Jimmy and I hit it off from the start. We’d met at the processing center and both ended up in Milan. The two of us spent a lot of time together. With everyone else I kept my mouth shut and let people know to keep their distance. I didn’t have anything against anyone; I just wanted to be left alone. Jimmy was one of the few guys I let get close. He asked me many times why I never said anything to anybody. I told him, “That’s just the way it is, man. I don’t want to know anything about them, and I don’t want them to know anything about me. I just want to be left alone.”
That wasn’t as easy as it sounds.
One day my cousin and I were watching TV in the television room, minding our own business. Another guy walked in and came straight over to me. “That’s my spot,” he said.
I looked around. The entire room was empty except for my cousin and me. I sort of shook my head and said, “Just pick another chair.”
He didn’t move. “That’s my chair and I’m not sitting anywhere else.”
I gave my cousin a look. “Listen, man, nobody has assigned seats around here. I suggest you sit somewhere else ’cause I ain’t moving,” I said.
“Get out of my chair,” he demanded.
I looked to one side, then back at him. I felt anger rising up inside me. This guy didn’t make me angry; I was always angry from being in there. Most days I was able to keep it pushed down inside me, but it didn’t take much to pull it out. This guy pushing me wasn’t much, but it was enough.
“I really think you better leave me alone, because this ain’t cool,” I said.
He walked toward the television, paused for a moment, then came back. “You better get out of my spot or I’m going to make you pay,” he said.
“Whoa. Wait a minute. You’re going to do what to who?”
He repeated his threat and added, “You think this is a game? This ain’t no game.” Then he walked to the door and looked both directions to make sure no officers were nearby.
“You really want to fight me over a spot? Okay. Let’s go out in the hallway and get this over with.” I got up and walked out. My cell was a short way down the hall, so I walked there to put away my headphones (you had to use headphones to hear the television). I also stacked all the things I’d need to take with me to the hole so I’d be ready when they sent me there for fighting.
“What are you waiting on?!” the guy yelled at me. He’d followed me to my cell.
“Man, you really have no idea,” I said. I walked out of my cell and went down to the end of the hallway. The guy came running and took a big swing at me. That’s the only one he got to throw. I threw one punch in self-defense and didn’t stop hitting him until, once again, my friends dragged me off of him. The moment he started pushing me in the television room, he ceased to be another inmate. Andrew Collins had come into the prison and I took him out.
The fight scared me but not because I thought I might get hurt. I didn’t care about that. What scared me was how I didn’t care about anything. The most dangerous people in prison are those who have nothing to lose. They don’t care if they live or die, which means they will probably end up killing someone or getting themselves killed or both. I never, ever thought I could become one of those guys, but slowly I was becoming one.
I had several other fights in between the two I’ve described. Every time I got a little better at taking my guy out, and every time I pushed it closer to the edge. It was only a matter of time before something really bad happened. I had become somebody I never knew, somebody I did not want to be. I knew I needed to change, but I didn’t know how. To change meant letting go of the anger that consumed me, to let go of my chance of getting even with the cop who had destroyed my life.
I didn’t want to do that.
I wanted him to feel the pain I lived with every day. I wanted him to get his, and I wanted to be the guy to give it to him. But if I stayed on the path I was on, I would never get the chance because I’d be dead long before the federal government let me back out on the streets.
Andrew
I woke up excited on Tuesday, February 19, 2008. The week before, an informant had told me that a guy we called Pistol Pete had a house full of crack and guns. Because I was a narcotics detective, I was off the day before for Presidents’ Day. I went into work anyway to put together a search warrant, and now I was going to serve it. Like I often did, I falsified most of the information in the warrant, even though I didn’t need to. If I’d been more patient and put in a little more time and work, I could have produced a clean search warrant. But I never even thought about doing that. A cop like me didn’t have to play by the rules. That’s what I told myself. The truth was I was too lazy and sloppy to do the hard work the job called for. Not that I cared. I had a search warrant for a big-time drug dealer, and today I was going to make a huge bust.
I needed this bust for a lot of reasons. The week before, I had gone on trial myself on an assault charge. Back in November 2007 I’d been in a bar fight and ended up fracturing a bouncer’s skull. Even though I was arrested and charged and went on trial, I never missed a day of work. The department told me to keep them informed about the case as it progressed, and that was it. The trial had ended, but the judge hadn’t handed down his verdict. Busting Pistol Pete, a major drug dealer, might put me back in the good graces of the department and myself.
Most days I didn’t have to be at the office until ten, but on February 19 I arrived early. Like I said, this was going to be a big day. But the search didn’t turn out quite like I had hoped. B and I and a team of cops searched Pistol Pete’s house, but it was clean. No dope. No guns. Nothing. I drove back to the station feeling frustrated and more than a little on edge.
My captain greeted me at the door. He called B and me into his office and told us to have a seat. “Collins, we have a problem,” he started. “I’m going to be straight with you. Your work has become sloppy to the point of being a disgrace to police work. I thought the suspension you had a few months ago might wake you up [I had been suspended for five days when I was caught falsifying information on a search warrant], but apparently it didn’t. You’re going to be demoted back to road patrol.”
I sat there stunned and hurt, but the hurt didn’t last long. Instead, a sense of relief came over me. My wife and I had already talked about the possibility of me leaving the narcotics unit because of the pressure that came with the job. But I had ruled that out because of the perks that came with being on the narcotics unit, like a take-home car, a free cell phone, a flexible schedule—to say nothing of the bonuses B and I regularly created for ourselves. I wasn’t sure how we could make it on just a cop’s salary. Now that I didn’t have a choice, I thought we could figure it out. I’d dug a deep hole for myself as a narcotics officer, and this appeared to be my way out.
For a few moments I didn’t say anything. I just stared at the floor, thinking. Finally, I looked up and said, “Okay, Captain. I’m sorry I let you down. Thanks for letting me stay in the department.”
“I know you have some things on tap today,” he said. “Wrap everything up this morning, then turn your keys over to your partner. After that you can go home and have your uniforms cleaned and pressed to get ready for road patrol tomorrow.”
My mind immediately went to what I was going to tell my wife. Choosing to step away from the narcotics team was one thing. How was I going to tell her I had been demoted? I couldn’t tell her my captain said I’d become a disgrace to police work. I was lost in thought when I heard the captain say, “We’ll need to search your office and your vehicle first.”
Cue the dramatic music.
My heart stuck in my throat. All the air was sucked out of the room. I could not breathe because I knew what they might find. Somehow I pulled it together enough to say, “Okay. I have nothing to hide.” Unfortunately, my voice cracked on the last word. I don’t know if my captain heard it, but I was positive he knew I was lying.
B and I followed the captain down the stairs to the office the two of us shared. I opened
the door and followed them inside. The captain immediately went to my desk and started opening drawers. The whole time my eyes were glued on the small lockbox I kept under my desk. From my vantage point I could just see the corner of it, but the captain couldn’t see it from where he stood. If he looked under the desk, I knew I was as good as gone. Thankfully he didn’t, at least not then. He went through every drawer but found nothing of interest. There were a couple of marijuana blunts in the top drawer that he either didn’t see or chose to ignore. When he got up and moved to B’s desk, I started to breathe again.
The captain went through B’s desk rather quickly. He spotted a small lockbox underneath and asked B to open it, which he did. After finding nothing of note in the box, the captain went into the small locker room area of our office. Small is an understatement. The room was partitioned off by a wooden door. Inside were two lockers where B and I kept our personal and work-related items. A file cabinet sat off to one side and contained all the files on our confidential informants. My duty bag lay on the floor of the room. I hadn’t used it in a very long time, at least from the time B and I started using this office. Back in the day I carried around all the tools I needed to do my job: latex gloves, supplies, even my paperwork. Frankly I’d forgotten about it.
When the captain started to open it, I wasn’t worried. I looked toward B and he mouthed, “I didn’t do this. It’s not my fault.” I gave him a little shrug of the shoulders as if to say, “No problem,” and looked away. Once the captain left my desk, I’d stopped worrying. I’d always felt more than a little bulletproof as a cop. That arrogance began to return.
My confidence evaporated when the captain looked up at me from the duty bag and said, “What’s this?” In his hand he held a plastic baggie with smaller bags of packaged marijuana. He also pulled out a small digital scale. Dealers use scales like it to weigh out drugs for sale. “You have any kind of explanation for these, Collins?”
I started to say, “I was wondering where that was,” but I thought better of it. I muttered something—I can’t remember what—but I had no explanation. To be honest, I was as shocked as he was that he found those things in my bag. The scale I could explain. Several officers carried them to get an accurate weight of the drugs they confiscated in arrests. But the pot—I knew that didn’t look good.
“I’ll have to contact the prosecutor’s office about this and report it to him. You may well face charges of possession with intent to deliver,” he said.
In that moment the captain ceased to be my captain, a man who had tried to mentor and mold me. Instead, it was clear he cared only about being the man who cleaned up the Benton Harbor Police Department and rooted out dirty cops. And I instantly saw him as the embodiment of evil, the man who threatened my freedom and livelihood.
The captain then moved to my locker and went straight for a small cashew can on the top shelf. Popping off the lid, he looked into the can, then back at me. He held the can out toward me. “What’s this?” he asked.
From his perspective it had to look like trail mix for a pill popper. The can contained all sorts of prescription medicines, pills of all shapes and sizes and colors. A few months earlier I had confiscated it from a car full of outsiders who had clearly come to Benton Harbor in search of narcotics. When I first opened the can, I nearly fell over laughing. I could hardly believe these people had crammed so many different pills into a peanut can. I kept the can as a souvenir. None of the pills were narcotics, so I didn’t see keeping it as a big deal. Every time I told the story about the car full of pill heads, I pulled out the can and showed it to my friends. Everyone always got a good laugh out of it. I didn’t dare try to tell this to the captain. I doubted he’d see much humor in it.
Before walking out of the locker room, the captain found a locked bag that held B’s riot gear. “Whose is this?” he asked.
“Yeah, uh, mine,” B said.
“You have the key?”
“Not on me.”
“Then we’ll have to take it upstairs to the fire department and have them cut the lock off,” the captain said.
By this time I could not look him in the eye. I stood off to one side, my eyes glued to the floor. As bad as the inspection had been, I knew it could have been a lot worse. I thought I might still be able to explain the pot and the scale and even the can of pills. Best-case scenario was I would be suspended for a month, maybe more. That I could handle. More likely I would get fired. I didn’t think they would prosecute me for what he’d found so far. Now I just wanted to get him out of my office and have this whole thing over and done with.
The captain stepped toward the door, but then, for reasons I will never know, he turned back toward my desk. He stood over it for a few moments, then bent down and looked underneath. My whole body went numb. I watched in slow motion as he reached under my desk and pulled out the lockbox. “What’s in here, Collins?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’ve got no idea,” I lied. “It was in here when we moved into this office. I just shoved it under my desk and pretty much forgot about it.” I knew he didn’t buy a word of it.
“Either of you have a key to it?” he asked.
B and I both shook our heads no.
“Looks like we’ll have to have the fire department cut this open too,” he said. He then handed me the box to carry. “My office. Let’s go,” he said as he led the way out the door. B fell in behind him, his duty bag in his hand. I paused for a moment at the door to lock it and to buy some time to figure out a way to get rid of this box that held my Crown Royal bag filled with drugs. The moment the captain got a look at what was inside, life as I knew it was over. Period.
For a split second I contemplated running out the back door of the police station and returning with an empty box. And how guilty will that make you look? I thought. Instead, I started down the hallway, following the captain and B, falling a little farther behind them. As we approached a bathroom, I took the lockbox key out of my coat pocket, dashed into the bathroom, threw open the lockbox, and tossed the Crown Royal bag into the garbage can. I knew I needed to bury it deep under the other trash, but I didn’t have time. As quickly as I could, I caught up with the captain and B. The captain turned around, looked me in the eye, and asked, “Why are you suddenly acting like a criminal?”
I gave him my best “What are you talking about?” look and then pulled a digital recorder out of my pocket. “My partner dropped this. I stopped to pick it up for him,” I lied. B took the recorder without saying a word. The captain just looked at me, then turned and continued toward his office.
The moment we stepped into the captain’s office he asked for the lockbox. “And your keys,” he said. I handed him both, knowing this was the end. He thumbed through my keys and found the one to the lockbox. Anger flashed in his eyes as he looked at me before opening the box. When he discovered the box was empty, he nearly lost it. He spun around to his phone and called the prosecutor’s office. Everything became a blur, but I could hear him talking about filing charges against me for the pot he found in my duty bag. He then called the K-9 officer and told him to bring the drug dog to the station. “Start in Collins’s office and see if you can find the trail from his office to mine,” he said. When he hung up the phone, he asked me, “Do you have drugs hidden on your body?”
For the first time in a long time, I told the truth. “No sir.”
He didn’t press the point. The conversation then turned to who would escort the K-9 officer and drug dog around the station.
While his back was turned to me, I said to B, “Man, this is garbage.” At the same time I motioned with my hands to let him know I had dropped the drugs in the trash.
The captain’s door opened, and a detective entered to ask the captain a question. The look on his face told me he had no clue what was going on. This was my chance. Many times I’d looked the other way when this detective went over the top in his aggressive tactics during an arrest. More than once I saw him slam a suspect down on the hood of a
patrol car and maul him while yelling, “Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” I’d even covered for him when someone charged him with using excessive force. He had to cover for me now. That’s what cops do. We called it the thin blue line, where cops stick together even when they know the other is in the wrong.
After the detective asked his question and before he could leave, I said, “Captain, I really have to go. Do you mind if he escorts me to the restroom?” Suspects were never allowed to go anywhere by themselves, and I was now a suspect, not a cop.
“Yeah. Go,” he said as he motioned me out the door. Looking at the detective, he ordered, “Keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t get rid of anything.”
The detective led me to a different restroom than the one in which I’d tossed the bag. As soon as the bathroom door closed behind us, I started spilling my guts. “I tossed a purple bag in the trash can in the other restroom. If the captain finds it, I’m finished. I need you to get it out of here. I’ll explain everything later, I promise, but for now, I need you to do this for me. My life is in your hands,” I pleaded.
“What’s in the bag?” he asked.
I dropped my head. My whole body began to shake. Finally, I looked up, broken. “Dope, man. There’s dope in the bag. I need you to get rid of it for me. Captain will crucify me if he catches me with it. I promise, it’s not what it looks like. I’ll explain everything later. Please, please, do this for me.”
“Yeah, Collins, man, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I got you covered.” The look on his face did nothing to reassure me he meant what he said. We went back to the captain’s office, where I found they had opened B’s bag. There was nothing bad inside. I sat down and tried to relax, but I felt as if I was about to throw up. I looked over at B. For a black man, he sure looked pale. No matter how hard I tried, I could not get him to make eye contact with me. He sat stock still, studying his shoes.
Eventually I pulled out my phone and called the detective. I tried to make it sound as though I were talking to my wife. “Have you taken care of that bill?” I asked. “It has to be done today.” The whole time the captain sat only two feet away from me. The detective on the other end of the phone kept telling me to stand by.
Convicted Page 10
