Breaking Rank (10 page)

At three different drug conferences in Washington, D.C, through the eighties and early nineties, I heard then-LAPD chief Daryl Gates, followed by high-ranking Justice officials from both the Reagan and Bush-the-Elder administrations, introduce sessions with this admonition,
Don't even
think
about decriminalization—it's not on the agenda.
Gates went so far as to say,
“If someone brings it up, shut him off!” He glared right at me. Under Clinton's Department of Justice the message was no different.

Not everyone is frightened of the First Amendment. Many Americans are speaking up, demanding a new,
workable
approach to the drug problem. An October 2002
Time
/CNN poll showed that 72 percent of Americans already believe there should be no jail time for possessing small amounts of pot, and 80 percent support medical marijuana programs (maybe that's because 47 percent of them had used the weed). When, as chief of the Seattle Police Department, I made my views on drugs known at a conference of mayors from Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia, the response was overwhelmingly positive. In presentations I made to business groups throughout southern California in the early nineties, the typical reaction was,
Why can't our government see the folly of the drug war? It's just plain
bad business,
a gigantic waste of taxpayer money.

A handful of politicians and even a police chief or two do favor decriminalization. I know this because they whisper endorsements in the privacy of their offices or over an adult beverage after a drug conference. Why don't they speak up? They're
scared.
They think they'll be voted out of office or forced to turn in their badges. But they “misunderestimate” the wisdom, the common sense of their constituencies.

Americans want to see their tax dollars spent on prevention and enforcement of
predatory
crimes, crimes that frighten them, take money out of their pockets, restrict their freedoms and cause them to change the way they live: domestic violence, child abuse, rape, robbery, burglary, auto theft, workplace and school violence, white collar, political, and environmental crimes.

Right now, the only people actively campaigning for sanity on the drug scene are hempheads, political mavericks, and career
decriminalistas.
If a small collection of thoughtful, currently closeted law enforcers were to make their views known they'd have influence far beyond their numbers. At the very least they might encourage a dialogue with their colleagues who remain under a culture-imposed gag order. It's time to talk about this, my brothers and sisters in law enforcement. It really is.

In the Netherlands, in England, in Canada it's been the cops leading the way. In the early nineties I keynoted an annual conference of the Canadian
Association of Chiefs of Police. I was struck by the candor and wisdom of several of its members as we chatted about the drug problem in our respective countries. In 1999, CACP passed a resolution calling for the decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana. Soon after, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police offered a statement in “full support” of the police chiefs' resolution.

Much to the dismay of the Bush administration, Canada is now earnestly debating the decriminalization of marijuana possession and use. At least one North American country has the strength and the sobriety to look at adult drug use as a basic human right. And to treat drug
abuse
, including my own near-addiction, as a medical not a criminal problem.

*
Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swann.
The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon
. Viking, 1992.

*
In the late 1980s I showed up shortly after my narcs had shot and killed the utterly innocent father of a suspected drug dealer; I stared in disbelief at the body of a fifty-eight-year-old man who'd made the mistake of answering his door with a TV remote in hand.

*
This genuinely laughable notion comes from the same hypocritical “states rights” reactionary who tried to gut perfectly sound state laws on medical marijuana.

**
Many local PDs make a bundle by converting drug dealers' seized assets to their own. They pad annual or biennial budgets with everything from bulging briefcases of cash to stocks, bonds, laundered bank accounts, homes, businesses and other real estate, cigarette boats, Jaguars, Harleys, weaponry, even fine art. These departments have developed a dependency, an
addiction
you might say, on this extra revenue stream. They're supposed to put the proceeds to use in drug prevention and enforcement only, but any muckraker with a follow-the-money nose for “misappropriation” could easily uncover multiple violations of federal and/or state laws in all but the most squeaky-clean agencies.

CHAPTER 3

PROSTITUTION: GET A ROOM!

“I'
LL BET YOU CAN
'
T
guess what my eight-year-old boy took to show-and-tell yesterday.” The woman had been taking in her trashcans when she spotted my car and flagged us over. I'd been driving at patrol speed down her street, chatting with a
Seattle Times
columnist who was along for an earful of community-policing philosophy.

“What's that?”

“You won't believe it,” said the woman. “Let me go in and get it.” We got out of the car and waited on the sidewalk. She came back out carrying one of those small boxes your checks come in. “Here, take a look for yourself.” We gazed down at a used condom in the corner of the box. I knew where this story was going. I'd heard it before at a community meeting in San Diego, except that version involved a nine-year-old girl who'd scooped up a used syringe to go with the condom.

“Where did he find it?”

“Right where you're standing.” She called her husband out of the house to confirm the story. “And this isn't the first one,” said the woman. “We find these things all the time. Plus needles and wadded up Kleenex and . . . I don't know
what
possessed that child to do such a thing!” Her husband explained that they'd tried to shield the boy from these findings. It was his job to police the area before the kid went to school. But, “Sometimes you miss one.”

“Look down our street, Chief,” said the woman. “What do you see?”

“For Sale signs.” Every other yard sported one.

“Ours is going up next.” The family lived on a busy residential arterial in a low-income neighborhood, perfect sales territory for hookers and their pimps.

The couple was forced to contend with prostitutes who work the morning commute: businessmen, professionals, blue-collar workers on their way to their jobs (or just getting off the graveyard shift). The hooker stands on the sidewalk, usually at the corner. The john pulls up, rolls his window down. The two of them play the language game, settle on a specific service and a price. She hops in, they drive off. But not far. If there's an alley with off-street parking they may go there, pulling into an empty apartment space. Or they may drive a block, pull over, and do the deed at the curb. It's usually over in five to fifteen minutes, the detritus of the trade often left behind for homeowners to clean up. Or for their kids to take to school.

It's a dirty business, practiced that way. And a dangerous one.

Dr. Stig Larsson, professor of social medicine at Lund University in Sweden, reports, “Historically, one finds the worst conditions in street prostitution.” This is borne out by the numbers of serial killings of street hookers over the years.

In Vancouver, B.C., we have Robert William Pickton, a pig farmer charged with twenty-two murders but likely responsible for many more (over sixty women disappeared from the streets of Vancouver between 1978 and 2001). There's John Eric Armstrong, an aircraft refueler, who has killed all around the world—Detroit, Seattle, Virginia, Thailand, Singapore, Korea, Israel, Hong Kong. He claims thirty victims but, again, the number is probably much higher. Then there's the “Spokane Serial Killer,” Robert Lee Yates, Jr., who's serving 408 years in prison on ten counts of murder, though it's anybody's guess how many prostitutes he's actually killed (by uncommon means, incidentally: he shot most of his victims, a loud way to take a life). The beginning of his spree is traceable back to two murders in Walla Walla in 1975. Then we have truck driver Gary Ridgway, the “Green River Killer,” who may have killed as many as ninety street prostitutes in Washington. It's hard to imagine a medium-size or large city in America that has not experienced serial killings of street prostitutes.

San Diego had its own major series back in the eighties and nineties, but with a minor twist: for a long time people close to the investigations were sure police officers were involved.

In 1992 I received a call from San Diego district attorney Ed Miller. We exchanged pleasantries then he said, “We need to talk. In person.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Where?”

“The Task Force office.”

“You'll have to give me the address.” The San Diego Metropolitan Homicide Task Force, investigating the deaths of more than forty prostitutes, operated in virtual secrecy, even though my department helped with their funding and gave them four cops. Its detectives and attorneys worked out of a nondescript office complex on the south side of Mission Valley. Only its members—and a handful of prostitutes and potential witnesses—knew of its exact location.

Miller gave me the address. “I'm on my way,” I said.

“And, Norm . . .”

“Yes.”

“Don't tell anyone, not even Bobby.”

“Bobby” was Chief of Police Bob Burgreen. I looked out my glass-walled office and across a reception area into my boss's corner office. Burgreen and I had worked together since 1966. Like yours truly, he was not exactly a cop's cop. Back when everyone smoked cigarettes he puffed a pipe. He quoted Shakespeare, recited from memory “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” lapsed from time to time into Old English, or Swedish, and would entertain me on graveyard shifts with weird metaphysical musings (“What if we, the whole known universe, were floating around in the testicle of a giant? Did you ever think about that?”). The chief was seated at his desk, phone to his ear.

“All right, I'm on my way.” I strapped my off-duty gun to my ankle, put on my coat, and walked to the elevators.

Miller met me in the parking lot outside the office. “Come on. Let's take a walk.” He put his arm around my shoulder and nudged me along a semi-exposed corridor under the building's second floor. Formerly the region's U.S. attorney, Miller was a big, earnest, amiable man. He'd made his bones prosecuting government and corporate corruption, and had sent some of the city's biggest names, including a couple of “Mr. San Diego's” to prison. He was in the middle of his sixth four-year term.

“We'll head upstairs in a moment,” he said, keeping his arm around my shoulder. “What we're going to show you is extremely sensitive, and very troubling. I should tell you, the guys are wary about this visit, especially your four people. But we need help, so we took a little poll. The guys trust you.”

The implication was obvious: They didn't trust Burgreen.

“What's this all about, Ed?”

“Let's go on upstairs. It's easier to show you than tell you.”

We walked up a flight of stairs and down a couple of doors. Miller punched in a code and we entered. With its warren of rooms, the place didn't look like any detective offices I'd seen. Except for the paperwork. There were files everywhere, case and forensic reports and photos stacked on desks, chairs, and on the floor. It seemed deserted—no clicking keyboards, no bantering across desks, no phones ringing off the hook. Not even a box of doughnuts. A moment later Brian Michaels, Miller's chief deputy, walked out of an inner room to greet us. Miller had assigned him to the task force. We followed him into the room he had just left. Inside, sitting and standing in silence, were most members of the task force, including my four cops—two from Vice, two from Homicide. Laid out on a large conference table were two “link charts,” each diagrammed neatly, their broken and unbroken lines connected to boxes, each box containing a single name.

On the first chart: prostitutes who'd been killed, or who had disappeared and were presumed dead, along with suspects and witnesses. It contained the names and “linkages” of several vice cops and patrol officers, each of whom I knew personally. On the second chart? People well known to most San Diegans: Chargers football stars, prominent businessmen, political figures. And Karen Wilkening, a notorious madam who'd provided services to, among others, Don Dixon, former head of failed Vernon Savings and Loan. Dixon had hosted lavish yacht and beach house parties for his pals, furnishing sex, gratis, to guests who chose to partake. Dixon had socialized with and contributed to the campaigns of local and national politicos. Several of those names were on the chart. I was surprised at many of the entries on Chart No. 2, but shocked at two: Bill Kolender, former chief of police. And Bob Burgreen. I felt ill.