A couple of days ago I took a long drive out through the country. Just me in my car; listening to music and thinking about all that is happening in our world.
As I was traveling down a particular road I saw a house that brought back a flood of memories. It wasn’t someplace I had lived, it was a house that was difficult to surveil.
It sat in the midst of a country mile and at the time there was no place to set up surveillance upon the home without being noticed.
The problem was, we were sending an undercover officer into the house to buy drugs and we couldn’t be more than a mile away from him if something went wrong.
The memories came crashing back when I saw the house, not because I was the undercover who went in to make the buy, but because I was the undercover they shoved into the trunk of a car so that someone would be close in the event that things went sideways.
Back then technology wasn’t on the side of law enforcement. It was somewhat antiquated and outdated and the range on listening devices, a.k.a bugs and wires, wasn’t very far.
Someone needed to be close so we could hear what was happening in the house with the undercover, but because of the rural setting no one could get close without being seen.
A plan was hatched to stick me in the truck of the informant’s car with the audio monitoring equipment so that I could relay what was happening inside the home to the backup teams who would be setup more than a mile away.
It wouldn’t have been an altogether bad plan, if it weren’t for the condition of the informant’s car. The informant insisted that his car be used to take himself and the undercover to the house because the dealer wouldn’t appreciate an unfamiliar car in his driveway.
The car in question wasn’t in bad shape, but the trunk was not pristine. It was packed full of random tools, extension cords, jumper cables, and worst of all, a couple of 5 gallon gas cans and several bottles of motor oil.
Those things on their own wouldn’t have been a problem if they weren’t missing their caps and lids.
So...I found myself locked in the truck of a car, lying on top of lug wrenches and skill saws, motor oil soaking into my pants, with the fumes of petroleum wafting through the stale air, as I quietly relayed the conversation from inside the house to the team down the street, while peaking through the crack in the back seat to keep an eye on the front door of the house.
Nothing bad happened during the buy. The undercover bought what he came for and we left without incident. But, the thought of that situation brought forth the memories of all the other crazy things we did when the situation wasn’t ideal.
Once I was buying crack cocaine from a group of guys we couldn’t identify and we needed to confirm which apartment they were in for a search warrant. One of the undercovers dressed up like a pizza delivery guy and went door to door until he found the right apartment. He ended up getting chased out of the building because the bad guys wanted to buy the pizzas from him (he didn’t have any pizza, just an empty pizza delivery bag).
Worth noting, this was also the case in which I had corn-rows. The dealers almost died laughing when they saw me and started calling me “White-Pac”. They never thought to ask me if I was a cop.
While I was working for the D.E.A. we had a case that took us into Ohio and coincided with an F.B.I. case. The F.B.I. was dragging their feet and we wanted to make sure the bad guy didn’t slip through our fingers, but we needed him to do a drug deal in Indiana so that we could charge him here without the F.B.I.’s help.
He was a clever guy and had a very strict routine. To get him across the State Line we flattened the tire on our undercover’s car about two miles from the Ohio State Line and then had the informant call the bad guy for help. They were supposed to meet in Ohio for the drug deal, but the dealer came to pickup the stranded buyers and did the deal in Indiana on the way to a gas station. We ended up charging him, much to the chagrin of the F.B.I.
On one occasion I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach before going to do a buy. Something just seemed off, so I took the biggest, craziest looking, weirdest acting undercover officer with me.
When the drug dealers saw him the entire tone I had been picking up from them on the phone calls changed. One of the men ended up asking us to give him a ride to the house where he gets the drugs.
We arrived at the house, gave him the money and he went inside...and then quickly out the back door and began running for his life.
He would have definitely robbed me if I had shown up alone. Instead I got to chase him through the inner city until he got trapped in a backyard under construction equipment where a police K-9 pulled him out.
Over the years there were all manner of disguises, ruses, and fly by the seat of your pants moments. If I hadn’t seen that house on my drive, I’m not sure any of these moments would have come back to me.
