Good Cop’s Long Slide to Disgrace

Growing up in the peach orchards of the San Joaquin Valley, Jim Slate was a bit too innocent and coddled for his cousin Larry’s taste.

Larry, six months older and wiser to the world, did what he could to educate him. It was Larry who introduced Jim to his first fistfight, his first beer and his first romance.

They played side by side in Pony League: Larry a catcher, all guts and tattered uniform, and Jim a meticulous outfielder with a line-drive swing. They shared a dream to become police officers and graduated from the same class at the academy in 1976. True to form, Larry became a motorcycle patrolman and Jim a 16-hour-a-day, by-the-book detective.

Jim went on to be celebrated as one of the finest officers Merced ever had--tough, fearless, a workaholic on behalf of the law. He didn’t blink an eye at the pressure to let old teammates and buddies off easy. The armed robber in his first felony arrest was his best friend from grammar school.

But the Jim Slate who waddled into the federal courthouse in Fresno in May 1995 was a different man, a wheezing, 420-pound disgrace with two bad knees and the nickname Tiny. The former Merced lawman of the year pleaded guilty to stealing 15 kilograms of cocaine from a bust that he and Larry had worked together. Last month, he left Merced to begin a 10-year sentence in federal prison.

It was an unthinkable betrayal of his badge and hometown and the foursquare values that the large Slate family had always stood for, and it stunned this farming town. Suddenly the texture of life seemed frayed.

Jim Slate gone bad? No way.

His secret might have remained safe from his cousin and everyone else, except that he peddled the dope through a local dealer who was every officer’s snitch. Larry Slate refused to believe it. When state narcotic agents, now his co-workers, first related their suspicions, he told them to go to hell. Finally, confronted with the undeniable, he turned cop on his cousin and helped the investigation.

“He insulted me. The SOB insulted our family and town and my profession,” Larry said. “We were partners. We were cops. We put guys in jail who did what he did. . . . I turned on him, you bet. And if the situation was reversed, I’d expect the same from him.”

Jim offered no reason for raiding the evidence locker entrusted to his care. Although his guilty plea spared the Slate family from the grimy details of his crime, it also robbed this community of a trial and a possible explanation, however self-serving, from Jim.

The questions still echo.

How could a model police detective, a man who seemed to take special pride in busting dirty cops, take such a plunge? He was the son of decent, hard-working parents in a tight-knit community of farmers, housewives, police, coaches, hunters and fishermen. There were so many places he could have gone for help.

Maybe it was the obesity--his weight had doubled over the last decade. Or the longtime girlfriend who dumped him, and his attempt to find a replacement in a police groupie half his age. After all, Jim spent only a fraction of the cocaine proceeds on himself. Most of it went to this new woman and a cousin who was jobless.

‘When Did I Let Go?’

Just before he left for prison, the 42-year-old Slate sat in the small, spare bedroom of his parents’ home--his self-imposed jail cell for two years--and talked for the first time about his downfall. He had used his voice so little since his arrest that he went hoarse after two hours.

He was still recovering from radical surgery to seal much of his stomach in an attempt to lose weight. He had lost 160 pounds. He was learning to walk--without the shuffle--and he paced back and forth, washed and dried his hands what seemed like a hundred times and drank constantly from a half-frozen bottle of Crystal Geyser water. His now-tiny stomach kept gurgling.

“It’s funny,” he said, smiling beneath a Fu Manchu mustache. “Here I am freeing myself of all this weight that’s imprisoned me for years, and I’m headed off to prison.

“I’ve done nothing but lay in this bedroom for two years and think, ‘When did I let go? When did I make that fatal mistake and go over the line?’ You know, I can sit here and say something snapped. But I didn’t hear something snap.”

If he tended to overdo things as a cop, meeting snitches at 2 a.m. or refusing to take a sick day in 11 years, he knew no other way. The whole Slate clan, refugees from the Dust Bowl, worked hard. His father, J. B., ran Del Monte’s 4,000-acre peach ranch by day and a turkey insemination business by night.

Jim tried to help with the turkeys but had a deep fear of birds. Larry had to catch and pry open the hens. “Larry wasn’t afraid of anything and he couldn’t understand my fear of birds,” Jim said. “He used to tease me. ‘How can you be as tough as you are and be afraid of a little old bird?’ ”

Jim grew up on the peach ranch, the oldest of three children, and attended Merced schools. Larry’s house was 10 minutes down the road in a rough little town called Planada, where his father served as constable. The cousins, so close in age, were like brothers, and they competed fiercely in baseball whenever the extended family got together for barbecues at the ranch.

Home plate was the shade of a mulberry tree, left field the bunkhouse where the migrant farm workers slept, right field the tin equipment shed. Off the pecan tree was a homer, an easy swat for the tall, broad-shouldered Jim. The game would just get going when Jim’s mother would shout, “You can run, Jim, but I don’t want you sweating.” Larry thought that was the most ridiculous thing, proof that his cousin could use a little dirtying up.

One summer night before their sophomore year of high school, the cousins were hanging out in the park in Planada when four guys jumped them. They nearly got their throats cut but Jim held his own, never leaving Larry’s side. He finally proved himself in the eyes of his fearless cousin.

Family and friends recall that Jim had a hard time fitting in when Larry wasn’t around. At Merced Junior College, baseball coach Butch Hughes was impressed with Jim’s versatility on the field but noticed he was awkward socially. Even so, Jim managed to get elected student body vice president.

“Jim had this deep need to please people and yet he turned them off with an attitude that seemed arrogant,” Hughes said. “Then he would overcompensate and try to buy their friendship. He was such a good person and he didn’t need to do that.”

After helping Merced win a state championship in 1973, Jim received a scholarship to Idaho State University. He led the Big Sky conference with a .396 batting average and might have had a chance at the pros but his girlfriend back home got pregnant and he returned to Merced. They married and he signed up for the Police Academy--the same class Larry was in. Jim’s marriage lasted five years.

“All I cared about was being . . . the best detective and the longest-running detective this city had ever seen,” he said. “I’d work my normal shift, come home, eat and then go back out and ride with someone else and work six to eight more hours for free. Seven days a week. I didn’t care about anything else. Nothing.”

His reputation for giving no quarter made life uncomfortable for his mother at the Ragu tomato plant where she worked: he kept busting the children of her co-workers. With equal fervor, he pursued killers and cops-turned-petty-thieves. Praise poured in from the district attorney’s office, victims, businessmen and housewives in this fast-growing town with its share of drugs and bad guys. His glowing evaluations each year recommended only one thing: slow down and lose a little weight. He looked in the mirror. At 6-feet-2, he managed to wear his 280 pounds pretty well.

Always a Workaholic

He began dating Mary Papageorge, a mother of four who was 10 years older, and they rented an apartment near headquarters. Always the workaholic, he let his cases--junkies and informants--invade their bedroom hours. She could never figure out what drove him.

“There’s a lot about Jim I’m still totally in the dark about,” Papageorge said. “He was slowly killing himself, working morning to morning, and eating fast-food hamburgers and cookies. He tried all kinds of diets. One friend gave him a diet where you make this big pot of vegetable soup and you’re supposed to eat a bowl whenever you get hungry. I think he lasted a day.”

When the state formed a local drug task force in 1986, the cousins were among the first hired. Jim was named custodian of the evidence locker and a backup supervisor. Even though he now weighed close to 350 pounds, he closed twice as many cases as the next officer and insisted on being the first to bust through the stash house door.

He trained everyone in the unit, then watched his cousin and the others promoted to the state Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement office in Fresno. The state would have taken him too if not for his weight. “This new batch of youngsters replaces the old batch and he’s having to train them too,” Larry said. “They’re drinking and chasing women, all the things young guys do, and here’s Tiny, by himself, plugging along, almost a father figure. It was sad.”

One year he went to the 80-member department’s annual Christmas party in a mood to drink tequila. He asked the bartender what the record was for straight shots in a single sitting. Seventeen, he was told. “Well, put out 20,” he said. “Jose Cuerva Gold.”

“He polished off all 20 shots in about 30 minutes,” said Police Chief Patrick Lunney. “That’s a quart of tequila, enough to literally kill some men. But he got off the bar stool and was in pretty good shape.”

In late 1992, after waiting years for him to change, his girlfriend decided she had enough and left. Jim was devastated. He looked in the mirror and saw a 40-year-old man who weighed 400 pounds with bad knees and gout in his ankles. On his own again, he tried running with the youngsters in his unit. Tiny’s place became a clubhouse. All the beer and cold cuts were on him.

“He invited me to a card game and I walked in and there were all these young cops and young girls,” Larry said. “They were drinking his beer and using his apartment to hit and run. They were playing him for a chump and he didn’t even see it.”

Unknown to Larry, talk on the street was that Jim was spending thousands of dollars on one of these women, money possibly lifted from the evidence vault. Larry got a call from a state investigator who wanted to meet. It was hot and the investigator was standing too close, wearing a leather jacket. Larry figured he was being recorded.

“We were bumping guns, talking, and there was no way I was going to believe him,” Larry recalled. “I told him you show me some evidence before I believe my cousin’s gone sideways. Talk is cheap.”

That night he called Jim to his house and confronted him in the driveway. Jim was cool as could be, and denied any wrongdoing. Larry wanted to believe that the spending spree was nothing more than his cousin finally parting with all his overtime money. “If he would have owned up to anything criminal, I would have beat the hell out him right there in driveway, and he knows it,” Larry said.

The young woman, a mother on welfare, told investigators that Jim had spent more than $200,000 in recent months, much of it in an effort to woo her to bed. Except for a new truck, little of the money was spent on himself. She said he made a game of it--hiding $100 bills under the sofa and making her crawl until she found them, handing her $7,000 and telling her she had 20 minutes to spend as much as she could at the mall.

A six-week search of task force records--books that Jim had kept--unmasked his first crimes. He lied to people who sought to reclaim cash seized in busts, saying the money had been forfeited under law. He later doctored the paperwork and pocketed the cash.

Almost a Perfect Crime

It was a perfect crime except for one slip. The doctoring was done with a slightly different blue ballpoint pen. “We were doing this with a magnifying glass and a flashlight. The Sherlock Holmes thing,” said Vince Jura, the state investigator who headed the internal probe. “We were able to account for $10,000 this way. This was his pocket change. The money he was blowing in bars. But where was the big score? We still didn’t know.”

Investigators discovered that a destruction order for cocaine had been falsified. The order was signed by a judge and dated but the amount of drugs to be destroyed--31 kilos, worth nearly $400,000--was added after the judge’s signature. Investigators knew this because Jim used two typewriters whose fonts differed ever so slightly.

“Narcs just don’t sell 31 kilos of cocaine. No one would trust them,” Jura said. “So I figure he’s got to be working with someone. Who is his king informant? Who’s the guy he protects, the guy he’s been working with all these years?”

The answer was easy. Every officer in town knew Chato, the heroin addict who had a special relationship with Jim. But Chato wasn’t talking. By this time, Larry had heard enough to know that his cousin had irrevocably crossed the line. He confronted him a second time and once more Jim denied any wrongdoing.

Larry passed the details of the conversation back to Jura, but they were hardly needed. Chato got caught with heroin and was talking. He told investigators that Jim had given him a few ounces of cocaine, then five kilos and then nine. Thirty-one kilos in all. Jim was so foolish. He gave a hefty chunk to Chato and got back $13,000 a kilo. But much of this money he gave away--to the mother on welfare, to a cousin who was unemployed.

And Chato had one more bewildering detail. After each dirty deal was done, they would sit in the car and Jim would play a cassette of Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine.”

‘He Got Stupid’

From there, the case was a matter of piecing together bank deposits, dates, telephone toll calls and hotel registrations--all leading back to Jim. Police Chief Lunney blamed himself for not insisting years earlier that Jim change beats and leave the task force. But no one else was willing to do his job.

The task force supervisor, Jim Pell, also second-guessed himself. “What really upsets me is not the big rip-off but the . . . everyday stuff,” Pell said. “He buffooned me the whole time.”

The cocaine came from a high-profile bust that Jim and his cousin and most of his former colleagues--cops now working for the state narcotics office--participated in. That was a little too much paradox for Larry.

“He boosted money out of the cases I did, my cases,” he said. “He was a good cop, smart, tenacious, incredibly hard working. He was 400 pounds and the biggest slob in town, but by God he was the best cop Merced ever saw.

“He thought he was bulletproof,” Larry said, shaking his head. “He got stupid about it.”

The cousins haven’t spoken in three years. They doubt they ever will. “I feel bad that I did this and let Larry down but I feel equally bad that he stuck his nose where it shouldn’t have been,” Jim said. “They never got anything from Larry that they could use against me. All they did was cause the family to go off in splinters.”

So why did you do it?

“I was hurt, physically down,” he said, sitting on a worn sofa surrounded by old baseball trophies. “I was emotionally drained from the job. I carried the workload of too many officers for too many years. I lost Papageorge. She was my stability. I weighed 400 pounds. Then all of a sudden I start getting pimped by this girl and my ego shoots through the roof. She used me like no sugar daddy’s ever been used. I started drinking again.

“Do you think this is what I wanted out of life? I didn’t do this for myself. I didn’t have some second home in Bullhead, Ariz. I didn’t have a bank account hidden somewhere. I didn’t get the money the dirty cops in New York got.”

He said the case against him was embellished, many details made up by informants. He offered more than once to take a polygraph test, but he said his ex-colleagues refused. He said he stole 15 kilos, not 31.

He caught himself sounding contrite and defiant at the same time, and his hoarse voice became a whisper. “I betrayed everything I ever stood for. God, I don’t know why. It wasn’t me. It just wasn’t me.”