“Yeah, I got it,” he responded.
One night, two months into his training, we were nearing the end of our shift, when we got a call. “Disturbance on the fifth floor, 282 Buell.”
Lots of cops go temporarily deaf at the end of their shifts. But I wasn’t like that. Once we went over our ten-hour shift time, we started earning overtime. So what was the hurry?
The building in question was so close to the police station that you could actually see it from there. It had no elevator, so Morgan and I hoofed it to the fifth floor of the six-story building and knocked on the door. “Police. Let us in!”
We heard a lot of noise inside, but no one answered.
In police work, you only go into a house if you have no choice, because bad things can happen once you’re inside. Optimally, you want the occupants to exit and talk to you in the hallway.
Back in the ’80s, we carried PR-24 batons, which are L-shaped with a butt-like handle that becomes an extension of your arm. I banged on the door with the butt of the PR-24 for a full three minutes before someone turned down the music inside. Thirty seconds later a college-age woman answered the door. It looked like she’d been crying, but showed no signs of physical abuse.
I said, “Ma’am, we got a call about a disturbance.”
As I spoke I looked past her to see if there was a threat behind her, and spotted a guy at the end of the apartment pacing back and forth.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“My boyfriend and I got into an argument,” she answered casting her eyes to the floor.
“Well, you’re going to have to keep it down. Is that your boyfriend back there?” I asked, pointing inside.
“Yeah.”
I knew from experience that I had to be careful. Women in these situations often turned on the police and defended their boyfriends. That’s why it was standard practice to respond to domestic calls with two officers.
I turned to Morgan and said, “You keep talking to her, while I go inside and check on him.”
The second I crossed the threshold I felt the little hairs stand up on the back of my neck. It was a sixth sense that I was still learning to trust.
I stopped a few feet into the apartment and said, “Hey, buddy, the police are here. Can you come out and talk to me?”
“Sure,” he responded politely.
There were a couple of beer bottles on the floor, but no signs of violence. Vermont state law at the time stated that if there was any sign of assault, we had to arrest at least one of the parties.
In this case they both seemed cooperative. The guy was in his midtwenties, wore a T-shirt and jeans, and seemed hopped up on something. I couldn’t tell if he was drunk or high.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
“We had an argument.”
My job at that point was to de-escalate the situation by remaining calm.
“Look,” I said, “we’ve got to figure this out. So step outside with me, so we can talk.”
“About what, sir?” he asked.
In domestic arguments, we had to ascertain who was legally entitled to reside in the house or apartment. If the lease was in his name alone, the girlfriend would have to leave, even if she had been the victim.
I said, “First, I have to establish whose apartment this is.”
We were still standing facing one another a few feet inside the apartment. I was wearing a thick leather jacket over my uniform.
“It’s my apartment,” he responded, “but she stays here. I think she signed the lease.”
“That’s confusing.”
“Yes, I know, sir, but it’s my apartment. Maybe her name is on the lease. I’m not sure.”
As a policeman confronting a suspect I always had to assume there might be a confrontation at some point and size up how I would handle it. If the guy was a bodybuilder or a massive four hundred pounds, I had to be ready to draw my gun or hit him with my baton. This kid wasn’t exactly skinny, but he wasn’t muscular either. He appeared wiry and fit.
I said, “Follow me. Let’s move outside.”
I got him to follow me to the entrance. To my left was a door that led to an outside walkway area with plastic chairs. Meanwhile, Morgan moved with the woman farther inside.
From near the front door, I asked the boyfriend again, “Whose name is on the lease?”
“Mine is,” he answered.
“So is mine,” she shouted from inside.
Now the boyfriend got agitated and he and the girlfriend started arguing back and forth about who was legally entitled to be there.
I said to her, “We need to figure out who is supposed to be here, because the other one has got to go.”
The tension between them escalated. Meanwhile, the boyfriend and I still hadn’t exited the apartment.
I said to him, “You’re going to come out into the hallway with me, while my partner stays inside with her and we figure this out.”
I couldn’t tell what was going on inside his head. I knew he was hopped up on something. Maybe he took what I said to mean that even though it was his place, he was the one who was going to be kicked out.
All I know is that he took two steps toward the door, then screamed and sprung at me like a tiger on steroids. I hit him in the chest to try to stop him and felt his muscles flexing. Next thing I knew he had pushed me through the door that led to an outside walkway with a waist-high barrier on each end. Before I knew what was happening, the crazed boyfriend was going for my throat. I raised my hands to stop him.
Even though he had turned on me unexpectedly, I wasn’t really concerned at this point, nor did I feel like fighting at the end of my shift. I was basically holding the guy and waiting for Morgan to come to my aid and help me take him down. In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, as soon as someone grabs a cop, his partner is at his side in seconds. Our lives depend on one another, so we have to have the other’s back.
But this case, Morgan remained in the apartment talking to the woman. He could see me and the boyfriend clearly, but didn’t move.
Realizing I was on my own, and had to deal with a guy who had gone berserk, I tried to kick the boyfriend’s legs out. Most people don’t see it coming and go down immediately. But when I kicked this kid’s legs, it felt like I was hitting an oak tree. His very taut muscles didn’t budge.
Now it was getting serious. As we grappled in the cold air on the walkway, the boyfriend seemed to be growing bigger and stronger. We were about the same height, but I was thicker in the shoulders and torso from lifting weights. Like the Incredible Hulk, the boyfriend screamed again, lifted me off my feet, and threw me like a rag doll toward the edge. The hip-high metal railing stopped me. Otherwise, I would have fallen five stories into a rubble-filled alley.
My brain screamed at that point, If you don’t do something now, you’re going to die!
The boyfriend started trying to lift me and throw me over the railing. He had his hand on my chin and was trying to use his legs as leverage. Morgan still wasn’t helping. Feeling a well of anger burst inside me, I waited for his legs to part, then rolled and kneed him in the balls as hard as I could.
The fight went out of him like air out of a punctured balloon, and he relaxed his grip. I immediately swung my body on top of him and cuffed the son of a bitch.
Now he was in agony and I was on my knees sucking wind. Looking up at the night sky, I kept telling myself I had a wife and kid at home and had just come within inches of losing my life. The maniac beneath me with his balls in his throat was so fucked up on God knows what, he probably would have gone over the ledge with me without even realizing what he was doing.
That’s police work. One minute you’re bored out of your skull, the next you’re fighting for your life.
Morgan finally showed up. He looked at me standing over the handcuffed kid and started stuttering, “I … I w-w-wasn’t sure … w-what was going on.”
I growled, “Shut up and stop talking.” Then I grabbed my radio
and called for a second car. Guys at the station thought the message had been garbled because I almost never called for backup and had a partner with me. When I repeated that I needed help, they responded like the cavalry.
Later, when I walked back to the patrol car with the handcuffed boyfriend, I saw Morgan waiting in the passenger seat. “Look,” he said, “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know—”
I interrupted him with two words. “You’re done.”
It was the end of the workweek. I decided to take the next three days off and sit in bed, where I replayed the incident over and over in my head, and thanked God I was still alive.
I never told my wife. A couple of months earlier, I’d been jumped while on duty by some drunks in a bar and beat up pretty badly. When I returned home from that fight bleeding with two badly swollen eyes and a separated shoulder, and I told Sam what happened, she’d gotten extremely upset. We agreed at that point that for the sake of our marriage, I would never discuss what happened at work.
I stayed true to that promise.
Four days later, when I returned to work, Morgan had already submitted his resignation. Nice kid, but he wasn’t suited for police work. Few people are.
4
QUANTICO
In February 1985, after less than two years as a uniform cop, I was promoted to detective. If that seems like a quick jump up the ladder, it was for several reasons. One, I had apparently distinguished myself as an aggressive and effective patrolman. Two, Burlington PD in the mid-’80s was short-handed, so competent cops were usually promoted quickly. And, three, I had someone helping me from above in the form of my former FTO, the Chaplain, who had been bumped up to detective a year ahead of me.
The Chaplain recommended me for assignment to the prosecutor’s division of the State Attorney’s Office. There, dressed in plain clothes, I learned how to assemble evidence so that it was airtight and overwhelming when presented in court. As I prepared witnesses and their testimony, I became fascinated with the whole subject of motivation. In other words, why did a particular suspect commit a specific crime? I figured that if I could think like them, I’d have a better chance making a case against them.
The understanding I developed came in handy a few months later as I started investigating cases as a detective. If I had enjoyed being a patrolman, I liked investigating and solving crimes even more.
The cherry on the cake was the fact that I was often teamed up with the Chaplain. We complemented each other perfectly. He was an expert at getting people to talk, and I was the bricks and mortar guy, who built cases slowly and methodically piece by piece.
Together we solved robberies, sexual assaults, drug cases, and the brutal double homicide of two convenience store workers in November 1986—arresting the suspect in five days. We were so successful that one holier-than-thou prosecutor suggested that we must have been getting physical with our suspects because a high number of them were confessing to their crimes.
I was inclined to confront the prosecutor face-to-face and ask him to back up his claim with evidence. Before I could, the Chaplain addressed the situation with his trademark humor, filing the following fictional police report on Burlington PD Detective Bureau letterhead and submitting it to the prosecutor in question. (I’m Detective A):
COMPLAINT #86-19219
DATE: 7/7/86
On 7/7/86 I was present in the Detective Bureau when Detective A brought in two males and told me he had just seen them on Church Street with an amount of what he believed to be cocaine.
Detective A took one of the guys into an interview room and I took the other. Detective A told me to “go fuck with the other guy’s head a little,” so I went into the other interview room to try and fuck with the guy.
I went into the room and the first thing I said was don’t lie to me or I’ll smash my fucking gun across your face. Then I told him that if he touched my coffee I’d fucking kill him.
So I says to the guy “Whatyadoin’ with that coke?” and he says to me “Hey.”
I just kicked back in my chair, put my feet up and looked groovy as usual. I said to the subject “Subject, we can do this my way or we can do it another way.” I think that kinda shook him up a bit, so he says to me, he says “You’re the coolest guy I ever met. Like I said before I’ll tell you everything you need to know, but don’t let that motherfucker Detective A near me, he keeps hitting me.” (The good cop/bad cop routine.)
So then ol’ Detective A comes back in the room and asks if he can talk to me for a minute and I say “Sure.” Outside the room Detective A asks what the guy told me and I said “Nothin,” just like that “nothin.”
And then Detective A says to me “Well then, make something the fuck up, saying something like ‘Yeh, it’s mine, what the fuck do you think pig fucker.’” Then Detective A runs into the interview room and cuffs the guy right in the back of the head, but there wasn’t a whole lot of blood, just about a half a cup full.
As he’s walking out of the interview room I hear Detective A say to the guy “Junior … I’m just doing my job” … and that’s the greatest line I ever heard.
All of us in the detective’s bureau laughed our asses off, and the pompous prosecutor never responded.
* * *
Back when I was a uniformed cop I had become friendly with several FBI Agents who were assisting us in a bank robbery investigation.
One day, one of them asked, “Hey, Mike, have you ever thought of joining the FBI?”
“Not really. No.” Expecting to remain with the BPD for the rest of my career, it had never crossed my mind.
Next time I saw him he handed me an application. Attached to it was a list of qualifications and the pay scale. When I saw that new FBI recruits made double what I earned as a police officer, I asked, “Where do I sign?”
Months later, on February 5, 1987, I received a letter on FBI letterhead that read, “You are hereby appointed a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
I thought it was a joke a first. As I read it a second time, my hands started shaking. Toward the bottom it stated that my starting salary would be $24,732. At the time, it seemed like a million bucks. For the second time in my life, the contents of a sealed envelope was about to change the course of my life.
A few days later, I got a call on a Friday from an FBI Applicant Recruiter, who said, “There’s a slot opening on Sunday. If you don’t take it, it’s going to someone else.”
“You mean two days from now?”
“Two days from now, correct.”
“What happens if I don’t take it?”
“You go to the bottom of the list.”
When I told Sam the news, she wasn’t thrilled, and I couldn’t blame her. Sure, we could use the extra money, but it was the middle of a tough New England winter and she was taking care of two-year-old Russell and was now pregnant with our second child. I quickly arranged for the Chaplain and another of my cop buddies to pack up our belongings and move Sam and Russell to her sister’s house in Massachusetts, then flew to Washington, DC.
On February 9, 1987, I was sworn in as an FBI Special Agent trainee at the age of twenty-nine. The FBI Academy is housed on 547 acres within a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, and reminded me of a college campus. I shared a room with a guy who looked like an accountant, and in fact had been an accountant. We became fast friends.
Our class of fifty—Class #87-7—consisted of ten former cops, ten ex-military, and people from all walks of life, including a veterinarian and music teacher. All but three in our class were male, and we were a mix of white, African American, Asian, and Hispanic. One guy had previously been earning $250,000 a year in the financial sector. Rooming next to me was an ex-NYPD cop and Columbia University graduate who I’ll call McDonald. He also happened to be built like a brick shithouse and looked like a movie star.
For some reason, he was always a nervous wreck, probably because of the insane amount of pressure he put on himself. I took it upon
myself to try to lighten his mood, and remember telling him, “Godammit, McDonald, if I had half your shit, I’d be the Director in a week.”
First day of class we all showed up in the best suits, white shirts, and ties. The women wore nice dresses. Everyone appeared scared shitless. I sat relaxed, waiting for someone to tell me that I was there due to some bureaucratic mistake and would soon be headed back to Burlington.
The instructor asked us all to introduce ourselves, relate a little about our backgrounds, and talk about why we had joined the FBI. Recruits stood and spoke with great seriousness about wanting to join the finest law enforcement agency in the world, and how their whole lives had been dedicated to this special moment.
When it was my turn, I said honestly, “I joined because I need the money.” The instructor looked like someone had pissed on his shoes, while the two class counselors and the rest of the class cracked up. That moment set the tone for the rest of my Academy experience.
I was the blue-collar cop who worked hard, told it to you straight, and liked to crack jokes and play pranks to keep the class relaxed. It’s not that I didn’t take the training seriously. I did. At the same time, I liked having fun, and saw humor as an antidote to some of our stick-up-their-ass instructors. The truth was that a lot of the classroom work and physical fitness training we went through over the next four months were things I’d done before either in college, at the police academy, or as a cop.
During the four-month course I discovered I had a talent for mimicking people, and often entertained my classmates with impressions of our instructors minutes before they walked into the classroom. Encountering a classroom of snickering recruits, the instructors would look sternly in my direction, while I appeared angelic and nodded to McDonald sitting next to me.
I was also appointed de facto head of the “beverage committee.” My duties involved summoning my fellow 87-7 recruits to an FBI barroom on campus known as The Boardroom, where we would quaff a few cold ones, crack jokes, and engage one another in conversation. That nighttime ritual helped the fifty of us from diverse backgrounds and walks of life meld into one cohesive unit.
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