Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal News Blogs -> Lawbeat

Legal News

: Lawbeat

Good questions reveal fake-cop scam

By Mark Obbie

Linda Trest wins the award for skeptical reporter of the month. The 51-year-old reporter for the weekly Gasconade County Republican in Missouri has given various explanations for what started her reporting that led to revelations that the police in Gerald, Missouri, had been duped by a man posing as a federal agent and leading local cops on warrantless raids. Among the explanations offered: that she was following up on concerned residents had voiced about the leader of the raids, "Sergeant" Bill Jakob; that she became curious when she heard that the secretive "agent," who wouldn't give his name to her or others, had told people that he worked for both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Marshals Service; and finally, as she told Fox News last week, "I was already suspicious of the police department and had been watching them very carefully, so this really raised a lot of red flags." Those suspicions led to a pair of stories in her paper on May 14 (here and here), resulting in the firing of the police chief, civil rights lawsuits by residents who were "arrested" in the bogus raids, and a criminal investigation that so far has not yielded any charges against Jakob or others. Whatever sparked Trest's reporting, it's yielded fame, in the form of Monica Davey's front-pager in today's New York Times, which followed this AP report by Alan Scher Zagier and the Fox interview by a week. Davey's story contains an angle that's ignored in the other reporters, including Trest's, and it puts an ironic and sad coda on the story, assuming it's true: The allegedly bogus raids focused on the areas thriving meth trade, which briefly went into a slump with all of the police activity.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on July 01, 2008 (boomark / email).