Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
Come on a ride along with a Veteran Homicide Detective as the twists and turns of the job suddenly end his career and nearly his life; discover how something wonderful is born out of the Darkness. Embark on the journey from helping people on their worst days, to bringing life, excitement and smiles on their best days.
Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
SnapShot: Drug Busts, Broken Glass and the Devil's Herb....
Ever wondered what being an undercover drug cop is really like? Forget the glamorous Miami Vice fantasy of sleek suits, speedboats, and high-stakes busts. In this candid snapshot from Alaska circa 2006, we're taken behind the scenes of a first-time drug warrant execution that spirals into an absolute comedy of errors.
Our storyteller paints a vivid picture of small-town policing where disguises amount to little more than grown-out hair and a pierced ear—about as effective as those novelty glasses with attached plastic noses. The challenge? Everyone knows you because, well, Alaska is essentially one big small town. From there, we follow the meticulous process of tracking marijuana grow operations by literally driving around with windows down, following your nose until you detect that telltale scent wafting from suspected houses.
What unfolds at the targeted yurt is nothing short of hilarious disaster: windows broken at the wrong house, a dramatic entry into an empty dwelling, no marijuana to be found, and the accidental destruction of thousands of dollars worth of tattoo equipment mistaken for grow light transformers. The humiliation culminates in a courtroom showdown with a flamboyant defense attorney who systematically dismantles the rookie's boilerplate warrant. Twenty years later, these painful lessons in thoroughness, precision, and attention to detail remain crystal clear.
Ready for a refreshingly honest peek behind the badge? Listen as we explore the unglamorous reality of law enforcement work and the valuable lessons learned through embarrassing mistakes. Share your thoughts with us about how this compares to your expectations of police work—we'd love to hear from you!
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to a Murders to Music Snapshot. So I'm going to take you all the way back to about 2006. In 2006, I was an undercover drug cop and you know that is sexy. Have you ever seen Miami Vice with the nice suits and the cocaine and the women everywhere and the boats and the nice cars? Yeah, that is not anything like what being a drug cop in small town Alaska is all about. Instead, you're the guy that grew up in town. Right, everybody knows you because you grew up there, your family's from there, your last name is known and popular and Alaska is just like one big city. No matter where you go in the state, you're going to be known by somebody. But you're that guy, you're that kid that grew up there.
Speaker 1:Now you're going to grow your hair out, you're going to grow a mustache or a goatee for the first time, pierce your ear and you're going to think man, you know what I'm, I'm really in this and nobody knows who I am. You know, it's like getting one of those cartoon glasses and nose and little mustache thing that you used to get for a buck 99 at the store. You know, you put them on and it's the glasses and the plastic nose and the little Charlie Chaplin mustache or Hitler mustache, depending on what side of the world you're from. That is exactly what I felt like, right? But I'm out there doing this and we're going to serve a warrant. We're going to serve a warrant on a house, but here's why we're going to serve the warrant. You see, we would always go for the low-hanging fruit back in the day, and the low-hanging fruit was marijuana. Now you may laugh and think that, man, I see billboards that say now hiring drivers at these dispensaries. Well, back in the day that was called the drug dealer and it wasn't allowed. And I've sent lots and lots of people to jail for marijuana. But it wasn't just the marijuana that we were sending them to jail for, it was the growing and production of said devil's herb.
Speaker 1:So we would drive around at night as drug detectives and we would smell the air for this weed, right. So we would drive around until we smelled weed because as part of the growing process, you have to vent all the stale air out of the room, and when you do that, you vent it into the atmosphere outside your house, and when you do that it smells like weed. And when you do that. The undercover cops drive around with their little Charlie Chaplin glasses and mustache on and they smell it, and then they want to track it down. So they stick your finger out the window, because they've seen that on TV, and you stick your finger out the window to figure out which direction the wind is blowing, and you head into the wind and all of a sudden you've tracked it down to this house.
Speaker 1:And here's this house. Now I'm going to describe it for you. This house is just off of the main road and this house is called a yurt. And if you don't know what a yurt is, a yurt, and if you don't know what a yurt is, a yurt is a round structure with a kind of crisscross pattern, oval dome shaped roof with like a fabric stretched over it, right. So that's the kind of house that we can smell. And sure enough, there's two of these yurts side by side and they're both identical looking, and and we go up and we can smell, and we walk up to the door at one and sure enough, this is the yurt that the drugs are coming from.
Speaker 1:So we go back and I write this warrant, and this is the first warrant that I will have written on a drug house. You see, I just started with the drug unit, so I'm kind of cutting my teeth and figuring this stuff out as we go. In fact, to be honest with you, I don't think I had ever been on a marijuana drug warrant before in my life, but this one is mine and I'm pretty excited about it. So I go back and I write the warrant and back in those days we were actually allowed to be police officers. Now they make SWAT teams serve all these warrants for us and we just have to come in later and collect all the evidence.
Speaker 1:Back in the day we got to get dressed up, you see, we'd wear our black outfits that said police, all over them in yellow We'd wear the bali clavas. We were I mean, we were high speed, low drag stuff, you know what I mean. And uh, having no idea what I was doing, I go out there and I hold a briefing and at this briefing I've got about 20 or so 25 different state troopers, local cops, that are going to help me do this and I get to tell them all what to do. So we have to think tactically because we're going to hit this house early in the morning. The house is going to be occupied, which is what we want, and we need to go in, serve the warrant, get in without anybody getting hurt. So here's what we do. We serve the warrant, get in without anybody getting hurt. So here's what we do. We set up in one contingency that's going to go down the driveway flanking the left and the right, but prior to them hitting the driveway, we're going to send a contingency around the rear. That contingency, when I say go, is going to take a piece of rebar and break out all the back windows of this house, make a lot of noise. What's that going to do? That is going to distract the occupants, make them look towards the rear of the house about the time we boot in their front door and come and yell police and take everybody into custody. I saw this on TV. It was going to work. I absolutely know it.
Speaker 1:So we head out there and everybody is stacked up in a conga line, all the cars are stacked up. We pull a uniform car down the driveway with lights on. We make our slow approach. We send the team around the back. I'm like three, two, one, go. And when we say go, we hear glass breaking. About that time we hit the front door of the Ram Boom boom. Front door goes open. Yell police police department, alaska State Troopers. We make our entry, we spread out and there's nobody there. There's nobody at the house.
Speaker 1:So we make our way all the way to the back of the house and at the back of the house we realized that there's no windows broken. That's weird. So we heard the windows break. So we regroup, recollect and we realized that the people that broke the windows out well, they broke the windows out of the wrong house. It was the one next to them. So this is a total Barney Fife type moment where we screwed up. But you know what? It's okay, we're in, everybody is safe, and we're going to process all this weed. But we get inside and there's no weed. They had moved it all out. There was remnants, there was flower pots, there was the grow lights, but there was no weed.
Speaker 1:So, my sergeants, all right, here's what we're going to do, guys. We're going to destroy all of their stuff that has to do with marijuana grows and we're going to take it as evidence. So we destroy it. So if by any chance they get it back from evidence, like the transformers that power the lights, we're going to cut those cords off. And I'm like, bet, I got this.
Speaker 1:So, with my brand new trusty tool bag and my set of dikes in hand, I go into the bedroom where a lot of the grow equipment is, and I start grabbing these transformers. And I'm grabbing one transformer after another, powers these lights, and I'm cutting these cables off, cut them, cut them and I'm cutting them up close to the transformer box, that way they can never re-splice the wires on right, because this is a devil's herb, this is a gateway drug and by gosh, people die as a result of this marijuana stuff. And I'm going to do everything to the best of my ability. So I cut all these cables off. I got a ginormous stack of transformers on the bed and my sergeant comes in. He's like what are you doing? I said I'm just cutting the cords off these transformers. You know we don't want them to get these things back out of evidence. And he's like what transformers? And I point to the pile on the bed and he says, hey. He says, uh, those are transformers, all right, but they're not transformers for marijuana grow lights. Nope, those are tattoo transformers. So this was the transformers for a tattoo gun. If you've ever got a tattoo. This is the little power box for those things and I'm like holy crap. So I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of dollars that I ruined that day and the state probably had to pay for, but I cut a ton of cables off.
Speaker 1:So let me recap this for you it's my first warrant. I'm being watched and scrutinized. We go to the house, we break the windows out of the wrong house, we boot the front door. There's no drugs, just a bunch of empty flower pots. There's relatively no grow equipment and what tattoo transformers are there? I cut all the cables off because I don't know the hell I'm looking at or what I'm doing. What an absolute shite show that was. So that was my very first drug search warrant. They only got better from there. But here's where it gets better right, a little bit of stuff that we did find.
Speaker 1:They ended up taking this to court, and in court I had to defend the search warrant that I wrote to get us into this property. I had to defend the search warrant that I wrote to get us into this property. Now these people hired a highfalutin black senior guy attorney out of Anchorage and when he showed up at the courthouse. He kind of looked like you would imagine. He's got the cane I mean I'm sure the hat was velvet and furry and with the rim around it and the long trench coat and he's got like the silver cap on his tooth and he's probably pushing you know 350 pounds and he's kind of strutting with that cane as he walks down the aisle and I'm like who is this guy? That guy there proceeded to tear me apart on the stand and absolutely ripped that warrant apart.
Speaker 1:So the some of the warrant was bad. It's that I didn't write the warrant. You see, there's a boilerplate warrant, boilerplate meaning that anybody can sign their name to it because it's got a bunch of facts and figures in there and, as a result, we can write our name. We can write in the information we smelled marijuana at this address. When we smell marijuana, it means there's probably going to be this much was a felony amount. Please give me a warrant. Well, I didn't do any of those facts and figures. So I got torn apart on the stand about somebody else's math and I learned a lot of lessons in that search warrant experience. I learned to do my reconnaissance, dot my I's, cross my T's, make sure everybody's on the same page and don't use somebody else's warrant, because there's a good chance you're going to have to testify to it and if you don't have all your facts straight, you're going to get torn apart. It's now I don't know 20-something years later, and I remember it like it was yesterday. That is a Murders to Music snapshot.
