They can take the gun and badge away. You can curse yourself for ever becoming a cop. Still, you don`t get it out of your system.
”Funny thing is,” said Van Desper, ”as a kid, I never once thought of being a police officer. Where I grew up there were few choices: O.D. on drugs, get killed in a gang rumble or celebrate your 21st birthday in prison.”
Desper, though, beat the odds that are a ghetto child`s grim destiny. Athletic ability and an enlistment officer saved him, Desper explained, and the Army happened to make him an M.P. So after his service hitch, he took the patrolman`s exam in Montgomery County, just outside Philadelphia, where he had grown up.
Even his detractors admit that Desper came onto the force like gangbusters.
”I was a good cop,” Desper said, while walking mean streets he used to patrol, Serpico-style. ”Whatever happened at the end, for 14 years I was a damn good cop!”
Indeed, after only two years as a patrolman on a force of about 80, Desper was promoted to a special investigative unit, and two years after that he became the department`s first black detective.
Montgomery County is composed mostly of bedroom suburbs whose middle-class breadwinners ride the commuter trains and expressways to
Philadelphia. But there are pockets of blight in the older towns, where the street scenes are as bleak as in the inner-city neighborhood where Desper was reared. In Norristown, the county seat, burned-out two-flats and low-life bars nestle virtually in the shadow of the courthouse.
In 1980, when the district attorney formed a task force to fight the narcotics trade, Desper was designated the point man. For seven years he worked undercover, worming his way into the local drug scene.
Using a variety of aliases and disguises, he would buy cocaine from street-corner pushers. Then he would flash his badge and read a startled dealer the Miranda warning, while fellow officers jumped out of parked cars and doorways to back up the arrest.
Over that period, Desper helped convict more than 100 drug dealers. Of the cases that went to trial, Desper`s testimony never failed to convince a judge or jury, or at least it didn`t until his final case.
By then, though, Desper was no longer a policeman, except in his heart of hearts. There, he said, he always will be, just as he always introduced himself on the witness stand: ”Det. Desper, Badge No. 138.”
”It`s not a normal existence, but in a strange way it`s addictive,”
Desper, 37, said, recalling the years when he led two lives. Desper lives with his wife, Anna, and their four children on a quiet street in a blue-collar section of Philadelphia. His own working day often started when his neighbors were sitting down at their dinner table, and lots of times he got home only as other families on the block were having breakfast.
The netherworld of Norristown`s Walnut Street, Desper observed while touring his old beat, doesn`t come alive much before sunset. Nor do you convince a pusher you`re on the up and up (according to the drug world`s inverse moral order, that is) by saying you have to cut out early to take your kid to a high school basketball game.
”There were too many broken promises,” Desper said, recalling how he and his wife started drifting apart. ”Too many arguments when I had to phone Anna and say I couldn`t make it to a family outing we`d planned.”
Close at hand, meanwhile, there was a tempting, albeit deadly, solace for Desper`s troubles.
Early on the job he learned that as part of the drug culture`s mores, the buyer checks out a dealer`s wares by sampling a little before turning over any cash, there being no after-sale return privileges.
Sometimes Desper could pretend to pick up a ”line” of cocaine set out for his approval, then brush it onto the floor instead of snorting it. But to refuse that kind of hospitality too often, Desper figured, was to risk exposure and potentially fatal danger.
”At the top, the drug world is run by businesslike types who are in it for big bucks, keep a low profile and don`t like anything messy,” Desper said. ”But we were working at the opposite level, where dealers who never sell more than a few ounces at a time think nothing of killing to protect their ma-and-pa business.”
To be sure, Desper`s superiors never authorized him to use drugs as part of his investigative work. (”In law enforcement, we don`t do that!” snapped Chief Oscar Vance, head of the Montgomery County detectives, in a telephone interview.) But Desper observed that he never was told not to, either.
”Our administrators took a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil position,” Desper said. ”`We don`t want to know how you make your busts,` they told us, `just make them.` But it`s either very naive or very dumb for someone in police work to think an undercover agent could survive by telling pushers: `No, thanks; I don`t do drugs.”`
In any event, after a while Desper wasn`t just using drugs for professional purposes. On the rationalization that he needed some relief from the stress of his job, plus the tensions at home, he began taking a little cocaine on the weekends.
Every addict starts the same way, Desper observed in hindsight. He tells himself: ”I can stop using drugs anytime I choose to; I can keep this thing within limits.”
For his part, Desper tried to convince himself of that last proposition by dividing his life into fixed compartments.
He continued to arrest Montgomery County narcotics dealers, taking care never to be high when he came to work and strictly accounting to his superiors for all the drugs he confiscated.
He did his personal buying many miles away, on Philadelphia`s West Side.
”I knew how to walk that walk and talk that talk,” Desper said, recalling his assumption that social graces he had learned on the job helped him blend into the inner-city drug scene.
Only afterward did he realize that the Philadephia chapter of his life was not as anonymous as he thought.
In 1985, Desper arrested Lot Samuel, a small-time Norristown pusher who operated out of his tavern on Walnut Street.
At the time, Desper thought it was no big deal. Neither did attorney Mike Giampietro, to whose Philadelphia office Samuel brought his legal problems.
Giampietro is a pro who knows that the criminal justice system operates on a law of supply and demand. The number of defendants awaiting trial varies from time to time. So, too, does the supply of empty jail cells.
Weighing those factors, and the strength of the evidence against his client, a good defense attorney can figure the going price of a given crime. A prosecutor does the same, and often their estimates will be fairly close, allowing a lot of cases to be settled by plea bargaining, which makes judges happy, too.
For if they had to try every defendant Van Desper and all the other policemen ever booked, court calendars would be gridlocked permanently.
Yet when Giampietro called the Montgomery County district attorney`s office on Samuel`s behalf, he was told his client would have to agree to spend time behind bars.
”Today, with the public outraged about drugs, `a sale means jail,` as we say in this business,” Giampietro recalled in a recent interview.
”But back in `85, the D.A.`s proposal was way out of line. This wasn`t exactly the `French Connection.` My client had allegedly sold Desper a few ounces.”
Still, Giampietro didn`t worry about the Samuels case. It can take years before a defendant is brought to trial, and experience has taught Giampietro that when a court date finally draws near, the prosecution`s price for cutting a deal often drops.
But Giampietro also believes in being prepared, and he made a few phone calls.
A defense attorney operates a little like a detective, Giampietro explained. Policemen sometimes overlook a dealer`s activities if he will tip them to rival pushers they can arrest. After nine years of keeping clients out of jail, Giampietro can plug into that same information network. He knew Desper was a strong witness who made his testimony doubly effective by looking a jury right in the eye.
”Can we find anything to counter Desper`s straight-arrow image?”
Giampietro asked his informants.
At first they didn`t turn up much: Desper was having an affair with a woman whose brother he once arrested (which Desper himself acknowledges). He had been seen buying drugs, however, in West Philadelphia. So it might be hard for him to explain in court what he was doing so far from his beat, provided, of course, Giampietro could get a jury to believe a less-than-Boy-Scout witness to those transactions.
Finally, an old client of Giampietro`s reported that Desper had just finished a 28-day stay in Eugenia Hospital, which is known for its drug-treatment program.
”I had someone call the hospital, pretending to be an addict trying to kick his habit, and ask how long he would have to be in for,” Giampietro recalled. ” `Twenty eight days` was the reply. `Bingo!` I said.”
By the spring of 1987, Desper had, in fact, realized he needed help. His addiction had escalated to the point where he was spending the mortgage and grocery money on cocaine. When Anna intercepted calls from bill collectors, Desper would try to cover his lies with more lies.
”Denial is an addict`s first line of defense,” Desper said.
”The second is promising and repromising you`re going stop using drugs.”
Finally, though, Desper couldn`t keep up the denial. One day, a few months before the birth of their youngest child, his wife confronted him with all those broken promises. Having been high for days, he was in no mood for criticism, and he raised his hand to hit her. Then he recalled an incident from a ”sting” operation of a few years before.
In such an operation, Desper explained, after busting a drug dealer, he would assume the role of the pusher, so his fellow officers could arrest the pusher`s customers after he had sold them drugs. Among the buyers on this occasion was a woman who left a car full of young children double-parked while she came inside to buy cocaine.
”At the time, I`d thought: `A mother bringing her kids with while she shops for drugs, that`s really low,”` Desper recalled. ”But I looked at my clenched fist, through a cocaine fog of my own, and said: `I`ve sunk even lower. I`m about to hit my wife when she`s carrying our baby.` The next day I signed myself into Eugenia.”
Desper told his superiors he was going into the hospital for treatment of stress, and when he came back to the job neither he nor they ever specifically discussed his drug problem. Yet he is convinced Chief Vance and the other officers knew. Vance denies that, though his explanation of the situation is not entirely consistent.
”Desper`s assignment after he came back to the force was to sit in the office and do nothing,” Vance said. Yet if Vance had no knowledge of Desper`s drug problems, why would he want the county`s taxpayers to pay Desper`s salary without getting any service from him?
Desper recalled that when he came back to the force his fellow officers treated him like a leper. He no longer was invited to the briefings at which detectives rehearse an upcoming arrest.
” `We`ll fill you in on the way over,` they`d tell me,” Desper recalled. ”It was obvious they no longer trusted me.”
He was excluded similarly from the after-work bull sessions when police traditionally work off stress over a beer and sandwich. For a cop, Desper explained, being deprived of that mutual support is the equivalent of psychological death, and finally he stormed into the office and resigned.
The next day he tried to withdraw his resignation but was refused. In the fall of 1987, he went back into the hospital for more treatment. Since then, he said, he hasn`t touched drugs. A few weeks ago he was hired as a private security officer.
For months, Desper did not hear a word from the police department. Then last February he got a call saying his testimony was needed. Lot Samuel`s case finally had come to trial.
”I told them to shove it,” Desper recalled. ” `I was twice in the hospital, and nobody called Anna to see how I was doing,` I told them. `I`m out of work, and none of you guys called with a tip on a job. Now you need me? Well, that`s tough!` ”
The next day, some of his former buddies took him to court in handcuffs. The judge had issued a bench warrant to compel Desper`s testimony.
”I couldn`t believe it,” said Mike Giampietro. ”I`d subpoenaed Van`s hospital records, figuring that would be enough get the case settled. But the young assistant D.A. said his office insisted on going to trial. Why they did that, when they knew Van`s drug problems would come out on the stand, is still beyond me.”
The Montgomery County District Attorney`s office refused to comment on the case, noting that Desper is suing to regain his job.
Samuel`s trial went much as Giampietro had planned, with one exception. Giampietro assumed that, having been brought handcuffed to court, Desper would be in no mood to help the prosecution. Yet the more he hammered away at Desper`s personal drug use, the more Desper tried to convince the jury that, his own problems nothwithstanding, his arrest of Lot Samuel had been a legitimate one.
”Van was on the edge of his seat all the time I cross-examined him,”
Giampietro recalled. ” `Okay, I was doing drugs,` he shouted. `But I caught the defendant red-handed selling narcotics.` After all Van had gone through, and the position his own department put him in, once he got on that stand he was a cop again.”
The jury saw it differently: After only 15 minutes` deliberation, Samuel was acquitted. Subsequently, Giampietro was able to plea-bargain a solution to his client`s remaining problems from other arrests. Under those arrangements, Samuel agreed to close his bar and leave Norristown. In return, even his arrest record will be expunged.
”I`ve helped guilty people leave a courtroom as free men, so I`m no moral paragon,” Giampietro recalled. ”But I never felt so low as after cross-examining Desper. My client comes out of all this with a clean record. But Van will be haunted by the case for the rest of his life.` ”
Desper himself glimpsed that irony while giving a postmidnight tour of his old beat.
He was recounting his bitterness at being abandoned by his buddies on the force when Lot Samuel came out the front door of his tavern.
For a few moments they confronted each other under a streetlamp that gave the scene the look of a Dodge City faceoff.
Then each man continued on his way.
”Fourteen years a cop,” Desper said, ”and it was the only case I ever lost. The only one.”
