Drug Arrests Were Real; the Badge Was Fake

[groovedaddy]

GERALD, Mo. — Like so many rural communities in the country’s middle, this small town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up.

Arrests began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood — mainly from television — to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s antidrug campaign abruptly fell apart after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding minister and a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/us/01impostor.html?th&emc=th

[Clovis Sangrail]

1. 'Sgt. Bill' should be in jail /nt

[fishwax]

2. how were local officials to know he wasn't a real officer?

I mean, after all, he sometimes wore a black t-shirt that read "POLICE," and he had a pair of "military boots" and he drove a Crown Victoria--yep, looks like it all checks out :eyes: He had a badge, too--I mean, it was a badge that he got as a private security guard, but a badge is a badge, right? And when they called the phone number he gave them for his supervisor, someone answered "multijurisdictional task force," so how were they to know :eyes:.