WHEELER DEALER: Chapter 12

Of course the DEA isn’t about to let this one go with just a 3-ounce buy. If this is a major conspiracy case, which it most certainly is, they’ll need better numbers to take to court. Out in Kansas City, Joel Levine, the DEA plant, lets Kessler know he’s ready to buy a kilo. Is Kessler up for it?

Once again, of course, Kessler is. And Roger, once again, isn’t. Forget the lunacy of robbing banks and then selling the dope to yourself. We’re past that now. But dealing in such large quantities has never been Roger’s style because it draws too much heat.

What he prefers is the local-yokel style, as he calls it – selling by the gram. Not that it’s ever done him that much good, if you’ve been paying any attention to his rapidly growing court record. But it’s his philosophy and he’s sticking to it.

Kessler comes by early one morning to plead with Sandra, and when Roger wakes up she lays it on him. “Oh c’mon, honey,” she says, “he’s our partner – your friend – and it means so much to him.”

So there they are, Roger and Stephen, at a lay-down in an East Portland apartment house, and the phone rings. It’s Levine’s girlfriend, back in town from Kansas City. “Want me to go with you?” Roger says just to needle him.

Once again Stephen says no, and he’s out the door. He’s supposed to meet her about five blocks away in his van. Roger leaves by a door at the other end of the complex and drives off.

Ten minutes later his pager starts going crazy. The baby sitter – they’ve got an almost one-year-old baby girl named Amanda now – says the police are in the living room. “The feds are coming up the stairs,” says Barbara Sargeant at the Wheeler Dealer office. They’re obviously hitting every place at once.

Roger drives down to a garage near his grandmother’s place where he’s got a nondescript Mercury station wagon stashed for just such an occasion. Drugs, guns, money and false ID ready to go. On his way out of town he makes one stop to call Kevin, the younger Spaise brother, to pick up Amanda. And Roger is on the run again – hiding out this time with Sandra in a double-wide in the middle of an orange grove outside Murrieta, California.

Three months later, when Kessler – well, what did they expect? – jumps bail on a $100 thousand bond up in Portland, they’re back at it. Well, you’ve got to make a living somehow.

Except that Kessler is of course in hiding now, too – in rural Dallas, Oregon, just west of Salem, with one of his bank robber pals from Marion, Hank Hampton.

Freddie Arellanes may be out of the picture but they’ve got a new source in the cartel. Sandra makes the pick-ups and they have runners going back and forth from California to Oregon. Another of Kessler’s Marion connections, a bank robber named Richard Ruip, is in charge of distribution back in Portland.

Back in the City of Roses, as they still like to call it, law enforcement agencies are on high alert. Not only is Kessler on the loose but two of his more dangerous friends, Fat Pat O’Shea and Lawrence Burhoe – both of whom, coincidentally, went Back East shortly after the Snedeker killing – have escaped from separate federal prisons and are headed back to Portland.

Burhoe, by lighting a fire in the back seat of U.S. Marshal’s car as he was being transported to court, then stabbing one of the guards with a knife blade he’d stuck in his shoe. And O’Shea, who was being transported back to Oregon to stand trial for the U.S. National Bank robbery, by faking a heart attack then over-powering his guards at the hospital.

Meanwhile, although it takes the DEA a little while to snap to it, Kessler and Ruip have been breaking into the old DEA office at Tenth and Washington hoping to abscond with all the evidence the government is planning to use against them in court.

Steve Kessler, handcuffed and on his way to court in 1987

As it turns out – embarrassingly enough, which is undoubtedly why none of this was ever leaked to the press – breaking in  isn’t that hard. They do it five or six times before they’re discovered. But in the end, trying to burn their way into the DEA safe, they trip and alarm and have to hide out in the false bottom of a Grandma’s Cookies truck parked in the DEA garage until it’s safe to leave in the morning.

If they can’t steal the DEA’s records, though, they can at least dispose of the government’s witness on another count of the conspiracy indictment. And so when Kessler learns the whereabouts of Dennis Reed – who, as you’ll remember, boosted all those Christmas presents for everybody at the Wheeler Dealer in exchange for .1 gram of heroin – there isn’t anything to do but kill him.

It’s truly amazing how casually, or at least automatically, the decision is made. But at a certain point, I think, it’s important to realize how much of this cops and robbers stuff is pure, mindless psychodrama.

The plan is for Roger to fly up to the Eugene airport, where Hampton’s girlfriend Jamie will meet him and drive him up to Dallas where Kessler is hiding out. Then the two of them will go to North Portland and get Reed.

But Roger’s flight out of San Francisco is delayed by fog, so he calls Jamie’s pager from the airport phone to let her know he’ll be late.

For those unfamiliar with this ancient form of  communication, pagers were a portable precurser to cell phones – sort of a step above beepers. You couldn’t send messages with them but someone  could dial your pager number on their landline phone – they were all landlines then – and leave a 20-second message.

Apparently, though, the DEA has been monitoring their pagers, because they know now that someone in the Kessler organization – although they don’t know who yet – is flying into the Eugene airport, and so they’re waiting for him when he arrives.

Roger, who of course is using a false ID, lands at the Eugene airport, disguised as a hayseed cowboy, big belt buckle and all. The DEA agents don’t recognize him but they know who Jamie is because she’s wanted as the driver on a recent bank robbery. So when the agents see him meet her in the parking lot, they arrest them both and take them to the DEA office in downtown Eugene. Later that night Roger is identified by the scar of an old bullet wound (a story for another time) on his stomach.

Meanwhile, Kessler doesn’t know what’s become of either Jamie or Roger. Shortly after dawn the next morning he dials her pager number and to find out what’s going on. And when he does he hears an operator – probabably the one at the pager company talking to someone at the phone company – say: “Put this call on hold. The DEA wants to know where this call is coming from.”

As Kessler immediately realizes, the DEA now knows where he is. Or if they don’t, they will in a matter of minutes because he’s calling from the phone at their hideout in Dallas.

He yells at Hampton that they’ve got to get out of there now and throws the essentials – drugs, guns and money – in his car. When Hampton is too slow getting it together, Kessler takes off without him. He’s about a mile away, he’ll say later, when he sees the helicopters coming over the hills.

A week later Roger is on his way to Rocky Butte, the ancient fortress of a prison that used to sit on the hills east of Portland.

And Kessler, well, he’s gone again.