MARCH 2022. Blues Vol 38 No. 3

BY TOM KENNEDY, B&G EDITOR
War story about violent 1970s HPD drug wars
set the stage for events leading to creation of
Houston Police Officers Union
his poison. Choosing nights in Central
Patrol, he quickly became intimate with
the Third Ward culture despite the fact
he had never been able to vote or buy
weapons or ammunition, had never
gotten drunk and always locked his
patrol car doors.
Many officers learned before decade’s
end that Thomas knew the meaning of
perseverance. He persevered through
the bloodshed and the tough initiation
dished out by the department. He even
was recruited by the Park Place Rangers,
the only way a young officer could
join the rugged, no-nonsense patrol
known for taking no prisoners. Instead
of worrying about the lack of legal
representation for officers involved in
shootings or fretting over insurance
co-pays that added up too quickly on
pay day, Thomas built a solid reputation
for the savvy needed to make cases
that stood
own way of doing things.
AGGRESSIVE WAR ON DRUGS
The narcs set records for blowing
the division’s monthly drug budget the
first three days of a new month because
they were making bigger busts, requiring
much larger sums. On the night
shift, Lieutenant Billy Ripley, Jim Kilty
and his aggressors in the war on drugs
were doing the same thing. Each of the
narcs learned to always be part of a
task force that involved Harris County
officers, the U. S. Drug Enforcement
Agency and the Texas Department of
Public Safety. One task force member
or another always had the money the
underfunded HPD officers needed for
their next bust.
The workload added up, especially
the time in court. The narcs worked sixteen-hour
days and sometimes on their
Recruiting because she was one of only
a few females who could pass HPD’s
tricky agility test. She became HPD’s
second female narc, with braces on her
teeth and a Sunday school image.
She had been a narc for only three
months when the Golfcrest warrant
situation arose. Woods needed help to
gain entry to the apartment and secure
the occupants inside. He radioed Thomas
as he worked late from the day shift.
Doyle Green bumped him and they also
got Nathan Brumley to volunteer to
participate. The sergeant going to the
scene was Gene Cox.
The sergeant and three other officers
arrived and shared information about
the case. The guy in the apartment was
sixty-year-old Thomas Garza Malone,
the poster boy for the early release
Author’s Note: The history of the Houston
Police Officers Union came in three
phases: 1) the formation of the Houston
Police Officers Association in the 1940s;
2) the creation of the Houston Police Patrolman’s
Union in the late 1970s; and 3)
the merging of HPOA and HPPU to form
HPOU in the 1990s. The following story,
based on a chapter in Houston Blue, the
Story of HPD, details the formation of
HPPU, whose history begins with a “war
story” from the violent drug wars in
Houston in the 1970s.
Pappy Bond had a plan in late 1974.
The new captain in Narcotics had taken
over a division troubled by unsafe
arrest practices and accusations of brutality,
wiretapping and other questionable
activities that often turned the tide
in the criminals’ favor. Bond attacked
the growing drug problem in the Bayou
City through a special inter-departmental
recruitment technique. He
perused the lists of arrests from Patrol
and wrote down the names of the arresting
officers most often appearing.
On his yellow notepad he scribbled
the names of the top three from
Central Patrol, Northeast, Shepherd
and Park Place. He interviewed each
of them, flattered their egos by citing
their aggressiveness, and appealed to
their purposeful demeaner as being
just what HPD needed to take on drug
dealers.
He sought and signed up the people
who later nicknamed themselves the
“buffalo hunters” on the day shift. The
night shift became known as “Ripley’s
Raiders” after Narcotics Lieutenant Billy
Ripley. These hunters and raiders were
younger officers unafraid to plunge
head-on into the more challenging and
dangerous police situations and live to
write detailed reports.
BUFFALO HUNTERS FORM
One of them was Bob Thomas,
who endured his share of meanness
and violence as a patrolman in Third
Ward and with the Park Place Rangers,
known in the 1970s as HPD’s toughest
patrol division. In his three years on the
force, Thomas had heard more shots
fired and saw more blood than hundreds
of officers with far more years on
any beat.
The “buffalo hunters” met for the first
time in early 1975, each finding himself
in a roomful of strangers, a condition
that quickly changed. Thomas threw
in with Officer Doyle Green of Central
Patrol. The modus operandi meant
working in groups on shifts. Thomas’
group worked days and also included
Rick Ashwood, Kenny Williamson and
Joe Otis. The narcs worked undercover,
using tips from street people and informants
to make buys of heroin and large
amounts of marijuana. They grew long
hair and beards and dressed the part.
They put in long hours together and
frequently socialized off-duty.
Thomas grew up in Oak Forest on
Houston’s Northside, an ideal backdrop
for conscientious young men and women
of the early sixties. Many graduates
of Waltrip High School, Thomas’ alma
mater, became Houston police officers.
An especially poignant fact in history
is that three Waltrip graduates were
police officers killed in the line of duty:
John Bamsch, shot to death by a robbery
suspect in 1975; Timothy L. Hearn,
killed by a pistol-wielding drug suspect
in 1978; and John Anthony Salvaggio,
killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1990.
The twenty-one-year-old Thomas
realized that Waltrip’s HPD tradition, his
three years as a UH business major and
sixteen weeks in the police academy
prepared him for the Houston streets –
but only to a degree. He got the same
on-the-job experience as thousands
of his predecessors. He graduated high
enough in his academy class to pick
up with supervisors and later in
courts.
Thomas was a quick study in drug
culture. He dressed the part, talked the
part and became an integral part of it
just like colleagues Doyle Green, Rick
Ashwood, Kenny Williamson, Jim Kilty,
Tim Hearn and others. He learned the
dangerous trade from more seasoned
narcs such as Frank Miller, Mike Woods
and Joe T. Dugger.
Narcs cultivated their snitches,
discreetly dropping charges against
suspects in return for certain introductions.
Bartering for a dismissal, the defendant
was required to introduce the
narcs to three people who sold drugs.
The informant might participate in the
first dirty buy. Then the narcs would
make two more on their own, building
up trust and carefully working their
way through the drug-dealing chain.
Captain Bond was looking good, too.
By the middle of 1975, the Buffalo Hunters
and Ripley’s Raiders developed and
cultivated a vast network of drug dealers.
In their first year, the Narcotics Division
saw a 300 percent increase in drug
arrests, a stark contrast to the squad of
predecessors disbanded because of its
days off. Thomas kept his marriage to
his high school sweetheart together by
spending every day off with her and his
daughters. Others weren’t so lucky. The
HPD divorce rate grew higher, particularly
among narcs. The narcs’ workload
grew heavier and, as they learned on
a December night in 1975 night, it also
became more dangerous.
Critics of the Narcotics Division of
the late seventies believed narcs were
overly aggressive and careless. Too
often they initiated arrest operations
without fully assessing the dangers.
Justices of the peace, particularly
Judge Lawrence H. Wayne, eagerly
demonstrated their anti-drug stance by
signing search warrants without posing
the detailed questions about the perilous
predicament in which arresting officers
would soon immerse themselves.
Early the evening of December 8,
1975, Officers Mike Woods and June
Cain were en route to a darkened and
rundown multiple-unit dwelling on
Golfcrest on the southeast side. The
twenty-year-old Cain was still wet
behind the ears. She grew up in Pasadena
and always wanted to be a cop.
Cain graduated from the academy at
age nineteen and spent a half year in
program in the Texas prisons of the seventies.
He served ten years of a ninetynine-year
sentence for murder. Once
paroled, he killed another man in a bar
fight and did another twelve years of
hard time on a life sentence for murder.
Malone had nineteen-year-old stripper
Bonnie Sue Hollis with him. Hollis
had recently sold heroin to a narc. The
buffalo hunters would have sweet,
innocent-sounding Cain knock on the
door and say, “It’s me,” which usually
prompted the drug to open up, triggering
officers to hit the door with their
shoulders and order the occupants up
against the wall. The ruse worked –
until this night.
Hollis didn’t open up. Malone jammed
a two-by-four against the doorknob,
burying the other end into the carpet.
The officers heard the toilet flush down
evidence as they kicked down the door.
Flushing continued steadily as several
minutes passed before the narcs gained
entry to the darkened one-bedroom
apartment.
FIVE SHOTS HIT FOUR OFFICERS
Green took the lead with his shotgun.
He grabbed Hollis by the arm,
eased past a small Christmas tree and
stepped down a hallway. Green aimed
his shotgun as he rounded the corner
76 The BLUES POLICE MAGAZINE The BLUES POLICE MAGAZINE 77
76 The BLUES POLICE MAGAZINE The BLUES POLICE MAGAZINE 77