Open Questions For Sheriff Braudis

June 29th, 2006 at 05:37am Michael Conniff 2

Open Questions For Sheriff Braudis

The times have changed, but has Bob Braudis?

The celebrated Sheriff of Pitkin County closely associated with the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson Jr. faces an election challenge this November from Aspen Public Safety Officer and performance artist Rick Magnuson, and most of the local political cognoscenti simply assume he will win, as always, in a walk. The charismatic officer of the law, often likened to a latter-day Wyatt Earp in the Old West, remains a figure of immense power and admiration in the Roaring Fork Valley.

In a “Face Time” feature in the Aspen Daily News, for example, Toppers co-chef Chad King cited “Sheriff Bob Braudis” first as his role model. In winter 2006, Aspen Magazine cited the Sheriff as one of the most significant people of the year in the valley. The Aspen vibe of live and let live is often attributed to his famous propensity to look the other way in small matters, and to keep a protective eye over celebrities matriculating in Aspen.

But now he is “out of town.” The lingering question is why would the chief law enforcement official in the county, a sworn officer of the law, leave in high season so as to miss the Fourth of July weekend, when thousands pour into Aspen?

Other questions arise about the uninterrupted reign of the “citizen policeman” in charge of an entire county, and many of those queries center around Sheriff Braudis’s attitude toward drug law enforcement, a posture that exploded into public view December 2, 2005, when a bevy of law enforcement agencies—including Aspen Police, Snowmass Police, and the Drug Enforcement Agency, burst into Cooper Street and Little Annie’s with guns drawn.

Arrests were made for cocaine and illegal immigration, but Sheriff Braudis was missing that day, too, because local and federal officials neglected to tell him that a major raid was going down just blocks from his office. Why? Everybody knew why—because the Sheriff is notoriously known for his stand that drugs are primarily a health problem.

That contention may be playing out in an unanticipated and unprecedented manner during the Sheriff’s absence.

But there have been other questions that have so far gone unanswered, in part because of the Sheriff’s charismatic presence in Aspen, and the notion that his tendency toward the laissez-faire bespeaks the laid-back attitude of his mountain town constituency. But even those assumptions came under fire when Aspen school officials and community members, concerned about the possibility of drug use among their children in the student population, laid into the Sheriff in a meeting of the Aspen City Council after the December 2005 downtown drug busts that startled many in town because it showed a chunk of the population was dyspeptic about the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office’s attitude toward enforcing drug laws.

The Sheriff, not coincidentally, chose not to attend.

To his credit, Sheriff Braudis has made no secret of his disdain for ordinances that conflict with the historical lifestyle of the constituents who keep voting him into power. Aspen inevitably exceeds the norm for the state of Colorado in seven categories of drug testing.

“Aspen has a permissive reputation…,” according to a story in the Rocky Mountain News that portrayed the efforts of NORML to overturn the criminalization of marijuana. “Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis has made no secret of his opposition to the nation's drug war, arguing that marijuana use should be legalized.”

The Rocky continued in the June 2006 story: “An illness kept Braudis from delivering opening remarks at last week's annual confab of criminal defense lawyers enticed to Aspen by one of marijuana smoking's biggest boosters – NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.”

The nature of that “illness” remains unknown to the population at large.

Sheriff Braudis is also known for his preference to look the other way. One friend says he even has an expression that he has used more than once: “Just don’t set the place on fire.” But it’s one thing to look the other way when a joint passes nearby, and perhaps another for a sworn officer of the law, the top law enforcement official in the county, is demonstrably present in the presence of hard drugs that carry felony sentences for possession and distribution.

Some of the concern centers around the Sheriff’s friendship with the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson Jr., the gonzo journalist who lived in Woody Creek and made no secret of his embrace of controlled substances. After a memorial for the writer, who committed suicide, friends gathered at Owl Creek Farm, where Thompson’s wife Anita was waiting with an LSD libation, according to actor John Cusack.

“Outside,” Cusack writes, “his wife offered liquid acid to people in the driveway.”

The Sheriff was present when Dr. Thompson’s ashes were shot from an enormous cannon some months later at Owl Creek Farm—and so were drugs, according to many accounts of the event. Sheriff Braudis also attended the ceremony to dispurse the ashes bankrolled by actor Johnny Depp, who once played Dr. Thompson in a movie.

Further, Sheriff Braudis has signed a book contract to co-author an account of Hunter Thompson’s life, a task that would seem to demand firsthand accounts of the gonzo journalist’s rampant drug use. Putting marijuana aside, any such written account that places Sheriff Braudis in the presence of cocaine or other hard drugs could leave him liable to prosecution.

Love him or hate him, one thing is certain: in the lazy days of summer 2006, Sheriff Bob Braudis is more present in Aspen than ever in his absence.

Entry Filed under: Aspen, Crime, Pitkin County, Sheriff Race 2006