Death of a Ranger
By the time a minor dope dealer discovered the man kicking in his door was a Texas Ranger, it was too late for them both.
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But the bad blood in Crystal City was tame stuff compared to Starr County, where in 1967 the United Farm Workers was attempting to organize labor. Connally sent in the Rangers after protesters burned down a railroad trestle, stopped a train by lying across the tracks, and defied state laws against mass and secondary picketing. Whatever his original intent, the effect of Connally’s order was to break the back of the UFW’s attempt to organize. Various Rangers were accused of smashing demonstrators in the face with shotguns, demolishing union cameras and exposing film, threatening to drown one UFW organizer, and, in at least one case, dangling a union man alongside a railroad track with his nose inches from a fast-moving freight train.
As in Crystal City. the villain of the Starr County war was A. Y. Allee. The captain was a gruff old veteran of Ranger wars dating back to boom town campaigns. He was truly carved out of the best Ranger tradition, which critics thought was precisely his problem. As the old captain told a New York Times reporter, “Those people, by George, started to picket fifteen to twenty at a time. They didn’t work and didn’t want to. They said they wanted to be arrested, and, by George, I accommodated them!” No Ranger in modern times (if ever) has received the heat Allee did over the Dimas incident in Starr County. Magdaleno Dimas was a United Farm Workers organizer with a long police record and heavy Teamsters backing, none of which made him the type of person A. Y. Allee would take to lunch. After several minor skirmishes, the captain chased Dimas home, kicked down the door, and whacked poor Magdaleno across the chops with the barrel of his shotgun. For this Allee was required to stand up before a special three-judge federal court in Brownsville and explain his actions. Allee said he was only doing his job. In an attempt to portray Allee as a racist killer, a union attorney kept accusing the old captain of disliking Dimas.
Allee reminded the court that Dimas had a highly unsavory police record. As to the charge that he tried to kill Dimas, Allee responded: “I could have killed him if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to kill him. Didn’t want to hurt him. I could have shot him three or four times before he got in that door if I was that kind of feller. I didn’t want to.” When the union lawyer pressed on with his belief that the captain had tried to kill Dimas, Allee snorted, “If I wanted to kill him, I’d probably take a little Bee Brand insect powder and kill him. Hell, it won’t take much to kill him.” Allee took the heat for Starr County, but the real villain was the secondary picketing law, which in 1972 was found to be unconstitutional.
As a practical as well as a public relations matter, a Texas governor would have to be faced with a very serious labor riot before calling in the Texas Rangers today. “The tendency now is to use uniformed people at labor locations,” says Colonel Wilson Speir, choosing his words carefully. “Some people felt the Rangers misused their authority in the Valley incident. But remember, Texas had a law against secondary and mass boycotts. Later, the federal courts threw the law out. Therefore, we are no longer required to enforce that law.”
It is the job of the Texas Rangers to investigate major crimes, make arrests, and assist local law enforcement agencies. Though the Rangers are the crème de la crème, they are only one of four services within the DPS Criminal Law Enforcement Division. They are not even the largest. The Legislature currently authorizes 94 Rangers, compared to 124 narcotics agents, 50 criminal intelligence agents, and 22 motor vehicle theft officers. Still, the Ranger badge is the highest honor accorded to a lawman in Texas. Something like 80 percent of the current Rangers came up through the DPS ranks.
Each year the DPS receives about three hundred applications for Ranger service, of which maybe a third qualify to take the entrance exam. An applicant must be between thirty and fifty, have at least sixty hours college credit and eight years experience in law enforcement, and possess a spotless record. Of the hundred or so who qualify to take the written exam, only the top thirty appear before the Oral Interview Board. Of the thirty, maybe three or four will be certified as “eligible.” Last year there were three eligible applicants and two vacancies. “We’re probably the only police force anywhere that doesn’t recruit,” says Captain Bill Wilson, a former University of Texas football player who is supervisor of the Ranger service. “We’re kinda proud of that.” Four of the 94 Rangers have Spanish surnames, but there has never been a black Ranger, much less a female. “As far as I know, we’ve never had a woman applicant,” says Speir.
Rangers are paid the same salary as Highway Patrol sergeants, $1302 a month. They are furnished with a .357 shotgun. They get a $500-a-year clothing allowance. Except for the Stetson and boots, there is no official Ranger uniform. In the sixties Rangers were required to own a gabardine suit for ceremonial purposes, but that requirement was dropped. Most Rangers these days prefer leisure suits. A Ranger’s proudest possession is his badge, traditionally made from a Mexican five-peso piece. The origin of this practice is not clear, but in the old days Mexican silver was soft enough to cut easily with a knife, and taking a five-peso piece from a Mexican was no great chore for a Ranger.
Given all this tradition and mythical status, you have to wonder what Ranger Bob Doherty was doing messing around with a nickle-and-dime marijuana bust. Captain Bill Wilson told me, “He had initiated the case himself, using information he got himself from a man in jail. It was just good, sound police practice is what it was. One fellow led him to the other fellow.”
But was it sound police practice to surround that farmhouse in the middle of the night unannounced and wearing civilian clothes? They could have easily come back the next day, or better yet, grabbed Greg Ott on his way to class. The Texas Rangers made 1764 felony arrests last year, and in no case that anyone could remember had it been necessary to act like they had Machine-gun Kelly trapped in an attic. Captain Wilson reminded me, “Any narcotics dealer who carries a gun has got to be considered a major criminal.” But Greg Ott was no major criminal, not until Bob Doherty was dead. What compounded the tragedy of February 20 was that it never should have happened.
If someone had walked into the philosophy department at NTSU on the morning of February 21 and announced that God had caught his fist in the soft drink machine, it would have made more sense than the news that Greg Ott was in jail charged with the capital murder of a Texas Ranger. One of the women quickly charted Ott’s biorhythms and reported that he was in triple crisis. She could only wonder about the dead Ranger. Everyone knew that Ott dealt a little weed, that was no big deal in a college town, and of course he was a trifle weird, as were most of his friends. “You see a slice of strange people in any philosophy department,” Professor Pete Gunter said. “But I’d have to say Greg was less kinky than most. He was the last person in the world I would have expected to shoot someone.” They were already speaking of Ott in the past tense, as you do when anyone’s life has changed irrevocably. A Texas Ranger. Unbelievable!
In his seven years of college Ott had been a fairly good student, and in the last year or so an exceptional one. He had graduated summa cum laude with a psychology degree the previous December. Now he was heavily involved with Heidegger, existentialism, Zen, and Buddhism. There had been an occasional girl friend (he was married once briefly), but Ott stayed pretty much alone, living in the country with his cat and his books and his leather-working equipment. His place, which he rented from Twin Pines Ranch, was a shanty onto which he had added two rooms, more than doubling the original size. In a workshop near the house, Greg and his partner Ron Mickey made belts, purses, vests, whips, and other leather goods that they peddled around campus.
Greg had had a bad time a few years before. He had been hooked on heroin, but now he was clean and gave every indication of staying that way. His friends seemed to think he had pulled himself together in recent months, and they were happy for him. But the heroin had permanently damaged his liver and he confided to friends that he didn’t expect to live long. “The thought that he might be dying made it hard for him to get close to anyone,” said Shirley Smith, who had dated Ott for about a year.
As a dealer of marijuana, Ott was small onions. He never had much money. If there is such a thing as grooving on poverty, Greg grooved on it. He didn’t talk much and when he did it was about Heidegger and nirvana and what he called “the Oriental no-mind concept of life.” Cathy London, another philosophy student, explained, “It was the idea that you flow with the movement rather than consciously exert yourself.” What made no sense to Mary Collins, an anthropology student, and to most of his other friends, was the gun. Three guns, actually--a pistol, a rifle, and a shotgun, all loaded. “Why did he have the gun?” Mary Collins asked. “Without the gun none of this would have happened.” Dr. Richard Leggett, who had talked on the telephone to Greg just minutes before the cops arrived, was also puzzled. “Everything he believed in was essentially nonviolent,” the professor of philosophy said, shaking his head.
Something had happened a year or so before, something traumatic and senseless. No one seemed certain of the details, but three men with shotguns had forced their way into Ott’s house, tied up Ott and a girl friend, and stolen some goods, including all his leather-working equipment. “He said it was the most fearful moment of his life,” Cathy London recalled. “He had never experienced such a feeling of total hopelessness. That’s when he got the guns.” Maybe the experience changed him, or maybe it just brought him back to a place he had been before. “You know how dope dealers like to play big shot,” another girl friend said. “They talk about blowing away pigs and stuff. They don’t mean any of it. It’s the old macho thing.”
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