Photograph by Wesley Law
His first clue is the vultures: at least 12 of them, sitting on a rock ledge about 20 feet up from the desert sand. Not flying, not circling. Waiting.
His second clue is the smell: a sweet-acrid rot that fills the air when they drive through a wash. That’s not a cow carcass, Joe Adams thinks. He sends two of his team members back out to scout.
It doesn’t take them long to find the body. It’s a young woman, wearing dark jeans, cheap Mexican sneakers, and a thin, black, long-sleeved top that was rucked up, probably in an attempt to get cool. The exposed skin is charred brown and black, and part of her midsection has melted away, fluid seeping into the sand beneath her.
Adams follows his volunteers to the body, draws a line in the sand, and squats just outside it. He sees no tracks; the wind’s high, and she’s been lying here a long time. No water bottle; either she tossed it earlier, or her body was dumped. But her cellphone’s lying next to her—is it her cellphone? Or does somebody just want it to seem like that?
Her body’s moving. “It’s boiling!” one of the younger volunteers exclaims.
“Son, her stomach’s moving because of the maggots,” Adams says, his voice as gentle as he can manage. The young man throws up. He wipes his mouth, looking mortified. “No shame in that,” Adams says. “I’ve done it myself.”
The county sheriff’s deputy shows up, checks for bullet wounds, orders the body bagged.
“That’s it?” Adams asks, incredulous. “No coroner?” He points out the cellphone, still lying on the sand, and somebody tosses it into the bag with her.
“I could have ID’d her in 30 minutes with that phone,” Adams mutters.
A retired St. Louis private eye, he’s been flying out to the Arizona desert regularly for six years to run his Project Bluelight, hunting any human who doesn’t have a legal right to be there. He looks for “sign”—drag marks where somebody used a ladder to cross a road without footprints; cow tracks oddly placed, because somebody glued a molded-plastic cow hoof to the soles of their shoes. A toothbrush in a back pocket usually means this is somebody’s last stop before freedom. A discarded backpack means its owner wants to hit the community looking like he already lives there.
Adams rages about holes in the border, calling it our country’s No. 1 security problem. But the way this girl’s body is being treated—this isn’t right. “I don’t care how much I hate these people for being in our country,” he tells his team, “she was somebody’s daughter.” He talks to U.S. Border Patrol, talks to the sheriff’s department, calls the Arizona Daily Star. The case nags at him: He likes action, not tragedy; clearly divided friends and enemies, not tangled sympathies. “She was so close—maybe a mile from help,” he says. “She probably got left behind because she couldn’t keep up—maybe she blew an ankle. The coyotes are paid to deliver; they won’t wait.”
Why yank a coroner from air-conditioned peace, then? For the sheriff’s department, this was a run-of-the-mill case.
“I will not let this go,” Adams tells the Arizona Daily Star reporter. “I am considering coming out of retirement, taking this case, and finding her family.”
To the Star reporter, he probably sounds like he’s reading from a bad script. But Joe Adams lets nothing go. “For other private eyes, it was a living,” he says. “To me, it was winning. Every case was a competition, and my opponent was my enemy.”
He reads danger as a taunt, a chance to battle wits. He says he’s always thought of this fearlessness as “a flaw, almost” in his personality. Granted, it’s a convenient flaw: He befriended a kidnapper in Costa Rica; trained rebels in the jungle of Burma (also known as Myanmar); brought in a fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list; turned down a hit job and became the intended victim’s bodyguard instead. None of that scared him.
What scares him is sitting in a wicker love seat on his patio, watching his favorite red-eared slider turtles sun themselves on a waterfall’s boulders and thinking about his past. The assignments he volunteered for never felt like suicide missions—somehow, he was always sure that if one person survived, he’d be that person. But in the contentment of his new life, with the woman he calls his queen sitting next to him and the world’s biggest Shih Tzu, Uzi, lying at his feet, he can’t figure out why he was so sure.
Adrenaline comes over most people in a white rush. Their heart races, their vision tunnels, and they either freeze or run. Adams’ heart rate slows. It’s as though the prospect of danger quiets him, calms his body, and focuses his thoughts. His reflexes speed up, decisions come in a single blink, and everything else slows way, way down. That cool, crocodile-like lethargy has saved his life more than once. It’s saved other people’s lives, too—and taken more than a few.
In Adams’ first encounter with the U.S. military, he cracks.
Two Air Force officers show up at his high school in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Joe’s called to the principal’s office to tell them about the UFO he photographed. He developed the negatives in the classroom in front of everybody, and the UFO appeared with thrilling clarity on the wet photo paper. The town newspaper ran the story on the front page. It’s the late ’60s—flying-saucer sightings are causing more hysteria than The Beatles—and the Air Force is compiling Project Blue Book, evaluating reports to determine whether UFOs are a threat to national security.
Joe blurts the truth: He stuck nails in the tops of two baby-moon Ford hubcaps and strung them with fishing line and hung them to spin from a tree branch. He doesn’t add his private rationale: “People want to believe this stuff. I was just feeding the monster.”
He was supposed to be feeding horses, every day after school in his family’s stable. His father, Joe Sam Adams Sr., is gone a lot, racing stock cars and working as a union organizer. He lives in a man’s world, and his son craves admission. Joe Jr. hunts, target-shoots, plays football, trains horses. His father checks up regularly, making sure Joe and his brother are following the rules. One day he gets so frustrated with Joe, he tears the downspout off the house and beats him with it.
Joe forgets why. But he remembers he deserved it.
In his second encounter with the military, Adams is 20 and tougher, his fear of authority already starting to dissolve. “Just give me a rifle, drop me out of a helicopter, and let me fight,” he tells his Marine Corps recruiter. Every man in his family has served in the military. He needs to know he can pass the test of combat.
Instead, he gets stationed in D.C., part of a high-scoring group handpicked to hear about a special naval intelligence unit. Adams rolls his eyes, picturing guys behind desks signing papers. Then he hears some of the details, and it’s James Bond stuff, CIA. “I could be a spook,” he thinks. “This is pretty cool.”
He takes the rules more seriously than he lets on, driving to camp with no pants on because he doesn’t want to muss their perfectly ironed creases. He wants to be better than everybody else.
He gets sent to California to train with Navy SEALs. He gathers intel for target selection and photo interpretation in Vietnam and prepares to be deployed. Instead, he’s transferred to an air-conditioned office in North Carolina.
“There’s no war in North Carolina,” he groans. But the war is Haiti: There’s intel that President Papa Doc Duvalier is on his deathbed, and Baby Doc’s enemies are conspiring to seize power. Adams gathers data for a mission that will help ensure that 19-year-old Jean-Claude Duvalier is installed as president.
On a trip to D.C., he gets a job offer. “Military contractors” aren’t publicly acknowledged in the 1960s; the CIA talks instead about “proprietary companies” and recruits military intelligence officers to staff them. Adams is granted an early discharge and sent to an island to train in jungle warfare. He winds up working in Laos and Cambodia; that’s all he’ll say. Four months later, his boss leaves, and the new guy brings his own staff. “I’m not going to get myself killed with people I don’t even like,” Adams decides. “I’m going home.”
He can’t wait for his hair to grow out. Vets aren’t much welcome, and he’s grown a little disenchanted with the war himself. He’s still in the reserves, though, so he treads carefully.
Mainly, he wants a job where he can carry a gun. This seems so obviously desirable, so necessary, in fact, that he doesn’t bother looking at alternatives. But at first, the closest he can get to that kind of power is his own body. He lifts weights, building onto his 5-foot-7-inch frame a musculature so dramatic that when people see the photos decades later, they’ll think Photoshop.
Adams decides to hitchhike out to California and become a stuntman. When one of his rides drops him in St. Louis, at Brentwood Boulevard and Highway 40, he walks up to George Turner’s Gym. He met the owner at a powerlifting competition and wants to say hi. He hangs out for a day or so, goes on to California—and makes a quick U-turn back to St. Louis.
“I’m a farm boy,” he tells his new friends at the gym. “It was too fast-paced out there. Too risqué. Too…demented.” He stays in St. Louis and pumps a lot of iron. In 1974, he gets married. He also gets named Mr. Missouri, then Mr. Mid-America. He starts his own gym in Maplewood, calling it American Athletic Clubs so it sounds like there’s more than one.
One day, a car drives by Adams’ gym while he’s standing outside, talking to a member who’s a boxer. Adams hears a gunshot and a revving motor. The boxer falls to the sidewalk. Adams jumps in his car and speeds off in pursuit. “He can’t hit me,” Adams thinks. “He’s a criminal; he’s got no discipline.”
He blocks the car, yells to neighbors to hold the driver, and takes off on foot after the shooter. His cowboy heroics make the news, and a friend at the Sunset Hills Police Department calls to say he should apply for a part-time police job. He’s still exhaling his drawn-out “Naaah” when his friend dangles the lure: “You could carry a gun.”
That gets Adams to the interview. One of the officers recognizes him from the TV news and slides a badge down the conference table. Reflexively, Adams slams his hand down on it. “Pick it up and raise your right hand,” the officer says, grinning.
The job involves showing up on any county radio calls that involve a weapon. Adams likes it until the rules start getting in the way. In 1978, the year his marriage ends, he goes out on his own, doing skip traces and bail-bond recovery, learning to be a private eye.
He collects people. If he goes out for dinner and somebody at his table mentions working in IT for Southwestern Bell 10 years earlier…hel-lo. He memorizes connections, does favors, cultivates sources. He develops a reputation for finding people who don’t want to be found.
When a man jumps bond and eludes a horde of bounty hunters, Adams locates a young woman who testified a little too glowingly, in a previous trial, about what a great person this guy was. Adams goes looking for her and finds an empty apartment.
“They owe me three months’ rent,” her landlord grumbles.
They?
“Describe the guy she’s with,” Adams says. The description fits. He asks to search the apartment. Other bounty hunters have already been there: slashed the mattresses, dumped the drawers, raked through the trash. Adams climbs up on a chair and reaches way back on top of the grease-filmed refrigerator. He’s careful that way, ever since he searched a drug house and found the lipped top of the kitchen cabinets lined with $100 bills the Drug Enforcement Administration must have missed. Here, he finds a few stray pieces of mail—including an unpaid bill from a pager company on Cherokee Street. He drives there straightaway. The owner says he just turned that pager off. “Can I buy the number?” Adams asks. “Don’t turn the other one off. I’ll pay you six months in advance.”
He shows up at the bond skip’s next appointment.
Adams lets his eyes bore deep, uses his instinctive certainty to overpower other people’s hesitation. He turns out to have a real talent for pretexting— getting information by taking on whatever disguise or trait will give him entrée. He’s a born actor—and a natural psychologist. He doesn’t look for people’s weaknesses; not exactly. He looks for what drives them. What will get somebody to a particular place at a particular time? Once he knows, he can make his quarry bounce like a puppet. It’s often comical—and Adams goes for comedy whenever he can.
A company’s owners decide to dissolve their partnership, and one of the co-owners hires him. The mood’s hostile and paranoid, so Adams arranges a leak to the other side’s investigators: If they want some good information, they should mount surveillance that night at 10 o’clock. Meanwhile, he sneaks stacks of folded cardboard boxes into the building. That night, the investigators show up and videotape people carrying out box after box, staggering a little as though the boxes are heavy with files. Adams’ friend—who was about to leave town anyway—drives off with all the boxes.
The investigators follow him across two states and watch him lock the boxes in an airport hangar. The co-owner will obsess about all that “stolen information” for months, losing his edge in the negotiations.
One day Adams is standing at a pay phone at Delmar and Skinker boulevards, talking to a police detective who works for him part-time. They’re planning a stakeout when Adams notices, out of his peripheral vision, a man approaching. He has a Raven Arms .25-caliber pistol in his hand, which Adams considers the lowest form of firearm on the planet. “I need some money,” the man says.
Adams says, into the phone, “Hey, you’re not going to believe this, but I’m being mugged. Guy’s standing right here with a gun on me.” The detective chortles and says, “Well, just shoot him!” Adams turns to his mugger and, patient as a dad with an overstimulated toddler, says, “I’m on the phone with the police. Put the gun down and walk away, or I’m going to kill you.”
The guy drops the gun and starts to leave.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“You said I could walk away!”
“I lied.”
Adams slides the gun into a gas-station key slot and has the man arrested. He loves it when somebody brandishes a weapon or threatens to kill him. Marksmanship—the pinpoint accuracy, the timing and dexterity, the intimate understanding of the weapon—was his first boyhood step toward confidence. And confidence is the first step toward self-control.
The only killing he regrets is the one time he fired in anger. Granted, it was war, and he was fighting communism. But he could have gotten away from the village without firing that parting shot. He vows never to let that impulse take over again.
“If you’re going to bore me to death, it’s going to get expensive,” Adams tells clients, “but if it’s exciting, I work pretty cheap.” One client gives him a plaque engraved with his own quote: “My sole purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.”
He especially likes rescuing children. For Child Find International, he recovers quite a few—including a child kidnapped by her mother’s pimp.
The child’s father comes to thank him. “You do a lot of mercenary work, right?” the father asks casually. “My uncle’s top 10 Most Wanted by the FBI.”
Adams matches his tone. “Really?”
“Yeah, he’s a drug dealer, he got caught for armored-car robbery, and he’s out on bond.” The next time the father pays a call, Adams is watching the late news. The FBI has a Red Roof Inn surrounded, staking out a fugitive wanted for armored-car robbery.
“Remember I told you about my uncle?” the father says.
“Yeah, it’s on TV right now,” Adams says.
“Well, he’s not in there.” The father says a bit more, tries to hire Adams to help his uncle run drugs. Adams stays noncommittal and contacts the FBI as soon as the man leaves. “You want this guy, I can get him for you,” he says, “but you’ve got to give me some slack.”
He hangs up, calls the guy back, and agrees to help run cocaine back from Colombia. The fugitive calls and invites Adams to Miami.
“You want me to pay $350 to fly down there, and I get there and you’re gone?” Adams asks. He insists on getting his plane ticket and hotel paid for in advance. He adds, “Man, you’re hot. You’re FBI Most Wanted. You need a professional inker to change your ID—I’m not working for you until you do.”
In Miami, Adams tells the fugitive they’re all set to get the new ID the next day: “Get a haircut, and show up in a suit and tie. No weapons.” At the appointed time, he walks the man across a field to a van—and sitting inside is one of Adams’ friends, a South African mercenary with a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun.
On the way to the FBI’s Miami office, the fugitive says, “You know how you got me, don’t you? You made me pay your way. I thought, ‘He couldn’t be a cop.’”
The FBI agent Adams reached at the Red Roof Inn (now retired) says Adams never explained what he was going to do, just offered to find the guy. “I said, ‘If you can catch up with him and turn him over, great.’ A couple months later, I get a call from the Miami office asking if I’m looking for this guy. I say, ‘You better believe I am,’ and he says, ‘I’ve got a guy here named Joe Adams who just marched him into the office.’”
Adams has a plane, so he hangs out at the airport a lot, picking up information about narcotics deals that the FBI is generally quite happy to receive—until the day he tells them a federal agent is selling information.
“My source says he has somebody in D.C. behind a keyboard who can run anybody and tell if they’re a DEA agent,” Adams says. “Create two new DEA agents, and I’ll give him those names. You program your computers so if anybody runs those names, it will tell you.”
He hears later that it worked. But by that time he’s already moved on. He likes being a free agent. His brother actually joined the CIA, became “a career spook.” Joe wants to play by his own rules, avoid the quicksand of politics and bureaucracy.
It’s just that he keeps running into the CIA.
In 1984, he gets recruited to train Contras, the Nicaraguan rebels who want to overthrow the Sandinista government. Adams has never heard of Contras or Sandinistas, but he doesn’t need details: “Fight communists? I’m in.”
He does security analysis for Contra leader Adolfo Calero, who’s exiled and living in Honduras. After training bodyguards for Calero and his directorate, Adams trains Contra soldiers to fight in Nicaragua. U.S. involvement is still covert, led by the CIA and National Security Council and championed in secret by President Ronald Reagan. But word reaches the U.S. Congress—Adams blames a disgruntled ex-mercenary—and the Honduran military shows up saying Adams and his men have to leave.
He and his team of mercenaries are flown back to Honduras. At the airstrip, their plane is surrounded by soldiers with submachine guns and rifles. George W. Bush is in town, running intelligence for his father, so the plane has to be secured until there’s time to deal with it.
Hours pass. One of the men, code name Mycroft, questions an Honduran soldier’s sexual proclivities in English. The soldier speaks just enough English. He jerks his rifle up and comes at Mycroft. Absurdly, without stopping to think, Adams raises his arm and mutters “10 Roger nine Charlie” into the jumbo face of his waterproof watch while glaring at the soldier. It’s total spy-spoof nonsense, of course, but the soldier looks wary—he has, after all, no idea just who he is guarding, or why—and the flare subsides. For years, Adams will laugh his high, manic giggle whenever he recounts the ploy—and the look on that soldier’s face.
Adams’ attorney, Dan Hayes, is also his good friend. “I’ve been stun-gunned by Joe; I’ve been karate-held when I thought another millimeter and my wrist would break,” Hayes says, “and that was just playing around!”
Has Adams ever truly pissed him off?
“Only as a lawyer,” he replies. “I have never seen anybody so comfortable on the edge.”
Hayes knew early on that his client’s activities in Honduras were being investigated, “even though he had the ear of Ollie North, who had the ear of President Reagan.” Public sentiment ran hard against U.S. support of the Contras, and the Department of Justice had no trouble identifying violations of the Neutrality Act. “Basically, gunrunning,” Hayes translates. “It was a multicount indictment, and if the judge wanted to do it consecutively, Joe was looking at probably 30 years. To the extent that Joe worries about anything, he was worried.”
The assistant U.S. attorney who caught the case spent two years preparing it. Hayes whittled the charges down so Adams could plead guilty to a single violation of the Neutrality Act, then sat back to watch.
“Here’s Joe, with his very military demeanor,” Hayes says. “The judge says, ‘Now is it true you were the leader of this band of Contras that crossed the border into Nicaragua?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ Absolutely not messing with the judge at all, taking full responsibility for his actions—but not apologizing for them, either, because to this day he still believes he was fighting communism.”
When Hayes finishes arguing the plea, U.S. District Judge Norman Roettger Jr. asks Adams if he has anything he’d like to say before sentencing. “Yes, I do,” Adams says, ignoring the sharp pain of Hayes’ leather shoe on his shinbone. “Your Honor, who do you think I work for?”
When Adams sits down, the judge says he’s ready for sentencing. This is unheard of—at this point, the attorneys are supposed to slam reports on the defendant’s character back and forth like pinballs, and the judge is supposed to ponder and weigh.
Roettger sentences Adams to one day of unsupervised probation and a $50 fine.
After the stunned courtroom clears, Hayes and Adams go to lunch with the prosecutor, a by-the-books type who never divulged the tiniest scrap of information along the way.
“I think you should tell him,” Hayes murmurs to Adams.
Adams shrugs. He rises, rests his hands on the table, and leans forward. “You know how you’ve been hammering me for two years?” he asks. “I’ve been hammering your secretary.”
In 1988, the Contra publicity gets Adams a job in Burma. He crosses the river in a cart driven by water buffalo, then hikes through the jungle and stops halfway up the side of a mountain. This is where he’ll live, in a low teak house open on all sides, while he trains rebels. General Ne Win, chair of the only permitted political party, has closed the universities in Rangoon, and students and professors have fled to the jungle to fight. So instead of campesinos from Nicaragua, Adams has teachers, law students, and chemists as students. They absorb information like it’s water.
Adams absorbs a good bit himself, feeding tips about Golden Triangle heroin traffic back to the DEA. His students come from 13 different tribes, and every morning, they line up in front of his house and bow to him. “What is this, Apocalypse Now?” he wonders. But Buddhists revere their teachers, and besides, they’re getting ready to walk into hell. He keeps his mouth shut and lets them bow, and in return, they tell him about Khun Sa, the most powerful of the drug lords.
Adams sent messages back through channels. He still thinks President George H.W. Bush should have negotiated with Khun Sa. “For $60 billion cash and a Ford Pinto station wagon, he could have shut down 60 percent of the heroin traffic in the world,” he says. “Instead, guess what? Khun Sa increased the harvest.”
On August 9, former KSDK-TV anchor Stan Stovall is in Philadelphia, weighing job offers, when his phone rings. It’s Adams, calling from Burma.
“You are not going to believe what happened here,” Adams says. “They had pro-democracy marches all over Burma—monks, women, children—and the military opened fire.”
“I didn’t see it on the news,” Stovall says.
“That’s because foreign journalists weren’t allowed in.”
Stovall and Adams are close friends: Stovall is godfather to Adams’ son, John, and Adams was best man at Stovall’s second wedding. They trust each other.
“I’ve got time,” Stovall says, and for the next five months, he lives in Southeast Asia, spending half of his time reporting in the jungle combat zone where Adams is training the rebels.
In February 1989, Adams goes to Quezon City, Philippines, to collect naval intelligence maps for the rebels. (They’re wrapped like Christmas presents, with tags that read, “To Joe from Ronnie.” When a customs official asks him what’s inside, he’ll say, “I don’t know. It’s not Christmas.”)
Supposedly, Adams has come to the Philippines to compete in an international sharpshooting championship. He doesn’t just compete; he wins the championship, and his picture’s on the evening news. The phone rings.
“Is this what you call covert?” his career-spook brother snaps.
Adams grins at the receiver. “It’s just my cover, man. Invisible in plain sight.”
Late in 1989, Adams makes a quick trip home from Burma to accompany a mercenary who’s got malaria. By the time they land, the same fever scorches Adams’ skin, and his eyes look like someone poured thick, molten glass over them. In the weeks that follow, his dreams drench him with terrors he never felt in combat.
Now he can’t go back to Burma, as he promised the rebels. Hell, he can’t even drive around skip-tracing or go looking for kidnapped kids. While he’s trying to regroup, a friend says he knows somebody who wants to hire a hit man.
“Why are you telling me?” Adams asks.
The friend shrugs. “He knows a lot about you. Maybe you can talk him out of it.”
Adams meets with the man, but wears a wire. He records an offer of $50,000 to kill Michael Athanasiades, who’s awaiting trial for killing his wife, Georgia Zeta Athanasiades.
“I don’t do contract hits,” Adams says, “and you are going to get yourself in trouble.”
A day or so later, Adams gets a call from a bail bondsman, who says, “I might need your bodyguard services. I’ve got a client out on $1 million bond, and he thinks somebody’s going to kill him.”
“Not only is he going to, but he tried to hire me to do it,” Adams retorts. When the bondsman comes over, Adams plays him the tape.
“Holy shit! How is it you always end up in the middle of this stuff?” the bondsman asks.
Adams agrees to take the bodyguard job; it’s perfect for malaria recovery. He meets with the man who tried to hire him and says, “Not only am I not going to kill Michael, but you aren’t either, because I’m now his bodyguard. Let the courts run their course.”
(Athanasiades is now serving a life sentence. “Joe did a wonderful job protecting me,” he says from prison. “He is very resourceful. He picks up the phone, and he gets what he wants.” Adams hosted his paying houseguest for a year and a half. “I stayed at his house in Maplewood,” says Athanasiades. “He’s a real clean guy—very regimented, constantly alert. He never said anything, but I’m pretty sure my smoking annoyed him. Tell him hello for me.”)
Adams can’t forget the day he took his 4-year-old son to Walt Disney World. One minute they were standing in line, and the next minute, John was gone.
Adams ran Disney World. Every foot. He’d never been scared like that before, never. His heart beat like a hammer, pounding hard enough to bend his ribs out. He kept running, all the way back to the hotel—and there was John, making long, lazy figure-eights on the swing set.
So in 1992, when the Chesterfield police call and tell Adams about a teen girl who didn’t come home from high school, he listens—even though six months have gone by with no word, no clue, no ransom demand. “The parents are frantic,” the officer says. “Why don’t you come in to the station, meet them, we’ll tell you about the case…”
“No,” Adams says. “I want to hear their version separate from yours. And I’m only going to take the case if it can be resolved.”
Long pause. “We think she’s dead.”
Adams isn’t wild about body-recovery cases. But when he talks to the parents, he finds out that they have a pretty good idea who took their daughter. A man they knew as Paul Detko, suspected of belonging to the white-supremacist group Posse Comitatus, persuaded a group of teenagers that a holocaust was coming in 1994, and he could save them with a computerized spaceship he had buried deep in the Earth. He told the girl he needed her to help save the world.
“O-kay,” Adams thinks. “I’m going to switch gears here. I’m going to look for the perp, not the girl. When I find him, I’ll find her—one way or another.”
He traces Detko to Costa Rica. Customs records say the girl hasn’t left the States. Adams flies to Costa Rica anyway. He figures his first step is to befriend the guy, show interest in his beliefs. This works faster than he planned. One day, he and Detko are sitting in a café, and Detko starts opening up, bragging that the CIA has a contract on him and he trained the Contras for Oliver North.
Adams fights to keep a straight face. Detko has no idea he’s talking to the man who did train the Contras for Oliver North.
Adams, on the other hand, is pretty sure who Detko is—but he doesn’t match the description the Chesterfield police had. Instead of a shaved head, he has a full head of silver hair (a wig), and he’s several inches taller (special shoes). Ever since a case with twin brothers confounded him, Adams doesn’t take chances.
He confides his mission to the hotel manager. “Nobody has a valid picture of this guy right now,” he explains, “and the FBI wants one. Can you get your camera and go out there on the patio while we are having lunch or something? Here’s the address to send it to.”
The manager nods rapidly. “We’ll take care of it.”
Since nothing’s breaking, Adams decides to raise the emotion, create some chaos, make Detko careless. He hires a couple of local guys to go kick in Detko’s door while Adams is with him, so he can’t possibly be suspected. Ghost-white, Detko blurts, “We’ve got to move the girl.”
“What girl?” Adams asks, his eyes wide.
Detko leans close. “There’s something in my life you don’t know about,” he says, soap-opera dramatic. He tells Adams he’s waiting for his true love to turn 17 so they can marry.
Adams furrows his brow in concerned sympathy—all the while hoping this is the Chesterfield girl and not somebody else. “Why don’t you use my room and make the call?” he offers.
Detko goes upstairs. Adams goes out to the lobby. To make a long-distance call, he knows, you have to dial the desk and give the number, and the operator places the call for you. So Adams stands behind a bamboo curtain, watches his room number light up, and memorizes the number the operator writes down. When Detko leaves, Adams calls the Chesterfield police. “This is it,” he says, and recites the number.
It turns out, the girl’s staying with a friend of Detko’s in a Mennonite community in Iowa. A SWAT team hits the place and retrieves her. She insists that she went willingly. Detko can’t be held in custody, so Adams has to slow him down.
And thus, another legend is born: Joe Adams throwing a guy into a volcano.
“I didn’t know it was a volcano,” he will protest, never too strenuously. “It wasn’t erupting. I just took him to the top of a mountain and left him there.”
As Athanasiades’ December 1990 court date nears, Adams starts hearing rumors that Yugoslavia will fall. One day, he comes home from the firing range and hears—he keeps CNN on 24/7—that Slovenia has seceded from Yugoslavia. “Well, here comes Croatia,” he thought. “It’s got ports Belgrade won’t want to lose.”
Adams flies to Croatia as a mercenary. He uses the name John Black. When a Croatian journalist asks whether that’s his real name, he says, “No, every place I work, I pick a color.”
“And for Croatia, you pick black?” the journalist asks bitterly.
“No,” Adams says, “I ran out of colors.”
He volunteers for an operation to open the roads to Sarajevo. He’s bumping along in the back of a truckload of Bulgarian mercenaries when somebody opens the flap.
“Where’s John Black?”
Adams raises a hand halfway, gives a brief nod.
The officer beckons him out and asks him to stay and train a special unit to go behind enemy lines.
It’s happening again. D.C. instead of the front lines. North Carolina instead of Vietnam. Adams sighs. “I’ll make you a deal,” he says. “One, I’ll train those people, but when the mission starts, I go with them. Two, no rules. No politics. Whatever it takes to win.”
Bullets are flying over Adams’ head, and under their high, steely hum, he hears an unmistakable ch-ch-ch. The Serbs have a tank. He motions, and the seven Croatian rangers he trained crawl after him, away from the Glina River bridge they were checking for explosives and through a hole in a farmhouse fence. They run behind the house for cover and find a higher fence in back—by the time they manage to climb over it, they’ll be shot. Adams has one of the soldiers tear the back door off the house, and they use it as a ramp and hoist themselves over. He goes last, and as he lands on the other side and starts crawling, he hears a clunking noise. The Serbs have fired a mortar round. It doesn’t go off.
They reach a small creek bed and hunker down, hear branches cracking as they’re shot off a tree a few feet above their heads. Urgent whispers: The two platoon sergeants are planning to make a run for it, gesturing toward the cornfield ahead. The corn’s near harvest, tall enough to conceal them.
Adams jerks his head to Danny, his interpreter. “You tell them, the first guy that runs, I’m going to shoot him in the back. It gets dark at 4:35 p.m., and there’s no moon tonight. They don’t have night-vision equipment out here. We wait.”
He hears Danny speak, hears the men arguing. “You are going to stay here,” Adams hisses in English, his meaning clear. “You will move out when I say.”
Just after 4:30, he passes the word down the line, and they run for the cornfield.
Which, it turns out, is not a cornfield at all. It’s a 10-foot strip of corn planted to control erosion, and beyond it is a wide-open field. If they had reached it in daylight, they’d be dead.
Before leaving for a mercenary gig, Adams used to learn the country’s history, geography, culture, climate, laws. He’d buy its favorite weapons and practice with them. He’d memorize enough of the language to get along.
By the time he shows up in Croatia in 1990, he’s so relaxed, he doesn’t even bother to master the currency.
“You have no dinar?” his cab driver asks when Adams hands him a handful of U.S. dollars.
“No, no, I ate on the train, I’m fine,” Adams says, thinking it’s nice of the driver to be so concerned.
When he realizes his mistake, he decides it’s time to retire from mercenary work.
He returns to private-eye work, but even that’s changing: You can’t do pretexting the way you once could; you can’t capture computer keystrokes or intercept cellphones. The police don’t want outsiders doing undercover drug stings. Intelligence agencies don’t hire private eyes as contractors the way they used to.
There’s just not as much slack in the rope, and people aren’t quite sure what to make of Adams’ loops and lassos. Is he one of the good guys or the bad guys? With all of his persona and shtick and bravura, it’s hard for an outsider to tell. He’s done so many favors and hired himself out for so many causes, his moral code’s impossible to parse.
In 1997, he pleads guilty to bribing a public servant—a Maplewood police officer. He’s fined $1,000. “Didn’t do it,” he says tersely. “I didn’t feel like sending a friend to jail to save $1,000.”
The prosecutor in the case, Dan Diemer, is now a criminal defense attorney in private practice. Asked his opinion of Adams, he says, “I think he’s incredibly trustworthy. He would more often take the high way on something like that than a lot of people.”
Adams’ only hint of tamed domesticity is the time he spends with his three kids: a daughter, whose mind he admits is foreign territory to him, and two sons, Joe and, 12 years younger, Jon.
In 1995, Joe is 20 and not quite grown-up; he hangs out a lot with a friend whose father is a dentist, and one day they break into the father’s office and steal laughing gas.
They accidentally asphyxiate themselves.
Adams’ friends tiptoe around him for the next year, afraid that in his grief, he’ll lash out, maybe try to kill the dentist. But this pain is heavier and duller than that. He knows it’s nobody’s fault.
Two years after his son’s death, Adams starts taking an interest in one of his clients and her three kids. “We’re gonna have some guy time,” he assures worried-looking 12-year-old Bobby Tsiaklides. First, Adams takes him to a firing range: “Every boy needs to know how to shoot.” Then Adams starts setting up scavenger hunts for the three kids—all-day distractions from their parents’ tumultuous divorce. His son Jon joins in, and Adams gives them maps, a compass, and a radio. When they get older, he buys the boys dirt bikes and teaches them to fish. And when Bobby loses Adams’ favorite lure, Adams doesn’t rage, just says, “We’ve gotta get it back.”
“But it’s in the bottom of the lake!” Bobby says.
Adams takes the opportunity to teach him how to scuba dive.
As a teenager, Bobby comes to work for Adams’ detective agency. Years later, he sums up what he’s learned: “No. 1: Be a man of your word.” He grins. “Well, actually, rule No. 1 is, whatever you do, look cool while you’re doing it. Always work hard. And never lie, cheat, or steal—unless it’s to gain a tactical advantage.”
Why did Adams go to so much trouble with somebody else’s children? Bobby never wanted to jinx it by wondering. Adams did date his mom after the divorce—but not for long. The relationship that lasted was with the kids.
Finally, after Bobby becomes a Marine, fights in Fallujah, Iraq, and starts studying to be a paramedic, he asks.
Adams shrugs: “I just did what I wish my father would have done for me.”
Adams goes back to Central America once more; he’s gotten Stovall an exclusive interview with Calero.
Hayes takes the same flight—with Adams’ detective badge in his wallet.
Adams and Stovall move to the smoking section, right behind Hayes, so Stovall can light up. Adams starts briefing Stovall, giving vivid detail about the Contras’ encampments and gun placements. Hayes lets the conversation build. Then he rises, spins around, flashes the badge, and barks, “Joe Adams, up to your old tricks! You are coming with me. U.S. Marshall.”
Stovall’s still clutching his notebook, and his pen traces a long squiggle right off the page as he darts a sideways look at Adams.
“Eat my shorts,” Adams tells Hayes nonchalantly. “We’re over international waters. You can’t touch me.”
“You’re right,” Hayes replies, “and if you get off this plane before we touch down in Nicaragua”—his lips are starting to quiver—“you’re home free.” They manage another 10 seconds, then both burst out laughing.
Stovall looks from one to the other and says, drawing out each word, “You rotten sons of bitches.”
On September 29, 2004, Deanna Daughhetee calls to hire Adams as her bodyguard. She’s going through a headline-making divorce from Ray Vinson and a vicious battle over everything from a plane and a puppy to the control of American Equity Mortgage.
Daughhetee is delicately boned and steel-willed. Adams sees fear in her eyes. She does whatever he tells her to do to stay safe, and he goes wherever she wants to keep her safe. One spring morning, for example, she wants to fly to Scottsdale to go shopping. Adams is not thrilled. The woman’s a security risk, and all this girly shopping crap will only make his job harder. But he trails along obediently. They’re at a café when her phone rings. One of her executives’ nephews didn’t come back from his spring-break trip to Mexico, and now his parents are getting calls asking for money.
“He’s probably in La Paz,” Adams says instantly; he’s not sure why. He’s never even been to La Paz. Daughhetee goes back to the phone for more details, then covers the receiver and whispers, “He is in La Paz!”
Adams swings into high gear. This beats shopping any day. He can use Daughhetee’s company plane and clear customs. One of the pilots is ex-Vietnam and loves him. “Don’t send any more money,” he tells the parents. “You sent some, that’s good, it’s bait. Just agree to pay more and deliver it in person.”
The father, a schoolteacher from a small town in Illinois, brings about $500. “We’re going to Mexico to ransom a child and you’ve got $500?” Adams says, lifting one eyebrow. He pulls out $10,000 and puts half in an overhead compartment. “Stay on the ground for two hours,” he tells the pilot once they land in La Paz. “If we’re not back by then, go to San Diego, stage the plane, and wait for further instructions.”
In La Paz, Adams rents a van and asks the driver how much he’ll charge to stay with them for two hours. He says $50. “I’ll give you $200,” Adams says. “Keep the engine running.” He and the boy’s father go to the town square. The father stands by the pay phone, and Adams stays in the shadows. No kid. Then they see him, with a man—they’re just late. They’re on south-of-the-border time. Adams notices two other guys across the street, watching. He shoos the father toward his son, then pulls out his private-investigator badge and says loudly, “St. Louis County! Stand back or I’ll have you arrested for kidnapping!” The two men run; the third stands dumbstruck, maybe still hoping for ransom. “He’s coming with us,” Adams barks. “If you don’t stand back, you’re going to be arrested for kidnapping.” The man runs after his friends.
Now Adams has the boy—and the boy has no passport. Back in the van, Adams starts coaching the father: “As you walk in the airport, put your arm around him and rub his head and give him some noogies, like a loving dad.” The driver overhears and asks what the problem is.
“He doesn’t have any papers,” Adams says.
The driver chuckles. “My brother is the customs agent.”
The first time Adams and Daughhetee talk on the phone for an hour and a half, he knows he’s screwed. He hates talking on the phone. He wonders if he should become a merc again, escape while he can. But he can’t bring himself to leave.
In December 2005, at a holiday party at the White House, they both admit how they feel. Adams stops taking a paycheck. He’s already warned Daughhetee, at the outset, “I’m going to do some things in this process to draw attention from you. If I can get Ray to try to focus on me, he’s less apt to try to make a move on you.”
The divorce is finalized in June 2006. Missouri Circuit Judge Michael Burton mentions Vinson’s infidelity, domestic violence, alcohol abuse, and sexual improprieties in the decree. Daughhetee keeps American Equity Mortgage in the divorce, losing only a few assets, the Cavalier King Charles spaniel, and Vinson’s priceless singsong twang on the radio commercials.
During a settlement conference, Adams is arrested for brandishing a knife at Vinson (Vinson’s point of view) or idly opening and shutting a friend’s new spring-loaded knife while Vinson walked past (Adams’ point of view). In court, Adams calls it a “baby knife,” but when asked whether it could be a lethal weapon, he graphically describes how he could use it to kill. He is sentenced to 90 days in jail.
Next, Vinson sues Adams and two other private investigators in Las Vegas for civil racketeering. Vinson says Adams and two other investigators dug up a woman who couldn’t even remember meeting Vinson four years earlier and paid her to lie. The woman, Pamela Brensinger, a former exotic dancer, swears under oath that she was coached to lie. (Adams says the woman was scared to testify against Vinson, and all they did was pay her husband to keep her off work and safely “pigeonholed” until the trial.)
The trial outdoes fiction, its cast including “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss (whom Adams persuaded—and paid—to put Brensinger in touch with him). Vinson wins an award of $500,000—$390,000 of it from Adams. Adams appeals.
Meanwhile, one of the other investigators has sued Vinson for libel. Vinson’s filed for orders of protection against Adams; Daughhetee’s filed for orders of protection against Vinson. Daughhetee has sued Vinson for “unfair competition” and won $300,000. And now Vinson is suing Daughhetee for “reckless indifference” and trying to reopen the divorce case.
But back to romance.
Adams and Daughhetee marry on January 27, 2007. Now they live in a modernized version of a medieval castle, and for the first time in years, Adams has an address instead of a post-office box. A 1942 Harley-Davidson WLA military bike he restored leans on its kickstand in the round entrance hall; Daughhetee swears she likes how it looks there. He hung a silver chandelier in the garage to surprise her, and he spins a Swarovski prism on a turntable when she’s getting dressed in the morning, so the sun will make rainbows for her.
He’s outside a lot; his men let him know by walkie-talkie when a visitor arrives. Uzi glides along behind him like a tiny Zamboni, his combed and beribboned black-and-white coat sweeping the ground. Adams live-traps the raccoons that come to fish in his waterfall, then chauffeurs them to the park. All winter, he fed high-protein cat food to a mangy coyote whose coat is now glossy. He can’t watch commercials about dogs in shelters.
“People are dirt,” he remarks. “If you want a friend, buy a dog.”
Adams gets little jolts of pleasure from the war stories, the boasts and swagger. But he bores too fast to be truly self-absorbed. His mind lights on something else, sparks to some new enthusiasm or challenge. “He’s not a ‘hail fellow well met’ type,” Hayes concedes, “but I have never enjoyed somebody’s mind as much as Joe’s. He reacts. He doesn’t sit around thinking up problems; he’s called in to figure them out.”
When he says he’s never been scared, he means he’s never been daunted, panicked, frozen in place. His brain just doesn’t work that way; the drive to win overrides any hesitation. But fear as hypervigilance, a constant awareness of danger and threat? He knows that kind of fear inside out. Most people think of safety as something that’s either present or absent. Adams thinks it’s up to him. So he stays loose, like a natural athlete, but he never really relaxes. He snaps bravado at the world like a red cape, and while it billows, his eyes scan hard, tracking the bull.
One night, he’s sleeping alone in his big new house (Daughhetee is away on a business trip), and the alarm goes off. He grabs his pistol off of the nightstand and runs downstairs, yelling obscenities, demanding that the intruders show themselves.
Then he realizes that his wife set her alarm clock, and that’s what’s ringing.
He laughs at himself and goes back to bed. Most people would be embarrassed at overreacting. Adams is thrilled to know just how he’ll react if anybody ever does try to break into his new home.
“I think my worst fear in life,” he says, “if I have any fears at all, would be being unprepared.” Danger, he says, “is when you don’t know what you’re doing.” He shoots every day and keeps refreshing his flying, scuba-diving and sky-diving credentials—just in case he needs to steal a plane, or bail out of one.
Jon “Buster” Adams comes out to the desert to work for his father. Adams fires him for insubordination. Bobby works a while for Project Bluelight. The next thing he hears, Jon is joining the U.S. Border Patrol.
Daughhetee flies out with Adams regularly. When they married, Adams retired as a private eye. He wants to be free to relax with her. So far, that’s included teaching her to shoot, analyze tactical strategy, and interrogate; it turns out, she likes this stuff.
Adams named Project Bluelight for a secret U.S. Army Special Forces counterterrorism group; he’s always disappointed when people don’t recognize the reference. He says Project Bluelight’s policy is “no media. We don’t exist. We just support Homeland Security patrol and do no interviews.” (Except this one, of course. And he’s just given Rolling Stone permission to follow him around the desert. And he did consider a reality show about his life as a private eye. And he filmed a trailer for a show about Project Bluelight, but it was deemed too politically incorrect to sell.)
“The border operations were a fad,” Adams says. “The hardcore people are still out there, very few, and the neo-Nazis, and the people seeking media attention. We cover 325 square miles from the border in Arizona. I saw a need for someone to coordinate current ground intelligence with the agents in the field, because they weren’t getting it. You’d think if they worked out there, they would know the area. No. The agents are rotated every six months because of fear of corruption. Do you know how many Border Patrol we’ve rescued? They’re lost!”
Adams places volunteers on various trails, setting up lines of observation so he can tell Border Patrol where somebody’s going to be in an hour or so. “There are people literally out in the middle of the desert, on foot or waiting to be picked up,” he says. “There’s an entire network of trails.”
The volunteers sound like a tough crew—ex-military and ex-police, with nicknames like T-Rex and Nighthawk. But two team members, a married couple, are archaeologists. “You wouldn’t believe the information they are able to tell us about water tables and rock formations,” Adams says.
His team members call him Colonel, his rank in his last mercenary gig. To get it, he didn’t have to rise obediently through the ranks; he just had to do things nobody else wanted to do.
He outfits his unit with guns, flashlights, limited thermal-imaging cameras, and night-vision goggles. His pride is Pepe, a custom Jeep Wrangler Rubicon 4x4 he named for the little truck in Romancing the Stone. When he talks about Pepe, he’s a 10-year-old boy running a SWAT team. “Total navigation, full siren package,” he says, speaking in choppy, excited phrases. “Sound effects through the PA: helicopter, machine guns, mountain lions, the Mexican national anthem. Landing light in the rear, so if somebody comes up behind me at night I can flood them—that’s an old bodyguard trick. Green LEDs for when I’m going down the tracks; green strobes front and back; $40,000 in the suspension alone. This thing can jump off walls. Homeland Security does not have a vehicle like this. This is what they need.”
Less than a month after he found the young woman’s body, he had her name. He kept in touch with the consulate and sheriff, offering to pay to send her body home. He learned she’d gone into convulsions after a rattlesnake bite, and a group of gunrunners had left her behind. “It’s got cartel written all over it,” he says grimly.
Adams likes to talk about supporting Homeland Security, but it can be hard for him to get the feds’ attention. One night, he gets a call: Four people are coming in, sighted on a trail, and they’re carrying huge backpacks of dope, probably marijuana. “Border Patrol doesn’t show up; they have a big operation going,” Adams says. “These guys are coming right at me, and dopers always carry a gun. I get back on the radio and tell two of my scouts to go to alternate frequency: ‘Border Patrol’s trucks are on the trail! Get on your motorcycles, run up here, come in stealth the last mile.’” In Pepe, he can cut power to every device with the kill switch, and with another flip of a switch, the Jeep lights up like the Fourth of July. “As soon as they come out and see those tracks,” he tells his team, “I’m going to go full package and run them right at you, and you turn all your lights on and watch them drop the dope.”
In the flood of light and sound, he watches the backpacks hit the ground and four men take off. “Four sad people running back to Mexico with no food, no water, and no marijuana,” he says, mock-sympathetic. “And now they’ve got to answer to the cartel.”
He says half the illegal immigrants he finds are carrying drugs; by his count, Project Bluelight has called in “174 bales of marijuana—that’s millions of dollars worth of dope,” plus a load of cocaine or meth. Six years ago, his scouts weren’t seeing any drugs at all. Now the cartels own the trails, and rip crews are organizing to ambush the traffickers and steal their dope. “We stopped wearing camo because the rip teams were wearing camo,” Adams says. “They know the trails, ’cause they have all run them themselves. Now we try not to be seen; before, we would light ’em up and get ’em to surrender.”
Hayes just shakes his head, thinking of his old friend out in the desert stalking drug-runners. “These are the ones that go around beheading people! But he’s got his guns and his troops, and he’s prepared. That’s where he gets his edge: He can perceive things that are out there.”
No rose-colored glasses?
“Nope. Night vision.”
