Jersey Tough Page 3

  The biker told us he was there to talk about “Mr. Brown,” an African-American drug dealer who worked the streets in Asbury Park. We knew exactly who he was talking about; we’d been trying to take down this guy for a while because he seemed to move a lot of product. But we hadn’t been able to get close to him.

  Hanson sat across the table and looked at the four of us. He seemed to focus on me, in part because I, too, was dressed like a biker and had multiple tats. All of us were wearing casual clothes to help us fit in during undercover operations; elsewhere on the floor, detectives wore jackets and ties. Perez said little but gave me a nod; whatever developed, Hanson was going to be my new confidential informant, or CI.

  Hanson described how he wanted to help us take down his drug dealer—who coincidentally happened to be a good friend of his. The biker explained that he’d gotten hooked on heroin as a result of being with Mr. Brown, and he was convinced that the only way to kick his habit was to get his dealer off the street—for a long time.

  Hanson’s story was hard to believe, and I told him so.

  “We have no charges against you,” I said. “Is this a revenge thing? If it is we have to move very carefully. These things become ambushes way too easily.”

  “It isn’t like that at all,” Hanson said. “If I don’t take this guy off the street, I will never give up my habit.’

  “Are you so tight with him that you can make me fit in?”

  “Yeah, but we have to fix up in the room in front of him,” he said, meaning that both of us would have to cook and shoot a load of heroin into our veins in front of the dealer.

  Hanson assured me that if we passed Mr. Brown’s test, we could buy some real weight from him—like a “bundle,” for starters. A bundle is equal to 10 glassine bags of heroin.

  “I respect you for doing this, man, but if you think I am putting a spike in my veins you got it wrong,” I told him. “I want this fucker gone. He is the real deal. But I am not going to shoot anything into my veins.”

  “Then he’ll never go for it,” my new CI said. His look telegraphed defeat. It was clear that there was no other way to do a buy with Mr. Brown.

  “Where would this likely go down?” I asked.

  “A motel room,” he said. “It’ll be a room in some motel in Asbury Park.”

  I asked Hanson if he wanted a cup of coffee. The two of us walked over to a lunch room with round white tables, chairs, a coffee machine, microwave and refrigerator. We chatted casually. I needed to know that I would be able to work with Hanson out on the street; I also needed to know that I could control him, no matter what the circumstances.

  My mind was racing. This was too good to be true; I wanted to take down Mr. Brown, but there was no way I was going to shoot up heroin, no matter what kind of bust I could make. As I talked to him, I realized that Hanson was agenda-free; he really did just want his dealer friend off the street so that he could get off drugs.

  “Hey, bro. What if we cook up and blow the shot?” I asked. “I had friends in the army shoot dope, I know the drill. I know how to cook it up, and I know how to draw the syringe. We just turn our back. Once the works are filled, he ain’t gonna have to see the last act. How about that? Can you hack it? Can you blow the shot? Because if you don’t, this case is shit. You are getting named in a police report. I cannot bullshit you; I think you are a stand-up guy.”

  “I can hack it,” Hanson said. “I’ll blow the shot. It won’t be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

  Over the next couple of weeks, the team kept Mr. Brown under surveillance from a distance, and I continued to meet with my CI. He was cold as ice, and I believed I could trust him when the buy went down.

  Hanson made contact with the dealer on a Thursday and arranged for a meeting in a run-down two-story motel that offered hourly rates—along with dingy rooms, dim lighting and filthy patterned carpeting. Late that night, we parked in the lot and took one of the exterior wrought-iron staircases up to the second-floor room where Mr. Brown was supposed to be waiting.

  My CI knocked on a wood door with peeling red enamel. The room’s curtains were drawn, but the lights were on and we could hear muffled voices inside. The dealer, dressed in dyed black jeans and an unbuttoned black sport shirt, opened the door a few inches and stared out at Hanson and me with dark-colored, uncaring eyes. There was another guy in the room, sitting in a threadbare chair in a corner.

  The seediness and squalor were appalling. The smell of the burned junk, the way this seemingly innocuous powder can hollow out a man, struck me. My informant had thick black tracks hideously marking his skin. If he wore a short-sleeved shirt, anyone would be disgusted. What woman would love him? He had the demeanor of a schoolteacher but the scars of a craven addict. How scarred were the souls involved in this danse macabre?

  Showing no hint of concern, Hanson made the brief introductions and said that each of us would be buying a bundle—but that I would be paying for both of us. Mr. Brown seemed okay with that. It didn’t make much difference to him where the money was coming from.

  I asked if we could fix up a little—just a taste—to keep Mr. Jones away, and Mr. Brown insisted that I shoot up in front of him. There was drug paraphernalia on the round table, including needles, syringes and cotton.

  Hanson and I both tensed up when there was a knock on the door. It was Mr. Brown’s girlfriend, a woman in her early 20s, wearing a tight top, shorts, high heels and lots of gold jewelry. She gave him a kiss, walked over to the bed and leaned back on the headboard. She was hot as a pistol and clearly distracted the dealer.

  I handed over cash for the two decks we were buying and gave Hanson two bags of smack. We each emptied the contents of two envelopes into a spoon, and used the syringe to add a small amount of water. Next we held the spoons over lighters and carefully heated the mixture. We stirred the heroin into the water, using the plastic top of the syringe. When the mixture started to bubble, we knew it was done, or “cooked.”

  Hanson and I grabbed small bits of cotton off the table, rolled them between our fingers until we had tiny round balls, and dropped them into the liquid mixture. We poked the needles into the centers of the cotton balls and pulled back on the plungers to suck all the heroin into the syringes.

  Taking pieces of yellowing surgical tubing from the table, we tied off our upper arms to make the veins more apparent. We put one end of the tubing between our teeth, held the other end with our right hand, and pulled until we started to cut off circulation. I looked over at Mr. Brown for a second and saw that his attention was focused more on his girlfriend than on us.

  Thank God for the bombshell, whoever the hell she was.

  Hanson and I sat on the foot of the bed, ready to do the shot. My CI successfully blew his shot, allowing the heroin to run harmlessly down his forearm and onto the already stained bedspread. Mr. Brown seemed unconcerned about my CI, whom he knew to be a junkie; he was more interested in my actions.

  But as I casually turned my back to Mr. Brown, I inadvertently stabbed myself in the arm—exactly what I didn’t want to do.

  My mind raced, and I wondered who else had used the dirty needle that was now stuck in my arm. For all the insane risks I ever took, this was the most extreme. I was potentially under attack from something microscopic in size but every bit as deadly as a razor or knife.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck, I silently screamed. I have a dirty goddamned needle in my arm. I would have preferred a knife fight or a shootout. I felt as if a white-hot poker was stabbing me in the gut.

  I quietly pulled the needle out and shot the junk onto the floor. Mr. Brown had looked away just long enough for me to cover my actions. He saw the blood on my arm from where the needle had gone in and took that as proof positive that I’d done the shot.

  Getting stuck with that needle was skeevy, and it freaked me out. I understood the risks, and I’d volunteered for this job. But this wa
s insidious and creepy. Fuck. Blood-borne pathogens. Would I contract hepatitis, herpes or some other sexually-transmitted disease? If I did get sick, what then? Wild thoughts raced through my brain.

  My CI and I left Mr. Brown’s hotel room with 16 bags of heroin. Hanson told me not to worry too much about the needle, because he thought they were clean. But it was very tough indeed to trust a junkie biker’s word that I was safe from infection. AIDS, thank God, hadn’t yet reached the heroin crowd in Asbury Park. It was only a few short years later that AIDS became rampant there.

  Hours later, I was back at headquarters, checking in the drugs as evidence. My plan was to go back and “double up” Mr. Brown, buying twice the quantity of drugs to further bolster my case against him. Fixing up in his presence was no longer necessary; I had passed the test. But I never got a chance to do another buy from Mr. Brown, who was believed to be the biggest heroin dealer in Asbury Park. The next day, Middletown Police Chief Joe McCarthy ordered me to leave the task force and return to the police department. He knew I loved my work with the undercover unit, but he was ordering me off, effective immediately, for reasons that had nothing to do with me.

  Even before I got the news that I was done with the case, something felt off in the task force offices. Some of the senior officers weren’t there, and that was unusual.

  Captain Harry Valentine called me into his office and asked me to shut the door.

  “Bradshaw, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but Chief McCarthy wants you back in Middletown,” the captain said. “Gather your personal items, do what you need to do and then get out of here. You’re not to return. Understand?”

  “Captain, what the hell. What’s going on?” I asked.

  Valentine had little to say. But apparently the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office had put together a series of indictments against three Middletown Police Department detectives—Steve Xanthos, Kevin McCauley and Pat Greeves—for violently assaulting a couple of meth dealers while on a drug raid. Xanthos was known for making heavy-duty arrests, but his tactics weren’t always the cleanest. McCauley and I had been friends for years, and I was surprised to hear about him. No doubt, Chief McCarthy was pissed. His force was now down by three detectives, and he had a major public relations problem on his hands. The chief wanted nothing to do with the Monmouth County prosecutor, and that meant that I couldn’t continue on the MCNTF.

  Now I realized why the task force offices had seemed so quiet. A number of the guys had apparently taken some time off to avoid having to tell me about Chief McCarthy’s decision. Valentine was the low man on the totem pole, and so he’d been stuck with the task. I tried calling headquarters in Middletown to find out what the chief had in mind for me. But oddly, it seemed that some of the commanding officers there had also left early. I wasn’t going to learn anything more about my next assignment tonight. I literally had no idea what my next assignment was going to be.

  What a roller-coaster I was on! I’m on the verge of really smacking some home runs, then the pinch hitter takes my spot in the lineup. What did this say about my personality, that no one in the brass wanted to look me in the eye? Did they think I was deranged, a risk to flip out? If so, they needn’t have worried. It had been a hell of a summer. A real blast. I was in no position to even make a case with Chief McCarthy—he valued loyalty, and I wouldn’t have the job if it weren’t for him sticking his neck out. I’d heard there was an opening in a new, smaller undercover operation. I would shoot for that and enjoy the remainder of the summer. Besides, my friend was one of the indicted detectives. And lest I forget, McCauley had invited me along on the ill-fated narcotics raid that resulted in his arrest. Lucky for me, I had been busy that night in Asbury Park.

  My MCNTF partners wasted no time taking me out for a proper farewell celebration, complete with a visit to a strip club in Eatontown that I could have done without, an elaborate steak dinner and some sorrowful goodbyes early the following morning.

  On Monday morning, I reported for work at the Middletown Police Department. There, the chief saw me and called me into his office for a quick conversation.

  “I know you liked it out there and were kicking ass. But there’s no way in the world we can have a guy like you helping those motherfuckers,” McCarthy said.

  I had no choice but to agree—and truthfully, I was worried about my buddy McCauley.

  The chief pulled one of the lieutenants into the conversation. “Hey, Danny, you know that three weeks of vacation you’ve got for Bradshaw, right? You’ve got that in the books, right?

  The lieutenant gave me a quick glance. It was clear he had no idea what the chief was talking about. But it was the chief.

  “Yeah, absolutely!” the lieutenant responded.

  “Great,” the chief said before turning to me. “Okay, then take three weeks off and when you get back, the next opening at the Bayshore Narcotics Task Force is yours.”

  I couldn’t complain. I suddenly had much of August off.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE POLITICS OF CONTRABAND

  One month later, I started work with another undercover unit—the Bayshore Narcotics Task Force, responsible for driving down illicit drug activity in the northern section of Monmouth County. I was excited to be part of the group, even though it was a tiny, low-budget operation.

  A group of local police departments had teamed up to form the BNTF, with each one providing staff on a rotating basis. There were only three of us in the unit when it started. John McCabe, a detective lieutenant from Hazlet, was the group’s supervisor; he brought John “Jack” Mullins with him from Hazlet. I was the only one who had any undercover experience, with three months’ worth under my belt, but all of us had spent some time on the streets and knew the area and its residents well. Other officers had already nicknamed Detective Lieutenant McCabe “Father John” because he had an uncanny ability to be able to get suspects to confess to just about anything without using excessive force. Soon the Keansburg Police Department sent over another officer, Armand “Armie” Ertle, and the Union Beach PD sent over Alton Bennett, giving us a total of five.

  We worked out of the Holmdel Police Department, which—like many small municipal police forces—was housed in the town hall. The two-story V-shaped building was just five years old; it had a light-colored stone façade and dark shingled roof. It was located on Crawfords Corner Road, not far from the Garden State Parkway, which made it easier for us to move around the area. The task force operated out of a room in the basement, across the hall from the police gym.

  Holmdel had an upscale population of about 16 thousand and a low crime rate—which made the police headquarters a great place for us, since we didn’t need to worry as much about low-level criminals seeing us and later identifying us as cops. Most of our operations and arrests would take place miles away, in the communities of Middletown, Keansburg and Union Beach.

  The transfer energized me. We were like a special-ops team, with very loose supervision. It was all about the character of the undercover operatives, their mutual trust—and, as always, results. I was on cloud nine. I had gone from an outlaw motorcycle culture, with jail always hanging over my head like a Sword of Damocles, to law enforcement with a nice amount of heady danger associated with it. I sincerely liked and respected my co-workers, and they returned the sentiment. We were determined to make this task force the highlight of our careers. I felt like I was born to it.

  On my first day there, I met the supervisor, McCabe. He wouldn’t be part of the task force’s everyday operations but would have full authority over the unit. McCabe was average in both height and weight, with a very mild personality. I got the sense that he could be a quiet but strong leader. He and I talked for a bit in the office and came up with the idea of going undercover as members of an outlaw biker gang—which would be easy for me. It wasn’t long before he suggested that Jack Mullins and I go out for a drink in Hazlet. We’d be workin
g together closely, relying on each other, so it made sense for us to get to know each other.

  Though Jack had no prior undercover experience, I was sure he’d quickly get up to speed and make a superb undercover. He was street-smart, a born raconteur and had prior military experience with a top-notch outfit in the Philippines. He also looked like a perfect fit as an outlaw biker.

  Jack and I headed for a quiet, out-of-the-way bar for lunch and a couple of drinks. We grabbed two bar stools, ordered pizzas and draft beers and watched a little of the baseball game that was playing on the TV. We were having a great time, telling war stories and laughing like hell. Jack could put away multiple drinks without it showing. We spent half the afternoon at the bar, sipping brews together.

  Suddenly Jack looked me straight in the eye and said, “I’m feeling like I should kick your fucking ass. I’ve fucking heard about you, all your fucking stories, and I’m fucking done with it.”

  “I know you’re fucking around, man,” I said.

  “I’m not fucking around at all. You need a beating, and I am the perfect person to do it,” Jack said. “It’ll get things started out right.”

  “You’re fucking serious?”

  “Fucking right I am,” he shot back. “I will beat you out to the parking lot, you motherfucker.”

  There was no way I was going to let this go, cop or no cop. I stood, walked out of the bar and headed to the parking lot around back—ready to pound him into the pavement.

  Jack came at me with fists held high. Just before he got within striking distance, he stopped and burst out laughing. “You thought I was serious?” he asked. “Everyone knows about you, you’re the last person I would ever want to fight. You’re killing me, man.”

  McCabe had been right to send the two of us out that day.

  I can only imagine the stories Jack must have been told about me. Police agencies are a bit like beauty parlors, places where gossip is told and retold—and often embellished at every step. As a former member of an outlaw motorcycle gang who rode through town on a custom Harley, got into bar fights on a regular basis and otherwise wreaked havoc on the Jersey Shore, I was no doubt real fodder for coffee break meetings in the field. The fact that I was a black belt martial artist also added to my tough guy image. Inevitably, the myth is much bigger than the man. I knew that going into the game, so I played things as low-key as I could. I rarely attended police-related drunk-fests and avoided confrontations with co-workers.