Cowboy Cops

Pope recruited his own expert. In January 2006, he called Joe Rector, an investigator who carries the title "special ranger" with the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. Rector assists with cattle theft investigations in Oklahoma. He claims to have recovered $984,000 in stolen cattle and agriculture equipment in 2006. And he says his ranger squad helps recover $5 million annually. Pope spent two days riding along as Rector's sidekick in the hinterlands outside Oklahoma City.

Rector explained to Pope that what he'd learned doing drug busts wasn't going to work in cracking down on cattle thefts. "I'm gonna show you an easier way," Rector told him. Rector favored waiting for thefts to happen, then using CSI-style tactics to lift fingerprints and evidence. He uses theft patterns to anticipate which areas will be hit next and to develop a roster of suspects.

Most herds in Missouri — the country's No. 2 beef producer after Texas — are owned by commuter farmers, leaving the livestock largely unprotected. This spring, the price of cattle has reached near record highs. Price can fluctuate within a few hundred dollars based on each animal's breeding and health, but a six-to-ten-month old calf might net upward of $700. And farmers have been reluctant to protect their investment with the use of brands or the computer chips used by veterinarians for household pets. Ken Disselhorst, a field representative for the Missouri Cattlemen's Association, estimates that only about 10 percent of cattle in the state carry brands and only 2 percent to 5 percent are catalogued by electronic identification tags.

After Pope's failed stakeout, the Cattle Theft Task Force members began funneling tips and incident reports to the Missouri Information Analysis Center, a post-9/11 operation in Jefferson City that works to identify patterns in criminal operations. The data showed that stolen trucks and trailers were often ditched across county lines, meaning cattle thieves might steal from one county and sell in another. The amount of stolen gear showed that urbanites were getting in on the action — farmers lifting cattle would have had their own tools. They also catalogued detailed descriptions of individual missing animals so they could be identified by sight at auctions. They learned how to read auction-house receipts to determine who was selling cattle, where the checks were being sent and where the cattle were going. "It sounds kind of boring, but the best way to catch these people is a paper trail," Nash says.

Prior to the Cattle Theft Task Force, there was no statewide accounting system for cattle thefts. Since January 2006, the team has arrested eight suspects. But authorities are secretive about the details in those cases. "Because these guys are not convicted yet and they are suspects, I can't release any details on those active investigations," says Sgt. Jason Clark, a Missouri State Highway Patrol spokesman. Clark says 300 cattle, worth about $400,000, have been located and returned.

Nash estimates that thieves unload their goods within 72 hours, no farther than 100 miles away from where the animals were stolen. Most of the stolen cattle end up at the state's 123 auction barns. The don't-ask-don't-tell atmosphere of many auction houses opens the market for cattle rustlers.

On a recent Monday afternoon, men in denim, fatigues and Carhartt coats squeeze into four rows of blue bleacher seats and an upper deck crammed with folding chairs inside the Callaway County Livestock Center in Kingdom City. Some chew tobacco and spit it across the concrete floor. Inside the corrugated metal walls, fans circulate stale air that reeks of manure, body odor and astringent. Today, the weekly sale will last 10 hours as 2,100 head switch hands.

The farmers face a small, wire-rimmed arena resembling a boxing ring. Above it, part-owner and auctioneer John Harrison is clad in flannel and a wide-brimmed suede Stetson. At his signal, handlers swing open a large door and two huge black heifers barrel out. The ring men prod and zap the animals with cattle prods to keep them moving. Then the men duck behind metal ladders positioned like barricades as the beasts turn to charge.

Men raise their hands. Harrison counts up the bidding in a monotonous cadence into a microphone. When he shouts "sold," the specifics of the transaction flash on a wood-framed digital scoreboard listing vitals: head count, average weight, total weight, bid price and buyer number. Buyer No. 404 has purchased the two half-ton heifers for $950 apiece.

Behind the scenes, auction operators don't often ask sellers and buyers for identification. There's little that could help investigators track stolen cattle.

Workers in the chutes say they don't ask too many questions. "If someone pulls up here in the middle of the night with a load of stolen cattle, we have no way of knowing," says 25-year-old Travis Woodworth. He's in charge of corralling sold cattle, which are driven by men on horseback into cages that extend in a giant maze behind the main building. Asked if he's been moving stolen cattle, Woodworth chuckles. "Hell," he says, "I wonder that sometimes myself."

When Harrison takes a break from auctioneering, he heads to the house cafeteria, with its yellow laminated tables and orange plastic chairs. He enters the room as Dale Davis, a ruddy, 66-year-old retired farmer from Bellflower is complaining about the state of thievery. Davis wears a mesh cap that advertises his favorite brand of farm product. "It has been worse really the last two years," Davis says. "It happens here. Hell, it don't take no time to unload them." Davis spots Harrison and clams up.