Sergeant Bill
(H/T Grits for Breakfast): Fake federal agent in Missouri works with local law enforcement for months, arresting drug dealers, extracting confessions without Miranda, and searching homes without a warrant. Apparently, the local police thought nothing was wrong until the real FBI showed up and arrested him:
GERALD, MO.–Like so many rural communities in the U.S. middle, this small town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up.Arrests began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, "a meth capital of the United States," the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.
Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood – mainly from television – to be the law.
They said the agent, a man some had come to know as "Sergeant Bill," boasted he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.
But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald's anti-drug campaign abruptly fell apart. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, former security guard, former wedding minister and former small-town cop from 35 kilometres down the road.
At first, I was thinking this is not the local police's fault - it sounds like this guy was pretty convincing. But after thinking about it, how could they not know? They didn't once check up on this guy? According to the article above, he used to work as a police officer 22 miles down the road and yet no-one knew him? The town officials and police are going to have a hard time selling that there was not something more going on here.
