Page 240 - NIXBOOK

DEA agents called our office one day, said they were going to do a big drug bust in our town and if we could help, that would be
great. A marijuana smuggler had crossed the border from Canada with some good BC Bud and was going to pass it off to another
smuggler in one of our parking lots, in about, oh, 3 hours from now. So we got ready and we all caught the two smugglers. Too
bad for them they tried to do the transaction in the parking lot of a Christian school – that absolutely counted against them as
violating the “drug activity in a school zone” sentence enhancement, which adds several years to their federal incarceration. I
remember the receiving smuggler’s pickup truck had a slick-top tonneau cover that was sealed shut; to open it required placing
a special magnet at an exact spot near the back tail light to activate the motors that raised it up, to expose the two hockey bags
stuffed full of marijuana. Have you ever seen a hockey bag? They are HUGE; designed to hold hockey sticks and all that giant
padded clothing that hockey players wear. They are big enough to hold 150 pounds of dope, each. The DEA was happy to get
300 pounds of marijuana but what they really wanted was the cash at the end of the deal. The smugglers quickly rolled and
agreed to cooperate, so the truck wound up getting flown on a cargo plane to Chicago, where it was reunited with the hockey
bags, one of the smugglers, an undercover agent pretending to be the other smuggler, and a whole bunch of federal agents and
city cops to see the deal through and seize the cash.

Traffic enforcement time: I pull over a car for some kind of moving violation. The driver pulled over off the road into a parking
lot, routine thing, sometimes I did this 15 times a day all over town. As I was talking to the driver, the business owner came
outside to talk to me. Walked right up to my car while I was writing a ticket. “Excuse me officer? Could you please turn off your
flashing lights? It’s not a good look for my business here.” Her tone was not politely asking though, she was more like telling me
to leave.

When Jeff Doran, the chief who hired me in 1993, retired, he got an easy part-time job at the clubhouse at the Wing Point
Country Club on the Bainbridge Island’s golf course. I remember one day several months later he stopped by the PPD to visit
and he was wearing his golf club shirt and I couldn’t help but immediately make a joke to him about his new job washing balls.
In that he wasn’t my boss anymore he was fair game to insult in a good natured way and he took it well.