From “Endgame: BigJon Moreland and The Genocide in South Kingston” by Greg Munchi.
Simon and Pegg
Books / E-publishing
2018
“…Lived in a brownstone, lived in the ghetto…I’ve lived all over this town”
~Talking Heads~
April 4th 2011. A day just like all the rest until 3:17 pm. For Sheriff Jon Moreland, “BigJon” to everybody who knows him, “just like all the rest,” entails a robust, early-morning ingestion of whatever narcotics the South Kingston evidence room had in surplus. After that, Officer Moreland usually grabs his laptop and heads to the bathroom for a duration of time directly proportional to the intestinal effects of the morning’s recreational pharmacology. April 4th happened to be a Vicodin day, automatic half hour easy. He’d surf the internet: news, Facebook, porn, (only, he stresses, after wiping and flushing) and then Sheriff Jon Moreland was ready to fight crime, or at least give crime a good dressing down from a safe distance. On the way out he notices his wife Dawn gazing into the fridge with a thoughtful hand on her chin. “What the fuck fatty?’ he says, punching her, hard, in the small of the back from behind. Her oxygen-deprived grunt and pain writhing get him all worked up and he’s forced to fuck her ass vigorously over the kitchenette before grabbing keys, wallet, and sidearm. He makes South Kingston Precinct Two just before 7:30 am.
The Two was his. He’d been the man there ever since a redistricting in 1987 split the Kingston dept. into two separate squads. One large, multi-tiered. The other tiny, and violently corrupt. BigJon Moreland was the only name on the list on that day. He hired his bother Hunter “Beef” Moreland, a two time loser living - at the time - in their mother’s basement, to be Sherriff‘s Deputy. He hired a pretty URI co-ed named Moira to sit behind the plexi during the day. On April 4th 2011, South Kingston Two Precinct, had exactly no hiring and exactly one firing. Moira took her leave in 2009 in the face of the country’s economic shittery. Also BigJon had been fucking her with regularity and people (Moira) were starting to talk.
And that was just fine with BigJon. Basically he and Beef rode herd on their little chunk of firmament and let the populace say what they would. They had no active immediate superiors and inspections were both well-announced and scarce. The collars that Moreland and Beef sent up were straight-lame: 90 percent low level possession with the other ten percent showing as traffic stops, j walking tickets, and parking violations. The numbers coming back to his bosses were awesome and consistent, but the hidden reality was simple and clichéd: Officer Moreland used his billet to generate, and accept graft from every criminal enterprise he came across. BigJon was point man for an operation taking points on everything from dime-bags to heavy weapons hauls and all points between. There hadn’t been a murder or manslaughter charge from SK Two in over 50 years. The last grand theft auto had been in 1971 and involved members of the same family. All of which meant that Moreland and Beef, for the bulk of their reign at the top of Precinct Two, went both well regarded and well outfitted. The constant activity of busting high school and college age partiers sent the right vibes toward Providence and CID. The suits downtown made sure SK Two got what they wanted, and so the gear was all state of the art. The sidearms weren’t the plastic Glock nines that every muni police from Maine to Mexico carried. Instead BigJon had asked for a limited edition Colt .38 with pearl grips and gleaming steel barrel and firing pin. Instead of lead-stock PD ammunition they used mush-head .357 cartridges with mercury tips.
Their cars each had an .12 gauge Remington auto loader between the front bucket seats, and another.12 gauge, this one sawed-off at the barrels and just after the fore-stock, hidden in a special quiver under the dash. They carried mace and batons. Beef kept a black sap in his glove box, BigJon had a eight inch switchblade stuck in the band of his ankle-holster next to a tiny silver derringer. They had radar, GPS, sonar, fish finders, radar detector, and radar detector detectors. The Crown Vics were in flat black with silver and white trim. The rig was a modified version of the stock police interceptor. The Hemi 386, supercharged and with a nitrous-mix toggle. They had a Boston Whaler 28 feet long with twin Mercruiser 225’s hanging off a heavy bracket. At the police boathouse in Salt-Pond there were two 17 foot hard-bottom Avon rafts with Evinrude 165’s and electric trolling motors. They had Harley soft-tails with red gumball machine sirens. There were Jet Skis, an ultra light, hang gliders and climbing gear. There was surveillance equipment. Mini mics and tape that could stick things to a hairy chest. Digital ears that could hear whispered conversations from thousands of feet away. Electric eyes that could see past the earths curvature. There was a disposable rocket launcher and six rockets, each capable of taking out a DC-9 three-thousand feet up and moving fast.
***
But…
Moreland was fond of reminding people…
It all means shit if the bad guys are allowed to operate.
Never mind that 99.8 percent of his arrests were first and second offenses from people who’d not yet grown all their pubes. To hear the Sheriff tell it he was holding things under control in a wild west frontier town where the bad guys are used to getting their own way.
One man can make a difference.
That’s what he told them at CID, and he meant it. It all rolled on like water through sewer until April 4th. That’s the day when Big John found Frank D’west’s shipment and everything went down the shitter.
The shipment was, by now everybody knows, a ten brick of coke and raw heroin worth about $500,000. What people don’t seem to grasp; just how Jon Moreland had come to possess such an outsized load of narcotics, is what I had come to Xeno to find out.
“I loved my package,” says BigJon. Twenty years have passed, the diet and exercise regiment at Xeno has reduced the once fearsome law enforcer to a scanty shadow of his former self.
“I loved it even before I had it, but when I finally got my hands around it, I’d go to any lengths to protect it. I mean, keep in mind, this is when things were starting to tip. You had the Giants, the economy…A lot of people were sort of beginning to doubt that government would or even could be there for them if the shit went down. It was like the wild west.
It’s an idiom he comes back to again and again. The former Sheriff of South Kingston fancies himself some sort of movie “good guy,“ doing whatever it took to rid his streets of drugs and crime. Who knew though? Who could’ve known, that “whatever it takes” in Jon Moreland’s mind meant just that: Crime and drugs. Acorn Step became the first name that night. The first victim of what many believe to be the word’s most loathed and ferocious man-killer, BigJon Moreland.
“I saw Acorn, uh Mr. Step, parked at the convenient mart just down the street from Crackto…From the High Street Area of South Kingston. Acorn’s mom grew, without question, the finest and most potent weed I’ve ever smoked. If it’s the strongest I’ve ever smoked then it’s the strongest anybody ever smoked. Bunny and I, see we had an understanding right? I allow her to prosper, she allows me to puff for free, and she gives me one of her fuckin’ sons to arrest once every few years. Ask anybody, Bunny doesn’t have awesome trees, Jon Moreland ain’t pullin’ Acorn over that night”
Actually, Mr. Step was already pulled over when the Sheriff made the car. They had a brief conversation. When it was through, Moreland walked to the back of Acorn Step’s car, opened the door and started searching for drugs.
“Weed was what I wanted. I smelled it, cause mostly everything Step smelled of delicious un-burnt weed. That’s all I wanted was my weekly. Instead, whoa what’s this? I got big white bricks triple zip locked in vacuum bags and whatever else. You understand, before this package I was a dabbler in opiates, heroin. After it…Well I had ten pounds of raw dog. That’s like a thousand pounds of street. That’s enough for anybody. Forever probably. I tried to explain to Acorn but he was starting to make a fuss and getting loud. I hooked him up, impounded the car. I figured I get him down the station, talk to Bunny, we get it straight.”
Instead though, things took a vicious and violent turn. When the sun came up on April 4th, 2011. Acorn Step was dead. The Giants were in Newport News. BigJon Moreland was on cloud nine.
“It’s a shame really, because when you go through it, it’s Acorn that really starts this thing. That fucker gets his appetite under control then none of this happens right? You see?”
I don’t, but then again, I wasn’t there. And Acorn did get dead that night. After that there was his brother Craig, and their brother Marcus. Gunned down in broad daylight hours after Acorn Step’s funeral. The next 48 hours are a matter of record.
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