GEM CITY CONFESSIONS
A project from the Dayton Daily News
Earlier this year the Dayton Daily News published the special series Gem City Gamble: Dayton’s police corruption, gangsters and the downfall of Pete Rose. Following the popularity of the series and requests from readers for more, reporter Wes Hills dug into his notebooks and conducted new interviews for a follow-up series revealing more details about how police corruption shaped the city’s history.
These stories are compiled in a new series we’re calling Gem City Confessions.
“I told him we’ve got to change it all. I says, ‘Chief, I’m not going to go to the penitentiary with all those boys up there (in Intelligent Unit),’” Cox said. “I’m going to law school.”
That fateful time Cox warned Igleburger about came in 1985 when a grand jury approved criminal charges against nearly 20 then-current and former law enforcement officers. The charges ranged from tampering with evidence, dereliction of duty, eavesdropping and interfering with civil rights to perjury and involuntary manslaughter. It was characterized as the worst scandal in the history of the Dayton Police Department.
“We (members of Intelligence Unit) gathered information on anything that came up,” Cox said. “There was a city commissioner they had a file on. It was because of his sexual perversions. And then there was a judge they had some information on. They were just gathering information on anything and everything.”
Cox said that even FBI agents would visit the Intelligence Unit “to listen to the tapes (of illegally recorded conversations) and report that information back to Washington. It made them look great. There was a very close relationship between the FBI and the Intelligence Unit before I came in.”
A major manufacturer of tape recorders in Chicago taught members of the Intelligent Unit ”how to use the eavesdropping equipment,” Cox said.
And an electronics engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base helped make the equipment. In exchange for his services, Cox said members of the unit took the engineer to downtown Dayton go-go bars where “they’d have go-go dancers do lap dances on him, play with his privates, and pour alcohol into him. And you know he’s an engineer, so you know the status of his mind. He had never experienced anything in his life, or even dreamed of, anything like that. The police had him and whatever they wanted, they got.”
Cox said the engineer was also made “an honorary Dayton police officer.”
Widespread wrongdoing
The wrongdoing wasn’t limited to the Intelligence Unit.
“Two guys on the Vice Squad were shaking bootleggers down,” Cox said. “Guys on the Narcotics Squad were giving a junkie dope. They would bring a junkie in and let him lay there 24 to 36 hours (until he was) really climbing the wall. And then they’d come in and give him a fix and the guy, for a fix, would tell you anything.”
Cox said he also discovered “there were certain police officers in the Intelligence Unit who were busting dopers. What they would do is take the drugs and pick up other dopers and give them drugs for information. And the same thing was going down with the Vice Squad.”
Cox said the wiretapping equipment “was all in a suitcase up in the Intelligence Unit and I took it down to his (Igleburger’s) office. He said he would take care of it. And I thought everything was cool. And I was naïve enough to believe it.”
“I loved Igleburger like a father,” said Cox, whose own father died in 1949. He said his mother “worked in a kitchen” to support him through Stivers High School, where he was an honor student and became a member of its Athletic Hall of Fame as a football player.
“Igleburger wanted to take a new approach to law enforcement,” he said.
Changing the system
Cox said the chief received “no cooperation from the command structure” who were opposed to hiring more women and Black people to become police officers.
“This system has got to change,” Cox said Igleburger insisted. He said the chief assigned him to join the planning unit where he wrote programs to obtain federal funding to reform the department.
Despite still being a police officer, Cox said he “had more power than the captains” because he was working directly for Igleburger.
“So, I told Igleburger, ‘let me write a federal program and put the Intelligence Unit and the Vice Squad and the Narcotics Unit all under one. They got about $130,000 in federal money for it.”
“The only way to do it was to clean house,” Cox said of the new unit. “They thought the means justified the end. I couldn’t believe the way they operated.”
To ensure applicants for the new unit were honest, “you had to take polygraph tests to get in,” Cox said. “I took it and passed it. I was the first person admitted to the unit because I wrote the program.”
‘A different world’
Cox said he requested the night shift as sergeant of the new unit so he could continue his studies to become an attorney.
Cox left the department on Oct. 10, 1973 after graduating from law school.
Credit: Lisa Powell
Credit: Lisa Powell
“It was a different world,” Cox said of policing during his era. “I regret some of the things I did. We did a lot of ass kicking. Like domestic violence calls, we’d take the assailant outside and give him four of five hard punches in the stomach.”
He said they would then warn the assailant, “If we have to come back, you’re going to get a hundred times what you did to your wife. That’s how we took care of domestic violence before it became what it is today. If I was in the department today with the rules and regulations of today, I wouldn’t last eight hours. I would be fired.”
Cox said “you didn’t have to have a high school education” when he was hired. “Grade school was enough. The big thing to get in in 1961 was to not have any felonies. The biggest test was to not to be a coward. If you were assigned to a two-man squad ... you’d better be first through the door. They don’t like cowards.”
Personal toll
The corruption destroyed a lot of lives and marriages, Cox said.
“Police drank on duty.”
He said when cops walked into a bar, a bartender would ask, “You want a coke?”
“You know, they’d pour you a mixed drink. You had to be sure it was a coke and not a mixed drink. It was all free. Meals were also free. When they came back after duty, the girls would be there. It caused the breakup of a lot of marriages. And we tried to clean that up in the Organized Crime Unit. Nobody drinks free, nobody eats free.”
“They’d (police) get hung up on drugs themselves,” Cox said. “Then they feel a lack of self-worth. They’d start running with prostitutes. They’d become alcoholics. The family life just goes. Divorce after divorce. I represented them (as an attorney) and I’d just see it time and time again.”
Cox said there were also some “great victories” under Igleburger. He cited the Miami Valley Regional Crime Laboratory, conflict management and getting all police records on microfilm.
Cox insisted “90 to 95 percent of police are honest, hard-working people. We’ve got five to ten percent that are not straight and have no reason to be there. They give us a bad name.”