GERALD, Mo. — Like so many rural communities in the country’s middle, this small town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up.
Arrests began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.
Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood — mainly from television — to be the law.
They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sgt. Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.
But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s antidrug campaign abruptly fell apart after less than five months. Sgt. Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding minister and a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.
Jakob, 36, is the subject of a criminal investigation by federal authorities, and he is likely to face charges related to impersonating a law enforcement officer, his lawyer said.
The strange adventures of Sgt. Bill have led to the firing of three of the town’s five police officers, left the outcome of a string of drug arrests in doubt, prompted multimillion-dollar federal civil rights lawsuits by at least 17 plaintiffs and stirred up a political battle, including a petition seeking the impeachment of Schulte, over who is to blame for the mess.
And the questions keep coming. How did Jakob wander into town and apparently leave the mayor, the aldermen and pretty much everyone else he met thinking he was a federal agent delivered from Washington to help barrel into peoples’ homes and clean up Gerald’s drug problem?
And why would anyone — receiving no pay and with no known connection to little Gerald, 70 miles from St. Louis and not even a county seat — want to carry off such a time-consuming ruse in the first place?
Jakob’s lawyer, Joel Schwartz, said that what happened in Gerald was never a sinister plot, but a chain of events rooted in “errors in judgment.” Schwartz said he believed that at least three Gerald police officers, including the chief, knew Jakob was not a federal drug agent or even a certified police officer.
“It was an innocent evolution, where he helped with one minor thing, then one more on top of that, and all of the sudden, everyone thought he was a federal agent,” Schwartz said.
“I’m not saying this was legal or lawful. But look, they were very, very effective while he was present. I don’t think Gerald is having the drug problem they were having. I’ve heard from some residents who were thrilled that he was there.”
There were numerous arrests during Jakob’s time in Gerald, but Schulte said Jakob had, in fact, gone to elaborate lengths to deceive local authorities, including Ryan McCrary, then the police chief, into believing he was a federal agent — with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Marshals Service or some other agency.
Besides having a badge and a car that seemed to scream law enforcement, Jakob offered federal drug enforcement help, Schulte said (a notion local officials said must have somehow grown out of their recent application for a federal grant for radio equipment), and asked McCrary to call what he said was his supervisor’s telephone number to confirm Gerald’s need for his help.
When the call was placed, a woman — whose identity is unknown — answered with the words “multijurisdictional task force” and said the city’s request for federal services was under review, the mayor said.
When Linda Trest, 51, a reporter at the Gasconade County Republican, started hearing complaints from people whose homes had been searched, she began making inquiries about Jakob.
“Once I got his name, I hit the computer and within an hour I had all the dirt on this guy,” Trest said.
