Leadville
At an elevation of just more than 10,000 feet, the strain of leaping out of a chair, dashing across the room, bending over to put your shoes back on, grabbing the telephone and having a frantic conversation and then racing out the front door, well, it can leave a 52-year-old guy a little short of breath.
Just ask Lake County Sheriff Ed Holte, who had that burst of energy last week in this small mountain town. He had just knocked off one of his favorite dinners – pork chops – and had helped his wife clean up the kitchen. Then he kicked off his shoes and settled into his wooden rocking chair in the living room. In one hand he was clutching that week’s edition of the local newspaper.
Holte screamed and shot out of the chair like someone had put a thumbtack on the seat.
Or like his undercover drug informant – who was that very night planning another cocaine buy from the bad guys – had been identified in the newspaper.
“There was definitely some profanity,” Holte recalled of the moment he saw the informant listed in the weekly Leadville Herald Democrat.
The only guy in town more breathless than Holte was, of course, the drug informant.
“One of my deputies called him,” Holte said. “The informant apparently said something like ‘My name is printed where?”‘
At least once a year, counties are required to publish in local papers (under the heading of legal or public notices) lists of expenses. The informant was, at Holte’s direction, supposed to be listed under “road and bridge employees.” Instead he was listed as a sheriff’s employee. It was the fault of the county clerk and recorder’s office, not the newspaper.
Marcia Martinek is the editor of the Herald Democrat. The paper’s offices are in a brick building constructed in 1895 and originally the home of a morgue, Nelson Undertaking, in a wild silver-mining town frequented by Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp.
Earlier this week, Martinek gave a quick tour of the building, pausing to nod toward the big window at the front, along the sidewalk.
“Back then,” she said, “when someone was killed in a gunfight, the sheriff had the body put right there in that window. The townspeople would come by and look at it.”
Which is, more or less, where the informant figured he’d end up after the drug dealers figured out who he was.
The informant spent that night huddled in the home of a Lake County deputy sheriff in this town of about 2,600 people.
In the morning the man high-tailed it out of town.
“He’s in a different part of the state,” Holte said. “It’s very possible there are some safety issues for him. We told him to keep his eyes open and don’t get comfortable and basically not to trust anybody for quite a while. He had bought a lot of drugs from these people. Now they know who he is.”
Believing the undercover operation had been destroyed that night, Holte, his deputies and Leadville police obtained warrants before midnight. Within a few hours, they had arrested 11 suspects in the drug ring. Three others named in warrants fled town that night.
“Did they read the legal notices and see the informant’s name and get out of town because of it? Who knows,” said Holte. “But it’s very possible. These people know who we are and where we live. They pay more attention to us than we do to them. We see them in the grocery store and post office. This is a small town.”
The money to pay the informant came from a state grant, Holte said. The county will probably get the grant again, he said, meaning more undercover operations are likely.
“First we’ll have a little meeting with the folks who put together that list,” the sheriff said, standing outside his own office and nodding toward the clerk and recorder’s office some 20 paces down the hall in the county building.
Despite the drug bust – and despite the town’s elevation – editor Martinek said not everyone in Leadville is high.
“A big cocaine ring like this is unusual,” she said. “Up here it’s usually pot. I can’t remember how many photos we’ve run of deputy sheriffs with a big plant under each arm.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches usually writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
