Inside Miami’s Drug War: Cops On the Front Lines
In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence detective Gary Jenkins sits down with Burt Gonzalez, a veteran officer from the Miami-Dade Police Department, for an unfiltered look inside one of the most violent and chaotic eras in American law enforcement history. Bert has published his story title The Real Greatest Show on Earth.
With decades of experience spanning multiple divisions, Burt recounts the transformation of Dade County’s police force—from Metro-Dade to Miami-Dade—and now back to an elected sheriff. He walks us through the gritty evolution of policing in South Florida, where the drug trade fueled daily violence and cartel wars left bodies in the streets. Burt shares firsthand stories from Miami’s cocaine-crazed years, including a shocking drug bust that netted 208 kilos of cocaine and over a million dollars in cash, offering a vivid glimpse into the unpredictable and dangerous life of a street cop.
Beyond the shootouts and seizures, we explore the human side of policing—the growing mental health crisis in Miami-Dade, the deadly unpredictability of domestic violence calls, and the emotional toll that constant exposure to trauma takes on officers. Burt emphasizes the importance of training, de-escalation, and support systems for those on the front lines.
The conversation also previews Burt’s upcoming show, Sergeant Maverick, a podcast where he’ll tackle everything from police work and politics to financial advice for first responders—and even the decline of customer service in America. Join us for this candid, eye-opening conversation as Burt Gonzalez pulls back the curtain on the realities, dangers, and hard-earned lessons of Miami policing during the height of America’s drug war.
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Transcript
[0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, welcome to the studio of Gangland Wire. I’m back here, and I have a fellow copper from down in Miami-Dade County, Florida, Burt Gonzalez. And, you know, I worked all the jobs on the police department, mainly spent my time in intelligence, so that’s why I focus on organized crime. But I worked all the rest of the jobs, almost all of them. I never was a wheel man. But other than that, I think I did everything. And Burt’s done a lot of things, too. So welcome, Bert. Thank you, Gary. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. And guys, you need to know, and we’ll talk about this later, Bert has a book out there about his career and some great stories called The Real Greatest Show on Earth. And believe me, Bert, it is the real greatest show on Earth, isn’t it? Well, that’s why I named the book that.
[0:49] I was thinking about what is it that we do and what do we call it out there ourselves, in the street, in the homes of our citizens and everything. And really, it’s a circus. So that’s where I came up with that. True circus. All right, now tell the guys a little bit about your department that you spent your time in and how you ended up going on that department and a little bit about the history of it and what it was like as you went over the years. So go ahead. So I was with Miami-Dade Police, formerly known as Metro-Dade Police, when I joined in 1983. And in the areas where my family moved here from New York and I followed a year later, the area was unincorporated Dade County at the time. It wasn’t called Miami-Dade County yet.
[1:40] And so the police of the jurisdiction was Metro Dade police. And our neighbor behind our house, Bob Johns, was a sergeant with Metro. So then all of my interactions, I’ve seen Metro everywhere. And then as I got to know Bob and I got to know more about the department,
[2:00] Metro Dade is the largest department in the Southeast United States. Now is Miami Dade. It still is. And it’s the sheriff’s office, even though we didn’t call ourselves that. We just called ourselves Metro-Dade and now Miami-Dade Police. It is a sheriff’s office as of a few weeks ago again. First time in 60 years we’ve elected a sheriff. And that involves all the politics about the county governing itself away from the capital, Tallahassee. And then the voters here a couple of years ago said, we want to have an elected sheriff again, as opposed to an appointed director by the mayor and the county commission. And you know, as well as I do, that if you have an appointed chief or an appointed director, the mayor has control over them. So the director is not answerable to the citizens or the chief of police isn’t really answerable to the citizens. They’re answerable to the mayor.
[3:04] And it caused a lot of problems. And finally, the citizens down here said, we want an elected sheriff again. In November, we elected a sheriff. One of my colleagues, Rosie Cordero-Stutz, who highly qualified, she was an assistant director with us. So now we’re the sheriff’s office again.
[3:22] So the more I learned of what department I wanted to apply to, it was going to be Metro-Dade and only Metro-Dade. I didn’t think about the city of Miami, which is another, the second largest department in South Florida.
[3:37] But it was going to be Metro all the way. And there’s going to be folks that may be here, listen to this, and going to say, well, that sounds pretty arrogant. Well, it is the best department down here for sure. And it is a leading agency around the country. And we’re very proud of that reputation. So I joined Metro, like I said, in 83.
[4:00] And two years later my brother got out of the army and he came on as well and I gotta tell you at that time it was the height of the cocaine cowboy wars when we came on.
[4:13] This is what I was thinking, Miami Vice. You say Miami area in 1983. I’m thinking Miami Vice, maybe. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a kilo of cocaine anywhere. I mean, it was everywhere. And the district that I work, Southwest District, we had a lot of dopers that lived there. They built these big houses. And of course, oh, that’s not a doper there. Of course not, right?
[4:41] Cameras outside. You know, and the thing about the cowboy wars at that time, besides the fact that cocaine was everywhere, we had a lot of dead bodies dropping all the time. And there was a time literally every day we were finding bodies all over the county, all our different districts. And the homicide rate was so high that our department had to create a specialized narcotics-focused homicide squad to handle it. So when you say Miami Vice, and also, I’m sure you’ve seen it and many of your viewers and our fellow colleagues, Scarface. Yeah. The movie Scarface. And that scene, I’m always reminded of that scene where Tony Montana and his crew are walking into the banks with duffel bags full of cash. Yeah. Well, I’ve got one story about that. And I was working, I worked mostly uniform in my career. I did a lot of training as well, but I also did plainclothes work.
[5:58] And we did a lot of street-level narcotics. So I was on this crime suppression team playing clothes, and we were getting hit with a lot of driveway robbers. We have an affluent area in the district I was working. And from the expensive department stores.
[6:19] Macy’s, Bloomingdale, Neiman Marcus, the people would get followed home and get robbed in their driveway. And they’re driving an expensive car, You know, so we got assigned to do surveillances and try to catch these bad guys. And, uh, like I wrote in the book, I always describe a bad guy as an asshole bad guy. Yeah. Cause that’s what they are. Right. So what we were doing these surveillances and we hired extra officers, uh, to increase our numbers. Cause we were a small plainclothes squad. Mark, Sylvia and I, uh, went down this one street one night about eight o’clock at night. And it was dark, and as we drove by this one house, we see two guys looking in the picture window next to the front door. Look really suspicious. We drove down the street. We didn’t see a car in the driveway. We came around. They were gone. Okay, we got something here. Go down, park in somebody’s driveway. I got out, told the owner who we were. Can we park in your driveway? We’re going to watch this house. We called the rest of the squad in. we surveilled for a while.
[7:30] No movement so we went to the house Mark and I went to the back of the house, and what we in the backs of a lot of Florida houses they have what’s called the Florida room it’s like a second living room that’s in the back of the house next to the yard or the pool, generally screened in or something like that when the other guys went to the front door and knocked on the door and a relatively of a young woman came to the door and Joe on our squad who had the gift of gab, she, he started, uh, interviewing her and said, well, there’s two guys that were just here and they’re gone. And she goes, there’s nobody here.
[8:13] So they relayed that to Mark and I, and we’re staring at the two guys in the floor room with the kids in the, in the back of the house. Uh-oh. Okay. Right. So, you know, the, the plot thickens, right? Yes. Joe talked his way into the house and got the lady to sign a consent to search. We secured it. He did have a gift to gab, man. Big time. Big time. We secured the two.
[8:40] Asshole bad guys, because that’s what they turned out to be. And we searched the house. In one of the rooms, we found Mac 11 machine guns. We found a table with a ledger book on it that was a code book that we sent to the DEA.
[8:59] We found suitcases with coffee grounds. Because at that time, the dopers were running the drugs or coffee grounds to throw the dogs off, as many people know. And then, you know, the acetylene torch tanks, their steel, well, those were used to drop from the airplanes into the Everglades. And they had a couple of those in the room. And then we found a garbage bag full of cash. Okay. Later on, when we counted it, it was $1.3 million in cash. Oh, my God. And then when the guys got up into the attic to check there, 208 keys of Coke. Ooh, 200? 208 keys, yeah. Oh, my God. So at that time, it was the biggest seizure in Dade history, Dade County history. Since then, it’s been eclipsed by tons. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But the ledger book, when the DEA broke the code, came back to a real estate office in Miami, Columbia, and a place in Milan, Italy. So it was a triangle and the lady was in the house with her husband and her three kids living as a family. They were from Columbia, no drug dealers from Columbia, right?
[10:17] So they were there set up to funnel the drugs and cash in and out of the house. Was it great police work? Okay, something suspicious. We jumped on it. It was dumb luck. Yes. It was just dumb luck. That’s how it works, man. I know. I got my own stories like that. Just dumb luck. You just stumbled into it. And then when everybody hears about it, oh, you guys did a great job. All right, we’ll take it.
[10:48] But I’ll tell you what, that day you guys were running around the station high-fiving each other as you put that coke in the property room it would counted that money out today everybody come and look look at all this freaking money they’re counting absolutely oh yeah oh yeah you know you take the win and then you move on to the next yeah yeah yeah well you know it works that way it’s just how it works you know then you put 100 hours in something else and nothing happens you know then all of a sudden something little something falls and it and it starts happening it for you i’ll tell you what that is how it works and and that’s one reason it’s fun it’s uh you know those guys like that or uh that would that’s just something i mean the most most marijuana or most cocaine we ever discovered during my short time i spent about two years in this business was five kilos that came in from california so that that tells you the difference in miami and dade and and kansas city we just you know we get that was the most
[11:46] you know that was the most anybody found for a long time. Finally, they found more. It was crazy everywhere. The same squad I was on, we were in uniform first and we transitioned to plain clothes.
[12:00] So what we used to do, we did something called working the pay foams. So in our marked cars, green and whites, as we called them, those were the colors. We would watch a bank of telephones, pay phones with binoculars. And the thing is that our cars are visible everywhere. So the bad guys were used to seeing our green and whites around. And they’d go to the pay phone with their roll of quarters and they’d be throwing quarters in there, calling Colombia or Bolivia, wherever it was. And we would watch them and then we would follow them afterwards. We’d stop them and then we’d get them to let us search the car, half a key, guns, you know, whatever it is. It was almost like shooting fish in a barrel. So then what we would do is we’d call Border Patrol because these guys are probably here illegally. And then Border Patrol didn’t need a warrant to go into their residence. Oh, really? Yeah, because they were here illegally. So they would get an entry. We would follow them in and back them up, and then we would find the rest of the narcotics or whatever it was. And we’d take all that. We would drop arrest forms on them, and then Border Patrol would take them away also and put an immigration charge on them. So as you know, paperwork is tedious. Yeah.
[13:20] Tedious. But it was fun. And that was just a brief moment in time during my career. Um i worked uniform most of the time i was a field training officer i was a field training sergeant um i did a lot of training over the years in different things different disciplines, but i really uh spent most of my time in uniform and you know i i liked it that way because that’s where the action is yeah and i like the craziness of the street the crazier it is on the street the more I was enjoying it, you know, everybody just lose their collective minds. We’d have, you know, big scenes or whatever, burglars running, perimeters, fires, hazmat situation, whatever it was, the crazier it was, the better I liked it. And I also, also had colleagues that were like that. You know, we liked the act. Yeah.
[14:14] Yeah. I know what you mean. I was the same way. You go, you go to the, uh, you go to the area, the district, you volunteer for the districts that they’re the highest crime. And that’s where the most action is. You could easily, you know, we had two kinds of policemen. We had the guys that were frantically trying to get out to the suburbs where there wasn’t anything to do. And then you had the rest of us that were frantically trying to get into the hot districts and, and get, if you had a beat car, get that hot car. So you could, uh, or get up maybe a, uh, a wild car. And once in a while they, they have programs where you’d have a wild car and you could just cruise around and just get into whatever you could get in.
[14:52] So that’s, that’s what we, that’s what we like to do here. I know that I had, uh, you know, and, and I remember one night I’m like.
[15:01] We’re on this kind of a burglary deal where we’re wild cars and there’s about four or five of us. And there was a high dollar district in which they were burglarizing in the evening while people were out to dinner. And then they come back over toward the ghetto. So all of a sudden, you know, we have, they jump one up. There’s been a burglary. Somebody’s came home. They caught them on the inside. They jumped in their car and they lost them. Then they found them. We lost them. And then they jumped out of their car. And I jump out of mine and we’re all one person cars. and I’m like chasing this guy through the backyards. Then I lose him, of course. And I’m running pell-mell and all of a sudden I thought, you know, I better slow down just a little bit. This son of a bitch will be waiting around the corner for me.
[15:45] And sure enough, they found him, you know, after I ran by him, he got underneath a bush. And another guy came along behind me and said, oh, he’s down here underneath the bush right here. I tell you what, it’s crazy out there. It could be really dangerous too. One bad guy means two bad guys. One gun means two guns. And you’ve always got to think that way.
[16:08] In our profession, while we like the action, when you leave the house in the morning, and here, we didn’t go to the district, like let’s say a precinct in New York at NYPD or some other places where you change at the station, right? You’re in civilian clothes when you’re commuting, and then you change. Well, we don’t do that. We just put our uniform out at home, and we go. Yeah, that’s what we did. And then in 92, one of our districts did a pilot program. Actually, it ended in 92, five years, to see if having assigned cars that you can take home was cheaper for the department because they didn’t get abused 24 hours a day. Yeah. And our union did that, the PBA, and the department agreed, the county agreed. So in 93, I got my first take-home green and white. And it was like, I was a little kid driving, you know, like when I was 16 years old and got my license for the first time. And now I’m driving without my parents or, you know, whatever. And I remember driving home from the station when it came to my car. I go, you know, remember Flounder and Animal House? Oh boy, is this great.
[17:22] And then we had the benefit of you’re allowed to drive it off duty anywhere in Date County because part of the package was that the visibility of the car being everywhere. So we did a lot of us did that. And I would say that, uh, until 2012, when I bought my 2008 Corvette convertible. I drove my green and white to tennis for decades.
[17:54] And then when I got the Corvette, of course, I needed to drive that with the top down and go play. Right. Yeah. And then when I got rid of the Corvette, it was back to driving the green and white to play tennis again. So it was a great benefit for us. It was good having it. You didn’t have to pay a dime for it. You didn’t have to put anything into it if you didn’t want to. The gas was paid for. The insurance was the county self-insured.
[18:16] And it was a great thing. Now, the other side of that coin, when you’re off duty and you come across a crash, you come across somebody broken down or something, stop and render aid. And I always did. That could be at the time, my mother who was broken down or somebody needed help. I’m in a patrol car. I don’t care. I’m off duty. I’m going to stop and I’m going to help. So unfortunately, a lot of our young, uh, Jedi Knights, as I refer to them now, they’re more involved with their phone and they just want to get where they’re going and they don’t want to be bothered if they’re off duty. And I, I can’t stand that. Um, I taught my son how to do it and he’s very good about it. We’re here to serve. So that’s what you have to think. Well, they still have take home cars like that. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. They talked about that here, but they never, I don’t think that, not when I was in patrol that they ever did it. You know, you got to be ready. Like you said, if you’re going to take it home, you got to be ready. If you see a wreck, you got to stop and do something. If somebody’s going to be flagging you down, you got to stop and do something. So I bet a lot of guys drove them home and didn’t go back out again.
[19:31] I’ve come across a bunch of stuff driving around in that car off duty. Yeah. Or on my way home from work or to work, something happens and i can take action you know i helped find a child with autism at one of our local parts here near our house when i was on my way home from the airport it is near the end of my career 20 in 2019 uh the call went out i’m on my way home i’m five minutes from home and the call went out over all the frequencies uh you know four-year-old with autism walked away okay.
[20:07] Why did he walk away? Well, that’s unanswerable. You know, the parents weren’t paying attention. And from my training that I had with autism, and I also trained a lot of officers in dealing with the mentally ill. So I did a lot of that. I was well-versed in that. But with autism, children are drawn to the water. And there’s a lake in the park over here. So when I told the dispatcher, I’m off duty, coming home, but I’m going to go to the park. And I went straight to the lake in that park. It’s a park near my house, a mile away that I’m very familiar with. Walking, cycling, playing tennis there, played softball there, played soccer there. I went to the park. Somebody was walking that kid back towards me.
[20:54] He fell in the water. Oh, wow. He didn’t drown. Thankfully. but and I said I’m glad that I went you know I didn’t have to go in the water or find a drowned child yeah, but like I said it comes with the territory you know you gotta take action you just can’t hide your you know bury your head and go home you know you’re listening to the radio even if you’re off duty which you have to do, in case let’s say in the case you worked you know for my department I’m on my way to play tennis and you’re in the jackpot screaming for emergency backup. And I happen to be the closest unit. Am I going to go to the tennis court or am I going to stop and help you?
[21:44] That’s a no brainer. Yeah. Fortunately, a lot of the young guys are like that. Yeah. Yeah. You got to do it. If you’re going to take, you’re going to take that advantage. You audit it. If you got to stop, if you see another policeman, I mean, I drive down the highway and I see some policeman got somebody stopped. I kind of slow down and watch and make sure everything looks copacetic and before I keep on going. So you got to, cause you’re out there when you’re out there by yourself, man, you’re, you’re alone and they’re not super bad and you’re not bulletproof. And I don’t know about you. You may have your own stories, but you ever tie into somebody who was crazy and, and was so strong that you couldn’t, one man couldn’t even hardly hold one arm down. Let alone take three or four of you, even just to hold this person down and get them under some kind of control. I mean, there’s a lot of people out there like that, and you run into them by yourself. You know, you better hope help gets there pretty fast. And so since we’re talking about my book, I have a chapter dedicated to mental illness.
[22:46] And here in Florida, the law that allows us to take somebody into protective custody for a mental disability when they’re acting out self-neglect, harmful to themselves, harmful to somebody else, is called the Baker Act law.
[23:06] Which was instituted in 1971 in Florida. And it’s a great law. So the title of my chapter, I used the code for our Baker Act calls, 43. And then I said, 43 mental illness, what batshit crazy is really like. I give it a little bit of a comical twist, but it’s a very serious chapter. And you know as well as I do, when someone has mental illness or they’re on drugs, they are so strong. And no matter what you do, they don’t feel the pain and you’re trying to take them into custody and you’re trying not to hurt them. But it gets to the point every once in a while where you’ve got to hurt them bad just to get them into custody. You know, we don’t want to do that, but they’re not going to give up. And I’ve run into that so many times. In Miami-Dade County, the national average for mental illness in the United States is about 3% of the population.
[24:14] In Miami-Dade County, it’s 9%. It’s three times higher than anywhere else in the country. So we’re Baker acting, as we call it, people every single day. Almost every police agency here in Miami-Dade County, and there’s 36 of them. Uh miami-dade mine and city of miami the next largest department, baker acting people all day long every shift every district or sector um it is just amazing how many people have it and then act out or something happens they get off their meds the police get called they’re tearing up the place a lot of uh um assisted living facilities These ALFs have people with mental illness and they end up throwing the things around and 911 gets called and we got to go fix the problem and you got to take them into custody. And as you know, getting him into custody sometimes just is not easy. And then after the four of you fought this guy or gal, shoehorned him into the backseat of the car or put him in a rescue truck or ambulance to take him on a gurney. You get to the crisis receiving facility They’re calm now, And then the doctor gets them. And then the doctor disagrees with your assessment.
[25:37] Where your uniform’s all disheveled, your name tag, the pen came out, you know, and the doctor’s in this clinical environment saying, oh, they’re fine. They’re fine. No, they’re not fine, doc. You know, so we’ve run into that a lot as well. I didn’t have like that. I mean, this guy, we just couldn’t even hardly control him and get him down to what we used to have. what they call a PRC psychiatric receiving center. And we get him down there. And all of a sudden this is like Mr. Meek, Mr. Mild. Those tenants are looking at us like, well, what’s wrong with you guys? You know, there’s nothing wrong with this guy. I said, okay, whatever you think we’re leaving him with you. He’s yours. We’re gone. Exactly. Exactly. And then unfortunately within an hour or two hours, they’re just walking out the door because the doctor, you know, he’s calm. Now the doctor doesn’t see anything that he might be harmful to himself or others and doesn’t hold them, uh, for a more thorough examination. So, but that’s the nature of our job. It’s things we have to deal with. And then we go on, go to the next one. Really?
[26:44] We had a guy at an intersection. He had a big truck and, and I don’t remember if we got a call or somebody noticed him. And then I think this other guy noticed him and called me over. I was nearby. And so we get out of service and we walk up this guy and he’s just like steering straight ahead and he’s just like pushing the clutch and then letting it out pushing in letting it out and this big truck is rocking back and forth and and we can’t get his attention so i reach up in there and i turn it off and it’s it’s in gear and then he and then they like start pulling him out well he’s resisting us the whole time and he’s a big dude so we pull him out we wrestle him around and they a bunch of other guys come in. We rough him all up a little bit, just trying to get him under control and, you know, finally get rid of him. And I remember this other guy, he was bad. And so he went back to the station. He wrote a whole bunch of tickets on this guy. And then the next day, they tell me, I said, oh, well, he was in insulin shock. Oh my God. I mean, you know, what are you supposed to do? I mean, you know, what the hell are you supposed to do? You just got to do something. And then we, you know, we had to call a tow truck and get that truck out of there. It was just, it was a nightmare. And all he needed was a piece of candy. I came as a young officer. I came across one evening and by the way, afternoon shift was always my favorite. The transition from day into night.
[28:09] Didn’t have to wake up at the crack of dawn and, you know, and on mid nights, I had a hard time functioning. But one afternoon I got a call. There’s this guy in the parking lot of an apartment complex on his knees. He’s incoherent. Fortunately, we get really good training and we get updates all the time. And I remembered, okay, something wrong. His door was open to his apartment. I went in and I found an address book where we had address books. Remember? Yeah. For our phone numbers. For our phones. Yeah. And I thought it was family. So I called him and they said, he’s diabetic. He’s an insulin shock. I grabbed orange juice from the refrigerator and I put it in his mouth, woke right up. I mean, came out of it just like that. Yeah. I heard that. Damnedest thing. But, you know, yes, sometimes these things, they don’t look right. You know, something’s wrong, but you’re not really sure what it is. You know, later on, now this is going to sound sarcastic and maybe it is because sarcasm is one of our superpowers as cops. We know that, right? Yeah. So in the last 20 years, many more children have been diagnosed with autism.
[29:30] Back when we started, you know, it was rare. Yeah, I’ve read that. That there’s, I don’t know what the story is. Now, there’s HDD and a whole bunch of things, right? So, and autism is one of the big ones. And now, you know, dealing with some child, especially a child that has severe autism, it’s very difficult. And you have to learn some techniques. And we went through the, all of us went through the training to try to learn these things. Because not only do we have the highest mental illness rate in the country,
[30:03] but it seems like we’ve got a lot of kids with autism. And as a side note, my oldest daughter, Christina, is going to our local college, Miami Dade College. Uh, she just got her associates in education and now she’s working on her bachelor’s and she’s going to be specializing teaching kids with autism. She has a knack for it. You know, she gets them to do what the other teachers can’t get to get the kids to do. It’s pretty cool. And, uh, when she told me this the other day that she had this class as a substitute and the T the main teacher said, how do you get the kids to follow you? They don’t listen to me. Christina has a knack for it. So I asked her, do you have a whistle? She goes, no. I go, well, let’s start calling you a kindergarten cop, like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
[30:48] Then I’m marching around the classroom. But she seems to have the knack. So for us, you come across somebody with autism. Hopefully you went through the train to try to deal with that because it’s super difficult. It’s not a mental illness, so you don’t bankrupt them. You don’t take them to a crisis center. It’s a different protocol. And one of the techniques that we learned was, especially with children, and let’s say that the child’s name was Gary. I’m going to use yours as an example.
[31:19] The child’s acting out, having an episode. Gary, 10, 9, 8. Gary, how are you feeling? And the kids are taught that way to de-escalate. So when you start counting backwards, they start counting. It doesn’t always work, but it is one of the techniques where someone with mental illness, they say, and you know the magic words, well I think I want to kill myself, you’re gone we’re taking you right there is no debate anymore but the autistic thing is different, it’s more difficult for cops, interesting yeah to get them to focus on those numbers I can see where that might work that is really interesting you bring your attention back they’re all over the place.
[32:13] Our neighbor last week The son, 37 years old, autistic, went running down the street and took off. Didn’t find him to the next day. 37 years old. So I can only imagine what that family’s gone through for 37 years. Oh yeah. Yeah. That’d be a tough one. So tell me something, Bert, did you ever like drive around the corner and just find yourself in a real jackpot? In a real mess and you’re all by yourself you had to jump out and start doing something, um crashes come to mind yeah because that seems to be the most prevalent you know for a patrol officer uh come around the corner and there’s you know three or four or five cars in a crash and you got people bleeding and all that all over the place and uh funny story about that when you know,
[33:11] the enormity of a scene, right. That can overwhelm a young officer. So I was a field training officer on midnights in our Midwest district. And I had George with me. He was on his first month writing assignment out of the academy.
[33:26] And at this big intersection that we have, it was a crash. Two U.S. Marshals were transporting a prisoner northbound on 87th Avenue. And a guy in his little work pickup truck blew the red light, whatever it was, three o’clock in the morning, and T-boned him. Everybody’s hurt. A lot of fire rescue response. Several engines a couple of rescue trucks so we get to the scene and it’s everywhere this this is a huge intersection and we got fire lights everywhere we got six police cars there and i tell the officer who got the call um we’re going to handle it for training because i was teaching George. So I go, George, get your clipboard. We’re taking this. And he literally looked at the scene and did this.
[34:30] He froze for a second, right? Oh, it’s overwhelming. I know it’s overwhelming. Exactly. One month, you know, it was first month on the road. So we got it. We started handling it, got all the information from all the parties involved and rescues doing their thing and transporting. And now we’re finally sitting in the car and we’re starting to report. And I said, you seem a little overwhelmed. He goes, I was in shock looking at all of this, right? And I said, okay, let’s break it down to its most basic component. What do you have? And he had to think about it for a second, and then I had to lead him. I said, George, you got one car going northbound. You got one car going westbound that blew the light, T-Bone. I want you to remove all the fire rescue trucks and all the police cars. All you have is a T-bone accident. That’s it. We have injuries. Yes. But that’s all it is. It’s only two cars. And he looked at me and it’s like I gave him a secret to the Holy Grail or something. Yeah. So. Yeah.
[35:36] Breathe, take a look at what you have and calmly start to assess, right? So to your point, you come around the corner and you see something. And then after a while, like I said, I like the chaos and the craziness, but after a while you come across and you see all this happening and you just go into that mode and you know what to do, right? When we’re young, not so much, But as time goes on, you just get better and better and better at it, no matter the enormity of the thing.
[36:12] Fortunately, one day, I was driving down one of our streets, and one of our officers that worked the Midwest District, which is around Miami International Airport, he came on the radio in a panic, and he said, a jetliner just went down. Oh, wow. It was fine air. It was a cargo plane. It took off and they didn’t secure the cargo. And as it was going up this, the cargo came loose and went toward the tail and put that plane down. It was a 757, which is a large jetliner. I’m into aviation. So when he said that, I could feel in my heart, It kind of stopped for a second because at first we didn’t know it was a cargo and not a passenger.
[37:10] And I talked to him later on about that. And he said he was so scared shitless because he witnessed it. Right. And you don’t ever want to witness something like that.
[37:24] Uh the the two crew or three crew that were on board were killed and one guy on the ground that just picked up his wendy’s lunch and was parked in his car near a business got killed, it just happened to be parked there yeah and you know i think back to that and i go wow it just to this day you know thinking what that officer saw or anybody else that saw it.
[37:53] Um and i’m glad i never had to witness something like that really you come around the corner you got bad guys running and it’s like okay what do i do all right i’m not going to run after them, i’m going to set up a perimeter and then get everybody in there because you know as well as i do the foot chase can end up in something real bad oh yeah you can get hurt in the foot chase Mainly you bust your, blow your knees out, things like that. But you can also get behind those houses and, and you can really get hurt bad. Yeah. And, and you don’t know where the bad guy’s waiting for you, you know, an ambush or there’s more than one bad guy. Yeah. You know, so I’m glad to say, you know, it experiences the best teacher. And as we go along in our careers and then you, you get to see things and assess it immediately. Right. This is what I got. This is what I have to do. I need help. I can’t do this alone. And you just kind of go into that automatic mode and start calling out stuff. You know, I need a box set up. I need a unit on this corner. I need a unit on this corner. I need aviation. I need canine.
[39:04] When I was an officer, start a supervisor. When I was a sergeant, I hear that. Time for me to go. Right? My officers are handling it. Time for me to go to the scene. Yeah. So it’s just. While it’s crazy, it’s serious, it’s dangerous, to me, it was fun. I had a blast. I really did.
[39:26] What about domestic violence calls? Those can be awfully dangerous. So I have a chapter in the book on domestic violence.
[39:38] You probably would agree that early on, especially in the early 80s, domestic violence calls were handled more like a personal matter, like between his houses, right?
[39:51] And we weren’t properly trained to handle them. Depending how serious the injury was, we make an arrest or not make an arrest. Usually the husband into leaving for the night, you know, it’s always a husband, ain’t it? Right. So in the wake of the OJ Simpson event, I think it’s either, I think it’s Netflix or prime or the other. There’s a new four-part documentary on the entire OJ case with behind-the-scenes stuff that we didn’t know about before. Oh, really? That’d be interesting. And the infighting in LAPD between Mark Furman and Lange and Van Adder. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. And how the crime scene technician screwed up the scene. I mean, it was a whole bunch of stuff that I highly recommend cops watching it. You’re going to learn a lot of stuff. So in the wake of the OJ disaster, our department with one of the universities did a study on domestic violence calls. Officers would respond to a domestic violence call, remove the felony. If it was a felony battery or something like that, you’re going to jail. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts, you’re going to jail.
[41:10] If it’s a misdemeanor battery on, you know, the husband slapped the wife, the wife slapped the husband, or pushed or shoved or grabbed, you know, something like that. The dispatcher on her console, and I say her because it was almost all female dispatchers at the time. We got a lot of male dispatchers now.
[41:30] You would tell her that the call is eligible for the study. She’d hit a button on her console, and we called it the roulette wheel. It would come up A or come up B, you know, like come on red, right? When you, when you throw the ball, if it’s an A, we make the arrest. If it’s a B, we don’t make the arrest. And the idea was when all the stats were compiled after six months, when we made the arrest, did it reduce the recidivism rate on those calls for us going back to that same household? Either reduce it or eliminate it completely. Or when we didn’t make the arrest, did we have to go back to the house? And after a six-month study, it showed absolutely if we made the arrest, it almost eradicated domestic violence in that particular household or reduced it greatly because we didn’t want, as you know.
[42:33] Women die the most by abusive spouses in this country. We made a lot of arrests and after the study was over we didn’t take any chances she’s got a red mark on her or something you’re going to jail okay you know if you can you can assess, that they’re telling the truth yeah the guy’s full of shit or she’s full of shit or whatever the case is but because of that study and the amount of domestic violence in a very busy county like Miami-Dade.
[43:06] We developed our, or formed our own domestic violence bureau detectives that just handle only that because it was so, you know, prevalent. So the, and, and you know that that is besides the traffic stop, the most dangerous thing cops do, the domestic violence calls, the most dangerous call cops go to. And I’ve been a lot of fights in domestics, um, where, uh, You’re going to go arrest the husband or the boyfriend or whatever it is. Yeah. Now she is, oh, don’t arrest him. And she jumps on you or the family attacks you. Right. And now everybody’s going to jail. Yeah. You’re asking for emergency backup. The world is coming. You’re just throwing bodies around and getting in a fight. I mean, yes, it’s crazy. And to a civilian, when they hear you and I and the other cops talk about those things, they go, oh, my God. You know, to me, it was great. I had a blast. No, you know, so, but domestic violence is that one call. And I chapter on that by itself. And I talk about.
[44:20] The walking up to the front door of a house, which is no man’s land for a cop. How many guys have gotten shot just walking up to the house? Because that asshole bad guy is waiting back there with a shotgun or a rifle or a handgun, and he’s not going to let you get to the front. And I’m sure, you know, you watch TV. And Gary, I would love to be a technical advisor on a police drama. Yeah, they kill me. They kill me. I know. They kill me. Why are you standing in front of the door, knocking on the door? I mean, you don’t do that. Yeah. You know, you just don’t do that. And especially when I was training rookies, right, this is the way we’re going to walk up. If it’s a hot call, we’re parked about two houses down. If it’s a single family house, not an apartment complex. and then we walk to the house, keeping an eye on things and trying to stay away from that funnel, the fatal funnel of the front door. And how many times if you were training young guys yourself, you’ve had to grab them and go, get over here, you know, like a puppy. So.
[45:36] The domestic, yes. Is it fun to handle? Well, it depends on your definition of fun, but I found it at times you know, and then walking into the house, separating the warring factions, as I call it. And the thing I learned from some senior officers when I was a rookie, when you walk in, scan everything and see if there’s any potential weapons laying around, kitchen knife, a pair of scissors, a screwdriver, you know, and if someone is going to go sit on a couch, get them off the couch. Yeah. Yeah. They’d be hiding a firearm, you know, so. The shit you and I didn’t know when we came out and we’re learning and everything, right? And we got our heads up our asses like every rookie does. And then later on you learn it. And then you can just, you can scan and see exactly what the threat environment is like.
[46:29] Make the arrest, not make the arrest. You know, on the hot calls when I was a sergeant, uh, that 22 of my 37 years was as a sergeant. So I did a lot of teaching, a lot of training.
[46:41] And I would go to the hot calls with my officers because it was my obligation to go with them. And especially when I had young squads to teach them and go in there and just keep an eye on things. You guys are going to handle this, but I am here. Don’t think of me as just your sergeant. Think of me as your backup. If the shit goes crazy, right? This, you know, you asked about any stories. So this leads me to this.
[47:10] July 20th, 1998 at 1045 p.m. at 2288 Northwest 46th Street in our Northside District. Northside District, for our department, everybody around the country might remember the 1980 riots. Northside District for us is where part of those riots took place. Overtown was in the city of Miami, and that was the other part of the riots. It’s late. Two of my rookies are handling a domestic call, domestic violence call. I don’t hear from them for a little while. So I go by the scene and it’s a duplex with a wall between the duplexes, a wall in the front with a gate. I get there and I’m listening to my two rookies debate with the subject boyfriend who apparently struck his pregnant girlfriend. So if you’re pregnant and you get hit, it’s an automatic felony, right? Somebody’s going to jail tonight. Yeah, in Florida, it’s an automatic felony.
[48:07] So I’m watching this and I, and then I say to the guys, what are you doing? Right. The subject’s sitting on the front stoop. I go, stop. You open this gate. He gets up and he walks inside the temp, the, the, the apartment, right. The duplex. I said, okay. So the gate’s locked, but I’m looking at the duplex next to it. It has no gate and it’s got a three foot wall between them. And I don’t guys, what are you? Doing? Come here. Follow me. We go to the next one. We jump over the little wall and now we’re at the front door. Okay. These guys couldn’t figure that out, but you know, they’re, they’re young. The subject battered his pregnant girlfriend. All right. He’s going to jail today. I said, come on out. And he says, I’m not coming out. I’m going to shoot the baby. You got a 20 month old son in there. No. Soon as I heard that I go move. And I start kicking in the door. It took about three shots. I kicked in the door. He picked up his 20 month old son and had him in a bear hug like this. And he was squeeze, trying to squeeze into death, literally squeeze the life out of him. So he had, he was like this and I jumped on top of him and pushed him on his back. My two rookies were with me. We got on top of him. We could not get him to let go of the baby. Gary, I am pounding this guy.
[49:36] I did boxing and martial arts, and I’m hitting him with everything I got, the right way of hitting somebody. He wouldn’t let go. I thought about shooting him in the head, but I was afraid that the round would come out and hit the baby. I put my hand between his head and the baby’s head. The baby’s head was right here with him.
[49:56] And I tried to squeeze it in so I can grab him and pull away while my thumb was exposed. Next thing I know, he’s biting down on my thumb. Oh, this is 1998. I still have the scar. It’s down to the bone and I’m yelling or he’s biting my thumb. So I’m pounding him in the side of the head as hard as I can. He won’t let go. So I remembered a pressure point right under the nose. So I reached under and I yanked as hard as I could. And he opened his mouth, right? Got my thumb out. So now I grabbed him. The guys were able to pull the, uh, his arms apart to get the baby away. We beat the dog shit out of this guy. That’s what I’m thinking. Right. So then my guys got him in custody. We’re going to go put him in the car. I come walking out and I asked the girlfriend, does he have any diseases? And she said he has AIDS. Oh, good. Oh, boy. I remember when that AIDS first started, that was a huge deal, man. Every once in a while, somebody gets stuck with a needle or somebody gets spit on or they get bit. Yeah, that was huge. A little bit of time. So I got on a radio. I requested fire rescue. The dispatcher asked me, who’s it for? I go, it’s for me. The subject bit me.
[51:14] My lieutenant heard that, and he goes, haul an ass out of the station. Rescue arrives, and it’s a truck company. And they send one of my rookies to the store for a bottle of Clorox.
[51:25] I’m not paying any attention to it, right? So he gets back, and you know how the fire trucks have that five-gallon water jug on the side of them for the firefighters? Yeah. Well, they didn’t let me see it. They took one of the Dixie cups. They put half water, half Clorox in it, and they go, Sarge, come here. Oh God Three firefighters Grabbed my hand and put it in a Dixie cup Oh God When the Clorox hit the wound Of course I started to pull out And the three of them were holding They go.
[51:59] Fight it, take it Because we’re trying to kill any chance Of the AIDS virus being transferred I gotta go to the hospital now I had to take one of those horse pills That kind of covers all the communicable diseases Yeah And the next day, they sent me to a satellite center for the hospital to meet Dr. Ross. And when I walked in there, he was on the phone with this disease specialist out of Coral Gables near the University of Miami. And I heard him say, yeah, the best time to be on the drugs is before it happens. And I went, what the fuck is he talking about? I was sent to the specialist, and he put me on the AIDS cocktail, AZT, Epivir, and Crixivan, to try to stop it before it did anything to me. Now, this is not the end of the story. You would think, I’m taking the medication, and I’ll be fine. Well, this is the first time this has ever happened to a Metro-Dade cop, right, or a Miami-Dade cop. Risk management for the county did not want me to see the specialist and didn’t want to pay for the drugs.
[53:10] Which costs $3,020 for the month. You would think this is a workman’s comp thing, but since it’s never happened before, they didn’t want to do it. So now I’m fighting with risk management. I’m on the phone yelling with these people over there. They wanted to have me written up for insubordination. And I’m telling them, you can go fuck yourselves. You have no idea what I’m going through right now. The drugs themselves were so potent. I lost a week from work. I could not leave the house and I had to keep running the bathroom every 30 minutes. Right. It was that bad. So since the county didn’t want to pay for it, it was time to play hardball. So my lieutenant sent faxes to all the local TV stations saying one of our sergeants rescued a 20-month-old that the father was trying to kill and he bit the sergeant and he’s got AIDS and the county doesn’t want to pay for it. And then my wife at the time did two television interviews till finally the county capitulated and they paid for the medication.
[54:05] After that, the proper policy was written for anybody that had this happen to them after me. Some months later, one of my officers got hit with a knife. This guy was trying to kill himself, and Sharky went after him. And when he went to grab the knife, the guy pulled back, and it hit Sharky in the hand. This guy was scraping the knife across his belly. It was a domestic, male-in-male domestic. And the guy broke up with him and he’s losing his mind and now he wants to commit suicide and Sharky got cut. The guy had AIDS. Now Sharky’s got to go through the same protocol that I did. So me being the asshole that I am.
[54:46] I called the director of risk management. She answered the phone. I got lucky. And I said, this is Sergeant Norberto Gonzalez. Norberto’s my formal mate. I said, do you remember my case where I got bitten by the guy with AIDS and you guys didn’t want to pay for it and everything? And finally you did. Well, Officer Benavides is one of my officers. And now he just got exposed to AIDS with a knife cut. I said, I hope that we’re not going to have to go through the same thing that you did to me. And then she said, no, no, no, no. He’s going to be covered. She turned around when we hung up and called my director and said, who the fuck does this sergeant think he is? Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
[55:29] The director called my major at the district. Oh yeah. It starts rolling downhill. Yeah. But he was, he was really cool about it. He goes, just tell Bert to back off. Calm down, Bert. It’s going to be okay. Calm down. But this guy that bit me, we got a warrant that night to draw his blood in the jail and have it analyzed. Yeah. You know what the infectious disease doctor told me? He said, this guy was so polluted with AIDS that had he hit you with a syringe of his blood, you’d have been in big trouble. Right. Now, for two years, I had to get checked every six months. When we went to the hearing for him, now, he was already a multi-time loser, 48 years old, alcoholic. That’s why he didn’t feel any of the punches. When we went to court for his sentencing, the jail doctor had to give a medical report on the guy. He suffered a brain aneurysm while he was in jail. The neurosurgeons at Jackson Memorial Hospital, the county hospital, and the Rattler Trauma Center, saved this guy’s life. The judge asked the doctor, how much does that surgery cost? It goes about $110,000. And the judge said, this guy’s got better healthcare than I do.
[56:44] So he got, he’s dead now. He died in prison. The county was paying for his AIDS medication when he got out of jail. And here I am, the officer’s son, and they didn’t want to pay for mind.
[57:00] Bureaucracy at its finest. Yes. Exactly. Bureaucracy at its finest. All right. Burt Gonzalez. Burt, this has been great,
[57:10] but we got a few things to talk about and you’re going to start a podcast. So tell me about that before we hang up here. I came up with the idea, of course, after the book to help promote the book, but also to be able to talk about those things that affect this all as cops. So my podcast, which is going to launch in about a month, and my son, Burt Jr. is the engineer.
[57:34] So he’ll be doing all the stuff that you do yourself that I don’t want to learn about. I do it all myself. Yeah, he’s going to do all that for me. So the podcast is going to be called Sergeant Maverick, the podcast, all things police work, politics, and life. I developed a guest questionnaire that I’ll email to my potential guests to give me more background information on them so that I can formulate questions. And then we’ll do the podcast, ask them questions, but talk about their careers, how, you know, for all of us, what was your decision to become a cop? You know, what was your background before that? Do you have a family? Where have you worked? And then we’ll transition, maybe, depending on the way the podcast is going, into the political topics of the day.
[58:20] I love presidential politics. I’m a political animal, so I’m into it a lot. So we may talk about the things that are happening that week, you know, or the president, the Congress, you know, what’s going on around the world. Some of the insanity that we see on a nightly basis. And then the life part of that, I’ll get into topics that affect all of us, not just cops, but that affect us all as citizens. And I think one of the first things I’m going to talk about is customer service and how piss poor it is, you know, that we all have to deal with almost on a daily basis when you go to the store. Or how about when you need to call one of your credit card companies or a cable company and all that nonsense, right? But it’s not just going to be cop-centric. Yeah, okay. I’m going to have firefighter friends on to talk about their profession, the similarities and differences between the two of us. And also, I’m going to get into financial and tax issues. So we all invest.
[59:31] Well, how do you invest? How do you know about money? How do you learn about money? So my financial advisor at Wells Fargo will be coming on and we’ll be doing a segment with him to talk about your pension and your deferred compensation and other funds that you have going into retirement. You know, how do you invest those things? Because we really don’t know how to do that. Unless you’re trained in money, you don’t know how. And then the other side of that coin, I’ll have my accountant Tom on.
[59:58] To talk about the tax implications for all that money that you now have set aside in an IRA or other funds so you don’t get yourself into tax troll. Officers and firefighters will have these funds and then they’ll take them out and they won’t pay the taxes on them. When they deferred all these years, right? Tax deferred and now you get yourself into a big tax jackpot. So I want to cover issues like that, as well as I’ll be doing family segments.
[1:00:29] So the first family segment will be my wife, Rosie. I’m back to the book. Of course, I talk about cops and relationships. And one of the sub chapters in there is called marriage, divorce, marriage again and again. So I’ve been married three times. Me too. My wife’s been married three times, you know, third time’s the charm, right? So then I’m going to bring her on first family segment completely expose myself and say go for it you know we’ve been together 21 years, and you know you want to call me an asshole call me an asshole I mean I’m not a box of candy to live with all the time like most of us.
[1:01:10] And then children’s segments I’ll have all my kids on what’s it like having a parent as a cop you know and let them go for it and go at it my nieces is Megan and Alina, my brother, both parents were cops. In the back of the book, the last chapter is war stories from a bunch of my colleagues. And the reason I included war stories by other cops, my colleagues, my brother, my niece, my son, and a whole bunch of others, you know, the thing, big, big things that happened to them or funny, crazy things that happen to them is that throughout the book, I have my war stories, depending on what the chapter is, right? The topic in the chapter, I wanted to add legitimacy to my stories by telling other cops stories because the crux of the book is that I’m writing not about me,
[1:02:06] but about us cops everywhere because we’re all the same. I ended with one last war story of mine. My wife told me, you need to put this one story in there because it was such a big factor in my career. January 7th, 1987, my son’s godfather, Gary, and I were heading back to the barn for the end of the shift. It was 9.30 p.m. A call goes out, man at the door with a gun.
[1:02:36] And Gary and I were going to be passing the new crew coming out of the station, uh, heading to the call. And we were close by. So we said, all right, let’s go. You know, that sixth sense that we have, right? I call it Spidey sense, like Spider-Man, you know, it’s tingling back here. I pull up a little way from the house, not in front of the house. Gary goes straight down. He’s the passenger. He goes out that way. And I worked my way around the house, the front of the house and to the back. And as I start working my way to the back, I’m looking into windows and I get to this big picture window in the back of the house.
[1:03:17] I look in. There’s a guy standing at the front door looking out the peephole, with a 30 caliber carbine in his hand. And there’s a 12 gauge on the couch. Asshole bad guy with gun. This is not good. I work my way. I get on the radio. Of course, I advise. got bad guys with guns inside the house send the world i get to the sliding glass door for the kitchen and as i come up like this the 18 year old of the three subjects meets me right at the sliding glass door he’s holding a semi-auto in his hand at that time i have a revolver we hadn’t transitioned to semi-autos yet that was this was 87 and we didn’t transition till 89 so i got a six-shot Ruger, whole 18 rounds on me. We meet eye-to-eye, and Gary literally, he goes, and I went, oh shit, right? Yeah.
[1:04:12] He runs inside and there’s a big pit like they use for a smoking mead or something like that. Concrete about a foot and a half tall. It’s the only cover I got. I get behind it. I’m pointing at the sliding glass door and I tell the dispatcher so the world knows what we got in there. I said, now we got two asshole bad guys in there with guns. A third guy, the 32-year-old in the suit, the 56-year-old was the guy at the front door. The 32-year-old in a blue suit comes out, and he’s at the glass door, and he’s going, everything’s okay, everything’s okay. And I’m yelling at him. I got my gun pointed at him. The family comes out behind him. They’re in their pajamas. Oh, man. Husband, the father, the kids, and grandma. It was a home invasion. So I’m yelling at him to open the door. It’s okay, it’s okay. One of the family members reaches underneath, unlocks the door, slides the door open, and pushes him out to me. So I jump up, I grab him, I put my gun to his head, I grab him around the throat, and I’m dragging him to the side of the house, and I yell at the family, go this way. Gary was waiting for him at the corner of the house. So we rescued the family. I drag his ass to the side, we handcuff him, the world is arriving, they put him in a car, I take cover again. The other two guys are not coming out. So we called for our special response team, SRT, right?
[1:05:42] And one of the guys who would become a very close friend later on was on that team. They negotiated for about two hours, and Frank told me later on, yeah, we told them basically, you come out or we’re going to come in here and kill you. We found the cut zip ties that they used to tie up the family in the kitchen, a little bit of cocaine, another pistol, a couple things, along with the shotgun. As it turned out, they hit the wrong house. The house, the doper house they were looking for was the next one over with all the cameras. Now we go to court. We have the bond hearing. Each guy has his own attorney. So the state attorney has me tell the judge what happened. And I give him the same story I just gave you. This guy did this. He had the gun at the front door. This guy had the gun at the glass door. This guy seemed to be the head guy calling the shots that we pulled out and we rescued the family. The judge holds him without bond. The background investigation the state attorney’s office did, the 56-year-old with the carbine, He was part of a truck hijacking gang that when the troopers stopped the truck after it was hijacked, his job was to drive by and kill the trooper out on the highway. Said, okay.
[1:06:55] Not a nice guy. The 32-year-old in the blue suit escaped from our jail. Don’t ask me how that happened. Right? Okay? How do you escape?
[1:07:07] Somebody- Good one. I never heard of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a corrections officer that was paid off. I have no doubt. So this guy fled to Costa Rica. And this took a few months. And the Costa Rican police found him. He was sent back with his arm in a cast like this. a cast down to here and a cast over one of the legs. Well, when the pull the Costa Rican police found him as a fugitive and coast there, it was a five story apartment building. He was on the fifth floor. I don’t know how it happened, Gary, but he flew out that window five stories down. He was trying to escape again. I guess, I guess. Yeah. We’ll have to go with that. Yeah. And then he was extradited back here and they all went to prison for, you know, 25 years or whatever the case was. But the reason I said that that and my wife said it should be in the book was a very important case is because had Gary and I walked to that front door straight to that front door yeah yeah exactly yeah you just don’t know those home invasion crews that are drug ripoff artists those guys those are the worst most dangerous criminals out there and you just stumbled into it that’s a man. Dumb luck again, right? Just dumb luck. During the cocaine cowboy times, we had guys impersonating cops doing these home riffs. It was a bad time.
[1:08:36] Then, I’m sure you’ve probably heard of the Miami River cops. Yes, I have. At that time, where it was real cops killing bad guys. Those guys jump in the river and took their cocaine and they couldn’t swim. I know I shouldn’t laugh about this, but there or something funny about it.
[1:08:53] Well, you know, I’ve done a couple of television interviews and the host of one, the Channel 4 here in Miami, near the end of the interview, he wanted to talk about corruption. You know, okay, I was ready for it, but I didn’t want to talk about corruption. I want to talk about my book, right? And our experiences. But he wanted to talk about corruption. Okay. And I said, yes, we had corruption. the temptation was so strong for some guys it was cash everywhere yeah like i can imagine what i told you about with the bag right yeah and i said it happens but then that’s why we have internal affairs yeah and they investigate these guys and we don’t want them either they get rid of them, i play tennis with this lieutenant.
[1:09:37] Quite a few times. He ended up getting popped by the DEA because someone ratted him out. He was helping drug dealers transport and guarding stuff. And of course I didn’t know it, but I know full well that the DEA looked into me because they were probably following him to the teleport. Oh yeah. He played. Yeah. And then they’re catching, they’re catching the number on my patrol car. Yeah. And then investigated to me to see what my finances were like to see if I was in cahoots with them. And then when he was arrested, it was like, we were all shocked. You know, the nice guy, I never knew that type of thing. But, you know, when you have that kind of money floating around, there’s going to be some bad cops. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We need to get rid of them. We don’t want to read. If you don’t have that big money around, there’s going to always going to be some bad cops. It’s just, that’s part of it. You know, that’s part of it. As I used to say, you know, if you didn’t have a little corruption, it wouldn’t be a big city. You know, all big cities got a little corruption. Come on some more than others some more than others yes some more than others we had our share then i was never i i was never brave enough to do anything like that i was like oh no.
[1:10:48] One of our guys uh was going through a a protocol and he went to the uh staff psychologist or psych services and he was asked you know would you stop a guy and the guy says you know don’t arrest me with the cocaine in the back seat or whatever you know and he offered you money, and he goes you know would you would you ever consider taking it and the officer’s response was well i’ll tell the guy you got 10 million dollars in your pocket right now right being sarcastic of of course, that it would take, you know, and he wasn’t serious, but no one’s going to carry $10 million with them because you’re going to lose your job. At least the 10 million, you can flee, right? At least.
[1:11:38] All right. Well, Bert Gonzalez, guys, there’s that story and many more in the real greatest show on earth. And also he’s got the podcast. What’s the name of your podcast i don’t think you said the uh the title of it sergeant maverick the podcast okay sergeant maverick the podcast and and i’ll put this show up about the time your podcast starts so be sure and send me a link to uh early show and let me know that it’s up and then i’ll work you in right after that all right absolutely absolutely i appreciate it i appreciate your time today bird it’s it’s been a pleasure talking to you as a brother and in many ways as as you know and we have a lot of similar experiences. I can tell you that right now. Like I said, like I wrote in the book, we’re all the same. All these things happen to us. We’re all the same. Okay. Thanks a lot for coming on the show, Bert. Thank you, Gary. I appreciate it.
[1:12:33] Hey guys, that’s, uh, that’s why my brothers, I’ll tell you what, those stories, I got a ton of them like that myself. I don’t know. I’m, I’m working on a book guys, a memoir. It’s hard. It’s really hard to write about myself.
[1:12:46] And I like to remain humble at least to as much as I can. I don’t know. It’s hard to do. Uh, you know, we all got ego. So it’s, uh, and, and, you know, and I don’t want to put it out there. If I look like, you know, I’m not just a regular guy and humble, but I have had some fun experiences that I think people would be interested in and, and some, I want to make some points out of my memoir and I’m sure a bird has done that with his. So I’m going to be working on that over the next year. Uh, don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So if you’re out there in your big SUV, as I’m saying now, or your big F one 50, watch out for motorcycles or your little Volkswagen bug. If you have a bug and I don’t know if you’ve had bugs anymore or your little car, uh your little miata you know watch out for motorcycles out there because it’s uh you know there’s no protection on the motorcycle you get hit by a car and you’re going to be injured there’s just no doubt about it and you’re probably going to be killed if you’re out on the interstate some way uh if you got a problem with ptsd or drugs or alcohol go to the va and get their uh website get their uh hotline number and if you’ve been the service you’ve not been the service and you got a problem with drugs or alcohol, why be sure and look up our friend Angelo Reggiano, former Gambino prospect, son of a Gambino soldier. He’s down there in Florida running there working at a drug and alcohol treatment center, I understand.
[1:14:13] I hope he’s still doing it. If he is, let me know. If anybody has experience with him, why let me know. I’m curious about it. It’s like Burke talked about. He’s got some going to have public service announcements at the end of his podcast. I feel like we should all be giving back. I’ve been blessed with a, you know, a good job and a lot of opportunities over the years and have a lot of fun with this podcast. And so I give back as much as I can. I’ve got things for sale. I got my own books. Just, uh, I’ll put a link to my author page on Amazon and go check my books out. If you do, especially that New York book, give me a, give me a review. I’ve only got one review. I got a bunch of reviews on my Chicago book, but if you’ve got my New York book if you’re a verified purchaser, which looks a lot better, give me a review on that. I really appreciate all you guys out there. Subscribe and like and watch my YouTube channel if you’re not on the audio podcast and share it with your friends. Helps. Everything a little bit you do helps the podcast and I’ll keep putting stuff out as long as I can. I’m getting old. Sometimes I think I should cut back. I just had a discussion with somebody about that the other day, and it’s hard to do. I need a mission in life. I need something to do, so I’m going to keep doing this for a while. Thanks a lot, guys.
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