The Logan case still lingers around town these days, much like the specter of the Mob. A lot of people, Mildred Binstock included, think Logan did it. And a lot of other people think he didn’t, and that the whole case was another example in a long line of shady insider dealings in town. According to Nathan Lein, former mayor Gene Vine, who sat on the city council until his death in 2008 from cancer, told Larry Murphy to get rid of Logan. Whether guilty or innocent, Logan was too much of a liability, said Vine. The county attorney, Wayne Sauer, said the same thing. The only thing that everyone can agree on, as Nathan put it, is that “making Jeremy Logan the Oelwein chief of police took major nuts.” That, and Logan has been hell on meth cooks.
According to Logan, the Oelwein Police Department, which has jurisdiction only within the four-square-mile incorporated area of town, was dismantling two meth labs per month back in 2002, his first year as chief. Labs could be anything from a house with a fairly complex setup in the basement to a guy and his wife single-batching in a Johnny on the Spot behind the dugout at the Sports Complex. No matter where the labs were, though, the Oelwein police were exposed to the toxic waste and the harmful fumes while wearing nothing more than their regular uniforms. As recently as the late 1990s, Logan told me, the police, unsure of what to do, let labs burn. Other times, knowing how much it would cost to clean them up, the police burned the labs themselves.
Anecdotally across the nation, cancer rates among first-responders to meth disasters have been climbing since the 1980s. Bill Ruzzamenti, a former DEA agent and the current director of the Central Valley High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) in California, likes to tell the story of how he smelled so bad after dismantling superlabs in San Diego during the 1990s that his wife would have to hose him down in the garage and burn his clothes. Still, said Ruzzamenti, the stench of ether and what smelled like cat urine would be so thoroughly soaked into his hands that they’d have to throw their phone away each month: the receiver and keypad stunk too bad to keep using.
As a result, DEA, in conjunction with the Environmental Protection Agency, passed a law in 2003 providing a standardized protocol for anyone given the task of dismantling a meth lab. The training necessary is available only at the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. Finding money to send someone for training is not easy, says Logan, although the alternative seemed to him far worse: years of lawsuits when one of his men got cancer. Upon becoming chief, Logan immediately demanded that an Oelwein officer be sent for training. By the time that officer had completed the course, in 2003, the town’s so-called Beavis and Butt-Head meth problem had increased to an almost incomprehensible order of magnitude: Logan and his officers were being called, on average, to one meth lab every four days. And every lab that got cleaned up cost the town an average of six thousand dollars.
Logan has a long list of disaster and near-disaster stories when it comes to meth. He also has enough cynicism to see the humor in places where, for many people, the joke would be obscured. One story is of an ex-Marine sharpshooter who was also a prolific meth cook and lived alone with his teenage daughter, whom Logan describes as an academic star at Oelwein High School. In 2003, increasingly paranoid that he would get caught making meth, the ex-Marine knocked out all the windows from his home and replaced them with black plastic garbage bags taped to the frames, thereby keeping people from looking in. They also provided a good way to defend the house, for he’d cut holes in the center of the bags from which he planned to shoot whoever came to shut down his lab. Near the windows, he had placed nineteen firearms of various kinds, along with seven thousand rounds of ammunition. What Logan thinks is funniest about the story is not that the ex-Marine aroused his neighbors’ suspicions by going outside in his underwear to dance in the street in the middle of the day; or that his daughter was home at the time, studying; or that the man, when the police came, tried to hide by lying still in the concrete gutter of the street, thinking he was camouflaged. What gives Logan a laugh is that the man had the most firepower stacked around the house’s highest windows, those in his daughter’s room, which provided the best vantage points for shooting. There he had two AR-15 fully automatic assault rifles, a Remington 12--gauge shotgun, and seven hundred rounds of ammunition. “Had he not decided to lay down and hide in the gutter,” said Logan, laughing, “there’s no question he would have killed every single one of us.”
Starting in 2004, Logan, with the blessing of Nathan Lein, demanded that his men pull over cars for what Nathan describes as “every little ticky-tack violation that gets us to the vehicle”: a cracked taillight; going five miles per hour over the speed limit; a dirty license plate; or a broken headlight. In addition, Logan schooled his men to use their familiarity with people they questioned to their advantage, and to use history and common knowledge to garner information and to catch people in lies. No more niceties and letting people off for having had a little too much to drink. Search every vehicle. Assume everyone is guilty and put the screws to them. Make them nervous. Logan instigated the practice of leveraging jail time in order to develop confidential informants, in hopes of getting those informants to give up their friends who were batching with them. Never mind if you went to high school with a guy or grew up on the farm next to him. This was like a war.
For some people, these tactics, while legal, defied the very foundations of life in a small town, where people’s familiarity with one another means everything. Logan’s attitude smacked of the sleight of hand and outright trickery associated with an urban existence. Mildred Binstock called Logan a Nazi. It was Logan who was the criminal, she said. Mildred was not the only one who felt this way. One morning at the Hub City Bakery, I overheard an octogenarian farmer declare to his coffee mates that, in an earlier time, a man like Logan could have easily been made to disappear.
To other people, though, Logan was a godsend. They felt the tweakers deserved no better. Even as the debate raged and people divided over their feelings, Logan’s tactics worked. Lab busts fell steadily until, during the last four months of 2005, the Oelwein police didn’t dismantle a single meth lab in town. By then, the city council had passed the ordinance calling for the demolition of derelict houses, which in many cases had been turned into meth labs. The town offered sales tax incentives to allow neighbors to purchase run-down homes that didn’t—or couldn’t be made to—comply with the new codes. That, or the council sold the concept of bulldozing under the more politic auspices of “adding green space.” Some people said Murphy and Logan were running people out of town and picking on those who could least afford to fight back. Roland Jarvis accused Murphy of trying to salve Oelwein’s economic woes by sacrificing the poor at the time when they were most vulnerable.
I told Nathan of Jarvis’s opinion. He was silent before saying that, every day, he saw the pain that the turnaround caused some of the people in his town. His girlfriend, Jamie, labored as a social worker in order “to clean up the pieces.” In the end, though, people had to understand that, as Nathan put it, “you have to plow some dirt in order to raise a crop.”
By late spring of 2006, Oelwein was entering Phase II of Larry Murphy’s town revitalization plan. Murphy liked to say that most men, when they turn fiftysomething, build a new house, buy a new car, or chase after a new woman. He, on the other hand, preferred to spend his time rebuilding a town. And Phase II involved literally tearing down parts of Oelwein in order to start over.
This would not be easy. Even Oelwein’s demographics were against it. The median age was forty-one, making it one of the oldest communities in Iowa, and one with a poor employment base. There were lots of other things to spend money on in Oelwein, where 20 percent of the children lived in poverty, and 80 percent of the kindergartners were eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches. The town’s median income, according to a 2005 EPA report, was half the state average. As Murphy saw it, Oelwein had an empty dance card. If it didn’t doll itself up quick and find a partner, he said, the dance was
going to be over.
Phase II would begin by improving a seven-block area of downtown. The plan was to pull up the streets and build new sewers, water mains, and gutters to aid with the withering and destructive effects that an average winter had on Oelwein’s century-old streets. In addition, Murphy wanted all new streetlamps. He wanted shrubberies and trees, which he hoped would boost morale around town. He wanted new sidewalks, too; the old ones were buckling and breaking in places. All this, Murphy reckoned, would cost a shade below four million dollars.
Second, Murphy wanted to encourage businesses to relocate to Oelwein by building a new septic system. The old one, installed a hundred years ago and augmented in the 1950s, was already in violation of sanitation codes. It couldn’t even keep up with the use of a shrinking population, not to mention the hoped-for industrial and population growth that something like a call center would engender. What the city council wanted was an overflow septic system of twelve million gallons. It would be both environmentally sound and highly cost-efficient, with sewage beds of common reeds that could naturally compost waste initially treated by the old system. That compost could then be used as fertilizer on farmers’ fields. Building the new system would cost nine million dollars.
For an entire two-year mayoral term, Murphy and the city council labored to come up with the money. As Murphy said to the council one night, either they push full steam ahead or else they slide inextricably backward. Those were the two choices faced by Oelwein in a global economy. Murphy essentially leveraged the next election on how much he could raise, selling people on the theoretical hope that business would eventually come to Oelwein, if only the improvements were made. He applied for Vision Iowa grants, which netted Oelwein $3.4 million. He and the council members, including former mayor Gene Vine, whom Murphy had unseated, lobbied for real estate tax assessments for the sixty-five commercial business owners in Oelwein. Murphy spent three weeks talking to each owner individually, going again and again to their homes and to their stores, asking them to agree to the passage of an ordinance that would essentially increase taxes with no guarantee of increased profits. He begged the townspeople to pass a referendum calling for a higher sales tax, which passed in late 2005, and a school bond referendum worth $2.5 million. Murphy and the five council members secured another $3.4 million in private donations from some of Oelwein’s wealthy old families.
What’s remarkable is that Murphy and the city council got the money they needed for the planned improvements and more—enough to build a new library with Internet access. Raising the money was in some ways the easy part. The hard part would come next, when Oelwein would either be buoyed by an economic resurgence or sink further. Once ground was broken for the street revival project in May 2006, it was anyone’s guess what would happen. Maybe in twelve months the shops would fill up, the call center deal would go through, and the long-empty Donaldson plant, with 160,000 square feet of prime industrial space behind the roundhouse, would find a new tenant. Maybe Logan would continue to keep the meth users under control and would prevent a new crop of batchers from moving in. Maybe In dependence wouldn’t use Oelwein as its ghetto. Echoing the Kantian philosophical tradition that pervades that part of the Midwest, and through which Murphy, like Clay Hallberg and Nathan Lein, understands the world, Murphy said that his only wish was to provide the genesis that Oelwein so sorely needed. Oelwein in the spring of 2006 was in the midst, as Kant describes it, of acting to the limits of its knowledge and its environment. From there, only a leap of faith would carry the town forward, no matter what actual advances it made. If Oelwein failed, then a subsequent generation would have to address the same issues. At the very least, said Murphy, Oelwein, just for trying, would regain the very thing that had been missing these many years: its dignity.
CHAPTER 8
WATERLOO
Ever since Nathan had moved back to Iowa in 2001, he’d wrestled with what he referred to as the Girl Problem. The Girl Problem was formed when he’d fallen in love with Jenny, the woman from Indianapolis whom he’d met in law school and who moved with him to Waterloo, Iowa, where he worked as a judge’s clerk, she as a public defender. There, they lived together while Nathan’s parents smoldered with indignation, for to them, cohabitation before marriage is a sin. Because Nathan’s parents would not be damned by God, they would be damned if they spoke to their son. In a roundabout way, it was the Girl Problem that brought Nathan back to Oelwein, putting him in a position to help his hometown rebuild itself. In another way, the Girl Problem represented a once-intractable dilemma, like meth in Oelwein, that seemed suddenly to be solvable.
Nathan might have been mad as hell about his parents’ treatment of Jenny, but his anger didn’t change the fact that he had been raised to respect their judgment. Add to that the idea that any hope of ever being involved in the central feature of their collected lives—the farm—would vanish if his relationship with his parents disintegrated, and Nathan was caught between two very powerful gravitational forces: anger and honor. He assaulted the problem with all the intellectual tools of his training in philosophy, to no avail; it was like a fortress whose walls would not be breached. He appealed to instinct, and this proved murkier still, for he did not see himself as the marrying type. And yet the idea that he and Jenny might never legalize their love did not minimize the obligation he felt toward the woman who had moved to Iowa to be with him. As the problem churned in his gut, he grew more and more withdrawn, more inward. For a year, it went on like this, with no answer. The war between his instinct and his desire settled into the trenches, where it threatened to destroy his life, not via entropy, but by attrition.
Then, in 2002, Larry Murphy had called and offered Nathan the job of assistant Fayette County prosecutor. He moved to Oelwein, and Jenny stayed behind in Waterloo. He still loved Jenny, he said, and she him. But the one-hour drive between the two towns felt longer all the time. Slowly, wordlessly, Nathan began spending more time at the farm. His parents never talked to him about the fight they’d had, and the familiarity of the silent understanding they’d reached reinforced the pull of his family. The very fact that nothing needed to be said made him feel the weight of his place back in the fold. With Jenny, he said, everything had been about discussion, about argument. When he and Jenny talked, it was like two lawyers debating. Though he understood the emotional liabilities of silence, Nathan found he preferred not talking to arguing. Nathan saw other women, including a DHS caseworker, though he couldn’t commit to anyone. He bought a tiny, two-bedroom house on in Oelwein’s Ninth Ward. And then, in June of 2005, Nathan’s half brother, David, died of heart failure in San Francisco at the age of thirty-eight.
David was Nathan’s closest confidant; being raised together in that house on the prairie gave them a shared understanding. It was thanks to David, who’d had the courage to get out of Iowa for good, that Nathan could see that leaving wasn’t an ideal solution. And it was thanks to Nathan for having the courage to return home that David still had an advocate for him with his difficult mother and his stepfather, not to mention a connection to the place where he’d grown up. When David died, Nathan was crushed.
Nathan’s parents had no money to go to California for a funeral. So it was he who went to get David’s cremated remains and bring them back to Iowa. Burying his brother was the hardest thing Nathan Lein ever did. He said a few days afterward that it would be a long time before he was “right again.” Three years later, he still, he said, wasn’t right.
But David’s death had also offered Nathan a solution to the Girl Problem. He didn’t ask Jenny to accompany him to the funeral—he asked the DHS caseworker, whose name is Jamie Porter. Why he did so was unclear. Perhaps, he said, David’s death put his own life in perspective. After the funeral, Nathan unburdened himself to Jamie of all the secrets he’d kept pent up for twenty-eight years. And so, as the town of Oelwein began rebuilding itself from the ashes of the meth epidemic, so began a new era in Nathan’s life, born out of the ashes of his b
rother’s death.
Jamie Porter is a year younger than Nathan. Standing next to him, she looks small, even at five feet seven. She has blond, shoulder-length hair and blue eyes bordered by long, delicate lashes. With her red cheeks and porcelain skin, she has the flushed, healthy look of someone just coming in from the cold. She attended Wartburg College in her nearby hometown of Waverly, Iowa, where she was an All-American softball player as a second baseman. She is still built in a way that suggests a home-run threat: strong, powerful legs and wide shoulders. She knows her way around a pheasant stew and is perfectly at home in a tent pitched somewhere on the Volga River. In the evenings during December’s late bow-and-arrow deer-hunting season, Jamie is known to climb into the tiny hayloft above Nathan’s woodstove-heated garage and sit next to the swing-door. There she can look down on a small field bordered on one side by an unincorporated spit of timber and on the other by the neighboring houses; Nathan’s street defines the point at which Oelwein ends and the country begins. Dressed in heavily insulated camo coveralls, with a book in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, Jamie waits in the ambient heat of the woodstove for the whitetails to pass through the field. Next to her is the bow Nathan bought her for their first Christmas together. To date, she has killed three deer from the garage window—two bucks and a doe.
Jamie has an undergraduate degree in psychology. She has worked since mid-2006 as a contractor for the Iowa Department of Human Services. DHS contractors are assigned cases by the courts; much of their work is in-home visits. On a typical day, Jamie might have three appointments: one with a child who has complained of physical abuse; one with a child whose mother or father is in jail for manufacturing meth; and a third with a recent parolee in the halfway house in West Union. Aside from the Northeast Iowa Behavioral Health Clinic, which has only six employees, there isn’t much in the way of other job opportunities for social workers in Oelwein.
Nick Reding Page 14