The Long Beat

With no direction in November of 1963, I left college and headed to my parents’ home in Atlanta, Georgia. I worked for a men’s retail store that December, and then headed to Louisiana with my college roommate. I dug ditches and worked with an excavation crew digging canals in the Louisiana swamps for $1.25 an hour. In March of 1964, I headed back to Atlanta.

With no money, no job, and living at my parents’ house, I was at a low ebb in my life. Looking for a job, I knew I did not want to sell clothes or dig ditches. Then I saw an ad in the Atlanta Journal: "Police Officers Wanted, non-residents can apply."

Two weeks after applying and taking a test for the Atlanta police officer’s job, I was wearing a badge and a gun. As a new trainee, I was assigned to the city/county jail. The Atlanta Police Department covered all of Fulton County as well as parts of two other counties. The patrol units were divided into traffic and criminal divisions, with a white watch and a black watch—the department was still segregated.

At the jail, after a brief stint in the prisoner processing section where we searched and fingerprinted the defendants, I was assigned to the fourth-floor white drunk tank. It was a very large room with showers and held up to 200 drunks, and I worked the 4 PM to midnight shift. Even after arrest and processing, I would confiscate knives, guns, and full bottles of whiskey from them.

Broward Segrest was a big guy—about six-foot-four and 280 pounds—and as glib and funny as you can be. His demeanor in the federal courtroom had gotten him several admonishments for contempt of court, fines, and occasionally even a threat of jail time.

The sitting judge for our cases in Montgomery was Frank Johnson. Judge Johnson was the federal judge whose rulings ended school segregation, abolished the poll tax, ensured that Black people served on juries, and ended all types of segregated policies. He was fair, but he put up with no pretentious defense attorneys.

In one case, I testified that at night I watched a moonshiner open his trunk and saw that it was loaded with one-gallon jugs of moonshine. The defense attorney asked me how bright it was that night, and I replied that it was a full moon and bright enough to read a newspaper. He then checked an almanac and found that it was indeed a full moon.

The attorney asked just how far I could see that night. At that point, Segrest replied, "The agent said he saw a full moon. How far is that?" I replied, "About 240,000 miles." No further questions.

I received a call from a detective with the Boca Raton Police Department. They had received a tip about a man who had rented a house on an ocean-access canal one-half block from the Intracoastal Waterway. The very nice house was rented for $12,000 a month, and the payment was made with a paper bag full of cash.

The Boca detectives noticed that the driveway was full of cars and a camper on one day, so they decided to surveil the location for any drug activity. Across the canal was a wooded mangrove area. They crawled through the mangroves—hiding their sidearms and radio under some roots, painting their faces with mud—and slid into the canal with just the tops of their heads protruding from the water. Just before darkness fell, an airplane flew low over the house, waving its wings, and five people jumped into a go-fast boat and took off toward the Intracoastal.

The detectives were about to exit the canal and retrieve their radio when they noticed someone standing behind them along the canal holding a machine gun. They froze, aware that any movement might provoke someone to shoot. They watched as the boat returned and the suspects unloaded bales of marijuana while passing the machine guns around.

After the armed guard left, the detectives were able to exit the water and call for help. By the time anyone could respond, the vehicles and camper had disappeared. Since we had no informants inside the group, I wrote for and obtained a wiretap for the home’s telephone. A couple of miles away, in an abandoned city water plant, we used one of the offices as a listening center.

In 1997, after 30 years as an ATF agent, there were two things that made me think it was time to retire. When I was younger, making an arrest or executing a search warrant caused an adrenaline high. It evolved to the point where I no longer felt those emotions, and I was just processing another routine arrest or search. That was dangerous to experience.

Then I received an offer for a new dream job: to be a manufacturer’s representative for a fly-fishing company. It offered me the opportunity to turn my hobby into a paying vocation. I got to travel, handle fishing equipment, and catch fish.

My journey was one filled with reward and a sense of achievement. Sometimes I wonder whether it was from hard work or just being lucky. My greatest achievement—and I don’t know how it happened—was remaining married through hard times and good times.

My wife only brought out the best in me, and we managed to raise two outstanding sons who married outstanding wives and have achieved more than we could have ever hoped for. Someone had to be watching over me.