PITKIN COUNTY'S POPULAR AND UNCONVENTIONAL SHERIFF PONDERS LIFE AFTER BEING
LAWMAN

ASPEN - Though he is not consumed with the future every waking hour, Bob
Braudis can't deny that the idea of what's next has become an
ever-increasing part of his life.

On a coffee table in the home of the Pitkin County sheriff, there are forms
for a will being filled out by his life partner, De De Brinkman. A little
more than a month away from ending his 24-year tenure as one of the most
visible - and controversial - lawmen in the nation, Braudis has taken to
carrying a camera wherever he goes, recording his dwindling days left in
office.

Perhaps it's normal. Braudis likes to talk about how he and his deputies
have spent much of their careers "looking good and driving fast." Now, with
his 66th birthday approaching, reflection and introspection are
increasingly along for the ride.

"I think about mortality more than I ever did. I think I'm at peace with
end-of-life issues," he says. "The only thing that would bother me is if
your mind stops working, if there's nothing else for it to do. I know guys
who retire and they croak within a year. My grandfather, 65, worked all his
life. Retired, had a pension, all that good stuff. An aneurysm. Off the
table. Bummer."

When he speaks, Braudis' words are breathy, decidedly soft in tone. As the
talisman for a department of about 60 employees, the vibe the sheriff casts
is unquestionably mellow. Hanging on a wall in his basement office on Main
Street is a shirt that's part of a Pitkin County uniform. Although there's
some fraying on one of the elbows, it's clear that it hasn't been worn in a
long time.

The old hippie from the '60s does still wear his hair long; his "uniform"
is a pair of jeans, with an untucked oxford shirt. A pair of sneakers
completes the look - sometimes he even wears socks. At 6-foot-6, Braudis
towers above nearly everyone he comes upon, and when he moves, his body is
all angles and jangles. Even so, the overall effect is still more balletic
than bull-rushing defensive lineman.

"He's handled some incredibly difficult situations where people are armed
and threatening to kill other people," says former Aspen Mayor Bill
Sterling, one of five to serve in that role during Braudis' tenure. "He has
a way of defusing those incidents. . . . He's not coming in with full
force, but he steps back, and when a big man that size steps back instead
of trying to overwhelm you with his dimensions, that's reassuring to people."

Scattered about Braudis' office are posters from earlier campaigns; the
placards were more arty collectors items than actually essential to
election. The sheriff only faced opponents twice: the first time he ran, in
1986, and in his last campaign 20 years later.

In between, Braudis was so popular that county voters passed an initiative
abolishing term limits, just so he could remain in office.

"He's been elected with the largest majority of votes than any official in
the history of Aspen," Sterling said. "I used to squeak through my
elections, get 51 percent of the vote. But Bob always got 75 to 80 percent;
he really had the respect of everyone - not everyone agreed with him - but
he had their respect."

To be certain, Braudis has his critics. Etna Tauscher is a 30-year resident
of the area and is unrelenting and quite upfront about her disdain for the
sheriff, sending almost daily missives to the local papers about his
shortcomings.

"I can say that I've never been a fan; I just don't believe he's done his
job," Tauscher says. "I'm just one of the paupers here now, but at one time
I was married to a very wealthy man. I had a bunch of very expensive
jewelry stolen, and when I tried to get help from them, they never answered
my calls."

In the upcoming election, Tauscher is hoping Rick Leonard can somehow upend
the overwhelming favorite, Joe DiSalvo, the current undersheriff who is
Braudis' handpicked successor.

Leonard is a former cop from New York City and Palm Beach, Fla. When he
decided to run for sheriff, Leonard thought it would be against Braudis;
when he found out that wasn't the case, "so much the better," he thought.

In an August primary, Leonard came in second in a three-way race, putting
him on the ballot for Tuesday's general election. DiSalvo, however,
finished first with 77 percent of the vote. And try as he might since then,
Leonard admits that he hasn't come close to making up any ground.

"The more I looked into things, the more I realized that the Pitkin County
Sheriff's Office really doesn't do anything," Leonard says. "And I was
mystified then, and I still am, about how (Braudis) became such an icon here."

Left Behind Life In The Big City

In the late '60s, Braudis gave up the "three-piece suits and shiny shoes"
that he wore in his job as a business analyst for Dun and Bradstreet in New
York and moved West.

"I was part of the movement of my generation, which was anti-war, pro-civil
rights, pro-women's rights - whatever any social justice in the '60s was,"
he says. "I was straining to get out of the corporate rut and into that. So
what did I do? I bailed out and moved to Aspen and got stoned. And it was
all good."

In those days, the chairlift up Aspen Mountain was literally a single seat.
Married with two kids, Braudis found a job as a ski instructor, forking
over $30,000 for a condo near the base of the runs.

"I thought it was a fortune," he says. "But I used to ski all day long - I
could ski to my house at the end of the day."

Not long after, however, Braudis' marriage was in trouble. Even worse, the
life of the party, the legendary Aspen powder, literally dried up.

"In 1976, we had no snow. It was like this at Christmas," Braudis says on
an impossibly warm and sunny October day. "Everyone who had a job here was
collecting unemployment, and I had two kids."

And so Bob Braudis, the philosophizing, war-protesting child of the '60s,
became a single father and took a job - as a cop.

"He basically went from being a hippie to being a dad," says Stephanie
Wells, the older of Braudis' two grown children (Heidi Mitchell is the
other). "Suddenly he had to bring in the money, get a job and be Mr. Mom:
cooking, laundry, homework and taking two teenage girls shopping for
clothes. And we weren't the easiest kids to raise. We were teenagers."

In that unlikely arena of law enforcement, Braudis found a mentor, and
kindred spirit, in Dick Kienast. Elected Pitkin sheriff in 1976, the former
Notre Dame and Duke philosophy student was the template for unconventional
policing. He hired Braudis and others of a similar bent, and the department
soon becoming known to locals as "Dick Dove and his Deputies of Love."

"He taught me everything I know about public safety," Braudis says. "He had
the balls of a burglar; he went out on a lot of limbs that I now tread on
without any fear. He blazed a lot of trails, did a lot of the risky stuff
that we take for granted today - officer discretion, discretionary enforcement.

"We can't enforce all the laws; let's pick the ones that the county wants
us to enforce. Let's not spend a lot of time and money on the laws on the
books that no one really wants us to enforce."

A Kienast staple was hiring citizens to run a department of peacekeepers,
rather than law enforcement officers. Braudis was a ski instructor; DiSalvo
was a college dropout and truck driver when he left his native New York.
The head jailer, Donald Bird, was a bartender. In his current office, Bird
proudly displays a mug shot of himself after being arrested for disturbing
the peace and assaulting an officer.

By the time Braudis succeeded Kienast in 1986, he was keen to pursue the
same relaxed approach.

Not long after taking over as sheriff, Braudis redesigned the county jail.
Rather than using the stainless-steel beds and toilets so often found in
lockups, Braudis went humanistic - the beds had wooden frames, and inmates
were allowed to move about in relative freedom.

That was fine until the wife of a visiting South American despot was
arrested for slashing the face of another guest at a party.

Braudis allowed a photographer into the jail to document the stay as part
of the woman's "family album," but somehow the shots ended up as a
centerpiece story in the National Enquirer, ridiculing the department for
running a bed-and-breakfast for criminals.

Admittedly furious at the time and catching heat from police officials from
across the country for making a mockery of correction facilities, Braudis
nonetheless stood his ground about the jail.

"Critics said (the inmates) would be building bonfires; they'd be making
shivs from the wood. It never happened," Braudis said. "It's their home;
you treat people like animals, they'll respond like animals. You treat them
like dignified humans, they'll respond. . . . We're all in it together."

When Braudis talks of community, of everyone being "in it together," some
interpret the talk as code for the sheriff's being lenient when it comes to
the use of illegal substances.

Because of the stances he's taken through the years, including that drugs
should be legalized, Braudis knows that any discussion he has will
invariably lead to the topic. Even so, he says the issue shouldn't come
close to defining him.

"I've never been a warrior on the war against drugs or the war for drugs,"
he says. "I never wanted to become a one-trick pony. You can easily brand
yourself if you invest a lot of your political capital on one horse.

"I made decisions in the trenches. How are we gonna enforce the drug laws?"

Anonymous Tips? No, Thanks

The answer he came up with was an amalgamation of some of his long-standing
tenets, including the idea of live-and-let-live and the protection of an
individual's civil rights under the U.S. Constitution. To follow both meant
that, under most circumstances, the Sheriff's Office would be loath to
conduct undercover operations to ferret out dealers and users.

"We made a policy, and the policy is very black and white: If any citizen
comes to us with a complaint about commerce in narcotics or drugs and is
willing to give us their name, as opposed to an anonymous tip, if they do
that, we will open an investigation about those allegations," Braudis says.

In 24 years in office, he continues, there have been perhaps a half-dozen
people who have stepped forward on the record to complain, with the
Sheriff's Office then opening an investigation. He acknowledges that some
of those old investigations are still open.

Earlier this month, Braudis was awakened by a predawn phone call from a
deputy who reported that there had been a 911 call made the previous night.
The caller said there would be "a bad event" at a local school late the
next morning.

It was unclear from the telephone message whether the problem was going to
be a bomb or a shooter. County school officials were notified, and the
decision was made to lock down the classrooms. Ultimately, the call proved
to be a false report, but Braudis thought the exercise, which included
deploying officers on-site at three locations, was a good test.

It also pointed out the difference, he said, between the usual humdrum and
dealing with a far more serious matter.

"Post-Columbine, schools are sacred ground; our children are there," he
says. "We don't know enough about why people go nuts and rock 'n' roll in a
school, but we do know how bad that response was in Littleton.

"We don't do a lot of these, it's just a sliver of the pie, but we think
about it a lot. It's like an airline pilot; you're really just a bus driver
until you have a catastrophic failure in Engine 1, then you'd better be
real good. If this did evolve into an active shooter - the Columbine
nightmare scenario - we could handle it. We know what to do - my
touchy-feely, hippie deputies would turn into trained killing (expletives).

"That's one of the biggest challenges to this job; you hire a mellow dude,
and six years later you say, 'Somebody's gotta go up that hill. Here's the
department machine gun, I've dusted it off. We haven't had it out for two
years, but you've practiced with it. Now you take that hill.'

"He might say, 'Damn, I've got a hangover. You know we were out together
last night.'

" 'You've got to take that hill; you might get killed, but the goal is to
kill him because he's shooting at kids. Take him out."

" 'Well, I never thought I'd be doing that.'

" 'You've gotta do it.'

"It's a bitch; 99.999 percent of the time, we're out there looking good,
driving fast, saving lives, and all of a sudden I ask you to turn into
Rambo. And you have to. What are you gonna do, take a bye?"

Reputation As A Ladies' Man

While Braudis' well-chronicled friendship with gonzo journalist Hunter S.
Thompson and his approach toward narcotic laws and live-and-let-live
policing made him semi-famous worldwide, he might be as well-known in Aspen
for his love life.

"My reputation is that, if some chick asks me to marry her, I do," Braudis
jokes.

"He always has some wealthy woman on his arm," sniffs Tauscher.

After three failed marriages, Braudis seems to have finally found some
peace with De De Brinkman, a former ski racer for the University of
Colorado who had also garnered a lot of attention herself when she moved to
Aspen some 30 years ago. At first, she wasn't much interested in Braudis.

"Every girl in town was after him; there were a couple of women, I thought,
'This is not good,' " Brinkman says. "And all my friends, they'd all go, 'I
can't believe Bob's running around with that woman.' And I couldn't either.
So, I thought I'd save him."

Braudis and Brinkman had flings during the 1970s, '80s and '90s, in between
Braudis' marriages. After his last divorce, Braudis' psychiatrist thought
it best that he didn't move into another long-term relationship. Brinkman
said she tried to honor those wishes, but the sheriff kept calling her
anyway. Eventually, they began to see each other quietly, not making a
public splash until the wedding of the "CBS News" and "60 Minutes"
correspondent Ed Bradley (a Braudis friend) in 2004.

The two have been together since, with Braudis insisting that "I've saved
the best for last. I look at this as the person I want to ride off into the
sunset with."

About four years ago, the pair went to a rehab clinic in Arizona. While
Braudis doesn't deny having been a willing participant in some chemical and
mind-altering stimulation, his primary addiction has been nicotine (he quit
smoking 10 years ago), and he says the main impetus in the decision was
supporting De De.

"When we were in Arizona, we took a bunch of psychological tests. There was
one on addictive personalities. I was in the 99th percentile statistically.
De De blew through the ceiling. Statistically it was impossible, but she
was at like 102 percent. Every indicator of addiction, she had - plus."

To watch the couple, hear their cooing, see the way the diminutive Brinkman
nestles her way into Braudis' chest and is then engulfed with his arms, one
knows there's caring. The question is, will love indeed conquer all, even
addiction?

"We know we're playing with fire - I ain't gonna burn up," he says. "I'm
not gonna let her. The reality is, De De is a full-blown alcoholic who
cannot drink again. If, in her quest for sobriety, I started drinking or
drugging, it would screw her up. I ain't gonna do that. I love her."

Through his years as sheriff, even during his debauchery with Thompson,
Braudis insists that no one in Aspen has "ever seen me drunk, ever seen me
stupid."

But Braudis readily admits to "letting it rip" away from the town; he also
realizes that the cumulative effect of those efforts has a long-term
impact. That may have manifested itself about a year ago. On a trip to
Europe with Brinkman, De De got a case of swine flu. Braudis nursed her
back to health, but when the couple returned to the U.S., things didn't go
so well for him.

After they arrived in Denver, Braudis says, the plan was to continue "the
whiskey tour we'd started in London and Edinburgh and places in between."
However, things took a different turn and he wound up in an emergency room
with a case of cardiogenic shock, in which there was so much fluid in his
lungs that his heart couldn't expand or contract.

Braudis says he's not sure how serious his condition was, but his daughter,
Stephanie, says she heard his doctors say they "weren't sure if he would
make it."

At times, Braudis downplays the event, even while acknowledging that it
served as something of a "Come to Jesus" moment.

"The mantra is that you want to leave the party while you're still having
fun. I've seen a lot of people get sick; I've seen a lot of people die. I
don't want to go there. The people I love, you can identify who's at risk.
My circle of friends here has been sort of a risk-taking group. Some of us
will make it, some of us won't, but an awful lot of us will. We're glad we
did it, but we're glad we stopped. That's where it's at."

"I'm Hanging Up The Star"

And so it was last winter and spring that Braudis found himself agonizing
over whether to run for another term, waiting almost until the filing
deadline before deciding no, in part, he says, because he realized he
didn't want to be sitting in his basement office when he turned 70.

The first person he told was Brinkman, scratching out a note that simply
read, "I'm hanging up the star."

When she was 19, Stephanie was almost killed in a car accident, so she says
she's very aware of the value in waking up to live another day. Given her
father's scare last year, she says she's happy that Braudis is around to
decide where the next phase of his life will take him.

Brinkman, who has worked as an agent and casting director, says, given
Braudis' wealth of experience, he has a future as a writer or perhaps on
the lecture circuit.

Braudis is definitely planning on writing, perhaps his memoirs, perhaps
some essays in which he promises to "name names."

There will certainly be travel; lots of travel. Some of it will be with
Brinkman, but really, whatever happens will merely be the next step on an
already incredible journey.

"My strength really is surviving, getting it done," Braudis says. "Like the
school; you don't talk about it for three days, you get it done. You let
the little bastards out of lockdown, and you reload for the next incident.

"If there's a plane crash or a mountain climber in trouble or a crime,
we're ready for the next one.

"You can't dwell on anything. You have to keep moving. I'm pretty
comfortable with having a full life, but I'm not ready to give it up yet."