Just cheap bump and mark.
Posted on 03/05/2002 10:22:47 PM PST by LloydofDSS
ARRESTED OFFICER EXPOSES ALLEGED DRUG RING
A phone call soured the annual Christmas breakfast at the Archdale Police Department.
"We need to come see you," state agents told Chief Gary Lewallen.
The SBI agents brought Lewallen unsettling news. State police were going to arrest one of his men, a trusted sergeant, on drug-conspiracy charges. And they needed to arrest him on the job so he'd have no chance to run.
Within minutes, brawny Sgt. Chris Shetley was in custody, head bowed, hands cuffed behind him like any other suspect. That sight -- a uniformed officer being led out of a police station in handcuffs -- broke hearts all over the building, the chief says.
"It's something I don't ever want to see again," Lewallen says.
That same morning, Davidson County Sheriff Gerald Hege was stunned to find himself on the other side of a sting operation. A meeting of area undercover officers at the National Guard Armory in High Point turned out to be a ruse by the FBI and SBI for arresting his top three undercover vice officers -- Scott Woodall, Doug Westmoreland and William Rankin -- on federal drug-trafficking charges. Hege, though not a suspect, wasn't warned beforehand.
"It was a total shock," Hege said.
The arrests of four respected law officers on Dec. 12, 2001, rocked residents in Archdale, Lexington, Thomasville and throughout Davidson County. As more arrests followed, a story began to unfold of good cops seemingly gone bad. Local residents expressed disbelief and struggled to understand how -- and why -- such a thing could happen.
A trial, scheduled to begin March 11 in U.S. District Court in Greensboro, might provide answers to those questions. But the defendants, who pleaded not guilty in early February, are now scheduled for a change-of-plea hearing Thursday. A conviction could mean life in prison and potentially millions of dollars in fines. Attorneys for the defendants did not return phone calls from the News & Record.
Federal investigators refused requests for interviews on the case. But affidavits filed in federal court provide vivid glimpses of officers kicking in doors, stealing from dealers and distributing drugs from county undercover vehicles.
According to federal authorities, the officers, along with Wyatt Kepley, son of longtime Davidson County Commissioner Billy Joe Kepley, and Mexican national Marco Aurelio Acosta Soza, conspired last year to steal and deal tens of thousands of dollars in drugs and cash. They say Kepley amassed at least $2 million and Woodall and Westmoreland at least $250,000 each from drug trafficking.
The story began to surface with the November arrest of another police officer, who told investigators he was part of an "organized criminal conspiracy comprised at the top levels of officers from several different law enforcement agencies," according to court documents.
The informant, identified only as "CW-1" in the court affidavits, is described as "a police officer from a local department, arrested Nov. 5, 2001, on state charges of trafficking in MDA/MDMA ( also known as Ecstasy ), conspiracy to traffic in MDA/MDMA, possession with intent to sell and distribute marijuana, and conspiracy to deliver marijuana."
Thomasville patrol Sgt. Russell McHenry was arrested on those charges Nov. 5. Thomasville Police Chief Larry Murdock, formerly McHenry's boss, confirmed that it was the officer's arrest that tipped authorities to the wider conspiracy.
McHenry pleaded guilty to federal drug charges on Jan. 29. He will be sentenced in May. Before then, he is expected to testify against the other officers in their federal trial. Cooperating witnesses usually receive reduced sentences in exchange for their testimony.
Based upon information contained in court documents, the following story unfolded:
Ten years after entering police work, Kernersville native Russell McHenry, 32, was looking for a steroid source and some extra money because of a recent divorce and child-support payments.
The Glenn High School graduate told investigators that he began using illegal steroids for weightlifting in 1998 and in April 2001 began buying them from an old friend who used Lexington bodybuilder Wyatt Kepley as a supplier.
Kepley, 26, was well-known in bodybuilding circles and reputed to be a major regional supplier of steroids. In late April 2001, Kepley was arrested in San Diego with more than $1 million worth of illegal steroids.
McHenry was paying an off-duty visit to the Tiki Club, an exotic-dance club off South Main Street in High Point, when he heard of Kepley's arrest from Chris Shetley via cell phone.
Shetley, a 35-year-old minister's son, and McHenry had begun their law enforcement careers together at the Thomasville Police Department in 1990, both eventually working as vice officers. Shetley left the Thomasville force in 1995 to work for the Archdale Police Department.
McHenry said he walked outside the club and saw Davidson County undercover officer William Rankin driving a vice squad silver Cadillac. Rankin, 32, had also worked with Shetley and McHenry at the Thomasville Police Department, leaving in 1997 to become a Davidson County vice officer working the Thomasville area.
Since he knew Rankin was a steroid user, too, McHenry said, he told him of Kepley's arrest and mentioned that the bust had "cut him off" from his supplier. McHenry said Rankin offered to "fill your order" and the next day gave McHenry $300 worth of anabolic steroids free of charge.
A few days later, McHenry ordered more steroids. He told investigators that by this time, he was sure the ultimate source was Scott Woodall, another Davidson undercover cop.
Woodall, a quiet, well-liked 34-year-old, had put in 10 years with the Davidson County Sheriff's Office. Co-workers, past and present, considered him a loyal law officer and a hard-worker, often putting in 15-hour days.
But he was the ringleader of the illegal operation, according to testimony in federal court. McHenry said Woodall sold him increasingly larger amounts and varieties of drugs, making the deliveries in the Davidson vice squad's white undercover van.
A few days after his first buy from Rankin, McHenry got more unsettling news from Shetley. A partially opened package of steroids addressed to a Lexington residence had been turned over to High Point police by FedEx package handlers. A High Point police detective became suspicious when Woodall came to High Point and picked up the steroids because the Davidson sheriff's office had never shown interest in steroid cases before. Shetley said the detective planned to contact the FBI.
McHenry said he paged Rankin, Woodall's co-worker in the Davidson vice squad, to set up a meeting to warn him of a possible federal probe. McHenry said he met with Rankin and Woodall in the parking lot of the Kmart store in Thomasville. Woodall told McHenry he would quiet any suspicions by turning in the steroids package as evidence.
But McHenry said Woodall was angry at the High Point detective for even looking into the case.
"I don't know why cops are after other cops," Woodall said, according to McHenry. "I wouldn't give a ( expletive ) if a cop pulled up and had a pound of crack on him." McHenry said Woodall watched him closely to gauge his reaction to the statement.
"I don't guess I would either," McHenry said. Evidently, it was the right reply. From then on, McHenry said, he was treated like an insider. Later, McHenry said, Woodall told him that he and fellow Davidson vice officer Doug Westmoreland, who also was involved in the drug ring, had worried that Rankin "did not have the heart to take the heat" if the officers became the target of a federal investigation. Woodall told McHenry that he and Westmoreland had discussed killing Rankin.
Westmoreland, 49, had been with the Davidson County Sheriff's Office since 1994. Formerly, he was a top auto mechanic in Thomasville, and had worked for Hege in two elections before the sheriff hired him as a deputy. Colleagues say Westmoreland was an avid hunter and marksman -- probably the best shooter in the sheriff's office.
McHenry said he began buying steroids directly from Woodall, putting in large orders every few days for anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 worth of the illegal hormone. By now, McHenry was selling as well as using; he told federal investigators that between late April and November, when he was arrested, he made about $50,000 selling steroids to other bodybuilders. Shetley, he said, was one of his customers.
In late June or early July, he said, McHenry met Woodall in a grocery-store parking lot in Thomasville to get more steroids. Woodall was driving the county's white undercover van, he said.
McHenry began to complain of his financial problems and mentioned, "half-jokingly," that he could sell plenty of pot if Woodall could get it for him. He said Woodall turned around in the van, reached into a large green Tupperware container and handed McHenry four vacuum-sealed, 1-pound packages of marijuana.
"We can do as much as you need," McHenry said Woodall told him. Then he said Woodall explained that he and other Davidson vice officers often resold seized drugs instead of turning them in.
McHenry said Woodall also suggested a way they could get even more cash -- by robbing Wyatt Kepley's apartment with a fake search warrant. Woodall told him that Kepley kept $50,000 to $100,000 in cash in a safe there, McHenry said. Woodall told him that he, Rankin and Westmoreland already had broken in three times, stealing more than $160,000.
McHenry said Woodall told him that he and Rankin were irritated with Westmoreland because he had only driven the car each time they had burglarized Kepley's residence. They always were the ones who went inside.
On this July 9 visit to Kepley's apartment on Pinetop Road in Lexington, however, there would be no burglary. Instead, McHenry would enter the house with a fake search warrant. The officers knew that Kepley would be in California for a court appearance on his arrest there. So they met at a steak-house parking lot in Lexington, where Woodall handed McHenry his Davidson County badge and a hand-written warrant he had made up.
McHenry went to the residence, where Kepley's girlfriend came to the door. McHenry identified himself as Deputy "Pete Jackson" of the Davidson County Sheriff's Office and threatened the woman with arrest unless she let him search the house. She complied.
She opened Kepley's safe, where McHenry said he found steroids and a large amount of cash in a grocery-store shopping bag. He also found a suitcase containing 16,000 vials of a steroid drug. McHenry said he took that, too.
Later in Lexington, he and Woodall split $42,600 in cash and the steroid cache. Later, McHenry told authorities, he and Woodall sold the steroids back to the unsuspecting Kepley for $12,000, as a "favor."
McHenry began recruiting other drug users to sell steroids, marijuana and Ketamine, an animal tranquilizer also used as a street drug. By July or August 2001, McHenry said, he had learned that Woodall was getting steroids from Kepley and marijuana and cocaine from a Mexican known to McHenry only as "Julio."
"Julio," federal authorities say, was really Marco Aurelio Acosta Soza, a 23-year-old Mexican national living in Lexington with his wife and children.
By mid-August, according to McHenry's own reckoning, he was selling five ounces of cocaine from Woodall each week. In late September, he said, Woodall met him in a motel room at the Howard Johnson in Thomasville, where McHenry paid him $11,500 for half a kilogram of cocaine. Authorities said in the affidavit that McHenry's girlfriend witnessed the sale and later confirmed it to investigators.
In October, McHenry said, he and Woodall moved into trafficking Ecstasy pills at nightclubs and parties. McHenry said Chris Shetley and two others, neither identified, were selling. On Oct. 31, McHenry said, he twice met Woodall in the East Davidson High School parking lot in Thomasville to take delivery of a total of seven pounds of marijuana. On one of the rendezvous, "Julio" accompanied Woodall, McHenry said.
McHenry said he and Woodall and the other officers also continued their quest for illegal cash. He said he, Woodall and Shetley broke into a High Point residence to rob drug dealers but found the house already burglarized. He said they also tried to shake down a guest at the Best Western motel in Lexington but found only a few grams of marijuana.
On Nov. 2, McHenry and Woodall, armed with another fake warrant, set out to rob a group of Mexicans in Rowan County, rumored to be large cocaine dealers, McHenry said.
After meeting in the Kmart parking lot in Thomasville, McHenry said, they drove south on I-85 in Woodall's undercover gold Chevy Caprice. After a few minutes, they got off at the East Spencer exit, then traveled about a mile to a white mobile home with plastic over the windows and a chicken-wire fence out front. A couch and a refrigerator sat outside beside the front door.
Woodall kicked in the front door, then entered the house with gun drawn, McHenry told investigators. Two Mexican men inside threw up their hands and were told to sit on the couch while McHenry searched the trailer.
He said Woodall took $900 from the pocket of one of the men, and they also seized three pounds of marijuana and three guns from the residence. Then, McHenry said, they drove to Woodall's "stash house," a brown wooden storage shed at Woodall's residence at 1014 Virginia Drive in Thomasville, and divided up the take.
But by now, serious problems were cropping up, according to McHenry's account in the federal affidavits.
On Oct. 15, Acosta Soza was arrested in Texas with $48,000 worth of cocaine - -- a shipment bound for Woodall, McHenry said. He said Woodall told him that he had to go to Texas and post $24,000 in cash to get "Julio" out of jail.
What McHenry didn't know was that state agents were keeping tabs on him. Thomasville Police Chief Larry Murdock had gotten a tip from an informant that McHenry was dealing drugs and alerted the SBI.
On Nov. 5, three days after the fake "raid" in East Spencer, state agents arrested McHenry at his West Market Street residence in Greensboro and charged him with drug trafficking.
McHenry agreed to cooperate with agents and was observed making four separate cocaine buys from Woodall, according to federal documents. On one of the final buys, on Nov. 29, he wore a hidden microphone.
Federal officers said they heard Woodall telling McHenry that Sheriff Hege had confronted him and Westmoreland that day about rumors they were involved in selling drugs. Woodall told McHenry that he had denied all to Hege and that Hege thought the rumors of dirty deputies might be a ploy by SBI officials to smear a longtime foe like Hege as an election year approached.
Hege tells a different story. He admits that one of his deputies heard rumors that federal and state officials were looking into area vice officers, including his own. He says he called in his officers and told them that if they were dirty, they would go down.
Hege contends that Woodall was trying to reassure McHenry by telling him the sheriff wasn't taking the charges seriously.
"Who are you going to believe?" Hege asks.
Hege also disputes other assertions in the federal affidavit -- that a man who came to Hege to warn him his vice officers were dirty was "roughed up" by Woodall and Westmoreland, and that a Mexican man shaken down by Woodall for cash was "run off" from the sheriff's office when he came to complain. Hege said his office is cooperating fully with the SBI to investigate both allegations.
After the officers were arrested Dec. 12, federal and state agents searched the trailer headquarters of the Davidson County Sheriff's Office vice squad, confiscating cash, suspected drugs, packaging materials and about 50 guns.
In the storage building kept by Woodall as a "stash house" at his residence in Thomasville, officers confiscated scales, packaging equipment and more than a pound of what appeared to be cocaine. At Westmoreland's Bowers Road home in Thomasville, officers seized 37 guns, including one with the serial number obliterated, and more suspected drugs.
All of the accused former officers, except for Rankin and McHenry, were denied bond and are being held in the Forsyth County Jail, segregated from other prisoners. Rankin, whom authorities said they could tie only to the steroid part of the ring, is free on $50,000 bond pending trial. McHenry has been released on his own recognizance.
Acosta Soza, described by court documents as an "illegal alien," also is being held at the Forsyth County Jail. In addition to the drug charges, he is under a detention order from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Since Woodall, Westmoreland and Rankin were arrested in December, Davidson County District Attorney Garry Frank has dismissed drug charges against more than 30 people because those officers had a role in their arrests. Last month, a convicted drug dealer filed an appeal seeking a new trial because the three ex-deputies were instrumental in his arrest. Frank said he has received letters from other convicted offenders asking him to re-examine their cases because of the officers' arrests.
Meanwhile, Hege is trying to repair the damage -- both to his department and his reputation. He has revamped drug search procedures for the sheriff's office.
Deputies have been frisked before and after conducting drug raids. Since the arrests, Hege says, he or another top officer has been on the scene when every major search is executed. And Hege, though he still hosts a local radio show and a national cable-TV show from the pink-celled Davidson County Jail, has cut back on interviews.
Though Hege has publicly shrugged off any potential political fallout from the arrests of three of his top deputies, political observers think the sheriff, who won re-election easily in 1998, will face his greatest political challenge in the 2002 election. Eight challengers, three Republicans and five Democrats, have filed to run for sheriff. One of them, former Highway Patrolman Roy Holman, decisively defeated by Hege in the last election, says he'll use the arrests in his campaign.
"The bottom line is it's a lack of leadership," Holman said. "You have to stay on top of things, and this apparently is not what has happened." While Hege works at preserving his political appeal, his deputies are busy trying to rebuild trust with the community. That's not going to be an easy job, says Edwin Delattre, a national expert on police ethics.
"Those charged to defend the Constitution are in a position to do it more harm than anyone," Delattre says.
Staff writers Bob Burchette and Phillip Reese contributed to this story.
You people are so twisted.
You act as if people are totally helpless and unaccountable when around drugs, then you want to legalize them.
SHEEEEEESH!!
I almost feel sorry for them - being an ex-cop in the pen is going to really, really suck.
The prohibition on drugs has robbed these police officers of their free will choice. As mere brutes with no conscience, they were forced by society to steal and plunder. It's all the fault of our policy and our social institutions and our laws that the law enforcement officers are being persecuted today. < /sarc>
Just cheap bump and mark.
Stay Safe !
Jeez, where to begin? How about with the idiocy and futility of prohibition laws? The same thing happened in the 20's and 30's with booze.
-ccm
Not to mention the length of time they'll be in for-- undoubtedly their law-enforcement status will be an aggravating factor at sentencing. Boy are they going to get the hammer dropped on them.
-ccm
Now if scumbag Sheriff Hitler would stop having roadblocks every 50 feet, life might get back to normal.
Since he will be on the ballot (unless we get him now, in the primaries), I won't be able to vote straight ticket this time.
Scratch that, on second thought, I think he will be one of several Republicans on the ticket, no primary... Maybe I CAN go straight ticket again after all.
Shetley, a 35-year-old minister's son,
It's clear to me that if he had been raised by swingers instead of a minister,this wouldn't have happened.If you expose your child to a building full of admitted sinners each Sunday,what else can you expect? (sarcasm directed towards some posters on the Van Dam threads)
HUH? (LMAOROTF) VICTIM COPS ? I guess the dealers are victims and the users are victims and the plants are victims and the oh i could go on and on but i wont.
CHOOSING THE PATH YOU WALK DOES NOT MAKE YOU A VICTIM!
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