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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.”
Gerald isn’t much to look at. The last in a series of small Franklin County towns strung along Highway 50 east of Union, it has an elementary school, one stoplight, one liquor store, a grocer and, including the Subway, three restaurants. The nearest Wal-Mart is 10 miles east across the Gasconade County line, and now that the town’s only bar has shut down, the closest watering hole is 4 miles away (and across the county line) in Rosebud.
Like much of rural Missouri, Gerald has its share of drug use—pot, mainly, but also meth. And as Franklin County towns like Union and Washington have become increasingly urbanized, Gerald, like Leslie and Beaufort to its west, has received many of the county’s poorest residents. It’s an unassuming sort of place you’d hardly notice as you slowed briefly on your way to Owensville.
Unless, that is, you happened to be one of the unlucky few who were pulled over by a pair of young men posing as police officers on the night of December 29, 2007, in the nearby town of Sullivan. Foreshadowing the fraud to come, the men, who reportedly threatened to assault some of the people they pulled over, were driving the personal vehicle of Gerald’s newly appointed police chief, Ryan McCrary, who had loaned them the vehicle.
McCrary had been Gerald’s police chief for less than a week. A young cop with a spotty record, the 32-year-old McCrary had worked as an officer with the Gerald Police Department once before, but was fired for a breach of trust.
“The election was coming up, and he decided he wanted to be the chief,” says former Gerald Police Chief Roger Maples, who fired McCrary from the department in the mid-1990s for leaking information to a political candidate. “He was feeding the would-be alderman information about police investigations.”
McCrary landed a job with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department in 1997. But there, too, he failed to impress his superiors.
“I don’t think he’s a bad kid—he’s gullible,” says Franklin County Sheriff Gary Toelke. “He had trouble learning the ropes on the road, and he went back [to working] in the jail for a while. I guess he just wasn’t happy.”
After leaving the sheriff’s department, McCrary bounced around, working as a small-town cop and mounting an unsuccessful campaign for Franklin County sheriff. He then worked as a government contractor in Afghanistan for three years, before signing on once again with the Gerald police in August 2007.
By late December of that year, the city’s board of aldermen had appointed McCrary to the role of interim chief after the council abruptly dismissed his predecessor, Gary Peanick. McCrary’s appointment to the post made him the third man to hold the position since Schulte’s election as mayor eight months earlier.
McCrary, who did not respond to several requests to comment for this story, is described by those who know him as nearly pathological in his need for other people’s approval. Former police chief Maples adds, “All [McCrary] ever wanted to do is be a cop.”
Others are not so generous: “He’s never impressed me as a police officer type,” says one Gerald resident. “Ryan McCrary was really into what he called ‘spook surveillance.’ He liked to look at things like bugs and other surveillance techniques.”
It was perhaps this heady cocktail of vaulting ambition and a love of Mission: Impossible–style dark ops that made McCrary particularly susceptible to the wiles of Bill Jakob when the latter strode into McCrary’s office, asking about work in Afghanistan and confiding that he was a member of the Federal Reserve Law Enforcement Unit.
“A lot of us guys out in the sticks, we don’t get the opportunity or education that these federal agents get,” says Maples, who now mans an archery shop on the outskirts of town. “He convinced them he was a federal agent. These small-town cops, they’ll believe anything: My hero just walked in the door.”
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(Accompanied by his attorney, Joel Schwartz, Jakob (in gray suit) exits U.S. District Court in St. Louis.)
He can’t remember the exact date, but Bill Jakob says he first met Ryan McCrary sometime in January 2008. For the previous few months, he says, he’d been supporting his family working as a security guard at the Federal Reserve in St. Louis. He was interested in becoming a contractor in Iraq or Afghanistan, but so far none of the companies had taken an interest in his résumé. He’d recently read an article in the newspaper about McCrary’s stretch in Afghanistan, and Jakob says he decided to stop by Gerald to speak with the police chief.
Their meeting was informal and brief, but the chemistry was undeniable as the two men discovered they had a lot in common: Jakob had worked as a small-town cop in southern Illinois, and like McCrary, he had a deep appreciation for the authority of the badge.
They talked briefly about contract work in Afghanistan, and when McCrary finally asked Jakob what he did for a living, Jakob says he told McCrary he worked for the “Federal Reserve Law Enforcement Unit,” a job which Jakob described to the young chief as “a well-paid, glorified security guard, basically.”
“I told him what I was. He assumed that all feds were FBI guys. I never corrected him on that,” says Jakob, who sits in his attorney’s Clayton office looking relaxed in a polo shirt and khakis.
The thing was, Jakob says he told McCrary, he’d been out of the military and traditional law enforcement for a few years, and even though he’d submitted his résumé to several contractors, so far he hadn’t had any luck.
Jakob says it wasn’t long before the two arrived at an informal deal: He would give McCrary a hand by working as a drug informant in Gerald, and in return McCrary would introduce Jakob to some of his contacts in Afghanistan.
In those first few months, Jakob says he mainly gathered “intel” for the department, eavesdropping on conversations at Gerald’s only tavern or trying to befriend suspects while posing as a fellow arrestee.
Meanwhile, Jakob says he began to grow into his role as a federal agent, going online to order phony ID cards and a badge for the sham “Multi-Jurisdictional Narcotics Task Force.”
“I became what [McCrary] needed me to be,” says Jakob. “He wanted me to help him. He wanted a federal narcotics agent, and I became a federal narcotics agent.”
Just how much McCrary knew about Jakob’s ruse has been the subject of much speculation. McCrary told the Gasconade County Republican—the weekly paper that first broke the story—that soon after meeting Jakob, the imposter supplied him with a fax number and told him to send a request for federal assistance to his supervisors at the “Multi-Jurisdictional Task Force.” McCrary added that Jakob gave him a phone number to call, telling the paper that when he dialed the number, he spoke with a woman who answered the phone, “Multi-Jurisdictional Task Force,” and confirmed that Jakob’s supervisors were reviewing his department’s request. Even more convincing: Jakob’s 2003 Crown Victoria—whose license plate read “Multi-Jurisdictional Task Force”—was fully loaded with guns, lights, sirens and a
radio system.
“I don’t blame our officers. Everyone was taken,” says Mayor Schulte. “I’ve been told he could quote federal laws word for word.”
Nonetheless, McCrary never independently contacted a federal agency to verify Jakob’s identity. Neither did he perform a more traditional background check, which would have revealed that Jakob was not certified to be a police officer in Missouri.
For his part, Jakob denies that he ever gave McCrary a phone number to
confirm employment.
“He never talked to anyone. I gave him my cellphone number,” says Jakob. “He called it, and the greeting when you went to voice mail was a female’s voice that said you have reached the Multi-Jurisdictional Narcotics Task Force, but that’s it.”
If Jakob knows anything more about McCrary’s involvement, he isn’t telling the press. Nonetheless, his attorney, Joel Schwartz, concedes, “There are certainly some suspicions on our part that McCrary knew more.”
“That’s preposterous and a lie,” fires back Peter Dunne, an attorney representing McCrary and the other Gerald officers. “If Bill Jakob says that, it has the same credibility he has for everything else he said, which I would say is very little.”
Six months prior to his arrival in Gerald, Bill Jakob was working as a salesman for Total Lock & Security Company in St. Louis County. He’d recently been promoted, and he was supposed to concentrate on sales of doors and lock sets to the military and U.S. government. While at first he excelled, making a few good sales and securing a company car, Jakob soon tired of the work, opting instead to create a fictitious client named “Lisa Kennedy.”
In Jakob’s scam, Kennedy was a contracting officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. To enhance Kennedy’s verisimilitude, Jakob created an email account for his fictitious client, uscorpsofengineers@hotmail.com, which Jakob then used to order hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of locks from Total Lock.
The aim?
“I wasn’t selling shit. They were up my ass, and I told them I was selling things—I did it to keep my job,” says Jakob, admitting that the scam lacked a payday. “I had a company car, but if I wanted to keep that car, I had to keep producing. [This way] I didn’t have to go to sales meetings. I didn’t have to sit through the hour-long why-aren’t-you-guys-producing meetings. It was ‘He’s kicking ass, just leave him alone and let him do his thing.’”
By December 2007, however, Jakob’s scheme began to crumble when Total Lock began demanding payment for the locks. Hoping to avoid detection, Jakob tried to pay the roughly $300,000 bill by charging it to an expired VISA credit card he’d been issued while serving in the Missouri Army National Guard.
Jakob would eventually plead guilty to charges that he defrauded Total Lock & Security along with his admission that he lied to and impersonated a federal officer. But in the early months of 2008, Jakob had fled the complications of Total Lock and was deep into another, infinitely more exciting scheme.
He says he initially worked undercover for the Gerald police. Even so, as he grew more comfortable in his role as a federal agent, he began to believe his own fantasy.
“I was a rock star. I was kicking ass and taking names, and those people who didn’t want to be me at least wanted to be very close to me,” remembers Jakob. “I had the attitude. I came and went as I wanted. I didn’t have to punch the clock and work a 12-hour shift. I never had to sit out on the side of the road and write a ticket in the rain. Here’s this guy who rolls in, he does what he wants, and the chief buys him lunch—this guy’s kicking ass.”
Jakob was not alone in his illusion, and soon after his arrival the Gerald police traded in their more traditional police uniforms for a SWAT team–inspired look featuring black cargo pants and matching T-shirts with the word POLICE bold across the back.
But Jakob’s moment of truth came on April 24,
when he says McCrary called him to help interview a suspect. When he arrived at the scene, Jakob says, the police had already arrested the suspect, and were standing outside the house.
At that moment, the police spied Michael Holland, one of their main drug suspects, approaching in a car.
“He pulls down the road, stops, throws the car in reverse and tries to haul ass,” recounts Jakob. “They grab him, and he’s got a bunch of dope on him.”
Holland, a 22-year-old roofer who is married with a small child, gives a somewhat more graphic account of the incident. He says that as he was driving to a friend’s house, “five or six” officers rushed his car with guns drawn.
“They automatically had a shotgun in my mouth telling me to get out of the car,” says Holland, who adds it was Jakob wielding the shotgun. “They threw me straight on the ground and had me flipped over with a shotgun in my face telling me, ‘You know where the money’s at. I know you have a bunch of money.’”
Jakob contends that up to this point his involvement with the Gerald police had consisted exclusively of gathering information as an undercover agent. But on April 24, seemingly without warning, Jakob began striding around the streets of Gerald with his Internet badge at his belt and a Mossberg 500 shotgun at his side.
“He was telling me that I’d get 20 years if I didn’t talk,” says Holland. “He’s like, ‘I’m going to raid your house.’ And I was like, ‘You’re not going to raid my house without a warrant.’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t need a warrant. I’m a federal officer.’”
Holland alleges that once he was handcuffed in the back seat of one of the police cruisers, Jakob, McCrary and Assistant Police Chief Scott Ramsey drove to his house, kicked the door in and raided his home.
“They destroyed my house,” says Holland, who claims that the officers not only kicked the door off the frame, but also ripped his couch apart, tore light sockets out of the walls, destroyed his bedroom set and stole $350 cash out of his checkbook.
Holland says that after raiding his house, the officers returned to the station, where Jakob received his second big promotion of the day: Instead of McCrary or some other Gerald officer interrogating Holland, they handed him over to Jakob.
“I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I’m good. I am very good. It’s a gift,” says Jakob, with no little hint of satisfaction with his interrogatory skills. “It’s more attitude and presence at that point than it is anything else. I’ve got, quote-unquote, the real police sitting around me. He was brought in in handcuffs, and I’m sitting at the mayor’s desk asking him some really tough questions. All of a sudden you go from playing church-league softball to you’re standing in the middle of Busch Stadium and you’ve got to strike out Albert Pujols. It’s big-time. You’re ready to crap your pants and cry.”
Holland, who in 2006 pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor drug charge, says that Jakob again threatened him with 20 years in prison. He says Jakob threatened to arrest his wife and to place his son in state custody if Holland refused to tell him who supplied the town’s drugs.
“He just kept asking me where the drugs were at,” says Holland, who maintains that once they interrogated him, the police handcuffed him in the back of a cruiser and forced him to accompany McCrary and Jakob on more drug raids.
“People could see me clear as day, so that endangered my life. People are thinking I snitched them out. I was like, this is crazy,” says Holland, who was spotted in the back of a police car by several witnesses whose homes were raided. “People have threatened to blow up [my wife’s] car. I’m supposed to be sniped out and end up in a river. I’m going to have to move out to my hometown because of what this dude did.”
Jakob denies that he and McCrary brought Holland on any raids. He does agree with Holland on one count, though—it was “crazy.”
“I describe it as like a surfer getting on top of a wave,” says Jakob. “For a while you’re riding that wave, but after a while it’s just pushing you wherever the hell it wants you to go. I think after a while it was out of control, and nobody was in charge of anything.”
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When Steven Holland heard his son had been arrested, he conferred with his wife, Glenda, and his daughter-in-law, Heather, who was at her in-laws’ house with her infant son. It was decided that Steven, who walks with a cane due to an advancing case of multiple sclerosis, should stay at home with the baby while Glenda and Heather went to check on Michael.
“As soon as they left, I’m sitting on the couch watching TV, and all of a sudden I hear BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!” says Steven Holland. “I opened the door, and it was Bill Jakob. He was standing there with a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun. He had it down at his side, then he put it up on his shoulder, then he pointed it in my face. And he said: ‘We got your son in jail, and if you don’t tell us where the rest of the stuff is, we’re going to put you in jail, too.’”
As though in a split-second accident, the world slowed down for Steven as he tried to come to grips with what was happening at his front door. Here was Jakob, allegedly pointing a shotgun at his head and telling him they were going to search his home.
“I said, ‘No you’re not—do you have a search warrant?’ And he said: ‘We don’t need one, I’m an FBI agent,’” Steven recalls. He knew his wife’s lapdogs were behind him, and he wanted to be sure they didn’t get hurt. But as Steven, shaky on his feet from MS, turned to look, he says that Jakob, McCrary and Ramsey pushed him to the ground as they rushed into his house.
Jakob has pleaded guilty to illegally searching people’s homes, but he maintains that reports of his warrantless searches and flagrant shotgun wielding have been exaggerated.
“We went through a door, and I had a shotgun in my hand,” says Jakob. “Ryan [McCrary] had an MP5, Scott [Ramsey] had a shotgun, [officer Shannon Kestermont] had her pistol out. When cops come through a door to search a house …”
At this point, Jakob’s attorney, Joel Schwartz, interrupts his client to remind him that “they were cops, and you weren’t allowed to have a gun. You weren’t a cop.”
“I wasn’t a cop,” Jakob concedes. “But I was playing the part of a cop. I’ve got to look like a cop. Cops come through your door to search your house—they have guns. I had a gun.”
Handcuffed and sitting on a chair, Steven Holland says he watched Jakob take a crowbar to his son’s $6,000 tool chest. His wife’s dogs were locked in another room, as the officers blew through his home, dumping drawers and clearing countertops.
Meanwhile, his wife and daughter-in-law were returning from the police station. But while Heather returned to the Hollands’ house to check on her son, Glenda went across the street to wait out the raid at a neighbor’s house.
Betty Jo Jarvis had only recently woken and was still in her nightgown when Glenda appeared at her doorstep. Locking the door, the women spent the next half hour huddled by Jarvis’ living room window, wondering why the police were raiding Glenda’s home. They had determined to stay indoors, but when they spied Heather being led out of the house in handcuffs, they both bolted out the door.
But as the women approached the street, Jakob and McCrary cut them off. At first, Jarvis says, the two men asked her where the drugs were, promising that they would pin any charge on Michael Holland. But after Jarvis refused, she says, McCrary and Jakob began asking her about her brother, Bobby.
“They’re like, ‘Don’t Bobby Jarvis live here? We know tons of dope comes out of this house,’” says Jarvis. “And then they asked, ‘Well, can we look?’ I said, ‘Do you have a warrant?’ [And they said,] I don’t need a warrant, I’m the fed, and they just walked in.”
Attorney Peter Dunne, who is representing Gerald police officers, maintains that the officers—but not Bill Jakob—acted legally as they went from home to home in search of drugs. “Either their entry was obtained by consent or probable cause existed to enter and the entry was justified,” he says.
Nonetheless, Jarvis maintains that McCrary and Jakob became increasingly hostile toward her once they unearthed her extensive pornography collection along with a “sack full of condoms.” Eventually, Jarvis says, they discovered a small amount of marijuana in an old Advil bottle.
“I wouldn’t tell them whose it was, so they put me in handcuffs and took me to the car,” Jarvis recalls. Once she’d been processed at City Hall, Jarvis says she was again interrogated. “They go, ‘Do you mean to tell me that if you and your brother were standing side by side and we pulled a gun, you’d step in front of the bullet?’ I said, ‘You’re damn right I would. He’s my brother.’ They said that was suicidal.”
Jarvis dug in her heels and says she wouldn’t tell them anything. Eventually, a frustrated McCrary took her to the Franklin County jail, where he had her placed on a 96-hour hold for psychological evaluation. In his petition to have her committed, McCrary wrote that he believed Jarvis was “suicidal” and that during an interview Jarvis had told him, “She would rather be dead than sell out her brother.”
Against her will, Jarvis was then committed to a psychiatric center in Farmington, where she was confined and medicated for a week.
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(Linda Trest, the reporter who broke the story)
Linda Trest was home on a Thursday night when someone arrived to tell her their home had been raided by a man who first identified himself as a federal marshal and then as a DEA agent. Was it possible, they asked, to be an agent for two agencies? Stranger yet, they added, this man had said he didn’t need a search warrant because he was a federal agent.
Trest, a reporter for the weekly Gasconade County Republican, was immediately intrigued, and as the evening progressed, she heard more stories about this “federal agent.”
“They all reported that a guy held a shotgun with a pistol grip to their head and ordered them to the floor. They were all marched out into their front yard in handcuffs,” says Trest. “But that evening, when the cops wanted to go home and go to bed, they just let everybody go.”
One week later, on May 1, Trest placed a call to Sheriff Gary Toelke, asking whether there was a federal agent in the area and, if so, whether he needed a search warrant to enter a house.
Toelke said he’d check into it. A few days later, the 51-year-old reporter got another frantic call: The town pharmacist, who happens to be Trest’s next-door neighbor, had just been marched out of the pharmacy in handcuffs.
Another call came later that night. This time it was from her son saying that the pharmacist, Mike Henson, was standing handcuffed in his front yard as the Gerald police searched his house.
“I was very, very, very nervous about these cops,” says Trest, who hustled home with her camera and starting taking pictures of the scene, including a few of Jakob, who was sitting on the porch.
“[He] came storming out into the street and told me to put the camera away,” says Trest. “He was really macho and puffed his chest out and was very aggressive when he talked to me.”
When she asked for his name, Trest recalls Jakob saying, “My name is Bill, and that’s all you need to know.” Pressing further, Trest asked Jakob which agency he worked for, to which he replied, “A federal agency, and that’s all you need to know.”
“He was really being a jerk,” she says.
Jakob remembers the encounter differently.
“I asked her to please not take pictures of the personal vehicles or anyone that was in handcuffs,” he says. “Part of the persona that I had to put out there was that I was a federal drug agent. Federal drug agents aren’t rude. They don’t cuss at you, they don’t kick you, hit you, beat you, take things from you. They are very professional, but they are very ‘Look, this is how shit’s going to be.’”
A day or two after this encounter, Toelke called Trest to inform her that there was not a federal agent working in the area. At that point, Trest, Toelke and Franklin County Detective Sgt. Jason Grellner began working full-bore to discover Bill’s true identity.
“We couldn’t get his name—they figured out it was Jakob—but we didn’t know that Bill spelled it with a ‘K,’” says Trest.
But luck arrived that Thursday, when the Gerald city council swore Jakob in as a reserve officer. “As soon as I found out the spelling, I slammed that thing into the computer. First we found the wrongful-death lawsuit, and we were able to verify that Jakob wasn’t certified to be a police officer in Missouri.”
•
With that, the floodgates opened. On Friday, May 9, real federal agents descended on Gerald and arrested Jakob. McCrary, Ramsey and Shannon Kestermont were suspended and later released from their posts.
Meanwhile, the revelations about Bill Jakob came at a rapid-fire pace: Not only had Jakob’s insurance company paid a $50,000 settlement in the wrongful-death suit, but in a related deposition he had lied about being injured while fighting in the army in Iraq: In truth, Jakob had never been to Iraq; he served in the Missouri Army National Guard, where he received an other-than-honorable discharge. He filed for bankruptcy in 2003, and at 22, Jakob had paid a $100 fine after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor sex-abuse charge in St. Clair County, Ill.
It’s hardly the résumé of your typical federal agent. Then again, Jakob is not your typical federal agent. He is scheduled to be sentenced this month to between 60 and 69 months in federal prison.
Jakob says he now regrets what he did. Not only is he facing prison time and a potentially costly lawsuit, but also the drug cases he worked on in Gerald have been compromised by his involvement. Still, Jakob believes the roughly 20 raids he led weren’t all bad.
“I’m not ashamed of it,” he says. “I think some good work was done in Gerald. We put a hell of a dent in the system, and I bet you could not go to Gerald right now and call some dealer from St. Louis and say, ‘Hey, bring me a load of dope.’”
