The Ranger Bandit
He was the drug kingpin with connections in high places. When he beat a rap, he taunted cops with an ad that said, “Better Luck Next Time.” Steve Benifiel called himself …
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Eastland County is considered by law enforcement agencies to be the hotbed of methamphetamine manufacturing in West Texas. Often called meth, speed, or crank, methamphetamine is far more powerful than ordinary stimulants and can be injected, snorted, or taken as a pill. Meth costs about the same as cocaine ($100 a gram), but it is very much a drug of the rural world, a workingman’s drug. Among some poor folk of Eastland County, the making and selling of meth is really just a modern-day version of the moonshining that once flourished there. Meth “labs” are nothing more than updated stills: Large glass flasks containing a variety of chemicals are heated over butane burners until they form a red oil. Then a distilling and condensing process creates the methamphetamine. Like moonshiners, meth “cooks” erect their labs far off in the country, away from prying eyes and noses (when heated, meth chemicals smell like cat urine), in old trailer houses or abandoned farmhouses. They cook for a few days, dismantle their labs, and then take off, thunder-road style, to a new location before the cops can catch them. “You have to remember that this is just a way of life passed down among the generations,” said Don Bush, the DPS lieutenant in charge of narcotics investigations in West Texas. “The granddaddies were moonshiners and now the grandkids are making speed.”
Unlike the large, organized cocaine rings in the cities, a meth organization is small, usually consisting of the cook and a couple of buddies who sell the dope for him. But Benifiel saw a gold mine in the meth trade, a chance to go big time. The interstate could be used to transport the drug all over Texas. And there weren’t that many police officers in Eastland County (besides the small local police departments, only a sheriff and four deputies patrol the county’s 931 square miles).
Benifiel needed $20,000 for the chemicals and glassware necessary to make a ten-pound batch of meth; on the street, that ten pounds would sell for $200,000. All he had to do was find a good cook who knew what he was doing, put together a loyal group of distributors, and keep the cops off everyone’s tails. With that kind of income, he would finally be able to buy all the land he wanted for his truck stops and get his wreckers rolling everywhere. He could be the king of West Texas.
In early 1989 he started up his drug ring. Thirty people were brought into the operation; twelve labs were set up in remote areas near towns like Necessity and Wild’s Canyon and Rising Star. According to federal court documents, Benifiel and an associate made a secret trip to Florida to purchase lab equipment. Though these weren’t exactly chichi drug dealers—their code word for meth was “shit,” and they used an abandoned couch underneath an interstate overpass as a drop spot for the drugs—they certainly could not be called unsophisticated. Benifiel acted as the chief executive officer, keeping track of the money but rarely getting near the drugs. Benifiel’s second in command was his buddy Guy Kincaid, then a 32-year-old Ranger native and former star high school quarterback. Kincaid did most of the hands-on work, supervising the labs, moving the meth from the cooks in the country to the dealers in the towns, and collecting the money.
In one of their most important moves, Benifiel and Kincaid recruited perhaps the most famous meth cook in the state, a West Texas hillbilly named Billy Dickey. Dickey, then 42, lived almost like a pauper in a run-down three-room farmhouse in neighboring Brown County. He didn’t even have a high school education. Yet according to the DPS’s Don Bush, he was a Mr. Wizard in a meth lab, a man with incredible scientific skills who never failed in making quality speed. Any dealer who could secure his services could make a fortune.
For years, narcotics agents in West Texas had wanted him. Dickey’s uncle, a deputy sheriff for Brown County, would regularly drive up and down the road outside Dickey’s home, hoping to catch him delivering drugs. But Dickey was always one step ahead of everyone. To make his getaways, he drove a beat-up 1970 Camaro with a rebuilt engine that could reach speeds of 150 miles per hour.
Normally, Dickey worked alone in a little lab in his barn and sold his drugs to a few close friends who acted as distributors. But Benifiel and Kincaid offered Dickey all the new glass-ware and chemicals he wanted. They said he could keep one half of the finished meth. Dickey agreed. The Benifiel gang—made up of hicks, farm boys, oil-field workers, and mechanics—was setting itself up to cook hundreds of pounds of methamphetamine.
IN HIS ABILENE OFFICE, 76 miles away from Ranger, special agent Tom Clark, an eighteen-year veteran of the FBI, began to hear reports that uncommonly large amounts of methamphetamine were starting to come out of Eastland County. Immediately he thought of Steve Benifiel. A burly, no-nonsense Texan who kept a handy pouch of Red Man in his pocket, Clark had been aware of Benifiel since 1987, when Ranger Gene Kea happened to mention that, strangely, Benifiel beat every rap thrown at him. One informant had piqued Clark’s interest when he said, “Everything that goes on in Eastland County, Benifiel knows about.”
Clark had often wondered about Benifiel’s friendship with the cops who worked the county. Benifiel, it was said, was always doing favors for officers, fixing their cars for free, buying them beer, inviting them to his house on Friday nights for poker parties. Charles Edwards, the former police chief, had to fire a couple of his officers because they spent more time around Steve’s Garage than they did patrolling the streets.
Most intriguing to Clark, however, was Benifiel’s relationship with Eastland County sheriff Dee Hogan. When he was elected in 1988, the bespectacled 59-year-old Hogan had little experience in law enforcement. Raised in Eastland County, he had worked at an auto-parts business in the Dallas suburb of Garland before moving back to run for sheriff. According to his chief deputy, “He didn’t have much of a clue what he was doing.”
But Hogan seemed to adore Benifiel—whom he fondly called the Bandit—and he started sending squad cars to Steve’s Garage for repairs. Hogan was not particularly subtle about his friendship with Benifiel. When Guy Kincaid was stopped in his car by a deputy and caught with drug paraphernalia and $12,000 in cash, Hogan personally took over the case. He authorized Kincaid’s release from jail, then called Benifiel to come get him, and then returned the $12,000 to them, even though other officers complained that it was illegal drug money.
Hogan, in turn, told his deputies that Benifiel was one of his sources who provided information on criminal activity. But Clark wondered if it was the other way around; maybe Hogan was a source for Benifiel. “Somehow, Benifiel could pick up the phone and find things out,” said Clark. “He always seemed to know every undercover operation going on in Ranger.” In fact, Benifiel did act as a source for Hogan by telling him about the location of certain meth labs. Hogan would make the bust and receive a lot of media attention—but what Benifiel had really given Hogan was the lab of one of his competitors. Benifiel’s labs miraculously escaped detection.
In September 1990, Clark got a tantalizing hint that something big was happening in Ranger. The police in Stephenville, 25 miles south of Ranger, had caught a young woman in front of a Wal-Mart with an ounce of methamphetamine. Clark went to question her, and eventually she broke. She confessed that she had picked up the meth from Guy Kincaid and that Benifiel was also involved. Benifiel, she said, was “heavy duty” and “Mafia-related.” She added that Sheriff Hogan knew all about the Benifiel ring and was “crooked.”
Clark, according to one fellow investigator, became “obsessed” with bringing down Benifiel. He put together a team of the area’s best narcotics investigators, including Don Bush of the DPS, an IRS criminal investigator named Don Karcher, and assistant U.S. attorney Dick Baker of Lubbock, a narcotics prosecutor. They, too, were throwbacks to the old days, contemporary versions of old-time lawmen like Si Bradford. They wore cowboy hats and boots, and they spit their tobacco juice into soft drink cans. Baker had a sign in his Lubbock office that read, “Drug Czar of West Texas.”
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