A True Prince off the City

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In Chicago, a cop goes undercover to crack a police dope ring

Government corruption in Chicago is at once routine and legendary, such a fact of everyday life that each new scandal seems not so much to shock citizens as to reaffirm their cynicism. Yet in the past few weeks even the most jaded Chicagoans must have been a little dismayed. Ten West Side narcotics policemen were convicted on June 30 of taking $250,000 in protection money from dope dealers. Last week, in a separate case, ten more policemen were arraigned and three others indicted for variously possessing and selling marijuana, cocaine and heroin. The investigation into police drug peddling was sparked by an honest cop who refused to look the other way. In the story that follows, he is called James Watson. TIME pieced together an inside account of the undercover probe after an exclusive interview with Watson, 42, and a series of conversations with other police investigators.

In James Watson's family, sinking into the street life on Chicago's black South Side was not allowed. Still, compared with his three brothers, who went directly from working-class boyhoods to college and upscale success, James was an underachiever. After high school, he became an Army paratrooper; after his discharge, he became a butcher. But Watson had a calling: in 1967 he finally admitted it and joined the Chicago police force.

He made a great cop. As a decoy dealers victim, undercover narcotics agent and organized-crime Watson, says a colleague, "was the guy you could always count on to be behind you." But his front-line successes made him an undeserving victim of the Peter Principle. He was promoted to detective a few years ago but proved too impolitic and got on the wrong side of a deputy superintendent. In 1980 Watson was demoted back to patrolman and assigned to squad-car duty on the South Side.

In his years away from the rank-and-file officer's life, the street ethos had become twisted. Fellow cops were not just smoking a little pot at home, after hours, but sucking on joints and snorting cocaine while on duty. For a year he watched, disgusted; regularly he saw drugs, including heroin, sold from squad-car windows. "I was told this was the new thing," Watson says. "It was supposed to be accepted. But to me it was a cancer that could destroy the department." To the dopers in blue, Watson was out of it, an old prig.

Until last fall, his loyalty to fellow officers was stronger than his anger. Then one day in September, responding to a routine call, Watson radioed for another patrolman to join him. The officer never came. He was too high, too jazzed up on cocaine, to do his duty.

On Sept. 26, a Saturday, Watson called Sergeant Thomas Chandler, 34, a colleague from his days on the narcotics squad, now working for the department's self-policing Internal Affairs Division. Watson unburdened himself, telling all, naming names. It was agonizing for Watson. He did not get a kick out of seeing himself as a righteous avenger and declined a further role in any investigation. Finally he pleaded, "Just be fair to these guys."