by Radley Balko
The White House needed something tangible to tout to the public. If they couldn’t use actual crime data to show their initiatives were working, perhaps they could just create their own impressive statistics by generating lots of arrests and convictions at the federal level. The journalist Edward Jay Epstein writes, “[Nixon] reminded Ehrlichman and Krogh that there was only one area in which the federal police could produce such results on demand—and that was narcotics.”44
But there remained the question of how to do it. While the federal narcotics enforcement agency, BNDD, had been expanded from four hundred officers in 1969 to two thousand by 1971, Nixon and Mitchell had been persuaded early in the administration to focus the agency’s energy on targeting high-level traffickers, at home and overseas. Its mission was to drain the drug supply, which meant long, complicated investigations that in theory would result in high-quality arrests, but not in a high quantity of them.45 Krogh had asked BNDD director John Ingersoll to reverse course and devote resources to making easy, high-profile arrests of low-level offenders that the administration could use for PR purposes. Ingersoll refused, arguing that those sorts of arrests might have made for good politics, but they did little to reduce crime or addiction. The BNDD was just one among several federal bureaucracies that had been pushing back on Nixon’s increasingly aggressive antidrug policies. He was also getting frustrated by the lack of cooperation from the Treasury Department and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
So the White House crime team came up with a plan. They would launch an all-out PR offensive to scare the hell out of the public about crime, and to tie crime to heroin. Once voters were good and terrified, they would push for reorganization to consolidate drug policy and enforcement power within the White House. Krogh put together a quick-hitting but multifaceted strategy that included planting media scare stories about heroin, publicly recalling ambassadors to embarrass heroin-producing countries like Thailand and Turkey, and holding high-level (but entirely staged) strategy sessions that they’d invite the media to attend. The plan culminated with a planned speech from Nixon that would forge new frontiers in fearmongering. An aide to Krogh told the journalist Epstein years later, “If we hyped the drug problem into a national crisis, we knew that Congress would give us anything we asked for.”46
G. Gordon Liddy, who the next month would head up the White House “plumbers” group implicated in the Watergate scandal, motivated his PR team with a series of films to educate and inspire them about the power of government propaganda. According to Epstein, Liddy’s movie nights concluded with Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous (but brilliant and effective) 1934 film glorifying Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.47
The scare strategy was executed as planned. Nixon’s June 17, 1971, speech more than met expectations. He declared drug abuse “public enemy number one” and asked for emergency powers and new funding to “wage a new, all-out offensive.”48 Years later, both this speech and a similar one he gave the following year would alternately be considered the start of the modern “war on drugs.” In a poll taken the following month, Americans named drug abuse as the most urgent domestic problem facing the country.49
A few weeks after the PR offensive, Liddy began working on a new plan to shift enforcement power to the White House. To work around obstinates like Ingersoll at the BNDD, Liddy ensured that the new elite enforcement agency would operate directly out of the White House. It would consist of narcotics “strike forces” to be dispatched across the country and populated with personnel pulled from other federal law enforcement agencies and local law enforcement. They would fund the program through the LEAA, which would allow them to use grants to persuade local police departments to cooperate. The strike forces would get high-profile, media-friendly arrests, generate empty but impressive-sounding arrest statistics Nixon could tout, and operate directly under Nixon and his top aides. By autumn, Nixon had given it the green light.50
The new agency would be called the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, or ODALE. Nixon appointed forty-four-year-old Myles Ambrose to lead it. Ambrose favored a much more aggressive, rough-’em-up style of drug enforcement. He had been head of Customs during Operation Intercept, and it probably didn’t hurt that these clashing philosophies about law enforcement had led to repeated feuds with Ingersoll, the BNDD head who was currently a thorn in Nixon’s side. Ingersoll only learned about the new agency while watching a TV news special in late December 1971.51
But ODALE was always strictly for show. It would never have more than a few hundred agents. Nixon’s executive order creating the agency even included an eighteen-month sunset provision. That wasn’t nearly enough time or personnel to fulfill the agency’s lofty mission to “stop the proliferating addict population.” ODALE existed to show off the Nixon administration’s showpiece crime tools—no-knock raids, copious use of wiretaps, preventive detention, and the power to jail witnesses who refused to testify before grand juries. Federal narcotics agent John Finlator would say in a couple years that the office “was strictly a political thing. They were trying to prove the No. 1 problem was drugs, as Nixon said. They were under pressure to produce.”52
In March 1972, all was set to go. The strike forces began . . . striking. The problem was that they weren’t always sure exactly what they were striking.53
HUMBOLDT COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, LIES ABOUT TWO HUNDRED miles north of San Francisco along the Pacific Coast. It is vast, mountainous, heavily forested, and sparsely populated country, home to a sizable portion of the state’s towering redwood trees. Over the last several decades, the county’s immensity, forest cover, and terrain have made it ideal for covert marijuana cultivation—and the hippie, agrarian pot culture that goes with it. And that has often put Humboldt County in the crosshairs of the drug warriors. On April 4, 1972, just a few weeks after the new Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) was up and running, Humboldt was also the setting for the violent death of twenty-four-year-old Dirk Dickenson, the first fatality in Nixon’s new “all-out war on drugs.”54
Local Humboldt County law enforcement had already produced one drug war casualty. Deputy Mel Ames, a hard-nosed, fifteen-year cop, had a knack for spotting drug offenders. In the spring of 1971, Ames had sniffed out two four-foot-high marijuana plants growing along the Eel River. After setting up a stakeout nearby, he watched for days in hopes of catching whoever had planted them. When the weekend came, he handed watch duty off to twenty-seven-year-old deputy Larry Lema. On October 4, 1970—a bright Sunday afternoon—Lema spotted twenty-two-year-old Patrick Berti, who was on his way to law school in the fall, and a friend walking along the river. When the two stopped to inspect the plants, Lema realized he’d found his pot cultivators. He emerged from the bushes to apprehend them. Lema and Berti, it would turn out, had known one another all their lives. When Lema confronted Berti, Berti turned, still holding a twig from one of the plants in his hand. Lema mistook it for a gun and shot him.
“Christ, Larry, you shot me,” Berti said. Those would be his last words. He died there in the woods. Berti’s friend had grown the marijuana. Berti had merely come to see the plants out of curiosity—he’d never seen pot plants that tall. A Humboldt County grand jury ruled Berti’s death a justifiable homicide.55
The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department had since signed on to Nixon’s more warlike federal drug initiative. They welcomed the help. Most local police feared that the county had been overrun by the counterculture. Starting in about 1970, “longhairs” had begun moving into the area and taking up residence in and around the town of Garberville. Probably not coincidentally, there had also been at least a dozen unsolved arsons in that area since 1971. All of the torched buildings had been occupied by the newcomers. If you were to draw a perimeter around the burned residences, somewhere near the middle you’d find the ranch where Dirk Dickenson lived with his girlfriend. In the fall of 1971, Humboldt County sheriff’s deputy Archie Brunkle led a recall campaign against the Garberville ju
stice of the peace for being “too soft on hippies.” He ran the campaign out of the Garberville branch of the Sheriff’s Department.
Against that backdrop, an informant allegedly told the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) office in San Francisco that they’d find a major drug operation on Dirk Dickenson’s ranch. Dickenson, the informant said, was running a million-dollar PCP lab. The BNDD office contacted the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department with the tip, and Undersheriff Bob Bollman agreed to investigate. (Bollman, incidentally, had been running the department since Sheriff Gene Cox had taken leave to treat his own addiction—Cox was an alcoholic.) Bollman assigned Deputy Ames to do some reconnaissance. Ames conducted two flyovers of the property. Neither revealed any signs of a drug lab. So Ames then recruited a local dogcatcher to work his way inside the house, under the guise of investigating a complaint about Dickenson’s two Saint Bernards. The dogcatcher returned and reported that he’d seen some roaches in a few ashtrays around the house. That and the informant’s tip were enough to get a search warrant.
Had they done a bit more research, the Sheriff’s Department might have concluded that a million-dollar drug lab on the property was improbable. The tenants—twenty-four-year-old Dickenson and his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend, Judy Arnold—had no electricity or running water. Upon discovering the two were hippies, the local rancher who supplied power and water to the house had turned both utilities off. So the couple piped in their own water. They did without electricity. Dickenson earned money for the two of them from carpentry and woodworking.
Contemporary media accounts of the raid on Dickenson’s ranch described it as a BNDD operation. The initial informant’s tip to the BNDD office in San Francisco came in February, before ODALE was up and running. But once the raid itself went down in April, ODALE had been operational for a month. It isn’t entirely clear that the raid was an official ODALE operation, but it seemed to have all the characteristics of one. ODALE was a transagency endeavor. Ambrose and his staff could detail law enforcement personnel out of several federal agencies to serve on task forces, including BNDD, Customs, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). The nineteen-man assault team assembled to raid Dickenson’s home on April 4 included members of both BNDD and the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, along with two federal chemists and an IRS agent.
On the morning of the raid, the nineteen agents, including the dogcatcher, were split into two teams. Half would arrive at the ranch in a Huey helicopter they had borrowed from the US Army. The others donned military jackets and would arrive by car. The car team would drive to the cabin, sneak onto the property, then hide in the trees. When the helicopter landed, the second team would rush out and storm the house. The car team would then drop down from the trees.
To be sure the operation got maximum exposure, Undersheriff Bollman invited the press to come along and watch. (This was another ODALE strategy.) Bollman told the newspaper reporter and two photographers that there was a good chance they’d be witnessing the biggest drug bust in California history. Later, he’d regret bringing them along. The managing editor of the local newspaper would tell Rolling Stone that, were it not for Bollman’s ego, the entire raid would probably have been “tidied up” and few outside Humboldt County would ever have known the name Dirk Dickenson.
One of the federal agents on the raid team was twenty-nine-year-old Lloyd Clifton, who had recently been recruited from the Berkeley Police Department to join the federal narcotics office in San Francisco. Four years before the Dickenson raid, Clifton had pulled over a motorist for a traffic violation. Spotting a bottle of gas in the car, Clifton asked the motorist if it was gas. The man said it was. Bizarrely, Clifton then called the man a “murderer,” for no apparent reason. (He acknowledged as much in a subsequent lawsuit.) When the motorist smirked at the odd insult, Clifton beat him with his baton.
In another odd incident, a California Highway Patrol officer had arrested a young black man for several outstanding traffic warrants. Inside the Berkeley police station, the man said it was a case of mistaken identity. The car was no longer his, and if they let him make a phone call, he could prove that he didn’t own the car when the traffic infractions occurred. They agreed to let him contact the owner. As he was returning from making the call, Clifton—who had nothing to do with the case—confronted the man and asked, “What the fuck are you walking around here for?” He then threw the man into an open elevator and began beating him. Other officers had to pull him off. The man Clifton had beaten was the son of a California Superior Court judge. For that beating, Clifton received a reprimand. In a third incident, he had beaten another black man outside the Berkeley jail, in front of both the man’s mother and a bail bondsman. Clifton claimed he was instigated to violence because the man had called him “a motherfucker.”
If this new federal initiative against street-level pushers was all about projecting aggression and instilling fear, Clifton was a perfect fit.
On the morning of the day he would die, Dickenson and his girlfriend woke at around 9:00 AM. They went out to inspect the tall, wide tree he planned to fell for wood to build some tables. The couple then walked to the property of the man who owned the tree to inquire about buying it. The man happened to be the dogcatcher who had just given them up to the police. He agreed to sell them the tree, knowing they’d shortly be raided by narcotics agents. The two returned to the ranch, stopping first to purchase a bottle of whiskey to celebrate. The couple also planned to build a bathroom that day. The bathtub they’d already built was sitting out on their porch, and they wanted to create a place to put it. They were cleaning out the tub to bring it inside when they first heard the helicopter.
The agents themselves were undercover narcs. They had long hair, mustaches, and unshorn faces. To Dickenson and Arnold, they looked like peers. So when the couple looked up at the low-flying helicopter, they waved. The agents waved back. Judy Arnold described the scene to Rolling Stone reporter Joe Ezsterhas:
Dirk said—“It looks like it’s gonna land.” It was over the house and it was really low. We left the back door open and came back inside the cabin. Boogie and Vernon [the Saint Bernards] weren’t barking. They were calm. Our front door was open and the copter was starting to land. Dust and dirt were coming into the cabin. Dirk walked over and closed the front door. Most of the door was glass. We stood at the corner of the big redwood table in the kitchen facing out the front door. The copter set down and the men jumped off. . . .
I didn’t have anything to be afraid of until I saw the guns . . . shotguns and rifles and everything. I thought it was some kind of ripoff.
I saw a foot come through the door, the foot and then the door was pushed open. It was busted open. And at the time Dirk turned and ran and told me to run. Before I could do anything they had me. Dirk jumped off the back porch and ran. There’s a terrace back there and a slope toward the woodline. They told me to freeze. There were at least ten of them inside by now. The one who broke the door down, Clifton, ran through the house after Dirk. . . .
It was terrifying. I was shaking. It was like some terrible storm had crashed down out of the sky at us. They held me. The dogs got excited and they were barking. There was mad confusion in the place.56
Local reporter Richard Harris, who rode along, wrote that the raid resembled “an assault on an enemy prison camp in Vietnam.”
The area wasn’t well suited for a helicopter landing. The gusts generated by the propeller kicked up dirt and rocks and swirled debris. Tree limbs popped as surges of air snapped them from their branches. As Dickenson fled, Clifton called out for him to freeze. It’s likely that Dickenson simply didn’t hear the command over the noise of the helicopter. Arnold says she still wasn’t aware that the men were police. When Dickenson continued to run, Clifton set the sights of his .38 revolver on the young man’s back. He fired one bullet. Dickenson fell to the ground.
Arnold describes what she saw:
I heard somebody say—“He’s been hit!” I didn’t hear the shot. The copter was taking off again and making this insane noise and the dogs were really barking. It was chaos. . . .
I heard he was out there and he’d been hit and I asked if I could go out there and see him. They said no. I said—“Well, can I at least go out on the back porch and see how he is?” So they held me and took me to the back porch. I looked off and I could see him. I saw him move his leg. It was spasmodic, like a twitch. . . .
They took me back to the cabin. They still hadn’t identified themselves. I finally saw a badge on the inside of this guy’s . . . coat, but they still hadn’t said who they were. . . .
They wouldn’t tell me how he was, wouldn’t say anything. . . . They put me in the orange truck and I said again—“Well who are you?” That’s the first time they officially told me who they were.57
The agents searched Dickenson for a gun. He was unarmed. And he’d been shot in the back.
Bollman made the journalists he had invited along promise to ask questions only of him or Kenny Krusco, the head of the federal team. But once Dickenson went down, photographer Ron Rose was able to freeze his death in one excruciating frame. Taken seconds after the shooting, Rose’s photo shows Dickenson lying on his right side, his left arm awkwardly draped over his body, his wrist facing up. His head is tilted back, and Clifton is kneeling next to him. Dickenson appears to be looking directly into his killer’s face. A uniformed deputy kneels on the other side of Dickenson, his eyes fixed on the dying man’s twitching leg. A rendition of the image would make the cover of Rolling Stone the following year.