Missouri Town Finds Drug Agent Is Really an Impostor

Town Finds Drug Agent Is Really an Impostor – NYTimes.com
GERALD, Mo. — Like so many rural communities in the country’s middle, this tiny town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up.

Busts began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood, from television mainly, to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

I know after all of this USA PATRIOT Act and FISA wrangling by the administration and congress it can be difficult to remember exactly what tiny shreds of the 4th Amendment we still have in place, but I think “search warrants to physically enter homes” still applies.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s anti-drug campaign abruptly unraveled after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding-performing minister, a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

Mr. Jakob, 36, is now the subject of a criminal investigation by federal authorities, and is likely to face charges related to impersonating a law enforcement officer, his lawyer said.

The strange adventures of Sergeant Bill have led to the firing of three of the town’s five police officers, left the outcome of a string of drug arrests in doubt, prompted multimillion-dollar federal civil rights lawsuits by at least 17 plaintiffs and stirred up a political battle, including a petition seeking the impeachment of Mr. Schulte, over who is to blame for the mess.

And the questions keep coming. How did Mr. Jakob wander into town and apparently leave the mayor, the aldermen and pretty much everyone else he met thinking that he was a federal agent delivered from Washington to help barrel into peoples’ homes and clean up Gerald’s drug problem? And why would anyone — receiving no pay and with no known connection to little Gerald, 70 miles from St. Louis and not even a county seat — want to carry off such a time-consuming ruse in the first place?

Why?  Because people of small character and low self-worth enjoy playing tough guy.  It’s the same guy who would go to great extremes as a kid to bully other kids.  This “Sergeant Bill” pleaded guilty to misdemeanor sexual abuse of a teen girl when he was 22 (another type of bullying), has failed in his business pursuits, and has played small-town cop before, but never long enough to have been state certified.  He’s a puffed-up loser who gets his kicks thinking he’s some vigilante superhero ridding the world of the drug scourge.  He needs to feel superior and righteous and what better underclass to bully than the reviled meth zombies?  He’s just another pompous, arrogant, self-aggrandizing, cruel, mendacious, predatory, sanctimonious, reprobate drug warrior – who failed to qualify for a badge first.