Illustration by Brian Hubble
Around dusk on February 21, a handful of police officers dressed in jeans, raggedy sweatshirts and ball caps followed a suspect from his house to a nearby Walgreens. They pulled into the lot, parked and waited for a uniformed Florissant officer to ask Arnell Fields to step out of his truck. The officer took it nice and easy, saying there'd been a burglary in the neighborhood and Fields fit the suspect's description. They had just a few questions; then he'd be on his way.
The second Fields’ feet hit the asphalt, the plainclothes cops rushed him from three directions. They found an unregistered gun—they say it was tucked in his pants; Fields says it was where it always was, between the driver’s seat and the console. (He owns Grubb’s, a soul-food restaurant on Dunn Road, and he carries the day’s cash and receipts home every evening. “I got the gun not too long ago,” he says, “because there’d been a lot of robberies in the area—the Krispy Kreme, Dierbergs, the Phillips 66—and it kind of shook me up.”)
The officers also claim that Fields had a bag of marijuana in plain sight on the passenger seat. (Fields admits he smokes a little weed on occasion but says he had none with him.) They put him up against his truck, handcuffed him and, he says, accused him of being “a f—gheroin dealer” who had just sold drugs to their confidential informant.
“I said, ‘You guys got the wrong guy, man.’ Eventually one of them got tired of me talking and said, ‘Sit his black ass in the car; he’s a big fat crybaby.’ Then this big guy came over, like, ‘Man, what are you guys doing to this guy? I’m a lawyer.’ He told me, ‘Don’t worry about nothing’—and later it turned out he was with them. I said, ‘I thought you were a lawyer,’ and he started laughing.”
The officers drove Fields to a new subdivision off Old Jamestown Road and stopped at the cream two-story house where he lives with his wife, Kimmi, a makeup artist, and their 2-year-old daughter. He refused to consent to a search, so Det. Josh Davis started the paperwork to get a warrant, and the other officers stood around shooting the breeze. Fields sat alone in the locked car, handcuffed, trying to figure it out.
Who were these guys?
Nobody knows much about the North County Municipal Enforcement Group—and its officers like it that way. Six guys from four police departments (Berkeley, Bridgeton, Hazelwood and St. Ann), they operate undercover, making street buys and using confidential informants to steer them to dealers. They focus on the nickel-and-dime stuff, the bottom of the food chain, and if they stumble across anything bigger—which doesn’t happen often—they immediately turn it over to the feds.
The North County MEG has its own (unmarked) base of operations—it used to be somewhere on Missouri Bottom Road, and maybe still is. Young, thrilled by risk and eager to make drug busts, the officers tend to do this grungy, dangerous work for a couple of years, then rotate out. “They are usually very forthright individuals,” says Chief Walter Mutert of Bridgeton. “They have a very good gift for gab; they’re very inquisitive.” One of the six is a sergeant; he’s the main supervision. The four police chiefs and the mayor of Bridgeton meet quarterly and review any complaints.
Formed in 1986, North County’s is the only small MEG unit left standing in St. Louis County. At one point there were six, and operations got a little slapstick, with undercover sellers bumping into undercover buyers and different MEGs unwittingly targeting the same suspects. St. Louis County solved the problem by absorbing smaller units into its undercover drug task force, which is now the largest in the Midwest, with 14 participating agencies and 68 members.
The four police chiefs running the North County MEG won’t join. They like their local control. “The chiefs get along,” says Chief Carl Wolf of Bridgeton. “We cooperate.”
In the early ’90s, twice as many departments participated, but one by one, the others left to join the St. Louis County and Drug Enforcement Agency task forces or do their own work. Wolf shrugs off the departures: “They thought they could do better on their own.” He’s quite content with his MEG’s results. He says they receive only about $25,000 from the U.S. Department of Justice (the St. Louis County task force receives $371,470), yet North County opened 633 new cases last year (one-tenth of St. Louis County’s 6,347, with one-eleventh the manpower) and made 419 drug arrests (St. Louis County made 821).
Granted, the lion’s share of North County’s arrests were for possession (73 percent), and in more than half of the cases the drug was marijuana. St. Louis County identifies drug-trafficking organizations and charts their hierarchies, makes arrests for manufacture or sale of drugs and feeds daily informationto the DEA. North County sticks with unorganized, small-scale drug traffic. Last year the unit eradicated 19 cultivated marijuana plants, destroyed 14 meth labs, seized 976 doses of ecstasy and, overall, took more than $1 million in drugs off the streets ofits neighborhoods.
The chiefs say that’s plenty efficient.
The affadavit Det. Davis put together to search Arnell Fields’ house made a strong case. On the day Fields was arrested, it stated, Davis had received information from a reliable confidential informant that Fields was selling heroin and marijuana from his residence. MEG officers had followed the informant to Fields’ house, the affidavit stated. “While inside the residence Fields displayed a quantity of heroin and marijuana to the c/i and told him/her ‘whatever you need I got,’” the affidavit stated, whereupon the informant reportedly left to get the money and called Davis from a cellphone to say “that Fields would be leaving his residence shortly and that he/she observed him put a quantity of marijuana and a black in color handgun into his waistband.” The MEG officers saw Fields leave and followed him to Walgreens.
As background, the affidavit cited arrest charges for “tampering” (Fields says as a teenager he rode with a friend in a car he didn’t know was stolen) and “assault” (“That was a nightclub downtown. Everybody was having fun, and then this guy came out and hit me with a bottle and both of us got to fighting”). Those were arrests, not convictions, but Fields does have a police record: He pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana in November 1997, but served no time. He also got a speeding ticket in 1997 and ran a red light in 2005.
Mary Foote, Kimmi Fields’ mother, says Brinks called her to report that the Fieldses’ alarm was going off, so she and another daughter, Jamaria Brisby, went to the house. They say one undercover cop told them to leave. “This is my daughter’s house; I helped her get this house; I have a right to be here,” Foote says she replied. She says the officer then snapped, “I’m taking them down; they are doing drugs; they are dirty. Get Kimmi over here, or we are going to tear this house up.”
Kimmi raced from her job at the Galleria and was on her way home when she reached Brad Kessler, a longtime friend who’s a noted criminal-defense lawyer. He advised her not to go to the house, because the police had no warrant and, as far as he could tell, no grounds for a search.
Brisby, meanwhile, was talking back to the officers, much to her mother’s chagrin. “Jamaria’s headstrong,” Foote says, “and he kept calling her ‘ghetto.’”
“He was very unprofessional and very ignorant, cursing,” Brisby says. “He said, ‘I know your kind.’ I said, ‘I’m a steelworker; I work 14 hours a day; my kind is very tired.’ My mom was asking if she could get her grandbaby some clothes and Pampers, and he said, ‘You might as well buy something for her; she’s not gonna have a f—g daddy when I’m done with this.’”
Fields’ neighbor, a lawyer, was home recovering from surgery, waiting for her fiancé to arrive. She looked outside and saw cars and SUVs everywhere. “Five or six white guys were standing in Fields’ driveway talking,” she says, “jeans, T-shirts, ball caps all bent up. One guy was lying in my yard, drinking from a QuikTrip cup. I saw him finish it and throw it down.”
Her fiancé came home, and a friend brought them dinner. “He’s a white male, very square-looking,” she says. “When he leaves, one of the guys says, ‘Hey, old boy in the car says you’re the dope man.’ My friend says, ‘I don’t even know that guy,’ gets in the car and calls us, kind of spooked.”
According to Kessler, the officers maintained that surveillance had shown lots of foot traffic to the Fields house. “Absolutely not,” the neighbor says. “The only people I ever noticed were some guy who comes over and cuts their yard, and over the summer I saw one barbecue there.”
The warrant to search came through late that evening, and the officers searched until daybreak. By the time they left, the Fieldses’ house looked like a giant had picked it up, turned it upside down and shaken it hard. DVDs were out of their cases, photos had been pulled from their albums and clothes were piled on the floor; insulation had been ripped from the walls, a carburetor had been taken out of a car and vents had been pried up from the floor.
The search inventory listed “suspect marijuana” (less than an ounce, Kessler says; the county prosecutor’s office did not return calls for comment) and “drug paraphernalia”—which police later said was a scale with a trace of heroin on it. “I don’t even own a scale,” Fields says. “Only scale I’ve got is up at the restaurant, where we weigh the food.” Two guns were listed, a 9 mm Luger and Kimmi’s Grendel .380 (a small, light weapon designed for inexperienced shooters). Neither was registered.
Scrawled at the bottom of the inventory was the most questionable item of all: a bulletproof vest. “I’ve had it for years,” Fields says. “I got that vest from my dad. It was hung with the suit that I went to his funeral in. He was a Vietnam vet, and you know how they came home. He was military-crazy; he had guns, knives—he was just loony.”
The MEG looked everywhere, and then they brought in a drug-sniffing dog. No hidden stash was found.
Now the case had turned into a locked-room riddle: If the confidential informant who led the MEG officers to Fields’ house had told the truth, where was all that heroin and marijuana? Informants get searched. Fields was followed from the house. And it’s hard to imagine anything escaping that search.
Confidential informants are the core of drug detection—and they’re problematic. Some just like the self-importance of helping or the rush of playing cops and robbers on both sides at once. Most are snitches trying to save their own skin—or set someone else up. “You never trust them,” says Capt. Thomas Jackson, commander of St. Louis County’s bureau of drug enforcement and drug task force, who’s taught a class in informant management. “You establish their reliability, and then you control them.”
The Fields affidavit said the informant had “proved to be accurate and reliable” and had supplied “information on prior occasions about drug activity, which has led to the seizure of controlled substances, weapons, and U.S. currency.” Of course, the informant’s identity is kept sealed, so prosecutors essentially have to take the police officer’s word for an informant’s reliability—and sometimes the officer has not worked directly with that informant. Sean O’Hagan, a former county prosecutor who’s now assistant circuit attorney, says warrant language about reliability and past seizure “can be boilerplate”; he grills officers for specifics to make sure past information was “100 percent accurate, not half-assed accurate.”
In Fields’ case, the only support for the informant’s story was the tiny bit of marijuana and the alleged trace of heroin on the scale Fields says he never owned.
“Where’s the scale?” asks Kessler. “Why didn’t they list it on the inventory? And how’d they know it was heroin?”
Wolf says, “I’m sure they field-tested it. As to the lab report, I don’t know yet. They may be waiting on that report before charging him.” Wolf won’t release the police report because the case is still under investigation, and he won’t say whether the informant wore a wire. But the affidavit made no mention of a recorded conversation—which would have been prime evidence.
Fields was kept overnight in a cell at the Hazelwood Police Department, then released.
And that heroin the informant saw? “Who knows?” Wolf says. “We sat on the house while they went and got the warrant. Usually a dog can find it no matter where it is.” He repeats that the informant has a good track record.
Kessler says he doesn’t believe the informant even existed.
For both the DEA and the St. Louis County task forces, it’s standard procedure for informants and officers to wear a KEL mic to record any conversation about drugs, and both suspects and informants are rigorously vetted. “If a judge puts trust in us, there is no way one of my guys is going back and saying, ‘What we presented to you is inaccurate,’” says Jack Riley, the assistant special agent in charge of the regional DEA office. “That has never happened.”
Modeling itself on the DEA, the St. Louis County task force gathers detailed informa-tion on their suspects and fills out paperwork about “safety hazards, fortifications, reconnaissance,” says Jackson. “We also do what’s called deconfliction,” reporting targeted individuals and planned drug buys to a center run by the Office of National Drug Control Policy to make sure no one else is investigating the same person or planning an operation in the same area. “Everyone should use it,” Jackson insists. But Wolf says conflicts were only a problem years ago, when there were so many different MEG units. “We don’t have to worry about that now. We have good cooperation between the units. And as far as I know, we’re the only one that makes undercover buys.”
St. Louis County’s street team makes hundreds of undercover buys a year. And St. Louis County reregisters its informants every six months, verifying and updating all information in their locked files.
“We know who our active ones are,” Wolf says, “and which are inactive. We don’t go back and hound people.”
Is the North County MEG playing things a little too loose?
Drug deals move from a tightly networked, sophisticated top echelon all the way down to the street-level dealers who work alone. Drug enforcement follows the same pattern.
“The North County MEG? They’re cowboys,” says defense lawyer Paul D’Agrosa. “They run pretty fast and loose. There are some really rough characters who are part of that unit. Their style is to find small potatoes and flip them [turn them into confidential informants] to go after the bigger potatoes, so they sit around and talk about who they think is a small-time marijuana or cocaine dealer and arrange an arrest, maybe do a traffic bust. They will flip that person by scaring him, using rough or strong-arm tactics that tell that person, ‘Look, we don’t want to deal with a lawyer. You turn at least three deals for us, and we will make this go away.’ Usually it’s three; that seems to be the magic number.”
Drug busts are the MEG guys’ Viagra, in the opinion of defense lawyer Nick Zotos: “They watched Miami Vice too many times. There’s a little bit more supervision of the St. Louis County guys; there’s no supervision for the North County MEG. They live on snitches, and every guy who gets arrested walks out with a pager number.”
Defense lawyers, of course, have their own biases about law enforcement—but one, John Lynch, happens to be a former police detective who spent years as a DEA agent working with the MEG units. “As of late, it’s kind of fallen apart,” he says of the North County MEG. “I don’t think they have the resources, and I don’t think they are supplying the personnel with the training they need.”
St. Louis County task-force members receive initial overall training; quarterly job-specific training; training from the tactical-operations team; specialized firearms training, such as night fire and concealed-carry firing; advanced undercover and surveillance schools; driving classes; and technical training on equipment.
The North County MEG supervisor goes to “a two-week school plus other training throughout the year,” Wolf says, “and officers attend a one-week undercover drug school. We ensure that they stay professional.”
Fields says one of the North County MEG officers was out of control, cussing and raging and using racial slurs. “He pulled me out of the car and slammed me in the mud, so I’m sitting in the cold mud. Then he put me back in the car, and I was in cuffs so when he pulled I kind of leaned on him, and he socked me in the jaw.”
Wolf checks on the claim and calls back: “According to this side of the story, he was never hit at all. Never put a hand on him. He gets here to Hazelwood and tells us he’s got an asthma problem, and that’s the reason we took him to the hospital.”
Kessler says a Hazelwood detective spoke to him from the hospital and told him that Fields’ jaw was just fractured, not broken. “If all he had was asthma, why’d they prescribe pain pills?” (Prescription number 2865529-01124, for hydrocodone.)
Wolf says he’ll be glad to look into the matter. “If he filed a complaint—and he could file it with me; I’m the chairman of the MEG unit—the officers would be required to take a lie-detector test, and we’d do a thorough investigation. I get complaints filed all the time.”
Kessler says there’s no point in filing: “They’d just investigate internally and then say they found nothing wrong.”
Fields could still be charged, if the MEG were to find enough evidence to convince a prosecutor. Meanwhile, he’s trying to figure out if somebody has a grudge against him. “At first I thought it was race,” he admits, “because if a white couple has money and a nice house, nobody thinks a thing.”
He hired someone to help clean up the house, but his wife still wants to move. She’s scrubbing at a muddy pawprint the drug dog left on her pale-beige carpet when the wind blows a chair over on the patio. She jumps. Fields goes to right the chair, muttering, “You see why we’re gonna have to move?”
