Lostport

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

 

On his eighteenth birthday, Ryan Maguire of Watsonville, California, used the army as his ticket out of his abusive home and followed the military trail to Bosnia, where he met his best buddy, Paul Carnavale. Paul was a Tampa kid who had a job with the PD there locked up when he got back, courtesy of his uncle on his mother’s side. He encouraged Ryan to apply; the PD was expanding, Paul told him, and the cost of living on the west coast of Florida was reasonable. After his discharge, Ryan took a bus to Tampa, determined to be everything his father had not been. With his military experience, the PD sponsored him at their academy and he breezed through.

After four years on the beat, he applied for detective. He wanted his shield, even aspired to Homicide. Wrote the exams, aced them, but got turned down, because there were other guys, older guys, guys with more years of service ahead of him in line. Didn’t matter how well he did or how good he might turn out down the road, it wasn’t going to happen for another few years at least. The veterans had to have their turn.

Being a coastal state, Florida was experiencing more than its share of drug problems: South American heroin flown into both coasts; pot trucked in from Mexico; meth cooking in homegrown labs that doubled in number every year, and all that before you even mentioned coke. The DEA classified Florida a High Density Drug Trafficking Area and gave the state special funding to set up a task force with the FBI, Customs and the state police. And they were hiring. Ryan applied and with his credentials and eager outlook became one of three hundred DEA special agents seconded to a Tampa-based squad.

They spent the next few years busting users, dealers, meth cookers and smugglers. They intercepted boats, planes, trucks and cars with false compartments that had crossed the Mexican border at Brownsville and headed east on the interstate. They uprooted pot farms in Pasco County and rousted meth cookers out of their mobile homes in Plant City. Ryan was doing well at his job and had moved in with a woman named Lisa Fleming, who worked for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Tampa, after dating her for a year. They were thinking of getting married, putting away money for a house in Fox Ridge, a new community off U.S. 75 that allowed you to keep up to two horses on your property. Neither he nor Lisa actually rode but the thought of it appealed to both of them. It was such a good time in his life—finally making something of it after all he had gone through being raised by a drunk—he should have known something would screw it up.

That something turned out to be a rogue group of Tampa cops who were allegedly ripping off drug dealers and keeping their dope, their cash, their weapons, their jewelry. The problem eventually came to the notice of the DEA: too many informants and busted dealers were telling the same story, how these brazen dudes were taking them down at gunpoint, beating them senseless, fucking terrorizing men who didn’t terrorize easily. Killing at least one who wouldn’t give in.

Because no active dealers would cooperate with the DEA, a plan was conceived to lure these cops into a sting. A new gang was formed: the Stompers, five Irish guys, supposedly former Westies and Southies who’d left New York and Boston for sunnier climes when their gang leaders up north went down under RICO indictments or the usual hail of bullets. Their phony sheets included convictions for drug running and hijacking—Tampa wasn’t like New York, where only Italians could take part in hijacking—and Special Agent Ryan Maguire, working under the name of Ray Bennett, was their leader. They grew out their hair and beards and sold dope that had been seized in DEA busts; staged hijackings with cooperating participants; planted stories in the media about their exploits and arrests; and used informants to spread the word that a new group was operating in and around the city, working out of a bungalow on 36th Street North.

The Tampa PD Internal Affairs Bureau had its eye on one potential suspect in the drug raids, a detective named Julian Drake, twenty years in, two ex-wives, a prodigious appetite for alcohol and material goods and barely staying afloat. They told one of Drake’s informants that a major deal was going down at the bungalow the following week, at least three keys of coke and twelve thousand tabs of Ecstasy, and to kick the word up the line.