The Dark Side – Just Wing It
Having worn the blue badge of a Texas Game Warden for a good many years, I can attest to being privy, and even a party to, more than one conversation with my fellow field game wardens that went something like this: “Man – how’d you like to be one of the undercover (UC) guys? Heck, all you gotta do is run around wherever they send you, pay a little attention to what the local outlaws are doing, drink beer, and hunt and fish all the time. That’s some pretty easy money, right there. Sign me up, coach.”
And actually, Retired Sergeant Game Warden Emil E. “Sonny” Seewald, the O.G. (if you don’t know, Google it) of the UC guys, would agree.
Sonny said, “I liked it (UC work) first rattle out of the box. Shoot -this was EASY. Much easier than sittin’ out on the @#$^$%-ing road all night, where maybe you gonna catch ‘em and maybe you ain’t.”
But it’s really NOT that easy.
When Sonny first went under fulltime in 1976, nobody, including his higher-ups, had a plan for how to go about it. He and Game Warden Gary Turner were the firsts.
They didn’t have any set policies and procedures or a budget to get it done. Sonny was issued a ten-year-old blue Chevy truck and was told, “Just wing it”.
So that’s what he did. It started off slow.
His boss told him, “Take that truck down to the Valley for whitewinged dove season and see what you can do.”
So, he and Gary gathered up some shotguns, some shells and a few cold beers, and headed south.
When the shooting started, they’d find a place where the hunting was hot and park nearby. Then, they’d sit up on some chairs in the back of the truck with shotguns in hand, sip on a beer or two, and count drops.
When the drops added up to enough birds for a hunter to be over the limit, they’d radio a field warden to go in and take care of business.
Counting drops was all well and good, but, given the time, any field game warden could make overthe- limit cases that way.
To catch the guys who were really good at getting away with that which they ought not do, you had to get in amongst ‘em. Hometown rednecks and good ol’ boys aren’t the easiest bunch to infiltrate.
To do so, one has to be one, and one has to have time; lots of it. And in a world where political whims and public policy regarding fish and wildlife conservation were driven by results that could be easily coded, quantified and monetized, getting the time and money to do big things was going to be a tough sell with upper management, and consequently, a hard row to hoe for Sonny and Gary to prove their worth.
So, Sonny and Gary set out to learn from the Department of Public Safety and other law enforcement agencies that had established covert units.
But the learning curve wasn’t just about how things needed to be documented and the proper legal procedures to make good cases for prosecution or – better yet – cases that were so airtight the crooks plead guilty in lieu of going to trial. Sonny and Gary also needed to know how to play dominoes, how to convincingly act drunk when they weren’t, how to pick out the ringleaders in a beer joint, and, most importantly, how to NOT act like a cop.
Because the funny thing about beer joints is that there are no timeouts. No do-overs. No alllee, all-lee, all come frees. You don’t get to pick who you deal with. If the biggest, baddest dude in the bar wants to try to sell you drugs, you don’t run off to try and buy fish from somebody else.
You listen. You learn. You document and establish a relationship.
More on all that next week…
