Eventually, I did run into Lance when we were both working another job, and I asked him what had happened. Where had he disappeared to, and why? He told me that he had discovered that his wife had been having an affair behind his back for years. He was really pissed off about it and could not believe that she would do that to him. He said that he had gotten really drunk and written a suicide/ homicide note explaining why he killed her and then himself.