by Mark Johnson
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
APPREHENSIONS & CONVICTIONS
“Part police procedural, part contemplative memoir, Mark Johnson’s Apprehensions & Convictions is all true, and a revelation. His story is by turns hair-raising, hilarious, and heartfelt. It should take its rightful place in the colorful Southern tradition of storytelling.”
—Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump, Kearny’s March, and The Aviators
“This unique and entertaining memoir by a former national charity executive, who finds himself policing dangerous inner-city streets as a 50-year-old rookie cop, is exciting, absorbing and unflinchingly honest.”
—Joseph Wambaugh, author of The New Centurions, The Blue Knight, the Hollywood Station series, and numerous other crime novels
“Gritty, thoughtful, and authentic. Johnson gives you unvarnished insight into a world in which few dare to tread. He’s the real deal and so is this book.”
—Adam Plantinga, author of 400 Things Cops Know
“F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed there were no second acts in America. He was wrong. Mark Johnson proves it. He’s into his third act now, from social worker to cop, and now to writer, and in Apprehensions & Convictions he leaves little doubt that he’s mastered that third incarnation. You’ll be grabbed by the seat of your pants on the first page and he won’t let go till the very last word.”
—Charles Salzberg, Shamus-nominated author of Devil in the Hole and Swann’s Lake of Despair
“Apprehensions & Convictions is a thoroughly enjoyable and compelling read, chock-full of authenticity and soul. Mark Johnson’s book is not only motivational, but, in a way, an excellent anthropological study of police culture and human behavior. Definitely essential reading.”
—David Swinson, author of The Second Girl
APPREHENSIONS &
CONVICTIONS
Adventures of a 50-Year-Old Rookie Cop
Mark Johnson
Apprehensions & Convictions: Adventures of a 50-Year-Old Rookie Cop
Copyright © 2016 by Mark Johnson. All rights reserved.
Published by Quill Driver Books
An imprint of Linden Publishing
2006 South Mary Street, Fresno, California 93721
(559) 233-6633 / (800) 345-4447
QuillDriverBooks.com
Quill Driver Books and colophon are trademarks of
Linden Publishing, Inc.
ISBN 978-1-61035-264-2
135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: What Are You?
Chapter 2: The Turd in the Punch Bowl
Chapter 3: Psychic Payne
Chapter 4: The Christmas Gift
Chapter 5: Cops ’n’ Corpses
Chapter 6: Baby-Mamas and Bastards
Chapter 7: My Parents Never Did That!
Chapter 8: Runnin’ Code
Chapter 9: A Pot to Piss In
Chapter 10: Love and Anger Management
Chapter 11: Mudbug
Chapter 12: Stranger in a Strange Land
Chapter 13: Plainclothes and Provenance
Chapter 14: Missing Persons
Chapter 15: Deception for Detection
Chapter 16: The New Squad
Chapter 17: Oedipus Wrecks
Chapter 18: The Chicken Comes Home to Pensacola
Chapter 19: Thievin’ Hoes, Prehensile Toes
Chapter 20: Bad Bluffs, Slipped Cuffs
Chapter 21: Solo Stakeout
Chapter 22: Slocumb’s Theorem
Chapter 23: Fool Me Once
Chapter 24: Bad Day on the Bayou
Chapter 25: Colt’s Capture and the Metro Amends
Chapter 26: Folly Chases Death (around the Broken Pillar of Life)
Chapter 27: Shit Gets Real
Chapter 28: Face of Fury, Search for Sense
Chapter 29: (Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
Epilogue
Additional Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
For Nancy, and Pete and Kate.
And in memory of Margaret and Stan.
Preface
I’m not a career cop, nor a natural warrior. But cops have always been among my heroes. Looking at the downside of fifty, it seemed time was running out. More than two decades of social service philanthropy (the majority as CEO) in three distinct cities had left me feeling restless and out of touch. Instead of trying to effect community-wide change, I thought maybe I could be more effective—more useful—to a few neighborhoods, even to just a few families or individuals at a time. I wanted to make a more tangible difference, in a more hands-on way. Not many jobs are more hands-on than policing. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It still does.
The names, nicknames, and aliases of all those portrayed in this book—police, suspects, arrestees, witnesses, informants, victims, public defenders, prosecutors, magistrates, and judges—have been changed, with the exceptions of Officer Steven Green and Lawrence Wallace, Jr. (both deceased, and a matter of public record), my immediate family, me, and good ol’ Ernie.
All events herein are from my own first-hand experience. My memory of them is supported by my dispatch notes, case files, official reports and narratives, conversations with others at the scene, and, in a few cases, news accounts.
Spoken words are necessarily recreated as closely as memory allows. In the absence of recorded transcripts, every effort has been made to convey the essential truth—the intention, inflection, and meaning—of the speaker and the words spoken. This includes colloquialisms, slang, and dialect, sometimes requiring improper grammar, profanity, and phonetic spellings. Some of the slang is racially unique, some is just southern. Mobile’s population is roughly half African American, half Caucasian, but my police beats were in primarily African American neighborhoods. I wrote the way the people in those neighborhoods talk. It’s not exaggerated or distorted. It’s different from the way people talk in Denver, Milwaukee, or St. Louis. In fact, understanding the local black dialect was a significant challenge in my early days as a cop. I had to ask people to repeat themselves multiple times, sometimes needing them to spell out what they were saying. I even had to do this on the air with police radio dispatchers—and this after having lived in Mobile for seven years. It’s a thick accent, a dense and colorful jargon, and it takes a while to fully comprehend.
At several points in my story, I use strong terms to refer to people encountered on the job. Some may take offense at words like “feral” or “savages.” I make no apology. Words mean things, and the people I refer to match the meanings of the words, and it has nothing to do with race or class and I don’t speak for all cops, anyway.
I have met cops from all over the U.S. and from a dozen foreign countries, and have found an uncommon commonality between us, stemming from the unique perspective and shared experience that the work bestows upon us. It’s scary, disturbing, dangerous work, mostly a plodding grind, occasionally thrilling, usually for scandalously low pay, but offering unsurpassed rewards. It’s the best job I ever had.
1
What Are You?
Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
—attributed to George Orwell
I’m just a few days out of Mobile’s Police Academy, my third night in the Third Precinct riding with my FTO, Porter. Sarge had just dismissed us from roll call, and we were in the precinct parking lot loading and fueling up Porter’s squad car. It was 1815 hours on a
sweltering mid-September evening.
Porter had told me the first night, “Get this straight, up front: I don’t know you and don’t wanna know you. Don’t give a damn about you, your life’s story, your wife and kids, what you did before this, and why you wanted to work in this fucked-up department, especially at your age, Grampa. You’re not my buddy, and you won’t be after this month is up.” He had punctuated this declaration by slamming the squad car trunk, where I’d just stowed my shotgun.
“I never volunteered to be a field training officer and don’t get paid any extra for all the goddamn paperwork. I hate rookies. Even though you’re old enough to be my pawpaw and you look like Clint fucking Eastwood—in Blood Work, not Dirty Harry, have you seen that yet? Then you know what I’m talkin’ about: he’s so old, he has a heart attack in the first scene—you’re just another goddamn rookie to me. All I ask is that you don’t bug me, don’t try to talk to me, or ask a million stupid-ass rookie questions. Just stay the fuck outta my way and don’t do anything to embarrass me.”
“Yes sir,” I’d said that first night, an academy reflex. I’d been told before of my resemblance to Clint but without Porter’s specificity. This time it kinda stung. I had just seen Blood Work. After the opening-scene foot chase ends with Clint’s heart attack, for the rest of the movie everybody tells him how bad, how sick he looks. Wasn’t Eastwood like seventy-five? I had just turned fifty.
“Jeee-zus,” Porter had said, blowing smoke and shaking his head in disgust. He’d then thrust his plump round face into mine, his sneer exposing teeth crying out for orthodonture. He barely has whiskers, I’d noticed, and a sparse, utterly pathetic mustache darkened his upper lip. I’d gotten a pungent whiff of coffee and nicotine from his breath but resisted pulling my head back.
“You see any fucking stripes on my sleeve, Pawpaw?” He’d raised a thick bicep, pulling at the sleeve. “First rule: Don’t call me ‘sir’!”
I’d felt my mouth forming the y of yessir but aborted it, leaving my chin slightly jutting, in what I’d hoped might be taken as defiance, or determination. It was taken as neither. Porter wasn’t even looking at me as we’d pulled out of the precinct and into the night. He was on a roll.
“Second rule,” he had announced. “Forget all that crap they taught you in the academy. It’s useless. Horseshit. Has nothing to do with how it really is out here on the streets. Just watch what I do, and the other guys on the squad. Except that worthless piece of shit Whatley. Do exactly the opposite of anything he does.” I had wondered, what makes Whatley a piece of shit? So much for the “brothers-in-blue” thing.
But Portly Porter droned on, his self-importance reminiscent of Deputy Barney Fife condescending to deputize Gomer Pyle in Mayberry. “Keep your mouth shut, your eyes and ears open, then maybe, just mayyybe, we’ll get along and you’ll survive this month.” He grabbed the radio mike and put us 10-8 (in service), as a one-man training unit. I didn’t count—even as a man, much less a cop—and wouldn’t for another ninety days.
I remember thinking, you fat fool, you’re a walking cliché, giving me that tired, world-weary-veteran-to-recruit spiel. You’re maybe half my age. Former Marine? Big whup. Do you really think I haven’t watched that scene you’re playacting, in maybe a million movies, most of ’em made before you could even talk?
But I was used to rookie disdain as the default setting of department veterans by now, having been razzed and lorded over and called crazy for the past six months by old cops, young cops, female cops, fellow recruits, academy instructors, my wife, and most of our family and friends ever since I’d abruptly quit my old job heading up Mobile’s United Way for a 75 percent pay cut and hired on with the department. I just sucked it up and held my tongue. I’m not one for much conversation, anyway. And if I ever do come up with a snappy comeback, it’s several days late.
Porter liked to write tickets. Traffic enforcement is my least favorite part of policing. But for Porter, it justifies parking the squad car on the roadside behind some bushes and just sitting there until the radar whines. I’d sat in obedient silence for two twelve-hour shifts, trying to focus on the radio, listening for our unit number to be called. Porter had mostly chain-smoked Marlboro Lights and talked for hours on his cell to some female in Arkansas he’d met online: “What’s your favorite thing at Taco Bell? Dontcha love those new Gorditas, with extra sour cream!” I was beginning to believe that old saying about police work: 90 percent boredom and 10 percent terror. I was craving the terror. And thinking maybe this was a really dumb career move, after all.
But third night out, as the day’s thick heat slowly rose up out of the asphalt while the blazing Alabama sun eased beyond the horizon, we finally get dispatched to a hot call, a domestic: white female caller, assaulted by known white male subject armed with a knife. Both parties still on scene. At last! I think. We get to rescue a damsel in distress!
Dubovitch will back us. (A reminder to me that even to the dispatcher, I don’t exist, at least not as sufficient backing for Porter.) I try to picture Dubovitch. From what little I’ve gathered, if he’s the guy I’m thinking of, he seems pretty squared away, based on his bearing at roll call and how the others regard him. A little cocky, maybe, but (I’m beginning to think) who of these guys isn’t? Dubovitch has been on about as long as Porter, seven or eight years, and is about the same age, late twenties, maybe thirty. At least he’s not fat and loud like Portly.
We pull into the rundown motor court, a place that charges by the week and month (and probably by the hour). That old jukebox chorus pops unbidden into my head: “I’ll even tell you that I love you if you want me to. Third rate romance, low rent rendezvous.” The Amazing Rhythm Aces.
The dozen-room Bama Pride motel’s neon sign has a nearly burnt-out, flickering P and so alternately reads “Bama ride.” It’s a long, sad-looking, one-story cinder-block building with peeling lime-green paint, sagging eaves, missing shingles, and broken windows held together with duct-taped cardboard. Room numbers are nailed all cattywampus to the splintered, scarred doors. Its weedy, cracked, and heaving parking lot is littered with cigarette butts, flattened malt liquor cans, broken glass. There’s a lone, battered, and rusty eighties-model Ford pickup, mostly faded blue but with a primer-gray door, parked at the far end of the lot. Evidently, most of this motel’s guests don’t own vehicles.
Dubovitch is already there, leaning against his squad car smoking a cigarette next to an agitated, anorexic, bedraggled, hard-looking woman talking fast and loud. Our damsel could be the “Bama ride” herself. She had likely been attractive, in a lascivious sort of way, in a previous incarnation. A large near-empty wine bottle is on the ground next to her.
She’s carrying on about how “the thum-bitch came at me with a knife! A goddamn knife!” She seems more pissed off than scared or hurt. She’s maybe mid-forties, her lisp the result of gaps in her frightfully discolored teeth. Strands of greasy, sweat-soaked hair stick randomly to her forehead, cheeks, and neck; she’s wearing a soiled, stretched wifebeater (barely containing her drooping, braless breasts), neon-pink short-shorts with white piping, no shoes, filthy bare feet. Tattoos, mosquito bites, scratches, scabs, and welts adorn her arms and legs. Dubo’s not even looking at her while she rants on with punching and parrying motions and points to the door of room number five. As Porter and I approach, I can smell her. It’s not a pleasant scent: a yeasty, sour odor similar to dirty sweat socks but sharper.
Dubovitch smiles and says, “Hey Porter, check out her tattoo. Show him your tat, darlin’.” The woman stops mid-sentence and proudly displays her upper right arm.
Porter reads aloud the faded greenish lettering, “FUCK MEN,” then grins.
“Is that your attitude, ma’am, or your job description?” Good one, Porter, I concede, grudgingly. He’s still a pompous ass, but I’ll grant him points for wit.
“I don’t need no thit from you, ath-hole!” our complainant spits through her gaping teeth. “I want him arrethted! Prothecuted to th
e fulleth exthtent of the law! I know my rightth!” A devotee of TV court dramas.
“No injuries,” Dubo says, ignoring her, “but those two over there witnessed the whole thing.” He nods toward a couple of gray-haired black men sitting on lawn chairs at the end of the parking lot, under the generous cool shade of a massive, moss-dripping live oak, whose roots are responsible for the crumbling, upheaved asphalt. “Guy did have a knife, they say, and he started it. It’s her old man. They both been drinking and fighting all day, according to the witnesses, and she confirms it.” He gestures to the wine bottle at her feet. When I look their way, the witnesses nod in affirmation. I swell up slightly and nod back with my most serious countenance: a man on a mission. At least they think I’m a cop. “He retreated to the room when she smacked him upside the head with the bottle.”
“You got her information, Dubo?” Porter asks.
Dubovitch nods. “I just gotta get her signature on the DV* form, and the witness statements. Why don’t you and your rookie go fetch him. He’s still in the room. No backdoor. Still has the blade on him.”
“C’mon, Pawpaw,” Porter says. “Let’s go get Mr. Slingblade.” He strides toward the door, which is partially open, to room number five. I notice he unsnaps the holster of his Glock and do likewise. My heart is pounding and my hand is trembling and I’m relieved nobody seems to notice. We stand on each side of the door. Porter gingerly pushes on it, calling out “MPD” as it swings open. We peer inside.
Naked except for darkly stained shorts, a man sits on a bed, propped against the wall. Blood covers him from a gash on his swollen forehead. He’s bald, except for long wisps of gray hair around the ears, bound into a ponytail behind his ruined face. The tangled sheets around him are soaked with gore.
Spying us, he snarls, “Arrest that bitch! She damn-near killed me! Looka me! I want that bitch chained down in Metro!”
“Settle down, Pops,” Porter says, waving off his demands as we enter. My eyes are popping at the sight of him. Porter’s eyes sweep the room, and mine follow. It’s all torn up. A nightstand next to the bed has been knocked over, its lamp shattered on the floor. A chrome-and-plastic chair lies on its side among broken dishes, scattered French fries, half-eaten hamburgers, and Sonic Drive-In wrappers swept off an overturned kitchenette table. Beer cans, wine bottles, and dirty clothes cover the floor.