Rise of the Warrior Cop

by Radley Balko

  Again to Arnold:

  I kept asking how Dirk was and they wouldn’t tell me. The copter was back and they were taking Dirk away and I said—“Can I go with him?” They said, “No, you’d just be in the way.” One of the dogs, Boogie, was out there running around Dirk’s body. They were carrying Dirk onto the copter and Boogie was crying. . . . The copter took off and Boogie stood underneath it, looking up—the roar wasn’t scaring him at all now and he was howling.58

  The raid team had brought no medical personnel with them. That was odd, given that they had planned a major drug operation and indicated in the search warrant that they anticipated weapons. By the time word got back to the house that Dickenson needed a doctor, the helicopter had already departed for the base. The narcotics agents had to call it back over the radio to return to pick up the wounded man. The same helicopter that had just delivered the men who killed Dirk Dickenson then flew him to a hospital in a bid to save him. He was dead before it landed.

  The police searched the house top to bottom. They found a joint, two roaches, several buttons of peyote, two LSD tablets, and a few small baggies of marijuana. No drug lab. They searched the surrounding area for hours. Some agents spent the night and searched more the next day. They didn’t find it. Arnold was arrested and jailed for the small quantities of pot, LSD, and peyote. Dickenson’s mother found out about her son’s death over the radio.

  After several hours in the Eureka jail, Arnold said, one of the attendants called her out of her cell.

  “He’s dead,” the attendant said. He then sent her back to her cell.

  The Sheriff’s Department and federal agents quickly went into ass-covering mode. Undersheriff Bollman told the press, “You can’t blame officers for being uptight. They’re aware of the situation today. Officers don’t go out on duty thinking they’re going to shoot someone, but many times they may wonder if they’re going to return home that night.”

  Three days after the raid, agent William Filben claimed he had tripped shortly after exiting the helicopter. The only people who saw him fall were Bollman, the local raid team leader, Krusco, leader of the federal team, and Clifton. The narrative went like this: Clifton thought Filben had been shot by someone in the house. That was why he kicked in the door and entered without knocking or announcing (they did not have a no-knock warrant). When Dickenson fled, Clifton, clad in jeans, boots, and a brown corduroy jacket, assumed he was the one who had shot Filben. When Dickenson then didn’t obey his command to stop, Clifton had no choice but to shoot him. As to why Clifton couldn’t have shot the fleeing, unarmed man in the leg, federal agent Ed McReedy replied, “The idea of shooting to wound is bush league.”

  US Attorney James L. Browning promised an investigation. “We are attempting to be as impartial as possible,” he said. “We have an open mind.” Seconds later, he added, “Nevertheless, on the basis of incomplete reports received by this office, I suspect it will fall into the category of justifiable homicide.” He’d keep an open mind, but he had pretty much already made up his mind.

  A month after the shooting, Humboldt County district attorney William Ferroggiaro went out to inspect the ranch and to re-create the scene for himself. While walking about two hundred feet from the house, he was stunned to find what looked to be a small drug lab. There was a tent, a platform, two containers of a chemical used to make PCP, a flask, and some broken glass lab equipment. It was far from a million-dollar operation. It was also far from plausible. Dozens of law enforcement officials had scoured the property for hours and found nothing. But now, visiting the site a month later, he easily found the allegedly incriminating evidence pointing to Dickenson’s drug operation. To his credit, Ferroggiaro reported the find—then publicly expressed his doubt about how it got there. “There’s a certain amount of taint to the discovery,” he said. “The possibility must be considered that the materials were planted on the Dickenson property subsequent to the initial search.”

  A federal judge soon dismissed the charges against Judy Arnold, finding that Clifton violated her Fourth Amendment rights when he entered without announcing. The judge also reprimanded Clifton for his actions. But that would be about as much punishment as Clifton would get. In June, the BNDD came to a “preliminary conclusion” that “Clifton was justified in shooting.” At the end of November, nearly eight months after Dickenson’s death, US Attorney Browning announced that he too had determined that the shooting was justified and he wouldn’t be pressing charges.

  That left Humboldt County and District Attorney Ferroggiaro. In recent years, Ferroggiaro had shown a willingness to go after the area’s bad cops. But few expected Ferroggiaro to take on the federal government. It was a surprise to nearly everyone when he did. According to Ezsterhas, Ferroggiaro was furious that someone had picked him to be the rube to find the fake PCP lab in the cover-up. The Justice Department had also been uncooperative with his investigation. After hearing about Clifton’s abusive track record from an investigator hired by Judy Arnold’s attorneys, Ferroggiaro had heard enough. He brought a second-degree murder charge against Clifton. A Humboldt County grand jury indicted the officer in January 1973. It was the first time a federal narcotics agent had ever been indicted for actions he’d taken while on the job.59 US Attorney Browning quickly pounced on the prosecutor, telling the Eureka newspaper that every other prosecutor he’d talked to said it was a “classical case of justifiable homicide.” The paper then reported, amusingly, that “Ferroggiaro’s response to Browning’s remarks is unprintable.”60

  By now the case had the attention of high-ranking Nixon administration officials, including US Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. Letting this local prosecutor get away with indicting a federal drug cop would set a troubling precedent. They couldn’t let this get to trial. Kleindienst’s office contacted James McKittrick, a local attorney who was known for defending cops accused of misconduct and who had battled (and beaten) Ferroggiaro in the past. McKittrick was flown to Washington, where Kleindienst then deputized him as a special US attorney. McKittrick wasted little time in needling Ferroggiaro. In February 1973, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Times-Standard explaining that people who question the actions of police are usually “radical elements” who want to “bring our country down.” Ferroggiaro had a history of questioning police. McKittrick insisted that he’d never suggest Ferroggiaro was part of these radical elements. Only that the radicals benefited every time Ferroggiaro brought a cop to trial.61

  McKittrick moved to get the charges dismissed. In so doing, he made two particularly ridiculous arguments. First, he argued that to allow the prosecution of Clifton to go forward would jeopardize an entire year’s worth of drug investigations on which Clifton had worked. This was the same variety of argument that defense attorneys would make at the trials of federal narcotics agents who had conducted mistaken raids in the coming years. But this one was troubling. At this point in the criminal process, no one was adjudicating Clifton’s guilt or innocence. Instead, McKittrick, now representing the federal government, was arguing that even if Clifton did murder Dirk Dickenson, the charge should be dismissed, because to try him would interfere with the government’s efforts to investigate other drug pushers.

  McKittrick then unleashed an even more audacious argument. He claimed that allowing Clifton’s criminal trial to go forward would be a slap in the face to the civil rights movement. By McKittrick’s reckoning, a federal investigation had already determined that Clifton had committed no crime. To allow a local prosecutor to bring criminal charges against him now would open the door to racist prosecutors in the South bringing trumped-up charges against federal prosecutors and civil rights investigators. The same administration that had capitalized on white fears about black crime, that had squeezed political capital from white resentment of civil rights protesters, was now arguing that a white federal drug agent should be let off the hook for killing a man . . . to protect the civil rights movement.

  McKittrick was eventually able t
o get the case moved to federal court. A federal district court judge dismissed the charge, finding that Clifton’s actions were reasonable under the circumstances of the raid. Nearly five years after Dirk Dickenson’s death, the Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals upheld the ruling.62

  In the end, a twenty-four-year-old man was chased from his own home by armed men who had just emerged from an Army helicopter. They then shot him dead, from the back, while he was unarmed, and on his own property. The heavy-handed raid was based on false pretenses and didn’t turn up the criminal enterprise it was supposed to find. No one would be held accountable for any of it. Dirk Dickenson was collateral damage.

  In eleven years, the helicopters would return to Humboldt County.

  HERBERT GIGLOTTO MADE GOOD MONEY AS A BOILERMAKER. That made the job’s early mornings more tolerable. He and his wife Evelyn went to bed each night at 8:00 PM to be sure he was up by 5:00 AM to get to his job. The couple lived in Collinsville, Illinois, a small suburban town of about twenty thousand people, fifteen minutes outside of St. Louis.

  At a little after 9:30 PM on April 23, 1972, the Giglottos woke to a crash. And then another. The couple’s inner and outer doors were being ripped from their hinges. Someone was breaking into their home.

  “I got out of bed; I took about three steps, looked down the hall and [saw] armed men running up the hall dressed like hippies with pistols, yelling and screeching.” Giglotto turned to his wife, who was still in bed, and said, “God, honey, we’re dead.”

  “That’s right, you motherfucker!” one of the men screamed. The men—fifteen of them—then stormed the bedroom. One of them threw Giglotto to the bed, bound his hands behind his back, and put a gun to his head.

  “Move and you’re dead,” the man said. He then motioned in the direction of Evelyn Giglotto. “Who is that bitch lying there?”

  “That’s my wife.”

  Evelyn Giglotto cried out, “Please don’t kill him!”

  “Shut up!” the man snapped.

  The man with the gun at Herbert’s head quickly flashed a badge, though he didn’t give Herbert time to read it. These were cops. The man then read a list of names and asked Herbert if he knew any of them. He knew none of them.

  “You’re going to die if you don’t tell us where the drugs are.”

  Giglotto pled with the man, “Please, please, before you shoot us, check my wallet for my identification. Because I know you’re at the wrong place.”

  Seconds later, someone shouted from the stairs. “We’ve made a mistake!”

  The men unbound the Giglottos and began to filter out.

  Herbert struggled to put on his pants to chase after them for more information. He shouted, “Why did you do that?”

  The man who’d just held a gun to his head answered, “Boy, you shut your mouth.”

  Evelyn Giglotto was most upset that the police had also thrown the couple’s animals—three dogs and a cat—outside. (Given the frequency of dog-shooting during raids in the coming years, the Giglottos’ pets got off easy.) “When you don’t have children, your pets sort of become your children,” she later explained in a newspaper interview. When she asked the police if her pets had been harmed, one of them replied, “Fuck your animals.”

  And with that they left.

  A half-hour later, this time on the north side of Collinsville, Arnold Blass, who had just finished cleaning his pistol and putting it away in the house, was chatting with a friend as the two cleaned the carp they’d just caught. A suspicious car had been circling the neighborhood. The two grew concerned when it pulled into a lot across the street and a group of shabbily dressed men emerged with guns, racing toward the home of Blass’s neighbors, Don and Virginia Askew. Blass and his friend walked over to meet the men, only to be brusquely pushed aside as one of them quickly flashed a badge that Blass didn’t believe was real. He later told the New York Times, “It’s a good thing I didn’t have my gun.”

  Inside the Askew home, Charlie, the family dog, began barking at a disturbance outside. Virginia Askew went to the living room to investigate.

  “My God, Don,” she said to her husband. “There’s a man at the window.” Every window in fact. The two looked around and saw guns pointed at them from every angle. Outside the front door, three more men stood with shotguns. Virginia Askew reached for the phone to call the police, but one of the men motioned to her from the other side of the window that doing so wouldn’t be in her best interest.

  Seconds later, one of the men delivered a powerful kick to the door, sending it quickly off its hinges and into the wall. Virginia ran to the bedroom with a shriek, passed out, and smacked her head on a table as she fell. Thinking they were being robbed, the couple’s sixteen-year-old son tried to call the police. One of the men put a shotgun in his face. More men poured in from the opposite direction after kicking in a back door. Finally, one of them flashed a badge.

  “If I kept a gun by the door, I’d have used it,” Don Askew told the Times, then added that he’d also likely be dead for doing so.

  As the cops ransacked the Askew house, Virginia regained consciousness, then began to hyperventilate. One of the men asked Don, “Do you know John Coleman?” Virginia, still bound, told them she couldn’t breathe.

  “Take it easy, lady,” one of them told her. “We’re federal agents, and we’ve gotten a bum tip.”

  They started to leave. Don Askew’s mood shifted from scared to angry. And he still was not entirely sure the men were who they claimed to be. He followed them outside and asked them to wait until the police arrived.

  “We can’t,” one of them replied. “We’ve got four more places to go tonight.”63

  The team in Collinsville was one of the thirty-eight strike forces created across the country by Myles Ambrose’s ODALE office. It was the new public face of Nixon’s drug war: swift, ruthless, overpowering, little tolerance for deviants. Finally Nixon had a team of cops who could utilize the tools he’d fought hard to give them. There would be no more feuding with federal bureaucrats. Namby-pamby local police chiefs and budgetary concerns could no longer get in the way. With LEAA funding, Ambrose was able to target specific state and local police departments that would carry out the drug war the way he wanted. In the five years leading up to the creation of ODALE, the primary federal drug enforcement agency, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, had carried out four no-knock search warrants. In its first six months, ODALE carried out over one hundred.

  Ambrose even set up a national “heroin hotline” that citizens could call to give tips on heroin dealers. The call center was run out of a Virginia mine shaft that at one time had been a possible destination for high-ranking government officials in the event of a nuclear attack on America. Ambrose was able to get half the staff of the federal Office of Emergency Preparedness transferred to ODALE—to answer phones on the heroin hotline. Promising tips—which could be phoned in anonymously—were forwarded to the closest regional strike force, which in theory would then pounce on the suspected drug dealer.64

  In an interview with PBS thirty years later, Egil Krogh described the glee in the White House once ODALE was up and running.

  There was a tremendous amount of zeal behind what we were doing, too. The people that worked on these programs came to work each day saying, “What can we do today?” It was a very exciting atmosphere. It was a place where I look back with a fierce affection of what we were able to do that I thought was effective. I regret the mistakes that we made, but we really tried our hardest.65

  Those mistakes quickly began to add up. The strike force that carried out the Collinsville raids hadn’t even bothered to get a search warrant before storming the Giglotto and Askew homes. Ambrose called the mistakes “reprehensible” and attributed them to “stupidity,” but quickly added, “Drug people are the very vermin of humanity. They are dangerous. Occasionally we must adopt their dress and tactics.” The agents in Collinsville were suspended pending further investigation—with pay.66

/>   In what would for the next forty years become a standard line from law enforcement officials, Ambrose also called the Collinsville raids “a very isolated situation.”67 That would become increasingly difficult to believe. Two months later, another victim of the same Collinsville strike force came forward. Twenty-seven-year-old John Meiners of Edwardsville, Illinois, had been raided three days before the raids on the Askews and the Giglottos. He got it even worse. At about 3:00 AM, the armed narcs broke in. He awoke and got out of bed, only to be pinned against the wall with a gun to his head. They then tore his house apart. They smashed up windows even after they had already made their way inside. They “confiscated” his stereo, golf clubs, shotgun, and camera. Meiners himself was arrested, taken to a police station, and held for seventy-seven hours. They wouldn’t even let him call his family, much less an attorney. After three days, they let him go with no explanation. And once again, they had no warrant.68

  By the following August, investigators discovered three additional warrantless raids by the same ODALE strike force at about the same time, bringing the total to six such raids over a five-day span. In the first raid, on April 19, police broke into an East St. Louis home and handcuffed resident Robert Underwood to a chair. One agent then beat him while another held a gun to his head. The next day three agents raided the home of Rev. Karol Rekas. On April 23, the same day as the Askew and Giglotto raids, five agents raided the East St. Louis home of Mr. and Mrs. George Juengel, neither of whom were home at the time.69

  Three months after those raids, in 1972, the New York Times published the results of its own investigation into the use of aggressive drug raids. The paper found that “dozens” of botched raids had occurred across the country since the 1970 federal crime bills and similar bills in the states became law. Agents, “often acting on uncorroborated tips from informants,” were “bashing down the doors to a home or apartment and holding the residents at gunpoint while they ransack the house.” The paper found that the botched raids were usually on lower-class families and were “tied intimately to the veritable explosion of government drug enforcement activities in recent years,” thanks to Nixon’s “total war” on drugs. Some victims told the paper that they hadn’t come forward because narcotics officers had threatened them. Others had remained silent because “in their hatred for drugs they condoned the tactics but not the specific incidents.”70 Two weeks earlier, the Associated Press published its own investigation, which came to similar conclusions.71 Little of this seemed to faze Ambrose. Within weeks of the Collinsville raids, he increased the number of strike forces from thirty-eight to forty-one.72