Processing Mad Dog back at the Middletown Police Department was a trip. He had a big audience, as men from the incoming and outgoing shifts were coming through. He started some rambling dissertation about wanting to go out west and live with the grizzly bears after clearing his name. After we got Mad Dog’s photos and fingerprints, I locked him into the Gray Bar Hotel.
“Dennis, I really hope you do go out west, if you survive the jail time,” I said. “You take your act out to Wyoming, and some sheriff’s officer is going to put a rifled deer slug right between your eyes. He will get a huge medal for it. Your act won’t play so well out there.”
Mad Dog pleaded out the charges and accepted 10 years in the Trenton State Prison, New Jersey’s only maximum security facility and a real shithole. Dennis Downey failed every parole hearing he had and wound up doing every day of his dime sentence, with not one day off for good behavior. I guess that shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
A CLASSIC HOT CALL
The dispatcher’s voice telegraphed urgency and danger. She directed me to a bungalow in a gritty, blue-collar area of Port Monmouth, where a 25-year-old steroid user had taken an unknown quantity of LSD and was completely out of control and howling like a wolfman. The guy’s 19-year-old girlfriend—the one who placed the call—was screaming for her life.
I flicked on lights and siren in the patrol car and jabbed the throttle hard. It was just after 2 a.m. one summer night in 1998, and the location was only a few minutes away from me. Other cars were also being dispatched, but I was the closest responding officer.
This was a classic hot call. On the way there, I went through different scenarios of how the incident could go down, and my adrenaline was pumping. I didn’t want to hurt this guy, but I had no problem taking him down if his girlfriend was in imminent danger. My gut told me this was going to turn into a cage fight—my strength and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu skills against this Muscle Juice maniac high on LSD.
No matter how skilled one gets in handling confrontations, one thing is certain: anything can happen, and often does. If God stays out of it, the better fighter will usually win. In this case, there would be no referee to stop the fight. Wolfman could easily be armed with a butcher knife or worse, anything the mind snakes of LSD may prompt. This was going to be either a decided victory for me or a real disaster.
Lights were on inside the house, and I heard howling as soon as I pulled up. I hopped out and saw Dieckmann’s car screeching to a halt. The shrill sound of sirens told me that a couple of other marked units were closing on our location fast.
The shouting and howls got louder when we pounded on the door. The house looked really small, and I realized that the space inside would likely be tight and cluttered. The chances of someone getting hurt would be high if three or four of us walked in together. I asked Dieckmann for permission to try to take the guy down by myself—one on one—and he agreed.
I threw the bungalow’s front door open and stepped into a 12-by-12-foot room serving as living room, dining room and kitchen combined. The young brunette who had called the Middletown Police Department was crouched in a corner of the room, crying hysterically, shaking, her arms over her head. Wolfman, a big, muscle-bound guy, stood in the middle of the room, wearing only a pair of gym shorts. He was sleeved up, with tattoos on both arms.
“Hey buddy, what’s going on here? Your girlfriend is freakin’ out,” I said. “How about if you and me talk this one out.”
Wolfman squared off in front of me and started howling again, louder than before. His girlfriend shrieked and crouched tighter into a fetal position in the corner. I shifted my stance, and he squared up to me again so that we stood parallel to each other. Every time I moved, he squared up and kept an eye on me. The seconds were ticking by, and I knew he was going to attack if I didn’t make a move—and now.
Wolfman started throwing his arms up in the air and stomping his feet on the floor.
I maneuvered around just a bit so that my opponent was standing in front of a low wooden coffee table. A quick shove was all it took to make him tumble backward over it. When Wolfman fell, he landed on his back. He immediately rolled over so that he could get back to his feet—and that gave me the opportunity I was waiting for. As soon as he was on his knees, I dropped my full weight onto him, forcing him to fall face-first to the floor.
I immediately brought my right shin across his lower back and leaned all of my weight onto this controlling knee. I then drove my left arm through his right shoulder/armpit area. Now my left arm was through, and I brought it toward my right arm. My right fist was gripping Wolf’s right wrist. I used a thumbless grip, with my left hand grabbing my right wrist.
Next, I switched knees and placed my left shin across the back of his neck and straightened my right leg, putting all my body weight on the back of his neck. I then slowly began pulling his right wrist toward his spine and upward.
Wolfman’s entire body went stiff as a plank; his shoulder was a fraction of a movement away from being ripped from its socket. I was in control, and I could have easily crippled him for life with a hard pull inward and upward—but I held my position. His eyes were bulging but he was in too much distress to yell or howl.
“Yo, Sarge! Get in here,” I yelled.
Dieckmann and the guys were in the door before the words left my mouth. I kept the pressure on while they shackled Wolfman’s arms and legs.
Wolfman was arrested for disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. I could also have charged him with assault for his menacing behavior—but I decided to give him a break. We transported him to Riverview Hospital, where he was given a drug to negate the effects of the LSD. He sustained no injuries from the takedown and was served with a summons at the hospital and released.
The next day, the Wolfman and his girlfriend walked into the Middletown Police Department to thank us for the way he’d been taken down, without a beating and without weapons.
I had a choice that night, and I could easily have gone into that bungalow with a side-handled baton, a PR-24, and beaten the shit out of the guy. That’s what some of the guys on the force may have felt compelled to do. But that wasn’t my style. My days of hurting people for no reason were over.
“Car 41, Car 43, Car 47, Car 48, Car 49, respond to a report of a fire at King’s Row assisted living, 1800 Route 35,” the male dispatcher said in a no-nonsense manner that telegraphed urgency.
Detective Mike Rubino and I, who’d been out working as part of the street crime unit, were just a couple of minutes away in an unmarked unit. We hit lights and siren and headed toward the complex, which was home to dozens of elderly residents, some of them infirm. The dispatcher had just sent five of Middletown’s seven sector cars to the fire scene, leaving just two available for patrols. It was rare for that many cars to be sent to one location.
Rubino and I were the first officers who pulled up in front of the sprawling two-story complex on the south side of Route 35. We saw smoke rising from the rear of the facility. There were some people milling about out front, and we ran to the entrance closest to where we’d seen the smoke. A maintenance worker directed us to the residential corridors, and we started working the doors.
Some doors were open. But in other cases, residents had locked themselves inside and we had to kick in doors to get them. The doors were strong and resisted. I was able to get through them by using kicks I’d learned doing martial arts. But even then, it was tough work and took rigorous effort.
My partner and others wrapped wet towels around their faces so they didn’t take so much smoke into their lungs. But I couldn’t keep the towel in place and work the doors, so I just continued without a towel. I was able to get a couple dozen residents out before needing a break.
I headed for the front lobby, where some firemen and EMTs had gathered. As I walked there, I grew light-headed, and my legs felt like rubber. The EMTs grabbed
me, gave me oxygen and placed me on a gurney for a ride to the hospital. I spent two nights there, recovering from smoke inhalation. Later, I was given a proclamation from the New Jersey State Legislature for heroism.
The impact of the Columbine school massacre in April 1999 was felt across the U.S., including the two high schools in Middletown, where bomb threats were starting to occur—much to my dismay and that of school administrators and parents. Every couple of days, someone would call in a bomb threat, and the high school would be closed down for the rest of the day as a precaution. The students may have thought it was funny the first couple of times, but everyone else was getting increasingly frustrated. It had gotten so bad that the principals had my personal cell phone number, and we were meeting on a regular basis.
One sunny morning in May, the principal called and said that he’d received another bomb threat, this one written on the wall in the boys’ room. It read, “There is a bomb hidden near the cafeteria. It will go off at 11:00 a.m. You have been warned.”
“Are you worried about this?” I asked the principal. “Do you believe it, even a little bit?”
“No. I think it’s pure crap,” he said. “But what if I’m wrong? Can’t we bring in a bomb dog?”
“The reality is that the County Sheriff’s Department has about three of them, for the entire county,” I said. “To really do a credible check would take about three days, covering the entire place. But … I have a dog.”
“What, like a dachshund?” The principal chuckled.
“No. An Akita. He’s real scary-looking, but he wouldn’t harm a soul,” I said, thinking out loud and hoping my somewhat harebrained plan wouldn’t get me in serious trouble. The one thing I was sure of was that my new Akita, Mujo, had the perfect temperament for this job. He was huge and looked ferocious—but the worst he was going to do was slobber on someone. “If we keep this between you and me, I’ll walk him in, scare the crap out of everyone, walk him right back out. I don’t tell my people, you don’t tell yours. This bomb scare stuff is getting old, fast.”
On protective detail for President George Bush Sr. during a campaign run in 1992. The propane tanks in the background were an obvious danger—and gave me grave concern about POTUS’s safety.
“Okay, every kid in this place knows when you show up—the grapevine in school is real fast. Let’s go for it,” the principal said.
I went home, changed into black jeans and a shirt, put the leash on Mujo and asked him if he wanted to go for a ride in the car. He bounded into the back seat of my unmarked unit and promptly stuck his big head out the window. When I got to the school, I cruised slowly in front of the place, still with Mujo staring out the back window. I parked, hauled Mujo out of the car and headed inside the high school. It was about a 50-yard walk to the administration office, but the bell had just rung and the hallways were packed with kids trying to make their way to their next class. The oversized black dog sauntered down the hallway as students flattened themselves against the lockers to the left and right. Mujo seemed interested in sniffing out a treat or two from the students.
“Nice doggie,” one girl said as she extended her hand to Mujo.
“Freeze,” I said. “This is a bomb dog; he will rip off your hand.”
The girl’s face went white with fear, and she flattened herself against the lockers with some of the other kids.
One of the older female staffers seemed ecstatic as I walked into the administration office with Mujo. “Praise the Lord for a miracle. I have been so worried. That door over there has been open, and it’s not supposed to be. I am so worried the bomb is in there,” the woman said.
“Not to worry, ma’am, my trained bomb dog will clear the area.” Mujo all but pulled me into the oversized closet, used to store brooms, cleaning supplies and a three-foot-tall stuffed lion—the school’s mascot. Suddenly Mujo had something to play with—and destroy. I yanked the stuffed animal from his mouth as he sat there, tail wagging.
“Thanks be to the Lord, we are safe,” the staffer said as we continued to check out the administration area with my “bomb dog.”
“As I said, ma’am, not to worry.”
We headed out of the office and back down the hallway. A 16-year-old girl walked up to Mujo, carrying a backpack in her hands. Mujo immediately tugged at his leash and headed toward the girl, sticking his nose in her bag—and no doubt smelling her lunch.
I theatrically yanked the knapsack away from Mujo and his newfound friend. “Are there any explosive materials in this?” I asked.
“No, please, no,” she said trembling.
“The bomb dog was hitting on something, young lady. Were there any fireworks in there recently?”
“Oh my god, no. Please, my boyfriend, he didn’t mean to do anything. I was just carrying them,” the girl said, now on the verge of tears.
“No problem, young lady, just give it a nice cleaning and be more careful in the future.”
I noticed the principal standing nearby, and giving me the sign to bring this visit to an end. I took the hint and announced that I would walk the dog down the main corridor as a safety check.
I walked Mujo down the hallway while classes were in session. He was clearly enjoying himself and had no interest in leaving. I, on the other hand, was anxious to wrap up the visit and get the hell out unscathed. We exited a few minutes later, and I walked Mujo back to the car. I could feel hundreds of eyes on us from inside the classroom.
I brought Mujo back home, gave him a treat, changed back to my original attire and went back to my normal activities. For the rest of the school year, until the third week of June, when school ended, not one bomb threat was issued from that high school. Mujo was batting a thousand for bomb searches. He retired that day from his bomb dog life, secure in the knowledge that he had done some good.
A few days later, I casually mentioned to my supervisor, Lieutenant Rubino, that I’d used Mujo to help bring the bomb threats under control. “Oh, I almost forgot to tell you,” I said before describing what happened.
“Are you fucking nuts?” he asked before shaking his head and walking away. He’d already heard more than he wanted to know.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
TOO LATE
“Hey, Chuck, the phone’s for you,” one of the guys in headquarters shouted. It was the principal of the Middletown High School, and he was calling to tell me about a sexual predator.
A 15-year-old had walked into the principal’s office earlier that day to say that Guy Marganti, the father of one of her classmates, had sexually abused her during a booze-filled party in his house the previous evening. The principal said he had no reason to question the girl’s story and that he wanted it investigated.
Later that day, I met with the teen and her mom to take the girl’s sworn statement. She tearfully described how she and a bunch of her friends often went to the house because Mr. Marganti would give them booze and let them party in his finished basement without complaints. Some of them had even started to bring their own liquid refreshments with them. She explained that Marganti, who had a teenage daughter himself, would often hang out with the kids in the basement, and that he knew all of the girls on a first-name basis. They ranged in age from 13 to 17.
Apparently the parties had been going on for quite some time. The teens liked having what they thought was a “safe” place to hang out and drink, and they’d kept quiet about it. Mrs. Marganti, who was apparently addicted to some kind of painkiller, generally hung out upstairs in the kitchen and didn’t care about the parties that were going on literally beneath her feet.
I wasn’t all that surprised to hear about the scene; I’d noticed a drop in juvenile alcohol offenses in that part of town, around Port Monmouth, and had been wondering what was going on.
Over the next few days, I tracked down numerous other teens who’d been seen at the Marganti parties and took statements from
each of them. A bunch of the girls made a point of telling me that I should talk to a 15-year-old named Michelle Dooley. They said that she seemed to have an especially close relationship with the 40-year-old, five-foot-eight Marganti.
Dooley came into police headquarters one morning, accompanied by her mother, who wore fancy clothes and drove a fancy car—but stank of booze and seemed pissed off to be anywhere near cops. I wasn’t surprised; I knew this family from its previous run-ins with the law. Michelle Dooley’s brothers were known thieves, and her father seemed perfectly okay with fencing anything that his two boys brought home. The father hated police in general—and me in particular, because I’d arrested the boys in the past.
With tears and nervous glances at her mother, Michelle eventually admitted to me that Marganti had been wining and dining her for months; that he’d taken her to New York on more than one occasion and even bought her a diamond ring; and that they were lovers. She seemed reluctant to give up any incriminating information about her “boyfriend,” who was some 25 years her senior.
Michelle Dooley was a pretty, post-pubescent teen who had the maturity of a 12-year-old. She was different from the rest of her family—naïve in a way and still a little girl at heart. I really liked her a lot, and it broke my heart to hear what she’d gone through. Rarely have I been so motivated to bring down a criminal. Maybe Marganti gave her the love and respect that she couldn’t find at home. I could only guess at what prompted her to give in to his advances. I wasn’t a psychologist or social worker, and it didn’t really make a difference in the end. My role was to pursue the sexual predator who had preyed on this young girl and try to bring him to justice.
All the statements that I’d gathered in the case, including the one from Michelle, painted a picture of a middle-aged sexual predator who took advantage of the fact that he had a teenage daughter to attract other teens to his house. The finished basement had a separate entrance so that the teens could come and go as they pleased. There were wood-paneled walls, a large refrigerator and several couches where they would hang out.
Jersey Tough Page 29