Nick Reding (14 page)

To this end, Murphy had given wide authority to police chief Jeremy Logan. Logan in turn had instilled a culture of aggressiveness
in his men. He’d built a new canine unit around a twelve-thousand-dollar drug-sniffing German shepherd. And he’d put himself
in charge of enforcing new ordinances, passed by the city council, ordering the cleanup or destruction of run-down properties—just
the kind of grimy, falling-apart rentals, said the real estate agent, that the castoffs from Buchanan County favored.

Every morning, Jeremy Logan leaves his house and drives five blocks to work in a blue Ford Expedition emblazoned with the
words
Oelwein Police
in the town’s green and yellow colors. Logan is of middle height and weight. His short brown hair is in a crew cut, which,
along with the sharp features of his face and the acne scars along his cheeks and jawbones, gives him a decidedly military
air. It takes only minutes, though, for Logan to reveal a deeply ingrained streak of friendly sarcasm and a sharp appreciation
for the irony that surrounds him. According to Clay Hallberg, for decades, if not since the police department’s founding,
the men saddled with protecting the citizens of Oelwein have been a violent bunch, and disdainful of the rights of the citizens
in this notoriously tough railroad town. (When asked to confirm this, Nathan Lein smiled and said, “I wouldn’t want to be
arrested, put it that way.”) Of the ten-man force, Logan is the only one with a college degree. Many of his officers are built
more like offensive linemen; almost all of them shave their heads. Knowing this and taking into account once again Logan’s
physical characteristics—the army crew; the soft middle signaling a distaste for the gym—is to understand that Logan is a
reflection of his job, which exists in the delicate middle ground between the brute strength of the department and the slick,
erudite bonhomie of Larry Murphy. Sarcasm, says Logan, is more than a coping mechanism. It’s like a second language.

Being the chief of police is perhaps the only job in town more visible than being mayor. Murphy, when he’s not running Oelwein,
has a political consulting business that sends him regularly to Des Moines, a three-hour drive south. Murphy’s kids are grown,
and he works from home, meaning that he can choose to hole up for a couple of days should things get tough—as they did when
he lobbied to make riding a bike on Main Street illegal. Logan cannot. He is constantly on display, whether picking up his
three young children from school or heading to the scene of an accident in his truck. When he does things that people don’t
like—agreeing to arrest students at Oelwein High, for instance—it’s not just he who hears about it. It’s his wife, too, who
has to smile and nod while she waits for her latte at the Morning Perk. Still, says Logan, this is a walk in the park compared
with the year before Murphy made him chief of police. That year nearly drove Logan out of the town where he’d lived his whole
life.

Details vary, but the consensus around town is that the former police chief, under whom Logan had achieved the rank of sergeant,
ran a loose ship. All Logan will say on the record is that there was a certain “laxness around the department,” and that he
thought it appropriate to one day approach the chief and tell him how unhappy he was with the situation. The chief, according
to Logan, thanked him for his input and said he’d think about what to do. Two days later, according to Logan, his wife called
him at work to say he was being accused of peeping in the bedroom of a local teenage girl. Further, said Logan’s wife, the
rumor around town was that the chief was suspending Logan indefinitely without pay. Criminal charges were expected shortly,
followed by the high likelihood of a civil suit. This was the first Logan, who was on duty when his wife called, had heard
of the charges.

According to the story that Logan tells, the charges filed against him accused Logan of routinely setting up surveillance
near the girl’s house, only to use binoculars to ogle her in her bedroom. Several times, it was alleged, he sneaked up to
the girl’s window at night as she undressed and masturbated in the bushes. Logan denies the charges vehemently, and maintains
that they were payback for questioning the former chief’s authority. It wasn’t long before Logan’s home life was a shambles.
His wife threatened to leave him. Unable to find another job, Logan was going broke. The legal bills alone were ruining him,
he says. So he violated the unwritten code that is often referred to as the Blue Wall, by which police officers refuse to
publicly discuss departmental conflict. Logan told Larry Murphy everything he knew about the department and its officers,
and how he was being set up. Thus began the first few months of Larry Murphy’s first term as mayor, in 2002. By the end of
that year, Logan—so recently fearful of jail time—had been made chief of police.

The Logan case still lingers around town these days, much like the specter of the Mob. A lot of people, Mildred Binstock included,
think Logan did it. And a lot of other people think he didn’t, and that the whole case was another example in a long line
of shady insider dealings in town. According to Nathan Lein, former mayor Gene Vine, who sat on the city council until his
death in 2008 from cancer, told Larry Murphy to get rid of Logan. Whether guilty or innocent, Logan was too much of a liability,
said Vine. The county attorney, Wayne Sauer, said the same thing. The only thing that everyone can agree on, as Nathan put
it, is that “making Jeremy Logan the Oelwein chief of police took major nuts.” That, and Logan has been hell on meth cooks.

According to Logan, the Oelwein Police Department, which has jurisdiction only within the four-square-mile incorporated area
of town, was dismantling two meth labs per month back in 2002, his first year as chief. Labs could be anything from a house
with a fairly complex setup in the basement to a guy and his wife single-batching in a Johnny on the Spot behind the dugout
at the Sports Complex. No matter where the labs were, though, the Oelwein police were exposed to the toxic waste and the harmful
fumes while wearing nothing more than their regular uniforms. As recently as the late 1990s, Logan told me, the police, unsure
of what to do, let labs burn. Other times, knowing how much it would cost to clean them up, the police burned the labs themselves.

Anecdotally across the nation, cancer rates among first-responders to meth disasters have been climbing since the 1980s. Bill
Ruzzamenti, a former DEA agent and the current director of the Central Valley High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA)
in California, likes to tell the story of how he smelled so bad after dismantling superlabs in San Diego during the 1990s
that his wife would have to hose him down in the garage and burn his clothes. Still, said Ruzzamenti, the stench of ether
and what smelled like cat urine would be so thoroughly soaked into his hands that they’d have to throw their phone away each
month: the receiver and keypad stunk too bad to keep using.

As a result, DEA, in conjunction with the Environmental Protection Agency, passed a law in 2003 providing a standardized protocol
for anyone given the task of dismantling a meth lab. The training necessary is available only at the Federal Bureau of Investigation
headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. Finding money to send someone for training is not easy, says Logan, although the alternative
seemed to him far worse: years of lawsuits when one of his men got cancer. Upon becoming chief, Logan immediately demanded
that an Oelwein officer be sent for training. By the time that officer had completed the course, in 2003, the town’s so-called
Beavis and Butt-Head meth problem had increased to an almost incomprehensible order of magnitude: Logan and his officers were
being called, on average, to one meth lab every four days. And every lab that got cleaned up cost the town an average of six
thousand dollars.

Logan has a long list of disaster and near-disaster stories when it comes to meth. He also has enough cynicism to see the
humor in places where, for many people, the joke would be obscured. One story is of an ex-Marine sharpshooter who was also
a prolific meth cook and lived alone with his teenage daughter, whom Logan describes as an academic star at Oelwein High School.
In 2003, increasingly paranoid that he would get caught making meth, the ex-Marine knocked out all the windows from his home
and replaced them with black plastic garbage bags taped to the frames, thereby keeping people from looking in. They also provided
a good way to defend the house, for he’d cut holes in the center of the bags from which he planned to shoot whoever came to
shut down his lab. Near the windows, he had placed nineteen firearms of various kinds, along with seven thousand rounds of
ammunition. What Logan thinks is funniest about the story is not that the ex-Marine aroused his neighbors’ suspicions by going
outside in his underwear to dance in the street in the middle of the day; or that his daughter was home at the time, studying;
or that the man, when the police came, tried to hide by lying still in the concrete gutter of the street, thinking he was
camouflaged. What gives Logan a laugh is that the man had the most firepower stacked around the house’s highest windows, those
in his daughter’s room, which provided the best vantage points for shooting. There he had two AR-15 fully automatic assault
rifles, a Remington 12--gauge shotgun, and seven hundred rounds of ammunition. “Had he not decided to lay down and hide in
the gutter,” said Logan, laughing, “there’s no question he would have killed every single one of us.”

Starting in 2004, Logan, with the blessing of Nathan Lein, demanded that his men pull over cars for what Nathan describes
as “every little ticky-tack violation that gets us to the vehicle”: a cracked taillight; going five miles per hour over the
speed limit; a dirty license plate; or a broken headlight. In addition, Logan schooled his men to use their familiarity with
people they questioned to their advantage, and to use history and common knowledge to garner information and to catch people
in lies. No more niceties and letting people off for having had a little too much to drink. Search every vehicle. Assume everyone
is guilty and put the screws to them. Make them nervous. Logan instigated the practice of leveraging jail time in order to
develop confidential informants, in hopes of getting those informants to give up their friends who were batching with them.
Never mind if you went to high school with a guy or grew up on the farm next to him. This was like a war.

For some people, these tactics, while legal, defied the very foundations of life in a small town, where people’s familiarity
with one another means everything. Logan’s attitude smacked of the sleight of hand and outright trickery associated with an
urban existence. Mildred Binstock called Logan a Nazi. It was Logan who was the criminal, she said. Mildred was not the only
one who felt this way. One morning at the Hub City Bakery, I overheard an octogenarian farmer declare to his coffee mates
that, in an earlier time, a man like Logan could have easily been made to disappear.

To other people, though, Logan was a godsend. They felt the tweakers deserved no better. Even as the debate raged and people
divided over their feelings, Logan’s tactics worked. Lab busts fell steadily until, during the last four months of 2005, the
Oelwein police didn’t dismantle a single meth lab in town. By then, the city council had passed the ordinance calling for
the demolition of derelict houses, which in many cases had been turned into meth labs. The town offered sales tax incentives
to allow neighbors to purchase run-down homes that didn’t—or couldn’t be made to—comply with the new codes. That, or the council
sold the concept of bulldozing under the more politic auspices of “adding green space.” Some people said Murphy and Logan
were running people out of town and picking on those who could least afford to fight back. Roland Jarvis accused Murphy of
trying to salve Oelwein’s economic woes by sacrificing the poor at the time when they were most vulnerable.

I told Nathan of Jarvis’s opinion. He was silent before saying that, every day, he saw the pain that the turnaround caused
some of the people in his town. His girlfriend, Jamie, labored as a social worker in order “to clean up the pieces.” In the
end, though, people had to understand that, as Nathan put it, “you have to plow some dirt in order to raise a crop.”

By late spring of 2006, Oelwein was entering Phase II of Larry Murphy’s town revitalization plan. Murphy liked to say that
most men, when they turn fiftysomething, build a new house, buy a new car, or chase after a new woman. He, on the other hand,
preferred to spend his time rebuilding a town. And Phase II involved literally tearing down parts of Oelwein in order to start
over.

This would not be easy. Even Oelwein’s demographics were against it. The median age was forty-one, making it one of the oldest
communities in Iowa, and one with a poor employment base. There were lots of other things to spend money on in Oelwein, where
20 percent of the children lived in poverty, and 80 percent of the kindergartners were eligible for free or reduced-price
school lunches. The town’s median income, according to a 2005 EPA report, was half the state average. As Murphy saw it, Oelwein
had an empty dance card. If it didn’t doll itself up quick and find a partner, he said, the dance was going to be over.

Phase II would begin by improving a seven-block area of downtown. The plan was to pull up the streets and build new sewers,
water mains, and gutters to aid with the withering and destructive effects that an average winter had on Oelwein’s century-old
streets. In addition, Murphy wanted all new streetlamps. He wanted shrubberies and trees, which he hoped would boost morale
around town. He wanted new sidewalks, too; the old ones were buckling and breaking in places. All this, Murphy reckoned, would
cost a shade below four million dollars.

Second, Murphy wanted to encourage businesses to relocate to Oelwein by building a new septic system. The old one, installed
a hundred years ago and augmented in the 1950s, was already in violation of sanitation codes. It couldn’t even keep up with
the use of a shrinking population, not to mention the hoped-for industrial and population growth that something like a call
center would engender. What the city council wanted was an overflow septic system of twelve million gallons. It would be both
environmentally sound and highly cost-efficient, with sewage beds of common reeds that could naturally compost waste initially
treated by the old system. That compost could then be used as fertilizer on farmers’ fields. Building the new system would
cost nine million dollars.