Hero To Zero 2nd edition (10 page)

“I can see that this is an amazing gift. So what’s the curse?”

Scott sighed and said, “That same recall and memory make it impossible to forget the really bad shit we see. Think about that. I can’t pick and choose what I remember; I remember it all—every dead child, every rape victim, every fatal car crash, every murder victim, and every real asshole we meet. I can’t go anywhere and not see people I know from work. I know details about them, good and bad. Get it? There is no escape. I take this shit with me everywhere I go. On the streets, that memory works for me. I can find people, remember their names, who their family members are and what they’ve done, but I can’t shut it off.”

I had never thought about memory that way before. No wonder the dude was so fucked-up and edgy.

Here is an example of one incident in which I know Scott was involved. He mostly worked alone, and spent a lot of time talking to people on the streets. He believed strongly that he could learn from anyone, and treated everyone with respect until they forced him to do otherwise.

Scott was intensely interested in the city’s raging gang problem. There was one dominant gang in the city at the time, and it was running the patrol officers ragged. Scott spent a lot of time talking to this gang’s members, learning who was in charge, how plans were made by the group, who called the shots. All of this information he passed on to the gang-unit detectives.

One night, Scott found out that the gang leader’s mother desperately wanted her son out of the gang. Scott was able to spend an hour or so talking to her, and realized that here was the veteran gang leader’s weak link. He loved his mother more than anything.

It took several weeks of talking to the jaded gang member, but Scott was able to convince him to give up the internal workings of the gang. In exchange for immunity against any pending criminal charges, the gang leader spilled his guts. He sat in interviews with the gang-unit detectives for hours, discussing details, tactics, and plans that had been made.

Afterwards, the sergeant of the gang unit made a point of thanking Scott. Scott said that the sergeant told him that he had a rare talent for reaching people and talking to them as human beings instead of as criminals. The sergeant said that he greatly appreciated the efforts Scott had made, and was going to recommend him for an award.

Scott heard the word
award
and knew that meant attention. He asked the sergeant not to do what he was planning; Scott did not want the attention. The sergeant was baffled—most cops crave attention. Scott’s brother Mike would have jumped at the chance for his peers to see him given an award.

The sergeant shook his head and said, “Okay, I’ll do as you ask. You really are different from your brother. Are you sure you’re not adopted?”

Scott smiled and said, “I’ve often wondered that myself.”

Some nights, Scott and Mike would work overlapping shifts. On rare occasions they would get a call together, which almost always ended badly. Here are a couple of examples to show you how different they really were:

One night the two brothers were sent to respond to a report of a family fight in progress. They both arrived at the lower west-end residence and started to ask questions and take statements from witnesses. They eventually determined that a fight had occurred at the house, but they could not figure out who was at fault.

The laws governing domestic violence were in a constant state of flux at the time. This was about ten months after the OJ Simpson trial, and the state legislature was still tweaking the domestic violence laws in a desperate attempt to deal with that continuing hot issue.

Both the husband and wife involved in the dispute to which the Prestons had responded had signs of injuries. Obviously a fight had occurred; however, at the time, the laws required the cops themselves to determine who the predominant aggressor was and arrest that person.

In this case, there was no clear sign of which party was the predominant aggressor. Mike asked the husband to step out of the house and into the front yard while another officer spoke to the woman involved. Mike, Scott, and the future Sergeant Leeds surrounded the man; while Mike talked, Scott and Leeds completed a triangle around the suspect. The suspect had nowhere to go should he try to escape. At least that was the idea.

Mike asked a few probing questions and tried to get the suspect to make some kind of admission, until it became really clear that that was not going to happen.

Mike suddenly stepped out of the triangle and opened it up, leaving a huge hole that the suspect could run through should he decide to do so.

Scott was puzzled;
WTF was Mike doing
? Scott looked at Mike and saw an evil expression, familiar from when they were kids. Mike was plotting something.

The suspect saw the opening and decided to run while the opening was there. Immediately Mike smiled and let out a loud YAHHOOO! The chase was on.

Mike could have easily caught the suspect in the first ten steps, but hung back a little. Scott was behind him, and wondered what the hell Mike was doing. Mike said, “Let him get around the next corner before we tackle him.”

Puzzled, Scott waited till they turned the corner, and then Mike sped up and tackled the suspect. A normal arrest would have involved the two cops grabbing the guy’s arms and handcuffing him, but Mike had other ideas.

Scott grabbed an arm and brought out his handcuffs. Mike said, “No not yet; don’t cuff him.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not done kicking his ass yet!” And Mike started raining down punches on the guy’s head.

Scott looked at the smile on Mike’s face, and remembered seeing that smile his whole life when Mike got into fights. This was bullshit. Scott stopped the abuse, and handcuffed the suspect.

He and Mike were instantly in each other’s faces, old rivalries reborn. The two cops nearly came to blows, exchanging insults and shoving each other. It was plain to Leeds, when he turned the corner, that something had happened between the two brothers, but he was much slower than they were and had missed the incident after the suspect was tackled.

Mike called Scott a rookie and said he had a lot to learn about the streets—his favorite insult. Scott told him never to pull shit like that again. The two brothers departed the scene, and did not speak to each other again for years.

Another night Mike was dispatched to an aggravated assault in progress. Right after he received the call, he signed out to attend to a parking problem in a grocery store. Yep! Mike put the felony in progress on hold because there was a parking problem in a grocery store that needed immediate attention.

That is what seasoned veteran officers do, right? They see the bigger picture, realizing at any moment the parking problem could get out of hand—and who knows what could happen then?

The dispatcher was quite understandably pissed off. It was a summer night, and there were no other units available to handle the aggravated assault in progress. Everyone was tied up on other calls, except the seasoned veteran Mike. The dispatcher ridiculed Mike for choosing to see to the parking incident first, and tried to get him to take the call, but he would not.

I was with Scott on another call, and he was pissed off immediately. Hearing the exchange between Mike and the dispatcher, he turned to me and said, “Can you believe this shit? You watch, tomorrow he’ll tell our family about how he saved some guy’s life, or rescued some kid from a fire. You would not believe the bullshit he tells our parents.”

“Do they know about how he is called BIKE-ONE?” I asked.

Scott laughed and said, “No, and I don’t have the desire to tell them. Mike is my dad’s favorite; he walks on water as far as the old man is concerned.”

Scott got on his cell phone and told dispatch that he would take the call for the aggravated assault in progress. The call we were on was nearly complete, so he left while I finished up. So Scott went, without backup, on the aggravated assault call, while Mike handled the more important parking problem.

After Scott arrived, secured the scene, requested medical assistance for the injured victim, arrested the suspect, and was nearly ready to leave the scene, Mike suddenly sounded off on the radio. He was clear of the parking problem and said he was now able to handle the aggravated assault. The dispatcher told him the call had been handled by Scott. Mike just said, “Okay, then I’m available to handle calls.” The dispatcher said nothing. Yep, Mike was available—till another dangerous parking problem arose.

I asked Scott, “How the hell are you two brothers?”

Scott rolled his eyes. “I’ve always wondered,” he said.

Scott continued quietly collecting awards and tried to stay below the radar. He had his own demons to deal with. He had been married several times and could not seem to find the same success in his personal life as he was enjoying at work. He had three kids, and was a great father. His kids were his hope for the future. He told me once that his life-long goal was to make sure that his children never had any idea what it was like to grow up like he and Mike had.

He did not succeed in being a decent husband, however. On his third marriage, buried in debt from divorce, Scott started to fall apart. The inability to shut down the bad memories from work, and the stress of divorce and debt, started to take their toll. Scott was a loner, and had no outlet for the stress. He worked out feverishly and tried to use the old tricks that had made his life bearable. Eventually, though, it all fell apart.

Scott had married a woman he met while working a part-time job, and they had moved into a place in the city. Scott was working two jobs and all the overtime he could scrape up to pay the bills. One night he discovered that his new wife had been having an affair with her boss and her boss’s husband. Scott was devastated, and he went after the couple with whom his wife had betrayed him.

Scott had a battle plan on the streets. He employed psychological warfare against the hardcore criminals he went after. Upping their stress level making them worry where he was, what he knew, and how he would next come after them. He used this same tactic on the adulterous boss and her husband.

This time, however, it backfired. His wife’s boss went to the police department and complained. An investigation took place, and Scott was found clearly to be in the wrong. He was given a choice by the department: he could resign, or face public humiliation. The investigators told him they would be forced to release to the press the fact that he had been involved in the incident and had terrorized his wife’s lovers. More attention was the last thing Scott wanted, and the choice was obvious. He resigned from the department.

Scott had an amazing career that any cop would envy. Multiple assignments, awards, and recognition, and he truly made a difference on the streets. But his personal life was a mess, and it destroyed his career.

Scott pressed on and recovered financially. He was hired again as a cop, but he never again made the impact on the streets that he had when he was with our department. Scott did a lot that will never be recognized. Years after he left the department he would get phone calls about cases he’d handled and questions about what he was doing now. We kept in touch, and I know that he won’t like being added to this book. Too bad.

PAUL BAILEY GREW UP IN
the inner city, and was a gifted athlete from the time he was a small boy. He was a star on his high school basketball team. He played the forward position, and was a huge reason for the team getting to the state championship his senior year. In the final state game, with three seconds remaining, the point guard passed Paul the ball, and he took the go-ahead winning shot; the ball passed through the rim and made the familiar
swish
you hear when it touches nothing but net. The team had won their first state championship in twenty years. Paul was the hero of the game.

Paul’s life was like that—charmed. He secured a full ride scholarship to the local college and completed his four-year degree. While in college, he married his high school sweetheart. She was a gifted athlete as well, and played high school and college basketball. They both graduated from college with academic and athletic honors. They were two gifted and talented people making their life’s dream a reality.

After college, Paul decided that he wanted to be a cop. He looked at all the local police and sheriff’s departments and decided to go with the sheriff’s department.