The Lost Dogs (4 page)

A BLACK DOG WITH
brown specks runs free. Her name is BJ and she’s a border collie-golden retriever mix. As she moves across the grass, her ears flop and jangle. When she catches up to the bounding tennis ball she’s chasing, she knocks it down with her paws and then clamps her jaws onto it. She prances back across this suburban Maryland yard and drops the ball at the feet of the man who threw it, Jim Knorr.

Knorr is a big man, with wide shoulders and a broad chest. His handshakes are nearly full-body affairs, as he almost lunges into them. As he does, his strong chin juts forward and his mouth creases into an easy smile. His receding hairline adds to the sense of openness about his face, as if he’s all right up front—forward and forthright.

It’s an odd countenance for someone who’s spent his life lying, or as they call it in law enforcement, working undercover. Knorr is a senior special agent with the USDA’s Office of the Inspector General, a position he has held longer than anyone else—ever. That’s because he’s never put in for a promotion and whenever one has been offered he’s turned it down. He never wanted to give up “the greatest job in the world,” being a field agent. “There’s no better feeling,” he says, “than catching the bad guys.”

It’s far from what Knorr imagined for himself growing up in Prince George’s County, Maryland, the son of a Navy engineer and a nurse. At the University of Maryland he studied agronomy and golf course management, and after school he landed an internship at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase.

At the course, Knorr had two basic responsibilities. The first was to drive the grounds at dawn, rounding up and burying all the birds that had died overnight from eating pesticide-infected worms. After that he would check each hole and make sure there was nothing in the cup, a chore made necessary after a prominent female member had reached into the first hole to retrieve her ball and pulled out a used condom that had been deposited there overnight. For this he had to wake up at 5:00 A.M. He understood the concept of paying his dues, but still.

One day he told his older brother, Michael, about his professional frustration. Michael, a Secret Service agent, suggested he look into the Department of Agriculture. Not many people realized it but the USDA had its own investigative unit, and Jim, with his agronomy background, might be perfect for it. Jim made a few calls and finally spoke to the man who ran the department. Knorr was told he’d need to get a criminology degree. So he returned to the University of Maryland and one year later he had a second diploma. He then pestered that USDA official so relentlessly, “the guy hired me just to get me to stop calling.”

In the early days he ran sting operations designed to catch people using USDA-issued food stamps to buy drugs and launder drug money, and he threw himself into the work. Although he was a typical suburban dad who lived in a tidy house with his first wife, Debbie, and their two kids, he let his hair and beard grow and set off to work in the morning in an old green army jacket.

He developed two cover stories to explain how he got the food stamps. Sometimes he would claim that he worked for the printer who produced them, and other times he told drug dealers that his girlfriend worked at social services, and she swiped them. Working undercover, he once bought a kilo of heroin for $100,000 in food stamps, then busted the dealer and tracked the stamps to see where they were being reimbursed and by whom. In his biggest case he helped take down Melvin Stanford, who at the time was one of the most prolific heroin dealers in Baltimore.

There were also government theft cases, busts of illegal slaughter operations that were putting downer cows into the food supply, fraud investigations involving a farm loan program, recoveries of rare stolen books and a handful of overseas trips as part of the secretary of agriculture’s security detail. Those trips amounted to working holidays, since, as Knorr and his fellow agents used to joke, not many people even knew who the secretary of agriculture was. Fewer still meant him any harm.

The boondoggles were payback for the hazardous duty Knorr had put in. More than once criminals received tips that he might be a cop. Knorr never had to fire his weapon, but he did draw it on several occasions. During one operation he worked with a drug dealer known as Chinese Billy. Eventually, Knorr busted Billy and flipped him, getting him to provide information to the government. During a conversation one day Billy admitted that he had once almost pulled a gun on Knorr. “Why didn’t you?” Knorr asked.

“I figured if you were a cop,” Billy reasoned, “your buddies would charge in and shoot me. And if you weren’t a cop, you would never do business with me again. So I let it go.”

The USDA was perfect for Knorr because it was a small operation. Unlike bigger agencies, such as the FBI, where personnel are closely managed and slaves to procedure, USDA agents have a lot of freedom. They’re encouraged to work on their own, cultivating contacts with local law enforcement to arrange joint investigations. Knorr excelled at this part of the job.

Working for the USDA also meant that he had the opportunity to defend animals, and he’d had a few chances to do that, most notably by working a few cockfighting busts. Still, somehow he’d never gotten a dogfighting case.

Knorr grew up with dogs, a Lab named Penny and a Chesapeake Bay retriever, Chester. He is the kind of animal appreciator who reads
Dog Fanc
y, but of all the dogs he’d known, none had meant as much to him as BJ. He’d never had a dog that had been so in tune with his internal state. If he was down, the dog would try to pick him up. If he was mellow, the dog would relax with him. When he wanted to blow off some steam with a run or romp in the yard, BJ was always ready. When they went to the beach for two weeks every summer, BJ would lie on the sand next to Jim’s chair, staring out at the ocean. “She’s truly like a best friend,” he would say.

As he stood in the yard tossing the ball to BJ, he chatted with his second wife, also named Debbie. A short woman with curly black hair and soft eyes, she had been a gene therapy researcher but eventually left that field to become the director of science education at the National Institutes of Health. The pair had been together for fifteen years, and as they watched BJ run to retrieve the ball, Jim reflected on his fast-approaching fifty-sixth birthday.

It was a significant milestone because USDA guidelines mandated that all special agents retire at fifty-seven. Jim’s time at the job he loved was winding down. “I can’t believe I never got a dogfighting case,” he said.

“I know,” Deb replied.

“I can’t imagine how someone could do those things to a dog,” he said. He was silent a moment, and then he added, “I’m okay with retiring, but I’d love to get just one of those cases before I go.”

“Well,” Debbie said, “I’ll say a prayer for you.”

It was late 2006 when Jim Knorr received the first call from a deputy sheriff in rural Virginia, a guy named Bill Brinkman, and although Knorr didn’t know it yet, the two of them were a lot alike. Brinkman, too, was a bit of a loner who enjoyed doing his own thing, making his own cases. Personable and intelligent, he had a jowly face, with puffy eyes that made him look as if he had never quite gotten enough sleep. It might have been true. Colleagues in the Surry County sheriff’s office called him Wild Bill, because his light brown hair took on a life of its own when he let it grow for undercover work.