by Tim Wood
Harold spent a lot of time at a downtown joint called Leroy’s Race and Sports Book. Leroy’s was an old Vegas bookmaking place on Main Street between the Greyhound bus station and the Union Plaza Hotel and Casino. It was a real Vegas dive with a lot of old-time sports book characters. Leroy’s was the kind of place with the high back wall with racetrack and professional sports odds handwritten in grease pencil; no fancy electronic red and yellow odds lines posted here, no sir! Good old-fashioned handwriting.
One day Harold sat down next to Paul on the bench outside the welfare office and they struck up a conversation. He must have had one too many Old Crows that day, because he was in a talkative mood. Paul asked Harold if he knew where he could unload a large quantity of food stamps. Paul said he had access to large quantities of stolen food stamps and he needed to make a big score and get out of town. This nickel and dime action on the sidewalk was too slow.
“Sure, Paulie,” said Harold. “Come on down to Leroy’s, the bartenders will buy all you can get and they will pay you fifty cents on the dollar.” Thank God! We finally got some decent info on a ring. Sitting in the back of the surveillance van on those hot Vegas afternoons watching Paul sell food stamps to the Vegas downtrodden was getting old.
The next morning about ten o’clock we wired up Paul and sent him in. The Golden Nugget parking garage had a nice view of Leroy’s front door and when I parked on the top level, I had a bird’s-eye view of the front and part of the side alley.
Paul would spend a few hours every day in Leroy’s getting to know the employees and the regulars who were propped up at the bar. We had Paul go in at various hours during the day. He always carried a couple of food stamp booklets in his pocket; marked USDA food stamp coupons. The coupons were marked so if he did succeed at selling some food stamps we could trace where they were redeemed.
Paul would sit at the bar nursing a Bud Light for hours, talking the talk. He would put his hand over his mouth, speaking into the microphone taped to his chest and give me a running narrative of his observations. He noticed the two bartenders were openly buying food stamps from patrons. They’d make a buy and slip the booklets under a towel on the counter along the back wall.
Paul was developing a relationship with Dale and Rich, the two bartenders at Leroy’s, but he wasn’t getting the feeling the time was right to offer to sell some food stamps. He didn’t want to blow this opportunity because if they declined his offer we’d have to shut it down and move on. Finally, one morning Harold walked in and sat next to “Paulie.” Paul bought him a shot of Old Crow, with a PBR chaser…the Breakfast of Champions.
Harold provided the opening we needed…the snitch we didn’t have. “Hey, Dale, my buddy Paulie here is the guy you need to talk to. He’s a stand-up guy and he can help you out.” That was all Paul needed, a good introduction and he was off to the races. Paul started small, one booklet for fifty cents on the dollar. A couple of days later another one. Then Dale introduced Paulie to Rich, the afternoon-shift bartender. A booklet here, a booklet there. But what are they doing with these food stamps?
One day Paul noticed a waitress from another establishment came in the side door off the alley and talked to Dale at the end of the bar. Dale was carrying the towel he’d picked up off the back counter of the bar. As they conversed a little, Paul was narrating to me the play by play. “Looks like she’s changing a twenty for smaller bills,” he whispered into his hand, “Dale gave her change and put the towel on her serving tray.” I grabbed the binoculars and watched her walk out the side door and continue down the alley. She turned right at a corner in the alley and disappeared from my sight. The only business or building to the right of the alley was the Golden Gate Casino. Paul said the waitress was in her mid-fifties with a really bad blonde wig. She was either a cocktail waitress or a Keno runner at the Golden Gate Casino. The Beaver left his surveillance position and walked over to the Golden Gate. He came out about thirty minutes later and said, “Shit! All the cocktail waitresses and Keno runners look like they’re in their mid-fifties and half of them have blonde wigs.”
The next afternoon Paul and I went gambling at the Golden Gate. We sat apart at the main bar and played video poker. Of course, we sipped a beer; you have to blend in for Pete’s sake. Paul narrowed our search down to two waitresses running drinks to the slot machine patrons. Jan and Evelyn; Evelyn or Jan. One of those was our girl.
A few days later Paul was back at Leroy’s selling food stamps to Rich. At this point in the investigation we had successfully identified nine players in Leroy’s selling food stamps to Dale and Rich. In order to get a good prosecutable hand-to-hand fraudulent transaction, Paul would approach one of the nine when he saw them in Leroy’s and he would offer to buy or sell food stamps from them. Paul knew all nine by their first names and we had gotten some good surveillance photos of each of them as they left the bar. With Paul’s eyewitness testimony and the hand-to-hand exchange of money with Paul, that’s all T.J. needed to prove conspiracy. They were as good as arrested.
Now we needed to identify the waitress and see what she was doing with the food stamps. Paul grabbed a spot at the bar closer to the alley side door and sure enough the waitress came in to get “change” from Rich. Jan…it was Jan. We had a surveillance team in the Golden Gate to see if they could figure out what she was doing with the food stamp booklets once she got back to work.
The Beaver reported that when Jan walked into the Golden Gate after her “change run” to Leroy’s she didn’t have a towel on her serving tray. Now, the next big mystery…what the fuck did she do with the food stamp booklets? We tried every angle possible to get a good surveillance position to see that entire alleyway, but it was too narrow and had two many angles—it wasn’t a straight shot from Leroy’s side door to the Golden Gate back entrance. Later on we even had an ATF agent help us by sitting at the bar in Leroy’s with Paul to follow Jan out the side door, though that never worked out. We speculated she was dumping those booklets somewhere or giving them to someone in that alley.
One day a regular named Jimmy, who’d we’d identified as selling food stamps to Dale, asked Paul if he would be willing to buy a booklet at fifty cents on the dollar. Why not? The more hand-to-hand illegal transactions, the better and it would add an additional count in the indictment against Jimmy. Paul said, “Sure, but let’s go outside.” They went out the side door to the front part of the alley where we could watch the transaction, get some photos of Paul exchanging money with the guy, and back him up in case Jimmy had a little armed robbery in mind.
About the time they were ready to exchange the cash, Jan walked by Paul and into Leroy’s. Paul bought the food stamps from Jimmy and then offered him a smoke. They stood in the alley smoking a cigarette and bullshitting about horse race betting. Jimmy was an “expert” at playing the horses and he didn’t mind giving his new buddy some handicap pointers. Jan eventually walked out the side door, right past Paul. Paul said good-bye to Jimmy and followed Jan at a safe distance. As he rounded the ninety-degree turn near the end of the alley, he plainly saw Jan hand the white towel to a white male, about thirty years old. His name was Bobby and he would be defendant number thirty-five.
It was time to wrap up this task force. We had thirty-five suspects, total; thirteen were from Leroy’s, twenty were repeat customers from the sidewalk in front of the Welfare Office, and two dirty store clerks working at one of the food stores. T.J. and I began presenting the cases to a federal grand jury about three weeks before we finished up at Leroy’s, and we were saving all the arrest warrants for one big roundup. T.J. wanted to make one big splash in the local news. “It’s not going to stop food stamp fraud in Las Vegas,” he told me, “but it’ll sure slow it down for a few months.”
The conspiracy indictment for the Leroy’s Race and Sports Book suspects was our last case, and once the grand jury came back with a True Bill (a majority vote by the members of the grand jury that probable cause
existed for the suspects to face trial) we started putting together an arrest plan for each suspect and assigned individual teams to each. The idea was to arrest all thirty-five, or as many as we could find in one day. USDA brought in five agents from Sacramento, the LAFO sent six guys to Las Vegas to assist. I had all the ATF guys, DEA guys, US Marshals, a few LVMPD detectives and Gaming Control agents for Leroy’s. Freddie, Bernie, and Irving chose not to participate—or maybe inviting them slipped my mind; either way, we had plenty of help. Now we just needed to find all of suspects.
On takedown day we briefed the arrest teams early in the morning at our office. Donnie and the Beaver put together an arrest packet for each defendant with photos, criminal history printouts, driver’s license printouts, and all the information we had on their residences and hangouts. Some even had jobs, so we included employment information.
At six that morning the arrest teams dispersed throughout Las Vegas and started hauling suspects into the office. By eleven we had eighteen to twenty in custody, all sitting handcuffed in chairs in our hallway. The place looked like the Clark County Jail intake center. It was awesome! Our plan was to have Paul go to Leroy’s about one in the afternoon and he would call me when enough of the players showed up. Dale and Rich did a shift change at two in the afternoon, so we had planned to at least wait until Rich showed up for his shift. The rest would be rounded up later that afternoon.
Paul was antsy. He wanted to go to Leroy’s a little before noon. “What the heck,” I told him, “Go ahead, I’ll expect a call about two.”
Paul wasn’t in Leroy’s ten minutes when the office telephone rang. It was Paul on the pay phone from Leroy’s. He was breathless, “Get down here now…right now! Bring all the arrest teams, they are all here!”
“What do you mean they’re all there”? I ask.
“I mean all thirteen of them are in Leroy’s right now!” he said. “Rich is in here in his civvies sitting right next to me at the bar. Bobby, Jimmy, Harold…all of ’em!” I could picture Paul on the pay phone in the back by the restrooms surveying the patrons at Leroy’s.
My buddy Vinnie G. from the Gaming Control Board and I walked in first. We all had on raid jackets and plenty of uniformed cops. The joint went quiet, real quiet. Vinnie G. and I made a beeline for the owner’s office. He was more than happy to cooperate with the Gaming Control Board. “Of course you can search my establishment if you would like to,” he told Vinnie. I had him execute a written consent to search form for me waiving his Fourth Amendment rights. The agents and cops started hooking up people left and right. You could have heard a pin drop in Leroy’s. Every single person sitting at the bar, most of them suspects, just stared straight ahead. You could tell they were just trying to disappear.
I overheard the Beaver talking to a guy at the bar as I walked past. “Nope that ain’t me,” he lied. The Beaver held up a photo of our suspect adjacent to his face. “Yep that’s you, Bobby,” said the Beaver. “Stand up and turn around.”
Word was spreading fast through downtown; the feds are taking down Leroy’s. Of course, no one knew this was a food stamp investigation. Everybody, including most of the defendants thought it had something to do with illegal gambling. The TV stations showed up out on the street. It was frickin’ cool! LVMPD started running everybody in the place for wants and warrants and they hauled a few guys, unrelated to our investigation out the door in handcuffs—you’ve got to pay those traffic tickets, you know?
Paul and I had to start preparing for the trials of the defendants; we had hours and hours of tape-recorded conversations of the illegal transactions. These tapes had to be copied for the defense, transcripts had to be made of all the conversations. Back in the eighties at the Las Vegas Resident Agency we didn’t have the computers investigators have nowadays. It was a massive undertaking and it kept us busy for weeks.
All thirty-five defendants ended up pleading guilty, but not without some drama. There is always drama. We slowly ticked off the guilty pleas on the individual cases, but six of the defendants from the Leroy’s case still hadn’t changed their plea to guilty. On trial day the AUSA and I carried boxes and boxes of evidence into the courtroom. We had spent hours and hours preparing for trial. Paul was in Las Vegas for a couple of weeks helping us prepare the presentation of evidence.
The six defendants were sitting at the defense table with six different defense lawyers. As we stacked the boxes of evidence around the prosecutor’s table, I could see the defendants squirming in their chairs. Some were in whispered discussions with their attorneys. Paul walked in and sat with us at the prosecution table…more whispers. The US district court judge walked in and took the bench. The first day of the trial was about to begin.
One attorney jumped up and to address the court. His client wanted to change his plea. A second attorney rose to address the court; his client wanted to change his plea. Pretty soon Jimmy jumped out of his seat and screamed, “I’m guilty!” His attorney grabbed him by the arm and pulled him down into his chair. The judge banged the gavel, “Order! Order in the court!”
One by one they all changed their plea. The judge had the defendants line up in front of the bench. Poor Jimmy was hopping from foot to foot; he was bouncing around like a squirrel! I’ve never seen a defendant so anxious to plead guilty, it was almost as if he thought the judge would only accept change of pleas from the first guy to speak up and the rest are shit out of luck. Jimmy, relax pal, your turn is coming. There is something about a federal courtroom that is very intimidating to your average run-of-the mill crook. This ain’t traffic court, that’s for sure, and Jimmy was more than ready to throw himself upon the mercy of the court.
Finally, it was over. We all breathed a sigh of relief…it had been a monster of a case. Paul went back to Sacramento and I’d never see him again.
* * *
As the case had progressed, I tried to talk Paul into applying with the Secret Service—he would have made a really good Secret Service agent. Paul was tempted, but he decided his family wouldn’t be able to handle all the travel a Secret Service agent is faced with. This, from a guy who spent about ninety days on temporary duty in Las Vegas. Go figure!
Those who work in other agencies have always held the misconception that Secret Service agents work excessive duty, though it is true to an extent. But in my career I never left the Redhead for ninety frickin’ days! True, Secret Service agents have to relocate and can’t spend their entire career in their hometown, and that was always the sticking point. Generally speaking, Secret Service agents are faced with a move to a big field office and a permanent protection assignment. You’re looking at a minimum of two relocations during your career. And then those presidential campaigns—twenty-one days on and twenty-one days off.
Years later, after I’d moved on from Las Vegas, Paul decided to leave the USDA—I guess those ninety-day temps to the hither lands of their geographical jurisdiction were too much for him. Paul transferred to the Department of Housing and Urban Development IG. They sent him to Oklahoma City.
On April 19, 1995, my buddy Paul Broxterman reported for work at the federal building in Oklahoma City and was killed by Timothy McVeigh. The Secret Service lost six employees that day, including Alan Whicher, one of my former supervisors on the presidential protective detail at the White House. I was at the White House working day shift protecting the life of President Clinton and I remember watching the news reports in the Secret Service command post, tucked in the lower level of the West Wing. I lost six colleagues that day, and little did I know I’d also lost a very good friend.
In 1999 the Redhead and I stopped in Oklahoma City while on a cross-country vacation. We walked through the Murrah Federal Building Memorial, a very beautiful scene including empty chairs in a grass field, waterfalls, and monuments. I walked around to pay my respects to the memory of my six lost colleagues, and when I came upon Paul’s memorial I unexpectedly broke down and started
sobbing like a little kid. I was a little embarrassed. I didn’t anticipate that would be my reaction. I had some great memories of working with Paul Broxterman. He was an outstanding criminal investigator and one hell of an undercover agent.
* * *
I got back into the groove of working out at the gym with Donnie and the Beaver at oh-dark-thirty again. The Beaver and I resumed our quest for the best cheeseburger in Las Vegas. I didn’t know it, but my days of working criminal cases in Las Vegas were about to come to an end.
Chapter 13
Forty-Two
Finally the day came when I brought the home the good news that we were leaving the Great American Desert. Good-bye Glitter Gulch and the constant sound of coins dropping into tin trays. Adios, dust, sand, wind, and sweltering hot sunshine. The Redhead was ecstatic, to say the least. I was on my way to Washington, DC, and eventually, the Presidential Protective Detail.
I was lucky enough to spend close to seven years on the President’s detail, comprising two tours on PPD with Forty-One, Forty-Two, and Forty-Three; that’s George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. My first PPD assignment was as a shift agent and my second was as a first line supervisor.
I settled in to the protection routine of working a shift…two weeks of days, two weeks of afternoons, two weeks of midnights, and a two-week training cycle. I actually found I had much more time at home than I did working criminal cases in Las Vegas. Go figure. On the detail we worked our eight-hour shift and went home, which was awesome! No unpredictable telephone calls in the middle of the night…on the shift we called it “eight and skate.”
In August of 1993, President Clinton took his first vacation as President. We went to Arkansas for a few days, then to Vail, Colorado, and finally to Martha’s Vineyard. We were at our morning shift meeting, on the last day before leaving the Arkansas lakeside estate of Mr. Tyson (the chicken Tyson) where the President was staying, and the shift leader was briefing us on the President’s itinerary for the next few days in Vail, and one of the scheduled activities was that the President and Chelsea would be horseback riding.
