Photographs by Virginia Lee Hunter

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Otis Schulte wants to change the subject.

In the past eight months, the mayor of tiny Gerald, Mo., has faced a recall petition. He’s seen his police department disintegrate. He’s been sued for millions of dollars, and his town has become an international laughingstock. All the while, the small-town mayor has endeavored to explain himself to anyone who will listen: from editors at the nearby Gasconade County Republican, to reporters from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to Katie Couric and 60 Minutes.

But today Schulte has had enough. It’s early fall. The leaves along the rolling stretch of Highway 50 that cuts through this town about 70 miles southwest of St. Louis are fraying at the edges. The midafternoon light is beginning to slant southward, and the air is thick with the changing seasons. It’s been months, he says, padding around the cluttered office of his home-supply store. He doesn’t want to talk about it.

But if Schulte wants to change the subject, many in Gerald are still puzzling over how Bill Jakob, a bankrupt trucker from nearby Washington, Mo., could pose for several months as a federal agent while leading the five-member Gerald Police Department on a series of warrantless drug raids before finally being outed last May as a fraud.

Why, they ask, did the Gerald police never bother to verify the imposter’s claim that he was a federal agent on loan from the fictitious “Multi-Jurisdictional Narcotics Task Force”? Or how is it, they wonder, that city police failed to perform a simple background check, which would have revealed, among other things, that Jakob had been named in a 2003 wrongful-death suit in nearby Union? For that matter, they wonder why—if, as Gerald officials allege, they believed Jakob was a federal agent—he was sworn in as a city reserve officer on May 8, one day before the FBI arrested him?

These are the questions Schulte is tired of hearing.

Jakob pleaded guilty in federal court last September to 23 counts of fraud, impersonating a federal officer and giving false statements to federal agents. The three Gerald police officers that allowed Jakob to run roughshod over their town have all been fired, and so far none of the people scooped up in Jakob’s dragnet has been prosecuted.

In other words, Schulte says, case closed.

“It’s over and done with,” says the mayor, pinching his face into a wrinkled grimace. “People are backing me. They know we didn’t go out and solicit this guy.”

That said, it takes scant prompting for Schulte—a compact, gray-haired man with a beefy mustache, wire-rimmed glasses and a kettledrum belly that hangs low over his belt—to charge that the combined pending lawsuits are “ridiculous.” He adds that the recall petition, which Franklin County authorities determined had no legal standing, was “a joke” and insists it was circulated by “drug dealers, a former mayor and non-supporters.”

“It’s like $130 million total [in damages],” says Schulte, referring to the combined federal lawsuits filed on behalf of the Gerald residents Jakob raided during his tenure at the city’s police department. “The whole city’s valuated at roughly $30 million—it might be less—but it’s way less than what they’re suing us for.”

For Schulte, the episode is one big misunderstanding: Jakob, a world-class grifter, swaggered into town and pulled the wool over the eyes of a gullible police chief, who in turn vouched for the con man’s bona fides to the mayor and city council. Jakob was so persuasive, Schulte says, that when Jakob told the city’s officers he didn’t need a warrant, they believed him “because he’s supposed to be a federal agent.”

“The guy walked the walk,” says Schulte, who adds that Jakob’s ploy was so believable that he still has doubts that Jakob was a fraud. “He had fax numbers. The license-plate frame to his car said ‘Multi-Jurisdictional Task Force.’ Even his car title was made out to the ‘Multi-Jurisdictional Task Force.’ What else could a city investigate? He had a Crown Victoria with radio equipment and lights—not everybody can have that stuff.”

Be that as it may, residents who claim their Constitutional rights were violated when Jakob and Gerald police raided their homes without search warrants are now suing Schulte, city council members, police officers, the City of Gerald and Bill Jakob. The plaintiffs charge that by failing to verify Jakob’s qualifications, the town and its officials are liable for the alleged violations. 

“I don’t see how any police officer can say they didn’t know what they were doing was wrong,” says Robert Herman, an attorney representing several Gerald residents. “To say they didn’t understand the basic concept of the Fourth Amendment? That drives credulity to the max.”

The pending legal action is not the only question left bobbing in the wake of Bill Jakob’s strange odyssey through Gerald. U.S. District Attorney Catherine Hanaway’s office continues to investigate the case, and the city is rife with rumors that more indictments are on the way. Meanwhile, people conjecture how much town officials knew about Jakob. More importantly, they wonder when they knew it, or why, if town officials really didn’t know anything, they swore in a federal agent as a reserve police officer to help patrol a town of 1,100?

“To me, what they did [by swearing Jakob in as a reserve officer] was they ratified what he did. They knew what he’d been doing, and they went back and ratified it,” says Herman. “It’s a collective madness that fell on this town.”