Pubdate: Thu, 6 Dec 2007 Source: Los Angeles City Beat (CA) Copyright: 2007 Southland Publishing Contact: http://www.lacitybeat.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2972 Author: Jeffrey Anderson THE MYSTERY AT 330 NORTH BRAND BLVD. A Family Searches for Answers in the Strange Death of a DEA Agent Known As 'Rubberneck' And 'Buckles' The grieving father crushes a cigarette into a crowded ashtray on the kitchen counter and stares blankly at a tiny TV screen next to the sink. It's 11 a.m. on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, exactly one year since he last saw his son, Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent Jeffrey T. Bockelkamp, alive. Today the father, thin and expressionless, is drinking in the family home in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, a blue-collar suburb of Scranton. Down the hall, the mother stands in the middle of a guest room she converted to a shrine to her dead son. She is revisiting the prouder, happier moments of his life - which ended last January 5 in a men's room stall on the 6th Floor of a Glendale office building. Dead by his own hand, according to an L.A. County coroner's report, Bockelkamp was buried in a closed casket. The walls of the tiny spare room are cluttered with plaques and certificates such as the one commemorating the Southwest Border Initiative, an operation launched by the DEA's Los Angeles field office in 2003. Scrapbooks and framed photographs show her tall, handsome son front and center, often shirtless, his white teeth gleaming. "His friends say he was made to be an agent," says the mother, a petite woman who talks in clipped sentences. In one photo, he is holding a trophy fish. In another, he is beaming amid a group of agents, clutching an ominously large automatic rifle. "He was the only one in his group certified to use that gun," the mother says. "No one wanted to touch it. He wouldn't sit behind a desk. He liked running and gunning." Everything Agent Bockelkamp did in life, he did to the maximum, friends and family say: scuba dive-master, Kung Fu expert, prolific amateur photographer, a lover of women - often juggling several relationships at a time. "They were all quite taken with him," Terry Bockelkamp says of her son's many girlfriends, a thin smile conveying her motherly pride. In this room, and in the minds and hearts of dozens of people whose lives he touched in profound ways, Agent Bockelkamp is an American hero: daring, thoughtful, and loyal - perhaps to a fault. In the Glendale bathroom stall where he died, however, he very likely saw his life and a tarnished career flashing before his eyes. The DEA suspected him of theft, his family says, yet even if it's true, they cannot accept that he could take his own life - not without extreme duress or betrayal. "Well you don't believe it do 'ya?" Terry Bockelkamp recalls Ryan, the youngest of her three sons saying, after a somber visit from a group of DEA agents last January. That day, and on several others, DEA agents showed compassion and offered to comfort the family, the mother says. Then the circumstances surrounding Jeff Bockelkamp's death became a matter of secretive investigations, speculation, hurtful innuendo, and downright mystery, she says. Agents insisted on guarding the body through the night at the mortuary, the Bockelkamps say, and took photos of car license plates at the funeral. Former colleagues told Jeff's hometown friends after the services to "meet us at his grave a year from now and we'll tell you the full story." A tribute Web site set up by the family attracts thousands of visitors who continue to send e-mails to the long dead agent, known to some as "Buckles," to others as "Rubberneck," "Goose," or "Maverick." "I will never forget the love you shared," reads one. "Always my wingman," reads another. "9 months, your monument is now in place," reads a recent e-mail from Terry Bockelkamp. One eerie message on the family's tribute site departs from the outpouring of love with a video file of a movie trailer dripping with Hollywood intrigue about a federal drug agent whose cover has been blown, for a movie called Meth. Someone calling him or herself "HIDTA-friend" (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Agency) claims to be working behind the scenes to bring light to Jeff's life and death. Then there's the DEA Watch Web site, which allows for anonymous postings that run the gamut from praise for a fallen comrade to harsh and, his friends say, unfounded allegations that he was an arrogant racist who got what he deserved. Yet real answers remain painfully scarce, the mother says, and compassion has yielded to closed doors and the obfuscation of officialdom - even a refusal by her son's closest colleagues to return her calls. "Once he was in the ground, it was like he didn't exist," she says bitterly. "You know, he could've come home to us, we wouldn't have cared how. DEA is saying he stole a watch. He had too much pride and honor for that. And even if he did, he didn't invent that sort of thing." The mother's enlisted the help of her home state's most powerful senator, Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, to pry for answers to the questions tearing at her family. A Brother's Command Center Bret Bockelkamp, Jeff's brother, appears in the doorway. Jittery, with gelled spiky hair, he looks like an older Robbie Benson, with heavy eyebrows and dark eyes that suggest he rarely sleeps these days. An electrician like his father, Bret has moved back in with his parents and established a command center in the basement where he lives, with his dog Harley, wholly devoted to unraveling the circumstances of his brother's death. Besieged by phone calls from reporters, tipsters, and government lawyers he claims posed as journalists, Bret has built a virtual bunker: the house is wired with security cameras; he is building a database to store information he has gathered about his brother's activities as an agent; a Santa Monica phone number allows DEA agents to call him in Pennsylvania without being detected by the agency, which has forbidden contact with the family. His work is solitary, he says. "I keep a lot of this from my parents. It's too much for my dad to handle. Once in a while he'll burst out and start yelling something out of anger. It's embarrassing." In possession of his brother's work and home computers, cell phone, and "black book" - a logbook of investigations - Bret says he has talked to colleagues, former informants, undercover agents in Mexico, and ex-girlfriends of his brother's. He even has records dating back to when his brother was a patrol officer in Maryland. "It's as if Jeff is still alive," Bret says. "His cell phone rings and people who didn't even know he was dead are calling him." The source of Bret's obsession - and the family's grief - is rooted in more than loss. They feel a deeper, darker side to Jeff's death - a sense stoked by the e-mails and occasional anonymous phone calls Bret says he receives. "People offered me money to talk to them about what we know," Bret says. He's also received calls from the Washington Times, USA Today, and even an L.A. Times reporter who suggested the family find a personal injury lawyer who could perhaps knock down some of the walls of secrecy; the Times reporter denies it. "We have received anonymous calls warning us not to push too hard for answers, that we can't handle what we're getting into," Bret says. Motivated by his own research, the interest from the media and all sorts of gadflies and cranks, not to mention the nagging questions that hover over his brother's death, Bret has become convinced that his brother was in the middle of numerous dangerous scenarios that could have placed him in jeopardy - whether the job was pushing him to the edge, or he was making others nervous. "I know he was working undercover on the Mexican Mafia." Now Bret also insists his brother was a scapegoat whose colleagues turned on him in a secretive agency where double, sometimes triple, lives lead to entangled relationships, misdeeds, confusion, and severe mental stress. "There was a lot of relationship stuff going on in his office," Bret says, alluding to an affair he believes his brother was having with a colleague, whose husband found out. "Some sort of power trip - they all wanted to get the girls." Someone - Bret will not say whom - has left him with the impression that two DEA agents in L.A. have overseas bank accounts that have raised eyebrows. Worse, the family has learned that the bullet that took their son came from a gun he possibly should not have been carrying. The family has consulted lawyers, Bret says, and is considering a $3-million, wrongful-death lawsuit against the DEA and the U.S. Department of Justice. "From Day One, there are inconsistent statements, contradictions, and bizarre incidents," Bret says. "I don't care if he did right or wrong, I want the whole truth to come out. I don't feel as if it's 100 percent suicide. There is something else going on. I constantly am questioning, is this normal?" "Nothing is ordinary about an agent's suicide," DEA spokesman Jose Martinez in the L.A. field office says, referring a reporter to DEA headquarters in Washington, D.C., and the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General. "I think OIG is still investigating." The DEA in Washington shared no information, however. "We have no comment whatsoever," OIG spokeswoman Cynthia Schnedar says. Sen. Specter's staff has been in touch with the family, but it's unclear whether the senator will be piercing the veil of secrecy surrounding the case. The matter remains under investigation, says a Glendale police spokeswoman, refusing to release the incident report of Bockelkamp's death at 330 North Brand Blvd. A few official details are contained in an L.A. County coroner's report: "The decedent, a 30-year-old DEA Agent, was the subject of an Internal Affairs investigation. During a break in the meeting on January 5, 2007, at about 12:37 p.m. the decedent stepped into the restroom. An IRS employee was washing his hands at the sink when he suddenly heard a gunshot and heard the decedent collapse in a stall. The man went for help and 911 was called. Glendale Police Sergeant Bracken arrived and determined death at 12:45 p.m. A police officer kicked the Glock semiautomatic pistol away from the decedent's side." The coroner ruled it a suicide. Other details from the report: Bockelkamp, who had an American flag tattoo on his left hip, used a hollow point bullet and fired one shot to his right temple with a backup pistol, leaving a five-foot stream of blood running to a drain on the bathroom floor. The Bockelkamps want to know how an otherwise exemplary agent under suspicion of wrongdoing, in the middle of an internal affairs investigation, could carry a backup weapon into a men's room stall, unattended. "He gave his heart and soul to the DEA," his mother says. "I want them to come to the house with his badge and answer some questions. As far as I'm concerned, the DEA killed him. His job killed him. He made it his life. Something is not right. As a mother, I just know it." Seasoned law enforcers are not taken by such talk. "It's not unusual to be around millions of dollars of dope and cash," says a veteran drug cop who often works with DEA agents. "To most guys it's just a job, to log it into evidence and move on. But if a guy can't resist temptation, or if he's a kleptomaniac, well, that can happen." Says another, without any hint of emotion, "The guy shouldn't have been dirty." Sources who talked to CityBeat on condition of anonymity verify what Terry Bockelkamp claims the DEA is telling her family: that Jeff Bockelkamp stole an expensive watch during a search and seizure of drug contraband. Some say he was under suspicion for doing it more than once. But that possibility is more than the Bockelkamps can handle right now. The "Cocky" Agent Bret Bockelkamp wants to venture out into a freezing cold November day in Clarks Summit and talk to Jeff's friends about his brother's legacy. He refuses to wear a coat. He's edgy and he says he cannot sleep for thinking of his brother. Asked if he has consulted with a grief counselor he snaps, "No, I don't want to talk about it. I'm OK with Jeff's death. I'm mad at the DEA, and the agents, for not giving us answers." His brother's death has affected him deeply, Bret says. He no longer enjoys his hobbies, such as motorcycling, or riding four-wheel recreational vehicles, and he moved out of his townhouse and stopped working as an electrician. He says he made a lot of money doing that, and by registering domain names and then brokering them on the open market, "So I'm doing pretty well financially." Still, the lack of sleep, the constant computer research, the phone calls and e-mails from around the world, and the poring over documents he claims to have obtained from the OIG - documents, he says, that implicate his brother as a suspected thief, but which also show DEA agents offering conflicting accounts during their interviews with investigators - fills his head with scenarios that are overwhelming. "I'm exhausted but I'm awake all the time," he says. "Sometimes I feel like I'm gonna explode." On a drive around town to visit friends who can attest to Jeff's good character, Bret grows frustrated that no one is home. Even the funeral home, where he says DEA agents insulted the director by insisting on camping out all night guarding Jeff's coffin, is vacant with the door unlocked on this Saturday before Thanksgiving. Finally he calls his mother and tells her to call some people to see if they are home. She obliges, and soon Bret is knocking at the door of Jeff Jenkins and his wife Chryssa, who agree to sit down to talk about Jeff Bockelkamp, who started his police career with Jenkins at the Montgomery County, Maryland, Police Department. Jenkins rented a U-Haul with Bockelkamp back in 2000 and headed off to the police academy with him. He and his wife shared a house with Bockelkamp. They were so close, "It was like having two husbands," Chryssa says. "I can't describe the kind of guy he was. Even after we moved away, and I had my first baby, and I got overwhelmed at times, I could call him and talk. He mailed me a gift certificate for a manicure and a massage, with a note saying 'You deserve it.'" The couple shares fond memories about what a character Jeff was. "Modest is not a word I would use," Chryssa says, "but not boastful." He was cocky, her husband recalls, "but not in that way that made you want to punch him in the mouth." A few other traits stick out, Jenkins says: "He had that year-round tan, and I swear when he came back home he had lasered the hair off his arms and bleached his teeth. "He was proud of himself but he couldn't talk about his work." Jenkins, retired now from law enforcement, confirms that a lack of closure hovers over his friend's death. "Everyone reads that DEA Watch web site, mostly we're waiting for someone to man up with some answers." Asked whether he accepts what the family has been told by the DEA he replies, "I can't say either way. Some of it I believe, some of it I can't." As a former cop, Jenkins senses the limitations of what Bret is trying to accomplish. "I know how law enforcement is. You're gonna get what you're gonna get. There'll be a last report, and people will believe it, or not. With suicide, you never have all the answers." Even those who were with Bockelkamp shortly before his death have a hard time fathoming what he did - and was suspected of doing. 'I Will Call You. You're Hot.' One day last fall, a third-grade teacher from Torrance named Cheryl Tabellion arrives at the Del Amo Mall to talk about her experience with Bockelkamp, her former lover and friend, who lived in a house with several agents in nearby Manhattan Beach. Tall, fit, and tan in a short white dress, Tabellion, in her mid-40's, is somewhat embarrassed at first to discuss her relationship with the fallen agent, because of their age difference. She recalls their first encounter, at a bar in Redondo Beach called The Grog. "Jeff made his presence known right away," she says blushing. "He grabbed my hips on his way to the bathroom and I thought, 'Oh, no one's done that to me in a while.'" Then he came up to me later with this big smile and we connected right away. He had the greatest smile, and he could make you feel like you were the only one in the room." Bockelkamp drank Red Bull and vodka. "He gave me his DEA card with his cell phone number and we talked about his work - nothing specific, but he was really passionate about what he did. He said he'd call me later because he was going to Panama the next day. Of course I found out much later he really went to see an old girlfriend. But he was really sweet. I remember he text-messaged me later that night when we first met with something like, 'I will call you ... you're hot.' I didn't know how to respond to a text like that." The two dated, if you could call it that, Tabellion says. "It was hard to see him. He was not very available. He didn't want to disappoint me by canceling plans, so there weren't really any plans to go out or anything." Weekends were reserved for Bockelkamp getting together with his work friends, she says. He called them his second family. During the week, the two would get together, usually at his house, sit by the fire, drink wine, and chat. "He'd talk for three hours straight." In the middle of the night she could hear DEA agents getting up to go to work, Tabellion recalls. "But I never socialized with them," she says. Just about every night she spent with Bockelkamp, she says, she'd stay with him in his room and then return home before sunrise. Bockelkamp loved Jessica Alba action movies and the band Snow Patrol, Tabellion says. He had great legs, with a serious tan line. "I think he might have gone to a tanning salon," she says. "And he always wore the same thing: shorts and a button-down shirt, and a baseball cap, even when he was indoors. He was really good looking. My friends told me to stop seeing him, but I couldn't not see him." His talk of work was seductive, Tabellion says. He showed off his guns. "He kept this one machine gun under his bed. He called it Charlene or something. I liked hearing about his work. He liked talking about it. It was interesting, and exciting." One time, Tabellion says, blushing again, when the couple was making out in the parking lot of some bar, Bockelkamp's gun, hidden in one of his many holsters, was poking her, "so he just took it out and put it on the hood of the car. Jeff was like that, so spontaneous." Though she felt herself falling for him, Tabellion knew there would never be anything lasting. "He knew what he wanted to do with his life. He made it clear that his work was his life and his priority. So our time together became something fun that I enjoyed while it lasted." The last time she saw Bockelkamp was a week before he died. It was the first time he stayed at her place. "He talked on the phone with someone that night about going to Panama. I could tell he was excited and I sensed he'd be leaving. He was one of five candidates for this job that he really wanted. He was worried that someone who spoke Spanish was going to get it. "It would be easier to hear that he died in the line of duty," she says, choking up. "He was so nice and polite, and so positive about life. Other guys just don't measure up. He had his life all planned out. He was so in control. [Suicide] just isn't him." Unbearable Heartache Bret Bockelkamp stops at a Subway in Green Ridge, north of Scranton, for a late afternoon sandwich. He whips out a money clip with the initials JTB - a memento of his brother's. The cold doesn't seem to bother him in nothing but jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt, as he talks constantly about his brother, and about how upsetting it is that the DEA won't come to the house and face the family with some hard answers. "This isn't like losing a friend," he says. "I've lost a brother. Someone who was fine one day, and gone the next. I could see if he had problems, but he didn't. He fought to keep crime off the streets. He should be honored the way he was. It's not like he worked at Burger King." One DEA agent actually has come to visit the Bockelkamps, Bret recalls, an agent named Billy Matthews. This was after Bret says he received a 400-page report from the OIG with voluminous testimony and names redacted that leads to one conclusion - a conclusion that Bret is not satisfied with: "He stole a watch in 2005, they say. Bunch of bullshit. Then why did they wait more than two years to issue a report? They never talked to us about it when he was alive. Then he dies and they show up at the funeral taking pictures of people's license plates? "I'd like to see some people go to jail for the things the DEA is accusing my brother of. But nothing seems to be happening." Matthews apparently did not realize the family had received such a report, Bret says. "He started in with this story that was just like all the other bullshit and I pulled out the report and dropped it on the table in front of him. He took one look at it and got up and left. I smelled something foul and I think he shit his pants." Matthews did not return CityBeat's calls for comment. Bret claims that through his own research, using his brother's log book and other work-related material, he can take the redacted report and find statements by DEA agents that are demonstrably inconsistent if not false. He says the family's lawyers have told him there might be grounds for an investigation into the investigation of his brother's death. John Rubiner, an attorney at Bird Marella, who represents the family, would not comment. Bret also claims that a Glendale police report of the shooting incident last January does not match the findings in the OIG report of his brother's death. He says there were no fingerprints on the gun that claimed his brother's life, and no gunshot residue on his brother's hand. Again, Glendale police would not discuss the case. And the L.A. coroner's report indicates that it was unclear at the time of autopsy whether anyone had touched Bockelkamp's hand before a residue test was conducted. However, Captain Ed Winter of the L.A. coroner's office says no one has questioned the conclusions of the autopsy on a case that he personally rolled out on, and that he "was pretty sure" a gunshot residue test on Bockelkamp's hand was positive. As to why officials from L.A. to Washington, D.C., are so unwilling to discuss Jeff Bockelkamp's death, one L.A. area official with familiarity of the matter says this: "Suppose the DEA catches a guy dirty, and they bring him in for an interview, and they lock one gun up but he has another that they don't know about. Then he goes to the restroom and shoots himself. Maybe they're afraid the family will claim the agency pushed the guy over the edge." Maybe that's all there is to it, but Bret Bockelkamp doesn't think so. He wants the government to reverse the coroner's findings of a suicide, in light of what he claims are inconclusive tests for fingerprints and gunshot residue, "so my family can get the full benefits they are entitled to resulting from my brother's death." Which is not likely, says Captain Winter. "Unless someone can convince me otherwise, the final determination stands. And no one has asked me to revisit the case. If we call it suicide and [law enforcers] consider it a homicide, fine, every now and then we disagree. But if we do disagree, it's almost always the other way around." To Bret Bockelkamp, however, even more is at stake than a coroner's finding, or the benefits he believes are due his grieving family. It's a matter of honor and pride, he says, growing increasingly agitated with persistent questions about his various theories. "As far as I'm concerned, my brother came in voluntarily to that interview and was acting in the line of duty. Did you know he had a small computer file with him? He was ready to give them anything they asked for. And now he's dead." Yet Bret is unable or unwilling to provide hard evidence to back up his theory, which seems to be that his brother was a suspected thief in a den of thieves who ratted him out. "This is about Jeff!" he shouts, visibly shaking now, either from the cold, the grief, or the anger. "I want to go home. Take me home!" He says he feels betrayed, that the day was not supposed to go this way. Back at the Bockelkamp residence, with the winter sky darkening over Clarks Summit, Bret disappears inside the house, stewing about being questioned on his theories. Perhaps his mother could shed light on them. But she will not come to the door. Finally, after several minutes and on the third ring of the doorbell, Bret charges out on the porch and stops just short of a physical altercation. He turns and yells for his mother. Instead, his father appears out of the kitchen into the front doorway. He is red-faced and pointing his finger at a reporter looking for answers to some of the same questions that have shattered this family. "No!" Frank Bockelkamp shouts, as if he were yelling at a dog. "No!" - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake