Lately I have been communicating a lot with some of my former California police colleagues. All of a sudden I decided to fess up to something I did after I became a parole agent. I broke all the rules in the book to put it to a crooked used car dealer. Here’s what happened:
One day when I was in my Santa Ana parole office, some guy walks in and introduced himself by telling me that the secretary of my former detective division in Riverside wanted him to drop by and say hello. He told me that he was her husband, which he really was.
I was dumbfounded because that secretary did not like me one bit. She was pissed off because whenever my close friends Neal Peyatt, the San Bernardino police chief, or Ed Noon, the head of the SBSO narcotics and vice unit, called for information when I wasn’t in the office, they would refuse her offer to help them personally or her offer to have other detectives help them.
Anyway, here's the real reason for the visit. It turns out that the secretary’s husband operated one of those 'here today, moved to another location tomorrow' used car lots. He took advantage of 'dumb' Mexicans and blacks by charging them way too much more than the cars were worth. And when the complaints started coming in he just up and moved to another location in Orange County. He was a real sleazeball.
Now the real reason he came to see me was that he had sold a car to one of my parolees similar to today’s Cameros (and Firebirds). He wanted me to get him the car back because - surprise, surprise - the parolee paid for it with a hot check. I promised him that since he was married to the detective office secretary, I would do my best to get the car returned. SORRY, BUT I LIED!
The parolee, a Mexican-American in his late twenties, was living with his mother. I went over to the house to see him, but first I sneaked a look in the garage. Voila, there it was. Then I went in the house to see him and said, 'Hey motherfucker, you paid for that car with a hot check, didn't you? Of course, he hemmed and hawed around before admitting he had done so. On top of that the parole conditions required him to get permission to enter into any kind of contract. So, he figured I was going to bust him right then and there.
Well, I had no such intention. I told him that the used car dealer was a bigger crook than he was - which was true - so I was going to give him a break on two conditions. First he was to keep his mother's garage closed at all times and that if anyone so much as moved that car only one inch, his ass was going back to the joint. And second, if he violated any more parole conditions, wrote any checks whatsoever, or broke any laws, his ass was going back to the joint, mucho pronto!
Guess what? The parolee was on his best behavior from then on. Every so often I would check the car's odometer and it showed that the car had not been moved.
The dealer phoned me several times to ask if I found his car. I lied to the asshole and told him I was still looking. Finally one day he walked back in my office. I greeted him by telling him that "I was just about to call you. I've got both good news and bad news. I've found your car - that's the good news. The bad news is that the parolee wants to file a complaint against you with the police and the attorney general for cheating him and for running a used car operation that was cheating poor Mexicans and blacks. So, what shall I do?"
And here’s the clincher. The asshole asked me to forget it and to tell the parolee he was welcome to the car. That's the last I ever heard from that sleazeball.
Damn it, what I did sure felt good! To this day I firmly believe that justice was served when I broke all the rules. Of course, I would have been in deep shit had the asshole turned me in. But I also felt confident from the get-go that he would rather lose that car than risk an investigation into his questionable used car sales practices. After all, instead of coming to see me, why didn’t he go to the police?
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