Surrounded by mangrove swamp, he felt lightheaded and ached to lie down and rest. But if he did, he might sleep for hours. He struggled to his feet, but collapsed. Unable to move his left leg, he inched himself back into knee-deep water, just enough for buoyancy. Crawling and clawing he made his way to the mouth of the marina. It took thirty minutes. He staggered fifty yards from the surf to the office door, dragging his useless left leg.
The marina director, seated at his desk, looked startled as Barry stumbled in and slumped to the floor. “I’ve been out in the ocean all night,” he explained.
The air-sea search for a body was canceled, and the Key Largo Volunteer Rescue Squad dispatched. Barry tried to sip a soft drink but it burned his lips and swollen tongue.
Rescue men were incredulous. “We knew you were dead!” one told him. Red lights flashing, siren blaring, they rushed him to Homestead’s James Archer Smith Hospital. Dehydrated and suffering from exposure, his feet and arms were numb and his legs and crotch raw. He was covered with painful jellyfish stings. Doctors said that after nearly thirty hours in the water, he was about three hours from possibly fatal dehydration.
Mike Melgarejo was piloting the Hog Wild to shore to refuel when the Coast Guard radioed the news. Engine noise drowned out part of the transmission, all he heard was that something had come ashore fifteen miles north. His passengers thought it was a corpse.
Mike cut the engine, and the Coast Guard repeated the message: Snorkeler Barry McCutchen had come ashore alive and was on the way to the hospital.
At Barry’s home, Susan answered a telephone call from the Coast Guard and told the crowd, who had kept an all-night vigil.
Deafening screams and cheers filled the room. They rushed to their cars to head south, to the hospital. When Barry was transferred to a hospital closer to home, a convoy of twenty young people followed his ambulance.
He was hospitalized for four days. It took three more before he could move his left leg, but he was alive. Even the Coast Guard was impressed. Had he not kept his cool and used his survival techniques, a spokesman said, Barry would never have come home from his ordeal at sea.
Survival techniques can save your life, but training and knowledge are not always enough. It takes something more, something you don’t find in the pages of handbooks.
12
Street Cops
Like the 10 percent of the fishermen who catch 90 percent of the fish, 10 percent of the cops catch 90 percent of the crooks.
Some call these gifted cops streetwise, but the truth is that good street cops simply use all five senses—plus a sixth. Instinct moves them to the right place at the right moment. Other cops can stand on a street corner for twenty-three hours a day, and nothing happens. Street cops are there when it counts. The secret is timing.
Gerald Green is the perfect street cop, a quick study in curiosity, dedication and brains. Events that might happen once in a lifetime to another cop occur with peculiar frequency to Jerry Green.
While waiting on a hotel balcony for a man wanted on bad-check charges, Green saw two sunny-day strollers react to the sound of a siren. The siren was nothing but a distant fire engine, but Green noted its curious effect on the men in the street below. One darted into a doorway, pressing a shopping bag to his chest. The other stepped cautiously into the street, looked both ways, then signaled the first. They began to hurry away, peering over their shoulders. When a second siren sounded, the man with the bag scrambled into a shadowy doorway and flattened himself against the wall.
Green radioed for a patrol car. As the cruiser rounded the corner, the two men stepped into a laundromat. The bag was probably full of dirty clothes, Green thought, and radioed the patrolmen to disregard his call. But as the Miami police cruiser pulled away, the two men ran out of the laundromat still carrying the sack, and leaped into a car driven by a third man. Green keyed his radio: “Disregard that disregard.” The cruiser wheeled around. Officer Mike Brown jumped out in front of the car and forced it to stop.
The men spooked by the sirens were stewards on the M.S. Nordic Prince, which had just docked. In the shopping bag: eight pounds of high-quality marijuana compacted into bricks.
In court on other business, Green recognized a defendant named Bobbi Jean, a slightly overweight woman with a perpetual smile. He had busted her for forgery a year earlier. Her troubles now seemed far more serious. She had confessed to the brutal slaying of a convenience-store clerk, and Metro police had charged her with first-degree murder and robbery. During her hearing, Green heard the date the crime occurred. Wait a minute, he thought. He could have sworn she was serving ninety days on his forgery case at that time. He was right. Bobbi Jean simply liked to confess. In fact, she had confessed six murders to Miami police months earlier. They did not believe her. So she tried Metro police. They did.
She pouted that Green had ruined her scheme to join her lesbian sweetheart in prison. “Sending me there,” she explained to him, “would be like sending you to the Playboy Mansion.”
Jerry Green seems to find crime any place, any time. It was his night off, but his honey-blond wife, Mary Jo, had a two A.M. craving for a Cuban sandwich, and he drove off to find one. Instead, he found an armed robbery taking place on a street corner. He shot one robber, chased and captured the other. Mary Jo got her sandwich—at seven A.M.
Jerry Green and Walter Clerke are the same age, joined the department at the same time and soon became a team. They were perfect partners. Clerke’s father had been a police captain in Brooklyn’s tough Bedford-Stuyvesant section. At nineteen, Walter followed his father into the New York City Police Department. Assigned to the notorious 41st Precinct—the area of the South Bronx known as Fort Apache—he and his pregnant wife, Susan, vacationed in Florida. They decided it was paradise, a safe place to raise their child, far from all the crime and the drugs.
It was, then.
Jerry Green and Walter Clerke are legendary. With luck, guts and a sixth sense, the pair compiled an amazing record, arresting sixty-three felons in five months. Even while attending fulltime robbery seminars for two weeks, they managed to arrest four armed robbers and eight other felons.
Green was named Miami’s top police officer of the year in 1973. He was first to win all three annual outstanding officer awards, presented by the Rotary, the American Legion and financier William Pawley, in the same year.
There was another first at the award luncheon, in the fancy ballroom of a posh hotel. Green made the surprise announcement that he was splitting the thousand-dollar award with his partner, who had gone unrecognized. “It was a team effort—by the three of us,” he said. Team member number three was his wife, Mary Jo. “I could never give the time and the effort I do to my job without her help.”
“I didn’t realize that being a policeman’s wife would be so lonely,” Mary Jo Green, mother of Gregory, age three, told me at the luncheon. “If you have something planned, he doesn’t come home. But you just put dinner back in the oven. I don’t worry about him because when the situation is at its very worst, he’s at his very best.”
Their time together was always short. Jerry and his partner worked nights. Mary Jo sold auto insurance during the day. But he telephoned her office daily to recount his exploits of the night before. “You can hear it in his voice,” she said. “He loves the work so much.”
Green intended to celebrate the award with Mary Jo that night. But he did not arrive home until six A.M. the next day. Two armed bandits had been hitting a bar a day in cities north of Miami. They robbed the employees and patrons, locking them in rest rooms before fleeing in a stolen car.
Green and his partner had found a child playing with a wallet in Miami’s central district and discovered that the billfold had been taken in the bar robbery that day. The robbers must live in the neighborhood, they theorized, and probably returned there quickly after stickups. They told police in Fort Lauderdale, Hallandale, Dania and Hollywood to notify them at once next
time the bandits struck.
That night of the award luncheon, the robbers hit a Hollywood bar. Hollywood police radioed descriptions of the suspects and their car to Green and Clerke, who raced to the north-south expressway ramp they thought the robbers would use.
“We got there about two seconds before they came driving off the exit. They were both smiling,” Green said.
They arrested the astonished robbers, recovered the gun, the loot and the stolen car.
The inseparable partners almost died together two months later.
A New Orleans man gave his clothes away that day in Miami. He no longer needed them, he said, “I’m not gonna live tonight.” He later shoved a gun in the face of a homeless man and forced him to crawl in the street, weeping and begging for his life.
Shortly before midnight, the man from New Orleans stepped out of his downtown hotel, blasted on barbiturates. He called a cab for himself and a man to whom he was selling pills. The Diamond cab driver, edgy about recent robberies, refused to allow them in his taxi until they lifted their shirts to prove they were unarmed. The men angrily refused. When a hotel security man tried to intervene, the frightened cabbie stomped on the gas and drove off. The man from New Orleans pulled a gun and waved it in the air, shouting that he should have shot the driver.
From their unmarked car a block away, fifteen minutes from the end of their shift, Green spotted the disturbance as the cab sped off. “Wally,” he said. “It looks like that guy in the black hat has a gun out on the street.” He drove toward the man, who stuck the gun in his belt and pulled his multicolored dashiki over it.
The officers drew their guns and ordered the two men to place their hands on the car.
The New Orleans man refused. “I don’t care if you’re cops or not! You’re going to have to kill me,” he shouted. “Come on! Let’s shoot it out right now. Kill me! Kill me!” He pulled his gun.
Green, frisking the other man, heard the commotion and saw the gun swing toward his partner. He ran to grab the weapon and all three grappled. Green and the gunman fell to the ground struggling. The man’s gun fired.
“I knew I was shot,” Jerry said later. “I had the wind knocked out of me. I was bleeding all over the place.” The bullet had slammed through his left hand and into his chest.
Clerke opened fire. He shot the gunman five times in the chest, from three or four feet away. The impact of the bullets showered Jerry with the man’s blood.
The man never flinched. Ignoring the five bullet holes in his chest, he fired back and shot Clerke.
“It felt like a sharp kick,” Clerke said. “My leg buckled.” The wounded officer stood in the middle of the street holding an empty gun; he had no place to hide, and the man who should be dead was still coming.
“Do something!” Clerke shouted to his bleeding partner. “I’ve got no bullets!”
Despite his wounds, Green said, the man “walked toward us, like a zombie, firing his gun. He was the living dead. I shot him, and it knocked him back to the car.” Green kept shooting, and the wounded man stumbled to cover behind the police car. “He had to be dead, but he didn’t know it. I shot him again. He ran down the street shooting back at us. I was shooting as fast as I could pull the trigger. None of the bullets stopped him.”
A normal person would have died or lapsed into shock after being shot, but because this man’s system was loaded with barbiturates, “he was a monster,” Green said, “the walking dead.”
Clerke ducked behind a pillar to reload. They continued to shoot until the man went down behind the tire of an eighteen-wheeler fifty yards away. It was over, they thought. “Then he started firing again. I saw him point the gun right at me,” Green said. The battle seemed neverending.
Clerke emptied his gun again, then scrambled to the car for their shotgun. Green reloaded his 9-millimeter semiautomatic Smith and Wesson. “We both opened up on him then. Wally with the shotgun, me with the handgun.” All they could see was the man’s legs. “Wally shot the heels off his shoes and shot holes in his legs. The man had holes in the bottoms of his feet.”
The gunman finally stopped shooting and began to fumble, fishing more bullets out of his pocket, trying to reload. The cops’ guns were also empty.
The gunman suddenly rolled over on his face. He had another dozen rounds of ammunition, but died before he could use them. The medical examiner counted twenty-seven entrance wounds.
During the initial struggle the gunman had dropped a bag containing several hundred pills. More were found in his room, uppers and downers, along with more bullets.
The second man had run when the shooting started. The hotel security man had chased him, but was knocked down by a ricocheting bullet.
The dead gunman was an ex-convict with a past history of rape, armed robbery, burglary, drugs and theft of a U.S. mail truck. When the death message reached his family, a half-brother in New Orleans was “indifferent.” His grandmother said he was a bad man, not allowed in her home. When police notified his mother that she could claim the body, she was uninterested.
“You shot him,” she said, “you bury him.”
The wounded partners shared a hospital room and admitted their luck. “Instinct told us he was dangerous, but we have restrictions on our use of firearms,” Green said. “We were ninety percent sure he had a gun, but we have to be a hundred percent sure. You can’t start shooting when somebody reaches under his shirt. They could be hiding narcotics. Our hesitation got us shot. When we were finally sure he had a gun and was going to shoot us—we were already shot.”
Clerke still carries a bullet lodged in his left thigh. In his left shirt pocket, over his heart, Jerry had a thick stack of field interrogation cards and mug shots, all fugitives he was seeking. The bullet went through his hand, plowed through the wad of pictures and slammed into his chest. Nearly spent, it penetrated no vital organs.
The wanted men may have saved his life.
Neither partner soured on police work—not then.
“This has been happening across the country,” Green said. “You can’t be afraid. The man wanted to take on some policemen. I’m glad he took on two who could handle him.”
Wally agreed that it was all part of the job. “You have to expect it and hope that you’re luckier than the next guy,” he said.
Their wives were terrified. “Jerry always tells me nothing bad can happen to him,” Mary Jo said fearfully. “Now I know that isn’t true.” The incident did have a silver lining: “He had to stay home to recover, and we were together every evening. It was great.”
Susan Clerke said she never wanted Wally hurt again, “but it’s been awful nice to have my man around the house.”
The partners continued to solve cases, make arrests and help rehabilitate people. They considered reform a major part of their job. “We don’t think in terms of punishing people who’ve done wrong,” Green said. “When we arrest a guy we think in terms of preventing his next crime, saving his next potential victim.”
“If they have any possibility of rehabilitation, we try to give it to them,” Clerke said. Some were beyond saving, so they focused their efforts on those who could be helped. “You come up with about one person out of ten who really deserves to go to prison.” The others responded positively to a chance.
“Junkies love their kids too,” Green said.
Assigned to a federally funded robbery-control program, the two cops worked with the courts and helped arrange probation, jobs and school enrollment for more than a hundred people. They put them in jail, then got them out and into work or college.
It worked.
Miami’s robbery rate dropped by 10 percent while it climbed by 15 percent in other communities.
“Face it,” Green said, “there’s no way a six-man unit is going to control robbery altogether in a city this big. So we’re taking another approach, trying to keep robberies down without staking out stores and shooting every hopped-up kid we see. We try
to keep people from being hurt. We sit down and talk to people we know are doing robberies.”
“You can sit down and convince a guy that pulling a robbery is not the way to make fifty dollars,” Clerke said.
Jerry Green and Wally Clerke got exactly what they deserved: They were honored as the best cops in the country by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Parade magazine published a story and pictures of them and their families.
Their bosses, displaying their usual wisdom, split up the partners.
Police brass don’t understand the old adage: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Green worked the bunco squad, breaking up con games, then homicide, the property bureau and back to homicide. He and Mary Jo had a second son, Jeffrey. Clerke worked patrol, riding a three-wheeler.
They hoped to work together again someday.
They never did. They never will.
The most successful partnership in Miami Police history ended forever when Officer Wally Clerke’s car was firebombed in an ambush behind a looted Zayre discount store during the May 1980 riot. Clerke walked into headquarters, turned in his badge and walked out.
He never went back.
“I quit after the National Guard came in,” he explained. “The situation was under control, and there was no more immediate need for me to continue helping the city.” Parade’s writer described them in 1973 as “such devoted policemen that neither can imagine himself ever doing any other kind of work.”
True then. Not now.
Clerke said he was selling his house to move to Stuart and become a charter fishing captain. I had trouble believing it.
“He’s bailing out,” Green said. “I don’t know what to say. He’s looking for a better way of life. The firebombing didn’t make him quit, but it didn’t make him decide to stay either.”
Disillusioned by other pressures, Clerke had been considering a career change.
Never Let Them See You Cry Page 19
