Lori's Stories: Cop Turned Drug Dealer

Without giving you more away, let me bring in my guest. It is Kelly, Kelly Robinson. Thank you so much for coming in for us today and for sharing your book. Welcome to Laura's Stories. Lori, I've seen your stories, I've seen your show, and I'm honored to be here. Thank you for having me. So let's get into this book. It's pretty heavy, right? It is heavy. It is heavy. So you had one of the most trusted jobs in society as a police officer. What made you suddenly decide to go on the opposite side? Were you involved in drugs before? Were you addicted? Tell us what your story is. Yes. No, I was not involved in drugs. When I became a police officer, I barely even drank. When I graduated from the police academy, I went to the busiest police station in the city. we had more homicides, more burglaries, more assaults, rapes. You name it, we had it. It was there. And I try to avoid narrowing it down because there's so many people involved and the anonymity of it. You know, people still live with this. Years later, I know it's something they still have to deal with. But it was a tough job, something I did not expect. There's a lot of training in the police academy. But when I first got on the job. You say that you didn't expect it, and you applied to be a police officer. What was it that you—did you not think that there'd come some training with it, or you'd be out on the street? Did you think you could have a desk job? Tell me how it was harder than you initially thought. Good question. I think the reality of it is you do think about these things, but when you're actually presented with it, to be on the job and you see someone dying before you, their life is passing, And they look at you and tell you, I can't breathe. Or you see children harmed. It was a devastating thing for me. And we dealt with this time and time again, shooting suspects laying there and you try to comfort them and talk to them about their children or their family, try to distract them. and it became a daily routine, day after day. And when I first got on the department, I went home, and I said, honey, I told my wife, honey, oh, my goodness, let me tell you what happened. And I began telling her, and she said, no, no, no, I can't take that. Oh, that's just too much. I didn't think about it, that it was too much. It was too much to share and too much to tell her these things. So that was out. but it was there was something about having to discuss this with someone and other police officers and what did they do after work they went out to the bars they went out drinking i was not a drinker it wasn't something that was in my uh it wasn't in me to drink i i really didn't so i began going out drinking with these officers we talk about the events of the day what we experienced what we went through different calls different um different things that happened and let me ask you this because you dealt with this on a daily basis and and how long was it till you got to the point where you're like this is a lot what's in years was it months oh it was months okay so it was it was months um and so you're dealing with this over a period of months did you become desensitized to it did you become apathetic because it's something that you deal with all the time did you were you able to switch it off or was sitting drinking with your buddies that was the way to cope yeah you pretty much you pretty much had no choice but to switch it off this is your job and so you did somewhat temporarily become desensitized but life goes on after you got off work the stories the things that came to your head late at night in the middle of the night On your day off, you think about events that happened, people who were harmed, shooting, you know, assaults. It's just it went on and on and on. So we did have to turn it on, turn it off. And then there's the adrenaline rush that you have. You have calls that come out that you're just and this is this is what you've been assigned to do. Many police officers. This is their job. This is what they do. And, you know, I think, Lori, the bottom line in this all about my situation is that the shadow that I bring on the badge of really good police officers that do their job every day, they go out and risk their lives. They're there to serve the public. And I was there to serve the public. And it just became overwhelming. I began drinking, began doing other things that I knew was not a part of the job. it wasn't going to help me um so when you say that you're doing other things are you are you doing drugs at that point how did you get to the point from you said you didn't drink and you know you went out um in a way to connect with other people that were doing the same things that you were doing in the same type of high stress environment and someone to maybe commiserate with how do you transition then from maybe having a drink to becoming addicted to drugs yeah and it's something you don't plan you don't expect and just just for the record oftentimes people say i'm gonna quit smoking i'm gonna quit drinking i'm gonna quit but they never say i'm gonna start smoking i'm gonna start using drugs i'm gonna start doing this it happens and how did it happen for me i went out bowling with a bunch of the coppers um went to bowling alley i'm not much of a bowler they're pretty much to talk shop talk drink a little bit we're leaving out of bowling one night and we walk across the parking lot and there's a guy in a car he's snorting cocaine through a rolled up dollar bill and i told the other cops with me i said hey that guy's over there he's got drugs you want to shake him down meaning take him out of the car see if he has any more drugs and they looked and they said nope that's DePasquale from precinct 17 what and i was that's what i said i was shocked i said another copper well Laurie that planted a seed in me at that point it planted a seed that is this okay is this something that we can do uh and i know we we shouldn't do it but is this how they handle it and it went on from there with that thought in my head and we pull people over for drugs we you know confiscate the drugs we put it in evidence um and it goes into storage in the lockup well one day we pulled over a guy now my new partner that i had um apparently he had used drugs before he used cocaine and we put someone over they um they got out they had been drinking we smelled marijuana in the car um we got him out searched the car my partner searched i watched the uh the the the driver and the passenger and then he let them go gave him a warning and we realized i didn't realize later but we realized that they had more drugs and we get it back in the patrol car my partner said look what i found And he waved a little bag of cocaine. And I actually had never tried cocaine at that point. And he opened it up. He kind of smelled it, tasted it, which was dangerous because it could have been anything. And then he snorted it. And he gave this, oh, that's good. And he said, oh, and he handed it to me. I had never done it before. And you kind of want to fit in. You kind of want to go with the grain. You kind of want to go with the crowd. And we know in today's times, you can't always go with the crowd. You can't always go where things are and what others are doing. It doesn't mean it's for you. I tried it. We did it again. I tried it again. I tried it again. Let me ask you this. When you tried it, were you in uniform? Were you in the police car? In uniform, in the police car. So in the back of your mind, you arrest people. We caution young people about taking drugs. Did nothing in your brain say, look where I am. look what I'll do today this might not be the right thing to do oh daily every time I did it there was a guilt that was in me a guilt that crept up especially when I went home and it was a secret that I hid from my wife Christian woman she never smoked never drank never used drugs you know and when my behavior began to change from the drug use I told her it was from the drinking i said we drink we go out and we drink we drink and i never admitted to using cocaine in the beginning um and this went on and the glue to my partner and i relationship was getting people and getting drugs that was the glue so let me just have you and your partner police officers out on the car uh busting folks for drugs are you doing that because you're like we're not going to register all of these drugs we're going to get some of them for ourselves for later on because you hear stories about this but this is interesting that yes so this was what you're this was your mindset exactly and in the book i we tell that that we were pulling people over to confiscate the drugs that we used there was an addiction and um it was something about temporarily numbed you from all the horrors if you will of the day um and the injuries you know you get injured you fight uh you know i've been hit in the head with bricks bottles stabbed a lot of things that that occurred and then you're expected to continue on to do your job people call you and you're the closest thing to the government that they see police officers and you I do. And I was a good police officer to a certain degree, you know, before the drugs got involved. I did my job. And to tell you the truth, growing up in New York, in New York State, at 16, you can go to jail as an adult, not 18, at 16. And I was a young boy. I was running the store for my grandmother. I was 15. And I'll never forget, the police pulled me over, threw me up against the wall. two white cops and they they questioned me and held me and and eventually told me you know how old are you how old and i told him i was 15 i said 15 they kept asking me and i didn't understand what's going on i didn't do anything i'm not i'm not a bad kid and they said we'll get your little head next year meaning when i turned 16 and later i found that a lot of police officers what they did was they would arrest young people of color they would give them they would arrest them so they'd have a record and it would follow them for the rest of their of their lives that's just insidious i mean even so knowing this and this impressed you at a young age you still decided that you wanted to be a police officer was it based off of that and you're like i want to do good i don't want to be seen as that help me to understand and this happened at an impressionable age, at age 15. And then you made the decision somewhere down the line to actually become a police officer. Yes, very impressionable age at that age as a teenager. And also, a short time after that encounter with the police officers, I went to the CYA, Catholic Youth Organization. A lot of youngsters, we'd go there and lift weights, play basketball, different things we did. And there was this one man, and he was so interested in our lives and what we're doing. And he would correct us, want to tell us what, you know, what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong. He would encourage us. I mean, this man was like a friend. And later I found out he was a police officer. So I see two sides of police officers that, and God has a way of just showing you things that you don't understand. And I saw that and I said, I can be like that cop and I can make a difference for a lot of people in my neighborhood that I grew up with. My friends who look like me, you know, they'll have somebody on their side now. And that, I think, motivate me. Also, the fact that we have four children and I needed a job to pay the bills. So that's it. When I took the exam for the civil service exam to be a police officer, I was hopeful that I would pass. And I did. And it was an opening for us to for me to make a living for my children and my wife my family so let me ask you this and refer back to the book um so we first meet you you're just describing being in the car having this um these kilos of cocaine ready to deliver them um were you addicted at that time were you were you taking cocaine then yes you were a courier okay so according to um page six in your book uh you said you got out the car. You had a plan to. You waited till kids cleared the street. You rang the doorbell of Chuck's office and the door was answered. They usually paid you $2,000. The deal went through. You went ahead. He inspected. All the seals were intact. You were able to get paid. And then I stood up and began walking toward the front door. The house shook with a loud bang at the front door and immediately my mind processed the possibilities of what was happening. There were two scenarios that could accompany that noise and neither was pleasant i knew that we were being robbed by another dealer or we were being raided by the feds so we know what what initially happened but we're going to stop right here and take a quick break and when we come back on the other side of the break we'll continue the story