metro fugitive squad
The sun has just cleared the rooftops when three cars roll up to a battered
duplex off Bolton Road and five armed men pile out. Without a word, two of them
trot to the back of the duplex and the others head for the low concrete porch.
One of the men hammers on the door with his fist. A plastic
goose rattles on its nail over the door and the thuds echo among the close-set
houses. A thin gray cat with a flea collar leaps onto the porch and begins
rubbing against legs
It's a wakeup call from the Metro Fugitive Squad, a
little-publicized, multi-agency team whose agents hunt the most dangerous game
of all --- men. In this case, the quarry is wanted for robbing a Roswell deli of
$2,000 at gunpoint.
No one comes to the door, which is locked. The tall window
next to it isn't, however, and two officers, weapons at the ready, step through
it.
They open the door to a three-room shotgun apartment,
pitch-dark inside because all the windows are covered and the electricity, as
well as the telephone, have been cut off. In the front room are two sofas, one
of them opened into a bed where someone has been sleeping. Jammed between the
sofas is a coffee table littered with change, matchbooks and other pocket
debris.
A search with flashlights turns up no one.
"Dry hole," mutters one of the officers. Tension
begins to evaporate and some of the officers wander outside. One of them stoops
to pet the cat.
Mike McGinniss, the big, ruddy-faced GBI agent whose case
this is, spots a pager on the coffee table. He picks it up and begins writing
down the numbers stored in it. As he does, his flashlight beam glints on a ring
of keys on the table.
McGinniss takes the keys to the door. The third one fits the
lock.
"He's here somewhere," the agent says quietly,
drawing his Smith & Wesson. In the back room, moving a chair reveals a door
handle on what the officers had thought was a tall, thin air vent. It is
actually a louvered door to a narrow closet. McGinniss opens it and steps back
abruptly, whipping his weapon into firing position.
"Come outta there!" he barks. "Come on!"
A tall, skinny man dressed only in a T-shirt and red
candy-striped boxer shorts steps out of the closet. Bruce Pickett, the GBI agent
who is second in command of the squad, pulls the man's hands back to cuff them.
"Man, I knew y'all gonna get me sooner or later,"
he whines. "Lemme put my pants on."
"Nope,"
Pickett says, snapping the cuffs shut. "You ride like you hide."
Varied
agencies unite
The Metro Fugitive Squad was created in 1979 under the aegis of the GBI, and is
staffed by officers assigned from various federal and local agencies around
metro Atlanta. It consists of four GBI agents, four officers from the Department
of Corrections, three U.S. marshals, an FBI agent, a Pardons and Paroles
officer, one from the State Patrol, one from the Department of Transportation,
an Atlanta Police detective and deputies from Cobb and Fayette counties.
Jennifer Davis, a GBI analyst, follows the paper trails that often lead the
officers to their quarry.
They work out of an unmarked office in a Riverdale business
park, and they have only one duty --- the pursuit and capture of wanted felons,
chiefly violent ones. They do not investigate crimes; when they catch a
fugitive, they simply turn him over to whoever wants him. Paperwork is held to a
minimum and they spend very little time in court.
To a man, they appear to love it. Morale is off the chart;
most say they hope to remain with the squad for the rest of their careers.
"It's a little more dangerous than your average
detective's job," said Monty Daniell, the GBI supervisor who runs the
squad. "But these guys are fire-eaters. You tell them there's a gunfight
across the street and they ought to take cover, they'd be over there in the
middle of it before you got the last word out."
And yet, the squad has never lost a man in the line of duty,
chiefly due to careful training and the fact that when one agent locates his
quarry and is ready for the "pull" ---the capture ---every other man
on the squad will volunteer to back him up. It has been a year since anyone on
the squad had to resort to lethal force; a fugitive trying to leap out of a
window pointed his weapon at one agent and was killed by another.
Motto:
Trust no one
At the duplex off Bolton Road, McGinniss puts his fugitive in the back seat of
his unmarked Pontiac and the rest of the officers resume their own hunts. On the
drive to the Roswell police station, McGinniss learns the fugitive is 31 years
old and has spent nine of those years in prison. He seems almost relieved to be
facing another stretch.
"Where's your gun?" McGinniss asks.
"Ain't got no gun," the man says in his perpetual
whine.
"Why'd they cut off your phone?"
"Had a guy stayin' with me, stole my callin' card and
run up a big bill."
"Can't trust anyone, huh?" McGinniss says with a
straight face
In the air conditioned Roswell police office, the suspect
shivers. He readily admits his role in the deli stickup and then, to detectives'
surprise, begins telling them about other holdups.
On the way back to Riverdale, McGinniss sings along with
LeAnn Rimes on the radio and plans his evening's work in the big vegetable
garden behind his home in Roswell. This pull was a simple one. Most aren't so
easy; often weeks or months of dogged tracking are required before the pull, and
even then it's sometimes a day or an hour late, and the hunt starts again.
"We average about 500 arrests a year," Daniell
says, "except years when the marshals sponsor one of their special
operations like the one right before the Olympics last year. That pushed us up
to around 800."
Most pulls go down without incident. "It's not unusual
for somebody to run, or put up a minor fight," Daniell says. "Every
three or four months, it seems like, one will break bad. But we go in with
enough folks to make it clear to them they're going to lose. Most of these
people, they break bad on innocent folks but they run up on somebody that shoots
back, they don't want to play then."
Members of the squad spend so much time in their cars that
they have to fill their gas tanks virtually every day, and most of their driving
is done on the meanest streets in the area. On a recent hunt in West End for a
prison fugitive named Rodney, Jeff May, Lee Blitch and Richard Brown stopped
repeatedly to talk to groups of young men sitting on porches and standing at
street corners.
"I guarantee you that 90 percent of everything they told
us was a lie," said May, a bearded, professorial man who supervises the
Corrections officers. "Almost every one of them knows exactly where Rodney
is, and in every bunch we went up to, at least one of them had a gun close to
hand."
The next day, hunting in the same area, May turned up a
narrow street where a crowd of young men was gathered just as an argument turned
deadly. "One of them pulled out a gun and stuck it in this guy's mouth. I
jumped out and threw down on him. He hopped in a car and the rest of them
scattered. We lost him in a chase."
Brown spots a young woman walking alone down a residential
street. He shows her Rodney's picture.
"Yeah, I know him," she says cheerily. "That's Rodney. He used to
sell dope up on the corner there."
"You seen him lately?"
"No, ain't seen him in a long time," she says, her
voice turning pensive. "Ain't nobody up there no more. They all dead."
She begins ticking off fingers. "Antoine's dead, Loquan's dead, Henrico's
dead . . ." She runs out of fingers before she runs out of names.
Word
on the street is legendary
If there are legends on the squad, they are Brown, Hoke Freeman and Pickett;
Brown and Pickett are founding members; Freeman joined in 1983.
A small, wiry man with wavy white hair and a white handlebar
mustache, Brown is the squad curmudgeon. He spends as little time in the office
as possible. "No fugitives in the office," he growls. He relies on
others to do the computer tracking; he would rather prowl the streets and talk
to the informants he has developed over half a lifetime of manhunting.
Brown has been chasing fugitives for 23 years. He worked for
the Atlanta Police Fugitive Squad for five years before joining the Metro squad
when it was formed. In 1994, when APD offered early retirement to many of its
senior officers, Brown took the retirement, went immediately to work for
Corrections and was back on the Metro squad in a year. His son is an APD
detective now; he's proud of that.
Despite his crusty demeanor, Brown goes out of his way to
help less experienced agents. "I've learned so much from him," says
Blitch, one of the newest men on the squad. "He's incredible. He gets after
you, he's going to get you. One guy not long ago, he just turned himself in when
he found out Richard was looking for him."
Freeman, the State Patrol representative, is a muscular,
steel-eyed man who exudes danger; at his most relaxed, he makes Clint Eastwood
seem like a choirboy. He is a man of few words and fewer smiles, making his
acute sense of humor almost startling.
"I don't think he's really afraid of anything,"
Daniell says. "If I knew I was gonna be in a gunfight and I could pick
somebody to back me up, I'd pick Hoke."
Men on the squad speak of Pickett with a sense of awe, but he
will not talk about himself. His concern for his agents has turned into a sort
of internal radar; he seems to materialize as if by magic wherever he might be
needed. But neither he nor Daniell will take a case out of an agent's hands.
They make tactical suggestions but ultimately it's, "How do you want to
handle this?"
Brown is headed to West End to resume the hunt for Rodney but
he agrees to detour to Cabbagetown to help Tony Simpson, the Cobb deputy, find a
woman wanted for probation violation. "Sweet Melissa, we call her,"
Brown snorts. "I hate doing stuff like this."
Melissa is a crack addict, pathetic rather than dangerous;
she's got to go back to jail because she couldn't get herself together
sufficiently to call her probation officer once in a while. Brown hasn't been in
Cabbagetown five minutes before he spots her wandering down a side street. Her
face bears open sores and she's filthy. Brown pulls his Thunderbird up to her.
"Come on, little girl," he says in a low, regretful
tone. "Time to go."
"Whatcha want, Brown?" she asks in a hoarse squeak.
"I got a warrant for you," he says.
"Oh please, Brown, please," she squawks, "Not
now. I'll turn myself in in the morning. Please, Brown. Gimme a break."
"Gave you too many already, girl," Brown says.
"Now look at you."
Neither Brown nor Simpson want to take Melissa to Smyrna, so
they wait for a city marshal. For almost an hour, a strange kind of family
reunion goes on around Brown's car. A toothless, gangling man named Junior
wanders up, bringing Melissa some money to take with her.
"You still getting those girls to shoplift for you,
Junior?" Brown asks.
''I don't do that no more," Junior assures him. They
chat about Casey, who just got out of jail, and the Meatman, who just got in,
and Big Eye, who hasn't been seen in a while. Finally, the marshal comes for
Sweet Melissa and Brown heads toward West End to hunt for bigger game. His mood
improves.
"We make it fun," he says. "Have a good time,
catch a lot of 'em." -- Atlanta Journal Constitution, Oct.
5, 1997
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