CON GAMES: Sheriff Bob's Sanctuary City

December 18th, 2007 at 08:49pm Michael Conniff 2

What we DON'T have here in Pitkin County is a failure to communicate. What do have is an egregious example of a public official who is taken at his word by local newspapers no matter how ridiculous the patter.

Perhaps you've heard of Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis. He's the publicly elected law enforcement official who has decided it is decidedly NOT his job to enforce any drug laws. When the biggest Colorado pot bust of the last ten years goes down in his jurisdiction, federal and state officials don't even bother to tell him because there is a good chance he will screw it up.

But in a local paper, the Sheriff continues to insist that he is the poor victim of a "communications" problem. When the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Aspen Police Department (APD), and other local law enforcement officials failed to tell him about the Little Annie's cocaine bust in December 2005, Braudis went to the local papers and crybabied about "communications" and the local papers took copious notes. APD Police Chief Loren Ryerson suffered the brunt of the reporting told as per usual from the Sheriff's perspective, but the truth is Braudis wasn't told about the bust for the same reason he is never told: because of his sympathies toward those enamored of drugs.

What other law enforcement official would attend a NORML marijuana legalization meeting and then check into a rehab facility, all the while putting up a smoke screen of health problems--and then never admitting he was in rehab in the first place? Why would the DEA or the APD tell him anything when he's playing for the other side and proud of it?

Pitkin County voters love him but that's not the point. Had he achieved 100 percent of the vote in his last re-election his duty is still to uphold the law. But what really get is not so much the rank hypocrisy of his position on drugs--that it's a health problem, not a police problem--but the way the local media buys into his bullshit he serves up on a platter. 

During the election campaign Sheriff Bob said he had not taken drugs in his time as Sheriff of Pitkin County. And here's the amazing thing: no one called him on it, despite the obvious obfuscation.

The latest coverup just makes things worse. Listen to this headline and sub-head in The Aspen Times: "Redstone pot seizure one for the ages. Officials say it’s not part of a larger trend." One of the "officials" in this case was Sheriff Bob Braudis serviing up this whopper: "“I don’t think Highway 82 is one of the pipelines, especially since [Independence Pass] is closed most of the year."

Oh, now I get it: because Independence Pass is closed, pot dealers shut down for the season. How nice. The only problem is the drug trafficking has nothing to do with Highway 82 and everything to do with Pitkin County's established reputation as a sanctuary city for drug traffic. And "not part of a larger trend"? This is at least the third time in two years Sheriff Bob has seen a major drug bust go down under his nose without him even knowing about it: Little Annie's, the Conoco station, and now the Aspen-Redstone pot debacle.

“I didn’t know much because [the investigation] didn’t involve much of Pitkin County activity,” Braudis told The Times.

That's just a flat-out lie. This was a Pitkin County drug operation with tenacles that reach across the country all the way to Israel. Sheriff Bob didn't know much because there was the unspoken fear he might tip off his pals about what was going down. But then this is the same candidate who said drugs were a downtown Aspen "core" problem right after the Conoco bust in his County jurisdiction--a bust he found out about five minutes before it  happened. 

"And county deputies regularly assist the DEA and vice-versa, Braudis said," according to the paper.

Complete, unadulterated garbage. The Sheriff didn't even know that his buddy Wingers of 35 years was missing because of a federal marshall's warrant in Mesa County until his peeps searched a database after a missing-persons report.

“It was just a lack of communication that we didn’t know he’d been hooked up,” Braudis said.

Think about it: why tell Braudis anything when he sees his job as maintaining a sanctuary city for drug use? But the finale in the story in the paper is even better if you read between the lines.

“I had no idea that he was allegedly in the transportation business,” Braudis said about his buddy Wingers.

The "transportation" business? Golly, I wonder why the Sheriff of Pitkin County didn't say the "drug" business. I wonder if he had some idea that the accused was allegedly in the drug business--and then did nothing about it.

Now that's what I call a communications problem.

The only question I have left is how does he get away with it? Don't the local papers have a basic journalistic duty to tell it like it is rather than look the other way? And what do they gain by maintaining their well-established status as Sheriff Bob Braudis's lapdogs? The last time I looked--Tuesday night--the Aspen Daily News had yet to write word one about the biggest pot bust in Colorado in the last ten years. Could it be they don't know what to say?

You would have to be high to miss a story like that.

Entry Filed under: Basalt, Snowmass, Aspen, Con Games, Crime, The West, Colorado, United Post