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June 22, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:45
John Baeza: 'A View From the Frontline of the Drug War'

Former NY Police Department narcotics detective John Baeza at the Ron Paul Institute May conference on "Winning the War on the War on Drugs," speaking of his conversion from drug warrior to anti drug war warrior. Harrowing tales of undercover drug buys!

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Time Text
New York Cop's Experience 00:15:06
My name is John Beza.
He said some of you might know me from the campaign, but I do have a, I had a career before that, and I had a life before that, and I was a policeman.
So let me just give you some background on me, a little bit of background.
Both my grandfathers were policemen in the New York City Police Department.
My uncle was a police officer in the New York City Police Department.
My father was a lieutenant in the fire department of New York City, and my uncle was a battalion chief in the fire department.
So I guess I was either going to become a cop or a fireman, and I chose police officer.
I didn't choose it to carry a gun and a shield and have power over anybody.
I chose it for family history purposes because I felt that that's what I wanted to do.
And I did a little reading when I was younger, and I thought I want to be a policeman.
I actually really helped people, and I had a lot of people in my family doing that.
So I started my career just before I became a policeman as a correction officer.
Most of you know that as a prison guard at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York, which is about 20 miles north of the Bronx.
It's a maximum security prison.
I was too young to become a cop, but I wasn't too young to become a correction officer.
So I became a correction officer at 18 years old.
I was three months out of high school, did a little training, and there I was in Sing Sing, 30-foot wall, high walls and guard towers, and there I was.
And this is going to be part of the story, part of my story, and there's going to be some information on this when we get back to it.
So I worked at Sing Sing for about two and a half years, and then I finally got onto the police department, which is what I wanted.
And I became a police officer in the 32nd precinct in New York, and that is in Harlem.
That is in central Harlem.
At the time, in the 80s, it was the most violent per capita precinct in New York City, maybe the country.
It's one square, less than one square mile, and there were about, I'd say, about 60, 70 homicides a year in less than one square mile.
So you can imagine the workload for police officers and violent crimes.
But as I learned, as a patrolman, as a police officer, I learned that these violent crimes, 99% of them had to do with the drug war and had to do with people needing drugs, getting money for drugs, fighting over drugs, because, of course, we know that there's no court system for drug dealers.
So I did patrol in a very dangerous precinct.
In fact, when you open the doors to this precinct, the big brass doors you open up, there's a memorial wall.
And on that memorial wall, there are 26 names of 26 officers that died in that less than one square mile precinct, the 32nd precinct.
That's by far the most of any precinct in New York City and probably maybe the nation, I would guess.
So I was scared when I got there.
I was scared.
I was scared when I was in Sing Sing.
But, you know, I went around and I was, as a patrol officer, I was inculcated.
Drugs to me were bad, and we needed to arrest people, and that was how it was.
So people were being arrested for drugs on the street every day, mostly vials of cocaine, crack cocaine, what have you.
And what I noticed was this old saying, stupid criminal behavior makes for stupid police.
I noticed that's a kind of a station house credo.
That is actually true because drug dealing on the street level is very simple.
You go on the corner and you start slinging vials of crack or whatever on the corner.
And to police that, most policemen, you know, they'll put everybody up against the wall, check their pockets, see if anybody drops a bag, a couple vials of crack, and they'll arrest them and they'll take them to jail and make overtime on it.
And that's what people called arrests called a collar.
They call it collars for dollars.
And that's what was happening.
You'd make an arrest and you'd make collars for dollars, make overtime, because you'd make a lot of overtime.
I want arrests.
It's not like other cities in New York.
You make an arrest, you take somebody all the way down to arrangement.
You might make 17 hours overtime.
So the police officers were not learning the intricacies of search warrants and stop and frisk or crime fighting in general.
They were just new that you throw a couple people up against a wall and see what you find.
You know, chase a couple people in an abandoned building, you're going to find some drug vials on them, some crack vials on them.
So this was kind of my experience on patrol.
And we did deal with violent crimes as well.
But again, like I say, out of those 60 or 70 homicides every year in that less than one square mile, I would say 90%, maybe higher.
You know, it's anecdotal.
It's not scientific.
But I would say that 90% of those homicides were drug-related.
It was just, it was a war that was going on.
And because there's no courts for these, for the drug dealers, you know, they fought it out on the street.
But you don't see, you know, Coors Light and Miller Brewing Company shooting it out on the streets.
You know, if they have to go to court, they go to court, right?
But the drug dealers don't have that, so they end up shooting each other.
And this is what we have.
We have a lot of violence.
So that was the early part of my career.
I spent a couple of years on patrol there.
And then I decided that I wanted to look towards getting a gold shield, the detective shield for the NYPD.
That's the holy grail for most cops.
Most cops, like when they want that detective shield.
And I wanted it as well.
So I put in for narcotics.
And the fast track was to, if you put in for an undercover job, you would get fast-tracked and you could make a detective in 18 months.
The reason they do that is because undercover work is very, very dangerous.
So I got the job and I'm going to explain to you a little bit about what undercover work is in real life.
What it is.
It is not just a plain clothes cop in an unmarked car.
That's not undercover.
A lot of people say that's undercover.
That's not undercover.
Undercover, an undercover officer or detective is someone who has such as me.
They took my name out of the computer, the department computer.
I stopped receiving the department magazine.
Yes, the NYPD is big enough to have its own magazine.
I stopped receiving the magazine.
The only thing I received really was my paycheck.
Nobody was supposed to know that I was a cop.
I had to, I never wore a uniform.
I used the judges' elevators if I went to court.
I would go through the back doors, precincts, never through the front doors.
And it was a transformation.
And it did transform me from a beat cop into somebody that could fit in on the street and make buys on the street.
So this is what an real undercover work is.
We're not talking about plain clothes guys just jumping out of a car.
We're talking about undercovers who have to who make buys from anywhere from, say, I would go out and buy sometimes a hand-to-hand buy of several vials of crack cocaine for some money.
Or on other occasions, I would go inside an apartment and buy a couple of kilos of cocaine and maybe a gun.
It all depends upon the day.
Sometimes I do both in a day.
Typically, my attire would be different for different types of buys.
If we were going to make buys, low-level buys, you know, I'd dress down, I'd kind of put crease on my face and wear old clothes.
And I mean, nobody really thought I was a cop.
In fact, cops certainly didn't know I was a cop because I remember one time I actually was stopped.
I'll give you a little story here while I can.
I was making a buy.
The police department doesn't give you your own car either, by the way.
You don't get a Ferrari or anything like that.
I used my own car.
I put New Jersey tags on it.
Somebody gave me New Jersey plates.
I don't know if they were stolen or not, but I put them on.
And I scratched off my inspection stickers.
So my car looked like it was from Jersey.
So I would drive around sometimes, and sometimes I would drive around my car with my car, and dealers would come up to the car.
So at this one point, I was at this one street, and a couple dealers would come up to the car and say, what do you want?
I'd say, let me get an eight ball, whatever.
And I'd have the department money, and I'd make a buy.
And I made a buy with a guy, and I took the drugs.
And what I normally do is take the drugs and just put it on the seat or whatever.
But all of a sudden, I saw a uniformed patrol car, marked patrol car, coming right at me.
And I knew I was transformed at that point because I hid the drugs.
I hid the drugs.
I had no ID, no shield or badge.
We call the shield in New York.
I had no radio, no nothing to identify myself.
And these cops came up to me and they asked me, what are you doing here?
What are you doing in this neighborhood?
And I gave the worst answer you could possibly give because everybody gives this answer.
I'm seeing my girlfriend.
Well, that didn't work.
And this one young cop started to berate me.
And he actually struck me with his flashlight, one of those mag lights on my thigh a couple of times.
Give me a couple bruises on my thigh.
And his partner was an old-timer.
His partner came out of the car.
And when his partner looked at me, I said to him, I used all police terminology, UF61, the form numbers, you know, overtime form numbers, stuff so he would know that I was a cop.
And finally, I was able to drive out of there and get out of there.
But I had a friend, my partner, he was actually arrested.
He was actually arrested by officers that he actually used to work with in the same precinct.
They didn't even know it was him.
And they brought him in, brought him all the way to the cells in the precinct.
And our narcotic sergeant had to go search for him.
We had to find him and get him out of the cells.
And he was a very good undercover because he was being very belligerent, even while he was in the cells.
He was really good.
I learned a lot.
I learned a lot from him.
So you get into that zone, you do.
And you also get into a zone where you can feel for somebody.
I made numerous long-term buys where I'd buy kilos of cocaine, guns, and I'd get to know the person.
And I'd actually kind of like them, you know, and kind of be their friend.
I mean, this is what we're doing.
And then the time for the case to be closed would come, and I would be arrested along with the alleged bad guy.
And I would actually feel bad.
I'm not afraid to say it.
I'd actually feel bad.
I'd say, oh my gosh, you know, and feel like kind of like a traitor, you know, because, you know, so now I look back on it, of course, I feel bad about it.
But these are some of the episodes that you go through as an undercover officer.
What we were doing basically out there with this buy-and-bust stuff is we were racking up body counts, bodies.
How many bodies do you get?
And that's what they called it.
They said, how many bodies did you get today?
20, 30.
And it all depended.
The undercover would make the buy, pull around the corner or walk around the corner, finally get back to the auto, and then radio back in, you know, the description, and they'd make the arrest.
And we do that numerous times until they filled up the vans, the prisoner vans, and that was it.
So it was a body count.
And it was also a thing where it was drugs on the table, guns on the table, so they could take photos, photo ops.
Everything was big about photo ops.
They want to put the drugs on the table.
In the meantime, there was no slowing down of the drug trade.
There was no, you know, we weren't making any kind of difference there.
And I think we all knew it.
But I'll take you to the point now in my career where I finally knew it.
And I finally understood.
It was very, it's a very emotional experience for me because it was a long-term buy I had been making several buys with the same guy.
And I was purchasing large amounts of heroin.
And on the last, one of the, it wasn't going to be the last buy, but on one of the last buys, I was purchasing about, I don't know, $16,000 worth of heroin.
And he took me to, the guy took me to an abandoned building on the fourth floor.
And he said, listen, there's an apartment in here, and we have the stuff in here.
And as soon as we got to that fourth floor, he turned around and he pointed a gun at me.
And he said, this is the end of the line for you.
He used a curse word at the end.
But, you know, this, was I scared?
Of course I was scared.
You know, I thought this is the end.
I'm going to die in a tenement in Harlem.
And it came up to me.
I started giving him the money.
You know, it's not my money.
It's the police department's money.
So I gave him money.
But as being in character, I kept some of the money stashed in my socks.
So he didn't get all the money, but he got most of the money.
Incident That Changed Mindset 00:02:21
But he didn't run away.
He didn't leave.
He had the gun pointed at my head.
And he said, I want you to turn around with the gun at my head.
And I knew, I instinctively knew that he was going to shoot me, but he couldn't shoot me in the face.
He wanted to shoot me in the back of the head.
And he was going to leave.
And I just refused to turn around.
I had no gun on me.
I didn't carry my gun because they always pat you down.
So I didn't carry a gun or anything.
I had no backup.
My backup team was a couple blocks away.
No means of communication.
So I wouldn't, I refused to turn around.
And eventually there was just a slight struggle and he ran down the stairs.
I ran down after him.
He was gone, long gone.
What happened was he took off in a car.
And at that point, I stood in the middle of the street looking around.
And finally, my field team came.
They saw me.
It's not their fault.
They just, you know, this is how it works.
You're undercover, you deal with the situation.
That was the last buy I ever made.
Because during that buy, during those seconds that that gun was to my head, and they caught the guy eventually, he admitted to what he had done.
He didn't know I was a cop.
But during that time period, I realized that I almost lost my life for what?
Somebody wanted to put something in their body.
Somebody wanted to make a personal choice that they wanted to use a drug.
And so why shouldn't they?
I mean, I really, it really hit home with me.
If it wasn't for that incident, which was my last buy, if it wasn't for that incident, I don't think I would be here today because that incident drove me towards a libertarian mindset.
It drove me towards learning about the drug war and learning about ending the drug war because I did not want to die for something like that.
And I thought it was ridiculous.
And what happened was I was offered a transfer prior to this.
I was on the transfer list for the Drug Enforcement Task Force, which was elite before the terrorism thing.
Drug War Farce 00:03:50
This was the elite thing.
They give you, this is where you get the car, you get the money, you get the Fed's money and everything.
And I went up to my lieutenant and I told him, I don't want to go.
He says, well, where do you want to go to?
You're good work.
I said, I want to go to Special Victim Squad, which is we investigate rapes, child abuse, sex crimes, real victims, because I wanted to be a real detective and actually have a victim and help a victim.
So I was transferred there.
And this is what I want to talk to you about a little bit here.
Just here's some talking points now.
When I went to Special Victims Squad, and you might have seen the TV show is on TV.
I haven't seen it, but now it's famous, but it wasn't famous when I was there.
There were 22 detectives for the borough of Manhattan, all Manhattan, who handled all child abuse, felony, sex crimes, sexual homicides, all those cases, child abuse cases.
And you would handle at any one time you'd have on your desk, you'd have a caseload.
And you might be handling a woman who was raped at gunpoint, a child who's burned with an iron, some horrible cases.
And you're one person, so you're juggling.
You can only do one thing at a time.
And it made me think, and I realized at the same time, you know, the narcotics division in Manhattan had a thousand detectives enforcing victimless drug laws.
Yet we only had 22 detectives to investigate these crimes that were stacking up on our desks.
So I realized at this point that the drug war is a farce.
It's a fool's errand.
And I soon, eventually I retired from the police department.
And that drove me into the libertarian mindset and so forth.
Some of the lessons I learned is one thing is that I don't think, and I think some of our other speakers here would agree with me, there's one thing in this world that all the tribunals, the narcotics courts, the extra cops, the narcotics cops cannot stop.
They cannot stop human desire.
People have a desire to use drugs, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, whatever it may be.
You will never ever stop that desire.
All the money in the world, everything in the world, you will never stop that desire.
And I'm going to go back and tell you a little bit when I was at Sing Sing.
Now, here's a maximum security jail.
So we're talking about, you know, we're going to stop drugs coming into the United States.
Well, just before I got to Sing Sing, there was a riot.
They did an assessment of the jail.
Now, everything's surrounded by 30-foot walls, remember, in Sing Sing, okay?
Big maximum.
This is a big prison.
They found 30 full-grown marijuana plants inside in the garden area of Sing Sing.
They also did a study, in that same study, they also found out that the price of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana inside Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison was about the same as it was on the street.
So it tells you how easy it was to get drugs into a maximum security jail.
And we're talking about stopping drugs coming into the country.
I mean, obviously, it's a fool's errand.
It's a fallacy.
Manpower and Optimism 00:07:25
But we have to understand a couple of things.
We have to understand that all this militarism, and Dr. Paul talks about it, the militarization of the police and SWAT raids and all this stuff.
I see it expanding.
I've been a policeman.
I know.
I see it expanding, and it makes me sick.
It makes me sick of the profession that I once was so proud of because innocent people are being killed over this fool's errand, this war, that we can actually do something about.
And we are, and we do have reason for optimism.
We have reason for optimism because I see that we're doing fairly well on the marijuana front.
I know we have some speakers that will talk about that coming up, and I'll enjoy that.
But I really am encouraged by that.
So I look for a little bit of optimism there.
My pessimistic nature brings me back to talk about what they call the harder drugs.
When are we going to get that?
Well, the only thing I could tell people is I tell people, listen, if your wife or your relative was a victim of a crime, do you want the majority of the police force to be dealing with victimless crimes like the drug war?
Or would you want them to be dealing with crimes that have victims?
Rapes, murders, robberies, property crimes.
And how about fraud nowadays?
Fraud is a big thing.
But we don't have that.
We have people, I mean, people join the police department.
They want to be soldiers.
That's not why I joined.
And also, I read a comment, Daniel, on one of the, I shouldn't read the comments, but I read a comment.
Somebody called me a Nazi.
But let me explain that I did this.
I was part of this drug war.
Well, I was part of it.
And one day I did a speech for law enforcement against prohibition.
I was a speaker there, I'm a member, I was a speaker.
And they had a list of questions.
And I said, you could ask any question.
I said, but I looked at the questions, and I said, I want you to ask this one particularly.
And that question was, what would you say to everybody that you've been a part of arresting or had arrested or whatever, you know, as an undercover or whatever, what would you say to them if you could talk to them?
So I was there with a DEA agent.
And so when I chose that question, he had to answer it too.
I don't know that he wanted to, but when he answered it, he answered it first.
And his answer was, what I would say to all the people I arrested for drugs is tough luck.
That was a crime.
That's it.
That's basically what he said.
Now my turn came to speak to these a bunch of college students.
And I said, if I could fit everybody in this room, it was a huge room.
So if I could fit everybody in this room that I had a part of putting to jail for narcotics, I would apologize to them and tell them that I was the criminal for violating their rights to put something, to possess something, to put something into their body.
So I take my responsibility for it.
I do take responsibility for what I've done.
And this, to me, speaking about this and having the opportunity to speak before you about this, is my ability to try to make amends, maybe, with myself, if I can, and for the bad things that I've done.
Because it's not good when you arrest somebody for drugs.
It's not good at all.
But, you know, one of the things that I've always remembered is my father, who's passed away last year, he was a lieutenant in the fire department.
And when I was a drug warrior one day, he told me, he said, I think we should legalize all drugs.
And I said, Dad, come on, you got to be kidding me.
You know, this is crazy talk from you, my dad, you know?
Well, my dad wasn't so crazy after all, was he?
You know, he knew exactly what was going on.
He had been in the ghetto.
He had seen what was going on.
And I still, to this day, I use him as my, he's my hero.
But I realized that we need to send a message.
So here's the message.
I told you a little about my career here, and I'm kind of winding up here a little bit.
But my message is today is to talk about, again, where do we want our manpower?
Do we want our manpower on these victimless crimes?
Do we want our towns running around with tanks?
You got a town by me.
I think it has, I don't know, 2,000 people, and it has a tank.
I'm thinking, what are they going to use the tank for?
You know, I mean, I don't understand it.
We never needed tanks.
When I was in special victims, we used to do search warrants all the time.
And that's when you learn when you were a detective, when you had a victim, that's when you learned the intricacies of real police work.
Whereas when you work narcotics work, you don't.
You don't learn that stuff because it's just, like I said, stupid criminal criminality makes for stupid cops.
Well, when you're dealing with a victim, you've got to go to court.
This is important.
You've got to rape victim.
You've got to murder victim there.
So you've got to make sure you do things the right way.
Well, we're not doing that.
We're just plugging our police forces full of narcotics cops and full of SWAT teams and militarized units.
And it's just not very good.
It's not very good for the victims.
So think about our relatives.
Let's think about our relatives.
Let's think about our family members.
And let's think about where the manpower is going.
Let's not let the manpower go to the victimless crimes.
Whether it's hard drugs or not, man, let's let it go to the rape victims and those child abuse victims.
I've seen too many of them, too many horrible, horrible cases of that.
And, you know, it shouldn't be 22 detectives here and 1,000 detectives over here working narcotics and only 22 working on these child abuse cases.
So to close up, I've been a little long-winded and I apologize, but I wanted to get you an idea of what Real Undercover does out there, what real narcotics work is, a body count.
And I also wanted to give you an idea of the personnel and the manpower.
Because some people don't realize it.
They don't realize the manpower situation out there.
And to me, that's a good talking point to go with.
So with that, Daniel, I'd like to wrap up because I don't want to go too long here and you don't need to hear a bunch of war stories from me.
But I really appreciate the time and I hope I've added something to all of you and to your knowledge.
I really do.
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