Where’s Ralph??
It had been about a week since Ralph had fronted us a pound of cocaine for $5,000. The last time we saw him, he was walking into his trailer with our money and we were leaving the area with the coke!
We had been hanging out at the cabin for several days waiting to meet with Ralph. There was no activity at his trailer next door.
Ralph was not the only person living in the trailer. His “wife”, Georgia, and their son, Nick also lived in the trailer. Georgia was said to be in her early twenties, while Ralph was 60 years old. Pictures Ralph showed us of a younger Georgia showed her to be a very attractive young lady. When we met her, after she had been “strung out” on drugs for a few years, she looked a lot different. Ralph said he and Georgia were married and Nick was his biological son, but their friends discounted the story and said Georgia just lived with Ralph, and Nick was her son by another man. Ralph treated little Nick like he was his own son.
Nick was a young man about 4 years old with light brown hair. He was a cute kid with a touch of a speech impediment, which just made the little guy cuter. He was a regular visitor at our cabin.
On his first visit to the cabin he performed a thorough interrogation of me. When I opened the front door, he strode right in and made himself at home at the breakfast bar. I sat down opposite him and waited for the questioning to begin. Nick looked around and finally pointed toward a picture on the wall, asking, “Where you dit dat?”. “I don’t know”, I lamely replied. We went through that routine several times and finally, I guess he became disgusted with my ignorance, he looked at a flower arrangement and questioned, “You dit dat at Walmart?”. “Yep!”, I exclaimed. Nick seemed relieved that I could at least show some glimmer of intelligence. We went through the same ritual every time he came over. We became good buddies. In other words, he had me wrapped around his little finger.
Ralph and Georgia were constantly at war with one another. One afternoon Ralph came charging into the house, obviously upset. He raised up his shirt and I did the same. Ralph demanded we each lift up our shirts before we began a conversation to prove neither one of us was wearing a wire.
I got Ralph seated and finally he calmed down. He looked at me and said, “I need a rub job on Georgia”. We talked for a while and I was eventually able to convince him not to kill her.
No doubt we could have taken a murder contract from him, but that wasn’t what we wanted. If we had taken a murder contract from him, we would have arrested him and that would have been the end of our undercover operation.
We wanted to get involved in the drug business with him. The more we got to know about his business, the more we were convinced he was involved with law enforcement.
We wanted to move up the ladder.
At one point we thought we had him talked into introducing us to his law enforcement partners. The problem was, they knew me, so I couldn’t meet with them! We got another TBI Agent from East Tennessee lined up to meet with them as our representative, but they got “hinky” and refused to talk to him.
Back then, on that part of the state line, if the bad guys got mad at you, one of their favorite ways to deal with you was to blow your place up or burn it down. One day while we were waiting for Ralph to show up, I was relaxing on the front porch when there was a loud explosion. The first thing I thought was, they had bombed our cabin!
I came close to expiring from cardiac arrest right there on the front porch. When I checked and I had all my arms and legs, the cabin was still standing, and I didn’t see any smoke, I calmed down a little. Later on we discovered that our place was sitting right dead in the middle of one of the training routes for the fighter jets from Pensacola. The explosion we heard (and felt) was caused by one of the jets flying overhead at supersonic speed and breaking the sound barrier!
After a week and a half, or so, Buster and Jerry and I met to discuss what to do next. We had not seen or heard from Ralph. We kind of figured if he had died or been killed we would have probably heard about it. Maybe he got a better business deal somewhere else, or maybe he grew suspicious of us and wanted to get away from us. There was no way for us to know what had happened, but as Buster liked to say, we had to “get off of square one!”.
The next day we indicted Ralph in federal court in Memphis for fronting us the pound of cocaine. We continued to uncover more about the drug ring using conventional investigative techniques. The undercover phase of the investigation was apparently over. At least that’s what we thought.
A couple of weeks after we indicted Ralph, Buster got a call from the DEA in North Alabama. They had some information about our buddy Ralph.
The author, Jim Leach, was the Tennessee representative to the “S.T.A.R.” (Small Town And Rural) drug enforcement training program presented by the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center at Glynco Georgia.