Within six months of my time at Prince Frederick, I had learned how much I enjoyed criminal investigation and solving crimes, even the seemingly trivial ones. It was always easy for me to talk to people and gain their trust.
I also learned that one of the most important things in the state police was how well you played softball.
Being a little lonely at Prince Frederick, I had requested a transfer to the similar sounding but totally different Frederick Barrack, in Frederick County, less than an hour’s drive from where my brother lived in West Virginia. Frederick was also a full-service barrack, meaning I would be exposed to much more in the way of criminal investigation. When I made the request, I was told that the waiting list would be long—it seemed that everyone wanted to be assigned to Frederick.
But timing is everything. To my surprise, my request was granted quickly because, apparently, the Frederick Barrack softball team needed a replacement outfielder, and I had played a lot of baseball as a kid. My transfer came through two weeks before the annual state police softball tournament, the annual brawl for the honor of holding the trophy as state police champion for the next year. My fellow troopers at Prince Frederick weren’t very happy with me, but all I could do was salute, say “yes sir,” and hustle to Frederick in time for my first assigned shift. I soon found myself standing in right-center field, my schedule magically arranged so that I had three days off in a row—the same three days the tournament was being played. New troopers fresh out of the academy never get three days off in a row. My new team went on to win the tournament that year. Prince Frederick Barrack took third behind Waterloo Barrack. My old teammates found consolation in calling me all sorts of names, but it was all in fun.
I enjoyed my uniform service at Frederick Barrack. I felt at home there. And for the rest of my career, I would find myself coming back to this place that had done so much to shape me. For the first couple of years, I dedicated myself to learning. The more I focused on criminal investigation, the more I realized I had found my calling. I did fine with the traffic side of the job, but I never set the world on fire when it came to writing traffic citations. I came to be known as “Trooper Black Cloud” because I had a habit of showing up in exactly the right place when a robbery, assault, or some other serious act was happening. It was a little freaky, I admit: several times I had stopped in the middle of the night to check on a random business only to discover it was in the process of getting burglarized. I was falling into great arrests. One of my sergeants told me I was either a very lucky trooper or constantly on the hunt for trouble. He said something else that stuck with me: “If you’re not more careful, you’re going to get killed.”
Frederick County in the mid-1980s was going through a rough transition. With crack cocaine becoming more rampant in America, that and other drugs were finding their way into our rural county. Like many states during that era, Maryland was playing catch-up. We had just four or five state police narcotics agents for the entire state. Looking to increase those numbers, the Frederick Barrack commander recruited me to start working undercover out of our barrack.
I was thrilled. Here was my opportunity to get out of uniform and earn my way onto the staff of the Frederick Barrack Criminal Investigation Section. But when I was pulled off road detail, I had zero experience in undercover work. I thought the job was to go buy drugs from people and then arrest them.
My first assignment was to spend a few weeks working out of the Waterloo Barrack in what was then known as the “Special Services” section. Thinking I would impress them on my first day, I showed up at Waterloo looking the way I thought a drug dealer should look: blue jeans, a T-shirt, an Orioles cap, and driving a beat-up old Mustang that had been seized by the MSP. Little did I know how much I stood out. I also didn’t know that I was about to meet a legend.
Detective Sergeant Warren Rineker, known far and wide as Rinky, sat in his office reviewing reports while I stood at attention in front of his desk. He didn’t even look up for the longest time. Of course I had heard about him, and from all the stories I had figured he would stand ten feet tall and have bulging muscles. But the guy I was staring at might have hit five-foot-eight at most, and he was definitely on the pudgy side. He sported a full beard and long hair—blond and graying—that tumbled well over his shirt collar. His weapon, a snub-nosed .38 with black electrician’s tape wrapped around the grips, was stuck into his waistband at an odd angle.
After he had let me stand there for several uncomfortable minutes, he tossed a set of car keys my way and said, “Go find this in the parking lot, and wait for me.” He never looked up from his stack of reports.
“Which car?” I asked.
Now Rinky looked up. “Do I look like your goddamn mother?” he said. “You seem to think you’re an investigator. So go fucking investigate and find it.”
I found my way out to the parking lot, which was approximately the size of two football fields. There must have been three hundred cars out there—marked, unmarked, covert, what have you. I wandered around clicking the electronic key fob, and eventually a car beeped in response. It was a blue Porsche. I knew at that moment that I was in the perfect place for me.
About a half hour later, Rinky joined me. He slid into the driver’s seat, and we were soon in downtown Baltimore. Rinky steered the Porsche down Baltimore Street, otherwise known as “the block.” The block consisted of strip clubs, bars, and lots of stumbling drunks. Middle of the morning or middle of the night, the block was not a good place to be. Rinky pulled over. He turned to me, took my gun, my badge, my wallet, and all forms of identification.
Then he handed me forty dollars. “Don’t come back until you’ve bought drugs.”
I got out of the Porsche, fighting the urge to run away. I could feel the knots in the pit of my stomach and the tiny hairs on the back of my neck. But this was the job I had hoped for, wasn’t it? So I walked the block, looking every inch a fish out of water, and feeling vulnerable without weapon or backup.
Eventually I came to a shabby-looking guy who smelled like the grime covering the tiny alley he occupied. He was an African American of indeterminate age—because of the filth caked on him, he could have been twenty as easily as sixty. But he had what I needed.
I bought some marijuana and a small rock of crack cocaine. When I emerged from the alley between two strip clubs, I spotted the blue Porsche pulled into a spot across the street. I got into the car and handed Rinky the drugs.
“Who’d you buy these from?”
“I don’t know,” I stammered.
“What did he look like?”
“Uh . . .” I had no idea.
Rinky started laughing. I was so shaken by what I thought was my utter failure that I couldn’t tell if he was amused or just being shitty. It didn’t really matter—he was laughing at me. I felt like a fool.
When he finally stopped laughing, Rinky said, “Relax, kid. I just wanted to see if you had the guts to buy dope off some fucking scumbag.” He then told me that from there on out, if I was going to be any good at this job I would have to pay careful attention to detail. “Detail,” he said, “is everything.”
We spent the rest of the day at a local watering hole discussing the various aspects of how to be a detective and how to work undercover. Now that I no longer felt so foolish, I realized how much I had loved the adrenaline rush that I had gotten from being on the street armed only with guts, determination, and my own wits. I was eager to absorb everything Rinky could teach me.
Though he was small and extremely laid back, the man was fearless. He was also the most intelligent trooper I ever met. In a heartbeat he could go from blending in with a group of bikers to infiltrating a group of Wall Street stockbrokers, making the transition in the time it took to change his clothes. With a sandwich and a bottle, and after working a sixteen-hour day, Rineker could sit down at midnight in front of his old electric typewriter and write a three-hundred-page wiretap order by the time court opened the next day. You wouldn’t find a typo, either. Rineker had the kind of talent that made him a potent adversary to even the best defense attorneys. They couldn’t beat his detective work; nor could they manage to get evidence or testimony thrown out at suppression hearings. Rinky’s tenacity was what made him exceptional at undercover work. Truly, I learned from the best.