It’s happened to me more than a few times, yet it
still surprises me. Twice during my career and then again just yesterday, I’ve
had encounters with people I had arrested in the past who flat-out admitted they were
criminals. I’m not talking about the guy who confesses to breaking the speed
limit when you’re giving him a traffic citation; I am referring to those
handful of individuals that tell you they make their living by committing
crimes. Or used to.
The first time, in the mid-80s, I was working off-duty,
uniformed security at the old Blue Goose on Park Avenue East. Back in the day,
we were permitted to do that…work security in a liquor establishment. That’s
not the case anymore, which is probably a good thing; the two quickest ways for
a male copper to get into trouble is booze and women, of which both are
plentiful in a bar environment.
The band, right at last call, starts playing their
version of ‘Freebird’, the old Lynyrd Skynyrd tune…and it was pretty bad, too.
Anyway, a guy I’ve known since middle school was a regular in the place; we’d
played baseball together in school but I can’t exactly say that Pete ( not his
real name ) and I were friends. Pete had a knack of always being in some sort
of trouble in school and I tried to stay away from those type of people. That
behavior carried on into adulthood for Pete; he’d been in prison more than
once. You see, Pete was, at one time, one of the premier safe-crackers in about
a four-state area. All of us in law enforcement knew him and what it was he did,
and eventually he’d gotten caught somewhere in Kentucky.
This night, as usual, Pete was pretty drunk. He’d always
spoken to me in a cordial manner but stayed away when he was with his pals; I
suppose he didn’t want to damage his reputation in the criminal community. As
the band drones on with the last song, Pete staggers over, bleary-eyed, and
tells me he respects me, and that he wished he’d made better life-choices when
he was younger ( not his exact words, but that was the gist of it ). He then
starts crying and tells me that he’d recently ‘done something’ and was so
ashamed that he wanted to die, that he never would have imagined doing
something so horrible. I gently prodded him to tell me, careful not to make it
appear I was interrogating him. Pete, arm around my shoulder, looks me square
in the eye and says he can’t admit to it because he knows he’d go back to
prison for a long time. “I can’t go back there. I’ll die first”, he told me, “…and
I know you’ll have to do your job if I tell you. I know that you know I’m a
criminal; I am, but I’ve never hurt anyone before.” Pete then staggered away.
It dawned on me what he was talking about; a month
prior, a business had been burglarized during the nighttime by professionals; they’d
defeated the alarm system and entered in such a manner that wouldn’t leave any trace
of how they’d gotten in. When the crew was finished and were leaving the place,
a woman who happened to live right next door came out of her home to let her little
dog out. She saw them and they saw her. These scum bags then beat her badly
enough to put her in the hospital, leaving her with the threat that they’d be
back if she talked to the police. She didn’t out of fear for her life. Pete, in
his drunken state, hadn’t given me anything that was useable in court and there
was nothing else that could be used to even establish basis for questioning. I
sent it up the chain but, as far as I know, nothing came of my encounter with
Pete.
I heard recently that he was in pretty bad shape health-wise; it is
un-Christian for me to say this but I hope Pete is suffering every single day.
Then there was Larry. Law enforcement in this county had
been dealing with Larry, his buddy and also a girlfriend seemingly every other
week for some type of business burglary. Their specialty was stealing
high-dollar lawn tractors. Not the Sears model you mow the yard with, but
rather those bigger suckers that aren’t quite farm tractors but still cost a
small fortune. Larry, too, had been in prison but he certainly hadn’t been
rehabilitated. Later on, he and his friends moved on to bigger and worse crimes…drug
trafficking, mainly cocaine. Not in small amounts, either. Larry eventually
became a suspect in a yet-to-be-solved homicide but nothing concrete enough to
charge him was ever developed.
I was attending a wedding reception in 2001, during
the three-year span I was out of the cop business due to a pretty bad spinal
injury; Larry was there, too, as he was somehow related to the groom. Larry had
always been friendly with me during past encounters; he never took it
personally when he’d been arrested. He came over and started talking to me,
saying he’d heard I wasn’t on the job anymore because of my back. “That’s too
bad, Clark, because I always liked you. You’re a good dude, not like some of
those other cops. I was a criminal and it was your job to catch me; sometimes I
won, sometimes you guys did.” We talked for another few minutes and that was
it. I never saw him again. Larry died a few years ago when his heart just quit
working, I’m sure because of all the coke in his system.
The last time was Friday, mid-morning; I was out metal
detecting in a small city park located right next to a business. I was in the
process of wrapping things up and had wandered over to check out the area
around an old set of bleachers before walking the 30 yards to where I’d parked.
Head down, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up; a black
guy I’ll call ‘Harold’ was walking towards me. I knew the face but couldn’t
remember his name, knowing only that I’d dealt with him on occasion while
working for Mansfield PD.
“I know you…”, I said to him, which kind of took him
aback.
“Know me? How you know me?”
When I answered that I knew his face and that I’d
worked at MPD for a number of years, his face lit up. “Yeah, you’re Cigar!” ( pronounced
‘cee-gar' ; I almost always had one while I was working the street ).
We exchanged names and then it all came back. Harold
hadn’t been a bad criminal, having only one 3rd degree, non-violent
felony on his record ( for which he got probation ) but several misdemeanor
arrests. I remembered him because it seemed like that, every time we were sent
to a disturbance at the old Jimmy’s Lounge on the square, Harold was there
smiling his gap-toothed smile. After a bar fight at Jimmy’s one night I’d
pulled him aside to question him as a witness. “I saw it, but I ain’t tellin’
nuthin’”, he’d said, “don’t wanna be no rat.” But after that time, if we had something
happen and Harold was there, he made it a point to greet me by my then-street
name. A few of those times Harold would give up a little information, too.
Harold and I talked for twenty minutes about the old
days, with him asking about some of the guys I used to work with and me asking
about the mopes he used to run with. As for him, Harold said he’d quit running
the bars and was staying out of trouble, having taken on a full-time job at the
business next door to the park. He’d come over to let me know that I was on the
business’ property next to the bleachers. Again, I got the ‘you was a good dude’
number, with Harold admitting to me that he’d run afoul of the law on a few
things but not gotten caught, except for the one felony. “I grew up”, Harold
told me, “and wish I’d done it a lot sooner.”
It makes me feel good when criminals tell me I was a
good cop back in the day, because I know it’s due to the way I treated them. Fairly.
Everyone’s human and makes mistakes.
I just wish Pete had admitted to his disgusting crime that night so many decades ago,
because I would have taken great pleasure in locking him away.
