RAYMOND CHANDLER MEETS JACK KEROUAC MEETS THE FOLKS FROM
"POLICE ACADEMY"? CALVIN CASE GIVES RAMS FANS HIS VIEW OF THE PACE/LANKFORD
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Since some thirty non-precinct officers somehow or other got involved in this major raid and lots of tax dollars were wasted it was too big to hush up and some braggarts from the county leaked the story to the press. The people held in the incident, who were supposed to get their measly $50, were from a local detail shop (St. Louis speak for car wash for folks from LA). They were not players in any sense, however were poor and black and that is always a good enough reason to hold someone, heck charges can be thought up...er brought up later. Picture the cast of Car Wash if you will. Now add the fact that the carwash guys have the key to their good client's house whose car they polish (the sports agent) cause they gotta water the plants and happen to be friends with a couple of rich guys who happen to be sports figures cause they wash their cars too. Ever party at a friend's parents house cause the friend parent was outta town, you get the picture.
>From the would be players aka car wash drying rag jockeys view: "Mind you Lankford has been shot at by jealous boyfriends before getting his old BMW holed in the process. So let's not involve girlfriends but we need unattached girls.... hmmm our buddies, the rich sports guys will party with us and pay for everything but we gotta bring the babes... and one of em is a baby face (Pace who is not exactly known for his good looks...and how would you like to have 330+ pounds lying on top of you) so it's got be a tough gal, good looking and no drug queen". (The only drugs here were Lankford's viagra and that for his soft bat problem. I heard someone put a fake rhino horn in his locker this week in case the viagra stops working and he wanted to go back to natural drugs).
The detail shop lads rack their brains and come up with the brilliant idea to run an ad in the Riverfront Times for some unattached females.
Now our wannabe mackerels (as in the French slang) have the right idea but aren't too clear on going prices. From the insulted sex worker, who got wired $150 to do two guys and both of them celebs, and one of them fat (ok heavy), plus a fifty dollar kickback????!!!! That's only fifty a head no pun intended and what if our mackerels get amorous themselves? Now we are down to $25!!! Heck $25 a pop for four guys is well below daytime street market prices and they wanted a strip show to boot. These fools deserve to be busted. (It no wonder the only person who would respond to these cheapskates offer would be the fools from vice). A halfway decent stripper for a bachelor party is at least $250+tip and that doesn't include any hanky panky either. These two fools really had no idea what they were doing and that is the only thing going to save them. The only thing they have on them at the moment is trespassing and that will not be pursued. I got that from the good girlfriend of the sister of mackerel number one.
According to 6th precinct officers (whose district it was) there may have been some jealousy/anger on the part of a the officers who let this story go to the press (weeks after the fact). It seem there are a few officers that look for a celeb to pop just to prove a point. This is especially true with the desk jockeys and wannabe's from STL's notoriously poorly disciplined and ill-trained mobile reserve who make up the pampered pet HQ flying squads. Recently one such task force was made up of a county/city team of spit shined vice desk jockeys. According to the line cops (unlike the jackasses from the mobile reserve I have nothing but the highest respect for the line cops), these Mobile-reserve REMFs (for anyone who was not in the military this means Rear Echelon M***** F*****s) and their twinkle toe partners from the county read what they thought was an illegal ad in a local rag for an escort service and went ballistic and arrived with more force cars/officers than an armored cav regiment to make a misdemeanor bust.
Mind you less than 4 blocks to the north of this "major bust" is the STL stroll or red light district where within a few minutes it would be possible to find three paddy wagons of street walkers day or night as it has been the traditional area for this service since around the 1904 world fair. Go into archives in at Postnet.com and do a search for "prostitution"--heck the STL Post-dispatch made it easy a while back with a front page story on in a Sunday paper to include the peak hours and prices with a little map for the tourist no less (darn thoughtful of them, finally some good reporting from the PD). Within a mile of this area are many "hotels" that see fit to rent rooms for the hour starting at about $7.00. No doubt for the bone tired traveler who just wants an hour "cat"-nap in a lovely almost up and coming neighborhood. The geniuses from the joint vice squad somehow overlooked this fact in their desire to protect the public from a party in a private fenced-in condo. The whole thing was handled so badly that the joint vice squad was disbanded in disgrace.
These vice squaders mobile reserves from the city are the same heroes the police chief Harrmon (he of last year's almost lost/overlooked 3 million dollar "oh now that you ask here it is" police secretaries slush fund) personally led in a mace spraying, stick wielding, infantry and horse mounted charge into the crowd of helpless women and children at the Soulard Marti-gras parade in an effort to protect the 100,000 or parade goers from a few underage minors with one half empty can of warm watery 3.2 beer with a lipstick stained cigarette butt in it, injuring hundreds in the process (also in PD archives for Feb 99).
The bozos from the county flush with their success in the nitty gritty city are back protecting the "rough" city of Clayton (average house price around a 3/4 million or 4 million in California dollars) and keeping it free of litter bugs and *gasp* the most evil of all criminals (in Clayton"s eyes)--poor people. Panhandling is an offense that carries the death penalty in Clayton.
The STL mobile reserve types are back at doing what they do best, leaning on the local merchants and running the payday loan operations (a great racket cause if you gotta collect on a starving widow you can do it with company employees in Police uniforms!!!!).
I think that the prosecutors, the anti-heroes from vice, the Post-Dispatch and the real police from out on the line (who have been uncharacteristically not shy in expressing their contempt for their REMF brethren on this one) would really like this one to go away. The court system in STL is very good making that happen when they need to clean up a little mess. Maybe the RFT might take a swipe or two at this, however I have it from a fair source that they are football fans too and right now STL already has charges against some officers in altering a police report involving the police and a murder and two such cases would really be bad for business. The DA in ST Louis just had her own son busted for a half pound of weed last week and would really like the press's attention elsewhere than on the court system right now. The Cards and Rams major ad clients of the POST are not too keen on having their names dragged through the mud at the moment as neither has posted winning teams lately and the Rams are planning to back Little here in the court system and don't need anymore aggravation or attention.
Enough cops are now trying on different duties over this that the careful balance between the press and cops is outta wack because the press printed stuff from so far outside normal channels that the normal channels are now blocked (scuttlebutt from the secondary's at the Cheshire Inn bar at 2:30 AM drinking buddies).
Calvin Case