Cowboy Cops

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.

Harrison adds powdered creamer to a Styrofoam cup of iced tea and exits the cafeteria down a wood-paneled hallway. When asked if his barn is handling hot cows, he looks down the hall both ways. "I don't think there is as much of that as there was," he says of cattle rustling. "We pretty much know where they are from. It hasn't happened in a long time."

He pauses, taking a long swig of his tea.

"If we are suspicious, we check into it." Sixty-eight-year-old Ralph Mika leans against his pickup truck, watching the sun set over his 82-acre farm. The long winter cold has finally snapped on this day in late February, and melting snow streams in wide channels across his muddy pasture. The yard is thick with the smell of wet hay and thawing cow patties.

Mika chews his cigar butt like cud. His heavyset frame is bound in a pair of straining overalls, and his skin is scorched magenta from too many days in the sun. Mika has spent most of the afternoon on his tractor, lifting hay into cattle pens. His friend Mel Nichols, a city handyman who usually works on rental houses, follows behind him with a pitchfork. Nichols does the grunt work because Mika's shoulders and arms are virtually useless, racked by carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis. Behind them loom rows of gigantic, round hay bales.

At its peak a few years ago, Mika's farm held 106 head of cattle. It was supposed to be his retirement fund. He'd been a social worker at a Veterans Affairs Hospital in Iowa until 1995, when he retired to rebuild the crop farm he'd inherited from his father. Mika commuted there 14 miles a day from his home in Mexico, Missouri.

The trouble started in January 2004 when he rented a trailer on his property to a farmhand named Louie Bowers Jr. and his wife, Deanna. In exchange for free rent, Bowers was supposed to tend the herd. "I trusted him," Mika says. "Hell, everybody trusted him."

In March 2005, Mika counted his herd for his income taxes and realized he was short 47 cows and 34 calves. Bowers claimed innocence, so Mika told him to be more vigilant and bought replacements. Seven months later, the town veterinarian arrived to pregnancy-check the herd, and Mika realized he was down another 54 cows, 43 calves and one bull. He called the Cattle Theft Task Force. Nash and Crain were dispatched to solve the mystery.

The task force found that 72 of Mika's herd had passed through sales barns. Nash and Crain told Mika that Bowers had used aliases to drop off the stolen cattle at a series of barns in the middle of the night.

Nash and Crain gave Mika a list of those who had purchased his stolen cattle. They came from farmsteads in Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. But there was a catch. In order to have his animals returned, Mika would need a county prosecutor willing to go out and seize the stolen property. And much of it had been sold and resold on the auction circuit.

Mika had insured his cattle in mid-2004, but he hadn't updated his coverage as his herd grew. Last November, he received a check for $57,000 to cover $125,000 in losses. He expects he'll have to sell the farm to recoup. His wife recently bought him a plaque to hang in their living room. It bears a windmill and the inscription "We've been through a lot together and most of it was your fault."

"I wiped us out," he says, spitting a wad of cigar into the dirt. "I can't recoup it. I ain't got no money to buy any cattle back. At 68, your most valuable asset is time. I don't got enough time."

In the wan light, Mika nods to Nichols.