To this end, Murphy had given wide authority to police chief Jeremy Logan. Logan in turn had instilled a culture of aggressiveness in his men. He’d built a new canine unit around a twelve-thousand-dollar drug-sniffing German shepherd. And he’d put himself in charge of enforcing new ordinances, passed by the city council, ordering the cleanup or destruction of run-down properties—just the kind of grimy, falling-apart rentals, said the real estate agent, that the castoffs from Buchanan County favored.
Every morning, Jeremy Logan leaves his house and drives five blocks to work in a blue Ford Expedition emblazoned with the words Oelwein Police in the town’s green and yellow colors. Logan is of middle height and weight. His short brown hair is in a crew cut, which, along with the sharp features of his face and the acne scars along his cheeks and jawbones, gives him a decidedly military air. It takes only minutes, though, for Logan to reveal a deeply ingrained streak of friendly sarcasm and a sharp appreciation for the irony that surrounds him. According to Clay Hallberg, for decades, if not since the police department’s founding, the men saddled with protecting the citizens of Oelwein have been a violent bunch, and disdainful of the rights of the citizens in this notoriously tough railroad town. (When asked to confirm this, Nathan Lein smiled and said, “I wouldn’t want to be arrested, put it that way.”) Of the ten-man force, Logan is the only one with a college degree. Many of his officers are built more like offensive linemen; almost all of them shave their heads. Knowing this and taking into account once again Logan’s physical characteristics—the army crew; the soft middle signaling a distaste for the gym—is to understand that Logan is a reflection of his job, which exists in the delicate middle ground between the brute strength of the department and the slick, erudite bonhomie of Larry Murphy. Sarcasm, says Logan, is more than a coping mechanism. It’s like a second language.
Being the chief of police is perhaps the only job in town more visible than being mayor. Murphy, when he’s not running Oelwein, has a political consulting business that sends him regularly to Des Moines, a three-hour drive south. Murphy’s kids are grown, and he works from home, meaning that he can choose to hole up for a couple of days should things get tough—as they did when he lobbied to make riding a bike on Main Street illegal. Logan cannot. He is constantly on display, whether picking up his three young children from school or heading to the scene of an accident in his truck. When he does things that people don’t like—agreeing to arrest students at Oelwein High, for instance—it’s not just he who hears about it. It’s his wife, too, who has to smile and nod while she waits for her latte at the Morning Perk. Still, says Logan, this is a walk in the park compared with the year before Murphy made him chief of police. That year nearly drove Logan out of the town where he’d lived his whole life.
Details vary, but the consensus around town is that the former police chief, under whom Logan had achieved the rank of sergeant, ran a loose ship. All Logan will say on the record is that there was a certain “laxness around the department,” and that he thought it appropriate to one day approach the chief and tell him how unhappy he was with the situation. The chief, according to Logan, thanked him for his input and said he’d think about what to do. Two days later, according to Logan, his wife called him at work to say he was being accused of peeping in the bedroom of a local teenage girl. Further, said Logan’s wife, the rumor around town was that the chief was suspending Logan indefinitely without pay. Criminal charges were expected shortly, followed by the high likelihood of a civil suit. This was the first Logan, who was on duty when his wife called, had heard of the charges.
According to the story that Logan tells, the charges filed against him accused Logan of routinely setting up surveillance near the girl’s house, only to use binoculars to ogle her in her bedroom. Several times, it was alleged, he sneaked up to the girl’s window at night as she undressed and masturbated in the bushes. Logan denies the charges vehemently, and maintains that they were payback for questioning the former chief’s authority. It wasn’t long before Logan’s home life was a shambles. His wife threatened to leave him. Unable to find another job, Logan was going broke. The legal bills alone were ruining him, he says. So he violated the unwritten code that is often referred to as the Blue Wall, by which police officers refuse to publicly discuss departmental conflict. Logan told Larry Murphy everything he knew about the department and its officers, and how he was being set up. Thus began the first few months of Larry Murphy’s first term as mayor, in 2002. By the end of that year, Logan—so recently fearful of jail time—had been made chief of police.
The Logan case still lingers around town these days, much like the specter of the Mob. A lot of people, Mildred Binstock included, think Logan did it. And a lot of other people think he didn’t, and that the whole case was another example in a long line of shady insider dealings in town. According to Nathan Lein, former mayor Gene Vine, who sat on the city council until his death in 2008 from cancer, told Larry Murphy to get rid of Logan. Whether guilty or innocent, Logan was too much of a liability, said Vine. The county attorney, Wayne Sauer, said the same thing. The only thing that everyone can agree on, as Nathan put it, is that “making Jeremy Logan the Oelwein chief of police took major nuts.” That, and Logan has been hell on meth cooks.
According to Logan, the Oelwein Police Department, which has jurisdiction only within the four-square-mile incorporated area of town, was dismantling two meth labs per month back in 2002, his first year as chief. Labs could be anything from a house with a fairly complex setup in the basement to a guy and his wife single-batching in a Johnny on the Spot behind the dugout at the Sports Complex. No matter where the labs were, though, the Oelwein police were exposed to the toxic waste and the harmful fumes while wearing nothing more than their regular uniforms. As recently as the late 1990s, Logan told me, the police, unsure of what to do, let labs burn. Other times, knowing how much it would cost to clean them up, the police burned the labs themselves.
Anecdotally across the nation, cancer rates among first-responders to meth disasters have been climbing since the 1980s. Bill Ruzzamenti, a former DEA agent and the current director of the Central Valley High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) in California, likes to tell the story of how he smelled so bad after dismantling superlabs in San Diego during the 1990s that his wife would have to hose him down in the garage and burn his clothes. Still, said Ruzzamenti, the stench of ether and what smelled like cat urine would be so thoroughly soaked into his hands that they’d have to throw their phone away each month: the receiver and keypad stunk too bad to keep using.
As a result, DEA, in conjunction with the Environmental Protection Agency, passed a law in 2003 providing a standardized protocol for anyone given the task of dismantling a meth lab. The training necessary is available only at the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. Finding money to send someone for training is not easy, says Logan, although the alternative seemed to him far worse: years of lawsuits when one of his men got cancer. Upon becoming chief, Logan immediately demanded that an Oelwein officer be sent for training. By the time that officer had completed the course, in 2003, the town’s so-called Beavis and Butt-Head meth problem had increased to an almost incomprehensible order of magnitude: Logan and his officers were being called, on average, to one meth lab every four days. And every lab that got cleaned up cost the town an average of six thousand dollars.