POLICING GAYS

Metro Cops Use Confidential Informants To Target Gay Chat Rooms And
Lure Homosexual Men Into Trading And Selling Drugs. This Undercover
Operation Changed The Life Of One Man Who May Well Be Innocent.

Despite its upscale name, the Stewarts Ferry Luxury Apartments are
more like middle-class projects. Just one exit from the airport, east
on I-40, the sprawling complex is crisscrossed by towering power
lines that hover over shallow, manmade ponds and more than 600 units
that all look the same. There are two pools, a large crystal-blue one
near the leasing office and another with an unobstructed view of the
interstate. The tiny, faded fountain that greets the complex's
residents is dry.

On a late Friday night in May, Steve exits I-40. A computer
programmer who can while away a night reading Scientific American, he
had planned to relax after a hard week. But 90 minutes earlier, he
spontaneously agreed to meet a blind date he found online. From the
Internet photo, Steve expected someone like him: a young gay man with
brown hair and tan skin, only with a trimmer, more athletic build.
The man said he had just moved from Los Angeles to Nashville to write
songs, and seemed a little more adventurous than the usually serious
computer programmer.

At a townhouse past one of the complex's pools, meanwhile, several
men sit quietly inside an empty unit. Most are in their late 20s and
30s. One is a swarthy man who could pass for a body-builder. He looks
menacing, but he may be the most empathetic of the group. Another man
has longish hair and glasses; another is at least 6-foot-4, flanked
by someone who looks like he should skip a meal every now and then.
There is also a man who is casually dressed, with a shaved head and a
brownish goatee.

The side road that leads to the apartments is impossible to miss. A
giant sign stands near a circle of seven small flagpoles flying Old
Glory, with a larger 30-foot flag in the center that is visible for
hundreds of yards--all lit up with spotlights. The flags are fenced
in by barbed wire.

Having passed the flags, Steve cannot find his date's townhouse. Each
unit looks the same, with a redbrick front, framed by greenish-gray
wooden siding. Steve isn't used to being lost. He gets even uneasier
when he calls the date from his cell phone and, strangely, the man
has trouble giving directions to his own home.

After a few frustrating minutes, Steve finally finds the address and
walks down a short, narrow sidewalk. He anxiously knocks on the door.
He is coldly greeted not by his date, but by a shorter, stockier man
with a shaved head and goatee. This is where Steve's nightmare begins.

In a matter of seconds, four plain-clothed undercover Metro cops
wrestle Steve to the ground after he refuses to submit. Steve is
stunned and doesn't understand what's going on. He worries that these
men are malicious rednecks who lured him so they could taunt and beat
up a gay man. So he continues to resist.

Steve is later handcuffed, hauled off to night court and charged with
resisting and evading arrest. He is also charged with possession of a
controlled substance--in his case, amyl nitrate, a popular sex drug.
Today, nearly two months after Steve's arrest, neither the District
Attorney's Office nor the Metro Police Department are sure that amyl
nitrate is even prohibited by law.

Since the fall of 2004, officers at the Hermitage Police Precinct
have been quietly conducting a sting operation exclusively targeting
gay men. Nobody there denies that. The precinct's crime suppression
unit, which operates as a mini vice squad, has been working with at
least one confidential informant who has been infiltrating gay chat
rooms, contacting users and seeing if they're interested in
exchanging drugs and cash for sex. Later, they'll lead their targets
to a local apartment or hotel room where Metro police lie in wait. No
informants are working straight chat rooms with the same purpose.

Sometimes the targets of the CI will be uninterested in even hearing
about illegal activity and will click off the instant message window.
But then the informant, who many describe as remarkably persistent,
will again contact his target and resume a conversation about sex and
drugs. Typically, CIs are rather shady individuals who employ a
working knowledge of the criminal underworld, from drug rings to
prostitution. The police enlist their help and reward them with petty
cash or a favorable resolution to their current legal problems.

The CI who has been working with the Hermitage officers clearly knows
what he's doing--establishing rapport with his targets by instant
messaging in the vernacular of some of the more risque chat rooms.
He'll ask his targets if they want to "pnp," which stands for party
and play, and is typically a reference to using drugs and having sex.
He'll inquire about "420" and "blow," shorthand for marijuana and
cocaine. He also knows about poppers like amyl nitrate, which are
inhalants that can work as muscle relaxers.

The confidential informant went so far as to fabricate a racy online
profile at gay.com that lured at least some of his targets. It
consisted of a series of nude photos of a young man, with sharply
clipped brown hair, who might pass for a younger version of George
Clooney. In one photo, the man is playing with himself, while in
another his nude body leans over a pool table. Subtlety is not this
informant's strong suit.

The police informant's online dispatches matched the sleaze of his
photographs. He boasts about a promiscuous sex life, highlighted by
recreational Viagra use and a large endowment. His preferred company
isn't exactly refined--"fuck and party buds," he writes, are who he
likes to spend time with. The informant characterizes himself as a
recreational drug user and describes his occupation rather succinctly
as a "songwriter and slut." He has a motto as well:
"party...fuck...repeat...party...fuck...repeat." It bears repeating:
this man is an agent of the Metropolitan Police Department.

He's also the same man who contacted Steve, which, you might have
guessed by now, isn't his real name. He agreed to talk to the Scene
only if the newspaper agreed to protect what's left of his privacy.
"Steve" provided us with a transcript of his online communication
with the informant. In it, the CI initiates an online conversation,
offers a compliment and announces immediately that he is looking to
"pnp tonight." Steve's response betrays a mild, fleeting interest,
but after about 20 minutes, he ends the dialogue and closes the
conversation box. At that point, Steve had committed no crime, nor
made plans to carry one out.

He did tell the informant, however, that he had some good "amsterdam
amyl." That's the name of a bottle of amyl nitrates Steve had been
given by a friend. Amyl nitrate used to be prescribed to treat
angina, but now is typically used to facilitate anal sex and prolong
erections. It is inhaled and can give users a dizzying buzz of
energy. It is not listed as either a prohibited controlled substance
or an illegal inhalant anywhere in Tennessee code--and it is widely
available and can be purchased at head shops and adult bookstores locally.

After a five-minute break, during which the CI was consulting with
officers, the confidential informant again contacts Steve and tells
him to "come on over." He adds, "bring the amyl...not butyl."
Interestingly, it is butyl, not amyl, that is listed as a controlled
substance. Although Steve doesn't ask for it, the informant gives him
his cell phone number. Steve calls the man and agrees to visit him at
the Stewart's Ferry apartments.

Officer Joel David Goodwin opened the door when Steve knocked. There
were at least three other officers present, he remembers. Goodwin
didn't match his date's photo, so Steve initially figured he knocked
on the wrong door. In his affidavit, Goodwin writes that he
identified himself as a police officer and told the defendant to
stop. Steve recalls hearing the words "Metro Police," but nothing
else. He says that when he saw the officer's badge, "it looked cheap
to me." Because of Goodwin's shaved head and the boyish features of
the other plain-clothed officers, Steve feared he had become the
target of a hateful prank. So he quietly but quickly backed up.

"Everything to me looked like this was just a bunch of good ol' boys
partying on a Friday night," he says. "Nothing from their behavior
led me to believe otherwise."

Steve took a step or two away from the door, but Goodwin snatched him
by the wrist. He twisted away, but the other officers grabbed him.
Steve wouldn't submit. He kept trying to pull away, but he remembers
being kicked and brought to the grass on the front yard. The men
grabbed and punched him, but he still tried to break free. Then Steve
recalls a sharp, devastating blow to his back that felt like someone
unloaded their handgun. "Now I know what it's like to be shot," he
remembers thinking.

In fact, the police later admitted that Sergeant Steve Brady, a
17-year veteran of the force, fired his Taser gun, delivering 50,000
electric volts into Steve's back. Meanwhile, he was being kicked.
Remarkably, Steve tried to get to his feet. In his mind, he was
fighting for his life. Then Brady shot him a second time with the
Taser. The officers ordered him to put his hands behind his back, but
he couldn't. His body was flopping like a fish out of water; every
muscle was convulsing, it seemed to him at the time. The officers
ridiculed him. "Does that tickle?" one of the officers asked, as the
others laughed uproariously.

It was nearly pitch black. What few rays of light emanated from the
parking lot were partially obscured by a tall tree in the front yard.
Steve looked back into the night air and caught a surreal arc of
electricity spring like lightning from the sergeant's electroshock
gun. For a third and final time, the officer Tasered Steve's burning
back. The sergeant's supervisor has confirmed to the Scene that Steve
was indeed shocked three times.

"I'm screaming the whole time," Steve recalls, still shaken by his
encounter with Metro police. "I'm constantly yelling, 'Please don't
do this! Please stop! Don't do this!' The whole time, there are pleadings."

Even at this point, Steve still didn't believe the men were police
officers. He had no idea what he could have done to earn the wrath of
the law. It's not illegal to meet someone on a gay chat room or
follow up with a visit. Straight people find love, sex and
companionship online all the time. Steve says, quite plausibly, that
he could not have fathomed that the bottle of commercially available
poppers he stuffed into his pants pocket an hour or so earlier could
have prompted several undercover cops to lie in wait in an empty
townhouse. He thought the men who surrounded him were rednecks who
got hold of some pricey toys and were looking to kill a gay man. So
he begged for his life.

"I thought, 'This is it. This is how I'm going to die.' "

After Brady shot him for the third and final time with his Taser gun,
Steve feebly submitted. One of the men ordered him to get up. He was
handcuffed, escorted inside the townhouse and told to kneel. Steve
was near tears. He continued to beg and shout, pleading with them to
stop. While on his knees, an officer snatched the bottle of poppers
from his pants. An officer with longish hair and glasses took a photo
of him and laughed. The officers took Steve to the back of the
townhouse, where there was a table stacked with paperwork. Also on
the table was a thick DEA enforcement book that oddly reassured him
that the men who had hurt him really were the law.

With his hands cuffed behind his back, Steve stayed put as the police
waited on another man who indicated to an informant that he would be
delivering drugs to the same townhouse. To pass the time, the
officers watched an old movie. Then, in a bizarre show of what might
pass for empathy, some of the cops made a run to the local Dairy
Queen, asking Steve first if he wanted anything. Thinking they were
mocking him as they had earlier, Steve answered somewhat
sarcastically. "Get me a banana split." So one of the officers
retrieved $4 from his wallet and later brought him back his dessert
of choice. Steve's hands were released and he was recuffed with his
wrists upfront. And that's how he ate his banana split. Meanwhile,
the other target of the evening showed up as expected with three
grams of crystal meth, two ecstasy pills and drug paraphernalia.
Fortunately for him, he did not resist arrest.

A friendly, engaging man, Eric Snyder is the investigative lieutenant
of the Hermitage Police Precinct. In numerous phone interviews with
the Scene, Snyder patiently answered questions about what happened
the night Steve was taken to jail. Although he wasn't there, the
officers who were are under his command. He speaks for them.

Snyder's story differs from Steve's, but not dramatically. The
lieutenant says that the defendant backed off after he knocked on the
door and said "you can't arrest me." Officers grabbed him, then put
him to the ground, but he wouldn't put his hands behind his back. One
officer gave him a knee strike, but he still wouldn't comply with the
police officer's orders. So Brady shot him with the Taser.

A Taser sends a shock for about five seconds. Most of the time,
Snyder says, that works, then the suspect is ready to submit. But
after the first bolt of electricity that May evening, the defendant
was still resisting. He began to stand, so Brady fired again. It then
took one more application to render the defendant compliant.

"Which is unusual," Snyder says. "Most people take to the Taser right away.

The defendant is listed on police documents as 6 feet, 180 pounds,
which is hardly imposing. In person, Steve seems even smaller,
thinner and decidedly unthreatening. He doesn't look like someone who
could give four police officers a fair fight. This is a computer
programmer, not a Titans lineman. How were four of Metro's finest
unable to subdue a man who spends 40 hours a week behind a desk?

"We can put away the pepper spray and the Tasers and do all our
takedowns with pure physical force," Snyder says. "But that increases
the likelihood of injury to both suspects and officers."

Steve's lawyer, the effective John Herbison, has penned a letter to
District Attorney General Torry Johnson asking him to investigate the
conduct of the Metro police officers who arrested his client. He
copied his note to Metro Police Chief Ronal Serpas. "The conduct of
officers under your command in this situation is reprehensible and
outrageous," he wrote in the June 10 hand-delivered letter." Please
advise the subject officers to not even think about retaliating."

Amazingly, at press time, Serpas had not forwarded Herbison's letter
to the police department's Office of Professional Accountability.

In the meantime, nobody seems to know whether Steve even did anything
illegal, other than resisting arrest. Here's how the charges have
evolved over the last few weeks: initially, police claimed that
Steve's bottle of liquid substance was not "amyl nitrate," even
though that's what he told the informant he would bring over. So they
charged him with intent to sell, deliver or distribute a counterfeit
controlled substance. Oddly, both the defendant and the attorney
claim that the bottle of substance he stuffed into his pocket was, in
fact, amyl nitrate. The real deal. They're not worried, though,
because the drug is not a controlled substance. So the charge seems
to be baseless. That's why Herbison has no plans to claim that the
police induced his client into committing a crime.

"Entrapment would not apply here because the defendant has committed
no crime at all," he says. "Entrapment admits a commission of the
offense and suggests that the criminal design originated with the
government. Here, no crime has been committed."

And no one on the other side is able to say otherwise.

Initially, assistant district attorney Tammy Meade, who reviewed the
charges, told the Scene that the police mischarged the defendant. She
says that while amyl nitrate is not a controlled substance, the
state's inhalant statute prohibits it. One problem: the inhalant
statute does not list amyl nitrate anywhere as a prohibited substance.

So now some of the officers at the Hermitage precinct claim that the
controlled substance statutes prohibit amyl nitrate obliquely. But
District Attorney General Torry Johnson says he's not sure. This week
he checked in with a lab and still wasn't able to ascertain the
legality of amyl nitrate. In other words, confusion still reigns. A
gay man was shot three times with a Taser gun because police planned
to arrest him for having an illegal substance. But today--more than
six weeks after the defendant was jailed--the top law enforcement
officer in the city can't say definitively whether he actually
committed a crime.

"We're trying to research whether this is a controlled substance,"
says Johnson, whose office has been working for months now to
moderate some of the more aggressive tactics of the cop shop.

Even if it turns out that amyl nitrate is not prohibited by law,
Steve may still face separate charges of evading and resisting
arrest. His attorney will likely fight those and will almost
certainly file a civil suit.

"The first step is to defend the criminal charges," says Herbison,
who has represented a number of high-profile clients, including Perry
March and Byron Looper. "After that is concluded, I do expect to ask
for a rectangular apology that includes the phrase 'Paid to the order of...' "

While no other case is as egregious as Steve's, the Hermitage
precinct is likely to provoke a wave of controversy with its
aggressive stings. Already, the police department's main vice squad
has drawn the ire of the district attorney for allowing confidential
informants to have intercourse with suspected prostitutes to build
open-and-shut cases. In one sordid encounter, a confidential
informant engaged in a three-way sex act with a husband-and-wife
escort service. That prompted a frustrated assistant district
attorney Tammy Meade to put an end to the controversial practice.

Now, though, the DA's office may have another public relations
nightmare on its hands. The Hermitage officers are conducting a new,
cutting-edge operation that explicitly targets gays, but they did not
consult with the DA's office on the thorny legal issues involved.

"From our standpoint, it would be helpful to be involved in things
like this on the front end rather than the back end," Johnson says.
"I'm not prepared to say we have any problems. We just don't know
enough to make any kind of judgment of whether this is good, bad or
indifferent."

So far, the Hermitage Crime Suppression Unit has conducted four
stings leading to 12 arrests for offenses ranging from prostitution
to possession and intent to distribute crystal meth, powdered cocaine
and ecstasy. Several of the men who have been apprehended say that
the police informant approached them repeatedly about engaging in
illegal actions.

"They were persistent through both the Internet and telephone
conversations over several hours," says one defendant. "When I didn't
respond, the chat window would reopen and I'd hear, 'Are you there,
are you there, are you coming to party, will you sell me some?' I
repeatedly said no."

This defendant says that he and the CI later exchanged numbers, and
the informant asked him again if he'd sell. "I told him I don't sell,
period, but I might share." He was later charged with a series of
felonies, including intent to sell crystal meth.

Although the police informant seems to be relentlessly pursuing his
targets, Stefanie Lindquist, an associate professor of political
science and law at Vanderbilt University, says these defendants
probably will have a tough time pursuing an entrapment defense. "If
the police give you the opportunity to commit the crime, that is not
entrapment," she says. "There has to be governmental inducement of an
otherwise innocent person."

Since the operation began, Snyder says that the police have seized
$6,500 worth of drugs. "In each of the four stings we've done,
they've involved the delivery of narcotics," he says. "If you're
looking at the greater good to society, hallucinogens and meth are
bad, bad stuff. Shoplifting, burglary, assaults--you can hinge all
these crimes back to drugs. If we can take $6,500 of it off the
streets, we feel like we're doing a service to the community."

Snyder admits that at this point, their confidential informant has
only targeted gay chat rooms, including ones on AOL and gay.com. He
says they let the CI lead them to wherever illegal activity is
happening. They don't tell him where to go. "When we're dealing with
our informants, they lead us to their comfort level. If the subject
has experience acquiring narcotics through a gay chat room, we assist
them in doing that." Snyder says the CI will approach just about
anybody in the chat room and see if someone will agree to exchange
drugs or money for sex. Nobody is targeted specifically.

Currently, the Hermitage precinct is developing a manual about
infiltrating straight chat rooms. For now, though, the lieutenant
says, as if heterosexual conduct were actually a part of the
counterculture, "we don't have anybody who can take us in there and
assimilate us into that subculture."

Snyder recognizes that while some of the other arrests have nabbed
serious offenders, the case against Steve is riddled with questions.
The obvious one is why the undercover officers didn't figure out
whether amyl nitrate was a banned substance before the sting
operation. Snyder says that these sorts of operations unfold quickly
and that his officers never really know what drugs the suspect might
wind up delivering. "We don't have a lot of research time. When this
happens, we accept that this is a controlled substance," he says. "In
a nutshell, there is a lot of stuff out there. I wish my guys knew
every illegal substance, but there are so many exotic pharmaceuticals
and compounds that nobody could keep track of all of it."

Of course, his officers didn't have to charge the defendant that
night. "Fortunately for all parties involved, we have time to
research this," Snyder says. But what happens if they determine the
drug is actually legal? That would be a small consolation for the man
we've been calling Steve.

After he was arrested, the defendant spent the night inside a holding
tank in the Metro jail. Surrounded by drunks, drug dealers and
hustlers, he tried to sleep on the concrete floor. Some of his fellow
inmates dozed soundly, but Steve mostly tossed and turned.

He wanted to call his friends to bail him out, but their numbers were
programmed into his cell phone, which the police had confiscated. He
didn't know any of their numbers off the top of his head. So on a
Saturday afternoon in May, Steve realized that he had no choice. He
had to call his parents.

Up until May, Steve had gone more than 30 years without sharing his
sexuality with his family. They probably had an idea, but they'd
never had a conversation about it. Maybe one day he would have told
them. But with the wounds of the Taser shots still burning, the
mild-mannered man knew he had to call his mom and dad to rescue him.
He told them he was the victim of a police sting operation, and
implied that he had been seeking male companionship online. Steve
finally came out to his parents, but the circumstance was clearly not
ideal. Since then, they've been solidly by his side. Not once have
they wavered; their support has been steady and without
qualification. Steve always knew he could count on his mother and
father. But he never wanted them to prove it like this.