We Are the Cops (14 page)

Well, I get in the car one day and this frigging real nasty one,
she gets into the car and says, ‘Kiss me.’

I said, ‘Are you out of your mind? Number one, I’ve never kissed a prostitute, I won’t kiss a prostitute. You’re here to do one thing, suck my dick and that’s it. I ain’t kissing shit.’

She says, ‘Okay, pull your dick out.’

I’m like, ‘What’s the matter with you? We haven’t even moved yet.’

She goes, ‘I want to make sure you’re not a cop.’

I’m like, ‘I’m not a cop. I wouldn’t be putting you in my car if I were a cop. If you’re going to get weird then I’m going to think that you’re a cop. Just get out of my car.’

She goes, ‘No, no. I’m not a cop. I’m not a cop.’

I said, ‘You know what? I don’t trust you, get out of my car.’

She says, ‘No, no, no, no. I’m telling you, I suck a good dick.’

I’m like, ‘Well how much do you charge for sucking dick?’

So she goes, ‘Twenty bucks.’

I said, ‘Alright.’

So I take my hat off – giving the signal – and she starts grabbing my zipper.

I’m waving my hat but little did I know that they’re sitting right behind us in the van, laughing their asses off watching me waving my hat with her right in my lap!

I said to her, ‘Alright, that’s enough! That’s enough!’

I got out of the car, took my hat and threw it at them, in the van.

They get out laughing and then she gets out and goes, ‘You are a cop!’

I’m like, ‘Yeah. I’m a cop.’

She says to the other cops, ‘He let me suck his dick!’

My pants are up but she got my zipper open. I’m like, ‘Yeah right, you sucked my dick! I don’t think so!’

My sergeant goes, ‘In three seconds? You know what, I believe her!’

Our undercover female officer would have a wire on her and I used to predominately work the wireless tape recorder. We’re in a van watching her and we have somebody ‘ghosting’ her, like a backup that’s close to her in case she gets touched or gets into trouble. But we also have the backup cars that move in when she makes the deal.

So this guy drives up and I’m listening to her talk to him and listen to what he’s saying to her. He drives up and he says to her, ‘How you doing?’

She goes, ‘Hey, you looking for a date?’

He says, ‘I just want to know, are you clean down there?’ And he points at her crotch.

She looks down – I’m listening and watching at the same time – she looks down and she goes, ‘Am I clean down here?’

And he says, ‘Yeah.’

She says, ‘Of course I’m clean down there!’

He says, ‘I’ll give you forty bucks if you let me eat your pussy.’

She says, ‘Wait a second, you want to pay me forty dollars to eat my pussy?’

He says, ‘Yeah.’

She makes the deal, we move in and we get him. We get back
to the office and I say to her, ‘Well, we never had a guy drive up to you and say that before!’

She says, ‘Let me tell you what I thought. Remember when I said, “You want to pay me forty dollars to eat my pussy?”’

I said, ‘Yeah.’

She said, ‘I almost turned the wire off and told him, ‘Okay, let’s go!’’

My partner and I were working a high prostitution area. It was the middle of the night and we see a street girl jump in a car, so we follow them. We see them park up and we give them a little bit of time before we go up on them, suspecting that maybe there’ll be an act going on.

We come up on the windows and my partner’s like, ‘Whoa! What the hell are you doing?’

The girl had a high heeled shoe in her hand and she was hitting the old man’s genitals – and he was obviously excited.

We’re like, ‘What in the world is going on here?!’

And the girl says, ‘He pays me to do that. That’s all he wants.’

Well, what can you do? You’ve just got to tell them to knock it off and then conduct your follow up investigation.

That’s the dark side – the crazy stuff that the general public would never, ever see.

Here in Las Vegas, there are a lot of adult bookstores and these adult bookstores have ‘theatres’. Basically, you go in and there’ll be all the dirty magazines, all the graphic videos and all the products
for sale – you know, dildos and things like that. Well, at the back of these stores they’ve put in little theatres that might have three or four rows with twenty seats and a large screen showing porn. There’re also little arcade booths that you put quarters in and it shows a number of different porn things on them. So a lot of guys will go there.

Well, these areas are high trolling areas for gay men to hook up with other gay men for sex acts in these places, and it’s not exclusively gay men – there are couples that have kinky fantasies; husbands will bring their wives there and things of that nature.

The Vice section at that time would bring up fresh faces from patrol or from somewhere else, because a lot of their guys had been there for a while and had been identified or become too well known. Well, one of the things that they would do, they would send you into these little bookstores. You’d go in and observe the different illegal acts. Then they’ll throw the lights on in the theatre and you then point them out so they can cite everybody or arrest whoever, depending on the circumstances.

When you first go up – the first time that they send you into the adult bookstore – usually you are horrified. And I certainly was, the first time I went in there, because honestly, I had no idea what went on in these adult bookstores, these little arcades and these little theatres.

I had to go and work with a group of old timers who had been in Vice forever, and they’re giving me advice like, ‘Okay, listen, don’t sit down in any of the chairs, because obviously you’ve got a lot of different people coming and going and they’re either
by themselves or with someone else and they’re masturbating or they’re engaged in sex acts.’

So the advice to not sit down was easy to figure out. I don’t want to sit in somebody else’s ‘problem’ or biohazard or fluids.

And then they tell you, ‘Okay, if you stand by the wall, certain people are going to come up to you – because that’s like a sign for certain people – and they’re going to come up and they might be doing things.’

And I’m like, ‘Good grief! What am I getting myself into?’

Obviously we have transmitters on our radios and we’re in communication with the outside should something go wrong, but you’re essentially in there by yourself.

The particular place I was sent into was one of the larger bookstores, where a lot of activity was known to go on.

They sent me in there and they tell me, ‘Observe for a while and remember who’s doing what. When you give us the “bust” signal, we’ll come in and shut the place down, turn all the lights on and get everybody.’

So I get in there, I pay and I go through into the theatre and I’m just eyes wide open! Unbelievable! It’s Sodom and Gomorrah going on in there! Literally. There’s guys sitting in seats masturbating, there’re two guys on the wall playing with each other, there’s one guy giving oral sex to another guy, there’s a young gangbanger with a bandana on and a flannel shirt, looking like a tough guy, who was engaged in anal sex with an old man who had a nun’s habit on!

And mind you, this is my first time in there, this is early on
in my career and I’m the new guy on the squad! It’s literally a scene out of Caligula or Sodom and Gomorrah and you’re trying to remember each person and what they’re doing so that later you’re either going to be citing them or arresting them. So, I’ve got probably fifteen different sex acts on seven or eight different people, you know? They’re intermingling and changing around.

I’ve probably only been in there not even ten minutes and they’re telling me on the radio, ‘Give it a little time, give it a little time.’

And I’m like, ‘No way! This is out of control. You’ve got to get everybody in here now.’

So I give the bust signal and I’m expecting the lights to come on and everybody to come in. But there’s nothing. No response. So I give it again. I wait and I’m starting to get a little nervous and I’m thinking that maybe my equipment’s not working. So I’m moving around and literally you have what I would call ‘zombies’ following you, trying to… you know, because you’re the fresh meat or the new person in there that they haven’t seen before. They may have their pants down or they’re trying to make a motion to you.

The normal reaction of a cop of course is, ‘Get the hell away from me! Stay away from me!’

So it had to look kind of funny, like a choreographed dance, where I’m trying to stay away from people but at the same time I’ve got to get close enough to identify them and see what’s going on.

Long story short, Vice not coming in on the bust signal was
kind of a joke or rite-of-passage, to make me squirm for a little bit on my first go-around. So I was probably in there ten minutes longer than I had to be, dodging these guys coming at me from all directions. And then they come in and we finally shut the place down and everyone laughs. Ha-ha-ha, you know? But that was just one example of the bookstores, and there are so many more.

M
any officers would speak to me about their gang problems but frequently they would state that their gangs were ‘not real gangs like you get in LA or Chicago’. When you think about gangs, it is the Bloods, Cripps and Vice-Lords type groups that comes to mind and from what I heard, these types of gangs are better set up in those two cities, with their organised trade in drugs and their well-established neighbourhoods and zones. ‘Enterprising’ was a word I heard more than once.

In some other cities, officers told me that their gangs were either wannabes or just a bunch of criminally minded kids calling themselves a ‘gang’ and attempting to emulate those from Chicago and LA. But although these ‘wannabes’ may be disorganised, they can still be deadly dangerous. Guns, murder and violence characterise all these gangs.

Of all the tours and ‘ride-alongs’ I have been on over the years, it was without doubt in the gang areas of Chicago where I felt the
most vulnerable; feeling that had I stepped out of the police patrol car and wandered down the road alone, I would have been shot dead within minutes. It was seriously frightening. LA wasn’t much better – I was once surrounded by a gang in Compton, South Central and had to be saved by the LAPD. I honestly thought I was going to die.

In Detroit, a cop told me I would be targeted and attacked very quickly in the ‘ghetto’ areas of his city but only because the people were poor, desperate and wanted whatever I had. Whereas speaking and riding with officers in Chicago, as well as reading the crime reports, it was clear that in some areas, I would be shot and killed by a gangbanger for literally no reason whatsoever. I read more than one account where an innocent person had been shot but not robbed. Just shot for the hell of it, or perhaps as part of a gang initiation.

Officers who work in these type of environments have a curious relationship with the gangs, as you will read, and I was left with the impression that it was one of feigned regard (‘respect’ is probably too strong a word, although it was used) whilst always – sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally – keeping one hand on their gun.

The gangs are basically doing the same thing, but they’re doing it differently. The black gangs are all about business, about the money, they’re all about selling. They’ll do whatever they have to, to maintain their spots. They’ll kill you in a minute. Usually – not all the time – but usually if someone gets killed it’s because of money. It’s because of the drug spot – somebody moving into somebody else’s territory.

A lot of times, with the Spanish gangs, it’s all about, ‘Oh, he looked at my girl’, just stupid stuff. They’re basically protecting their ‘hood’. So if a member of a different gang is going through their neighbourhood and they know he’s from another gang, they’ll kill him, they’ll shoot at him or whatever. And vice-versa, they go back and forth. But it’s not about money – it’s just about turf. They both sell drugs though, the black and Spanish gangs.

White gangs? They’re not too strong in this city. There really aren’t a lot of white gangs in Chicago. There are whites in some of the Spanish gangs but very few in some of the black gangs. Usually black gangs are all black. Usually. You may have some Hispanics in there but in the Spanish gangs you’ll have a variety. You’ll have eighty percent Spanish, ten percent black and ten percent white.

White gangs, they’re usually about smoking pot and drinking. They might sell drugs, but they sell inside, they won’t be on a corner. It’ll just be by word of mouth. You’ll go to this house to buy weed, you’ll go to that house to buy cocaine. You do it inside.

Spanish and black gangs, they’ll have street corner sales, because they do it more. It’s a huge business, street corner sales of narcotics, just huge. You’ll drive in some neighbourhoods like the Eastside, Westside and Southside, you’ll pull up, they’ll have look-outs and most of the time they’ll look at you, they’ll try to figure out if you’re the police or not. If they don’t think you’re police, they’ll direct you, ‘go to that corner’ or ‘go to that alley’ or ‘go to that gang member’. You can either do it on foot or you can do it in your car.

It’s crazy. In some neighbourhoods, you’ll drive up in your car and you’ll get three or four sellers and they’re all from the same gang – from the same group or faction – but they’re all trying to sell their pack and finish their work. They have one or two packs that they sell. They give the money back to the organisation but they keep a certain amount. So that’s their work. So they want to sell and get out of there. So you’ll have three or four guys running up to the car trying to sell you the same thing. It’s just business. It’s business as usual.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of good people in these bad neighbourhoods. A lot of them are held hostage in their neighbourhoods and in their houses because they really don’t want to come out, because it’s not safe. They go to work, they come home, they lock their doors and they stay in their house. And at night their neighbourhoods turn into little war zones. A lot of shootings. You hear a lot of stories of children getting shot. You know, they’re not the intended targets but they’re playing in their back yard half a block away and two gangs are fighting each other and the rounds just keep going until they hit something and a lot of times it’s a little kid or a woman. It’s sad, very sad.

There are a lot of good people in poor neighbourhoods so one thing you’ve got to remember is, you can’t treat people the same. You’ve got to treat people accordingly. The way I look at it, I treat people the way they treat me. You could be living in the worst neighbourhood but you’ve got a nine-to-five job, you work hard, you have your little house and a car and if you have an issue with the police, I’ll treat you accordingly. If you’re a gangbanger
and I know you’re a gangbanger – because I see you every day and I see you selling and gangbanging – I’ll also treat you accordingly.

Sometimes cops get that confused, they think that everybody’s an asshole.

We’re working the Westside, a predominantly black neighbourhood; a lot of gangs, you know what I mean? It’s an area where you have to pay respect to the people too. So that’s what we did. We worked hard, got into a lot of fights, got into a lot of things but never hit anybody when they were in handcuffs. We never did anything that would be considered wrong.

Well, we were dealing with a guy who was a major crook at the time – a major gangster in this area of town that was all gangs. What happened was, we get a call one night over on the Westside, to a guy with a gun who was shooting, blah, blah, blah. We roll over there and this dude – this major crook – is there. He runs from us and he ends up tossing a handgun – he throws a handgun. We grab him but couldn’t find the gun and end up bringing a K-9 unit in. K-9 does a search and they find the gun. Well, one of our guys – he’s a good man but he’s all this, all mouth – well, he’s the one who caught the dude and got him cuffed up.

The dude’s going, ‘Motherfucker! Fuck you!’

Well, one thing leads to another and this cop ends up slapping the dude whilst he’s in cuffs. So the suspect gets majorly pissed off, because it really isn’t the right thing to do – to slap the guy. So the dude starts challenging the cop, ‘I’m gonna kick your ass when I get out of jail. I’m gonna kick your ass, motherfucker.’
After that things started to get heated up in the neighbourhood.

We believe that you have to make your name but you also had to do what was right out on the street too. You earn that respect but you can lose it by doing the wrong thing. Hitting somebody in cuffs was the wrong thing. Times have changed as far as what you can do and what you can’t do. Well, the dude gets out and he’s running down the department, ‘Motherfucking punks! You guys are a bunch of punks!’ Then he starts talking about this specific police officer, ‘Fuck you, I’ll take you one-on-one! One-on-one!’

We all get the word on this. We end up securing a section of town – a project.

We tell this cop, ‘You need to whoop this dude’s ass, because he’s talking shit about us and we’re having to take all these beatings from the gangsters in the neighbourhood. So you need to whoop this guy’s ass, dude. Straight up – man-to-man.’

So we have this thing all set up. They show up and this dude’s there and we’re like, ‘Whoop his ass and be done with it. Let’s get past it.’

Well, the cop ends up arresting the guy for intimidating a police officer or whatever. We’re like, ‘Er, no! You need to whoop his ass or he needs to go free.’

We wouldn’t let this cop arrest him, so we let the dude go. Well, that just caused open turmoil on the streets, because basically you’ve got a cop who’s backed down.

‘You guys are nothing but a bunch of pussies!’

So we’re riding it. We we’re doing a lot of training at that time, so we we’re working out and doing a lot of things – cops
like to stay in shape – a lot of karate and a lot of that type of fighting stuff. So, we’re driving around in the neighbourhood after that fiasco and we pull over this other gangster who used to drive around town in a bright, Pepto-Bismol pink car. I mean you couldn’t miss the dude because he’s driving around town with his shit and he was one of the head gangsters. So, we’re pulling this dude down for whatever the case may be.

Anyway, one thing led to another and he says, ‘I’ll fight him.’ And all of a sudden he’s pointing at me.

It all boiled up from this previous cop having backed down. Now we’re nothing but a bunch of punks as far as the gangs were concerned. People were calling us pussies and all this stuff. We lost total street credibility and we lost a lot of respect.

So this gangster is out there pointing at me – he’s not an overly huge guy – and he’s going, ‘I’ll fight him.’ And he’s pointing at me, right?

So my partner’s telling me, ‘He says he’s going to whoop your ass!’

I come out and go, ‘You going to whoop my ass motherfucker?’

And he goes, ‘You guys ain’t nothing but a bunch of punks.’

I go, ‘Really?’

One thing led to another and I stripped down to a t-shirt, we went around the corner behind one of the projects and I go, ‘All right motherfucker, show me what you’ve got, let’s go.’

So I start throwing a couple of karate kicks, you know? And the dude starts backing up, saying, ‘No man, no kicks. Straight
up blows man, just straight up blows.’

I go, ‘Fuck you! I’m going to kick you on that side of the face and then I’m going to kick you on the other side of the face, motherfucker.’

So I throw a couple more kicks. Now, you’ve got to realise that we’re not the only ones there – everyone from the projects is there. We’re surrounded. So basically he ends up backing down and runs away – and this is one of the gangsters, right?

Well, the next day, the same street, my partner and I are riding around together, driving around the neighbourhood and all of a sudden these little kids, five to eight-year-old neighbourhood kids, are riding their bikes by us and they’re like, ‘Rollers!’ – you know, their word for ‘cops’ – ‘Rollers!’

We’re sitting there and they go, ‘Oh dude! Hey, that’s the dude who backed down the gangster, man. You’re cool, brother, you’re cool!’

So after that and a few other battles, we earned our respect back. You know what I mean? We had tons of fights but never got one complaint.

But all those things we did, it was always straight up, man-to-man. It was a different world back in the day. We’d meet in the parks and do whatever we had to do to gain that respect, but we’d never disrespected anybody, never hit anybody in cuffs. It was always straight up. Like I said, you earned that respect but you didn’t disrespect anybody either and that way you never had any problems. We were always fair, we were always firm and we never backed down.

The gangs will kill you over a nickel bag of weed. They’ll even kill each other in the same faction. They’ll have wars within. Like, if somebody gets locked up – a guy who’s either middle management or a boss – and has to go to jail, you’ll have fighting to figure out who’s going to take that person’s spot.

A lot of times you’ll have three or four little factions fighting for that one spot and they’ll start shooting each other – the same gang. They’ll walk up or they’ll drive up and they’ll shoot five people from their own faction, like it was nothing.

I’m on 15th and Linden, which is downtown. It’s primarily a Hispanic neighbourhood that has some real heavy Hispanic gang ties. I was a training officer and I used to take my trainees down there all the time to try and get them involved in a lot of gang activity. So, this one time there was a group of gang members hanging out at a known apartment complex. There were probably, I don’t know, ten or fifteen of them. So I pulled my car up, put the headlights off and everything like that – kind of covertly pulled up – and my trainee and I watch them, discuss some things that gang members do, watch their activity, the way they carry themselves, things like that; see if we can maybe develop some type of reasonable suspicion and go out and stop them.