Undercover

They sacrifice their old lives for a lonely routine of dirty clothes and dirty business, blending into a world of street drugs in what has been called the nation’s best covert police program.

As rain dotted the windshield of his battered truck, worn-out wipers squeaked an irritating refrain. An overwhelming stench permeated the cab, and cigarette butts overflowed the ashtray. The driver kicked at potato chip bags and dirty napkins littering the floorboard.

But the man behind the wheel —a filthy, unkempt mess who reeked of stale beer and sour sweat, who looked as if he’d slept in the same clothes for weeks — seemed oblivious to anything but his mission.

He cracked open a 24-ounce can of Natural Light wrapped in a brown paper bag, took a swig with one hand and dialed his cell phone with the other. He waited for a dealer to pick up. No answer.

“Hey, you seen Money?” he yelled through an open window to a stranger near Watkins and Ontario. “Who?” the man called back, shrugging.

He was getting impatient, anxious to spend the two wrinkled $5 bills in his work shirt pocket.

Near Hunter and Hollywood, a woman in an orange T-shirt hopped into the vehicle, uninvited. Her name was Silky, she said. What was he looking for? “Hard,” he told her.

Silky jumped out in search of a street-corner crack dealer nearby. No sale. He didn’t like the look of the driver.

No problem; Memphis’ streets are a buyer’s market, a virtual midway for addicts. Soon Silky spotted a familiar face just down the block.

“Big Mama! Come here! Come here! Go get me a dime.”

Big Mama — a heavyset woman in a black dress — disappeared between houses and re-emerged a few minutes later with a rock of crack.

After deducting her commission — a small corner of the rock — Silky handed the rest over to the man she’d just met.

She stuffed the white crumbs into a glass crack pipe and lit the end, charred black from previous use. She took a long, slow hit that sounded as if she was trying to suck the last drops of liquid from a straw. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Then, as quickly as she’d arrived, Silky hopped out and faded into the neighborhood. As she disappeared, the driver’s demeanor abruptly changed. He spoke into a hidden microphone with the cadence of a police officer.

“UC 1335. Undercover capacity, Memphis City Police Department. In the area of Hunter and Hollywood, Hunter and Hollywood. In reference to purchasing crack cocaine.”

 In a nearby parking lot, the officer dropped the waxy substance into a tiny numbered plastic bag similar to the ones dry cleaners use for buttons. He scribbled down details of the buy and stowed the evidence in an Altoids tin.

For a visitor riding alongside, it was  a gut-wrenching few minutes: the startling interaction with a crack addict going through withdrawal; the fear that at any moment they’d be discovered as frauds; the acrid plume of crack smoke that enveloped the cab; three visits in three days to buy from a dealer — inside his home.

This September day — and two to follow — brought into focus the perilous, often surreal job of undercover police officers in Memphis who work in neighborhoods ravaged by crack cocaine, where the drug trade stokes the city’s considerable violence.

“Crack cocaine fuels, I would say, 80 to 90 percent of the home burglaries and car break-ins,” s aid Det. Paul Sherman, the MPD undercover unit coordinator. “... But it also fuels the violent crime.”

On some street corners, dealers — “dope boys” they call them — jump into buyers’ cars. Inside one home, $10 worth of crack was weighed on a scale placed on the stove near a batch of candied apples. On another visit, the dealer retrieved drugs from the underside of a baby swing. The kids played video games on a big-screen TV in the next room.

One buy begets another.

Then another.

In all, undercover officers buy numerous times — often four to five times  — from the same dealer to provide sufficient evidence and to give a team of officers and prosecutors time to identify sellers known only by their street names, create case files and win indictments from a grand jury.

Only then does an army of MPD officers crash through the front door with arrest warrants.

A Shelby County grand jury recently returned 163 indictments against 51 people for the unlawful possession of a controlled substance with intent to manufacture, deliver or sell. Most charges were for the sale of crack cocaine. 

The Shelby County District Attorney’s office also filed public  nuisance actions against owners of 12 suspected drug houses.

In the latest roundup last week, officers arrested 28 suspects based on evidence collected by undercover officers — all of their buys surreptitiously videotaped. Twenty-three suspects are still wanted.

At 4428 Medley, where UC 1335 repeatedly purchased crack cocaine as a reporter watched, officers wearing bulletproof vests walked past a custom painted Cadillac to surround the house.

A woman answered the door and let officers in. Arthur Foreman, 28, walked in the living room from the back of the house and was arrested. He was led to a waiting squad car in handcuffs.

UC 1335 was nowhere in sight. He’d moved on. Another street corner friendship to forge, another buy to make, another file to build.

“I know what I’m doing is going to get picked up and mopped up later,” he said. “But it all hinges on what I’m doing right now.

 Since Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin — an undercover officer in the 1970s —revived the undercover program 3 1/2 years  ago, indictments against 1,547 defendants can be linked to the nameless, faceless officers.

The undercover unit has shuttered more than 200 drug houses under the state’s nuisance law. Their work has brought at least seven indictments against suspected dirty cops on charges of theft, drug dealing and rape. Even the recent bribery case in the Shelby County Clerk’s Office emerged from intelligence gathered by an undercover officer.

“You have to be able to sleep with the enemy, if you will,” Godwin said in a recent interview. “That’s a loose term, but I mean you’ve got to be able to infiltrate the enemy and gather information.”

But it’s only after the drama fades that the details emerge. And because their deals are recorded by sophisticated, closely held technology, the team’s conviction rate — at 95 percent — is the highest in the department.

One undercover officer posed as a Vice Lord and put 40 people, many gang members, behind bars. Another pair of officers (including Godwin’s son) spent two years infiltrating Memphis strip clubs, an operation that resulted in 70 defendants being charged with drug and prostitution crimes. Another officer ran a car wash that doubled as a drug market and sent 47 people to jail.

“A lot of people think it’s just a war against drugs and we’re not winning,” said Paul Hagerman, the Shelby County assistant district attorney in charge of special operations and organized crime.

“But the genius of this is these violent criminals in Memphis, Memphis’ robbers, murderers, your high-level criminals, the way they support themselves every single day is through the drug trade.

“... By making drug cases against the most violent people in Memphis you’ve stopped their next crime of violence, their next robbery, their next murder. That’s the biggest impact of the undercover unit.”

Put another way, he said: “You know, they got Al Capone through tax evasion.”

 The officers who work deep undercover for MPD alter their entire existence — their names, their appearance, their tidy, secure personal lives — to burrow into the city’s darkest and most dangerous places where crack is sold openly, where stolen goods are fenced, where prostitution rings thrive.

Undercover police operations are not unusual in the United States. Many departments have units in which officers in plain clothes pose as prostitutes or buy drugs. But few agencies outside the FBI operate such elaborate undercover units like the one in Memphis, according to Joe Pistone, the legendary FBI agent who infiltrated the New York Bonnano crime family for six years as jewel thief Donnie Brasco.

Seattle has a good program, but officers there don’t go deep undercover like in Memphis, he said. At the federal level, the U.S. Customs agency also has a top-notch program but still doesn’t do long-term, deep undercover work, he said.

“I would say that Memphis has the best program in the country, and I don’t throw around accolades like manhole covers,” said Pistone, who teaches in Memphis’ undercover school.

“There are a lot of good programs, but they don’t amount to what Memphis is doing.”

In the Bluff City, undercover officers immerse themselves in a lifestyle filled with drug addicts and criminals unlike their colleagues who leave at the end of a shift to take their kids to soccer practice. They stop bathing, grow beards, dye their hair — even make the lifetime commitment of getting tattooed for the job.

The officers operate from a secret office. Police brass will not reveal how many are involved. They guard sensitive operational details — how recordings are made, the types of vehicles they drive, the sorts of fake jobs they have.

The officers are hidden to such an extent that they don’t testify. Their names don’t appear in court files — only their undercover numbers.

Defense attorney Michael Scholl has represented dozens of clients indicted because of undercover officers’ work.

“As a defense attorney, any time I see an undercover operation it always draws a red flag with me that there are certain issues, certain constitutional issues that I have to look into a lot deeper,” he said. “How they got their information, how they got into the position to have contact with my client.”

But, Scholl said: “When it’s done by the book it does serve a very legitimate law enforcement purpose, and it’s very hard to defend against. But there’s a lot of ways to make mistakes doing it.”

The Commercial Appeal was granted rare access to the undercover unit after agreeing not to reveal information that would identify officers or compromise their work.

The reporter who accompanied UC 1335 was required to attend a training session, watch surveillance video of previous operations and look and act the part. That took two weeks of no showers, pink hair dye and elaborately stained clothes.

As a safety precaution, a team of officers was nearby listening in on the drug buys — a safety net never provided for undercover officers.

During these three days, UC 1335 pinballed across the city as if on a dope-buying binge. All day, every day he approached dealers at neighborhood stores, on street corners or in crack houses to buy drugs. He never took a lunch break or stopped to grab a cup of coffee. When he wasn’t talking on the phone setting up a deal, he was zigzagging neighborhood streets looking for new targets.

In three days, he made at least 23 buys.

“You have to compartmentalize your life,” he said. “When I’m doing this, I’m a different person. When I’m at home, I’m a different person. It’s almost like controlled schizophrenia. But you have to do that in order to keep your sanity...”

“Every day that I go home is successful.”

Two years ago, UC 1335 worked as a mechanic in an auto repair shop, servicing engines, replacing parts. He never imagined himself as an undercover officer until unit coordinator Sherman convinced him to quit and join the police force. It was his cool, polite demeanor, how he talked to people, that made Sherman think he might be good for the job.

But not until the mechanic completed the department’s grueling undercover school did Sherman know he had it in him. Since Godwin revived the program, 10 classes of officers from around the country have participated, three at the Regional Counterdrug Training Academy at the Naval Air Station in Meridian, Miss., — modeled after the FBI’s undercover  certification course in Quantico, Va.

UC 1335 sat through hours of lectures on how to read facial expressions, disguise himself and artfully lie. The undercover unit has become so adept at disguise, in fact, that when former undercover officer Louis Brownlee’s uncle sold him crack, he didn’t recognize his own nephew. He went to jail.

During training, severe sleep deprivation left UC 1335 unsure of the difference between real life and role play. Officers are roughed up, have guns pointed at their heads, their hands bound. As if on a movie set, he practiced buying drugs in a place called Mount City that has a faux motel, pharmacy and store front. It’s modeled after the FBI’s Hogan’s Alley.

Music blares in a trailer designed to look like an inner-city row house. Fake crack rocks litter the table in a living room with dirty carpet and holes in the wall. During one buy, UC 1335 tried to make a deal with a trainer pretending to be a deranged man. The officer left busted up but earned a passing score because he stayed calm under pressure.

UC 1335 showed the kind of self-control and focus that Dr. Frank Masur, the clinical psychologist assigned to the unit, looks for in helping choose officers for the program. He calls it emotional intelligence, the same innate qualities successful politicians and executives have: street smarts, resilience, and the ability to read people.

“Some of them have to do some real soul searching,” Masur said. “‘Do I really want to do this kind of job that may put me, and my family indirectly, at risk?’”

For UC 1335, the answer was yes. So earlier this year, he assumed a new identity. He was given a street name, a new Social Security number and a fake job that helped him blend in.

His work is a solitary, monotonous routine in which his new, counterfeit life and real job have merged. He can’t talk to family members, ride his bike or go camping, pastimes he loves. He can’t go home at night; he lives in a safe house the newspaper reporter was not allowed to visit.

No one except his parents and a sibling know what he’s doing, even fellow police officers. He has no backup, no police radio chatter to keep him company. Sometimes the only way to change the mood is to flip the radio station.

“You can’t do much else,” he said, joking. “They’re still gonna be sellin’ dope, and I’m still gonna be wearin’ the same drawers.”

On a recent September afternoon, the grease-caked fingers of this reserved 28-year-old who used to bathe twice a day, gripped the muddy steering wheel of his truck. He was wearing the same T-shirt he’d put on every morning for a week, one of two he rotates. When one gets too crunchy, he said, he airs it out and opts for the other.

“The whole lifestyle is kind of d i s gusting,” he said. “I get all kinds of weird stares — when you’re going into the grocery store to get what you’re having for dinner that night. But I know something they don’t. I know why I’m doing this. They don’t need to.”

Somewhere in the mix of beer, sweat and cigarettes, UC 1335’s truck had a rancid smell that wasn’t quite discernable. Deer urine, he explained. He’d smeared it under the roof padding so the truck would stink. The worse he smells, the more he blends in.

Cigarettes and beer are his acting props. He’d quit smoking six years before taking the undercover job but started again to play the role. The props help him look the part but also serve as conversation starters because drug dealers and junkies bum everything — a swallow of booze, matches, loose change. As for the beer, he drinks less of it than he spills. It’s more about smelling the part.

He never knows what he’ll have to talk about or where a conversation might turn.

After long days of making friends with dealers and buying crack, he’ll do paperwork and then crash at a sparsely decorated, rundown house that isn’t home.

He might play a video game once he peels himself out of his nasty clothes. He’ll keep himself in the bubble, missing Christmas dinners and time with friends.

He won’t focus on the bullet holes that riddled a dope boy’s car or the day a dozen dealers rocked his truck because they didn’t make the sale. There will be moments of levity like the time a guy named Redd tried to sell him three packages of steaks he’d stolen from a grocery store and stuffed down his pants — before telling him where to buy quality dope.

Long bike rides, fishing and camping will be there when his work is done. So will the vintage cars he is fond of rebuilding. But for now, every piece of junk he puts in his evidence box won’t go into some kid’s lungs.

He’s doing God’s work, he said, albeit the part few people can or want to do. Somebody has to do something. It might as well be him.

To him, the job is that simple.

Originally published in the Commercial Appeal