The Drug Task Force Fire
From James Donahue’s Journal
The last major story I worked on before I was forced off my bureau job and wedged into early retirement involved a mysterious fire in the Sanilac County building housing the operations of the Drug Task Force.
The Drug Task Force was an offshoot of Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan’s infamous War on Drugs. While Reagan was in office the federal government began funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars down the pipeline through state coffers and into county governments to establish divisions of police operations known as the Drug Task Force. The task force was comprised of a select group of police officers chosen from the Michigan State Police, the Sanilac County Sheriff’s Department, and some of the local police departments. Just like in the movies, these officers shed their regular police uniforms, grew bears, let their hair grow long, and began moving with the night people as undercover cops, looking for anyone selling, buying or possessing marijuana, cocaine, or any of the other controlled substances listed by the government as harmful and dangerous to use.
Strangely enough, before the Drug Task Force became reality, the folks in rural Sanilac County, Michigan, didn’t perceive of themselves as having a drug problem. Our children, then attending the middle schools and high schools, said they had no knowledge of anybody selling or using marijuana. Our biggest issue then, as it was when I was a teen, was alcohol. And from the best I could learn, this had not changed.
Because most of the local police were known to the youth throughout Sanilac County, the first operatives sent to fish out the violators were hired characters from outside sources. I met one of these men and learned that he had been a member of a California motorcycle gang and apparently was cooperating with the police to work off penance for some criminal activities of his own. Thus we had a few really seedy characters mingling with the youth of our county, posing as undercover police officers.
One early morning I received a telephone call from the dispatcher at the Sheriff’s Department. I was invited to participate in a police narcotics raid. This involved the entrance of homes with search warrants by police departments all over the county and the apprehension of about forty or more young men, all charged with furnishing, buying or possessing marijuana in the presence of these “undercover” narcotics people. It was an all-day event that culminated in a line-up in the District Court for arraignments on what turned out to be mostly misdemeanor charges of possessing some weed. There were so many arrests in that first raid it took weeks before they were all filtered through the court system. Most paid fines and were released on some form of probation. All in all it was no big deal, although the initial story was somewhat sensational because of the sheer size of the operation.
It was Sanilac County’s first blast resulting from the federally funded War on Drugs. And it was not going to be the last. There were numerous raids to follow, but none of them resulting in the number of arrests. And the crimes began to get more and more serious. One early morning raid was at a house in Sandusky where the occupants were found to be operating a sophisticated indoor greenhouse, growing marijuana under hydroponic lighting and watering systems. Yet another raid occurred in the middle of the night at the Marlette airport. I watched with the deputies as a twin-engine aircraft dropped down on the airstrip and taxied up to a van that was waiting for it. Then officers moved in. That plane was filled with bags of marijuana valued at nearly a million dollars in street value. The plane, the van and all of the marijuana was seized. I later learned that the Drug Task Force seized the van and aircraft under a new Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, sold them and used the money to finance further task force operations.
The whole drug operation soon became quite sophisticated. County task forces began inter-acting with one another, forming regional task forces that coordinated operations across county lines.
I noticed that it was not only the Drug Task Force, but many individual police officers in the county began operating on a richer level than they should have been. Some of the deputies I knew well were moving into nicer homes and had costly toys like motor homes, new cars, pickups and boats on trailers in their yards. I covered county government, had access to the budget and individual salaries, and knew most of the police were receiving wages comparable to my own. And I could not afford to live at the standard they were living. It was obvious to me that there was something very wrong and I suspected it was all connected to the War on Drugs. I imagined that the police were furnishing the drugs and creating the region’s “drug problem” but I could not prove it. I kept my mouth shut and just watched and waited.
I started attending meetings of the Drug Task Force Board, comprised of the commander of the Michigan State Police Post, the Sheriff, and police chiefs of Sandusky, Yale, Brown City and Croswell, the four cities in the county. The meetings were usually quite formal and involved discussions about dealing with the financial operations of the department. At one meeting, just after a marijuana raid in which officers cut down a quantity of cannabis growing in a wooded area, there was a discussion on just when to dispose of it. It was determined that all of the drugs were to be kept stored as evidence until after arrested suspects appeared in court and the cases were brought to conclusion. I asked how these drugs were disposed of. I remember getting some strange stares from the police chiefs. I believe it was the State Police commander who explained that it was taken by the officers to an undisclosed place and burned. And no, I would never be allowed to witness such an event.
Eventually cocaine turned up in the county. Our first realization of this involved a murder case on a farm just north of Yale at the south Sanilac County line. It seemed that some guy got blown away by his girl friend that turned a shotgun on him during a heated argument. Police searched the house and found a large amount of cocaine. There were also the usual costly toys in the yard that included costly vehicles, a boat and other items. It was discovered that the murdered guy had been a major supplier of cocaine in the Detroit area and was hiding out on the farm in Sanilac County. He apparently had an airplane parked at a nearby airport. All of this stuff was seized by police under the RICO Act.
As time went on, I saw more and more evidence of possible police corruption and it was starting to concern me. Some of my friends in the police seemed to be involved. They were acting more and more aloof, as if they were afraid I might start asking questions. I didn’t have to ask . . . I already knew.
One day I received a tip that another ominous activity was occurring among the police. This man said he was hunting and had walked into an abandoned house near Palms, a tiny settlement in the northern rural area of the county, and noticed boards in the floor appeared to have been recently removed. He said he found one board loose and lifted it to see what was under it. To his shock, he said there was a large cache of guns hidden there. He said he reported his find to a county deputy, and was told to keep his mouth shut. He was not to tell anyone what he had found. He said he worried about it and wanted me to know because he trusted me. He said he thought by the very way the officer responded that the cops were into some kind of illegal activity involving selling guns. I was well aware that a lot of guns were being seized by police during the drug raids and had no idea what was happening to these weapons. The pieces of that puzzle were beginning to fall into place.
The climax to all of this came the morning the building housing the offices of the Drug Task Force burned. It was a major fire that totally destroyed the two-story wooden structure located on Main Street, right across the street from the County Court House. We learned that this was the building where all of the confiscated drugs, guns and money seized in all of the drug raids was supposedly stored in a vault, in a locked basement storage room. The fire was so hot and so intense that all evidence of anything that had been stored in that vault was allegedly destroyed.
There was a big investigation by the Michigan Fire Marshal’s office. It was quickly determined that it had been an arson fire. In fact, the investigators found evidence that a flammable material had been spread throughout the building, assuring that it would be totally destroyed and that the local Fire Department would have no chance of saving anything. Indeed, by the time the fire was noticed by a passer-by at about three o’clock in the morning, fire was breaking out of windows on every floor.
The director of the Task Force was eventually arrested and charged with the crime. He pleaded innocent and there was a trial. Lawyer John Paterson was hired as the defense lawyer. I covered the trial in Circuit Court with great interest and heard some interesting testimony that helped me mentally tie a lot of things together.
The building that housed the task force was one of several downtown stores acquired by the county to hold a number of new offices and departments after voters turned down bond issues that would have financed a badly needed expansion of the 100-year-old courthouse. This is why everything was stored in a wood frame building instead of a more secure facility.
The director of the task force had only recently been promoted to take that job after the former director resigned or retired. I do not remember the circumstances. The prosecution argued that the director was living beyond his means, with a motor home, new car and boat in his yard, suggesting that he was acquiring money from other sources.
There had been an election of some new members of the County Board of Commissioners a few months before the fire, and it was disclosed that one of the new commissioners was apparently as curious as I was about the operations of the Drug Task Force. He began asking questions and demanded to see a complete accounting of all of the records of drugs, guns and money seized by the Task Force, make an inspection of everything in the vault, and track where it all went from the day the agency was formed. The next day the building burned and all of the records went up in smoke.
It was about this time that I was having lunch with Lawyer Paterson and we were discussing the case. I told Paterson that I thought the police in the county may be involved in drug trafficking and that I was very concerned about what we were hearing. I broached the subject, hoping to get Paterson to reveal what he knew. But I apparently committed a serious blunder. Certain people in the area now knew for certain that I was onto what was going on. They also knew that once I had enough evidence, I would expose the corruption. The decision was obviously made to stop me, one way or the other.
About a week after that conversation I was served notice that the bureau office where I had worked for 32 years was going to be closed.
From James Donahue’s Journal
The last major story I worked on before I was forced off my bureau job and wedged into early retirement involved a mysterious fire in the Sanilac County building housing the operations of the Drug Task Force.
The Drug Task Force was an offshoot of Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan’s infamous War on Drugs. While Reagan was in office the federal government began funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars down the pipeline through state coffers and into county governments to establish divisions of police operations known as the Drug Task Force. The task force was comprised of a select group of police officers chosen from the Michigan State Police, the Sanilac County Sheriff’s Department, and some of the local police departments. Just like in the movies, these officers shed their regular police uniforms, grew bears, let their hair grow long, and began moving with the night people as undercover cops, looking for anyone selling, buying or possessing marijuana, cocaine, or any of the other controlled substances listed by the government as harmful and dangerous to use.
Strangely enough, before the Drug Task Force became reality, the folks in rural Sanilac County, Michigan, didn’t perceive of themselves as having a drug problem. Our children, then attending the middle schools and high schools, said they had no knowledge of anybody selling or using marijuana. Our biggest issue then, as it was when I was a teen, was alcohol. And from the best I could learn, this had not changed.
Because most of the local police were known to the youth throughout Sanilac County, the first operatives sent to fish out the violators were hired characters from outside sources. I met one of these men and learned that he had been a member of a California motorcycle gang and apparently was cooperating with the police to work off penance for some criminal activities of his own. Thus we had a few really seedy characters mingling with the youth of our county, posing as undercover police officers.
One early morning I received a telephone call from the dispatcher at the Sheriff’s Department. I was invited to participate in a police narcotics raid. This involved the entrance of homes with search warrants by police departments all over the county and the apprehension of about forty or more young men, all charged with furnishing, buying or possessing marijuana in the presence of these “undercover” narcotics people. It was an all-day event that culminated in a line-up in the District Court for arraignments on what turned out to be mostly misdemeanor charges of possessing some weed. There were so many arrests in that first raid it took weeks before they were all filtered through the court system. Most paid fines and were released on some form of probation. All in all it was no big deal, although the initial story was somewhat sensational because of the sheer size of the operation.
It was Sanilac County’s first blast resulting from the federally funded War on Drugs. And it was not going to be the last. There were numerous raids to follow, but none of them resulting in the number of arrests. And the crimes began to get more and more serious. One early morning raid was at a house in Sandusky where the occupants were found to be operating a sophisticated indoor greenhouse, growing marijuana under hydroponic lighting and watering systems. Yet another raid occurred in the middle of the night at the Marlette airport. I watched with the deputies as a twin-engine aircraft dropped down on the airstrip and taxied up to a van that was waiting for it. Then officers moved in. That plane was filled with bags of marijuana valued at nearly a million dollars in street value. The plane, the van and all of the marijuana was seized. I later learned that the Drug Task Force seized the van and aircraft under a new Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, sold them and used the money to finance further task force operations.
The whole drug operation soon became quite sophisticated. County task forces began inter-acting with one another, forming regional task forces that coordinated operations across county lines.
I noticed that it was not only the Drug Task Force, but many individual police officers in the county began operating on a richer level than they should have been. Some of the deputies I knew well were moving into nicer homes and had costly toys like motor homes, new cars, pickups and boats on trailers in their yards. I covered county government, had access to the budget and individual salaries, and knew most of the police were receiving wages comparable to my own. And I could not afford to live at the standard they were living. It was obvious to me that there was something very wrong and I suspected it was all connected to the War on Drugs. I imagined that the police were furnishing the drugs and creating the region’s “drug problem” but I could not prove it. I kept my mouth shut and just watched and waited.
I started attending meetings of the Drug Task Force Board, comprised of the commander of the Michigan State Police Post, the Sheriff, and police chiefs of Sandusky, Yale, Brown City and Croswell, the four cities in the county. The meetings were usually quite formal and involved discussions about dealing with the financial operations of the department. At one meeting, just after a marijuana raid in which officers cut down a quantity of cannabis growing in a wooded area, there was a discussion on just when to dispose of it. It was determined that all of the drugs were to be kept stored as evidence until after arrested suspects appeared in court and the cases were brought to conclusion. I asked how these drugs were disposed of. I remember getting some strange stares from the police chiefs. I believe it was the State Police commander who explained that it was taken by the officers to an undisclosed place and burned. And no, I would never be allowed to witness such an event.
Eventually cocaine turned up in the county. Our first realization of this involved a murder case on a farm just north of Yale at the south Sanilac County line. It seemed that some guy got blown away by his girl friend that turned a shotgun on him during a heated argument. Police searched the house and found a large amount of cocaine. There were also the usual costly toys in the yard that included costly vehicles, a boat and other items. It was discovered that the murdered guy had been a major supplier of cocaine in the Detroit area and was hiding out on the farm in Sanilac County. He apparently had an airplane parked at a nearby airport. All of this stuff was seized by police under the RICO Act.
As time went on, I saw more and more evidence of possible police corruption and it was starting to concern me. Some of my friends in the police seemed to be involved. They were acting more and more aloof, as if they were afraid I might start asking questions. I didn’t have to ask . . . I already knew.
One day I received a tip that another ominous activity was occurring among the police. This man said he was hunting and had walked into an abandoned house near Palms, a tiny settlement in the northern rural area of the county, and noticed boards in the floor appeared to have been recently removed. He said he found one board loose and lifted it to see what was under it. To his shock, he said there was a large cache of guns hidden there. He said he reported his find to a county deputy, and was told to keep his mouth shut. He was not to tell anyone what he had found. He said he worried about it and wanted me to know because he trusted me. He said he thought by the very way the officer responded that the cops were into some kind of illegal activity involving selling guns. I was well aware that a lot of guns were being seized by police during the drug raids and had no idea what was happening to these weapons. The pieces of that puzzle were beginning to fall into place.
The climax to all of this came the morning the building housing the offices of the Drug Task Force burned. It was a major fire that totally destroyed the two-story wooden structure located on Main Street, right across the street from the County Court House. We learned that this was the building where all of the confiscated drugs, guns and money seized in all of the drug raids was supposedly stored in a vault, in a locked basement storage room. The fire was so hot and so intense that all evidence of anything that had been stored in that vault was allegedly destroyed.
There was a big investigation by the Michigan Fire Marshal’s office. It was quickly determined that it had been an arson fire. In fact, the investigators found evidence that a flammable material had been spread throughout the building, assuring that it would be totally destroyed and that the local Fire Department would have no chance of saving anything. Indeed, by the time the fire was noticed by a passer-by at about three o’clock in the morning, fire was breaking out of windows on every floor.
The director of the Task Force was eventually arrested and charged with the crime. He pleaded innocent and there was a trial. Lawyer John Paterson was hired as the defense lawyer. I covered the trial in Circuit Court with great interest and heard some interesting testimony that helped me mentally tie a lot of things together.
The building that housed the task force was one of several downtown stores acquired by the county to hold a number of new offices and departments after voters turned down bond issues that would have financed a badly needed expansion of the 100-year-old courthouse. This is why everything was stored in a wood frame building instead of a more secure facility.
The director of the task force had only recently been promoted to take that job after the former director resigned or retired. I do not remember the circumstances. The prosecution argued that the director was living beyond his means, with a motor home, new car and boat in his yard, suggesting that he was acquiring money from other sources.
There had been an election of some new members of the County Board of Commissioners a few months before the fire, and it was disclosed that one of the new commissioners was apparently as curious as I was about the operations of the Drug Task Force. He began asking questions and demanded to see a complete accounting of all of the records of drugs, guns and money seized by the Task Force, make an inspection of everything in the vault, and track where it all went from the day the agency was formed. The next day the building burned and all of the records went up in smoke.
It was about this time that I was having lunch with Lawyer Paterson and we were discussing the case. I told Paterson that I thought the police in the county may be involved in drug trafficking and that I was very concerned about what we were hearing. I broached the subject, hoping to get Paterson to reveal what he knew. But I apparently committed a serious blunder. Certain people in the area now knew for certain that I was onto what was going on. They also knew that once I had enough evidence, I would expose the corruption. The decision was obviously made to stop me, one way or the other.
About a week after that conversation I was served notice that the bureau office where I had worked for 32 years was going to be closed.