A True Prince off the City

By Kurt Anderson

In Chicago, a cop goes undercover to crack a police dope ring

Government corruption in Chicago is at once routine and legendary, such a fact of everyday life that each new scandal seems not so much to shock citizens as to reaffirm their cynicism. Yet in the past few weeks even the most jaded Chicagoans must have been a little dismayed. Ten West Side narcotics policemen were convicted on June 30 of taking $250,000 in protection money from dope dealers. Last week, in a separate case, ten more policemen were arraigned and three others indicted for variously possessing and selling marijuana, cocaine and heroin. The investigation into police drug peddling was sparked by an honest cop who refused to look the other way. In the story that follows, he is called James Watson. TIME pieced together an inside account of the undercover probe after an exclusive interview with Watson, 42, and a series of conversations with other police investigators.

In James Watson's family, sinking into the street life on Chicago's black South Side was not allowed. Still, compared with his three brothers, who went directly from working-class boyhoods to college and upscale success, James was an underachiever. After high school, he became an Army paratrooper; after his discharge, he became a butcher. But Watson had a calling: in 1967 he finally admitted it and joined the Chicago police force.

He made a great cop. As a decoy dealers victim, undercover narcotics agent and organized-crime Watson, says a colleague, "was the guy you could always count on to be behind you." But his front-line successes made him an undeserving victim of the Peter Principle. He was promoted to detective a few years ago but proved too impolitic and got on the wrong side of a deputy superintendent. In 1980 Watson was demoted back to patrolman and assigned to squad-car duty on the South Side.

In his years away from the rank-and-file officer's life, the street ethos had become twisted. Fellow cops were not just smoking a little pot at home, after hours, but sucking on joints and snorting cocaine while on duty. For a year he watched, disgusted; regularly he saw drugs, including heroin, sold from squad-car windows. "I was told this was the new thing," Watson says. "It was supposed to be accepted. But to me it was a cancer that could destroy the department." To the dopers in blue, Watson was out of it, an old prig.

Until last fall, his loyalty to fellow officers was stronger than his anger. Then one day in September, responding to a routine call, Watson radioed for another patrolman to join him. The officer never came. He was too high, too jazzed up on cocaine, to do his duty.

On Sept. 26, a Saturday, Watson called Sergeant Thomas Chandler, 34, a colleague from his days on the narcotics squad, now working for the department's self-policing Internal Affairs Division. Watson unburdened himself, telling all, naming names. It was agonizing for Watson. He did not get a kick out of seeing himself as a righteous avenger and declined a further role in any investigation. Finally he pleaded, "Just be fair to these guys."

Lieut. Richard Sandberg, 45, was put in charge of the probe, and with Chandler staked out a South Side tavern called the count, the cops cut deals on Wednesday nights. From their unmarked brown van, the investigators watched police drug sale after police drug sale and plenty of sampling. "There they were, not 10 ft. away," recalls Sandberg, still incredulous, "just dipping into the vial and snorting away." Brazen, but not incriminating enough. Sandberg insisted on getting tape recordings of the transactions.

A state police agent was wired with hidden microphones and sent into the Ebony Room, but the dealers were not foolish enough to sell to a stranger. Watson then went to the bar with a female undercover agent, introducing her as a friend who wanted to buy cocaine. Says Sandberg: "The absolute worst happened. One of the men recognized her as a narcotics cop." After she left, Watson's keen undercover instincts saved him: he had just met the woman, he claimed, laughing, and had no idea she was a narc.

For five months the investigators had failed to get a transaction on tape. Finally, in early March, Chandler convinced Watson that only he would be trusted enough to make the undercover drug buys. Watson would pretend to be a neophyte dealer eager to make a few extra bucks by selling to friends. Often the sales took place in the middle of the night. Watson kept working his regular 8-hr, patrol shift as well as his 4-hr.-a-day outside job as a security guard.

For him, last spring was a blur of sleeplessness and sharp-edged tension.

His first buy was on Thursday morning, March 11, at an apartment in New Town, a chic singles neighborhood. He chatted with his host, a cop from his precinct, and then got down to business, agreeing to buy 1/8 oz. of coke for $300. The conversation was recorded by a pair of miniature microphones fastened to Watson's chest. Eavesdropping in a van out side were Sandberg and Chandler. In a nearby car was IAD Officer Victor Howard, 37, who, like Watson, Chandler and all but one of the indicted dealers, is black.

Howard vividly recalls the anxiety of later "overhears." Says he: "Every delay, every long pause, and we wondered--had they figured it out?" In fact, one of the targets did figure it out. Suspecting after a second tape-recorded cocaine sale that he was being set up, the pusher threatened to kill Watson and his family. Instead, Chandler pressured the man to cooperate. "He flipped," says Chandler. "He was looking out for his ass." As it turned out, the "flipper" made drug buys that accounted for ten of the 13 indictments. In return he may escape jail.

On June 11, squads of IAD officers and other police inspectors, 50 in all, fanned out and ar rested the alleged pushers. As many as 20 other cops are suspected of drug peddling, but they were not caught on tape. The investigators wanted to move before their cover, or a life, was lost.

Watson is not rejoicing. He and his wife and three children are now in a different city, living under an assumed name. His former buddies, he says, "wouldn't mind killing me." Like Chandler and Howard, he had worked to get more black police hired, and the sense of betrayal is bitter. And his anguished decision to trap comrades, Watson says, "is something I still haven't worked out. I probably never will." He is pleased to have shown that cover-ups are not standard procedure in his beloved Chicago department, especially under the reformist administration of Police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek. "I knew if I went to the right people," Watson says, "something would be done." And what of his own life?

"I want to go back to police work," he says. "It's my job."

--By Kurt Anderson. Reported by Ken Banta/ Chicago

With reporting by Ken Banta

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