Lines and shadows (3 page)

"Only ten percent of the crimes are reported," he liked to say. "Here's a picture of a fourteen-year-old girl when they finished with her. Here's what they did to a man who didn't have enough money to satisfy them. Here's…"

Oh, they just
loved
him for that uptown. Cops generally trust the press about as much as they trust politicians, judges, lawyers, psychiatrists and the Red Army. Dick Snider was conducting a one-man publicity campaign. He was even quoted in a
business
journal as to the impact of millions of aliens in America.

"You'd have to build a Chinese wall two thousand miles long to stop them," he said. "To tell the truth, pard, I don't know if
that
would do it." And not that he'd stoop to overkill, but he once perversely noted that when Joseph and Mary fled King Herod they were illegal aliens.

And when asked for the solution to the grave dilemma, Dick Snider would just squint a slaty eye at his interviewer and roll the ubiquitous cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other and rock back on his cowboy boots and say, "Pardner, I don't think I
have
a solution. I just don't want people brutalizing them on my beat. In my city. In my country." In
his
country! That did it. Uptown, in the corner pocket, the department brass started ricocheting like snooker balls. Who
is
this son of a bitch?
His
freaking city!:
His
freaking country! You ought to be able to trust a goddamn Okie with a goddamn dust-bowl kisser not to make I speeches on behalf of the goddamn
country!

Nevertheless, his publicity campaign was working with a vengeance. He was appearing on television more than Mayor Pete Wilson. And some of the high-ranking officer who didn't trust
any
middle-level management person who would crawl around the hills like a rattlesnake—these same if brass hats had to become instant border-crime experts because slavering reporters were demanding answers to the questions Dick Snider was raising. Even Chief of Police William Kolender, known as a progressive police administrator, telephoned Dick Snider, with his jaws a bit torqued, complaining that he was made to look bad during one of the lieutenant's impromptu press interviews.

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It wasn't that Dick Snider disliked the chief; in fact quite the opposite was true. He thought he might have a chance with his secret scheme precisely because Kolender
was
the new chief. So he chose his words a bit more carefully, but continued his publicity blitz, supplying any

journalist who called with all the lurid details of alien ambush by bandit wolf packs. And the top brass of the San Diego Police Department found themselves paying visits to Southern Division to tramp around the goddamn hills and canyons, slipping in Coyote crap, trying to become instant border-crime experts,

Thanks to one bigmouth lieutenant named Snider. One of the more critical reporters of the police beat overheard a deputy chief bitching about Dick Snider, and the reporter remarked that it goes to show you can't trust any white man that talks good Spanish. And the deputy chief stopped nodding like a dashboard doll and said
that
was about as humorous as a prostate probe.

But Dick Snider hadn't been in law enforcement most of his adult life for nothing. He understood the workings of the bureaucracy well enough to mitigate any radical notions of fighting border bandits simply for the sake of saving illegal aliens. Especially at a time when Californians were talking about taxpayer revolts. He did what every wise civil servant would do: he found a buzzword.

"We need
a federal grant
," he told reporters. "To create… sort of task force." Dick Snider envisioned a force of men, comprised of San Diego cops and federal officers from the U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Customs. But during any discussion of his idea he'd toss around his buzzword: federal grant. The fact is it was virtually impossible to receive a law-enforcement federal grant. But he bandied numbers about, and was quoted in several interviews as to the modest deal with the bandits. And journalists ran to U.S. Customs and U.S. Border Patrol to discuss the merits of proposals being put forth by a San Diego police, lieutenant who seemed to have "his finger on the pulse of the border," as they put it. In police circles what Dick Snider was doing is called washing dirty laundry. And cops just don't do their duds in public, not if they care about their police careers. Not if their pension is not secure
.
And his wasn't. But there had always been a certain naïveté about the big lieutenant. Other policemen talked about it. He tended to believe that if your cause is just, you can't get hurt too badly. Which caused more cynical colleagues to show white eyeballs. The federal grant went nowhere. However, after the media barrage Chief Kolender fulfilled Dick Snider's hopes and dreams. He began discussing with federal authorities a task force to cope with the crime problems of the border. And to Dick Snider that meant at long last he would deal with the bandits. He had an idea whose time had come—a generation later.

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THE INSIDERS

ANY COMMENT ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NO-MAN'S-land by the

international border usually begins and ends with a judgment, critique, debate about one Jesus Manuel Lopez, the police sergeant chosen by Dick Snider to ramrod his fledgling Border Crime Task Force.

It would be a mistake to try to understand Manny Lopez too quickly.

"The better we came to know him, the bigger the question mark," is how one of his men would later put it.

And the metaphor could not be more appropriate. Manny Lopez was marked by the interrogation point. He was only twenty-nine years old, with a hairline already retreating on a small head. He had nearly Asian eyes, a nose more Middle Eastern than Mexican, slightly pocked cheeks, a gap-toothed impish grin. He would have looked at home selling carpets at a bazaar in Izmir, and there was probably never a rug peddler who could have out talked him. But what one would not forget about Manny Lopez was the question mark. When he was in any way aroused, his right eyebrow did the most remarkable reptilian sidewinding crawl up up up his forehead until it formed a perfect question mark across his skull.

Many a man in the months to come would be amused, Bewildered,
terrified
, watching that right eyebrow begin to slither, creep and crawl until the interrogation point was formed. And then you had an indelible portrait of Manny Lopez. A question mark. He, staring intently, the right eyebrow curling, squiggling,
locking
in.

"Manny Lopez kept turning me down at first," Dick Snider said. "He was a hard-charger and superambitious. He wanted to be a plainclothes investigator. He didn't seem too impressed with what I was selling. But he was my only choice from beginning to end. It wasn't just that he was the only Mexican sergeant crafty and crazy and gutsy enough to pull it off. He was the only sergeant
period
."

All of the task force members would call Burl Richard Snider "Lieutenant" when they addressed him directly. But when talking about him to others it was "Burl the Pearl."

"Dick Snider
is
a pearl," Manny Lopez always said. "I worked for him back when he was a sergeant and I was a rookie. The guy could never be anything except out front. But that can be a
fatal
flaw in police work."

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During his police career Manny Lopez was elected president of San Diego's Latino police organization, not an important career step given the makeup of the department. In a force of 1,365 men and women, on the very fringe of a sea of Latinos stretching from Baja California to Tierra del Fuego, less than 5 percent of the department were MexicanAmericans. There were four sergeants. There were no lieutenants, no captains, one inspector, no deputy chiefs. Incredibly enough, there was only one in homicide, and none working burglary or robbery.

The large city of San Diego has been accused of nourishing a village mentality in areas of social progress, tucked away as it is in a far corner of America. And a police department always reflects its community. The Mexican-American cops did not refer to themselves as

"Latinos" or "Hispanics" or "Mexican-Americans." They called the majority "whites" and they called themselves "Mexicans." And yet even this might be refuted by those people living south of the imaginary line who feel they are nothing like the northern "coconuts," who are brown on the outside but white within.

Linguists say that there are not many people who are truly bilingual—that is, foreigners who can fool a native speaker by conversing in the mother tongue unaccented. Manny Lopez was one who could. And he was a
talker
in both languages. He had also been director of the San Diego Police Officers Association, the first Mexican-American to hold this post. And the Police Officers Association represented
all
cops: white, black and Mexican. He was also on an advisory panel to the chief. So Manny Lopez knew something about politics. He had career ambitions and wasn't impressed with Dick Snider's obsession with aliens being victimized on American soil. But when Dick Snider showed Manny Lopez some photos of an alien who'd been robbed and had his face ripped away by a twoby-four studded with nails, Manny looked at the pictures and said, "Okay, you got to count me in."

And Dick Snider was ecstatic. He had the man to ramrod the task force. And he figured that the man of his choice had been persuaded by the very thing which so obsessed him: the agony of aliens. Except that Manny Lopez
wasn't
persuaded by that. He privately said,

"Dick Snider coulda shown me a picture of an alien with his head cut off. I woulda said that's tough.Life's tough."

The truth is, he was sick of waiting for an investigative job and he was sick of Northern Division with its bloated whiny millionaires. He was even sick of ogling all the bikinis stuffed with surf bunnies that littered the streets of La Jolla. He was almost thirty years old and wanted some
action
before he settled down and made a real run at promotions. "I was bored.
Real
bored," he admitted. "
That's
why I joined Burl the Pearl's task force." And that decision would completely change the direction of his life. file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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It was jointly decided by Dick Snider and Manny Lopez that the Border Crime Task Force should probably be composed of Mexican-American cops. As it turned out, this was a fortunate decision, given the radical change in direction the experiment would take. But at the start the search for Mexican-American officers began only because Dick Snider was one of the few in middle-level management who spoke Spanish and realized its importance here where the ocean of Latinos was flowing inexorably north.

He assumed that all Mexican-American cops would at least understand Spanish well enough to do the job as he had conceived it. He and Manny Lopez were going to lie in wait in the canyons, much as Dick Snider had done alone these many months. They were to listen and observe and catch the bandits smack in the middle of their robberies. They would ambush the ambushers. That was the
plan
.

The publicity blitz by Dick Snider had not been lost on U.S. government law-enforcement officials. Two customs officers and two border patrolmen were being loaned by the government to Dick Snider to augment his task force. The city of San Diego was giving him ninety days to produce results in the bandit-plagued hills and canyons. That was a very short time to turn a squad of city policemen into… what? Canyon-crawling commandos?

They all wondered early on if they were destined to be bastard children. The amorphous experiment was being seriously questioned even before it began. Their budget was being trimmed before they spent any. Their training time was being cut to five days, giving them a weekend to rest before going out in the canyons at night to do whatever the hell it was they were going to do. And they had only a vague idea of what they were going to do out there. Oh, they were going to curtail the marauding bandits through some sort of commando ambush, but not in any way that remotely resembled tactics they'd used in street police work.

And they took a verbal beating from the rest of the cops who got wind of the training camp at the U.S. Marine Corps facility at Camp Matthews, some ten miles north of downtown San Diego. They were outfitted in black navy watch caps, goggles for brush crawling, camouflage fatigues, combat boots. A few tried blackening their faces like military raiders they'd seen in a hundred war movies, and directed obligatory cracks at those with darker skin, just as they'd seen in a hundred war movies. Even Dick Snider, who finally had his dream realized, wasn't sure how to train his new task force now that he was being given his chance.

"I remember the first briefing," he said. "I told them it was gonna be very unpredictable out in those canyons. I told them chances are somebody was gonna get hurt. I wanted them to believe it from the beginning. If someone had to get hurt it should be the bad guys." file://C:\Documents and Settings\tim\Desktop\books to read\Wambaugh, Joseph - Lines a... 11/20/2009

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And they looked at him and nodded respectfully, and he saw them roll their eyeballs and heard the puff of a dozen involuntary sighs and he thought, "They have heard this speech before." In a hundred war movies.

Manny Lopez came to doubt it from the start. He looked at them in their camouflage and goggles. These weren't marine raiders. These were city
cops
. And other cops howled when out of curiosity a few heard about Camp Matthews, or got a look at them when they made the mistake of wearing their John Wayne suits to the police station on the way home. But they were an eager band of young policemen and they just grinned and shrugged and ran it off all day in training.