WHEELER DEALER: Chapter 13

Everything considered, the view from the Rocky Butte jail, which used to sit on the eastern edge of Portland overlooking the vast forests and magnificent mountains of the Cascade range, was probably not that uplifting after all. Especially with the dreary gray Oregon winter settling in.

Or knowing, as Roger had to by now, that the government could go after him on a continuing criminal enterprise charge which could mean thirty years in prison. He’d be 65 when he got out. If he ever did. Think about that.

So when Kessler sent him the message – “Do you want us to come and get you?” is how he put it – of course Roger said yes.

Kessler, who’d just slipped away from the DEA in Dallas, Oregon, was hiding out now in Seattle. Along with Roger’s wife Sandra and Fat Pat O’Shea who’d just escaped from prison back East. The messages were being ferried back and forth by Sandra’s younger brother Kevin, who could visit Roger in Rocky Butte.

“Then tell him the cavalry’s coming,” Stephen sent back. “And be sure to keep your eyes peeled when you’re going to court.”

Which meant, of course, that they were going to snatch him from the marshal’s van, which every other day or so took him from Rocky Butte to the courthouse to meet with his lawyer. A few days later Roger saw Kessler and O’Shea, standing at a turn-off along the route, presumably working out the final details of the escape..

Kessler also told Roger to ask Hank Hampton, who’d been arrested in Dallas because he was too slow getting his stuff together, if he wanted to go too. Hampton said no.

But the next time Roger took the courthouse trip, security had been doubled or tripled. There was now a chase car behind the marshal’s van and the guards carried AR-15s. Hampton had obviously ratted them out. So much for the marshal’s van plan.

Meanwhile, of course, Roger was doing his thing. “There are fifteen ways to send drugs into s prison,” he says. “Visiting rooms, of course. Guards. Slingshots over the walls. Dropping off clothing with dope sewn into the seams. Hollowing out the ends of legal briefs. You can liquefy drugs and soak them up in greeting cards. And then you’ve got the vegetable room like we did at OSP. Freeze it in with the fruit or vegetables.”

But the most ingenious of them all was probably the one he devised in concert with a black con artist, Skillful Davis, who happened to be in Rocky Butte at the time. In the middle of the night, someone would place a packet of dope on the ledge outside the western entrance to the downtown courthouse. That’s where the inmates from Rocky Butte who had court dates were dropped off every day.

The next morning the trustee who took the food up to the inmates  would pick up the package, stick it in a food cart, and then deliver it to whoever was supposed to get it in the holding cells on the sixth floor.

The inmate in the holding cell would then body-stash it, or to use the more common underworld term – don’t be too shocked – keister it. It’s a technique smugglers have used for centuries. You’ll even find in Papillion, the great Steve McQueen escape movie. And then of course, said inmate would bring it back into Rocky Butte when he returned that evening.

Roger and Skillful Davis even figured out how to call the courthouse guards from the Rocky Butte phones the night before, posing as one of the criminal defense lawyers who regularly did business there  and instructing the guards to pick up whoever they wanted to receive the package on the next day’s courthouse run. All you needed was their Bar numbers.

Meanwhile, up in Seattle, Kessler and Sandra were doing whatever they could to keep their struggling drug business afloat. Since they couldn’t risk going to Portland themselves, an old armed robber Kessler had met in Marion, Richard Ruip, was handling the business there for them.

So of course it wasn’t long before two young hot-shot detectives from the Multnomah County Sheriff’s office, Bobby Peterson and John Bunnell, were onto Ruip. At first they had no idea he was getting his dope from Kessler. As far as they knew, he was just another Portland drug dealer, and the place was full of them.

But what they also knew was that his girlfriend, Valerie Timms, who worked as a bartender, was selling drugs on the side. So in time-honored fashion they jacked her up, and to save herself some serious jail time she told them not just what she knew about Ruip but about the Kessler dope connection as well.

The two sheriff’s detectives passed the information along to Neil Van Horn, the lead DEA investigator on the Kessler case, and were soon working with him as a team. The surveillance on Ruip intensified.

Then one very cold night in February the three of them, plus at least a couple other sheriff’s deputies, follow Ruip to a truck-stop bar on I-84 where he meets briefly with a heavily bearded man, who, as they all would later say, they just didn’t recognize.

After Ruip departs the bearded man finishes his beer. Then he walks out to the parking lot, gets into a brand new Lincoln and heads back towards Portland. At which point, someone says, hey, shouldn’t we at least find out who this guy is? So they pile in their cars – there are three of them now – and follow at a respectful distance.

The Lincoln takes the I-5 turn-off and heads north towards Seattle. About ten miles on the Washington side, Van Horn, who’s in the lead car, radios the Washington highway patrol to pull the guy over, you know, just to be sure.

Up ahead a Washington trooper turns on his flashing lights, and Kessler, knowing that he’s not been speeding so this could be just some big misunderstanding, pulls over to the side of the highway and rolls down his window.

But when he sees the trooper – who of course has been warned over the radio that the man he’s been asked to stop may or may not be armed and dangerous – approaching with his gun already out, Kessler starts firing.

He doen’t hit anyone but the chase is on. Up I-5 as fast as the big Lincoln can go, with a growing assortment of law enforcement vehicles in pursuit.

At the Kelso exit, still barreling along at eighty-five or ninety, Kessler turns off the highway, which is where it happens. In hardly half a mile the exit ramp ends abruptly in a T where it meets Todd Road – and Kessler, no longer in control of the vehicle, goes airborne and, with a crash, up a sizable embankment on the other side of the road.

Halfway up the embankment the Lincoln stalls out. Kessler throws it into reverse, sending it back down the hill at his pursuers, and rolls out. There’s no time to look for his two pistols which have apparently been thrown under the seat and he takes off.

It's dark and the temperature is in the teens. Kessler buries himself in the ground with only his nose showing, he’ll later say. The next day there’s an inter-agency search for him with dogs and FBI helicopters but somehow they don’t find him.

That night, from a pay phone in the tiny town of Castle Rock, some three miles north of where the chase ended, he puts in a call to Sandra in Seattle. She says a car is on the way to pick him up. It’ll be there in forty-five minutes.

Not even five minutes later he’s stopped by two Castle Rock policemen who want to see his ID. Kessler tries to sucker punch the one closest to him but the guy’s no pushover. Both cops draw down on him and Kessler’s under arrest. He’s still got he $10,000 that Ruip slipped him under the watchful eyes of the law back in the truck-stop bar, but it won’t do him any good now.

They lock him up in the Kelso jail, and this time it’s Roger, down in Rocky Butte, who sends the message. He’s just heard about it on the TV news. “What’s going on?” he asks. “How you doing?” Kessler comes back with a one-liner:

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

It’s an old English proverb, of course. But what Kessler’s obviously thinking is the line the Jack Nicholson character in The Shining keeps typing, over and over, as he’s going nuts. That’s Kessler for you. A joker to the end.

But then, as you can probably guess, if you’ve been following the story this far, it’s not the end at all.

The old Rocky Butte jail thst used to sit on a hill east of Portland. It was torn down in 1983 to make room for I-205.